Ep. 277: "Old Sauce"
This episode of Roderick Online was recorded on Monday, January 22nd, 2018.
It's a good one.
Hi Merlin.
How's it going?
Slow, slow, slow and low.
That is my tempo.
Yeah, me too.
I had a migraine last night.
Oh, Merlin.
Yes, yes.
I'm sorry.
Oh, you know, I'd complain, but who'd listen?
Me.
I ate the booger.
I, uh, I, I've discovered that I, I really enjoy, uh, some herbal teas, like a celestial seasoning.
So I've been drinking a lot of that.
And apparently I think I neglected to drink anything with caffeine in it all day yesterday, which I didn't notice until about nine o'clock last night.
Oh, nine o'clock headache, nine o'clock headache.
You'll clear right up.
I'll just go to bed.
Oh, oh, tinky winky.
Oopsie doopsie.
I woke up at midnight.
No.
Oh, shit.
Yeah.
No, but you know, it's it's sometimes I can talk myself out of it.
I'm no John Roderick, but sometimes I can say to myself, I am feeling this pain, but the pain is not going to bother me.
I will just feel the pain as a thing and I'm not going to let it trouble me.
I'm a power through this or unpower through this.
I will be mellow about this and not stress about this and that will be OK.
Mm hmm.
And I eventually got to sleep.
It worked.
It kind of works.
I mean, I got up and I did the usual thing of like, you know, don't, don't, they say, don't stay in bed if you can't sleep.
So I got up and I took a shower, took a hot shower and I moaned.
I did this lot.
Oh, no.
Yeah.
And I put it on that special thunderous setting, you know, where it hits you really hard on the neck.
Uh-huh.
Yeah, sometimes if you've got a normal headache, that can actually help a lot.
Because I think part of it is, when you're feeling this, it's super interesting.
Whenever you've got a pain or a headache or something, I think your body overcompensates and tightens up, and then that just makes it worse.
Yeah.
But you don't experience pain.
Well...
I could see you choosing to just not allow it.
The other day, when you and I saw each other recently, a while back... We're so bad at this.
I remember seeing you at some point before the day this show came out, which was recorded the day it came out, I'm sure.
Yeah, somewhere back in the day.
Back in the day.
Was that before we were phony award-winning podcasters?
It was right about the time.
Okay.
Yeah, I felt like I was going to throw up.
I felt like I was going to throw up the entire day.
And I refused to allow it.
I refused to
So submit, and then at the end of the day, I did anyway, have some throw-ups.
For those who have not listened to that episode yet, this is owing to the fact that your wonderful daughter had thrown up all over you.
That's right.
It's the gift that keeps on giving.
You had 60 good hours, and then you woke up the entire floor of your hotel room going, ah!
Yeah, I ruined everybody.
I screwed everybody up.
So, you know, I can fight it.
But then, oh, and it was terrible also.
It's not just like that I passively threw up.
Yeah.
But you and I had a similar last night.
Not that I had a headache, but in the middle of the night, 2 o'clock in the morning,
I said, I'm hungry.
And of course I wasn't.
You were sleeping is what you were.
Yeah, but I was like, I'm hungry.
And so in the state that I was in, I came downstairs.
I found one hamburger bun that was frozen.
I took two Nathan's famous hot dogs.
I microwaved the collection of these things.
I sliced the hot dogs down the middle so that they had a flat side.
And then I cut them in half so that they were little... Wienerettes?
Wienerettes.
I piled them on top of this hamburger bun, covered the whole lot with a slice of Swiss cheese, microwaved it again just for good measure, melted cheese.
And I started eating my hot dog burger.
Mm-hmm.
And my front tooth broke out.
Oh, come on.
Your special tooth?
Yeah.
So now I'm sitting here.
Oh, no.
And I thought maybe if I go to sleep, I'll wake up and that wouldn't have happened.
You get a do-over.
Yeah.
But in fact, now I have to deal with this today.
Oh, John.
Yeah, and I'm hilariously lisping, but I also... I don't really notice it except when you're making a joke about it.
Yeah, but there's a tiny little... Sibilance.
A tiny little sibilance.
Sibilance.
Oh, God.
Hooray.
You know, that's so sad.
You're such a warrior.
You're like the Magellan of meats.
You're so good at just getting out there and saying, I'm just going to do some stuff with food and see what happens.
Really, you get in there.
A lot of people are saying, I don't have a proper meal here.
It seems to me that you should be rewarded for your ability to cobble together a delicious super snack out of whatever is available.
And I salute you for that.
I'm sorry your tooth fell short for that.
Yeah, well, the writing was on the wall.
It had been a long time since I'd had that tooth repaired.
And honestly, my dentist now wants to affect a permanent solution.
No, you should just get a continuing resolution until February and it'll be fine.
I'm not stressed.
I'm not stressed.
so i have to just i have to decide you know all of these things it's adorable no big man like you with that sound it's really cute yeah did you did you make a quick okay first of all fuck dennis but also uh you know they always got a plan
They always got a plan for your life.
They got a plan.
They got a plan.
They want to fuck you up.
They see you as a handful of teeth with a checkbook.
You know, fuck those guys.
Not including all the dentists that listen to this show, though.
You know, you can pay them in Denticoin.
Are you aware of Denticoin?
It's a new Bitcoin.
It's a Bitcoin for the dental industry.
Denticoin?
Did I mention this to you already?
Does it also rise and fall with the wind?
Could I get rich on Denticoin?
Nobody's getting rich on coin.
So the tooth has been... So you've had a surrogate tooth.
For a pretty long time, right?
Long time now, 10 years, yeah.
So there was that time when you had your long rock and roll hair and the missing tooth and you just went with it?
I went with it.
The whole tooth was gone at that point, right?
Yep.
Okay.
And then at some point you succumbed to big tooth and you went ahead and got your thing put back in.
What's the, I don't know, what's the lifetime of a replacement tooth?
How often do you need to get it dealt with?
Well, that's a great question.
I mean, like, for example, do you know when the clock is ticking, do you get a warning sign?
This is getting loose.
This is getting wobbly.
So the way that my tooth is fastened in there is not... I think when my dentist goes to her continuing education classes where she gets together with all the other dentists and they talk about all their new technologies, she probably does not pull up a slide where she says, and in this case, this guy won't make a decision, and so I have superglued this tooth in between the other two teeth.
You got like a 1940s tooth?
He won't wear a pontiff, which is a kind of like two things.
A pontiff?
Or whatever, a pontic.
Uh-huh.
He won't wear one.
He refuses to.
He won't.
He refuses all the surgeries.
And now increasingly he has refused to just get like a bridge like an old person would.
That's what they say if I understand that correctly.
I mean because my wife's been through some of this, you know She had that jaw surgery that was like so involved and involved two things and gum things and she's still getting gum graphs and all this kind of stuff Like they want to really get in there.
They want to make you into like a cyborg They want to put like screws in your head and shit, right?
Oh, yeah, they want to you know, they want to get their saws out and cut my cut my whole thing apart Yeah, I mean remake me the crazy thing is that if you go to Most doctors
and say, ah, my knee is killing me.
I want to get a fake knee.
I want to get a robot knee.
The doctors say, look.
Slow your roll.
We've got other options here.
Well, yeah, and the consensus seems to be until your thing, until your natural thing actually fails, no matter how good a job we do,
The fake thing is never going to be as good and complication-free as even a badly working natural thing.
Yeah.
So don't fuck with it.
It's like an old car.
I mean, in some ways, right?
Well, like, if you start replacing parts willy-nilly, you don't know what you're undoing with each thing that you're doing.
Yeah.
My best friend from high school has had back problems for a long time.
And thank goodness...
that I have never had back problems.
I don't know about you.
No, that's one where I feel so fortunate.
My mom had chronic neck and back problems through my whole youth, and she was just miserable the whole time.
Of course, I thought it was because she was old and had done something wrong.
I didn't realize it was just because your body gets fucked up.
Yeah.
And my pal, his back went out.
I was with him when it happened.
He was 24 the first time.
And, you know, and he couldn't, I mean, I had to carry him and it was traumatic for us both.
But he has been suffering with this back problem his whole life.
And, you know, I've gotten away scot-free.
I'm pretty big.
And I worried that my back was going to be, was going to, you know, be in trouble.
But he called me earlier this year and said,
Just wanted to call.
I hadn't talked to you in a while.
I'm going into surgery.
I'm having this major back surgery.
And it involved like going in through the front.
And the back and putting all this stuff in there.
And, you know, but he was like, I'm at the point now where by not getting it done, I'm having nerve damage to my feet.
You know, I might not.
And then.
It's a whole spinal column thing.
Yeah.
And even then he called me then a couple of weeks later and he was like, we're holding off.
And it's because.
The rate of success is like, it's not that it's low, it's just that you just enter into a whole other world where you can't go back to not having had the surgery.
But in the dental world...
My goodness, they are very, very enthusiastic about these major surgeries that involve your entire face.
And I've never had anybody say, and I've talked to a lot of people about it.
It's not just one person.
Never had anybody say, well, you know, whatever problem you're having.
It's probably going to be, in the long run, less of a big deal than sawing your face in half and grafting it together with titanium bolts.
And, you know, don't worry, we've got that all figured out.
It's a very personal area.
You think about when you're a little kid and you have a loose tooth, and even when it's just loose, let alone close to coming out, it changes the way you feel, the way that you bite, the way your whole face feels.
And they're very cavalier about saying, well, we've got a whole program we can go through here.
I learned about it in a newsletter.
There's a whole thing we can do.
We saw your face in half, we put in some screws, and then your life will be different.
Yeah.
I told you, I mean, the shocker for me was that for years and years, they'd been saying, we're going to break your lower jaw, saw some piece of it out, and move your lower jaw back so that it fits with your... That's what my lady had done.
Right.
You met her when she was in that state.
You saw that one time.
I know.
That was a massive, massive thing.
She was really laid up.
You have an underbite?
Is that right?
Ooh, I don't know what that is.
No, my teeth just come straight onto one.
There's no over-under.
Like a raptor.
Yeah, the over-under is that I am just like a wolf trap.
And I guess one of the things, of course, is that your teeth do wear.
Whereas you're, you know, like, well, honestly, that's the story of getting old.
Everything wears.
My knee creaks because it's just wearing out just like my knee.
Your car does not start an infinite number of times.
If you're the kind of nerd that I am, you know that when you buy a laptop and you turn it on and you go and look at the battery information, your laptop is rated for 1,000 charges.
Okay.
Which, if you think about it in terms of, like, years, you go, oh, this thing should be good for three, four, five years.
But when you think about it in terms of after 1,000 charges, I'm off the reservation.
This thing just may not work anymore.
And then pretty soon you get, like, Donald Trump.
You start thinking your body's a battery, and you should ride in a car when you play golf.
Because it wears and wears and wears.
Every time you start your car, that's one less time your car will start.
Yep, yep.
Every time I bite into a late-night hot dog sandwich, you know, there's not an infinite number of those in my future.
It's so depressing when you put it that way.
It really is.
Something so quotidian.
Oh, God.
Well, sure.
I mean, that's the thing.
When you're young, you think like you got hot dog sandwiches stretching to infinity.
But now.
Who knows how many more times I'll be able to grind my teeth over Congress.
Well, that's the thing.
How many more times am I going to make that sandwich?
I know.
That particular sandwich.
I know.
I know.
in my life how many how many times will i be in a position where i will be allowed to make that sandwich you ever calculate how many saturdays you get before your kid stops liking you pro tip pro tip don't do it but but the but the term the terminal moment with the dentists was the time i went in to talk to a specialist and he was this like
He was a diminutive man with a big white sort of Einstein haircut.
He drove a Porsche 911, which is how you know you've got a good dentist.
And I think he was probably wearing driving shoes and maybe even driving gloves.
That's a smart look.
And he said, and I was like, well, you know, everybody wants to break my jaw and move it backward.
And he laughed at me as though that was my idea.
Right.
And he was like, let me ask you a question.
What do you think happens when you move a jaw back?
Does it improve your airflow or would it constrict your airflow?
Right.
And I'm like, it's just a, I didn't know there was going to be a test.
Yeah.
Right.
Um, I have no dog in this race.
Why don't you tell me?
And he was like, no, no, we don't do that anymore.
We don't move the jaw back because it just makes your airway more constricted.
And I was like,
I don't like the sound of a constricted airway.
He says, exactly.
He said, now we cut your top palate off and move it forward, and then it improves your airway.
Oh, that sounds so much.
If it's the top and not the bottom, my gosh, how could you refuse?
Like, yeah, wow.
I eat a piece of pizza too fast, and my palate's ruined for three days.
If they could just move it forward, my airflow would be greatly improved.
I wouldn't get mouth meat anymore.
Oh.
But this, you know, like in the, and I think this is true of all the surgeries, right?
In the back surgery world, there are people walking around or maybe not walking around whose backs were, or were operated on 35 years ago.
And they put like two big metal bars in there and put gaffer's tape around it and screwed it together with drywall screws.
And nowadays they go in and they whistle while they work and they put some fiber optic cable in there and you've got CCTV.
And it's a whole different game.
But it doesn't make you feel like...
This is the other problem of technology, right?
Where you feel like now the technology of right now, the top forward technology of right now is as good as a thing is going to get.
But what do you do?
You get back surgery and then six weeks later, somebody puts up a slide at the continuing education dinner and says, we've figured it out.
Never do that again.
Let me introduce you to patient 75.
It feels that way.
Well, you know, there's something I mean, I don't know.
I don't know fuck all about medicine, but it's always seems so strange to me the way that drug trials work, especially when it comes to something like a life-saving drug, like an AIDS drug or a cancer drug.
And the only, as I understand it, the only really scientifically valid way is to have a test group and a control group.
So like half of the people getting it are getting a sugar pill.
Yeah, because that's what you got to do for the science.
But like when you go in, you got the guy with the Porsche and the driving shoes.
It kind of feels like this guy's going to be on my side.
This guy has the great state of the art technologies.
But then it just comes down to like, I don't know, Star Trek versus Star Wars people.
And like, oh, you know, no, this is definitely the way this is definitely the way you don't want it.
You don't want to get with those soft the bottom half, guys.
Those guys are hucksters.
That's right.
Get on board the soft the top.
The top train.
It's like the dead Kennedys say, you know, one thing's fixed, another falls apart.
Jesus Christ.
Wow.
Jello.
So right.
So trust your mechanic.
You know what I'm saying?
Trust your mechanic.
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I typically, as you know, try and go through this, you know, life on this big blue marble in space.
Hmm.
by relying on as few things as I can.
I try not to rely on technology.
I try not to rely on comfort.
You've talked about this a great deal in the past.
It feels like a lot of it comes down to your will and wanting to make sure that you can get by.
But you said rather candidly that you want to limit the number of things that might go away after an apocalypse and you'd have no way to get it back.
Now what?
Now you're hooked on jaw surgery for the rest of your life.
Yeah.
Who's going to do that in Apocalypse?
You don't have enough buckets to trade for that.
I mean, there are, I'm sure, all kinds of benefits that attend someone who attaches themselves to hoses and eels, like John Travolta in... Boy in the Plastic Bubble?
No, in Spaceship Earth.
Oh, okay.
Or maybe like... Or like the guy from Bill and Ted in that movie where he's a pod boy.
Where he's got all the hoses in him and he's got the neck thing?
Yeah, the guy with the hoses and the neck thing.
And the hoses and the neck thing.
And it's a battery for a robot planet.
Until they figure out, oh, this is the Matrix.
Red pill.
Red pill.
Red pill.
Red pill.
If you want a battery pack for a robot planet, I'm sure you get a lot of good stuff out of that.
No, the surgery's going to be good for you.
Let me put this thing in the back of your neck.
It's going to be really... It's really state-of-the-art.
Yeah, right.
Like, just put your credit card information in.
Just, you know, like, scan your iris.
It comes with a free trial.
Yeah.
And then when you drive around town, every time you get a ticket for running a yellow light, the ticket will go right to your bank account.
You don't even have to think about it.
That's right.
We'll just capture all the data.
Yeah.
Isn't that convenient?
So good for you.
Isn't that convenient?
But I try to limit the number of those, particularly the ones that people do voluntarily without thinking about it.
Like, I've got a conditioner that works with my hair.
And it costs whatever it costs, $70.
But if I don't have my conditioner, then my hair just doesn't play ball.
And let's tear the veil away.
A lot of people shampoo and condition way too much.
Whoa.
Oh, yeah.
Yes, they do.
I don't want to take you off your story, but I'm here to tell you.
If you get off that particular merry-go-round, you'll discover that you can mostly wash your hair about once a week and you'll do way better.
Because you know what it is?
It's like Carmex for your head.
You're drawing out all the things that your head would do naturally, and now you're addicted.
You're addicted to Neutrogena.
Yeah.
Don't put Carmex on your head.
Don't put Carmex on your head.
You're not going to have that after the robot warms.
No.
No.
Well, the thing is, now you're just a slide in somebody's slideshow.
We used to put Carmex on the head, but now we have discovered.
I chose this one.
That's if we move over to the top part, and he was totally into it.
It takes off in portions.
Now, excuse me, I have some driving to do.
Zoom!
He pulls on his gloves.
Oh, yeah, you're top of mind for him.
Your health care is top of mind for the German driving dentist.
Yeah, he's just knocking them down.
100, 200.
He can see those fighter planes.
Mm-hmm.
But so I try to limit that stuff.
But the problem is at a certain point, right here I am, I'm sitting here, I'm a man in his 40s, and I have a missing tooth today.
And there is a better solution.
There's a better solution.
And that solution is to get something slightly more permanent.
Now I have, I was putting my little pills in my little pill box today.
Because once I started taking my pill for my bipolar and I discovered that it worked for me and it was a medication that I actually endorsed.
Then another doctor who had been saying to me for a long time,
You have high blood pressure.
You have hypertension, is what they say.
And I was like, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Just the same as I'd said about everything that every doctor... Oh, surprise, surprise.
Another doctor who has a diagnosis about what's wrong with me.
Here I am.
Oh, gosh.
I'm the big actor.
Blah, blah, blah.
Calling me amazed.
And so I was like, all right, what's the story?
Now I'm taking this one medication.
What's the story with this high blood pressure?
Oh, then I switched it all over to the lady doctor that had yelled at me about bipolar.
And I was like, you're my new doctor.
I want you to yell at me about everything because you're good at it.
She passed muster, right?
She did.
And she said to me, I don't think I yelled at you before.
I think your story has become inflated.
Is she listening?
Oh, yeah.
Okay.
And I said, you absolutely did yell at me.
I marked it down in my book of quotations.
In your mind palace.
And she was like, I don't know, that doesn't sound like me.
And I was like, it sounds exactly like you.
Listen to you now.
Listen to what you're saying exactly right now.
So everything you're saying on here is feeding into her analysis of how things are going.
Like if anything else needs to be put into your tiny pillbox.
Yeah.
So she said, yeah, you have hypertension and you need to take this pill.
So I took it.
It was just a, you know, it's just a diuretic.
It's just like drinking coffee.
Okay.
That's my take on it.
And then she was like, yeah, okay, it's doing okay.
But now you need to take a second one because a lot of times we don't get it on the first pass.
You need to take two.
I was like, OK, you know what?
You're you're a doctor lady.
You're throwing pills at me.
That's fine.
You know, I'm not fighting you anymore.
So now I got those two that I put into.
So then I was like, well, shit, now I need a pillbox.
And I went and I looked because I wanted a cool pillbox.
You
Welcome to the 40s.
You know, right?
You see all these things.
You know one of those old lady pillboxes that has like embroidery on it.
You want something ball or something fucking steampunk.
You know, with the big type on it that's like Monday morning, Monday afternoon.
I'm not one of those.
I wanted something cool.
And every day in my freaking Instagram feed, some ad pops up for something that's like, dude, well, and it's a, you know, like order a box and it's got a knife and a hatchet and mustache wax and like, you know, like all this crap that nobody needs.
That's like sandalwood.
Oh, it's like a bespoke kipple box.
They send you a bunch of stuff you don't need.
You subscribe to that.
You get another eel.
Now you're getting a free – well, not free.
You're getting a subsidized box of shit every month.
Yeah, and it's all got – it's leather.
Is it for your daily carry, John?
Masculine.
Sometimes?
Yeah, it's for daily carry.
Everyday carry?
Is that what they call it?
Well, there's aspects of everyday carry, but if something's coming every month –
That means you're presumably changing your everyday carry every month.
They better give you a bandolier one month, give you a Chewbacca belt.
Yeah, and I feel like your everyday carry people, the ones that are real scientific about it, they don't want a new thing every month.
They want to hone it down to the fishing line that can also be used as a garrote, that can also be used as a radio antenna.
For finding fresh water.
You do a gorka.
You get maybe a couple pistols, a knife, and a tourniquet.
Yeah, and a divining rod.
And a divining rod.
Or divining a wire that you could also use for a group.
A divining rod.
A wire.
Right.
Which you can use to escape.
Yes.
If you, you know, if you throw it, you connect it to your knife.
Or you could bind an adversary.
Bind an adversary.
There it is.
Everyday carry.
Yeah, you want to have a knife, which is also a hatchet, but which is also something that you can huck up onto a roof and use it as a hanger.
Oh, quick question.
Does that knife rely on fucking Bluetooth?
No.
No, it doesn't.
It does not.
No, no, no, no, no.
You have an untethered hatchet knife.
That's right.
But I'm looking at these things and I'm saying, all right, where's the, you know, like where's the bespoke pillbox?
Yeah, that's what I want right now.
I want a pillbox.
Here's what I want.
I want what I want.
I want two weeks worth of little doors.
So that's 14 of them.
14 little submarine torpedo tube doors.
Monday to Sunday, Monday to Sunday.
Monday to Sunday, Monday to Sunday.
That's sitting up, you know, it's not torpedo tubes.
It's like an ICBM.
It's like a missile submarine.
Okay.
14 doors on the top.
Okay.
Each one's got a missile in it.
Okay.
I want it to be small enough to throw in a bag.
Okay.
When not notice it I want it to be and so I want to have kind of round edges.
I don't want it like Too square.
Okay.
I want the doors to help me disabuse me here Part of it is you're trying to avoid the stuff that you see Near the magnifying glasses at Walgreens.
I don't want it to be like a rainbow colored plastic.
Okay.
I want it to be something cool That's the individual right that belongs to me and I've and so I've been out looking at it like and
That's a very creative way to approach it.
The 14 doors.
Yes, that's what I'm trying to accomplish.
And I wouldn't mind if it was silver and had little glass doors.
That's the top return I am getting when I search for cool pill case or box.
Yep.
I'm seeing a nice-looking silver one.
I'm seeing a lot that look like fruit, one that's got a Cthulhu on it.
Yeah, I don't want that.
Okay.
But I want to be able to see into the little containers because you want to know which ones are full and which ones are empty.
In case you forget what day it is.
That's right, which happens to me every single day.
Yeah.
But I want it to be, you know, I want the, when the doors are closed, I want them to stay closed.
When the doors are open, I want them to stay open.
So I want this and I'm searching everywhere and nobody's making artisanal pill cases because I guess the artisanal people are all 38 and they're not, they're not taking 15 pills.
Yeah, their knees don't hurt.
Anyway, then, so I had these three pills going on, and then I was like, well, I live in Seattle in the wintertime.
I better throw some vitamin D in there since I'm taking pills anyway.
You could probably do with some B12, too.
Well, and then I put a big B in there.
Did you use one big B?
I try and get a B in there.
I feel like I should take a B. I've heard that Bs are good for people like me.
You know, back in the day before I was taking all these pills, I would sometimes buy a bottle of B and take it, and it worked.
It made me feel better.
Okay.
Huh.
Huh.
It helps your mood, right?
Yeah.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, it does.
Huh.
And then about a year ago, well, a year and a half ago, Millennium Girlfriend...
started taking Elysium.
Elysium.
Now, come on.
That sounds like a science fiction thing.
Elysium.
Elysium.
Do you remember Elysium?
Elysium.
Elysium.
Should I ask my doctor if Elysium is right for me?
I don't think you should talk to your doctor about Elysium.
Is it a nootropic?
The thing is that the more people know about Elysium... Less there is for us.
Well, I think that's right, because Elysium... Elysium.
...will allow you to live forever.
Oh, Elysium, all right.
Yeah, because it binds to your neurotoxins, and it takes your alpha Bs, and it turns them into alpha Cs.
And alpha Cs are what you need.
Alpha Cs are what plants crave.
It comes down to the alphas.
You've got to switch your alphas.
Sure.
And what happens is if you get in there and you get your beta blockers that will like antioxidize your neural net.
Oh, it like castrates the cancer boys.
Well, and what it does is it takes your blockchain and it breaks, see, it breaks the RNA and converts it into RNP.
Okay, so it changes the dispensation to ladder chain.
Exactly.
Okay.
Top headline I'm finding here, Elysium Health, live healthier for longer with science.
That's right.
And Elysium.
So Elysium was this miracle pill that came out.
And part of their stratagems were that they had all these scientists.
They got all these Nobel scientists together.
I've seen a lot of white guys in ties.
And they were like, will you endorse this?
Will you endorse this?
And all the scientists were like, yeah, sure.
Sounds like good science.
And there were a bunch of these scientists on their board of directors.
They actually put them on the board.
Yeah, all these guys look like potatoes with eyeglasses.
And they all won the Fields Medal, and that's why they're so mad at Matt Damon, because he won't just do the math.
Because the Martian?
Well, no, he won't do the math.
Because they won the Fields Medal for crying out loud.
Okay.
So, this stuff, this Elysium... I'm losing track a little bit here.
So, you've got your brain pill your lady doctor gave you.
Yeah.
You've got a... Was it a blood pressure pill?
Two blood pressure pills.
So, up to three pills.
One of them is a little pink pill, and one of them is a very strange little mustard-colored pill.
Okay.
Oh, they're different kinds.
You're on a cocktail.
Yep.
Yep.
You don't even drink.
Yep.
No.
So there's three pills, and then I threw a D in there, and then I threw a B in there.
Okay.
All right.
Throw in the D. I threw the D. I threw in D's nuts.
Oh, wow.
Once.
Once.
Anyway, so then I'm hearing this Elysium talk around the, you know, this is the pillow talk that I had at a certain point.
This is what we're talking about around the breakfast table.
This is where you're hanging out with Generation Snap.
Yep, Elysium.
Yeah, they're buying glasses from vending machines.
Yeah, that's right.
And getting long life from the Elysium.
Elysium is one of these things where it's like every pill costs a dollar or every pill costs two dollars or something like that.
But what price?
For eternal life.
Yeah, what price, Merlin?
No, no.
How do you put a price on eternity?
How many extra Saturdays do you want while your daughter still likes you?
All of them.
The problem is that's a finite number.
Well, there might be a pill to reboot her at some point, I'm hoping.
I think what happens is you get a bunch of Saturdays after she stops liking you.
Yeah.
That's where the extra Saturdays come, and that's not necessarily where you want them.
Oh, no?
Okay, you want to get them front-loaded.
Okay, so at this point, you're up to... Well, now, wait a minute.
So I wasn't entirely on board with the Elysium.
Okay, but I mean, we're up to three, four, five-ish.
Five-ish, right.
Five pills, okay.
Oh, okay, so...
Before the Elysium, my mom came to me and said, I'm taking these pills which are good for your joints.
Is it cocosamine chondroitin?
Yes.
And I said, what evidence do you have these are good for the joints?
I think Dr. Oz likes it.
And she said, there is no evidence that it's good for the joints, but I take them on faith.
Huh.
Okay.
Because it's made out of the, these pills are made out of the collagen that we use in the joints.
In the joints.
So if you had more of it.
And it knows where to go?
Is it like repairing the ladder DNA?
It knows where to go?
It seeks out the joint areas and then replenishes them like some kind of a supply mission?
This is what we don't know.
Okay.
But if you give your body more of this stuff... It couldn't hurt.
I mean, what's it going to do?
It's either going to pee it out... You pee it away.
It's like a vitamin C for your joints.
Yeah, or the little dudes in hard hats that live inside your body that move like I-beams around are going to be like, we got some more of this stuff.
Let's get it down to the joints.
That's right.
Exactly.
The little sergeant major that's like...
So, you know, so I put that in there because I got this bum knee that I got when I jumped off the outfield wall at RFK Stadium during a Grateful Dead concert in 1990.
Oh, and this is unrelated to when you fell off that piece of equipment at the dump?
This is completely unrelated.
This is a bad knee that goes all the way back to 1990.
Okay.
It's basically Jerry Garcia's fault.
It's the OG bad knee.
Yeah, that's right.
And so why not?
Because when I go to the doctor about the bad knee and I'm like, ah, that knee is kind of killing me.
The doctor says, you don't want to do a knee surgery until you have to.
I'm like, oh, so what you're saying is I wrap an ace bandage around it and I pretend everything's fine.
Hot.
And the doctor says, wrap an ace bandage around it.
You don't have to pretend it's fine.
I can't help you with that part.
That's just a thing you do now.
I'm taking these pills that maybe you pee them out, maybe you don't, but what do you want to do?
It's a dollar a day.
How many Saturdays do you want?
Right, right.
Anyway, so I look into this.
It's amazing how that could get turned against you.
Oh, everything gets turned against you.
Yeah.
That's how they get you.
That's how they get you.
Okay.
So the man who, if memory serves, I brought you Theraflu one time and you didn't want to take... You were deathly, deathly ill.
You had to show a great American.
You were very, very sick.
I think I brought you some ephedrine and a Theraflu and you didn't want either one because you didn't like to put that stuff in your body.
Well, what happens with the Theraflu... Back in 1991, when I knew...
A lot of junkies.
I knew more junkies in 1991 than I know now, for sure.
It was the style at the time.
It was.
I think that that might have been peak junkie, although I do.
The thing is, now I know.
Maybe in Seattle.
I think in West Virginia they're doing pretty good right now.
Well, that's right.
It's all flipped around.
Yeah.
Back then, being a junkie was a thing that you did if you were an urbanite that wore Black Island.
Yeah.
Now it's just if you're living in West Virginia and you're working on cars.
Oh, we got to talk about that someday.
That is so fucked up.
It's really terrible.
Every time I read about it, I'm more completely freaked out.
It's a crime against humanity.
It's sickening.
When you think about the CIA and the government intervening in populations, you think about them putting AIDS into the gay community.
Yeah, like a crack for black people.
You do not think about...
it isn't typically thought of as a concern as a conspiracy one paragraph i screenshotted yesterday i didn't have the heart to post it but this is i think i want to say from washington post article i forget this one paragraph that just had me back on my heels the opioid epidemic has also made some pharmaceutical companies very rich a real barrier to getting the industry to buy into change okay hang on sales of prescription opioids almost quadrupled
Between 1999 and 2014, 4x in 15 years as the number of prescriptions soared.
By 2010, there were more than eight opioid prescriptions for every 10 people.
Purdue Pharma, the makers of OxyContin, have sold more than $25 billion worth of the drug in the past decade.
Jesus Christ.
So you're not on that right now, as far as you know.
Ha!
No.
If you backed up the OxyContin truck, and you poured that stuff in, and you gave me as much as I could take, I would, A, take zero.
But if you forced me to have it in my house, I would take it out, I'd dump it in the pool, and let the worms figure it out.
Ha ha ha!
Somewhere downstream, some fish in Lake Washington would be like, whoa.
You made some worms start chasing the dragon?
I don't want it.
I don't want it around.
Yeah, you prefer not to.
Yeah.
And the thing is that the junkies that I knew back in the 90s were like shooting up.
That was how you were a junkie then.
Like needle-based heroin.
The whole thing.
You cook it there in your spoon.
You do the do.
Yeah.
And then if you're lucky, you don't die sitting on a toilet at the Cafe Roma and make the employees try and force the door open and then call the ambulance.
They make the employees do that?
That sucks.
Well, they don't make them.
It's just like, who the hell?
It's the employee that's like, knock, knock, knock.
Are you done in there?
Hello?
No, the manager's in back shooting up.
He's got other people to empty the toilets.
Exactly.
But now what I know, I do know a lot of junkies now, but there are all these maintenance junkies where they're like, I'm not a junkie.
I just have to take these pills for anxiety and pain.
It's like, ah, fuck, you're 48 years old and you're fucking strung out?
Yeah, tell it to the robot apocalypse.
I mean, you want to talk about an eel.
Yeah, no shit.
The ultra eel.
Oh, I struggle with it.
I struggle with it.
Yeah, I know.
I want to be back on it so hard, but I think about the apocalypse.
Everybody wants it.
You know, it's not that it's easy to not do it.
It's fucking awful.
And then, you know... So we're up to plus or minus five pills.
Well, the thing is, the reason I don't take Theraflu is that the junkies back in 1991 used to huddle around their little fucking Bic lighter fires and say...
To each other, the secret junkie language that I learned to speak.
The junkies can't.
I learned to speak it because they studied.
Is it like cockney robbing slime, but about heroin?
It's basically that.
It's like, oi, you're the red-headed guvda.
It's the hypodemic-spipodemic.
They would say when you can't get junk and you're starting to get the bads, you're starting to get some DTs, Theraflu.
Theraflu.
If you take Theraflu, it takes the edge off, yeah.
You drink it or you shoot it?
No, you don't shoot it.
My God.
I mean, who knows?
You can tell I haven't done a lot of this.
I could see snorting it.
I could see people snorting.
People love snorting things.
Yeah, I think it would burn the shit out of it.
But you drink it, and by quelling the flu, colon flu-like symptoms, it takes down your heebie-jeebie bats?
That's right.
That should have been their other...
When they're selling Theraflu in like urban markets.
Yeah, what you call an off-label usage.
Yeah, you want to say their slogan should have been Theraflu.
Takes the edge off.
And so I started to think in the early 90s that Theraflu was powerful medicine.
Because if it is helping that, if it's helping those creepy crawlies, if it's helping the feeling that like flies are burrowing in your arms, then it's probably stronger than I need when I've got a cold.
So I typically only employ Theraflu when it's like, all right, I don't even give a shit anymore.
If I end up on Oxycontin because of this, whatever, fine.
I'm so freaking sick right now.
I don't care.
Anyway, so I'm up to five pills.
Okay.
But then the Elysium thing feels like it's just got – it's just they spent a lot of money on the logo and the label.
It seems like an executive drug, if you know what I'm saying.
Oh, yeah, I do.
There's this whole class of what they call nootropics, which is these whole class of – you don't even want to call them drugs.
It could be herbs.
It could be some kind of – all these things that have –
very little to zero FDA evidence of everything.
And that goes back to like the St.
John's wort, the ginseng, like all of these things that have this rep for doing a certain thing.
You got all the, what are they called, the homoerotics?
What are the ones that don't do anything?
Like the acillococneum.
What do you call those?
Homeopathic, the homeopathic drugs.
Well, you know, if you go to Germany and you tell those people that they don't do anything, they're going to get real mad at you.
So there was a big lawsuit over St.
John's wort there, wasn't there?
Didn't they crack it down?
The thing about the Germans, and you know we don't like to talk about the Germans.
Well, you know they're hard on Scientology.
Well, and that's the thing.
If you are mad about Scientology not being a real religion, but you believe that the cure for an allergic reaction is to give you a micro dose of...
fucking you know uh collagen fly wings i feel like you gotta you gotta you're using too much to do the real homeopathy the smaller the doses the more effective it is you have to that's just that's just pseudoscience that is
You know what?
That's just pseudoscience.
You know, they don't let you take ephedrine for your bad nose sniffles in Germany because they think it's a controlled substance.
But they give you some, you know, they give you some tincture of like monkey sweat.
And they think like, oh, this is the real cure.
You got to get with the program.
Germans invented aspirin.
You know, they pioneered most of the drugs that we use nowadays over in Germany.
At first, I thought you said germs invented aspirin, and I was like, this is a new theory I had not heard.
No, no.
I don't believe in germ theory.
Okay, so you're up to five.
You've got 70 pills a week.
Elysium, are you hearing the... You're back with Millennium Girlfriend back in the day.
Back in the day.
And were you persuaded to give Elysium a throw?
So like with my mom's magic collagen pill, I went and did some separate research.
Okay.
And the research around and the collagen pill has on the label like this is not we are not at all saying that this does anything.
But, you know, but if as long as we have said that, we're also going to say this is amazing.
And with Elysium, it was a thing where they had this substance, which was called NAD+.
NAD+.
NAD+, which is nicotinamide something, something, something.
Nicotinamide something, something, something.
Plus.
Plus.
And nicotinamide is pretty easy and cheap to get.
But if you combine it with some other things, an A and a D, some kind of di-nucleosis.
Fix it again, Tony.
It's a nicotinamide di-nucleosis.
You get this stuff, and then you add a plus on the end.
Okay.
And it turned out, this is the amazing thing about the story, it turned out that there's only one company in the country that makes NAD+.
And Elysium gets their NAD+, from the same company that everybody else does.
Because there's only one company that makes it.
Oh, they're just white labeling something that's almost a commodity.
Yeah.
Elysium combines... It's not like their special bespoke formula.
No.
Okay.
No, they just discovered... Elysium's discovered that it did this other amazing stuff.
All the 50 Nobel scientists all were the ones that were like... And I think they combine it with a separate... A second ingredient.
So it's not just NAD+, it's NAD+, plus...
That's the plus.
It's some kind of plus.
It's the other plus.
It's the reason that Japanese-made Ibanez tube screamers sound better than American-made Ibanez or Korean-made Ibanez tube screamers.
Because of the plus.
Okay.
Never go with a hippie to a second ingredient.
That's right.
It has a diode.
Oh, okay.
It has a second diode that's light emitting.
So I said, well, if the active ingredient in Elysium is NAD+,
Why don't I just get my NAD plus from the bulk supplier?
And the answer to that, you know, the pillow talk answer was, well, Elysium is something else.
And basically, like, don't fight City Hall.
It's got all these it's got all these scientists.
Look at the design of this jar.
It's it's very, very modern.
Sure, you put that on your counter and people say, why are you taking a pill?
If you show up with like a Whole Foods plastic bag full of powder, it's probably not nearly as cool as having this, what's it called?
Basis Biolysium.
Have that sitting on your desk.
Or sorry, at your hoteling desk or your standing desk or your unicycle desk.
It's sitting on your desk right next to your like five steel ball clacker that you have whenever somebody asks you a question.
Your Bitcoin wallet.
Yeah.
The beanbag chair for your companion dog.
Yeah, well, the thing is that at your office, you have nap cubes that you can go take a nap in.
I actually asked a person who had nap cubes in their office, does anybody ever go and take a nap in there?
And they were like, what?
No, you would be definitely looked at askance if you went in there and took a nap.
Yeah.
And I said, it's like a, it's like a, like a, what do they call it?
A tiger trap, a lobster trap.
They're going to see which kind of, which, who are the dopes that grab a beer out of the copiously stocked fridge?
And who are the people who actually use the nap cube?
We told you to please use.
Yeah, that's right.
If I worked in an office, I would use that nap cube twice a day.
And the person I was talking to was like, you would be fired.
I was like, it's right there.
It says nap cube on it.
Right.
And they were like, oh, yeah.
It doesn't say productivity box.
It says nap cube.
We are encouraged to use the nap cubes.
But no one ever goes anywhere close.
Yeah.
Anyway, so I decided I was going to start taking – I didn't want to get left behind is the thing.
When Matt Damon goes up to the Elysium and starts kicking ass with all the people that are living in a terrarium –
up in WALL-E super spaceship.
I didn't want to be the one.
I'm just looking at pictures because I googled for that.
Does he have a science spine in that?
Is that what that is?
Yeah, he has a science spine.
It looks like he's got a GoPro on the back of his head.
Because in the future, everybody has a science spine and everybody is a karate master, but they all live down on Earth in Johannesburg while the specials live up in Elysium.
In like the WALL-E thing, except they're not chubby.
Okay.
The WALL-E version.
Maybe they got Peloton or like one of those things up there.
Well, the thing is, I think they're taking NAD.
Oh, they got NAD+.
They got NAD+.
Yeah.
So I was like, look, I'm not going to sit here and watch you take Elysium every day and not also do it.
But I don't want to be... How galling would that be for her to outlive you?
Well, and she's already younger than me.
I know.
She's got an edge.
So I wanted all the Saturdays.
I wanted more Saturdays.
So I started taking NAD.
Well, then...
So that goes in the pillbox.
And then I was, when I started taking the bipolar medicine, I started to feel like I wasn't remembering certain conversations.
Ginkgo biloba.
Ginkgo biloba?
Ginkgo biloba?
What are you taking?
Oh, so...
So I went online.
Everything I get is online.
Yeah.
I went on that's the biggest eel of all.
That's even bigger than Oxycontin.
Online is your big eel.
They're going to raise your price on Prime.
You're going to be so mad.
They already did.
They sent me an email.
They were like, oh, guess what?
Prime is more now.
Congratulations.
We've increased the size of your eel.
I didn't want it in the first place.
Why am I paying more for it now?
Now I've got to watch 40 movies a week just to pay it off.
So, oh yeah, and Hodgman gave me clear.
Clear, which lets you go through the airports without talking to anybody.
All right.
Do you pass that on?
Is it like nobility?
Do you have to have somebody that knows you?
They vouch for you?
Yeah, you get knighted.
But then the way Clear works is after you've had it for a while, after you've had Hodgman Clear, then they're like, we build your account for your payment for Clear now.
Oh, you pay for it?
You pay.
What do you think?
How else would you keep out the snorks?
Yeah, you're keeping snorks out who don't have the money to pay for it.
They're over there in the Dickens line.
One day I'm going to get on.
If you have more than three ounces of cold gruel, please throw it in the bin.
Nobody yells at me at Clear.
I went through Clear the other day.
You can have like a hillbilly joke and just walk through it.
Well, the woman didn't even, she walked past, she gave the Heisman to the TSA guy.
Wow.
She was like, this guy's with me, and she walked me right up to the thing, and I was just like, whoa.
Yeah.
Okay, one day I feel like I'm going to get in that clear line, and instead of putting me on the flight that I'm taking to Atlanta, it's going to put me on a flight to Elysium, and they're just going to say, don't worry about it.
It's covered.
You're not going to Atlanta anymore because Atlanta doesn't exist.
We're going up.
Oh, man.
But the problem with it is if you amateurize it.
Mm-hmm.
You've got to fly 40 times to make it seem like it's reasonable.
Oh, Jiminy.
Would you pay $10 to not have to put your gruel to the... It should be more like an airport lounge where if you can go in... There's been times when I'm like, shit, yeah, I'll pay 50 bucks to sit in this place for two hours, not be with the snorks.
But I wouldn't want to have to be charged for it every month if I'm not using it.
You get charged.
You get charged.
The number of times I fly...
It's right at the line where it's like, I'm paying $15 per time I fly.
Now, is that?
There'll be one time when that is 150,000% worth it.
And then a bunch of times when maybe it's the day when they do the freebie days where the snorks get to go through.
Have you seen that?
Oh, no.
Have you seen that?
Sometimes they'll say, I don't know if it's clear, but there's the one where you get to go to one of the special lines.
It's like, oh yeah, today's free trial.
You get to go through the special line over here because we're not very busy today.
No, no, no, no, no.
That's not going to be clear because clear requires, clear wants you to do a retinal scan and all this other stuff.
Okay, all right.
You have to be, you know, you have to be willing to endure.
You have to be willing to wear your privilege on your sleeve if you're going to go through cure or clear.
There's no better place to wear privilege if you've got it though.
At an airport?
Yes.
It's a perfect place for privilege.
Oh, that's true, too.
But if you're at the airport and you're looking over there and there's a guy with a corncob pipe and he's got two chickens on his shoulders and he's like, I've never been to an airplane before.
Two chickens and a one-string banjo.
I'm telling you, you put your thumbprints down on clear.
I ain't got no thumbprints.
Welcome to clear.
The government took it.
Yeah, that's right.
He's like, I can't bring my blunderbuss on the plane.
Says who?
And you're like, no, no, no, no.
Ron Paul revolution.
Then you get the Simpsons thing, or you get the Seinfeld music.
Boom, boom, boom.
And then you're through.
He was carrying a blunderbuss.
Okay, so Elysium.
I went through SFO the other day, and I got dropped off by my Lyft.
Uh-huh.
And I was sitting at the gate in six minutes.
What terminal?
Terminal one.
Terminal one.
Is that open again?
Yeah.
Oh, it's nice.
It's nice.
That's the redone one.
Yeah, they got a big, like, Calder mobile.
No, they don't.
But they should.
It's the type of thing where they would have a Calder.
Number one, I don't always keep them straight.
I think United is three.
Well, there's International, which is totally baller.
That's where Virgin is.
I don't fly United.
Okay.
And then I think one used to be the odds and sods one, and I think they redid it.
They redid it.
Okay, all right.
They redid it.
Six minutes is insane.
It's insane.
That's almost like how it used to be to go to the airport.
You just walk in.
Here's my bags.
Could be anything in there.
I don't know.
Walk on through.
Get yourself a hot Sam.
Back in the day when my dad would walk me down to the gate to put me on the plane.
You could get on the plane with the person and just say on the strength, I promise to get off the plane.
Yeah.
Well, they'd be like, all right, everybody that's not flying, get off the plane now.
And my dad would be like, all right, here's a check.
Here's a check for your mother.
Don't lose it.
My dad would walk me down to the gate sometimes, and they'd be like, oh, we've closed the gate, and the jetway is pulled away.
And my dad would say, I'm Dave Roderick.
Let me tell you why you need to bring the jetway back to the plane.
And they'd be like, all right.
I mean, that happened more than once.
If we agreed to bring the jetway back, will you withhold your anecdote?
Oh.
counselor roderick so you're a little bit lost in the stack here at some point your millennium girlfriend uh had gotten you on to the elysium so i'm taking nad plus but then i started to i started to like people would say well remember you when you were talking to that girl and you said this and i was like i don't remember right i don't even know who that girl is what do you mean right
And my memory is like a big part of my self-identity.
It's your brand.
I mean, I know.
I remember.
I remember things.
And all of a sudden, the thing is, I still could tell you all about the Grateful Dead concert where I broke my knee, but I couldn't remember having met this person a week and a half ago.
And it spooked me.
And so I went online.
Maybe it retards, pardon my saying, it retards aging by losing memories.
So you feel like you're younger.
Right, right.
Or you're less encumbered by the weight of memories.
It's like a clear line for experience.
I didn't want that.
No.
And so I go online and, you know, if you look at the contraindications of drugs, they all say the same thing, which is this drug may give you the following symptoms, which is every conceivable symptom that you could feel as a human being.
Like memory loss, or you might not be able to hold your poo in.
There's always diarrhea, headache.
But there's one, like I've watched too much NBC, which is increasingly making me realize what an old person network is, because it's all old person ads.
But it'll be like, you know, Cylentrix treats...
Arthritis.
Do not take if you're allergic to Cylentrix.
Cylentrix may cause suicidal ideations.
You're like, really?
Right.
Cylentrix might make your mustache fall off.
Cylentrix.
There's a lot of things in Cylentrix.
There's fucking ukulele music.
I can't break my blunderbuss arm.
Come on, Sarnage!
One of the things that they said on the line was they said, yes, if you take Lamictal, Lamotrigin, Lamictal, Lamotrigin.
I used to.
It may affect your memory.
But the thing that helps your memory may also the black box warning indicates you might also get a deadly skin rash.
Oh, that's right.
And that's the bad stuff.
Because every once in every once in a blue mood, somebody is taking lamictal lamotrogen and their skin falls off.
Oh, my shrink who was like, he was like an Ayn Rand psychiatrist.
He would give me anything, but he's like, look, look in my eyes.
Seriously.
Be very, you're going to start with like one-tenth of a pill.
We'll try that for a week.
Then we'll go to like one-eighth of a pill.
Like this is this stuff.
It is serious and it will hit you fast if you if you end up being one of the people.
It's a black box warning.
It's one of those rare things that's like, hi, really big warning.
You will die if you take this wrong.
You'll die in a really bad way.
Your skin will fall off, which is a bad skin dye.
Yes.
If you have to lose one thing, your skin shouldn't be it.
As a memory serves, it's on-label for epilepsy, if memory serves, and off-label for—I got it for mood stabilization.
Yeah.
Well, and the mood stabilization was the thing that they had—they had it approved for epilepsy, and then it was just one of those, like, licking a toad in the Amazon rainforest type of situations.
Seems to work.
They were like, wait a minute.
All these people that had both severe epilepsy or severe seizures, let's call them, and also seemed to be bipolar.
Wow, look at this.
They're not sad anymore.
And they didn't gamble their house away this week, which is a big improvement for them.
All they lost was their skin.
It's your single largest organ.
So I go online and they're like, if you are suffering from memory loss from taking Lamictal,
The thing that works is if you take NAC.
Plus or minus.
Just regular prime.
It's NAC prime.
NAC.
There's no plus or minus.
It's like N-acetylene-castell-acetylene.
They're doing a lot of work in those letters.
They are.
NAC, non arthroscopic crash test dummies.
And so I was like, well, this is confusing because I'm already taking NAD+.
Are you telling me I'm taking NAC now, too, to stave off the memory loss from taking lamictal emotogen?
And, you know, this is how they get you.
Yeah.
So I said, all right, shit, shit dog.
I got a pill case now that is the size of a Honda Civic.
It's got 14 doors.
I'm just throwing pills in here.
So I ordered some NAC.
And the problem is as soon as the NAC showed up, they both have because they don't have Elysium style labels.
They just have whatever junk junk style labels.
When I run out of one of them, I can't remember whether it's the NAC or the NAD.
Oh, that's how they get you.
That does which or what, right?
No, no.
Are they visually very different?
No, they look.
Is it just, see, I take a bunch of stuff that's just like white stuff in a capsule.
Yeah, that's what this is.
And it just looks like German tinctures, right?
Yeah.
Because neither one of them is like is is FDA approved for any.
I mean, I think is approved for asthma attacks.
Yeah.
But it also restores your memory.
And NAD plus is basically like a placebo that makes you think you're going to live on a spaceship.
Oh, God.
You need a really good pill case is what you need.
I do.
Basically, I need one that's a fanny pack, but strapped to my leg like Tomb Raider.
so you can deploy them as needed that's like i'm feeling a little bit memory weird kapow i my memory might be better but i'm not sure better not stop taking it though that's the other thing with the lamictal is you also have to you have to taper off too don't don't do that don't and sometimes i forget and then it's like oh boy it's been a whole day but apparently it stays in your body for like a couple of days so you don't have to freak out your skin won't fall off
But with NAD, when you go online and you're like, I want some NAD+.
I'm looking on Amazon right now.
They have a life extension brand, NAD+, cell regenerator, nicotinamide, riboside.
Riboslavin.
Riboslavin.
Riboslavin.
Riboslavin was my roommate in college.
But the problem with NAD Plus is that all those things on Amazon.
So I went on, right, and I was like, what's the optimal dosage of NAD Plus?
And they were like, well, you can take up to 500 milligrams, but we think you pee out the last 200 of that.
So the ideal dosage of this thing that we don't know what it does is 250 milligrams a day.
Sure.
That sounds about right.
That's what I would have guessed, yeah.
Yeah, but a lot of the bottles that you buy, because I don't want to sit and be taking this stuff all day.
A lot of these come in 125, so you might have to double up.
Which I hate.
And now you're going to need a bigger pillbox.
This is how they get you.
You order it from Amazon, you get it on Prime, and now it's not going to fit in your goddamn pillbox, you're getting it in the pillbox from Amazon.
Which just raised their prices.
Give me a fucking break.
I bought it one time, and it was like, you know, something like 50 doses, 250 milligrams.
And it came...
And then I turned the bottle over and read it more carefully, and it was like— Serving size two.
Serving size two.
Yeah.
And I was just like, oh, I want you to die a thousand deaths, you people with your fake labels.
Like, just make a 250 milligram pill.
I know you can.
Why don't they make the whole plane out of NAD?
That's right.
Right.
So I have to take another 45 minutes going and searching all these things to find out which one is 250 people.
And you better hope once they're in your steampunk pill container, you better hope you don't mix them up or have a little spill.
You're going to know who goes back where.
Well, and every single one of them is slightly different size or slightly different color.
So I guess...
I kind of know what they're doing.
But now I'm taking a bunch of pills that's like as big as a bird's nest.
Like I feel like I'm eating four blue eggs a day.
Can I say, just I'm going to toss this out.
This is not on you.
I feel like it might be a little bit of a constraint of your imagination because you're thinking about pillbox.
What if we take it from a different angle?
What about more like a tackle box?
You get a tackle box or maybe like an artist supply box.
I bet you still have some very cool artist supply boxes.
It's got to fit in a small bag.
Well, but see, with the amount of things you're taking, you might need another bag.
You might need to be Spoke Pill Filson.
Oh, this is the thing.
Ha!
Ha!
This is the thing I'm afraid of.
Because, first of all, I don't know if some of these... Oh, and then, because I'm taking a B and a D, I figured, why not throw a fish oil pill in there?
Oh, my God.
That thing is the size of, like, a baby pig.
John Roderick, I've lost count.
Give me an updated count on where you are on a daily basis.
How many are we talking about?
I'm talking about, like, nine pills or something like that.
Nine pills.
And I don't know which ones counteract which ones.
Some of them you're not supposed to drink grapefruit juice.
This one over here says there's no soup.
Like, I don't get...
There's no project manager for your life.
You end up being the de facto project manager for all the pills you put in your face.
And how are you to know?
You're not a physician.
Well, and all these things are like, these aren't prescription drugs.
These are just shit I found on the Internet.
It's cool, man.
We got it off the shelf.
There's no lethal dose.
Right.
Except what happens.
I mean, like if I sat down with a pharmacologist.
which is what they call them, and I said, all right, here's all the pills.
What do you think of this?
Yeah, they're going to get into your interactions and agonisms and whatnot.
Yeah, and are they going to say, like, well, 9 out of 10 of these pills are just in that one fish oil because that's all any of us really need is just to take one fish oil pill a day.
Or are they going to say, if you take this little pill for your heart and this big pill for living on a spaceship, the two are going to combine to turn into a Reiklo-Sylabide.
Oh, it's like a health Voltron.
Or something.
Is that going to bounce off the free radicals?
Or is that going to bounce off?
Synergism, right?
Is that synergism?
Synergy?
Synergy, one plus one equals 158.
That kind of thing, right?
You can't land on a fraction.
What's the opposite of synergy?
Like, is he a great man?
Yeah.
Does he ride the lightning?
Has he ever seen the fucking sea beam splitter off the Tannhauser gate?
Like, no, I don't want it.
The pills are working, John.
I can tell the pills are working.
You're lousy with Elysium.
So what I need is basically a thing that when I sit down at the little desk in my miserable hotel room somewhere...
And your little head beam.
I need a bespoke pill container.
Yes.
Because sometimes when I'm feeling brave, I'm like, I'm going to eat all these pills in one gulp.
Oh, no, no, no.
Just on the bees alone, that's going to put a hurting on your trachea.
I throw them all in there, and I drink this big glass of water, and I'm like, booyah.
But then that voice in my head that's wanting all the Saturdays is like, what happens, you know, like all your cool rock star friends all die of Oxycontin overdoses.
What happens if you're the one that chokes on a fish oil pill?
Man, we're wearing half glasses in a hotel room.
Like that's a bad look on you.
You know, like don't die young because you're like brave about taking a bunch of like knee vitamins.
Billy Joel writes a song about you.
It's going to be so sad.
Don't do that.
That's not me.
So now I take him in three gulps.
Okay.
But, you know, I just, I feel like such a, like a ding-a-ling.
Yeah.
It's, yeah.
I went from no pills to nine pills.
Yeah.
And it was just, it's like pill escalation because I was taking one that helped.
And who knows?
I mean, who knows if I, if I wean myself off all of those, if there's an, if there's a pocky lips, like, and I'm out living, living in the danger.
Mm-hmm.
Am I going to be, am I going to wean off all these things and then my skin falls off?
Oh, and here's the thing is like that stuff may seem to be doing something or nothing.
So you're not worse off.
But then like what happens when the apocalypse comes and suddenly daddy got no Lamictal.
How's that going to go?
Oh, well, so I figured out some in your survival bucket.
I figured out a way around that, but I'm not going to tell everybody, but I did definitely feel like, look, this whole business of people that take prescriptions and
which is you're basically tied to the doctor and the drugstore.
Oh, it's a whole system.
For me, that meant having to go to my shrink once a month, pick up a paper prescription, walk it into a drugstore, have them give me the side eye, and then give me exactly 30 days worth of pills.
Yeah, exactly 30 days.
Exactly, yes.
And it's like, this is not a drug you can abuse.
There is no secondary market for it.
You can't sell it on the street.
I got to show my license to get fucking Claritin D.
And that's, what, for pimples?
No, no.
No, no.
No, that's for my breathing.
Oh, oh, oh, Claritin, right.
Claritin, yeah.
But if you want stuff that works, you can get that Charlie Brown shit off the shelf.
But if you want stuff that actually works and maybe gives you a little bit of energy, you want the Claritin D behind the counter, and they give you the side eye.
They give you the Walgreens side eye.
I don't want any side eye.
And also, I did not like being tethered to this 30-day thing.
Oh, no, no.
You're in the teeth of the gears at this point, my friend.
Well, I'm like, what happens if I go offline?
What happens if I go in the hole?
What if you lose the Bitcoin wallet that has all your prescriptions on it?
Exactly.
What are you going to do then?
What happens if the Walgreens closes?
What happens if all Walgreens close?
What if they break the blockchain?
What if the blockchain breaks them?
There are no bipolars in foxholes.
What you need to do, I think, is you need to come up with an honest... You've been very forthcoming today, and for that I respect you.
You need to come up with a spec.
To paraphrase Donald Rumsfeld, the pillbox that you want.
That you would desire.
You need to say, I need this many cubic millimeters of space for my, at this point, probably 13 pills a day.
You need to give that closure, what you want it to look like.
If you want it to have a theme, like maybe like a Donald Duck thing.
And you need to put that out in front of Generation Super Train and see what they can come up with.
Because we know people, as you know, as you know, we know people with 3D printers.
We know makers.
We know that a maker is fair.
And they could make you the pillbox of your dreams.
Right.
Well, you saw the duck that lost its feet that got plastic feet from a 3D printer.
There's nothing we can't print anymore, John.
You could probably print Bitcoin today.
I'm the duck with plastic feet.
You know what I mean?
Like, I want a steampunk pill case, but I want it to look like Wild Wild West from the 60s, not Wild Wild West from the 90s.
We watched Ocean's Eleven last night, which I think is a pretty good movie.
It's okay.
Yeah.
Yeah, but it's got a lot of the thing you like.
Don Cheadle, setting aside his really, really quite bad English accent.
Oh, it's so awful.
Oh, it's so awful.
But there are a lot of guys who have a cool metal suitcase with foam in it and compartments.
Is that any direction you would consider going?
I do like that, but the problem is, first of all, if I'm going to handcuff something to my wrist, I want it to be the football with the coats.
Yeah, or a little Jewish girl.
Yeah, because you've got to get through clear.
Well, you got to get through clear, but also like this has all got to be, you know, everything's got to be on the DL.
You've got to look like you're just sitting there like recalibrating the phone.
You don't want to look like you're going anywhere or doing anything.
And and so you can't like be carrying a football.
You can't be you can't be handcuffed to a girl.
Right.
You know, like that's suspicious.
You got a football or a biscuit or a girl in a chain.
That's the kind of thing that raises eyebrows, even in a clear type situation.
That's why you're paying the big bucks.
Well, it's got to first of all, it's got to be mental handcuffs.
Right.
And that takes a little that takes that's going to take a month.
But but what I you know, what I I feel like I feel like the secret here.
I mean,
I went to the Canadia because sometimes Canadia, just like Germania, they have different attitudes about drugs.
Their drugs are so cheap.
Sure.
You want to get a 3-3-3?
Get it.
Or a 2-2-2 or a 5-5-5 or 1-10-1-20, whatever it takes.
But they feel the same way about Lamictal or they don't feel any way about it.
But I couldn't go up there and buy a big bin of them because they're also like, no, you got to be tethered to these.
But that's not the key.
I want a giant one.
The problem is I don't like to buy into this, but don't email me.
But the generic is not always the same as the brand.
Like, be careful.
my shrink told me there were cases and and he's not believe me like i said he was a libertarian he doesn't sweat this kind of stuff but like it was like he's had people like call him up in a pretty bad way where he basically was asking did you just stop taking the x that i gave you and it turns out they were on the generic and it wasn't doing what it's supposed to because it's not super well regulated rut row mm-hmm
For the Lamictal, you might want to put down a couple extra bitcoins and get the good Lamictal.
For some of that stuff... Oh, wait a minute.
I don't get the good stuff anymore because I was like...
I don't know why I care about saving the insurance company money.
Yeah.
I should just be getting the gold-plated ones.
You got a big heart.
That's part of the problem.
It is.
It is.
You know, I want whatever insurance company is, you know, that's been shown by the state of California to call.
Your heart is so large it's visible.
like Steve Bannon's liver.
It just protrudes.
I think you should get some help from our listeners.
You should tell them what it is that you're looking for, the style that you're looking for.
People know your personal aesthetic, right?
You've gone into Filson and said you want a purple bag.
I think you could do that with our listeners.
I don't want to put you on the line here, as they say, but you could probably get some help making a very, very cool, very, very cool case.
The thing about it is that
Old apothecary stuff is made out of glass, but I like to be able to use my bag as a pillow.
And so I can't have, it's not something where I've got a hard case suitcase with wheels on it and I walk through the, uh, and I walk through the airport like some kind of flight attendant.
Like I've got a thing that if, if push comes to shove, uh,
I want to be able to, like, I suppose with a hard shell suitcase, if push comes to shove and you bail out of an airplane on top of a glacier, you can ride that suitcase down to the end of the glacier.
But that's not what I want.
What I want is the ability to, first of all, use it as a pillow.
Maybe use it as a water bag.
I don't know.
It could be a weapon.
It could be a defensive weapon.
It could be like a shield.
I think more than anything, I want to be prepared for time travel.
If I walk through a temporal anomaly and it transports me back to 1810, I don't want to be standing there with some bag that looks like a plastic turtle.
Right.
I want to be able to say like, hey, what's up?
It's going to raise a 19th century eyebrow.
It sure will.
And so I don't want my pill case to be the thing that gives me away.
Oh, I see.
But in the olden times, I want to be able to see into it.
So it would either be made of glass or maybe like super thin tortoise shell.
Maybe I'm like a really rich person and it's made out of amber or something.
Or ambergris.
Or ambergris, right?
Yeah.
It's made of honey.
I don't know what it is.
I don't know why I keep coming back to steampunk.
I feel like steampunk gives you so many options for eras.
It does.
It does.
And I'm, you know, like, am I steampunk adjacent?
No, I would not say that.
I'm never going to wear goggles.
I do not want gauges on anything.
But do, and I'm certainly not going to wear a duster.
We've covered that.
Especially now that Donald Trump has started wearing one.
No, I got the memo a long time ago.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
You're not in a John Woo movie.
Get over it.
I'm not in a John Woo movie, but if you look at Han Solo.
Yes.
Han Solo, take the blaster away.
Oh, he could go anywhere.
Replace it with a pistole.
He could go anywhere.
He could be in the regiment of almost any country at almost any time.
Yeah.
He'd be an officer in almost any military.
He'd walk right up to D'Artagnan and say, need another musketeer?
Yes.
Right.
He could go.
He could be anywhere.
He could do anything.
He could be he could be.
Where could he be?
He could he could walk up to St.
Augustine and say, I forgot my tie.
Can I can I come in?
I confess.
Right.
Right.
So I feel like Han Solo is it should be a good place to start.
Can you can you pull out?
I forget if we've talked about this.
How are you with a vest?
Can you do a vest?
So I've started a vest.
A vest is a tough thing to pull off.
I've started to try to pretend that I'm not fat.
You could do the Andrew Dice Clay thing where you cut your sideburns to look like a jawline.
You're trying to do a forced perspective thing on your face.
Yeah, it's the George Lucas problem.
Oh, dear me, no.
He looks like he might have been 3D printed.
Well, his beard certainly is.
Yes.
It's the dewlap.
You're not fooling anybody with where you trim that thing.
He's still got a dewlap.
It looks like the strap of a 1940s football helmet.
It's a classic meat beard.
Uh, right.
You don't want, you don't want, you don't want your, you don't want your turkey waddle to stick out below your beard.
Cause it doesn't, why would you, why do men do that?
Defining the line.
So that's like, Ooh, I don't understand it.
Okay.
So you need something.
I started wearing vests because I'm like, well, the part of me that I want to conceal is my big tummy.
Why don't I accentuate it with a garment that only is like extra tummy.
Okay.
But I do feel like, again, there's a fine line between wearing a vest where it's like, I'm a riverboat gambler, and wearing a vest where you say, I'm a college professor who's taking his jacket off.
Yeah, being a riverboat gambler versus being like somebody who does card tricks on a riverboat.
right good time charlie and his vest well but i like a wool vest but the problem is a wool vest then you're not talking about a patagonia here if you want so you can like my wife has an outfit that i love that is very han solo she's like sexy han solo when she goes to work she wears this one outfit i'm like wow you look like han solo it's really hot she's got a puffy vest is it puffy it's not that puffy it's a patagonia it's pretty small profile but she's got cool boots and some pants and she it's a real smart look
You're not talking about a Patagonia.
You're talking about a waistcoat.
Yeah, I have to be careful around a down vest or a puffy vest because I do have some.
I have a green puffy vest that dates back to 1975, and I stole it from my dad in 1981.
Wow.
And I still have it.
It's kind of held together with duct tape.
And then I have that original purple vest that Kel McCarl stole from Gary King Sporting Goods.
That's a purple North Face, back when North Face, you know, before you—
It could save your life.
That's right.
It could save your life.
And this vest, if you jumped out of a plane and landed on a glacier, you could ride that vest to the bottom.
Oh, Jiminy.
And I still have both of those things.
And I do wear them.
But, like, the other day I was at a thrift store and I found a barboer.
vest which is a quilted vest that is like fancy English like a fox hunting vest or something like that and it was not very much and I was like do I go this way with my life and I did I got it and I did go that way and the other day I was out this is a long time ago when I was at the women's march
The Pussyhat March.
And I wore my Barbour vest underneath my other garment.
And then the wind picked up.
And I had already pre-protected my daughter with her large coat, even though she was mad.
Even though she was like, I don't want a large coat.
I don't need a coat.
I was like, wear a coat.
Then I had my Barbour quilted vest, and I felt like I had a secret weapon, which was an undergarment.
Wow.
That was under the other.
I like their stuff.
Well, it's really nice, but it isn't, you know, they're not giving it away.
No, they aren't.
But, you know, it's like pretty nice.
It's quilted, but if I'm seeing the one you're talking about, it's pretty low profile.
It's not puffy.
You don't look like you're going skiing in the 80s.
No, no, no, no.
It's very low.
You're meant...
It's that it's that whole English like country life thing.
Some of these guys are wearing with a necktie and it's kind of sharp.
You're meant to look like you're not meant to look.
Right.
You know, like Prince Charles has been wearing the same double breasted jacket since 1960.
And that's because he's rich.
And so he's going to be king any day now.
That's right.
You just can't wait to be king.
There's a whole website that talks about the patches that the British royal family has put on their clothes.
Is it like a hanky coat?
A hanky coat.
Oh, you know, just lets you know a little bit about the preferences.
No.
You know what I'm saying?
No, no, no.
It's not that.
It's that there's a website where there are all the photographers that are standing around trying to get pictures of Emma Thompson when she gets out of a car.
But then there are the photographers that have really long lenses that are just chasing Queen Elizabeth around Balmoral Castle, just trying to get pictures of her corgis or whatever.
And those people have these pictures of like
like uh you know prince mountbatten or whatever and they're like here's a picture of him in 1971 wearing this coat here's a picture of him in 2015 wearing the same exact coat and we zoomed in on his cuffs and they've been repaired that's old money that's what new money never understands that is old money old money is you get something nice and then you keep it around it gets a little bit beat up you fix it
It's so hot.
Yes.
Why do I know that website is there?
Because I have gone there and studied all these things.
Why wouldn't you?
It's like, oh, one of the brass buttons on Prince Charles's jacket doesn't match the others?
Like, they didn't even bother to find a matching button.
It's so brilliant.
But that's where that sort of stuff comes into play because it's meant to look like it's not meant to look.
And I think that that's pretty Han Solo, too.
Mm-hmm.
So you're vest curious.
I'm, I am.
Yeah, I'm vest.
I'm by vestual, right?
Like I will wear the right vest.
I try hard not to wear the wrong vest.
Sometimes it's hard.
It's a commitment.
You know, once you put that on, you're out of the house for the day.
That's why I have like 14 Stetsons, but I've never worn one outside because I put it on.
I'm like, I'm wearing it.
I'm wearing it today.
I walk around the house.
I'm like, I've got it.
This is it.
This is it.
I'm going this direction.
And then I get to the front door.
I open the door.
And, you know, Gary's across the street.
And I'm like, I am not fucking wearing this Stetson outside.
And one day I feel like when my beard goes completely white, which is not that long, when something happens that I just have crossed the line and I'm a vest-wearing, pill-popping geezer.
Then I'm just going to be like Stetsons.
You feel like you'll know when it's time?
Will the beard tell you?
Do you remember in the 90s when you would be somewhere, and in your case, you'd be there in your Air Force jacket with your Dread Pirate Roberts mustache, and you'd be standing there with your Bacon Ray guitar, and some old...
Would be at the club with like dyed hair.
Oh, I know that old.
You know the old?
Oh, I know the old.
Yeah, yeah.
There's always an old.
Sometimes it's a prepper.
Sometimes it's a skinhead.
There's always an old.
There's an old and he's standing around with a group of 26 year olds and he's like, what's up fellow kids?
Yeah, the elder statesman.
Yeah, what's up fellow teenagers?
Yeah, right.
And it was a bad look.
And I remember those olds, and they were probably 32.
I know.
There was a guy in Tampa.
His name was Mike Ratt.
And he was an old-school skinhead punk rocker, and he was at every show.
And he was like, at the time, he looked 60.
He was probably 32.
Yeah.
But I was 19, and I was like, Mike Ratt.
But what has happened, what had happened was...
And styles changed so that now it's no longer that the olds are like trying to dress young.
It's that all the youngs are trying to dress old.
My mom laughs every time she opens a catalog because she's like, every single person in here is dressed like you.
And I'm like, what can I... No fair.
That's not a fair way to put that.
They caught up with me.
They caught up.
That's right.
But the problem is now you don't have that indication.
I have more final shirts than you have had hot dinners.
You know what I'm saying?
Hot dinners.
But I'm not putting manic panic in my hair.
They're putting like old sauce on themselves, right?
They're slathered in old sauce.
Just like Grandpa had.
Do I look like an old that's standing around trying to be a young?
Or do I just look like I always looked and the youngs are standing around?
Yeah, like that should change you.
Give me a break.
Give me a break.
I'm surrounded by ducklings that are carrying hip holster pillboxes now.
Because I talked about it on the goddamn show.
Oh, this?
Yeah.
That's my pillbox.
I'm taking NAD+.
Because I want as many Saturdays as I can get out of this life.
Shit, dog.