I once was at a dinner in Milan with a group of friends. At this dinner, Patrick Stangbye made a proclamation that he thought himself to be an intellectual to which I replied that I too thought of myself this way, and the entire table erupted in laughter. I’m smart…right? I like to nerd out about things. Learn trivial facts about trivial things. Right? After I met David Zilber, I realized how wrong I was.

Back when I had my podcast, I was told by my friend that I should reach out to this guy named David. A fellow North American (Canadian) who would likely make for an interesting guest. At this point in my podcast series, I had only had conversations with people I knew, so the thought seemed a bit out of my comfort zone, but I reached out to David regardless.

The purpose of my podcast was to talk with people about absolutely anything that they wanted except for work. The title “So What Else do you Want to Talk About?” was a prompt which after introducing the guest, I would ask them, and they would reply with a topic we could discuss. In most situations I had been briefed prior to recording so I could prepare. With David this was not the case, and when I asked him “So what else do you want to talk about?” he replied with simply “Love” and blindsided me. You can listen to the episode and hear me at my dumbest. My most stupidest. I counter David with what I thought to be an interesting point about time and the Fourth Dimension, only to find that David held exponentially more knowledge of Quantum Physics than the exact zero-sum I had in my arsenal.

Go listen to the podcast. It’s great if I do say so myself. Just mute the parts where I speak, and it can be quite informative.

Context is born and I add David to the top of my list of people to hunt down and photograph. David is no longer at his post at the world’s greatest restaurant (Noma) and is working at one of the world’s largest bacteria banks where he sits in a glass office which resembles a lab in Jurassic Park. As I find him (after being lost on the campus for a while) he is prepping white tempeh patties into airtight bags which he will carry the following day as a guest of a cooking show. He packs 4 patties into each bag, and we discuss our lives, David becoming a father, war, my friend Corwin whom I introduced to David the year prior and their “conversation” about Elon Musk, and who knows what else.

I overcooked it (kitchen reference) in asking to come to David’s office, as I decided to make the 30-kilometer commute (each way) by bicycle instead of by train. I roll back from Hørsholm towards the city, very excited by the dawn of my project and the glimpse into a life which I would have otherwise never had the opportunity to see.
I ask David to meet up once again in order not to just showcase him at his place of work. On a beautiful Danish day, I ask him to bring his current reading, and I bring a camping chair and we meet in the city center. David sits down on one of the city’s busiest walking streets and soaks up the sun as he turns pages in his books. His hands showcase equations which likely unlock a code that I will never understand. He reads a book as thick as my camera about salt. A whole book about salt. David is a professional intellectual.

I pack down my chair and say, “thank you” and “goodbye” to David before we part ways. I race home to import and retouch the images. I’m fascinated by the multifaceted talents and knowledge of this man whom not long ago I did not know existed. I feel that I could broach any topic with David, and he would be able to explain it to me as though he’d always known about it where I am just discovering it. He’d do so in a way which was not pretentious rot holier-than-thou. I feel that David finds joy in knowledge and discovery, and I found joy in discovering David.