YouSaid · the spoken record

Janna Levin

lines on the record: 117
first: 2020-07-09
most recent: 2020-07-09
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Use the subjective tense, but they'll feel it. They'll notice it in a really subtle way. And that's why great writers are respected by tons of people who are not great writers. Like, I respect writers who far exceed my abilities because I recognize something that they're doing, not intellectually, but emotionally.”
2020-07-09 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #445: Janna Levin on Extra Dimensions, Time Travel, and How to Overcome Boots in the Face · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, I feel like there were generations of writers who really appreciated structure and there are fads in writing. Then it becomes, there's a lot of self-analysis, which is not structural. And there's a lot of different styles of writing. And I always really resonated with things that had layers. And I work really hard on structure. I lay out drawings on a board. And I think really hard about modules and elements. And I hope it doesn't show, right? I don't want you to read it that way, but I want it to be there. And one of the conversations I had with a friend recently was like, he's like, Jana, nobody's going to notice that, you know, one of our writers had a grammatical error. And I was like, but they will. They might not quote the rule that he misuse.”
2020-07-09 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #445: Janna Levin on Extra Dimensions, Time Travel, and How to Overcome Boots in the Face · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I appreciate that. And I do that in writing. Like, for me, writing is sculpture. I have this weird relationship with writing that it's sculpture. I'm not really sure how to explain it, but it's structured. Tell me more.”
2020-07-09 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #445: Janna Levin on Extra Dimensions, Time Travel, and How to Overcome Boots in the Face · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think I was elated because it didn't come out as oh I'm revealing the pain in my heart it came out to me and I don't know if anyone else felt this way but it came out to me as a sculpture that I worked on and I felt really good about and that I controlled my nerves and I got on stage and when I get on stage and it's good I feel like this it's because of this like sort of love vibe from the audience And the moth is such a wonderful venue. Like they're so fantastic and their audience just is on your side. And I so felt that both from Catherine Burns, the director who helped me frame the story and the audience, that that's why I locked into this really other zone. I am telling a personal story to people I care about, even though I'm also telling it to everybody. And it just afterwards I was elated. Yeah.”
2020-07-09 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #445: Janna Levin on Extra Dimensions, Time Travel, and How to Overcome Boots in the Face · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Off piece there. I was absolutely like, oh my God, a Holocaust surviving Nobel Prize winning chemist and I'm going to talk about my boyfriend I really worked on that piece. It was only, I only had a couple of weeks to do it, but it's one of the only times I can remember having to walk around the city block a couple of times to cool off. I begged them to let me go first because my anxiety level was so high. But once I got on stage, I was like, I'm in it. I got this.”
2020-07-09 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #445: Janna Levin on Extra Dimensions, Time Travel, and How to Overcome Boots in the Face · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“In me. And they were like, Gianna, talk about your boyfriend. So it was really not an easy assignment, right? Definitely go on.”
2020-07-09 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #445: Janna Levin on Extra Dimensions, Time Travel, and How to Overcome Boots in the Face · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“DNA evidence to release prisoners who were wrongly incarcerated. Huge, Eric Lander's huge, a guy who was doing hand transplant surgeries for marines and people in Iraq. And it culminated with a Nobel Prize-winning Holocaust surviving chemist.”
2020-07-09 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #445: Janna Levin on Extra Dimensions, Time Travel, and How to Overcome Boots in the Face · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I mean, those are both, I think, really valuable questions. I do a lot of public speaking about science, and I have a pretty personal tone. You know, my first book is pretty autobiographical and personal intimate. So it's not like I'm afraid of that. But I was terrified of giving the moth talk. It's so funny. I'm on stage all the time. I don't get nervous. Like you could wake me up in the middle of the night and I'd be like, yeah, black holes. But for this part of it was that I was telling this story for the first time that I had kept to myself for over a decade. And part of it was that I was an exceptional company. It was a world science festival. And Eric Lander spoke about the human genome project and using”
2020-07-09 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #445: Janna Levin on Extra Dimensions, Time Travel, and How to Overcome Boots in the Face · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And we, because we didn't want him to be overwrought about, like, we didn't want him to feel sickly because we believed he wouldn't be. But it's such a rare condition. And not everyone does well with that condition. It's so rare. We got off really lucky, but it was really important to us that he feel strong and healthy and not have a consciousness of a sick kid.”
2020-07-09 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #445: Janna Levin on Extra Dimensions, Time Travel, and How to Overcome Boots in the Face · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Work on constructing it and work on the levels of it as I would a book. And even though it was only a 15 minute story. And my son only heard it a couple of years ago.”
2020-07-09 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #445: Janna Levin on Extra Dimensions, Time Travel, and How to Overcome Boots in the Face · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Was 11. And by then, we felt so confident in his health and that he would not perceive himself as sickly and that other people wouldn't project on him. Like if you tell that about a baby, people become overly precious. And it's something I really don't like. I really don't like when kids are treated like glass. And so it was this kind of dark secret that Warren and I went to great lengths to keep him healthy, to see doctors, to go to zillions of experts, to travel across the country, to have him participate in studies, but told none of our friends. And that was the till nobody or everybody when the moth asked me to do it. I felt ready at about that point in time to make it work, like a piece.”
2020-07-09 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #445: Janna Levin on Extra Dimensions, Time Travel, and How to Overcome Boots in the Face · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Everybody. Touch on one of the things we need sorry to interrupt you too, but this is when we started with. That was something I was going to tell nobody or everybody. I told nobody. I mean, I had some of my dearest lifelong friends. I didn't say a word about it. And I think the anxiety was that people would find it so peculiar that they would treat him as sickly and his organ placement is healthy. It's just exceptional, he's strange. And so we hit it. For years, we just, and I think when I told that Muha story 2011 maybe he was...”
2020-07-09 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #445: Janna Levin on Extra Dimensions, Time Travel, and How to Overcome Boots in the Face · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, my son, his heart is on the right side of his body. And all of his organs are mirror reversed. And the fact that it happened to me of all people was pretty strange. And, you know, just so people aren't alarmed, the placement of his organs are totally healthy. There's nothing wrong with having, he's literally a mirror image. Of most of us, and there's nothing unhealthy about the Oregon placement, it's just extravagantly rare. And it was sort of, I felt like it was. Brutal part of working class Manchester. And I'm a sort of like kid from Chicago who had everything. And it was like the odds of us both having the resonance of that, it's extremely rare genetic condition. And going on this very peculiar journey together and creating this exceptional child who is a mirror image as though he was taken on a trip around Amobia's strip.”
2020-07-09 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #445: Janna Levin on Extra Dimensions, Time Travel, and How to Overcome Boots in the Face · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Flipped chirality. So left handedness and right handedness is known as chirality. Going on a very peculiar journey and coming back with a different chirality, like fundamentally different. And I don't know if you want me to do the spoiler of the end of the story.”
2020-07-09 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #445: Janna Levin on Extra Dimensions, Time Travel, and How to Overcome Boots in the Face · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And there's something in the story that is related to that right-handedness, which is very predominant in nature and left-handedness, which is also very predominant in different ways. And the idea that we take these things so for granted, we don't even question them anymore. Why is your heart on the left side of your body? Why is mine on the left side of my body? What is the asymmetry that is for almost every single person on the planet? There's an asymmetry that we all have. And it was kind of this story of strange journey between me and at the time boyfriend, now husband, coming back with a”
2020-07-09 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #445: Janna Levin on Extra Dimensions, Time Travel, and How to Overcome Boots in the Face · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So that talk, it describes a journey through life, but one in which you come back different. So really technically, mathematically different. So if I take a left-handed glove and, or let's start with a right-handed glove, because most of us are right-handed, and I go around, I travel around a strip, just literally imagine a cylinder. It comes back right-handed If you take that same glove on a trip around a Mobius trip, which has a twist in it, your right-handed glove comes back left-handed. And it is fundamentally different.”
2020-07-09 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #445: Janna Levin on Extra Dimensions, Time Travel, and How to Overcome Boots in the Face · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But if I live in three dimensions, I can simply lift the inner ring out. And that's what four dimensions allow you to do with the interconnected links. And it's really hard to see.”
2020-07-09 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #445: Janna Levin on Extra Dimensions, Time Travel, and How to Overcome Boots in the Face · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“If you lived in four dimensions, you could take the steel welded rings that are totally locked and interconnected that could not be separated without a chainsaw. In four dimensions, you can separate them without breaking them And here's the analogy that helps with it, but it's still just you'll never be able to see it. I can't see it. No mathematician can see it either. But in two dimensions, we can see it. Suppose I had a big steel ring surrounding a small steel ring in two dimensions. And they could never come off the plane. They could never come off the table. There is nothing I could do to get the small one outside of the big one but cut the big one. Yep, you agree with that? That's a simple metric.”
2020-07-09 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #445: Janna Levin on Extra Dimensions, Time Travel, and How to Overcome Boots in the Face · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And so that's where the math is this insane guide that we inherited that. My friend Brian Green, whom I don't know if you've interviewed, says things to me like, yeah, maybe one day we won't do math, but right now it's all we got. And that's what it feels like the math shows you something and you're like, whoa. Here's an example of what math showed me that I can't visualize. So suppose you had two interconnected rings in three dimensions. There's nothing you could do to separate them. To steal welded interconnected rings loosely connected, there's nothing you can do to break them apart unless you cut the steel, right? If you lived in four dimensions spatially, you could actually lift them apart no problem.”
2020-07-09 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #445: Janna Levin on Extra Dimensions, Time Travel, and How to Overcome Boots in the Face · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's totally accurate. I would say that I discover stuff through math that is so counterintuitive that I really wrestle with it. Which is why I love math because it's telling me stuff that I can't see. So, even these things that I'm blathering at you, I struggled with them. I struggled with these ideas because we're really reliant on intuition that we can see and perceive a curved surface in a higher dimensional space or we always have to go down a dimension. The math I follow and trust, but believe me, I cannot visualize a three-dimensional sphere nested in a higher dimension. It's not available to my mind or anybody else's. And we can't do it and we can't, we don't have an intuition for it.”
2020-07-09 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #445: Janna Levin on Extra Dimensions, Time Travel, and How to Overcome Boots in the Face · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We are limited by our experience. We're three dimensional beings. We understand that the Earth is a compact to dimensional surface that lives in a higher three-dimensional space. What we have trouble with is the idea that there could be a compact two-dimensional surface that does not live in a higher dimensional space.”
2020-07-09 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #445: Janna Levin on Extra Dimensions, Time Travel, and How to Overcome Boots in the Face · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's it. I could do that in three dimensions. I could go forward and come in the back. And that's it. It's a three-dimensional space. It does not live in a higher dimension. It is just connected in a mathematical way that looks like a crazy donut if you embedded it in a higher dimensional space, but it does not need to live in the higher dimensional space any more than you're game Pac-Man looks like a donut to you.”
2020-07-09 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #445: Janna Levin on Extra Dimensions, Time Travel, and How to Overcome Boots in the Face · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But that donut does not live in a higher dimensional space. It lives happily in 2D on your 2D flat screen. That's the whole story mathematically. He goes out one side, he comes in the other. He goes at the top, he comes in the bottom. And if you see that and you start to think like, okay, wow, that's a weird computer rule, but computer rules are only reflecting mathematical rules. And the universe could obey the same rules. I go out to the right side of the universe. I come in the left side. I go out the top of the universe. I come in the bottom. There is no need for that to live in another space.”
2020-07-09 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #445: Janna Levin on Extra Dimensions, Time Travel, and How to Overcome Boots in the Face · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I mean, there's no requirement in the video game rules. He exits the right side, he enters the left side. He goes out the top, he enters the bottom. I don't actually know if he can go out the top or on the left and right side, but we'll extrapolate. That means that What topologists would call that is a donut, that it has the shape of a donut. He's continuously going around in one direction, and he can continuously go around in the other direction.”
2020-07-09 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #445: Janna Levin on Extra Dimensions, Time Travel, and How to Overcome Boots in the Face · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Pac-Man lives on a two-dimensional donut that is not embedded in a higher dimensional space. That's it. There's no higher dimensional space. He lives in a flat two-dimensional world.”
2020-07-09 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #445: Janna Levin on Extra Dimensions, Time Travel, and How to Overcome Boots in the Face · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Pac-Man just showed up on my video feed. You know how Pac-Man goes off the right side of the frame and comes in the left side of the frame? And you know how you can go out the top of the frame and come in the bottom of the frame”
2020-07-09 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #445: Janna Levin on Extra Dimensions, Time Travel, and How to Overcome Boots in the Face · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And that's where you start to go, like, okay. And the kind of impact of that is that anything that spacetime is part of the universe. So if I said, yeah, we live in a higher dimensional version of the Earth, a three-dimensional sphere, nested in a higher dimension than any relativist, anybody who follows, who uses Einstein's theory as a guide would say, yeah, but that's spacetime and therefore that's part of the universe. So, there's no such thing as space or time, locations, or events that aren't part of the universe. All that would mean was that we unnecessarily lived in four dimensions. So here's another example that I think is going to make this a little bit more manageable. If you look at, let's look at a video game, let's look at Pac-Man, which just turned 40 or something right now.”
2020-07-09 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #445: Janna Levin on Extra Dimensions, Time Travel, and How to Overcome Boots in the Face · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It lives in 3D, though, which is how as three dimensional beings were able to visualize it. So we're like, yeah, the Earth is finite and it's 2D, but there's all this three-dimensional stuff that it lives in. And we want to do the same thing with the universe. I want to tell you there's a three-dimensional equivalent to the Earth. That is a sphere. It's a three-dimensional sphere. You cannot visualize it. And it need not be nested in a higher dimension.”
2020-07-09 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #445: Janna Levin on Extra Dimensions, Time Travel, and How to Overcome Boots in the Face · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“To conceive of, but I believe I could convince you that it's possible that I do not need to embed the three-dimensional universe if it's finite into a higher dimensional space. So let's talk about the Earth. The Earth as a surface, forget about the inside, forget about it that it's a solid object. Let's just look at the surface of the Earth. That is two-dimensional. All I need to know on the surface of the Earth is east, west, north, south, 2D. That's it.”
2020-07-09 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #445: Janna Levin on Extra Dimensions, Time Travel, and How to Overcome Boots in the Face · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I am not going to deny that this was hard for everybody, even very accredited, experienced mathematicians. This is not an easy concept, but I will tell you there is no requirement for anything on the outside. There's this sort of pat answer that people give, which is there's nothing north of the North Pole. Go more north of the North Pole and you go south. I don't love that answer because I understand that intuitively people are saying, yeah, but I could go up. And so it's not satisfying. But here's what's really hard.”
2020-07-09 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #445: Janna Levin on Extra Dimensions, Time Travel, and How to Overcome Boots in the Face · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And is a compact finite surface. That was a discovery recently in some sense. Spanish explorers were afraid that Columbus was going to sail off the edge of the earth, that it was not compact. And so this kind of thinking should be, we should be asking that about the universe. Is it possible? So if I leave New York City and I travel in a straight line as best I can, I might need to paddle. I might need to walk, I might need to do whatever, I will come back to New York City. That was not known until fairly recently. It might be like that with the universe, that if I left the solar system in a spacecraft and I left the galaxy and I traveled in a straight line, after a while, I would very surprisingly find myself coming back to the Milky Way galaxy and the solar system.”
2020-07-09 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #445: Janna Levin on Extra Dimensions, Time Travel, and How to Overcome Boots in the Face · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And you're noticing the curves on the surface of the earth. You go up the hill, you go down the hill. I live on Morningside Heights by Columbia. I go down a hill to Harlem. I go up a hill to Columbia. And that's local. But if I pan way, way far back, I see that the earth is actually a sphere. And I don't see that up close. And that is something ridiculously enough we still have flat earthers. But that is something that the Greeks and ancient astronomers discovered it was not a known thing. And so that aspect of space-time, that compactness, the fact that the Earth isn't infinite, the Earth isn't an infinite plane. It is actually curves around, wraps back on itself.”
2020-07-09 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #445: Janna Levin on Extra Dimensions, Time Travel, and How to Overcome Boots in the Face · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Have a teacup, and I'm looking at it super, super closely. I see the curves on it. That's what Einstein taught us about. But if I put it further away, I see a handle and a connectedness of the handle. And we call that topology, the fact that there's a hole and that even if this was made of clay, there's nothing I could do to my teacup to get rid of that whole unless I broke it. or did something like that. So we call that topology. It has a feature. It has a feature called a whole. It's not equivalent to just a solid object. And that aspect of geometry, once Einstein said spacetime is curved and it's geometry, people started to ask, well, what about topology, the connectedness? So for instance, let's look at the Earth. You and I are in different parts of the Earth. Maybe you're near a hill.”
2020-07-09 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #445: Janna Levin on Extra Dimensions, Time Travel, and How to Overcome Boots in the Face · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So Einstein had this funny quote, which I've said many times, which is, only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity. And then he says, and I'm not so sure about the universe. And as soon as Einstein started talking about spacetime and geometry, so basically seeing the universe as a curved geometry, his theory cannot specify the global connectedness. It's not necessarily a shortcoming of Einstein's theory of general relativity. It's just that we suspect that the quantum theory of gravity beyond Einstein will tell us something about the global structure. So for example, if I'm looking right now.”
2020-07-09 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #445: Janna Levin on Extra Dimensions, Time Travel, and How to Overcome Boots in the Face · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's a big one, and also not my favorite in a sense. I do like the basic pleasure of experience, of something that we've discovered, of something, you know, that we found on paper in math, and then it's out there. I love that connect.”
2020-07-09 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #445: Janna Levin on Extra Dimensions, Time Travel, and How to Overcome Boots in the Face · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And Sean, in no small part, has made me, you know, look at that. And as a friend and as a colleague and as a scientist, he has made me look at that. And I think he's right about that. And Sean and I actually have a long-running joke because he was in graduate school at Harvard when I was at MIT. We were very good friends. And I became more and more Just calculate, man. It's objective reality. Just do it. Let's discover stuff. And he went more and more into philosophy, and we totally tease each other about it all the time.”
2020-07-09 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #445: Janna Levin on Extra Dimensions, Time Travel, and How to Overcome Boots in the Face · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Proof that something's true and that we actually do not understand it. And I think that they're right to press us, that it's not good enough just to build stuff, that if you technically, philosophically, intellectually do not understand something, use it as a guide to tell you what's beyond, what more we could know. And I really think that the philosophers on the interpretation of quantum mechanics, the measurement problem, which is to say in quantum mechanics, things don't always assume a concrete state yet when we measure them, we find them only in a concrete state, like this kind of what is reality stuff? What is the role of complex systems? I think they're right to press us on this. And I think that they're making way more progress than the physicists are. And you've spoken to Sean Carroll.”
2020-07-09 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #445: Janna Levin on Extra Dimensions, Time Travel, and How to Overcome Boots in the Face · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I would say that the philosophers are doing the ones from my perspective are doing the really provocative important work are demanding that physicists acknowledge that they don't understand their most widely accurately tested paradigm in the history of science, namely quantum mechanics. And so it's pretty wild that we build these machines like the Large Hydron Collider in Switzerland and that we discover the Higgs particle, the goddamn particle, which was appropriated as the guard particle, but the original title was the goddamn particle. And, you know, is incredibly stunningly accurate. You can build stuff. Like for me, that's like the base level.”
2020-07-09 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #445: Janna Levin on Extra Dimensions, Time Travel, and How to Overcome Boots in the Face · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“To like not be like, I gotta, I got a wrench. I know how to use it to be like, but you don't understand that wrench. Let's talk about it. Those people are really, really important and provocative. And nothing against plumbers. Lenny Suskin, who is one of the most brilliant physicists I've ever known, was a plumber and grew up in the Bronx, a plumber's son. And Lenny is an absolute creative genius in theoretical physics.”
2020-07-09 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #445: Janna Levin on Extra Dimensions, Time Travel, and How to Overcome Boots in the Face · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Like at Oxford, at Columbia, at Rutgers. I think there's one at UCSC, if I'm not mistaken, where they're really pushing physicists to not be plumbers and to like...”
2020-07-09 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #445: Janna Levin on Extra Dimensions, Time Travel, and How to Overcome Boots in the Face · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And I have very off opinions about Wittgenstein, but that I still believe. I think he was a scientist, a mathematician, a mystic. I think he was a poet. So, I mean, those for me are the biggest standouts. I love the rationalists if you wanted to study Lock Berkeley Hume, Descartes, you know, all that's great, but if you ask like at a pleasure center level, I would kind of stick to Bertrand Russell Heidegger and Wittgenstein and not to miss the modern philosophers who are basically very close to the boundary of science and philosophy, who are pushing forward interpretations of quantum mechanics, understandings of the nature of time, and there's little communities, there's little centers.”
2020-07-09 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #445: Janna Levin on Extra Dimensions, Time Travel, and How to Overcome Boots in the Face · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's tough. I think that, you know, somebody like Bertrand Russell, who's also a mathematician. I know this is unpopular, but I really enjoyed Heidegger. There was something to his madness Wittgenstein for sure, but you're never going to figure him out. The story.”
2020-07-09 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #445: Janna Levin on Extra Dimensions, Time Travel, and How to Overcome Boots in the Face · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Never crossed anyone's mind. And in retrospect, I always had that leaning. I just felt it in a more kind of organic, poetic appreciation kind of a way”
2020-07-09 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #445: Janna Levin on Extra Dimensions, Time Travel, and How to Overcome Boots in the Face · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Nobody was like, oh, you're a scientist. I loved books about evolution and I loved Carl Sagan and I loved lying on the beach with my dad on a dark. In South Carolina, where there were no street lights. Like, I'm a city kid. I'd never seen this guy, and marveling over the view of the Milky Way. I just didn't see it as science. I saw it as an experientially wonderful thing. And I loved my dad's MD to where my mom taught me how to read. My dad taught me how to ask questions. You know, my dad's just a super curious guy. He would always talk about why is it like this? And why is it like that? And just, you know, in a different 10 years later, people would have said, your daughter is a scientist, but at that time, nobody said that.”
2020-07-09 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #445: Janna Levin on Extra Dimensions, Time Travel, and How to Overcome Boots in the Face · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And then with chemistry, I've always loved naturalism, always. And I just didn't see it. You know, we talked differently about it when I was a kid. Nobody was like, what do you mean by natural?”
2020-07-09 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #445: Janna Levin on Extra Dimensions, Time Travel, and How to Overcome Boots in the Face · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, I think, you know, the math classes were very anonymous. They were big classes with calculus. It was very anonymous. I just did really well in calculus. I really did. I liked math. I was good at it. I didn't think twice about it. It's like being good at jump rope. I really didn't think twice about it. Yeah, I could crush the calculus. And I don't know why. I didn't really have any background. It's not like something that necessarily runs in my family, but I enjoy it, actually. And I would find weird solutions. Like they would throw one problem on a calculus test that they hadn't taught you how to solve. And I would like that problem. And I would spend my time on that problem and I would fix it. And I'm not saying I didn't do badly sometimes, but calculus was just sort of a skill thing. It really like jumping rope.”
2020-07-09 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #445: Janna Levin on Extra Dimensions, Time Travel, and How to Overcome Boots in the Face · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think one of the reasons why I became pretty mathematically leaning was as a compensation for not feeling like I had the intuition.”
2020-07-09 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #445: Janna Levin on Extra Dimensions, Time Travel, and How to Overcome Boots in the Face · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Job isn't to obsess about his personal life and his personal psychology and the phrasing of every word because math is universal. And I had this chilling experience that I cannot even describe. And after that, I basically switched. I was probably a sophomore going into my junior year. And so by a junior in college, I switched my major to astronomy and physics. I took math going crazy, which I always liked math. I always liked math. I just didn't know I had any purpose for it. And so I scrambled. I really scrambled to try to catch up to my peers who were those, you know, kids who had the chemistry set in their basement and always knew and knew things I didn't know and like had intuitions I didn't have. And so I really scrambled and”
2020-07-09 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #445: Janna Levin on Extra Dimensions, Time Travel, and How to Overcome Boots in the Face · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Albert. And he had no idea I was sitting in the back of the room all those years ago. And I swear to you, it's what made me have that switch of I don't want to talk about what comp meant. Nobody's talking about what Einstein meant. We simply have to carry it on from where he gave us the baton. We have to keep moving.”
2020-07-09 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #445: Janna Levin on Extra Dimensions, Time Travel, and How to Overcome Boots in the Face · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And he comes in and he's not, in my mind, he's doing philosophy at a totally different way and style. And he starts talks talking about Einstein and free will and quantum mechanics and determinism. And everyone, even the most obnoxious show-offs in those classes, and I'm sure you know what I mean. Everyone got quiet And I thought, wow, I'm not hearing all the bluster I usually hear in this room. And I just was mesmerized. And David Albert is now a friend of mine and a colleague. He got the job.”
2020-07-09 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #445: Janna Levin on Extra Dimensions, Time Travel, and How to Overcome Boots in the Face · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT