Ep. 436: "Murder Dogs"
Hello.
Hi, Sean.
Oh, hi, Merlin.
Oh, hi, John.
How are you?
Oh, it's you.
Yes.
And it's you as well.
Oh, it's you.
Oh.
Oh.
Oh.
Well, rather.
Oh, boy.
It's early.
I know.
I know.
I started sleeping later.
I don't love it.
Oh, wait a minute.
I thought that that story was going to go one direction.
I started sleeping later.
It's amazing.
Yeah.
And then it went the other way.
I don't love it.
Well, it's a situational thing, I think.
Yeah.
The school year has begun.
And at this point, I think I'm probably 11 for 11.
And Dad practically slept through everybody leaving the house in the morning.
Yeah.
Uh-huh.
11 for 11.
You haven't caught a breakfast yet, huh?
Yeah.
Well, you know, she used to go to, when she went to elementary school, like kids do, it was literally two and a half blocks away.
I would walk her there every day.
I'd get exercise.
And now she goes to a school more in the middle of town.
And it's a little bit of a journey, especially when dad doesn't drive.
of taking care of herself in the morning um just in general her autonomy is uh has gone places we couldn't imagine like i've told you she takes these long walks she'll walk to golden gate park she takes muni home at this point mostly and doesn't hate it which is weird but i don't know i always assume she's with some man she met on the internet
Oh, sure.
Or woman or they.
Sure.
But yeah, but you know, she should do her.
But no, no, I just, I like the later sleep and I like to capture bonus sleep.
It's an ongoing project for me is kind of get bonus sleep and then super bonus sleep.
But it's just the timing situationally, you know, do you ever do that?
You ever go like, you know, I could do another hour.
Oh, Merlin.
That's my every, that's my every day and always has been, you know, my, my catchphrase is,
when I was in fifth and sixth grade was five more minutes, please.
Five more minutes.
I just wanted five more minutes.
Now what I really wanted was two hours more, but I could negotiate five minutes a couple of times before I had to get up.
I never, ever, ever should have lived in this world.
It's not, this is not the world for me.
This is a different world.
It's a world for people that live in the,
We're on a 24-hour clock instead of a 28-hour clock.
I was about to say, this is your innovation and arguably maybe your curse is that you are not on a 24-hour clock, and it's not like you haven't tried.
That's all I've done.
I've tried and tried and tried.
But the last few days, I've been going to bed at 1.30 a.m.,
Which is better, right?
It's two hours earlier.
At least, yeah.
And what that means is that there is a shot at me getting eight hours of sleep.
And it's good, except I don't think I get very good quality sleep.
So I still am a little bit, but I'm always looking for an extra hour somewhere or other.
I feel you.
What you want is somewhere in the middle of the night, let's say 4.30 a.m., we set the clocks back.
Oh.
And then...
You wake up at a reasonable hour, but somewhere in there, two extra hours got added in, right?
It's a kind of, what would you call it?
Lo-fi time travel.
That's exactly it.
Lo-fi time travel.
You're not enjoying it, or I mean, you're not conscious of it.
You just go back in time two hours.
And then live out your normal timeline.
Whoa.
And if you could do it every night, the problem is- I could find a pocket sleep universe.
Hmm.
You know, somewhere where I could tuck in- Like a Madame Butterfly?
What, you mean like a strap-on?
Yeah, kind of.
Basically, I find some kind of an existential alcove I could tuck into to have a nap within my sleep.
Like, what if I had a way, it's like a kind of multitasking.
What if I could sleep while I sleep on two different timescales?
Or, put differently, if I could turn back the clock on the universe while I get, say, an extra 90 minutes.
Something like that.
There's got to be a trick in here somewhere.
I think I've told you about my roommate, Shannon, back in the early 90s.
Shannon was a, he worked at
He worked in the kitchen at one of the big seafood restaurants downtown.
Bing clam chowder.
He ran the oyster bar.
Bing clam chowder?
Bing clam chowder, yeah.
Bing clam chowder.
Bing cherries and clams.
I like the sound of that.
But that's a stinky chowder.
It must be a stinky chowder.
Well, he enjoys it.
Being the guy at the Oyster Bar in a downtown seafood restaurant, you get all the lawyers come in at lunch.
I mean, it's a stage.
He was a rap artist early 90s.
And so he liked the – he liked stage time wherever he could get it and shucking oysters for people and talking to them.
You know, you're like their bartender kind of.
I get it.
A performer.
It's hip-hop mollusks.
Yeah, except it's oysters instead of drinks.
I mean they had drinks too.
Don't get me wrong.
But I came into our apartment one time and Shannon was sitting there drawing –
sketching out some schematics, big, big, he had a bunch of pages going big schematics.
And I, and I said, and he was, you know, Shannon was also very science fiction.
He was very science fiction oriented.
Uh, the, the, the term nerd didn't exist at the time.
Uh, and he wouldn't have said he was a nerd.
Because he dressed all in black with combat boots and he carried a full-size maglite on his belt.
Oh, I know the type.
A few other tools.
Kind of closer to what we think of maybe as a goth.
Well, except he thought of himself as an urban ninja, like an urban combat ninja.
Did he ever do front sound somewhere?
Because that is the, well, I mean, like that to me sounds like somebody who, who works at the club, you know, and like, like the, the, the, you say has flashlight, right?
Yeah.
But the, the, you know, those guys, they have the small flashlight, the small mag lights, the little ones, because you don't need all that mag light.
No, he used the mag, the mag light for him was a weapon.
It was, it was meant to be like a, Seattle was like a baton.
It was a baton.
Seattle was a more dangerous town then.
You're always throwing fish.
Well, and he rode a mountain bike everywhere.
Shannon sounds cool.
Oh, he was cool.
Is he a white fellow or an African-American man?
No, he was African-American.
Because there wasn't that much white rapping going on at the time.
And I'm loving the aesthetic in my mind of him on a, what did you say, a dirt bike?
No, it was like a...
it was a proto mountain bike it wasn't like a mountain bike like the ones you would see now it was a street let's say it was an urban mountain bike it was meant for it had it didn't have knobby tires it had I get it I get it street legal and but Shannon sounds sounds very cool and he sounds like you know you catch him on the wrong day you're gonna have to you're gonna have to touch the ninja you know you don't want to mess with this guy Shannon was very he was very muscular he was very uh Shannon Shannon was uh was legendary his nickname was Spike
And he had dreads, but they were short.
So Spike kind of went.
Brother from another planet type situation.
Maybe a Donald Glover.
And Spike was working on this project for a while.
It's like he was drawing out this schematic.
And eventually, you know, I finally said, so what's, you know, what's the project here?
Like you're building a thing.
And he's, you know, very science fiction.
He had a lot of futuristic notions.
He really, he believed in technology and the future.
Nowadays, we would say that he was a nerd.
But at the time, he thought he would never have said nerd.
He was in a different world.
And, you know, and the fact is he's not a nerd.
He's just he likes robots.
And that's what he was building.
He was building a robot, except it was a robot that he could get inside.
Like, I think it was based on the on the loader in Aliens.
Mm hmm.
Right.
Yeah.
An exoskeleton, if you like.
An exoskeleton.
Is it a Gundam?
What do you call that?
Or you could be like a Jaeger, right?
You could get one of those.
You go to fight some kaiju, and you're going to need a Sigourney Weaver suit.
Yeah, these are all wonderful words, but I don't know what any of them mean.
I'm so sorry.
I'm so sorry.
The point being, this is a hip-hop clamsman who also – well, that's a really poor choice of words.
Clamsman.
You've got to be real careful.
It's like that adverb we don't use anymore.
The M and the N are right next to each other.
He's a clamsman.
And so you'd seen him working on his schematics for a while and thought, huh, I wonder what's up with Shannon.
Well, we were always working on stuff at home.
Everybody was always drawing something or screwing with something.
We were always trying to invent some kind of thing, some robot that was going to save the world or destroy the world.
I'm not a nerd, as you know.
Not a nerd, not a fan.
Never was.
Never was.
But, you know, we would watch Akira and we would get all into how motorcycles should be rather than how motorcycles are.
And so Shannon said, he was very excited to tell me about the project.
Because, of course, we were also on drugs.
Oh, okay.
Oh, Shannon too.
Okay.
Oh.
Shannon said...
I think this is the future.
It's an unbeatable idea.
I just have to get the funding to build it.
And I said, what is it?
And he said, it's a robot exoskeleton that will work the clam bar while I sleep inside it.
oh i see and i said if you could build a robot that could work the clam bar yeah why even be there why would you have to be there you could just send the robot
And he said, because I would be inside getting paid.
I mean, I think I understand.
I mean, on the one hand, I don't understand because, yeah, it just seems like it would be better to have the suit do the work.
I'm just worried also about the business.
The businessmen are probably real busy doing business and deals and stuff.
But it would be – if I looked over and I saw –
I saw a ninja man inside of a suit like that.
I would have to assume the robot had abducted him to make him sort of like a matrix thing.
Like maybe in order, maybe there's some, who's the robot rules guy?
Not Arthur C. Clarke.
Whoever it is.
Whoever the robot guy is.
Yeah, yeah.
Asimov's robot laws.
Maybe there's some secret codicil.
There's like a fifth law that you also have, you have to have a robot.
A robot has to have some kind of a human component.
Sure, a minder.
And we say, like if I was on Twitter, you'd say, was this written by a robot?
But that's super interesting.
Would they be able to tell that he's sleeping?
I think you would have to have... I mean, I don't remember... Do you have an eye shade with eyes drawn on them or something?
I think what it would have to be is you'd have to have a kind of glass window where you could see Shannon sleeping...
And then probably an explanatory sign, like your clams are being prepared by a robot suit of my design.
But I am here.
And then there's a red button.
If you need me, press the button.
Like a call bell.
Like you would say, can you please come to the front and help?
In this case, I'm sorry to trouble you, Shannon.
I read your sign.
They haven't invented QR codes yet, so I have to read this whole thing on your exoskeleton.
But, you know, I wanted to try the Kalamatas instead or whatever.
Kumamatas?
Kumamatas.
A shucking knife is a very, you know, it's a powerful tool.
I think a robot could probably shuck oysters faster than a human if it had been properly constructed.
If it were today, the AI and ML of a robot with a shucking knife, I'll bet you there would be some extreme bloody horror for the first few hours, and then it would be a nonstop shucking machine.
Just a shucking machine.
That's right.
And then Shannon's in there.
It's on logs.
He's getting paid, right?
Of course he is.
At the end of the day, the robot doesn't get paid.
Plus tips.
Robots don't get tips.
Plus tips.
And I don't know how much I would tip a guy that was sleeping inside of a robot suit, but the robot suit- This is a robot brandy snifter you put in there.
I'm like the piano man.
The robot might lean over with that shucking knife and be like-
Please tip 25%.
You'd be like, oh, yes, ma'am.
You have 20 seconds to comply.
Yes, ma'am.
But I think about that a lot.
I still think about that.
What was that, 1993 that we had that conversation?
He worked on it even after I pointed out – not pointed out.
Even after I had some questions, I interrogated him.
pretty thoroughly, like, well now, so you'd be, so, you know, that kind of, and it didn't dissuade him, it didn't slow him down.
So you were kind of, perhaps like me, a little bit hung up on the, not whether this is a good idea or whether this is possible, but if I understand what your goal is, Shannon, what's your, kind of your,
handful of goals are, I just want to understand more about how this gets you to those goals.
And there might be different ways, but let's keep talking about this robot soup, because obviously this is going to be the future.
Yeah.
The key element, this is the key element that Shannon could not, this is always the thing about science fiction, right?
We always think we're, we sit and think about it.
We're using all of our powers to, um,
to imagine a future landscape and populate it with ourselves, but we never fully understand how much different the future, in what ways the future is going to be.
That's one of the truest things that you have ever said.
It's absolutely true, and it goes for a million things.
We've talked about this before.
When you and I were, especially little kids, you were a very little kid, there was a huge concern about what they call the population bomb and the idea, like one of the most sort of apocalyptic things, obviously more than climate because that wasn't a thing yet, perhaps even more than nuclear holocaust was this idea that like the population is growing too quickly and there's not going to be enough food and blah, blah, blah.
You just can't grow that much food.
But you can't account for what happens in the future.
The future is not changing, evolving, moving in a way that has over much to do with the thing you've chosen to focus on.
And so you might be really surprised to find something sneaking up from the side that you hadn't even thought about.
And then that becomes a different problem.
Like what we learned with a lot of stuff is just not a lack of food.
It's a lack of will to deliver it to the people who need it.
But also, I heard somebody say this yesterday.
I watched The Hurricane all day yesterday.
That's why I just told my family I'm watching The Hurricane.
And one guy said something so smart, and it was basically about, I think it had to do with, oh my gosh, this is so scary.
Ida is coming up.
It's already probably knocked out some oil refineries.
which oil refineries produce up to, you know, 20% of the U.S.
supply of oil.
But also it's headed toward the cancer corridor between Baton Rouge and New Orleans, where it's just cheek to jowl, all like, you know, chemical industries.
Anyway, long story short, this guy said something that reminded me of this, resonated, was that, you know, it seems obvious, but like, we spent the last hundred years preparing for the problems we thought were the world we were dealing with in the last hundred years.
This also goes for Afghanistan.
This goes for everything.
And now we're in these situations where we have all this in computer stuff you call a technical debt.
You've got all this stuff you're kind of stuck with as the system and almost no way to pivot with any kind of alacrity.
And you're kind of stuck with that.
And like, that's the same problem thing we talked about with like, what is sci-fi?
Sci-fi always looks like whatever is the cutting edge right at the moment.
I mean, one time sci-fi was probably fax machines, you know, but, but Shannon had a fantastic, he had a fantastical vision of a future beyond being a rap and clamsman.
I think, but he was constrained.
He's constrained by the past.
Well, he's constrained.
The one constraint was that he could not think beyond the idea that you had to go to work to get paid.
You had to be there.
The problem was not that there wasn't an efficient way to shut clams.
The problem was not that we didn't quite have the technology to build exoskeletons that you could, you know, powered exoskeletons that you could wear to work.
None of these things were the problem.
He could surmount these problems.
No, the problem was he had to get up and go to work every day, and he was trying to – and that would remain true.
Yeah.
Even after we'd put a man on the moon.
Right.
And what he couldn't – There's a man on the moon, but he's still got to go to work and shuck a clam.
Right.
What are you doing for me, Buzz Aldrin?
He wasn't thinking past –
his current iteration as a, as a, uh, as a clamsman either.
He wasn't, you know, he, we weren't sitting in that apartment and he wasn't saying one day I'm going to own a record label or one day I'm going to be the, you know, the, the first man on Mars.
He, you know, his vision was,
I think he felt that building an exoskeleton was maybe a more immediate possibility than it actually was.
He hadn't read the papers.
Well, if it were me, I would realize I am to some extent sniffing my own farts.
I have a long history of getting very, very into something way more than makes a ton of sense, but I'm so intoxicated with the idea that I'll tend to kind of look past the parts of it that aren't as practical because I'm so excited and buoyed by the idea of, in this case, having a Sigourney Weaver suit.
Yeah, if you think about, I mean, right now at Boston Dynamics, there's someone walking up and down the halls.
They're going to be so sorry.
They're walking up and down the halls in a robot suit with a shucking knife looking for a clam.
They might have taught those goddamn dogs how to do it at this point.
We don't know what they're doing because they only post videos after they've already made the terrifying thing.
But the deeply terrifying things that are, I guess, in their basement, they don't even seem to have a basement.
Oh, I don't even – well, the dogs.
Like, you know me.
Real life, I love a dog.
I say hello to every dog.
I say, hey, buddy, to every dog.
And then sometimes I'm not usually this outgoing, but I'll say, is it okay if I say hi to your dog?
And I put out my fist because I love dogs.
Now, the Boston Dynamics dogs –
You can already tell that they're going to be in whatever we use for film strips in the future to explain how it all began.
We thought it was cute.
We thought it was cute to have an electronic dog.
But then we taught it how to become a clamsman, and then we couldn't turn it back.
Yeah, some of us thought it was never cute.
I think it's eldritch horror, John.
The first time I saw any of those Boston Dynamics things.
You can't knock them down?
You ever try to knock one of those down?
Do they tear the doorknob off?
The dogs tear the doorknobs off?
Ha, ha, ha.
Have you never watched any science fiction movies, you people?
No, you have.
You surely have.
You just had weird... Have you ever watched the third act of a science fiction movie is the question.
Weird blinders on, you know, like you're... Yeah, America only watches the first two-thirds of every movie.
This is the problem.
Don't build the murder things.
It should have been right there when you signed the contract.
They were like, would you like to build murder things?
You should have said, ah, no.
No.
No, don't do that.
Don't just come up with a different thing.
One of the drones they used the other day, it's a take on the Hellfire.
Oh, yeah.
That's a good take.
Did you read with the six blades?
Did you read about this?
No, tell me about the six blade take on the Hellfire.
Yeah, it's like a Gillette.
Fuck it, we're doing six blades.
It's a Hellfire.
There's all kinds of different Hellfires that you can get different attachments to.
Most of them look like Doctor Who's Sonic, excuse me, The Doctor's Sonic Screwdriver.
But in this case, you can go look, I think it's called the RN95 or something like that.
Oh, the RN95.
Well, go look on the Hellfire page on the Internet Science site.
But the notion is there's no ordinance, right?
So when this thing, it's an unusual missile in the sense that, yeah, it gets shot, I think, from a drone.
It's an over-the-horizon attack, as they say.
I know you love those.
I do.
You said it had eight blades.
Is that right?
Yeah.
Six.
Six blades?
No, for Christmas, they're releasing them with eight blades.
And that little soapy strip.
Yeah.
And instead of exploding, it just is horrific.
It just chops them up?
It just chops them up?
It's like, imagine like you've got fins.
And supposedly this is top secret, but it's not really top secret.
And what you see will be renderings of what we imagine it looks like.
Knowing what we know about the Hellfire, but it's got these six, imagine like the blades of like a Wile E. Coyote bomb, except it's got these big blades like up near the nose and it just crushes and just shreds whatever it hits.
And if you see what an automobile looks like when this thing hits it, it's almost scarier than an explosion.
It's very medieval.
Hmm.
What were we talking about with the suit?
Oh, it's the R9X.
It's the R9X.
It's got a halo of six long blades.
Wall Street Journal had a piece that I got to read the first three paragraphs of.
Well, that's exciting.
There's a thing John Syracuse taught me.
My worst friend, John, taught me that I have come to really appreciate.
And he calls it the XY problem.
I mean, I don't think he named it.
But I don't know if we talked about this.
That seems like a pretty generic name for a problem that's on an XY axis.
Well, I do it a lot.
So let's say, for example, the XY problem in this case might be, I mean, I don't want to presume what Shannon's X is, but it's when you ask, one way to think of this, and the way it applies to me so often, is I ask for fairly detailed advice from somebody I consider an expert to teach me how to solve or fix X, but I never told them that the thing I'm really trying to accomplish is Y.
okay and so you can get a lot more expertise and usefulness if instead of and i do this all the time with people especially like with customer support people because i think i'm smart oh i think here's the problem you know and it's it's one of those things where you try to be smart and yet instead you end up dumb because and i'm not saying shannon did this i am very intrigued by this suit i would love to see the schematics if he ever puts that out i will buy that book
But like in that case is, well, what is it you're trying to solve here?
Are you trying to solve like I don't want to go to work or are you trying to solve like I want a cool suit?
Because there's probably – the answer to why is probably a lot less complicated than the suit, although it's not nearly as fun as the X of the suit.
I think you've zoomed in on a couple of things.
I mean definitely what he wanted was not to have to go to work to get more sleep.
What we really did then, what our jobs really were, was to go get messed up every night.
And go on messed up adventures as people who were... Urban ninjas.
Who were messed up.
And, you know, I was always a... I was never an urban ninja.
I was never more than like an urban community college English professor.
Yeah.
So, you know, when the superhero team all got together, you know, Shannon was like, and then, you know, Dave Emiliano Mitchell was like, and then I showed up like, you know, a bunch of papers fell out of a file onto the floor.
Yeah, if I capture enough coins from this, will I get to get tenure?
I need a second elbow patch.
But Shannon definitely perceived in his interactions with the city that he could benefit from
An exoskeleton because we were I wouldn't say that we were always getting in fights, but there were a lot of zombies in Seattle then.
Right.
You know, like Seattle's zombie population goes up and then it goes down.
It goes up and it's up.
Right.
Urban street zombies here.
It was then.
And this was, you know, early 90s.
It was it was peak peak zombie certain kind of zombie.
And so Shannon always felt – every time he walked – I mean we all did.
Every time you walk out of the house at a certain hour of the day or night, it felt like you were kind of going into a combat situation.
So Shannon was already up-armoring himself all the time.
He had – he wasn't quite wearing football pads.
But when he watched Escape from New York or Road Warrior, he was –
Yeah, he was aspiring to a time when we all anticipated this is the other failure of science fiction.
You assume that the dystopia is not only inevitable, but it's going to look a certain way.
And everybody's going to, you know, like they're going to be fighting over the hockey pads in the abandoned mall because you're going to need hockey pads.
Yeah.
And it's not going to be a dystopia like this one where you're just trying to get – you've been denied access to your Facebook account or whatever and your world comes to an end.
So he was always up-armoring with all this found shin pads or whatnot.
He definitely wanted the robot suit for that.
But the real problem he was trying to figure out is how not to be poor.
Oh, that's the why.
Yeah, this was the problem we all had that we didn't know that there was a solution to.
But he felt like he was going to game it.
They didn't see him coming.
And he was going to end up not being poor because he had built a suit to do his work while he slept inside it.
Okay.
Not that he had learned how not to be poured by building a suit and selling the suit.
Building the suit and selling it to the government to use it.
So if he went on Shark Tank, Mr. Wonderful would say, okay, I'm going to give you this money.
I want to get money back from each unit you sell.
But ultimately, I think we should sell the license to make the Ninja Clamsman exoskeleton.
And then he would say, no way.
I'm here for the suit, brah.
In a way, right?
He was...
He was ahead of the Boston dynamic.
I mean, somewhere at that point in time, 1991, there were some people our age who were in a room in Boston and they were like sketching out an exoskeleton and thinking, how do we make this work?
Shannon should have been with them.
He should have figured out a way.
He should have ridden his bike across the country and joined that elite team.
Hmm.
And he would be there making murder dogs now.
He might have been the savior of humanity.
I suspect it's too late at this point.
At this point, probably the dogs are running Boston.
I think Shannon would have happily contributed to the murder dogs.
He would not.
Really?
No, he would have been happy to.
Once he learned that...
a he could build murder dogs and b that he could be on the other side of the control panel like he could run the murder dogs see it's that now i don't want to say again i'm not going to say this is shannon i have not met the man but there is a certain conceit to this this goes back to to frankenstein's monster right there's this conceit that like oh i'll be able to hand i'll be able to handle this
You know what I'm saying?
This will all be fine because I'm a real smart guy with access to lightning and some brains.
I'd be normal.
Like I'm going to be able to make this the way that it's never going to become a murder dog.
And then maybe at some point you actually become a little bit enamored of the murder doggery.
Knowing Shannon, I believe he would have gone in eyes open trying to make murder dogs, never looking for a peaceful murder.
It was a different time, John.
It really was.
I think it's – and that's a phrase that does not get you a lot of cred nowadays to say it was a different time.
It's a different time.
But for Shannon, it would have been a different time.
He hadn't seen – he didn't know from Murder Dogs at that point.
He had not been through what we've been through.
I mean not to make it dark, but I think if you pulled a lot of people in Berlin in say 1929-30 –
You know, they would have bet on a different 30s coming down the pike.
I think that Shannon was trying to was in a way ultimately trying to solve what he imagined was a future zombie problem.
We had we had X zombies in 1993.
What would make anyone think that there wouldn't be twice that many zombies in 1997?
Right?
I mean, you're just – I mean, that's just – that's how it would work.
I mean, that's biology, right?
I think it's biology.
Except what happened was like a money wave came in in 2000 – whenever that was – seven or something.
Whenever the money wave came in.
The money wave.
Was it 2007?
Yeah.
They backed up the money truck, and then the money washed away all the zombies for a while.
One day a real rain is going to come wash all the zombies off.
The zombies washed back in.
It's basically an estuary.
Zombie title problem.
Tidal estuary.
Estuary, is that where salt and fresh water are exchanged?
Yeah, I believe so.
Is there an estuary?
An estuary is where a river runs into the sea and makes a sort of twisty, twiny.
You know, the Mississippi ran backwards yesterday.
I saw that.
I was watching the hurricane.
I saw that.
That's interesting.
Did you see that one where the roof tore off in little bits?
It's the one that kept showing over and over.
It looked like Inception.
It was wild, man.
Yeah, the funny thing was they kept showing it over and over.
So, yeah, you couldn't miss it.
And every time they didn't credit, I'd say, credit Megan.
Megan took that.
It feels like right now, as a hurricane watcher.
Hurricane watcher.
Oh, you come from a weather family, John.
You and your mom.
Hurricane watcher.
Hurricane watcher.
Yes.
Everyone loves a big storm up here.
And we're getting real tired of fires.
But the problem with Ida pummeling Louisiana and all the live updates is that there were a lot of live updates last night at 1 in the morning.
And I don't see that they've been – they have not been updated fast enough for me or in enough detail for me.
It's like, yeah, okay, there's power out.
Right, got it.
But like show me the money shot.
Right.
Show me the basement's full of water.
I don't want to see that same roof blow off over and over.
I want to see Ida pummeling Louisiana.
Like, where's it at?
It always comes in at night.
That's kind of the path of the bummer, right?
And they got to place their poor people.
I made a joke about this on the internet yesterday, but it's like, you know, quoting here, like, hello, I've been sent by, you know, an East Coast media operation to stand in the hurricane and tell you why you should never stand in the hurricane.
They have some and they got to get the right shots.
You CNN, you could tell CNN had such a hard on for this one stop sign.
There's this one leaning stop sign and it kept showing the guy in front of the stop sign.
And every time you're watching it the whole time, you know, it's like waiting for a loose tooth, you know, to come out.
You're like, oh, that thing's going to go any second.
And they kept coming back to the shots with the stop sign because, you know, they wanted to be there when the stop sign just blew.
Yeah, they were waiting.
Yeah.
I mean, I don't like to I don't like to have other people's misery be my entertainment.
But weather's fascinating.
Well, but it's not the misery per se to me.
It's the awesomeness of nature stuff.
The awesomeness of nature.
Stuff, yeah.
The awesomeness of nature as it collides with our hubris.
Like that's the part that I – do you remember the big storm that hit Singapore or something or it was – or Hong Kong?
There was a storm that just went right in to a major Asian city.
Like a typhoon?
A typhoon.
Yeah, those are rough.
Watching the storm interact with these giant buildings that just –
Or where people looked like they were a safe distance away and there was plenty of real estate between them and the water and then the water just goes whoosh.
Well, there was, you know, that whole tidal wave thing.
But this was one where it was the wind was just, you know, or whatever the tornado was in Texas that actually like hit a skyscraper.
Like those are the ones that I really, you know, like watching, watching like a, like a small house get blown away.
There's no, there's nothing fun in that, but watching like a dam get overtopped or a, or a skyscraper get thrashed.
It just, it, um, I don't, I have to say to myself every day, every time I pick up schadenfreude, I go, no, put it down.
Leave it.
And then I go, but, but, but.
It's like, no, put the Schadenfreude down.
No, you're not allowed to play with that.
And then I go, but I want to play with it.
No.
Put it down.
But I can't.
I can't resist it.
Everywhere I look, there's schadenfreude.
Or at least the promise.
Stuff like, you know, you should have gotten vaccinated type stuff.
Oh, all of that stuff.
I fight that one.
I hate it in myself.
Instant karma, instant karma.
You walk around and it doesn't exist.
There is no such thing.
There is no schadenfreude.
Try not to celebrate anyone's misery if you can.
No, of course not.
But at the same time, it's just sitting right there.
Yeah, I know.
It's just sitting right there.
It's like somebody...
I didn't manifest it.
It happened out in the world.
But it doesn't.
It never does.
It never does in any way that's satisfying because that's not the way the universe works.
Nobody really gets their comeuppance.
Bad things happen to good people.
Good things happen to bad people.
Like, you never get a belly rub out of the universe.
The universe is always, you're always like, oh, it's tantalizingly, oh, this sandwich is going to end.
And it's like, nope, it's covered with sand.
You never get it.
So you can't, but at the same time, I'm always chasing this little schadenfreude around my house going, oh, come here, come here, come here, come here.
And it just stays right out of my fingers.
You know, my friend, Brian...
is a firefighter here in Seattle.
And he became a medic.
He joined the fire department right after 9-11.
And he's younger than me by a handful of years.
But we knew each other in the early 90s.
A very talented guy, just a smart and funny, gentle-hearted man.
Um, and somebody that like, there's a part of me that just will always love him, you know?
And, but there was, but he also like in this culture of friends that we had where everybody was kind of trying to be an artist, you know, he sort of tried to be an artist and he made these wonderful little clay sculptures of, uh, lizards that were, um,
still alive, but had been plated and were in the process of being eaten.
So it was like, it was like a little clay lizard and it was cut into, the lizard was cut into, so its viscera was there, but the lizard was looking at you at the same time.
They were pretty twisted.
And they were wonderful.
And it was like, if lightning had struck him in a certain way, if somebody had come along and said, I'll give you $2,500 for that, but it never quite...
He didn't get the – like the art thing didn't grab him around the ankles.
He was the one that was spearheading the whole change the billboards gang.
Oh, Culture Jam.
Culture Jam.
We used to climb up on the billboards and make the anti-abortion billboard say something whimsical or the – he was really against –
big trucks so he would get up on those billboards that were selling trucks and he'd be like oh i don't have a big enough penis or whatever you know he was oh a big truck like you'd buy from ford yeah a big ford truck anyway after 9-11 brian went and joined the fire department and i and i was like the fire department really like i
the world we're living in the, our little Capitol Hill, like go to alternative theater world was so far away culturally from the fire department.
And after nine 11, I looked into joining the military.
I was, I was just under the age cut off.
You know, I was like one year young enough that I could still join up.
And I, you know, and I had of course a blown out knee.
I had all these like
things that they would have said, wow, no.
I don't think I ever knew this.
But I considered it.
Yeah, it just felt like I'd always, because I've always admired the services and I've been fascinated by military culture.
It plays a large role in my cosmology.
And I thought, maybe this is it.
Maybe this is the time that I join up and
Do my part.
I'm always trying to think of ways to – not think of ways.
There are lots of ways.
But I'm always trying to do my part.
It's important to you to make yourself useful, it feels like.
Yeah, and it ended up that there was zero need for me with my broken knee and my bad eyes and my 35-year-oldness to join the military.
But Brian, who was 30 –
joined the fire department and he became a firefighter.
And, you know, it's like being a community college professor.
You don't just get to pick where you go.
They send you places.
And so he's fighting fires out in Kitsap County.
He's stationed at some fire department out in, uh, in the boonies.
And, um, eventually he makes his way through the system to Seattle.
And I kept thinking he was never gonna, he was never gonna, um,
Go all the way with this.
At what point are you going to quit the fire department?
Because you've got to be kidding me.
I mean, it's great.
It's wonderful.
Thank God you're there.
But firemen have mustaches.
Firemen live in suburban housing developments.
Firemen do not typically vote.
Make big pots of chili.
They do.
They don't vote Democrat or –
I had a friend after high school who had a series of nervous breakdowns and became a volunteer fireman.
He learned scuba and he became a volunteer firefighter.
I think it might have been for the uniforms, but I'm not sure.
You would get a call from home.
Does anybody live at a fire station with a pole anymore?
No.
Yeah, they do.
They do.
I think you do shifts that are 48 hours and then you go home for three days.
I get it.
Mike Squires is a volunteer fireman up in Hudson, New York somewhere.
No kidding.
Yeah, and if your house caught on fire and then all of a sudden you looked out and there was Mike Squires struggling up a ladder, you'd be like, come on.
What the hell?
There's no such thing as a retired firefighter.
Brian's very strong, you know.
Can you imagine?
You're saying Mike would be like groaning?
Mike's like, oh, God, when you get out of here yourself, God, throw me the cat.
I call first floor.
You know, so Brian becomes a medic because being a fireman, like I say, the number of progressive, like politically progressive firemen in the in the in the King County area, which is one of the most progressive counties in the country.
Like firemen are still coming in from out of town with their out of town attitudes.
Around here, they make the cops look like hippies.
Yeah, well, and even the gay cops and the gay firemen that you would think would progressivize the department are just –
are just pinched-faced, grouchy hicks like they're straight counterparts.
It's the fireman and cop.
They're droogs.
They're basically droogs.
Yeah.
It trumps whatever your other orientations are, right?
Yeah.
If you're a fireman, you're a fireman.
So Brian becomes a medic.
He's like, I guess, you know, sitting in the –
Fire department, there's a lot of just sort of casual lack of progressivism.
A lot of casual racism.
And so he goes in and then he's doing medic.
So medic is like you're always busy.
There's always somebody that's ODing or somebody that's having a heart attack or somebody that calls the medic because they're lonely.
You're driving around all the time.
You keep busy.
And, um, and he, you know, he'd settled into a life because the medics cycle around the fire departments at different, uh, at different speeds than, you know, it's like, it's like circles within circles.
And he, um, he took on a leadership role and this whole time I was very impressed.
You know, I'm very impressed that he, he's the type of person that would commit to a thing and then follow, follow through on it.
And he was following through on this way past the cosplay that I initially thought it was.
Right.
Like the post 9-11.
You thought it would be like a phase.
Well, how many people joined the military in 2002 and then got out as soon as they could?
I mean, probably a lot because, you know, that initial wave of like, I'm going to go fight the crusade.
You could probably buy a shirt, you know.
You could buy a shirt, yeah.
Well, no, I mean, like, that's, as with a, I mean, sorry, I don't mean to sound callous, but as with a firefighter, a professional firefighter and a professional soldier, I mean, there's a reason that that can sometimes be a patrilineal sort of occupation.
I mean, it helps to have a certain kind of the right stuff for that job.
Do you know what I mean?
Like, you've got to be a little different from other people to have those jobs.
Yeah.
I have a nephew who's a firefighter in a small town in Ohio.
And if you can imagine the political tenor of a fire station in small town Ohio.
No thanks.
Boy.
They really cover the whole breadth of ideas.
And he's really – and my nephew is very much like –
He, I think he enjoys the work and I think that it's, you know, there's a lot of cats.
You got to get out of trees and houses that you have to stop from burning.
Brian was doing medic stuff and I think it just, you know, like any healthcare provider, the, the, the routine starts to drag on you.
It's like another OD, another, and it's part of what contributes to the collective firefighter mentality because, you know,
You see people at their worst.
I'm always intrigued by jobs where you frequently encounter people who are having their worst day.
And that could be something as basic as me trying to get a replacement for a canceled flight.
The customer service people, the person who has to deal with the lost luggage, they're always dealing with angry people who are having a terrible day.
And I'm not about to cut that over much slack for cops, but even if you're a totally cool, doing-your-job cop, you're still going to meet a lot of people who are having their worst day.
And how could that not have an impact on how you look at other people?
It really – and I think with the police in particular, the training that is necessary to go into departments and say, look, everybody you're meeting is having their worst day.
But your job is not to approach them as though they're doing something wrong, right?
The police –
If you go out into the world every day, assuming everybody that you meet is a criminal, you're going to manifest crime everywhere you are.
Oh, sure.
Yeah, absolutely.
And so the challenge is to go out into the world where everybody you meet is having their worst day and assume nothing about them, but realize that your job, your purpose here is to ameliorate that rather than
to increase the pressure.
If you recruited those people, basically the idea is saying you're going to become a professional at harm reduction, I think you'd get a very different sort of person showing up.
With firefighters and medics, I think it's, you know, the class division really comes into play because the people that are having emergencies are, you know, you very less frequently get called to put out a fire.
Like a crack pipe fire or something.
Something you could judge.
The fire trucks are not always running down the main street of Medina because somebody's having a – somebody's ODing.
But there are neighborhoods in Seattle where the fire trucks are there every day.
And poverty is the root cause of that disease, of the disease that they're –
And the firemen just see that.
That's all they see.
And so they come to think of whole stretches of the population as just being like, you know, it's the – if you live in the suburbs and you look at the city and you go, eh, they're all scumbags.
Like you can't – you can hardly fault them.
It's just that you have to because that ends up what's happening.
But so Brian at a certain point –
And I think partly because he's there and he doesn't know what else to do, he gets promoted.
Because you know what it's like if you have a job and you're like, huh, what am I doing in this job?
It's like maybe I should try and be the manager of this department where I don't really know what I'm doing here.
And that's, you know, that's why we get CEOs.
He wouldn't be the first.
And then COVID happens.
And nobody here in Washington knows exactly what to do, like nobody anywhere, except we were ground zero Seattle for the first COVID.
Right, that's like the first patient, the first discovered U.S.
case, right?
Right.
And so the mayor and the fire chief, just trying to figure out what to do, picked Brian out of a
you know, out of just a handful of kind of lieutenants standing around a medic and a lieutenant and said, Hey, figure out, um, you know, how we can do some testing to figure out, you know, like basically they threw, they, they threw this idea at him and it was a, it was a, an undefined mandate at first, just like,
We have a problem.
COVID is here.
We don't know how to tell it from the background noise.
Like, what should we do?
Sort this out.
And in a very, very short amount of time, Brian had figured out that he could train firefighters to test people for COVID.
And no one else was doing this.
Nobody else saw this as a...
as a firefighter job.
Test people.
You mean like just where you happen to be like out in the field and hey, you want a COVID test?
Well, initially, right?
You're, you're trying to, you go to a, you go to fight a fire and you're, you know, you're, you know, you're dealing with people that might have COVID.
I see.
But very, very quickly he set up a system where citywide you could go down to,
you know five or six locations in the city and get a free covet test administered by a fire firefighter or a medic and get the results in a couple of days this is you know this is march april 2020 and interestingly right at that just a few months before the state of washington had
finally decided that the emissions testing that we'd been doing for 20 years or longer, where every two years you had to take your car in and hook it up to a machine and make sure it's not polluting.
Yeah.
And that was how you got your tabs.
The state of Washington said this program, which was originally designed to get all these old smoky garbage cars off the road and
has been a smashing success and there are no garbage cars on the road.
Now, the number of cars that fail their emissions test is so small that it's not worth having this whole system, this incredible apparatus.
I see.
And part of that must be a change in the kind of automobiles that get manufactured.
I mean, even, well, and even a 10, 15 year old automobile now still is, you know, it hasn't,
It's not like my GMCs.
Yeah.
It's not going to be like an El Camino from the mid-70s or something.
Yeah.
Well, and even mine that was built with a catalytic converter.
I mean, at a certain point, that catalytic converter rusted off and fell on the ground.
But, you know, I am such a small, small percentage of the problem.
And so they closed all the...
It's amazing to think that they could have kept it open and it's just a money generator and a problem for everybody.
I was going to say, I bet there's a lot of pushback from the gas stations or whoever.
You can get it at a gas station here.
Is it like an official freestanding thing in Washington?
Yeah, it was a whole system.
It was almost like a DMV kind of thing?
It was.
Satellites?
Wow.
It was a big facility.
You went on a certain day.
You lined up in a big line of cars.
You went up.
They did the whole thing.
So the only – I mean the government was profiting from it.
But like how often does a bureaucracy just decide to dismantle itself?
Oh, right.
It's not done.
I didn't know that was a thing.
Around the town, we had these sites where it was basically you could line up 50 cars.
There were little booths.
You could drive up into a covered area.
There was a person in a booth.
that used to check your emissions, but now was going to stick a swab in your nose and get, and test you for COVID.
That's incredibly progressive in its thinking.
And so Brian became, Brian, Brian was the person that developed this whole system for the counter, for the, for the city, for the city.
And so in Seattle, throughout the pandemic, going and get, getting your COVID test was a,
a pretty painless stay in your car.
The firefighters and medics were all having a great time.
They were out there listening to their music.
They were always funny and it was never, it never felt scary.
And this system became like the one thing about the COVID response up here that you just, that had no
It was flawless, right?
It was something that we all came to depend upon.
If you needed a COVID test, you went down there, and then they sent you your results in your email two days later.
And it was in conjunction with the University of Washington.
We were lucky to have the university here that was doing the processing.
It's amazing this succeeded.
It's incredible.
Well, it succeeded, and all of a sudden, Brian is...
In the news, because it's like, how is this working?
What is happening?
Like, where did this come from?
Most places didn't think of COVID testing as a city responsibility.
You know, it was all done other ways, right?
And not efficiently.
Somebody else will take care of this.
Right.
And for profit or whatever.
It was difficult.
And so Brian becomes like the person that they go to with the microphone, like, tell us about this.
And Brian's very photogenic and he's very charismatic.
Yeah.
And so all of a sudden, you know, he's running this whole system and he's only a lieutenant.
So they had to, you know, there are a lot of people reporting to him that have seniority over him that, you know, fire departments are very seniority oriented.
Right.
They've got to like realign his, uh, his position or like recategorize him, I guess.
Right.
Right.
So they gave him a, like a wartime, a brevet, uh, promotion to captain.
So he became a captain in the fire department and he's too young to be a captain.
He hasn't done it.
He's not like, um, uh,
He doesn't have, there are all these people.
He's because like normally you'd move up by, I'm guessing that normally you move up in a structure like that by having managed more people and then having managed people well, and then they give you more people to manage, et cetera, et cetera.
Except in this case, his is, it's less of person management and more of like programmatic project management.
Yeah.
But he wouldn't have the respect of other captains if he just got turboed up over a lot of people that were a lot older.
One of the wonderful things about the U.S.
military is that if you haven't screwed up, you will get promoted.
You're going to get promoted as you get older and as you've had the job for a certain number of years.
The only reason you don't get promoted is if there's a reason –
Like, you have to fail.
Success is baked in.
And that's true up to a certain point.
Like, in the military, you will get promoted automatically up to a certain point.
And then you have to start demonstrating, you know, they're not going to automatically promote you to lieutenant colonel.
You're going to have to demonstrate some kind of leadership beyond just showing up.
Right.
But I've met a lot of people in the U.S.
military who had been promoted as far as captain who – Army captain.
Army captain.
Right.
Not Navy captain.
Army captain.
Everyone who worked with them.
Two gold bars?
Two silver bars.
Two gold is second lieutenant.
Gold bars.
Two gold bars.
Two gold bars.
Two silver bars.
Two silver bars.
I'm spacing.
I'm spacing on this.
I know a captain in the Navy is like a colonel in the Army.
I'm thinking about Hawkeye.
I feel like he's got silver.
I think the gold bar, the gold bar lieutenant...
is the lower rated of the two lieutenants, and the silver bar is the higher ranking lieutenant.
Never mind.
Keep going.
I'm sorry.
I'm confused.
I went to Navy military school.
Yeah, right.
So I know about ensigns and stuff.
And I think it's really irresponsible to have two different kinds of captains.
That's like being a chiropodist and calling yourself a doctor.
No offense.
Yeah.
Anyways, he's spearheaded or helped spearhead this amazing effort during the pandemic.
And I think in the fire department, even more than the military, the people that get promoted are not necessarily...
The shining stars.
They're more like the mustache Pete's that have just been clinging to the thing.
You know, it's why you see so many, so many fire department officers who are like, haven't climbed a ladder in a long time.
Um, they really throw their weight around.
And Brian just hadn't done the, he just hadn't done the time.
Um, so, but he's not, you know, he's not a, he's not enough.
official captain it's a brevet promotion but he's he's definitely like got people reporting to him that didn't expect to be reporting to this this young pretty boy who's suddenly running the whole show and so I had Brian over the other night with a couple of friends we hadn't seen each other in a long time Brian's been very busy he's running the entire city he's saved the world
And we're sitting around and we're having fun and we're just good to see each other.
And we ordered a pizza.
Scott Musgrove was here.
Scott, we can all agree on cheese.
Musgrove was here.
Oh, there you go.
And Scott, at some point along – this is the thing about doing a podcast.
You never know.
You never know.
And so we're sitting around.
We've all known each other since –
I mean, I've known Scott since 1991, like 30 years I've known Scott.
Like we're, we are tight bros in a way that like, like we went to high school together.
You know, we, we can not see each other for a year and it's never going to take a, take it away.
There's nothing he could say or I could say that would ever change our friendship for the worst.
I mean, we can only get to be better friends.
And we're sitting here.
It was like, what should we get?
Oh, let's get a pizza.
It's easy to do.
All right.
And we're putting it together.
And Scott says, well, we can all agree on cheese.
You're kidding.
And somehow, and he, this is Scott's sense of humor.
Very dry, very low, low simmer.
At some point in the last however many years, we can all agree on cheese made it back to Scott.
Oh boy.
And he listened.
He listened to the show.
Oh my God.
And he never said anything to me.
He's had that in his quiver for that long.
He's been waiting.
Just waiting.
Waiting meant not just to do a good line, but to have the patience to wait until actual ordering of pizza was happening.
What are the chances?
On one hand, maybe his heart was beating really fast because it was like, finally.
I've been waiting to say, well, I've never kippled.
For 45 years, and no one has ever asked me if I like Kipling.
And it's there.
It's waiting.
All I need is somebody to say, do you like Kipling?
It has never happened.
I think it's the most popular postcard of all time.
Yeah, it's still a great postcard.
It's a great postcard.
But he says, well, we can all agree on cheese.
And everybody in the room says,
You know, I look around.
Of course, everybody's heard it because if Scott's heard it, they've all talked about it.
Right.
It's just four of us.
It's just Brian Scott, Michael and me.
So if if Scott's making this joke, Brian's heard it already for sure.
And so has Michael.
You know, it's like somehow it made its way to them.
It was a great moment.
And, you know, I didn't acknowledge it.
I was like, oh, we'll get a cheese.
Get a cheese, we'll get a pepperoni.
Didn't just let it... If he's going to slow roll me that long, I'm going to slow roll him right back.
Didn't even give him the satisfaction.
That was cool, John.
That was cool.
I was like, okay, a cheese, pepperoni.
It was nice.
How'd he respond?
How'd he respond?
Exactly.
As you would expect Scott to do, not even a raised eyebrow.
He played it off legit.
Jesus Christ.
And then the pizza came, and there was a cheese pizza, and there was...
Pepperoni pizza.
It was delivered by Dan Harmon.
We talked happily.
All the great pizzas.
But the point of this story was that as we were sitting there with Brian, and partly the party was to celebrate Brian because he'd had
a tremendous couple of years or year and a half.
He'd done all this hard work.
He'd, he'd, he'd not just done a good job for himself, but he'd like actually helped people the rarest experience as a professional person to like, you know, you, you've done well, my son.
And at a certain point we said, you know, we're talking and congratulating him and we're having a good time.
And I said, but the thing was,
maybe you did too good of a job, don't you think?
Like, where's the schadenfreude?
Weren't there supposed to be, weren't the bad people supposed to get COVID?
Like, did you protect us too well?
Oh, I see.
And we all sat and kind of stared at our shoes and thought long and hard about,
The fact that, yeah, maybe he could have eased up a little bit a couple of times.
Maybe he could have – maybe he could have –
you know, transmitted a variant instead of just protecting it.
There are times when something like this happens.
There's times when there's stuff like, think about the way the computer security works or whatever, and you sometimes think like, wow, it's going to take somebody rich and white and famous.
It's going to take a bunch of rich, white, famous men being affected by this before something happens.
And I won't say it out loud in the same way that you just did, but there's been a fuckton of times, not out of schadenfreude, but out of an abundance of, we need to stop this.
It's like, man, how many people, like rich white guys need to die before we take this seriously?
And there were times when you're like, I can't believe they survived that.
I can't believe they survived that.
And it's all the poor black people and brown people who are dying.
And you're like, fuck, this is like, I swear to God, I'm not this person.
But there's this part of me that thinks we could have gotten out of this easier and earlier if it had been taken seriously by seeing people like that get it.
I feel very ashamed thinking, but I do think that.
I am the type of person to say that out loud, and I really was – in the end, all three of us really turned on Brian and were like, you could have stopped this whole thing a lot sooner if you had just let the disease go into certain quadrants.
You could have just Johnny Appleseeded it and –
You blew it.
You know, like how did it get into the White House, make everybody sick, and then nobody of consequence perished?
Like where – my little schadenfreude –
bear is running around this house i can't even i couldn't even get a glimpse of it during that period i was like i know you're in this house it said he's like the little he's like a little snuggle bear yeah yeah snuggle bear and i was like just please just please let me pet you
So how do you respond?
How do you respond to that?
You know, I asked him if I could interview him for a podcast.
I was thinking the same thing.
And he said, I'm still an officer of the... I'm still like a captain in the Seattle Fire Department.
I can't go on your...
rinky dink little podcast and talk shit about the oh he's probably not clear to talk about it like it's in the rear view right but also like i i've got a friend who um who's you know like a like a fairly high-placed military officer now that i asked if he would come on the podcast and he said i i
I am forbidden to come on your podcast.
It would be an idiotic move for me, suicidal even, for me to come on your show and let you ask me impolitic questions because like –
My job requires that I not comment on any of those things that you would love me to comment on that we could talk about in private.
Especially if you want to talk about drones, right?
And it's the same with Brian.
He's like, you know, we can sit around here.
We have a good laugh.
But I, you know, like I'm on TV tomorrow.
Like there's no way I'm going to be on your silly ass show.
This is why all of you people keep not getting picked for game shows.
Oh, interesting, because you're creating receipts, as they say.
Yeah, don't create receipts.
And I feel like I can tell this story about Brian on the show.
Because, you know, everybody that listens to the show knows that I make up all these stories.
It's 100% false stories.
It's never caused a problem for you, for somebody to not be sure how much of something is true or not.
Ten years of doing the show, and every one of our listeners knows...
That it's a make-believe show full of make-believe stories.
I think your show, your anecdotes exist in a quantum state of some kind, where they're on the one hand a thousand percent true, and on the other hand a thousand percent false.
And I'm not sure what cracks that nut, but just because you say it on the show doesn't make it one way or the other.
It does not end the mystery.
That's right.
That's right.
In this sense, consciousness is not the observer that's going to determine the state of the story.
It's something else.
It might not even be a cat.
In the box.
No, I got the cat in the box.
No, it's not a cat.
It's not a cat.
It's a Schrodinger's snuggle bear.
I love you.
You can't catch me.
I'm too fast for you.
You can't catch me.