Hey there. It's Stephen Dubner and we have got a bonus episode I like you to hear.

We just finished a three-part series called The Curious Brilliant Vanishing Mr. Fineman about the late

theoretical physicist Richard Fineman. When he was in his 20s he worked on the

Manhattan Project. When he was in his 60s, he served on a presidential commission investigating

the Challenger Space Shuttle disaster. In between, he won a Nobel Prize, had a million adventures, and lived a life of, well, curious and brilliant are pretty

good words for it.

And then, yeah, then came the vanishing.

He died in 1988, and his legacy has shrunk since then, too much for some people's taste.

That would include me.

So for this series, we sought out a variety of people to talk about

Fineman. One of the most unusual interviews happened at the Ecelyn Institute in Big Sur, California, where Feinman spent some time in the 1970s and 80s.

Our Eselin host was Sam Stern.

Well, when I think about Eselin, I think about this place where people are able to explore

like a new way of being through a lot of it is through humanistic psychology.

How much do you personally know and care about Richard Feinman?

All I know about Feinman is that there's this one talk in the archive that's from 1984.

It's called Tiny Machines, and I listened to it this weekend. It doesn't necessarily feel a line with the greater human potential movement in general. He seems like a brilliant neurotic fast-talking Jewish guy.

It doesn't make him unlike the rest of the teachers from that time, but he, yeah, his concerns seem scientific and mathematical and not necessarily embodied the way that a lot of the other teachers sort of like

They grounded their work in the body

Feynman was definitely an outsider at Esselin. He was generally an enthusiast of just about anything that might prove

interesting, but he was also a perpetual skeptic who didn't trust even mainstream psychology, much less the fringier variants being explored in California at that time.

But Feynman's curiosity often led him to surprising places. As a kid he experimented with lucid dreaming. As an adult, he explored

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