v28 - Do you regret it yet?

I don't normally do this, but content warning, this episode talks at length about death and funerals and, while I continue to approach everything with an inappropriate degree of levity, if that's something you're not game to listen to right now, go ahead and skip the first hour of this one.

Recommend me your favorite show or video game at podcast@searls.co and I will either play/watch it or lie and say I did. Thanks!

Now: links and transcript:

• Kirkland Signature, Organic Non-Dairy Oat Beverage
• Die with Zero book
• The "Prefer tabs when opening documents" setting
• Aaron's puns, ranked
• Amazon hoped more people would quit
• BoldVoice Accent Oracle
• Cab drivers get Alzheimer's less
• Video Games Can’t Afford to Look This Good
• LG announces Bachelor's Only TV
• Can the rich world escape its baby crisis?
• Why aren't we talking about the real reason male college enrollment is dropping?
• The Diplomat
• The Penguin
• It’s in the Game Madden documentary
• Like a Dragon / Yakuza 7
• Indiana Jones and the Great Circle

Transcript:

[00:00:29] It is our first new year together in this relationship.
[00:00:36] Breaking Change survived season one.
[00:00:39] We are now in season two.
[00:00:43] I don't know what, you know, how seasons should translate to a show about nothing.
[00:00:51] I like to talk about how, you know, in different stages of life, we go through different seasons, right?
[00:00:58] You know, like maybe, you know, after, you know, the seasonal life when maybe you get married or you have a kid, your first kid and all the changes that kind of go with that.
[00:01:08] And if you play multiplayer competitive games, you might go through different seasons.
[00:01:15] You know, like if you play Diablo four or Call of Duty, you might be in a particular eight week or 12 week season.
[00:01:24] Now, as you grind your battle pass, that's similar in in scale and scope to having a child or having some big life event, because it turns out none of this fucking matters.
[00:01:35] Hello, welcome.
[00:01:36] This is a this is your kind and friendly host, Justin Searles, son of Fred Searles, son of Fred Searles himself, son of a Fred Searles.
[00:01:48] That's yeah, there were there were, I think, three Fred's before me and then my dad was like combo breaker and he named me Justin.
[00:02:02] Uh, thank you for subscribing to the advertisement free version of the podcast.
[00:02:08] Uh, if you, if you think that there should be an advertisement version of the podcast, feel free to write in a podcast at Searles.co and then pay me money to read about your shit.
[00:02:20] And I will do that.
[00:02:21] Uh, and, and, you know, I'm happy to have all the conflicts of interest in the world because, uh, if your product sucks and I use it, I can't help myself.
[00:02:32] I'm just, I'm just going to say it's bad.
[00:02:34] So, uh, that's a real, you know, I, I, if you can't tell, I also run the ad sales department of this journalistic outfit and, uh, that might have something to do with the total lack of, uh, corporate funding.
[00:02:48] Well, anyway, this is version 28 of the program.
[00:02:54] This, this, this episode's breaking change titled, do you regret it yet?
[00:02:59] And that'll make sense, uh, momentarily.
[00:03:03] Uh, so, um, it's a big one in a sense, you know, it's something that, uh, there's very little in life that I'm not comfortable talking about.
[00:03:14] And that's because, you know, well, I'll just dive right in.
[00:03:20] So, so I read it, uh, I read an article, uh, uh, some number of years ago that explained that part of the reason why foot fetishes are so common in men is like part of the brain that identifies feet.
[00:03:38] And part of the brain that is like erogenous in its, you know, there's different parts of the brain.
[00:03:46] They do different things, but if you got to pick which neuron cluster you lived in as a part of the brain, erogenous zone, that would be sweet.
[00:03:53] That'd be a lot more fun than the, um, whatever the, the part of the brain is that gets scared easily, which, uh, because I get stressed and anxious,
[00:04:04] even just talking into a microphone with zero stakes on a recording that I could stop.
[00:04:08] That makes me no money.
[00:04:10] I'm too nervous to remember the fear part of the amygdala.
[00:04:13] There it is.
[00:04:14] You see, and if it just, and, and that gets back to my point in my particular fucked up brain soup,
[00:04:22] the, uh, the, uh, the part of my brain that talks out my mouth hole is right next to the part of my brain that critically reasons through things.
[00:04:37] So for me, it is very difficult to process something without talking it, talking it through.
[00:04:47] And the idea that something is taboo has always been really uncomfortable for me.
[00:04:52] And you can just sort of see the pained look on my face as I try to hold it in like a, like a burp or something.
[00:04:57] Like I, I, I got to let it out somehow.
[00:05:00] And so I'm, I, you know, I'm glad, I'm glad I get to be here with you.
[00:05:05] I hope you find it kind of entertaining.
[00:05:06] Unfortunately, the thing to talk about first thing, as I get into the section of this to-do list, that is this podcast titled life is that the big thing that happened since the last major breaking change, uh, uh, back in version 26, which is, I, I, I understand two numbers away from 28.
[00:05:30] Uh, the big thing that changed, uh, is, uh, my father, Fred, he of a, a long and proud line of Fred's, uh, he passed away, uh, uh, uh, December 15th.
[00:05:45] So just, just shortly after, uh, the previous, the previous version aired and, uh, pretty much every it's January 4th today and we're still working through it.
[00:05:59] Um, he had a heart attack.
[00:06:02] I think that's fair to say at this point, there's no, you know, no way to be a thousand percent sure, but all the signs suggest that's what it was.
[00:06:11] And, uh, you know, without getting into, uh, the, the details, my side of the story is like, I was at Epcot with my brother, Jeremy.
[00:06:26] So at least we were together.
[00:06:28] Um, Jeremy gets the call and, uh, you know, we were, we were in that little tequila bar, uh, hanging out with a friend of ours who works there.
[00:06:40] And, uh, the tequila bar inside of the Mexican pavilion pyramid.
[00:06:44] And, uh, he had just brought us out the three kind of specialty cocktails that they got going on right now.
[00:06:53] Uh, which is, uh, you know, wasn't, we are in a great time.
[00:06:57] It was a lot of fun.
[00:06:58] And, uh, Jeremy gets the call.
[00:07:00] We process a little bit.
[00:07:02] We realized like, we got to get home.
[00:07:04] We got to figure this shit out.
[00:07:06] You know, he's, he's a, he was a former emergency responder.
[00:07:09] So he's really good at, uh, at thinking through the logistical things that you have to do with a relatively cool head.
[00:07:16] It, you know, he comes across as like, you know, not drill sergeanty, but somebody who's like, you know, part of being calm and collected in an urgent situation is you have to be very direct.
[00:07:28] And boom, boom, boom, boom.
[00:07:30] So that was as soon as he knew what was happening.
[00:07:35] That's the mode he flipped on.
[00:07:37] And the mode that I flipped on was intense, uh, metabolization is the best word I can think of it.
[00:07:44] Cause like you have like, like, like, like the saves take four shots of liquor, right?
[00:07:48] You will metabolize that at whatever speed you do, and it'll hit you really hard and maybe you'll black out and maybe you'll, uh, you're a slower burn.
[00:07:56] But for me, I feel, I feel things, whether they're chemical toxicology report showing up things or emotions, I tend to feel them extremely intensely and, and, and, and, and in a relatively brief burst, you know, uh, if you ever lit in a strip of magnesium on fire, which for some reason I did several times.
[00:08:19] I was in, in, in different science lab classes as a kid, it brights, it burns real bright and real hot, but not for very long.
[00:08:27] So while, while Jeremy was in his, you know, we got to figure out what to do mode.
[00:08:33] Uh, we got to get out of here.
[00:08:35] Uh, we gotta, you gotta, you know, we gotta book the next flight to Michigan to take care of this shit.
[00:08:43] I was in, I'm going to, I'm going to just take a little, I'm going to pop a little deep squat here in Epcot, uh, right outside this bar.
[00:08:56] And I'm going to just allow my vision to get blurry, which it did.
[00:09:04] Um, my heart to race, my stomach to turn.
[00:09:08] And I just needed that, you know, you lose track of time when something big and, and, and, and, and earth shaken happens.
[00:09:20] I
[00:09:22] snapped out of it is, you know, it's, it's crude way.
[00:09:31] Words don't, words that you use for everyday things end up getting used for big life-changing things.
[00:09:40] And it makes it feel smaller.
[00:09:43] So even though I'm verbally processing every time I tell the story or think through it and, and talk it out.
[00:09:53] I, I, I, I kind of came to my normal Justin senses pretty quickly, uh, where normal Justin senses means, you know, back in the bar, you know, everyone's, you know, who'd heard was upset and immediately like they're in their own kind of sense of shock, even not knowing my dad.
[00:10:14] And I, I was, you know, uh, comforting them immediately and, you know, just asking our host, Hey, you know, because as a, as a staff member, he, he's able to get us out of the park a little bit more expeditiously, uh, than having to go all the way out and do this big, you know, what would have felt like a 15 minute walk of shame out of a theme park.
[00:10:39] And, uh, yeah, anyway, so he got us out of there, we got home, booked flight, got, went up to Michigan the next day, uh, pretty much immediately.
[00:10:50] And, and, and, and, and, and kudos to my brother for, for having that serious first response.
[00:10:56] Cause like my first response after asking for, Hey, get us out of here was to see those three specialty cocktails on the table and be like, well, that, that would be a waste and B I could probably use a drink.
[00:11:08] And so I, you know, one of them was a sake and, uh, mezcal infusion.
[00:11:13] And I was like, well, they'd already poured it.
[00:11:16] So I just threw that back on, on my way out the door.
[00:11:18] That was probably a good move.
[00:11:21] Uh, so we got up to Michigan, right?
[00:11:25] And I don't want to tell anyone else's story about how, how they work through stuff and families.
[00:11:31] Everyone processes things differently.
[00:11:34] Uh, uh, so I'll skip all that shit.
[00:11:36] I'll just say that like pretty quickly, the service planning, like that takes over, you know, the, uh, this is the first time I've had an immediate family member pass, but pretty quickly you're like, all right, well, there is this kind of, you know, process.
[00:11:53] It's like not dissimilar from wedding planning, but instead of having six months, a year, or if you're an elder millennial, like eight years to plan, you have, uh, a few days.
[00:12:07] And fortunately, uh, uh, dad had just by coincidence of, of, of another, uh, person we know passing had found a funeral home that he really liked.
[00:12:18] And he, he said he wanted to do that one.
[00:12:20] So that, that was off the table.
[00:12:21] That was, that worked out.
[00:12:23] But, uh, then, you know, even, and that was helpful.
[00:12:28] That was really helpful to sit down and, and, and, you know, of course you go to the funeral home, you talk to the funeral home director and super sympathetic there.
[00:12:35] It takes a certain kind, right?
[00:12:38] A person, you know, you gotta have the strategically placed tissue boxes all over the place and then know when to stop talking and when to hand it and when to back away.
[00:12:46] And, you know, dude is an absolute champ, but he's also done this before and he knows the questions to ask.
[00:12:55] And it's not to like boil it down into a questionnaire, but it, it's a questionnaire.
[00:13:00] It's like, Hey, what do you want?
[00:13:01] How do you got to do this?
[00:13:02] You know, you're being bang, boom.
[00:13:04] What?
[00:13:04] And fortunately, uh, collectively we came to the table with a lot of answers to a lot of those stock questions at the ready.
[00:13:15] Um, but the thing that stood out to me was, you know, there's going to be a service we're going to have to write an obituary.
[00:13:22] They gave us a start and, um, a start is actually the perfect thing to give me when it, when it comes to writing, you know, if you give me a blank page, it could take me all week.
[00:13:32] But if you give me something I don't like and like me not writing in a hurry would result in the thing I don't like going out, then all of a sudden I get the motivation to go and write some shit.
[00:13:46] So we, we, we, we, we worked together and we cleaned up the eulogy or the, excuse me, the obituary, all these terms you only use sparingly.
[00:13:55] Occasionally, uh, got the obituary out, had a tremendous response, maybe from some of you because it was up on the website.
[00:14:05] Had a tremendous response from people.
[00:14:07] Everyone was shocked.
[00:14:08] You know, no one expected that, uh, dad had a tremendously large social network being a dentist for 45 plus years in a community of people who loved him.
[00:14:20] And he was genuinely, you know, an incredibly kind and friendly guy everywhere he went.
[00:14:26] Uh, so, so that was good.
[00:14:29] And you re and, and it was the obituary that made me realize like, well, I, you know, I knew this intellectually, but be like, oh yeah, like next few days here are for them.
[00:14:37] It's for everybody else to understand process grief.
[00:14:42] And so as soon as the obituary out, I was like, all right, next eulogy time.
[00:14:48] So I, uh, I approached it as soon as I knew it's a, when I know something's for me, I let it be for me.
[00:14:58] I'm not, I've, I accept myself.
[00:15:00] I love myself and take care of myself as best I can.
[00:15:03] I don't, I'm not a martyr, right?
[00:15:06] Like I don't push down my needs and interests for the sake of other people.
[00:15:12] To the point of other people's viewing it as selfish sometimes.
[00:15:15] And increasingly over the years, I'm viewing it as like, maybe you, maybe it's the children who are wrong.
[00:15:21] Maybe this is just the way to be, because it turns out that when you take good care of yourself, you can show up for other people.
[00:15:26] Well, right.
[00:15:26] So anyway, I, I, as soon as I knew that like the point of the service wasn't for me, the point of the service was, uh, the other people in the room who, who, some of whom drove hours and stayed overnight in hotels to come be there.
[00:15:42] It was, it was to give them something.
[00:15:46] So as soon as that bit flipped in my brain, it became very easy to write a eulogy because I, I approached it like work.
[00:15:56] I approached it like a conference talk or yeah, like it, I didn't actually open keynote, but I thought about it because that's how, that's how I tend to storyboard and work out conference talks.
[00:16:09] And I, I thought about like, well, maybe I just do that and I just don't show the slides, you know, because I think it would be possibly inappropriate to, to have a PowerPoint presentation at your, I, at a funeral.
[00:16:23] I don't know.
[00:16:24] I guess I had to make one anyway.
[00:16:26] We'll talk about that.
[00:16:29] So anyway, writing, the eulogy took over.
[00:16:31] It went smoothly.
[00:16:33] It, I liked how it turned out.
[00:16:35] If you subscribe to the newsletter, you'll get a copy of it.
[00:16:38] So, so justin.searles.co slash newsletter.
[00:16:41] It's called Searles of Wisdom, which of course, you know, me making that sound kitschy right now in this rather grave moment might sound inappropriate to, to, to shill, but you will get a copy of the eulogy.
[00:16:53] I'm happy with it, how it turned out.
[00:16:56] I, uh, as soon as I wrote it then, of course, and this is what I'm trying to illustrate is like everything just became task A.
[00:17:03] Like, okay, task A is complete, task B, no real time in there for processing and thinking through things through.
[00:17:11] Uh, so the eulogy took over, wrote it, and as soon as I'd written it, I was now task C, I gotta deliver it, you know.
[00:17:21] I don't typically read a script when I speak, uh, but I had to write it all out as if it was being spoken.
[00:17:32] And I had to even practice and rehearse it as if I was reading it because I knew that in an emotionally, you know, the best way that people seem to talk about this is like, it's, your emotions are close to the surface as if like any little tiny thing could just break the surface tension and, and, and spill over.
[00:17:51] Right.
[00:17:52] I knew that out of my control, I might, I might tear up.
[00:17:56] I might cry.
[00:17:57] I might need a minute.
[00:18:01] While delivering this.
[00:18:02] And so I, uh, I, I practiced it to be read, but I knew like, man, there's just a, there's a, I call it a 5%, 10% chance that I just have a fucking breakdown and I can't get through this thing.
[00:18:18] And the anxiety in the day and a half leading up to the service worrying that I would fail as a public speaker outside the context of, you know, sure.
[00:18:32] Everyone would give you a break if your dad just died.
[00:18:35] Right.
[00:18:35] But this is like the last thing I'm doing for him, you know, in a, in a publicly meaningful way.
[00:18:40] And it's also a skill that I've spent a lot of time working on.
[00:18:45] And so I wouldn't for me to fail at that by, by breaking or by even, even just failing to deliver it successfully and in a, in an impactful way would have been hard for me.
[00:19:05] And it would have been something I probably would be ruminating on here.
[00:19:08] We are a couple of weeks later.
[00:19:10] And as a result, what happened is the same thing that happens before I give a conference talk in front of a bunch of people at a conference or whatever.
[00:19:18] It's the, the, the, the, uh, stress hormone gets released, the adrenaline and the cortisol starts coming out.
[00:19:26] And so the morning of the funeral, everyone else is kind of approaching it their own way.
[00:19:31] And I'm like, it's game time, you know, like I, I'm dialed in my, you know, all of my instincts are about just getting through that five to seven minute speech.
[00:19:47] And no emotional response before then.
[00:19:50] And afterwards, to be honest, the biggest emotional response afterwards was the relief of successfully.
[00:19:57] And I did successfully deliver it.
[00:19:59] And, uh, and then as soon as task C of delivering it is done, then task D starts of now it's the end of a funeral service.
[00:20:08] And you've got a receiving line of all these guests coming up and they, you know, they're, they're approaching the open casket and they're, they're coming to, you know, hug you, talk to you.
[00:20:17] See how you are.
[00:20:18] And there's a performative aspect to that, right?
[00:20:22] Like you gotta be like, all right, who's ready for lunch?
[00:20:24] That would be inappropriate.
[00:20:25] Right.
[00:20:26] But the, you know, also talking about how, like, oh, I'm actually mostly focused on how I did a good job.
[00:20:32] Giving this speech would separately be maybe, you know, off color, but these are the things that go through our brains in the, in these high impact moments.
[00:20:43] When you just have to, when, when, whenever a situation dictates that your behavior be misaligned or the statements about oneself be at all discordant with what's really going on inside you in that literal moment.
[00:21:08] And so, so I did my best, uh, of course, to make it about other people and see how they're doing and answer their questions in as, uh, productive a way as possible.
[00:21:20] Right.
[00:21:20] Give them answers about myself that gave them the things that they needed was my primary response all through.
[00:21:29] And then, and then through that, and then task E, the wake.
[00:21:32] Right.
[00:21:33] And, and, uh, you do, you, you do that.
[00:21:35] And then suddenly, uh, well, now you have task F after, after all that stuff of like, okay, well, we've got all this leftover food we got to take home.
[00:21:42] So it's like load up the car and, and, and, and help everyone out and see everyone on their way safely.
[00:21:48] And then, you know, you're exhausted and you want to just go back and, and, you know, get out of this fucking suit that barely fits.
[00:21:58] Nope.
[00:21:59] Task G is you got to go turn around, drive 20 minutes in the opposite direction to go back to the funeral home, to pick up all of these flowers.
[00:22:05] Cause you, you tell people not to send flowers.
[00:22:07] Uh, you, you say, you know, in dad's case, donate to the humane society, but people send flowers.
[00:22:14] And then, you know, what do you fucking do with them?
[00:22:16] Right.
[00:22:17] It's like, well, here's look, if you or someone you're affiliated with sent flowers to this particular funeral, I'm deeply grateful.
[00:22:25] And I had a moving moment, actually looking at all the flowers of friends of mine, people who never met dad.
[00:22:31] Most of the time, a couple of our neighbors, right.
[00:22:35] Who we don't really know well, but they're just really lovely people.
[00:22:38] They, they did a bouquet and it was really nice.
[00:22:40] You know, flowers are beautiful, but.
[00:22:49] Like a cigarette can be really, really nice, but a carton can be a lot.
[00:22:53] Uh, you know, a cocktail can be really nice, but drinking a whole fifth is problematic.
[00:23:00] When you have so many bouquets that you can't fit them into your vehicle and also the people in the vehicle.
[00:23:06] It's all it's, it, it just, it, it becomes a work.
[00:23:10] Right.
[00:23:11] And so that's what, you know, that's one of the ways in which having this service like this become sort of, you know, like less about the immediate family and more about the surrounding, you know, network of people that somebody knows.
[00:23:24] And maybe this is all common sense and, and I should have been more conscientious of this going into the experience, but looking back on it, uh, I was just sort of like, all right, well, here's next task is figure out how to cram all these flowers.
[00:23:39] And then you get home and it's like, where'd all these flowers go?
[00:23:43] And so you just kind of scatter them throughout the house.
[00:23:48] Uh, but they're all, you know, like they're not invasives or they're not like going to survive the long winter.
[00:23:53] Like they're, they're now all on their own separate week to two week timer of themselves dying and needing to be dealt with, which is like, you know, a, let's just say an echo or a reverberation of like kind of what you're thinking about.
[00:24:07] So maybe, okay, look, I don't want to spend this whole fucking podcast talking about a funeral.
[00:24:15] I realize it's like maybe a bit of a downer, but you know, there's other stuff going on to like, I skipped a whole fucking half day activity.
[00:24:25] Actually is wedge a task in there between B and C if you're for anyone playing the home game and keeping track of this, not that it's that complicated, uh, you got to come up with a slideshow, right?
[00:24:39] So you've got the visitation before the service and we also had it the night before for anyone who couldn't make it or, you know, maybe acquaintances and whatnot, who didn't feel like going to the whole service, whatever it is.
[00:24:57] You got to come up with a slideshow, which is theoretically easy these days because there's so many goddamn pictures of all of us.
[00:25:04] It's theoretically easy because you have tools like, uh, shared iCloud photo libraries, uh, and shared albums, which, you know, as soon as somebody suggested a shared album, I went into my like pre canned speech.
[00:25:20] And I think of, well, actually shared albums predate, you know, modern ways of sharing photos in the photos app.
[00:25:25] And so whenever you put anything in a shared album, Apple compresses it pretty badly.
[00:25:30] It, it downscales the resolution.
[00:25:32] It also, you know, adjusts downward, the quality of the image.
[00:25:39] And I got halfway through that spiel and being like, you know, this is going to go up on a 10 ADP TV in the back of a room.
[00:25:45] Like it's fine.
[00:25:46] That's not the issue.
[00:25:47] But then the next issue is, you know, everyone goes in the people and pets and photo library, sees all the pictures of dad that aren't bad.
[00:25:56] And we all dump them into the same shared library, shared photo album, which is like, like, that's no one's fault, but mine.
[00:26:02] I told people just do that and I'll clear them out.
[00:26:04] But then you wind up with, and it turns out, this is how that stupid fucking system works.
[00:26:09] The shared photo album will treat all of those duplicates as distinct.
[00:26:14] And there's, even though there's duplicate deduping now in the photos app, it does not apply to shared library, shared photo albums.
[00:26:21] And on top of that, if somebody adds something to a shared photo album, they can remove it.
[00:26:27] But for somebody else, like, like, let's say I added a photo of dad that Becky didn't want in there.
[00:26:33] Well, Becky can't go in and remove it.
[00:26:35] Only the organizer can remove it or the person who posted it.
[00:26:39] So then I had to be the person going through and, like, servicing any requests people had for photos to, like, ban from the slideshow.
[00:26:46] Because for whatever reason, you know, it's a sensitive time.
[00:26:49] And then after it was all done, you realize the slideshow tools don't work correctly.
[00:26:56] Like, just the play button and all the different options in the Mac, like, just don't work correctly in a shared album.
[00:27:01] Because, of course, they don't.
[00:27:02] So then you've got to copy them all.
[00:27:07] You thought I was talking about feelings, but it all comes back.
[00:27:11] All comes back to Apple shit.
[00:27:13] So you've got to copy them all into your photo library, whoever is going to be running the slideshow.
[00:27:17] Create a new slideshow project from there.
[00:27:20] Dump them all in there.
[00:27:22] And then realize there's no, once you've dumped shit into a slideshow project, there is no way to reorder them.
[00:27:27] Short of manually drag dropping extremely slowly in a left-right horizontal scroll dingus.
[00:27:34] And you've got 500 pictures or something, just fucking forget about it.
[00:27:37] And on top of that, I had all these dupes.
[00:27:40] Like, I had manually de-duped as best as I could before.
[00:27:43] But first question I get half an hour into the visitation is like, yeah, it just seems weird.
[00:27:48] Because, like, there's this one picture of me that's going to come up, like, four times.
[00:27:52] I was like, I'm sorry, bud.
[00:27:54] I said, oh, it's randomized or whatever, you know.
[00:28:01] So after you get all of those into a photo slideshow project, and successfully, I installed amphetamine, which will keep your screen awake.
[00:28:11] And you plug that into HDMI, and you know how to put a fucking Mac on a TV.
[00:28:15] I don't need to tell you that.
[00:28:16] After all of it was done and I got home, the two days later I realized, oh, yeah, shit.
[00:28:24] Because now my photo library is full, all of the most recent photos are just shit that was copied, that was already initially in my photo library anyway.
[00:28:32] And none of them are showing up in the little dupes thing, of course, because it needs days to analyze on Wi-Fi.
[00:28:39] So I went to the recent imports or recently saved tab, and then I had to manually go through and delete, like, 1,400 pictures of my dad.
[00:28:50] And then hope that, like, I wasn't deleting one that wasn't a dupe.
[00:28:55] So I had to go through and, like, manually tease these out.
[00:28:59] It took me a fucking hour and a half.
[00:29:02] And, yeah, so then I deleted all those to kind of dedupe it, because I was confident I had copies of all those pictures already somewhere else in the library.
[00:29:11] That could have been smoother, is the short version of this story.
[00:29:16] And, of course, there's no goddamn good software that does this.
[00:29:20] There are two people who have made apps that simply shuffle photos in a slideshow.
[00:29:26] And they're bad apps.
[00:29:27] So they look old.
[00:29:28] It's like they basically had to reinvent slideshow stuff, including the software and the shuffling and the crossfades and the Ken Burns effect and the music and all the stuff that the Apple product does.
[00:29:38] They had to reinvent all that just to have a shuffle button, which is what you probably want, especially if you've got a mix of scanned photos and, you know, contemporaneous photos.
[00:29:50] Because there's no way you're going to make the timeline actually contiguous.
[00:29:54] So instead, like, well, here's, like, a bunch of photos between, like, 2003 and 2017, because that's the digital photography era.
[00:30:05] And then in 2018, when we scanned all of our photo albums, suddenly it's just all of the photo albums in random order.
[00:30:12] And then you have 2019 to 2024.
[00:30:15] Like, it's not a cohesive experience.
[00:30:20] Now, I would say, well, you know, it's a visitation.
[00:30:23] People are coming and going.
[00:30:24] They go in, they visit the casket, and they spend time chatting.
[00:30:28] But, like, they don't, though.
[00:30:30] All the chairs are pointing at this TV, and people just sat there for more than an hour.
[00:30:36] They'd watch multiple.
[00:30:37] Like, I thought that having a 45-minute long slideshow, that pacing would be okay.
[00:30:43] People watched it two or three times while they chatted, you know, just the state of, the lack of kinetic energy throughout the entire experience of somebody passing.
[00:30:54] You know, the phrase sit Shiva from Judaism.
[00:30:58] Like, I am somebody who is relatively uncomfortable just sitting around, around other people.
[00:31:06] I'm happy to sit around by myself.
[00:31:08] I'm doing it right now.
[00:31:09] I'm actually pretty good at it.
[00:31:10] Ask anybody.
[00:31:11] But to not have an activity with other people, and also not to have, like, interesting conversation to have with other people,
[00:31:20] to just have to be around and with other people, is really goddamn hard.
[00:31:25] And I suspect I'm not the only one who feels that way.
[00:31:28] Hence, everyone just staring at the slideshow and making a comment here and there.
[00:31:32] So, a couple things did jump out at me about that service and about the visitation, though, that were interesting.
[00:31:40] One was, Dad had mentored a couple of younger dentists in his last couple years practicing.
[00:31:48] People who had intended to take over the practice.
[00:31:51] That's his own long story.
[00:31:52] But they were, my age or younger, probably younger, definitely younger, come to think of it.
[00:31:59] Splendid people.
[00:32:00] Like, super upbeat, super duper energetic, just, like, fun.
[00:32:05] They forced my dad to do stuff like go fishing and get out and do things that he normally wouldn't do.
[00:32:13] And they blew me away by just saying, like, you know, dad was 72.
[00:32:18] He was like, this guy, most dentists, when they get older, the hands get shaky.
[00:32:25] Their craft gets sloppy.
[00:32:28] But your dad was, he, he, I think he said, he set the standard.
[00:32:33] He was just a beast.
[00:32:34] He was, and I was like, what do you mean?
[00:32:36] Like, actually, I've never really talked to anyone about his craft, right?
[00:32:41] Because he didn't want to talk about it.
[00:32:44] He was like, his prep work and, and, and how he prepped for each procedure was meticulous and perfect every single time.
[00:32:53] And his technique while doing things was, was like, like phenomenal.
[00:33:00] And they went into a handful of specifics for me.
[00:33:02] And that was really special to me because I, like, I, I know that about myself that I'm chasing this asymptotic goal of perfection, but I didn't have evidence that my dad was as well outside of just stuff around the house.
[00:33:16] And you can say that, well, that's perfectionism and that's OCD.
[00:33:19] And we both have like, you know, traits of that too.
[00:33:20] But the, that was really interesting because everyone had only ever experienced my dad as a patient or somebody who's like really, really gregarious and friendly and good at comforting patients.
[00:33:33] But yeah, their stories were really, really encouraging.
[00:33:39] And that was, that was one where it's like, I was glad to be able to walk away from that series of experiences and learn new stuff about my dad, uh, new stuff that rounded out the story of him in my mind.
[00:33:54] Uh, so I'm really thankful to those guys, uh, because they were able to dive in and baby bird for me, explain like I'm five, like the ways in which he was a great dentist, which is just a thing that like, you know, everyone.
[00:34:08] How do you rate your dentist, right?
[00:34:10] Well, he's good at comforting me.
[00:34:12] He's good at explaining things.
[00:34:13] He doesn't upsell me a lot.
[00:34:15] You know, I'm not afraid when I'm in the chair with him.
[00:34:17] And then afterwards things seem to go pretty well, but like, really like the, the work is a black box.
[00:34:22] You can't see what's going on in your fucking mouth.
[00:34:24] You're, you're conscious.
[00:34:25] You know how you feel before and how you feel after, but it's, uh, that was really cool.
[00:34:31] Uh, the other, uh, another dentist that worked for him earlier in, in, in, uh, his career, uh, she, she had previously lost her dad and she said, you know, she said something that felt at the time, extremely true.
[00:34:47] That a funeral is like having to host the worst party ever.
[00:34:51] Uh, so that just to put a cap on it, that's, uh, accurate.
[00:35:00] It felt like a party because I got to see a whole lot of people, friends from college, you know, Mark Van Holstein, the president or former president, but co-founder, founder of, uh, mutually human software in Grand Rapids.
[00:35:10] You had my former housemate.
[00:35:11] He came out, uh, uh, other kid, uh, other friends from, from middle school, high school made the trick, trick, trick, trick, Jeff and Dan.
[00:35:21] It was really great to see so many people under, you know, suboptimal circumstances.
[00:35:28] And then of course the whole set of extended family where it's like weddings and funerals, huh?
[00:35:33] And then like the obligatory, like, yeah, we should really figure out a way to see each other more.
[00:35:37] And it's like true.
[00:35:38] And no one doesn't feel that way.
[00:35:40] It's just like structurally unlikely the way people's lives work.
[00:35:44] Uh, and so there's a sort of, uh, uh, nihilism is definitely the wrong word.
[00:35:52] There's a sort of resignation that one has about what even are weddings and funerals and why is it that there's this whole cast of characters in your life that are important or close to you and via affiliation or history in some way.
[00:36:12] But that you only see at these really like, like, like, like loud life events where it's a big, the background sound is a huge gong going off that distracts from actually getting to know the people.
[00:36:26] If you just, you know, picked them on a random Tuesday and went to lunch, you'd probably learn a lot about the person.
[00:36:31] But if it's just in the context of like, you know, like looking at, you know, a tray of sandwiches and having to find something to say, it's all going to be sucked in by the event.
[00:36:41] And that's too bad, but that's, that's life, I guess, uh, tasks, you know, H through Z day after I, I had intentionally put off any sort of like looking at stuff, like, like thinking about the logistics, uh, the finances, the legal side, the, all that stuff, life insurance, yada, yada.
[00:37:06] Uh, but then, you know, it was a lot of that, right.
[00:37:09] For, for the rest of our trip, we were there for, for, for 11 days.
[00:37:12] I would say skipping a lot of the minutiae because I, of course, you know, when the, when the, when, when a, when a household had a household or breadwinner passes and they didn't leave instructions, like you got to go and do the forensic analysis to figure out like, what are all the, where is everything?
[00:37:32] Right.
[00:37:32] That's, that's what it was.
[00:37:34] It's all fine.
[00:37:36] But the, uh, the tech support son, which is like my, you know, uh, it's not an official designation, but, uh, you know, it's a, it's a role I've stepped into and I feel like I've grown into pretty well.
[00:37:48] One of the things that jumped is, all right, so we got a couple of things going on.
[00:37:54] One, my mom is in an Apple family organized to buy my dad's Apple ID.
[00:37:59] Now what?
[00:38:00] All the purchases have been made in general on dad's Apple ID, including their Apple one premiere subscription.
[00:38:06] Okay.
[00:38:07] Well, you know, next eight, you can imagine my next eight Google searches or coggy searches.
[00:38:13] All right.
[00:38:14] Well, how do you change head of house or organizer of a family answer?
[00:38:19] You cannot.
[00:38:19] Okay.
[00:38:20] Well, how can I transfer the purchases from an organizer to somebody else in the family?
[00:38:28] You cannot.
[00:38:28] Okay.
[00:38:29] Is there a process by which I can make somebody sort of like a legacy page on Facebook, a legacy
[00:38:35] human Apple ID?
[00:38:37] No.
[00:38:39] Okay.
[00:38:40] So what do I do?
[00:38:41] And they're like, well, you can call Apple support and they may need a death certificate,
[00:38:45] but then you can call them and then they can do some amount of stuff, but some, but you don't
[00:38:52] get to know what.
[00:38:52] And once you kind of go through that process, the Apple ID gets like locked out or that's a,
[00:38:57] that's a risk.
[00:38:58] And all the sort of, you know, contingent, other things related to that.
[00:39:02] I was like, all right, well, I don't necessarily want to do that as a first resort, but I do got
[00:39:09] to figure this out because having just like this extra Apple, having this whole like digital
[00:39:14] twin to borrow a, an industry term, continue to be a part of a, you know, an Apple family,
[00:39:22] a one password family or all this for years into years, just because the software companies
[00:39:27] don't make it logistically possible to die.
[00:39:30] Uh, that seems great, you know, like, like, so working through that, you know, like I, I still
[00:39:38] don't quite have a solution to that.
[00:39:39] I'm just going to get through a couple of billing cycles on all the other stuff first,
[00:39:43] before I think too hard about it.
[00:39:44] Just kidding.
[00:39:45] I've thought really hard about it and I've got a 15 step, you know, uh, set of to do's,
[00:39:50] but they're just gonna, I gracefully, mercifully, I mercifully punted them two weeks into the
[00:39:56] future.
[00:39:56] Uh, I, one of the biggest things other than the Apple family stuff was my, my dad had just
[00:40:09] bought a new iPhone 16.
[00:40:12] I, and he set it up and all that stuff, but my mom was on an older one, like a 12 pro or a 12 mini or a 13 mini.
[00:40:19] And it didn't make sense to leave her with the old phone and the new 16, just like in a drawer,
[00:40:30] it made sense to give her the new phone.
[00:40:33] Right.
[00:40:34] Otherwise that the other phone's old enough.
[00:40:36] It's like, I'll just be back in six months or, or, or, you know, like we'll, you'll be wasting
[00:40:39] money.
[00:40:40] So, and that, you know, just like deleting photos of your dad because of a stupid duplication bug,
[00:40:45] having to go through a whole bunch of hoops to, to migrate one phone to the other was like the
[00:40:50] next challenge.
[00:40:52] Cause here was why it was thorny, right?
[00:40:54] If, if all of the bank accounts and multi-factor authentication against banks is almost exclusively
[00:41:03] SMS, right?
[00:41:04] Cause they didn't get on the bandwagon for a, a T O T P or, you know, like you scan the QR code and you
[00:41:11] get an authenticator app to, to show it.
[00:41:13] And because they, they certainly don't support pass keys.
[00:41:16] Uh, we can't just turn off dad's cellular line until we work through all the financial stuff.
[00:41:22] But at the same time, okay.
[00:41:25] So like if I'm resetting dad's phone and moving mom's stuff onto dad's phone, then how do I
[00:41:30] transfer, how do I get these, how do I make it so that dad's SIM doesn't just disappear?
[00:41:35] Cause like last thing I want to do is have to call T-Mobile and explain, and then set up the
[00:41:41] old phone from scratch and then have them like, I guess, restart the e-SIM process over the phone
[00:41:46] on Christmas, you know, Christmas Eve or whatever.
[00:41:51] So I, um, I came up with like a towers of Hanoi solution that I actually kind of liked.
[00:41:56] What I did was I transferred dad's SIM from the 16 to mom's 13, call it.
[00:42:03] So now she had two SIMs on her phone.
[00:42:05] She had her primary SIM and dad's SIM, uh, e-SIM.
[00:42:09] Uh, uh, and then I, oh, and the 13 or the 12, whatever has one physical and one e-SIM.
[00:42:17] And she fortunately had a physical SIM in there.
[00:42:19] So she was able to, to, to receive dad's old e-SIM.
[00:42:22] So now the 13 of that stage has a physical, a physical nano SIM and an e-SIM.
[00:42:27] And then that allowed me to go to dad's phone, back it up, of course, and all that, and then
[00:42:32] wipe it.
[00:42:33] Cause it had no cellular plan on it.
[00:42:35] And then you set it up new, you set it up for mom.
[00:42:40] And during that wizard, you know, you do the direct transfer, they're connected via, you
[00:42:45] know, USB cables or whatever.
[00:42:46] You set it up for mom.
[00:42:49] And she has to, she, it says, Hey, you're ready to transfer your cellular plans.
[00:42:56] I'm like, yes.
[00:42:56] And then I, it's, I realized it's not, you click, you tap one in it and a check box goes
[00:43:02] up next to that number.
[00:43:03] And then you check the other one and the check box, the check mark moves.
[00:43:07] It's clearly like it doesn't support actually initializing a phone with two SIMs, which means
[00:43:14] now it's like, okay, so I'll move for a primary SIM first as part of this direct transfer.
[00:43:20] And then the direct transfer, because her router was simultaneously and coincidentally failing,
[00:43:25] the direct transfer failed because the wifi timed out.
[00:43:30] And when you're in the direct transfer mode between two phones in that setting, you can't
[00:43:36] like get to control center and turn off the wifi nick.
[00:43:39] So then I've got these two phones that I can clearly tell are timing out in the activation
[00:43:43] process while the SIM is moving.
[00:43:45] And I'm like, fuck sake.
[00:43:47] But it's also like a mesh router and there's three mesh access points throughout the house
[00:43:52] and I don't know where they are.
[00:43:53] So I, I can't just unplug them and make the SSID go away.
[00:43:57] So then I would like throw on my winter coat, it's fucking freezing outside and I start marching
[00:44:03] down the street until I can get to like far enough away that they both lose the wifi signal
[00:44:09] so that the transfer doesn't fail.
[00:44:11] So I, it took 15 houses.
[00:44:14] I'm, you know, in, in, in, in, uh, uh, my winter coat, 15 houses, they finally get onto
[00:44:21] five G and then the, the, the transfer starts succeeding.
[00:44:23] And then I start walking back and then it's just instantly says failed.
[00:44:26] So then I get back to the house, start the whole thing over again.
[00:44:30] And now of course, mom's primary SIM is like trapped on the first phone or the second, the
[00:44:36] new 16, but in setting it up again, it doesn't see it anymore because like it was just at that
[00:44:41] perfect moment when all the e-sim juice lands in the 16 or whatever.
[00:44:48] So I started the whole process over again.
[00:44:50] I, I, I set it up fair and square and then I, I, uh, uh, it all went fine after a few hours.
[00:44:59] And then the last thing it does is the 13 or whatever says, Hey, okay, time to delete
[00:45:04] me.
[00:45:04] And then it's like a, basically two taps and you've deleted the phone that just was the
[00:45:08] sender or the old phone in the transfer process.
[00:45:11] And I almost habitually clicked it.
[00:45:13] And I was like, wait, no, that will delete the SIM, the e-sim.
[00:45:16] So click, no, cancel out of that, restart the phone.
[00:45:20] And then, and then you can transfer that second SIM back to the first one.
[00:45:23] So like when that was just two phones, just moving to e-sims, like again, you know, note
[00:45:28] to Apple, like this could probably be made easier.
[00:45:31] Uh, it's just, it's edge cases like this, that all software companies are really, really bad
[00:45:37] at, uh, especially ones that don't have a great track record of automated testing and stuff
[00:45:43] like, so I get it.
[00:45:45] I know why it happened.
[00:45:47] The other thing that sucked was a dad had an Apple card and if we're not going to have
[00:45:52] a phone with dad on it, you don't want, there's no other fucking way to cancel an Apple card.
[00:45:57] You have to be on the phone that has the Apple card to cancel it.
[00:46:01] But if there's no phone with Fred on it, like that meant I, that forced the issue.
[00:46:05] Like I'm not, I'm putting off all the financial stuff, right?
[00:46:07] But I had to cancel the Apple card, but I had a balance.
[00:46:10] So now I've got to like pay a balance on this Apple card.
[00:46:13] And of course the banking connection, he didn't like, like it expired or something.
[00:46:18] So I have to go and find the banking information.
[00:46:21] I log in, whatever I hit cancel.
[00:46:23] And it's, you can cancel the card.
[00:46:25] It wants you to pay the balance first.
[00:46:27] I tried to pay the exact balance.
[00:46:30] It was $218 and 17 cents.
[00:46:32] I, and I tried 15 goddamn times.
[00:46:35] Uh, I changed to a different bank and it said insufficient balance.
[00:46:41] And I was like, does that mean like the checking accounts overdrawn?
[00:46:45] So then I'm panicking.
[00:46:45] It's like, so I go into the bank account.
[00:46:47] I'm like, is it easy overdrawn or what?
[00:46:50] Hour of, you know, me retrying and doing this only to realize that there's a fucking bug,
[00:46:58] a rounding bug of sub decimal sense.
[00:47:02] Because when it said $218 and 17 cents as being the balance owed, it was probably a floating
[00:47:09] point under there of $218 and call it 16.51 cents.
[00:47:16] Because when I tried to do $218 and 17 cents, it failed.
[00:47:21] It's an insufficient balance, which made me think insufficient funds.
[00:47:25] But then I had the bright idea to try just one penny less than that.
[00:47:28] And it cleared.
[00:47:30] It meant that you can't make a payment on the card that is in excess of what is owed on the
[00:47:35] card.
[00:47:35] And it saw that fraction of a penny as being, oh, hey now, a little too generous.
[00:47:40] So an Apple, you know, be good guy, Apple, making sure people can't overpay.
[00:47:44] Also, the bad guy, Apple doesn't write tests or use, you know, appropriate data structures
[00:47:50] for storing goddamn dollars.
[00:47:52] Results in, I can't close this card out.
[00:47:56] So eventually, so I got it down to one penny.
[00:47:58] And then when it was down to one penny, it let me pay one penny, which is separately hilarious.
[00:48:02] So I close the Apple card and then the Apple card says, all right, you're closed now.
[00:48:09] The card is removed from all your devices.
[00:48:14] Now monitor for the next few months and make payments against anything that shows up in
[00:48:18] the statement, right?
[00:48:19] Because like, that's how credit cards work.
[00:48:20] Things don't post immediately.
[00:48:22] I was like, well, I have no idea what was getting charged onto this thing.
[00:48:26] What might hit it?
[00:48:28] I'd scrolled through a statement.
[00:48:31] I had a feeling it wouldn't be bad.
[00:48:32] But then of course, like as soon as I wipe that phone, I even restored it.
[00:48:36] I restored dad's Apple ID onto another phone because I had a burner phone back when I got
[00:48:42] home just to see like, would it, would it, would it, would the, would it, the iCloud sync
[00:48:47] work, you know, where your wallet shit just shows up in the new phone just magically after
[00:48:52] setup.
[00:48:52] And the answer is no, because the Apple card is closed.
[00:48:55] So there's no reason to put the Apple card on the new phone.
[00:48:58] People would be confused, even though it's just in this removed state of like, watch the
[00:49:01] balance, which means now that once the phone gets wiped, there's actually no way to pay
[00:49:06] a balance.
[00:49:06] If one were to materialize, I guess it would just go to collections.
[00:49:10] So now, you know, like, please don't post any transactions to my dad's defunct Apple card.
[00:49:16] Cause like, I don't have any fucking way to pay it.
[00:49:18] There's card.apple.com.
[00:49:19] But like, that's just for downloading statements.
[00:49:22] So great job, Apple, like you should really make it easier to die.
[00:49:26] Like, fuck, fuck it's sake.
[00:49:27] This is a, I realized this has been a lot.
[00:49:33] I'm going to move right along.
[00:49:37] While we were up, we wanted to just, we needed a break.
[00:49:42] It'd been like day after day of the same, you know, emotional and logistical tumult.
[00:49:48] Just a real grind.
[00:49:49] So we want to go see a movie and like, like, uh, uh, Jeremy had expressed interest in seeing
[00:49:53] wicked, which is an autobiography about Ariana Grande as a person, as best I can tell.
[00:50:00] Real just, she seems like a piece of shit in real life, but also she got to play one in
[00:50:08] a movie.
[00:50:08] And so like, uh, it's like one of those things where it's like, well, that Bill Murray just
[00:50:12] like plays himself.
[00:50:13] And it just so happens that he is such a delightful and interesting person that everything he's
[00:50:18] in is always amazing.
[00:50:19] So I'm glad she got to play herself.
[00:50:21] It seemed well acted, but I knew it was probably just who she is.
[00:50:27] Uh, huge fan.
[00:50:31] Uh, so anyway, we went to see wicked and all of a sudden, you know, we joked about it beforehand,
[00:50:37] but like, I can't, I don't understand lyrics.
[00:50:39] I have a thing I've got a, uh, a worm lives inside my brain.
[00:50:43] And whenever there's a song playing, uh, that worm starts humming and I can't hear the lyrics
[00:50:49] to the song.
[00:50:50] I can't understand or discriminate where the words are starting and stopping.
[00:50:53] I can't tell what is being said.
[00:50:56] And if I can barely make it out, then I'm so overwrought and focusing on what's being said.
[00:51:01] Then, then I kind of lose the thread.
[00:51:02] Like I'll hear the individual words if I really focus, but then not understand what is being
[00:51:08] communicated through lyrics.
[00:51:10] At the same time, you go to a musical, you go to like, when I went to Hamilton, this was
[00:51:15] like extremely clear.
[00:51:16] It's like, Oh, I, I put, we went to Hamilton, uh, when, when Hamilton was still cool and not
[00:51:21] seen as some sort of, you know, uh, uh, white supremacist whitewashing by putting BIPOC
[00:51:27] people in, in these roles and whatnot, 2020 was a hell of a year, uh, when we went to
[00:51:33] Hamilton, I got, they got through the first number and I was like, that was very impressive.
[00:51:38] I, I appreciate the, this tonal, you know, interesting take.
[00:51:43] This is like very like, like skillfully and artfully, uh, done.
[00:51:47] Uh, and then, uh, you know, then they go straight into another song and I turned to Becky.
[00:51:54] He was like, is there, is there no talking in this one?
[00:51:56] Is there zero spoken dialogue in this?
[00:52:00] And it turned out that the answer was yes.
[00:52:02] And I was like, I don't understand anything.
[00:52:04] And so, uh, when we went to Hamilton, which I'd paid a lot of money to go to, uh, I walked
[00:52:09] to the lobby in the middle of the show.
[00:52:12] And then I ordered like two thingies of wine, uh, which I paid a lot of money for the wine.
[00:52:20] And then I got back to the seat, threw back both wines and fell asleep.
[00:52:23] So that was Hamilton for me.
[00:52:26] So here I am at wicked and we're in the first little ditty.
[00:52:28] And I'm like, I don't understand any of these fucking words.
[00:52:33] I don't, I don't know what's happening.
[00:52:35] And I've got to worry that this is going to be a song heavy movie, which it was.
[00:52:40] So I was like, you know what, like normally I'd be embarrassed to do this,
[00:52:44] but I'm going to go to the front and say, like, I'm hard of hearing.
[00:52:49] Can I have a subtitle machine dingus?
[00:52:52] I knew that theaters had them.
[00:52:55] I didn't really know how they worked or what they were, if they were any good.
[00:52:58] But I was like, you know, for the sake of science and technology, I'm going to try the
[00:53:02] subtitle dingus.
[00:53:04] So I went to the front, I went to the little, like, you know, whatever ticket booth, and
[00:53:08] they handed me a gooseneck snake thing where the bottom is like, it's like a, a drill that
[00:53:17] would bore a tunnel, but it goes in the cup holder.
[00:53:20] So it's like a cup holder drill and it screws in.
[00:53:23] So it goes in the cup holder.
[00:53:25] You screw it in to secure it.
[00:53:27] And then there's a long gooseneck, a too long, in my opinion, gooseneck.
[00:53:31] It's like probably two feet.
[00:53:34] If you don't know the term gooseneck, like, like, like, like bendy, like, like, you know,
[00:53:42] relatively thick, not a cable, but like a, like a pole that is pliable.
[00:53:48] So you can bend it in all sorts of different directions to kind of adjust it.
[00:53:53] And then on the top, it was a, a device that had a blinder on the top so that other people
[00:53:59] weren't getting a whole bunch of illumination and seeing subtitles and a radio system in
[00:54:05] the center, as well as like a kind of internal projector unit.
[00:54:08] And so it was very interesting to see how these worked.
[00:54:11] You would, and, and, and honestly, because I was uninterested in the Ariana Grande story,
[00:54:16] I was mostly just futzing with, and it gave me something to do for the three and a half
[00:54:23] hours.
[00:54:23] By the way, I had been told that there was an intermission and I was told that because somebody
[00:54:29] had in the game of telephone and said they broke it up into two parts.
[00:54:32] So like I went in expecting an intermission and then we're like three hours in, it's almost
[00:54:37] like 11 fucking o'clock.
[00:54:38] And I'm like, I got to pee, but like, I hear there's an intermission.
[00:54:41] How late are we going to be here?
[00:54:44] So that was, that kept me busy too.
[00:54:46] I had something else to do, but anyway, the, the, the subtitle machine was really interesting
[00:54:50] because as you look at it and once you get it configured, right, you realize like while
[00:55:00] I was walking down the, the, the corridor, it just said, Hey, you know, go inside the theater
[00:55:06] or whatever.
[00:55:07] When you go in the side of theater, it'll just start showing up.
[00:55:09] And when I looked inside the theater, just at the, at the edge of the theater, it was like,
[00:55:14] malfunctioning.
[00:55:15] It said like something about an, a reader.
[00:55:16] And then I realized, Oh, what's happening here is, and this is really one of those kind
[00:55:20] of old school, cool technology, you know, innovations where they couldn't just use a digital system
[00:55:27] for this per se.
[00:55:28] Like a protocol, right?
[00:55:30] Like if you were to build this today, these would be like lithium ion battery devices that
[00:55:34] would have some charging dock and some kind of software that ran on, like on top of some
[00:55:38] minimal Linux stack.
[00:55:40] And then it would use the, the, the theater's wifi to send subtitles, which would require
[00:55:46] all of this configuration, right?
[00:55:47] Like, okay, now punch in on the touch screen on your subtitle device, like which theater,
[00:55:52] which theater you're in and which movie time.
[00:55:54] And we'll play it.
[00:55:55] Right.
[00:55:55] But instead, this was just like a short wave radio system.
[00:55:58] So you'd be inside the theater and every theater you, you've never even noticed this.
[00:56:03] Probably you're in the theater and you're watching a movie.
[00:56:06] And the subtitle machine is just receiving these waves that you can't see because the projector
[00:56:13] area, I presume is just always blasting out radio waves of the current line of dialogue.
[00:56:20] You just didn't have the device to see it.
[00:56:22] And so I got the thing screwed in with Jeremy's help because I'm not very handy and I got to
[00:56:29] actually follow along the rest of the movie, which makes me an authority on, on, on being
[00:56:34] able to say not that great.
[00:56:35] Not very interesting.
[00:56:37] I I'm on the Kinsey scale.
[00:56:40] I'm all the way to hetero male, which means musical theater is not, doesn't come naturally
[00:56:48] to me in terms of being like something that gets me real excited deep down there.
[00:56:53] Uh, sorry if that's you, I'm just saying it's not it anyway.
[00:57:02] Uh, yeah.
[00:57:03] So that was, that was pretty cool.
[00:57:05] Uh, other life stuff.
[00:57:13] Well, the, the version, I guess tying a bow around the, uh, the trip up there and all
[00:57:21] that realizing I've gone an hour on it now.
[00:57:25] People, when you move from the Midwest United States to Florida and you do it because you
[00:57:35] feel like the Midwest kind of sucks, you know, it's cold.
[00:57:38] A lot of the time, uh, a lot of the rest belt States are, well, they're called rust belt.
[00:57:45] They're dying economically.
[00:57:46] There's less economic activity.
[00:57:48] There's less new stuff.
[00:57:50] There's less vibrancy.
[00:57:51] Uh, when you move from the Midwest to Florida and you have a great setup there and lots of sunshine
[00:58:00] and, and, and, and stuff to do people react in very different ways.
[00:58:08] No one just says, Oh my God, that's so great for you.
[00:58:10] I'm really, really happy for you.
[00:58:11] Wow.
[00:58:12] That sounds awesome.
[00:58:12] I mean, some people kind of do, uh, a lot of people are either jealous or in some state
[00:58:20] of denial or, or frustration by it, you know, like you feel abandoned or whatnot.
[00:58:27] I think, I think the people who genuinely think the Midwest is better and the people who are
[00:58:34] jealous, both end up asking the same question of us Midwestern expats.
[00:58:41] And that, that question is, do you regret it yet?
[00:58:44] God, I've been down here for four years.
[00:58:48] Right.
[00:58:49] And here I am.
[00:58:50] My dad just died.
[00:58:52] Just put on a funeral, you know, staying at a Hampton Inn.
[00:58:57] Huh?
[00:58:59] A Hampton Inn where like, it was a great experience.
[00:59:02] The staff were really great, but like they had a desk in the laundry room that was never screwed
[00:59:07] in or, or, or secured properly.
[00:59:08] So I set down my brand new MacBook pro and a Coke, a can of Coke.
[00:59:13] And then it just collapsed all of it all at once to the floor.
[00:59:17] So my MacBook got soaking wet and Coke.
[00:59:19] And also the, the unibody enclosure got super scraped up.
[00:59:23] And, uh, the, the day before the funeral, I was all, you know, in a lot of neck pain from,
[00:59:29] from the fall and the general manager still hasn't gotten back to me.
[00:59:33] It was gray outside.
[00:59:35] It was cold.
[00:59:37] You know, and I, and I was struggling like for activities and things we could do as a
[00:59:42] family and, and settled.
[00:59:43] Uh, and the best, most entertaining thing to do was the Ariana Grande story.
[00:59:50] And they ask, do you regret it yet?
[00:59:52] Like totally just straight.
[00:59:56] Every time we go back, I thought like, this is going to be the trip.
[01:00:00] I go back and I don't have a single person ask me that, but then it came up relative at the
[01:00:06] wake.
[01:00:09] And I was like, man, thank you for asking.
[01:00:11] You know, I think about it a lot.
[01:00:14] I love Michigan.
[01:00:14] Michigan's beautiful in the summers, but inside I'm like, come on.
[01:00:17] No, I don't regret it.
[01:00:19] Yes.
[01:00:20] I'm already homesick.
[01:00:21] Uh, it's fucking awesome here.
[01:00:23] I'm not going to lie.
[01:00:24] Like I live in goddamn paradise.
[01:00:26] I don't know why more people don't do it.
[01:00:28] I don't, you know, politics are part of the equation for a lot of folks, uh, politics and
[01:00:35] policies.
[01:00:36] Uh, and I, and I get it, but man, like I am so much fucking happier here just on a
[01:00:42] day-to-day basis.
[01:00:43] Like you, you blind out all of the sort of like metal layer stuff and just like my meat
[01:00:48] bag gets a lot more sun and a lot more movement and a lot more just stuff going on down here.
[01:00:53] And so, no, I don't regret it yet.
[01:00:54] Uh, but if I ever do, I'll let you know, I've got a podcast, so I definitely will.
[01:01:02] Uh, one thing I do regret is eating so, or is, uh, uh, drinking so little dairy in my
[01:01:07] twenties because I have become extremely lactose intolerant.
[01:01:12] Uh, so I don't have any lactase to the point where even if I drink lactaid, like, like what
[01:01:19] they call like lactose free milk, but, but actually is lactose full milk with also lactase enzyme
[01:01:25] added to it so that your tummy will process it.
[01:01:28] Even when I drink that, I drank 20 grams two nights ago and the whole next day I was
[01:01:33] wrecked.
[01:01:33] That's not a lot of fucking milk.
[01:01:35] Uh, now you call that an allergy or an intolerance.
[01:01:39] Um, but like if I want cereal, like it's going to happen.
[01:01:42] So sure you can pathologize it, but I was like, I, I am making a trade with my future self.
[01:01:48] Like I'm going to put up with some indigestion so that I can have this deal.
[01:01:52] Okay.
[01:01:53] We're in, uh, if I had a peanut allergy to the point of like anaphylactic shock, I'd be
[01:02:01] having the same negotiation.
[01:02:03] I would just probably not take the deal most of the time.
[01:02:07] Uh, anyway, I finally caved.
[01:02:11] Cause like I talking about politics, I am politically, um, unaccepting intolerant of,
[01:02:19] uh, milk alternatives.
[01:02:22] Cause it's not milk.
[01:02:24] People call almond milk, milk.
[01:02:26] That's not milk.
[01:02:27] That's just squeezed almond.
[01:02:29] And like the amount of water that goes into making an almond is insane.
[01:02:32] And so the, whatever almond milk is must be not, not really great from a sustainability
[01:02:37] perspective.
[01:02:38] And it's just, it's not, it's not what it says on the 10.
[01:02:41] It shouldn't be allowed to be called milk.
[01:02:43] It's like that fake egg product called just egg.
[01:02:45] I was like, that's no, it's unjust egg.
[01:02:48] This is not an egg.
[01:02:49] Uh, so I, I, I caved and I bought Kirkland dairy-free oat beverage is what it says in the
[01:03:00] box and oat milk.
[01:03:02] And I had that last night and I'm still mad at myself about it, but here we are.
[01:03:08] I'm going to say that's, I'm going to cap it at an hour of life updates.
[01:03:16] I knew it would be life heavy.
[01:03:18] Um, but, and because it's a heavy period of life right now, but if you're curious after all
[01:03:24] of this shit and all the storytelling and all me getting stuff off my chest, I'm actually
[01:03:28] doing great.
[01:03:29] I'm processing things.
[01:03:30] Love my dad dearly.
[01:03:31] Um, I, I've taken the moments, you know, to be quiet and still and to spend effort and
[01:03:44] time genuinely reflecting and going through old things and, you know, letting feelings happen
[01:03:51] and letting those memories come by and doing other things to protect that memory, especially
[01:03:56] as I go through all these logistics.
[01:03:58] Right.
[01:03:58] And as I dig through the finances and the legal stuff, it's like, you know, just any decisions
[01:04:04] that he made and stuff like he's not there to explain them now.
[01:04:06] So if I'm frustrated about that, like that's on me, not, not something to taint his memory.
[01:04:12] Uh, I think I'm doing a lot of the things, right.
[01:04:16] And I think I'm, I'm, I'm grieving at the grief appropriate pace.
[01:04:22] Uh, so thank you for everyone for sending sympathies and stuff.
[01:04:24] But, uh, no, yeah, I think there's not that I don't want your sympathy, but I feel like
[01:04:32] I'm doing really well.
[01:04:33] So thank you.
[01:04:34] Thanks in part to you.
[01:04:35] Uh, I guess one last thing I'll share simply because it's the new year in Japan, the new
[01:04:45] year, Oshogatsu is the most important holiday, uh, for many, many years.
[01:04:51] One reason that the Japanese don't make a big deal a lot about birthdays is like everyone
[01:04:56] sort of, my understanding is, or I've heard everyone sort of nationally like treated their
[01:05:00] birthday is the first of the year.
[01:05:02] Um, you know, whatever year you were born in was what mattered.
[01:05:06] They have different words for, uh, the phrase you say to celebrate the new year before the
[01:05:14] new year, new year, you say, as in have a good year ahead.
[01:05:21] And if you see somebody after the new year, you say, so it's like, it's a new year.
[01:05:27] Congratulations.
[01:05:29] Now, the thing about that last phrase, is that it's a, it's a positive, happy, congratulatory
[01:05:36] phrase.
[01:05:36] Hey, we made it.
[01:05:37] Problem is if somebody in your family died the previous year, somebody didn't make it.
[01:05:42] And so it's customary in Japanese.
[01:05:45] If you have a friend and you know that they have a family member who died, you're not supposed
[01:05:51] to say to them at the new year, you're supposed to express sympathy, you know, thanks for,
[01:05:58] for being there for me.
[01:05:59] Thanks for trying harder or whatever, you know, something more, uh, non-congratulatory, but
[01:06:06] still affection.
[01:06:07] And there's, you know, two or three set phases that people use in that case.
[01:06:10] This is a fun culture note.
[01:06:15] Uh, cause I, you know, with the time change and everything, I, a couple of days ago, I spent
[01:06:19] a lot of time texting with my Japanese friends to, to wish them a happy new year.
[01:06:22] Cause of course it's important.
[01:06:24] Um, culturally for them, I did get a lot of Akimash Deo Meditos back from people who do
[01:06:31] know that my dad just died, but I, I was willing to cut them some slack because it's actually
[01:06:36] their culture and I don't care.
[01:06:37] All right.
[01:06:40] That's enough life shit.
[01:06:40] Let's fall shut.
[01:06:41] Is it fall, fall, fall, fall, deep breath.
[01:06:45] All right.
[01:06:46] I said deep breath, but I'm not going to take a deep breath.
[01:06:49] I'll do that later because I got to play the stinger and it's titled follow up because
[01:06:54] the next segment of the show is also titled follow up, I guess.
[01:06:59] So a couple of newsletters ago, I had explained a bit about my current phase of life and my
[01:07:12] decision to step back from being employed.
[01:07:15] And, uh, in response, a lot of people, a lot of people, I had probably three or four people
[01:07:24] the book die with zero, uh, to me.
[01:07:27] I, I don't have the author's name in front of me.
[01:07:30] I should probably do that.
[01:07:31] It's a book.
[01:07:32] I, I, people seem to really like it.
[01:07:35] Uh, the idea is as you might guess, Bill Perkins, he seems, it seems to be very, um, people online
[01:07:45] seem to like it.
[01:07:45] People who, you know, like the, the online hustle culture, people, you know,
[01:07:50] who tend to have the insatiable desire for more and growth.
[01:07:56] They seem to be like pausing for a second to be like, Oh, what if we hit an inflection
[01:08:02] point?
[01:08:02] And then it just makes more sense to enjoy our lives rather than always go for more, which
[01:08:08] was kind of what I was writing about.
[01:08:10] Uh, I just put that here as a note that, uh, it's, it's funny how sometimes it takes things
[01:08:23] being in a book for people to listen.
[01:08:26] Uh, especially it's even funnier when they don't read the book, they just either hear
[01:08:33] a synopsis or an interview or, or, or a blinkist of the book, uh, a cliff notes.
[01:08:40] And it takes, it takes that to believe it because like the, the power of authority is so strong
[01:08:49] that like, I, I just don't, I don't really believe in books that have straightforward messages.
[01:08:56] Like this book could have been a blog post.
[01:08:58] It was cause I wrote one, right?
[01:09:00] Like it's, and granted, this is a four-year-old book, but like, like I, I feel like for some
[01:09:08] folks, the appeal to authority is just so important in, in their decision-making criteria that if
[01:09:15] there's not a, an employer or a system or an accepted cultural norm that gives them a lane
[01:09:24] through which to believe or think a thing, then they will resist it.
[01:09:31] Or it'll just like, let it like pass by.
[01:09:34] It just, it, it, it passes through some membrane and falls to the floor.
[01:09:38] Uh, because there's so many successful books out there that are effectively like could have
[01:09:44] been three sentences long and the book is just padding and, and different ways of saying
[01:09:50] the same thing and, and whole genres of books that get sold and gifted and whatnot that no
[01:09:56] one ever really reads.
[01:09:57] Cause they're not really books.
[01:09:58] They're like a, a signal.
[01:10:00] They're a signal that like, Hey, this lesson seems good.
[01:10:03] It could help you.
[01:10:04] Uh, here's a book.
[01:10:07] And because it's in writing, cause it's on paper, it's, uh, um, it, it, it lends credibility
[01:10:15] to the idea that like, it's okay to think this or to make this change.
[01:10:19] Uh, so to me, a book is a hallmark card with extra steps, right?
[01:10:25] It's just heavier and there's shit in the middle.
[01:10:27] Now there's different kinds of books, but I'm talking about these sort of like that's self
[01:10:31] help maybe to a certain extent, but also, um, messaging books, like a book with an agenda,
[01:10:38] like get people thinking or doing this.
[01:10:40] Like, uh, one that I pushed around a lot was, uh, uh, Cal Newport's first book, the deep,
[01:10:47] deep thought, deep, deep work.
[01:10:49] Right.
[01:10:49] Uh, and, and I thought it was an interesting book, but even I got like, you know, I was
[01:10:56] like, okay, I get it.
[01:10:57] Yeah.
[01:10:58] It, you know, that book could have been a blog post.
[01:11:01] Now he's got a whole, you know, cottage industry around his, his sort of productivity guru stuff.
[01:11:05] Uh, it's a shame to be honest.
[01:11:10] I just say, I think it's a shame of an industry.
[01:11:12] So anyway, I wrote this book here simply because as follow-up people sent it to me and I had no
[01:11:17] other thoughts until I started speaking, but it's a, it would be a shame to write something
[01:11:23] like that.
[01:11:24] Tim Ferriss with four hour work week, which was a ludicrous book.
[01:11:28] That's not true and not replicatable for maybe at all, but definitely not for most of the people
[01:11:35] buying that book who bought the book and then immediately like lost all motivation to actually,
[01:11:39] you know, work and make the money.
[01:11:44] Um, I, uh, I'm glad to have not written books like that or not have ever.
[01:11:55] I had people as early as 2011, somebody was like, Hey, what you're doing is really interesting.
[01:12:00] What are you talking about?
[01:12:01] It was really cool.
[01:12:02] You should write a book.
[01:12:04] This, like I had people approach me about doing books relatively early in my career.
[01:12:08] Uh, that would have been more pointed and, and, and, and sort of messaging books.
[01:12:13] It was very strange.
[01:12:14] I know, but I, to each one, I was like, I don't, I don't have the patience for that.
[01:12:20] Cause I don't.
[01:12:20] And for the longest time I would play it down and I would, even to myself, I would say, well,
[01:12:25] it's because I don't have like, I need the rapid feedback of do a thing, put the thing
[01:12:29] out and get, get the accolades or get the, get the feedback at people saying, Hey, good
[01:12:35] job at a boy.
[01:12:36] And I need that on too tight of a time loop to go squirrel away and spend a year or two
[01:12:42] years writing a book and then coming out and having the book come out and then getting the,
[01:12:47] the release, getting, getting the people excited about you.
[01:12:52] Like that would be too long.
[01:12:53] That's what I would always say.
[01:12:54] And that's kind of what I told myself.
[01:12:55] But now that I think about it, it's just like, I think it was just like most books in a lot
[01:13:00] of nonfiction categories, probably also some fiction, like they just don't have that much
[01:13:05] to say.
[01:13:06] And the idea that like a book has to be a certain number of words ends up with a lot of fluff
[01:13:13] and not a lot of stuff.
[01:13:16] So I don't know, man, like I, I, if I had written the book written, you know, any book
[01:13:27] that was that style of book and gone, the sort of guru route of this is just the way to live.
[01:13:34] This is the way to code, right?
[01:13:36] This is the, you know, the methodology with a name on it and, and whatever.
[01:13:41] And then like, we put a whole conference around it and we, you know, go around the country
[01:13:44] and, you know, it's, I do workshops and this is the way the problem with that is like, there
[01:13:52] wasn't even enough for a fucking book.
[01:13:54] And now your whole identity is Bill Perkins.
[01:13:59] Your whole identity is this one interesting sentence or idea.
[01:14:05] Now you got to stretch that out because it's your moneymaker into a whole series of books
[01:14:11] and a mini series and, uh, you know, interview circuit and a workshop thing.
[01:14:16] And it's all speaking thing, right?
[01:14:18] Maybe you get a radio show like, uh, uh, blows and fucks.
[01:14:23] What's his name?
[01:14:23] David, uh, the, the Christian finance dad, you know, I'm talking about the one who tells you
[01:14:30] to freeze your credit cards.
[01:14:31] Like, great.
[01:14:32] He's got like five great pieces of advice, but like, you got to turn it into the rest of
[01:14:37] your fucking life is just to be a bloviator.
[01:14:39] And look, I'm a bloviator.
[01:14:42] I'm bloviating right now.
[01:14:43] Kind of like it.
[01:14:44] I might stick it, stick it out here.
[01:14:46] I might keep on doing this, but I blow you about whatever the fuck, right?
[01:14:50] I don't have some like main thesis that I thought of in my twenties.
[01:14:55] I'm still just, uh, I all got, got to pay rent.
[01:15:00] So here, let's drag this dead horse out of the barn.
[01:15:03] Just sorry, buddy.
[01:15:05] Got to keep on beating the fucking shit out of you.
[01:15:07] Cause this is just apparently my career now.
[01:15:10] That's how I feel about basically everybody, whether it's Gary V or whoever in the sort of
[01:15:17] like hustle culture influencer world, yes, they do stuff and yes, they've got other stuff
[01:15:21] going on, but it's effectively, it's like the, their whole game becomes around a personal
[01:15:29] brand that is so one dimensional, you know, if you're a multidimensional person and you've
[01:15:37] got a personal brand and you've gotten to go and do lots of different things.
[01:15:40] Like that's, that's really fascinating.
[01:15:42] Uh, uh, and, and, and good on you.
[01:15:45] That's really fun.
[01:15:46] But there is a whole cottage industry of just very one note people.
[01:15:51] And it almost always starts with a book, a book that gets traction because at birthday,
[01:15:58] when you don't know how to give somebody something, but you do want to send them a passive aggressive
[01:16:02] message that they need to change what they're doing, you can give them the book.
[01:16:06] And if that message resonates with them, great.
[01:16:09] Now you've, now you've got two people who believe in the book and that's how it spreads
[01:16:14] like a meme.
[01:16:15] So, uh, die with zero is a book.
[01:16:18] I'll link to it in the show notes.
[01:16:20] If you, if you need to buy it for yourself, I don't know why you would next follow-up item
[01:16:25] is, uh, I think I'd complained about this probably the early iOS 18 betas.
[01:16:31] But when you're using, um, announcements with Siri, that is to say, Siri will, uh, you know,
[01:16:40] interrupt your jog or whatever, when you have the headphones in and say, Hey, so-and-so
[01:16:45] it just says yada, yada, yada.
[01:16:47] And then it listens because you can say reply and you give your reply.
[01:16:55] Well, one thing that started happening in iOS 18 that was driving me up a wall is if, as
[01:17:01] I was running, I was only on my jogs, I'd hear all these beep boop sounds like they sounded
[01:17:06] like ping pong balls bouncing off of an invisible wall.
[01:17:09] Uh, whether I was speaking or not, or while I was speaking a reply and it was only just totally
[01:17:18] random that I happened to be turning my head while stationary when one of these things happened.
[01:17:25] And I heard the beep boop and I realized it's the new feature where you can nod or shake your
[01:17:32] head to dismiss or agree to any of those Siri announcements.
[01:17:36] So like, you know, if a phone call comes in, you can nod and it'll accept the call.
[01:17:40] And I assume you'll also hear ping pong ball up and down sound until it confirms.
[01:17:45] And then you hear like a, an audible, an audio equivalent of a check mark.
[01:17:49] Right?
[01:17:49] So that's what that is.
[01:17:52] Uh, it's good to know that now it's sort of like having a neighbor who's making noise above
[01:17:58] you and it drives you goddamn crazy, but you, you, you go upstairs or whatever.
[01:18:04] And you, you, you're like, you can pound the ceiling all you want with the broomstick.
[01:18:08] But as long as you keep hearing it, like in, at least in my brain, I'll be like, what
[01:18:12] is that?
[01:18:12] What are they doing?
[01:18:13] That's what I want to know.
[01:18:14] It's like, yes, I want the noise to go away, but I most urgently just need to know what it
[01:18:20] is.
[01:18:20] Cause if I knew what it was, then, then, uh, my head would stop trying to spin stories
[01:18:27] about what it was.
[01:18:28] And so like, I, I, you know, it's like that now that I know that the ping pong ball sound
[01:18:34] is it thinking I'm shaking my head furiously because I'm just, you know, there's a head
[01:18:38] bob as you, as you jog around the neighborhood, like that's where that is.
[01:18:41] So if you've been having weird ping pong head like me, that's, uh, that's maybe what happened
[01:18:49] just as a public service announcement, that one, uh, speaking of public service announcements,
[01:18:56] when I was setting up that new Mac book pro, which is now scraped to all shit.
[01:19:01] Uh, good luck repainting that space black finish, by the way, when I was setting it up,
[01:19:06] I checked a box that I had never checked before, which is in the settings app, desktop and doc.
[01:19:11] They've rearranged all this shit.
[01:19:13] There's an option called prefer tabs when opening documents.
[01:19:17] And I thought, you know, I've never set this to always, but I could give it a try.
[01:19:22] Cause I typically do like to use tabs and it drives me a little baddie that like finder
[01:19:27] just is so aggressive about opening new windows when it's got a perfectly good tabbed interface.
[01:19:31] So I clicked always.
[01:19:33] And then the next two weeks of my life, I saw just a lot of weird bugs.
[01:19:37] So I was like a lot of beach balls and a lot of really weird UI stuff.
[01:19:41] And a lot of like me getting trapped in part of an app and not being able to get out of that
[01:19:45] part of the app.
[01:19:46] And it took two weeks to realize it's because nobody tested that feature recently and Swift UI apps
[01:19:53] basically don't work.
[01:19:54] Uh, so, uh, if you have that setting set, change it.
[01:19:59] All right.
[01:20:00] I guess follow-up was mostly public service announcement time and me getting something
[01:20:04] off my chest about books.
[01:20:05] I hadn't thought about it in a while.
[01:20:07] Uh, you know, speaking of stuff on chests, Aaron likes to get stuff off his chest every now
[01:20:14] and then in our next little, our next little number, which is when we read one of Aaron's
[01:20:24] puns and he, he sent us a pun just last night.
[01:20:27] The pun turnaround time is just impeccable.
[01:20:30] Uh, this time around, I said, I might need a pun.
[01:20:33] He was there.
[01:20:34] Let's read it.
[01:20:37] So remember season two, uh, I totally forgot to shill to promote this.
[01:20:43] So the reason that version 26 jumps to version 28 is because in between Aaron and I recorded
[01:20:47] version 27, I guess it's not that hard to understand.
[01:20:51] In fact, you, as a subscriber to this podcast feed, you probably saw that the numbers did
[01:20:55] not have an interruption.
[01:20:56] Uh, version 27, he and I ranked collaboratively in a consensus format, all 26 of the puns from
[01:21:03] 2024 and we were able to do it.
[01:21:06] And the last thing I want to do is make that list even longer by re-ranking these puns once
[01:21:11] they're more than a year old.
[01:21:12] So we're hitting reset on the puns.
[01:21:15] This is now season two puns.
[01:21:17] So season two, 2025 puns is what we're listening to, which means I don't really have to rank this
[01:21:23] one.
[01:21:23] It just kind of goes in the list as the number one ranked pun, at least for this week.
[01:21:29] Let's read it.
[01:21:30] I'm revealing it now.
[01:21:33] I was really hoping to play Bellatro today, but I don't have time.
[01:21:38] So I guess it's not in the cards.
[01:21:39] I was really hoping to play Bellatro today, but I don't have time.
[01:21:47] So I guess it's not in the cards.
[01:21:49] Bellatro is a video game.
[01:21:52] If you haven't heard of it, it's a card game.
[01:21:55] It was really popular on Steam on PC because that's where it launched.
[01:21:59] It's now available on just about everything, including if you have the Apple Arcade subscription
[01:22:06] in iOS.
[01:22:07] It's an arcade game.
[01:22:08] So the Bellatro Plus version is unpaid.
[01:22:11] Don't don't pay for this game.
[01:22:12] If you already have it, you just download it.
[01:22:14] And it's a it's sort of like a really bad poker.
[01:22:19] It's like a poker game with slightly different rules and jokers that do weird things and you
[01:22:24] are competing for like high scores against it's a single player, but it's sort of like
[01:22:29] a card puzzle poker game with custom rules.
[01:22:35] It's apparently very addictive, but in Aaron's case here, it was not in the cards.
[01:22:39] So, of course, the pun there is it is a card game and it's not in the cards.
[01:22:47] So that's a little it's not his most complicated, I will say, but, you know, it is a pun.
[01:22:54] And I, you know, in terms of so one of the things I guess if I'm going to mention it,
[01:22:59] I'll mention it now.
[01:23:00] One of the things we landed on and it's kind of fun if you do listen to version 27.
[01:23:03] Also, it's up on YouTube, by the way.
[01:23:06] So there's a video of us moving up and down everything in the spreadsheet, which might be
[01:23:11] a little bit more, you know, simple to follow.
[01:23:13] If you listen to the end, you realize like it took us the two and a half hours to actually
[01:23:20] come to a grand unifying way to rank puns.
[01:23:25] And the answer is of the people listening, how much cumulative time does the pun waste
[01:23:34] in those people's lives?
[01:23:36] So there's and what's the depth, I suppose, of like the time wasted in terms of like how
[01:23:45] deep does it cut?
[01:23:47] So that's, you know, a way to look at it is like Bellatro.
[01:23:51] Now, because it's tied to this particular game, which is having a moment.
[01:23:55] If Bellatro becomes like Tetris and people are playing Bellatro like games, like they still
[01:24:00] play Candy Crush forever, years and years from now, then that means that every time that you
[01:24:06] play up, boot up Bellatro or tap on that, that app icon, you might think I was really hoping
[01:24:12] to play Bellatro today, but I don't have time.
[01:24:13] So I guess it's not in the cards.
[01:24:15] You might remember the pun and then have that much of your life wasted again.
[01:24:22] It's like a it's a it's like an annuity to him.
[01:24:25] Right.
[01:24:25] So Aaron will feed on that, the dark energy that that fuels him.
[01:24:30] But if Bellatro is already kind of had its moment and, you know, you never think about it or play
[01:24:36] it again, then this was a one time only time waster.
[01:24:39] So whether that influences your decision to ever play Bellatro again, that's that's up to
[01:24:46] you.
[01:24:46] But that's that's a little behind the scenes on what's going on here.
[01:24:50] So, yeah, that's that's today's pun.
[01:24:53] Good job, Aaron.
[01:24:54] That's a very good pun.
[01:24:55] And it's currently the number one pun.
[01:24:57] Look at that.
[01:24:58] We'll see.
[01:25:00] We'll see where it lands.
[01:25:01] But, you know, first, let's let's get to the news.
[01:25:10] So news, Amazon, where, you know, so many people in America are employed now to having
[01:25:24] to do very hard labor in distribution centers, moving boxes around or contract companies, you
[01:25:31] know, with the blue vests in the in the dark blue trucks, like schlepping stuff all over the
[01:25:39] place many times a day, really hard jobs, obviously can't do that remotely, but you can do the
[01:25:46] cool programmer stuff remotely.
[01:25:48] And people who work at Amazon have been, you know, able to work remote or hybrid for, you
[01:25:57] know, since the pandemic, like a lot of programmers or any sort of like job that could mechanically
[01:26:02] be done over distance.
[01:26:05] We've talked about before psychologically that, like, first of all, there's an inequity,
[01:26:12] right?
[01:26:12] Like certain roles have to happen in person, even inside the same company or the same team.
[01:26:16] Other roles don't like.
[01:26:18] So there's a fairness argument of who has to go into the office and who doesn't.
[01:26:26] But more than that, there's the middle manager and the executive who their whole job is results
[01:26:33] and how they get results is part of it is, you know, they, it may be that they, that, that
[01:26:40] the supervisory aspect of being a manager is the only thing that they see as being their
[01:26:45] work.
[01:26:45] And so you see some number of managers who just come in and like empty office, twiddle their
[01:26:50] thumbs.
[01:26:50] There's nothing for them to do.
[01:26:51] And they, they get self-conscious that pretty soon people are going to realize they're not
[01:26:55] doing anything.
[01:26:56] And then they're going to be the ones getting bopped on the head.
[01:26:59] But it's also just the case that like, once you escalate beyond an individual contributor,
[01:27:04] you are, you spend a lot of your time talking and, and I don't know about you, but the more
[01:27:11] time you spend talking on zoom, like it is draining and it's less effective than being in person
[01:27:16] with somebody, you get all of the stress of meetings and none of the affectionate, genuine
[01:27:25] connection with people.
[01:27:26] That's my experience.
[01:27:28] I don't know.
[01:27:29] Now, is it a trade-off I'd still take?
[01:27:32] And would I still work remotely most of the time?
[01:27:34] If not all the time?
[01:27:36] Yes.
[01:27:36] And that's, that's exactly the problem, right?
[01:27:38] So I'm not, I don't support just blanket statement, return to office policies, right?
[01:27:46] But the people who tend to be running things and making the decisions on policies at companies
[01:27:52] like they, the, the reasons why they want people back are understandable.
[01:27:57] Some of them are defensible.
[01:27:59] Some are less defensible, but Amazon wants people back.
[01:28:05] Now, this article, the, uh, the Amazon is struggling with, you know, their, their RTO policy, their
[01:28:20] mandates, they keep delaying them and pushing them out and people feel jerked around.
[01:28:25] Some people moved cross country.
[01:28:27] Now they've moved back, say to like the Austin area.
[01:28:30] So they could go to the Austin office or threat threatened with losing their job.
[01:28:34] But the mandate is still not in effect because it turns out Amazon doesn't have enough office
[01:28:40] space to put all the people that they hired in the heady halcyon days of post pandemic,
[01:28:44] you know, stock indexes.
[01:28:48] And, you know, this article doesn't talk about quitting or resigning.
[01:28:57] But if let's say you're Amazon and you put out a mandatory or will fire, you return to
[01:29:03] office policy and you know, people are really mad about it.
[01:29:07] And you also know that the stock market is rewarding layoffs.
[01:29:10] And after Elon bought Twitter, everyone's like in, in the chattering, you know, wealthy tech
[01:29:17] people classes talking about how, yeah, maybe we don't need that many people just to keep
[01:29:20] the lights on the RTO policy is a proxy way to get people to resign and find jobs elsewhere.
[01:29:31] But like the job market is so tight right now from the other perspective that there's not
[01:29:36] a lot of opportunities out there that this article and I, you know, ours is a really, really good
[01:29:44] publication has been for so long and I'm glad that they're still there on the beat.
[01:29:48] You're talking, this article handles the superficial, what is happening?
[01:29:55] You know, Amazon mandate.
[01:29:57] Oh, delay because there's not enough office space.
[01:30:00] Handles it beautifully.
[01:30:02] What is, goes on said though, is one of two things has to be true here, right?
[01:30:09] Like either Jeff Amazon, uh, and his cohort can't do basic math and they don't realize that
[01:30:21] they don't have enough chairs for all of the butts that they've hired, which is like, you
[01:30:27] know, it's not a super easy problem when you've got multiple offices, but it's not rocket science
[01:30:32] or now stick with me.
[01:30:37] They expected more people to quit than did.
[01:30:42] So they, they, they had a graph right internally and I'm sure it's not shared, uh, uh, you know,
[01:30:51] on their intranet with the whole population of the staff, but they probably have some graph
[01:30:57] and it shows the, the amount of attrition that they'll get with each RTO tightening of
[01:31:04] the screws, each of these shakedowns to come back to the office and people are holding on
[01:31:10] for dear life because they want the, in many cases, overly generous compensation packages
[01:31:18] that Amazon was shelling out, shelling out in the early 2020s.
[01:31:23] It's 2025 now.
[01:31:24] So that's the early 2020s.
[01:31:26] We're in it by the way.
[01:31:28] And that's not what the article is about.
[01:31:32] That big company gives away the game that they were hoping more people would quit.
[01:31:37] And then they didn't quit.
[01:31:40] Now, okay.
[01:31:41] It's really hope or expect, but if, if it's expect, then, then you would, you would assume
[01:31:51] that they would be working on solving the problem of getting more chairs, but they aren't really
[01:31:56] because they don't want to have even more people, right?
[01:32:00] Uh, it's, it's sort of like, look, it's kind of like, assume you wear a, um, slacks and a
[01:32:09] belt to work every day.
[01:32:11] And then you, you, you, you, you take a nice long vacation.
[01:32:13] You take two weeks in a cruise ship and you, you just gorge yourself.
[01:32:19] All you can eat food, drinks, package, the whole thing.
[01:32:21] You gain 10, 15 pounds, which in a two week cruise pound a day, that's actually like normal.
[01:32:31] A lot of people experience that you come back to work after that two week bender, same pants,
[01:32:38] same belt might not fit.
[01:32:41] Right.
[01:32:42] And then, then you're dealing with a whole series of feelings about what to do about that.
[01:32:49] Uh, but you've got the urgent need of like, I got to go to work, right?
[01:32:53] You weren't wearing this, the, the slot you were wearing sweatpants and, and, and pool shorts,
[01:32:59] right?
[01:32:59] Swimming, swimming trunks.
[01:33:02] Uh, you didn't notice that is what happened to the entire tech sector during the COVID remote
[01:33:09] work days of we've got to hire as fast as we can.
[01:33:11] Oh, don't care.
[01:33:12] They're in, they're in the upper peninsula of Michigan.
[01:33:13] That's fine.
[01:33:14] Well, you know, we're, we're remote now remotes the future.
[01:33:16] Uh, so, so, huh.
[01:33:20] I'm sorry for the people who work at companies that are getting jerked around like this.
[01:33:26] It really sucks, but that's, that is what is happening here.
[01:33:30] Uh, interesting piece of technology.
[01:33:35] This, this company called bold voice, which sells software to teach people how to adopt
[01:33:43] a more natural English accent.
[01:33:46] So these are foreign, uh, uh, people for whom English is a, not their first language.
[01:33:52] They sell training or software coaching to make your net, uh, your accent sound more natural.
[01:34:00] Which is, you know, as somebody who studies a foreign language, that's a hard fucking problem.
[01:34:06] Uh, I've investigated, uh, tools to help me with pitch accent so that I don't have to just
[01:34:14] watch a bunch of videos and practice a lot and like, listen to myself talk.
[01:34:19] There is a tool called bold voice that has a, uh, went viral in Japan recently.
[01:34:26] So I had a friend of us, ours, uh, I text us to test our own voice against it.
[01:34:32] It's called accent Oracle.
[01:34:33] I'm going to share the link cause you might have fun with it.
[01:34:36] It will, uh, you talk at it, you read scripts and then it will ascertain whether it believes
[01:34:44] that your accent is a native English speaking accent.
[01:34:47] And if not, it'll guess what country you're from, right?
[01:34:51] What accent, what is your first language that you're coming from?
[01:34:54] And so our friend was like, Oh man, like it says, I've got a very strong Japanese accent.
[01:34:59] Like, but, but he'd only seen it on Japanese TV.
[01:35:01] Of course, everyone's result is very strong Japanese accent.
[01:35:04] And he's like, does this thing even work?
[01:35:05] He needed me as a data point to prove that like, yes, I, so sorry, bud.
[01:35:10] It sounds, it says I'm a native English speaker, but still like, like the technology, I would
[01:35:14] love to know how this works.
[01:35:15] Uh, I'd also love to steal whatever AI model it's, it's doing this for, because I would love
[01:35:22] to port this to other languages and whatever language software I ended up building.
[01:35:25] Uh, another article, uh, it's a wall street journal.
[01:35:30] I'll, I'll share the archive short link.
[01:35:33] Taxi cab drivers, uh, apparently get Alzheimer's less because the thinking goes, uh, if you're
[01:35:48] not using a GPS to navigate you all day long, the amount of spatial reasoning skills it takes
[01:35:54] to kind of mentally plot a course in your mind and get around is, uh, uh, significant.
[01:36:01] And, and the, and just the kind of mental exercise that results in less, you know, uh, cognitive
[01:36:08] issues later in life.
[01:36:10] Uh, so if you're like me and, uh, you used to have a good sense of direction, but then you,
[01:36:16] you, even when you're going to the same place that you've been a thousand times, you, you still
[01:36:20] punch it into the navigation system anyway, just for convenience, it might be a good, you
[01:36:25] know, Hey, maybe just drive to the grocery store without it next time.
[01:36:30] Uh, I was thinking about that.
[01:36:34] Cause my dad never used the GPS system in his car, uh, which, which turned out to be frustrating
[01:36:39] because then, you know, I didn't know how to get anywhere.
[01:36:45] And so I started using the navigation that I get, I'd get yelled at when, uh, uh, it turned
[01:36:49] out that like half of the roads are dirt roads and he was always focused on keeping his car
[01:36:54] immaculate.
[01:36:54] And so like, I just made mass of myself and got mud on his car pretty much every day that
[01:36:58] I was up in Michigan.
[01:37:00] Cause I didn't know how to get around and I didn't know how to avoid all the dirt roads,
[01:37:02] but that was in my dad's brain.
[01:37:04] So taxicab drivers don't get Alzheimer's as much.
[01:37:08] That's good.
[01:37:09] Cause unfortunately they, these days they're, they're Uber drivers and they're not going to
[01:37:13] have health insurance, sad trombone sound, followed by, um, another link, uh, New York
[01:37:21] times, give you an archive.is Nintendo, uh, all about Nintendo.
[01:37:28] It's, you know, video games can't afford to look this good.
[01:37:31] So this is actually like interesting because it's finally mainstream media coming to grips
[01:37:36] with now.
[01:37:37] It's not a particularly well-sourced, well-researched article.
[01:37:40] Like there's factual issues with it.
[01:37:43] Uh, and there's editorial decisions in this article that are not perfect, but just the
[01:37:48] breakthrough moment of, wow, Nintendo made an extremely smart financial decision where
[01:37:53] the Nintendo switch is now the most profitable.
[01:37:55] That lifespan is the most profitable.
[01:37:57] The profits from that period dwarf in combination, all other, the rest of Nintendo's entire history
[01:38:05] combined, why?
[01:38:09] Because Nintendo continually from the GameCube onward made the, the bet over and over and
[01:38:15] over again, not to chase fancier graphics on the theory that the artwork cost would, would
[01:38:23] increase super linearly.
[01:38:25] And that expectations would go up and dev times would go up and the cost of input would go up.
[01:38:32] But the outcome was still selling $60 games at retail to a group of people who are getting
[01:38:40] smaller because the next generation are being raised on mobile games and, uh, you know, games
[01:38:46] that where they don't even care how good they look because gaming for, you know, Gen Z and alpha
[01:38:51] in many ways, it's just an excuse to hang out, right?
[01:38:54] It's like, well, we were, we're separated by distance.
[01:38:57] And so when we play Roblox, it's like a social chat and games are sort of secondary or even for
[01:39:01] Minecraft or whatever, like, yes, mining happens, but it's mostly just a place to exist with one
[01:39:06] another.
[01:39:06] So good article.
[01:39:10] Um, if you need to lend credibility to the argument that like Nintendo made a brilliant decision by
[01:39:16] intentionally staying five years behind the eight ball, probably a good thing to think about.
[01:39:20] Cause in the next few days here, maybe January 8th, maybe sometime this month, uh, Nintendo
[01:39:25] switch two will be announced and it's going to be, you know, way more powerful than the
[01:39:31] first switch, probably just a little bit less good than a PlayStation four pro, which is a,
[01:39:38] you know, granted a eight year old console, but this one's going to be portable and it's
[01:39:43] going to be able to receive ports from lots and lots of stuff.
[01:39:45] So it's going to be able to grow a pretty quick library pretty fast.
[01:39:48] And it, you know, it's not going to be rocket science to ship games on it.
[01:39:51] Um, yeah, there turns out, uh, the thing that gamers say they want, and I'm one of these
[01:40:00] gamers is picture perfect, super realistic visual fidelity.
[01:40:05] I want you to recreate real worlds that trick my brain into thinking I'm there.
[01:40:11] The number one word I use in games is immersion.
[01:40:14] I want to feel totally immersed.
[01:40:15] Uh, but the cost of that is you may need to run your business out of business to the brink
[01:40:25] of bankruptcy every time you release a game, because increasingly it's just a bunch of 35
[01:40:31] year old and up men who want that.
[01:40:35] And they are shrinking.
[01:40:37] Uh, and they also are cheap and all these subscription services now are, are, are, are making it.
[01:40:43] So like, I won't pay some, I have not paid $70 for a game yet and I don't plan to.
[01:40:47] Right.
[01:40:48] And so like, where does the money come from?
[01:40:49] The answer is like your profits.
[01:40:51] And so that's why, you know, you got publishers like Ubisoft that are in death's door.
[01:40:55] Um, yeah, so it's all a big death, death spiral, but Nintendo sitting pretty, uh, by not chasing
[01:41:02] this sort of fan driven or technologist driven compulsion to always have beautiful, perfect
[01:41:12] graphics, uh, which is a real damn shame because it's like literally one of the top three things
[01:41:17] I care about when it comes to a game, but you know, the, the, the rational part of my brain
[01:41:22] can't help, but like, you know, acknowledge like that was very adroit, you know, they're
[01:41:27] in a much better situation now.
[01:41:28] Uh, next up, uh, LG, which I think sometimes their logo will say life's good as if that's
[01:41:39] what it stands for.
[01:41:40] I actually don't know what it stands for.
[01:41:44] I assume it's some Korean combo word.
[01:41:48] Um, but I don't know, uh, life's good.
[01:41:51] They just announced, uh, the world's first bachelor's only television set.
[01:41:55] Uh, it's a bendable 5k, 2k monitor.
[01:42:02] That's like 40 some inches.
[01:42:04] So 5k, 2k is like an ultra widescreen format, 5k pixels wide and 2000 pixels up.
[01:42:13] Uh, it's not quite retina if you're coming from the Apple world, but it's high, it's a high
[01:42:20] DPI.
[01:42:22] It's, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a enough pixels to do like pixel doubling, uh, uh, or
[01:42:28] close to it.
[01:42:28] So the things don't look super blurry unless you're, you're really, really up close.
[01:42:33] I think it was like 127 dot pitch.
[01:42:35] It's also bendable.
[01:42:37] If you're into that sort of thing, you can bend it and change how curved it is.
[01:42:42] And it's big enough that if you're like, that's why reading this is like, this looks
[01:42:46] like something for bachelors who have smaller apartments and they just want to use the same
[01:42:51] device for their TV as for their gaming.
[01:42:53] Right.
[01:42:54] Cause like at that point, 40 plus inches, it's like the size of a TV in a small apartment.
[01:42:59] Uh, or at least used to be, I guess now you can, you can go way bigger for pretty cheap.
[01:43:04] I am personally really glad to see, oh, and it's an OLED display.
[01:43:10] The only thing we don't know is they didn't announce the, uh, the refresh rate.
[01:43:14] So is this because they didn't, I assume it's a 60 frames per second affair, which is fine
[01:43:19] for me, but seeing OLED gaming monitors finally coming out at a higher resolution than 1440p.
[01:43:26] That's pretty fucking cool.
[01:43:27] Cause like I could, I could squint and imagine using that for work, uh, and having a monitor
[01:43:33] that actually performs well, uh, from a gaming perspective where it's like once you've gone
[01:43:37] OLED, it's really hard to go back.
[01:43:39] The local dimming zones and the sort of shit that Apple does, uh, is not the same, you
[01:43:45] know, especially in, in environments where you might only have small little blotches of
[01:43:49] black here and there, the contrast ratio on OLED is just so much better.
[01:43:52] And we got the dual tandem OLED displays in the M4 iPad pro.
[01:43:58] And that's wonderful, but like, we're still probably a couple of years out from MacBook pro
[01:44:03] getting the same OLED treatment.
[01:44:04] Uh, I can only imagine that a 32 inch or bigger, you know, studio display or pro display XDR,
[01:44:11] unless it literally costs 15 grand.
[01:44:14] Uh, I don't think Apple's in any sort of hurry to, to get OLEDs out the door at those sizes.
[01:44:19] So I would love to see it, but in the meantime, the likelihood that if I, uh, assuming that I
[01:44:25] continue to do work at a computer and not via the vision pro, uh, seeing that there are more
[01:44:33] player, you know, more players in this field than simply one monitor that is, you know, sufficiently
[01:44:40] ultra wide and also like at all high resolution is encouraging.
[01:44:43] Uh, there was an article, a sub stack.
[01:44:47] Let's see.
[01:44:50] Clicking through, I want to make sure I opened the right one first,
[01:44:55] or maybe I have the same article open twice.
[01:45:01] Oh man, I think I, I think I have an article and then another article front that cites the
[01:45:11] other one.
[01:45:12] Oh no.
[01:45:14] Oh no.
[01:45:15] Okay.
[01:45:16] I want to get, I want to make sure that I don't waste your time other than the sort of verbal
[01:45:21] tap dance that you're hearing.
[01:45:23] What's the right order to talk about these?
[01:45:28] Uh, there's a, there, well, you know what?
[01:45:34] They're not tightly related now that I think about it.
[01:45:36] They're both about boys and girls, male versus female statistics in America.
[01:45:43] Uh, one, let's start with the baby crisis.
[01:45:49] So a lot of right wingers, a lot of people in the sort of like the, the, the family matters
[01:45:54] wing of America and in a lot of countries around the world have adopted pro natalist
[01:45:59] views that like, you know, with dwindling birth rates, uh, the only solution to keep economies
[01:46:08] going and social, social like safety nets working is to either accept more immigrants, which is
[01:46:15] not acceptable in reactionary, right.
[01:46:17] You know, mindsets or make more babies, which is increasingly difficult to convince women
[01:46:25] to do, uh, article like dives into a lot of the data on this.
[01:46:30] Uh, and that's the economist that did it.
[01:46:33] Great economist article.
[01:46:35] Uh, well-researched what buried the lead.
[01:46:40] Because a lot of the data points that we hear about this issue are coming from people
[01:46:47] who have like a pretty, the reason I started with politics here, have a pretty strong, like
[01:46:51] set of incentives to exaggerate the nature of the issue.
[01:46:57] Uh, because you know, like maybe they're pro family and they don't want women working in
[01:47:04] the workplace, right?
[01:47:05] And maybe they, uh, or, or, or they know that if they can, you know, encourage women
[01:47:09] to have children sooner, there'll be, they'll be less tempted to go back to a workplace because
[01:47:14] of the gap in time.
[01:47:15] Maybe they're just anti-abortion or whatever it is, right?
[01:47:18] There's a lot of reasons you might want families to have more kids from, uh, and, and, and try
[01:47:25] to massage the data into, into agreeing with you.
[01:47:27] One thing that I never would have thought about, and that's buried in this article.
[01:47:34] More than half the drop in America's total fertility rate is explained by women under the age of
[01:47:41] 19, not have now having next to do children.
[01:47:45] So like if, you know, if we've gone from, I don't know, 2.4 to 2.1 or 1.9, half of that
[01:47:55] drop is literally just us solving teenage pregnancy through contraception and education.
[01:48:01] And yes, abortion.
[01:48:02] And so like, to a certain extent, the hyperbolic reaction to it.
[01:48:09] And then as the data goes on, you read a little further past that paragraph.
[01:48:13] You're like, Oh, like people are just planning more and delaying more until it's like right
[01:48:17] for them.
[01:48:17] And so like to solve it by just pushing people to have kids younger, you're basically signing
[01:48:24] up more children to have miserable childhoods where their parents weren't ready for it.
[01:48:28] Uh, and reducing the total amount of economic activity that like, you know, a mother or a
[01:48:36] family unit would be able to produce otherwise if they had delayed having children.
[01:48:41] So yeah, think about that next time this comes up is like, actually, you know, let's, when
[01:48:48] we talk about statistics and the fertility rate, let's remove, let's just start with like people
[01:48:54] under 18.
[01:48:55] Let's say like, can we all agree that's maybe not ideal in a developed country?
[01:48:59] Cause if we do, then it's like, turns out that's like a lot, quite a lot, uh, of what
[01:49:05] we're, what we're talking about here.
[01:49:06] The other one isn't, is, I don't know what we call a sub stack feel.
[01:49:12] It feels article-y, uh, and it's titled, why aren't we talking about the real reason male
[01:49:17] college enrollment is dropping?
[01:49:20] Uh, and it introduces a term that's new to me titled male flight.
[01:49:24] And it talks about other cases and experiences where the, as soon as men enter a field, like
[01:49:32] veterinarians, uh, uh, programs, as just a men enter a field, as soon as like women enter
[01:49:39] the, the, um, the classroom, like men tend to back away as if it is a threat to their
[01:49:44] masculinity and it's happened enough in enough cases that, and I've seen this happen anecdotally
[01:49:54] that it's sort of interesting to think about like the, once you hit the 60% women tipping
[01:50:02] point in a particular program in a school, suddenly it becomes less valued by society seen as, you
[01:50:08] know, more feminine by men.
[01:50:10] So it threatens their masculinity.
[01:50:12] So they back away and do something else.
[01:50:14] And then like, you know, the entire pay scale and cultural perception of the, the, the job
[01:50:22] itself goes down accordingly.
[01:50:24] And so this is like, in a sense, this is like pretty straightforward, you know, smash the patriarchy
[01:50:31] kind of shit.
[01:50:32] But like in another sense, it's like, oh yeah, I mean, being married to a teacher.
[01:50:38] And having a lot of friends who went into nursing, like you, you can totally see this, right.
[01:50:46] Or having like, you know, as a computer scientist, as a programmer, like they were the first programmers
[01:50:51] were basically all women and they were treated like secretaries and paid like secretaries.
[01:50:54] But then a whole bunch of men entered the field and now it's science, right?
[01:50:58] Separately incorrect perspective.
[01:51:03] And like all of a sudden, like the, the compensation goes way up.
[01:51:06] And so does the prestige and everything that comes with it.
[01:51:09] So like, there's like, regardless how you feel politically about this, like there is a certain
[01:51:14] amount of elasticity going on here.
[01:51:15] And the thing about it is, as you kind of scroll through and you read, you realize, okay, well,
[01:51:19] we're hitting the 60% tipping point on college enrollment generally.
[01:51:24] And so when you look at how people are talking about school, if you look at how, like, you
[01:51:28] know, on Reddit, everyone's saying skip college.
[01:51:30] It's a, it's a, it's a waste of time.
[01:51:31] It's not worth it.
[01:51:32] It's sort of like we've, you know, it's going to further accelerate the devaluation of higher
[01:51:41] education, if not education more broadly, if we're not careful and as a society, we're,
[01:51:47] we're not careful.
[01:51:48] So that's pretty cool.
[01:51:49] Yeah.
[01:51:50] This is, this is a, this is an upbeat day for us.
[01:51:53] As we started off 2025, we're figuring in, we're figuring shit out.
[01:51:57] Let's at least watch some good TV and that'll be over in the recommendations.
[01:52:04] For any newcomers to the program, this is usually the part.
[01:52:11] where I talk about video games, TV books, stuff that I'm consuming that I enjoy or that I
[01:52:18] don't enjoy.
[01:52:18] I suppose I'm not too discriminating.
[01:52:20] One of the things I talked about early on in season one, the earlier season of my life,
[01:52:28] that is 2024.
[01:52:29] I had an issue for, oh, you know, roughly 20 years where I really struggled to play a video
[01:52:40] game without having a second screen up playing a TV show simultaneously, which made me select
[01:52:46] games that were pretty mindless, like destiny two or world of Warcraft, where you're kind
[01:52:50] of like going through rote behaviors.
[01:52:53] And as a result, you need something else to keep your, um, keep your mind going.
[01:52:57] And I like that overstimulation.
[01:52:59] Don't get me wrong.
[01:53:00] I do, but it means like a whole nother category of games.
[01:53:03] I just don't play them like, uh, uh, uh, Japanese language games, for example, you know, like those
[01:53:10] are less stimulating than playing a semi stimulating game plus a semi stimulating TV show, which is
[01:53:18] no way to live.
[01:53:19] Right.
[01:53:19] So I've, I've, I've forced myself over the last few months to kick that habit.
[01:53:23] And I've been mostly successful.
[01:53:24] There are certain days where it's like time to play games.
[01:53:27] And it's like already 10 PM or whatever.
[01:53:29] And I'm just like, I don't have enough gas in the tank to do this.
[01:53:32] Uh, and so I wind up distracting myself until I go to bed, but in general, it's gone really
[01:53:37] well.
[01:53:38] Uh, I'm in playing, uh, Indiana Jones, which Indiana Jones and the great circle is available
[01:53:45] for free on game pass.
[01:53:46] If you have that available to you, otherwise it's just a normal last game that you pay with
[01:53:50] money dollars.
[01:53:50] It is beautiful.
[01:53:52] The, like I mentioned last time around the tutorials, like the opening Raiders, the lost
[01:53:57] arc, it's really great.
[01:53:58] And as you get into it more, you realize this is, this is an old school point and click adventure
[01:54:05] game in three dimensions and I'm finding that it has like experientially, the immersive qualities
[01:54:17] are making me realize that it's a lack of combat or relative de-emphasis on combat.
[01:54:24] I mean, you, you got a gun the whole fucking time and you're punching dudes and punching Nazis
[01:54:28] left and right, which feels good these days and hopefully all days.
[01:54:33] Uh, it's, it makes the immersion experience land for me.
[01:54:39] Like for example, a game, um, like Skyrim, the, the elder scroll series, very immersive
[01:54:44] games.
[01:54:44] People like them a lot, but the constant threat of just like violence around any corner or
[01:54:49] always having to be on guard against a potential zombie who gets up in the catacombs and whatnot.
[01:54:53] It, it diminishes the sense of like, I'm in these fucking catacombs.
[01:54:59] And it's genuinely spooky because like, instead I'm just like, all right, always have the bow
[01:55:03] drawn.
[01:55:04] You never know when one of these zombies is going to wake up and it turns everything into a set
[01:55:11] piece for combat.
[01:55:13] But in Indiana Jones, you know, you'll have segments where you're around other people, you're in
[01:55:18] a city, you got to be stealthy.
[01:55:19] You got to kind of be smart.
[01:55:20] And then you have segments where you're like go underground and you're just there and you
[01:55:25] had, you had to open a door that hadn't been open for a thousand years.
[01:55:28] And so from a plot perspective, it makes no sense for you to immediately find other people
[01:55:32] there.
[01:55:32] It's just you doing trials like the ones from the movies.
[01:55:37] And that you sure there might be traps that you need to avoid, but it really allows your
[01:55:44] brain to be like, ah, yes, I am here.
[01:55:46] I am exploring this and you can take in the environment.
[01:55:49] You can think about it in a sort of relaxed pace is the wrong word, but in like a mindful
[01:55:53] way.
[01:55:54] And so I think that's wonderful.
[01:55:56] In fact, it's delivering on the wish fulfillment that I think a lot of people get from a game
[01:56:00] like Skyrim where you, you want to explore these caves and these dungeons and see these
[01:56:04] fantastical places and things, uh, in a sense of solitude, but the constant barrage of NPCs
[01:56:13] and, uh, enemies sort of gamifies away any sense of awe or wonder.
[01:56:22] Whereas this game by having wonderful graphics and also the de-emphasis on combat, which I'm
[01:56:27] sure plenty of people who want that from a game, I mean, you've got plenty to choose
[01:56:30] from, won't be super into.
[01:56:33] It means there's more puzzles.
[01:56:37] It means there's more thinking.
[01:56:38] Um, yeah, me getting rid of that habit or at least pausing the habit of also watching a
[01:56:45] show while I play a game all the time has made me really enjoy this game and it's forced
[01:56:50] me to move at a slower pace, which is something generally that's been on my, on my goal list.
[01:56:54] Uh, so it, you know, the other game that you compare it to a lot is uncharted, which was
[01:57:00] always like an Indiana Jones game, but they had to justify its existence by making it very
[01:57:04] gamey, uh, and blockbuster-y.
[01:57:06] And so they'd have the big set pieces just like this new Indiana Jones piece does where you're
[01:57:10] climbing up to get into a, a Nazi Zeppelin, right?
[01:57:13] And it feels very much like uncharted, but the stakes are, so then you're on the Zeppelin
[01:57:19] having a conversation, not, and then you're on the Zeppelin having like a corridor shooter
[01:57:23] where you just mow down hundreds and hundreds of Nazis so you can get to the next cut scene.
[01:57:28] This is this by making a triple a game that delivers on a narrative experience that isn't
[01:57:36] just a complicated movie in terms of interactivity, but is instead a real video game with lots of
[01:57:45] interesting systems in it makes Indiana Jones really stand out to me as a monument in modern
[01:57:52] gaming.
[01:57:53] It has not been done like this before, not on the big stage that it has.
[01:57:57] Uh, so yeah, it, it's a, it makes me glad that the, the one thing about the game that does
[01:58:06] have a modern trope that, that maybe we should all take a break from is you have a journal
[01:58:12] and instead of the journal being paper journal, I mean, it's also a paper journal, but you have
[01:58:16] a basically like a huge task list.
[01:58:19] You have this to-do list that gets generated for you as you overhear conversations.
[01:58:23] And as you, uh, you know, move around, you've got the main story quest and you got the side
[01:58:27] quest and you got the field work and you got these mysteries to solve, which puzzles, and
[01:58:31] you got all of these sort of like to-dos.
[01:58:33] And part of me after, as I was leaving the first segment of the game is in the Vatican,
[01:58:38] as I was about to like knowingly cross the threshold and kind of do the last little quest
[01:58:44] before I was expecting to clear the Vatican and move to the next place, my video gamer
[01:58:51] brain was already thinking, okay, well, I've got 25 fucking other to-dos here back in the
[01:58:56] Vatican.
[01:58:56] And I know like, apparently the game is pretty like, there's a point where it's permissive
[01:59:00] about you going back to past places and kind of cleaning up your side quests.
[01:59:04] So it doesn't like give the big like dialogue box saying point of no return, which is another
[01:59:08] thing that's common in games.
[01:59:10] But even without that, just having the sense that the Vatican stuff was wrapping up gave
[01:59:16] me like, I didn't, I didn't even play it one night because I was like, I don't want to do
[01:59:20] all these side quests, but I don't want to not have done them because there's a lot of good
[01:59:24] content in there.
[01:59:25] There's a lot of good stories and maybe I'll show up to the next area and I'll be underpowered
[01:59:30] because I won't have, you know, acquired certain skills and so forth.
[01:59:37] And I just had a thought to myself, it's like, you know what, maybe instead of trying to just
[01:59:41] mainline a main story of a game or just be absolutely completionist, maybe I'll just ignore
[01:59:47] that whole tab and just do whatever I see, right?
[01:59:53] Like just like how games used to be, like speaking of Skyrim, two games before that was a game called
[01:59:59] Morrowind in the series.
[02:00:01] And Morrowind had relatively little in the way of a heads up display and interface and
[02:00:06] a constant to do list in the sidebar.
[02:00:08] I mean, there are ways to get to your quest log and stuff, but Morrowind was a game where
[02:00:12] you just like walked the fuck around and then shit happened and you'd be like, cool.
[02:00:19] Something just happened and it would, it would feel extemporaneous and random or like it only
[02:00:26] happened to you.
[02:00:26] But as soon as like something goes into to do tracker and it's like, now it's a waypoint
[02:00:31] in a map and I'm walking to that waypoint.
[02:00:34] Whatever happens there is a set, is a, is a, is a movie shoot.
[02:00:38] It's a, you know, it's clearly on rails.
[02:00:41] It's clearly, it's not, the thing doesn't have to actually be organic.
[02:00:44] It just has to be convincingly emergent.
[02:00:48] The phrase emergent gameplay is like kind of what this often is referred to, but emergent
[02:00:54] gameplay actually depends on like a lot of math and, and a lot of physics systems and other
[02:01:00] things that is kind of like, at least without AI inventing stories dynamically, which I don't
[02:01:06] know would be any good anyway.
[02:01:08] I'm dubious.
[02:01:09] Emergent gameplay is also sort of at odds with narrative experiences.
[02:01:14] But we can all trick ourselves into having emergent narrative experiences by just not
[02:01:20] looking at the quest log and just kind of roaming about and, you know, we're directionally.
[02:01:26] We know the next area is over this way.
[02:01:28] Let's just go.
[02:01:29] So I've been practicing playing the game that way the last couple of nights and boy, howdy,
[02:01:33] is it a lot more fun?
[02:01:35] Cause I feel like I am having experiences and not like I am just long day of doing to do's
[02:01:42] on my to do track or let's go fire up this game.
[02:01:44] So I can do to do's on this one that means less, even less.
[02:01:49] So yeah, if you haven't checked it out, do it.
[02:01:52] On my steam deck, I've been playing like a dragon, Yakuza seven.
[02:01:59] No longer a beat them up.
[02:02:00] It's a, you know, it's a kind of dragon quest style RPG turn-based battle system, which some
[02:02:08] people were upset about, but then you remind them like actually the Yakuza combat system
[02:02:12] and like where it was more of a brawler, like was never actually that good or engaging.
[02:02:17] Uh, what it was always about was the set pieces that you you're in Japan, you're in, you know,
[02:02:24] you're working in a crime syndicate.
[02:02:26] You there's this big epic sweeping story and the story itself is pretty basic, but the side
[02:02:33] stories are hilarious and very interesting and fascinating.
[02:02:37] And the, and the things that you interact with are really cool.
[02:02:40] And the relationships between the characters are really interesting, uh, which is just seems
[02:02:45] like a better fit for a traditional role-playing game.
[02:02:47] That's turn-based.
[02:02:47] Uh, so I'm having a great time.
[02:02:49] It's a great steam deck game.
[02:02:51] Cause you know, the graphics are fine and, and, uh, yeah, just, I'm, I'm inching through
[02:02:54] it.
[02:02:54] It was really nice to have a steam deck while we were over in Michigan, um, so that I could
[02:02:59] have something to unwind with, uh, back at the hotel, uh, at the end of a long day.
[02:03:04] Cause, uh, and it was super effective for that.
[02:03:06] Uh, also it pairs really well.
[02:03:08] Jeremy had the idea, get my X real glasses out.
[02:03:11] The AR glasses, like 400, $500.
[02:03:14] Not to say that they're cheap, but like compared to the vision pro they are that those glasses
[02:03:21] have a 10 ADP screen in each eyeball and a USB-C cable.
[02:03:26] You, you start your steam deck, you're in a game, you plug in the cable.
[02:03:32] The only reason that you have to, you have to wake this, the steam deck up first or else
[02:03:36] it won't initiate, right?
[02:03:38] Wake up the steam deck, plug in the cable and boom.
[02:03:41] Now you can, in any posture you're like, while you're lying down in bed, you're playing a triple
[02:03:46] a ass game with a really nice controller on a slightly too heavy steam deck, but hell, you
[02:03:51] can have it on your lap.
[02:03:52] It doesn't matter, right?
[02:03:53] You're not holding it up to look at it.
[02:03:55] And a very good, rich, you know, gamut of colors, 1080p screen in your face.
[02:04:02] And, you know, the two, three hour battery life.
[02:04:04] It was awesome on the plane.
[02:04:06] It's great playing at night because, you know, it's filling up most of your field of view.
[02:04:11] Whereas you're squinting at, you can make a tablet's eight fucking inches.
[02:04:15] It's huge.
[02:04:16] I would love a steam deck that was smaller for this exact reason, right?
[02:04:20] Um, so anyway, uh, cool, cool beans on the TV front, uh, Becky and I started watching the
[02:04:29] diplomat season two, uh, the, the best reason to watch the diplomat, which is on Netflix.
[02:04:34] And it's, uh, uh, about an unlikely ambassador to the UK who's used to being in more war-torn
[02:04:41] regions in the world, uh, who, who mostly spend season one complaining about how she has to
[02:04:46] dress up all the time, uh, and doesn't like doing that, which is pretty much how I would
[02:04:51] probably be.
[02:04:51] Uh, the number one reason to watch it is because Carrie Russell.
[02:04:55] So that's what we're doing.
[02:04:58] And it's great because Carrie Russell, uh, say no more.
[02:05:03] The Americans is one of my all time favorite shows, uh, and that whole vibe.
[02:05:09] Um, so, so diplomat is more like madam secretary, but really good because Carrie Russell.
[02:05:15] So if you, if you need further convincing, we're just, you and I are wired differently.
[02:05:20] Uh, I talked a few months ago, maybe now, maybe not that long couple, some number of versions
[02:05:28] ago, I was talking about the series, the penguin on, uh, max.
[02:05:33] And it's, you know, it's takes place on Colin Farrell plays the same person he played in
[02:05:39] the Batman with, uh, you know, the, the, the twilight kid one.
[02:05:44] It was a good movie.
[02:05:45] Don't get me wrong, but like, he wasn't penguin ass penguin.
[02:05:47] He was like a club owner or a club manager.
[02:05:51] Uh, he's still on the, the villain team, but we'll hadn't gone full blown blown, you know,
[02:05:56] Danny DeVito yet.
[02:05:57] Uh, uh, penguin and the penguin series, which is eight episodes, limited series.
[02:06:04] Uh, I talked about it being really good.
[02:06:07] It being like a really good Scorsese style, you know, gangster series.
[02:06:15] Uh, the finale, like I, I actually canceled max.
[02:06:19] I was saying, I was cleaning up some of our subscriptions.
[02:06:21] We don't really use it very much.
[02:06:22] I canceled it.
[02:06:23] And then I let it lapse and penguins finale came out.
[02:06:26] And last night I had time to myself and I was like, you know what?
[02:06:28] I, I want to watch that.
[02:06:30] I'm going to, I'm going to watch that.
[02:06:32] And so I literally paid $20 to watch one episode of television by resubscribing to HBO max.
[02:06:40] Uh, and it was worth it.
[02:06:41] It was so fucking good.
[02:06:43] Good Lord.
[02:06:45] That show is great.
[02:06:46] Uh, that is one of the best, especially for something tight.
[02:06:51] That's, you know, one does not presume is going to have a season two.
[02:06:53] I think the season two equivalent will be the next Batman movie, which unfortunately has been
[02:06:57] delayed until 2027.
[02:06:58] So if you haven't watched this yet, you got plenty of time to get there.
[02:07:00] Uh, is my guess.
[02:07:01] One, one assumes he's going to be the big bad in that one.
[02:07:06] It is of extremely well executed series, uh, similar to see on the Disney side of the fence
[02:07:17] there, the and or series taking a property that was pretty tired and doing something fresh
[02:07:24] with it that even if you stripped away, the intellectual property would still be fucking
[02:07:29] rad and, or did that for star Wars penguins doing that for Batman to the point now where
[02:07:36] now my expectations for Batman are really probably inappropriately high, just like after watching
[02:07:42] whatever came after, uh, Ahsoka or whatever came after and, or I was like, you know what?
[02:07:48] Maybe I don't like star Wars that much.
[02:07:51] Maybe I just like and or star Wars.
[02:07:53] Uh, so yeah, if you haven't watched it, check it out.
[02:07:57] Uh, documentary, uh, uh, I started yesterday.
[02:08:01] I, uh, uh, I Paul, I didn't, I love video game documentaries cause I love video game history
[02:08:08] and I love being able to see archival footage of things that I kind of, you know, heard through
[02:08:11] the grapevine or had read about.
[02:08:13] Um, and there's one called it's in the game, uh, which was a electronic arts motto for a long time.
[02:08:19] Uh, and it's about Madden, the story of how John Madden football was created in the eighties.
[02:08:27] It's rise to prominence, uh, it's struggles through its struggles recently to stay relevant.
[02:08:34] Um, and tons and tons of great interviews, including with Trip Hawkins, the founder of,
[02:08:39] um, the founder of EA, uh, at one point, this gamer fans will appreciate this part.
[02:08:47] At one point in the second or third episode, they asked him, do you want to talk about 3DO?
[02:08:52] Cause he left EA to go start his own game console, which was a colossal failure.
[02:08:56] And he just sort of like, Oh yeah, let's, let's maybe not talk about that, but not from
[02:09:03] like a place of like humility, but a place of like still fucking sore about it.
[02:09:07] Like, like big man, child energy.
[02:09:10] That made me laugh.
[02:09:12] Anyway, it's a really touching, it's a really good documentary.
[02:09:16] Cause like, I don't play Madden.
[02:09:17] I've never been into Madden, but like seeing the number of lives that touch as well as it
[02:09:22] was one of the first franchise.
[02:09:24] First of all, it's the first franchise to just have like 35 installments.
[02:09:27] Like, and if somebody had to have the idea, let's do another Madden this year, even though
[02:09:32] it's just basically the same game as last year.
[02:09:34] Like that wasn't written in a stone tablet and handed down by the video game gods.
[02:09:38] Like that just a dude thought of that.
[02:09:41] Uh, and then John man was like, cool, do it.
[02:09:44] And then they had to figure it out.
[02:09:46] Uh, it's also like the first game series that had tremendous cultural crossover appeal outside
[02:09:56] of the radio shack, you know, purchasing computer game boys in a suburb in the Midwest in the eighties
[02:10:09] and early nineties, like it broke out of that sphere.
[02:10:13] And you get to see that a lot with the number of, um, black people, people from different socioeconomic status,
[02:10:21] the number of players who were like, you know, like how it influenced the game and wanting to go into playing football,
[02:10:27] the relationships between fathers and sons, where maybe one isn't really into gaming and another is,
[02:10:32] or they're both into football.
[02:10:33] Like it's a, it's a really interesting, I'm glad that they made this and I'm glad that they made specifically this
[02:10:41] because like, I think if you're going to do a sports documentary or no, if you're going to do a documentary
[02:10:47] on sports games, you should do it like a sports documentary.
[02:10:49] And it's kind of that, like it's yeah.
[02:10:53] Anyway, uh, it's on Amazon prime.
[02:10:56] So you have it because I, if you're listening to this, you, and you live in an Amazon country,
[02:11:01] like the, the greater federation of Amazon States, like Japan and, and, uh, the UK and America,
[02:11:07] if you live in one of the Amazon countries, uh, you already probably have it.
[02:11:13] So, uh, yeah, it's in the game.
[02:11:15] Great, great documentary.
[02:11:16] I think, uh, I'll leave it there and we'll just see what I, you know, get up to next time.
[02:11:24] If you've got any recommendation, I mean, I share a lot of my opinions about like things that I like
[02:11:28] to watch and do and play.
[02:11:29] I would love to hear your recommendations too.
[02:11:32] And I'll talk about them, uh, on the podcast.
[02:11:35] It is, if you're not familiar, it's podcast at searles.co.
[02:11:39] And then I will see it and I will definitely read it and I'll probably reply.
[02:11:43] And I might even mention it on air.
[02:11:45] No promises.
[02:11:46] I know like, you know, some number of you, you listen to this and you think, oh, maybe I'll
[02:11:50] write an email, but then like, you know, you're doing whatever.
[02:11:52] That's why you're listening to a fucking podcast.
[02:11:53] And then you go, then you go and you go about your day and you're onto the next thing.
[02:11:58] And that's fine.
[02:11:59] I'm that way too.
[02:12:01] Like I don't write into podcasts very often, but once I, there's a couple of podcast hosts
[02:12:06] who are like, you know, pretty notable out there.
[02:12:07] And I'll, I've gotten into email correspondence with them like relatively regularly and they
[02:12:12] treat me like a human.
[02:12:13] It's kind of nice.
[02:12:14] So if you want to be treated like a human, just email me, uh, your favorite video game
[02:12:18] or TV show from this year.
[02:12:19] And I will, uh, appreciate you.
[02:12:22] All right.
[02:12:23] Uh, well, speaking of the mailbag, that's also the next thing that we tend to do.
[02:12:29] Sorry.
[02:12:29] I hate when I'm explaining the show format, but like, I'm just pretty tired.
[02:12:33] I'm realizing now it's been a long goddamn couple of weeks.
[02:12:37] I'm glad to have a new year, but I'm not.
[02:12:40] And I feel like we're out of the woods.
[02:12:44] We're out of the holiday woods here, but I don't, I don't know what kind of year it's
[02:12:48] going to be.
[02:12:49] Hopefully good.
[02:12:50] And you're right about that too.
[02:12:52] I don't know.
[02:12:52] Here we go.
[02:12:53] Marius or Marius writes in subject line, doing my civic duty.
[02:13:07] Uh, uh, I've been an avid listener of the podcast since episode one and greatly enjoying it.
[02:13:14] I am going through a bit of podcast fatigue right now, losing interest in all that sciencey,
[02:13:20] motivational health and wellbeing related advice all over the place.
[02:13:24] End of sentence.
[02:13:26] Listening to some more realistic talks about day-to-day quote unquote struggles is more,
[02:13:33] is somewhat more entertaining these days.
[02:13:35] PS.
[02:13:37] I've been an engineer since the late nineties, starting with infrastructure and networks,
[02:13:41] transitioning to programming and Ruby around 2010.
[02:13:43] Uh, I I've been doing that since then.
[02:13:46] Uh, first, sorry if I misplode your name.
[02:13:50] Second, sorry, I'm bad at reading things.
[02:13:52] Three.
[02:13:52] Uh, I mostly picked this one because it was highly complimentary to me and I liked that a
[02:13:58] lot.
[02:13:58] So if you want to get right on air, just all you got to do is tell me you, you enjoy this
[02:14:04] program, whether it's true or not.
[02:14:06] I will feel the happy feelings afterwards.
[02:14:08] No, but seriously, I think there really does seem to be as podcasting has become more popular.
[02:14:20] It's just an audio format.
[02:14:22] These are just MP3s in an RSS file.
[02:14:25] Like the number, the shape of different kinds of shows, right?
[02:14:30] Like you can just literally, like there's so many different ways to be.
[02:14:33] And this format, right.
[02:14:39] Was like really common in AM radio.
[02:14:41] Like a person talking to you relatively informally about the goings on of the day was, uh, a big
[02:14:49] fucking deal and really common.
[02:14:51] You know, it's how people commuted, you know, uh, grew up, dad would commute and he'd listen
[02:14:57] to Mitch album in, in, uh, before Tuesdays with more, he made him relatively famous.
[02:15:02] And, uh, of course Mitch even had co-hosts, but like there were some number of years where
[02:15:08] the co-hosts were not really, uh, invited to speak very much.
[02:15:13] It seemed like, but that's sort of style, right.
[02:15:18] Of radio program kind of just died and, and the, the, the current crop of podcasts that
[02:15:23] we have seemed to all be multiple co-hosts on a regular format or NPR like program or serial
[02:15:32] or something where it's like, this is a show and this is science and this is whatever.
[02:15:35] And it's, it's serving a purpose.
[02:15:37] So I appreciate that.
[02:15:38] Like, you know, some number of people out there just like having shooting the shit, so to speak.
[02:15:44] And that's what, that's what we're here for is we're rhetorically shit shooting together.
[02:15:50] And, uh, so yeah, thanks for being here.
[02:15:52] I appreciate it.
[02:15:53] Thanks for writing in, uh, really, truly Matt writes in and asks,
[02:15:59] Matt, you just, you stared into the maw of this one.
[02:16:25] There's maybe one of the reasons why kitchens keep getting bigger and kitchen islands keep
[02:16:30] getting bigger is because of the, like the tension in American marriages to have enough
[02:16:40] counter space to, for example, prepare a meal.
[02:16:44] Uh, but also an increasing number of bespoke appliances that all require electricity, all want to sit on a counter permanently and be like the big thing.
[02:16:57] Right.
[02:16:57] So like on ours, I'm, I'm not looking at it, but thinking left to right, we have a ton of counter space.
[02:17:04] Our house is huge and I had to bring in a cart to like store fruits and veggies and stuff and also an instant pot.
[02:17:12] So there's a relatively large instant pot over there.
[02:17:15] I didn't want the steam going up against the cabinet, you know, cause if the cabinet gets a ton of steam over and over again, the, the pain will warp.
[02:17:23] So we've got an instant pot, we have an air, a ninja air fryer, both are ninja brand.
[02:17:29] Uh, in general, we like the ninja brand a lot.
[02:17:32] Like it seems like they're actually making real products and it's not just like Hamilton beach or Cuisinart, just like looking for like lowest bidder, bitter subcontractors to like be able to say that they made a slow cooker.
[02:17:43] Um, and then sell that on Amazon.
[02:17:45] Uh, so ninja seems to be making actual products and I would like those.
[02:17:49] So yeah, that's a one, two punch instant, instant pot, which we don't get a lot of use out of, uh, because Becky doesn't need enough beans.
[02:17:56] So everyone write in and tell, tell Becky, we should be eating more beans.
[02:18:01] We say we like protein, not big bean people.
[02:18:04] I would love to be eating more beans.
[02:18:06] Uh, that would make me feel like we are getting more out of that instant pot investment.
[02:18:12] Uh, the air fryer, super convenient, use it a lot.
[02:18:15] I like crispy food and I don't like to have to douse it in like, you know, a, a vat of hot oil first, uh, that will then, you know, trace amounts of that oil will go inside of me and make me fatter faster.
[02:18:27] Uh, so, so being able to make something hot and crispy on the outside is great.
[02:18:30] Uh, it would be nice if a combination air fryer, like very, very powerful convection oven microwave was a thing in America.
[02:18:40] But as far as I know, and, and Jeremy was just talking to me about this, like Subway has them in certain fast food restaurants, have them in the U S I don't know if that's like a product that people typically sell.
[02:18:52] I should look into it.
[02:18:53] Uh, but in Japan they're called helshio.
[02:18:56] Um, and it's a, it's a whole product category.
[02:18:59] I think Panasonic are the big ones where you have IR cooking infrared.
[02:19:04] You have a heat plate in the middle.
[02:19:07] You have a, a steam cooker.
[02:19:10] So you have to like load water into it and it's a microwave, uh, and it's a convection oven.
[02:19:15] Like this is a five, it's a not quintuple.
[02:19:19] What's, what's the one after quintuple?
[02:19:21] It's beyond quintuple threat in terms of food prep.
[02:19:25] And so, so as a result, you can just put in like a casserole dish or whatever you're cooking, type in the pin code or you use the touchscreen, depending on what kind of model you have.
[02:19:35] And like bingo, bingo, it's a expertly made souffle with everything perfectly timed right inside of one device without all the shifting around.
[02:19:42] Like I would love for that product category to have taken off.
[02:19:46] And we had like, I think the June oven was a startup trying to do that kind of thing, but it was only like two or three heating elements.
[02:19:52] And of course they had to tie it to some bullshit subscription.
[02:19:54] Uh, the Tovala was one that we used for a little while.
[02:19:58] And that was the same sort of thing.
[02:19:59] It's like, well, to really use it, you have to be buying their food and their food was not always great.
[02:20:04] Okay.
[02:20:06] Moving right along.
[02:20:07] Um, I'm a real stickler.
[02:20:10] I try to move stuff out of, we got way more cabinets than we need.
[02:20:14] So we, uh, keep a lot of these things in the cabinets.
[02:20:17] Okay.
[02:20:20] Then there's the range, like, you know, we have a gas range.
[02:20:22] And then after the range, I guess, technically my brother bought us a salt and pepper grinders that are electronic.
[02:20:30] So they have to be plugged in.
[02:20:32] There's a little docking station.
[02:20:33] So that's kind of an appliance.
[02:20:34] Then I am home free.
[02:20:38] I think I'm doing pretty good.
[02:20:39] Actually.
[02:20:40] I think I'm now I'm visually at the, uh, the knife block, which is not an appliance because it is a block full of knives.
[02:20:47] Uh, and then to the right of that, there's two, you know, wall mounted microwave and oven double unit, which takes us to our next little counter nook.
[02:20:58] And that is just, I got a ninja coffee machine.
[02:21:00] So I think, I think we're, I think it's just the three, but we're there.
[02:21:06] It was a, it was a real fucking struggle.
[02:21:08] I'll tell you that.
[02:21:09] That means like you open up three or four different cabinets and we've got all kinds of stuff.
[02:21:13] It's interesting that you said kitchen aid mixers are universally permitted.
[02:21:16] I think kitchen aid mixers are real dumb.
[02:21:19] There's a real stupid, like no one ever uses them.
[02:21:23] I think maybe people have like an idea that like, oh, I'm going to bake a cake or something.
[02:21:28] But I, I think the reason that there are always permitted on counters is that they're absolutely fucking nowhere for them to go other than the garbage you burnt.
[02:21:38] Uh, um, let's see.
[02:21:43] I've got a couple of real good ones, but I'm going to save them because my throat's gone.
[02:21:50] It's been a long, it's been a long day.
[02:21:52] Uh, Jason, he offers a, uh, a bug.
[02:21:59] He says Apple sports.
[02:22:01] Okay.
[02:22:01] Here's a bug that I just hit.
[02:22:03] Apple sports updates the ranking of the team.
[02:22:07] Even when you're looking at results from the past, from yesterday.
[02:22:12] So like he's talking, I'm sure about, uh, NCAA college football.
[02:22:16] So like, let's say that the game happens on Saturday and the rank and the teams win and lose.
[02:22:22] And then the new rankings come out on Sunday.
[02:22:24] You want to know one assumes.
[02:22:27] All right.
[02:22:29] So I'll read.
[02:22:30] So the rankings no longer represent the ranking of the time of the game.
[02:22:32] There it is.
[02:22:33] I just discovered this and the overlap of extremely into Apple and also into sports is probably low.
[02:22:41] And now I'm mad.
[02:22:42] Yeah.
[02:22:42] So that's the thing is like the people who wrote this game, there's, you can already imagine it.
[02:22:46] There's like a data model somewhere of sports team and they have a, you know, the data associated
[02:22:51] with them is like, well, they got a name, they got a logo, they got colors.
[02:22:54] Uh, they've got, uh, you know, what league they're in.
[02:22:57] Of course they belong to a certain league and they might as a piece of metadata have like
[02:23:01] their current ranking.
[02:23:02] And since the game is there, since the app is just for looking at sports scores, you don't
[02:23:07] necessarily need a lot more than that.
[02:23:08] You might have a current roster or whatever, but like, there's not a, you don't want to
[02:23:12] have a time series database for no reason.
[02:23:15] You're going to just say like, okay, well the number was 23 and now it's 22, but it means
[02:23:19] it's like you go back in time and you look at previous scores and now it's going to be
[02:23:25] say that they were 22 ranked yesterday, but that's also what they are.
[02:23:28] Yeah.
[02:23:29] That's, um, it's a real obvious oversight that would be seen as unacceptable if this was like
[02:23:35] a product you were charging money for, but you're not because it's just a random Apple
[02:23:39] stock app.
[02:23:39] That's not very good and get in line.
[02:23:41] It'll just quietly eliminate the entire market for similar apps made by independent publishers.
[02:23:48] Uh, and that bug will live on for 10 years.
[02:23:51] So there you go.
[02:23:51] The Apple way.
[02:23:54] And there we are.
[02:23:55] Okay.
[02:23:55] Well, I hope you all have a wonderful, um, start of the year.
[02:23:58] Uh, I'm grateful for every minute of my existence, but even more so now.
[02:24:03] And, and I am have a renewed sense that, you know, whatever you're feeling, whatever you
[02:24:09] want to do, there's, there's no better day than today to do it.
[02:24:11] So carpe that diem for me.