Solomon & Smith

Theo Rollason joins Milo and Jack to discuss Queer Edward II, their new film built from thirty hours of unseen footage shot during the making of Derek Jarman’s Edward II, and to trace Jarman’s film back through Christopher Marlowe to the medieval king himself. Along the way: Jarman turns Renaissance history into Thatcher-era queer politics, Marlowe makes class more scandalous than homosexuality, Tilda Swinton transforms Isabella into a vampiric villain, Edward’s murder becomes entangled with AIDS and Jarman’s own mortality, Peter Greenaway attracts some professional jealousy, and a lost archive reveals the funny, chaotic, intimate reality of making one of British queer cinema’s defining films.

00:00 – Introduction

05:36 – Theo Rollason enters

11:52 – What Makes a Derek Jarman Film?

22:01 – How Jarman Reimagined Edward II

29:23 – Gay Love and Gay History

37:05 – Tilda Swinton: Queen of Thatcher

45:36 – Marlowe and Jarman: Kindred Artists

50:48 – Death & the AIDS Crisis

58:38 – 30 Hours of Lost Edward II Footage

1:03:50 – Derek Jarman vs Peter Greenaway

1:09:45 – What was Jarman like on set?

1:16:30 – Clip from Queer Edward II

00:00 Introduction

04:38 Lolita Summary

10:50 Did Epstein actually read/like Lolita?

14:32 Epstein's upbringing - boomer sexuality

19:51 Did male boomers create modern sexuality?

24:21 Differences between Epstein and Humbert

28:29 Do we all want to be children forever?

30:35 Our desires have been created for us

32:27 The modelling industry

34:55 Creation: of oneself, of others

36:30 Britney Spears, Olivia Rodrigo, Sabrina Carpenter

38:37 Piper Rockelle: the Gen Alpha twist on the American Dream

41:53 Creation in Lolita - The ending

45:34 Lolita - controversial then and now, for different reasons

48:19 To write a book properly, it needs to be misread

50:48 The paradoxes of our age around children and sex

53:13 Why Gen Z are turning away from boomer sex

57:10 Conclusion - Epstein is a boring loser.

Please help us continue having these discussions on Patreon, or follow us on other Podcast channels here: https://linktr.ee/solomon_smith

Richard Barakat's *Faust the Magician* is available here: https://shorturl.at/CDWx0

See also the below discussions:

Richard Barakat: The Literary Collective (Spring 2025): https://youtu.be/rwecUdt0p28

Richard Barakat: Philosophic Dialogues from La Frontera (Spring 2024): https://youtu.be/YiiZbUErFcA

Richard Barakat joins us to explore the strange relationship between poetry, magic, and the Devil, beginning with Marlowe and Goethe’s Faust tellings and ending with Richard’s own apocalyptic Faust for the 21st century. Along the way: Pindar raises men towards the gods, Ovid turns poetry into immortality, Yeats makes images into magical powers, paganism and Christianity collide and combine, artistic genius edges towards possession, and Faust’s desire to transcend the human becomes inseparable from the old suspicion that the arts are, somehow, the Devil’s domain.

00:00 – Are the Arts the Devil’s Domain?

06:24 – What Is the Magic of Poetry?

10:15 – Marlowe, Goethe, and their Fausts

19:37 – Pagan Gods, Christianity, and Syncretism

27:43 – Pindar and Becoming Like the Gods

38:52 – What Makes Great Art Ineffable?

41:42 – Writing a Darker Faust for the 21st Century

49:50 – Faustian Knowledge, Faustian Power

52:32 – Yeats the Magician

57:20 – Ovid, Transformation, and Artistic Immortality

01:07:16 – Yeats: Leda and the Byzantium Poems

01:22:33 – Satan's Faustian Bargain

01:30:13 – Can Art Create Gods?

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00:00:00 Intro

00:05:30 Ramon arrives - poetic epigraph

00:06:30 What does it mean for God to Speak?

00:09:47 Is Arabic Special? Is it older than Nature?

00:12:04 Is the Quran translated into Arabic from Transcendent Speech?

00:14:11 Could putting God's words in a human language degrade them?

00:18:41 Are Arabic speakers especially chosen by God? Is Islam exclusive?

00:23:05 Should all Muslims learn Classical Arabic?

00:25:48 If you have two sentences that say the same thing in different words, could they both be from God?

00:32:49 What is the basis of the Quran's authority?

00:39:21 Variants of the Quran

00:48:22 The first printed Qurans. Literacy.

00:52:55 Can deaf illiterate people experience the Quran?

00:56:55 The mysteries of meaning. How do words mean things?

01:01:40 Is beauty truth? Is the Quran beautiful?

01:12:37 Would God choose to reveal himself in common language?

01:16:13 Did anyone ever try to write a better Quran?

01:22:25 The proof of the Quran lies in its effect on people.

01:27:16 Why did God stop revealing himself? Why are there no prophets after Muhammad?

01:32:10 Is God active in the lives of all humans?

01:34:22 Did the companions' editorial power cease after their death?

Please help us continue having these discussions on Patreon, or follow us on other Podcast channels here: https://linktr.ee/solomon_smith

00:00:00 Intro

00:07:38 Why Does Consciousness Break Science

00:10:40 Is Life Special? Biophychism: Is Life Consciousness?

00:14:40 Are Observations (Quantum Physics) Dependent on Consciousness?

00:18:10 A Unique Element of Consciousness, distinguishing it from Life

00:21:25 Why is Consciousness Not A Vague Concept?

00:26:40 Are Our Brains Lying to Us? Is Consciousness an Illusion

00:32:58 Is Artificial Intelligence Conscious?

00:35:00 Epiphenomenalism

00:39:25 The Matrix and Divorce of Mind and Reality

00:42:25 How Much of Our Awareness Relies on Sense Data?

00:48:40 Pure Being and Pure Consciousness

00:52:12 Panpsychism, and how it solves the problem of consciousness

00:56:45 Mysterianism and Colin McGinn

00:59:06 Is Panpsychism just sexed-up materialism?

01:03:17 Weak vs. Strong Emergence

01:07:25 Is Panpsychism an Imaginary Science?

01:10:45 Consciousness is Integrated Information

01:14:08 Cosmopsychism

01:20:13 Physical Reactivity is the Signature of Consciousness

01:23:39 Could dark matter or antimatter be without consciousness?

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Taylor returns to take Milo and Jack through ten great works of American "Gnostic" literature, beginning with Emerson’s Nature and ending, exactly a century later, with Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom! Along the way: Jones Very believes himself to be Christ, Hawthorne discovers the stain in creation, Ahab declares war on visible reality, Whitman meets the “real Me”, Dickinson confronts an inaccessible God, and Melville, Bierce, West, and Faulkner push the American suspicion of the world into ever darker territory.

Part two of our Gnostic Bonanza; the first part - on the original Gnostics - available here: https://youtu.be/brOyXDlaA-Y?si=DQGCLCq61lwZm4PG

CHAPTERS

00:00 Introduction

03:24 I. Ralph Waldo Emerson – Nature (1836)

11:15 II. Jones Very – Essays and Poems (1839)

18:48 III. Nathaniel Hawthorne – Mosses from an Old Manse (1846)

24:46 IV. Herman Melville – Moby-Dick (1851)

34:55 V. Walt Whitman – Sea-Drift / “As I Ebb’d with the Ocean of Life” (1860)

41:21 VI. Emily Dickinson – Poems (1861–65)

50:53 VII. Herman Melville – Clarel (1876)

59:01 VIII. Ambrose Bierce – Tales of Soldiers and Civilians (1891)

1:04:10 IX. Nathanael West – Miss Lonelyhearts (1933)

1:07:38 X. William Faulkner – Absalom, Absalom! (1936)

1:21:04 American Gnosticism – Final Thoughts

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In this episode of Solomon and Smith, Jack and Milo speak with Taylor Caron about the Gnostics: those strange, alluring, heretical early Christians who believed that the physical world was corrupt, that its creator was not the highest God, and that salvation came through secret knowledge of the divine world beyond this one.

This is the first part of a two-part conversation. In this episode, we begin with the original Gnostics: the lost gospels, the Nag Hammadi texts, the Gospel of Thomas, the Secret Book of John, the Gospel of Judas, Valentinus, the Gospel of Truth, Thunder, Perfect Mind, the Epistle to Flora, the Gospel of Philip, and the Second Treatise of the Great Seth. In the next part, we turn to American Gnosticism and the strange afterlife of these ideas in modern literature.

What is Gnosticism? Is the material world evil? Was Yahweh the demiurge? Who or what is Barbello? Why does Jesus keep appearing as a child, an old woman, a voice, a double, a robe, a cosmic emissary, or a being laughing from outside the crucifixion? And how did a collection of bizarre early Christian texts found in Egypt in 1945 come to haunt modern religion, literature, conspiracy, pop culture, Harold Bloom, The Da Vinci Code, and the idea of hidden knowledge itself?

Chapters:

00:00 Was Valentinus better than the Bible?

01:10 Introduction

05:47 Taylor enters

07:50 What is Gnosticism?

09:30 Nag Hammadi and the lost texts

11:01 The basic Gnostic worldview

15:18 I. The Gospel of Thomas

20:30 II. The Secret Book of John

23:18 Barbello, Sophia and the demiurge

29:42 III. The Hymn of the Pearl

34:15 IV. The Gospel of Judas

38:38 Crucifixion, flesh and anti-natalism

40:09 V. Valentinus' Fragments

45:24 VI. The Gospel of Truth

52:16 VII. Thunder Perfect Mind

56:20 VIII. The Epistle to Flora

1:01:18 Jesus and the Hebrew Bible

1:05:27 IX. The Gospel of Philip

1:10:46 X. The Second Treatise of the Great Seth

1:15:48 Orthodoxy, heresy and the stakes of the crucifixion

Please help us continue having these discussions by supporting us over on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/c/SolomonSmith

What is a view? What is attention? Does a number become more real if it is larger? Are advertisers being ushered into a hall of mirrors? And if every video, every creator, every athlete, every billionaire, and every man on earth can be given a bigger number, have we made the world better — or simply made value meaningless?

We discuss YouTube views, attention inflation, dead internet paradise, advertisers, Zimbabwean trillionaires, egalitarianism, Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, cinema box office inflation, World of Warcraft stat squish, the psychological horror of decline, the impossibility of measuring attention, the parable of the workers in the vineyard, angelic value, Christianity, equality, and whether every mote of dust has infinite worth.

Chapters:

00:00 The number goes up

00:51 Introduction

04:45 YouTube changes the view count

08:02 Advertisers and the fantasy economy

12:40 Do labels change reality?

14:47 Egalitarianism, power and resentment

19:03 Do big numbers hide inequality?

22:35 Cinema, inflation and fake success

24:22 Stat squish and the horror of smaller numbers

27:14 What can value actually measure?

31:07 Can attention ever be quantified?

36:01 The workers in the vineyard

38:01 Earthly numbers and angelic value

42:36 YouTube views in heaven

43:38 Christianity, equality and infinite worth

Please help us continue having these discussions by supporting us over on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/c/SolomonSmith

Thinkers mentioned: Richard Dawkins, Noam Chomsky, Jerry Fodor, Charles Darwin, Paul Grice, Fred Dretske, Gottlob Frege, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Saul Kripke, Richard Montague, Iain McGilchrist, Alfred Tarski

00:00:00 Introduction

00:04:49 Knife Throwing, Other Athletic Activities

00:11:57 Poetic Epigraph

00:13:05 How to integrate Philosophy, Linguistics, and Biology? Should philosophers read Dawkins? Should biologists read Tarski?

00:20:15 Origins of language. Are any aspects of language as old as consciousness?

00:27:39 Can we only discuss language in language?

00:29:06 Are all philosophical problems linguistic? Analytic philosophy

00:32:45 Fodor and the Language of thought. Language without communication

00:34:50 Consciousness and the limits of knowing

00:39:38 Can something exist without you knowing it?

00:42:40 Can we understand/build a mind?

00:43:49 Links between Mysterianism and Apathatic theology?

00:48:13 Does McGinn's Mysterianism conflict with his Naturalism?

00:50:10 Why do we have introspection?

00:55:28 Do our brains see the world dualistically to support the existence of language?

01:01:35 Wittgenstein's Investigations. Split brains. McGilchrist.

01:03:43 The brain has over-invested in spatial reasoning.

01:06:16 Communication without symbols, without linguistic utterance.

01:11:38 Philosophers don't pay enough attention to animals. Darwin, etc.

01:14:35 Philosophers read too much psychology, and don't understand it.

Please help us continue having these discussions by supporting us over on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/c/SolomonSmith

Kirwin's article on mathematics is available here: https://kirwinhampshire.substack.com/p/the-dark-night-of-mathematics

In this episode of Solomon and Smith, Jack and Milo speak with Kirwin Hampshire, mathematics PhD and author of the Substack Ossuray Lost at Sea.

Is mathematics discovered or invented? Is it a formal game, a spiritual art form, a machine for generating truth, or the highest expression of human creativity? And what happens when AI begins solving open problems, producing counterexamples, and doing the thing mathematicians thought belonged to the strange, private, intuitive life of the mind?

We discuss what a number is, why mathematics feels certain in a way other forms of knowledge often do not, whether infinity and zero expand the limits of thought, and why mathematical discovery can feel closer to art, wizardry, or religious revelation than to ordinary technical work. Then we turn to the nightmare: AI-generated mathematics, the psychology of being scooped by a machine, and the possibility that human mathematicians may be reduced to checking, verifying, and understanding what machines have already produced.

Is AI killing maths? Or is it revealing what mathematics really was all along?

Topics include: AI and mathematics, mathematical creativity, open problems, counterexamples, proof, intuition, infinity, zero, Gödel, Cantor, mathematical beauty, the philosophy of maths, AI art, chess engines, human purpose, dangerous knowledge, truth versus goodness, and whether machines are about to ruin the most beautiful thing humans ever made.

Chapters:

00:00 AI and the human gap

01:15 Introduction

05:58 The challenge

07:37 Kirwin enters

10:00 Poetic epigraph

11:37 What is a number?

17:11 Maths, mind, and reality

20:37 Mathematics as creativity

22:30 Infinity and the machinery of thought

26:45 Falling in love with maths

32:15 Discovery, invention and the unfinished painting

37:14 Has maths become too arcane?

41:35 AI enters mathematics

44:11 AI counterexamples and open problems

49:39 Chess, machines and the loss of spark

52:36 Humans as the AI’s assistant

57:22 Intuition and the human gap

1:02:34 Dangerous truth and the Copernican trauma

1:06:50 The Impossible Luddite

1:13:40 Why does AI hurt?

1:16:12 Is AI just another tool?

1:21:17 Truth, beauty and incompatible desires

1:24:08 Process versus result

Performance of the second movement from Bartók's second quartet by the Carmel Quartet, used under the following license: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/deed.en