Faustian Identity
Episode Stats
Length
1 hour and 19 minutes
Words per Minute
132.86479
Summary
In this episode, we discuss Christopher Nolan's Interstellar, the new film directed by Christopher Nolan, starring Matthew McConaughey, Anne Hathaway, and others. We discuss the apocalyptic nature of the film, the themes that it raises, and how it relates to Kubrick's 2001.
Transcript
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Romain, welcome back to the podcast. How are you?
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Good. I'm doing quite well. It is very cold out here in the Pacific Northwest.
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Actually, you know, we are close to the British Channel,
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so the climate is quite oceanic, and winters are not that cold in Paris.
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So it's maybe 10 degrees Celsius. I don't know in your scale what it is, but it's nice.
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I don't know what that is in non-communist measurement units, but it's probably somewhat chilly.
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We should stop talking about the earth and weather and things mundane,
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So let's begin a discussion about Interstellar,
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which is the film recently released by, directed by Christopher Nolan,
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starring Matthew McConaughey, Anne Hathaway, and others.
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First off, I think this podcast is really a sketch,
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because I think there is a great deal involved with this movie.
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I think Christopher Nolan is raising many very important themes,
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and he's also raising a lot of issues that relate back to other classics of science fiction.
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I mean, you said in your review, Ramon, that this is a remake of 2001,
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and maybe that's a little bit of a stretch, but I think actually it's right.
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It is a kind of remake, in the sense that almost every science fiction movie is a remake of 2001,
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And also, I think he's raising some other important philosophical issues,
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and some interesting scientific issues, including relativity and other things.
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And so I think, you know, I think this is a good start.
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I think we might need to revisit Interstellar later on.
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And I'd also say that if you haven't actually seen Interstellar,
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So I would go out and watch it, and then come back and listen to Ramon and I talk about it.
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So why don't we, let's, I think a good place to start with this is in the apocalyptic nature of the film.
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And let me set this up a little bit, and then I'll let you talk.
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2001, you could say, is a, you could say that it is a propaganda film for the space age.
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And I think you could actually say that very literally.
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Actually, in the, the, the, one of the, one of the final cuts, not the final cut of the film,
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it actually included interviews with NASA scientists,
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and it was, you know, it was almost a presentation of,
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this is the, the great new world we're going to live in with NASA.
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Now, obviously, there are a lot of different aspects of the film,
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and in many ways, Kubrick paints a very, a dark picture of a society.
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But I would say that the society presented in 2001,
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And it is, it is one that is capable of marvels.
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It's one that, for which space travel and exploring the universe
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It, it's one where probably the USSR and the U.S. are, are kind of interchangeable societies.
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There's a society of lies and a society of, of, of bureaucracy and, and things like that.
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But this, 2001 paints a picture of a very, a very positive picture of the world in 2001.
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it was, it was a sense that we are going to accomplish miracles in 2001.
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We are going to be doing these things that we can't even imagine today.
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The world it presents is dramatically different.
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The world it presents is something like the 1930s Depression-era Dust Bowl,
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It, and as, as you mentioned in your article, Romain,
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it, America ends with a, or the world ends with a whimper and not a bang.
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It, it, it's not a, it's not really a Mad Max scenario,
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and it's not a World War III, everyone's dead scenario.
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It, it seems to be just a, you know, the, the world just has been getting worse for, for decades now.
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Farming has become, has reasserted itself as, as, as, as this extremely important, necessary profession.
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Something we, farming is something now we take for granted.
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And, and, and there is a scene where John Lithgow, who is, who plays Matthew McConaughey's father,
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And Matthew McConaughey's character, Cooper, his wife has, has passed away due to cancer
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that could not be cured with modern, you know, uh, MRA machines and things like this.
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Uh, but, uh, but, but he's, you know, John Lithgow is, um, he, he's there and he's saying
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that, you know, every, he's remembering back, and you could tell that he's remembering back
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He's saying, every day used to be like Christmas, you know, first it was the iPhone 6, and then
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it was the iPhone 6 plus, and then the 7, you know, he, basically he's, he's, he's, he's
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going, and he said at one point also, like, everyone wanted to have it all.
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And I think he's getting at this consumerist society, uh, you know, where we're obsessed
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with new jobs and new, getting new gadgets and entertaining ourselves in new ways.
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You see, I, I think that's what he's gesturing, he's gesturing into our society.
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And I think what he's saying, if you, if you conflate these two things, I think what he's
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And, you know, yes, uh, there's some marvels to our society, uh, that are, that are great.
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The fact that we can do all this stuff on touchscreens and, and smartphones, and, and that's a lot
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of fun, but at the end of the day, we're, we're totally impoverished.
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And so I, I really think, you know, if you can see where I'm going, I, I think both
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Lithgow's memory and, and what, um, what, what Nolan presents, uh, as reality in this,
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in the, in the future in Interstellar, that's right now.
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I, I think that's a commentary that we live in an age of modern marvels, but it's all about
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We can kind of see that, that we're living on borrowed time.
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We're, we're living on debt and it's, it's going to go away.
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And at the very least, it's, it's a kind of, it's an impoverished society where we, we no
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longer have that will or even that ability, uh, to reach for the stars.
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We, we now think, you know, NASA, uh, you know, as you mentioned, NASA has now been, has
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now abandoned its Faustian ambitions and instead is dedicated to raising the self-esteem of Muslims
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It's, it's no longer this industry, uh, that, uh, you know, and it was an industry to get
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We had, uh, huge industries all working together in unison for this big goal.
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We, you know, we, we have a, just one more government department that is, uh, you know,
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concerned with equality and diversity and not, uh, you know, superhuman ideals of going beyond
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And, uh, so anyway, I, I think, and I've gone on too long, I'll let you talk now, Roma, but
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I think this is really Nolan's commentary on our modern world.
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We might think that it's full of marvels and that it's scientific, but no, it's actually
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It's actually a desert and we're living on borrowed time and we are experiencing a kind
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of collapse, a collapse of ourselves, of our ideals, of our ambitions.
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Um, so what are you, what are your thoughts on just this, this background to the movie
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The fact that it, you know, the fact that it took place in a depression?
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Well, you mentioned that, uh, you know, um, and I mentioned it in my review that, uh, Cooper's
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wife died because, uh, her tumor wasn't diagnosed in time.
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And what's interesting is that, you know, we live on borrowed time and, and so the machines
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we use, we don't really deserve them in a way, but, uh, you know, we are all also, uh, it's
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I mean that, uh, all these marvels have been created on the basis of science that were established
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between the 17th and the 19th century and the first half of the, of the twenties.
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But, uh, you know, when you took, when you take a generation now, even if, uh, young people
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today studying science, um, I'm not sure we have, you know, uh, the brain power, not only
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to invent new things, but to really maintain them.
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And, uh, I don't want to sound too reactionary, but, uh, there might be a time when, uh, you
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know, uh, students and researchers and engineers and professors are not gifted enough to maintain
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all these infrastructures like, uh, nuclear power plants and, you know, it's, uh, it's true
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in Anglo-Saxon countries and it's also true in France and actually many other countries.
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Uh, I think, uh, Russia as, um, you know, was a leading country, uh, under so-called communism
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Um, maybe Germany is resisting, but only in very practical engineering, which is, uh, actually
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what Germans do best today, but, uh, before that they were, uh, leading researchers.
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And, um, if you take, uh, really a generation of engineers and researchers, I don't think we
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I might be wrong because I'm not a scientific type, but, um, you know, it's, it's very, really
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And also the fact that, uh, today scientists are really focused on their field, but they
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You don't have like, um, you know, in, in most Western countries, uh, you had, uh, in politics
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and in, um, you know, the printing press, uh, the press, I mean, uh, you know, publishing
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newspapers, uh, in, even in, in arts, you had, uh, people who are trained in, um, you know,
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to be physicians, physicians or, um, you know, doctors or, uh, uh, you know, they had studied
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science, but then they developed their talents in other fields.
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And today you don't have that, you know, I, scientists are almost a kind of case, which
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is very powerful and important, but they don't, for example, when you have many people who are
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very good at math or physics or biology, but they are almost ignorant in other fields.
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And I don't think that science can maintain itself if it cuts itself from philosophy or
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I think you can look at this in, across all fields.
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I think that that lack of a, of an overriding purpose or a great dream or, or meaning, I think
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we have all become, to use a German word, Fock Mensch, uh, we, we've become, we've become
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People are very good at a particular specialty.
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Um, but beyond that, whether they have, whether they think about anything is questionable.
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I, I remember there was, um, we shouldn't perhaps, uh, dilate on this too much, but I, I remember,
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uh, seeing this study that showed that the iPhone 5, which came out, uh, two years ago,
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that the computing power within one iPhone 5 is greater than the entire computing power
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Uh, I might have gotten a detail here or there wrong, but you get the general point.
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What we, the, the kind of, the, the ability that, the amount of billions of transistors
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that we're carrying around every day in our, in our smartphone or our, our watch soon or
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It is really more power than these computers that would exist in a building, uh, 50 years
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I mean, again, I, I don't, I don't want to sound like a Luddite.
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I kind of hate, I think that's a, that's another thing.
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I don't want to sound like, oh, we should all go back to the fields and start, you know,
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I, I think these people are the people who can come up with something or can craft the
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But at the end of the day, people are using their iPhone five or six to tweet about what
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they had for dinner while they're sitting on the toilet.
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Well, the problem is more of the massified aspect of it.
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And it's where Silicon Valley is wrong because you have these people who are geniuses like
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Um, it's less the case for Bill Gates, but he's obviously, obviously a genius.
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I would say he's a very, very, very clever man, but not a creative genius like Steve Jobs.
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So these guys are an elite, an intellectual and mental elite.
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And then they want to bring the fruit of their knowledge to, to the masses who maybe don't
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And, uh, in Interstellar to get back to the movie.
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Uh, we have the result of, uh, the massive, massification of technologies.
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The problem is not that you have technology, even, you know, technology that is really,
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that, that can be bad for the environment, but only if you massify it.
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And, uh, you know, the fact that we, we, that the industry is producing cars and planes and
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It's a bad thing when you have a nation, um, it's America.
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It's a little less the case in Europe, but still with families having two or three cars and it's
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And, uh, and, uh, and, uh, and, uh, and, uh, and, uh, and, uh, and, uh, uh, and, uh, and, uh, and, uh, uh, and, uh, uh,
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I'm not sure where Nolan stands on eugenics and dysgenics,
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when they watch the baseball game at the beginning of the movie,
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people look really degraded physically and mentally.
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And it's also the consequence of the fact that, you know,
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and natural selection was not only stopped, but reverted.
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And so you have the NASA types in the movie, in Interstellar,
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who don't have children or just one child, like Professor Brand.
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you have more, you know, numerous families among lower classes.
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And by lower, I don't mean by the income, but by the quality.
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And it's also, it's not the consequence of technology or the industrial revolution,
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but of the fact that the prevailing ideas were egalitarian.
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And so I'm repeating myself, but I really want to stress that.
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And I think Christopher Nolan really is gesturing towards these ideas that we're talking about.
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And again, he's gesturing towards them the way that a filmmaker would.
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where every argument is explicit and buttressed with evidence and so on and so forth,
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a filmmaker gestures towards a feeling or an idea.
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And I think that is what he's talking about, I think, with all this.
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I mean, it's interesting when Cooper first discovers NASA,
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I noticed that there was a kind of almost fairy tale,
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You know, he's getting a signal that he thinks might be from somewhere,
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and then he goes to NASA, and then they're like,
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Okay, get ready, we're going to send you into space.
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There was something kind of incredible about that,
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But maybe that was kind of fitting with this whole movie.
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which actually we talked about maybe a year ago with John Morgan.
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the way we see reality through the five senses is, you know,
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there might be, so there was a movie like Sixth Sense,
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Maybe it's just a Sixth Sense that Murph, so Coop's daughter has,
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I, whenever, I've seen some headlines of reviews of Interstellar
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well, you know, if a planet were that close to a black hole,
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gods forbid that people start making scientifically accurate
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I mean, anyway, yeah, I, I just think that that,
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Theoretically, you can't travel faster than it.
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You know, you're going to obviously experience time
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the time of someone closer to a gravitational body
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where, you know, time would have different values
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and, you know, someone, something was happening.
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where all the little parts were kind of moving,
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I think there's something about that kind of conception
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Let me try to climb back to where I was before.
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They're using the older, you know, parts and that kind of stuff.
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if someone ever happened upon some of our private conferences.
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that is only actually focused on food production.
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And actually, NASA is just taking a share of the territory.
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you know, paying taxes to the federal government
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that huge data center in Ogden, Utah, I believe,
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You have to clean your house several times a day