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[Assistant] The action starts with MSU, WeatherTech Sports Car Series, six hours at the Glen.


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[Assistant] Hey, check out MotoGP at TT Assen. I've never been there, I want to go there. That's at 1.30 Eastern on CNBC. The NASCAR Cup Series kicks off the charge to the playoffs in Nashville under the lights.


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[Assistant] Uh, we got one in the can, we need to thank everyone for watching. Uhm, we appreciate all your guys' support.


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[Assistant] Wherever you download your podcasts on all the, uh, podcast applications, uh, make sure you tune into us, uh, motor sports on NBC YouTube page. And of course, um.


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[Assistant] Uh, Peacock, we are on demand on Peacock, so you can go back and watch some previous, uhm, episodes if you would like. Uh, we appreciate all the interaction that, uhm, everyone that you, that you give us and, and you do for us. We love the questions. I will say the questions, uhm,


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[Assistant] Ramp them up a little bit next week for sure.


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[Assistant] Some of the questions that we don't answer, I don't want you guys to get bummed, but a lot of it is because some of the questions are answers that we give on the analysis, like during the races kind of answer the questions. So if you can kind of think of some questions that are


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[Assistant] Maybe not so much related to the actual race that weekend. That would be helpful for our Vietnam.


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[Assistant] But, uh, nevertheless, we appreciate, we appreciate all the viewers, all the listeners. Again, like, subscribe, comment.


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[Assistant] And, uh, make sure you check us out. Have a great, uh, great trip this week with your family. That's gonna be epic. You deserve it. You worked hard for it. I know the kids are gonna have a great time and send us some pictures.


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[Assistant] After, uh, after the final moto and the overall out this, uh, red cross flag.


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[Assistant] That, uh, Hunter jumped on and we got some tape about that and we have a Hunter's, Hunter's view on it and what he had to say.


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[Assistant] I think that yeah, for sure. You're exactly right. Like safety first and foremost, and you brought up something really good.


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[Assistant] I think that the officials got it wrong, uhm, and I'm not the, I don't, I'm not trying to be insensitive, whatever, what, whatsoever, but I mean, dude, the guy was cranking his motorcycle up. It really wasn't like, I shouldn't, I'm not even going to say it was a, uh, it doesn't matter the size of the jump, but regardless. Yeah. I think, I think it wasn't.


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[Assistant] Or like, was he laying there for a little bit, or did he just stall the bike, or?


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[Assistant] You know, like why the red cross flag in that situation? I understand that like it's on a jump, but you and I have been...


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[Assistant] In millions of races where the yellow flag's gone when a dude falls down.


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[Assistant] I wonder what happened there. It'd be interesting to talk to the officials and get some more wording on that to exactly like why the Red Cross. So to your point, uh, like yes, does Lars have any leg to stand on? Probably not because it's right there on video. He blatantly jumped it.


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[Assistant] Definitely a tough spot to be in. Like I said, you can't read the lappers always correctly.


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[Assistant] There's a lot of factors that can come into Daytona, but like you said, like, I really feel.


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[Assistant] Oh no, I have a gavel, and basically we're all friends.


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[Assistant] Well, 30 years ago or 40 years ago, I think each president would choose his successor. They're all males. And at a certain point, somebody decided that it might be good to have an election. And I know the candidate who lost the first election.


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[Assistant] He was confident that he would just be elected without any question and his opponent


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[Assistant] Offices like the President and the Vice Presidents and so on. When they choose someone as a potential candidate,


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[Assistant] They approach that person and ask him or her whether or not the person will run.


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[Assistant] And in my case, I was very flattered and I said absolutely and I ran in an election. I had one opponent who is very much like me in a lot of respects. He's from California. We have similar mathematical backgrounds and I think both of us were viewed as very popular and very well known and there's no campaigning in the sense of debates or


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[Assistant] You know calling, calling your opponent, you know, lying Ted or something. It's still very collegial.


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[Assistant] But I did make it known to my colleagues at Berkeley that I actually was going to be happy to serve. Very often if you see someone you know who's a candidate for something, you say, well, we're going to do that person a favor by voting for the opponent. But I actually wanted to do it and I was very happy that I won.


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[Assistant] Where is that from? It's from eastern Poland. It's from a town called Graevo, which I've never visited. My grandfather was Ribetski. And when he came to the United States in the early part of the 20th century, it was the fashion at Ellis Island to make everyone American, as American as possible. And so I became Ribbit.


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[Assistant] Which has become very useful to me in France. And many of my colleagues, they would phone up restaurants to make reservations and try to explain their last names. And if the last name didn't sound French, there'd be a lot of hesitation trying to get the name right and so on.


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[Assistant] Yeah, well, there are many, many French rebates. And in fact, on Facebook, you can see there, there are big clusters of them. And there are people who've contacted me saying my ancestors came from France through Cuba. Were your ancestors in Cuba? No.


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[Assistant] So I was born in Brooklyn, New York. My parents were both born in New York City. And when I was three years old, we moved to a place called Rockaway.


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[Assistant] Which is a part of Queens, but it's a pretty remote part of Queens. Like they don't even have a Starbucks nearby to show you how remote it is. And recently it's become very Brooklynized because it has surfing. And so all the hipsters come from Brooklyn now on the weekends.


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[Assistant] And many of them have actually moved to Rockaway. So for example, the rock singer Patti Smith bought a house.


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[Assistant] It was my best subject, yea. So I was a pretty good student, terrible athlete, complete nerd, but I was good at school in kind of all subjects and math was the easiest.


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[Assistant] I don't think I knew that there was such a thing called a mathematician. I've told this story many times, but it started when I was a freshman at Brown.


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[Assistant] I went to my first mathematics course. It was a course in abstract linear algebra.


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[Assistant] And I loved material and I was really taken with the professor and I, you know, looked at this guy, his name was Frank Stewart, and I said, I want to be like that. This is what I want to do. I had still no idea what it actually meant.


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[Assistant] You know, I didn't know what professors did, how they spent their time. You know, there's this thing called research and committee work and reviewing and traveling. I had no idea what the game was, but I was very taken.


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[Assistant] Both with the content, with the mathematics, and also with this kind of freedom from the constraints of business.


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[Assistant] What were you at Brown doing? Well, so I showed up as a freshman with some vague intent to try math and applied math and chemistry. I took one applied math course. It was a year long course. I didn't like it very much. I never took a chemistry course. So I went straight for math. I did math and broadcast radio. I was on the campus radio station.


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[Assistant] That's correct. In the US, when people come to college, they are not really expected to declare their major until their third year. And so there's this idea that they can experiment and try a different thing. In fact, it's very common. I mean, if you look at what people are majoring in,


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[Assistant] On say the Berkeley campus, well, they're majoring in things like social relations and anthropology, you know, theater. It's very rare to take a high school student and say, what do you want to major in? And people will say anthropology. You know, people will talk about their core subjects. Maybe they'll talk about computer science, but they won't think, well, I want to be in geography.


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[Assistant] Okay, I mean the admissions boards, they choose people to try to sculpt the profile of their entering class and they have an idea of who's coming in and they could be completely mistaken.


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[Assistant] I did. So I'm, I'm the rare example of somebody who set out on a path and just kept walking straight. I mean, most people, you know, Yogi Berra said, if you come to a fork in the road, take it. I mean, most people end up doing things that, that are completely unpredictable. And my thing, you know, I just kept going forward and there was no obstacle and I liked it more and more and I, here I am.


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[Assistant] So it's a blend of number theory, which is the study of whole numbers and geometry, which


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[Assistant] Also pretty well understood what that is. So there's a kind of number theory slash algebraic geometry subject, which has been coined arithmetical algebraic geometry. So that was my subject and I came to it because I had some professors at Brown who were kind of very, very forceful and they said, you're very good in math, read this paper.


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[Assistant] And there were these two people, Ken Ireland and Michael Rosen.


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[Assistant] And they were fantastic. You know, they were doing interesting stuff. They were interested in things and they kind of kept pushing me in different directions.


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[Assistant] They told me where to go to graduate school, who to work with, what subjects were interesting, and it just meshed well with me.


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[Assistant] Well, so I think I was lucky in that I was pushed into a subject that I'm actually good at. I believe that people have very uneven aptitudes even within a subject like mathematics. You know, I may not have been very good at geometry or probability or some other subject. I probably would have been okay because, you know, I was


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[Assistant] Kind of good and all around, but by luck I was pushed into a subject that really spoke to me and I was able to speak back after a while.


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[Assistant] I think the mix is the best thing because if you do several things and on a given day you're not so good at one of them, well you turn to the other. Whereas if you're just focused on one thing, like for example suppose you have a sabbatical year and you're at a math institute and you know that the entire year you're going to be doing research.


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[Assistant] Well, at the end of the day, if your pad of paper is still blank, you feel terrible. You haven't done anything.


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[Assistant] Whereas if you start thinking about something and you kind of keep going in a circle and you've just come back to what you've done before, you say, well, you know, maybe it's time to make up this week's homework.


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[Assistant] Well, there are a lot of long-term goals for the subject.


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[Assistant] One of them, curiously, is the theorem that was proved by Andrew Wiles with the help of Richard Taylor and Brian Conrad and so on. The modularity of elliptic curves. That was a very well known conjecture.


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[Assistant] It had nothing to do with Fermat's Last Theorem. The thing that I studied that was my thesis and a lot of my subsequent work


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[Assistant] One topic is Galois representations and modular forms, which came into the proof of Fermat's last theorem. So when I was a graduate student, there were countless courses and seminars on subjects like Iwasawa theory, Galois representations, modular forms. These are all things that came together, you know, 20 years later.


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[Assistant] Oh, it's a mix. I mean, so certainly over time, people became more and more confident that elliptic curves would end up being modular. They thought, you know, it was true, but something we couldn't prove. So they began


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[Assistant] So if you derive a consequence of an unproved conjecture, you have a theorem. You can state it in different ways. You can say assume all elliptic curves are modular, then such and such is true. Another way to spin it, you can say that all elliptic curves that happen to be modular have the following properties.


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[Assistant] I wrote a thesis at Harvard that I was kind of vaguely proud of and I wondered whether anyone will offer me a job. What was the title of your thesis? Gawah representations attached to a billion varieties with many real multiplications.


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[Assistant] A mathematician named Serge Lang grabbed it and he said, I'm sending it to the American Journal and I'm going to tell the editor in chief to publish it.


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[Assistant] And he did that and nothing happened for about two years. And finally I kind of inquired, you know, whatever happened to this? And they asked, and finally it just got published. You know, I was wondering if anyone would ever read it, but it turns out it has lots of citations and people think it's a good thing for background. I was waiting, you know, to hear whether any place would ever offer me a job.


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[Assistant] And before I expected job offers to come, I got a phone call from Princeton University asking me to come and be basically a postdoc. So I was there.


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[Assistant] For, it's hard to count the years because the third year that I was supposedly in Princeton, I got a fellowship to study in Paris. So that was my first year in Paris and I actually taught at Princeton for a total of three years with this year in Paris kind of sandwiched between the


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[Assistant] Second and third year. You got to take that Rebay surname out for a test drive. Yeah. In fact, one of the first things I did was to take the Metro to the Ampass Rebay, which is a little alleyway.


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[Assistant] And I've certainly have photos of myself standing in front of the impasse rebeille.


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[Assistant] So this was completely unexpected. I hadn't applied to Berkeley. But secretly, you know, when I thought about universities where I might go, Berkeley was probably at the top of the list because it was one of the top three universities in terms of mathematics, the other two being Harvard and Princeton.


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[Assistant] And I had visited Berkeley once for a week on my way to a conference. I just thought it was paradise.


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[Assistant] So I tried my best to hide my enthusiasm when they phoned me up. I ultimately accepted an offer of an associate professorship at Berkeley and promptly went to Paris again for a year. And so I first came to Berkeley kind of a year and a half after the initial phone call.


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[Assistant] Well, it was kind of the light and the kind of joy, the informality and Telegraph Avenue was full of people wearing tie-dye shirts and it was kind of like the 60s was still going on.


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[Assistant] Well, you know, I'm thinking of someone I know who works in San Diego who applied for a job and in his interview he said, I'm a Californian trapped in the body of an Englishman. So maybe I was a Californian trapped in the body of an East Coast person. Okay, that makes sense.


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[Assistant] This is before a while, so this is in the early to mid 1980s. There was this guy Gerhard Frey who keeps coming up in all the discussions of it. And he was the first person that I knew of to try to think about the links between elliptic curves and solutions to Fermat's Last Theorem.


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[Assistant] So at the time, there was a lot of study about elliptic curves with various properties.


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[Assistant] And if you had an elliptic curve with various properties,


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[Assistant] You could derive from that elliptic curve the solution to some equation. And there was a movement.


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[Assistant] One of the mathematicians was a Russian mathematician, Demyanenko.


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[Assistant] Where you try to rule out certain kinds of elliptic curves by deriving from the existence of the elliptic curve.


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[Assistant] A solution to an equation that didn't have solutions. So that was the subject. And it was going back and forth between elliptic curves and solutions.


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[Assistant] And Fry somehow stumbled on this idea that if you had a solution to Fermat's Last Theorem, this would give you an elliptic curve with extremely problematic properties.


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[Assistant] And he kind of went around telling people about this and he came to Berkeley and spoke to me and gave a talk.


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[Assistant] And I was very unconvinced. I kind of really didn't believe it. This is around 1982 or 1983. And over the next year or two, he came to this idea that if elliptic curves were known to be modular, it should be possible to prove Fermat's last theorem.


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[Assistant] And he wrote a manuscript that was like two or three pages with an outline of the assertion that the modularity of elliptic curves implies Fermat's Last Theorem. And he was well aware of the fact that his outline was not at all complete.


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[Assistant] But he was hoping that people who were experts in the theory of modular curves, like me I guess, would fill in all the blanks and kind of make the thing okay. I was still completely unconvinced. I didn't...


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[Assistant] I don't kind of know that he was right but he gave lectures in Europe and a lot of European mathematicians in 1984-85, that academic year, started thinking about his lectures and his little manuscript and thinking about ways


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[Assistant] Longer manuscript, it was a letter to Jean-Francois Maast, French mathematician, explaining


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[Assistant] Assertion, he called it epsilon, meaning a small number.


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[Assistant] Then you could actually justify what Fry had started to do.


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[Assistant] So in other words, Sarah's letter basically said,


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[Assistant] Fry looks like he's right, you just have to prove this one extra thing. And this was in the summer of 1985, and I got a copy of the letter, we were all together at some conference in Northern California.


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[Assistant] And I started thinking about this epsilon and it was really right in the center of things that I understood.


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[Assistant] Well, I thought that the connection with Fermat was kind of the icing on the cake, but I'm not one of these people who say, you know, I kind of went to the library when I was a 10 year old and read about Fermat's Last Theorem and it was my great goal. It was a challenge. It was a mathematical challenge. It was right in my subject. It was something that I thought I could do.


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[Assistant] And I was responding to that challenge. The connection with Fermat made it, you know, even more important to think about.


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[Assistant] Oh, so I thought about it off and on for a year. This was the academic year in 1985-86.


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[Assistant] And I, you know, was teaching calculus and whenever I had a spare moment, I thought a little bit about this problem and asked myself whether I had any special insight into it that other people didn't have.


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[Assistant] And at the end of the teaching, so this would be in May.


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[Assistant] I was on my way to Europe. So the first thing that I did was I went to Harvard for basically a week. So I had an office that I was able to use and I was also staying with my sister in Wellesley. I remember sitting in her kind of breakfast table in Wellesley thinking about this thing and realizing that I knew something


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[Assistant] I flew to Europe, I was in Paris for a while and then I showed up at the Max Planck Institute in Bonn. And in all of these places, I had my pad of paper and I would write the thing. And by the time I got to Bonn, soon after my arrival, this is probably around June 1st, 1986.


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[Assistant] I realized that I could do what I thought was only a special case.


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[Assistant] Wrote the thing over and over again on different sheets of paper and I convinced myself that it was actually true. And I started talking to people about it in Bonn.


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[Assistant] And I might have given a lecture or two in Bonn, and I also wrote a letter, a physical letter on paper to Barry Mazur at Harvard, and I mailed him the letter, and I didn't hear back.


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[Assistant] And then there's this famous story with the cappuccino in August of 1986 in Berkeley.


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[Assistant] There was the International Congress of Mathematicians that happened to be in Berkeley. Barry Mazur was there and I said, hey, you know, I sent you this letter and I'm trying to work on the general case and you didn't respond to the letter. And Barry looked at me and he said, well, of course, you know, you have done the general case. You just have to do something slightly different.


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[Assistant] So he thought he was just, you know, sprinkling some powder on it and telling me something that I should have realized long ago. So we went and had a coffee at some cafe at the edge of campus.


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[Assistant] It's now called Cafe Strada and we sat there and as soon as he explained the thing in one or two sentences, what I had to do extra, I realized that there was gonna be no problem, that the thing was going to work.


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[Assistant] No, it made a lot of waves. Not to the extent that Fermat's Last Theorem itself made waves, but it made waves within mathematics. So I was approached by journalists who wanted me to kind of talk about the proof for various popular and scientific magazines. Everyone knew about it in mathematics, that this thing had happened. And there was also


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[Assistant] A certain amount of skepticism, is this proof going to work out, you know, because I didn't have a complete manuscript, it hadn't been accepted for publication, I gave lectures, I explained all these things, and a lot of the proof,


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[Assistant] Was so convoluted to people that they thought it couldn't possibly be correct. At least some people felt that way.


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[Assistant] I thought that the assertion that needed to be proved, the modularity of elliptic curves, was completely beyond the techniques at that time.


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[Assistant] So I thought what I had done was to convince people that Fermat's Last Theorem was true morally.


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[Assistant] Because people believed in the modularity of elliptic curves.


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[Assistant] But I had no expectation that anyone, you know, seven years later would claim to prove that elliptic curves are modular.


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[Assistant] Well, not that I was aware of. Now it turns out, of course, Wiles went to his attic and worked on this thing quietly, but apparently other people were having kind of similar ideas, you know, maybe there's a way to do this.


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[Assistant] John Coates would invite me to Cambridge, basically he said, you know, whenever you're tired of Paris and want to spend a week in Cambridge, just come over and we have a room for you.


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[Assistant] You give a lecture, we can pay some travel expenses, we'll invite you to high table. So I came to Cambridge, you know, maybe four or five times, maybe even more, during that year, and Wiles was Coates' student.


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[Assistant] And in fact the thing that I had done by the end of the year


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[Assistant] Was something that also created a lot of interest in mathematics. I proved what's now viewed as the converse to a theorem of air brawn, shock air brawn.


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[Assistant] And I was lecturing on this in Cambridge and Wiles got very excited and one of his first papers was to take what I did and go beyond that.


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[Assistant] And then his most famous paper after that was a joint paper with Barry Mazur where they proved something called the main theorem of Iwasawa theory.


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[Assistant] And they did that by using techniques that were derived from mine.


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[Assistant] I had no knowledge of it. I mean, I take him at his word. And in fact, what he says is that he was obsessed with Fermat and the adults in the room told him, you know, don't think about that. Here are some fruitful problems that you can think about. And he took their advice.


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[Assistant] Well okay, so in June 1993, there was a conference in Cambridge, and I was invited, I was one of the speakers. And at a typical conference, you have, you know, a number of speakers, maybe four or five, six per day, and no one speaks more than once.


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[Assistant] And Wiles had told the organizers that he had something very special that he wanted to present and it would require three separate lectures.


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[Assistant] On three consecutive days and he was booked for this and after the first and second lecture there was widespread speculation that he was going to prove the modularity of a very wide class of elliptic curves and this would be enough to prove Fermat's last theorem.


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[Assistant] Well, the title of his talk, I mean, in fact, I joked that both in my article and in Wiles' article,


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[Assistant] Fermat's equation appears in the introduction and never after that. I mean, both articles are about the technicalities of modular forms, modular curves, Galois representations. These are the tools that we'd all been working with. And Wiles's lectures had a title like that.


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[Assistant] Yeah, in fact, someone kind of whispered to me that this was gonna happen after the second day, so it wasn't a surprise to me because I actually had some knowledge.


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[Assistant] But even if I hadn't, you know, I would have expected something like that. And there was a huge audience for his lecture. A lot of people had cameras. A lot of people brought their friends who were not in the subject and they said, you know, come to this lecture. Something historic is going to happen.


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[Assistant] What was it like being in that room? It was joyful. It was electrifying. It was kind of a celebration.


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[Assistant] You know, when I was a graduate student, my relatives would say to me, well, what are you doing this for? You know, what kind of subject is this? And I would say,


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[Assistant] Well, you know, basically what we're trying to do ultimately is solve equations, because that's something people can understand. And, you know, it's wonderfully validating, after all these years, that we're actually solving an equation.


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[Assistant] I may have. I certainly had a film camera there and I took a number of photos and then there were some group photos that I appear in that were taken by other mathematicians who were there.


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[Assistant] The Newton Institute knew in advance that something was going to happen and they chilled cases of sparkling wine. It was actually Napa Valley sparkling wine. Of course. That was served after his lecture. There was a lot of buzz. And as soon as the lecture ended, someone came up to Andrew and said, Gina Collada from the New York Times is on the phone. Will you speak to her? And Andrew turned to me and he said, can you talk to her?


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[Assistant] So I went into an office, it was actually my office, and I sat underneath my desk.


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[Assistant] In order to have some soundproofing, because there was a lot of chatter in the hallways. And I spoke to her, you know, for maybe a half hour.


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[Assistant] And I outlined the whole thing and the next morning our names were on the front page of the New York Times, which is kind of remarkable. So like my parents, you know, got the New York Times delivered to their driveway and they opened it up and there's their son on the very front page.


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[Assistant] There was this possibly unfortunate term that she used. She kind of referred to me as Andrew's spokesman.


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[Assistant] So it was true that he asked me to speak for him in that context.


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[Assistant] But then, somehow it became known in the press.


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[Assistant] My attitude was I would speak to everyone, and they asked me the same questions over and over again, you know, did Andrew Wiles prove Fermat's Last Theorem? And I basically said yes, and occasionally I would mention


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[Assistant] That I had done some preliminary work, but that rarely made the write-ups. No. It was all about Andrew Wiles. There's a whole Numberphile video about that though, Ken. Okay.


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[Assistant] It was an interesting situation to kind of deal with the popular press. I'd never had this happen in my life before. And I found that I was fairly good at it. I could explain things to people who didn't know anything about mathematics. And I thought it was a good use of my time.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] It really did, because first of all, when Andrew first heard about the flaw in July of 1993, I guess he didn't believe that it was all that serious. He thought it just needed patching up.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] So he must have been aware that I was out there, you know, beating his drum, but he never told me. So it took months before I found out how serious the problem was. And I had been kind of out there saying, you know, Andrew Wiles had proved Fermat's Last Theorem. So I'm glad that it worked out.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Yeah, so Taylor and Wiles huddled together and they thought about various things and finally they or Andrew or Richard found the missing piece and they published that as a joint paper.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Well, I certainly liked my model better, but Andrew had a very good excuse, which is that Fermat was such a kind of sought after thing, that if he revealed that he was working on the problem, people would have rushed in. And it was very important to him to be the person who proved Fermat's last theorem.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] What do you do next? Well, there is an encore problem. There's no question about that. And what I've done, if I look off to the side and say, you know, what has Ken Rivet done? Well, I've done a surprising amount of outreach and professional service.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] I haven't done anything as great as the contribution to Fermat's Last Theorem. Realistically, I'm not looking for that. So I'm looking for some balance where I continue to contribute to research and also now I'm a pretty well known and


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Well regarded sort of senior mathematician. So I do things at the National Academy of Sciences. I'm also kind of the chair of the class of math and physical sciences at the moment. I work with the American Math Society. So I feel that I'm still contributing in different ways.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Well, you kind of maybe lose some speed, but you have lots of wisdom, and you can recognize situations that some people may not.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] It is a hobby, there's no question about that. So when I first came to Berkeley, I had no camera, and I was, as I said, fascinated by the light, and all the scenes in Berkeley, so I bought my first camera. What was it? It was an Olympus OM1.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] So this is a film camera and it had no flash and I went around and I took photos and I would get them developed in photography stores so I'd come back, you know, with color photos and then someone said to me, well you really like photography, why don't you do black and white photography and go in a darker.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And there is a dark room on campus, and the dark room is beautiful, had lots of equipment.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] There were courses you could take with accomplished Bay Area photographers.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] So I did all that and I spent a lot of time in the darkroom and it became the thing that I would do at the end of a day of mathematics. You know, at five o'clock I would go in the darkroom and I kind of emerged three hours later with lots of prints and lots of negatives.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Oh, well, so many years ago, I started taking haircuts with one particular stylist who's no longer coming to Berkeley.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And we together hatched this idea of taking photos of the two of us at the end of every haircut. I kind of believe in the power of a sequence of photos, even if one photo doesn't reveal all that much, having a long sequence of similar photos again and again.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Shows you kind of the arc of time and there are various details that appear and disappear, people walking past in the back, so I really like that. And I took a photo of every haircut and then when my stylist decided that it was no longer worth her time to drive to Berkeley,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] From San Jose, the photos ended, and this was quite a few years ago.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] When I was a student, both at Brown and at Harvard, there was some tradition that faculty members could have lunch and other meals if they wanted to.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] With students and I found it really valuable to me to meet all sorts of people who would come and sit around with students. I remember, for example, meeting Yo-Yo Ma when he was a freshman. He was at one of the tables and there were lots of public figures who would come in.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And sit with us and I thought that was really wonderful and when I came to Princeton I asked whether or not there was such a program and there was so I became a faculty fellow at various dining halls and when I came to Berkeley there was no such thing and I kind of wondered for a long time whether such a thing might crop up.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And when I started teaching very large courses,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] That had formerly been small courses. In the math department at one point we began teaching third year courses in large rooms, whereas before they'd only been taught in groups of 25 or 30 students.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] I thought, you know, this might be a way to get to know the students and I would organize lunches in the dining halls. And I pitched this to the College of Letters and Sciences and they were all on board. They gave me a card so that I could get free lunches.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And I would sit with the students and I found it was really valuable and they liked it. And then somehow this morphed about five years ago.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And some of the students have taken me up on the suggestion and I think it's a nice way to get to meet students informally and find out a little bit about their lives.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] It depends on the size of the group. So a small group, they'll ask me about myself and they'll be a little bit uncomfortable. You know, it's kind of intimidating to be with a faculty member and they're addressing questions to me like, you know, how did I come to be a mathematician? What do I do in my spare time? What is it? How long have you been at Berkeley?


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] But then there are bigger events where there'll be, you know, 10, 12 students and then what happens is they just talk to each other and I'm there kind of almost like a fly on the wall. I mean some of them will talk to me but everybody's much more relaxed and I find those to be the most successful.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] There's a staff member at the faculty club, Jerry Fowler, who's a fantastic photographer, and he takes photos of the group. And he really gets the best expressions out of people. I think people warm up to him immediately.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Right, and you see the seasons changing, the colors of the leaves.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Some of the photos, everyone's wearing an overcoat. Some of the photos, people are in summer clothes.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Well, it's a kind of communication. It's a different skill. It's a different activity. It's not explaining technical math to people who are committed to mathematics. And I think everyone


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] On the Berkeley campus because it's such a large public university is committed to that kind of teaching because someone who comes here and realizes that there's that kind of teaching almost every semester and doesn't like it will go elsewhere.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] As my presidency is coming toward an end, it ends on February 1st, 2019.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Well, there's never been a situation where someone has done it twice. My successor, Jill Pfeiffer, is a mathematician at Brown.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] After her, there are two candidates who are now recruited for the next election. One of them will be Jill's successor. On February 1, 2019, I will become the official


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Yeah, so at every moment, there are two presidents in the AMS. There's the president, and then there's either the president-elect who shadows the president, or the immediate past president,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And after my one year as immediate past president, the next person who will have been elected will sign on as president-elect.


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[Assistant] And on the other hand, it means that we are dismissive.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Don't get things wrong at all. We're just really bad at that stuff because we're not very good at calculating. But I sort of think actually a more interesting and more accurate way to frame it is to have that as a secondary idea and instead have how much power should we give the machine.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Hi folks, Lee Diffie from NBC Sports here. If you truly enjoyed what you just watched, you can get more news, interviews, and highlights by subscribing to the Motor Sports on NBC YouTube page. You can get it all, so go for it.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] A little town called Kolomna. Kolomna. Kolomna. Where's that? Near Moscow.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Wanted to go into social sciences or humanities. You kind of knew that you would have to be, uh,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] So in those areas you could not possibly have a kind of freedom that you could have in mathematics or theoretical science.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] You're going to recruit kids, talented kids to go into physics and so on and math, because they knew it was important for the industry and for the weapons, for defence. But that is, at least that is showing some foresight and not just the


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] What really excited me was the subject itself. I was just drawn to this, to this, to this.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Interestingly enough, so I did, I was interested in literature and art and so on, but actually math, uh, uh, was my least favorite subject. I hated math.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And he is a mathematician. So I, and I, I live, I lived in this town, this little town.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] At this, at this college. And he had a, had a name which, you know, could take, could come from, directly from Tolstoy's novel, Evgeny Evgenyevich. It was a patronymic.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] That there was this famous mathematician, Rohlin, uh, topologist, uh,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Where he stayed for a few years as a professor at this institute. It was during that time that my teacher was a student in that college. Okay. So you see, so it's kind of like this lineage.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Uh, and of course it prob- I knew that part of the story that he wanted to do physics but he was unable to and so he basically had to go to this engineering college and then he kind of, uhm, gave up. He kind of didn't really try to pursue that dream that he had.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And she's, she's, oh, how are you? And she, they start talking and...


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] There is this guy, Evgeny Evgenievich, who wants to meet you. He's a professor of mathematics in this college. And by the way, this college was literally five minutes walk from mine.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Previously were thought to be indivisible, protons, neutrons, et cetera, and yet turn out to, you know, contain these little, smaller pieces. And I was very excited about it. And he said, oh, okay, cool. And do you know about the representation theory of SU3? And I'm like, what? SU what? And he says,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] You don't know SU3, then how can you possibly understand quirks? So you hit a nerve in the following sense that I was frustrated by the fact that in those popular books that I was reading, there was this, it presented this nice narrative.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Nice captivating story, but they never explain the details.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Which I couldn't make heads and tails of at the time, right? And then Evgeny Evgenievich pointed to those pictures and formulas and said, you think what they teach you at school is real math? No, this is real math.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] He gave, he said, we can't jump immediately into this stuff. You, you have to first learn the basics. So he gave me a few books. Uh, there was a book about, uh, linear algebra, for example, so that he said linear algebra is the basis of all of mathematics. Interesting enough, right now I'm teaching, uh, uh,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Theorize all these beautiful theories that you heard about or read about. They did that based on sophisticated mathematics.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And it was very convincing because he showed me those books and so on, right? So, so I was like, okay, then I have to do the math. But very quickly I discovered that the math that he was talking about was actually very interesting in its own right. So I became very curious about that, even not necessarily


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And then suddenly the bail was lifted, and I was like, okay, look at this, look, there's this. And I was like, okay, this is great, so my hands were full. We suggest with that stuff.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] So it turns out that in addition to the numerical system that we are used to, such as, uh, well let's just say, let's just say, uh, real numbers. So real numbers, right? So meaning,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Is a prime number. So it could be 2, 3.


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[Assistant] Then there exists this five attic, five attic numbers. Okay. There is this collection of numbers. It includes rational numbers. Just like real numbers include rational numbers.


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[Assistant] If you have something 0.1, it means like 1 over 10, and this 0.01 is 1 over 100, right? So and so on, it becomes exceedingly smaller.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] But a periodic number, a five-adic number, say, number two P is, let's say P is five, P, P...


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] So that was one thing which really, uh, stood out. That's one concept. And it kind of helped me to see this hidden side of mathematics. When I say hidden, I mean


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And so then it becomes clear, so this is my last year of high school, it becomes clear that I want to be a mathematician.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Okay, so the only school, only place where you could study pure mathematics, not applied mathematics, in other words, mathematics, uh, in connection to some real world problems.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] specific problems, but pure mathematics, just for the sake of it, so to speak, which is what I had been studying for a year by then. That place was Moscow State University. And it was this grand building, you know, like,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Uh, my father was Jewish by blood, not by religion, so he was not, he was an atheist actually, and uh, his parents were not religious either, and my mother was Russian, and the only religious person in my family was my maternal grandmother, and she was an orthodox Christian, so she actually went to church.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Antisemitism at a kind of domestic level, you know, kind of like, just kind of...


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[Assistant] And so these people, these kids, they would surround me. If I were alone, they'd probably beat me up. But because there was this friend who was always stand by me. And interestingly enough, you know, he came from the poorest family. He was a very bright guy, but he came from the poorest family. But he had a moral, moral, moral, you know.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] So written mathematics exam, I actually solved, I just went and solved all the problems, even though everybody said you cannot solve the last problem. It's unsolvable. But I didn't know I couldn't do it, so I did it, you know?


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And solved it. I solved it. And so afterwards I came home, and I, uh, uh, Evgeny Evgenyevich came to my, uh, to our place, and I explained to him all the problems and solutions, and he said everything is correct. So I was actually happy. I was like,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Fail me. I got, I got some idea about that by then. But I was in denial.


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[Assistant] So I get my ticket, my two questions, and then you have to sit down and prepare. And my ticket, and first of all, I knew all of it. Through and through.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] After two minutes I raise my hand. I'm ready. And there are three examiners in the room, and nine of them...


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] That's when I was like, the reality hit home, you know? I was like, uh-oh.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And then I was like, okay, my inquisitors have arrived. You know?


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] The men, well, yeah, much worse. So, it was, on the one hand, it was, well, when I look back, on the one hand,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Because the way it was approached, uh, was the worst possible way. If they actually came to us and said, look, you are, you are 50% Jewish, you have blood, 50% of your blood comes from Jewish, you know, uh, family, whatever. And that's why we cannot accept you. So, okay, so he was like, okay, this is a draconian, unfair, you know, policy.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] But it's not because I'm not good enough, it's just because that's how it is, so I'll have to deal with it. That's not what they said, because it would be illegal to say that, because in the Soviet Union, of course, all nationalities are equal.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] The surface looked like normal questions, but would be ten hundred times harder, which they would never give to a regular applicant. And then they would pretend that those were the real questions that they give to everybody, and because you didn't solve them, you're actually not good enough.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Testimony about, there are actually articles published with lists of problems. It's actually interesting to see. Now, it's a kind of a historical artifact. To what length these people went to be able to deny something to people that they hated for no reason at all.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] I knew, I knew that they stitched me up. I knew that it was unfair. So luckily for me, luckily.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And they were so nasty, you know, they'll be like, this is wrong. So like, what is the definition of a circle? And I'm like, a circle is a set of points on the plane.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Equidistant from a given point. He says, no, that's wrong.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And so we were in the elevator for a couple of minutes or a minute, just the two of us. And that's when he suddenly.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Starts giving me compliments and he says, oh, you are so brilliant. How come? You know? And I was like, you gotta be kidding me.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And, and it is, it was, and you gave me the name. It was a university which was called Oil and Gas University, which sounds strange, right? Why an aspiring mathematician would want to go to an oil and gas?


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And I actually applied, and indeed they did accept me. And moreover, 90% of the kids, it was a much smaller program, they were like one tenth of the Moscow University math.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Oh yes, a lot. So here's what, interesting enough what happened was, first of all, I was lucky to be at this school because as I said, many of my classmates actually came from the tradition of like really best math education in Moscow. In Moscow there were specialized schools.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And, uh, most of the kids in my class, my classmates, you know, the, the oil and gas university.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] War uhm, from those schools. And so they knew, they had many classmates who actually were accepted to Moscow University, so they could...


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And for instance, one of the kids who was a classmate of several of my classmates, his father was like a great mathematician.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Moscow state. However, to get into Moscow state was not easy, because the building was guarded by the police.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] You know, it's funny because at some point after my book was published, I was interviewed by somebody and I recounted this part of the story. And the interviewer, you know, she said, hmm, interesting. She said, in this country, they try to keep students inside the university. You're sneaking in. In Russia, they try to keep you, Soviet Union try to keep you outside.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] It's crazy, you know, if you think about it. Later on, uh, two or three years later, I was able to get an ID, a pass to be able to walk through the front door. But you could not get through the front door, there was a policeman.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] You've gained, you've gained occasionally when I came home, you know, on the weekends.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] It was kind of chance, by chance. The whole thing sounds really improbable. But there was a professor in my school who kind of took note of me.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And then he had a pro-, he was a very good mathematician in his own right, and still is. And he had a problem that he had to solve, which was in the area of topology, which was the area where Fuchs was king. And so that in those days, it was quite common that these people, they all knew each other.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Said, I don't know, but it shouldn't be very hard. Normally I would give it to a good graduate student to solve. But since you work at this oil and gas institute with these unfortunate souls who were denied entrance, why don't you find a bright guy in there?


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And give him my phone, him or her, my phone number.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] So that I could supervise their little research on this in private. Okay. You see? So my professor could, so folks could give, could give it to somebody in Moscow University, but he was mindful of what's going on and people like him, they wanted to help. So they want to find some little way in which to at least to help somebody to overcome the system. You see? So for me, it's always like this story, like people say is


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Uh, those who were unfairly, uh, treated, treated unfairly.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] By and large, you have to expect that there will be obstacles. So in my case, they were maybe a little bit too much, you know, but all of us meet obstacles one way or another. If you try to do something different, if you try to do something that's not even slightly off the beaten path.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Sure enough, you will meet resistance. So, first of all, don't be surprised. Don't take it personally. And keep going and keep following your heart. Keep following what you think is right.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] He's like, okay, here is a hidden door. I'll let you, I'll, I'll take you. And you impressed him. And I impressed him. And I very quickly, I wrote my first paper. So I was 18 years old, you know, and my career took off. And three years later, I was a visiting professor at Harvard.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] But can you imagine, so for me now to speak about that kid, you know, that teenager that I was, can you imagine the drive? Can you imagine the, how much he wanted to?


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Very difficult and it would break a lot of people and then she could break people too.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] But if you are able to just hold tight and kind of say, no, I'm going to do it, then actually you can turn it around. It's kind of like a jiu-jitsu kind of move, you know? So suddenly you use that momentum of your opponent to actually propel you to the next height. You use that energy to actually go further that you would, I would never have got, I'm pretty sure I would have never achieved, you know, as much as I did in such a short period of time.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] So, about 50 years ago, he came up with these groundbreaking ideas about connecting problems in two different fields of mathematics. Number theory.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Yeaah, and took so many years for me to actually come to terms with, because for many years I was in denial of what happened, so I didn't fully appreciate.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] I actually start questioning. Do I actually love it or do I do it just by inertia?


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] You know? And there was a lot of sort of, uh, contemplation of this. It wasn't clear with the answer. And I knew that I was ready to move on to something else if I don't like it anymore.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] They only teach you how to paint fences and walls, but never show you the paintings of a great masters. Then of course you will say I hate art.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Yes. But how to do it? Because I understand it's difficult.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And I tried to do it other ways and I could see how difficult it is. So I decided to wrap it in a personal story as a kind of a trick to show this kid who is so excited about the subject and then he faces obstacles.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] But what I realized later is actually I had to tell this story to myself also. Because a lot of that I was, I knew this as a third per- in a third person.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Not in the first person. I did not fully actually identify myself with that.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] No, I was not yet communicating with my 16 year old, but I allowed him to write.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Something about themselves, but they may not be ready yet to frame it in these terms, but yet they can be drawn to it.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] So then they may contact me and speak about how they were fascinated by the mathematics of it. But sometimes I can actually feel that actually there is more. So sometimes it is just a straightforward interest in mathematics. But usually it's more than that. I think that it touches upon some


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And, you know, so in that sense, just like mathematics is universal language, so Pythagoras theorem means the same thing to everybody, right, at any time.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] X squared plus Y squared equals Z squared. That's what we, that's why we love mathematics is because it brings us together. But so do this personal experiences because when you tell me about something that you had to overcome, that you were mistreated and so on and yet you were able to succeed.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] These two parallel tracks are kind of, they are meant to be together because they are there to remind us of who we are ultimately.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] I understand it now more clearly. Again, I did not understand at the time so much. But it was sincere. It was a sincere effort. That's what matters in the end. I wanted to do something different.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Matt Michael formula not written on a blackboard, but tattooed on a body.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] It kind of shows you that mathematics gets under your skin. So it kind of shows this visceral character of it. So that a story of a researcher, a story of a mathematician, a truth seeker, if you will. It is a romantic story in some sense.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] To me, it was just an insight. It was just this, boom, it just came to me. And I was collaborating with this amazing French film director. And we were bouncing ideas for a few months.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Stylized stage of a Japanese no theater. So it's a homage to this Japanese film, although the story is totally different. The premise of the film is that the mathematician played by me, of course.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Being chased by this sort of evil people that are not specified. But actually, see 10 years ago, I saw that, which many of us are very much aware now of the dangers of mathematics.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Through surveillance, through uhm, actually the very first uhm, number file video I did was about the NSA putting a back door in a popular encryption algorithm, right? So, so many, some years before that I was already kind of interested in this idea that mathematics could be misused and used for evil.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] In the media, in the news, in the public domain. At that time it was not so widely discussed in 2009. So that was one thing I was interested in. So he's being chased.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] But, of course, there's a woman, there's a woman he's in love with, and he wants to make tattoos of this formula on her body. Now, a lot of people took this literally, and they were offended by this, because they said, why is Matthew Church a man, and


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And be more, not just bring, but be supportive, be compassionate, be aware of the plight, of the difficulty of being a minority. You know, so it's not something to say as a slogan, but something that requires sustained effort. Having said that, the film was very personal for me.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And I see now it more clearly because actually I was both that man and that woman so because in the end he kills himself but she, at the end of the film she actually rises with that formula on her belly.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] So that was me. I wanted to be reborn. That feminine side, which I had felt perhaps suppressed for many years, it wanted to burst out. So for me it was very personal. So the gender role distribution.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Was consequence of that very, very personal character of this film. I could not articulate it at the time. Actually, I understood this later. Some people, interestingly enough, some viewers saw it right away. That what I was talking about. I did not know it. I understood much later.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And I saw very clearly that this was my, my desire, my wish to become more whole, more myself, to know who I am, to become more whole and more, uhm,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] It's like wow, you know, so if, I felt if I, if I wrote the formula on a blackboard and tried to explain it, most of the audience would walk


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] But here we could, I think people could feel that energy of it, that it's not, uhm, it's pure, it's not superficial mathematics, it's not, uhm, devoid of passion, it is not separate from our lives, it is actually


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] As far as we know who was a university prof- had a PhD, was a university professor, was an editor of a prestigious mathematics journal.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] So let's just say from passion, that you're passionate about, something you're passionate about, is poetry. That's what it is. And so it's so easy to forget. So a lot of my math is poet- I would say is poetry. But some of it is not, so.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] So when you give me this opportunity to speak, I said yes, without thinking, because it's just, I feel like part of the family of Numberphile. And so it's a pleasure to speak, you know. So that's to me an example of something I did today, which was from the heart, from the passion, you know.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] That's right, man, we're, uh, we're up in Mammoth right now, uh, last minute trip. We woke up on, I think Monday morning and the wife was like, hey, let's, let's jam to Mammoth. We have this week open. So we're up here. We got a fresh 15 inches, um, last night. So.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] I cannot, well, I tried to ski two years ago and with the plates that are in my leg from St. Louis, they run so far up the front of my shin that the ski boot is so rigid, um, I can't even put a boot on and get them in the skis because it just bothers me too much. So I'm a boarder, man. Ah, there you go.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] We come back Thursday morning and then I'll go be there Friday to pick up my credential and baby it's on.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] I, I 100% agree. I think, um, you know, it's going to be interesting to see how Eli, I'm going to just switch gears real quick and come back to Jet, um, how he approaches this. Is he going to come out of the gate, you know, hot and heavy and ready? Um, or is he going to work in a little bit, you know, a little bit slower? So I think that's going to be the question or, you know, what we're going to have to wait and see.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Uhm, because I look at the roster, I look at the sheets and, and, and look at, yes, Eli is, is a, is a main contender. Jett's a main contender. Uhm, you know, there's definitely, Sexton's a main contender, right? So uhm, I do think that 17 rounds or 20 rounds basically of super motocross is,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Is going to be an adjustment for Jet, but I also say he's, he's traveled the world. He's seen so many conditions, like we've talked previous shows and.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] I will say that I think it's harder to go undefeated in Supercross. You know, with only one gate drop per night.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] You know, close, close, close racing, you know, outdoors, I feel like for me, I can only speak for myself is when I went to outdoors after super cross, it was a little bit of a weight off my shoulders because now I'm looking at this whole, I got 30 plus two, a little mistake. I can, I can recover from, you make a little mistake in this class in these stadiums, on these tracks.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Um, it is, it's going to be, you know, it's really, really hard to come back and, and, and, and chase down chase or chase down Eli or any one of the writers that are, that are winning that night. If you have a.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] I mean that's a, those are some big shoes to fill as we all know.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] You know, uh, you know, myself, you, Ricky, you know, we have, we have quite a few wins in Supercross, but man, getting to that 72 is,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Is, uh, it's a huge number, you know, and, and I think the big thing is too, is multiple seasons of, of, of big numbers, you know, you got to knock down, um, you know, uh, 10 to


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] You know, let's say 15 wins per season to, you know, to, to get to that 72 mark, depending on his trajectory of his career and how long he plans on racing, right? Cause there's only, I mean, yeah, if he goes undefeated, okay, we can knock down 20 right there, you know, but the odds of that happening right now.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] I'm going to say are slim to none. I think he's going to win, uh, I think he's going to win probably 10 rounds, if not maybe more. I think Eli has the opportunity to win 10 rounds or more.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And then chase also, you know, um, you know, it throw him in the mix, you know, if he's, if he's cleaned up those mistakes and, and, and how the motorcycle is, how he's adjusting to the new motorcycle, the platform and the new team and all of that. So it's a, those are some big shoes to fill buddy.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Yeah, and I think too that I think one thing that we, you know, I think...


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] You know, watching the last, uh, three SMX rounds, right? Like Jett was phenomenal. Amazing. Um, nobody was better than him, but also I think it was a different, um, set of circumstances, you know, not a lot of pressure coming in now.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] He has established himself as probably the best guy and the guy to beat. So as you know, that has, uh, uh, uh, you add another set of, uh, some more load on your shoulders, some more pressure because you are the guy. So I, it doesn't matter who you are. I know he, you know.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] I mean, he, let's, let's be honest, he, he kind of waxed all the boys, you know, so, um, you know, it was, it was a pretty flawless, very easy. I don't want to say easy, but flawless series. No, nothing really, um, caught him off guard.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] But like we talked about, Supercross is different. You know, it's just, it's a different ball game than outdoors.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Yeah, I, you know, that's, I'm thinking, you know, I think the big question for me is, is if, if Eli is, it can match Jett's pace because I know chase only match Jett's pace a few times, but at that point.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] You know, uh, Jett already had points lead, he already was in control, mentally he was in control.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Uh, we're starting a new season and if Eli can come out and get him on the ropes.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] That's going to be something different that in this class that he hasn't dealt with, um, and for 20 rounds. So if Eli's, if Eli can, can get up there and run that pace, we all know that Eli's a veteran in this sport. He's, he's very consistent. Not, he doesn't get really that flustered that easy and neither does Jet, but also.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Has, Eli has not put that pressure on Jett. So is Eli the one that can.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Put Jet into that position to make a few mistakes, more than what we're used to seeing.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Yeah, I a hundred percent agree, you know, making that big change, making the move to a different team. Um, and it's in, and also I come, you know, a completely different platform, you know, um, from aluminum platform, aluminum frame platform to a, to a steel frame platform. So, and then also learning the new team and every, and the team learning, um, chase.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] But yeah, he's got to come out and kind of make a, you know, I don't think he needs to come out and win Anaheim one, but he needs to be up there.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] I can only speak from the outside looking in on this, but I feel like snowball, it could snowball very quickly in the wrong direction, uhm, you know, within the first five rounds.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Because of just how big the change is, you know, so like you said, you want to come out, you want to get there and you want your mental side of it to be like, Hey, I made the right change. This is how, this is a winning platform.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Uhm, and you don't really know that till Anaheim 1. I do know that these guys...


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Three or four of these guys will get the setting perfect. They'll love their motorcycle at Anaheim One and about five of the other guys are going to have fire drills on Monday where they all go back to the drawing board. Hey, our bike was too stiff. Our bike was too soft. It didn't turn here. It didn't do this. It didn't do what I wanted here.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Um, I personally went through that, uh, one or two of the Anaheims where we thought we were, we nailed that nail right on the head coming in and we get there afterwards. And it's like the fire drill of all fire drills on Monday, right? We need to reinvent the wheel. So I've been in that position and that's one thing that, um,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Would be a critical point in step for chase. So I hope he nails it because that, you know, right off the bat, because having those three main guys in the, in the mix right off the bat is, is what we all want to see.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Yep, 100%. That's another big, uh, big move. And we've, we've listened to it at, uh, at the last three SMX rounds, you know, that he thought that this was the move, the change, uh, that he needed to get back home, um, you know, to, to have his best performances. Um, you know, just,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] You know, I'm going to go out here judging off of his last, you know, the three SMX rounds that we had wasn't, uh, that phenomenal of three rounds. I know that we all know that he wasn't on the bike that long. He was long on the bike motorcycle longer than I think, you know, was portrayed on in social media and in the media in general. Um,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] But yeaah, I think that's gonna be a big one, right? Because we have a past champion leaving.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] The team that he won his two championships with in Supercross and going back to a, back to the Yamaha and, and, and trying to start fresh. So I think he's another one under, under the microscope too, that really needs to have in these first three to, let's call it three to five rounds.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Really needs to be up there in the mix, for the mental side of it, for the team side of it, and just for the whole series, right? Because it's a long series.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Back to what you said about how stacked this class is. I mean.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Man, from third to tenth, really, I mean...


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Two, three, four tenths that could change your race from, from fourth to eighth, you know, and, and eighth is not where you want to be. You want to be up in that, you know, Anaheim one, um, round two, round three. You want to be anywhere from, you know, first to fourth and be right. You know, you don't have to be in.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] The mix, but you need to be within a tenth or two, so like, hey.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] This is a little bit of a bike issue, setting issues. We just need to, we just need to dial the motorcycle in and I will have those extra two tents, right? So uhm, that's what I think, you know, if anybody, he's another one under the microscope.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] I'm looking and thinking he kind of reminds me of Chad a little bit, right? Like.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Uhm, certain weekends a bit off the pace and he's not even in contention. He's the third place guy that weekend, gets third or fourth.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Um, and then he shows up the next weekend and all of a sudden he's, he's going to be right. He's going to be racing for that win. So, um, but I agree. He needs to find a little more of a little more speed because I think what's different now than in the past is.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] He, you know, when, when coop raced and won his championships, there was about three guys that could win three or, but now we have our field is so stacked. So, um.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Really needs to get out there and make a statement for himself. And, and, um, you know, like you said, show a little more, a little more raw speed and, and, uh, and pick up the whoop speed a little bit because with the amount of the depth that we have in this, this, uh, this series right now.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] You can't afford to, to be running around third or fourth because man, you're going to have another eight dogs behind you trying to nip at your heels, you know? So.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Uhm, you know, Kenny shown up to these, and I don't want to say a high pressure situation because there's, you know, you can lose this week, you can lose the championship this weekend, but you definitely cannot win it. We've, everybody's heard that. Uhm, but for some reason, you know, Kenny is able to show up, uh, and, and, and, and ride.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Uhm, where I'd always show up at Anaheim one, like, man, what's, what's James been doing? How, what's he, you know, how's, how fast is he, you know, I had a lot of questions. And I'm not saying Kenny doesn't. Uhm, but for whatever reason, like you said, he rises to the occasion at, at Anaheim one in these first three rounds. Uhm, my.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Yep, yep, so it's a new platform, uhm, you know, and I actually, uh, was able to talk to, I forget his name, but, uh, one of the guys that helped develop it, uhm, I ran into him at one of the tracks, one of the California tracks, and, uh,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] It was kind of funny because he's like, he was telling me, he goes to the Kawasaki used to, used to be, or was, um, one of the worst bikes in the mud.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And I'm like, to kind of turn the light on in my head, cause I was like, dude, I couldn't ride my bike in the mud. Like it was absolutely, I don't know, it was rigid, whatever the case may be.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] So they have a new platform, uhm, I've seen videos online, social media and things like that, uhm.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And yes, the bike is completely different than what I rode. It's been eight years or nine years, right? So, uh,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] But little traits, those motorcycles, there's little traits that these motorcycles have that they, that even eight years out, you can kind of see the trait that it has, right?


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] I don't see that anymore with the new, new platform. Uhm, I feel like it's a lot more forgiving, just, and I swear, just watching off social media, watching AC, watching Jason.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Uhm, it looks more forgiving, it looks more forgiving in, in the slippery, uhm, call it muddier material.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Yeah, hard packed stuff. It's more forgiving in the, in the, in the edgy whoops, um, things like that. So that being said.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] If the motorcycle is that much easier to ride for him, um, you know, it might, the mistakes might be a lot less fewer, right? So, uh, I hope so because last year I actually was expecting Jason to be on the podium a lot more and, and, and at least knock down a few wins. So.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] You know, I think this year is a, I know it's a new chassis, new platform.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] But it's kinda his time, right? He needs to, he needs to kinda pull, pull the rabbit out of the hat.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And I do, I think he's been, he's flown under the radar. There's not, not have been a lot of, not a lot of talks about Hunter. Um, I do agree. Um, I think that, uh, you know, it hasn't been a ton of videos of him either riding. Um, but I will say watching Hunter and over the years of riding the lights bike or the 250 bike, um, I do think once he gets a few races under his belt,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] For some reason, I feel like the 450 is going to suit him a little bit more. I think the 250 Honda was a little slow. I think he had to override it to.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] To run the pace with those guys, I think his starts had to be absolutely perfect to put himself in a position to fight with Hayden and the top star guys and the top PC guys and things like that.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And as you know, when, when you line up at Motocross or Supercross, uhm, and you know, you have, it's, you have to be razor sharp on, on, on the line, on the gate, when the gate drops.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] That's a little nerve wracking when it's like, if you don't, you know, cause we all know out of, out of all the gate drops that we do.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Uhm, and I think his writing style is going to suit that 450. I do think he's a little more precise than, than sometimes than Jet. Uhm, I do see.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Hunter making mistakes and he doesn't recover from his mistakes as well as Jett. Uhm, I feel like when Jett makes a mistake, it goes in one ear and out the other, where I feel like Hunter


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] You know, I'm like, why are you making mistake after mistake after mistake? You make a mistake.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] It happens, it's motocross, it's supercross, you're going to, nobody's going to be perfect.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Don't think about it. Move on to brush it off and move to the next one. Click your laps off.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] I have not, I, the only thing I've kind of heard from the husky side of things from Vital and, uh, maybe I think Swapmoto was, uh, they were kind of, I guess they had two chassis to try and had the option of running two chassis.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Which is kind of cool, uhm, don't know how that's going to play, you know, how that's going to affect, uhm, you know, e-e-e-each one of those writers, uh, Christian Craig or Mook Dog. Uhm, but last year Mookie rode really well at the start of Supercross.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Uhm, I think it's time for him to, to win. I think he's got the talent. He's got the speed.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] It all comes down to him minimizing the mistakes. As we know, Malcolm has the speed. He's got the talent. It's just been the mistakes that, that have, that have his winning the supercross has eluded him.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] So, like I mentioned, I was able to go out two or three times this season just to check up on Ryder D. Um, hey man, come out and check me out, you know, like, you know, since I worked with him last year. And, uh, uh, so I got to witness and got to see, um,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] So, more than likely, he puts himself in a good position. And from what I saw speed wise...


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Speed-wise, he should be, I think, around the top five.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Uh, which would be a phenomenal, um, finish anywhere around that. I mean, even top 10, right? With the, with the field that we have. Um, I think he's better than top 10. Um, I think he's more around the fifth through eighth mark.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Um, if, if he, if he makes it through Anaheim one with no, you know, tip overs or mistakes. Um, but as we all know, huge learning curve, you know, like I went to MXGP and raced four rounds. Um, my world was turned upside down. Um, I do think it's a little easier to come.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Uh, uh, to, to the US, um, from the living standpoint in the, in the, in the practicing standpoint and, you know, just because our, our amenities are basically 24 hours. Um, you know, everybody wants to come to the US, right? So that's, that's where he's at. He's landed himself here. Um, but I'm telling you guys.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] If he makes it through these three rounds, uhm, healthy, I think we see him, I think we see him, uhm, do really well, uhm, by round three.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] So I think that, uh, there is a video of him running around going over the bars in the whoops. He's already had a big one, you know, a couple big ones. So it hasn't deterred him, right? It hasn't, he's, I, I, I got to talk to him when I was out there at, at, at TLD's track.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] You know, and he, and he told me, uhm, yeaah, had a big one in the whoops, you know, and flew over the bars and landed, like slapped his back on the, on the, on a takeoff of, of a, of a three-footer. Uhm, so it was a gnarly one.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Um, but no, I, I, I don't, I do see him here next year full time. Um, because I think he.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] I mean, he's got the skills. It's not a case of him, you know, of him going out in these first three rounds and maybe not cutting the mustard. I've already seen him, Rod. He's, he's, he's, he's developed. He's there.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] That doesn't mean he doesn't have a ton to learn. Uhm, but I do think that the Europeans are very smart. Uhm, I even want to err on the side of that.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And that's what I had actually told him. I said the racing part, you'll be fine with. And I told him, I said, or told a few people that was around us, I was like,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] The biggest thing he's gonna have to learn is having a front wheel right here by your, you know, by your head or having 22 guys and bars all in the first turn and, and the chaos that happens inside of the first.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] First lap or first three laps, not to say MXGP doesn't have that because you know, sometimes they, they do, but it's not like Supercross. So, um, I just think the learning of how Supercross is raced, uh, I mean, he's got the skill, like I said, he's got the starting, he can start, he can pull all shots. Like I think he's going to be a contender, um, for, for, uh, next year for, for podiums.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] I agree and I think, I, there's, it's, so there's a couple different scenarios you can look at this. Going to a...


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] It's not a factory team, he might have a smidge of factory support, but look it's not a factory team.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Um, and I think some guys that plays into, into the benefit, um, some guys that, that are, I don't want to say he's on the cusp, but on the cusp like that, a factory, non-factory, some guys actually, the factory brings too much stress, too much, um, you know, to perform. I don't think that was Dylan.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] I think what Dylan's going to run into is not having the backing and the parts and the support from the factory to make the changes he needs over the course of 20 rounds. Um, I think he's going to really, you know, when he, when, when they find something they're struggling with,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Uhm, I think that that's gonna be, it's gonna be tough. It's not a factory team. So uhm, and as we know that things can start to snowball really quick, uhm, if, if the rider can't get it under control within one or


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Yeah, fabpal110, I don't, uh, that's, that's far-fetched there, buddy.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] You know, I mean, right off the top, let's talk, let's talk, uh, Joe switching teams. He's the team, new bike, new team.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] He's got to learn the motorcycle. The team has got to learn him, um, in those race scenarios. Um, I do not think that Hayden is dodging Joe.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Uhm, I think that was probably a strategic decision based on Brian and, and, and Star. Uhm, but no, I do not think that he is dodging Joe. I think that, uh, Joe is going to be fast. Joe can win races. Joe can beat Hayden. Uhm, but no, there's no dodging going on there, buddy.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Yeah, I know. I think, um, I think interesting, uh, Ryder D, like you said, Switch teams. We have Levi Kitchen over at PC now. Um, I do think that this is kind of, uh, or not kind of, this is a, I would say a pivotal point in his, in his career. Yep. That, uh, okay. Let's say he doesn't win the championship, but he needs to win, I think in the lights class.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Uhm, I think he needs to win four to five races to, uh,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] You know, kind of solidify himself in that class. Not that he already hasn't, but I know Levi Levi's capabilities. I've seen him ride.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] From 80s on up, because he's from up by my, by me. Uh, he's definitely a very talented individual.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] His racing needs to improve a little bit, um, less mistakes.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] I believe so. Yep. And I've heard that, uh, he's riding very well right now on, on, on the PC bike. So interesting. Another one that switched teams, you know, new platform, new team learning, um, you know, coming in with, uh,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] You know, Mitch behind him, I think that, uh, not that that KTM was, didn't work for him, but I feel, I feel like, uh, this might be a little bit better home fit for him. There you go.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] It is important to win A1 if, if it's in reach. Really? Really? If it's, if it's in reach, uhm. Why is it important?


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Well, I think, I think it makes your entire season go a little bit easier. And I, and I can speak for that.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Uhm, first hand. I have won Anaheim once, twice I believe.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Uhm, and then I've left Anaheim 1, I think the worst time I left there was the 16th position, so way, you know, quite a ways out of the top 10, and I was playing catch-up. All, you know, up until round probably 8 or 9.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] From why I say important is when you show up at Anaheim one with all the hype and with all the pressure, everything that's there and you knock off that win.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] It is such a stress reliever after that. Okay. Boom. We got the points lead. Not so much based on the points, but just that you were able to leave there, um, with the win now.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Third is just as good as a win if the win wasn't in reach.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Um, it's a, it's a pretty, I think it's a fairly prestigious race to win. Anaheim won. Um, I was lucky enough to do it twice. Like I said, um, it just makes you, your Monday and your first couple rounds, weeks of Supercross, I feel go a little bit easier. You're not kind of, not that you're chasing your tail after you have a bad Anaheim won.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] But going home on Monday, it sure feels a hell of a lot better hanging that trophy up on the wall.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Be within contention. So if that meant third, second, it wasn't, no, I didn't put win in my head. Like I, I'm going to Anaheim one to win.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] That wasn't, that wasn't what I thought. Uhm, I thought-


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Let's get through in a one solid points. Let's see where our bike's at. Let's see where everybody else is at. Um, and if the win is achievable, you take it because I feel like after that.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] You know, some teams are going to have fire drills on Mondays or on the Monday right after. And some are just going to be like, Hey, I was just totally off the pace. Spike was fine.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Uhm, Anaheim one has a, you know, it has a weird stigma around it when, when you swing your leg over the bike.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] I don't know, it's just, it's, it's, it's different than most supercross races.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Get title 24 back up and running, uhm, I had a great time doing that last year and, uh, man, I'm, I'm, uh,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] I'm looking forward to Anaheim one and, and, and seeing where all these guys are going to fall. It's, it's, uh, feels like it's been, it's been a while since I know these, I know the racers don't feel like it's been a while. They're like, just, we just got done. But, uh, but no, from the fan's perspective, uh, I'm ready, man. I'll be there. I'm bringing the boys to Anaheim one and.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] He was a giant in a lot of different ways. He did very important central mathematics. He did any amount of recreational mathematics. He was also a stunt man in various respects. Quite a remarkable character.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Oh, he attracted plenty of attention. That was, you know, he famously said that when he went to Cambridge for university, he decided to transfer from being an introvert to an extrovert. But his, his notion of being an extrovert was to do stunts. So, you know, he could roll his tongue in, in more ways than you're supposed to be able to do.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Or he could calculate the, uh, day of the week of a given date, very, within two seconds. He loved that kind of thing and was extremely good at it too. I mean, very talented person in a lot of different ways.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] But, he wanted to stand out, and that was how he had figured out to do so, I think.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] He was never not playing the room. He was a, he was a born performer, and it was absolutely charming to be with him. I mean, if you like that kind of thing, and I do, uhm, you know, it was...


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And uhm, we had nice cocktails, and there was music, and then we went down to hear Conway talk.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And Conway had come wearing a tie, which was extremely unusual for Conway. And, uh, but he saw that Wilhurst was not wearing a tie. Of course I was wearing a tie. But Wilhurst was not wearing a tie. And, uh,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] So as he began his talk, he commented on this and he said, since Will was not wearing a tie, he wasn't going to either. And, but that wasn't, you know, that's not enough for Conway. So he took off his tie while he was standing at the podium and threw it on the floor and jumped up and down on it.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] He was phenomenally fast. He could make calculations in his head very accurately and very quickly. You know, he had this system for telling the day of the week on which a given date had fallen. So he would say the 9th of March, 1564, and he would tell you instantly the day of the week.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And he was right. I mean he had a whole system for doing this. He practiced incessantly. His computer wouldn't let him log on until he had solved one of these puzzles.