Ep. 602: "Cinnamon Toast"
Hello.
Hi, John.
Hi, Merlin.
Good morning, Captain.
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whoo yeah i know what would the first thing that was different be oh geez it's early i'm trying to figure out how to make this either funny or serious or funny yeah i know serious or funny you know there'd be extra fingers that was serious and funny ai slob
Slop.
Slop.
Slop's a word I learned.
Well, it's everything now.
Everything's slop.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I suppose.
I'm going to close this window.
I don't know, man.
You know, everybody wants you to do stuff.
How you doing?
You were out last week, and now you're here.
Oh, yeah.
I was sick.
I was sick for two weeks.
Like it used to be before the pandemic.
Like in the regular days when you just get colds?
Back in the old days when you get a cold and then, you know, like me, it's like you have a sniffle and you're like, okay, everybody else would be over this in two days, but I'm about to go on a Nantucket sleigh ride.
Where I'm every kind of sick and then I feel better and I go out one night and then I get ten times more sick.
That's how they get you.
And then my ears are plugged up and then my eyebrows fall out.
Oh, no, you know, just everything.
Yeah, you can't go out like that.
No.
And so I've just and the thing is, no matter what I do, if I sleep for 18 hours a day and and say my prayers.
it's basically i get just exactly as sick as if i just sat and ate donuts you know with my bare ass in the snow so donuts come up a lot yeah they're one of the great things i was going to ask you if they're if donuts represent an intrusive thought but i guess the better question is are they an intrusive food
Yeah, donuts are one of those things where... I'm like that.
I have foods that are just on my mind.
Yeah, if there's a donut, I'll eat it.
And I'll eat a second donut.
But I've never felt better after eating a second donut.
Well, because then you also have the opportunity to be a gentleman and stop.
Two is a good amount of donuts to eat.
Now, here's the thing, and this reminds me a little bit of the 1980s when everybody would talk about how much they hated homosexuals, when obviously a lot of those people were, in fact, well, if they weren't homosexuals, they were, to quote my friend Sam's dad, missing their best bet.
Yeah, they were friends of Dorothy.
They were fellow travelers, and I, so sometimes this lady doth protest too much.
And they'll say, hey, donuts.
And I'll go like, no, I'm good.
Because the problem is...
If I have one donut, I will eat all the donuts.
Yeah.
I'll eat the donuts until there's no more donuts.
Now, some people say this, they make jokes and they crack, and I know GLP-1s are changing everything.
But, like, you know, there are people who say you can't open that bag of chips, you're going to eat all the chips, or, you know, that sleeve of cookies or whatever.
Now, personally, I'm the kind of guy, I open me up a quart of Haagen-Dazs, quart, pint, pint, pint.
I open up a Haagen-Dazs, a standard Haagen-Dazs, and I throw the lid away.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Because you know what?
I got self-knowledge, and to me, that's more valuable than self-esteem.
We got fancy donuts here, like you guys do.
Sure.
Voodoo.
Everybody lines up for them, all the way from Seattle to Portland.
No, thanks.
But we have ones that are called Top Pot Donuts, and they're a couple... Top Pot?
Top Pot?
Top Pot.
T-O-P space P-O-T?
Mm-hmm.
I don't care for that at all.
Well, but the pot in this pot is a pot of coffee.
It's the top pot.
We have an ice cream sandwich here called It's It, and I've never cared for that name either.
Oh, I love an It's It.
Yeah, but I don't care for that name at all.
Anytime I'm driving in the South Bay and I drive past the old It's It factory, I give them a hearty salute.
Well, you know what I like?
I don't know if they even still have it anymore because I don't go places, but on 101, there used to be a really good sign of a cartoon-looking guy smashing a mouse with a mallet.
You ever seen that?
Mm-hmm.
No, but it was like a 3D sculpture thing.
It wasn't just now.
A two-dimensional image of a man hitting a mouse with a mallet is pretty funny because I think he's wearing a top hat.
I'll find it.
The great innovation in Itzit technology lately, I don't know if you know this, is that they now have mini Itzits.
Quit lying to yourself.
You're fucking lying to yourself.
No, it was a real commitment to dig into it.
How big is an Itzit?
Is it the size of a typical ice cream sandwich?
An Itzit is the size of two large chocolate chip cookies with what is probably two huge scoops of ice cream compressed in the middle.
Oh, and is it round like a moon pie?
It's round, yeah.
See, I thought it was rectangular like a blackboard eraser, an African-American board eraser.
No, it's much larger than a hockey puck.
It's like as big as an In-N-Out burger, except it's made of ice cream and cookies.
Okay.
I'm not slagging it off.
It's a meal.
No, no, no, no, no.
I've never had one.
I've only ever seen the science.
The mini-itsits are little.
It's still five bites.
Now, sometimes I like a smaller version of the big thing, and other times I think it's troubling.
I don't like the tiny M&Ms.
I think the form factor of an M&M is fine the way it is.
I know the funny thing about those I do I do you could sprinkle them on ice cream like a Haagen-Dazs after you throw Yeah, but then they get too hard and then you're just crying and then you just got it.
You gave yourself a problem Well, yeah, I like to mix it You got to mix it up because you freeze an M&M and it does become a little bit hard especially with teeth like yours in this economy Here's what you here's the thing about those mini M&Ms.
Okay
M&M, the M&M Mars Company.
Yeah.
Big candy, they call it.
Made slash makes.
A full-sized, I'm talking about like a size of a Cadbury bar, a full-sized candy bar.
Okay.
That is a candy bar of chocolate full of mini peanut M&Ms.
Mini peanut M&Ms.
Now, does a mini peanut M&M only constitute half a nut?
Half a legume?
Legume.
Oh, that's clever.
Wow, talk about technology, John.
I bet they couldn't have done that in the 40s.
Well, they apparently can't do it now because they made this bar.
I discovered the bar.
Nature sowed the seed.
I ate the seed.
You didn't make the rat.
I didn't make the rat.
I discovered this bar, and it is, I'm sorry to say, the greatest candy bar that America has ever produced.
So you get a Cadbury-style bar...
Or, you know, Nestle's Hershey style form factor, but good chocolate.
And inside is mini peanut M&Ms.
That's right.
That could be pretty good.
That's a grown-up taste, but I could love that.
Milk chocolate, yeah.
Milk chocolate.
That's pretty good.
So, so good.
And then the Mars M&M Big Candy, their decision was, let's make this candy bar the hardest thing to find in the world.
Harder than any mystery flavor of Doritos.
Can I beg you not to get me started on this?
Why do people bring good into the world and then make it difficult to find?
And I spend the amount of time I have spent scouring the earth.
I walk at night with a lantern held high.
Looking for either an honest man or a candy bar.
Or this particular candy bar.
And you can find, they make the one with the M&Ms that aren't peanut.
You can find it, although still very hard to find.
Interesting.
But you can find it, and it is amazing.
It's an M&M inside of a chocolate bar.
It's amazing.
But the unobtainium, and if you go in, if you go in right now and you say M&M, mini M&M peanut chocolate bar, it will throw up a hundred sites that say we have it, but we're currently out of stock.
You know, I don't like to use this show for my own personal reasons.
This is a public resource, John.
Do we agree?
You're doing it on behalf of humankind.
Oh.
Well, I've realized that sometimes my concerns rise to the level of being other people's concerns.
And I still find it in this economy, in this post-COVID world, I still find it so strange that sometimes you just can't get something for a while.
It's weird.
Like we have a certain kind of dish washing liquid that we like that is sent free and it's not weird and it's very easy to deal with and you barely notice it exists.
And sometimes you just can't get it for three weeks.
But when it comes to something like, uh, like, uh, so my question about the big candy is, you know, the story of chicken McNuggets and how the person who invented chicken McNuggets was like, okay, we've got all these chicken parts that we can't use.
Like after we get the good part of the chicken out.
Pink slime.
Yeah.
Could be.
Could be.
Except chicken.
Chicken slack.
Chicken slack.
Chicken slack, we used to call it.
Chicken slack.
Awful bird.
It's the slack off of a chicken.
And I mean slack in the Bob Dobbs kind of way.
Yeah, J.R.
Bob Dobbs style slack.
You know, I get that.
I get that.
You know, it's a shame we can't bring that word back.
It's been stolen by that application.
Oh, there's something called slack.
What does it do?
Is it like a messaging platform?
Mm-hmm Yeah, it's for people inside of a company to waste time communicating with each other.
Oh, right It's one of those it's one of those technologies where people never aren't at work anymore.
Is that yeah But the more you're on slack the less work you're actually doing you've convinced yourself to talking to other people is your job But that's really just a part of your job.
There's also the part of your job where you do your job
My phone threw up a message yesterday and it said, if you don't use the WhatsApp app, it's going to delete.
Whoa.
So it's a use it or lose it type situation.
But I thought it was maybe spam because what app ever self deleted?
Well, I mean, on the face of it, it kind of sounds like one of those pay your toll texts.
It sounds like one of those, because here's the thing.
I'm going to tell you something.
This is what they call it.
It's called social engineering.
There's ways you can get at people technically, but you can also get at people socially.
And what I've learned based on information is you get people to do crazy shit by making them emotional and making them scared.
Which is, I guess, a kind of emotion.
So that says to you, hey, John Roderick, because now you're looking at privation, not abundance.
You're looking at privation, privation of WhatsApp.
And whether or not it's something you use, you noticed it.
You know what I'm saying?
I think they're trying to make you emotional.
And they might be trying to wheeze your juice from a hacking-type standpoint.
I don't know.
So they probably want you to use the app more.
Is that the idea?
They want more MAUs?
Well, I was overseas, and somebody over there, across the seas...
Said oh, well if you know Yeah, it's give me your whatsapp and I'll let you know when blah blah blah And I was like I don't have whatsapp and they acted like I didn't I know I know it's like me when I used to say I don't have Facebook I sound like one of the hill people Yeah, and so I downloaded whatsapp because apparently over in the other seas across them
There are seven of them, you know, and I was across two of them Sargasso and it's the Sargasso Sea was one of the ones I was across and and the you know the Great Barrier Sea or whatever and I used WhatsApp all the time because everybody was on it all the time and I was like this is just texting you guys
And they were like, no, no, it's not just texting.
It's this amazing.
It's because of the privacy component.
It's me.
Don't know.
But the day I stopped being over those seas, like what came back across the seas, I never opened it again because nobody here in the United States of America that I know has never suggested it.
Don't children use it?
Don't know.
I don't know any children that have phones.
Ha, ha, ha.
So you say, oh, I see.
Well, look at me.
I'm Waldorf.
I know.
You can make a phone out of blocks.
They wear glasses.
This Montessori.
I'm sending you a photo of this.
It's called Western Exterminator Company.
And there's a man dressing.
It looks like he's kind of dressed.
It's a fancy dress man from what looks like probably the Gilded Age.
He's got spats.
He's got a top hat.
He's wearing gloves.
And he seems to be abrading a mouse.
And he's got a hammer or a mallet behind his back.
Yeah, I've seen this for sure.
I thought this was some sort of old...
Like a Victorian-era cartoon.
Well, I'm going to speculate that maybe it wasn't always mice, and that's all I'm going to say about that.
Oh, look, of course, it was a rat.
It could have been a guy in a sombrero who liked to sleep.
Like, you know, I don't know.
They might have changed it up.
I mean, like, history's had a lot of different mice, John.
It's true.
It's true.
So a lot of the time they're the heroes.
America was the mice in the American Revolution.
I'm watching the Ken Burns series on PBS and it's very, very good.
Oh, you are.
Yeah.
I tuned into, I opened threads yesterday.
John, you got to get off the internet, man.
And I saw like four really terrible movies.
takes on Ken Burns' American Revolution.
He can knock me over with a feather.
And I get, this is one of those, like, leave it, leave it, leave it.
I have a whole staff of people whose only job is to tell me, leave it now.
Remind you to leave it, and then when you don't leave it, to find somebody to distract you, perhaps, with more than two donuts.
Yeah, just like over here over here and I but I was like wrote this long threads where I was like, you know the thing about all of you fucking and then I got to the end of it and I went through a whole of the whole time I went through and corrected all the grammar and made sure that all the periods and the ellipses were in the right places and then I heard in the very middle distance And I was like, what was that?
What was that sound?
Way off in the distance.
Did you think you might want to honor that voice?
I know it's very difficult to hear.
It's very little.
It's like the mouse.
By the way, I just sent you a link.
The man is named Mr. Little, and the mouse is named Menace Mouse.
Is it something where there's like a little mouse voice?
It would be so easy to miss that.
Well, it was, but I stood up and I looked around.
I was like, is that coming from inside?
It might help if you said leave it to yourself when you stood up aloud.
Eventually, I heard through the dream state I was in, leave it.
And I was like, leave it?
Leave it?
Who do you think you're talking to?
And then eventually I sat down and I...
took i took the time to manually delete every single letter that i had typed into no program delete delete delete just each one of them i was just i was taking it out on the letter as i sent it to letter hell like okay leave it i will leave it how do you like that apples
And then I left it.
And I closed my phone and I went into a different place.
Another room.
I'm so proud of you.
I mean, obviously, as your friend, I like to think I'm your friend.
I'm proud of you for your action.
But honestly, I'm way more proud of you for your self-awareness, for your self-knowledge, for your self-listening.
You listen to Menace Mouse.
I listen to Menace Mouse.
Mr. Little took a knee.
Yeah.
I haven't read this whole article yet, but I'd like to learn more about what Mr. Little does when he's not on intimidating mice, because I think he might be a bad actor.
He's got kind of a look.
He does, especially when you look at the picture that's looking at Mr. Little from the perspective of Menace Mouse.
Yes.
You realize there's a huge power imbalance.
Something in my writing project I work on that I was saying one time, before you, I'm paraphrasing here, but before you make a decision to do something, ask yourself, what is the best possible outcome of this?
Yeah.
So sometimes I'll start with an anodyne statement, and then you can realize what my point is in a second.
And so I'll say, before you decide to do something, ask yourself, what is the best possible outcome of this?
This is especially useful before things like, say, jumping onto a moving car or yelling at a baby.
now why do i say that because we've all yelled at babies sure and many of us and many of us have jumped onto a moving car and i would say that in most of those situations you know we never really asked ourselves what is the what's the best like if like if everything went the way i hope it goes well this real answer is i'll feel like i took an emotional shit
And got something out of my system.
That's the real answer for most of us.
Maybe not for you, but for most of us, that's the real answer.
But do you wonder, like, what would the best possible outcome have been if you had posted your very good proofread writing?
Would be in multiple arguments about the That's the best that's the best.
Yeah, okay with a bunch of total total know-nothing dealings who yeah I mean, this is the thing about the doughnuts.
Well This top doughnuts.
Yeah
I'm priced out of getting five donuts because it's a real investment of time and money.
Is that right?
But at 11 o'clock at night, sometimes at my local grocery store, there will be a dozen top pot donuts for $5.
yeah now that's an enormous savings over the normal cost of two dollars and fifty cents for one of these donuts we're talking about less than these are not these are not fresh from the place but but something that's available at the store and they're giving you their their this is basement bargain basement prices on something that's otherwise kind of a luxury item
Well, the thing is, this grocery store has a Top Pot donut display.
The donut company comes in the morning, hot and fresh piping donuts that you're meant to take one of with a special little wrap.
You know, you have your tongs.
You put it in a little bag.
These are the donuts that didn't sell during the day.
Okay.
Oh, these are the night donuts.
Night donuts.
For a while, they were getting the mix wrong or whatever, and there were...
there were 12 of the donuts that i like the best in a box for five dollars and i that seems like a pretty good deal i was like i can't afford not to buy these no and then i would come home and i would put each donut individually in a sandwich bag and i would put them in the freezer okay and then i would have 12 donuts you heat them up later well a little but you know they melt to you know you only give them 15 seconds
Oh, hell yeah.
But, you know, the way my freezer is packed full of things already, the donuts, like, I had to put one over here and one on top of this little container of last year's gravy.
That's a good way for a donut to hide, if you ask me.
That's right.
But then that gamifies it because now the refrigerator, it's like, are there donuts in there?
I don't know.
Min-maxing, they call it.
Min-maxing?
I think that's what it's called.
Do you sometimes find a special donut, though, hidden away?
Yeah.
You've mislaid, not mislaid, but you know.
Every once in a while, I'm back in there, I'm looking for something.
How do you feel about that?
You feel good when you find a hidden donut?
I love that.
Sometimes that'll happen to me with a Haagen-Dazs bar.
It feels amazing, except for now I have diabetes.
Yeah.
It's not even pre-diabetes anymore.
No, it's full just... You got full-blown diabetes.
Full-blown diabetes.
I didn't know that.
That's a shame.
I got donuts rolling in, you know, and it's like, I can't afford to get them now.
Even if there was a Girl Scout
with a with the overturned milk crate out front who was like want 12 free donuts i don't know why she'd be doing it but i'd have to say young miss i have diabetes oh man you think it would make her feel bad
I don't think young people know what it is.
Because at that point, she becomes sort of a pusher in a lot of ways.
You know, I can't tell whether young people... It's like sex trafficking, but for pastry.
Young people either don't know how to feel bad anymore, or they feel so bad about themselves all the time that they don't know how to feel bad about me.
They feel bad about the wrong things in the wrong way.
It's so weird.
I would say, young lady, I have diabetes.
And she would say, do you know the 25 things that I have?
And then I would just mope off.
I would slump even further.
Now you're trying to meddle in the Grievance Olympics.
Yeah.
And I'd hear, leave it.
Just leave it.
I wasn't made to leave it is the problem.
I wasn't built to leave it.
It doesn't seem... Well...
I, it, it, it may partly be the time that we're from and the places that we're from and our different upbringings and so forth.
But like, I don't, I don't, I don't feel like I was particularly raised to leave it.
You know what I mean?
Nope.
You were raised to go after it.
Yeah.
Like, yeah.
Like, like a goddamn, like my beagle used to kill bunnies in our yard and it made me very unhappy because the bunnies were so cute to kill the baby bunnies in our yard.
But you know what he's, he's just beagles.
Beagles gonna beagle.
Beagles gonna beagle.
Yeah.
There was that guy, you've seen that guy with the pink guitar that goes and plays for rhinoceroses and stuff?
I don't think I have, John.
It's one of the internet content.
Is that something you saw on threads?
It's an internet content.
Okay.
And he's a guy who goes, he's got a pink guitar and he sits in a chair and he plays for wild animals on the other side of a fence.
Is it plugged in?
No.
Nope, just an acoustic guitar acoustic guitar.
That's different.
Okay, and he's got a nice voice He's got a sweet voice and he plays cover songs of of sweet songs and that what makes this compelling content is that apparently a lion a full ass lion a whole pride of lions who were just sitting there minding their business thinking about human babies to eat and
If this guy in like a flat cap with a pink guitar sits in a folding chair and starts playing clocks by Coldplay or whatever, they will not only get up and come over, but they will sit down, luxuriate in the music.
What?
And like start...
grooming each other and it relaxes them it seems it does rhinoceri no kidding every kind of creature octopus raptors is it only cold play no he plays the whole selection of kind of i've seen the famous one of the guy who plays uh i forget what the horn is i want to see a trombone i've seen the one of the guy who plays a horn for cows
That's an old one, but I've seen that one.
I think the guy that plays the horn for cows was the inspiration for the guy with the pink guitar.
Yeah.
My dog didn't like it when I played harmonica, and I thought that was funny.
Yeah.
Take that.
He really... I speak for the baby rabbits.
You know, a couple of years ago, I put wind chimes up all around my house, and I really think... Wind chimes are like farts.
People like their own.
They hate everybody else's.
They are something.
It's a cacophony.
And I think the owls are like, you know what, buddy?
like go fuck yourself because we're out here well because they're out in the forest in the middle of the night trying to hear the rustling and you're saying me me well they're they're like you know we do we look real carefully and listen for little critters echolocation and you're over here like bing bong bing bong bing
You're hurting their signal-to-noise ratio, Al, from an Al standpoint.
I feel like my house, although I got the wind chimes just to make all of my neighbors feel unsettled, because it's a little serial killer-y.
But I'm afraid that maybe I am disrupting the ecosystem, that I've worked so hard to build and maintain.
This is the kind of thing we heard about in the 80s, John.
Do you remember this?
At the time, it made people so upset.
Of course, you've got the snail darter.
We won't get started in that.
Or, for example, the baby turtles that needed to cross to do their breeding, and then they finally made them little tunnels and stuff like that.
When you first hear these kinds of things, you think, you've got to be kidding me.
This is post-industrial America.
No way am I going to worry about whether my metal yard device upsets an owl.
Right.
But now we think about that, don't we?
Because you could be throwing off their breeding.
Maybe it's like one of those ladies who can't come when there's sirens, you know, like in movies.
I heard just yesterday that apparently hormone replacement therapy, which was supposedly supposed to be giving women with perimenopause cancer if they did it, even though it helped a lot.
Turns out.
And so for years, nobody could do it because it was killing them all.
And it turns out, no, that's not true.
It's actually fine.
I heard that.
I also heard they're taking testosterone for their sex.
Really?
Yeah, that's what I heard.
Perimenopause.
And that's different from periodontists.
Periodontists can get perimenopause, but it is different.
Right, and the blue skies you've ever seen are in Seattle.
That's Perry Como itis.
That's right.
And the that was kind of funny John Don't you think there's a pretty good pull really?
It was a bit more Perry Como from when we were kids.
It's pretty blue SCTV had funny jokes about how he would be like falling asleep while he was singing on TV I always thought that was funny.
You know Another kind of content that I was consuming yesterday was Carol Burnett show.
Oh man outtakes Man pretty fun stuff
Yeah, I mean, it's silly, but boy, did that ever have an impact on me.
Every time Tim Conway, because Tim Conway didn't used to be a regular when I was a kid, and then he became a regular.
It was Lau Wagner, Harvey Korman, Vicki Lawrence, and Carl Burnett.
And then sometimes Tim Conway would be on, and it was always like the highlight of my week.
I know.
Tim Conway, you know.
Mississa Wiegand.
I mean, Dorb, right?
He thought he was so... And then they crack up.
Harvey Korman cracks up.
Yeah.
You sure that little asshole's finished?
I know that you are on YouTube.
What?
You're the you in YouTube.
Oh my God, thank you.
There's no I in YouTube.
There's no I in YouTube.
I am only on YouTube when I'm trying to listen to music.
Or watch the videos that I continue to add to your list.
Or watch your amazing videos.
Do you check in?
Because I added another one last week.
I have not seen it, but thank you.
No, but you go for music.
It's an easy way to listen to music.
Easy way to listen to music, although it frustrates my child a lot that I go there to listen to music.
Especially if you're getting ads.
But I am getting ads.
I'm ad-free.
I'm ad-free.
That's the only way to fly.
I know, you know, and I should.
It's the best 20 bucks I spend every month.
I wouldn't even know where to start.
I wouldn't even know where to begin to attach that eel to my... Oh, my goodness.
Well, it enables me to watch some rather extraordinary, very long videos without somebody trying to tell me about Factor or whatever.
Factor.
I don't know.
See, I don't even know what ads people get anymore.
I'm guessing it's the kind of shit my wife buys on Instagram.
It's something like a hairbrush that's also, I don't know, a battery starter or something.
Something just happened to me in the last week or two.
Sorry, I didn't mean to take you off YouTube because I'm very interested.
Well, no, because this is what we talk about.
It is.
It's the same.
It's the same where it just feels like everything's a vine now.
But now all of the ads are the same, which is they're indistinguishable from the content creators.
It's always somebody that's like, oh, my God, I...
I was having so much trouble flipping pancakes in my pancake flipping like extreme sports.
At that point, we're looking at the black and white video of the person who has pancakes all over their floor because they're having so many problems.
Oh, these pancakes.
Has this ever happened to me?
It happens to me all the time.
And then my friends and I home built this artist anal pancake flipping business.
Yes.
With real leather.
Hammered copper.
Hammered copper.
And now when we jump out of airplanes in the Alps wearing a suit that's made out of birds, we can flip pancakes in midair.
And we're not even asking you to buy it.
We're just telling you it's here.
I don't get UTIs anymore.
don't get you ever since i got that hammered copper my husband and i came up with this apparently you can take hormone replacement therapy again and not get cervical cancer no and it's only 79 if you act now and i just i don't know i i really because when i look at myself in the mirror i go are you a content creator
You're not.
No, you're not.
You're not.
Not in the increasingly conventional sense.
I do think there's a difference.
Yeah.
I mean, like, I remember when I very first learned, and it's going to be difficult for me to talk about this without sounding like I'm talking down to people.
And the reason for that is that I am talking down to people.
Sure.
I remember this one thing that you go out there and you love your South Korean makeup tutorials.
I understand that's a thing, right?
You go to, you get your, you get your makeup tutorials and that's the whole thing.
I remember listening to a podcast one time and the entire podcast, it was a podcast I enjoyed, but the entire podcast was, uh, about, it was an, as, as the Vox would call it, an explainer.
And they'd done an explainer on the drama that was happening inside of makeup.
YouTube.
Makeup YouTube drama.
Okay.
Now here's, I just want to like, I'm going to stop for a minute here because I know a lot of you fucking live in this trash every day.
For those of you who don't know what this, I just want to clarify what that means.
There's people who make YouTube videos about makeup.
It's a popular, popular thing.
And this is back in the day.
I'm sure now people do it on their TikTok or whatever, whatever.
But it was a whole genre and there's different people doing it and it's competitive.
And then you get into things like you have collaborations with other creators.
But then, of course, because it's YouTube, you have beef with other people.
Oh, you beef.
You get makeup beef with other people.
And so I just want to be very clear that like I turned off the podcast because at that point I did go to college.
It was only in the 80s and it was in Florida.
But it did occur to me that I'm sitting here feeling very unhappy listening to somebody explain to me
in like a ha-ha, can you believe this way, about YouTube drama between makeup people, that's in addition to the fact that makeup YouTube drama exists.
And then people will make a video about, a meta video about that drama.
That's honestly what I think.
When I hear people talk about content creators, that's kind of what I tend to think about.
When I hear content creator, I think shovels of whatever.
Shovels.
Of whatever.
Of whatever.
Shovels of whatever.
And this show, say what you will, this is not shovels of whatever.
This is a bespoke product in the minds of two people you theoretically like.
It is.
It's bespoked.
my daughter got into uh this musical called epic the musical okay and epic the musical is a musical in the style i'm gonna just go out and say she would argue with me but i'm gonna say in the style of hamilton
but using the source material of the ancient Greek myths.
Oh, neato.
And it is a fully... I'm sorry, I just went off the down.
Promethiai, Promethewi, Prometheus.
You were made for this life.
And when I say I'm the style of Hamilton, it's not all rap.
It's classic musical.
It's a musical.
It's got lots of songs.
but it's you know yeah but it's my name is let's just call it urban let's just say it's an urban musical about about you can't get a mortgage yeah i get it yeah that's right uh about uh the ancient greeks and it's very popular with her cadre
yeah my kid has those my kid has musicals like that that i am utterly unaware of that he and his friends are all just like super into that then i find out it's like a huge thing i'd never heard of epic well so epic is it's fully fledged um but for some is it on broadway well this is the thing for some reason it it is not as far as i know um staged
it is 100 just like a recording like jesus christ superstar like jesus christ you know that not a lot of people may so maybe people who don't know that the jesus christ superstar which many of us know from the ted neely um with the one that has a really good judas you know my mind is clearer now um that movie was based on a musical but that musical is based on an album that's
album right so tim tim and uh what's his name sirian sirian sirian was named sir uh you know what's that guy's name who's the guy who's that guy who's that guy the guy who does yeah in mcclellan in in sterling he but that you know the guy who writes the musicals um they did that in the 60s and they recorded it and by the way that version of heaven on their minds has one of the greatest piano clams
of all time in it and it's in every single version they kept his andrew lloyd weber's tremendous piano clam they were like this clam is just it it's one of the parts that goes you know how it goes nazar with your famous son should have been a great unknown but i'll find the clip for you he has a tremendous clam
You do it three times and it's jazz.
But that's unusual, because the thing was that you couldn't get the money to go stage a musical, so instead they recorded an album.
And they brought in the singer from Deep Purple, which I think is kind of cool.
Which is, I think, what's happening with Epic, although it astonishes me.
They're doing it on the, oh, this is like a millennial musical, you do it for no money.
Well, I think it's now a massive, massive, massive media property.
Okay.
But I don't understand why all of the huge companies that are out there like, who's got the next Hamilton hasn't turned the epic of the musical into either a musical or more likely a film.
Why haven't they gobbled that up?
Yeah.
But all of these kids, they all know every note of it.
And I was asking her the other day, my little person, what's your current YouTube consumption other than the videos that Merlin sends us?
And she said, well, there's a lot of beef right now.
Between epic the musical commenters Okay, and I said go on and she said well the number one epic the music commenter has like four million followers and the next Largest epic the music commenter only has two million followers and and the the composer
of the epic, the musical said in one of his YouTube posts, because he has 460 billion YouTube followers.
He said, I want to give a shout out to my man, Josh.
But both the number one epic music commenter and the number two epic music commenter are both named Josh.
Oh.
And so it wasn't clear which Josh he meant.
Now everybody in the epic the music YouTube commenter sphere is Just going nuts over which Josh and both Josh's are claiming To be the one that I see getting the shout outs
And so she pulled up.
But that opens a new front inside of this unnecessary popularity war.
Because now you end up, just to state the obvious, if you like one Josh more than the other, or as is often the case, you particularly dislike one Josh over the other, you're going to pop up and say, no way.
Robert Epic was obviously talking about my Josh.
That's right.
And the guy that wrote Epic might also be Josh.
I don't know.
I think there's a lot of namespace pollution among young people
Well, yeah, yeah, I think I think more more than anything I was just struck by the fact that yeah every one of these people is Making what I can only imagine is 1 million dollars a month from factor at auto playing factor ads on YouTube.
Please remember to like and subscribe Um really helps you discover the show all of their content is them talking about this unproduced musical
And so when I'm sitting on anything and these people are just going by like, we handcrafted these.
And I look and it's like, that person's got 4 million followers.
And apparently all they do is imitate a guy who owns a pizza parlor.
Like all of their content is 30-second videos of them going...
Hey, get out of my pizza parlor.
Hey.
Is that Josh speaking there?
Them with a different hat on.
He's like, what are you talking about?
I'm just looking for a pizza.
Hey.
That's the end.
And it's got a million views.
And you're just like, am I?
Am I?
Am I a content creator?
Six, six, seven.
Are you my mother?
Yeah.
Six, seven.
I can't even hear it now.
I can't even hear six and seven in order without going six, seven.
Yeah.
Because it's been beaten into me.
I don't think any of it's funny.
I don't think it's funny on any level.
I'm such a sourpuss, John, and I don't talk about it because I'm a man without a flag.
But in the same way that I use ChatGPT differently than the rest of you, plus I'm very good at ChatGPT.
That's why you guys are sad and I am happy.
Also, I am not interested in what hats Josh has to wear today.
And I don't even think it's that funny to talk.
I'll talk about it with you here.
But I go around with one specific friend of mine in particular who follows this stuff more closely than they admit.
And I'm just like, I cannot believe you leave.
To me, it's like leaving your front door open from an attention standpoint.
Okay.
Like, how could you just let all... How could you let the knowledge of that just wander into your world?
Tell me how you use ChatGPT in a smarter way than others.
Well, I mean, just quickly, I don't want to get too far into it because people hate ChatGPT.
But the way that I use it smarter than others is, I mean, I use it for...
fairly straightforward things like aggregation and organization of information that then relies heavily upon previous information that I have.
So, for example, when I'm doing stuff with, a good example would be 3D printing, it knows everything or fixing things on my Synology, my shared hard drive thing that I have, whatever it is.
But it remembers the whole history of discussions that we have had about that.
It knows weird stuff like what folders mean what
It can give me commands that I copy and paste that already know all the things about my world.
And so right before we started talking, I dropped in a 3D print.
And I said, this thing's tearing apart at the mid-levels.
How do I strengthen this without adding too much print time?
And it happily gave me five ways to improve that.
I've never asked it for...
I've never asked it if I should harm myself.
I've never asked it if, like, what my problem is.
And it's never suggested that I hurt myself.
And I don't think that's because I'm not a sad teen.
I think it's because people use this shit in fucking weird ways.
And that's just a bouncing-off point to say.
And consequently, I feel the need to say here for...
completely selfish reasons i don't think i use youtube like other people like my youtube history is like taskmaster and history and like nerd technology stuff mostly and like i don't i'm not interested like in fact if like the very first thing i see is somebody's face with nano leaf hexagon lights behind them i tend to turn it off and if it begins the first thing the person says is hey guys i turn it off and
Like, that's not what I'm here for.
If it's stock footage, I turn it off.
Yeah.
You know, that's why... What if it's airplanes crashing?
See, the problem is, a little of that goes a long way, because like Russian dashboard cams, your algorithm... That show meteors?
Oh, my... Well, like, I started out... I told you this years ago.
I kept hearing about Russian dashboard cams, and I thought, well, to have a complete education, I should at least find out what this means.
And so you start out with something as anodyne as that bridge...
that tall trucks keep running into, right?
Like there's that famous bridge.
And then like, but then you get into Russian dash cam videos and it's like, oh my gosh, or just dash cam videos in general.
And it's like, whoa, crazy car accident.
Somebody blew through a red light and their car flipped over three times.
And you're like, that's pretty fucking cool.
And within like, John, within like eight minutes, it's like top 20 motorcycle deaths.
And it's like, you know, that went in a way I didn't want to go.
And so then I have to try and persuade YouTube that that's not who I am.
And no, but seriously, I mean, I will...
And this is so funny.
I'm so wholesome.
I'm such an upsettingly wholesome person.
I'll send you my recent YouTube history.
It is almost all, like, the Taskmaster.
Let's see.
Here is the rest is history.
They're doing a series on Elizabeth I right now.
That's really good.
Paul Scheer on Conan O'Brien.
I sent something to Jason this morning.
Superchunk doing a cover of Magnetic Fields.
This morning that went up.
Ricky Jane is 52 assistants.
I watched that all the way through again last night.
Good stuff.
It's great stuff.
I'm going to go all the way to say it's great stuff.
Ricky Jane is 52.
Well, somebody that I guess knows me and I kind of know on the internet has done a big upscale of it from the original VHS.
Oh, because it's terrible.
It's not a great copy, the one that's up.
But also, I think I saw how he does one of his tricks.
Oh!
Look at you.
And I like not knowing, you know.
Yeah, I like not knowing.
So anyway, and this is not, I'm not trying to big time, a lot of Disney videos.
I'm not trying to big time, but just to say like, well, I don't know.
There's this part of me, because I'm Merlin, man.
There's this part of me that's always thinking like, gosh, a lot of you seem so unhappy.
So, so very unhappy.
So very emotional.
So very angry.
Everybody's so angry.
And I'm like, I'm always just, I want to encourage people to look at the role that that open front door is.
What they allow into their home from an attention standpoint could be having a role in how unremittingly unhappy they are all the time.
And I'm like, yeah, but like then you could go watch, you know, Bob Mortimer try to make Richard Ayawade laugh.
Or you could go watch my guy Project Farm show you which jump starter you should buy.
You could watch Richard Thompson do the song Beeswing, which is his best song.
Like, these are all things that you could do today.
The Tourist on Top of the Pops doing I Only Want to Be With You, that wonderful cover with Annie Lennox and Dave, you know, for 79.
Great cover.
And, like, man, it's...
I realize I sound a little manic and like, I have to just put happy things in my face, but it's, it's not even that it's that like, there's just, it's not, when you talk about the content, the content is so depressing, the stuff that a lot of people bring, bring into their world, but it's not even a given piece of content.
It's, it's the din of low stakes, shallow, emotional bullshit that,
That leaves you sitting in the same muddy puddle and wondering why your ass is wet My mom came in and sat down last night and said I was talking to chatty G
And about cinnamon toast.
Wait, does your mom said this?
Yeah.
And there's a room full of people.
I'm the only, I'm the only, uh, she has my attention.
Yeah.
I'm the only, uh, like male identified person in this whole room.
everybody else is talking about uh hormone replacement therapy and then mom says just drops this bomb i was talking to chatty g about cinnamon toast yeah yeah yeah and it becomes clear to me that what she means is she was talking to chatty g about my guinea pig
That was named Cinnamon Toast.
That is such a sweet name for a guinea pig, John.
Did you name it?
I did.
And Cinnamon Toast was the guinea pig that I had between second and fourth grade.
Okay.
Whoa, it lived that long.
Well, this is the thing.
We have always wondered why Cinnamon Toast was such a remarkable guinea pig.
Such a long, live little rodent.
The Cinnamon Toast lived for a long time.
Cinnamon Toast would sleep in my bed with me.
Stop it.
Cinnamon Toast got along with all cats.
Oh my God.
Cinnamon Toast basically had free roam of the house and never peed or pooped anywhere but inside of his cage.
What an extraordinary animal.
In summer, I would go out in the yard and Cinnamon Toast would come out and play in the grass with me while I was on the swings or whatever.
yeah so and when cinnamon toast finally died cinnamon toast died of old age i was sleeping in the backyard in a tent and cinnamon toast was in his cage outside my tent because you know you take the cage off of the newspaper and you just put it down in the grass and cinnamon toast can eat the grass
And he was out sleeping.
It's almost like a little playpen.
It's like a little playpen.
He was out sleeping in the grass with me.
And then he died a peaceful death in his cage in the night.
And so my mom is talking to Chatty G about the guinea pig that I had 50 years ago.
And she has a big smile.
And she's like, I was talking to Chatty G about cinnamon toast.
And Chatty G agrees that some guinea pigs are exceptional.
Is that right?
And I said, is that right?
And she went on to explain in what for some people might have been a lot of detail that some guinea pigs do exhibit a greater intelligence, you know, within the guinea pig.
within the sphere domestic guinea pigs because i don't know how well they do in the wild these days but the domestic guinea pig for some reason or other that i imagine you'll get to some some girls are bigger than others some some some guinea pigs mothers are sorry the some guinea pigs just seem to have something a little special about them and we think we know why oh
Well, Mom, and I couldn't tell where Chatty G's speculation ended and Mom's speculation picked up and took off.
Totally normal.
But Mom said that there were guinea pigs that were bred as lab guinea pigs.
And those guinea pigs, unlike Algernon.
They're like Caesar in Planet of the Apes.
Except they're not.
Those are the dumb ones.
Oh, I see.
They're bred just to be science.
That's Noseus.
And then there are guinea pigs that were bred to be in kindergarten classrooms.
as god intended natural guinea pigs and every once in a while you get one like i mean they have big boobs yeah big boobs you know big naturals no like cinnamon toast he was a larger guinea pig he had he had tremendous personality and then mom goes on to say so maybe his lineage comes from the children
Think or maybe maybe he would maybe if he had been in the wild He would have been king of the guinea pigs in the Andes somewhere That's why he's like he's like well, you know like like Caesar or like what's the other one?
You know like all the call the characters Roddy McDowell played.
He's always the head the head chimp.
He's the smartest.
Yeah, I met him once right McDowell I met Roddy McDowell when you met him he was Tony Randall thing where I'm never quite sure what his situation is.
He was very posh He knew my dad
You're kidding me.
No, and we went to see him perform in a play at the Cirque Theater.
And afterwards, we went up and my dad introduced me because he knew that I was a fan of Rodney McDowell.
That's why we went to the play.
Sure.
Met him.
I can still picture him, although I was...
Probably I probably I owned cinnamon toast at the same time.
This is all that we're all talking about the contemporaneous with the cinnamon toast era 1977 I'm meeting Roddy McDowell over here.
I've got cinnamon toast over here Yeah, yeah, yeah, but then so so I said to mom What were you talking to chatty G about?
that led you to start talking about cinnamon toast, this 50 years dead.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
And she said, oh... Because, I mean, first of all, when you said cinnamon toast, I thought she was talking about how to make cinnamon toast.
When you told me who cinnamon toast was, the implication being, she sat down at her computer, she logged onto the internet, and said, tell me about my guinea pig cinnamon toast.
But that's not how it happened.
Well, I still am unclear, because I said, did Susan...
teach you to use Chatty G in this way?
Because Susan talks to Chatty G every day.
about a lot of stuff that I don't think you would approve of.
It's not that I don't approve.
It's just there's a phrase that I've been using since I first started using LLMs a couple years ago.
There's a phrase I will continue to use.
I have never asked for relationship advice from a Coke machine because that's not what a Coke machine is for.
A Coke machine is uniquely suited when it's working correctly.
A Coke machine will take a certain amount of money,
in various ways, and then give you the drink that you would like, and it will hopefully be cold.
And you can define how well the Coke machine is working by whether it took the correct amount of money and gave you the drink that you asked for.
But I would never ask it if I'm pretty.
Without knowing what's going on inside the Coke machine, I think as a young person, I imagined that it was converting money into Coke.
I thought it was a mechanical Turk.
I figured there had to be a tiny person in there.
A little tiny person in there that was like... Enjoy your Mountain Dew.
It's 12 ounces of delicious sugary energy.
And I don't know... You know, Mom's becoming more and more of an unreliable narrator.
She said... Although Susan is...
Far and away, the most vocal proponent of Chatty G in our family talks about Chatty G and their conversations all the time.
Mom then says, oh, no, Susan didn't teach me to use Chatty G. I mean, she mentioned it.
And that's how she mentioned it.
She mentions it like every time, every day.
And so mom she but just to be clear so Susan uses it throughout the day for a variety of things including things that touch upon the internal interior personal things Yes, but but uses it enough that it comes up in the same way that like YouTube comes up because I use YouTube a lot, right?
Yes, that's right.
And I don't think that she's using it in ways I mean, I don't honestly
Lord love a duck.
Yeah.
Having never used it.
I don't want to see it.
I do not want to see her chat history at all.
And I don't know what the hell, like when you say things like you input information into it and you get like clear programming instructions, I'm like, oh, that's cool.
I could see if I even knew where to put that.
Every day.
I mean, it's developing code for me every day.
It's fixing stuff for me.
It's telling me,
which sandpaper to use on this thing and why, mostly.
And it's not, I mean, again, I had the unique displeasure of having to explain how LLMs work to a group of people who didn't know last week.
And it's always very disorienting to people when you explain how it actually works because it's not magic.
There's not a meaningfulness engine inside of it.
It just figures out what the next word should be.
And that's why, and I had to keep saying, you know, you can't ask it, you can ask it for a citation for something, for example.
When you say, like, I'll say, like, are you just guessing about this?
Can you check the documentation for this?
And, you know, the thing is, if you ask it for a citation, the thing to understand, at least among understanding of this, is it's gonna just treat that as a different request for a search.
In other words, if you say, well, how do you know that Robert Lowell said that to Robert Giroux?
then it'll do a search to try and find that like Google would.
But it's not telling you where it found it because it can't know how it found it because it's just putting words in order.
And once you understand that, you get a little less mental about all of this.
And then you take it for like, I'm sorry, I'm ranting now because it frustrates me that people are so weird about it.
But yeah, I mean, you can get real weird with this stuff.
Here was the thing that I didn't see coming.
Then she said, I asked Chatty G. I didn't ask, right?
This is unprompted.
I'm just sitting in a chair, you know, and this is what I get.
You're the only man in the room.
You're the only one not on HRT in the whole place.
That's right.
And she said, I asked Chatty G how much pollution and energy was used by Chatty G to tell me about Cinnamon Toast.
And Chatty G based on several I think she continued to prompt Chatty G Chatty G said it is much more polluting to stream a movie on Netflix than the amount of energy I used to tell you about Smart guinea pigs.
I would point out that that's not really an answer to the question
Well, and I was just like, uh-huh, uh-huh, uh-huh, because I'm just, I'm, who knows where this conversation is going next.
Yeah, I mean, I'm just, I'm still reeling from all the information.
What am I going to do?
Provoke my mom and my sister in a conversation about AI?
Leave it.
Talk about a leave it.
Oh, Jesus.
Rolling her eyes, you know, and I'm like, I don't, this is like, I do not want to be in the middle of this.
Between y'all and Paul.
Every single person I've met in the last six months.
Because I went to a party not very long ago.
I went to a band practice.
I've been doing these podcasts where I'm seeing people on the internet.
And every one of them, I'm like, so what do you do?
And when they tell me what they do, my first thought is, well, hey, I can do that.
Really?
Yeah, because I have yet to find a job that AI can't do.
It can do a lot of jobs.
It won't necessarily do them well.
Well, that's the thing, but that's true of people, too.
And as anybody that's ever worked in a cafe can tell you.
Yeah.
But, you know, it's like, what do you do?
Oh, product marketing.
Oh, boy.
Yeah.
Well, AI can do a bad job of that, but the CEO is going to think it's more affordable.
Oh, no, no, no.
I'm sorry.
Two things can be true at once.
Yes, you're absolutely right.
I think that there's going to be a pretty fair amount of regret about the muscle that's getting cut with what we hope is just easy cost savings.
Because these are the same kinds of decisions you would make about having shittier napkins at your pizza place.
Where it's like, can I save nine cents a day on this?
And you'll save a lot more than that if you get rid of somebody making 80 grand a year to write press releases.
Right.
And the press releases won't ever be read by anybody again because, you know, because whoever reads press releases will just say, hey, what are the press releases?
Well, yeah, the AI.
I mean, you'll be creating AI content for AI content probably, I guess.
Yeah.
Well, and that's and that so when I look at these content creators and I'm like how many of these are even real how many of these how many of these epic the musical Commentator beefs are just being generated in a Russian bot farm.
Oh Interesting you think it's those division
I you know anymore kind of feels I don't even know no I don't even know anymore I mean I'm I spent two days trying not to picture Donald Trump giving Bill Clinton a blowjob okay trying not to picture it it's hard to prove a negative that but that's the thing AI slop oh because of the Epstein thing yeah slop you know slop
Slop.
What a lazy fucking word.
What a fucking lazy word.
And the thing is, that's the thing.
Slop is slop.
It's a dumb guy word.
It's one of those, you know, there's those dumb guy words like tranche, where people just love to say them because they've learned them.
Remember after, well, after the financial crisis.
tumult yeah tranches of data i said the other day mortgages that you would try and like the big short if you haven't watched it watch it again watch it once a year it's a great movie great movie great movie and it's got ryan gosling in it a lot of people forget that um i forgot that but uh but but you know tranche it's a dumb guy word the same way that people say you know uh they use the objective uh
Never mind.
I'm not going to talk about dumb people.
I'm going to say, if it's making you happy, hakuna matata, but it seems on the face of it, apparent to me, that you people are not being made happy with this, and you have lost having any kind of a role in how the world improves with what it is you're spending your attention on.
You should watch the Ken Burns documentary.
And then if you are inspired to go online and have a hot take about it, don't.
Leave it.
You know, it opens with the Native Americans, which I like.
Oh, that's nice.
Well, I mean... Is there a land acknowledgement?
Better.
Thank God.
Thank God.
No, but it takes its head on, like goes straight into it.
And believe me, if you're worried about, yeah, but you know Thomas Jefferson had slaves.
Believe me, it comes up.
George Washington...
did some pretty bad did some pretty bad wooden teeth cherry tree yeah cherry tree powdered wig across the delaware did to get the delaware you got the quarter i've got the i've got the all the high notes yeah yeah you've you've you've done what did we you know we we
We've absorbed a lot of George Washington material in our life.
Yeah, his sword is in the Smithsonian Institution.
Is that right?
I saw Bert and Ernie at the Smithsonian.
Oh.
The original puppets.
I have a photograph of it.
It almost made me cry.
It made me so happy.
Because my little kid loved Ernie.
One time, years and years ago, there was a display, a Sesame Street museum at the New York State Capitol in Albany.
New York State Capitol.
New York State.
Get a rope.
Get a rope.
Sorry, sorry, sorry.
Okay.
Okay.
So children's television workshop Sesame Street New York State and we we were I don't know what we were doing in Albany.
We were on tour We were going from place to place and I was like we're pulling over and we're going to the Sesame Street Museum.
Fuck.
Yes, and we did and it was Incredible talk about the tears.
I mean they have the whole they had mr. Hooper store.
Oh my god.
I love mr. Hooper and Gordon Gordon
That was right in my wheelhouse.
So you're from that generation.
I mean, it was... Obviously, I'm saying this in retrospect.
I'm not completely stupid.
It wasn't made for me.
But I think it started in 1969.
I was three years of age when that came out, which also then, of course, maybe almost as saliently, made me the perfect age for an electric company a few years later.
Because like WOW Magazine and Dynamite Magazine, or like Target and the Gap, it's a vertical educational integration.
But boy, I really like that.
And you know what's funny?
I don't know if I ever told you this.
At one point, I think in college, when you'd say things like this, I said, oh, I said to my mom, I was home for something.
I said, oh, mom, you know...
Fred Rogers, he's such a good man and he's so kind.
And you know how you're in college and you love Fred Rogers, partly because you can watch him when you're hungover, you know?
But Fred Rogers, and she goes, what are you talking about?
And I was like, you know, Mr. Rogers' Neighborhood, you know, King Friday and all that, Lady Elaine.
And she's like, you did not like- Speedy delivery.
Speedy delivery.
She's like, you did not like Mr. Rogers when you were a kid.
I was like, what are you talking about?
She goes, you thought it was really, really boring.
And I had one of those, I don't know, like an M. Night Shyamalan moment where I'm like, oh, I'm so gay bones for Fred Rogers now.
But apparently I thought he was boring when I was a child.
And I probably said so.
Isn't that funny?
Well, but you know, there's three-year-old you and there's seven-year-old you.
That's true.
And seven-year-old you probably left a lasting impression on your mom because you were like, this is boring.
But three to five-year-old you was like, he took his slippers off.
It was a little slow, I will admit.
Can I ask you a guinea pig question?
Sure.
I want to make sure I'm thinking about the right kind of animal.
We are acquainted with, but especially we're very well acquainted with a family in the early 2000s that we'd hang out with.
And so a guinea pig is like, so the hamsters are the little ones.
And guinea pigs are like pretty big and eat a lot of lettuce, right?
I mean, they're almost like a porcupine, right?
Yeah.
Yeah, they're chonkers and they sit and they go chomp, chomp, chomp, chomp.
John, they had given the guinea pig a room.
And I don't think it was because, I don't think it was specifically because they loved it, although they did love it.
I think it was because they were like, we need to have a place where we just have the guinea pig.
Because if we let the guinea pig do its own thing.
So they had a small room of the house that was basically like a guinea pig pen.
And I thought it was so fucking weird.
Yeah.
Now, did yours, did Cinnamon Toast like his little enclosure?
Like the way Gibson did?
oh yes because gibson like disclosure right yeah and we and i and i put a cardboard box in there that was his house that had a little door you're a good friend and then guinea pig would sit and chomp on the cardboard and you know and guinea pigs i think that they can sometimes like toss their vegetables around so that they are kind of throwing them out of the cage and some kind of guinea pig
gesture i'm not getting a game like the way a baby throws something off their plate i think there might be a little bit of guinea pig game yeah yep yep you know i feel like guinea pigs are social and if you have more than one guinea pig they maybe spend more time thinking about one another and they don't they're not as
Oh.
Well, then let me ask my follow-up question.
And you don't have to say, have you done any personal scholarship on your own about the extraordinary power of certain guinea pigs?
Have you looked into this yet?
Well, see, this is one of the things I think that differentiates me.
Do you feel like that would be a loss for you if you looked it up?
Like, you'd feel like, oh, you got me on that one.
You know, you got rickrolled by the guinea pig?
Yeah.
I just feel like that is not where my curiosity lay.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Like wondering why Cinnamon Toast was the way he was.
It's kind of like figuring out the magic behind a Ricky J card trick.
Oh, boy.
You and I don't want to know.
I don't want to know.
How does he keep finding all the aces?
Yeah, we don't want to know.
The guy that finds all the aces, the guy that's just pulling cards out of the air, I don't want to know.
But Cardini.
Are you talking about Cardini?
He can't get rid of those cards.
What the hell?
He keeps trying to get rid of them and the girl's not even helping.
And so when I think about cinnamon toast and all of our magical years together, I'm not trying to duplicate it by finding another one.
I don't, you know, I'm not trying to like, I don't want to do it wrong.
The next guinea pig I get, I may never touch a guinea pig the rest of my life.
And so when I look back at my own life,
I almost never, if I'm going to ask why about something in the scope of my life, it's never going to be in the family, which is one of the many reasons that talking to my mom is amazing.
Because exactly.
That's why there's other people, John.
Yeah.
Where the hell did that come from?
And, you know, and she was obviously storing it up because she wanted to talk to me about it the next time she saw me like, oh, guess what?
What?
Chatty G says that cinnamon toast was an exceptional guinea pig.
Can I tell you something?
Hmm.
I don't know if this will count as a peer-reviewed study, but I did just ask, I said the chat GPT just now, briefly, are some guinea pigs extraordinary?
And you know what it said?
What?
It said, yeah, because it speaks in vernacular now.
Yeah.
Every so often you get one that's unusually bold, clever, social, or just has a weirdly big personality.
They're outliers, but they exist.
Then that's Cinnamon Toast in 100%.
Exactly.
Cinnamon Toast, according to my mom, who was a grown-up at the time.
Yes, she was a grown lady managing computers.
She was a grown lady managing computers.
And she says that she identified different calls that Cinnamon Toast would make for each person in the house.
Oh, my God.
She said when she woke up at 5 o'clock in the morning, Cinnamon Toast had a distinctive morning call he would give her.
Look, he was saying good morning specifically to her.
But if he was sleeping in my bed with me, he would not make the call.
What?
It has contextual awareness.
Don't wake John.
Only if he's in the cage did he give his little chirp to her of greeting in the morning.
If he was in bed with me.
This makes me think I should stop eating guinea pigs.
Or at least stop feeding them to your giant snake.
He's not so smart.
Stupid snake.
Are some snakes extraordinary?
Ask chat GPT.
How the hell am I supposed to know?
How about this?
Are some horses extraordinary?
Because here's the thing.
Here's the thing that some people, some people don't know about Chachiputi.
Chachiputi will rarely tell you no.
What it will tell you is try to find something that comes up with it.
It says, sure, some horses stand out for brains, temperament, athletic ability, or just an uncanny bond with people.
Same deal as with any species.
A few are real outliers.
Outliers keeps coming up.
Am I making you frustrated?
I'm making you frustrated.
Well, it sounded like it was getting a little short with me, and it said, no, you're fine.
No, you're fine.
Well, I recently changed.
I told it to be more terse, because I've had it.
I've had it with all this shucking and jiving.
You can tell it how to be.
You know that, right?
You can say, hey, can you speak to me in like Valley Girl talk?
Oh, absolutely.
You should see, at one point it took 100,000 tokens just to load my instructions each time.
Because my instructions are very, very deep.
It knows a lot about it.
It knows...
It knows or at one point, I won't say that it knows because I don't know what it knows, but what it has learned in the past from me is not to say the shit that drives me fucking bananas, to not use neologisms that I dislike.
I've asked it not to turn nouns into verbs if there's a better verb that says what you want.
I've asked it to avoid all of the things that drive me fucking crazy about dumb guys.
Now, when you say tokens, are you like paying it Dogecoin?
No, it's 20 bucks a month, but like, no, there's, there's, I, I, I don't know enough to explain it, but it takes a certain, basically, and then John, John Syracuse has actually explained this really well, is that basically every time you enter anything, everything's, what is his phrase?
Everything's input.
All it's doing is reacting to what you've inputted.
know what you put in the prompt it'll be different each time like it's all different depends on the heat index and all that kind of stuff but but no but like it's all just input and so it knows where i was born it knows it knows it knows all the things and i i utilize that you know anyways this has become about chat gpt and that's really depressing
Yeah, well, I mean, as somebody who's still, you know, never held a Nintendo Game Boy in his hand, I'm always going to be your... I'm always going to be your fact-checking friend who's like, what?
What about the voice of... Hang on, hang on, hang on.
What about the voice...
Of Getty Lee?
Question mark.
How did it get so high?
Let's see what it says.
What about the voice of Getty Lee?
How did it get so high?
No, see, see?
No.
Oh my fucking, oh my fucking God.
You're such a nerd.
What's it say?
Well, it's supposed to say in the voice of Bob Nastakovich.
Then, you know, and he goes, aw, you're my fact-checking cousin, aw.
Yeah, I know him, and he does.
And he does.
Physiology, technique, influences, and then youth plus adrenaline.
He retrained himself.
There's a really good spirit of radio from their induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.
Their whole Rock and Roll Hall of Fame with the Foo Fighters is a really good performance worth watching.
But they go into, they do this thing where they do this intro, this medley before, why am I telling you this?
You don't care.
You don't want to crush, right?
I love Rush.
I thought Eric liked Rush.
Eric worshipped Rush.
Okay.
But that was your warm-up.
You did Spirit of Radio as a warm-up song sometimes, right?
Or a check-the-PA song.
I've seen Rush three times.
Really?
Which is more than a lot of people.
Whoa, I've seen Rush once.
I saw him on that Washing Machine tour.
It was really good.
I saw the Washing Machine tour.
Not their finest hour, I didn't think.
Yeah.
No, but I mean, you know, did you see him back in the day?
No.
Me neither.
Me neither.
I would have killed to see them.
Because, like, I still, I'm like, you fucking cowards.
Release Existage Left in 4K, you fucking cowards.
You can go get it online.
You can get it on, of all places, YouTube.
If you go back and you watch Existage Left, seriously.
Yeah.
1981, Montreal.
I was worried that they were Satan worshippers.
Of course.
Look at this black t-shirt.
There's at least two things about this black t-shirt that are very upsetting.
One of them is a man's ass.
Yeah, a naked man.
And then as you say, what's he walking into, John?
Is he walking into a crucifix?
He's walking into a devil's pentagram.
Yep.
Yep.
Not a pentagon.
Not a pentagon.
He's...
No, it looks like he's being tortured by Satan.
He's reaching into it.
He's trying to reach out to the priests of the Temple of Syrinx.
Yeah, they might be kids in Satan's service like so many others.
I heard your mom has a caress of steam.
We did it.
Hour and 16 minutes.
Pew, pew, pew.