Well, let's have a quick look at each in turn:
Physics
Matter is made of quarks and leptons. We don't know what there is outside of the boundary of the universe. And time is a field like space only not really.
All of this was well-known decades ago, when I was a physics student. But after getting a doctorate in quantum field theory, I left the field completely, and rarely turned back. So I was excited by the possibility that in this podcast I could learn if anything interesting has been discovered since My day.
Sadly, the answer is, "no."
Oh, there’s dark matter. 85% of the universe is dark matter. We didn’t used to know much about that. And now, in contrast we can say...
Nothing, actually. They still know nothing about dark matter. 85% of the universe, and we can't see it, we can't detect it, we can't say anything about it. In fact, the only reason we think it's there is because, if it isn't, then somebody (Einstein?) got something terribly wrong.
Humor
Ricky Gervais is back--three times, actually. And he has plenty of funny things to say. I laughed often in the course of each of his phone chats with Sam. Wouldn't all of us love to able to call up Sam and ask him something like, "What are dreams for?"
I particularly appreciate his musing about the very nature of humor, because, as a writer of fiction, I often wonder what I can do to give a scene more levity. How to find the humor of a situation. The funny (ahem) thing about Ricky, though, is that despite his deep intelligence, one does not get the feeling that one has experienced anything substantial or profound after hearing him. He comes off as complete inconsequential fluff.
Poetry
And David Whyte is back, after the original appearance in February of 2020, and also an appearance in the Waking Up app. As a bit of a disclaimer, I will acknowledge that I didn't think much of his "headless wonder" podcast #184 with Sam. And perhaps because of that, the first time I played the new episode, it sounded more like the Buddhist aisle of a Hallmark store than anything I'd call poetry. But then I thought maybe I'd been letting Ricky Gervais rub off on me, and maybe that was just too snarky. So I waited a week and came back and to replay the episode.
But the second time around, the main thing which struck me is how everyone with a British accent has this immediate unfair advantage--at least, to the American ear. There's something about it which makes the speaker sound so erudite and profound. They could just be reading their flipping grocery list, and you want to give them the Nobel Prize for lit'rachor.
So, in an effort to be fair, I'm putting in writing a few quotes from the conversation. If these strike you as profound without the benefit of hearing them read in his Yorkshire/Irish lilt, then I will concede that there really was something there:
Regret
Regret is a frontier to your future.
I find it useful to choose a moment in my life that I regret, and use it as a pair of eyes and ears to pay attention to the future.
Friendship
Without tolerance and mercy, all friendships die.
Honesty
Honesty is not found in revealing the truth, but in understanding how deeply afraid of it we are.
Ambition
Ambition may be essential for the young, but becomes the essential obstacle for the any attempt at a mature life... The ease of having an ambition is that it can be readily explained to others. The very DIS-ease of is that it can be so easily explained to others... What is worthy of a life's dedication does not want to be known by us in ways that diminish its actual sense of presence.
You will decide for yourself whether this sort of sentiment is indeed as profound as it sounds out loud. Personally, I found much to nitpick about the these snippets, and plenty more to object to in the essays Whyte read from in this podcast. I do concede that it's very hard to construct a monologue consisting entirely of profound observations. I'm sure I would be much worse at it than Whyte is.
One final observation: I didn't find anything in this conversation to fit my definition of poetry, namely: heightened languange and metaphor that leads to a more profound experience. It might well be that if there was a more poetic and less prosaic thrust to this whole conversation, then I'd have felt a little bit less like I was listening to John Cleese reading corporate inspirational posters from the 1980s.
