Ep. 253: "A Worked Horse"
Hello.
Hi, John.
Hi, Merlin.
How's it going?
Good.
I'm sorry that I'm late.
You're pretty close.
Pretty close, but...
But it's still late.
Our listeners don't actually know when we started recording.
Unless we tell them.
Oh, I see.
I see what you're saying.
But I appreciate the courtesy.
Well, I mean, I know that... Do you feel it affects the show?
When I'm late or what time it is?
Sure.
Well...
I think it does affect the show on the long haul.
If you feel like I can't reliably be in the chair hooked up with all the life support systems plugged in at the time that you have set...
Through multiple calendar.
That I have set and that you agreed to.
Multiple calendar.
That I have set based on your request.
And so this is a briar patch of your own design.
You know, a little bit of the little lateness is just it's bad form.
It's bad form.
Yeah.
And I want to be, you know, I want to be Johnny on the spot.
It's named after me.
Oh, no, that's so much pressure.
It really is.
Right.
I have relatively few things like that.
Yeah.
It's like Merlin go to market or whatever.
Merlin go to market strategy.
Yeah.
That's what they say down in SV, as we call it.
Down in old SV.
Old SV, we call it.
I learned an excellent new word today that I think might be useful to you.
Yeah.
There's a podcast I listen to.
It doesn't matter.
It's called No Such Thing as a Fish.
And it's these four researchers for a British quiz show called QI.
And every week they come in and they take four topics and each one of them offers an interesting fact they discovered in the last week about that topic.
They also have really good Twitter.
And I know you like Word Twitter.
I do.
Nikthemiron.
Nikthemiron.
You can tell it's Greek because it's got a Y. I think I'm pronouncing that correctly.
Nikthemiron.
A period of 24 hours.
Used to avoid confusion between day, meaning daylight, and day, meaning 24 hours.
Huh.
Isn't that pretty good?
So how would you deploy Nick Thammer on?
Well, I mean, first of all, you're going to sound like kind of a douche if you say it, because you're going to sound like a guy who follows word Twitter.
But I think that's, you know, it's funny.
This is one of those things, you know, eight words for snow type situation where we've got these words that are very easy to confuse oneself with or trip over.
Yeah.
Another example, I don't want to derail the derail, but another one is this week versus next week.
I think people use next week and this week very differently.
It's so funny that you say that because I am always tripping up this week, next week.
Is there a standard for that?
It's crazy, right?
I mean, I have said in the past to you something that I think I probably picked up from John Syracuse.
Mm-hmm.
Which is, oh, why is the USB thing so hard to tell what the top of it is?
And you always go, you always don't respond because it's probably a trope in your world.
Well, I do know that I get it wrong over 50% of the time, which seems improbable.
Yeah, and it seems like it'd be real easy to put like an X on it or something.
I saw a Lifehacks video that says you should make a marker and mark the top side with red on the dingus and then draw on your computer.
That's a Lifehack.
That doesn't seem like a good Lifehack.
USB goes this way.
But it does seem funny that it doesn't come that way from the factory.
But I am constantly saying, well, all right, let's get together next week.
Next week.
On...
Monday.
Let me give you another one, because I think part of there's several problems here.
One of the problems is what people consider this and next.
Some people think next Tuesday means the next Tuesday that comes up.
And I think other people think that means the next Tuesday of a week starting on a given day.
So that's problem number one.
Problem number two is I still don't think there's a cent on whether a week starts on Sunday or Monday or otherwise.
So I think it's doubly confusing.
So if we're talking on Saturday, well, let's say, just for fun, let's say we're talking on Saturday and I say next Tuesday.
Does that mean in three days?
Yeah, I think so.
But if you're on Monday and you say, let's get together next Tuesday, I think you mean the Tuesday in the following week.
Because you would say this Tuesday.
about the one coming up right but i but as you say right this seems like something the language should have decided upon something we should have resolved maybe 500 years ago because it comes up all the time there just isn't a a nick theory on about this where we can say like
It is not this Thursday, but thus Thursday.
Some further... Thus Thursday, I kind of like.
It's thus Thursday.
Yeah, we and the way we make up for this is people like me add levels of precision that make some people roll their eyes.
Well, I mean, it depends on who I'm talking to.
And that isn't that the point?
Like when you're talking to somebody, I mean, it can be pretty crazy making to do business regularly with somebody who's in, say, the UK or Italy.
or something like that.
Right, well, especially the UK, given their culture.
With food, am I right?
So hard to do business with those people.
Scotch egg.
The thing with that is, though, I mean, I think you develop...
you develop a shorthand with each other of learning how to sort of, you know, how, what level of precision is needed.
Right.
And I think the safest thing to assume, and this is what I do, as you, as you may know what I do, it's easy enough for us because we're in the same time zone usually, but usually what I will do is when I propose something, I include what I consider to be three important pieces of information when referring to a date, which is a day of the week, the date of,
and the time in that person's time zone and then with my time zone in parentheses after it i'm trying to really bring the fight to them you really do a fantastic job and then even i mean we have had multiple conversations where i have said great let's talk tomorrow morning at eight and then i immediately get a calendar invitation for tomorrow which i assume you hate which is which is amazing and
And also, it's confusing for me because I sometimes go in and make a calendar notification.
I'm so glad to hear that.
I did not know that.
And then yours arrives.
And then I have two, because if I do not accept your calendar invitation, I get a tersely worded memo very quickly.
Oh, no, that's not from me.
I don't send that.
No, you say, I just sent you a thing and you declined it.
I have never, ever done that.
Now, this gets into another thing, which is that now we're derailing the derail to the derail, but it's also confusing because calendar apps suck.
And then you get these mystery meat reschedules or deletes, and you're like, I'm not sure what to do about that.
But, you know, I think it pays.
Here's the problem is that I am racked with anxiety.
And if I don't have a sense of what's on my calendar for the next week, and let's be honest, I don't do much.
But knowing what's on the calendar is all that keeps me from being up all night.
I think those are great rock and roll lyrics, too.
What's that?
Knowing what's on the calendar keeps me from being awake at night.
That's pretty good.
You can use that if you want.
It's a new kind of rock and roll.
I don't think that would have been a very good Rolling Stones lyric.
Oh, it's new rock.
Yeah, it's new rock.
It's post, post, post rock.
You know, a lot of times doing business in...
Doing business is hard, first of all.
Let's just put that out there.
Especially with Inglang.
With Inglang, it's bad.
In Italy, sometimes you have to stipulate what... The power there is in 220, right?
And they're like, whatever you need, 220, 220.
It's casual, Ma.
But yeah, I...
I shared my calendar at one point with members of my family because everyone was trying to make arrangements, plans with me.
They all had things for me to do.
They kept being confused.
Like, wait a minute, you're out of town?
How come you didn't tell us you were out of town?
I'm your mother, for instance.
And I would say, oh, sorry.
Which is my go-to answer.
If you're going to apologize, that's a good answer.
And so I started sharing my calendar.
Like, you know what?
My life's an open book.
Go ahead, everybody.
Here's my calendar.
If you want to add things to it, if you want to look at where I'm going to be today, fine.
Fine.
I got nothing to hide.
Not you.
But then you can't put things in your calendar that you don't want everybody to see.
You can't be like, oh, I'm going to the bathhouse with a bunch of guys from the third army tomorrow.
And, you know, and we're going to like go over our invasion plans.
We're going to get clean.
No, you can't do that.
And so now things show up in my calendar.
I don't know where they come from.
Did my mom put that there?
Did my daughter's mother put that there?
Did somebody I used to date put that there that I forgot to disinclude from the calendar now?
Things like, you know, Tuesday, July 29th, drive car off cliff into ocean.
Right, right, right.
It's like, who put that there?
Yeah.
So, yeah, so my calendar has become very confusing.
Oh, also, a long time ago, maybe you can help me with this.
Hmm.
I want to get back first of all, or maybe later.
I'm not sure whether first of all or later.
I want to know, does your week start on Monday or Sunday?
I'm still working it out.
I think it starts on Monday.
I feel like that this is one where I have to yield to my perception of others, where I think most people think of Monday as when the week starts.
I think so.
Sunday is the last day of the week, I think.
So it would be hard to deal with
I don't know exactly why it would be hard, but I think it would be hard.
I feel like maybe this is my Christianity showing that I think I was raised.
I mean, I guess it's in the book, but also just culturally was raised to think of Sunday as the first day of the week.
Huh.
I don't know.
I'd have to go check my Genesis on that.
But I feel like that was sort of the community standard in Cincinnati, Ohio, in my community, in White Oak anyway, for when the week starts.
Interesting.
You know, I would think if you were an Orthodox Jewish person that that would make sense, right?
Because the Sabbath starts on Friday at sundown and ends on Saturday at sundown.
Why would Sunday be the end of the week, right?
Wouldn't Sunday be the first day?
Yeah.
Right.
You're saying that's Jewish Sunday?
Jewish Sunday is Saturday.
Right, right, right.
Friday to Saturday.
It's a little bit of a... It's a different...
It's a Koblenz or whatever.
It's a Nyctheron.
Nyctheron, and you get 15% off your week.
It's a Nyctheron.
You can't touch your microwave oven, and it lasts 24 hours.
You wash your hands before and after you pee.
Yes.
It's not the day, though, because it's the night.
Before I help you, can I just wrap up two things on Nick Thameron real quick?
Okay, because I'm reading for my further scholarship on this, which now is almost 14 minutes of scholarship on this.
I think it is an English language problem, and I'll tell you why.
According to the Internet Science site, it is the period of time that a calendar normally labels with a date.
Although, and I think this is where this might be useful for you, although a Nickthameron simply designates a time span that can start at any time, not just midnight.
It's a movable feast.
That's part one.
If you go to bed at 2 a.m.
every night, you're dealing with a Nickthameron, not a day.
So, section one in other languages.
Some languages have a word for 24 hours, or more loosely, a day plus a night in no particular order.
Unlike a calendar date, only the length is defined with no particular start or end.
Furthermore, these words are considered basic and native to the languages below.
So, unlike Nick Thameron, they are not associated with jargon.
So, like Nick Thameron in Shaysa.
Let's see if the Germans have one.
I'm sure they do.
Doesn't look like it.
Wow.
This is lots of, you got Danish, Swedish, Iceland, Frischian, North and West Frischian, whatever that is.
Dutch.
Oh, see, so it's all the Scandahuvians.
Yeah, good dog, poor day.
They've got dog.
Dog, D-A-G is a lot of them.
Dog and dogur.
Latvian, Lithuanian, Russian, Hebrew.
Oh, Hebrew.
Wow.
Bulgarian, Bengali, Sanskrit, Tamil, Polish, Ukrainian.
Oh.
So many of those languages are Baltic Sea languages.
And I'm going to make an exception for Bulgarian.
It migrated down there somehow.
But a lot of the death metal countries have it, too.
They all have dog.
Well, that's what I mean.
Baltic, not Balkan.
Oh, sorry.
Baltic Sea, the north part.
Uh, so that makes me feel like that's, yeah, right.
Some kind of, some kind of, uh, death metal thing.
It's a death metal thing.
A lot of these, not many of these Ukraine can be warm, right?
Most of these are cold countries.
Nah, Ukraine.
Well, I mean, Ukraine, but like, uh, Ukraine and Bulgaria, both Slavic countries.
So the Slavs could easily, that could just go down the river type of thing.
You know what I mean?
He was a pretty warm country.
Hebrew's a warm country.
That's confusing, but they often go their own way.
And then what was the other one?
Bhutan?
There was one in there.
Bengali?
Bengali.
One of these kids is not like the other.
Bengali, it's interesting.
That's got to be just something within their culture that they have a Nick Thimmer on.
Nick Thimmer on.
Anyway, I just want to give you something to think about.
Yeah, well, I just want to give you something to think about.
This could be, I think this is a kind of thought and time technology.
The idea of the Nick Thimmer on could be very useful to me.
Well, so this gets back to the other question that I had for you that seems like it falls into the category of there's an app for that solution making.
I'm your boy.
That's in my portfolio.
Yeah.
But here's the deal.
So I am a time geographer.
Right?
We talk about historians.
But historian is sort of too broad and is meaningless or culturally co-opted by every guy that reads Civil War magazine.
Which, incidentally, is an interesting magazine.
Is that what it's called?
Civil War.
Is it about all civil wars or just the one in the States?
It's a Guns N' Roses fanzine.
Okay, Guns N' Roses, Marvel, could be anything.
No, it's a magazine just like by and for old men who want to sit and refight the battles of the Civil War.
You know what, also, it's kind of like a Best in Hellman's type situation.
You know what it's called in the South?
What?
War Between the States magazine.
Is it the city?
Is it the river?
Let's work this out.
It's the War of Northern Aggression magazine.
But so as a time geographer, right, I'm always thinking about things in terms of a time geography.
How did this, you know, what was happening earlier?
simultaneous to this moment why how did this fit into a timeline of like a social timeline in this area and then in this wider area and then the wider area right like what's happening um what's happening in this period that is affecting it that we're not examining because we're focused on the history of this time so you can't
You can't have a history of Germany without having the time geography.
Because you've got to say which Germany and how Germany.
Which Germany, how Germany, but what's happening in Germany is not independent of what France is doing at any moment in its history.
And what's what France is doing is is do, you know, is it's responding to what is happening socially in Paris at that time.
And what's happening socially in Paris at that time is is reaction reacting to what's happening in London at that time.
And so to not be able to to bring to bear kind of.
geographical knowledge of time, but both side to side like that, but also the depth of it, right?
Like what happened in 1740 is determined by what happened in 1710 and determines what happened in 1780.
And so I'm always trying to construct
things in my mental imagination but within four dimensions yes and so the fourth dimension is geography the fourth dimension is time geography i think the fourth dimension is bust size the fifth bus the fourth dimension is bust size the fifth dimension is love the fifth dimension is hot air balloons when the moon
It's your eye.
What's their big hit?
Oh yeah, Up, Up and Away.
That's right, Up and Away.
Marilyn McCoo and Billy Davis Jr.
were in that band.
What?
Marilyn McCoo?
You know when they hosted Solid Gold?
She was on Solid Gold.
They got their start.
Marilyn McCoo and Billy Davis Jr., if memory serves, got their start in the fifth dimension.
They were in the fifth dimension.
I need to look that up because now I feel bad if that's wrong.
When I was a kid, I studied the LP cover of Up, Up, and Away.
Studied it over and over because they were riding in the bass dick of a hot air balloon.
That's a great song.
That is a really good song.
No, but I mean the actual song.
I loved that when I was a kid.
Well, and all those harmonies.
Oh God.
And there's this Jimmy Webb songs.
Oh my God.
But so my question for you, the reason my calendar is fucked up.
Oh yeah.
Sorry.
Is that at a certain point I started using my calendar as a tool of time geography.
Interesting.
There's also a, you know, there's also a personal time geography.
Right.
And so important dates that I needed to catalog and remember in relation to other dates, I would go into the calendar and go back in time, scroll, scroll, scroll, scroll, scroll, scroll, and make calendar entries in this Apple calendar long before I started using it or before, you know, like back in time.
And I filled it up and I didn't very effectively use the little, I tried to use the little colors.
Like everything in yellow is something that happened to the Marx Brothers.
You know, like everything in green is what, you know, is what is on a timeline relating different guitar companies to one another.
And now I have like 50 calendars, 48 of them.
are all things that are time geography calendars that I never look at.
I don't consult them.
And I can't really easily access all that data that I mistakenly put into this back when I couldn't think of a better option.
And so I have all this stuff back there.
I don't know how to get it out.
And if I did get it out, I wouldn't know where to put it where it's a special tool.
That's not I'm not trying to make any meetings in it for next week.
I'm trying to look at the spread of history in a calendar.
But that's.
Like a calendar.
You're right.
You need a different app.
You need a time geography app that can combine the historical, the public, the private, let's be honest, the notional.
You're going to want the Cimmerillion on there somewhere.
Or shizzle.
You're going to know about the making of the ants and whatnot, right?
Making of the ants, right.
You need to see all that stuff on a continuum, and then really kind of a minority report-like.
You wave your hands around.
You say, okay, move aside the Gandalfs, and let me just see the Germans.
Let's get the Gandalfs out.
I want to see the Germans.
You've seen that famous graphic because it comes to me in the mail every year.
Yeah.
The one about Napoleon's invasion of Russia.
Probably the world's, if not the first, probably not the first, but probably the most famous infographic in our age made famous by the Tufti books.
It's a brilliant way to illustrate several complex axes of information.
Right.
Yeah, an infographic, right.
And that's an example of the visualization of time, distance, size, right, all together.
And what I want is the ability to do that also sort of three-dimensionally within both worlds.
physical space and also notional space there's a lot to this because i have to tell you it wasn't until you described it this way that i realized i want this and so very much more because what i what what i want yes what i would like is certainly the ability to see things like where was i living when this album came out
Yes, exactly.
Okay, if it's been this many years since Ghost in the Machine came out, what album came out that many years earlier than Ghost in the Machine without me having to go look it up?
I want to basically be able to spin my finger like it's a dial phone and have it just pop right up.
but then you know what else i want i want to go way deeper i want to know i just changed the batteries and a whole bunch of things in my house and i want to be able to see how long my batteries last without it getting in the way of my roderick on the line recording i need depth i don't even know how john i don't know how many dimensions i'm going to need but i want to be able to look at ants and aaa batteries and see it all on the same continuum as ukraine yes right and we've talked before about how in our mind
In our mind, by which I may be referring to my mind.
Our group mind.
The geography of a year takes on a certain shape, right?
It turns right.
Oh, 100%.
And then it zips along, and then it does a little veer, and it ends up looping.
But it's also not a loop.
It's a spiral, right?
Because you don't end where you started.
You end at the beginning of the next year.
Otherwise, you'd be repeating the same year.
Any kid will tell you that.
Exactly.
And what do you do?
Is it spiraling up?
Is it spiraling down?
Is it a spirochete?
Is it a spirogyra?
And so it's also spiral.
It's not just spiraling.
It's not spiraling down.
It's spiraling forward.
And so how do you incorporate that?
Like, how do you also know what happened?
Every July 3rd imagine if you could take the shape of the year Which I think some of our listeners have been kind enough to draw they've done a wonderful great effect I don't just go listen to all the shows before but we talked about this that a year has a shape to it and John described it and I think I mostly agree but imagine if you had the actual shape of your Actual year and it could pull up all of your data from all your devices from from from your dingus to your phone It pulls up all of that information and now guess what you get an overlay
You could see an overlay of like the raw data, your curve over your curve, but you could also see it like if, okay, so tell me where I run into problems, right?
Tell me where I run out of gas, right?
Tell me why it is I keep thinking of, you know, I believe in miracles, you sexy thing.
Why does that keep coming up?
But also the Ukraine in ends.
You need a way to have all of that and the police, let's be honest, but you need a way to have all of that, but you don't want it to be so busy that you can't do a Tom Cruise gesture with your hands like this.
Like you're a gynecologist.
You part them like curtains.
Just show me Roderick on the line.
9 a.m.
Monday.
I was reading a thing the other day that said, oh, the television debut of the film MASH happened on September 13, 1974.
September 13, 1974.
Okay.
And I said, that's my sixth birthday.
Get out.
On my sixth birthday, the...
Film MASH debuted on television.
Now that is absolutely useless to me because at six years old I was not conscious of MASH debuting on TV.
But what the fuck was I doing on my sixth birthday?
Now I have to go dig through my files.
I want to put that in context.
I want to say, wait a minute, what was happening in Watergate September 13th, 1974?
You turn it maybe 90 degrees, you could go way deep.
You could say, okay, give me more on September 13th.
Oh yeah, 1985, Super Mario Brothers released in Japan for the NES.
Obviously, I want to know about that.
Interesting.
Mao Zedong's 1971 Mao Zedong's second-in-command and successor, Limbao, flees the People's Republic of China.
Yes, you want that.
Well, I do remember that.
But then you also want to be able to go, zippa-zab, zippa-zab, you do a little flip.
Yeah.
Right?
And now we're just looking at 1974.
But then also give me the time geography of that date in 1974.
What happened before that?
Right.
Right.
What's leading up?
You know what happened?
Give me the I want to read the reviews the following morning in the newspaper of the television edit of the debut of MASH because they must have taken a lot of stuff out.
but hot lips hot lips in the shower falling down well they had to take that out they had to take all of the i i wonder how much of the racism they took out who knows a lot of racism and just kind of casual sexual assault yeah just so much sexual assault yeah that stuff doesn't age well doesn't age super well but it's hilarious she's just trying to do her job still still is up there on all the you know usually uh on a wikipedia page i
I'll read the head headers and then I like to scroll down to the bottom and find the controversy section where, you know, it turns out because because you don't want to read a thing.
You don't want to get like 15 pages into a Wikipedia thing.
And then at the end, there's like and all of his theories were discredited when it turned out that it was all a scheme.
You know, it was all a Ponzi scheme to like to to, you know, sell children into slavery or whatever.
You're like, ah, come on.
Put that at the top.
And I like to go down, see how many divorces people have had.
It's important.
It's part of their time chart.
It's all context.
And I go down in the MASH movie thing, and it's just laudatory the whole way down.
There's no thing at the bottom.
Critical reappraisal of the movie MASH.
And I didn't want to go to a third source.
Never go with a hippie to a third source.
That's right.
So I decided that I just would take the popular opinion and just say, oh, it's one of the 200 great American Film Institute films of film.
But my birthday every year is an important flag planted in the sand.
You're one year older than Tyler Perry, exactly.
Well, and I think Will Smith was born the same, right around the same time as me.
I think we are almost exactly the same age.
If it's not the same day, where do you go for that, right?
Well, sure.
But what was he doing?
He was in South Philadelphia, born and raised.
Two sportsmen were born on your birthday.
Someone called Brad Johnson, who's an American football player.
Okay, ball thrower or catcher.
And someone called Bernie Williams, who is a Puerto Rican American baseball player and guitarist.
bernie williams i think i know bernie williams okay not personally but but so you know when your birthday is and the problem with my birthday being in september i guess other people's birthdays are like this too but september you know there's a hard right turn in september in the year in the year geography yeah yeah so you're kind of standing there at a street corner right you're like my birthday my whole life
has been a sort of waiting for Godot park bench.
You're watching the year turn.
School starts.
It's autumn.
It's a nice time.
But also, it's the 13th, so school has already started.
It's sort of like in that place of like, it's not close enough to Halloween to feel like it's Halloween-y.
It's not summer anymore, even though it's sometimes warm.
So anyway, there's this flag planted there in September that I can say like,
But I always, this is another problem.
I always have to count.
It's always like, oh, was I five or six?
Like, what year is it again?
You're going to lose your train of thought.
The whole reason that you're really there is going to get lost because now you're having to do a bunch of maths.
Was I in Mrs. Christ's class?
Was I in Ms.
Lankford's class?
Mrs. Philippart, Ms.
Wiltsey, Ms.
Rently.
Ms.
Wiltsey, but Mrs. Philippart, that was a good one.
It sounds more like a command.
She looks like a hypocephalic penguin.
I'm with you, though.
There's got to be an app for this, or a series.
You know what?
There's got to be a platform for this.
Why has no one made this?
It does feel like a Minority Report-style big wall of stuff that you do a ballet dance in front of, and your data flows around you.
I don't want that, but I do want this.
i share i share a birthday not birth date i share a birthday with i thought it was mclean stevenson but now i don't see him uh rich little the impressionist oh he's amazing he's great tina turner um bruce paltrow pretty cool
That's one of the altros, Dan.
That's right.
That's right.
You know, I thought there was more interesting people.
Oh, an American porn actress called Honey Wilder.
Honey Wilder.
Honey Wilder.
Do you think that was her birth name?
Let's find out.
Now I'm going to look at this and I'm going to get lost.
Yeah, down the porn star real name index.
The porn star real name hole.
That should be in the app.
That should be in the app.
Did you ever have... Well, okay, so I do.
Here's what I want to put in the app.
Where we were living at the time... Yes, I've done this in Excel.
I have done this in Excel.
Yes, right.
But it skewed.
Like, my mom was dating Bobby...
Between somewhere in 74 to somewhere in 77, I guess.
Now, I remember very distinctly when she was dating Bobby, but not on a calendar because that was pre when I was conscious of calendars.
I just remember it amorphously.
Yes.
But I want to put all of the significant dates of my mom dating Bobby in the early to mid 70s.
You're probably remembering it by association.
You're able to remember this because of that.
And that is something you very much remember.
Like, you know, the Watergate hearings or something.
But you want somebody to do that for you.
Not somebody.
You want some app presence.
I want a tool.
You want a tool.
Yeah.
One time I was running down the dock...
Mm-hmm.
A leather-worked wallet with a horse head.
An embossed horse.
Yeah, or a worked horse, because this was before things were embossed.
Somebody did this with a little leather stamping tool.
Wow.
The wallet had a zipper.
It was a zipper wallet with a horse on it.
And it had, I can only imagine, some very, very important things that a seven-year-old would carry in his wallet.
Mm-hmm.
The wallet slipped out of my pants pocket and plopped into the water.
Oh, no.
And I stood and watched as my horse wallet, because the horse was also painted white.
The head of the horse was painted white.
Watch as it slowly sank into the deep.
And...
It was very hard to console me in moments like that.
You love you love the objects in your life.
They have they have valence.
Yes.
Right.
And I'm you know, I'm not a baller.
I don't I don't outwardly about the W.
Yeah, right.
I am a baller without a W. Yeah, no question.
Yeah, but I don't sit and rend my hair.
I don't ululate.
I just sit there and I plummet.
I slowly sink into the ocean with the wallet, right?
A little party you went down with that white horse.
I have remembered that wallet and that white horse my whole life.
And in fact, in the 90s, I wrote a song about it for my band at the time, the Bunn Family Players.
Was it Teaspoon?
No, that came later.
Teaspoon is about a teaspoon, but also about a girl, but also about drugs.
It's also about other things.
That's right.
It means something different every time.
So I want to know when in the real world, when on a calendar timeline did that happen?
When were we out on that dock?
My mom should be able to give me information that would allow me to at least put that.
It had to have been summertime.
You're not going to go out on a boat.
You're not going to lose your horse wallet in the winter.
So one of the summers, one of the three summers that she was dating Bobby.
You're not going to lose your horse wallet in the winter.
No, that's like, come on.
No when to fold them, no when to walk away, no when to run.
Don't start a land war in Russia.
It got very cold and he had extracurricular activities.
That's why he couldn't go.
So I want that.
I want that for some reason.
And but but, you know, my mom didn't start and end dating Bobby on a calendar.
And, you know, what what grade was I in?
And I had the thing is, I have photographs and I would like to put those photographs into this tool for.
And the app you have will say like, oh, this is the date you put it on your computer.
Yeah, there you go.
That's not helping, but also you want to... Here's the thing.
It would be nice to get granular down to the minute.
I would love it if it was very much granular to the hour or the day, but you know what?
For the first cut at this platform, I would be okay if you could just put everything that happened in all of history, including my life, within a given month.
That's a start.
A month... You know what?
Give me a month with heat maps.
Give me a heat map month so I can see like, oh, this is this pulsing...
period around the time more or less than mom and bobby broke up and i lost my horse wallet yes right right you know what i'm saying i mean i don't don't just agree you know what i'm saying right like if you it's going to take a while to get all this perfect we're probably going to have new metadata on life on a go forward basis but based on what we've got historically and geographically you know and really let's be honest geologically let's put all of that into the mainframe and see what we can push out because i already have
this data i have attempted to put this data into the mac calendar into some kind of there's a google uh the google maps has a has a feature where you can sort of plan trips because they build these things and they're like this is going to be a tool for people to plan trips and i'm like i don't want to plan any trip i want to document past trips in a
in space, right?
I want to draw them out, but I also want to put other information in there to describe what has already happened.
And a lot of these programs, you put something in, and if the program itself doesn't have some reason to alert you to some upcoming thing,
It just has no, it just sort of becomes a crinkly, dry, dead leaf on your computer where you're like, oh, that's right.
Didn't I put something in that once?
It's not.
You don't want to see like however long it was, like three months.
It's just a big, long banner that says Europe.
Right, right, right.
That's exactly right.
That's the worst kind of time geography.
And that's what I have right now.
And I have that in six different platforms.
And, you know, my mom still remembers, right?
Like if I had been able to really pull this data when my dad was still alive, I could go in with this architecture and I would say, fill in some gaps here for me.
When was it exactly that you...
put rapture jaguar around a tree and my dad would say oh i don't know 49 and i would say well it could have been 49 dad because you you didn't buy there weren't any trees in 49 they all started growing in the early 50s oh right right uh 59 well dad can you really not tell the difference between 49 and 59 like that's a that's a long scope and he's like all right god damn it
It was June of 56.
I remember it like it was yesterday.
And then I would go, oh, all right.
So now there's something weird about how, why he doesn't want to tell me when this happened.
And meanwhile, I'm putting this information in.
He's an reliable witness.
And now I can't, now I got nothing.
Like I asked my Uncle Jack questions and Uncle Jack's go-to answer, and it's always been, Uncle Jack says, I don't remember.
And I don't know whether Uncle Jack remembers or not.
He just says he doesn't remember.
And I say, Uncle Jack, somebody's got to remember.
You're the only one that was there.
You're the last of the Mohicans.
And he says, yeah, I just, I don't remember.
And it's like, as a time geographer, I'm standing there with my quill pen and my parchment ready to put this down.
And it's like, Uncle Jack, I remember better than that.
Like, I can at least give you the following notes.
framework.
But my mom is still around.
She still is acute.
And I can say to her, I can sit with her and work this stuff out.
And, you know, a lot of the data we have about our family is the result of her grandmother doing genealogical research at a time when you had to write letters to the county purser of the neighboring county, and that person would send you back some
And you'd go to graveyards and wander around looking for headstones that had recognizable names.
And my mom's grandmother wrote a bunch of stuff in the back of the family Bible.
Yeah, ditto.
And that family Bible became the jumping off point for a whole historiography of our clan on that side.
Thank God for it.
And now I want that in six dimensions on my phone.
Is that so much to ask?
I don't think it is.
You've got more than adequate firepower on there.
It's just a question of will.
Right.
And it's a question of somebody being willing to design this or pull together five programs that already exist under an umbrella of a sixth design, a sixth element, if you will,
Here's another question, Merlin.
This is an interesting tech question.
Is there a word for a computer program or an app which just is populated by other apps?
And it's an over app, an Uber app.
That just takes the skill sets of five different apps that are all trying to do something, that are all trying to make commerce because that's what apps are trying to do.
They're out there trying to make commerce like this one will get pizza delivered to your house in two minutes.
And this one over here is telling you, you know, the temperature in Jakarta.
And this Uber app takes those five apps unbeknownst to them and combines them into an actual resource app.
that is like doing some deeper thing.
Is that a thing?
Absolutely.
Well, think about this.
Think about whatever app you use for your calendar,
Really, what you've got is some kind of, you've signed in somewhere, and it's pulling in your same set of data from iCloud or Google Calendar or whatever you use.
It pulls that in, and then there's features as to how it's displayed and what kinds of reminders you get.
But that raw information exists as a feed.
right?
Yeah.
I think about stuff like with my, I do lots of stuff with, um, uh, what would you, the fancy word is like, what do they call it?
Self quantification or, but basically like I can track my sleep.
I'm tracking my steps.
I'm tracking my weight.
And there are apps, varieties of different apps that will, on the one hand, there are apps that will track that stuff.
Like,
Like, this thing is saying how many steps I got.
And then this other app can pull that information in through an API, and then now I get that in all these different places.
So, yeah, I mean, there's no reason this can't exist.
There's probably some half-finished open-source version of this.
I think we need to get John Syracuse on this, because we're going to need a database structure for this that is very, very sound and scalable, because we need to think about the time geography that we don't know about yet.
Right.
That's the thing.
People always plan for what we know.
How do we plan?
How would you even know?
You start planning for the future.
Yes.
You plan for the future.
You know what I'm saying?
You go to war with the army you don't have.
No.
You go to war with the army you can't predict would exist.
Right.
You haven't even imagined the army you're going to go to war with.
There could be a comeback of the terracotta men.
We don't know.
There is almost no thing...
that happens or happened or will happen that I won't at some point or another want to see in a calendar.
Get all the metadata fixed up for all of that stuff.
When you look at your how many steps did you take today bracelet, and you look at that when you pull it up on your phone or computer, you, I'm assuming, thrill to see it
In time right you want to see like how many I can be I can be walking and like as I'm taking steps I can see the step count going up on the on on the dingus But yes, also on my phone, but you want to see like how many steps did I take this week?
How does that compare to the week before the this week last year?
Yes, like everything you want to populate like you because you want to see it that way you want to see it that I want to see it all and
And it matters.
And then you're like, why did I why did I walk so much in June of last year?
Oh, June of last year, I bought a rabbit and I was chasing the rabbit all the time.
That explains that.
And I have enough that does that now where it tries to draw conclusions and says things like you walk more when it's sunny out or you sleep more when it's this time of year and stuff like that.
I'm already like on this grail quest.
Believe me, I am there with you.
I like that.
You walk more when it's sunny outside.
Thank you, computer.
Well, some of them are pretty bad.
I mean, some of the conclusions, it's trying a little too hard.
It'll be like, you know, you weigh more when you're in Washington, D.C.
And it's like, what?
I was just there one time.
Like, what?
Tebow.
He said you like horses.
It looks like you're trying to write a letter.
Do you need help?
Yep, yep.
But, you know, a lot of this is already there.
There's missing parts, so we've got two pieces to this.
You've got your data stuff over here and your metadata stuff, and then you've got what the app does over here.
And they're obviously, both are partly there, but mostly failing.
If I want to see when Christmas happened every year...
I have a way to do that.
That data exists.
I want to see that on a calendar with exactly one month-based view.
That's not a problem.
Right.
There are always kids on The Letterman Show that can tell you what day of the week Christmas was at any year in history.
Yeah.
Wouldn't that be handy?
Rule of thumb, it's usually December 25th is the rule of thumb.
Yeah.
But is that next Tuesday or last Tuesday or this Tuesday?
Next year or last year.
This year, right?
I'm getting really confused.
But no, now the problem is failing in both ways.
On the one hand, how do you get all the ambient data that I don't think I need to care about over here?
normalized into a format where then we've got the app over here who can do stuff like make the heat maps and say like oh you get sat around this time of year because uh there's fewer bicycle rentals like tell me things i don't know show me mash in 1974 i think we need both two fronts here sure and then this guy over here yeah right you got the arab what uh what's confusing to me now is that i also need some kind of
measurement of my judgment.
Oh boy.
Because it's very hard within oneself, I have found and have been studying recently, to not see your judgment along somewhat of a constant line.
Because you feel that there's constancy in your existence.
Right.
I don't want to get too Kierkegaard.
No, no, no.
I think you're there.
This is the kind of arrogance and self-absorption that got us to where we are.
Yeah, in the world today.
To think that there is this one self that is going on all along.
This is how we beat the Neanderthals.
But you know that you are not constant.
And I know for a fact, although I in many, many ways am constant, my judgment is maybe measurably different.
Maybe not.
I get a lot of evidence presented to me in story form by other people in my life.
Previously on John Roderick.
That's right.
Previously on John Roderick.
The following seemed to be true.
This was a two-part episode.
And now... And the thing is, I am not a person that is...
That you cannot depend on their reality being consistent, right?
I'm not somebody that's like, well, wait a minute.
Yesterday you said that you would never move to Paris.
And today you're saying that you're going to move to Paris.
Which is it?
That is not what happens.
The anecdotal evidence that is sometimes presented to me by other people who are also unreliable and have an interest in the outcome.
It's unreliability all the way down.
In all humans all the time.
Mm-hmm.
But, you know, I hear things like, well, since you started treating your bipolar condition with your medicine, something is different about X.
And I and and my initial reaction is this is one of those situations where you've you person who is sharing this anecdote anecdote with me has looked at a photograph of Christmas in 1976 so many times that you think you remember 1976.
Sure.
But what you're remembering is the photograph.
Like, I am not convinced that anyone else's anecdote is any more clearly remembered than my own internal memory of it.
But I'm listening to people say this, and I now would like some kind of Fitbit of judgment where the machine on the wrist is saying, in September of last year, you probably would not have had 14 coffees today.
And the September of the year before.
Oh, it's an intelligent agent.
It's got like a soft kind of like, what do you call it, like a fuzzy logic to it.
We go, hmm, this is more likely than that.
It's a quantum computer.
Mm-hmm.
It's a fuzzy action at a distance.
Yes.
And so what I need to know is how different, because I perceive myself to be different than I was five years ago.
I perceive it in many, many, many, many ways.
But how different am I measurably different?
from five years ago, not just in how many cups of coffee I typically drink, but in these other ways that are measurable.
We're just not collecting that data.
We weren't five years ago.
But now that we are collecting all this data, and it's mostly being used to target us for Amazon Prime deals.
Get a new model.
I want access to that data in order to measure my
psychological process or my psychological progress through a calendar progress and process you should see those on different axes and then you can make a tom cruise motion but look here's the problem is like well part of what you're describing is like i don't even know if your microscope is seeing the same microscope that i'm seeing like well you know is your red the same as mine it's right how do we know we're not living in a giant's thumbnail how would how would you even know how would you know how can i trust how can i trust your judgments about my judgments
That's the tricky thing in human beings.
Right?
What if you do that?
What if you make the encoding error and not me?
This happens all the time.
Somebody says, you're different.
And you say, I'm not different.
You're remembering wrong.
Or it's you that's different.
You're a judgmental asshole who offers opinions without being asked.
Really?
And because we don't yet have drones shaped like mosquitoes that are flying around recording everything and are there for us to say, drone, replay that conversation from 11 minutes ago.
See?
See?
You did say it.
And then the other person goes, fake news!
And then you're right back to the start.
Because their drone has a Snapchat filter on it that makes everybody look like a deer.
Oh, I know it's super cute.
And then they play back reality.
And they're like, oh, they've Instagram their memories.
And now everything looks like it was shot in a sewer in 1992.
Right.
Right.
Right.
Well, this is the thing I think we've talked about before.
Maybe this was just something that maybe this is just pillow talk that I've shared with lady friends.
But.
There will be, obviously, a moment in the very near future where, as part of our ongoing sort of cultural sense that my reality is equal to your reality, and it's not important that anybody be pursuing an actual reality.
Lived experience.
Lived experience.
That it will turn out that I...
I am a deer in my reality, and I also expect you as my friend to have me as a deer in your reality.
Oh, it becomes like a second life type situation or an avatar.
Yeah, it's an identity thing.
I'm the deer and you are the headlights.
You are the magnet and I am steel.
And if you are a friend of mine or a respectful person,
You're going to see me as a deer in your heads-up display.
I get it.
But then somebody else goes, oh, no, I don't see species.
That's right.
I refuse to see you as a deer.
I'm a millennium.
I don't see species.
Yeah, right.
Or, yeah, it's going to be this kind of like, I'm a libertarian, so I refuse to see people other than...
as they actually appear in corporeal space.
Right.
Or maybe they're always a pug.
Or they're always, yeah, we're right, right.
Or I refuse to see anybody except colorized as a plastic G.I.
Joe.
And then over here, there's going to be a culture of people that are like, I always when I accept a friend request from someone as they are standing in front of me and we're both looking at each other in AR.
Yes.
I'm always going to accept their friend request in the terms that they are dictating.
which is like in my in my ar world right i have flowers pouring out of my ears i get it okay and you have to maybe you have to negotiate this a little bit in a respectful way you meet somebody who says you know whatever i don't care you can draw a mustache on my avatar i don't care another person says i am dear i am always dear right another person says i'm a barely visible gas right and another person is like a cosplay cool cat and you have to respect that because that's cosplay cool cat
Well, and there's absolutely going to be a thing where you can set your settings in your actual AR existence where you're like, I'm not going to interact with anybody.
You can't add me as deer.
Right.
I have to accept the deer request, and then you have to agree to apply these terms and conditions.
I'll always be a deer.
Right.
And I'm not going to interact with anybody in the world that doesn't acknowledge me as a deer first and foremost.
But then what do you do when you walk into the fudge shop and you say, I'd like to order three pieces of fudge.
And the person behind the cash register refuses to see you as a deer.
Oh, I see what you're saying.
It's like a wedding cake type situation.
We're not going to make that.
I don't make fudge for deer.
I only make fudge for furries.
But you're not going to be able to get a job places unless you're like... No, because you're going to have to get a chip.
You've got to get the fresh chip.
You've got to get a new chip.
And maybe everybody there is a cartoon horse.
Or a worked horse, like a white horse.
Or a white horse on a wallet.
La la la.
A white horse on a wallet, I know, I know.
It's drowning.
And there are going to be communities of people up in Montana who are in their AR goggles are only seeing each other as Green Army men because people are going to then be selecting communities based on
To what degree you accept another person's reality as your reality when you're interacting with them.
And if you were, for example, as a family, a clan, as a group, you were to go and take over a virtual national park in Oregon, you could and probably should dictate the terms of the avatar.
If you're going to show this on Facebook Live, you have to show me as the avatar that I am in virtual Oregon.
Right.
That's the only respectful thing to do.
There are going to be people whose lives are amazingly rich in the sense that they accept everyone's identity as that person prefers.
So they're going to be walking down the street and here's going to be an amorphous gas and here's going to be living in a yellow submarine.
Right.
I mean, it's going to be whatever somebody offers up.
You just you just take it.
Like if somebody says, I am a 16 foot tall anvil with tiny little feet, that's going to be who you're dealing with.
Right.
You're going to be living in Comic-Con all the time, which sounds pretty great.
And actually, I wonder if I'm always trying to think, like, I don't want to go to Comic-Con as spy versus spy because people have already done that.
But has there ever been a Blue Meanie?
I bet there has.
But if there hasn't been a Blue Meanie, I want to be a Blue Meanie.
Yeah, but this is your lived Blue Meanie.
Well, sure.
I want to be called Blue Meanie when I'm dressed as a Blue Meanie.
Mr. Meanie is my father.
I mean Blue.
Yeah.
But that is going to make it very additionally difficult to agree upon a shared reality because in deer land, in amorphous gas land, some things are simply not possible.
And if those things happened...
That's less important than whether or not they're possible in the other reality, right?
It's not possible that a deer would eat a beef.
Oh, because a beef isn't on a deer diet.
Right, but if this deer ate a beef, that deer is looking at the beef through their AR lenses as waves of grain.
And who's to tell you that just because you're a deer, you can't marry a cartoon anvil with tiny feet?
It depends on the community standards.
Right.
Somebody is going to be out there in Montana telling you you can't do that, and they're on the wrong side of history.
There's a huge wrinkle, and this might be what we're already talking about because I'm not sure, but there's one huge wrinkle to this is how will this be recorded as time geography?
Once you move to this new level, it used to be that like whatever meat bag you had was the meat bag you got.
Right.
And you don't get upset.
But like what happens when sometimes you're a deer, other times you're an anvil and sometimes you're an amorphous gas.
How does that get recorded by the apps?
Well, so now, right, like one of the major selling points of Snapchat was that they're not recording it.
And all this is fun.
And you're just over there having fun, sending each other dick pics or whatever used to happen on Snapchat before it became a publicly traded company.
And I think that was the appeal to, because people would ask me all the time, what is the appeal of Snapchat?
Why is that?
Because I'm obviously a tech pundit.
And I would say, I think the appeal of it is that
Certainly when I was young, like between the ages of 16 and 26, there are five extant photographs of me that I know about, and they are in a shoebox.
Now, there are probably 15 other photographs of me where I am in the background of a photo taken of two other people, and that's in someone else's shoebox.
But if I want to see what I looked like at age 24, I do not have many options.
You'd have to interpolate, triangulate, simulate.
But the problem is I looked awful throughout that period, and I looked awful in a thousand different ways.
So there's no way to say...
Okay, I want to see drunk and high John in September of 93.
No beard, weird haircut, the bicycle month.
Right.
And I remember it very well, right?
Sure.
This is your liability is you don't black out.
I don't black out.
And so it's like I was dating a bike messenger.
There was that guy that came around the Comet Tavern for about a week talking about how we were going to open up a jazz cafe and it was going to transform the world because hip hop and jazz and freedom and us.
Was this the one in the bus station?
That was the one in the bus station.
Wouldn't it be nice to just scrub back and watch a little bit of that?
And now, if this was happening now, there'd be 50,000 photographs of me working the door at the bus station Jazz Hip Hop Cafe.
As it stands, if there is a photograph of me doing that, I don't own it.
It's in the background of somebody else's shoebox.
You're the deer in someone else's selfie.
That's right.
But I think Snapchat offered contemporary people the option of having the fun of that photograph, but not having it in your shoebox forever.
The problem is that Snapchat already...
I feel is sort of being marginalized, right?
Like Instagram came in and was like, oh, we can steal all your ideas except for we'll keep it and it'll last.
That's what happened, right?
Instagram took some ideas from Snapchat.
I'm not on either one, so forgive me.
But Instagram came in and swooped in and took some of the uniquely Snapchat-y ideas and basically took it lock, stock, and barrel and made it part of Instagram.
Is that right?
Yeah.
It made a part of Instagram.
You get your stories.
You get the stories.
You get stuff like that, right?
And the stories, like, disappear after a while, and they're kind of hard to, like, oh, I'd like to rewatch that.
It was only two seconds long.
I have no idea.
It just breaks my brain.
Yes.
I don't know if you can watch it, but we're not promising that it doesn't exist somewhere on our servers.
But somewhere in the near future, all of these interactions between a deer and an amorphous gas and an anvil with two small feet, that's all going to be kept by Jeff Bezos in assault.
I want the opposite of Snapchat.
I want retroactive reverse Snapchat.
I want everything that Anvil has ever done from the moment that it decided that its lived experience was an Anvil with tiny feet.
I want to be there for that.
I would I would scrub past that Christmas at the Anvil house.
That would be so sweet.
But instead, we're putting our resources into doing the opposite, which is to taking a picture of nothing and then making it go away.
I don't want to sound.
anti-millennium i love these people i think they're going to build our future you know give them hope let them lead the way sure like we've got to stop destroying the unimportant things and then remembering remembering all the unimportant things that is the ephemera we're lousy with it we're swimming in an ocean of ephemera but we can't even touch it even with our little hooves
Can't touch the ephemera with our little hooves.
Think about it.
There's so much ephemera that's just right there.
You know it's right there.
There's probably one person from the Hip Hop Jazz Alcohol Club that you can just almost kind of remember.
Somebody from the newsstand who used to come in.
Didn't they make you play reggae?
Was that it?
Well, I mean, at the newsstand.
But, you know, the jazz club is where I met Reggie Watts.
Now, Reggie Watts lives in a separate reality.
Reggie Watts' reality and mine are only any more tangentially connected by virtue of us both occupying a similar sort of world.
weird minor celebrity status.
Does he even still know that he's your nemesis?
Does he even know that anymore?
The thing is, the last several times I've seen him, he has been in a... Like a Popemobile?
No, I don't feel like this is talking out of school to say that he has been in a vape cloud that excludes other people from entering.
Oh, does he bust a sick vape?
Probably busts the sickest vapes.
You think Reggie Watts busts the sickest vape?
For a long time.
He busted sick vapes back before vapes, and now that there are vapes... We're not talking about e-cigarettes here, we're talking about little R2-D2.
It looks like an R2-D2 dildo with a sick, like a raspberry vape.
For sure.
And the thing is, Reggie knew that he was my nemesis when he and I were...
uh dating the same person subsequently oh uh so we so he so we were nemeses in the sense of like we would run into each other and there would be a little bit of like are we cool can i ask who came first pardon me let me rephrase that yeah um can i ask what the order of partnering was
So I was partners with someone who, you know, I was early on in her partnering life.
Okay.
And then we split up.
And then somewhere along the way, she and Reggie had a relationship.
I, when I found out, tried to discourage her because I had known him.
in other worlds, in this jazz cafe.
This was one of the worlds.
But also, we had so many.
Our Venn diagrams overlapped quite a bit, although never at the center of the circle.
We were never like, let's go to a third location, fellow hippie.
But my lady friend spoke very highly of him.
They parted amicably.
And then she and I came back together somewhere down the line in our timeline.
Where it was like, oh, we've been apart for a couple of years, but it turned out we're one of those couples that gets divorced in 74, remarries in 76, and then gets divorced again in 79.
That's a nice way to do it.
That's very symmetrical.
I like that.
Each of us were married 11 times, but two of those 11 times were to each other.
This is the person I was married to the most.
Right.
And so it was, you know, so there, but there was a period there in the middle where he was dating her and he was like, when we would see each other, he would be tentative and a little bit like, Hey man, you know, are we cool?
And then I was the one that was like, we're cool.
What are you talking about?
Of course, everything's cool.
You know, I'm not seeing her anymore.
I'm not one of those guys.
Like, yeah, I'm happy for you.
You know, but I wasn't.
No.
And then later, you can't say that.
You can't say I'm not happy about it.
You have to be like, yeah, that's fine.
That's going to be recorded forever.
People will be able to scrub back on that.
And this is a long time ago.
I was in my twenties.
I didn't have any sense of, but then later on, she and I are dating again.
Like she's an iconic figure to, in my life.
And then he is in the position of, of having to say,
Hey, I'm happy for you.
But because I felt like my relationship with her was the primary relationship, I did not feel like I needed to say, hey, is this cool?
Because I didn't.
There was just an interregulum that included him.
I was the original, the rhyme animal.
Oh, interesting.
And so I was like, hey, what's up?
Oh, yeah.
Times have changed.
And then he was like, oh, I'm cool.
You got him doubting him.
He's doubting him.
Not you do this, but he's doubting himself a little bit.
Well, you know.
The one who asks, are we cool, is the one who thinks you may not be cool.
Right.
And I didn't have to worry about whether or not we were cool.
You knew you were cool.
He's not my nemesis now.
No.
My God, I couldn't be happier.
Not at all?
You couldn't be any happier?
Listen, for everybody's success, I am happy.
Yes.
Listen, all I want is for people to thrive and be happy.
You sure?
Absolutely.
Okay.
You know, thriving is, you know, like I'm...
I'm thriving and crying, right?
Wow, nice pull.
I'm just wanting everybody to succeed on their own timeline.
I want them, if they are dear, I want them to be dear.
Oh, my gosh.
What a generous worldview you've developed.
I watched his TED Talk, and I thought it was kind of confusing.
I didn't really understand.
Yeah, we've been watching some TED Talks, and I thought it was a little confusing.
He's very talented.
He's extraordinary talented.
You think he's a victim of the vape?
I think that there, I mean, one of the things is you can say I am a deer, I am an amorphous cloud of gas, and you can also say I think that this chemical intoxicant really relaxes me and is great and it's better than alcohol.
And whatever it produces in me, however it makes my reality timeline into something other,
That's something that I would like you to click yes on.
Okay.
Oh, interesting.
Please agree to these new terms.
Right.
There's been an update to the terms and conditions.
You have to remember this as, that's a really good question.
If you suddenly become a deer who vapes, I'm guessing you don't have the ability to, can you retroactively change the record on that to where you always will have vaped?
For that matter, let's say you stop.
More importantly, let's be honest, you're a deer who has stopped vaping.
Is erasing history a racist way to put that?
What do you call it?
If you say, I am still a deer, but I no longer vape.
Please update accordingly.
Click for terms and conditions.
Please remember to like and subscribe.
This is going to be very difficult if you spend a large portion of your life as, like, I'm the vaping deer.
Well, but maybe more importantly, now your lived experience is, like, think about you and the alcohol.
God bless you.
Like, maybe part of your lived experience and identity now becomes, I'm the guy who used to vape.
Oh, even better, I'm the guy who used to vape but doesn't even talk about it.
That will absolutely be true, and I have never met a person who used to vape who doesn't want to talk about it.
That's just in the nature of that game.
Used to vape.
But like, if there were 15 years of you where your avatar was,
a little deer nose and big bloodshot eyes and like a tiny little vape sticking out of your little deer mouth.
That would be so cute.
It's super cute, right?
Because the vape device would also be scaled.
So if it was like a baby deer, it would be having like a little tiny, like a beep, beep, beep.
Beep, beep, beep.
And your little voice would be changed.
But then you quit vaping.
And as soon as you, like you think changing back to your anime icon from your deer who vapes, you think that's going to change history, buddy?
Oh.
Well, you will have that option.
But doesn't that screw up everybody else's timeline?
Well, of course it does.
But that's the thing.
Like now, if you have a shoebox full of photographs and you're sitting around with big red bloodshot eyes and you look like whatever that guy from 4chan is, best friend Charlie or whatever, where you're like, I'm a meme.
Best friend Charlie.
What?
Does he take a sick vape?
Yeah, he's like, my mom said you can stay over.
Yay, best friend Charlie.
You're the best meme ever.
But you can go back and wipe it and say, no, now I work for Raytheon.
Oh, okay.
And I am a very straight edge deer.
Right.
And I'm going to back wipe.
I'm a consultant for the Rand Corporation.
I've never been a deer.
I have never vaped.
So Bezos has all of that in a salt mine.
Yeah.
And then it's going to be a thing like, well, you can only wipe the vape off your deer face so far.
So it's kind of like torrents or blockchains.
I mean, is there some way, is it like, is it like a Bitcoin?
Like, is there some way that there's a record that has to be verified across all the different clients?
Because I mean, I'm thinking like this, you know, what if, what if somebody goes in, I guess this will all be dealt with by John Syracuse and how he scales up this and he just spins up the entire system.
But like,
All that stuff out there, somebody changes their icon, that has to change everywhere.
Does that retroactively change MASH in 1974?
Well, so Zuckerberg right now is sitting on his toadstool somewhere with his little bong talking to Alice in Wonderland.
And right now, Facebook and Instagram and these things are all trying to
project.
It's all about how are they going to sell ads and how are they collecting this data in order to predict
when we're going to need a new pool filter right so that so that you know if you like if you if you bought a pool filter people who bought pool filters also bought three more full seven different kinds of pool filters i don't think that's what happened but okay so that's what they're trying to use that technology to do right predict what you're going to buy next what they haven't figured out
Is that all of this, what, you know, how long has Zuckerberg been compiling history, history, personal histories?
There's no way to know yet.
Right.
But not that long.
Right.
Ten years, let's say.
When did fucking Facebook come on?
That's less than ten years, right?
Something like that.
So let's say all these people in the data collection spheres are all nearing their 10-year anniversary.
Now they have 10 years of data on all of us.
Apple knows from our phones where we've been every day, what cafes we go to, where our mom lives.
Apple knows because they've been tracking.
And Google knows how many times we put in, like,
Deer porn, deer in the headlights porn or whatever.
Right.
And they're all using it the wrong way.
But that data is all there.
It's like photographs of us.
It's the it's the worst stuff that we're afraid of putting on Instagram, but we're not conscious of it existing still.
And so you can you can clear your photo out.
archive off of your Facebook page.
So nobody ever remembers you were married to Marty and you can say, I was never married to Marty.
Oh man.
Or you know what?
We don't talk about Marty anymore.
Right.
But somewhere in the salt mines that are owned by Apple, uh,
There is a giant throbbing red pin that says Marty, Marty.
And even if you remove it, there's still going to be a Marty-sized hole in everybody's blockchain.
That's right.
The North remembers.
The North remembers.
Yeah.
So what is that going to be like when there's 50 years of data?
And what happens when everybody starts doing that?
I mean, this is going to get super confusing.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Well, and when everybody starts doing it, it's all proprietary information.
But then Syracuse or future Syracuse.
Future Syracuse.
After Syracuse transitions to an amorphous gas.
Right.
That Syracuse is going to build an overarching architecture that somehow data mines and strips all that data from all these companies that thinks it's proprietary and combines it somewhere else.
Else somewhere out where the where the mean God is floating in a big chair on a meteor.
Right.
And he's talking to the lesser gods that are mad at each other.
And he's like a big meteor God, but somehow still is like not a big enough God to not live in a meteor.
Right.
And the anvil with the tiny feet walks into the salt mine.
It says, clear the cache.
So maybe over here, John Syracuse is that little boy Zelda from that game.
But then in these other ones, there's been a mistake.
There's been a cache error.
The icon doesn't show up for a minute.
But then he becomes a deer with a vape pen.
And then how do you deal with that at scale?
And are you ready for this?
How do you record the glitch over time?
Because that's still part of the Borges timeline.
That still needs to be in there somewhere.
It can't just be a log entry.
Oops, we've vaped a deer.
There's
got to be a full record of that thing.
Unless, of course, that's against somebody's personal ethos and their lived experience is as a deer, in which case they should not even have errors.
But the problem is there are throbbing red pins all over, right?
Does throbbing red pin mean missing data or corrupt data?
What does it mean?
No, throbbing red pin is like there's a pin, right?
If you go to your daughter's school every day, the pin on the map of your significant destination is
It's larger and larger and larger until it's like this is a major destination that this guy goes to every day.
So if I'm going to market fried chicken to him from the neighborhood gas station where he stops and gets fried chicken.
Yes.
And if I'm going to present an ad for this fried chicken to him as though he's never had it, even though he has it every week.
I'm going to remind him of this.
That pin is just a very big pin.
And if you say, my daughter doesn't go to that school anymore, that pin stays on your map.
You can't unthrob a red pin.
That's right.
It's there forever.
And somewhere in Apple's time geography, they're never going to let you forget that that pin exists.
Even if you never go there again, Apple's going to remember.
And you can't
You can't forget it.
You can't un-go to that place.
And if an unscrupulous 11th party gets in there and says, huh, and then your daughter says, I'm a dear, I never lived in Seattle, I'm reinventing myself as a Parisian.
And good for her.
Right.
I'm an amorphous guest that lives in Paris.
She's a Persian in America.
Right.
Well, yeah, right.
I know it's serious.
Somewhere in her history, 150 years from now, my great-granddaughter, somebody at Apple has the story.
And you cannot run.
right you can't run from that somehow no matter how much you can virtually run if you're a deer yeah but the but the the throbbing is something that's out of your control right and you and so there's fake news and then there's fake news like which one is this well that's what i'm wondering that's a good point do you have your phone nearby
Of course.
Are you kidding me?
I don't want you to reveal the details of this, but I think this might be fine.
I don't know if you know this.
I bet you'll really enjoy this.
Okay, let's go.
Go to settings.
All right, settings.
Oh, I have low battery, Merlin.
Oh, no.
It's all right.
It's all right.
I can deal with it.
I put it in low power mode.
All right, I'm in settings.
Oh, you know how to do that.
Good for you.
Yeah.
Here I am in settings.
I'll tell you.
Well, let's do this.
I don't want to make this too educational.
You know, because I have a special relationship with AT&T, they may have disabled this function because I have...
A plan they don't want me to have.
Oh, God.
So they take away all the fun things in order to bully me away.
Were you grandfathered in on the unlimited data?
I'm grandfathered in.
And even though I don't use it, even though it's not a it's not actually a problem for them.
They're so mad about it.
They're like, oh, sorry, we don't allow you to do that.
I was grandfathered in.
Then I accidentally added tethering.
I did something where I was ready to pay more money for it, and they went, oopsie.
Oopsie doopsie.
You're not grandfathered anymore.
Oopsie doopsie.
Some terms of conditions may apply.
That's right.
And you clicked accept, and that means that you are fucked.
Scroll down to privacy.
It's the gray icon with the white hand.
That's also Saruman's avatar.
There are actually 16 rings.
A lot of people don't know that.
Privacy.
Okay, here I am.
Privacy.
Top one.
Do you see location services?
Location services.
Now.
If you don't have those turned on, nothing works and everything yells at you.
Oh, I know.
I'm finally off Uber.
It took a really long time.
I'm finally off Uber.
Now, scroll.
All the way down.
All the way down.
Down.
Advertising.
Do you see system services?
Wait a minute.
So I go into location services.
Go into location services.
All right.
Now scroll all the way down.
System services.
Click on that.
Click on that.
Yep.
Okay.
And now you're going to go down to frequent locations.
Okay.
Frequent locations on.
Click on that.
Click on it.
Oh.
Hmm.
Okay.
Isn't that kind of interesting?
So the first thing that comes up... Don't tell me to boobah!
No, but this is really... This is really, like, confusing and wonderful.
Because the first thing that comes up is Bremerton, Washington.
Really?
13 locations... That comes up before Seattle?
Yeah.
13 locations recorded... Between...
june and july but that makes no sense i've is this some is this like my computer that got stolen three years ago kind of it's basically this is they're saying here that allow your phone to learn places you frequently visit in order to improve useful location related information in maps calendar and more did you know that it was doing this you assume that it was doing yeah i suspected it but yeah i don't mind it but it is it is kind of interesting
So this is saying, what is this even saying?
I'm trying to make sense of this.
It's coming up with some of these that I don't understand.
There's camping.
There's Alcatraz.
Why the hell does it have anything to say about Bremerton?
This is an interesting twist.
How far away is Bremerton?
Bremerton is a ferry boat away.
Here's what's even additionally crazy.
There are only five things in my history.
Bremerton is at the top.
13 locations recorded since June 25th.
I've been to Bremerton once.
Okay.
Since June 25th, I guess.
I went over there at one point since then, one time.
They must think something very important is happening there.
Did you live extra hard there?
Did you have emotional experiences?
Is there any kind of metadata it might have picked up about your experience that said, let's mark this and make a throb red?
Don't say.
Well...
So when I click on it, now I'm looking at a map of the west coast of the United States, and it has a big blue throbbing dot over Bremerton, and then it has a blue dot over San Diego, California.
And it says, I'm scrolling down here and it's like three visits since June 25th.
And then I switch on it and there's like a blue dot over a Sherry's on Wheaton Way in like Silverdale.
And then there's, I click on another dot and there's a blue dot over Peggy Washburn's fine art photography somewhere.
I don't know why I never went there.
I'm not sure what this is now.
There's a blue dot over salad style on B Street.
I don't live in a place with a B Street.
Is there any chance...
that this is surfacing information you either don't remember or did not prioritize is it trying to tell you something about salad or photographs or fairies is there anything that you as you look at this i'm not saying you blacked out because as we know you don't black out but like if you were a vaping deer and you looked at this what is this telling you is there anything is there anything to be gleaned about your matrix from this
Did you go to Comic-Con?
I did.
I went to Comic-Con.
It was super fun.
I walked around.
I bought some comic books.
I talked to people about comic books.
I had my usual Comic-Con experience, which is that I didn't understand.
That happened a lot.
But you know that going in, right?
I know it going in.
I say, like, I'm going to this thing I do not understand.
I'm fine with that.
I no longer seek to understand, frankly.
Like, I understand enough.
I was walking through Comic-Con, and there was an enormous scrum of people around a booth.
And it was a big, big booth that was branded with the Warner Brothers logo.
and it was a two-story tall booth with a big curved staircase, and the lights were very bright around it.
And, you know, you're going down the same hall that, like, over here, there's a guy that looks like the guy from The Simpsons who sells comic books.
It's that guy sitting at a booth with a bunch of copies of, you know, like, a bunch of cardboard boxes with, like, DC titles from the 60s.
And then two...
blocks down the comic-con highway there's this huge like experience warner brothers and all of a sudden these people appear these security guards who are like this road's blocked this road's closed you have to go around it's like you have to go around what are you even talking about we're just you can't go around you crazy people i mean there's like
They are almost guaranteeing that there will be a stampede.
But I'm looking over this security guard, and there are paparazzi...
who are holding their expensive cameras up above their heads.
You know the way they do that where they can't see what they're taking a picture of?
Yeah, like no-scope shooting where they're like, I'll get something.
I'll take enough of these.
Yeah, they're just firing and their flashes are going off.
And there are dozens of these crowded around.
And I'm like, what is happening?
Is Harrison Ford here?
Right, right.
And then you look, and it's some sort of smiling young actor or actress from the latest WB show, which is called, like, Coathanger and Tibbs.
Coathanger and Tibbs?
Oh, is it Zane?
It's probably Zane.
It's probably Zane from Coathanger and Tibbs.
Something, right?
And you go, wow.
Who fucking cares?
Hey, guys.
You know?
And the whole thing, and I'm trying to get over here to see if this person has any copies of Mad Magazine from the 70s.
Right, right, right.
And I can't get through because Zane from Coathanger and Tibbs is there for 11 teen minutes.
Well, they take, like, this, you know, pow, pow, pow, pow, pow, pow.
Right.
And they have that, like...
plastered on smile and the big friendly wave and you know that they're held together some makeup artist right behind the WB screen has taped their shit together and sprayed on enough stuff that they can stand out there for like
For 45 seconds and get their picture taken and look amazing.
And then they walk back in.
That's it?
That's the photo op?
It didn't seem like much longer than that because if it had been.
Because the thing is those flashbulbs going off.
It is, you know, the other people at Comic-Con are...
like summer night mosquitoes.
And those flashbulbs are like that weird electrocution machine.
Oh, they say flashbulbs equals important.
This might be Zane from Coathanger and Tibbs.
It might be Zane, it might be Harrison Ford, it might be George R.R.
Martin.
And they just start to move toward the pa-pa-pow.
And that's why the security guards appear
But the security guards, it's funny in those situations, right?
You know that those people who are local San Diegans, they are not invested.
They're not invested in the safety of Zane.
They do not care if he is overrun and murdered.
and his body is stripped and his limbs are eaten.
Oh my.
They do not actually care about Zane.
They also do not care about you on the other side of the line.
They don't care whether you are trampled.
They don't care whether you survive this day.
They are employed to stand there as long as they can to say, sorry.
And if anything happens, if enough mosquitoes...
push up against that screen and say, I am dying to be electrocuted by this thing on a hot summer night, and they start to push, these security guards will say, I'm out.
They're not risking their lives.
And Zane, frankly, is just on the other side of a folding table covered with towels.
There's no real protection.
It's all just an agreed-upon thing like, okay, here's a table.
There's a table here.
You're counting on social norms.
Right.
But it won't be long before at a Comic-Con somebody...
The crowd resorts to cannibalism and Zane is just a pile of bones.
I want to be there for that, frankly.
They should start planning ahead.
I mean, because if Cuthanger and Tibbs is going to become the franchise that the WB really wants to become, you should have somebody waiting in the wings.
Do we still waste time saying the WB?
Isn't there some like... I think it's the CW now.
Dub-a-du-dub?
Dub-a-du-b.
Dub-dub.
Dub-dub.
Dub-dub.
Oh, Zane.
Zane, man.
The Zane, man.
I can't stop thinking about that vaping deer now.
If anybody wants to draw up an icon of a vaping deer, I would be OK with that.
I would like the deer to be cute.
Should the deer be slightly anime?
It's got to be fucking cute.
Are you kidding me?
It's got to have and it's got to have literal doe eyes.
It's got doe eyes.
It's got a little deer nose and probably is wearing a crown.
How can it have Rudolph nubs instead of full horns?
Absolutely.
Yeah.
And, you know, even the bloodshot eyes are cute.
It's going to be my new super name.