Ep. 222: "Bastik of Problems"
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Hello.
Hi, John.
Hi, Merlin.
How's it going?
Pretty good.
Pretty good.
I'm a little bit disheveled.
I'm a little bit, I have to say I'm a little bit, not 100% put together.
Oh, huh.
Yeah.
Why don't you say that?
Oh, well, I'm drinking canned coffee.
And it's canned coffee light.
What's it light on?
45 fewer calories than...
The other branded espresso and cream can.
Oh, I get it.
I get it.
I enjoy those.
So it's lighter in calories.
I wasn't sure whether I would enjoy them or not.
I saw them at the grocery and I said, what the hay?
What the hay?
And there was a woman looking at them.
And I said, what do you think about those?
And she kind of – it was, you know, my local grocery.
And she said, can't live without them.
I said, never had one.
And she said, don't start.
Yeah.
But there was a lot of whimsy between us, you know.
We were exchanging something.
Groceries bring people together.
Yeah, they really do.
And so – and I said, which ones are the ones?
And she grabbed some –
that had some sort of flavor, some flavored ones.
She was like, these are my Achilles heel.
And I said, I don't think I can go that far.
I don't think I can go to, you know.
Is it like a hazelnut or a pumpkin spice type situation?
Yeah, something like that.
So then I reached and I grabbed, of course, the full octane ones.
And I stood there with the full octane ones and the ones that were saying I'm 45% less
Then all of that, I'm 45% less of the bad stuff.
I'm sitting right next to it on the same price.
You really going to get the full strength stuff?
Mm-hmm.
All the sugar and the cream and all that?
And so I made the compromise.
I got one of each.
Consumers like choices.
Yeah, that's exactly true of me.
And sometimes we satisfy.
I like that word a lot.
Where you got to find the best of the options.
And in my case, I wasn't familiar with the beverage.
And so I got one of each.
And this morning, looking at it in my pantry...
Because my plan was, right, I was going to have a full-strength one.
Because I don't know if you can hear, but in the background, the coffee maker is going.
There's real coffee on its way.
Is that coffee you got in a bag?
Yeah, this is bag coffee that I'm running through the machine.
A long time ago, I told you about the coffee maker that I had purchased at Costco.
And you said, that's a bad coffee maker.
Did I?
Yeah.
You said, let me fix that for you.
And then the next day, this is what it's like being friends with Merlin Mann.
A lot of people ask me, what's it like being friends with Merlin Mann?
Must be complicated.
And I say, let me tell you a story.
You gave my mom a wallet.
You gave my mom a wallet.
A man's wallet.
I still carry it.
And I said, I got a coffee maker.
And he said, that's a bad coffee maker.
Let me fix that for you.
And the next day, a better coffee maker showed up.
at my house.
Did I get you a Cuisinart?
Courtesy of Merlin Mann.
Was it a Cuisinart?
Do you want to know the full story?
I always want to know the full story.
Here's the thing with my daughter.
She'll ask me a question that I don't really feel like answering.
Not because it's about penises or something.
She did ask about testicles last night and that was complicated.
But sometimes she'll ask me a question and I'll go...
That's kind of a long story.
And she, without missing a beat, says, I like long stories.
I'm like, well, I'm going to need a new euphemism for I just want to watch TV right now.
I like long stories.
I just want to watch Shark Tank.
I don't want to explain testicles to you.
Those men are dressed like two potatoes, and they're kind of not very good potato costumes.
And Mr. Wonderful said they look like testicles.
Oh, Mr. Wonderful.
It might have been Mr. Wonderful.
It might have been Damon.
And then they continued to make, then they brought in the scrotum.
So I was compelled to almost explain the scrotum.
I said, it's kind of a long story.
And she said, I like long stories.
Would you explain the scrotum to me?
I don't know.
I'm not sure.
I know the difference.
Were they actually potato costumes or were they dressed as testicles?
They were just nominally potato costumes.
Sometimes on Shark Tank, they come out and they got a bit.
And these guys, this was kind of one of the relatively rare joke projects.
And these are two guys, it's called, I don't want to give them free advertising.
But basically what they'll do is you give them $10 and they write something on a potato with a Sharpie and then mail it to somebody for $10.
And they were seeking investment.
I think they wanted $50,000 for, I think, a 10% stake, which would be a $500,000 valuation, as Mark Cuban would tell you.
Yeah, they ended up getting funding from Mr. Wonderful.
Wow, no kidding.
Yeah.
I have no idea what we're talking about now.
I thought Mr. Wonderful, wasn't that like a rip-torn character?
Yeah.
He played Nixon.
Yeah.
I have an okay idea sometimes about things you won't understand.
And just knowing how much you enjoy.
Well, you're a man of the world.
You're a man of the culture.
Yes.
You licked your finger and stuck it in the wind.
Yes.
Sometimes you enjoy, and you're a man who enjoys being confused for a minute.
I could tell you more.
Yeah.
I was in a dentist's office.
They did look a little like testicles because the eyes of the potato kind of, you know, the human eye is a funny thing.
Not a potato eye, but yeah, testicle is a funny thing.
But, you know, I can't explain the scrotum until I explain the testicles.
It's kind of a long story.
I find myself in this situation all the time.
There's a lot of things about the body I wouldn't want to have to explain because I act like I understand and I don't really understand.
I don't understand why sometimes I'm certainly the only person that has ever done this but sometimes before I use the toilet I'll weigh myself and then I'll weigh myself after and sometimes I weigh more after I use the toilet no you don't do that that's crazy try it sometime it's really bewitching I don't have a scale in my house I think it might be air
I don't have a TV.
I don't have scale.
That's something you need scale to know about.
I don't watch the scale any more than I watch the TV.
I got a Wi-Fi scale.
I'm free of all your shit.
Does your Wi-Fi scale click up with your Fitbit?
Yep.
It works together through the API.
Does it open your garage door?
Yep.
I got the Matt Howey garage door.
I saw an episode of a TV show that I think was a Shark Tank, but it was a Canadian version.
I was in Canada.
Oh, that's super interesting.
Shark Tank is an American import of a British show called Dragon's Den.
which is a little bit more serious, like English things are.
Dragon's Den.
Dragon's Den.
It's very serious.
They put them in the Dragon's Den.
Put them in the Dragon's Den.
They got to come in.
They got to explain their valuation.
At least on Shark Tank, they'll tell you things like, you know what?
That's not a company.
That's a product.
Oh, hello.
I like that phrase.
And then Kevin, who's also known as Mr. Wonderful, will say things like, I'm going to give you the best piece of advice.
Take it behind the barn and shoot it.
That's what Kevin will say.
I don't want to know anymore.
I'm starting to taste the aspartame a little bit here.
I didn't want to get into this, but, you know, it's like Michael Stipe says, when you throw something away, where is a whey, right?
Yeah, that's right.
Where is a whey?
Where is that 45% fewer calories?
It's in the aspartame taste that's on my tongue right now.
Well, and I'm always intrigued by this, especially with things like light bulbs to me are the greatest example of this.
But your coffee that you got there is a good example, too.
Like with a light bulb, they go, oh, you know, this uses 10 percent less energy than 100 watt light bulb.
But I go, well, you know, it's not like elves came into the shop and did that.
You did that.
You made it like that was science.
Who did?
They seem surprised.
They go, oh, my God, we got a light bulb.
Well, you know how it uses it gives 10 percent less light.
A lot of the time.
Oh, see, that's how they get you.
In your case, they said, well, we arbitrarily decided to put less sugar in this.
Yay us.
Yeah, but we have total control of this product.
John, they own the whole tech stack.
Let me see here.
It's got sucralose.
That doesn't sound good.
No, but the sucralose, I think, is what I'm tasting.
You know, I'm very sensitive to aspartame or sucralose.
I'd love to hear more about that.
Or acacia berries or whatever.
I don't like any of them.
Oh, any kind of like a trendy new food additive?
No.
When I first started drinking it, I was like, oh, it doesn't taste like Coke Zero.
That's this is good.
I mean, you know, like there were two days when John John Scalzi was drinking a lot of that stuff on the cruise.
And, you know, I admire him.
And and so I tried to get into it because he's always he's crazy with the Coke zeros.
And I said to myself, this is it.
I'm finally I've tried.
I tried Diet Coke in college.
No luck.
What cruise are we talking about?
The only cruise I've ever been on, the Joker cruise.
John Scalzi.
Isn't that his name?
Yeah.
He was drinking a lot of these.
No, that's exactly right.
I drink some like a crazy person.
Oh, I see.
And I tried it, and I still, it's better.
It's better than the aspartame, or however you pronounce it, or whatever.
Aspartame?
Aspartame.
Yeah, I present colon and so on choosel.
All right.
All right.
The only thing they can push out of my head.
OK, well, I got to pivot for this, but you go ahead.
So you notice there's less sugar in it.
Arbitrarily less sugar.
Yeah.
No, I don't want anything to do with these anymore.
And I could tell you I didn't when I spot them because I looked at the can and it was the wrong color.
Here's my pivot because you know this about me, that I'll get into a thing.
And I've had things in my life.
Oh, yes.
I think right now you could legitimately say that for some years now, seltzer water has been a thing.
Well, I feel like that coffee maker that you sent me was also like you were in the middle of a thing.
It just happened to be that you were buying coffee makers.
Is it the pushy kind?
Is it the kind where you push it through the little tube?
Pushy?
Pushy?
Was it pushy?
Pushy?
Pushy?
But, you know, for a long time it was Coca-Cola.
And what I'm getting at, some people, it's smoking.
But there's like a go-to thing that you return to for...
I drink nourishment, comfort, whatever, several times a day.
I think a cigarette is a good example.
For me, seltzer is a good example.
I drink about 12 of these cans a day.
And I'm just always, I'm always with, I have two, four, six, eight, eight cans on my desk right now in different states of undress, mostly drunk.
Do you have things like that?
Because it feels like it pushes up against some issues that you have with the world.
It seems to me like, you know, you don't there's a time when you smoke cigarettes.
And when you smoke cigarettes, I think you smoked a lot of cigarettes.
Yeah.
And then and then you stop that.
Yes.
And it seems like you try to catch yourself and you say, leave it.
You see yourself.
I feel like you see yourself having something turn into something you're doing too often or perhaps with not thinking about it and you say, leave it.
Is that accurate?
You try and be the ball.
Be the ball, Danny.
You see the ball and then you be the ball.
Is it good to be the ball?
I've never been quite sure.
I think a lot of people say that.
It's sort of like people saying they want to be rich.
They say they want to be the ball.
I don't know if they really want to be the ball.
If all you have is a nail, every problem looks like a hammer.
Oh, yeah, that's so true.
So the last couple of days...
Now I'm starting to wonder whether this is a problem or not.
Okay.
Well, you came to the right place.
Because I'm feeling super duper weird right now.
And partly it's because I've been waking up in the middle of the night.
And staying awake for a couple of hours because right as I'm about to go to sleep, I'm already asleep.
Let's call it a sleep.
Let's call it a toe.
I've got a toe in a sleep.
You know that thing when you're like, I didn't sleep at all or I haven't been asleep but in fact you were asleep?
You know that feeling?
Oh.
Well, you know, the thing is, it's hard to remember being asleep until you're awake, but also your Fitbit will tell you how much you were actually sleeping, and it will make you feel bad sometimes.
What I've noted, well, so there's that, but I often will say, oh, you know, I just...
laid down here for a second i didn't really sleep and then i look and the clock will reveal actually 45 minutes have gone somebody was sleeping somebody in this room was sleeping and so there's but i i i have a pretty i have a close relationship with the in and out uh area of sleep right i'm a little bit in i'm a little bit out and lately i'll get a little bit into sleep just like just just dip your toe in there and then somebody in the dream
not like a bad person, but somebody that I know or that is a tangential character or, you know, casual, somebody on the street will turn and, and there will be like an uncomfortableness.
I will feel a little off.
There's something a little off happening here.
And, uh, and this isn't the, you know, like I had, I had nightmares when I was young and,
Um, like anybody, I think.
Uh, but lately for a long time, I have not, I haven't had any kind of bad dreams at all.
I haven't been remembering my dreams at all.
I've just been, I look forward to sleep.
I laid down.
I mean, I don't like to go to sleep as we've discussed, but it's not that I dread sleep.
I just don't want to have to stop being awake.
Um,
But it's not like, oh, what awaits me?
It's the Babadook or whatever.
I don't want any bad times.
It's not like that.
I just – like I enjoy sleeping.
But lately, there will be like something that jars me.
From within the dream space.
So you become sort of self-aware that you're in a dream and it's time to go?
Well, but then I get a panicky feeling within the dream and then I come out of the half-sleep place in a kind of like –
panic that feels a little bit like if you put baking soda and vinegar together, like, you know, you accidentally make a dream volcano.
I make a dream volcano and I pop up, I pop up out of sleep, but then I'm like, I'm, I'm breathing fast and I'm highly, highly suggestible.
Uh, uh, uh, I'm highly suggestible of, uh,
causality of that feeling in the sense that I know that it's... You think there's a reason that it happened?
Yeah.
Okay.
And I think there's a reason in the real world that it happened.
Or I don't think that there is, right?
I mean, if I'm thinking about it, it's like, oh, you got into a dream, weird dream place, and then you got into a strange panic, and now you're awake.
Like, roll over and go back to sleep.
Okay.
But I'm suggestible...
and have been for now years, that in fact, there was either an UFO in my room trying to touch me, and that's what caused me to jump out of sleep.
I know that was an old, is that still, does that occasionally still happen?
That UFOs come in the night?
Yeah, looking for the anchorman.
Well, the thing is, I have, I have,
I have, uh, spun these yarns to myself such that I have created, I think a lifetime susceptibility to my own goof.
Uh, which is like, if you are afraid of ghosts, then yes, ghosts exist because you are afraid of them.
You're creating them.
You're, you're seeing them, right?
Right.
And you're seeing angels in the architecture and you're seeing UFOs in the closet.
That's real.
The UFOs in the closet?
No, no, I'm not being facetious.
I mean, we're pattern matching things and it only takes a little bit of some kind of emotional or intellectual fuel to have you start seeing or noticing things in certain ways.
I think everybody does that.
Yeah, and so I've dug a little trench in my imagination that where I attribute my panic to one of these various causes.
Either like ghouls.
A kind of generalized bedevilment?
Yeah, bedevilment.
No, not to be, you know.
No, that's right, though.
Yeah, but there's something, there's some kind of an external-ish thing that's causing that to happen.
Yeah.
And so then I can't immediately roll over and go back to sleep because I'm hyperventilating a little bit.
And I'm searching the room and I'm saying, okay, A, is there an UFO who has come to touch me but then run away like a childlike alien that doesn't want to reveal itself, that isn't ready to say –
that isn't ready to greet me on the international stage like a dignitary.
But it's just more mischievous.
Yeah, sneaking into my house in the middle of the night and tickling my feet and waking me up from a dream.
Yeah.
That seems like a dumb thing for an alien to do, but they're inscrutable.
Yeah.
Or is it that even though I've been living in this house for 10 years, it's suddenly haunted?
Haunted by the
haunted by the, the ghouls of, uh, of the 10,000 civil war soldiers that never ever marched through this area or, uh, or something else.
Is it, um, is it a premonition?
Is it, so for whatever reason, then I lay in bed awake and this is, this has only been happening very recently.
It's never plagued me, but, um,
But the last couple of days, I ran out of my medicine, my medication.
And I was like, oh, I got to go to the drugstore and get that stuff.
And then I forgot that day.
And then the next day I forgot.
And so now... A lot of that stuff will stay in your system for a little while, but it starts half-lifing its way out.
Yeah, right.
Half-lifing.
And so I'm...
I'm feeling – did you remember the movie Dreamscape?
Not really.
What happened to that?
Well, Dreamscape was a movie from the 1980s, mid-1980s, which is sort of our heyday for cultural references.
Yeah.
And stars a little guy you might remember by the name of Dennis Quaid.
Mm-hmm.
Kate Capshaw.
Nothing wrong with that.
And so –
You know, it's got Max von Sydow in it.
Christopher Plummer.
And Christopher Plummer, who was... Captain Von Trapp.
Yeah, that's right.
But it was a movie about, like, Cold War paranoia.
And...
He could go into the dreams, right?
It was like all those movies like Inner Space or movies at the time where people were shrinking themselves down and going into the bloodstream in a little submarine.
Oh, yeah, sure.
It was like a science thriller where there's a – Inner Space also featuring Dennis Quaid.
Oh, interesting.
Mm-hmm.
I see.
Well, yes.
Interesting.
What do you think?
Is there a connection, do you think?
I think we may find one.
And you're familiar with the actor David Patrick Kelly?
Maybe.
From the movie The Warriors?
Yeah.
Warriors.
Come out and play.
He was in 48 Hours.
Oh, that guy.
Yeah, the bad guy.
Oh, sure.
He played a lot of bad guys.
Oh, yeah.
Look at that guy.
So he is the bad guy in this movie.
He is an assassin who goes into the dream of the president because he's going to kill him in the dream.
Oh, okay.
And then in the real world space, the president will appear to have just had a heart attack in his sleep.
Oh, that's good.
But in fact, he's been killed by a dream assassin.
And Dennis Quaid has to go into the dream, the president's dream, through a wall.
They had to get him into the room next door because you've got to be somewhat proximate to the person whose dream you're getting into.
It's a little bit like the plot of Stranger Vacations or whatever.
Mm-hmm.
TV show that everybody's watching.
The one on the Netflix.
Also a little bit of a little bit of what's called proprioception.
The Batman guy.
What's that movie?
Interception.
Oh, Interception.
Yeah.
What's that called?
Yeah.
Interceptions.
Interceptions.
That's the one where you get the levels and you spin your top.
And the world folds over on itself.
Yeah, yeah.
Like, which is a great effect, but weird.
Yeah.
Anyway, so, but what complicates, so there's the dream assassin plot, which is pretty heavy.
And David Patrick Kelly, super good bad guy.
But what complicates it is that the president is having a dream about a post-
nuclear apocalypse that is his fault.
He started in a nuclear war and now he's like living in the blown out future world.
So the president, the president's already in a, in a hellscape of his own.
And then the dream assassin comes to kill him.
And then Dennis Quaid comes in to kill the dream assassin.
I don't want to give too much away, but, uh, not a super good movie, but it really, uh,
uh imprinted on me this um this geography that you can be a the president b think you're responsible for nuclear war every night when you go to sleep and spend your whole night living in an apocalypse that you created and then you have to wake up in the morning and be the president again and try not to do it it's a little bit of a peacenik movie too to be honest um
And then assassins can come into your dream and they'll just seem like dream characters within the dream but it's actually like a real bad guy who's there to kill you and then another guy can show up.
So I don't know.
That imprinted on me and so those borderlands –
Yeah, it's very unclear what's going on.
So whether you mean it to be or not, that's somewhere in your mind you're wired a little bit around the idea that there are pathways that a rogue agent could get into a dream.
I don't even feel 100% that my dream space is safe from invasion.
Okay.
But now I haven't taken my medication in a handful of days.
Yeah.
And so I'm feeling a little tingly and I'm feeling a little bit disoriented, slurry, but it's also because I'm not sleeping.
So I cannot identify what my problem is right now.
There's a little handful of problems.
What I have right now is a bastic of problems, a bag of holding full of small problems.
What I need to do is I need to get out of here and go.
I need to stop drinking this aspartame coffee and go to town.
Hitch up the wagon to my dwarf donkeys.
Your comfort donkeys.
Somebody after our program last week sent me a link to the notion, and it is a notion of a comfort donkey.
Yeah.
And I spent a little bit of time researching, researching small donkeys.
You got a little bit of property.
You get a Bastic for it.
Exactly what I was thinking.
There was a, there was a picture of a couple.
The people, obviously the people who are raising dwarf donkeys are baby boomers, right?
I mean, we keep thinking of baby, at least in my head, I have a picture of a baby boomer and it looks like
It looks like a still photograph from 30-something, right?
I'm always going to think that they're 30 and I'm 15.
Oh, a yuppie.
Yuppie.
Thank you.
Exactly.
But baby boomers, of course, are 65 years old now.
And at least, you know, and they're wearing dad jeans and they're voting for Trump.
And for the most part.
Yeah.
And they're raising dwarf donkeys.
Right.
I mean, because who else would do it?
I mean, I can think of most 25 year olds I know would happily raise dwarf donkeys.
They just don't have the resources.
But also by house if they could.
They'd buy a house if they could.
That's right.
They'd accept an offer for a job.
A millennium would love to have any kind of, you know, you go beyond the heritage chickens.
But if you want to have four-legged animals that are healthy and have the appropriate Bastic, you're going to need resources.
You're going to need space.
You're going to need tolerant people living in the house with you.
Yep.
And I mean, it really is.
It's a whole, it's sort of like saying like, oh, you know, I want to have a hot tub.
Well, there's a lot of dependencies to getting there.
Ditto for, what is that?
What do you call it?
What kind of donkey?
I'm going to say dwarf donkey.
Dwarf donkey.
Okay.
But there was a picture.
So I'm looking at this and I'm like, yeah, these donkeys are cute.
And of course, the way they get you is they show you dwarf donkey babies.
Oh, see.
Dwarf donkey babies look like they're about the size of a Scotty dog.
Yeah.
You're like, this is a thing I definitely want.
You need a special plastic for that.
Oh, dwarf donkeys, look at these.
But then they grow up and it's the size of a Great Dane, but it's a donkey.
Oh, these are really cute, John.
Yeah.
Do you see the picture of the two baby boomers, mom and dad, let's call them, in a...
in a Surrey with a fringe on top, except there's no fringe.
So let's say it's a fringeless Surrey.
It looks like one of those vehicles for that, what they call it harness racing?
Yeah, that's right.
It looks like if you're going to do that fancy harness racing, except it's two people in J. Crew clothes and a donkey with blinders.
Yeah, and the donkey's pulling them in the little Surrey.
Look at the looks on their faces.
Are they not smiling?
And I take you out with the donkey with the blinders on.
Do they not seem like...
All the choices that they've made in life that have deposited them here, they're proud of.
Don't you think they're proud of everything?
Again, dependencies.
They got time to be together when the sun is out.
They have a bespoke two-wheeled vehicle that they can both sit in comfortably.
And they have, I believe it's called the tack.
They've got the gear that they need to harness up the animal.
And perhaps most importantly, they have a dwarf donkey.
And those are the contingencies you're talking about.
You're talking about get a hot tub.
Oh, boy.
Yeah.
You don't just get a hot tub, you know what I mean?
You get the whole camp train of people from AquaQuip.
Oh, boy.
And plumbers lined up out the door, and then you got all the little chemicals you got to buy all the time.
You got to do all the HVAC, whatever.
You got water.
You got heat.
You need space for it.
You got to get maybe zoning.
Skim stuff off the top all the time, depending on how you use it.
But if you – I mean the tack is what's going to set you back $100 a week.
Oh, yeah.
Just find all the little leather bits.
Now, do you think – do you think is this a Bastic donkey or is this more of a stable kind of donkey?
Well, this is – we were talking about this before, right?
If you're going to walk into an airport with this guy, you're going to have to make a – it's going to have to be a –
a real vest and you're going to have to make a serious, you're going to hold eye contact with people.
There are going to be four or five people.
Oh, it can't be like a teehee, I'm getting away with something.
No, no, no.
You're going to have to hold eye contact with people.
You're going to have to have a couple of letters that are
that are like notarized.
Notarized letters, yeah.
And you're going to have to just sit there and look at them, and they're going to look at you, you're going to look at each other in the eye, and you're going to say, this fucking donkey is coming on the plane.
I have so many questions, and again, I don't want to be ableist.
I have so many questions about how far this can go, because now I'm looking at a picture here of three dwarf donkeys pulling a man in a very small Conestoga wagon.
Oh, my God.
See what I'm saying?
So what if you show up at the airport with that?
You're like, I need a lot of comfort.
I don't think you can do that.
This is a mobility device.
Mobility device pulled by three comfort donkeys.
That I need to take on an airplane.
I feel like... I feel...
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I feel like there are so many people I know, young people, who would just, if what we needed as a culture was comfort donkey ranchers.
Two, three, four.
There would be so many young people lining up to take this job.
All of a sudden, like, what do I call it?
4F.
What's the thing you do in?
Yeah, 4F.
No, 4H.
All of a sudden, 4H would become pretty cool.
Oh, 4F is when you don't have to go to Korea.
That's when you got flat feet.
Yeah.
But think about that now.
4H Club.
4H Club.
You got a Macklemore haircut.
We could repopulate the Dakotas.
Oh, on fleek.
All those little towns out there that Monsanto bought and plowed under, we could just fill them up with Macklemore's, raising comfort donkeys, but the problem is we don't need them.
This is the thing.
It seems like if you're within a narrow perspective, you could think to yourself,
If we made enough dwarf donkeys, think of the problems we could solve.
Like think of all the people that want right now.
They don't want to get in their car and be in rush hour traffic.
They want to go to work in a Calistoga wagon pulled by three miniature donkeys.
And all we have to do is make the donkeys and they will come.
Mm-hmm.
Well, you kind of put your finger on it, though.
You look at these millenniums today.
Their parents from 30-something, you know, that's an aging population.
They might have need of this.
Mm-hmm.
Well...
I've been talking about alternative forms of transportation, urban transportation, for a long time.
Have I not?
Oh, no, absolutely.
You know we're on the verge.
We're on the verge of something.
It's about to happen.
And now people send me articles.
We're on the cusp.
People are sending me articles all the time about like metropolitan gondola projects and funiculars on the rise, literally.
And all kinds of things, you know, like –
Like gondolas, but like actually the Venetian kind with like a guy standing on the back in a flat hat.
All guy in a boater with a big stick.
That's right.
He carries a big stick.
It would be like bike lanes but water.
Yeah, exactly, right?
I mean, turn everywhere into Venice.
How hard can it be?
Yeah.
But as we move on one hand to technological super state –
On the other hand, right, everybody's starting to wear like garters on their sleeves and straw boaters.
I saw a straw boater for sale the other day and I was sorely tempted.
Like we're waxing our mustaches.
This is the crazy thing, right?
So you think we're basically turning into Shakey's Pizza.
Absolutely.
And it is the thing that defies science fiction.
Like for all of the genius science fiction –
prognosticating that was done in the heyday of science fiction in the 1950s and 60s when they were really thinking about the future.
And we can point to a lot of authors and say like, wow, they were so, you know, like they had this
They were so prescient, right?
They could see like we were about to develop the talking broom or whatever.
You point to something that's like, did we?
That's funny.
It was a good story.
Hey, Wi-Fi broom.
Robert Heinlein or whatever.
The three rules of Wi-Fi brooms.
But what no science fiction writer ever, ever conceived was that in 2016 –
the music and fashion of the young people would be derived from like a sort of pre vaudeville mining aesthetic, like a, like, like, like the early days of photography, like banjo music and waxed cotton are going to be waxed cotton, a form of weatherproofing.
that has been obsolete since the 19, well, since the invention of rubber, right?
And like old timey, you know, like leather bottom shoes and like hop, hop, hop, hop.
Bikes in general, penny farthings in particular?
Yeah, right.
Who saw the return of the penny farthing?
No one, no one.
And that's the failure of the imagination of,
Right.
That, that the science fiction writer of 1959 trying to think about what 2020 would be is like putting together all these, these hovercrafts and
And in fact, it's not even like the culturist has discovered and is exploiting and mining this crazy vein that isn't even the sexy part of Victoriana, right?
It's just like this is just bizarre.
Like it stems from a desire to wear suspenders again or something.
And so when I think about
when I think about the now and, and trying to science fiction, my own future and our future, of course, we're going to say that, that the, uh, that the dwarf donkey pulling a Calistoga wagon is the future, right?
The future of public transit, because it comports with the weird, trendy, uh,
Like past fixation, the weird trendy like 15 years of the past that we're focused on now.
But really, 30 years from now, the fashion is probably not going to be like so – it's not going to be frontier anymore.
What is it going to be?
I think it strains our minds to imagine the ways in which dwarf donkeys are going to be employed.
Oh, there's no way to predict it.
There's really no way to know.
Yeah, because right now you see the dwarf donkey pulling the Calistoga wagon with some aging baby boomers on it.
They're having a good time.
You imagine the Macklemore's will be having a good time doing that.
But none of us are imagining what the infant children... You never know.
If I had to try and summarize it, because this is something I do think about a lot, about thinking about the future and what we know and what we can guess.
And, you know, we can sort of make these reckons about the date by which a certain kind of very specific thing might happen.
But what we can never know is what happens in between now and then.
that's that's you know in some ways you could you know say something like well you know um personal human flight like that's gonna happen it's it can kind of happen now but like how many other like really interesting weird and unpredictable things will happen before we get jetpacks right right well hoverboards in the airports i mean all the time now you see on my in my own neighborhood
You see kids on those little like hoverboards with the weird blue glowing ground effect.
Are they still dangerous?
I remember hearing around last Christmas that every single one of those is dangerous.
They seem dangerous.
Well, basically they were – I feel like I heard that they had gotten very popular and that there was a relatively small number of places in China that were making them in a highly unregulated way and that they were susceptible to catching on fire.
Is that still the case?
Have they scaled up with that?
Is there an underwriter's lab?
So you mean not dangerous just that you're going to –
Fall off of it and break your head but that it also might explode under your feet.
Well, I don't know.
I can't speak to that.
I feel like it's – when I try and think about the future, I am reminded of how many things in my own life I thought were going to be valuable skills that I had acquired.
And what it turned out was that it wasn't that the skill had been surpassed.
You know, you think about in terms of computer programming, right?
You learn how to program in Fortran and then that skill is surpassed by the invention of a new language and it feels like a continuous improvement and your skills can get old.
Um, you know, your, your doctor skills can get old or your legal skills can get old and you need to be continually updating those skills.
Right.
Like you need to keep up with Fortran.
Right.
But it wasn't in a lot of the skills that I acquired, it wasn't the case that my skills became atrophied.
It was actually the need for those skills in general just went away.
Just went away.
And we've talked about it.
We talked about you being able to eyeball what year that Les Paul came out, things like that, knowing which lineup of ELO was which year.
There's things like that.
But also think about this.
I mean, think about the kind of...
I'm thinking here about like there was that time in the 60s, 50s and 60s, where for, in the end, relatively short amount of time, people with a high school education could get a really good job, good wages, good job security, union job with benefits that would let you retire working in an automobile factory.
Right.
And that was that was in its way a kind of high tech job.
But you can buy a new car every three or four years.
Well, think about VCRs getting popular in the early 80s and starting like a VCR repair business.
That's a kind of middle to high, not high tech, but like people need somebody to fix their VCR.
I mean, this thing costs $500.
I got to get this thing fixed.
Yeah.
The guy at the typewriter repair place up off of Broadway that was there until I took a typewriter in to be repaired by him into the early 2000s.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Same kind of thing.
Yeah.
And so I was thinking about this in terms of songwriting the other day.
Oh.
I have a good friend whose name is Eric.
He records under the band name Cataldo.
And I think he's a great songwriter.
And as I was reflecting on him and his songwriting, I realized that his songwriting or the art of songwriting –
is still a viable art, a wonderful art, and you can still be really, really great at it.
But the culture, just in the last 10 years, has moved away from a single person with a guitar writing songs.
You know, there are still plenty of examples that would, you know, like...
What am I trying to say?
Exceptions that prove the rule.
But we're we're now in a we're now in a in a waning of.
Of songwriting as the as the primary way that people are.
seeking music and entertainment.
And it waxes and wanes, right?
I mean, there's dance music for a while and then it's back to songwriting and then back to dance music and back to songwriting.
But it really did feel like for a long time it felt like a certain kind of pendulum swing.
Yeah.
And right now it feels like songwriting, to sit and write a song with a guitar is almost an anachronistic thing to pursue when
you have so many options of sitting with your computer and making music and, you know, generating beats and making, making, um, making music, but that, that you wouldn't really describe even exactly as like a song as much as it is a sort of scape and thinking about thinking about
The future in those terms, like I think the songwriter will always return, but that may be a bias.
That may be a prejudice that I have that favors my own past and my knowledge of the past.
And it may be that songwriting never does return, that the technology becomes the art itself.
And the, and every once in a while, some, some 20 year old, a Jewish kid from Minnesota steps up in a straw hat and says, I'm an old man already.
And I'm going to start singing songs about hopping freight trains.
But I don't know how many more times that's going to work.
Because you think about what are some of the golden ages of what we consider songwriting?
You've got, I guess you could go back to think about something like Stephen Foster.
You could think about Tin Pan Alley.
You could think about the Gershwins.
But then even, obviously, into the 60s, you've got these weirdo characters like Jimmy Webb, like Paul Williams, Burt Bacharach and Hal David.
Then you get into things like the musicals and stuff like that.
But it feels like today that superstar role is more like a Mark Ronson now.
It's more like a producer.
And I know that's been around.
You could go back and look at somebody like Trevor Horn in the 80s.
Nobody ever remembers him from the Buggles.
If they do remember him, they know him from Frankie Goes to Hollywood and Yes and ABC and stuff like that.
Whereas today, again, Mark Ronson I think is a good example.
Can you name that many Mark Ronson songs that you like?
It's the one where they ride the bikes around.
I don't know.
But I know he does this thing with Lady Gaga.
I know he does that.
Hasn't that kind of become the new songwriting?
Well, I mean, I listen to music all the time in different environments where I'm kind of astonished.
Like, you can hear that the music was expensive to make.
Even if you're really gifted and you're just making it on a laptop,
at home, it's expensive to make because it, because of the way it sounds, you have to have, you have expensive equipment and you have access to, to, uh, good players.
Like it's not, it's not stuff you could program the playing.
There's some of it's played, you know?
And, but I can't figure out what the market for this music is.
It was, it was expensive to make and I'm hearing it now.
So it was disseminated obviously, but, uh,
Who would buy this?
It isn't songs.
It's not stuff that you're like, you know, get that record so I can play that song over and over.
It's, you know, it's musical, um, it's musical landscape.
And yeah, I think that the line between, between music maker and producer and songwriter is all very blurred.
Um,
Obviously, pop music is still churning out song-based hits, but those are being written by songwriters in a very different way.
It's not very Brill Building-y.
But when I think of 30 years from now and people listening to music, there's a very real chance that the way people think about music 30 years from now, it just hasn't occurred to me.
And I'm, and I'm still thinking like, well, the songwriter is going to come back after this, after this period of, of dance, you know, then that, then that guitar is coming back out of the closet as it's done a handful of times in my own life.
But it, but it isn't inevitable.
And I think that, I think that's the hardest part of
of prognosticating.
Certainly when I was running for office, it was the hardest part of talking about transportation with people because they, they just cannot conceive of a time when the, the paradigms change so that the whole notion of, like I was driving along the other day, looking out the window at, um, cause you get out, you get outside of the center of any town and
And all of a sudden, I mean, just a little bit outside of the center, all of a sudden the parking lots just get so big for things.
You know, the parking lot of a Lowe's is bigger than the Lowe's.
I totally forget about that until I'm there.
And it's like, I mean, even, you know...
San Francisco in the Bay Area, it's nothing like Florida.
I mean, unless it is literally like Christmas Eve, the parking lot at the mall does not get full.
The parking lot at Walmart and Sam's does not get full because it is so, so very big.
There's so much parking.
And so much land that we think of as being under development or, you know, this land is being used.
It's not abandoned land, but it's just paved.
And.
Like and fallow, except on Christmas, like you say.
And so when you're talking about a future.
and I think in the very near future, where parking is no longer a thing.
You know, if my predictions are true, and... Are you making a coffee?
I am.
No, I'm just curious.
I mean, you're getting a lot of Foley there.
I just want to make sure people know you're making a coffee.
Oh, you're talking about Foley noise like this?
Yes, that's good Foley.
Yeah.
Woo!
Yep.
A little background noise.
I want people to be able to locate this podcast in real time.
I just want to make sure we're not confusing anybody.
Do you think our audience gets confused?
God, I hope so.
I think that they stay right with us.
Have you ever heard... These are my four cast iron pans.
Ready?
Here's one.
Here's two.
Here's the third one.
And that's the fourth one.
Are you at home, John?
Is that your office pans?
No.
she hates these patterns um but like when parking goes away when it's no longer a necessity our world is going to look bananas to us they're going to look back so you get your paved driveway you get in your car
One person in a car on the paved driveway.
The paved driveway goes out to the paved little court by your house.
You take that to get to the other paved road to go on this very big paved road full of one people in a car.
You get off at the paved exit.
You drive down the paved access road.
You pull into the parking lot.
That's going to seem bananas to go to pay the electric bill or pick up some JoJo's.
That's going to seem nuts.
It's nuts.
It's nuts.
It seems nuts already.
But like everybody.
But people go when you say that.
Because they got their reasons.
Well, because, yeah, they haven't – particularly at the level of like, hi, I'm running for office.
And I think that in particular when we're talking about a $3 billion levy to expand this system and build it in such a way that it lasts 50 years.
We're going to build this tunnel under the city and it's going to last for 100 years.
And and you're running for office and saying, like, it may last for 100 years, but we're only going to need it for another eight years.
And all you have to do is go back and look at let's let's pick out an arbitrary time.
Like what?
What's the time when the car first started coming around, but was nowhere near as popular as a horse?
So turn of the century, 19, even 19 teens.
Let's call it 19 teens.
So the 19 teens, I mean, I'm sure there were a lot of people who said, look, you know, these horses are producing a lot of waste.
We're going to need ways to better accommodate the waste of horses, which is a completely sensible thing to say.
As long as you assume that that curve is going to continue to go up rather than not just go down, but go away.
I'm going to be the horse poop mover king of New York City.
In 1920, I'm going to move more horse poop out of New York in 1920.
That's going to get people to vote.
They are going to turn out for that because I forget where I heard this.
There's a wonderful story might have been on 99 percent invisible.
But there's a story about like I think Chicago and just the incredible problem they were having with the amount of horse waste and horse waste.
And I think they were just dumping it into the lake, I guess.
Playgrounds.
That's right.
It was the episode that led to why it is they raised up the buildings one floor in order to put in sewage.
But anyway, I'm sorry to mean to derail you, but that's the kind of thing where I don't think it's surpassingly difficult to look at that in retrospect and say, you know what?
I could see how that was really awful, but I'm glad at some point there was one day or there was one week where we went from our last idea of how much we should worry about horse poop
To the next idea of like, you know, I'm kind of coming around this idea.
We need to think about this problem a little bit differently.
Somebody's got to do that at some point.
I'm not asking you to give up your car or hate your car.
I'm just asking you to be honest about looking at the fact that it's not sustainable for the future.
And there may be better ways.
I'm not asking you to do anything except keep in mind that there might be better ways.
I want to know how we are going to employ dwarf animals in the future.
Because I feel like the axis of dwarf animals is – I mean like we are making more and more dwarf animals all the time.
Yeah.
Right?
Like the – I think that – and this may be a money-making opportunity.
This may also just be like one of those things where when they look back –
They say the, you know, the Isaac Asimov's of dwarf animal prognostication were John and Merlin.
In 2000, the tail end of 2016, they foresaw a time when the global need for animals that are small, that are forever young, right?
Yeah.
Like we have a global now, like passionate need for
desperate need for baby animals and all you have to do i mean it's like it's what 40 of the internet right is is uh is baby animals well what if we what if we do a little bit of blue sky solution hearing here what if what if we stop acting like this is something exceptional or weird that will go away when people stop being weird about this one thing and say what if it's what if it's almost the opposite of that
What if this is the thing we never knew we needed because of the following opportunities?
I'll toss out one, just the larger idea of accessibility.
Accessibility is good for everyone.
There's no reason not to have accessibility.
The biggest failure of accessibility is not thinking about it early enough.
This is how you make ugly things.
This is how you make costly things.
If you think about accessibility from the beginning and stop acting like it's some weird thing to accommodate this one guy in a wheelchair and go, no, everybody needs this or will need this.
Think about that from the beginning.
And all of a sudden, lots of things start to change.
What if, in fact, and you know what?
Shame on us.
Maybe we're being too specific by saying it needs to be a dwarf donkey or a specific comfort animal.
Obviously, there's a Venn diagram where this heavily correlates with things like wanting a pet.
The millennials are not going to want kids the same way that the previous generations wanted kids.
Oh, who knows?
There's no way to know.
Who wanted a kid?
I mean, I don't think the previous generation wanted kids.
They wanted draft animals.
And the cheapest ones were kids.
They wanted draft animals.
So, so it was, it might've been dwarf donkeys all along.
That's what I'm saying.
Dwarf donkeys all the way down.
My, my, my, my feeling is yes.
Right.
Like the lately in, in an increasingly large number of Seattle businesses, when you walk in now, the, uh, restrooms are like gender neutral, gender, gender open.
And, uh,
It is so logical.
It's just so reasonable.
Like you couldn't possibly have a problem with it.
Logical, reasonable, obvious, and not costly, not weird.
There's nothing about it that's difficult.
The only thing that's difficult is to imagine ever a time when the bathrooms were segregated by gender.
Like you look at it and you go, right, okay, at a baseball game,
In a stadium where there are 15,000 guys that all want to take a piss at once.
There should, yes, absolutely be troughs where those, where you can herd all those wildebeests into a thing where they can just pee and keep moving.
Right.
I mean, like it should be a keep moving, get out of the way situation.
You enter by this door, you start peeing, you keep moving toward that door and then you be done peeing by the end.
Right.
Don't gum up.
Yes.
But otherwise, any other kind of restroom facility, what the hell were we ever thinking that they were segregated, right?
I mean, you can have a little anteroom where there's a mirror and a sink that everybody can use.
And then just potties.
And that's like a no-brainer, like an access no-brainer.
The bathroom at my junior high, which was built in, I think, 1977 or 78, at the time seemed weird, revolutionary, I don't know what.
Of course they still had boys' and girls' bathrooms.
But when you walked into that bathroom, it wasn't really a room anymore.
It was really more like it was more closer to what you see at an airport, you know, where there's doors in.
There's like a doorway in and out.
You think about the classic.
I'm sorry.
Let me backtrack here.
You think about the classic old school bathroom is there is a door that says boys or girls.
You go inside and then everything's inside.
In this instance, there was more like a you could kind of see it.
You could see into this from outside because it didn't matter.
There was a an area with like six or eight sinks.
And and paper towel dispensers.
And then behind that, there was like a dozen doors, full like floor to ceiling doors that you open up to go inside into this your own little private corridor.
You close and lock the door.
You use the bathroom.
Why is that not pretty much every bathroom?
And if you have something private to do, you do the private stuff in a stall that's actually a private.
The old bathrooms, which a lot of people, a lot of people, any younger than us would have no memory of.
And I'm talking about the bathrooms that were in downtown buildings that were not like 70s skyscrapers, but proper old buildings.
Chrysler building style, downtown buildings or bus stations.
Most of the courthouses, most of the buildings that my father spent a lot of time in, and I'm not saying he spent a lot of time in bus stations, but, but the world, the world of 1970.
Which was the decaying world of 1935 where the bathrooms.
What decades decay are we actually seeing in the current decade?
I like that.
Like right now we're seeing the detritus of the 80s mostly.
Yeah, right.
I mean you see the garbage around you and you're like, oh my god, 80s, early 90s garbage.
In 1970 it was all 1935 garbage.
All these little old people still wearing fedoras, eating in those little railroad diners where you walk in and there's a ham.
All those bathrooms had marble floors.
And the stalls were divided by these sheets of marble that were like two inches thick.
Right, with giant heavy wooden doors.
Heavy doors and porcelain thrones, porcelain toilets that were like things of beauty.
Everything about these bathrooms, when they were constructed, were things of beauty.
And by 1975, they were like weird toilets.
like the marble is all kind of discolored and the door has, the door fell off its hinges and somebody screwed it back in with a different size bolt.
And, and, uh, and there was always a suspicion that there was somebody in one of the stalls that had been there all day.
Yeah.
Um, but the sound of walking into one of those bathrooms and like the, and the echoing of your, of your leather sold wing tips and,
Like that's a thing that they started taking those bathrooms away.
They just started gutting them and replacing them with just shite bathrooms.
But like those bathrooms, even in 1935, could have been –
Like all in, everybody in.
All skate, everybody skate.
Well, I mean, what you're describing, I can think of that so clearly.
There's buildings downtown that are still like that, where like the place I used to get my hair cut, you get the keys, you go upstairs, you know, it's again, not meant, it was meant for a different time.
It was meant to be like, there's a bunch of businesses in this building.
It wasn't meant to accommodate people coming from the haircut place downstairs.
And the bathroom itself, you know, obviously was from the 20s or 30s.
Like you say, it was like being in the Senate or something, but really shabby and run down.
Very difficult to maintain.
Just as the Senate was in that time.
No, am I right?
But you're also talking about this fixation people have on bathrooms as place for aberrant vice.
Right.
And so that's what led to like in my high school, you know, my high school, the bathroom stalls in the boys room did not have doors.
Oh, right.
If you wanted to poop, you had to do it.
And of course, I never would.
Prison poop.
I guess.
Yeah, sure.
You can make it into prune wine.
You had to go into this because that made it easier to manage and maintain.
You'd see people smoking, you'd see them fighting, you'd see them doing all the aberrant things that boys do in bathrooms.
So, you know, one of it is like, let's try to keep aberrant stuff out of bathrooms, but that's, I don't know, man.
I feel like that's the fixation, is there's still this idea that there's going to be some dude in the bathroom who's there to do something with his wiener that ain't peeing.
And so, not my daughter.
She's not going in there.
And it's like, well, that's such a strange angle.
It's like refusing to go in brick buildings because you think you're haunted.
Is it your mom that doesn't like brick buildings?
No, my mom loves brick buildings.
She has a problem with some kind of building, right?
So many kinds of buildings that she has.
She has problems with contemporary shite construction.
Yeah.
But she's not opposed to, like, I don't think she's opposed to, like, any particular...
construction but it's our hang-ups in the same way that we're dealing with the garbage 80s i mean it's our hang-ups from other decades that keep us from i'm not even say again let's just be clear i'm not telling you to change anything today i'm just saying like are you sure that the things you're positive about still have any relevance today and is it possible that the things you're so positive about that you think still have well is there any chance at all that that point of view that's doing nothing to make your life better might actually be harming someone else
Well, and this is what I'm saying about dwarf animals.
Yeah.
We have a lot of – I think we mock dwarf animals in general and baby animals and a fixation on baby animals on the internet.
We don't viciously mock it.
It just seems like beneath one's dignity to spend too much time secretly looking at pictures of teacup poodles and tiny little pigs.
Oh, man.
You spend a week at our house and you're going to come around.
Well, this is the thing.
And I mean, but we all do it.
Right.
I mean, I'm like, I'm not going to go out on.
I'm not going to out myself on my award winning podcast by saying that I spend any amount of time looking at tiny little baby alligators or cute like owls playing with cats or whatever.
It's been killing me the whole episode.
Have you ever seen a poodoo?
Can I encourage you to just go to your search engine and type in P-U-D-U?
All right.
P-U-D-U.
Because I'm thinking like donkeys are good.
They're kind of big.
What if we got some of these guys to help out?
Oh, a little South American deer.
It's the world's smallest breed of deer.
Can you see how little they are?
Oh, that's a very little deer.
It's a deer that looks a little bit like a rodent.
It's like a capybara meets a toy-sized dog.
Here we are at the crossroads.
There's not going to be parking anymore.
All this land.
Get over it.
Get over it.
There's not going to be parking.
We're going to pull up all that asphalt and we're going to reuse it.
We're going to squeeze it.
We're going to milk it for the oil and we're going to turn it into park benches or whatever people do.
We're going to super train it.
All that asphalt.
Then we're going to have all this open land.
There's going to be these Lowe'ss.
Presumably we're still going to need Lowe'ss because who – Lowe's is the chain of stores.
Yeah.
What is somebody going to do if they want to tear the classic turn-of-the-century kitchen and bathroom out of their vintage home and turn it into a thing that feels like one of those hotel rooms that you – extended stay hotel room if you're on a business trip?
Oh, yeah.
Like what if you want to Airbnb the place up a little bit?
Get yourself a new Wi-Fi broom.
Yeah, a new Wi-Fi.
You're going to have to go to Lowe's.
But you're going to order it on your Amazon.
You know, it's going to be Amazon slash Lowe's slash AOL slash MSNBC.
You're going to go tick-a-tick-a-tick-a-tick.
Or you're probably not even going to go tick-a-tick-a-tick.
You're going to say, Siri, is it raining?
And then Zooey Deschanel is going to start to cry.
I don't know how the future is going to look.
But what I want.
Would you want Zooey Deschanel to be your Siri voice?
You think you'd like that?
Siri is only ever – Siri is like Harvey Korman to me in the sense that – Can't keep a straight face.
Well, no, in the sense that every once in a while I'll be interacting with my phone and then all of a sudden Harvey Korman opens a closet door and says, hello?
Yeah.
It only happens accidentally.
I'm like, no, Harvey, no, back.
It's not your, no, not your turn yet.
Like, yeah, I've never used, I have never employed any of the voice command systems in my phone voluntarily.
Okay.
They're just, they're like, they are Easter eggs.
if the Easter egg was like a, uh, like a, uh, uh, an angry crocodile, you know, like, I'm like, I don't know.
And then you can't, then you're like fumbling and no, I don't use those things.
But I, but I, but I know that one, I know that people do constantly, constantly Matt Howie right now is garage doors going up and down two miles away.
Siri, Siri, disconnect, disconnect in the house of the sprinklers are on India golf, niner, niner, abort, abort.
But so we keep thinking that the purpose of these animals, of these tiny deer and of these dwarf donkeys pulling little carriages is that they are – they're amusements.
They are amuse-bouches.
They are – Amuse's bouche.
Amuse's bouche, right.
They're a lieutenant's colonel.
And we don't think of them as practical.
We're not envisioning a future –
In the same way that 15 years ago we never could have envisioned that the banjo would become the primary instrument of contemporary pop in 2016, we are not realizing that the poodoo maybe is like a real economic driver.
Poodoo ranching, like how are we going to employ poodoo's?
in a future economy that we can't even picture right now.
But I think there is a place for Poodoos.
I think we're going to make a place for it.
And then retroactively, it's going to seem inevitable.
We were always on a collision course with Poodoos.
Well, think about automobiles.
Weird nuisance.
They're just scaring the horses.
Sure.
And think about
Think about right now, we, you know, like it's hard for us to imagine, wow, what's the next animal that someone's going to need on an airplane with them?
But the reality is all the animals, the airplanes are going to be full of animals.
And that's going to seem totally normal.
Everyone is going to travel with a companion animal of some kind.
I'm just, I'm, I'm, I'm like, uh, I'm, I'm spitballing here.
I'm blue sky in.
maybe 20 years from now every single person travels with a companion animal all the time backpacks there was a time when only children and hippies and people who camped used backpacks right it would seem it would it would seem weird for a grown person
I'm thinking about when I started college is when I got my first like Jansport style.
Is that what it's called?
Or like one of those cool backpacks.
And I think when I went to college is when I got one because I knew that I knew that when you went to college, you had to have a backpack.
You wear it on the one shoulder, even though that was kind of stupid.
And you put your books in there.
And then within the next few years, I still had a briefcase.
Still had a briefcase.
With your Wall Street Journal folded up.
Wall Street Journal and a briefcase.
Well, yeah, think about when Michael J. Fox rides his skateboard into the malt shoppie and the guy says, why are you wearing a life preserver?
Right, yeah.
Did you just fall off a boat?
We're in the middle of Ohio here or wherever that took place.
Can't get a Pepsi free?
Can't give you a tab?
I hardly know you, kid.
He's going to be there.
See the link I sent you?
Just recently?
Yeah, this is the thing.
This is just another little viewport into this.
I take your point.
So what if, instead of thinking it's just weirdos that need animals on planes, what if it's inevitable that everybody has an animal on a plane?
But also, what if you need a way to get your animal around town when we don't have cars?
Where did you send me this link?
Here in the Skype program?
Yeah, you basically go to animalssittingoncapybaras.tumblr.com.
Bye.
I'm not able to navigate this website here.
Yeah.
So where would I find it?
I'll send it to you the other way.
Oh, wait.
Here.
No, no.
I found it.
There's a little thing.
Okay.
Oh, that's really a thing.
Animals sitting on capybaras.
Oh, get out of Dodge.
It's a whole site.
It's a Tumblr.
You can't make this stuff up.
Get out of Dodge.
There's monkeys on capybaras.
Birds.
There's a baby capybara on a... There's a capybara riding on another capybara.
Oh, my goodness.
There's a bird on capybara.
Well, let me ask you this.
Does the capybara look sad or stressed out?
The capybara is so content.
It's so happy.
The capybara is enormously contented to have a cat on itself, a monkey on itself, seems like an eagle on itself.
They want things on them.
Yeah, I totally agree.
They love a monkey on their back.
Isn't that funny?
Isn't that funny?
We're trying to get monkeys off of our back all the time.
Turns out.
Turns out we didn't have the wrong aminal.
So it's part of it a design problem.
Part of it's just a conceptual problem.
We think too much about how stuff should be.
Like really, as we pointed out on numerous occasions, a plane is basically a shitty bus in the sky.
It's very much based on the model of a bus.
Don't you think?
Are these capybaras having capybara sex?
Is that what's going on in this picture?
Which one?
The one where it seems like they're having sex.
Oh.
It's like animals on capybaras, but then it's like, this is a capybara on top of another capybara.
Oh, they did a little Day Live, they kind of slipped in, did a little fight club, slipped in.
Yeah, it's a little bit of like a whoop whoop.
Uh-oh.
Yeah.
Oh, yeah, look at that.
In the same way that we go into the Amazon and we pick little rare herbs and we grind them up and we see if it's aspirin,
Right.
We take we take some bark and we and we say, you know, somebody, some brave scientist somewhere is like, well, what happens if you snort it?
Well, what happens if you put it under your tongue?
Well, what happens if you are?
I guess they're probably not that brave.
They're probably doing it to mice.
They're probably like the mingles of the world, but they are mingles of mice.
The mice mingles.
They are a legend.
But but but so what we're discovering and looking at animals on capybaras dot tumblr dot com.
is that God, let's just say God.
Let's shorthand for whatever it is.
Let's just shorthand it to God.
Okay.
God already made capybara's
to have things right on them.
We just didn't know it.
We just weren't looking.
It wasn't until Tumblr came along.
You take some aspirin, get some South American aspirin you put in your butt, you realize this is something that's been right in front of us in plain sight all along.
It's just nobody ever collected it scientifically onto a Tumblr site.
Each person that saw a monkey on a capybara thought, whoa!
They didn't realize, no, no, no, that's what capybaras are for.
They only ever sold 1,000 capybaras, but everybody started a zoo.
That's right.
Every single one of them was a monkey.
Right.
So now we have the data.
Now we know this is what they're for.
Now we know that the capybara is the comfort animal for any comfort animal.
It's like a universal donor.
Exactly.
Right.
Like if – so in a world where we're all traveling with our familiars, what do the familiars do when it's their coffee break?
Right.
They go chill with capybarras.
Right?
So there need to be – so one of these Lowe's parking lots is going to have to be a capybara –
not farm you're gonna say it's just capybara landscape you go to you go to ikea at least at our ikea and they got a big area downstairs where your kids can go and go and play amuse themselves and they say please don't don't leave your kid here but in this case it's almost like a christmas tree lot or a pumpkin patch that could be full of capybaras who are totally happy to be there and have things sit on them yeah and then the other animals that are like oh i'm all tuckered out from chilling with my my human host yeah
They just want to sit on a capybara for a while.
And these are like economic opportunities for people that have foresight, that have vision.
And we're only just because, of course, the humans are going to need these support animals because they're all going to be wearing VR headsets.
Oh, you know what?
That had not even occurred to me.
So you're kind of like the Elon Musk of comfort animals.
You're taking the success you've had in this area over here and applying it into this area you can't even see over here that the others can't see, right?
You're taking a far, you're on the cusp, a far-reaching vision of taking all the things that people don't understand and turn it into something that maybe you understand.
Because initially, who rode in, like, a chariot was a pretty expensive thing to build.
A carriage was a pretty expensive thing to build.
The roads were not very good.
And it was not super like if you built a carriage in, uh, in Jerusalem in four AD, uh, that wouldn't be a very useful vehicle.
There wouldn't be a lot of places you could ride in it.
And so we needed to over time, like the Romans built these roads and even those would be fairly uncomfortable in a carriage, fairly bumpy because we hadn't invented carriage suspension systems yet.
And then over time, you know, over time we democratized the carriage.
Initially it was for rich people only and then it was for, you know, it was for moving soldiers and grain and eventually it was a thing that you could, that not even, I mean, even until the invention of the automobile, you know, a carriage was still like a big part of the family's wealth.
But you're also pointing to another interesting related thing which is that
Each of the pieces of what you're describing improved, got better, got less costly, got better quality.
Not all at the same time, not all at the same pace, not all at the same location, but roads got better.
The parts for the wagon wheels probably got less expensive.
There was a rising tide raising all of those carriages.
Yes.
And now we're in a situation where every single person has
I'm not every single person, but it is very, very democratized that we have, uh, these like comfort carriages that can go 80 miles an hour on the freeway that have air conditioning and stereo systems.
And you can have sex in the backseat if you have to, you can live in even.
Um, and so what we're, when we're looking at comfort animals right now, we are seeing only the beginning.
It is not,
Right now, the people who are forging the documentation for their comfort animal are actually the ones that have the long view.
I have been thinking about this.
I actually heard something on the radio this morning.
This is going to the Supreme Court.
There was a girl with...
I forget, cerebral palsy, cystic fibrosis, but she had some kind of a thing where she needed some help, and the family cobbled together this money, and they got her a dog whose name was Wonder, and then they went to all that trouble, and the school said, you can't have a dog here.
Mr. Wonderful.
Mr. Wonderful.
They brought Kevin from Shark Tank and he was able to help her in class.
But no, I mean, seriously, like right now we look and like we joke and we say, hey, do you have a vest for that animal?
Show me the license.
Do you really need that?
Like, what if what if we're the retrograde ones here?
What if what if you know what I mean?
Yeah, no, that's absolutely right.
I think we're saying show me your papers.
And and what will what will end up happening is that.
We're not just going to breed for animal dwarfism, but we're going to increasingly – like we – humans have intervened in the breeding of dogs for a long time.
Yeah.
And, you know, you breed dogs for this.
You breed dogs for that.
You breed some – some dogs are real smart, but smart –
In specific terms, like this dog is smart about herding sheep.
This dog is smart about chasing rats down holes.
Sense of smell.
Sense of smell smart, right?
It's kind of smart.
It's like emotional intelligence.
For a long time now, they can smell for bombs.
They can smell for weed.
Now they get dogs that can smell cancer and diabetes.
Did you know this?
It's smell-o-tional intelligence.
Did you know about that?
The diabetes is a new one to me.
No, no, I did.
I mean, I keep thinking that I should have one of those dogs because when I feel hypochondriactical, I would like a dog just to sniff me and give me the thumbs up.
You know what I mean?
Little paw thumbs up.
Yeah, because when you go to the doctor with your hypochondria, you say, doctor, I feel like I have...
I feel like... Did I tell you about my back cancer?
Oh, no.
I'm so sorry.
No, John, I didn't know about that.
Was it smelled by a dog?
Well, no.
Dog kept smelling your back and making a face?
So, I was...
I was moseying around.
Yeah, as you do.
And I reached back.
There was something on my back and I reached back and there were like two enormous sores on my back.
Oh, no.
And I looked in the mirror and I was like, what the –
And they were a little bit moldy bumpy.
Right.
To begin with.
I got some moles.
No, no.
I don't mean it in a normative way.
But I mean, you've got you've got skin that does things.
Oh, yeah.
Yeah.
All kinds of things.
You know, I'm a my skin is sensitive and it's allergic to itself.
It's allergic to itself.
It gets a little bit.
It gets a little inflamed sometimes if I use the wrong soap.
or if the wrong soap is even suggested to me.
Oh, now that is sensitive.
But also if I don't use soap, right?
I'm allergic to my own oils.
So it will get really sensitive if I don't use soap often enough, or if I use the wrong soap.
You're sensitive if you do, sensitive if you don't.
That's right.
If a truck carrying soap goes by...
and someone alerts me to the fact that that truck might contain soap, I will probably get a rash.
Oh, John, that's terrible.
Yeah, it's bad.
But this was two giant sores in the middle of my back.
Oh, my God.
And I was like – Are they not turning you often enough?
Well, that's exactly what it looked like.
It looked like I had MRSA.
And they were the size – they were each one the size of a quarter.
Oh, no.
And they were – it's hard to say when you have two points –
Whether or not they're parallel or not, because any or whether or not they're like connected by a straight line, because any two points are connected by a straight line.
That's a good point.
Yeah.
So you look at Euclidean parallelism.
Yeah, right.
Exactly.
You look at them and you're like, that sure looks like it's.
Like some kind of did you ever have shingles?
No, no.
But I've had herpes related things.
Yeah.
Well, I feel lucky that I've had chicken pox.
I've had I've had I get stress bumps.
But I've known people with shingles and apparently it's quite unpleasant.
So I've had shingles.
Oh, boy.
And what's very confusing about shingles is that they happen on one half of your body.
No.
Yeah.
Is that because of neurology, John?
Yes, I think.
I think it is neurological.
I was at a party the other day and a woman I was talking to said that she worked at Zymo Genetics.
And I said, oh, are you a biologist?
And she said, biochemist.
Oh, sure.
And I was like, God damn it, I feel like such an idiot.
Of course, biochemist.
And I was like, biologist, I was just trying to throw a general blanket over it, like molecular, could be a lot of things.
She's like, biochemist.
I'm like, damn it, damn it.
I was so close.
I'm not a folklorist, I'm a folklorologist.
But so I'm looking at these sores on my back and I'm like,
This is no good.
I'm sorry.
I don't mean to take you off here.
I'm imagining quarters.
I don't have any in front of me here.
Oh, yeah, I do.
Hang on.
I got two quarters.
How far apart do I put the quarters?
They're five inches apart.
So almost like the proportion of a Dracula bite.
Yeah, except a quarter-sized Dracula bite.
A quarter-sized Dracula bite.
That's exactly it.
Okay.
Oh, boy.
But, you know, the way that shingles are bicameral, or whatever, in the sense that you, you know... They got two parties.
There's a line down the middle of your body.
Right.
And...
On one side, you have the Democrats, which is to say no shingles.
And on the other side, you have another party.
They call it the loyal opposition.
And that side of your body is completely covered with like big, big sores.
It's very weird.
It's very weird.
And it's true, you know, front and back.
Like you turn around and half your back is shingles.
So I'm looking at these things and I'm like, is this – is the fact that there's two of these but they seem like they're the same size and separated by about four or five inches.
Is this a kind of –
Could you have a bicameral shingle or is it something where you've got two different cases of shingles and they just aren't familiar with each other?
Or is it a staph infection?
Is it a cancer?
Yeah.
And so everybody that I saw for the next several days, I was like, would you look at this?
And they would look at it and they'd go, ugh.
And what was crazy is that
five, six days into this thing, it wasn't clear to me or anyone whether the condition was getting better or worse.
The sores didn't really change size.
They just changed composition.
And it was like, sometimes they seemed like, and sometimes they seemed like that, but it didn't, it wasn't, it just was not cool at all.
And I was thinking, I need to go to the doctor.
I am, this is a very weird thing.
It just came out of nowhere.
And now I have this
And the longer I wait, you know, this is going to be one of those things where they say, oh, if you had come in a week earlier, maybe we could have saved you.
Right.
Um, who knows how long they've been there.
And so I was about to make a doctor's appointment.
It was, it was at the point where my usual project of like, just wait till this goes away.
had produced results which were that it wasn't going to go away.
That's kind of a result.
Yeah, that is a result.
And now I need to go to the doctor fast because having determined that it's not going to go away, it means it's here to stay and I need immediate treatment.
And then – and I'm sitting there and I'm thinking like what possible – like search your brain for an explanation for this because, you know, they hurt.
But –
But it didn't seem like, it didn't seem like if the cancer is already like creating this kind of like Carposi's sarcoma.
Oh God.
Like what, like I should be sicker than I am or something, you know?
And then I remembered that I had gone to the Russian bath and I was thinking, wait a minute, I went to the Russian bath.
is this some kind of like spa mercy?
It could, could be infectious, right?
Some kind of thing I got from the, from being in the, in the cold saltwater tank with, uh, with a bunch of Ukrainians.
Like, is this something?
And then I'm thinking I was at the Russian path.
That's gotta be, there's something to this.
And then I remembered when I go into a sauna, I like to go to the hottest part of the sauna.
And I,
I went into the sauna and I climbed up to the top bench of the sauna next to the brick furnace.
And I leaned back onto the, onto the bench and the bench was very hot, but I like a certain amount of scalding pain.
And so I pressed my back into the hot bench and it like was very hot and sort of sizzled me.
And I was like, ah, yeah, you know, really like pushing on it.
You deserve this.
I deserve it.
Like give it to me.
Yeah.
And the bench was held together with two steel bolts.
The bolts obviously heated to a temperature.
Yeah.
in which they were able to give me
Burns.
You got bolt burns, bolt burns that like were serious burns.
Like it's like a second degree burn.
Yeah.
And I was sitting there just like pressing into this thing and enjoying the feeling of like, this is really, I mean, this room is 155 degrees and I am scalding myself on this bench and not realizing that no, in fact, you're burning yourself on these superheated bolts.
Uh,
And that was a sample size that caused me to realize that I was not good at self-diagnosis.
And pretty sure that I'd crossed a line.
My whole life I believed that I couldn't die.
It was impossible to kill me.
So far the evidence stands up.
That if God had wanted me dead, there were so many opportunities.
And each opportunity...
Sort of proved, you know, proved the, uh, the premise that I wasn't meant to die and that if, and that when I did die, it was, it was, it was ordained.
It was supposed to be, it was, it was going to be a big deal.
And so all these little things like, oh, be careful.
Don't slip on the ice.
It's like, look, if God wanted me to die, I wasn't going to be on the ice.
You know what I'm saying?
Right.
No, ample opportunities.
Well, we've got a little bit of time here.
Were there times in your journey with the bolt burns where you think you might have needed a little help of one kind or another?
Maybe you were anxious about how you felt.
Maybe your shirt was rubbing up against it and you couldn't get to a shelf.
Were there any times where you could have used the help of some kind of an animal?
And if so, what animal would have been useful to you?
Absolutely.
The kind of animal that I needed was a cancer sniffing dog.
Because if a dog... He just would have gone, eh, you're good.
Yeah.
I was having anxiety, right?
And the thing is, I'm having anxiety all the time now because I crossed some Rubicon.
Yeah.
Where on one side of the Rubicon, it was me and the Romans.
And we were...
Well, or let's say it was me and an army made up of like the barbarians to a certain extent and Carthaginians.
I was going to say they brought the elephants, right?
Yeah.
But we're on one side.
Was that Hannibal?
Well, no, it was Caesar across the Rubicon.
But you don't need an anxiety sniffing dog.
You know you got anxiety.
Well, but I didn't used to, or at least I didn't identify it as anxiety.
I identified it as a desire to smoke another cigarette.
But now I realize that, oh, I'm waking up in the middle of the night because UFOs are touching my toes.
And I am pretty sure every time I go to the doctor and I say, well, what
What does that mean?
And the doctor says, don't worry about it.
And I say, that's not what doctors are supposed to say.
And the doctor leans in and says, so I have a new doctor, right?
And I have this relationship now that I've always wanted.
My dad had a relationship with his doctor.
I've never had a relationship with a doctor.
Yeah, me neither.
So now I have a doctor and we're developing a relationship.
And my doctor is 6'5".
He's 60 years old in very – not like – he's not carved out of oak but he's in good shape for a 65-year-old.
He has a fidget.
He's a fidgeter.
Oh.
He sits with his fingers and pulls on his fingers and fidgets.
Oh, I like that.
I like a little humanity in a doctor.
Yeah.
He kind of is like a – probably bike commutes.
He's kind of hippie.
What's his background do you think?
Sort of a doctor.
He went to med school.
Okay.
He's a kind of comfort doctor.
Yeah.
And so I've been saying to him like –
Well, yeah, but what's the worst case scenario?
And he says there's no point in thinking about a worst case scenario.
You're already dead and you're dreaming this.
I say wrong.
The point of a worst case scenario is to think about it.
Absolutely.
To brood on it.
And he said wrong.
Don't think about the worst case scenario.
The reality is that anything can happen.
And so why not just not think about it?
And I said, well, that seems dumb.
And he said, no, the opposite seems not dumb.
Wow, I like this doctor.
Seems dumb to think about worst case scenarios when there's no.
And so I'm like, well, what about this?
And he said, well, we could test for those things, but typically we don't.
And I was like, well, but this is a typical situation because it's me you're dealing with.
Yeah, I'm John Roderick.
Yeah, so let's roll out these tests.
And he was like, yeah, you know, we test and then maybe we find something.
Maybe we don't.
Typically, you don't have any of the additional symptoms of anything.
That would move us in the direction of thinking that you had anything other than that you're perfectly healthy and fine.
And I'm like, well, this says you, mister.
Yeah, right.
It's easy for you to say.
Yeah, what about all the potential heart attacks I haven't had yet?
And he's like, yeah, well, you don't seem like somebody.
I mean, anybody could have one at any time.
People have them all the time.
But generally, we think that if you're going to have one, you'd show these symptoms and you don't have them.
And so what I need is one of these dogs.
And every morning I would wake up and I would let the dog start at my finger, sniff up my arm, sniff across my back and down the other arm.
And if the dog is not signaling, if the dog is chill, then I would chill.
Oh, I get it.
There's no abnormalities.
The dog has done its job.
It can go ride a capybara for the rest of the day.
I take your point.
Now, this was a product that was on Shark Tank last night, and they got a Kickstarter for this thing, and it looks like a tiny little spy camera.
And the idea is you look through this thing, it's an electronic device, and when you're putting sunscreen on someone, you can see how much sunscreen the person actually has on because it's used in ultraviolet science.
And so basically, if they look like they're wearing blackface, you're good to go.
Okay, so I think, again, I think Mr. Wonderful went for this one.
I'm saying you need something similar here, right?
You want some way of saying you're George Costanza.
You want to get out of here.
You want the dog to basically give you some assurance that, at least for today, no cancer.
Well, and the thing is it doesn't have to be a dog.
It could be a tiny deer.
Oh, you could have a cancer-sniffing poodoo.
What if I had a cancer-sniffing poodoo who, because there are no parking lots anymore, right?
There's just poodos everywhere.
Right.
Now imagine this.
Imagine a future world where there's a plague of poodoo's upon the land.
That's a nice because.
Right.
Because a lot of people bought comfort poodoo's.
Oh, it's going to be like Nutria's, you think.
Yeah.
They turn them loose in the yard.
And then pretty soon they're mating.
And then pretty soon poodoo's everywhere.
Like poodoo's are out-competing squirrels.
So they're almost like a pigeon where you're like, ugh, they're a blight.
Yeah.
Poodoo's everywhere.
Ah, get these poodoo's.
Get out of here.
Shoo, shoo, you're out with a broom.
Shoo, shoo, poodoo.
You're shoo-shoeing poodoo's with a broom.
Hmm.
And yet what we didn't realize, Amazon rainforest aspirin powder, poodos can smell cancer.
And they're super cuddly.
So you walk out in the yard in the morning.
You stretch.
Oh, you grab the nearest poodoo.
Oh, I like it.
Sticking it up your arm.
Right?
It's almost like a drinking fountain.
Yeah.
They're just around.
Yeah, they're around, right?
You don't need your own poodoo.
You're walking around, you grab a poodoo, you have it smell you, you say cancer, no cancer.
Right.
Or just whatever.
Or whatever.
Like, what if it could tell you, what if there's a poodoo that was wandering around the park, you just pick it up like you would like a lady's purse.
What if it can like smell whether you're full of shit today?
Like, wouldn't it be nice to go like, you know, I wonder if I'm full of shit today.
I kind of feel like I might be sort of full of shit.
You know what I mean?
Like, am I fooling myself about the world today?
Am I doing something really dumb and not knowing?
And the poodle would just nod a little and go, mm-hmm.
Wouldn't that be cute?
Isn't that how you use a scale?
You mean the Wi-Fi scale?
Yeah, you wake up in the morning, you stand on the Wi-Fi scale, and you're like, am I full of shit?
Well, it depends.
You weigh yourself before and after, and there can be a differential of up to six tenths of a pound.
Well, that's what I'm saying.
I think that when you actually— You're saying literal shit.
Well, no, you poop and then you gain weight.
Sometimes, yeah.
The weight that you gained is full of shitness.
I haven't tested it as much on pooping as peeing, but yeah.
I think that people do not want to know whether they're full of shit and that if that were – if poodos could smell that, then they would be eradicated.
Yeah.
Oh, so that's good to keep in your pocket in case you ever do get a true blight.
But you're saying this is more of a you are mortal, you are mortal type situation.
Yeah, well, I mean— Poodoo as an existential jester.
What we don't know is how Poodoo's, like, how they signal.
Yet.
We don't know that yet, right?
Like a retriever, like a pointer.
Oh, it tucks up its little tail and it raises its little hand.
Sure, it points at the duck.
Yes, there's your duck.
There's your duck.
There it is.
So how does Apudu signal either that there's an abnormality at the cellular level?
Like Apudu could signal and say, you need...
a molecular biologist, another Poodoo could signal and say, no, what you need is a biochemist.
Oh, that's good.
Different signals, right?
Because its sense of smell is so acute that it even understands terminology that you get wrong.
Right.
That's amazing.
It knows what you need before you know you need it.
Exactly.
It's kind of like a four-legged butler.
Four-legged butler.
A butler scientist.
You know what?
That's the branding that we're going to brand our Poodoo farm.
Four-legged butler.
I feel very strongly that the way that Poodoos signal full of shitness is going to be, this is the sink or swim for them.
This is the inflection point.
Now, do we want to breed them?
As John Syracuse says, do we want to evolve them in a certain way in a Lamarckian sense?
Do we want to push the Poodoos this direction as regards signaling?
Or do we want them to just show us here's the way?
How do we know it's working?
Sure.
If they signal in a way that we can anthropomorphize, like if a poodoo knows that you're full of shit and it rolls its eyes.
Or holds up a yellow card.
Right?
Then this actually endangers the poodoo.
Oh, that is so interesting.
You know, but if a poodoo.
The call is coming from inside the poodoo.
Precisely.
If the poodoo signals in a way that is more obtuse.
What if it cuddles you a little bit?
If you're full of shit and its reaction is to cuddle you?
Yeah.
Oh my God, we're billionaires.