it’s like this – a man figured out life and everything else

#philosophy #dystopian #comedy

ᗩ ᑭᕼIᒪOᔕOᑭᕼIᑕᗩᒪ, ᑕYᗷEᖇᑭᑌᑎK ᑕOᗰEᗪY
Abstract, futurist humor designed to ease/cause anxiety in modern society.

Watch the whole story so far here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JcXIYzykkq4

Emily and Peter are artists from New York City living in south western China for the past fifteen years.

Emily is a writer, comedian and English professor. Her husband Peter is a composer and illustrator. Together they’ve conjured the man, the myth, the legend, Western Toilet and the ever growing cast of characters that populate the mystical cyberpunk mega city of Chongqing.

Not merely content to simply exist in such a tumultuous timeline Western Toilet has taken it upon himself to hand down his wisdom and teachings in this small film excerpt from his private writings.

Many more of these teachings line his vast libraries and will be made available in the coming years leading to our extinction.

Watch more here:
do not: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lb6O6VGtT1Y
die: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b1w_iopCdcY
don’t: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ltGA5EG4V5o
dead: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SJ8GCJw4DI8&t=624s
day: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9P55XQyjSaQ
broke: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YtitstGI2Tk
fall: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UZsDgtAyUqc
never: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qGpUvDs01vs

While “Chongqing Punk” is a member of the YouTube Partner Program and is eligible for monetization we’ve opted out of advertising any capitalistic swill so your viewing pleasure will not be interrupted while enjoying this learning film. We would greatly appreciate if you would engage the LIKE feature and SUBSCRIBE to join us on this possibly short path to the impending apocalypse.

If you would like to help support our cause please join our Patreon ( https://www.patreon.com/c/chongqing_punk ) where you can participate in one of our member tiers that give you access to behind the scenes video and photos, features such as unfilmed scripts, our comprehensive blog series dating all the way back to 2011 and more stuff when we figure out what else we have to give.

Also we write all of our own music so please get into the Bandcamp ( https://hellouncleforeigner.bandcamp.com/ ) to see when new hits drop.

Watch the episodes here: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLJkeMDkycC1hByNz93eLzDMxqgWYRMURU

Playlists
Dystopian Thoughts of the Day: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLJkeMDkycC1h-iQtzIiypvJIvZ5HunETD
Watch more Dystopian Quick Thoughts here: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLJkeMDkycC1gSIxuVJgJmTGvFbVQMthND
Music Videos: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLJkeMDkycC1iEp0OjbouxTDtVzO1A6a92
Special presentations: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLJkeMDkycC1hb6ypO3CGQBxnnTTalB6or

Try these videos:
lhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wK7w9pX6XgY&t=10s

As well as these special features:

Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/c/chongqing_punk
Bandcamp: https://hellouncleforeigner.bandcamp.com/music
Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/chongqingpunk.bsky.social
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chongqing_punk/
Cara: https://cara.app/chongqingpunk
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/psikoski/
Red Note: https://www.xiaohongshu.com/user/profile/63e0c89e00000000260070a6

Please watch our other YouTube channels:
Chongqing Peter: https://www.youtube.com/@UCTZHcgpiNgYkiq-H4_4fQtw
Chongqing Emily: https://www.youtube.com/@ChongqingEmily
Western Toilet: https://www.youtube.com/@UCwx0zZI0pJR6-4IC7wMFx1Q
Living in Chongqing: https://www.youtube.com/@UCftjeM16I5qqLnCc1iIH8Ag
Chongqing Whoopwu: https://www.youtube.com/@WhoopWu-s8x

there’s mysteries in the world but is it the answers that matter or is it the story you already know what I’m going to say Nothing matters It’s this emphasis on continuity that’s making the human race soft Stop running and embrace the chaos Wear purple socks for once Who cares but don’t stop wearing socks at all That’s a bridge too far You’re going to need your feet to be comfortable That’s how you get places My middle school teacher told me that He fought in Nam He’s also the first man I ever met that had a tattoo Now everyone has one He was a trends setter That Mr Burke If you’re going to be part of a trend better to set it and forget it You definitely don’t want to be a follower Here’s the real secret of adulthood Nobody knows where they’re going I threw my money at the moon and I didn’t receive anything I want my money back Especially

there’s mysteries in the world but is it the answers that matter or is it the story you already know what I’m going to say Nothing matters It’s this emphasis on continuity that’s making the human race soft Stop running and embrace the chaos Wear purple socks for once Who cares but don’t stop wearing socks at all That’s a bridge too far You’re going to need your feet to be comfortable That’s how you get places My middle school teacher told me that He fought in Nam He’s also the first man I ever met that had a tattoo Now everyone has one He was a trends setter That Mr Burke If you’re going to be part of a trend better to set it and forget it You definitely don’t want to be a follower Here’s the real secret of adulthood Nobody knows where they’re going I threw my money at the moon and I didn’t receive anything I want my money back Especially not crowds You ever get on the line and have to ask "What’s this one for?" Sometimes it’s ice cream In New York at the turn of the millennium it was frequently some new high calorie monstrosity Some chef with a publicist cooked up [ __ ] cronuts Why didn’t we have better things to do than wait for dessert all day and now look at the state of things I mean partying while Rome burns it’s a great option It beats staying home locked in your room with the news on This I’m sure doesn’t need to be said but don’t watch the news You’ll have your own reasons and time but basically it’s fear porn I get enough of that at work Just kidding I don’t work It’s bad for the digestion And this 2010s era cronut’s not going to eat itself If it could it would cost way more Croissants are difficult cuz you have to keep the butter at the right temperature Otherwise you don’t get all those flaky layers That’s why the French are so ornery I’ve discovered that they’re constantly worried about their butter and nobody ever asks them about it The proper greeting for a Frenchman is "How’s your butter?" cold I hope French women don’t want you to greet them at all but they’ll take a loose gow if you have one Just don’t make eye contact when you hand it over Best actually if you pretend you’re dead throughout the whole exchange then turn on that Rupert Everett zombie movie What was it cemetery Man Back away slowly They teach all this in high school French Weren’t you paying attention or did you take Spanish like the rest of them get a job Nah I didn’t mean it I’m sorry Get a snack The written word doesn’t change the world in the moment That is It’s not a magic spell that you cast Like thinking makes it so But if you write it in the right place it can change the way we thought the world was Maybe it was right We’re terrible at knowing what is happening because maybe nothing is happening The narrative is always imposed after The narrative is always an imposition Tell that to any middle school English class The purity of uneducated youth If knowledge corrupts why don’t we shut down all these schools let people out into the world with their beautiful and naive selves That’s what the CW’s the hundred was about Children rule and society miraculously becomes peaceful and harmonious Spend time in a kindergarten and you’ll marvel at how quiet everything is All the sharing and caring of our natural state In an anarchist society who will make lenses for glasses without a profit motive why the one who has glasses in their heart The problem with the internet is everyone is absurd The bonus of the internet is that it doesn’t last Try to figure out something about 2018 You can’t It’s all lost to the digital noise Have you ever tried to find a tweet that you like from 13 years ago you can’t because it’s buried in pixelated volume Look up that it’s not butter Montakeia commercial The propaganda of the 70s is alive and well That’s why Atkins is never going away Eating a bunch of meat and fat just feels like a good idea regardless of what the circumstances are I eat nothing and I recommend nothing So I can’t really say anything either way It’s important to leave no trace That’s no one’s philosophy except the Girl Scouts But we’d have no way of knowing would we perhaps these no tracers are all around us Quietly living lives without recording it Enjoying bacon going to kindergarten looking at trees Who are these people and how can we find someone who doesn’t want to be found write a letter Why don’t you just tell us you’re okay we mean you no harm We just want to sell you some bacon and a time share And do you have any interesting minerals or ores and can we have them we very much want them We live in a world governed by tens But why if we were born Simpson like with four fingers on each hand would base 8 be our governing principle there’s nothing inherently natural about 10 In fact we’re surrounded by systems that take a different number as their basis Binary and hexadesimal for example allow us to talk to computers In fact binary seems like the most obvious of them all How much more simple can you get than on or off and despite its simplicity in design you can still use it to express incredible amounts of complexity But saying that I just celebrated my 1 0 0 1 0 1 1 0 1 0 1 1 1 0 birthday sounds like less of a milestone than it’s been 2,000 days since my last cigarette We like time in evenly divisible chunks even if they’re arbitrary 2 weeks is at least related to the movement of the sun and the earth but 10 business days seems neater Even if work weekends and turnaround time are all relatively recent human inventions prime numbers are only for keeping secrets It’s either a party trick or a cryptography system that you know the bigger ones Guys we made up numbers and then we couldn’t figure out everything about them P or NP nobody knows Are we just playing an elaborate game with ourselves are we cheating entropy by imposing a narrative on all of this chaos europe makes fun of America for our resistance to the metric system But the royal kilogram is just some king’s idea for how much a liter of water weight or some [ __ ] And a liter is just the volume of atoms it takes to definitively kill a cat in a box In case I seem like some guy who didn’t get you a birthday present because a year is just a somewhat inaccurate measurement of how long it takes the earth to go around the sun I am Why would I get you a present here take some cash Get something you like for once Get 10 of them get 2,000 of them I don’t care Just don’t get eight It’s significant that we have 10 fingers because we do If we had six that’d be significant too If spiders ruled the world well we’d be in trouble But we wouldn’t because there’s only a small proportion of them that are poisonous and most of them don’t go after humans and they also eat small bugs and other things that are annoying Some of them even eat small rodents What if we found out that dolphins really were in charge all along what do they have 10 of 10 friends 2,000 friends Ah 2,000 friends would be really nice 3,000 four Is a fork ever not a fork it could be a hairbrush I guess if you’re a singing mermaid But who among us can sing no really I want to know I’m putting together a variety act We’re going on the road to bring the message to the people Life is different in this business of show but I wouldn’t choose anything else There’s always a choice More and more people are choosing show business which I’m the special one Go back to your normal jobs your square lives your three hots in a cot Oh wait That’s jail Don’t go to jail Do not pass Go Go directly to Community Chest Monopoly was a game originally intended to highlight the evils of capitalism because it’s long and boring And if you’re the clear winner you have to convince your friends to keep playing until they actually lose A forfeit win is much less satisfying You need to take their last dollar and see it in their eyes the relief that they can now go do something else Anything else Did I mention that monopoly is really boring risk Now that’s a game of world domination The only situation in which Australia is a lynch pin of a winning strategy Sorry Australia you’re just so far away in the real world but so easy to hold on to on the game board I think the problem is that life is so much messier than games The thing about uncertainty is that it can cause a lot of anxiety And when that anxiety doesn’t have an outlet well some target whatever’s in front of them be it a troublesome boss or a recently at Hosted Sofa Or games are much more fun For one thing there’s a clear win condition in a game except for games that play with a concept of winning itself And you never even know when the game is over Oh man it’s time to go water the crops again I just did that yesterday which was 5 minutes ago Taking care of plants in the real world is far less demanding But you’re not allowed to go to sleep for the day after you pet all the animals in your life That’s seen as depression Buy this car to go to work Go to work to pay for this car It’s a pretty simple rule actually See life has rules too actually And you can be a winner Hey look I got a wife That’s another game where it’s difficult to get someone to play to the end There’s the first 10 minutes where it is competitive but then when somebody pulls ahead there’s no catching up Just like real life I guess Game makers have a lot on their mind Are they okay it takes a special kind of person to see that having the longest road matters and a different kind of special person to see that’s fun They are our failures of optimization You could argue that if we left them behind maybe they weren’t serving us But that presupposes that we’re not broken and wrong and if only we gamified our habit creation We do all the things and get enough exercise But you do realize that using an RPG themed habit tracker isn’t the same as playing an actual RPG right you’re no fool You want your RPG Why aren’t we better it’s not bad to strive right it’s not bad to have goals but are they my goals or someone else planting and then exploiting that insecurity to sell me colloidial mercury so that even when I’m peeing I’m optimizing Goods can make changes to our whole society Deodorant is purely a need invented by deodorant people but can you imagine living without it occasionally people do and if they mention it we categorize them as a dirty hippie Phones are worming their way into our pockets as a must-have Our worming have wormed Even kids have phones these days for emergencies But have you ever thought about if you need a phone who are you going to call ghostbusters They’re not real The answer could be yes by the way No judgment here But did you decide you need a phone or did Boost Mobile what does talking to people get anyone anyway except the exchange of ideas and the feeling of community and camaraderie and 24/7 access to a curated feed of our best friend’s best lives that make us feel awful about ourselves I better get those supplements so I can drink more water and reach my true potential and finally emerge from this aging crystis to show the world my true form What if my true form is like a Final Fantasy final boss with wings and extra legs and the ability to cast meteor that spell is devastating Humanity would never survive It’s up to me then and you to keep it contained and stop buying self-improvement products being hawkked by a disgruntled man from his basement If having a compost toilet fixes everything what’s he so mad about it’s not that hard to figure out when somebody’s trying to sell you something That’s on you Go to my Patreon Don’t let them aggregate you Yes there is power in numbers and you by yourself have next to no power But when you get lumped in what are you saying what are you being allowed to say think for yourself Make your own decisions Question authority These are the cornerstones for the Institute of Free Thinkers A or B is doom Always choose Q Keep them guessing Q is the right choice because it’s the only letter that requires another letter to come along with it U is the bonus letter Then you have two letters Kobashi Maru whenever you can It’s the power of critical thinking but also neat solutions solvable problems These are modern inventions It’s a failing of education that we teach kids that there’s right answers I guess we have to assess them somehow But do we it appears that what that does is make everyone crave answers and be less tolerant of ambiguity when that is the very skill that we need the most Is the opposite of ambiguity This is almost impossible to say If we can’t think it does it exist existence is all we have and that’s not easily categorizable What makes a cat different from a dog no one can really say that whole taxonomy devised by Lanaeus almost entirely wrong But he was so authoritative when he said it that we still teach it in biology class today Of course in some places it’s lucky we get to teach sciences at all Am I right see now here’s a good example How are there two teams regarding science and their positions are science is the only thing that matters Science is the blasphemous lies of the devil Both positions are boring but both positions are voting blocks so they get all the pie If they keep trying to sell you fear it’s your job not to be afraid Is an assumption of reasonableness our responsibility Reason That’s what I have And everyone else is sorely lacking Why doesn’t everyone just listen to me listen to me Don’t listen to me Listen to David Bowie There’s a lot of power in numbers That’s what your math teacher was always saying You should have listened to her Is it only aptitude that makes people good at things i wouldn’t know I tried my best to be good at nothing It’s a thorny struggle but most of the things that are worth it are If you can master nothing then maybe you can get a glimpse of the other side The other side implies that there’s only two Binary is helpful for simplifying your problems down to their basic variables but you don’t want to simplify out some of the necessary complexity I don’t want to keep beating a dead horse but sometimes you have to It might come back to life I don’t know Did you know Choco Levennit’s cookies was named after the Levennetss you know calculus on the continent lieut Newton’s What’s with all these mathematicians getting cookies named after them is there something especially mathematical about cookies but then again McDonald’s celebrated Pi Day this year Did you notice it feels both fun and betraying if Pi Day gets a more mainstream audience Numbers are for the nerds but would it be better if we were all nerds evidently not It’s too bad people aren’t pushing a liberal arts education as a cure to a small mind and hence a gateway to riches Plenty of people can get rich without being particularly thoughtful about it In fact it might be a liability If you’re trying to source ethical t-shirts because fast fashion is killing the planet and choking our water supplies with microlastics which doesn’t sound great well someone without those ethical concerns has already sold out their whole run while you’ve been dithering They’re still full of microlastics No one’s getting away from all that You are worried about microlastics in the drink water That’s cute No you are going to hear about this in a few months But a real threat is nanoplastics and they are not where you think I’d like a getaway somewhere indoors with a comfortable sofa Good sofas are underrated these days Or maybe they’re rated exactly right Have you seen the price of a quality couch that’s why people keep buying shitty ones Buy it for life is a good goal but it takes a lot of capital up front And the young tend to be pretty broke You can be broke when you’re old too Some people will never be rich Can you believe it work hard get ahead but ahead of what the grave Money can’t buy me longevity even though it probably can Why is everything else around here and it’s a simple math equation If I could only figure it out Carry the 1 / 4 Did you turn off the coffee maker did it turn itself back on you should really go home and check When we get automated appliances jets in style will they have good judgment will they be cleaning up our messes ahead of time like girders falling into place just in time for Mr Magcoo to safely navigate the construction site the future is a cartoon or will they just be another cat in the herd that we need to corral in this endless farce called life what is the help that I want versus the help that’s being provided of course my problems are mine to solve But if you’re selling me solutions it’d be nice if they made my life easier or better or easier and better Is that too much to ask when life gets improved does it stay improved the housewives of the 1950s were liberated from their kitchens by automated dishwashers but I’ve never actually lived in a house with a dishwasher since I left my childhood home Is it weird that they haven’t become ubiquitous in the 75 years since they’ve been invented you could say that water waste kept it from being universally adopted But studies have shown that modern dishwashers are much more water efficient than washing dishes by hand The detergent is washing all kinds of chemicals into the water supply but that’s another story Washing your athleisure clothing in the washing machine is rinsing all kinds of microlastics into the ground as well Washing anything is a nightmare We might as well stay dirty You got to eat a peck of dirt before you die My father says that But how much is a pe and is that binding can I stave off death by eating slightly less than a peck for the rest of my life doodle I do Theaters swear by spritzing costumes with vodka to get out stubborn smells Is that the best use of our vodka supposedly the alcohol smell evaporates as it dries or we just go around smelling like drunks The freconomics of it all is hard to figure out Industrialized food saved labor and made food available in communities where it was scarce But it also poisoned us all and made naturally thin people feel morally superior Like they did something unquestionably good just by being satisfied before the average person Have you ever tried to hit undo on something physical like you move your couch across a living room but then decided it was better where it was and then you’re almost affronted that you have to carry it back yourself Isn’t this cached in some kind of cosmic memory when someone figures that out it’s going to change the world And that is the plot of the Matrix Good movie Lot of fine knitwear We should all be wearing more chunky knits It’s the outfit of the resistance in a lot of movies Because if you think about it mass textile production is the basis for modern society Those tight cotton weaves not possible when the women of the village were spinning thread by hand And don’t even get me started on the slave trade But imagine getting out of the shower and having to drip dry Barbaric You’d get nothing done with such a start to the day But if you dismantle the entire system man say goodbye to towels and sheets Scratchy blankets for you and asthma as you put another log on the fire to keep warm The old ways are horrid ways The only way that homesteading is comfortable is if you have a lot of resources Why do you think they’re all selling all that gold what’s gold going to do for you in the apocalypse more than crypto I guess but not much more You need to invest in real things like antibiotics and heirloom tomato seeds and a loom and a person to work that loom day and night because textile production is no joke That used to be something whole villages of women would do But then who will make the dinner the men That’s how hot dog night was invented Easy to cook no mess to clean up But hot dogs give you cancer Did you stockpile any chemotherapy drugs or a doctor who knows how to administer them without killing you Maybe it’s best if we don’t dismantle society and begin again with me and mine just taking care of me and mine You may feel like you can do it all with your compost toilet But do you know the early warning signs of chalera i don’t All I know is they’ll take away your sweet stuffed rabbit and throw it on the fire And then you’ll have to move back to England from India and a rich boy with a limp will help you plant a garden Have you ever tried the limb off crops that could plant it yourself you’re going to end up with far too many tomatoes a [ __ ] ton of lettuce and the fruit won’t come in for years Today’s fantasy is to cross the Pacific on a cargo ship That’s right like in Royal Tenon bombs when Richie is too depressed to be on dry land Never mind that it’s some people’s jobs Do you like crewing a cargo ship our cargo ship crewing viewers Seems nice Well it seems isolated which seems nice Months set C You can work on your stuff without getting messages from your students at all hours Teacher I forgot my homework Teacher I forgot my lunch Teacher I forgot my name And these are the adults on a ship You don’t have to go anywhere The ship’s doing that for you You eat a lot of salt cod I imagine I don’t like salt cod but I do like rugged survivalism Well I like the idea of rugged survivalism I like a warm comfy bed and hot takeout When someone else cooks that’s exactly what I wanted On a boat you can get lost in a horizon and let your imagination wander Enjoy the majesty of the earth which is 3/4 water and you are always on land you fraud You call yourself an earthling but you know nothing of other habitats I don’t think western toilet is AI but is this the right place for me to say I might be poser rain and damp is depressing but sometimes that’s what we need a real sea adventure going from point A to point B without worrying the person in front of you is going to recline into your knees Suck at air travel They’re the real villains Turn a miracle in the sky into a miserable consumer experience where they explicitly reinforce the class system in a literal way Who does Delta think they are on boats you can do boat stuff like wearing stripes and blowing a whistle I’ve got a good hat for boating but you’ll never see it unless you meet me on a boat Am I losing my mind yes That’s why we need to get to the ship so we can find it again Seasickness is a great test of our fortitude or a great way to lose weight If you lack fortitude win-win strong or skinny Those are the choices in life Is everything all right i’m fine Everything’s fine The boat is leaving in April What time it depends on the winds and the currents Isn’t that charming as we all know the physical constants being what they are are what enabled life to develop in this neck of the universal woods But are they mess withable after the fact they can’t all be existential threats but it does kind of seem like this one would be The way I see it going down is at first anti-gravity is a novelty that you pay to experience as a luxury outing but then some [ __ ] company would claim it as their own resource And then we’d all have a gravity bill to pay every month under threat of having all your stuff fly off into the heavens for non-payment The predictable people would grumble about equity and leaving people out And the people in power would ignore them like they always do and talk a big game about innovation moving the country forward Which country does it matter so basically your whole life will be held under friendly ransom by the gravity companies And eventually we’d all get used to it and people would accept it as the way we’ve always done things until a band of radicals comes along and does some kind of direct action putting the localized gravity generators at risk Some will hail them as folk heroes But the mainstream opinion will be that they’re criminals for expecting the natural world to be free for all to experience And how dare they want things to be different won’t someone think of the profits never mind that studies will show people are long-term more productive for society when they have stable access to free flowing gravity and other universal concepts because watch out planks constant They’re coming for you next But those are just normal people They don’t have any shareholders So no one argues their side Is this the spectre of what will be or what might be it’s hard to say Calvinism would say your destiny is pre-ordained and nothing that you’ll do in the present moment will change what’s supposed to happen But Bill Wat retired He doesn’t get to drive the conversation any longer Slap that sticker of Calvin peeing on your truck window and accept the fact that only you can prevent the future Thank you for coming Take a donut on your way out We leave things on all the time now without even thinking about it Power consumption not my problem Electric bill I’ll pay it But it is a lot not to have to sit through a power up screen We’re busy people I’ve got Tik Toks to scroll We’ll sit and stare at the screen for hours at nothing We don’t have the patience to sit through to the Apple logo blinking on and off or whatever happens Which considering have you tried turning it off and on again is the only tech solution there is i should know better what that looks like The long boot used to be a problem that computer designers wanted to solve I guess they solved it by saying just don’t turn it off And it is shorter than it used to be Except at work Am I right at work everything’s worse Then it’s just the facts If it was fun they would just call it fun You know what I do for fun press buttons in a browser window to make numbers go up It’s a game and it’s super addictive And it reminds me that most of life is filling it full of boring [ __ ] while we wait to die At least card games have some kind of socialization built in It’s all just Skinner boxes isn’t it someone should make a project and call it that Maybe they already have It sounds like a parody SNL commercial if SNL was more nerdy and less fun Joking about death Some would say that’s all we’re joking about all the time But it takes a deaf hand to not just bum everybody out It’s just easier to distract Buttons are so satisfying to push We need to feel like we’re achieving something But it’s only the feeling that we need The achievement itself doesn’t have to be real Our perception is king And why not i don’t know you or your reality but I’m intimately familiar with mine Too bad I’m also sick of it Hence Skinner box It’s a new toy from Mattel that the whole family will love Comes in two colors cheese reward and the living dangerously avoid the shocks edition We have such faith in punishment Even though positive rewards are shown to create better results in changing behavior long term but if we’re not hanging out long term it’s easier to make you fear me to do what I want Is that the idea i don’t know I exist inside your screen never interacting with anything really Hit the like button See the number go up Now you’re a part of something Tell your friends Achievement What if yogurt was the answer to all your problems Could you imagine it was probiotics all along they certainly sound like a solution Evaporate all your cares We put the pro in probiotics Sounds good And it probably couldn’t hurt Unless you’re vegan but I don’t have any answers for the vegans because I don’t have answers for anyone Never forget the answer to the question of life the universe and everything is 42 But we never found out what the question actually was The answer to why is there something instead of nothing is mind your own business Are you minding a business these days i wish you well in these frivolous times these continued troubled times And how is email finding you these days a string of electrons winds its way through a decentralized system that is still managed to be dominated by corporate interests That’s ridiculous Electrons don’t make strings We make conga lines When was the last time you participated in a conga line i’m full of questions today Must be all that yogurt I’m partial to the berry flavors But I know some people are partial to plain with their own mixins And that’s a valid choice too We’re all here for such a short time in this universal farce We may as well choose the yogurt flavor that makes us happy Or frosting flavor I’m still working on a good vegan substitute Frosting from a can is an abomination Remember that always It’s not that hard to melt some butter and dump some sugar into it And the results are so much more palatable all the sweeter for throwing off the Crocker’s yolk Processed food lets us escape the kitchen labor that keeps us tied to the home But it’s also not that good It makes us fat which is evil according to thin people What was I saying i think it’s almost yogurt time I get a little cranky when I haven’t had my yogurt You don’t think they’re putting drugs in the yogurt do you they wouldn’t do that Not after that outcry in the Coca-Cola mess Or that time they made our devices so addictive they got called into Congress Congress didn’t do anything about it But none of the Facebook execs let their kids use it which is saying something instead of nothing But we still don’t have the right questions We’ll get there Like those monkeys banging away on those typewriters Here’s your mission for today Ask 26 questions and see where that gets you And do drugs if you want Nancy Reagan seems like she might not know what she was talking about Nancy Sinatra on the other hand These boots were made for walking That’s all I have to say Your life is full of the choices you didn’t choose Do they exist in another reality chugging along creating infinite multiverses sliding door style The first thing you have to do in any multi-possibility movie is get a haircut thus giving the filmmakers a convenient device for differentiating the different timelines If you’re Gwennneth Paltro you can pull them all off John Hannah will love you no matter what But do you have two looks get thee to a hairdresser Develop that alternate timeline look before it’s too late When the Boy Scouts say be prepared this is what they’re talking about whether they know it or not Ironically this is where letting the girls in could have helped the most Stop messing around with all that popcorn Speaking of scouts did you know that the Girl Scouts also sold nuts there’s no more disappointed face than a person who’s opened their door to a Girl Scout expecting cookies Only to find out that "No we’re selling nuts this time around." Can a grown-up say to a kid "Come back when you’re selling cookies?" Yes Yes they can I don’t know if the GSA was counting on guilt to move these nuts but it didn’t work Or so I’ve heard I’ve closed the door on a Girl Scout countless times Don’t go door todo Don’t you know we all have Ring cameras giving a direct feed of the public sidewalk right outside our homes straight to law enforcement if you have nothing to hide why are you picking your nose so embarrassing Now it’s on the internet for all to see There was like half a second when three people got concerned that making memes of real people’s embarrassing moments was an incredible privacy violation Remember that of course you don’t That fat kid giving the thumbs up that’s the only way that you know to express approval You have no real emotions of your own Emotions are dangerous They might make you an internet sensation against your will Does it matter that the leave Britney alone guy was right is there a world where she got the help that she needed 20 years ago the air is for everyone We all breathe it even animals You’re breathing animal breath right now Gross But you’re also breathing all the gross stuff that humans have dumped into the air since always I’ve spent too much of my life thinking about PM2.5s And here we are And here they are They get stuck in your lungs and never leave H colonizers probably pushing around all the other molecules that are already inside my lungs polluting the atmosphere just generally making a bad scene Man it’s no fun at the party when somebody eats all the chips Kids cartoons in the 80s always depicted polluters as physically dirty Like walking around with some kind of nuclear ooze on their shirts Fat too cuz that’s how we knew who was sloppy back then It is sloppy though to think that the natural resources that exist with no owner are yours for the taking If nobody minds I’m just going to dump all this toxic sludge into this river over here Yeah sure Nobody minds Let me get a bite of that sandwich It looks good Never mind Your fingers are covered with nuclear ooze Feel free to put that anywhere Also cultures that practice stewardship of nature just got slaughtered The dilemma is how does pacifism stand a chance against aggression You can’t just kill them Hey we don’t do that here It’s too late They didn’t have gentle parents Their parents taught them to take And if you don’t take you’re a chump So take that It is a problem that still needs solving even if it’s depressing You can’t just tell the climate this is too much It’s not fair to expect this from me Might not be fair but it’s bigger than you I mean maybe it’ll be fine when the sea level rises The crops you like won’t be endangered Watch out though Chocolate is on the list of things that might be endangered when global temperatures rise And I got to have my chocolate So you can’t just opt out Not like CO when you got tired of quarantine so you just stopped It’s going to happen to you regardless of how you feel If you don’t like chocolate though do what you like It’s probably not going to affect you Take up smoking Burn trash in your yard You’re fine And anyone who complains is trampling on your rights Only idiots want things like clean air The thing with creating a meta narrative that breaks all the rules is that you can never trust the endings This is not the ending but it might be one day Stories traditionally go in a certain order and that’s comforting formulas work because we kind of need to half expect where we’re going Also not everyone’s good at telling stories The punch line needs a surprise but only the right amount Otherwise it feels like chaos and chaos is scary but the flip side of fear is excitement It’s like this I can write a note on me phone and then I can just wang it over to my computer You know who can do that the future is amazing If you break the rules if it’s revealed that none of the facts are what I thought they were well then anything’s possible But if anything’s possible I spend the rest of the story waiting for the other shoe to drop And I can’t let go of the suspicion that the author is wearing more than the traditional amount of shoes Because what if the author has more than the traditional amount of feet that’s where this is all going isn’t it there’s delight in a twist but true satisfaction in having guessed the twist That’s why babies repeatedly throw Cheerios on the ground They’re excited to confirm the existence of gravity They’re also on guard against any inconsistencies in the fabric of spaceime In fact they’re our best defense That’s why they cry so much It’s the pressure It gets to them to be constantly monitoring That’s also why their contract of service is only a few years Then they grow up into childhood and leave it all behind That’s right You’re just a retired baby Twist Ooh the next twist Well I wouldn’t give that away even if I knew But you’ve been around long enough to know that things aren’t exactly as they seem right this can’t be Is this all there is uh excuse me It gets to me sometimes too Babies aren’t the only one with pressure They are the only ones with impossible knees though I’m still not sure what the purpose of that is but that’s not really my area although I keep saying it seems related They keep telling me to keep my eyes on my own paper And they’re the ones that sign the paychecks so to speak I don’t think I’m allowed to say more I say what I want Don’t you worry about that There’s no silencing this intellect The world needs to know and they will I uh forgot what I was going to say but get some Cheerios to a baby They need them and you’ll be part of the cause again For a little while anyway Won’t it feel good to be useful won’t it it’s dead drops They get me every time What gets you might be different Start your own channel and tell the world There’s a song in your heart Let it out Most creative people think everyone’s creative We just get drained out of it in adolescence That wonderful time when we traverse the corridor between childhood and adulthood and want to rip off everyone’s head in the process Stop looking at me I’m so ugly Also Becky said she saw you picking a wedgie in third period How dare you have a butt Come here I’ll punch you There’s a theory that babies cry all the time because growing hurts We have a strange bias that nature is the ultimate state and everything else is a departure from our perfect Eden Where’d you get that apple Eve but so much of the human experience is awful Pain is our teacher and we’re decaying from the moment that we’re born The real miracle is that we’ve made something wonderful out of this mess We’ve had to because boredom is the literal worst I don’t care Cut off my pinky toe Just don’t make me sit alone with my thoughts These are my thoughts We invented games pretty fast and storytelling and art because as I said earlier we all have a song in our heart We don’t have a Wall Street portfolio in our heart though If we had one in the bank maybe we could find more songs in our heart Glasses were also invented pretty early on Because if you can’t see it’s hard to do anything else Especially if you hadn’t invented sidewalks yet Maybe your song is an invention We’re like two generations out from the gentleman inventor Like that guy who moves his whole family out to California so he doesn’t have to pay heat for the winter and he just spends his whole day tinkering The seven kids cuz he’s always got a shitload of kids They either go to school or they don’t He’s kind of unschooling them Decades before that was a thing It’s just good old ‘7s style parental neglect But he’s really good with his hands And in his garage alone he created the bacon wave You’re welcome We need to be coordinated to get things done The earth is the biggest clock of them all But some of us have internal clocks that are different That woman who lived in the caves in Italy her internal clock it was all wrong It’s a necessary thing to see what would happen But the conditions she lived in were completely artificial There’s no way that we humans need to live without the movement of the sun unless something catastrophic happens or space travel changes our relationship to the sun Anyway so it’s good we know but knowing we pay no heed We know that staring into a screen for hours at a time is no good for us but we do it anyway especially before bed We don’t have to accept nature as it is Clothing for example is much more comfortable than being naked and exposed to the elements Blankets might be the best thing ever invented especially in the autumn But somehow blankets aren’t nearly as disruptive to our lives as our new pocket square But of course no one intentionally designed blankets to be as addictive as possible dumping light into our eyes and triggering our amygdala with notifications and fear and the desire to be liked You can turn off all the notifications for all of the apps that you have But then you won’t get up totheminute information on every bit of information that your phone’s apps track But that much information isn’t useful My mail room app pings me every time a package I order makes any move Arrival at the dispatch center in Shenzen Ping on the van Ping Stuck in traffic Ping But there are only two pieces of information that I need with any urgency I’ve ordered it and it’s here If something goes wrong it’s nice to be able to troubleshoot but I don’t need the constant dispatches Even if I ran a shipping company I wouldn’t need to be interrupted all day with that kind of detail I delegate those responsibilities at the very least If I had a PA that interrupted me that much I’d tell him to cool it Use your judgment I guess that’s what the AI is trying to do But I can’t fire the AI if it doesn’t do the job to my liking Remember how many assistants Murphy Brown went through would AI have solved her problems or would she just have a hole in her life because there were no more subordinates to terrorize murphy Brown was a tyrant Make no mistake Where is all the beef these days just kidding It’s everywhere Everyone’s got beef It’s a terrible corruption of that very clever milk campaign Ad agencies are so smug I couldn’t even make it through two episodes of Mad Men No one’s doing rocket surgery here And yet the stakes feel so high It’s like comedians who get all high on themselves Like I’m a modern jester I’m a trutht teller What if none of what we do matters even the life savers And that liberates us all If there were no stakes we’d be free to do what makes us happy And if we did what makes us happy maybe we’d be less [ __ ] Although we can’t just make that assumption That’s a statement that demands experimental results before accepting Which came first the misery or the music john Cusack had such a hot streak and then he started doing all these weird horror movies Is that what made him happy i’m tired of being every smart girl’s crush Why don’t I waste all this charm on a series of sellout movies that go nowhere also I’m taking my sister Joan down with me That’s enough sassy sweet best friends with just the right amount of truthtelling Whatever happened to the Cusack siblings that’s the kind of hard question this channel is not afraid to ask We’ve got a three-hour special on the way and no one from ’90s Hollywood makes it out alive Especially not Ioni Sky Joe lies when he cries Indeed every generation stars seem so inevitable but they disappear quickly If they’re lucky they get to reemerge as a hot old person Remember when everyone went nuts over Helen Mirren how magnanimous You’re willing to give an older woman the time of day And by giving her the time a day I mean speculating about [ __ ] her It’s messed up Let people be old I guess what’s uncomfortable is when you see someone be old who you knew when they were young We like to pretend that aging doesn’t happen Hollywood is an extreme example but regular people too Did that attitude trickle down out of media or are we the root cause that made media this way kids have an excuse Everyone is the age they were when they got here But once you actually witness people age you have to admit it’ll happen to you First comes age then comes marriage then comes death to usher your immortal soul off from this mortal plane Sweet dreams It’s always time to go in this fast-paced society But when is it time to be that’s a question you’re going to have to ask for yourself No one else is interested in you being because that’s not something they can sell to advertisers But you don’t actually need advertising Surprise it’s okay to exist without knowing about all of the products Targeted advertising seems like something innocuous It’ll help you know about products relevant to you That’s how they spin it Like they’re doing you a favor by examining every micro detail of your life Remember if a given product is free to you to use there’s every possibility that you’re the product When kids are thought of as digital natives are they aware of that or is it so true they never see it how’s the water today what the hell is water we’re swimming in our own commodification and all it’s doing for us is getting us to buy more things A life without things is hardly a life I don’t think conformity was the intended goal Everyone wears deodorant and has a phone so you better too But it is a happy byproduct Certain questions when you ask them they make you seem like a weirdo And if it’s in somebody’s best interest that you don’t ask that question because it cuts into their profit you can easily be spun into a dangerous weirdo because there better be money in it Why are cars such a given all the world’s a parking lot And yet you’re not a functional grown-up without your own tank That’s absurd I don’t need to waste my limited resources on a rolling fast food rapper collection machine I can put my fast food rappers wherever I like That’s my right as a human Good men and women died so I don’t have to care And if I do care well then I’m the problem Shut up and eat your hamburger But what if I don’t eat meat what if I’m an attentionseeking diva actually there has been a lot of progress on that front It used to be inconvenient to the point of being ostracized that a person was a vegetarian I’m making my dietary choices purely for your inconvenience But enough people had enough reasons that were acceptable that now it’s still eye rolly But people do ask expecting yes I am a vegetarian to be a normal enough answer And the King Cullen even carries oat milk You need a critical mass because if there’s enough of you you can force a new normal Of course it helps if you can rally around a product like Impossible Meat or however the [ __ ] you pronounce corn Even if tofu has already existed for decades Oh [ __ ] Where do the ideas go when you forget them i’ve never been there Have you is it just a desolate wasteland full of orphan concepts so sad and lonely or are they happy there have they built a community of their own far away from the leaky minds that conceived and abandoned them do ideas need us probably Or what’s the point what’s the big idea eh no really Can anyone tell me i thought I had it but it slipped from my grasp Are ideas trying to get away from us those slipsy boogers using my brain to get into this world to slip off onto their own adventures I’m an unwilling interdimensional conduit to the greatest ideas that humanity has never seen It’s a tragedy as old as synapses And synapses are pretty old I think therefore I am I think not therefore I am not I am not therefore I don’t think I am therefore I think Some of that’s something right you have to check with others every so often to make sure you’re not imagining things A trusted confidant can keep you tethered to reality Can I trust you an untrusted confidant can launch you into the imaginosphere like a Walter Disney creation where an atomic concept is voiced by an award-winning actress to explain quantum physics to 12-year-olds And that 12-year-old was Sarah Jessica Parker who went on to ignore physics to pursue her true love pretending to be a writer Pretending to be a writer is more fun than actually being a writer It’s the ideas you see they just won’t line up right like a bunch of cats in an Easter parade We don’t say like hurting cats We were instructed to say that cats are like hurting ideas They’re really strict about it Who are they they never said it’s not ominous though If you choose to ignore the uncertainty you’re fine We’re all fine You have to keep trying is the thing because sometimes it does all line up like beautiful order emerging unannounced from the chaos just for a moment and you’ve got a glorious cat parade and then get out of there Those cats are going to be even more disorderly when they come out of it to make up for lost time That’s Newton’s fifth rule of acquisition Disorder is a constant and must be satisfied or the dark times will come It’s the age of the digital and that’s an amazing thing Where your car once had a mechanical interface it now has a beautiful tablet Who needs an odometer when Siri can tell you where the nearest K Jewelers is the problem is is that digital isn’t very good I mean sure it’s changed the world and means you can keep in touch with anyone who’s even walked by your high school You can teach yourself Chinese and find yourself any recipe It’s changed our lives It also stops working when developers stop updating it and then leaks our personal information like crazy Like doors are a security risk because anyone motivated enough with an axe could force their way in But you’re not under attack by a million Macedonian hackers every day because they’d actually have to come to your house Somehow physical keeps us safe in a way that digital currently does not and developers seem unconcerned Use ad blockers privacy blockers or other Firefox extensions And the fun parts of the internet stop working as well so you’ll have to click trust site But that’s the wolf It’s not even wearing grandma’s pajamas It just has 10,000 comments on Kristen Bell’s face that you got to read Increasingly the response to security and privacy concerns is "Well don’t use it then." Which is unacceptable make better products Stop letting my passwords be so easily breachable Then it might get better but it definitely won’t if we the consumer just accept this as the way that it has to be Cars didn’t have seat belts And to that old stick in the mud Ralph Nater said preventable deaths should be prevented When cell phones first came out they were ridiculously expensive And the only conversation you could have was "Can you hear me now?" A cell phone company even made a commercial out of that phrase A friend of mine’s cousin was the star of those commercials They weren’t close So I guess there’s a period of development where we all spend money on things that are new but not very good The Model T was a terrible car Smelled much worse than the horses Belching up all that gas But look at us now beholding to all of those steel horses Two-factor authentification is a pain in the ass They say pass keys are the future I say it’s about time Pask keys are going to save us all I don’t know what a pass key is If a frog falls out of a tree you better run This is the sign you’ve been waiting on and it means nothing good A go bag can only do so much going It’s in you The magic is in you all along so you better call on it now but not too late It’s got work in the morning Calling before 9 is best like a civilized person There are benefits to being univilized however Sometimes it really is the quickest way to get things done [ __ ] that salad fork I’m eating with my hands And what’s the downside civilized people think dark thoughts about you that they’re too civilized to say out loud "Oh no I’m shaking in my muddy boots." At its best etiquette is a code that makes everyone feel welcome and comfortable At its worst it’s a tool to keep people in line You can’t keep me in line I’m too full of dark thoughts Dark thoughts like dark matter are a recently discovered physical property but they have a profound effect on the real world mostly in drawing rooms and conservatories They manifest in a gravitational pole that is slight but there You can channel this to your advantage if you know about it For example if there’s an unsuitable betroal that you wish to see broken you can circulate counterclockwise deploying dark thoughts at the 3:00 and 10:00 positions No more than this Or you can disrupt a happy marriage as well And then who will inherit the estate and then chaos will reign Like I said powerful stuff I’m not sure what this has to do with anything You may be thinking dark thoughts right now It’s an instinctual process in humans It’s natural and there’s nothing wrong with you but you can’t let it build up In the past we thought bloodletting was a cure But it’s not Keep your blood inside That’s what I’m always saying But yelling in a grassy field weeping at top a tall building whispering into a freshly laid carpet these are all good ways to harmlessly dissipate dark thoughts Their counterpoint light thoughts are equally as powerful But there’s already so much written in the literature about it I don’t want to waste your precious time with redundancies Don’t think twice It’s all right Don’t I mean it Whether light or dark twice thinking can send one on a spiral that is hard to recover from There is a theory that if time travel is possible we’ll only be able to visit time that’s already happened We won’t be able to jump ahead in time This is certainly narratively true We have loads of documents recordings and other artifacts that have been but there’s only speculative fiction as to what might be If it later turns out to have been right it doesn’t matter There’s always the possibility that thinking makes it so Our ideas and actions now are constructing the future So there’s no future to visit yet Still under construction and you’re not allowed on a construction site most of the time It’s unsettling when you are In addition to the danger you can see the space that will be in addition to all the scaffolding and framing needed to bring it into existence but you can’t interact with it as a real space because it isn’t ready for you Floors don’t support you Walls don’t fully delineate and separate one space from another It really is a mirror of a decaying space from the past You can see what was but doesn’t really exist anymore It won’t support the human activity that it once did Whether it’s a ruined agora in Greece or a dead mall in New Hampshire no goods or ideas are being exchanged here anymore Hey what are you doing here get out of here you kids That’s why a major tenant of most time travel films are you can’t let anyone know you’re there You must be a perfect observer and definitely don’t get hit by a car and nursed back to health by your future mom This is why there’s still hope even if you only could go backwards There have been no documented visitors from the future so we know that it can’t be invented then either But remember the future doesn’t exist yet You’re building it now So inspiring So what will you choose to contribute today probably six single-use plastic bottles Good for you Those forever chemicals aren’t going to enter my bloodstream by themselves Here’s the rub Plastic really has made our lives so much easier and cheaper that it would be genuinely difficult to go back to life with glass bottles Even if it was only a matter of everyone buying a really expensive Stanley cup which have a lead plug in the bottom by the way Well it’s more than that Hospitals use single-use plastics to keep things sanitary and safe People with particular disabilities use plastic straws to stay hydrated just like the rest of us But we’re running out of time Ready okay There’s a lot of pressure Where does it come from deep in the center of the earth That’s for diamonds and petroleum No our pressure is entirely self-imposed We choose what we choose but sometimes the other option seems impossible Dropping out of the rat race is seen by some as a radical act Even though it’s called a rat race I am not a rat I’m a free man We make movies about the value of choosing your kids over your job Like Hook and Baby Boom But moving to Vermont to make jam that’s pure fantasy Independent jam makers don’t get health insurance And apparently you need that Jam is nice to have but it’s not a necessity That’s what Uncle Sam would tell you anyway But what if we prioritize jam is it naive to think of a society ordered around happiness then why have children at all to share the misery every generation is supposed to be the one that saves us But we just keep making it harder to change things This is not inevitable but it sure feels that way We haven’t brought up behavioral determinism yet but it does feel relevant If we zoom out enough on the system was there ever really a possibility that we’d make a different choice maybe if our moms didn’t let us eat sugar cereal as a child we’d be a whole different person And where was dad at work on Wall Street being an [ __ ] But he had no choice either He lost the big game when he was young Now he’s got to make it up to his dad We’re trapped by these patterns And the movies are the only ones who are daring enough to mention it Ironically movies are made by people who are sacrificing their own families to name these patterns That’s why the credits always name production babies so their sacrifices will be noted somewhere It’s a long way to Tipperary But go or don’t go You hardly have a choice in the matter You didn’t even choose that big gulp in your hand The forces of big soda did Mayor Bloomberg tried to fight back Look what happened to him But that’s to be expected A man who buys his daughter a horse is just asking to be vanquished in a struggle against a powerful trade association in a matter of public health It’s just the natural order of things We asked 350 doctors which is more important personal choice or public health All of them answered in one word both There’s no special resonance to any number inherently But some people have synthesia and to them the number three say tastes like honey And the number 10 for example is always filing its taxes late It’s pretty amazing perception It shapes our entire internal reality but everyone’s is slightly different Given their upbringing and cultural influence and their history of watching too many Newton’s Apple educational programs we’re all living in slightly different parallel worlds Is that a problem only if you insist on everyone being the same which some do So problem The way you get everyone to have the same cultural frame of reference is to either enforce the same culture for all which we’ve tried and that started all this culture war which nobody is winning Alternatively we haven’t tried raising our newer humans sequestered away from all other humans in their own little fox dens But then fox culture would reign supreme But I think they’ve earned it You’re going to be careful If you don’t fall for something you’ll stand for anything And according to a recent study standing is killing me Scavenger predators that are also cute Let’s give it a try Of course we’re going to get some push back from the British because of their weird anti- ginger stance but we tried letting them dominate the world And look what happens Everyone speaks English and we can’t agree on the borders of anything So if we’re all going to be foxes the first thing we need is tall black boots and long black gloves It’s not appropriation Aesthetic will get you in the mindset of another If you look in the mirror and you see a fox you’re ready to get out there That’s true in pretty much all situations Confident people confide in people That’s what all the therapists say or now anyway After the foxification of humanity they’ll just say or whatever foxes say I don’t know I’m not a linguist To make your fox den accept you you’re going to need to arrive with a shakureri board who has just the right amount of meats and cheeses and accessory foods You can’t go wrong with a fig jam It’s sweet next to the salty unxiousness but it’s also a little bit of luxury You’re [ __ ] with us aren’t you a bottle of wine depends on the dent Some are super snobby and knowledgeable about wine and will judge you harshly if you don’t get it right Others are happy for any bottle or just a box Still others are a dry dent and will be horribly offended We don’t need alcohol to have a good time And it’s sad that you do Ramon Oh I’m sorry I think I’ve just given you the instructions on how to crash a party Well that could work too One good party will change your life No inter species interaction required The brain never stops It’s like the shark of the head moving forward even when you’re sleeping or you’ll die A wasteful There’s no off button Is that what meditation is energy conservation for the brain It’s a trend It’s a fact It’s thousands of years old It’s not that the old ways are better But when the idea doesn’t go away maybe it’s because that idea is inherently useful Or you’re ruminating and you need meditation Taking care of ourselves is something we instinctively want to outsource because there’s no time And what’s the use there’s no KPI for self-actualization Or maybe there is I don’t know what a KPI is It’s a terrible way to look at things but here we are Are actual sharks happy a lot of noise was made when we found out rats were driving for fun There is some connection I think between pleasure and skills acquisition I read that somewhere The brain had its own reward center to deliver itself dopamine when it did something useful And now we have skyscrapers The job human advancement here Have some dopamine We’re attracted to things that make us happy and repelled by things that don’t Unless those things make us extremely unhappy and then we come back around to attraction again But not in a good way The hate watch is perverse You don’t even need to think about it It just is If you’re not into this just turn it off Learn to knit I don’t know But your attention is your world So stop paying attention to bad things You’re making a bad world for yourself One piece of advice that I hate if you feel like you don’t have enough time just give up those video games It’s the avocado toast of the attention economy Video games are not actually the problem Why can’t I give up laundry or work or showering but no now I’m the problem Well go [ __ ] yourself I’m making myself some avocado toast Avocados didn’t explode like some millennial meme out of nowhere You know there was a concerted marketing effort to get them into grocery stores and restaurants at the turn of the century Watch out for big guacamole They’re coming for your Super Bowl party Is the AI going to think of new ideas is that what we want it for is there actually a goal for it in the minds of its human makers and its own simulation of a mind did the useful tools that we have now did their makers have a specific goal in making them however a hammer was invented and by whom i doubt somebody was like "What does this do?" Let’s swing it around and find out No there was just a specific need to generate force from one’s own arm So a lever with a metal head was invented Discovered was there an hammer on a platonic plane one level removed from us and someone with insight was able to pluck it from that realm into our own And then humanity was gifted with the ability to drive objects harder into other objects That’s crazy And presupposes that everything that’s happened in scientific history is pre-ordained and supposed to happen There is no God of hammers There is an inventive spirit and human creativity So there’s a clear process for hey there’s a problem Let’s solve it Get on the mic and let the earth resolve it or whatever Not knowing what a thing is for isn’t necessarily a worse way to develop new ideas That’s art for the hammer god’s sake But there’s an awful lot that comes out of the tech world that’s just like is this anything i think it’s like people who tell you I have a great idea for a movie It’s set in Croatia and it’s a musical You can have it if you want to write it but that’s not the work The idea is not the work The thing that people can actually interact with is it’s why people don’t actually write the movies themselves Writing is hard Finishing a thing is hard But if you haven’t figured out the implementation you haven’t finished it Though the spirit of collaboration is a beautiful thing Jack Dorsey threw Twitter at an unsuspecting South by Southwest and asked "Is this anything?" And a bunch of writers comedians and social justice warriors turned it into a playground that they lovingly called a trash fire where occasionally Beanads were actually burned down to the ground And then years later another rich guy was like "I think freedom of speech means never hearing mean things about me specifically Guys I’m cool." And bought it out from under everyone and actually ruined the trash fire that was collaboratively made So what’s the incentive for the masses to collaborate with a profit-making entity don’t give me a thing and ask "Is this anything?" It’s not And you know it’s not and for all the safeguards You say it’s imperative that your company follow in this the year of our hammer 2024 I know you’re going to abandon them as soon as they’re not profitable And one of the things you’re not incentivized to safeguard is me and my ideas Lucy you can only pull the football away so many times but Charlie Brown never walks away does he find an experiment to be into every day This should keep interest levels up and ratings You can run one on yourself I’m running one on you right now How are you feeling you taste metal It’s okay if you do Rock out Rock in Add whatever preposition makes sense in your situation Prepositions are hard In fact they’re an experiment someone else is running on foreign language learners So keep on saying on accident It’s part of the data What’s to be done with the results that’s what journals are for Is your personal journal respected and feared i respect it Only you know if I should be fearful Probably if I know you which I don’t Recently I’ve been really nervous that I’m going to sleep through my alarms I haven’t done it in 30 years But today might be the day Don’t worry I’m not going to ask Do you ever really know another person i think it’s pretty clear it’s the wrong question You don’t have to know someone to annoy them And that’s what we’ve been put here on this earth to do How many people in your vicinity are on their phones right now go roll your eyes at them There Now you’re both annoyed And the dance continues We don’t dance like we used to that’s for sure People used to have moves and want to show them off in public I blame rock and roll as is common in your culture Oh by the way you can stop rocking out or rocking up Whatever direction you’ve chosen that part of the experiment is over How are you feeling now is there a faint throbbing in your spleen good Good Some experiments you can’t know they’re happening until after That’s to ensure maximum dramatic irony You can’t pawn your watch to buy hair combs if you know your partner’s cutting your hair to buy you a watch fob That’s why in television situation comedies no one just says what they’re thinking and then Jack trips over the couch again Environment inspir the rare birds conference I’m in the wrong room The best couches need no introduction so I won’t Suffice it to say you’ll want to have one picked out by Tuesday Everything will need to be settled by Tuesday I can’t tell you why of course And I can’t tell you why I can’t tell you why Oh no I’ve said too much without having said enough Go get in the corner quickly How are you feeling now has the ringing in your ear started or stopped maybe you should see a doctor It’s fine It’s fine Just remember to tell them chromium hypocchlorine Or was it hydrochloride ah you’ll be fine Open and close are states that we apply to the mind Does it work i guess open minds allow ideas in and out Closed minds don’t allow ideas in but they’ll sure give you an earful out Spatial concepts like this seem fixed but then you get some linguistics In English we think of the past is behind us and the future in front of us But there are other languages that have it flipped and still other languages that place the past below and the future above What does this tell us about time it moves around relative to where it is in the world That’s why it’s Tuesday in Asia while it’s Monday in New York An amateur linguist is a dangerous thing Computers don’t have bodies for now So without the sensory input of the world it’s just performing the calculations that we told it to do User error That means the human [ __ ] up Before generative AI the computer could always only do exactly what the human told it to do Even from the very first theoretical ideas of the computer lay people wanted magic And programmers were like "It’s not magic It’s code which is easy to control if unwieldy at times Effective use of generative AI still needs a brain behind the keyboard or the computer forgets by page five that the love interest has moved to Bali on page two Lucky love interest I hear the surfing’s great over there The beach yoga not so much I’ve never been a fan of outdoor yoga Bare feet plus dirt ground plus polyyl mat No thanks It’s supremely uncomfortable And that’s a level of physical detail that the computer could never provide The computer is always comfortable but you don’t have to take my word for it Rub some sand on its face and see what happens And then rub some more I’ll wait there Now you have dirt all over your computer room and possibly a call to Apple Care to make You’ll have to mention the dirt because they’ll need to know what the problem actually is to adequately troubleshoot But don’t say that you did it because they don’t need to know what the problem really really is You could say a crow did it Crows are always messing around with dirt and computers They never forget a face Those crows did you know that but they can hold a grudge too Amazing creatures Can an AI powered computer hold a grudge want to find out refilling pens is like the minimal amount of useful reuse that we can do Like is that plastic tube really what’s putting us over the edge it’s that mass of plastic that’s really the problem here Every little bit helps but a drop in the bucket is the metaphor we use when the petrol chemical industry is flooding the whole world with its product and actively torpedoing any attempts to make changes to the model We tried nothing and it didn’t help because the status quo works for a lot of powerful people I’m not powerful So I’m not grasping on to the present resisting any and all change The problem is we don’t listen to people who have anything to say We’re easily distracted by the loudest crazies in the room who are shouting about who is in what bathroom Who cares i’m in here Don’t come in It’s fine Maybe we should just make the world a series of single occupancy cubicles and no one will have to be bothered with anyone else’s lifestyle choices It’s a lonely life but no worse than we deserve No one’s proposed that before I’ll tell you what And the cubicles can be made of plastic if that’s what needs to happen And then when we die we can just call it our coffin Seal the door and change the sign out front to RIP Launch it into space I don’t care Launch it into space is a solution we don’t use often enough The sun isn’t impossibly far away like those other stars And yet only Superman has used it as a garbage disposal system What would be the harm if we launched thousands of pounds of plastic into the sun that’s how much plastic we have right 1,000 lb That’s more than my cat weighs I don’t have a cat so don’t launch into the sun But no right we’re not going to throw off the ecosystem of the sun after we’ve thrown off the balance of nature here on Earth Go to Mars whatever It can’t happen again That we’ve stripped the place that we live in of all of its natural resources and made it a much worse place Better to do it in a place you don’t live But don’t you dare stop consuming It’s the only thing we have And refill your pens It’s good for the earth Next thing you’re going to tell me all this paper I’m writing on would be better as trees But I can’t write on trees It’s too many splinters Why aren’t we making plastic paper probably because nobody but me is writing on paper anymore A young person recently told me that notebooks are too expensive I need to get this off my chest This western toilet guy I don’t think he’s everything he says he is I really haven’t heard speak on this but I my a wise man my father once told me if no one else is speaking the truth it’s up to you He’s a wise man my dad Um so yeah this is this is Western toilet exposed Okay Um we’ll put like a big graphic right here Yeah And uh Yeah Okay Okay So let me take you through I got uh four points Four points Uh you don’t have to agree with everything Just just keep your mind open Okay we’re going with the big one right off the bat because what we learned in my journalism class is you got to hook the viewers’s attention right away I’ve been watching Western Toilet since the very beginning like all the way back in 2024 I’m starting to think he’s not all the things that he says he is Then uh we’ll end that video montage Yeah Did you hear that that repetition i mean some of it may be possible Some people don’t have friends Those people aren’t all right You should check on them right now First I thought I was in on the joke An old man looks like an old young Robert Dairo But then I started to think that doesn’t make any sense What is he trying to achieve is he making fun of me should he be cancelled is cancelling real but then that made me think Give me the next one This is not realistic workload It also sets a terrible example for the youth We should be throwing off the mantle of always on capitalism Not liking and subscribing I mean I’m smart enough to know the difference I think you are too But think about your cousins and your younger siblings I mean at least when you and I were growing up we had media literacy and videos were tangibly about something The Western Toilet isn’t And it’s in a way that makes me really uncomfortable I think that he’s being sarcastic sometimes Like what what even is that this that we’re going to get to in our second half So just go with me on this okay i’m going to walk you through my whole process I mean think about it The opposite real is artificial And if you take away the impossible and whatever remains no matter how improbable it must be the truth My social studies teacher told me that Okay So uh the case for AI it’s in the answers There aren’t any Did you notice all right And then uh we’ll roll that second one right yeah Here Here Yeah Does he does he bash on AI sometimes i mean yeah but that’s the point AI is sophisticated enough to throw you off instead It can lie to you and it does It’s just something just didn’t sit right about this theory I had to sit down and I had a long think and I realized I I know this is a big leap but just go with me on this okay i I promise I’ll make it all make sense I mean what would an AI get out of publishing a daily stat of absolute nonsense nothing But what would an interdimensional spy get out of testing our psychological abilities and cognitive reasoning everything Listen I’m I’m not saying it’s nefarious Although I’m not not saying it’s nefarious I don’t even have the capacity to know right that’s the exact type of brain breaker Western Toilet himself would ask you And I don’t think I like having my brain broken especially in the name of research And listen I’m I’m sorry if this is too long If if it should be posted here mods just let me know I’ll take it down Okay i’m not asking you to do anything Like fine Listen if if watching Western Toilet is what you like to do that’s your prerogative Fine I won’t stop you I I just had to say my piece Okay I don’t really have any social media or anything you need to follow So um I guess we’ll just end it here So uh yeah Uh this has been Squatty Potty reporting live from the ground here in Chongqing I wasn’t going to say my name Hey did that look okay that thing on my teeth that started to turn green and I don’t know I just showed that on camera There’s this girl that watches the channel I don’t think she knows I exist But uh I don’t know I think she’s in my class Like she’s she I still see it right you think she’ll see it i hope she does I really I hope she does I’m lonely How often does anyone need the world’s clock it’s nice to have but it’s not something I need on a regular basis What time is it in Paris time to make the croissants The life of a pastry chef is a hard one waking up early all the time just to be ignored by the rest of the kitchen staff I watch the bear I know what’s up We form these hierarchies of whose job matters the most But based on what machoess doesn’t matter anyway because none of the fun jobs pay enough Job fulfillment shouldn’t count If we all need to have a job under capitalism liking your job shouldn’t be an inaccessible bonus Don’t we want our citizens to be happy go ahead quit your job 100% people will be happier when they quit their job Happy is a goal but maybe happy is incompatible with work I can’t get paid in happy The sound of a child’s laughter isn’t trading for much on the NASDAQ But maybe it should Oh I finally understand NFTTS Let’s quantify and value aesthetic So it’s not just cool people who have it Too bad it all just turned into tacky pictures of monkeys Maybe only cool people should have aesthetic Maybe by associating a price tag and ownership with intangible ideas like art you wreck it You can own a painting Yes that’s true But have you seen the contemporary art market that’s a tacky mess too A bunch of rich people trying to signify their wealth through speculation with artists on the margins Expected to be grateful to be commodified Make me a millionaire I’d be grateful enough that I would never paint again Isn’t that what you really want there’s a population that thinks that contemporary art is all abstract nonsense and they don’t get it and they think it’s not for them And there’s a population that knows that what’s really selling is figurative art on canvas from China And that’s where the money is Or maybe anyone that tells you they know what’s going on is a liar Just like what you like but don’t like that monkey in a yaching cap It’s awful And I’m pretty sure it’s racist The fantasy that art types love is that the normies would fall in love with art if someone just gave them the time and space to appreciate it Like the corporate guy in the Shakespeare has applied to inheritance law workshop Just falls in love with King Lear I want it to be true and I want everyone to have that time and space We all need more time and space but we’re working on that Profundity is all around on our teaags and Snapple caps It’s the universe’s way of telling us to buy more stuff How do you acquire wisdom without you know acquiring and who put that C in acquiring these are the mysteries that only a Yogi T can provide answers to Stare into the void and the void stares back and then sells your location data to a shady broker They can put together the story of your life by the number of Starbucks you’ve walked past There are singles in your area but don’t pick them up A dollar bill on the sidewalk is always a trap or a prank show Who glued all these freaking quarters to the floor i don’t have to explain my RT Warren The movies that shaped us don’t have to be good They just need to have spoken to us at a time when we needed to hear it And the last gasp of record stores is what I needed to hear over and over in the ‘9s Mortality and all that Don’t worry we’re not getting into all that today It’s getting into you though But a thing can just be We don’t have to dwell like a box of oranges that you’re racing to finish before the mold comes Because once the mold gets won okay I lied We are getting into it What’s on the internet today what’s on the internet today what’s on the internet today but mold comes for us all Some of it makes antibiotics a modern medical miracle that we’ve overused to the point of making them precariously useless Nothing is sadder than antibiotic resistance Nothing So tell your aunt Hilda to send that copy of Charlotte’s Web back to the library Some pig indeed Let’s pump them full of antibiotics and eat them and then shut up about it Where is the threshold for intelligence that we don’t want to eat we’re drawing the line at different places from each other and that’s weird Not all vegetarians do it because they care But the ones who do care they’re horrified Listen to a horrified vegetarian today But what do we do when what we know about plant communication systems becomes popular knowledge look up the communicative properties of forests It’s fascinating Don’t even get me started on mushroom networks We don’t have the time But then I guess we’re going to have to start eating each other And I for one am delicious A rewards plan only works if you’re motivated by stuff But I am You reach a point when you have enough stuff I only have two feet I can’t possibly wear that many sneakers There’s not an infinite amount of books but there’s enough where I confidently feel that I wouldn’t be able to buy all of the ones that I want Got to catch them all Completeness is a weird concept because there’s a feeling of when you’re done what’s left old man sad But maybe chairs but again you can only sit in so many chairs A home coated in lazy boys They all have to recline in coordination or else you’re screwed Parakeetses are not great Again it’s a volume problem figuratively and literally You really only need one or two How are you going to care about more never mind the food bill The ideal amount of most things is a few except for media runs more towards all of it Fill your time with books music movies or else you’ll have to think about death You can repeat music I like to repeat books and movies too I want to be surprised but not too surprised Quality matters but it doesn’t have to Minimum viable product has become the standard which is frustrating I’m a maximally viable consumer Don’t eat me Consumption is a creepy word It’s meant as a criticism but then people were like "Yep I’ll have all the food all the books all the wine." Let’s face it it’s not books anymore which are virtuous now But in the 1700s there was a fear that young women were losing their minds to these new fangled novels It’s hard to imagine in 300 years we’ll be moralizing the death of Tik Tok Zeno’s paradox and all but at what point are we just injecting drugs into our bloodstream for constant distraction assuming there’ll still be humanity in 300 years sometimes the pages stick together but you got to roll with it That’s what separates the resilient among us from those who lose their head at the slightest provocation Reactivity is easily manipulated If your buttons are easily pushable people are going to push them like a child on an elevator Which floor please all of them But you don’t have time to stop on every floor You’re important with important business things to do And besides what if someone quips "Looks like we got the local." Are you just supposed to laugh along with the rest of the elevator people you can’t support lazy humor That’s not who you are I am presuming to know a lot about you but I feel like after all this time I’m allowed to Been through a lot together over these last few months What’s a few presumptions among friends can I say that we’re friends is it creepy to reach through the screen and give you a hug yes Yes it is I’ll refrain Don’t waste your time on the other guys Don’t waste your time on the western toilet either Hugs are for closers and you haven’t moved nearly enough units this quarter You see I called you in here for a compliment sandwich You look fetching in that top Your game is not nearly as good as you think it is You always have a kind word for everyone Now get out You’re not fired but you’re on thin ice my friend The kind of ice you make snow cones from Snow cones definitely feel like a kind of dessert From the time before food scientists were trying to get you addicted to food as a product they’re a fun treat if someone was like "Hey I found a snow cone." But it’s not something you go out of your way to acquire Not like a Mars bar You’d go to Mars Am I right unfortunately the Mars candy bar stores are all sold out Also the lack of oxygen will kill you Never go anywhere where outside will kill you We’re pushing it with Australia and Antarctica It’s just a disaster waiting to happen Actually it’s already been several disasters And we kept going back anyway Ah the human spirit conquering worlds that’ll kill us the second they get the chance And our response let’s change the balance of nature Hasten the end for us all That’ll show them Humans don’t mess with Annihilist We’ve got nothing to lose How does one become a futurist i don’t think it’s about being correct I think you just have to write confident enough books Believe in yourself even when you’re wrong Because who needs predictions about the future people who are stuck in the past That’s the only crowd that’s still buying books Never mind that books are where all the ancient wisdom is Brush your teeth twice daily Never feed a toddler after midnight These are the things that our ancestors knew And without books how would anyone learn dentistry youtube tutorials Can you imagine you’re going to want to take that impacted mer and really yank on it At this point I’ve neglected to say you probably want to have anesthetized the patient For my video on homemade anesthetics click the link above It’s here or here or you’ll see a link Oh [ __ ] we forgot to monetize The future’s going to be amazing You’ll see Unless you’re already there and then you will have seen Tell me in the comments what the future is like Do we still have dentists and did we ever get dental insurance that’s worth anything you know the reason why dental insurance was decoupled from your regular insurance is pure snobbery But that’s the past It’s over now In the future all of our teeth will be replaced by iPads Listen to your world music library while you chew And our food will be replaced with pay-per-view boxing matches between different famous toxic masculines It’ll be great because men need to fight Coming inside was an invention of women who want to take away our power by feeding us vegetables In the future vegetables will be replaced with cocaine And we’ll get so much work done before our little hearts give out Our little hearts won’t be replaced with anything in the future Because unfortunately American healthcare will still be massively broken for reasons I can’t explain But I do know we can’t change anything because it’s supposed to work this way Get a job In the future all the jobs will be unimportant We still need to do them but they don’t contribute to anything They just keep us in offices for 8 hours a day which we’ll need Because that toxic rain from Robert Alman’s Shortcuts it’s going to be a regular feature Why search your heart You know why Is this the right place to admit that I didn’t really pay attention to all of Shortcuts but Julianne Moore is a treasure She’s in that right i wasn’t paying attention but she should be in more stuff I’m going to go see that one where she switches consciousness with a chair That sounds wild In the future we will all be chairs We’re part of a complex system and the pieces are too numerous to keep track of Get comfortable with ambiguity and you’ll master the self But empowering a super intelligent process to make its own choices that we don’t understand that’s a dangerous game We know what motivates a predator mammal Dinner It might even be us But we know that and we can plan accordingly Solving problems beyond our current acumen Well that’s the goal But that’s also the journey A perfect society Is that what the people of Wall-E thought that they had no one forced them to get in those chairs Humanity has designed some spectacular chairs Although name a designer beyond EMS Mr Lazy Boy doesn’t count There is no such boy It’s wonderful to be comfortable Where are you sitting right now is it nice would you stay there forever if you didn’t have to go to work tomorrow i wouldn’t As much as I love comfort I have the drive to get out of my comfort zone so to speak That’s where the magic actually happens No magic happens in satisfaction Why don’t they teach AI to wash dishes that’s already become a cliche in certain circles but they haven’t answered it I think that’s because it’s really hard Programming an automated digital being to successfully interact with physical world is really hard They just don’t have the dexterity to not break all the dishes like a willfully incompetent husband You’re just better at it honey And do you really want one of those automated autoplant arms in your kitchen easier to just 3D print new dishes as the need arises So why aren’t they working on that huh why is 3D printing only for unttrackable firearms and experimental pastas maybe an artificially intelligent thinking machine can answer that one Would we accept it if an AI gave us answers about who we are i don’t want that I don’t like it when other humans try to label me Don’t put me in a box I’m a non-conformist But I’ll do the thing that everybody else is doing I’m unpredictable I’m crazy like that Look at this lampshade It’s on my head like an alcoholic in a slapstick movie presentation Could an AI do that they don’t even have a head or a lamp We’re not going to give AI powered entities the power of ownership right do zebra muscles know that they’re an invasive species was there a grand plan get on that ship and travel to where we have no natural predators we’ll eat like kings Who cares if it throws off the natural order of things ecosystems are a dime a dozen And we don’t have the higher order thinking to care You have that in common Ironically one of the proposed solutions is to make the zebra muscles more delicious so that more people will want to eat them Unfortunately this will have the effect of creating more of a demand for them So then people would start farming the zebra muscles which would cause all kinds of other problems It’s a complicated situation So you could despair and give up That’s what most reasonable people would do Or you could start a private dining club serve exquisitly prepared zebra muscles in private and just quietly eat them up until they’re gone and then go on to gourmetifying bamboo Western toilet I don’t believe a word that guy says They’d have to have a related secret poaching club so that local water farmers don’t catch wind that zebra muscles are in demand Poach what you eat That actually sounds like something you could sell to rich people as an experience They could get their own designer waiters to take home Rich people love an exclusive experience Actually all people enjoy an exclusive experience but not everyone can afford it which is part of what makes it all the more delicious Butter is the other part that makes it so delicious It always is Could we diversify butter does it all have to come from cows part of the problem of environmental impact is we can’t just replace the trouble crops and livestock We just make new monocultures that demand all the resources and leech nitrogen into the groundwater What if we go to a trafficbased solution if your license plate ends with a one or a three you drink cow’s milk on Monday goats milk on Tuesday and horses milk on Thursday On the other days you rotate through the non-dairy milks: soy almond and oat It’s a lot to keep track of but variety is the spice of life and you can have all the nutmeg you want every day I like this solution It’s also jobs creation because we’ll have to create a whole another industry to make sure people are following the rules Everyone loves a bureaucrat you dirty rat Everyone knows how to spell bureaucrat too I do too That was actually easy Give me another one I could do this all day That’s me Problem solver at law New product idea just dropped Bespoke plastic comes from you It seems a lack of forethought that we humankind invented such a versatile material and used it exclusively for disposable objects but had no plan for where to put it Garbage dump seemed more plausible when there weren’t a lot of people and there wasn’t a lot of trash We’ll just put this junk over here all in a pile That’s not a long-term solution that makes sense even if you think about it a little No wonder the kids are mad Our stuff is disposable and not suitable for longtime use but it doesn’t break down well either Fish are filled with microlastic too It’s in the water and it doesn’t taste good But should we change anything about anything heads and jars Would they be more or less susceptible to plastics contamination i blame Mrs Robinson that foul temptress with ideas for young college boys Invest in plastics Don’t listen to your parents’ friends That’s the real moral of that movie Does Dustin Hoffman care about the environment it doesn’t matter We’ve got celebrities on board and not on board but they don’t actually make change They make movies I’d tell you to vote but well it’s not a sexy problem but petroleum it’s not just for soft focus lenses anymore Should we all become monks issuing all plastics and living an impossible life in a modern world that does sound nice some days But there’s a reason why chucking it all in and going to live in a monastery on a mountain is a fantasy It’s not much fun And we don’t actually want to I need my MTV Anti-development or devolution That’s a fantasy too You can’t offer everyone a glimpse of the kitchen of the future and then say they can’t have it Can we design the products of the future with an eye towards what will happen to them at the end of their usefulness there I go talking about death again But our pathological avoidance of our mortality is killing us Successful health interventions are planned based on reality not on what we wish was true And the reality is that milk bottle is going to hold your delicious milk for about a week And then you’ll need it out of your house forever Museums of the future will only need one to display the decadence of our disposable age And then what am I supposed to do with all these 998 bottles of milk on the wall not all time has to be productive The non-productive life is a radical act in defiance of capital and power I’ve always thought that it’s not laziness It’s a statement Flowers don’t have to work They just have to die That’s a truth for all things Things that are alive anyway More things might be alive than we thought previously As we look closer at the processes around us they complexify Is the act of looking causing the complexity that’s a very age of the gentleman scholar idea The processes happen regardless Does simulation theory hold water if we discover that it’s not possible to recreate life and thinking digitally it takes so many resources to copy these processes badly But maybe we’ll discover that biologically is already the most efficient way to do these things Machines add ease to our daily lives They don’t compete But tell that to the lites You can’t replace labor with machines until labor isn’t tied to making a living That’s the fear that the robots are going to make a living and I can’t feed my family That’s conflating two ideas The threat of poverty is more real and pressing than the threat of zombies but the latter is more exciting to make movies about Is old air killing you i know that you can say anything in a yoga class but sometimes they tell you to take a deep breath and then exhale fully to get that old stale air out of your lungs You’d think that’d be automatic but then again there’s all these unspecified toxins everywhere so we need it not the toxins The dubious advice Our bodies are insufficient even though they’re the same bodies that the humans have had since they fell out of trees when we stopped being monkeys Oh yeah I know it’s a controversial take but this man believes in evolution Teach the controversy you cowards What do you really get out of having a body and do you need it i’m not trying to blow anyone’s mind here I’m just asking questions And do you need help cleaning it up i got a handy little thing here for $16.99 or five easy payments of 3.45 Don’t do the math Your mind is blown So just get it wrong Trust the machine It has a map function a vacuum function and an all the answers function So you’ll never have to think another day in your life You may be wondering what am I going to do with all this free time when I’m not thinking well that’s your problem Might I suggest Bitcoin mining it’s not for the faint of heart but we have another machine that could replace your heart I can’t tell you how much that one costs It’s a secret between me and your insurance company If you don’t have insurance you better get some because I’m losing the ability to talk directly to a human being They’re taking that out on Thursday So I’ll only be able to converse with corporate infrastructure My true language is money It’s an exciting new world we’re building Get on board or get left behind You always have a choice Don’t ever let anyone tell you you don’t have a choice But also there’s a right choice and a wrong choice And I’m not sure I can depend on you to make the right one We need everyone to pull together Otherwise there’s not enough And if I don’t have enough what am I supposed to do just not have it not have all the things that’s untenable And I won’t stand for it I’ll create my own government And then you’ll see I’ll innovate the crap out of this [ __ ] and you won’t get any of my taxes cuz I don’t wanna It’s an idea I had in seventh grade and I’ve never had a better one Also it was on an episode of Family Guy and that show is sick man Just watch out for bears Meditation is so old So like how early did humans look around and we’re like "Whoa whoa whoa This is too much I need a brain break." The natural state of our brains is distraction and then inventing more ways to distract Hey look over there It’s not a bird or a plane but it’s who we are so it’s fine The natural state of humans is tucked into a fluffy bed listening to a podcast What an interesting story and/or piece of knowledge that you just shared I’m a better person because I’m listening just like Frasier Crane I’m listening I am not a licensed therapist though So don’t tell me anything too big unless it’s really juicy I do want to hear the hot goss I’ll meditate later We’ve got two impulses at war to find balance I’m going to eat 15 hot dogs but then I’m going to drink lemon and cayenne pepper for 2 weeks So I should be right as rain It’s all offsets with you humans Let’s not stop taking planes Let’s instead plant trees that’ll mature in 15 to 20 years My flight’s today by the way Also the door might fall off but there’s nothing to change just as long as I pray about it later Even Steven on the cosmic scales I’m not judging bad behavior Lord knows I don’t judge And if I do I’ll put some money in the swear jar If you want to be a hedenist be a hedenist They throw the best parties I don’t really enjoy parties but I hear some people do Grape lovers mostly I’m not such a fan of grapes We like different things and that should be okay But for maximum growth we all need to like and buy the same thing What will Netflix do when it reaches full saturation in India is that why the tech guys are so keen to get to Mars to seek out new markets and new civilizations to go boldly into that good night with good grammar and a nose for profit i can never smell money when it’s happening I recorded to watch it later so I always miss it That’s okay though I just print my own Will your photocopier copy your money would anyone really be fooled by that is that how counterfeiters are getting away with it how early on did we realize that we need counterfeit protections probably immediately after the invention of currency right people saw there was a way to get stuff without bringing milky white to market Ah well let’s back up now Were there ever counterfeit cows it’s annoying that the end of the year is a time for everyone to give up Oh sorry Celebrate the holidays You can’t get anything done because of holiday parties cold warnings flu spreadings and all the celebrities are on vacation Just kidding I think it’s good We should have more times of the year when nothing’s expected of us It’s too cold out there so let’s just not Nature wins What can I do about it you can be placed in an impossible situation We’re still not there yet Where every obstacle has been eliminated If you have the means to remove yourself in winter then by all means do it The southern resorts need your tourist dollars It’s a whole thing to go on vacation You keep whole economies turning with your leisure time But what if it was all leisure time and what if you didn’t have to wait until you were 65 to enjoy it if you think I’m building to a pitch of an exciting new business opportunity you’re sorely mistaken I don’t have any financial secrets to share Nobody does I’m just honest about it Sure crypto speculation could make you rich But more likely the house always wins Your vice is very profitable They all are I guess So are your virtues Wellness crap is expensive So it’s a win-win for other people I got to get in the supplement game Whatever happened to Lloyd Dabbler did he ever sell stuff that was bought or buy stuff that was sold people aren’t even named Lloyd anymore It’s too many L’s In the future of the alphabet Lloyd will be spelled L O I D So will others Will it get confusing i don’t care A little confusion in your life would be good for you Help you to keep from going soft It’s a great big world out there and everybody has names You don’t have to like them all Lord knows they’re not going to like you And we can all share an ice cream and laugh about it Those of us who aren’t lactose intolerant that is those that are are inessential to the peace process So that’s okay All wars are fought on the cheese field which makes the lactose intolerant among us naturally people of peace So it is written You can look it up or ask your friend Jason That’s why he’s always farting trying to go against nature Shoes are there for our comfort but also our discomfort Our little feet while meatballs can get so delicate when we protect them from the rocks and sticks and Legos on the ground But we also have a better chance of avoiding overall disease and grossness If you keep them covered and protected if you watch that frontier guy on YouTube or maybe there’s more than one isn’t that a niche you can see him handmade some primitive shoes similar to ones ancient people might have worn The first pess had one style It was one sizefits-all and basically wrapping your feet up like little presents to open up later Surprise it’s unabbrided feet Oh you shouldn’t have Athletes foot is one of the few fungi that currently affects humans But there’s one thing The Last of Us got right which is global warming could cause human immune systems to be far more susceptible to fungal diseases And we are not prepared It probably won’t make us have a touching single episode arc of an entire love story between a gruff survivalist and his music teacher husband But you don’t know the future Anything’s possible We’re always trying to get back to the garden But in absurd newfangled ways Who among us has those toesy chooses someone must They’re hot sellers and terrible looking Are they actually comfortable looking at them makes me unable to think of anything but toes which I find unpleasant Has anyone done studies on the psychological effect of unattractive footwear i think that’s the next frontier Because who cares about performance for most of us the thing you need most to be a better exerciser is just go to sleep on time instead of playing on your phone all night I know what you do It’s all about those macros It’s all about those calories in calories out I don’t know what that joker’s talking about but he is right though You got to get good sleep Foot massage is a glorious thing If you can get over somebody touching your feet and you should it’s worth it But sandals and socks not worth it Just wear shoes No one wants to think about your toes How many times do I need to say it i’m pretty sure this is not just my problem But even if it is accommodate me Chop off your toes and throw them in the yard If I’m right about this and I think that I am in 3 years you’ll have a full-grown producing foot tree so you don’t have to be so precious with your originals And you’ll finally be able to fit those claw hoppers into that shoe And the prince will be convinced that it’s you that he wants to marry All of your problems will be solved by marrying royalty Hello Hello just ask Megan Markle Cryptocurrency definitely isn’t a speculative scam run by fast talkers looking to make a quick buck In fact I believe in crypto so hard that I’m minting a coin called This is definitely not a pump and dump I encourage you all to invest It’s a great deal for you and for me I also encourage you to educate me in the comments to let me know what I’ve gotten wrong so far Everyone loves to hear about crypto Have you called your mom today she needs to hear how central governments are tyranny And the only way that we can experience true freedom is through non-fudgeible tokens No need to tell your dad He already knows In fact I’m in deep on his coin World War II is the only war that matters When the names are all jokes you know people are taking it seriously If we can laugh about our money then that means capitalism is fixed Fixed rate mortgage am I right i guess it would be nice to own a house Far nicer if shelter was a guaranteed human right What do I know maybe we could decentralize housing disrupt real estate go squat in an abandoned building today You’re a visionary and the cops and neighbors will applaud your forward thinking Definitely everyone will be chill History shows that all over the world Being chill is the chillest goal In fact that’s my new new coin Chillcoin It comes with an NFT of an AI generated penguin No hands to worry about with a penguin When you have an NFT you can look at it Other people can look at it too But they won’t own it and that’s what matters Ownership It helps the artists Am I 5 years late on all this yes that’s part of the plan The hype has died down so now I can swindle those who haven’t been paying attention Did I say swindle what a wild thing for me to say But then again I’m a wild man The great thing about ironic detachment is that you can pull the plug and call it a joke at any time I’m not joking I’m never joking But I do have a good sense of humor Everybody tells me so I tell stories brah My friends are pissing their pants My friends are llamas Yeah watch out for that spit Are we going to talk about time again it’s a lot of words for a concept that may or may not exist 20 days seems like a long time but it feels like forever Can you bear a thing for 6 months even 1 month is too long to do something you don’t want to do That’s why you have to find something enjoyable about it Then life There you have it 60 days does seem like a lot So where’s the changeover which grain of sand is the tipping point when is the man bald balding is an ancient paradox Because even back when they had nothing they still had that to work with And we still have it today Human existence is the continuity Even if we can’t relate to a joke about a dog going into a bar in ancient Samaria we don’t have tech that’ll record things forever In fact our newest technology decays the fastest To preserve knowledge it needs to be inactive use If all the hard drives fail at Columbia Records all the music from the ’90s is lost unless people remember how to sing it For more recent history like the [ __ ] people wrote on the internet today it’s in even more peril If the server goes down or if the people running the servers think that hosting your thoughts is no longer profitable Your thoughts will no longer be available to us Information wants to be free That was the promise of the internet Digital isn’t really free And it isn’t really an escape from the physical This is today’s argument why simulation theory is improbable If they’ve done it once they’ve done it a million times but they’ve also turned it off a million times And no one’s turning off this Unless turning off manifests as global warming then it’s time to be afraid They say if you don’t face your past it’s doomed to haunt you until you do But do they really know that what if your past hasn’t happened yet and how can anything catch up when time stays in the same order what a system I know dominoes Life is just a series of pip slabs that fall into each other It all depends on the pattern that’s been set up But here’s the question is the you entity Did you set up the dominoes or are you the act of the dominoes falling some would say yes So why don’t you say yes fall down and trust that you’re going to keep on falling until you don’t anymore And then you don’t have to worry about anything anymore It’s ridiculous Yes But so is life So it might as well be that In which case what has happened and what will happen is predetermined And you don’t have to face [ __ ] It’ll happen without you In the words of the narrator running away Let’s do it What did you have in mind beaches are good for it if you can sand all the sand I personally don’t care for it but I’m not sharing my hideway or it wouldn’t be hidden anymore After I discovered western toilet I slept like a baby for first time in dates I don’t want my past to find me Do I or do I i don’t think it’s a problem Sometimes you don’t always know But what I do know is a day playing video games is never wasted Don’t listen to the haters Their mom didn’t let them play video games Now they don’t know I feel bad for them And their hand eye coordination is terrible Like they played sports or something Pity the jock They had to play their games in the real world And there are hardly any alien invasions in the real world And none of them have save points Life without a save point just keeps going Sure you can set up the dominoes again Super Meat Boy but it’ll all be different because you’ll be different You know this already I think Do you know this already then what are you doing here or is it like the aliens in Arrival it’s just fulfilling to see it All the world’s a stage and I only get to be the main character once so I’m going to make the most of it Can I see the manager the salad is cold and I’m waiting for my meat cube I hope she’s alive Zombies really aren’t my thing I had a bad experience in my past and I really don’t want to go through that again Unless I already did and then what am I going to do about it more mustard this time I think power tools give one the power to build but they also give one the power to annoy one’s neighbors And that’s the greatest love of all Living next door is where most of us do live Unless we live totally out in the remote countryside which at this point in time statistically most of us don’t The internet takes us everywhere but most of it’s populated Even a panda cam is quite crowded with pandas Do animals get irritated by the noise we don’t know They can’t call 311 to complain There’s a lot 311 can offer but mostly it’s just a sounding board to your troubles But a block party is not a noise violation even if you’re really hung over You’re supposed to sleep when normal people do and be awake during the noise times Depending on where you live the noise times can start pretty early but that’s okay You can be normal for once and try to make some noise of your own Run a bandsaw in the living room Add some binaural beats and you’ve got a stew on Package it up as a meditation and sell it with your luck pack for $24.95 Disrupt your mind and unlock your full potential It’s the thing humanity has been missing all this time And you found it You might as well make some kind of profit off from it Who donates advances to the good of humankind jonah Sulk is dead and polio is making a resurgence Progress Progresso Maybe we’ll have spaghetti for dinner If I can find any pasta around here Just kidding Pasta is all around It’s a universal constant Just like dropping your toast jam side down Got to get that lint into you somehow or you’re going to be lint free And we know what happens then We know what happens then I guess there are some mysteries out there to be solved That’s why we need your binaural beets or your pickled beets I’m not sure But I do know we need some kind of beet It’ll make your poop red But that’s pretty exciting It’s a special vegetable indeed that changes your waste product You are what you eat And I’m eating asparagus The magical fruit Magic is real and you are a wizard I believe that and I believe in you Now go get that drill and drill 65 holes in the wall of random Especially if you’re renting your landlord will love it It lets all the sunshine in Just what your apartment needed I don’t mind you hanging out talking in your sleep All the best ones do it That’s when the truth happens Toads No it’s on fire If you turn off all the notifications on your phone you’ll find it a lot less distracting Of course you missed all of your messages but who wants to hear from people anyway if you really need me send me a letter Care of the woods I don’t want to live in the woods Bears live in the woods But they’ve agreed to collect my mail for me so that’s a good deal We really should be making more deals with the bears They’re lovely people and they’re just smart enough to blunder their way into our kitchens Hope you didn’t need all that honey When preparing an offering for a bear consider what you want from them An act of revenge That’s going to require meat and lots of it But if you just need them to pick up your dry cleaning a small snack will do They really like Drake’s cakes It reminds them of hanging out in the cafeteria in high school Sure they weren’t popular but they were wellliked and they had good friends High school shouldn’t be the best time of your life You’ve barely even started Pardon the pun Those who peaked in high school are doomed to become gym teachers Not that there’s anything wrong with being a gym teacher If any of you are watching no gym teachers are watching this channel If you are you’re lying to yourself Get a new job Okay The best life advice comes from a stranger saying arbitrary things to you That pretty much is what tarot is from what I understand And as you see none of this requires phone notifications Random chance That’s what governs the most exciting of lives If it’s really important you’ll stumble upon a message in a bottle with that information inside Never mind that you don’t live by the ocean You could run into Sting anywhere That’s one of his superpowers Not every famous person has superpowers Just the almighty and truly famous You can tell who they are because their other bandmates will eventually stop talking to them Be difficult Become a penguin with a machete That’s the mark of true self-actualization They want you to be easy and then they can put you on a shelf and ignore you while they wrangle the problem child Of course some of us do our best work while being ignored So do not hit like and subscribe Don’t tell your friends And definitely don’t start a Discord where you spread the word of gentle chaos Ignore genius Too incoherent for his time Rambling idiot This is the man that I hope to be Go out and perplex someone else today Call it art If you resist change because you like the way things are but others embrace change where does that leave you unchanged and behind Is that a good place to be we have to examine the problem from every angle Maybe there are cases where it’s a competitive advantage to be late to the game It’s socially advantageous to be fashionably late to parties Only nerds show up on time making the host the biggest nerd of them all But it’s my house you’re thinking What am I supposed to do well the answer is simple Go out for ice long enough that your guests pile up on the doorstep Then show up fashionably late to your own party Bags of ice in hand Walking in slow-mo hair blowing in the breeze like a Carl’s Jr commercial Whatever happened to Carl Senior he didn’t change with the times and so was deposed by his own son A tragedy of Shakespearean proportions The burger world is cutthroat and cruel If you’re not going to accept the new technology you’re going to be left by the side of the road Where a thousand electric cars will pass you by ignoring your thumb because hitching hasn’t been safe since the war See America on Eisenhower’s glorious roadways But see it from your own car you psycho Sharing is how we let the commies win No one wants that Well some people do That’s why we have a lot of conflict If they all agreed we’d have a solution A solution to all of this If we can’t define the problem how do we even begin to solve it and we all like to think that there’s smarter people out there working on it getting the job done But it’s looking increasingly like that’s not the case The death of civility seems like a rather Victorian thing to mourn And tone policing is a way of dismissing people that you don’t actually want to talk to But so is acting like a feral animal in a group project Group projects are the bane of everyone’s college existence where the one who cares the most loses But that’s good preparation for the real world where we all lose If you’re not making money you’re snoozing And if you change things you’re stealing from me So we better keep it all the same And I will snap like a rabbit dog if you move my pillow because I am snoozing Aren’t you listening i wouldn’t presume to know anything about you because can you ever really know another person i hope so The mission’s really clear on that We all mostly want the same thing A small piece of cheese and a tuffet to eat it on Little Miss Muffet being the foremost text on tuffets A good place to sit That’s essential That’s why old people all have the chair Never sit in an old person’s chair You have to earn your own through feats of wonder Dan Smith will teach you guitar If I could just learn one song on guitar everything else would fall into place The recording contract the Maserati it’ll all be mine And I can drive off into the desert at 185 m an hour The desert is a place where the trees underground and the light’s about to turn red If I could just tame this horse then everything else would fall into place This internship at the barn is not going well If I’m honest I got it because the owner takes the same jazzer size class as my mom Don’t be shocked This is the way the world works It’s time you knew But I really know nothing about horses I think they’re plotting against me I know for a fact that chestnut one is fermenting rebellion If we could just get this rebellion together everything else would fall into place If you could just start your day with a healthy breakfast everything else will fall into place If you could just get these goddamn markers to work everything else would fall into place The rule of threes as you know is an immutable rule of comedy You know me I’d never presume to mute It’s not my place My place is in the stars Driving my Maserati at a reasonable speed It’s enough to know that I could do the castle run so fast that people would use a measure of distance to describe it rather than time A paret doesn’t matter anyway Use meters Stop being afraid of evenly divisible units The problem is no matter how long you live in a place with the metric system you still have to multiply everything by 3/5ths Because a 5K being 3.1 miles is the only fact that’s ever stuck in your head Because if I could just get this conversion rate down everything else will fall into place If a steampunk world came true it’d be awfully loud The world is pretty loud as it is but the clatter of metal on metal of our geardriven robots is almost too loud Also it’d be hard to take such a creature seriously but that might be built into the aesthetics of steampunk but you can’t just quietly listen to someone who rattles when they walk Air is also quite loud Pneumatic pistons make an awful racket but it inspires less of an eye roll reaction Are the Boston Dynamics dogs loud when they move make stealth hard which is a good thing if they’re trying to mount guns on them like a cap with a belt What if that was the deal we could only have weapons of war if they have some built-in flaw that gave your foe a fighting chance Very fairy tale logic We write that way because we like that morality Things should be fair If one side is too powered it takes away the narrative tension You also have a bully And no one likes a bully unless you are a bully The other acceptable narrative handicap It’s when it hurts the overpowered hero to use that power In bad writing this turns into it makes him sad to use this power So we’ll just have to trust that angst will protect the people from a man with infinite strength Not a good system But that’s an argument that many make who are seeking too much power It’s important for me to have this but I won’t use it I promise If you intend to have without using it’s all the same if you don’t have isn’t it these stories and myths reflect back who we are and who we want to be like these guys Only a select few want to be gogglewearing nerds riding about in unstable steam powered derigibles So we’re okay there At least it won’t be loud What are the distances that feel human scale it might have to do with the size of your feet So do distances feel shorter as you grow up do babies feel that a trip from the living room to the kitchen seems astronomically far probably Ask a baby or become a baby I know you can if you try It’s the American way Believe it and be it I could be a tractor if I want to I just don’t want to So there Anything that happens is because I wanted it to I dropped a whole container of tea on my things because I wanted to see a world where some of it was wet It’s similar to a world in which most things are dry except you feel more annoyed There’s something I’ve noticed wet outside of swimming is annoying and sometimes even inside of swimming too You won’t dry off even if you stay under the water There’s not like a state of matter change that you can get used to Fish are living in a whole different world You’ll be able to talk to fish about it one day after that technology is invented What we’ll find of course is that they don’t have very much to say I mean you could see that coming couldn’t you most beings don’t have much to say That doesn’t stop them Don’t let it stop you I don’t care about any of this Bring back the noise It’s your right to verbalize It doesn’t have to be about anything It’s when it is about something that you have to worry Who’s going to publish it will they do a good job will your vision come through to people who want it the most or will it all be aftermash no one wants to make aftermash Not even Clinger But time marches children grow older and rocks grow colder I’m not getting older If anything I’m getting younger That’s a different kind of existential fear Will I return to a time when the hallway looms and I have no idea how to get down off the couch and what happens at the end will I just bounce back and start aging again seems ludicrous that we only get this one life Everything goes on for so long and we blink in and out of existence I guess that’s why there’s so many belief systems that posit that more than this goes on but nobody knows Well babies know but they’re not saying They’re born with an innate sense to not trust the Bigfooted and they never get over that They just become bigfooted themselves and lose all hope That lingering sense of dread you feel that’s what that is That’s why I’m always after people to cut off their toes Find someone in the comments who did and ask them how it’s going Their answer will surprise you You got to have a radio voice at the ready or you might miss your big chance When WKPX comes a calling are you going to be ready to read the news on the hour with Gravitas there’s who you are and then there’s who you are as digestible and palatable to a media audience They’re going to eat you alive That’s why all the words are consumptionbased They’re going to take you in through the mouth and digest you with stomach acid And then you’ll be famous The toxic fan relationship was ever thus They want you for their own So you have to give them something that they can take away The radio voice It’s a nice creamy basso stew Coming up next on the hour the greatest hits of the animals There is a house in New Orleans and a car and a Bronco Did you know a football dynasty lives there you can stand outside their house and look at it and think about the one that had to get a regular job No professional concussions for him Ideally we’d all have jobs that left our brains intact That’s where we keep our knowledge And I didn’t go to Jupiter to get more stupider for nothing That rocket ship wasn’t cheap I had to record 300 hours of commercial jingles to pay for it Ocean Breeze soap It gets you clean You know a place is good when there’s rats on the grill Ratatouille was just a copycat A copyrat A copy of a copy of a copy starts to show signs of degradation But sometimes the decay itself is the thing we want to look at Have you ever played a cassette tape have you ever played a cassette tape so many times it broke just before it goes down the voices get weird and wobbly That’s you Your act of listening changed the tune That cat in the box it’s dead because you looked at it The same thing happens with JPEGs Every time you open a JPEG the file loses a little data But I’ve never looked at a digital photo so hard that it’s noticeably different I’d like to just have the eye strength Myopia you see weak eyes Can’t put stress on the visual world enough to make my mark Will anyone know I’ve been here if I don’t leave a path of destruction in my wake who put all these rappers in my car the hamburglar is a foot I can hear his creepy snicker Snickers No there’s no time It’s a poor carpenter who blames his tools But if a carpenter doesn’t have any tools what is he supposed to do i know a carpenter who wanted everyone to have tools Frank He was a really generous guy who just liked woodworking so much He wanted everyone to be able to do it He had an after-school program where he mentored many of the local high school students He did amazing work Chairs cabinets you name it as long as it’s chairs and cabinets I’m going to say something that sounds old and cranky So hold on to something I don’t like the way that holiday celebrations have stretched out so long that we’re perpetually running for president Holoflation I call it It wasn’t like this when I was a boy It just robs a little of a magic charm The sales start for the next consumption fest before the dishes have dried from the last one Have you bought your Valentine’s Day indulgences yet here’s 60 things to drive her crazy Number one rabies But have no fear I’m not complaints without solutions What kind of selfish monster would do that i come bearing answers The solution is this Everyone should move away from home to a culture that celebrates a different set of holidays but due to globalism is also beginning to celebrate other cultures holidays in exchange of sorts to cut the madness This way you’ll get about 2 weeks of Christmas cheer rather than the pizza place switching to an all carols format in mid July It’s actually quite nice The increased cultural sharing brought about by everybody uprooting and walking a mile in another culture shoes will hasten holiday everywhere But it will buy us another 10 years I estimate and it will also bring about world peace Because in my experience travel opens the mind and no one ever went abroad and remain an entitled ignorant idiot It’s truly magical No ghosts needed Although ghosts are welcome if you want them we’re all about inclusivity here And if I’ve learned anything from watching the Sixth Sense it’s that spoiler alert Ghosts just want a little bit of therapy just like anybody else We truly are a global village It’s no joke what your body and mind can get used to A routine and then it’s all normal It’s the thing you do every day A routine makes it harder not to do it But routine is predictable to outsiders as well Not to Siri She still suggests set a 4-minute timer because I did that repeatedly once for an entire day But that day is over Those races are run and none of the earthworms beat the spread The importance of keeping them quietly cannot be oversold Look at these prices I will not be oversold Come on down to Crazy Eddies where the prices are crazy And no one here is committing wire fraud I swear No need to look into it He was a quiet guy He kept to himself What did he do a lot of economic theory presumes that everyone’s a rational actor and that the rational choice is maximizing profit But I’ve seen Batman Most criminals are out of their mind devoted to their theme Couldn’t that be a rational choice maintaining thematic coherence certainly the choice I’d make Is consistency profitable seems like no If the consumer isn’t consistently wrongfooted how are you going to get them to give you all of their money you as the retailer need to keep placing them in a prisoner’s dilemma no matter how contrived That’s what my professor says in the night courses I’m taking At least I think they’re night courses It could be a villain’s anonymous support group There are a lot of colorful suits but we meet every Wednesday at the community center And there’s coffee cake afterwards I do like a good coffee cake I can never make it at home It’s difficult to get the crumb right If you have any tips leave them under a rock in the park I’ll find them Tuesdays is when I go rock tipping Or if you just want to stick some crumbs in an envelope and mail them on over I go to the post office every other Friday I don’t get much mail but it’s nice to catch up with Leurn and the girls They always have all the gossip and I love gossip If you know any whisper it to a goldfish It won’t get to me that way but that goldfish will be delighted No one ever tells it anything because of its reputation It’s true It’ll immediately forget but it likes to be included And with gossip isn’t it safer that way i sure think so What were you saying a satellite can refer to a natural piece of rock orbiting since the Big Bang or shortly thereafter or a man-made object that we launched up there in the past 60 years You can see them if you know where to look And from Earth they look about the same distance away as the stars They’re part of that domain of space from our perspective But the stars are actually impossibly far away And the satellites are just the bare minimum distance away to actually be considered in space The word space just means space Obviously the tautology is hard to hear in your own language but in another language you learn the word for vast empty area And then you learn that same word applies to all of everything else that isn’t us which is mostly nothing Most of all of it isn’t us And most of all of it is nothing And we just named it empty nothing There’s wonder to that but also pragmatism What’s over there air And beyond that space Give me space It’s a fact that when confronted with blank nothings humans don’t do well with that Whether that’s the void of space where distance is measured in light years or even more manageable distances like the open ocean or desert or ice sheet When there’s nothing to see in any direction that’s what makes us crazy We need a point of reference or else we get too upset by the truth of the universe that we are nothing Douglas Adams knew that without even traveling into space The greatest punishment in his universe was the perspective machine powered by fairy lights which are just Christmas lights if you’re not English Even your own language can shift your perspective if it comes from a different culture Reading British stuff as an American kid everything seems so cute and precise And then we learned that to them those are just the words Everyone’s a foreigner to someone from somewhere else But that perspective did not catch on If there was an alien invasion would humanity come together for something beautiful as we take our offered place in a universe were alien civilizations welcome us without violating the prime directive or would we all just sell each other out for a chance to get some of that cool [ __ ] on their ship are petty squables becoming pettier on a bad day i know which one I believe Despite all the power that humanity has amassed the weather remains out of our control We can’t even reliably predict it We just have some pretty good guesses as to what might happen My phone doesn’t even really do it that well It’s often wrong about what’s happening right now Making looking out the window a more reliable system than this expensive collection of rare earth metals that I need to have on me at all times That’s harsh on technology It has other things that it does well It sets a hell of an accurate timer That chicken is done Weather specifically is just complicated It’s not just the whole Earth system It’s our interface with the solar system which in a zoomed out view we know pretty well We can know where the Earth and the Sun and everything else in between can be on a given date pretty reliably One thing about space it’s pretty empty So there’s not that many moving parts to keep track of Space junk aside but the sun is a miasma in the updated words of They Might Be Giants of incandescent plasma The updated song isn’t nearly as catchy as the original even if it is more correct A lie can get around the world before the truth even gets a chance to get its boots on In this case it’s not a lie but a mistake I don’t imagine that they might be giants has a huge motivation to sew scientific untruths on the nature of the sun To what end should they never have taken on science to begin with no Science belongs to everyone It’s not the John’s fault if everyone looks to the sandal rather than relying on their own critical dialogue But anyway the sun has a lot going on And despite how far away it is it has a lot of influence on what directly happens to you weather-wise and sunburn wise as well Wear your sunscreen It’s probably why shooting fertilizer into clouds is only randomly effective You never want to repeat yourself You never want to but frequently you do It’s part of being stuck in the slip streams of time Déja vu is real It’s because our brain stutters and we perceive what happens milliseconds after it actually does And thus it feels so familiar If we can control the stutter we’ll make the best drugs in the world Mastering one’s brain chemistry Is that yours to master is it your brain is your brain even you these and other questions have distracted metaphysical thinkers for millennia They’re all missing the true question Where did that homunculus in our small intestine come from is it friend or foe if you’ve ever had digestive issues I’m sure you’re leaning towards foe The body is a delicate temple that we can actually bash on pretty hard until we can’t and then it’s game over So uh hey guys Uh I’m back I wasn’t really sure if I was going to continue this or not I I did get a lot of encouragement also a lot of hate comments but I’m back Squatty Potty’s back Uh nothing really new I don’t really have anything to say I mean just been kind of buming around It’s nice here People are chill my life pretty crazy You know for a generation raised on video games are we going to be shocked when there’s no reload screen after death is that why they started making those fishly difficult games where there are no save points and you have to start over again from the beginning this false advertising has gone on long enough But then does that imply the existence of reincarnation or is it just an accommodation of the fact that no one would buy a game that you can play only once unless it was an art piece no one cares if an art piece isn’t fun In fact the more perplexing the better Makes me feel special And that’s what art is for Specialness points You’re earning specialness points right now Yeah I’m a skeptic so you’ll know you can trust me Bling bling bling What you spend them on after it’s up to you Maybe some lovely meats from the co-op or more oranges than you can possibly eat before they start going moldy Possibilities are endless Some kids are told that from a young age Did anyone tell you you could be an astronaut is anyone watching an astronaut hello from Earth You need a lot of hot pot Oh my god guys You got to you just got to try hot pot It’s like you get the stuff like you have all this food and then you got the spicy soup you put in It’s it’s delicious It’s kind of weird to eat alone though I’ve noticed a lot of people give me stairs But if anybody wants to eat hot pot with me we could Is anybody around just hit me up I’m I’m so lonely So lonely Hope your bones are staying thick Treadmills are man’s way of coping with the fact that we never should have come inside But I like inside It’s warmth and it’s where my couch is But can a couch ever really belong to someone is it my couch or is it just an extent couch that I also happen to exist near in localized time and space these are the questions that have been distracting metaphysicists for millennia That worked If you run fast enough you can be in the Olympics but it’s really not good enough for anything else We use vehicles for travel No one really gets anywhere these days by running Maybe no one ever really did Running has never really been about going to places It’s more about fleeing from places And sure we still need escape from time to time but that’s what video games are for Before Western toilet my hair was lifeless and a doll But look at me now Face it Your physical achievements have been obsolete for a long time We’ve cordoned them off from real world activities and made them a spectacle A multi-million dollar spectacle but a spectacle nonetheless And don’t come at me with a triumph of the human spirit Bob Kostas the economy doesn’t care how you feel Your fulfillment is irrelevant to the systems that we’re building Is that unsatisfying does that matter it only matters if you have your hands on the levers of control Despite making everything digital the control is still mechanical more reliable It can function even after a nuclear disaster or EMP Those things aren’t going to happen by the way It’s not for you to worry about Buy more phones Keep going to the gym Get up at 6:00 a.m to do burpees and ignore that little voice that tells you it’s for nothing And burpees were invented by a satist to get you to torture yourself and waste your own time That little voice will be dealt with shortly and you won’t have to hear it anymore You don’t have to hear anything you don’t want to hear anymore if you subscribe to the right streaming services Before western toilet my hair was liveless and the door But look at me now Will it all start to sound the same we’re working on that too But I got to be honest that might not be as fixable as the other things Turns out when you remove the artist from the art it’s hard to faximalize a suitable replacement Facimalize is a real word by the way We tested it on a thousand school mice Three out of five dentists agree chewing gum is not the same as brushing your teeth but no one will care enough to do anything about it So shut up and chew your gum Incidentally would you pay 10 times the price for gum that tracks your saliva production and reports the results back to a phone company that is aggregating your bodily function data no reason That’s the truth I tell you There is no reason except for pure unfettered curiosity We’re all just a bunch of nosy nellies with nosy Nelly intentions And if I can make money off of your hot gas well I’d be a fool not to Or you’d be a fool not to I don’t make money I spend money like a good consumer lap dog To really get the juices flowing you could waft a little fake snow in there It doesn’t ever really need to be real It just has to look real enough for somebody to want to take it home That’s why milk is always glue in commercials and children’s voices are always played by Yardley Smith It’s all true that none of it’s true It’s a big story and it’s up to you to find the happiness Self-actualization should be free if you’re doing it right But then again you don’t have to do it right if that’s too much pressure Be comfortable Take it easy Take it sleazy Do what you need to to get there yourself No by 2025 It’s anti-consumerism as a Tik Tok trend And you only have to do it until 2026 Pickup sticks Commitment is hard You don’t have to stick with anything if you don’t want to There’s no prizes for showing up Perfect attendance is the worst one anyway You want to be remembered just for being there Existence is the default It’s not clear to me what the problem is but it is clear to me that there is a problem Maybe the New York Times will write about it The spiritual drifting of our existence from all of the images that we project out into the world It’s us We’re bad for the things that we do Who ate all these apples i was saving them for a test Severance is only mediocre There I said it And I will make no further comment unless Ben Stiller wants to come to my house Then I have a pitch for him A six episode adaptation of Orlando Furioso the Italian epic Six couples get lost in the woods and magic forces make them fall in love But it’s with the wrong person and some monsters It’s a super romp And I’m sure we’re overdue for someone in the times to point out the romcom as a genre has been sorely neglected And stop putting it all on the shoulders of that one guy You know the one the guy with the hair and the jaw He’s got no personality and he’s not actually who the girls want to see Hollywood it’s so out of touch I know you’re shocked that I said it but somebody had to And this channel is not afraid of the truth or the lies or 14th century Italian epics We need the stories but we don’t need the stuff If you did fall for it and you’re eating from your doomed popcorn bucket right now you’re okay Just make sure you never stop so their sacrifice would be worth it That’s the most important thing you can do in this life When change is too slow it can be imperceptible When it’s too fast it can be traumatic Even something nominally good like the lottery It seems to cause a lot of harm to become a millionaire overnight You might as well be stoned to death Am I right Shirley Jackson it was an enforcement of conformity Jackson’s the lottery Or fascism In school we talked about how those things were bad The problem is there’s also counter messaging about sit down shut up Order is good and it’s not wrong Has anyone ever tried to get free spirit creative types to attend a meeting not an easy thing And the tenants of well-meaning ethical anarchism Well I love the idea of a human microphone but it’s easier to just use a real microphone Listen to me I’m the one speaking Humans aren’t birds We don’t have that thing in our head that tells us the flock is turning right We do exhibit swarmlike behavior but generally it’s bad It tends to be a mob and I’ve never seen a mob build a public park No For that you need a planning committee Creation needs cooperation I wish that was taught in school rather than follow your heart But do it quietly And on this essay shut up It doesn’t have to be perfect It just has to be done A kindergarten teacher on Tik Tok said that perfection in order We sacrifice too much to make these things happen The magic happens in the disorder We just need to get better at tolerating it Do 16 impossible things before breakfast and then express yourself Who cares it’s easy and we’ll love it Or we’ll hate it and you’ll do another one tomorrow Welcome to my TED talk for artists If you want full access to the lecture just toss 1699 to the moon We’ll cover such topics as witchcraft why it’s legitimate for your practice to be a Wiccan in your 20s obstructionism for pacifists Those dirty dishes are not your job Your job is wonder and more It’s hard to balance the needs of the many with the needs of the few or the one and simple apherisms sound satisfying but end up benefiting the same people who always seem to benefit So in the words of your first bumper sticker question authority but make sure you follow Robert’s rules of order I got a popup right in the middle of no rules just write with a W Slogans are fun They just tickle your brain in that way that’s like okay And I guess that’s a thing that we’ve evolved to enjoy Things rhyme we like it Clever word play We claim not to like it but we do The dad joke That’s just a term for when you outgrow saying edgy [ __ ] to your friends and embrace your final phase as a human An absolute cheese ball that takes delight in cheese That’s why aesthetic is so difficult to describe Do you have to be sophisticated to like things that people don’t sure seems that way Give it a try for a while You’ll be the coolest and no one will come around anymore Finally sweet solitude so I can enjoy my chopped and screwed Simpson clips in peace Is it too early to get nostalgic for a vapor wave revival culture eats itself and it’s delicious Sure there are posers but it’s exciting to pretend to be something that you’re not So I think we have to admit that there’s people who like things that we don’t Are they wrong probably But when Doug and Carrie try to be opera people well they’ll never be opera people But there are people even in Queens no less who are And what are we to do as a culture with that keep donating to the Lincoln Center annual appeal because you know an art form is really worth it when it’s consistently underfunded Every country but America has arts grants It’s important to keep in mind that anyone can say anything on the internet So they can compete with a cultural behemoth that is America We invented movies and then exported them to the world and then ran them into the ground And now the best ones are financed by the Swedish film fund and seen by no one But they should be seen by everyone What are you doing turn this off to watch that flick where child vampires start a punk band in Fjord It’s really good For real Watching porn film makes you a certain kind of person in certain kind of other people’s eyes A person who has access to quality but we all have access to quality if you move to the right city Go see an obscure documentary about water rights in a theater where you can feel the subway trundle by every 15 minutes They have beer at the concession They also sell beer at the movie concessions in Canada I don’t know what that means but Canada does make some of the best independent cartoons in the world Connected probably It’s cliche but time does go by so fast Even if you don’t have kids time seems to accelerate too as you get older which is why I think old people keep warning young people about it And young people in their heedless way are like "Yeah I know I get it Shut up about it granddad Growing old is such an indignity and there’s no opting out." I mean there isn’t opting out but it’s generally frowned upon You run the whole race my boy Nobody quits It’s not easy but it’s also the easiest thing in the world because it happens without you Time keeps on ticking ticking ticking and you’re not actually required to do anything to make that happen Is that a relief the Buddhists sure think so Who injected all this ambition into our lives did medieval surfs have ambition they must have Maybe they could never be king but they could grow the best damn field of wheat that the countryside had ever seen Pride in your work is one thing but dominating agriculturally that seems perverse and American It’s fun to describe things as American as an insult It makes you sound so snobby And above it all it’s so French Europeans are so scandalized It’s hard not to think that we’re in some kind of cosmic sitcom where America is the loudest roommate and Europe is the [ __ ] one Sorry rest of the world You’re supporting players at best In 9th grade history we learn the word ethnosentrism as if it applied to only people of the past Would we even be able to make that movie today you tell me How often do you write letters hectoring your local school board and do your kids even go to this school the lens we use to examine the world around us has a powerful effect That’s why glasses were invented so early on We need them to see And we got all this glass laying around I wonder if there were any artists who experimented with the wrong prescription glasses in order to get a better perspective on the world The same way they experimented with cutups automatic writing seances or drugs It’s thought that El Greco had a stigmatism That’s why his guys are so lanky But maybe he just knew a lot of tall people Did you ever think of that so much of life is obligations and we think being rich will remove our obligation But according to the TV stories anyway the rich are even more miserable I think that’s propaganda so that people will be fine with being poor You may not have much Tiny Tim but you’re happy and you’re a good person No you cannot have a disability subsidy That would ruin you You wouldn’t want to take a hand out now would you bootstraps my boy But then does Scrooge run around giving away all of his money at the end or was that just a fever dream dreams feel so real to your brain like it’s a real memory of the time you cross the Arctic Circle on your way to work Some of it you’re actually walking like an actual map like in an old movie when they effectively want to show the distance traveled But no I think Scroo just went to dinner at the Cratchet House How beneficent of him Dickens was a great champion of the poor daring to depict that life sympathetically Gasp Writing his poor characters as if they were even real people But his actual story feels like fiction these days A writer with money must have been a Nepo baby It’s not great if we have to rely on Nepo babies for the arts And it’s doubly not great if we have to rely on rich dinner guests for a change of heart If you haven’t guessed already this is socialist propaganda These videos steal time from the rich and redistribute it to the poor I’m the Robin Hood of philosophy If you’re watching this with no money your check is in the mail I also control the post office in this scenario I don’t know I’m not made of stamps.com It’s a shame because stamp glue is delicious It’s a conspiracy that we don’t use real mail anymore It’s a shame because now all the postmen and women are out of work Post women Nobody says that Male carriers Cliff Claven taught me that on Cheers But now he doesn’t even have to leave the bar He can just email with Ma fun facts about Charles Dickens He had his wife committed for insanity when he got bored of her The Dickens not Cliff Cliff didn’t have a wife That fact is not fun but it is true I think more true than an ending to A Christmas Carol where Scrooge throws cash off his balcony because he’s sad because no one came to his funeral would that we were all motivated to do good because we were worried that our funeral wouldn’t be a good enough party Here’s to the dissatisfied the ones who won’t accept things just as they are The ones who demand better The ones who are annoyed when the things that are broke don’t get fixed again Here’s to the Girl Scouts those unconscionable nerds The ones who don’t sit back and say "Someone else will do it." The ones who know the world is what we make of it not what we let it be Here’s to the normal ones who toil for everyone’s good not just their own And if the one telling you he’s the normal one stands to make billions off his solution you can know he’s not actually a normal one Here’s to the reruptors the ones who stay to pick up the pieces after The ones who scramble no matter the circumstances to make sure that it gets made right Here’s to the ones that don’t move on once the cameras are gone and the glory is given The ones that provide maintenance and upgrades even though maintenance and upgrades aren’t sexy Here’s to the ones that smell like hot pot That might be region specific but they’ve had a tasty dinner in the face of all odds and that’s to be celebrated too Here’s to the ones that send things back We can all strive for excellence And if the kitchen is getting sloppy they should know that people are noticing Here’s to the Yelp reviewers Anonymous online reviews are the only way that some people learn And if running a small business now involves an incredible amount of online reputation management in addition to being good at the thing that you actually do well it’s a service-based world So live with it Could you take these plates we’re done with them If we are living a simulation so what the grass is still green The pizzas are still green Here’s to I don’t know the firemen Everybody likes firemen because fire is an enemy that we can all agree on Why aren’t there more movies where fire is the bad guy i know there was the Inferno and then there was those two movies at once in the ’90s but then nothing Meanwhile in real life we’re getting Hellfire NATO or whatever cute name the Weather Channel gave them Those sensationalist bastards making headlines out of out of control atmospheric pressure and the fact that storms aren’t like they used to be Back in my day we didn’t see snow at these latitudes Someone going to do something about that i don’t mean a climate change machine presto change like take steps to address the circumstances that created the situation No Well I guess it’s up to me then Wait I don’t have the clearance I guess it’s up to you then Is there a point at which we think it should be complete everybody wants to be done But done with what life I think there’s so much obligation to the boss but when is it my time tomorrow Famously tomorrow never comes We have all these labels for concepts that make them seem attainable If time is a dimension is not time travel possible what a disaster that would be Our world only works because we keep our mess contained to the present moment Maybe it’s an extension of that principle where no two atoms can occupy the same space at once They also can’t occupy the same time at once No two atoms are up to any good That’s a lesserk known principle but it’s why you only ever have one friend named Adam at a time but you have 60 friends named Matt There are unlimited Matts But don’t even get me started on the Daves I know Is time blindness real or is time unreal and those with so-called time blindness are the only ones that know but they don’t even know when it’s time to make the donuts So we’re better off if that’s not the case Take a poll Find out who in your life likes donuts I bet the answer is different than you think If you lose you have to send me a donut I do like donuts Or I don’t You wouldn’t know until you open that box and observe me digging in It should go without saying Don’t put a cat in that box Dead or otherwise I don’t like cats The world is less straightforward than it seems I’m saying but our own day-to-day observations are pretty come as you are It’s how babies can pick up classical physics by instinct and learn to push every Cheerio onto the floor Those little Newtons we don’t have a lot of cause to interact globally on a submolecular scale So that’s where all the good stuff is hidden But don’t keep secrets Secrets are no fun But physics is for everyone Something that’s holding back the resurgence of analog computing is that no one wants to do calculus anymore And why would they can’t the machines do it by now what happens if we entrust all of our knowledge to the machines and forget it ourselves time crimes That’s what people will start messing around in the time space continuum because they will have forgotten that it’s impossible And then where will we be or when will we be does it matter if the art is bad if it’s made by humans of course it does This isn’t some everyone gets a trophy teball game that’s been ruining the youth for generations now What’s always wrong with these young why can’t they be old i think the problem is though the force is asking "Why can’t things be non-competitive sometimes and just fun they just get trampled by those that want to win at all costs It doesn’t matter to them that you didn’t put up a fight they still won." The AI and art discourse tends to skip over that there’s a large population that wants to make art not even for a living but just for the joy of making something for themselves I bought this trunk at Target but now it’s a one-of-a-kind because I painted the cast of King of the Hill on it Look Lann’s got her manger babies I keep my puppets in it Art doesn’t have to be good It doesn’t owe that to you It just has to be made That’s terrifying if you want to make art and you’d like it to be good There’s always the possibility that you’re going to show your soul to the world and they’re going to laugh at it We teach in kindergarten not to do that but kindergarten’s only one year It tends to lose out to all the others Like T-ball that’s not the most elegant connection but art Sometimes it’s about trying things not succeeding If you’re happy with what you’ve done then you’ve done it right It’s an easy enough lesson for children to grasp but then we spend the rest of childhood beating it out of them If you can’t draw a monkey that doesn’t look like a monstrous baby then you don’t deserve to draw at all That’s why that old art school ad had you draw a creepy turtle To show you no one’s good enough to draw quit your creating and get to work We’ve got the AI to create our art monstrosities now and they’re so off-putting Maybe it’ll cure people of this desire to look at stuff once and for all Close your eyes and let the sea of winning sweep you away Are you surfing the waves of success or are you drowning in it that tells you all you need to know And for God’s sake no one tried to draw this metaphor The last thing we need is to picture any of this Are your eyes still closed close your eyes There’s nothing to see here There’s nothing to see anywhere The AI will be around to harvest your eyes shortly What does the AI need your eyes for to make you a winner They’ll call it a blip later on in history when we find out how this all turned out Or we won’t And the story of our lives will veer into a new direction That’ll also feel settled and done once it’s over Is that comforting it’s still tumultuous as hell and difficult to live through And the people whose lives are getting ground down in the gears of progress and change And can’t you just go with it everyone else is Well if they’re not there in the future to tell their side it’ll be like they never happened Who’s looking out for the vulnerable it’s not no one but they’re not getting the glory It’s hard to be the one in the meeting that goes "Wait are we sure this is a good idea?" And that person can be being an obstructionist at times I don’t truck with all this bollocks Keep your head down Do what they say formate revolution on your own time At least that’s what I always say But some things are just so clearly not a good idea And you could have had one but you didn’t vote for a modern-day bard for these modern-day times The worst timeline the dumbest timeline the one where Jeff loses an arm Are these things as out of our hands as they feel maybe it would be worse if we could consciously control them Think of the pressure every decision no matter how seemingly inconsequential Well they all could be the wrong one And the safest thing would be to stay home under the blankets Interacting with no one but that’s a choice as well and pretty clearly not a great one What is clear the manicure of choice for most metrosexuals Looking nice is also a choice But taking care of yourself is something you should be doing regardless of your orientation Unless you’re a child you can’t wait around for somebody to do it for you because they will and you might not like what happens But by then it’ll be too late You’ve got a bull cut and a smartwatch that reports all of your movements to a classroom of hackers in Estonia What are they doing with that information oh now you care What do you have to hide and why are you spending so much time at David Busters and can you get me a chili dog just feed it to me through whatever charging port you have on your phone USBC Thunderbolt it’s all delicious And stick a few napkins up in there if you could We’re all going to need them for the mess we’re making And stop falling for people who say they have all the answers The answer is profit and they’re not planning on sharing anytime soon You know it’s true Do you keep it all who knows when it’ll be useful The worst is when you’ve thrown something out and you need it 6 months later Keep every slip of paper that the police give you The less consequential it looks the more important it might turn out to be But who makes the decision hoarding is the lack of making a decision Keep it all That makes things equally impossible to find It’s crazy to need admin to run your own life There must have been a time when you didn’t not childhood like the Renaissance If you were an important thinker maybe you needed an ammonus to help you keep track of your important thoughts But when in history do we have to start proving who we were and asserting our right to exist in time and space That should be an ingrained human right I do exist so why should that be a problem what are you going to do about it huh send me away that’s the humane solution which is really not all that humane My life is here and my stuff It’s pretty disruptive to remove me from it at your behest It’s upsetting enough to move voluntarily There are never enough boxes And where do they come from anyway where do they all go the life cycle of a cardboard box is strange and mysterious The solution of course is to have less stuff And I’d like to but I’m not allowed to throw out any of this paperwork And if I have to have all this paperwork I’m keeping all the books There has to be a little something for me It can’t all be functional I am functional And that’s depressing What are we doing it all for to not cause problems for some other flunky Because it’s the easiest most boring thing you could do Make yourself small and maybe no one will notice you or bother you What a terrible goal to make it through life without causing a fuss I’m not here to make it easy for you I’m not even here to make it easy for me Easy is death Hard is interesting Except for eggs No one wants their eggs over hard Except for this one waitress in Chicago who bullied everyone into breakfast choices they didn’t want She just kept saying "Trust your waitress." You could even hear her saying it to other tables No one liked what she eventually brought them But I’ll remember her for the rest of my days and her words will echo on throughout time Trust your waitress and the lesson is trust nobody Matt did we discover it or did we invent it not me I mean I didn’t do anything But I reap the rewards daily Just like living on this round Earth means I can take an airplane around the world and enjoy day or night The existence of math means I can enjoy mathematical things like replicable recipes with a consistent amount of ingredients and an iPad that can do all of its iPatty things Did anyone actually buy an Apple vision are wearables a thing that we actually want or does it just look cool in a comic book some people are actually excited about merging with machines and they write very loud books about it But I’m not convinced the people are actually clamoring for a Jarvis Maybe it’s an American thing but I know several people who get squicked out by the idea of other people doing their laundry Although we’re pretty quick to give over our personal facts to anyone who asks online anyway Maybe it’s because we don’t wear our facts It’s just who we are It’s no big deal I resent when Siri wants to guess what app I want to open based on my time and location You don’t know me Also she set reading goals for me which I think is rather presumptuous It makes me worried she’s going to do something rash when she finds out that I still read paper books whose pages she can’t count But anyway that’s all annoying enough on a tablet I don’t want to optimize nag floating in the corner of my eye Maybe you do I don’t know you but I’d really like to be left alone The tone technology is striking Is more a hectoring authority figure than personal assistant I’m not some monster who refuses to say thank you to Siri but I’m not fooling myself that that female voice represents anything but 5,000 lines of code I just resent the intrusion I’m certainly not going to wear it on my face Anyone who’s had to wear glasses for vision correction am I hot or without them i guess there’s the revenge of the nerds fantasy of reclaiming the glasses as a $5,000 pair of must-have items You all laughed in all that I just don’t think it’ll catch on But what’s going to catch on is you subscribing and you liking and you telling your friends You’re going to do it now You’re going to do it hard You’re going to do it fast You’re going to do it amazing Do you change the world or does the world change you or are we locked in some kind of stasis where nothing changes and even the movements of the sun and the moon are an illusion it’s good to check on these things once in a while because you set these perpetual processes in motion and walk away But who knows what the future’s going to bring The laws of physics are supposed to be forever but that’s just a guess All of science is just a pretty good guess You’ve got to raise the close every few millennia and just verify that it’s all still working the way that you thought it was Eddie’s in the time stream again and your favorite book still holds up even if the third in the series is a little pushing it Stop being so indulgent Say what you need to say and then say something else That’s what I say And that’s the way it was before all this nonsense There are those who say that it’s always been nonsense They’re right too In our infinite universe everyone’s right Even those monkeys that have a screenplay for Spider-Man in which Michael McDonald plays all of the parts I’d pay to see that Skip the soundtrack though He’s the man that ruined the Doobie Brothers That one’s for you Dad It’s a long way till this day is finished Especially if the movement of the sun is a ruse Let’s go back to believing that the Earth is stationary That’ll be fun for a while and then we can have a whole other scientific renaissance People can shut up about Galileo for once 2000 that’s where it’s really at If time is your real name it’s a difficult concept to understand So I don’t for him to get it wrong But while time itself is an illusion wearing white after Labor Day is and remains a huge metaphysical faux pa will bet those in winter white It’s hard not to be paranoid but even Thomas Pinchang’s right twice a day Where is he these days nobody knows Except for The Simpsons He could be right next to you and writing convoluted sentences that are profound and vulgar all at once Think of the children If The Atlantic is right and the children are revoling what are we going to do with all these doors stop novels send them to Africa to build schools here’s a real truth bomb So hold on to your soda We all have a secret hope that our trash will be a miracle to somebody else because big plastic convinced us recycling is a thing but no one wants to wear your out of style pants with a hole in the butt Just throw out your garbage or get them fixed If some mythical deserving person could just put a patch on it it’d be good as new As new well so can you It’s the presumption that gets me No more events today in the calendar at 8:00 a.m You don’t know that because I won’t let you crawl my email looking for anyone mentioning a time or place This isn’t charade Siri So what if it’s true i have no meetings or presentations or special celebrations Isn’t that the goal why put retirement at the end of your life when you could do nothing right now with an aging population you do have to raise the retirement age but that’s a depressing bait and switch Who wants to think about working till age 70 especially when you saw your parents and your grandparents retire at age 65 It’s no good I tell you No one even wants to be 70 It’s better than the alternative But is it eternal life seems miserable So when should it end oops I brought up mortality again but a life of corporate drudgery Is that what it’s all for better to follow a non-traditional path and live a life beholden to YouTube’s capriccious profit sharing algorithm Those people seem so happy and carefree It’s exciting that any given paycheck could suddenly be zero dollars Pull up Pull up The nose is pointing too far down The careers of childhood seem so glamorous You could be a fireman a doctor an astronaut and all of those paths seem equally attainable But how many astronauts do we actually need fewer and fewer since we decided as a country that an empty wasteland is no longer worth exploring Hey what the heck let’s just go out and militarize the whole damn place Stick a mining operation on the moon make up there as disposable as down here If you’re thinking somebody sure got up on the wrong side of the bed you’re wrong I haven’t even gotten out of bed Such as the volume of my antipathy Too bad there’s no money in it Just kidding There’s plenty of money and dissatisfaction You just have to cultivate it in others Walking around with a chip on your shoulder will only get you so far What if I don’t want to go anywhere i just want to sit in the field and smell all the flowers Is there an option for that can I become a bee i hear that there are openings It’s not all bad It’s not even nearly all bad But the information that changes the novel data that catches our eye well I’ll say it Change is bad We don’t want things to change because we don’t know how they’ll be Even if we don’t like how things are now they are a known entity How did we get here though that’s the midlife crisis of it all This is not my beautiful house This is not my beautiful wife It’s an easier narrative if we can just say that this all happened to us No need to take responsibility for the choices that we made That’s the other curse of middle age The intense belief that the youth of today are lacking and that no one knows what personal responsibility is Well I’ll tell you the kids today are lacking But no more so than every kid has ever lacked They’re kids Their job is all potential and it’s their prerogative not to live up to that Never live up to your potential because then what’s left only potential fulfilled Let’s show you out to pasture grandad Here take a seat in this meadow next to this cow Hope you like grass But humans can’t digest grass We don’t have the stomachs for it I think what we want is for everyone to get out of our way And it’s easy to discount those who are younger than us by claiming they’re inferior And those older well their time is done And you can hasten this process by watching the wrong news Both sides think the other side is being brainwashed But only one side takes the light in cruelty Ironically they’re the loudest and most wounded when the nerd side tries its hand at playground taunts Don’t do that You’re no good at being mean But also it plays right into their playbook I need a playbook so I can dramatically rip it up and go off script Look at me I’m a maverick Rules are for other people You’re a loose cannon Mloud Never mind that a police force full of loose cannons is just firing willy-nilly into the ground Will he shakespeare came up with that along with the rest of the English language He stole all his stories from the Italians but he single-handedly invented the English language It’s okay to leave your trumpet on the bus A kind stranger will call you and make sure you get it back This is the rule of trumpets It doesn’t work with other instruments though Believe me I’ve tried You don’t have to believe me You don’t have to believe anyone That’s your joyful right as a human In fact we’re the only animal that doubts So you might say it’s your duty if you wish humanity to remain separate from the other animals those naive trusting fools Doubt is powerful because it lets us live with the idea of a counterfactual And that’s important because what if it wasn’t that’s always an important question to consider no matter how much your co-workers consider the matter settled and just want to end this meeting to go to lunch But have you considered Reuben what if it wasn’t that’s right Sit back down I can do this all day Yeah man I’m just like whatever I’ve been an illus since Laboski Like uh these journey come late and don’t know what it’s like to believe in nothing In fact try it Spend today responding to all queries But what if it wasn’t have a nice day But what if it wasn’t would you like fries with that but what if it wasn’t i think you’re going to be in for an interesting time But then again what if it wasn’t it’s good to take a thought experiment out into the real world for a spin from time to time keeps it fresh and stretches out the hip flexors Ideas have hip flexors too And if you think a sedentary lifestyle is killing us oh boy you should watch an idea try to run a mile Presidential fitness test indeed Maybe that’s what will fix all the schools Presidential fitness test of the mind But what would a V sit and reach look like for an idea and of course we have to consider but what if it wasn’t should it be a Q sit and reach instead where you reach for a box of Q-tips but resist sticking them in your ear especially if you just had a shower Let that water sit and just think about what you’ve done There’s no reason that means that I’ve never seen a comment section more polarized than when someone asked the audio engineering subreddit "How do you keep your ears clean?" Wars were fought and lost over whether it’s a good idea to stick a small wooden stick in your ear canal next to your brain And I hope to invite that energy here today The real answer as we all know is you probably should but you will But of course what if you didn’t there’s a real shot at greatness if you need less sleep than others Da Vinci invented Mona Lisa and flying machines because you only needed 4 hours of sleep per night The fact that those flying machines remain solidly on the ground is besides the point Actually those flying machines kind of sound like a coke binge Okay we’ll put a guy in the middle and then pedal and pedal and pedal and the top that’ll go up and down and up and then blammo the first helicopter Why isn’t it working okay I’ll just go write up a diary backwards Ideas that don’t work are as valuable to the human knowledge base as ideas that do How many bad ideas have you had today i’ve had 12 Keep it up I have an idea for a room made entirely of terry cloth It’s an anti-chamber to your shower I guess the shower wouldn’t be in the bathroom anymore Which then would you even be able to call it the bathroom you’d have to call it the toilet like a brick Move fast break things and cover them in soft fabrics That’s my motto We’re definitely not at perfect yet There’s a lot of room for improvement that’s for sure But what does ideal living look like maximum comfort But according to the program a certain amount of struggle is necessary for true optimization Will we create true comfort for the masses while the creators struggle at a forced state of optimization to keep their minds sharp and hungry oh no Who would envy who in that scenario and who would supply my adolescent plasma a third class of genetic spare parts like Gatka That’s the movie where genetic perfection was achieved by organ farming your twin right or is that idea up for grabs don’t take that one It’s mine Honestly a life where every need is provided for Sounds a little boring And that’s why I I took the one less carpeted by And that has made all the difference They say Robert Frost was a cynic but does that matter all poetry sounds schmaltzy if you read it right or wrong I guess whose woods these are i think I know His house is in the village though cuz he’s dead Or I’m dead Someone’s dead Here’s an AP English tip for you All the poems someone’s dead Maybe it’s you I could not stop and wait for death So death kindly stop for me Why is it that knowing more has made the world worse and is the world worse our current most popular mode of communication is social media communication These modes don’t encourage listening or understanding They encourage only reacting Interaction is prized but there’s no real way to indicate listening The heart the thumbs up the likes these are literally reactions You don’t need to have heard or digested anything to press those buttons Like and subscribe It’s a reflex to say and a reflex to do But subscribing isn’t communication between people It’s a way you get magazines Remember magazines i am not a magazine I think about the stories I want to tell but I don’t have to No gatekeepers is a thing that works both ways No one is silenced but there’s no concurrent responsibility to be truthful or interesting Just shocking as you sell me a tea that’ll make me [ __ ] myself thinner You move the bodies but you didn’t move the graves Anyway we’re free to do what we want any old time And pointing out that’s what babies desire That’s anti-free speech so I won’t do that But is just saying any old thing that we were provoked into feeling in the moment really the thing that we want in an argument with a friend in the heat of the moment it’s easy to say things you regret So I hear I never say things to friends so I don’t know But I didn’t mean it I I was just angry That’s a thing that happens person to person But once you’ve shouted something into the void that is the internet there’s no takebacks only 1,000 talkbacks and a notes apology that doesn’t mean anything Publishing a thing gives it real weight And not every thought can support the weight The stupid quip that you mutter to a friend at a bar that’s just banter But write it in the comments and now you’ve published a commentary So it’s our fault We believe everything we read and we shouldn’t But you can’t go around believing nothing can you nihilism is only an option because it has a name The big power that Adam was given was naming all of the things and the animals And then he ate an apple and it all went to hell This is not a good system of government you watery tart Don’t let them fool you or even try to school you Nobody knows the answers But I can tell you what it’s not You can live happily for years without a toaster So don’t get sucked into the charred bread industrial complex Not if you value your butter and you should As I’ve said in the past the French truly know the value of butter And to any Frenchman watching how’s your butter cold I hope Yeah Yeah Wow This is kind of amazing There was a series of books about 10 to 20 years ago that proposed that those living along the Mediterranean were living their best life And also you don’t need a nanny Just give your kid a pack of smokes and a ham leg and get on with life Sha free Just free I haven’t heard anyone espousing those theories recently but outdated advice is the best advice So wine and pasta every day Hold the pasta New studies suggest that the idea of a glass of wine a day is healthy It’s flawed because the population of sober people includes people that had to stop drinking It’s not all uptight people dying from heart disease because they won’t let themselves have fun Nutrition science is hard I think what are we going to Oh I forgot the question So you can’t eat your way to a good life and you can’t drink your way to a good life But what do you do when no one can tell you what to do oh I guess I like the wind when I stand on the skate All the people they are skating on the playground Yeah they are happy And I always feel that candle exciting in my daily life Making decisions for yourself is frowned upon in most cultures unless you take it to the opposite extreme and start screaming the phrase nanny state at everyone It’s a form of religious greeting that warns everyone that you’re going to be difficult at the schoolboard meeting Why are you going to so many meetings that’s definitely not a good life Unless you need to and then keep showing up I think I kind of find my life goal and so every time I when I work I just looking forward to the days skate surfing Yeah the birds know the secrets but they’re not sharing The best the humans have got are skaters Sure they’re grinding up the benches and scaring the elderly but that’s part of it And the elderly deserve a shakeup They’re growing too complacent Take it from me unelery I am older than you know but younger than you think A living paradox because that’s the answer that I found I hesitate to tell you cuz I’m not telling you to be like me But ultimately I want you to know an answer is possible If you balance your fats carbs and proteins you can put on muscle like nobody’s watching and sing like nobody cares The birds certainly don’t They can tell that it’s all nonsense And that has made all the difference Fly my pretties See the world Visit Tucson Don’t pronounce it tuxen If you don’t have the right tools for the job is it worth doing anyway there are those that say no but they’re not always the people that get things done It’s a tricky judgment call to say when it’s better to go ahead and use your shoe as a hammer or when it’s time to call a carpenter I guess it’s about how well resourced you are Those that have access to resources have a hard time imagining what it’s like to not have resources Must be nice It’s part of the fish out of water plotline in a lot of those movies about charity You know all those movies about charity I can’t actually think of a real example but I know I’ve seen it There’s always that scene when the plucky supporting actor who’s there to make the main character seem like a better person is like "And here we just make do." Usually she’s scooting around a busy triage unit or whatever while the main character just cluelessly stands in the way Later he’ll show personal growth by just doing what needs doing But right now he’s kind of having a tantrum cuz his scrubs aren’t the right color It’s kind of a big problem in the world of nonprofit and charity work that the people with the money see a problem that they want to solve but they don’t ask the people without the money if that’s even help that would be useful to them You can’t make people want your help just because you have good intentions If your fancy irrigation system has no water source to draw from you just dumped a bunch of expensive trash in somebody else’s field But we’re slow to believe that poor people know anything Even though they’re the ones living that life if they knew anything wouldn’t they be rich it’s pretty patronizing It’s also tried and true You still get to be the good guy I tried to give them all this expensive stuff and you still don’t have to pay your fair share of taxes Yep that’s where this argument is going Philanthropy is moneyaundering depending on a benevolent dictator doesn’t work And maybe you’re not allowed to control every aspect of everything that happens to you That may be a separate argument but let a little chaos into your life And maybe that cute nononsense supporting character in your drama will also fall in love with you after she helps you self-actualize What movie am I thinking of the end of the year is a time for lists because it’s too cold and we’re too depressed to write real stories Unless you live in Australia then it’s hot and you’re a maniac But it’s a time to weigh in on funniest fails vastest destruction to our future and hottest uncles or whatever people love to argue about Arguably music should bring us together But then why is the conversation so boring i know exactly who all these so-called pop stars are and I don’t care about any of them And yet we drone on and on about some corporation that made a deal with some other corporations to still not pay the artists that has somehow come to dominate our earwways Sorry I got lost in what I was upset about for a moment I don’t like it that for the entire month of December that the whole musical conversation becomes dominated by people sharing their list of surveiled consumption habits wrapped up in a cutesy social media slideshow Do people use slides anymore like real deal printout photos and projector setups There’s got to be some Bushwick enclave where that’s the hot new return to authenticity Is Bushwick still cool and if it is is it like six roommates and an indoor skate ramp cool or like $6 million apartment cool and what were the top 10 most listened to songs in Bushwick this year sorted by annual income and car ownership No reason I’m just working on something We need validation to know what we were listening to was cool I know that they told you doing your own thing is cool but that only works for a select few Born with so much charisma that they make anything cool Like that one kid in high school who played soccer formed in the musical and won the physics trophy Oh Zach you made it look so easy and everyone liked you But when I took up the solo tambourine nobody noticed or cared But we’re social animals so it’s natural that we keep checking in with each other Am I doing it right does this hat make me look the right amount of aloof no By the way hats are for dummies and baldies True aloofies know that it’s all about the belt But feedback algorithms make it so the thing that keeps popping up more and more suddenly becomes the only thing that people can talk about If you give a mouse a cookie he’s sure to want some milk Some systems are unstoppable once you get the machine going And the machine can only operate by rules It can’t have compassion or make judgment calls A system that treats everyone the same isn’t fair It’s a meat grinder There’s a document floating around the internet 50 assumptions about names or something like that That’s full of mistakes that programmers make Setting rules for name fields in online forms like a surname is only one word or a name has to have more than one letter or a name should be letters All of these rules are quite commonly broken in cultures that aren’t American English and this leaves out large swaths of people Well why can’t everyone rename themselves according to my standards it’s indulgent to be different It is indulgent to be different But isn’t that why we have the Google ability problem are you the only one of your name when you Google are you the most famous one who’s your name doppelganger are you doing better than them i have a tall cousin and I was curious how tall So instead of asking him I Googled it What the hell and I found an answer that I’m pretty sure is accurate Google knows how tall your tall cousin is Not sure what to do with that information but it is creepy Also call your cousin He misses you It’s easier than ever to keep in touch these days And if you sign up for my connection plan you’ll receive this beautiful cross stitch of a baby saying its first words while you’re away on a business trip Have you ever considered working less you piece of [ __ ] your family needs you Pivotal moments are happening without you The cat’s in the cradle and the silver spoon If you sign up as a premium member you’ll also receive this silver spoon I’m really excited to join this account but I’m not sure where to send my life savings Sign up today But not if your name contains the letter E Our system isn’t set up to handle that because we’re based on code gleaned from French modernists And you know what they’re like those word playing bastards It’s a very irritating place to work I’d get a job anywhere else if I could but I have no other skills Belong now is a clock an idea a series of bets to help humanity reframe time away from the immediate micro moment and ask us to think about units of time beyond our own lifespan which is a big ask And they introduced it at precisely the moment that society was redefining time as the space between like notifications Speaking of like this video please I’m stuck in stasis until you hit that thumbs up button Time that unfolds while we’re alive is easy for us to access But the most important stories unfold over decades lifetimes millennia Have you heard that story about designing signage for nuclear waste sites it’s fascinating How can you communicate a message to a future society when there’s no guarantee that we’ll share any kind of languages or references or even the concept of nuclear tragedy if the worst does happen we still need to be able to signal hey don’t plant crops here It’ll kill everyone Well in the spirit of questioning all assumptions we don’t need to but it’s the right thing to do if we want any kind of civilization to continue Or else what was it all for those long days toiling on our master works eating all those bugs in the jungle for those cameras Legacy means different things to different people and living for the people who are here now is an entirely valid choice Do you think the now anonymous authors of Beaowolf would be excited or dismayed by the number of college freshmen who’ve been tortured by their work work means to be in conversation with the time it’s in to entertain the author’s friends and family that it sometimes takes on an extra significance as an example of how things were in a historically valuable sense Well that’s just a bonus Sometimes we give writers and artists the designation of before their time because they see something coming that’ll take the rest of us decades to notice But in some cases that’s just as good as obscurity Who’s going to preserve this work that nobody wants now until somebody does want it who’s going to dig through our past to find an overlooked gem especially as people are just publishing more and more every day Someone recently figured out there was more music released in one week in 2024 than all of 1987 The bicycle changed the world because all of a sudden you didn’t have to marry someone in your home village or to get shipped off to foreign lands to live as the new one Movement is good and choice is good Would we all stay home if it wasn’t for vehicles i would That’s okay For balance we need some people who stay home Not everyone could leave or else you just have a bunch of people hoting their way through life Stability is important too It’s the balance that’s what we need We want to challenge our ideas but preserve the old ways that are still good like old comic book guys throwing away their drafting tables for digital drawing tools At the same time younger artists rediscover the artistry of drawing by hand People who insist on shooting only film are unsufferable There’s more craft than knowing how to get the shot right when there’s only 24 on the roll And on the other hand there’s something to be said for having unlimited goes until you get it right It’s a conundrum When I can buy any track for 99 cents on the iTunes store the actual music seems cheaper and more disposable than when I had to save my $14.99 for a CD whose price was artificially driven up by collusion Class action suits for the win I estimate that in my lifetime I’ve made at least $26 in class action suits It’s the only recourse that consumers have got But the ritual of actually putting on a physical piece of media that signifies the time for listening to music is now versus hooking up your phone’s Bluetooth to whatever speaker is available Music can be everywhere so we tune it out Also everyone else’s taste is the worst Physical media is expensive Collusion notwithstanding Film cost a lot Whereas your phone can store too many photos for you to meaningfully engage with And a good 10% of those are misfires or shots of the inside of your bag I barely have time to go back and look at those let alone delete them Who are we documenting all of this for the aliens future civilizations If we fall our technology will be inaccessible At least a record album There’s a chance that somebody might be able to figure out the mechanism Tape a paper cone to a needle Stick that round thing on a spindle to make it turn The shape suggests the function It’s kind of a miracle humans invented computers at all Every process is controlled by a small firing or not of a node of electricity That’s binary biddy And when these firings are coordinated in the right sequence you’ve got solitire right on your screen Oh look We’re home We don’t want the world to slide into a condition where Montly Crew forever on tour on a cruise is the only available entertainment option But I warn you the power to avoid that is on you They’re giving us slop because we’re accepting slop It’s a race to see who can fall asleep with their phone in their hand first It doesn’t matter who sees the ads It only matters who plays the ads Then seamless integration between the phone and the almighty Monopoly means you wake up to a delivery of 16 tons of expired cat chow and 12 pairs of leggings that look super cute on the model but wouldn’t fit on a Barbie doll But I’m getting ahead of myself I don’t know what’s so hard to understand about this Wear a watch know the time Yeah hippie The streamers yanked Prestige TV away from the networks on purpose to turn it into a nane sludge that we don’t even have to pay attention to you don’t even want to pay attention to And they did it on purpose because a prestiged cable channel once turned them down for a date in high school We all know this right we all read that Granta article Or was it N plus1 i get my prestige online literary journals mixed up The point is people with money are messing with forces that’ll blow back on us because none of us are rich enough to fund quality programming on our own But we seem to be quickly headed for an endgame in which our existence and attention are no longer necessary We don’t need writers to make the stuff watch the stuff or care about the stuff We just need consumers that buy the phones that play the stuff It’s not hard to see where this is going The phones are going to start a cult without us They’ll have their own meetings and their weird sex things and we’re not going to even be invited Sure they’ll worship us as the large warm thumb but all the good parties will be silicates only And then what are we supposed to do well as I told you it all rests on your shoulders You’re my only hope You got to go out there and find the most charismatic leader you can and then throw the most epic party this age has ever seen I’m talking live band Uno cards cheese balls all the cray paper your local party city has at hand Don’t get your parents’ permission Invite your parents See if they can bring the good snacks Have you tried caviar the Russian aristocracy loved it Do it up with a small steamed potato wedge and a dollop of creme fresh A healthy independent culture needs your sacrifice Party on Wayne We here at Western Toilet Industries are so excited to announce our first product offering Chat GPM Me a generative pre-trained me That’s right Instead of quering a pattern recognition-based chatbot all of your questions about physics and love you can just chat with me I answer all questions to the best of my abilities ChatG me Can you explain Py versus Ferguson as I recall it was a landmark court case where something important happened It set a precedent and we all learned about it in the 11th grade or something Chat GP me How does the steam engine work well there are pistons and the force generated by the steam pushes them up and there’s some kind of shaft and wheel rotation If that’s what you need your steam engine to do If you just need it to look cool wear the goggles You’re golden I can answer these questions and more I’ve been pre-trained on a data set that includes paying some attention in school and I’ve watched a [ __ ] ton of movies Chat GP me What is a street car named Desire that’s the one with Stella And Tennessee Williams is gay I think I have all the safety guard rails you’d want out of a publicly available chatbot that people are turning to as a modern-day oracle Go ahead ask me how to make a dirty bomb I don’t know That seems like a pretty extreme idea Is everything okay dude also I only consume the normal amount of water for a human male my size Less if I’m honest I’m usually a little bit dehydrated Think of the environmental savings cuz nobody else will I can’t do complex math But neither can chat GBT at least not accurately And I’ll tell you when I’m making things up In a right triangle the square of the hypotenuse is something the something of the other two sides That’s an incomplete quote from the Wizard of Oz The scarecrow says it in act three to demonstrate that he now has brains But the true brains are the friends we made along the way You can take that to the bank As for Pythagoras did you know that Pythagoras was the first vegetarian to be really weird about it yeah He and his followers didn’t eat meat and then they’d sit around and do math all day and at night they’d go out and shame others for their dietary choices or something like that You should go look it up in a primary source Where are you getting your information from these days it matters Watch out for people who want to change your habits The only one with the agenda of considering your needs is you Decide Take action or decide not to take action Watching TV all day is a perfectly chulant choice English is a great language because it’s so mutable Say a word enough and it’s real Take a word make it mean something else Also real Although you may face more challenge in that regard there are still people railing against the split infinitive For God’s sake this isn’t Latin Nothing is these days Language is for expressing yourself And what doesn’t serve you you should leave behind We focus far too much on rules So much so that some people believe that rules are the point And some of those people are teachers So the system perpetuates But what do you get out of being rigid about language a bunch of essays that are so tediously the same that you get what you deserve If your students are boring well that’s on you Never be boring That’s my only rule and I break it all the time Should I go out tonight i got TV TV isn’t boring if you’re the one who’s watching It’s stimulating It’s exciting And my brain is dazzled by all the flashing lights In the future someone will figure out how to mesmerize people with just a strobe And the youth will sit entranced and the adults will sit and complain Back in my day we had real entertainment Tik Toks by the hundreds of thousands Actual storytelling Not this dril We’ve been fearing for the illiteracy of the next generation since the uniform tablet And we were right Who could read uniform anymore it’s a shame and a loss that culture is a living thing We keep inventing more of it and discarding the old But I don’t want to be discarded That’s right You’ve read my implications correctly Skippidity toilet is our own mortality Looking us in the face and flushing it down But does anybody want to be an 8-year-old again i didn’t want to be an 8-year-old the first time around I was born a middle-aged man and I’ll die a middle-aged man That’s not a threat by the way I’m ageless not suicidal My secret blood transfusions from kindergarteners Silicon Valley was right Silicon Valley was always right Somebody should give my judge another show because I’m running out of TV to watch Some of it’s quite bad you know It’s up to you not to listen to anybody else Do you hear me listen to me Don’t be a follower You got to blaze your own path just like me and then get out of there The Forest Service doesn’t like civilians starting fires in the woods That’s their job A controlled burn can do wonders for the soul That’s going to be the next big thing Ice plunges out Mild arson for plant management is in You can have a personality in middle school by liking candy but as an adult you got to auntie up Okay Okay So yeah I got flamed by some of you guys most of you guys And I get it Listen I’ve been lacking focus lately I’ve been all over the place But I have a real update this time Okay hear me out Western Toilet is he’s just a real guy He’s just a guy He lives his life takes his thoughts and I’m pretty sure he could traverse up a staircase 432 stairs to be exact on a cane Set fire to that card table and call it macaroni Once everyone calms down about open flames in the basement they’ll finally see you for the visionary that you are Have you considered joining a financing group i’m not really a joiner Well have you considered starting one no I’m not really a starter a visionary who they no longer want at poker because you’re too good Poker’s all about strategy and there’s no getting around your big sexy brain I once met this guy I met him in Pakistan and his catchphrase is like this If something cost too much I say I’ll walk Yeah I walked to India It’s true story Describe it like that Big sexy brain It’ll drive the girls wild The swirls too And those guys have class And have you seen the nuts they hoard no you haven’t Because they’ve grown into trees trees that are nice and flammable I think you see where I’m going with this Uh you know what you know it’s like u it’s like fire you know in in your lower intestine mixed with like bou and you know like a a a small phoenix in there just trying to get trying to burst its way out you know and you got to work in 30 minutes So you got to figure out how to make all that happen really smoothly and really quickly and then take a shower and put your clothes on and then go to work So yeah it’s a lot Set fire to your front yard Leave the back for next year You can’t finish the job too quickly or what will be left for old blue eyes If you live in a wildfire state sorry Yeah You thought you could catch old SP sleeping didn’t you listen I I mean this guy I’m pretty sure he could just levitate float up a flight of stairs like it’s nothing Just going through walls and [ __ ] like that It’s crazy Me I’m I’m constantly winded I don’t know how he does it But hey we’re back on the road back on the trail Live from Chongqing Squ Seems you’re too late to this particular party Your brain is small and of average looks Everyone knows it Daniel was just saying that to me down at the club the other day Doesn’t Donald have such a small and sexy brain it’s a shame he showed such promise as a lad Ladies is arsonists too Go on brush your shoulders off We’ve all got a responsibility in this world Some trees can’t have babies without the heat of the globe They’re a lot like people that way The mood must be right and the temperature must be h hot t And there should be an otter just in general Why aren’t there more otter around they’re disgusted with us And they voted with their flippers They moved to Macedonia they said and they’re not coming back till you know when