v37 - Whose bone is this?

Hi there. It's been a few weeks. It's been a great number of ordeals since the last time I spoke with you all, which I believe I recorded on April 30th. Maybe 29th. I don't know. It's all a blur. It is now May 22nd. I have been camping out in Japan in a series of business hotels for over three weeks now, which is concerning. Well, this is a podcast. Hello. Hi. My name is Justin, and the title of the podcast is Breaking Change. Every episode, something's got to break. I am very broken.

for example, but there's got to be something novel about this release relative to all the previous ones. That's because we need a new major version to be cut. This is version 37 of the program. And its release title is Whose Bone Is This? Which will make sense if I remember to tell you what that's all about. In fact, I'm going to make a note right now.

Whose bone is that? There you go. Because I just realized I was at risk of titling it as such and not actually following through. It's been a long fucking few weeks. Give me a... Cut me some slack, please. All right. Well, I've got a new mobile recording studio set up. I've got a goddammit, an iPhone 16 Pro with a megsafe...

Is that Belkin? Yeah, Belkin Clippy-Doo on top of a 14-inch MacBook Pro connected via a USB 3.1 Gen 2 cable that I just had to buy because the USB 3.1 cable that I bought last night apparently. Didn't allow data over it, only charging. And then on the other hand, on the other side of the equation over here, I've got a second cable and that's connected to a DJI mic mini setup.

little charging case there and that's what's connected here and so the audio quality will be worse than you are accustomed to because uh this is coming from the breaking change east studios and not my normal little Orlando habitat. I don't know if I've talked too much about this, but I actually get nervous before every...

recording. Not as nervous as I used to get before going on stage and giving a conference presentation, but I still get like a little bit of a pump of adrenaline right before I go on air, even though it's not really on air. both because it's not traveling wirelessly just yet, but also because this is a recording that I have an opportunity to edit. I could get rid of all the swear words like fuck and shit and if I wanted to.

Like that last one, probably shouldn't have said. But that's what the E rating is for. Maybe I'll bleep it out. Maybe that'll be my first bleep and you'll all just have to wonder. But also am I too lazy? Making a note to maybe bleep that one out. Maybe bleep that one out. Alright, we're just, we're cruising.

So anyway, I'm fresh out of adrenaline, unfortunately, already because I woke up at one in the morning to a ring burglary alarm. phone call. I was sleeping in this bed over there in this aforementioned business hotel and I had an AirPod in my ear because uh of a sickness that i have it's easier for me to fall asleep with a podcast of random people talking maybe that's you right now maybe you are attempting to sleep and i should have avoided saying that third swear word that i'd mentioned earlier

Maybe it jolted you awake and you're like, that word is not okay, Justin. Anywho. I was in bed with an AirPod in my ear because I'd been listening to a podcast because I'd been head on a sleep timer for 15 minutes, fell asleep. The some number of hours later with the AirPods still in my ear, I started, you know, the phone ringing sound woke me up and I.

I'm asleep. You know, seriously, you don't know what you just know a jingle is happening and you're like, well, I did not need to start playing any music. And so you tap it right to like pause the fucking music. But that. Now you've just answered the phone. And so now you've got a second problem, which is there's a lady in your head and she's like, hello, this is right everywhere. And I was like, whoa, slow down. She said,

This is ring home monitoring and a burglary alarm was just detected in your residence. Would you like me to dispatch the police? And I said, well, I don't know. I can you hold on a minute? And then I got my phone out and I was looking at the, like, we've got two cameras on the outside of the house. And I was like, can you tell me anything else? Cause like I see my pool guys parked out front, but like, I don't know.

what what it doesn't look like anything happened and and she she asked for my safety word which is coincidentally because you know, people struggle to have too many passwords and pin codes in their head. My sex safety word and my ring alarm safety word are actually the same word, which is separately now that I think about it, like kind of fun.

Some number of like home monitoring alarm people now, like if they ever do have sex with me, they'll be like, whoa, hey, wait a second there. That sounds familiar, that word.

So anyway, if you listened to version 36 of the program, you might know that I'm here, ostensibly, to buy a condominium, which in Japanese is referred to as a manchon, as a second home for Becky and I. so that we can split time between Japan and America, which has been a dream of mine my entire adult life, and we're this close to pulling it off. But nothing makes me more excited about owning two homes than...

Waking up in the middle of the night wondering, is my house burning down? Is it being actively burgled while I'm on the other side of the planet? As it is, I'm stressed out about like, you know, things like, oh, the front door locks, battery is going to die. And I will not be present. All sorts of things about winterizing a home. At the end of the day, if you're going to be gone for more than a couple of months, you really just need somebody on site who can go and check on it.

I don't think there's any real way around that. So I'm coming to grips with that on both sides. So if you're thinking of pulling off the second home life, which I don't necessarily recommend because I think it's way too much, if... If America sold canned chew-high cocktails, I wouldn't be doing this. But because it doesn't, I am inconveniencing my life and spending a great deal of money for the privilege. So yeah, let's see, we're celebrating, you know.

Seven days from now, I was originally going to go on a solo trip to Japan. Becky had blessed it. It was actually her idea. She was like, you know what? Your dad's death and taking care of your mom's. finances and stuff and all the other shit that you've been doing for other people lately. Maybe you should just take a trip on your own. It was her idea. And so I signed up to do that trip. That trip starts in seven days. So I'm kind of currently in this interregnum where I am still on the...

lock down the condo we want to buy mission. If and when that ends, I will be in some liminal space between the two trips, which I will not be actually flying back and home to Florida. I will just sit. and think about what I just did. And yeah, so that trip was gonna be my 20th anniversary. Because it was June 2005 when I first came to Japan to do an internship in Hikone, in Shiga Prefecture, followed by a study abroad semester, so about six months.

And, you know, incidentally, this interregnum that I'm speaking of is Becky and Mai's 18th wedding anniversary. So not to say that... because it's got two years on her, Japan is nearer and dearer to my heart than she is. But it does have seniority, I suppose, in that I'm going to be missing my anniversary to be here drinking Kan Chuhai.

So I love you, Becky. I hope you're listening. If you're listening, it's probably a sign that you miss me, and I miss you too, even though it's been a grand total love. uh 23 hours we miss each other immediately because we're still lovebirds and we totally are just uh uh obsessed with each other uh as a factor of both of the depth and breadth of our love and also how few friends we have, which explains why we both have podcasts. But seriously, folks,

It's been a pretty wild trip so far. A few random memories stand out. If you follow internet people, there's a guy named Craig Mod. I don't know what his legal name is, but he internets as Craig. No space, no adornment, M.O.D. at the end. blogging for a long time. He writes books, like one-off little fancy books for people who like fancy avant-garde shit. And there's a book that he wrote several years ago, I think it was like around...

Just pre-COVID, he was taking these long walks through Japan. He lives in Japan. And it was called Kisa by Kisa, referring to Kisa-ten, which are like post-war period... coffee shop, tea shop, you know, restaurant places, cafes. You could think of it as a traditional Japanese cafe, I suppose. And among the many...

things. First of all, they're dying because the people who started these things up are old now and the people who still go to them are old. And so when you think of like what makes a Kisa a Kisa relative to like a Starbucks, which has since taken over Japan and there's now more Starbuckses in Japan than McDonald's. is in Japan, and there were a lot of those. What makes Akisa? Akisa, I think, I close my eyes and I think, okay, I'm thinking like,

you know, a lot of dark wood. I'm thinking a very fancy blended coffee that costs $7 and you don't get free refills. I'm thinking of parfaits and toast and eggs and egg sandwiches in terms of food offerings. I'm also thinking about smoking. There's a lot of smoking going on typically. And you know, otherwise it's just normal cafe shit.

Well, the thing about Craig's book, at least his discussion of his book, I don't know how much the book, I didn't buy the book because I'm not a book person, but I listen to podcasts while I'm trying to fall asleep. and on such a podcast five years ago, he was talking about the book, and he said that he was really, he'd fallen in love with pizza toast, which was like a Japanese kisaten specialty, because...

not having a lot of equipment in terms of a kitchen facility, you would have like a toaster oven or a small grill and you could put like a big old fucking Texas toast into that. And so you do that, you'd slather on. Probably initially it was just ketchup, but like, you know, some sort of tomato sauce and some sort of probably not very high quality shredded cheese. Not a lot of it. Maybe some pepperoni, maybe like a mushroom or something. It's like a Western style.

dish that a middle school student could totally make. Like on the list of, you know, if you've got like a middle school age child, there's probably a list of like appliances they're allowed to use and not allowed to use in the kitchen. This is a middle school and under. friendly after-school snack. And yet...

You know, Craig had tremendous affinity for it. And I'd had it once or twice before, but it had been years because most Kisaten are closed and the ones that are still operating don't necessarily serve it. And so I found I was in Niigata with Becky. And I was looking for some lunch. I was looking for a good egg sandwich, honestly. And so that had me looking at Kisatan. None of them offered egg sandwiches, which was a bummer. Japanese egg sandwiches are awesome. So instead...

I saw right on the tabulog reviews, like this place has pizza toast. And so I was like, all right, I'll check it out. You know, pizza toast is great. So I went and I showed up. And I wasn't prepared for like the karmic moment that it was. bringing upon me. But I sat down at the table. I ordered a blend coffee set with a pizza toast. 800 yen, 750 yen, which translates to about five dollars.

They add a little cabbage-y salad as well. Tabasco sauce and salt as well, which is not typically served with any fucking thing in Japan, so I appreciate that. Although I guess pizza sometimes will come with Tabasco here. often come with Tabasco here. Correction. I was getting served my stuff and just before it came out I noticed like this was a scene. I did this sort of like letterbox directorial view of the situation.

And to my left, there was a woman dressed like she was in her 30s, but clearly in her late 50s, smoking a long drag on a skinny cigarette, not with a fancy holder, but you know. It was the middle of the day. She was by herself. There's a salaryman in the center and he was just chain smoking and he was reading the paper, physical paper, newspaper. And he saw me come in. He was like, yeah, I'm good.

I killed whatever vibe he had, he walked out. And on the right, there were two older women and they were having a little chat and it looked like they'd been coming to this place for 40 fucking years. And then on the far right in the corner there was a window and through that window you could see excavation equipment like those claw diggery guys. I don't remember my Tonka truck.

you know, toys, the transformers that like do things in the ground and then don't transform into killer robots, those ones. Yeah, so... Clearly like the store next door was being actively torn down and it was pretty loud and it was the middle of the day so it was not the most like inviting environment. So I'm just like zooming out here and I'm like taking it all in.

the the master was clearly like like the often in japanese uh restaurant terminology the master is is uh nomenclature for whoever is running the joint because most places are just run by a dude or a lady, but a dude almost always. And so I noticed him and he was, you know, dressed up, you know, all formal, like a butler, which I guess is also kind of part of Kisa culture if it considers itself a higher class one.

And, uh, his hair was all stringy and surfer duty. Like he was like a cool guy, but also like late sixties. And so like wiry and really gray and this, this feeling of just like, man, this is a. This might be the last time I get to go to one of these, if I don't make a point of it. And then all of a sudden, right before the pizza toast came, I started hearing this like really...

deep bellowing howl and I looked back and it was that lady it was that older dressed like younger lady and I realized in addition to smoking and having some food in front of her She was sobbing. She was sobbing like she was at a funeral of her entire immediate family who had just been murdered by her brother or something. Like, it was... It was a sob that was just deep, like...

She was experiencing deeper feelings than I think I've ever felt. I think I've felt deeper feelings about her in that moment than I've felt about any of the own shit in my own life. My dad died in December. And I saw some people get really, really, like, emotionally impacted by it, grieving deeply. And it was touching. You know, I grieve in my own way.

I cry and stuff and I get misty. I'm ashamed to say that I get as misty at the end of a good movie when the, when the soundtrack hit just right as I do when like somebody close to me dies, which is fucked up, but I don't know. There's no right way to do it. But thinking of all those experiences with all those people grieving around the loss of my dad, I didn't hear anything like this. Like, I know people loved him, but like, whatever she's mourning.

is either real real fucked up and dark like i don't know like maybe she's got uh all of her money out to loan sharks and she can't pay right like maybe she had a pachinko addiction or her husband did or you know like deep shame has fallen behind like upon her and her family i don't I was, listen, look, the reason for all this speculation is the five minutes between her starting to sob and me receiving my pizza toast was about 45 minutes long in terms of how it felt.

And he's just sodding. It's getting wet. It's getting mucusy, you know, because there's just like the waterworks are running. I get the pizza toast. And as I'm receiving the pizza toast, the master is like looking at, he realizes what's happening. the second that he sets it down he looks at me and he's like i i don't know what we do here

Well, and I was actually immediately relieved because I thought, oh, well, good. This isn't like a daily occurrence. You know, people don't just come to your old timey rundown about to go out of business cafe. just to sob about how terrible their lives are and the regrets that they've accrued over a long life throughout Japan's post-war economic boom and then bust.

So I was like, okay, well, at least this is weird for him too. That makes me feel a little bit better. And she just kept on sobbing. And I was like, this pizza toast isn't getting any warmer. So I just started, you know. And I was like eating it, you know, and it was like, it was pre-sliced, so I didn't have to like cut it per se. But I did anyway, because like, you know, my mouth's only so large. And I...

I started eating it and it was really crunchy. It was like extremely loudly crunchy to the point where I was drawing the attention of the sobbing lady and now she's looking at me and she's realizing, oh my god, this gaijin can see that I'm sobbing. And so whatever. amount of you know emotions were happening the shame dial got turned up and so now she's looking at me and looking at her food and looking at her cigarette and uncontrollably sobbing and uh

I just kept finishing that toast because I was in it to win it. I paid my 700 yen. Or committed to pay. Drank my coffee, looked around. The, uh... Sobbing lady eventually, like the guy eventually like bust the lady's table mid sob, not really communicating. She pulled out a purse, paid something, and she eventually left.

And I texted Becky like, that was really fucking weird. Like, I don't know what just happened. And a few days later, Becky had an experience. She was here too in Japan for a couple of weeks with me. She had an experience where like she saw women alone sobbing in public. And then I saw another one on a train and she was just sobbing by herself in public. No men sobbing, just women.

I don't know why. Didn't get to ask. I should have asked. Maybe I could. It's the kind of culture where the right thing to do is to say fucking nothing and just let it happen. This is a culture where if you're in an elevator, the worst thing you can do is talk at all. You just stare straight forward and you don't look at other people or think about their business. Well, you think about it, but you don't say anything.

so like you know because you'd just be bringing more shame to like force somebody to vocalize what the fuck's going on like by saying are you okay or whatever like i saw like this woman like she fell down in front of me this older lady she was about four feet tall and she was very old and she like she was walking in front of me in the street and she's uoka

And her whole body, it was like her bones were just jello or cartilage. It just like fell. It looked like a bad video game physics, you know, just like crumpled in front of me at a weird angle. And I didn't know what to do. It was like kind of... catchy swoopy dive and I was like, are you okay? And then the fact that I asked if she was okay was way worse for her from her perspective than the fact that I like was, that she'd fallen at all.

So that'll serve me right. So anyway, didn't say anything to the lady. Didn't say anything to any of you ladies. And then on Becky's last night here, because she went back yesterday. We had a Mohsburger. Becky was like, you know, I want one more Mohsburger. I want like, you know, I need some more protein after dinner because we only got steak for dinner.

You know, it's your last time on the trip. You want to have like all the foods. You got to make sure that you get a good ramen. You know, you got to get a good tonkotsu ramen. You got to get a good tonkotsu pork cutlet. which is what I was about to say before I fucked up the pronunciation of those two words, which I seem to always do. So we're at Mosberger, and she sits down. He finally gets her Mosberger, and then this woman sits down right next to her, just right next to her.

And she's another older woman, lots of makeup, so it's kind of hard to tell what's going on. And she's sniffling and she's like, stuff's happening in the eyes and the water's going. And like lots of like quick sniffs. And I swear to God, my first reaction is she is either sobbing and trying not to sob really hard, or she's got some kind of respiratory infection that is going to result in both of us getting super COVID. And I was like,

Becky, I was like, if there was like spare tables around, I would have really just picked up Becky's little basket of burger and like led her to another table surreptitiously somehow. But that wasn't on the table. literally because there weren't any tables. So I instead just

watched this lady sniffle snob cough a little. And walking out of there the minute that we did, Becky and I both just turned to each other and Becky's like, like one, two, three, like Becky's like, whoa, that lady was sobbing. And I was like, coughing like dying right like so we don't know for sure if she was sick or sobbing but upon reflection i think becky's right i think she was just also sobbing

uh it's great national pastime i don't know why more people don't do it seems like it's all the rage right now especially among um you know pre-elderly old women i don't know where the elderly line is but you know they they seemed ambulatory Yeah, so sobbing women everywhere, that's apparently the next stage of Japan's depopulation crisis. The country that brought you, you know, the popular news line of what do they say?

they're more adult diapers sold in Japan every year than than baby diapers. And that's been true for so long that it's like a trope now.

Other stuff that's gone on in the trip that's memorable, I got to go out for dinner with Koichi Ito, and he's the fella.

who works on RuboCop so diligently, and RuboCop is the Ruby library upon which StandardRuby, the linter and formatter that I published initially and that TestDouble maintains, well, he... he's done a lot of work by pulling stuff out of standard and into rubocop including most recently this lint roller plug-in and so if you follow my newsletter i wrote about why that was so precious to me and i'll link back to which one that was i think it was

January of this year's edition and I wanted to get him out to dinner, thank him, get to know him better as a person. Had a great time. Had a good meal. And in the process of the meal, it became clear I was asking about succession plans for Mats, the guy who runs Ruby.

You know, he invented Ruby 35 some years ago. I think he's like 60 now. You know, a lot of people are asking, hey, you know, are you gonna retire? Like, what's the succession plan look like? A lot of people assume it's gonna be some sort of. community vote among the committers to elect some kind of leadership or some kind of, you know, governing boards, steering committee, I don't know. But I use the phrase BDFL.

with Koichi and realized he had never heard it before. And I was like, oh, well, it stands for and then realizing that all of the contingent words in this are kind of hard or two of them anyway. Benevolent dictator for life. You know, like DHH over Ruby on Rails is a benevolent dictator for life. Linus Torvalds over Linux is a benevolent dictator for life. Bit of a tongue twister. And Matz as well is a BDFL.

Now, Mats knows the phrase BDFL because people talk to him about it all the time. His English is pretty good. But, like, Koichi didn't. And so here I am, like, asking and, you know, Googling in Japanese, like, what does BDFL mean? And I found a Wikipedia article, and I had a funny title, and the funny title was... So like that phrase right there literally means a nice lifelong dictator.

or kind lifelong dictator. And so there's a Wikipedia article that I will link to that is literally like explaining to people what BDFL is, as if it's some sort of like organizing principle for how we run the world. It's clear in the article that it's like mostly about open source stuff because that's the only real place that this has emerged so far.

because we've only got really one and a half generations of humans writing software. But one assumes that we're going to get to the point where BDFLs are going to be a flash in the pan. Although, although...

Software still is and remains one of the only things where like a single person can build it and then the rest of the world can depend on it simultaneously with like zero marginal cost for duplication. So it's not like, you know, if you were to build a chair and then everyone in the world wanted that chair, right?

Like you would need to scale up some sort of human infrastructure and like teams and peoples and committees and like branch offices and shit, factories. So like succession would be built into that because you'd have a whole lot of people around you. You can just like write one really awesome thing.

Badgers, like Daniel, what's his name, who writes curl. Like he could, in theory, just write curl and never share it with anyone. But like curl is a tool that's used by everyone, right? So I don't know, maybe BDFLs are just sort of built into software as the default.

way that software is governed. I don't know. Oh, yeah. Whose bone is that? So Becky and I, we will often, when we're in Japan, say to each other, Whose bone is this? And we say it when we're eating a food that is on a stick, but the stick is a bone, a real bone from a species. And this happens most often with frankfurters, like hot dogs. So it's kind of like a gag item except like you see it.

You see it too often for it to be strictly a gag. Like was it pizza law or pizza pan in Japan has like a side item like chicken nuggets or chicken wings. You can order sausages and the sausages come on a bone. And so it's like, it looks like a hot dog, looks like a little sausage, like a little Vienna sausage, you know, maybe four inches long, but it's on a bone, like a, like a, like a, like a drum, like a chicken drum wing bone.

And you're like, that sausage is not a chicken sausage necessarily. And if it's pork or whatever, like, I don't know what pork bone, pig bone maps to this. And I don't know, you know, how the bone was inserted.

or came to be associated with this meat product. And the dissonance, right, between like the meat product that I am trying to consume, the bone that was presumably... dead a long time before it was came to be reassociated with this a different meat that I'm eating it from kind of hoping that you don't bite into for that reason I don't know like biting into a bone that is eminently related to the meat that it's that that on seems fine like there's a similar amount of

life force or Gaia still associated with the bone. So that seems okay. Like the, the, I mean, the tendons are still connected, so it's kind of all of a piece, but like if this bone just been sitting in a drawer for three months, like I don't want to be biting into that cause that's not hygienic.

Anyway, when we eat such a product, because we have no shame and we're happy to order things that are hilarious, Becky and I will look at each other and say, oh, whose bone is this? It's happened long enough that this has kind of been a running gag for close to a decade between us.

And I just had a whose bone is this moment. I was at a kushiage place. Kushi means stick and age means fried, often referred to as a kushikatsu place because like katsu means cutlet and one of their kind of go-to items. are beef or pork cutlets that are fried and on sticks. There you go. Well, this place had one called Churip. I don't remember having had it before. I probably have, but I didn't really connect what the fuck was going on here. And what came out was like an all dark meat

All meat, like felt processed, but I've since learned it wasn't. It was like all of the good meat on a chicken drum. but it was some of that like thigh meat kind of rolled in and it was really good and it was fried and there's no real bones or cartilage or tendon it was just like a big old fucking chunk of meat and it was on a bone.

And I was like, you know, I've eaten a lot of chicken. And I've eaten all, you know, we ordered the rotisserie chicken. I've eaten all the parts. I've investigated. I've gotten the lay of the land. And this kind of meat bite and this kind of bone... hold. They do not map together. Like, on any normal species of chicken, I shouldn't be able to do this. So a Chutipu, which is katakana, and it's taking after a tulip. So like, this is a...

I've since Googled, and apparently it's a delicacy in Japan particularly, even though it's called to French something, a drumette. You take the drum and you kind of like just like reconstitute all of the meat at the end of the bone. You don't actually remove the bone, so it is the same chicken's bone most of the time, I have learned.

So the answer to whose bone is this is the same chicken that I was eating, but I'll post a picture. Maybe that'll be the art for this episode. It's delicious and innovative and distressing. And that's what I love about this country. Well, that's about enough life stuff for now. Let's follow up to what else is going on.

All right, so let's follow up on follow-up items. If you are a subscriber to Searles of Wisdom, which is my monthly newsletter, the idea of the newsletter, the conceit. if you will, is that every month I put out an episode, an issue right in the beginning of the month to describe what the fuck happened last month.

And of course, the joke is, here's two things that happened last month, an essay about a totally unrelated evergreen topic. And it's really bad for SEO because a lot of these essays are things where I'm like, I should really post this to the blog as like a... proper blog posts, but really they just live as issues of this newsletter. And I try to, because the line between newsletter and blog are so blurry to begin with, I kind of like treat it like a

playground for subscribers to just see some side of me that I don't normally show. But really, the reason that I write the newsletter is for me because I want to, as I'm fond of saying,

plant a stake in the ground every month and say, every month I need to have a useful thought, a deep thought about something that fucking matters. It could be a retrospective thing. It could be a prospective thing. It could be... uh a silly thing it could be creative writing that doesn't mean anything at all right like i just want to have have gone through the exercise and the pain and the tumult and the turmoil of writing something carefully

This month was a real fucking mess because on the flight, as April 30th was becoming May 1st or May 1st was becoming May 2nd, I didn't have internet access and I wrote like 1500 words. of what would become 2,500 words of this newsletter. And that last bit, that last little nugget, where I'd already kind of built up everything to my point pretty much clearly.

That only took me like 19 more days, but I got there I got there and it was miserable because I'd sit down to write But then I'd be working on condo related stuff or something would come up or I'd have to switch hotels and

For whatever reason, I never got more than like an hour and a half at the computer at any given time. And I was really struggling to land the plane. Even remember like, well, what? By week two of this, right? You're like, what the fuck was I trying to say with this newsletter to begin with?

And then you get some cost fallacy. You're like, I could just scrap this and write about something else, like how to buy a condo in Japan. So that's all that fits in my goddamn head right now. But the problem is I haven't actually successfully bought a condo in Japan yet. And so it would be a little presumptive to write a blog like a

how to post about that. So I just kept fucking that chicken. I just was like, you know what? I'm just going to force it because sometimes in life things are hard and the only way through is through and you got to just. nose axe grindstone your way to the other end so i that's what i did

It's what I did, and I got through it, and I wrote it, and the minute that I published it, it was funny. I was sitting next to Becky, and she just happened to check her mail, and she's reading it, and she's chuckling and commenting and stuff. It's funny when I've got such a strict...

barrier in my mind between the things I do for me and the things I do for other people. And the weird thing is everything that I share publicly into the universe, including this podcast, is first and foremost for me. It's because I want to process stuff in this case orally out my mouth hole. And I, you know, if you don't like listening to your own shit, right? Like I listened to this podcast and I enjoy this podcast. This might be Breaking Change is Justin Searles' favorite podcast.

I publish the episode. I do all the work. I do the edit. I put it on the internet. And then it shows up in my Apple podcast player. And I'm like, sick, motherfuckers. Got a new episode of break and change on my feed. What? And then I listen to it. And I'm like. Damn, this guy slaps. Like, shit you not. That is my lived experience. And you can't argue with somebody's lived experience. It's something I learned in 2020. And why is that? It's because, like, I think...

Having my mom is somebody who is like very like as a child I'm saying like when I was a kid. Let me back up. My mom is somebody who she she commands attention. And one way to do that is to filibuster, right? Like just talk too much as I do in podcast form. And one way to do that is to be really thoughtful and insightful.

and or just throw people off. Subvert expectations is the modern phraseology that we often use for this. And my mom's really good at both of those things. She's really good at talking. and verbally processing through all of her thoughts. And unfortunately, like her, I often struggle to actually know what I'm thinking until I've had a chance to talk through it.

Although GPT Advanced Voice Chat is like helping me do that a little bit better and spare some of my friends and family. But Because I grew up in an environment where somebody in the household communicated that way, somebody as impressionable as one's own mother, I just had it buried into my skull at a very young age.

that like it was everyone's duty. to be fascinating. When we talk about what's a good life, it's like, well, you live with dignity and integrity and you follow these 10 commandments and you are an upstanding member of society and you do well in school and you get a good job and you get good pay and then you have

a kid and you get married or whatever the fuck and then you mow the lawn a lot and then and you keep mowing the lawn until you can't anymore and then you go to another place where they mow the lawn for you but you kind of just stay in the bed forever and then you die but like there's an additional imperative in my brain which is be fucking fascinating. First and foremost, if you're living your life and you're a boring ass fuck, meaning that you find your own goddamn life boring.

I'm not here to judge. I'm saying this moment, this comment could be the first day of the rest of your life. If you Couldn't stand in front of a microphone for an hour and talk about yourself and how you're thinking through things and what you're doing and what you know if You would bore yourself to try to do that then something is wrong Like, what's the point of life if it's not to be interesting? And the greatest calling in my experience...

At least in my ideology, I should say. I'm saying these things categorically because they're axiomatic from the Justin Searle's cerebellum perspective. I know most people don't act like this, but for me... A day in my life that is boring or dull or unproductive or doesn't move the needle in any way or doesn't make a fun story, like that's a day that's wasted and we only have 4,000 weeks and 4,000 times 7 is a number I'm told.

I'm told. I don't want to guess at the number because I've forgotten it. I'm not going to type it now because I can't think math while I'm talking. I'm good at verbally processing, but I can't think through math. 28. I'm going to say. Anyway, it's got to be 28, right? Yeah. Jesus fuck. So 28, what, thousand days? It's not a lot of days. So you have like, you waste a day going to work and then not.

Not making something of it right or coming home right and just like tuning out like For me and the thing is like when I say be fascinating I don't mean go goddamn bungee jumping every day like for me Part of it could just be where are you?

What are you doing? How are you thinking about what you're doing? Like, you know, like, like yesterday, my laptop right now is standing on top of a, what seems to be a two and a half foot cube. cardboard box. Me figuring out where to find this box, how to buy it, how to get it back to this hotel... and not look like I was robbing them and then assemble it so that I can kind of build this shitty studio that is

that I'm standing in front of right now because I needed to prop up the laptop so I could speak at a camera at like the appropriate height, right? And so like the number of things like working backwards is like, okay, well, there's no tall tables in this room. I don't want to be seated because there's like...

a vanity chair over there that wouldn't be appropriate for sitting for three hours and then i was like okay so how do i make the laptop tall and i'm like pulling down like this like like gigantic zippered bag of extra like futon and and comforter I guess maybe pillow and like piling them up and putting the laptop on top of this pretty precarious and that's not a solution.

I go outside and I start looking for stores. I'm in the middle of this particular prefecture that is kind of a suburban hellscape. wandering around I go to a 100 yen store I'm like maybe if I can pile up some like inboxes and then you know like like like like paper inboxes right that you would put documents into if I stack up seven of those and put the laptop on top of that and that didn't work

So I went to a home goods store and I was like, wait a second, like they sell moving boxes. So I started asking the lady like, do you guys sell moving boxes? She's like, oh yes, are you moving? I'm like, no, I just need to put a... can you just show me where they are? And so I go and find where they are, and I get, you know, to realize that the way that they measure boxes in Japan is, of course, metric and not imperial, and that they count it by, like...

the diagrams for like how big each of these boxes were like confusing enough but then I realized for each box size they had a sample unit that you could like fuck with. I was like okay cool and so like I'm here I am just like literally squatting down and like like assembling different cardboard boxes i buy the one that i want i i start walking out and then immediately there's a huge windstorm and i basically got like a kite

like this huge like unfolded box and it's like whipping away and it starts to tear, you know, like I get back to the hotel, I assemble the box. I get some of the binding tape that she'd left to like to mark it as having been sold. I seal the box with that and now here we are and I've got my own little recording studio, right? Like a stupid fucking story. It's not interesting.

on its own but because it was like there was the pressure of like I gotta figure out how to like record a podcast tomorrow morning because I'm only in this hotel for two days and then I got shit to do. I don't have time to do it afterwards. Like I only get one shot at this. How am I going to make this laptop be three feet taller? It became a story because that's got all of the workings of something that's just... it's...

There is a tension there, right? Like I could fail like and and things could go wrong and It doesn't mean that you have to find the story interesting. It just means that I was living it and it was stressful. Maybe there's a relationship between my desire to Find myself and my life fascinating and the fact that I am so high-strung

and so high-stressed and dialed in all the time, right? We often think about the stress as the negative thing, right? Well, you should be chill. You should be more relaxed. Well, the thing is like if you're super relaxed, you also kind of just don't fucking care. And if you're super relaxed about your life, maybe sometimes it means you don't fucking care about your life. Here I am like, all right, so 466 millimeters seems to be tall enough, right? But like...

Could I stack it up to 520 millimeters if it was only 380 millimeters wide? I'm doing this math and sampling it out and trying to judge. if an empty cardboard box would fall over with a laptop on top of it at these different perspectives. Now like that's like, is that me being high strung and stressed out? Yes, but also like it kind of incorporates into the like, you know, you could everything short of the soundtrack.

is playing in this home goods store as I'm like, you know, CSI leading with like all of the like, you know, trigonometry and calculus derivatives like floating in my head in front of me. Right. So All that to say, the newsletter took me a long time. Took me a long time to write. And that's... That function for me of pausing and sharing things with you, ostensibly with you, for myself though, like in a periodic, occasional way.

For me, it is really, really valuable to punctuate my existence through Some you know some scatterbrain short-term things like I started vlogging I haven't shared any of these but these are just like one minute videos I record every single day vertical video talking to myself while I'm walking from place to place It's kind of like a little journal

right? That is a different function, right? Then going on a podcast and talking for three hours about like contemporaneous tech news and programming shit is a different one than writing a monthly newsletter. that like you force yourself to like, this is going to matter, this is going to be about something important, is a different thing than just writing a blog post, right? Like these are all different creative exercises.

The thing I guess I want to impart about this is that I'm sorry that my newsletter was late, but I just, and Becky very many times was like, dude, you could just be with me and be a chill, normal motherfucker, and maybe people wouldn't notice if you missed your monthly newsletter. Hell, if anything, you're just going to call attention to the fact it was three weeks late by putting it out on May 19th.

I just couldn't do it. Not because of them, but because of me. I want to be able to say that I did this thing. And I want to have done it because I think that there's value in it. I've decided that there's value in it. I am the arbiter of what I believe is interesting, worth it, fascinating. And so anyway, I think about that sometimes because I've never heard this articulated by anybody else, so I'm not sure how you feel about it.

I'd be curious if you think that this is a new idea to you or an old idea, an obvious idea. Either way, I'd love to hear your perspective on you and your own fascinatingness. Unfortunately for you, you can email. podcast at Searles.co and potentially I'll read this on the show if I can just get over myself and not keep talking about this metal layer. Moving right along.

I posted again a follow-up to the blog. I posted that I've been to 35 of the 47 prefectures in Japan. I did that as an exercise because Koichi was asking how many I'd been to and I didn't really know. It turns out the answer was 35, although today I'm staying in Saitama in part because I'd never been there before, and so now it's been 36. So I'll have to update that page, and I've got now a month or so.

to travel the country and I'll see how many I'm able to knock off in the course of that. In fact, I was thinking about potentially doing a road trip, a solo road trip and touring around some of the more, you know, back burner. places that are kind of like out of off the beaten path and realize I found the service I can I can rent a decent enough newish enough car for just $500 a month and

That's not a lot. That's like less than a lot of people's payment. So I might just rent a car for a month and just drive and figure it out. Still trying to figure out what I want to do with that.

Anywho, the biggest follow-up, right, is like version 36 was, hey, I'm going to fly to Japan tomorrow and buy a condo. I was young and stupid. But I... You know, I've been to a lot of places in Japan. I've been all over the place. I've lived in suburbs. I've spent a lot of time in downtown cities. I've been out in the real boonies. I've been up in mountains. I've been on the sea.

Like I said, I've been in most of the prefectures of the country prefectures are like states if you don't know This trip in particular, we went to Asakusa, which is like a historically significant part of Tokyo, and we walked in on this three-day Matsuri festival, and they're moving the big Shinto floats and stuff, and everyone's excited and drunk.

And I, you know, had a beautiful day in Yokohama. We went to Yokohama together. It was a gorgeous, sunny, warm day. And we walked the whole, all through all the piers. We walked up and down the famous Chinatown.

And all I can say is I'm really glad to not be moving to those places. And I'm really glad to not be buying a house in either of them or in the vast majority of places in Japan that I've been. I love to visit, right? But what do I want out of a second home is... a place to have a home base where I can sit and I can do good work, where I can walk to a gym, get a good workout.

exercise my body as well as my mind, that it has delicious food, also ideally within walking distance, and entertainment, ideally within walking distance, and then also fantastic transportation. so I can get wherever I want to go in the country relatively easily. It also should have good weather. It should have good access to nature, right? So like, be near the mountains, be near the ocean, not necessarily in the middle of both. It should be relatively protected from natural disasters.

The particular spot that Becky and I have landed is just south of Shizuoka Station, and it is literally all of these things. From the perspective of amenities and stuff to do, the city is so diverse. Setting aside the part that like the economy is pretty good and like it's a very nice place and like affluent. which I always like because affluence tends to breed like businesses and shit to do and nice things to eat. But it feels almost like a video game map. Like, so I was in Yokohama.

And I'm playing through Yakuza Like a Dragon, which takes place in Yokohama. Except in the game, you can run from one end of the video game map to the other in like three minutes. And in real Yokohama, I can tell you, like just walking across that pier took... Becky and I like two hours and it was exhausting and it was so sparsely populated with shit to do that I was pretty boring. Shizuoka is more like the video game. Like, you just walk every block has some kind of cool thing going on.

And the weekends, there's activities and there's people doing shit. It's just a vibrant town. Like you go from the station, you walk a couple blocks, it's like full of restaurants. You walk another block, it's a red light district. You walk another block, you have all of the kind of government.

buildings and municipal stuff. You know, you go in the other direction, you've got this like Beautiful residential suburban area and you've got a city park and a school and you walk a little bit further and you got like a commercial district and all of this is like totally accessible You know within a 10-15 minute walk walking radius and then if you want to go somewhere you can get on like the

two train stops over and you're on the beach and you've got like little beach town stuff with new developments and restaurants and great stuff to do. And if you go take the other train line up, just like a few stations, you got several other little town-like environments that you could visit and go a little further than that, and now you're in the mountains, right? And almost all of it has great views of Mount Fuji, if you get up high. It's got, uh, because the Tokugawa Shogunate.

was based in that area. It's got this famous road, so it's got a ton of rich history as well and a famous temple and a ropeway that connects that temple up to this 1,400 stairs that you can climb and all these.

kind of more traditionally touristy historical activities. It is just absolutely chock-a-block with shit that I love about this country in one tight place. Oh, and then in terms of access... it's an hour you know i'm not trying to sell you on this but like why i'm so excited about this particular city and why all of my research kind of landed me towards this might be the only city like this in the country you're an hour from tokyo but like via the Shinkansen, so it's fast and convenient, but...

not an hour, not anywhere close to an hour via commuter rail. And most people in Japan, like the Tokyo sprawl is defined by how far can I get on a commuter pass because my employer will pay. a monthly fee for a commuter rail pass for me. But like that radius is significantly smaller. And Shizuoka is well beyond it. And so you'll never experience this, like it's sort of just the general sprawl from Tokyo into Shizuoka, at least not with the rail system as it exists today.

And so you can get to Tokyo in an hour, but you have to pay 50 bucks on a Shinkansen, which no commuter is ever going to do. It doesn't have too many tourists. because there's not that many famous tourist things to do, and so it's got a few hotels, a few nice hotels, but it's not just overrun, especially with foreign tourists all the time, which is great. In the other direction...

You can take the same Shinkansen bullet train to Maibara station, which is in Shiga, where I'm, you know, started my life in Japan. And it's pretty much equidistant from Tokyo. It's like another hour, 20 minutes or so. You go just one stop further is like fucking Kyoto and one stop after that is Osaka like and so you're you're pretty quickly like wow you're like

right smack between Tokyo and Osaka. And on the Tokaido-sen, which is the most important Shinkansen track in the country, you can go all the way, most of the way up Honshu and most of the way down Honshu, and then that connects down to Kyushu. Pretty soon it'll connect all the way up to throughout most of Hokkaido as well. Like this is, this is really nice. Like you can land at Haneda airport, be to where this particular condo is going to be.

If you play your cards right and all the timing works out, with a single train transfer, you can be there in like an hour and 25 minutes. Like, that's nuts. It is too good. Uh, and, and I, I, I landed here and I got here on day one. I was like, clearly like I got, I'm going to be brought down to earth. Like there's no way that this place is going to hit every single one of these checkboxes as well as it does. Uh, as well, it looks like it does.

But it has. And in fact, my high expectations have been exceeded every single time. Great food, great people, great experiences. And as I visit all these other cities that would have been on my list, people were telling me to move to. Asakusa, or Yokohama, or in this case, Saitama. Literally, I have different people telling me all three of those places. And as I experience those places, I'm like, man, I am so glad I didn't listen to those motherfuckers. I'm so glad I just did my own research.

me and my true friend ChatGPT landed on Shizuoka. So that's how we wound up here. The process of trying to purchase the condo has been

really challenging, though, and for understandable reasons. Unlike a lot of countries, foreign non-residents are allowed to buy real estate in the country legally, which is great because that's exactly what I am, a foreign non-resident. However... due to changes in banking regulations pertaining to anti-money laundering, as well as just general trends where a lot of Western banks that used to pride themselves on having a presence in Asia, they've pulled out of retail banking in Asia generally.

And so that drawback, like for example, Citibank used to have a bunch of branches in Japan that you could just get a retail bank account and have it participate as a domestic-ish bank account in Japan. That's gone now. And so the regulations having changed, there's not a bank in the country that'll let a foreign non-resident open a bank account. The know your customer rules are too strict for the anti-money laundering stuff. It's just not worth anybody's time. And so no one lets you do it.

Okay, so rule number one, foreign non-residents are technically allowed to buy real estate. Rule number two, they basically functionally can't get a bank account. Rule number three is that Condo fees like if you buy a condo and you have association fees like an HOA or something like that those pretty much by convention Have to be paid

out of like an auto draft monthly payment out of a domestic bank account because Japan's like ACH equivalent, its domestic bank transfer system is unique to Japan. So like you need the domestic bank account to pay. the monthly fee. which you cannot get as a foreign non-resident, but you can buy as a foreign non-resident, which is why step four, Justin realized real quick as soon as I landed, there's a reason why foreign non-residents don't tend to buy.

like residential condo units that aren't designed for foreigners by just everyday property developers. Because those property developers are only going to sell to you if you can demonstrate that you're going to be able to pay the monthly fees that they're charging you after delivery. You might be able to buy a used condo, no problem, because at that point, the only...

Person whose approval you need is the seller and they're getting out of there, right? You might be able to buy a house, no problem, because it doesn't have the same problem. You just have to be able to pay your taxes. So yeah, I didn't realize I was doing it on hard mode, but there I was. And I worked through a series of different attempts to make this easier before I just gave up. and did things the, I don't know if it's hard, most expensive way.

You know, I have an old bank account. I tried to reactivate it at Storm, and I was not able to initially succeed there. Might take another stab at it. I considered starting a domestic corporation, which I could have done, but it would require...

to actually have a shareholder who is a Japanese resident who could vouch for the company and then create the account, which sort of just takes me back to square one. At that point, I could just give power of attorney to somebody in Japan and say, this is the person whose account I'm using. draw this fund, which I could do, but then that would, again, potentially raise anti-money laundering concerns or just stress.

It's weird, right? It's like, oh yeah, here's my HOA fee. Like here's this guy named Jeff, his bank account and his bank account details. Like he'll pay for all of my fees. That's weird. But there are property management firms, and that's ultimately where I land. So the company does nothing but exactly this, basically, is facilitate.

foreign, non-resident owners, usually for investment properties, usually for rentals, to pay their fees on their behalf using some sort of escrow scheme as a liaison.

Finding one that would do this for me was really tough because it turns out that the vast majority of them either assume that you're renting it out and so they make the money back from that administrative headache that they're doing for you by like charging One and a half percent of the rent of you know, whoever is renting the place or

They're real estate agents that do it as sort of like a cost of doing business sort of thing to try to secure new leads for buyers. And so I found a bunch of services that do this. And I was like, yeah, I'm already like talking about getting into contract and I just need somebody to do this one piece.

to essentially play this role of property representative and pay these accounts. And they're like, oh, yeah, if you're not working with us as a client, we're not going to do that for you because it's a pain in the ass. I'm like, all right, great. So I finally found a company that would like actually just do the thing, and that's very delightful. So between that, I got all my ducks in a row. I'm signing a contract on Saturday. Knock on wood.

And I couldn't be more excited. Everyone involved has been really wonderful. A friend here, a local friend here, who's been a tremendous asset in helping me every single step of the way. He's been a real true friend. It's, yeah. It seems like it might be happening. Now, stay tuned to version 38 of the show because it might all go sideways. And if it does, it does. But I've learned a lot in the process, and it's been a great experience overall, even though it's been...

Pretty trying and time consuming and exhausting. Yeah, I've got nothing else done for the better part of the month, but this is going to be one of the most memorable months of my life. And remember, rule one with me is be fascinating. Every single day has been a fucking adventure. So there we are. God, so many little adventures here speaking of.

So in America, we just sign for shit. You can sign your name, Daffy Duck, and as long as you're the one doing it, people are like, all right, sure. And if the signature really, really matters, somebody might insist that it's...

sort of resembles your name. And if it really, really, really matters, the thing that tends to matter most with signatures in the US is that your signature today should look like it used to look like on some reference document. So for example, when you vote in America, the way that a lot of voter ID laws work is that you need to make sure that the signature on the envelope or whatever, the ballot that you submitted. Looks like the signature usually on your state ID or driver's license.

And that's the closest we have to any sort of verification that you are who you say you are. Well, in Japan, as opposed to signatures, they use seals, which are called hanko, like little like plunky downy stamps that you You have them and they're like stick shaped and you open up a little case and you press it against some ink and then you stamp the paper and that's how you sign a thing. Now it's a much more rigorous system. because not only is every hanko designed to be more or less

unique. There's a cottage industry. Every town has like a little hanko maker who makes these unique-ish rubber seals with people's kanji Chinese character names on them. So you buy one. And there's nothing special about it per se. It should say your name on it. But there might be a little flourish there or styling to kind of make it your own, make it unique. And then in whatever municipality you live in.

What makes it, you know, authoritative is that you go to the city hall and you say, hey, I'm a resident. I live here. Here's my identification, like my number card or whatever. Or if you're a foreigner, your Zaidu card. You go to the City Hall and you say, okay, here's my Honko and here's my ID and I want to register this. uh with with city hall and then you do that and you and you'll get what's called uh uh an inkon show me or uh

Yeah, maybe an inkan todoku shou. Like, you'll get back a document saying like, okay, this is registered as you, and internally, they will have an internal registry of like, yes, this person's name, this person's address. is associated with this particular stamp.

So that way, if you ever get engaged in like a real estate transaction, for example, you can go back to a notary or you can go back to the municipality and get a fresh copy indicating that, yes, you still live there, you still are you, and this is still the hanko that's registered to you. name get a get a fresh copy of that it's got to be fresh like three months or less old and then you you take that to the to the closing you say this is

the certification that this stamp is my stamp, and then you stamp the document, and then that's how you do it, right? And it's a chain of trust system. So that makes some kind of sense. Signatures. Granted, they make no fucking sense at all. So when I was sitting down at the condo, they were like, well, okay, you could register a stamp. And I was like, well, the thing is, legally in Japan, like, you can't actually register a stamp with a municipality if you're not a resident.

You just can't. I had one registered in Nara when we lived there, but there's just no analogous way to do that if you're not a resident because it's the municipality that holds it and holds it based on contingent of your address. if a non-resident inherently doesn't have an address, I just can't do that." So they're like, okay, well, then what?

They used a word that I don't know if it was the technical word or not, but essentially basically a signature certificate is the English translation that the US Embassy has landed on using for this.

because honestly it's like i think the japanese would be like which is a very funny that that's five kanji that mostly just used two syllables over and over uh So figuring out how to do that I was thinking I could go to a local notary and I could get like show them my passport and get and get one of these signature certificates But then realizing that like, you know

Unless you're in Tokyo, that might be a little bit weird or not a normal function that they do a lot. So they might, you know, scrutinize it. And the realtor said, my friend said, like, look, you got to go to the U.S. Embassy to do this. That's going to be what is authoritative and convincing to us. And so I went to the U.S. Embassy. I got a last minute appointment. Appointments are normally like a month out for this.

of thing and I didn't have a whole month, but I was just checking the site and it was like, oh, a new appointment opened up at 8.30 a.m. tomorrow. I guess I'm going to book it. So took advantage of that shinkansen out of Shizuoka, got out the door at like 5.30 in the morning. Got to the U.S. Embassy. It was as fraught as I feared. You know, just like it's like it's literally like going back to America where it's just like.

People aren't nice to you and it's kind of shitty and it's like dirty and stinky and everyone's kind of rude Now granted the actual notaries like the staff that I dealt with directly were really really lovely kind people doing the very best they can with limited resources. Don't get me wrong.

But like from a vibes perspective, man, it was a real shift. Also, like the thing about Japanese bureaucracy and rules is like, yeah, they're really onerous and there's a lot of them, but they're internally consistent and people follow them religiously. One of the rules when you go to the embassy is you can't take a bag with you. Totally fair. You can't take family, can't take people with you. Security is really important. They say you can't take a bag.

larger than 10 inches by 10 inches. And I was like, okay, so like, what if you're there to notarize a document? Because A4 standard issue, like the equivalent of like letter page documents is like 8. 27 times 11.69 inches. So you're saying I can't take a briefcase because that's bigger than 10 by 10 with my documents in it? Like what do I do, right? Do I have to carry naked paper into there?

and just hope that, like, it doesn't rain? Like, I spent so much more time thinking about this 10 by 10 fucking bag rule than anyone who's ever worked at the US Embassy has ever thought about it. And of course, like, they're not open to feedback about this. I don't assume, but like I literally went to the 100 yen store, I went to Daiso and I got like a transparent document, soft shell document zipper just to protect it from the potentiality of rain.

the day that I went. So that way it wasn't technically a bag. And you'll never guess, but when I walked in, a bunch of Americans just had bags and shit. Because of course they did. So. That's what I get for caring. Anyway, that's all I got to follow up on now. We'll just have to see how Saturday goes. Thank you for joining me on this epic journey. Let's go have a terrible pun.

Through the magic of time zones and internet, I was actually able to get a hold of one Aaron Patterson, the person on this program whose responsibility is to provide with us a... an entertaining joke. a pun, a bit of wordplay, I was able to get a hold of him and say, Aaron, I'm going to record a podcast. I need a pun. And he dutifully replied in invisible ink, as he always does. I don't know how he does it.

Because whenever I try to send something in invisible ink, it just sends prematurely. But he did it, and it's time to reveal what he said. And then we'll take whatever he said. I will read it a couple times, I'll let it simmer, marinade, I'll stew in it for a bit, and then I'll rank it alongside all the other puns so far in... 2025 season two. So here we go. Getting there. Oh, man.

Aaron says, I never pre-order video games. Instead, I just by now play later. I never pre-order video games. Instead, I just by now play later. That is... That's real good. That's real good. It's tight. You don't have to play video games to relate to it. Yeah, it's obviously, it's a play on buy now, pay later, right? Klarna is in the news, is getting completely just, you know, apparently huge recession sign that like people are...

In fact, I bet you that what inspired this is I sent him that article about how Klarna's financial reports are really indicating like people are failing to pay back their buy now, pay later purchases. uh hopefully it wasn't for taco bell but still regardless not good this is this might be the new top one this is gonna be this is all right so what's the current top for this year

I thought installing a new shower would make my house worth a lot more, but it turned out to just be a wash. Boom. This is better. This is the number one pun of the year, no doubt in my mind. I was with some something addled mind, but I couldn't think of what. I am pun addled. My pun, get off my pun horse. All right. This is great. I'm excited. It's way more fun to have a pun that I don't hate to talk about with y'all.

than to have most of these puns. So I'm gonna, here, pull my shit back up. Sorry if you can hear more keyword clackity-dackitys. You know, that is the nature of the mobile studio that we are dealing with.

um all right so boom that was quick that was easy number one pun of the year i don't pre-order video games instead i just buy now play later Okay, one other layer of this, right, is like if you do play video games, you probably know what it's like to like on a Steam sale or when a game releases, you buy it, buy a game.

because it's cheap, because like, you know, you get some sense of urgency, like everyone else is doing it. So you buy it with the intention of like, oh yeah, I'll play that later. And then later never comes. And so you wind up, most of the games I spent most of the money on, like.

i've not actually gotten around to playing right because time passes then new games come out right or you realize you just want to play the old games so this pun hits deep like it it's a twist of the knife as well and that's That's the kind of bittersweet confusion of feelings that we're looking for in puns on this podcast. So thanks, Aaron. That's a great one. I will come at you and tell you.

separately, that this was a good pun, because Aaron, he's too busy to listen to a three-hour podcast. He just likes to contribute. So thanks for that. So without further ado, let's take it to the news.

I don't know how you like your babies, but I hope it's extra crisper-y. I didn't have a better way to lead into that. First story, just a little standalone piece. Turns out... we've got becky ever since realizing that like crisper as a tool could create individualized genetic therapies for people including you know custom designer children that you know have

big tits and penises, uh, or, or blonde hair, uh, or whatever the fuck, or, or, you know, a lack of down syndrome. Uh, those are probably the top five check boxes on the form. I've not had kids, but we've got our first ever incident of a child who had a really rare disease and they did the CRISPR addict. They shot it full up of something that was gonna go and slosh around in the mRNA stuff and it's just, it's all, it fixed the thing. And so, you know.

the way that these individualized genetic therapies become normalized is when you're saving somebody's life who could not be saved otherwise, right? And so I think we're going to see a lot of this, and that's great. Because saving lives is good. Of course, it's also going to normalize a pathway in the fee-for-service medicine environment that we live in, industry that we all participate in, in America at least.

uh and uh it's it's a hop skip and a jump away to you know you're a 30 year old and you're getting a shot and it's gonna make your DNA reprogram itself to make your dick bigger. That's just, just around the corner. It's all because it's all thanks to this CRISPR baby.

for for getting his life saved like this so so so so good job kid future me will thank you uh uh on to video game news uh GTA 6, Grand Theft Auto, the 6th edition, where it's almost like this game series is a real life exponential back off algorithm where like the first two happened within a year of each other and then the third one came out a couple years after the second one and then the fourth one was like about a year and a half after that and the fifth one was about

Two years after that and then GTA 4 which was like the seventh one Sixth one like that one That one was like several years later and then GTA 5 was like six years after that I think right And here we are finally getting GTA 6, which is going to return us to Leonidas and the Florida fake state and Vice City and all these places. It seems like they're going to cover a lot of Florida in this game.

except no Orlando, no theme parks, as far as anyone can tell, which is a real disappointment. Yeah, so Grand Theft Auto VI, that's what, like... 11 years. I want to say that the 5 came out in 2014, maybe even sooner. I don't know. It's been in development for a long, long fucking time. And the first trailer was like a bit of a mood piece and the graphics weren't amazing. It was like, okay, sure, Vice City 2, basically.

This second trailer is also a mood piece in that it's a lot of cinematic stitched together and maybe some over-the-shoulder kind of like, you know, gameplay-ish but clearly not gameplay footage. with the real voice actors and you can see the story. It's kind of a Bonnie and Clyde sort of thing with two main characters. An extremely white man that's sure to please all of the white men out there who keep getting companies like Ubisoft to go bankrupt for deigning to have female main characters.

It's probably going to be very successful, no doubt. But the story looks great. This trailer looks fucking awesome. The graphics look great.

And this is what I thought, what I assumed all AAA games would look like by now. Like 10 years ago, if you're like playing like a bunch of... triple a video ass games you're like all right cool so just keep fast like last 10 years i went from looks like absolute dog shit to looks pretty good next 10 years holy shit it's gonna be photorealistic it's gonna be like real people

You know, just amazing graphics. And the reality is, of course, you give me a side by side with a game that came out in 2025 and one that came out in 2015 and and if I if I squint. I might be able to see the 4K texture resolution in the new one. Like, hell, I mean, the Oblivion remaster, like I was watching the side by side of that one and there were certain moments where I was like, which, wait, which one's which again? I don't, I don't know, right?

And that's not because I got bad vision or anything. It's just like, you know, things just haven't changed that much. And so GTA 6, now that looks like a video fucking game that like could not have been done in previous... hardware generations now of course like it cost them probably a billion dollars to make it but hey i'm worth it you should make more billion dollar games so that i can think that these graphics are pretty good actually

It was one of the fastest growing videos of all time. So like clearly I'm not the only person interested. I think it's like sitting at like 115 million fucking views right now on the YouTube. So it's right up there with Breaking Change, the podcast. So check it out if you haven't. If you watch this podcast or listen to it and you don't and you have not yet seen GTA 6, then that is a, in that Venn diagram, you are a polyp.

So thank you. Ars Technica is reporting that Valve is taking another step forward towards making SteamOS a true Windows competitor, which is a bit of a like-out. an over-the-top headline. What it's really saying is that there's a compatibility program now where works on SteamOS is going to be something that Valve publishes for video games.

uh so so when you're a video game right now and you're listed in the steam store like it'll say are you steam deck verified because that's the only real hardware so far that has used steam os and i've got a steam deck sitting right actually you know for the for the for the youtubes i got a fucking hanging off of it i've got a steam deck right here that was totally worth using this prop to say hey look i've got a steam deck

And I play that one game on it, the one Yakuza game on it. It's going to soon have a sibling in that Asus is releasing a product. I think the the or was it the Lenovo go s or something is going to be able to run SteamOS or is going to ship with SteamOS. So now we're dealing with like multiple SteamOS running devices. There's rumors that Valve themselves or maybe licensees are going to be releasing like

essentially desktop boxes that can sit in a home console, like form factor. And so you'll run SteamOS on that and be able to buy and install games. So it makes perfect sense. that they, across multiple hardware profiles, they'll say like, you know, table stakes, this will run on Steam. This doesn't have any sort of like anti-cheat that will prevent it from running on Steam or a launcher that'll require a keyboard and mouse. Like it'll kind of touch on all of those concerns.

And that verification system is really all that they have left in terms of what they've got to be able to demonstrate short of having an ISO image that you can just download and install this thing like Linux onto literally any fucking box, which which maybe is the end game. So so if you're frustrated with Windows. for whatever reason. Proton, which is the translation layer that Valve has built to be able to run Windows games on Linux, is really, really impressive.

So I'm looking forward to seeing where Valve takes SteamOS from here. It's an important little baby step forward in figuring that out. But at the same time, looking at my Steam Deck, I wish I could play my Microsoft Game Pass games on it. And you know what? When you start talking about like... What Microsoft's next Xbox looks like, there's increasing rumors and murmurings that that next Xbox might be a Windows system that can play Steam shit just as well as Game Pass shit, and a shoe be-

basically the 30, 70 split with the assumption that the console is going to be totally locked down. You know, Microsoft. shit the bed so badly with the Xbox One generation, and they're so far behind now, that having another lockdown console may just not be in the cards, especially one with like, you know, a high entry level price tag.

At that point, it's like, you're already releasing all your games on PlayStation now, so why wouldn't somebody just buy a PlayStation 7 instead, since they could theoretically at least buy all the games on that one console? It's just funny to imagine that we could be talking about having a Steam deck, Steam console, basically, that can play Steam games, but not Game Pass games. or an Xbox that can play Steam games or Xbox games.

uh and and that that would be the microsoft hardware would be preferable as a result so it really does seem like both should just open up to each other uh and of course there's a lot of steps between where we are now and there But even as it is, a Steam Deck or a dedicated Game Pass system, either of those is far more appealing to me as somebody who likes to have a... reasonably large library than either my Nintendo Switch or a theoretical Nintendo Switch 2 if I were to have one in hand.

Or my PS5, which has mostly just collected dust since I bought it in 2020. And maybe my biggest regret in terms of a console purchase ever. And I owned a Saturn for a while. Yeah, speaking of the Switch 2, you know, it's coming in June. We're just a couple weeks away now. I still have this fantasy that I'm going to go to a Yodobashi camera or something or a Bic camera and stand in line for this motherfucker.

Just to say I did just to kind of have that collective experience of me and some other number of nerds I Don't know like If you follow the hardware at all, it's not impressive hardware. You know, it's like a two hour battery life with a 20 watt hour battery means that it's total TDP, including the screen and the APU and everything can't be more than 10 watts.

which is like not a lot like a Steam Deck, for example, like just the APU can be configured by default to run at 15 watt TDP, meaning like how basically how much power does it draw and.

All in, there are some people who get it to go 23, 24, 25 watts of draw while being played in mobile mode. Even on top of that, like the Switch... apu itself is like significantly less powerful uh in a lot of really important ways and it's running on eight nanometer process like a really old process uh uh probably just keeping some old samsung fab open and the thing about

Large processes like that eight nanometer process is that like it's less power efficient. So you're having a very power constrained device running on a very power, you know Hungry node at eight nanometers, like the graphics look fine in what we've seen so far. And of course, like software that's designed for a particular hardware spec is able to optimize much to an extent.

uh that like more generic you know like playing a pc game on any old tom dick and harry cpu is is not going to be so tightly tightly integrated But like this is the start of a new console generation, they think they're saying. And the last one was like eight years. And granted, the Switch's hardware was ancient when it came out in 2016. But like this is already really like they literally like like somebody.

leaked in China a Switch 2 circuit board, and it was printed that it had been built in 2021, and as far as we can tell, it is final fucking hardware. 2021. Four years ago. Like what happened was Animal Crossing. And so like suddenly the Switch had like its best fucking year ever.

And so they just kept putting it off and putting it off and then they just didn't bother upgrading the hardware because who would bother? They probably already had a contract in place with Samsung. And so now, if anything, all that's really changed is that their margins are going to be better on the Switch 2 than they otherwise would have been.

uh because you know stuff those components are only gonna get cheaper over time so i don't know all this adds up and i'm just like the switch 2 doesn't seem like something that any gaming enthusiast should buy for any purpose other than playing Nintendo's exclusive games. And since the only exclusive game at launch is Mario Kart World, if you're not like a Mario Kart nerd, you should probably just wait.

So that's a bummer because like I love new hardware, but if even I can talk myself out of buying new hardware, then there must be some sort of problem. See, last game note, Fortnite.

for all the fortnite fans who just can't get enough fortnite but only on phones for some reason fortnite is back in the ios app store uh it was a journey i'm not going to recap the whole you know epic court case or anything but Essentially, Apple was forced to let you link out to the web finally.

to, as the remedy for the anti-steering provisions, that is to say that if you're in the Kindle app now, there's a buy book button and it'll take you to a website and you buy the book and then you go back to the app and then the book is there. Still a little bit hinky, but like you can do it. Spotify, you can sign up for Spotify, right? Thing was like that remedy, like the court order didn't literally say you got to let Fortnite back into the store because like...

Epic broke other rules and Apple banned the account. So when they resubmitted, you know, announcing to the world, Epic was like, oh, and Apple's going to totally let us back in now. Right, right, right. Apple... didn't initially and didn't indicate that they were interested in doing that. But the judge basically, you know, say, hey, we're going to remand you back to court on Tuesday if you don't fucking do this or if you don't.

come to a joint resolution with the other party, which Apple probably would have taken to mean like, she's going to force us to do this anyway. And so then they did it. So that's great. I don't know. Some people are calling for Tim Cook's head about this. uh i just don't care very much uh clearly the one thing we did learn is that tim cook is not some kind of galaxy brain right because this is like there is no

nothing was won now, right? Through all of this fighting and trying to prevent the slippery slope and, you know, if they had just won straight up and gotten away with it, then yeah. tim cook would look like a genius but he kind of doesn't and instead just got dressed down by a judge and now had to give in anyway so like it just looks uh more petulant than anything uh so that's uh you know

egg on Tim's face and some people say, hey, he should get out of there and they need to go and work on their... Of course, people who are developers in the Apple ecosystem are going to say that because they've been pretty pissed for a long time about the degree to which Apple... you know, doesn't value them. From my perspective, Tim's going to have a lot of really hard politics to deal with for the next several years, keeping Trump happy.

And if I was an Apple shareholder or a board member, I'd be like, Tim. You know what? We probably do need a leadership change. We probably do need a shot in the arm from a PR perspective. We probably do need fresh blood to think about some of these problems differently now that we're a services and hardware combined company. But you know what we don't need is to...

Crown a new CEO as your replacement and then let Trump just absolutely tear them to shreds over the next several years and absolutely, you know, just create a whole... another nonsensical series of PR fiascos for the company that that new CEO has to come.

not, not just out the gate, like be able to deal with, but then have their personal brand associated with as well. Like now that person is going to be standing up at the state of the union because Trump insists on it. And so like people are gonna get pissed about that. And, and instead what. Tim Cook should probably do is keep playing ball, keep doing his thing through the end of the Trump administration, and then revisit, right?

That's probably the right answer, but that's satisfying to literally nobody, right? The people who think he should be kicked out immediately and the people who think that Tim did nothing wrong, no one is satisfied by that. That's probably the right answer and I wouldn't be surprised. if at the end of the second Trump administration, he's pretty ready to take a fucking break and do something else. Yeah. All right, next up, CarPlay Ultra.

the next generation carplay is called carplay ultra and it there's a video and there's a there's a website i'll share a link and top gear guy did a video that is pretty cool but only if you buy an aston martin which I'm not going to do. I will say that like Aston Martin has like normal car sized infotainment screens.

And it really makes one wonder whether or not this thing is going to scale up to EVs and these like, you know, massive 18, 20-inch tablet car-puters that modern cars have. Because as somebody who's been using a Tesla... regularly. It's not clear how you get from A to B. And because Apple's announced that they're working with Hyundai, Kia, Genesis, and you know, that portfolio of Korean car makes.

uh uh they've got a pretty big blend of uh evs now with those big tablets it'll be really interesting to see what happens how how apple translates that user interface to more of the like instead of just you know conforming their UI around the speedometer and the tachyometer and all that to instead be like the dominant, this is really the home screen for your car. That's when I'm, that's what I think we should look for, but that's.

who knows a year and a half away so that's been up um another rumor about vision os3 coming up that that you'll be able to scroll with your eyeballs that's great you know you do right now you you kind of point and click you point use your eyeballs as the pointer in vision os so you can look at something and then you pinchy pinch and select it so it's it's already eye tracking you

And I have often felt like scrolling is a real pain in the dick when I'm using my Vision Pro. Like if I'm trying to read an article, I just like feel like I'm pulling on a thread over and over again. I don't like touching my fingers together for that purpose. I like to touch them together for other purposes.

But the idea that you'd be able to scroll with just your eyeballs, some people are poo-pooing it, like, oh, how would they ever figure that out? To me, it feels totally natural. The analogy in my mind is... If you've ever held a tablet and it's reading an article, and you kind of put your thumb in the middle of the tablet, and then you actually let the tablet physically fall, that page will scroll exactly at the same rate.

that the tablet is falling, right? So you're keeping your thumb where it is and then the tablet starts falling. It's like the content gets dragged up. That's kind of like that. is almost like how a teleprompter would be working, right? If the teleprompter was like a literal physical reel of, you know, like turned on a crank, right? Of like texts that had been printed.

uh, and then, and then torn through or pulled through some sort of roller. That's kind of what I'm imagining here is if you're reading an article and as your eyes get towards the bottom of the article, it would just kind of keep it centered, sort of like you're always

like you're leaning forward in a segway and it's just kind of rolling forward as you go next line to next line so that everything stays that way you're not just staring at the bottom of your screen so to speak but you're kind of just reading and as you go down and just kind of keep scrolling up

kind of naturally and progressively. If that's how it works, that's awesome. And in fact, that might be a more pleasant reading experience than a lot, even on a Mac or whatever, or a computer or an iPhone where you are still actively physically having to do anything. As long as the retinal sensors are configured properly and able to tell when you're reading line 38 versus 39 versus 40, it should be able to set that acceleration and that momentum, you know.

in a pleasant way so that'd be pretty cool i don't know uh let's see uh ai search for phones man Supposedly Apple is working on as a hedge that they're Google. Yeah, here's what I don't like, right? So Google right now pays Apple about $25 billion in terms of... referral fees basically for Google searches that are performed on account of the fact that Google is the default search engine in Safari.

That deal might get shot in the head by the antitrust suit that Google lost. So Google is now considered a monopoly, one of the remedies on the table of many. including having to sell off Chrome, would be that they can no longer do this backroom deal or these exclusive agreements with companies like Apple, which means that Apple wouldn't get that 25 billion anymore. And so if Apple really believed...

that the best thing for their customers in the product was just Google searches, then they would, you know, just have Google still be the default, right? And you could change it. If it's a thing where it's just the highest bidder, then they would put it out to bid, right? And they say,

DuckDuckGo versus Microsoft versus whatever the fuck. Ecosia. Like, if you guys want to bid on this, you can bid on it. Whoever wins, wins. Of course, they're not going to do that, though, because it would look ridiculous, right? They'd look... Petulant. No, I used that word already. I don't get to use petulant again. They'd look cheap, miserly, just like shystery. Shystery. They'd look shystery. They'd be like, all right, we're just available for the op-

highest bidder and that's the search engine that everyone in the world has to use by default, right? And then force us all to go in and then change it back to Google, for example. So that's like probably not what they're going to do, but instead this Bloomberg article about them Inventing a new AI first search engine for Siri that would incorporate web search with other kind of like onboard searches. Kind of doing what perplexity does.

One has to wonder, the counterfactual, is this a thing that Apple would only release in the universe where they're actually forced to stop taking Google's money for search?

they're doing because it would be better and but it would only be better enough to be worth it to them if that 25 billion disappeared or are they doing this because they think it would just legit be better and they're willing to turn it on and ship that feature even if it means say like voluntarily giving up the 25 billion dollars like

I'm pretty sure everyone agrees and everyone knows the answer to that question is like, like they would just keep taking the $25 billion as long as they could. But like once that. money dries up if they've got some better ai based search thing then like oh yeah i guess we'll just throw a dog bone and make the product better you know it's another chink in the tim cook armor that like clearly like it's almost on its face the product is suffering because of this tight-fistedness of

having the revenue and profit be the North Star instead of making the product better be the North Star. So that's happening. I don't know. I would love if search on iPhone was... better and gooder than Google. Right now I've got DuckDuckGo, not DuckDuckGo, I've got Kagi as my search engine for iOS and that works great.

Uh, but I also have like, I use chat GPT search a ton. It would be great to have a single thing that I just type into and I got the best of both worlds immediately on iPhone, which maybe it just means I should be using perplexity, but I don't know. Next up, this is big, big rumor, big news, big, big rumory news. Apparently iOS 19 is going to let developers use AIs.

use Apple's AI models, use their LLMs just like any other LLM API from their apps. And this is huge because right now, if you want to have an onboard local LLM as part of your iOS app, you've got to fucking ship that motherfucker. And that might be two, three gigabytes. And then at that point, maybe it's like, hey, after you install the app, okay, click this button and then download the models that you need.

course no one wants to fucking do that and conversions would be really shitty and like So instead what they do is like they all just phone home to the OpenAI APIs or the Cloud APIs and they just pay for somebody else to run the AI model, which then means like you can't have a all you can eat subscription solution. without charging a relatively high subscription fee for an app that might just be better off, better served as like a

free app or an app where you just pay once. So if Apple actually does this and lets you call their models locally and those models are decent and the API is stable, meaning that those models are getting better kind of magically as the people like update iOS. Like for me, as somebody who wants to be developing AI assisted apps for iPhone. This is what I'm waiting for. In iOS 18, I was expecting this and it didn't come. If 19 is announced, I will be very happy.

So between that and the visual refresh in iOS 19, I'm suddenly extremely excited about WWDC, which is coming up here just in, what, June 9th? Yeah, on the 9th is the keynote, so I'll be paying attention. You know, new visual design that's SwiftUI first up and down the platform stack will probably mean it's never been a better time to start a new app.

uh that's like kind of like all on the modern stack of apple software tooling and then having a callable ai model uh you know that you can rely on if you're targeting ios 19 and its sibling platforms

or later like it seems like a great floor to get in on so i'm looking forward to it i really hope i actually as opposed to get off the pot This is Apple adjacent, I guess, because Johnny Ive, you know who, he and Sam, Sam and Johnny, have a website up at openai.com slash Sam and Johnny. So Sam Altman, who's got more billion dollars than since, although he wants to have trillions of dollars available to him, he's settling for spending mere billions on acquisitions that probably won't go anywhere.

Sam Altman and OpenAI have acquired IO, which is Johnny Ives startup, which I think like 40 to 50 employees, a mix of designers, mostly designers, product designers who worked at Apple, as well as a handful of people who were product managers, and one presumed a smaller handful that were responsible for product engineering.

as far as i know like not very many software people uh so so io has existed for all of a year and they have not produced anything they may have had a couple of clients i don't know They've been collaborating, of course, we've heard for about that full year with OpenAI on some kind of unannounced hardware. But you go to this website, right? They announced the I.O. merger. It's a nine minute video.

with Sam Altman and Johnny Ive, and it's a real puff piece, and it's got the music, it's got the pacing, you know, you've seen this video before, and it's a tone piece kind of, right? Like, first of all, when sam altman is in this and when he's on anything really i just feel like he in his head he's he's trying to imitate

Jesse Eisenberg playing Mark Zuckerberg in the social network like it's like he's trying to be that guy like on purpose and I don't if that's true okay if that's true that's fine but like It's not the character I would choose to play in that melodrama. And I always, you know...

Got some great people like, you know, like, like, like we, we think, you know, like we, we don't really know who these people are other than their reputation in Apple was supposedly pretty good. You know, Scott Cannon is a, I think an iPhone. product developer or product manager, Tang Tang. I don't know how we pronounce that, Tang Tang, if it's intonated the same way for both names, for both Tangs. Evans Henke was head of industrial design after Johnny Ive left.

I don't know, man. Usually when people leave Apple and they're like, we're going to go do the thing and we're going to build this integrated thing again, it usually doesn't go anywhere. Obviously, Johnny Ive has a lot of cache.

He's a sir, right? So he's knighted. I don't... I don't anticipate that this is going to be more than the humane pin but less awful like more practical like like like a real thing like I'm all about new hardware I'm all about you know taking a totally fresh crack at what can consumer electronics be if you really lean into all this cool AI shit and you are actively willing to drop the past, right?

because obviously Apple and Google might be excited about a lot of the AI shit, but they're not going to suddenly take the keyboards off the MacBooks, right, or the touchscreens off of the smartphones. and maybe some of that stuff will ultimately be proven to be vestigial, right? So having some new line of consumer electronics that is divorced from that past just like the iphone didn't have the clicky keyboard at the bottom right or the or the stylus like

Maybe it's time for something like that or maybe soon it will be time for something like that. And so OpenAI better than anybody just in terms of their size and their incumbency factor as AI leaders. it makes sense for this to be them. And, you know, Johnny Ive and the Apple people, like it makes sense for that to be them too. Will anything come of it? I don't know.

Like, will it be good? I don't know. Like, odds are it won't be good because most things people do aren't good. But maybe it'll be good. Well, we'll just have to see. You know. I love that this happened during Google I.O. So now OpenAI has kind of co-opted Google's GPT branding and also their I.O. branding. I don't think we're going to hear.

I.O. again from them post-merger. But it would be funny if they called it OpenAI.io as being their hardware division, just to kind of say fuck you to Google. I was watching this video while I was walking through Saitama and it was buffering slowly because it seems to not be a YouTube video. And so I had time to think in between each sentence.

And it was rush hour and everyone was walking towards me because it was like I'm staying in a hotel that's like in the corporate dystopia. And I was walking back to the station in the opposite direction. Listening to the monologue of each character in the Sam and Johnny drama film, I'll be honest, not to say it was moving, but like it's...

There's a lot of things when we talk about being vestigial, about like current knowledge work and life, like watching all these people, like they're in suits, they are all dressed up. They've got their laptop bag and they're marching into an office after having spent half an hour on a train to go and sit in a cubicle or in a small team setting and mostly just stare at that computer all day.

The world doesn't make a lot of sense right now. So the prospect of big changes happening to that world, like, you know, they might be scary and they might be like low probability of success.

but like it doesn't make the current world that we occupy anymore justifiable or sane uh and so so so you know i'm sure some some very small percentage of the people that i was walking past in this kind of concrete jungle that no one would ever otherwise be going to on purpose like some number of them actually have real jobs where like they need to be there in person whereas zoom wouldn't cut it where they're not just going to look at a computer

where they've got physical stuff that they got to do, but like one imagines that they've all got pretty soft hands. Like some paper might be involved and talking face to face is always better than Zoom and stuff, but. I don't know. It was a moment for me. Anywho. Yeah, you know... The only other thought I have in this video is Johnny Ive is like, he's the essentialist. He's like, oh, we're tore down to the bare, you know, just the aluminium and glass and the purity of the whatever the fuck.

And yes, he can pontificate about that. But like when he's pontificating and when he does expand in those old videos, it was like about the product. Here, this is a nine and a half minute long video. And I swear to God, they spent like a minute and a half just talking about how great San Francisco is.

the topology of, you know, and I call it the history and everything about SF. Like SF is irrelevant to this announcement. Like, yes, it is part of your story that like you, you met there and moved there to do this IO thing, but like. Unless it's a big part of the branding that you are going to be staffing up and building an office of hardware people and you're looking to recruit them to come to SF, I don't know what it really does for you.

Like maybe it's just that they don't have any physical hardware to show. And the only way to ground this story is to ground it in a place because people know what places are, but man, it just seemed distracted. I'd rather have had that minute back or had a bigger impact. A nine and a half minutes is a lot to ask people to watch. So having this be a six minute video that's a little bit tighter might have been better. I don't know. I'm just, everyone's a critic.

Also, not in the video, 6.5 billion fucking dollars. Like when you're watching the video, you're like, oh yeah, Johnny's gonna go work with this guy now and he's bringing some of his friends and they're gonna build some stuff. 6.5 billion dollars for a year old company with like 40 employees that hasn't shipped anything? Like what? What?

dude i would have done it for like 30 million i know i'm you know lower rent than johnny but fuck 6.5 billion dollars well johnny i was never gonna work in day in his life again or i'm you know going to have to One imagines other people in the company might have had equity too. And so now you've got a whole bunch of people probably with earn outs that they don't need to earn. So I wonder what the terms of this agreement are in terms of how.

if it's an all-stock deal or something. Retaining these people is going to be real fucking hard if you're already talking about a denominator of $6.5 billion. Jesus Christ. So we'll see where that goes. I'm gonna look through you know, we're already at an hour 54 my throat hurts I Was so young when we started this podcast episode

Quick hits. Alright, I'm gonna work through these quickly. One, there's a study. It finds that ChatGPT diminishes idea diversity in brainstorming. I'll leave it at that. Of course it does, right? Something that tries to steer us towards the median is not going to be able to think of or encourage ideas that are far outside that norm, which is one reason why I still can't fucking get it to like right.

my kind of pros, which is, as mentioned earlier, all about subverting your expectations and throwing you off kilt. Kilter? Tilt? You know what I mean. Throwing you off. Your game. Microsoft engineers, this quote is I think from the slash dot summary, slash dot, still a website, should be their tagline, are being forced to dig their own AI graves.

And the premise of the story is it's an information article and information is paywalled. So I don't read it, but I read summaries of information articles and sometimes they're interesting. Microsoft employees have been told use Copilot, use code generation more and report back on the percentage of your code that is AI generated and we want to see that number go up. So then they do it.

And then Microsoft announces another round of layoffs and they lay off more people. And then Satya and other leaders at Microsoft go and they announce, hey, look. We're now at 35% or 45% or 50% of all code at Microsoft is written by AI. Of course, they're incentivized to do that because it's good marketing. They're doing Azure and they've got this ChatGPT.

or open AI partnership and they want to be seen as leaders in AI and given the enterprises that look to Microsoft in terms of the products that they buy, like, yes. If I was an executive at Microsoft, it would make a certain sense to encourage people internally to use these tools and it would make a certain sense.

to track how much code is AI generated. Because on one level, it does make a certain sense that we'd be ahead of the eight ball because we're developing these tools and so we're using them before other people. But as soon as you make this a metric that you tell people like, we want this number to go up, please make this number go up and put the fear of God in their hearts because layoffs are also happening.

DW Deming had this quote. He said, if you give a middle manager a numeric target, he will hit it even if he has to bring down the company to do it. And that's kind of what this feels like. It's like, yeah, if you want to just have a whole bunch of AI generated slop, where it's like now something that could have been done in 10 lines, I find a way to do on 150 lines.

because 140 of those lines was generated comments by ChatGPT or Copilot. Like I can do that, right? If I have no shame or if I'm bad at my job, right? I don't take any pride in my work. and so that's going to be the employee that's looking really good because like oh look charlie over there's got 80 generated by ai that he got merged in and then all you got to do is find a couple other friends who like review each other's pull requests for you it'll be like hey man let's sneak in more of this

And so you get that one person on the team who's like stalwart and saying, no, we got to actually like do good and not just commit shit to hit a number. Well, like, yeah, I. Seems bad. One nice thing, one nice technology, there's a, I think it's a Python tool, a library that implements an idea that I had.

within 15 minutes of trying to use AI agents to do any real coding work. And that is called muscle mem. So like if you've got a program that is essentially dispatching AI agents to do particular tasks. you'll realize really quickly, like most tasks, like for me, it was this real estate searching thing. Like here's an agent that has tools and those tools include things like can look up.

real estate listings and do a search, can translate those into English, can enhance each of those listings by drilling into the

to the page or following other links about them or the developer, right? Like these different tools. What I realized really quickly was like, wow, I'm burning a lot of LLM API tokens on having it figure out how to route from tool A to tool B like every single fucking time and also it's really slow so what muscle mem does is it will recognize early and kind of um break out into a cached path like a hot path be like oh I see a query like this. Does this query sufficiently look like

Any other queries that we've recently dispatched? Oh, it does. And that one did tool A to tool B to tool C. So like, let's just do that instead of calling through the LLM and doing it the slow way. And then you have some sort of cache validation.

happening, right? Maybe it's based on time or whatever. So MuscleM does that for you and that looks really goddamn cool. Like every now and then... we move one step forward in terms of capability, like that we have these agents with Langchain and stuff that you can call through and have, you know, using that React model, so to speak, of...

getting an AI to do shit for you programmatically. And then we have these suitability things where it's like, yeah, but in practice, that kind of fucking blows. And here, why don't we just cache this to make it actually be like... suitably fast because where I wound up with my little agent program that I built was like, you know what? I don't need agents at all. Like I don't that this be a CLI that I can talk to doesn't really add a lot of value. I should just like

use AI maybe to build a script like any other script or a scraper like any other scraper that I had normally would have built. And also maybe I don't even need the AI. Maybe I just do it. Yeah. tools like this that like libraries like this give me like a little bit of hope that you know we are actually working towards something and we're not just oscillating

Again, it disappoints me that so many of them are in fucking Python and TypeScript because I don't like writing either of those things. But eventually, you know, one presumes that something like that'll come to Ruby and one hopes it won't have to be me. I'm the one. I'm hoping it won't have to be me. I'm going to share a very long, real journal article on Frontiers, and I'll share the title. I'm not going to...

The title is Naturalizing Relevance Realization, Why Agency and Cognition are Fundamentally Not Computational. So if you think that we can just algorithm our way into building real brains, you are incorrect. This, I wouldn't say proves, but like this makes a very strong argument that there is no straight line where we just keep adding GPUs and then we get to a brain, right?

And I think a lot of us intuitively believe that, but this adds a lot of formality to that that's worth checking out. So I'll share that link. A link I will also share is the Chicago Sun-Times summer reading list. And it was full of fake books. Some large number of the books were just fake because somebody wrote that article of, hey, here's our summer reading list and just passed the chat GPT and...

probably wasn't even paying for plus and didn't check that all the books were real. And if anyone gets pissed off about AI generating bullshit, it's authors. So yeah, authors are not happy that in an article that printed onto a paper magazine or paper newspaper, right? So like we have AI slop now actually showing up in ink and paper in the real world.

Yeah, so authors are pissed. Anyway, it's just, you know, journalism is beyond fucked and it seems like they are, journalists are operating under such stresses that... They are inadvertently or vertently accelerating their own demise. Speaking of demises, college towns are fucked because fewer people go into college. So...

you know, four year degree granting institutions, people are realizing might not be the kind of gravy train that they used to be. Unemployment among college graduates is higher than ever. And if you read this article, it's a Wall Street Journal article. I'll share that plus the Apple News Plus link for any of you Apple fans out there who have Apple News. If you read this article, it's not saying that college towns are bust.

going bust it's saying that like mediocre or mid college towns are going bust so like you know the the the Macomb, Illinois, like Western Illinois University, like they're super fucked. Like coffee shop can't stay open levels of fucked. But like other cases of like University of Illinois and Urbana, like that campus. And if you, if you read the article, you kind of see this narrative that makes a certain sense, right? Like if, if I want to go to college to get more money, to get a better job.

At this point, learning the skills isn't the thing that I'm going to get from the college that I couldn't get from ChatGPT or something, or from an online course. Like it's really about gated access to opportunities and so like really top tier universities There's still enough people hiring fresh out of college graduates that the top tier universities can saturate that demand for new hires. But as the number of employers who are looking to hire fresh outs.

Fresh college grads as as that number of like the overall demand for four-year college grads shrinks the ones who fall out first are the bottom right so people at community colleges people who are at regional universities or state schools that aren't particularly like you know prestigious

You go to one of those schools, you're at the bottom of the ladder. You're going to fall right out the stack ranking of like, who are the remaining employers looking to hire four-year grads going to hire? Now, like, once... The question that this demands us to ask is, are we seeing this and it's only going to affect mid-tier and low-tier prestige universities? Or are we just in year one or two of this phenomenon?

And three years from now, we're gonna be talking about how even University of Michigan grads can't find a fucking job. unless you go to Ivy League or something, right, or MIT. And at that point, now, are universities just going to go back east? Like William and Mary was like a seminary. That's how these all started, right? It was like seminaries and like only people who were like, you know.

getting ready for to become enter the priesthood or whatever would actually go to college are we getting like back to that or it's just like this handful of tiny elite institutions and that's the only people who really need to go to college of course it won't get to that extreme but one there's a certain retrenchment happening geographically if you think about where the successful university is going to be even a few years from now so

Interesting article. One last piece of news I thought was worth sharing is a substack. Lauren Leake has a substack that combines two concepts. That seemed to both be true. One, response rates to surveys continue to fall to significantly less than 5%. I think she said 5%, but like for political, like...

For political polls, it seems to be much, much lower than that. And two, AI bots and AI agents that are so instructed are responding to more surveys than ever, and she pegs it at 20%, but no one can really know that number. So if humans are responding to fewer surveys and robots are responding to more surveys Pretty soon. We're just gonna have like I I guess a an AI bot for president like because

until we realize that we can't really trust public opinion polling or surveys very much, but we continue to make important decisions based on them. Like, anyway, she goes into just like a few basic ways in which this could introduce systematic. systemic bias into our interpretation of surveys and what they mean. In some ways, it'll pull towards the political center.

uh or or in terms of customer preference and norms and expectations but you know i I still keep coming back to this idea that Apple and Google using iOS and Android could just have, like they tried to do with that COVID exposure thing that didn't work. I think they could just introduce a new standard that says like public policy polling built into every device. You know, we have your identity, we've got these pass keys, we know you are you, right? Just like that signature certificate thing.

And we could track whether you've responded to a survey or not. And we could just work with a public policy firm or with the government and say, hey, you want. You know, to know the answer to this question, well, we will find you a simple random sample of a thousand people and we will keep harassing them until we get those thousand people to respond. So we can get you very close to the hundred percent response rate. And also we own the operating system.

And so we're able to make things like picking out who your favorite presidential candidate is or whatever the public policy question is. in terms of what you support and don't support, we can make that really pleasant and easy to click. Like Apple and Google can fix all of public polling in relatively little effort.

That they don't do that, I think, is partly because there's nothing sexy about it and, you know, everyone loves to shoot the messenger with this stuff. But man, it would be such a tremendous public service. So, of course it won't happen.

Cool. Well, that's enough news. Let's bust out the fun zone and talk about some recommendations. Well, recommendations shouldn't take too long because I have not had any time for fun. I haven't watched any TV shows. I haven't watched any movies. Wait, no. We saw Paddington in Peru in Japanese. at the theater. And that was pretty good. Seems like Becky was able to follow all of it. So maybe it was a little obvious. It was pretty good. I don't know. All the Paddington movies are pretty good.

Seem like high quality family films Let's see what else is going on Would you a baseball game so Miyagawa from Rebuild FM, which is like the most popular podcast tech podcast in Japan as far as I know. Uh, he is an old Ruby community guy. Uh, we had him out for a baseball game. We went to the Yakult Swallows at Jingu stadium, which is over in Harajuku near Meiji Jingu. Meiji, Meiji Jingu.

Saying it that way backwards sounded weird. Anyway, Meiji Shrine. They've got a really cool stadium. It's like nice and outdoorsy. Yeah, so I had fun at the Yakult Swallows game. Japanese baseball, I recommend it. Paddington in Peru, I recommend it. There's this dance troupe in Japan that's been on hiatus for five years or so since COVID.

called World Order, and it's like a pop and lock thing where they do synchronized dancing in public. And the conceit is that the dudes all wear like suits, stretchy suits, but suits. And they do really clever editing to make it look like they're popping between different places. And they did a new video called Samurai. And I was like, oh, finally, a new video after five years is fucking great. And I started sharing with a few people, including Miyagawa-sensei.

I say sensei because he's my pop culture teacher. So I send him to Miyagawa-san, and he... He replied immediately. Yeah, it's just too bad that he like went off the deep end with the anti-vax conspiracy theory of stuff and tried running for local offices and hot water about it and stuff. It was like a motherfucker like It's

Time to milkshake duck is so fast now where it's like as soon as like I see anything, it's like, oh wow, this is really neat. It turns out that they're actually secretly a Nazi and we all just found out. That's a bit of a bummer. Nomad is a consumer goods accessory company, kind of like 12 South, I guess, if you're familiar with them. Let's see.

I got a cable from them, a very fancy universal cable. It's USB-C to USB-C, but it has like a little nubbin, has like a little like Apple Watch charger on the end and what what I thought I was going to get was a lightweight cable that I could take and travel with and then that way eliminate one more cable from my what I'm looking at here which is like five fucking cables flying around.

And I was like, this will save me time and space in my bag. And the cable came and it's like two meters long. It's really long, I think. And it was very heavy. and the little watch piece in particular is like way heavier than Apple's own watch charger even though it looks identical. And between being so big and so heavy I was like this is actually like

heavier and bigger than the two cables I was taking previously. So I'm going to return it, but their return people have been fantastic. Like, even though I'll be outside the 30 days because I'm, you know. I can't send it back even though it's back at home because I'm not there to send it back. They're going to extend the return window for me, which is lovely. So shout out to Nomad and the cable that I don't like that they just made. So thank you.

Let's see. Recommendations. A new theme park called Junglia. Junglia is opening in Okinawa in July. And if you watch the trailer earnestly and believe that it is what it seems to show... It's going to be the best theme park in the history of theme parks and has dinosaurs and stuff. Of course, there's a lot of CG going on and it seems like mostly total bullshit.

But I'm very excited to see what this ends up being because I haven't seen that kind of false advertising so just over the top in a long time. And it's a hilarious little trailer. And if they end up delivering, then I guess we'll all be going to Okinawa because it would be the coolest fucking theme park ever. Very Jurassic Park vibes.

um yeah let's call it that's all my recommendations i don't recommend you do anything else i don't have any i Just how about you recommend something to me and you email me podcast at searls.co and you recommend some content or ideas or things or places or whatever, anything you like at all, just email me.

Please. I'm so lonely. All right. Speaking of those emails, let's check out the mailbag. Justin writes in, Justin, who is not me, but rather a different Justin. I'm a relatively new listener. Version 30 was my first episode. Nice. Thanks, Justin. From Justin. I was familiar with your guest appearances on the changelog and found your podcast. It has become a regular in my podcast rotation and I get excited when I see a new episode is released. Me too, as previously discussed.

My question, do you think Apple software has gotten worse? I returned to Apple products because I found the Android experience buggy. Around Pixel 2 timeframe was when I swapped. And the Apple experience felt better, but recently I have experienced extremely frustrating bugs on almost every Apple product I own.

I wanted to see your thoughts on Apple software over time and if you felt like the failure of Apple intelligence is the most clear example of a slow degradation of Apple software. Maybe they need to take a step back and simply sssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssss

and simplify the software stack. Best of luck with condo purchases in Japan. I can't imagine doing it over a different culture. Yep. All right, Justin. Thanks for writing in. I appreciate it and thanks for listening. So has Apple software gotten worse? I think that in a lot of ways, in a lot of ways, Apple software is better than ever.

All of the operating systems update in lockstep with one another. They do it on time. It used to be the case that the first beta update for any of these operating systems. would very possibly fuck up all of your data. Very possibly fuck up your data in the cloud and then that's way harder to unfuck up. That doesn't really seem to happen anymore, partly because of better policies, procedures, and sort of developer hygiene, so to speak. And partly because they continue to refresh and build.

the rebuild the foundation on which all of their frameworks are built. And so those become more rugged over time and durable. And so they've got a solution, a durable solution to syncing data and so forth that doesn't have to get reinvented every two minutes. Whereas like we did indeed have to pay the price once or twice to have like, you know, Apple notes to go from a, you know,

roughshod syncing solution to the proper iCloud syncing solution that is built to last, right? So in that one sense, I think indeed like Apple's stuff has gotten to be better over time and not worse. Another way that they've gotten better is that they used to do no automated testing and now they do more than no automated testing and that's an improvement.

One way that you could see them as getting worse is that they are writing bigger checks than they can necessarily cash. And that's on two dimensions. One dimension is just usage. So like the number of... uh ways that you can use use quote unquote a constellation of apple products as an individual is is this combinatorial explosion that wasn't true 20 years ago 20 years ago when i got my first mac

2004. I had an iBook. There was no such thing as continuity. Like that iBook could interface with the iBook, the internet, maybe an eyesight camera if I Plunked one of the big old fucking cameras on the top You could plug an iPod into it and sync the iPod but like I did It didn't have to worry about like well if I'm on a Wi-Fi with

at a house and the person's got a watch. That watch can unlock the phone or also authorize things in the settings if that's configured. I've got the touch ID thing as well, but I've also got like an iPad over here. which if it comes near the MacBook, that can act as a sidecar screen as an additional display. But if like, you know, like the iPad is then put onto a different Wi-Fi network or an access point for some reason.

that display needs to keep working but but maybe it will but maybe it won't and then if the person says the word the s word uh uh maybe the home pods go off and if if the audio which could be playing over the airplay 2 protocol of the music app in the mac is currently going to those home pods but then the

voice assistant goes off on the home pods like is there i wonder if there's some kind of backflow problem you know like and that's just a handful of the products those are the first ones that came to my head in terms of like what could be interfacing with a mac at any given moment like And that's like, now add to that, like maybe you're in a hotel wifi or, you know, a hostile network sort of thing, or what if one of those things is on a VPN and like continuity, I think.

is one vector by which it is oh yeah like forget about the fact that like Forget local area network, like how much of this is syncing over the cloud versus like the peer-to-peer Wi-Fi solution that they've sort of built versus MDNS, aka Bonjour over a network or some combination of all of these things to try to be as fast as possible.

Bluetooth sync that happens over you know, to unlock a MacBook or a Mac from your from your watch uses Bluetooth and it uses time of flight analysis to make sure that like the watch is sufficiently close to the Mac to be able to. you know, have a strong enough signal to be confident that there's not a man-in-the-middle attack happening. All of these things, like when I say like writing checks that are bigger than Apple can necessarily cash.

There's no amount of testing on the planet that can actually make sure that every single one of those permutations in combination won't cause some kind of problem. Well, we've got all these different routers in the world, and some of them just don't do a good job of multicasting MDNS. right or bonjour requests or some of them are going to have radios on them that maybe they use a backhaul for the radio for this mesh network that they've got.

And that, that backhaul radio is like on a proprietary channel that just happens to fuck with the peer to peer wifi that you need in place in order to use Mac virtual display from a Mac to a vision pro. Oops. You know, like. What are you going to do? You're going to call support and you're going to say, this isn't working and that's not working. What's support going to do? They're going to be like, well, did you try resetting them both?

You know, you could reset network settings, you try like restoring the firmware and like when that doesn't fix it, right, you're like, well, I guess Apple's quality is just low. It's like, well, well, no, because it turns out if you drove both those things to a different house on a different network that had a different router.

something maybe that like the problem would go away but like you live where you live and you've got the router and at no point are you thinking that like this the one product in your house that isn't made by apple is actually incidentally at fault for why it doesn't all work right so like that's That is the nature of the game when Apple has 15 different fucking products and their marketing promise to you is that they all work together seamlessly all the time.

It's just not possible like things will go wrong And the more products you have and the more ways you use them in creative ways and in aggregate with each other, like as you have your AirPods switching between your watch and your phone and your, you know what I mean? Like, so it's usually in the...

error gap between the devices, that shit goes sideways in my experience. If I'm just using one of their devices in isolation, it tends to work pretty well. The other way in which the marketing gets out over their skis... is a recent tendency to announce future products or lean a little bit too hard into pitching.

functionality that's not really there. And Apple intelligence, of course, is the best example and the worst example of this. And I think that they're going to be very cautious about announcing, pre-announcing stuff or really tooting their own horn too much in terms of bloviating about how revolutionary a particular software feature is, unless they're confident it's actually going to work for most people most of the time.

For me, knowing...so how did Craig Federighi respond after iOS 13.0 shat the fucking bed? Every beta for iOS 13 was god damned awful. Like it was buggy. Didn't work very well. 13.0 comes out. Phones don't even work on it. They need like a 13.01 or 13.02 update on day one to even like function. I think maybe they shipped with it, right? So like most people didn't even actually experience 13.0.

The iPad that was supposed to come out that was announced I think coincident that ended up shipping with 13.1 because they couldn't even get be made to work like it was just That particular OS came in so hot

and it cascaded through all the other platforms. That was the year where Craig Federighi and his lieutenants put their foot down and they were like, we're going to get to like a a proper cadence of delivery and the way we're going to do that is have these milestones and we're going to let features slip we're just going to let them slip because like what we're not going to give up on is like the basic uh functional soundness of our platforms

right so that was like a kind of come to jesus moment and that's why public beta 1 i'm not going to be afraid to install it on any of my devices right They will ship the operating system. It will continue to work. It won't be a huge step backwards. The recent Mac updates are pretty perfunctory.

right it's not just because there aren't a lot of new mac features it's because they're not willing to go three steps backward to go one step forward so you can have like one new shiny feature like table stakes now are higher and the expectations are higher and they've raised the floor on what they consider to be shippable in terms of quality. Now, it's not where I'd want it to be. And if I worked inside Apple, I'd be pushing for them to go higher, but it's definitely better than it was.

iOS 13 was that wake-up call. I think Apple intelligence is going to be a similar wake-up call for how Apple approaches software in the future, and I think that can only be a good thing. For what it's worth, yes, Apple's software has gotten worse in a couple different dimensions. Some are just outside the control of anyone because we've all got too many devices and too many kind of hostile ecosystems for them to test. And some of them are in the sense that marketing has been...

able to run roughshod over the rest of the organization for too long, you know, and it was one thing when Steve Jobs was doing it and he had the, you know, benevolent dictator for life button where he could just run over everyone until he he forced his will on them

But marketing doesn't work that way anymore. And so the best they can do is complain to Uncle Tim and then have Tim try to push on the AI guy to make Siri go faster. That's just not functionally how the organization's wired to run anymore and so you know i think that the apple intelligence thing is going to quiet the marketing people to maybe spend more time trying to find ways to sing the praises of the world as it is.

and get away from this idea that they are going to actually wish cast themselves into a vision of the future and then hope software just catches up to it. Because that's just not how any of this works. Justin, thanks for writing in.

Uh, do, huh. Brian writes in, send me this link for hireworkforce.ai. He says, I hope you have a mailbag in time for this hero video to be covered. Who thought that video would be so enticing? Yeah, go to this URL, hireworkforce.ai. I'll put it in the show notes. And you have to go on a desktop because like the interstitials that pop up on mobile are like so obscuring that I wasn't actually able to get the video. If you can get this video to expand and play and watch this man.

and eight people who are apparently AI video versions of himself in different roles in a Zoom call. And you can see just how self-satisfied this smug guy is about this product. Just watch it. It's so cringy. It's so bad. If this is the world that we're building, we are super fucked. Andrew writes in. Hi, Andrew.

Long time listener, first time caller. I've gone through the back catalog because I'm constitutionally incapable of hearing version 36 without knowing what came in the 35 versions before it, or because I want to hear your brilliant takes. Wow. Again, you want to be read on this show. Write in and compliment me. or because I want to hear your brilliant takes in every single episode. Am I including a compliment to increase my odds of getting right on the show? Ba-boom! Yeah. Who can say?

Anyway, during the pun section you downranked the Joy-Con pun on the grounds that Becky doesn't know what a Joy-Con is. Aside, I agree with this reasoning.

saying that it doesn't pass the Becky test. And because of the particular way in which my brain is broken, I immediately thought of the Bechdel test. That is to say, the Bechdel test being a journalist, somebody... named Bechdel I'm sorry it's long enough now I kind of forget the details but the idea being like if a movie doesn't have a single scene

where two women are talking to each other about something other than a man, it fails the Bechdel test. And you'd think that would be like a really, really low bar, except... A surprising number of films at the time failed the Bechdel test and it became enough of a meme now that like When scripts are reviewed, one really hopes that they're still checking to make sure that they've got at least two women talking between themselves about something other than what a man is doing.

Fuck's sake. So yeah, instead of the Bechdel test, I've got the Becky test. That's like almost a pun and maybe you could coin the phrase and become the feminist thought leader in the world of puns. More sincerely, the show is great. Keep it up. Sorry to subject you to three paragraphs of derangement. Well, thank you, Andrew. And just like one of Aaron's best puns, we have now collectively subjected all of the listeners to three paragraphs of your derangement.

uh and i wouldn't have it any other way uh prem writes in another kind of another three paragrapher we'll do this and then we'll call it prem

I share the same sentiment re the tourist spots in Tokyo. I used to really enjoy hanging out in Akiba, that is Akihabara. It's like the electronics area in Tokyo. Browsing the stores and walking around the streets, but now I got fed up and started buying things online instead. The roads are just full of tourists and quote-unquote guides who are blocking the sidewalk gathering people to move from place to place.

I'm happy that the tourists do drive up the sales of stuff in Japan because Japanese buying power is pretty low right now, but damn, they are annoying. I recently had an opportunity to go to the suburb, I don't generally travel, after Ruby Kaigi, And I really understand what you said. There are so many unexplored and not well-known places in Japan that aren't on those Western social media sites, and those places are lovely.

after driving around and stopping by a few places i was really telling myself i should get better at japanese and probably move out well if that suburb uh if the suburbs still have the internet of course i can work maybe starlink or something Aside, before I read paragraph 3Prem, pretty much Japan has nationwide fiber coverage. For less than $100 a month, you can get symmetric gig internet service.

basically anywhere, including up in the fucking mountains. I've stayed in Airbnbs that don't have... Yeah, that don't have... really any services. Like I stayed in the Airbnb once, like a cottage that didn't have like garbage service that like, you know, wasn't even on the fucking map, but they had power and they had a fiber internet.

They literally had gas tanks on site to be able to run their bath and they had fiber. You're gonna have internet no matter where you are in this country in practice. Okay, back to your email. Paragraph 3 reads, Anyway, I hope that your condo purchase trip goes well or went well. We're going. I actually had a small thought in my mind that maybe you couldn't stand something in Japan and that's why you moved back to the States.

Prem is aware that in 2020, Becky and I lived here for a year. And no, we went back because it was always going to be a one-year term thing. Looking forward to hearing you tell the story about the purchase in the future episodes. All right, man. Well, thanks. Thanks for writing in. Hope you're doing well. And I would say in general, Japan is a big fucking country. You know, like there's a hundred and, you know.

35 odd million people in it uh granted that's in a tighter geography than america's 350 million are all spread out in but uh you know 35, 40 million live, yes, in the Tokyo metro region. And yes, that makes it the most populous region in the world of any metro. But like, that's still not half.

that a lot of people all over this country uh managed to live and work and enjoy their lives all over the place and so um that's one reason why i was sharing that blog post about how many prefectures i've been to and and i If anyone's interested in going to a place that's off the beaten path and they want to write in and tell me a little bit about themselves and like what they're into, I'm always happy to help people get a lot out of a Japan trip by...

tailoring it to like your interests and getting out of just the traditional tourism corridor of tokyo osaka kyoto um all right on that note i got i got places to be it's been a few hours uh and i really really need to drink some water because like my throat is dying and potentially like maybe get a workout in and

Just reckon with the fact that I spent the better part of a day just making this gigantic mess so that I could have a little fake studio. Now I'm terrified. If I hit stop recording, will this recording even work? Like, I guess if you're listening to this, it did. And if that's the case, if this sounds not totally garbage, maybe I'll cut another one of these before I go back home. Who knows? Not me. Okay, let's be done now.