Jack Lawrence

Extremely condensed backstory:

Well I was born in…

• Defying the forces of natural selection, I made it to my late teens.

• I applied to Oxford University for 2012 admission for Physics and Philosophy as an undergraduate, and was rejected. I did pretty well in my A levels, and decided to take a gap year.

• I reapplied to Cambridge the next year for Natural Sciences, and was accepted.

• And so, I studied Natural Sciences at Homerton College specialising Physics, with some History and Philosophy of Science thrown in for good measure - from 2013-2016.

• My thesis was on the Everettian interpretation of Quantum Mechanics (aka the multiverse interpretation).

• I spent much of my time doing side quests. These included lots of improv comedy with the Cambridge Impronauts (a society of which I became president of) and some Dancesport (for which, thankfully, no footage is available on the internet).

• I graduated in 2016.

• Finishing physics at Cambridge generally meant you went one of three paths - academia, finance or consultancy. I didn’t think I was cut out for the first, and I loathed the idea of the second, and so soon after graduating I found myself on a graduate scheme at a consultancy firm.

• I lasted a year.

• It was something of a crash course in nihilism in its own way.

• My mental health also started going very downhill for a variety of other reasons.

• Because of this, and some other sources of despair, I decided to run back, screaming, into the arms of academia and more debt.

• I applied to Oxford University university again - this time, for a graduate version of what I had wanted to do initially.

• This time, they accepted me.

• And so, I completed a masters in the Philosophy of Physics at the University of Oxford at Balliol College from 2017 to 2018.

  • I wrote about the metaphysics of time, the one-way speed of light, explanations in science and the H-Theorem.

• I ended up doing a few side quests there as well, including accidentally starting another improv troupe with some friends called The House of Improv. They, to this day, continue to exist, long after all the original members have left. I’m quite proud of that.

I applied for a PhD programme at the Philosophy of Physics department and was accepted, however I struggled to get funding approved. Further, I had a number of other concerns outside of financial worries, mainly around my mental health.

• I ended up giving up on academia, and got a real person job.

• I found my feet a bit in tech (I have a LinkedIn if you really want to look me up) and spent most of my spare time doing improv comedy with another improv troupe a friend and I started (named Hivemind) and very occasionally writing on my blog here.

• Then the pandemic happened.

• I couldn’t do Improv anymore, so I started making videos. I decided to try for one whole year irrespective of impact - I called it A Year Of Bad Art.

• In the last week of that year, I had a video go viral on Tiktok (incidentally, on the philosophy of time - video here if you're interested)

• Since then, I kept at it.

• And here we are.