I was in the room when he made the comment, it's not entirely unfair. The libraries are mostly for computers and group meeting rooms. Many of the books I have checked out have had no stamps since the late 90s, and several I've been first to checkout.

He had a few digs at the audience including saying they were maybe not very interesting as they hadn't sent him good questions. There seems a bit of I/we are so great, everything else is crap. Part of his style I guess.

I said "either my talk is not interesting, or you (the audience) is not interesting, or both. Please try to disabuse me of the latter".

Please try to be more diligent about what you are complaining about. It's clear that I didn't mean remotely what you imply.

Why wouldn't you take the trouble to check your memory before writing the above?

Zing.

I enjoyed the hell out of both videos and will be watching them again because there was so much to unpack there. I didn't send an email because it's intimidating to email someone who has affected my life in so many ways, but I will take this opportunity to thank you for your work and for sharing your ideas in these videos.

Please do email -- I don't even bark much, and bite not at all.

P.S. The audience did get around to "disabuse me of the latter" -- I finally started getting a lot of emails, most of them very thoughtful and worth reading, and replying to.

What are some of the questions that stood out?

Many were requests for deeper looks at "communicating with aliens". Many were about more information for how to get around our "bad brains".

Fair enough. My bad.