Avi Loeb

And as soon as I got that, there was a position at Harvard that was advertised and nobody wanted it.

No one wanted it.

Nobody wanted it because the chance of getting tenure at Harvard at the time was extremely small.

The previous person who was tenured from within was 20 years earlier.

So...

people said they offered it to someone else and that's someone that they knew he was a postdoc at harvard he said no no no i i will go to a faculty position in the netherlands instead because i know that there i will get tenured and i'm not risking i'm not wasting my time because there were lots of people that were in this position that didn't get tenure and they had to go somewhere else so he said i'll just cut to the chase and go somewhere else so they offered it to me and i said

I don't mind.

Again, an offer I cannot decline.

I don't mind doing that because I have plan B, which is to go back to the farm.

And frankly, I'm not sure my life would have been worse on the farm if I went back there because of the beauty of nature.

I would still be happy.

Well, who was still back on the farm when all this was happening?

Your family?

My father.

Your father?

And my mother obviously helped him, but it's mostly my father who was a farmer, basically.

Didn't he want you to stay on the farm and not do any of this?

He wanted you to stay.

No, but my mother recognized throughout my history the importance of intellectual pursuits.

And I used to speak with her a lot.