1
2
3
If Kurt teaches stone skipping like a Zen master, he talks like he’s on his seventh cup of coffee, at a breathless pace, switching between topics rapidly. As we stood on that shoreline, we touched on Socrates, George Carlin, Albert Einstein, Paulo Coelho, quantum physics, Taoism, the Sanskrit Mahabharata, and how the dogma of Christ’s divinity was, according to Kurt, “where the Western mind went off the rails.”

He has theories on the true purpose of the Antikythera mechanism, an ancient Greek device used to track astronomical positioning. “Ask him, ‘How do you tie your shoes?’ ” Paul Fero, a close friend, told me, “and you could be there for half an hour.”