I had nothing to do, so I start to figure out the motion of the rotating plate.  I discover that when the angle is very slight, the medallion rotates twice as fast as the wobble rate—two to one.  It came out of a complicated equation!  Then I thought, “Is there some way I can see in a more fundamental way, by looking at the forces or the dynamics, why it’s two to one?”

We work with young people, from the ages of 11 to 17. Our main program is the Pathways to Freedom. And we’ll be going from Memphis, Tennessee through ten other states, and Washington, DC, and to Canada. It began July 13th and ends August 8th. We hope to take as many young people and their chaperons as possible throughout these areas, and stop and have workshops and programs. They’ll be traveling in buses, and we hope that will inspire and give them a sense of history and also to encourage them to be concerned about their self and history and motivated to reach their highest potential.

The Cumming fragrance line. the soap, Cumming in a bar (still available at alancumming.com) is my favorite ever pun on my name.

I love curating things in general. I love writing. It might actually be the solution to my problem, my dilemma that I don't know what to do. It's because I like to do everything. I like to appease that nature of wanting to dabble in things.

No. I mean, yeah, I drink some protein stuff. But in general, I think protein—I don’t want to say it’s a myth—but I think it’s a little overhyped by various lobbies and industries and things like that.

I pretty much always just get up and have like a big breakfast and then go climbing. That’s kind of the standard.

Oh, I don’t know. I mean, like, just like, I don’t know, environmental propaganda or something. Or like the meat stuff. I’m like pretty stoked on all the vegetarian type of stuff now, just because it’s such an easy way to minimize your impact on the planet. And it’s just, you know, I mean, it just solves so many different environmental issues. But I don’t know.

Well, 20 is still slightly too old, but like my 18-year-old self, I would just tell to – I would say to just not bother going to college at all. Because like the year that I spent at Berkeley was a total waste of my time, basically. Not because there’s anything wrong with Berkeley, but because I just wasn’t passionate about what I was studying, and there’s no – there was no point in me like grinding out a year of studies that I didn’t care about.

Yeah. I, I think an interesting thing with that is that like, is it even failure if you've learned from it and you've taken those lessons onto your next project or the next thing that you're working on? And it's like, that's not necessarily a failure. It's all just part of a long-term learning process.

It was probably before my career, I had an accident when I was younger, I fell down a mountain, it was a little bit ridiculous but, I slipped unprepared on the ice. It was probably one of the few times where was sure that I was about to die.