‘funny,’ not funny Jim Infantino and Lionel Cassin

Andrew Silver is a research affiliate at MIT where he leads a seminar on leadership and film. He is a film director, producer, and writer of many films including Radio Cape Cod, Next Door, and Profiles In Aspiration.
Jim recorded his half of this podcast from his home, where champagne was added to the mix of the conversation. Andrew, Jim, and Lionel discuss a variety of films with regard to leadership in varying degrees, starting with Oppenheimer, but with attention paid to the previous attempts at a biopic of the "father of the atomic bomb," then Barbie, and Dune, which shared multiple attempts at telling the story, the latest being a huge success at the box office.
The idea of the power of the box office comes up over and over again. Lionel and Andrew try to land on what can make a successful release of either music or a movie, and after an hour, we decide to have Andrew back to talk more about these topics.

Ben Solo rejoins the pod to talk about 1 book and two short stories. We start by discussing a book by Rory Sutherland. The full title is Alchemy: The Surprising Power of Ideas That Don't Make Sense, although, it was previously called Alchemy: The Dark Art and Curious Science of Creating Magic in Brands, Business, and Life.
We move on to talk about a short story by Jorge Luis Borges called The God Script, which we all felt was profound. Finally, we talk about a short story by Andy Weir called The Egg. There are spoiler for these short stories but a person could read them quickly before listening if a person wanted to.
A theme shared by the two stories is the infinity of dreams. which reminded Jim of a song, which turns out to be a poem by Calderón de la Barca and you can hear a reading of it here.

First, apologies for missing a week. Producing these takes a lot of work and I needed I week off.
- Jim
Our guest this week is Balazs Szelenyi, Associate Teaching Professor at Northeastern University.
From his university bio: Balazs Szelenyi received his Ph.D. from UCLA in 1998 and teaches classes on Philosophy, Globalization, Sociology and History for Northeastern University. His first major area of research was on urban history and urban development. Based on that research he published his first book called The Failure of the Central European Bourgeoisie (2006), and an article on the dynamics of urban development in the early modern period in the American Historical Review. His second area of research was on the origins and causes of genocide, for which he received fellowships from the National Endowment of Humanities, the American Council of Learned Societies, the Fulbright Commission, and the German Marshal Fund. In 2003 he was named a Fulbright New Century Scholar for his research on genocide and the Holocaust. He has published articles in the academic journals Past and Present, Theory and Society, Social History, and the Austrian History Yearbook. Balazs has also co-edited a book called Cores, Peripheries and Globalization (2011). Currently Balazs is finishing his book on the Holocaust called From Minority to Übermensch, as well as developing a new interest on the impact of technology on society and the moral dilemmas involved in the evolution of transhumanism.
We talk about his work teaching with a focus on AI and transhumanism and the future of thinking/learning. We discuss mind-extension technologies such as AI and earlier, starting with writing and the telegraph. We touch on Kurtzweil and his singularity, the new purpose of higher education, and what happens when all the inputs and outputs are filtered by machines.
Balazs says that rather than use AI for avoiding work, his program is developing AI to better interactively teach students how to delve deeper into a topic.
We had a great time talking with Balazs, and this discussion went on for an additional hour, which will be released as bonus material on http://patreon.com/jiminfantino/ our Patreon member's site.

Peter Mulvey joins the pod in person, sitting side by side with Jim in the Slabmedia offices this week. We talk about his career in songwriting, hitting a little on themes and methods, but also on inspiration, and a long history of work. Jim mentions Peter's TED talk about his book Vlad the Astrophysicist. We talk about the creation of his recordings: Notes from Elsewhere and More Notes from Elsewhere and play some clips from recent albums, Are You Listening?, There Is Another World, and Love Is The Only Thing featuring SistaStrings.
On the literary front, Peter talks about reading The Pugilist at Rest by Thom Jones, the works of Lorrie Moore, and the poetry of Tom Hennin, notably, Darkness Sticks to Everything and The Herron with No Business Sense.
Jim mentions that Lionel compared some of Peter's work to the guitarist Nic Jones, especially his song, Canada-i-o. We talk about Norwegian prisons and the case of Anders Breivik being sent to a humane prison there, which, interestingly, he calls inhumane in this article.
Our conversation continues to trend in increasingly philosophical directions, including some discussion of meditation and groundlessness until we land on the topic of redemption for the crimes of popular figures, specifically Louis C.K.'s apology. Peter mentions an interaction with Amanda Palmer on forgiveness in this vein.

Ben Soto joins the pod to talk about The Monk and the Philosopher: A Father and Son Discuss the Meaning of Life which is an extensive conversation between Matthieu Ricard and his father Jean-François Revel. Ben found this book particularly fascinating, given his interest in Buddhism, science, and the nature of mind. We also talk about The Ego Tunnel: The Science of the Mind and the Myth of the Self by Thomas Metzinger and Jim and Ben get very heavily into the nature of mind, while Lionel listens and adds his thoughts at the end.

We begin by espousing the benefits of corduroy jackets, move on to quality problems at Jim’s childhood bagel shop, lambaste The Onion, and wave the flamethrower of curmudgeonliness at perceived modern production optimization techniques. We then talk about our varying perceptions of the state of Connecticut. Jim mentions Rein’s Deli, where a photo of his band hangs on the wall. Lionel remembers his time growing up in that state.
On to the sujet de la semaine–The Rise and Fall of D.O.D.O., a novel by Neal Stephenson and Nicole Galland. Jim is a fan of the character Grainne; a super powerful Irish witch who lives during the Elizabethan era, however, we feel that this book suffers from the caricatures in his other novels, regardless of Galland’s influence and writing. One of our key issues is the treatment of magic in the book, which is written like science fiction, but borders on fantasy. We praise his books The Diamond Age, and Anathem, but start to point to a common structure that speaks to the predictability of his plots. We compare his formula with other authors like Michael Crichton. Jim stops Lionel from spoiling the plot of Anathem which is a real surprise, even though it follows the Stephenson formula.
We contrast this novel with our previous two reads: The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time, and The Midnight Library, as well as Sea of Tranquility by Emily St. John Mandel.
The connection gets dropped and we pick up by talking again about 2010: The Year We Make Contact which was inarguably horrible and points back to the idea that we make the best decisions we can at the time.
Lionel asks Jim to read a J.G. Ballard’s short story called Prima Bella Donna, and then we make promises we probably won’t keep about reading Ulysses, The Dubliners, and Finnegan’s Wake. We talk about not finishing Gravity’s Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon. Lionel says Ballard narrative is impossible to predict and the style has such a light touch, it’s easy to get disoriented in exciting ways. The Martian Chronicles comes up as well, and Lionel implores Jim to read the first story in that Ray Bradbury collection. Jim brings the conversation back to D.O.D.O. and the philosophical idea behind it, which he finds fascinating, but ultimately thinks were not fleshed out enough.
Jim mentions that he’s been working on a short story called The Paradox Principal. Lionel says Jim has written lots of short stories the form of songs. They talk about the opposite sort of song that is generally not a short narrative but a kind of suggestion: the love song. Lionel talks about wanting to set up his home studio differently. We talk about our motivations for creating music and stories and everything we do in a world of abundance of creative effort and a relative shortage of audience. Lionel says Vangelis has one answer, which is we write so that we do not feel alone. We talk about how an audience of one can sometimes be enough.
Lionel mentions watching Generation Kill on Max. The story is based on a book he read, which he liked. He says the show is worth a visit. Jim says his TV watching time is radically curtailed. We rifle through a series of TV shows and guage our reactions. Back to Generation Kill, we briefly discuss the history of the second Iraq war. We both say we want to watch Shogun. We both remember how the first TV series captivated America at a time when Japan was seen as threatening to our economy. This brings up the issue of having to subscribe to an increasing number of platforms to see everything we want. We talk about possible alternatives.
We try our best to put an end to this madness, but end up relaunching a discussion of several more films before we lose our legs and topple over.