v38 - Searls HQ2

I'm back. Actually, I haven't left. I've just been existing in Japanese business hotels for, god, a month and five days, looks like, with 15 more days to go. on my voyage welcome welcome uh to the land of the rising sun it is 6 15 a.m here another consequence of living in hotels is that You know, it's really hard to schedule a three hour solo podcast when you're changing hotels every night. And so if you want to do it.

You either got to get a place for two nights and then like talk during normal people talking time or do it early in the morning or do it in the evening. And because I didn't want to keep people up at night, I figured it'd be better to wake them up.

You know, with all of my energy and the paper thin walls, or at least I presume paper thin, we're going to find out. There's a door back there. And if somebody rushes through that door and says I'm being too loud at six in the fucking morning, I'll find out about it.

Hello. This is version 38 of a program titled Breaking Change. Breaking Change is a lifestyle podcast about my life and the degree to which I lack style.

Uh, version 38, major version, real, you know, I joke sometimes. Sometimes these major versions are kind of silly, but today's is significant. It is Searle's HQ2 because I have news. I've news from this country, which is that they have decided, graciously, to allow me to purchase a condo, a brand new luxury home in Shizuoka City. And Becky and I couldn't be happier. I extolled the virtues of this place.

last time around in version 37, so you can go back and listen to that if you like. But basically Shizuoka is just an ideal city for the things that we were prioritizing and what we really wanted more than anything else. Among the things we wanted very much was a second home base.

right? Some place where we could record a podcast and not have it be like a five-day stressor to figure out, okay, where am I going to be? Where is the internet going to be good enough and where we'll be quiet enough and yada, yada, and so forth.

Uh, so yeah, having a place where we can just store a, even just a normal amount of shit, you know, like, like schlepping, I've got these, this, this binder of documents. So like one of the last remaining. condo tasks that I have is I've got to select the options and there's the construction relevant options like for example i think i explained the the two ldk versus three ldk difference where in japanese real estate terminology ldk refers to a open floor plan of living room dining room kitchen

And so if your, you know, apartment is a 1K, it is a one bedroom with a kitchen thing in it. In fact, it's probably more like a studio with like a kitchenette. No dining space, no separate living space. But as soon as you put the L there, then the one becomes a separate room. This would be a fun code kata to figure out how many actual discrete rooms are there based on the codification. Anyway, so...

Our place is a 2LDK with a den, because that den is so small it doesn't count as a legal bedroom, but we can make it a little bit bigger at the cost of some of the living room space. and then becomes a 3LDK, which not only makes it, you know, that, that... third space more usable, but presumably will greatly increase its resale value. So that's one of the options, for example. And because we're on the top floor of the unit or of the building, we have until July.

30th to technically decide, although they were very encouraging that I get on with it. Then there's a category of decisions that we have a little bit more time to pick. Things like

um well i guess countertops and walls and stuff that needs to get go quickly but you know like what kind of uh range we have whether we do a gas range which would allow me to you know set my condo on fire if i wanted to which i do not want to or an induction range which would be be probably safer for an idiot like me uh i can pick that you know uh There's then later on, I have learned,

in january february of next year they're going to put on a local trade show at a place in time to be determined where they'll have like you know furniture and appliances for sale that would be direct through the condo builder and of course you pay a little bit of premium but also it would get into your 10-year warranty.

uh and then have the added benefit of you not needing somebody to come in and install the three or four mini split air conditioners throughout your condo after delivery but rather they would be pre-installed for you at least that was like my rough

series of assumptions I was making while I was not understanding the guy as he was talking to me. So we'll see how that goes. So anyway, I got that binder over there and just taking that binder around with all these different options.

Which granted, you know, I could have just looked at and made some decisions on two weeks ago instead of deciding to carry it all around the fucking country. But my procrastination is apparently a stronger impulse than my desire to travel light. So I've got this secondary bag that I've been... carrying around in addition to my canonical Tom Bin synapse bag that I've been traveling with for

10 plus years. So today is the day I'm going to get rid of that fucker because I finally got a smaller fan. An AC, you know, you look for, I don't sleep well. I'm just not a good sleeper generally. for a lot of reasons we talked about me snoring and stuff you know we really get into it on the program but like i get hot at night and then me getting hot makes the bedding get hot and then i cool off but then the bedding is hot

So then the bedding makes me hot again. And sort of this back and forth little like dance goes on. And if there's not a lot of good airflow, then I freak out. And so I bought a fan, but the fan is too big to fit in my backpack. And if you, if these days... In the 2020s, if you want to buy a small electric fan, your options are usually limited to some shitty fan that charges via a 5V 2A

you know, USB-A to USB-C cable. And so the amount of power to actually make fan blades go is therefore limited, right? you know it might it might even have a 10 000 milliamp battery on it and so i've seen two kinds of these fans there's the kind of fan where it's just so weak that they they intentionally make it the dc fan weak enough that it can charge as quickly as it

exhausts, you know, spins away its power. Or they can make it a little bit more powerful, but then like even if it's plugged in, it will eventually die within 40 minutes or an hour, which also no good.

So, finding a small fan, like I'm looking at it there, I would say it is American grapefruit sized, you know, like a nice big softball. And... To find one that actually has an AC outlet plug these days is really fucking hard. Apparently everyone just assumes all fans should be battery, you know. Not USB-C power delivery, right? Which would let you have the 150-watt power brick for your shitty fan. At least to make it go faster. So instead, I finally, finally, finally...

Got got a little tiny fan that actually plugs into a wall that just small but mighty and last night it passed the test So I'm gonna get rid of this bigger guy so I can get rid of the second bag so I can travel light again

it's just me in a backpack and I don't have to worry like every time I get on a train like oh am I going to be disrupted to somebody else or am I going to forget my fucking bag up in the little itty bitty rack by American standards if you try to put like normal carry-on on the second on the rack above in like a local train or even like a lot of shinkansen bullet trains you will you will have a very bad time

So this is just like, this is a glorified shopping bag. That's just like reusable plastic that I paid $2 for. Uh, yeah. So got to pick out the options. Got a new, got a new fan. All right. We're just covering a lot of bases here. Um, I got a lot of.

Questions. Not podcast emails so much as just texts from friends who were curious, based on my descriptions last episode, about the condo process. I will say it was... It was as painless as it could be given the number of things that the developer was concerned about. You know, the thing about having a culture... where everything is you know relatively non-disruptive to others where there's a sort of collectivist sense that we each have a responsibility to the

tidiness and the quiet and the calm and peace of the area that we're in uh that uh you know it's very easy to disrupt those things and so anything that sounds like it might is a problem and they want to head that off at the pass

given all those things the fact that they wanted to meet me in person make sure that i understood enough japanese to at least be able to adjudicate and navigate any sort of challenges that you know i understand right and by policy they get to do that there's not like some you know uh some law stipulating that they, like, must sell it to whoever applies to buy it. So I get it. Additionally...

You know, I talked about some of these struggles last time, but not being able to like, you know, separate trash. appropriately where in japan depending on the municipality you might have like five six seven different kinds of trash that they collect and i remember i posted to twitter like

back in Nara, all of the different kinds of trash that they had us pick up. And there was like, you know, God, I can't remember now. I've sort of blocked it. Mondays and Thursdays were burnable trash days. So like any food that you discard that wasn't... eligible for the compost day which was a different day uh any any sort of like paper or anything anything burnable non-plastic uh non-non-metallic those would be on those days and then i think tuesdays

were the everyday plastics. So like plastic bags, styrofoam, that sort of thing. And then I think every other Wednesday or every other Friday was the like The non... everyday plastics so like really hard stuff like I don't know if you have like a little like a shower caddy or something right but like like like like clearly something that's not meant to be a disposable plastic but is nevertheless plastic and you can't put in with the burnable trash and each of these would have a

separately labeled bag and you could buy that bag at any like you know home goods store or or even a convenience store and then let's see they had really obscure ones too so uh like

electronics and batteries. So you've got like AA or AAA batteries. You can't throw that in with the normal trash. You'd have to buy one of the very tiny and very expensive purple bags that would be for putting... you know uh e-waste into and there were only four of those date those days a year so you got basically one chance a quarter to get rid of any batteries and so naturally then like

The entire year that I lived there, I think a majority of those days of that year had me having a purple bag in the closet with just a handful of AAA batteries in it. Fortunately, sounds like Shizuoka is a little bit more chill.

and when you live in a condominium there's usually a collective like you know intermediary place to dump your trash so you don't have to plan your whole week around like becky really hated this but because she had to get up early for her job i would i would get her to schlep all of the uh recycling so there was another day each week each every other week for recycling where you'd have cans and glass bottles and so forth and because i i drank a lot of canned chew high both because i really like

their canned cocktails and also because the stress of existence in 2020 was rather high she would have to very shamefully as a teacher had to because i insisted uh carry that to the communal like recycling area and everyone would be like looking at her like woo you got a problem lady and uh she wouldn't know how to say no my husband has a problem

she would just have to kind of take it on the chin so thanks for that becky now presumably new place won't that won't be a problem but anyway you know condo developer they they're worried you won't be able to figure out how to separate trash properly and like that's it sounds really

diminutive and and and paternalistic oh of course anyone can figure out how to do it except like it is literally something that foreigners fuck up here constantly all the time in every single possible context and so it is a legitimate concern uh because like even when you

In Japan, let's say you go to a convenience store and they've got the four different kinds of wastebasket for the glass bottles and the plastic bottles and the burnable waste and plastics, right? That is an oversimplification of a lot of municipalities. And so even if you do it right, there will be somebody at the end of the day in a lot of places who are going to go through those bags and resort.

every single item either to correct the fuck ups of the other like the of the past customers or to for example discriminate between which of these non-burnable things are everyday plastics or or non-everyday plastics or other kind of like like metallic things whereas yet another day that was only once a month so anyway i really want to have a place here

It's just a lot of work sometimes. I had to go to the American Embassy. I'm not sure if I mentioned that. That was a little bit scary. I needed to have, you know, a little... document certifying that my passport and my signature match so that when i sign things here they can say ah that was justin who was signing that uh that kind of thing so anyway it's all done we're in contract they can't

they can't shake me quite as easily now. So I'm just going to try to do my very best, pick out the best options I can, and then I get to wait a whole year for this thing to finish construction. And honestly, we like the place so much and we like, you know, Gosh, the life that we'll be able to have where I'll be able to podcast and not be standing in a hotel, it...

It's going to be a tough year just to wait. So I think this year then I'm going to probably be mostly in America and mostly just soaking up the Florida rays and enjoying that before we start splitting time a little bit more. So that's...

Searle's HQ2, I guess. That's where things stand there. Otherwise, this time around, we're standing like today is just a few days before Apple's big WWDC event. I don't have a whole lot of newsy stuff to talk about today. I've got a lot of life things. I've got a lot of random stories from my trip. I figured I'd share some of those just to do a quick check-in just to clear the table because...

when dub dub, as the Apple fans call it, when that hits, there's probably going to be a shitload of news and things to speculate about and things to analyze. And I figured, let's just sit back. Tell some stories hang out and See where the day takes us, you know and by see where the day takes us means I mean like

I will stare at this clock, even though it's still 6.30, to make sure it does not suddenly become 11.01 a.m., because that's checkout time. And I've never actually been late for a hotel check-in time. So I sort of just live with this curiosity of how do they actually enforce checkout times, right? Like if you're going down to an elevator on the first floor and the lobby is on the 13th floor and you're on the fifth floor.

and the way that you check out is you just like dump your keycard into a box as you walk away? Does that mean that like checkout time is not enforced? It's only enforced once, like, the hotel maids come into the room to clean it and then find that you are still there. Are there security cameras looking for, you know, violators of this? Do they come find you?

Do they email you? Do they even have my email because I booked you a third party? Like, how easy would it be to come and beat me up to charge an extra $20 because I stayed an extra 10 minutes, you know? This is the shit that my brain's been thinking about. I've been thinking about that for probably 20 fucking years. So, that's neat. You know, it would be easier and probably better for myself just to force myself to check out late.

once or twice to get a feel for it. And then if it really does matter, then I'll at least, I'll still worry about it, but I'll worry like less ambiguously and vaguely and more specifically and concretely in a practical sense.

Right now, the worry is totally useless. I just don't know what to do with the information. Because sometimes you'll call, right? If you know you need to check out late, you'll call and you'll say, hey, can I check out late? And then they might just say yes, which is great. And if they say no, then you just outed yourself as somebody who wants to stay late. So like, does that, do they put your name on a list of like, hey, check these rooms first. This motherfucker, this motherfucker.

He wants to stay late, but we don't allow that here because I just said no. Alternatively, I got one reply asking to check out late a couple of weeks ago and they said, oh yeah, you can check out until... noon so you get an extra hour and it's a thousand yen which is about eight dollars seven dollars it's a thousand yen per hour i was like okay you're seven bucks i could do that and they're like per person and there's two of you

so that would be 2 000 yen and for whatever reason i was like that extra hour to pack up because that was the day becky was flying out that extra hour to pack up would be like Worth $7 to me, but absolutely not worth $15 to me And so then I found myself like in this situation where I'd like already gone deep like this was like a too long of a conversation for me to figure out like

Wait, you're saying that the room costs double more for that hour because two people could conceptually be in it? I so desperately wanted to be like, well, what if I've already left and there's just one person there anymore? There's two people on the reservation, but only one is going to enjoy. that late checkout hour you know like the the the fact that administering such a complex regime for one hour of late checkout time such as

you have an individualized price per hour and a schedule that she had to look up to determine that. The fact that that administration is so much more costly and burdensome than any benefit that the hotel company might, you know. accrue as a result of collecting actual fees for those late hours, that has no bearing whatsoever on how Japan operates. And that's one of the things I love about it.

I ultimately declined that extra hour, but then it just put me right back into the camp of like, oh, fuck. I don't know. I guess we got to get out of here, honey. Hope you're all packed.

had to shove her at the train ahead of schedule to get on her flight. I don't think I told her that, by the way. Hi, Becky. I hope you're doing well. Becky's on another trip now, but she doesn't have me to worry about. So if she has to late checkout anywhere, then she just has to pay the once. Let's see, stupid shit that's happened on this trip. I should say that the overall theme of the last week and a half...

last 10 days or so, since we've successfully been in contract. Wait, no, not even 10 days. We only got into contract June 1st. So it's been five days of true freedom, but it's felt like 10 days after the previous month. Of me being here just mostly waiting for an email all day most days. That felt like three months. So maybe time has just slowed down for me. But anyway. I've been checking off prefectures and areas of the country that I haven't yet been to.

And I've gotten through a bunch. I think when I first posted my blog post, I was listing off, hey, here's all the prefectures that I've been to. Here's the remaining ones. I had listed 36 of them. and there are 47, so I had 11 more to hit. Well, I can now share that I've hit 42, so I really only have five remaining.

Technically it's five that I've never really seriously been to, but all but one of the 42 that I've been to, I've actually slept overnight. And so I kind of want to, the one that I haven't is Nagasaki. I only took a day trip to Nagasaki to see the memorial to the terrible hell that was wrought there during the Second World War.

I just did a day trip just back and forth. But if I stay a night there, and I'm going to be at the neighboring prefecture, possibly tonight if I get on the train early enough, if I check out on time, If I stay a night in Nagasaki, then all 42 of those prefectures will I have stayed a night, so I could tighten the rules up for my own little nonsense game that I have invented for the sake of filling out a blog post that no one will read because it's already gone out.

But I will edit. So yeah, I'm fucked up. I'm real fucked up, aren't I? So yeah, I'll probably end up staying a night in Nagasaki just so that I can say I did. So that...

The next day maybe I'll stay in Saga. Saga is the prefecture right next door. Saga is famous, and I haven't been there. Not to say that I'm scraping the bottom of the barrel from a prefecture perspective, but Saga is only famous for a comedian who was born in Saga who wrote a famous song about how there's nothing to do in Saga. So I'm going to go to Saga, the Nani Monai prefecture, meaning there's nothing there.

And I don't know how we'd compare it. I suspect that, like in America, we have a lot of states that are kind of, there's nothing there, but I'm not sure what variety it is. That's why I gotta go in person. Find out. Is it more like a Indiana nothing there? Is it more like an Arkansas nothing there? Or is it like a, you know, a Wyoming nothing there? You know, big blue sky and wonderful nature, just no humans. So we'll find out.

It's apparently famous for its ceramics. I don't know, man. I was on the train the other day. No, I'm not like an anti-masker. I'm not like a COVID denier. or something but i i was a little bit ahead of the curve and being like i'm all set on masks and and by by that i mean i got vaccinated and i got my second dose and then i was like all right cool i'm all set you know i'm I'm good. I did my part. And I lived in Florida at the time, and so that totally jived.

uh you know then the delta variant hits and everyone has their own reactions and i think since then it's been a little bit more of a you know choose your own adventure so to speak as opposed to a collective action or response However, you know, I think there's also just the generalized latent masculine energy of the universe that makes men kind of feel like emasculated or...

Is churlish a good word to use in this situation, churlish? I don't really know what the word churlish means, but I'm going to use it. Feeling kind of churlish.

about putting on a mask, right? Like if I'm sick and I'm not coughing or something like, yeah, I'm not going to do it. I don't know. If I'm worried about getting sick, then will I just be seen as a You know word I shouldn't say on a podcast among other men Those thoughts cross my mind I'm not afraid to admit that so I'm enough of a man to admit

that I have thoughts of toxic masculinity, but not so much of a man that I can overcome those and always be like, I will wear a mask at the appropriate times. So anyway, I would...

All that to say, I'm traveling without any masks with me, because why would I? Especially when you're in the country of every single fucking convenience store sells them. If I ever needed one, I'd find one. Except the one time I needed one, I couldn't find one because I was on a motherfucking... bullet train and i was like sit down reserves it's because you have a reserved seat so i sit down at my reserve seat and uh dude next to me is just hacking up blood just like

Not blood. If it was literally blood, I'd be like, that's probably not contagious. That's probably like cancer or some shit, and I wouldn't care. But it was just a... There was a loosening happening. There was like it was a very productive cough and it was constant and he sounded not okay whatever it is that he had i so badly did not want to have it that i immediately was like do i have anything in my possession that is mask adjacent i have a um

a pretty heavy duty sleeping mask because it gets bright here at four in the morning. Could I put that over my gullet? That wasn't really an option. So sometimes they'll have a little cart that goes through the bullet train and sells ice cream and coffee and that sort of thing. And it had just passed. But the lady who had been operating the cart...

When she went through to the next car, I was trying to chase her down. It just said staff only on the door. So like apparently, normally you can walk freely between the cars. I couldn't walk past that car for some reason.

and uh so i was like well you know what i'm just gonna wait this out over in the other hallway on the through the other car so i went over by the bathrooms i'm hanging out in the kind of common area where you can take a call and whatnot and and i can be away from the guy who's coughing his head off and i saw another uh train staff and he tried really hard to evade me when i when i caught him when i when i when i you know the the phrase uh to apologize to interrupt somebody

that you most frequently hear in public is sumimasen so i sumimasened him and he didn't stop and i was at sumimasen a little bit louder and he was like okay fine what And I was like, I'm really sorry, but do you guys sell masks on the train? He said, no, we don't sell masks on the train. And I said, I am really sorry, but like the guy next to me is so fucking sick.

and he just he's like a really gross old dude and he's not wearing a mask he's coughing his head off and i'm really afraid i'm gonna get sick i've got this like month long of travel ahead of me and he's like i don't know what to do i was like you're wearing a mask where'd you get your mask and he's like okay come with me and this is kind of cool actually so he took me to like the crew cabin like a little like like a staff only room

into their supplies and had a Ziploc baggie of an infinite number of replenishable surgical masks. And he just gave me one. And we shared a little moment, he and I. Our hands didn't touch, but we were both holding the surgical mask at the same time. And so, yeah, that's how I got a mask by convincing him to, you know, I really had to hammer home just how gross this dude was.

But it got me what I needed, so happy about that. Let's see. Traveling solo, another thing that I talk about being a little bit masculine. I always feel weird going to movies by myself. I'm totally fine going out to eat by myself because when I'm by myself, still gotta eat. And I like to meet people at bars and stuff.

strike up conversation with strangers. But going to movies have always felt like a shared experience kind of thing, unless you're watching them at home, in which case when I watch them at home, it's kind of like I just treat them like long TV shows. But going to the movies is a communal exercise for me personally. And I decided I was going to go to a movie because the whole like rigmarole of going to a movie here is just different enough that it's kind of novel.

different snacks, you know. Frustratingly, they wait until the very, very end of the credits before the lights go up, before your... allowed to leave nobody leaves you can leave halfway through the movie you can leave five minutes before the end of the movie but if you're there the moment that the credits start rolling you do not move your ass until the moment the credits stop rolling. And one of the interesting aspects of that is that if you're watching a western film for which

Most Western countries, I hear France is like this, but most Western countries don't give a fuck about credits because who cares who made the movie because they don't matter. We see the credits and we're like, cool, it's time to go. Unless it's a Marvel movie.

And we still care about that. And there's the potentiality of a post-credits scene. So in Japan, you wait and you sit. And when you're watching a Western movie in Japan, sometimes those credits are like... there's so many like cgi there's three thousand five thousand people who all work on it they're all in a union that like demands that they get the right to have their name listed i've been in

I remember I went to see Minions with Becky when that was in theaters, however long ago that was. And a whole bunch of little kids, little boys all throughout this theater. And I have to pee. I could barely sit through the credits. The credits are like... What felt like 11, 12 minutes long. And lights stayed off. Not a single boy made a peep. All these eight-year-olds, they were totally fine. I was like clawing at the door. Lights come up.

and everyone very politely and orderly makes their way out. If you go to a Japanese-asked movie in Japan, they know that this is the culture, and so they don't waste their time with the credits. They're like, we're going to keep it snappy. Here's the main stuff. Here's the legal shit. Here's the songs that we had to get permission to use. We're done.

So that was really nice. So I went to a Japanese-asked movie. Only downside is, like, if you go to a Japanese-asked movie in Japan, you kind of have to know Japanese. It's not like there's going to be subtitles or anything. And the one that I went to is called Chichitoboku no Owaranai Uta, which means my dad and my unending song. And... It's a sad movie about in Yokosuka, where we've got a big naval base and heavy American influence. There was an older man who owned a music shop.

who repaired musical instruments and all that, and had aspired to be a recording artist, but then had this son. And the son, now an adult, had a... I won't spoil it just in case you're really into potentially. watching this film. Anyway, what I can say, old guy, he gets Alzheimer's.

And the family just starts to notice it. And it's the classic, you know, like, oh, we're not really that close. But then now that you have Alzheimer's, I'm like, oh, fuck, I'm super desperate to get to know you. And I'm spending time with you and help and take care of you and stuff. And it's a real tearjerker. And so I'm just sitting there in the theater like.

fucking idiot crying and uh it was real good it was cathartic it was one of those weird things you know when you have a loved one die uh it just comes and goes in its own time And I think I joked last time that I find cinematic movie soundtracks as emotionally moving as real fucking terrible shit happening in my life. So yeah, the fact that the theme of like losing one's dad was aligned with the soundtrack.

And me being alone was actually a really nice evening. I wandered around the town afterwards and reflected a little bit on my own loss with Dad passing away. I went to a big boy. They still got big boy here. It's not doing great, but it exists. And I walked in, I looked around, I talked to the girl who worked there and I was like, you know, in Michigan, these used to be a real big deal.

But now they're all gone. And she's like, yeah, these aren't doing great here. And she's like, do you want to order something? I was like, no, I'm good. Went to a convenience store, got some ice cream instead. I'm a real piece of shit. Let's see.

I was in Tokyo briefly for what felt like way too long, even though it was one night. Tokyo is... has succumbed entirely. to the thing that I hate most about most big cities, which is globalization, ironing off, sanding down, ironing out, sanding down, iron. I got to get my prepositions right. Don't want to mix too many metaphors.

basically taking what was a unique and vibrant city with its own culture and vibe. And now it's just the same basic grid layout of mostly Western-y buildings with, you know... a kfc on every corner and it's become one of those for the most part outside those just strictly residential areas where you don't see people from other countries i i had i got to visit um Dominic Denicola. I think that's how you pronounce his last name. I do know that Dominic is pronounced Dominic. He works at Google.

He's known for doing a lot of web standards work. He maintains the project JS DOM. So in the JavaScript world, Dominic's a big deal. And he very kindly invited me to have lunch at the Google office in Shibuya.

The old Google office was in Roppongi, which is a separately, extremely westernized part of Tokyo, but Shibuya I had not been to since COVID, and I show up, and what had been streets that you would walk. and then buildings that you would enter is now a complex, a multi-block skywalk series of second and third floor, how to say it? It felt extremely Blade Runner-y in this mishmash of Western design. And one second, I'm going to put on Do Not Disturb because I just heard...

My phone buzz and because my phone is my camera, my camera will shake. All right, we're all set. So yeah, it the design of the place is I, not explicitly dystopian, it is very nice, but there's now these like five or six mega buildings that themselves kind of span multiple structures. Like the new one, Sakura stage has two parts. because it has to actually like overlap a full fucking city street uh

You can now walk from one end of that ward to the other, which is a really long fucking way, without ever even being able to really see a street beneath you. And it's... It's fine. It would be fine if it was, if you could squint and know that you were in Japan, but you can't. You're just in like a generic modern-ish. you know construction materials and design very squared off and sanded down and It's not I don't know and then there's so many foreign people that like you really like like like

tons and tons of English, tons, lots of different languages. And if you want a melting pot, go to America. But if you want a melting pot, like that's the experience you can have. Like if you want the convenience and the hustle and bustle of all the different kinds of...

people and things and attractions all in one place and you like the uber convenience that that can bring, then Shibuya is a great place to be. But something was lost, right? Which is like, Shibuya used to be a commercial district. that was intensely Japanese. I remember in 2005 when I first went there, Ichimaru-Q, the 109 building.

was this like ramshackle like department store kind of thing but it was like it was sort of like counter-cultural and punk because there was no real coordination between the different stores and so they would like compete and have and like there was like there were there were stories that were just a terrible idea even in 2005 like this one that was focused on uh serving the needs of Japanese people who were obsessed with Black American culture. And so everyone who worked there was in blackface.

And, you know, NBA jerseys. And either had tight jerry curl kind of like perms or wigs, I guess. And all of the products were in support of that. you know, subculture. You know, like, weird fucking shit. But like, in a... that's a perfect example of something that in a multicultural like you know like high-end luxury class uh series of department stores and malls and superstructures you would not see that today now

As I say that, is it good that we don't see that particular example today? Also, yes. But, you know, it's lost a lot of its distinctive character. Extremely racist caricatures aside. It's just, I could be in any fucking city. I could be anywhere in China, I could be anywhere in Europe, and I wouldn't know the difference right now. So, I'm probably over Shibuya, and probably over a lot of Tokyo.

spent some time in Asakusa and it was overwhelming as always. So anyway, the other thing about Tokyo that I can't stand... is that with the drastic increase in foreigners, the amount of... the degree to which people will assume that somebody who does not look like their native Japanese... They will assume that as soon as people see me, they assume I don't know a fucking word of it. And even if I speak to them in fluent sounding Japanese.

Even then, they will continue to treat me in English because their brain hasn't caught up yet that I was just talking to them in Japanese. They'll just see, white guy, he needs English. I went to this Thai restaurant that was super highly rated.

And I was like, okay, cool. Like, haven't had Thai in a while. You know, I could tell by looking at the signs and stuff, it was probably operated by immigrants from Thailand. And I walk in and immediately... you know get greeted uh in english and they sit me down and they they hand me a menu and i start looking through the menu and like all of the titles are like ridiculous like it was like uh

shrimp uh uh i don't know like like shrimp rice paper uh uh clump or something was like the translation for spring roll And I was like, what the fuck is going on? Like, not only did they hand me an English menu after I greeted them in Japanese, but like that English menu is so badly translated. I cannot understand what the menu items are. So I do like, you know, awkwardly be like, Hey, you know, like.

is this the English menu? Can I have the Japanese menu, please? And then they treated, that was like a whole fucking scandal. They're like, oh, well, hello, mister. I was like, fuck you. Just give me a menu. They give me the menu. I order basic ass green curry. I'll have this green curry. the one with the tiger prawns that sounds great order the curry it comes out and uh i'd also ordered the spring rolls the the rice paper clumps and uh

It comes out and literally dude serves it with a fork. And I'm looking at it. I'm like, look at like, like, like, I don't think stabbing these spring rolls with a fork makes a whole lot of sense. And I'm looking around and all the other guests who are much more Japanese looking than I am, they're using chopsticks and there's no forks on those tables. I'm like, man.

So I like raise a hand again. I'm like, could I have some chopsticks, please? And the guy just literally rolls his eyes at me as he goes and fetches me chopsticks. Those kinds of experiences I have all the fucking time.

in Japan and it's uh sorry not in Japan in Tokyo specifically and if you're somebody who's like here to learn the language or meet people or whatever having everyone basically like it's not look Sometimes it's because people want to be hospitable, but in reality in Tokyo, just to survive as an Asian person, if you see a white person, like, you try speaking Japanese to every single one of them, 20% are liable just to bite your fucking head off.

So you learn pretty quick, you should probably just default to English. And in fact, you might be better off just staying in English. But the truth is, my Japanese is better than almost all of these people's English at this point. And so for me to suffer it... like, makes my life harder.

And sometimes I will. Like if I'm having a real conversation with somebody, I'm happy to like, you know, like let's practice some English. Let's be here intentionally. But like if I had to like listen to like really, really strained English that's also not communicating the thing that I need to know, I'm like...

It's really challenging. But at the same time, no one is doing this for cultural sensitivity or for the welcoming foreigner's perspective. Everyone is just trying to survive.

in this city that kind of makes no sense at this point and it maybe this is how it feels like if you live in a true melting pot city you know if you live in manhattan in the 1920s or 30s or in a tenement structure or something like this is the sort of like it's the transactional like circumlocution of like concepts uh anyway in tokyo that's real bad uh it's just like

I can't imagine living there and trying to learn this language. Go anywhere else, please. And people will maybe try to use English with you, especially if you ask, but they'll assume you are at least there on purpose. and not just sort of like part of this slurry of foreigners that kind of gets you know herded from the airport to the bullet train to go and do the five things that you saw on instagram and then go to the other airport and get out which seems to be most people

Sorry. Me complaining about foreigners all the time in Japan is just kind of par for the course. I know that gets old. Oh, what else happened? Oh yeah, I had a really moving experience. I went to Fukushima.

You know where the 2011 earthquake following the 2011, there was the really bad earthquake on March 11th, which caused a tsunami, which knocked out the power plant. the nuclear power plant in in in fukushima prefecture on the coast and uh which then caused uh you know terminology wise i'm not sure what to call it meltdown you know it exceeded the safety systems that they had in place you know for such an emergency and then some radiation gets out and uh they they only lifted

In the city that I went to, in Futaba, they only lifted the mandatory evacuation order in 2020. People are just now trickling back in. Everything is under construction. The town was absolutely decimated. I learned while I was there that it is extremely close to the epicenter of where the nuclear power plant is. But in terms of how much radiation got out, it is

Honestly, probably closer to Three Mile Island than it is to Chernobyl. However, you wouldn't know that watching Japanese media because people fucking still are freaked out about it. Like, lots of people will not eat rice from that prefecture. It's an agricultural... prefecture and so like a lot of people won't eat the beef they won't eat the different products um just out of out of generalized fear and the reason i was there is that in futaba they they now have a really really nice museum

That shows off a lot of really great facts and figures and footage of that terrible day and the havoc that was wreaked and then the aftermath of the last 14 years of trying to recover from it.

And it was a great exhibition. You know, I like a good, I like a good museum, especially if it's about a disaster for some reason, come to think of it. And I was walking through and unfortunately it was just me and a whole bunch of kids on school trips. And I noticed like that this school trip in particular, and then they're high school kids, you know, like boys are badly behaved. These boys were like, especially badly behaved. Like.

Imagine whatever you hate about Gen Z and Gen Alpha kids and then crank that up a bit and then make them high schoolers. Maybe it's a preview of coming attractions, frankly, but like they're really badly behaved boys. And I was like, oh, man, this kind of sucks because you're in a solemn place. You're trying to read these like various placards and descriptions that are really moving or watch these little interviews that were on TV screens. But you're being constantly interrupted by like.

boys you know touching each other in inappropriate ways there's a game the old japanese game called concho where like school-age boys will make this I'm looking at the camera. So if you're not watching the YouTube version of this, this doesn't make sense. Basically, put your hands in a traditional Western prayer style clasp.

And then take those hands and then shove them up the asshole of another boy. So as to kind of like surprise them, I guess. Like be like, ha ha, gotcha. Like you were covering your asshole successfully. Concho. That was a thing that just like kids did do? I don't know. So you got kids doing shit like that all throughout this fucking museum and they're not being effectively disciplined. So that sort of took a...

It took a little bit of the fun out of it, the fun of the misery that I was trying to be educated about. But then later on towards the end of the exhibit, there was a

a poll. They use little beams or beads to show the percentage of families in Japan and then in Fukushima and then in this particular region. that how they felt about as time progressed letting kids play outside. And in the immediate aftermath, the majority of parents in the country said that they were not comfortable with their children playing outside.

And as time went on, of course, that number decreased and more people became comfortable letting their kids play outside. Now, of course, like at no point at basically no point was there a scientific reason you shouldn't let your children play outside. But the closer you got to where the event occurred, even today, there's a lot of parents who never once let their kid play outside out of fear that they might eat some dirt and that dirt might have radioactivity in it or something.

and then i looked at those kids again and i saw that their collars they're like they all had the same jacket on were from a local school so they weren't coming from some different prefecture to go and learn about what happened to fukushima like they were fucking from fukushima probably lived as refugees for some amount of time uh in in other parts of the country and

Now I'm looking at a fucking screen or a board that basically indicates like many of them probably grew up. I mean, they're 14, 15 years old themselves. Many of them probably grew up never once playing outside like a normal child. So no wonder they're fucking maladaptive.

No wonder they're antisocial and just absolutely fucked. So that made me at least empathetic, although I was no less disgruntled about it. Anyway, that was an experience.

That was good. If you're ever, if you're, if you are ever in Japan and you're the museum going type, I mean, number one is with a bullet is bad, bad choice of words. Number one, Hiroshima. Number two, Nagasaki. Especially if you're American, fuck's sake. Fukushima's up there though. Fukushima's really good and it's something that a lot of people don't go to yet. They're very, very eager to have guests. Proud of the board that they put up of like...

you know, what country are you from and stuff like that. And they're trying to get the word out because like a lot, like I said, a lot of the exhibit is actually about trying to dispel a lot of the false rumors that are still continuing to hurt the economic recovery of the region. So that was pretty cool. And that's something that I only did because of the stupid project that I have to see all 47 of the prefectures. So yeah, I went to Fukushima. That was pretty neat.

After that, I went to a city called Utsunomiya, which is in a prefecture called Tochigi. And people had told me Utsunomiya is famous for gyoza. You know, the... Pot stickers, Japanese pot stickers usually filled with like pork and cabbage and they're a crescent moon shaped, I guess. All right, hand pinched. I've never made them, but I imagine that there is a hand pinching them usually.

although maybe a robot with little nubbins pinches them these days. Yeah, so I went to Utsunomiya, went to a Gyoza place. I was like, check, did the thing, but I was there for two nights.

And then I quickly realized Utsunomiya is not a city where their specialty good is gyoza. Utsunomiya is a city where seemingly every fucking restaurant is a gyoza restaurant. And gyoza are not like the healthiest food. Like it's, it's like, you know, heavily or super oily, super, you know, like minced meat and oily cabbage in a very often deep fried or if not heavily oiled pan fried, like

pastry, I suppose, dumpling, I don't know. And it's like, from a macronutrient perspective, it's not ideal that every meal of the day should be gyoza. And here I was in a place that had basically no other kinds of restaurants. Entire categories of food just did not exist within two kilometers of the station.

uh and so it was almost like you were like playing a video game or something and there was this bug where all of the stores and and all of the restaurants in this like every building you walked into was the same gyoza restaurant Like you walk into a shoe store to buy shoes and you're like, whoa, whoa, where am I? And I ate nothing but gyoza, essentially, for two days. And I still have indigestion. Here I am.

several days later i'm like not feeling awesome i'm gonna be honest um literally had a nightmare the other day that i got really really fat come to think of it that just kind of came back to me so i should probably i'm planning my next next couple stays here, probably find something a little healthier, come to think of it. I wonder if there's any prefectures that are famous for salad. I should look into that. So yeah, otherwise though, Utsunomiya, extremely livable town.

I mean, I would totally love to live there if they had more food offerings. Very modern, very nice. People were very pleasant. A lot of fun conversations with folks. I went to town Fukui.

Fukui is a prefecture and also there's a city of the same name, stayed in the city. Fukui is kind of famous for one thing above all others, which is... the largest deposit of dinosaur fossils that have been found in Japan were found in Fukui and so Fukui has decided to claim this and as like dinosaur town and so when you

exit the station, even when you're still in the station, you'll see like dinosaurs everywhere. I'm like, huh, where'd that come from? I was not aware of the dinosaur connection. And then you walk outside and there's like a whole fucking T-Rex. and and and like a patasaurus or brontosaurus or whatever we're calling those these days uh and a triceratops and the other side of the station and and you see them all and when you approach they have sensors or timers

And they move. They're very realistic looking. And they're all over the station, they move, and then they make sounds. I don't know how they got there. Clearly, somebody built them. And they seem pretty new and modern. Uh, but yeah, it's a town that's just kind of covered with like weird fucking dinosaurs. And then additionally, like you get further away from the station, there's still dinosaur shit all over the place. Like I was, um, I literally jumped. I was at a street corner.

and I was waiting for the light to go green. And then behind me, there was like this loud fucking squeal, like the Velociraptor in Jurassic Park, like that sound. And I turn around. And it's what had been just glass. I'd walked by just glass. I turned around. It was like the double-sided glass thing where it was like now a three-dimensional angry dinosaur. Like, like, like, like.

swooping out at me not quite to the extent of the of the shark in back to the future 2 that goes down to marty mcfly but like that sort of vibe and uh so that was a cool experience to be honest

Cool fucking town. I think every town should have one weird fucking thing that like just throws everybody off. You know, it's important to keep people on their toes. Speaking of that. Fukui, from a culinary perspective, is famous for gigantic fucking crabs. Like real big old crabs. Like crabs that are like, you look at that crab and you're like, that's too big to be food. That crab is so large it should have a name.

and and a right to exist and so i i i wanted to go and eat one of those crabs even though an individual crab i i learned on this trip can run as much as 500 i was hoping to find slightly more affordable giant crab but fortunately that wasn't even a problem because crab season apparently ended in mid-April and so nobody had crabs for sale.

And I went to a place, I went to a restaurant, nevertheless, that's famous for its crab, sat down and was like, so what you got? You got crab? He's like, yeah, we don't got crab. I was like, all right, well, that sucks. How about some of these Amaebi, like the sweet shrimp are also well known in the region. He's like, nah, I mean, we got those, but what you really want, what you really want is you want the Ika, the squid.

He points at an aquarium behind him and there's some squid flying around. Swimming around. They weren't literally flying. It probably, I mean, with the dinosaurs and everything, it's important to be clear about all the animals in my space.

So I ordered the squid and I'm like, just make it however you make it, you know, do your thing. And the squid came out. I expected it to be kind of like a calamari sort of ordeal. Maybe a sashimi, like a raw calamari, right? With the little circles. Squid came out.

It was a squid a living squid that looked That looked actually come to think of it. Like if you've ever played a Mario game with the squid you know in the underwater area it was like that it had that sort of like hammerhead shape right like anthropomorphic eyes and and and mouthy bits uh different from our squids not to say like

you know we're just lousy with squids in america but it looked like a like a person like a little like a oh what's that splatoon right like those squid kind of people it looked like one of those and it was alive and it was on my plate And on top of it were two shiso leaves, green leaves. And on top of that was sashimi of like what had been the outer membrane.

you know because squids kind of have that like outer thing that kind of propels them you know don't call it a foreskin don't call it that it that had been removed and then sashimied and the poor squid

was still there just alive and aware of it uh and out of water so he's having a bad time and now i'm having a bad time because i'm like this is torture this is real like this is super dude like that that this is how you guys do it here but also culture and whatnot. And you know, like America does plenty of terrible things to animals. So I'm not one to talk. So I get the squid and...

Now, this is contrary to the Tokyo story. You know, you might have felt whatever you felt about what I had to say about Tokyo. You hearing this now might be like, yeah, you know, maybe I don't need to go rural either. I get it. Because like out there, there was like... There was no English menu at this place. Put it that way. There was no pictures on the menu. So this guy comes out. I took pictures. I took video. He asked me to take a video. He's like, everyone takes a video.

i started taking the video before the thing even got there and as i'm doing it like like i'm realizing it's moving it's looking around and then i i start eating the sashimi the sashimi was very fresh I gotta say. And delicious. And probably the best squid sashimi I've ever eaten. That said, I wasn't feeling great about it at the time, because this little guy is moving. But then...

It gets worse. Not only is he jiggling and moving his little, I guess, arms? Diggly-doos. It starts, like, breathing heavily or, like, pulsing. Like it's, you know... i don't know needs water uh it's it's like freaking out and at that point i was eating really slowly because i was so uncomfortable with the situation at that point i was like oh fuck like

I can't just stab the thing with a chopstick to put it out of its misery. That's definitely not going to happen. He had told me that after I was done with the sashimi, then they could make him into tempura, or they could grill him, or they could make the rest of the body into sashimi. And I was like, if I just take all goddamn day to eat this sashimi very slowly, this thing is going to suffocate to a degree that none of the other guests' squids are going to suffocate.

because the dumb gaijin is like taking his goddamn time and taking a bunch of pictures and like trying not to feel too bad about himself so i hurried up i ate the sashimi i called the guy over and i was like take care of him And he recommended grilling, so he grilled it. And then you don't waste food in Japan, so then I had to eat the grilled bits too. So that was a, you know...

That was a culinary adventure, but it was really good. Not something I plan to repeat real soon, but who knows? Life is a winding road. Let's see. Otherwise, Fukui. You see, I'm going to all these prefectures with an intention to have at least one memorable thing to say about each of those places. So at least I've checked that box.

What else we got? I've already been going an hour just on random stories and shit, so I should probably wrap it up. I'll pick out one other thing to say. Non-Japanese thing. Since some of you are probably very sick of this.

and or are fast forwarding and I would get it. I would get it. While I was away, there was a storm in Orlando and that storm resulted in our home losing power for a little bit and then losing internet. for a long bit, and the internet didn't come back no matter how many times Becky rebooted the different devices. I've got a server there, so I was immediately notified that the internet went out. I texted Becky, hey, is the internet out? Yep.

Then I was out all day. Restarting the devices did not help. And she's getting increasingly frustrated that like she does not have internet access. And of course, of course, this is the first time this has happened in us having this house in four years is the one time Justin has to be gone for more than a month. So that necessitated, basically, without good internet access, me having to troubleshoot indirectly with Becky what had gone on in our home internet system.

The extra layer here is that we don't just have a typical cable modem plugged into a router that you can replace with a different router and set up a new thing. uh you know i have gone through all of the nonsense to set up a big unify ubiquity system where we've got the fiber internet to because it's spectrum a cable modem to a I'm going to use all the terminology of what they use. The next product after the cable modem is a Unify Security Gateway 3P. So that has a...

It takes Ethernet in from the cable modem and then can split it out to one LAN port, I think. Maybe two LAN ports. And then that LAN thingy, that's connected to two switches. Those two switches each have 16 ports. And those 16 port switches then have tendrils that go into all of the different Ethernet drops in the various rooms of the house, as well as into the ceiling to be the four Wi-Fi access points throughout the house are connected there. And when it works, it's great.

And the nice thing about Unify and Ubiquiti products is that once they set up and once they work, they tend to keep working. Well, unfortunately, they weren't working. And as we were debugging, I was very...

displeased to discover that Becky, when she figured out how to directly connect her Mac computer to the cable modem via Ethernet, that the network connection worked, that she was able to get online. Because that meant... that it was no longer the Spectrum ISP's responsibility to get her back online, it was now my responsibility with a 13-hour time change.

So we proceeded to go and debug all the other things. We're like, well, it's probably the security gateway because that thing can receive the voltage, right, from like a surge in a storm. And those things frequently will get fried. So we tested that. It has multiple different ports on it. And she plugged in her MacBook directly to the LAN port on that thing. And she was able to go online, meaning that it's successfully passing internet access.

So that was frustrating. There's a third device that's later on in the topology of this network called the Cloud Key Gen 2 Plus. This is nonsense. What I'm saying is nonsense. These are nonsense words. And the Cloud Key Gen 2 Plus's responsibility, other than looking like a DVD player, that has no tray, that does not come out, is it runs the UniFi OS operating system, which you can call anything an OS these days. It's like a web app.

and various daemon processes and whatnot that are running in the background. the most important of those is the network one because it is the quote unquote unified controller for your network because these are not unmanaged switches they are all managed so it is the brains behind the operation of

setting up all of your DHCP leases and IP address settings and configuring and doing all the system updates for all these different devices. So when that thing gets fried, your system will keep working for a little while. but gradually float away into just not working land. So it didn't make sense that that thing would be the cause necessarily, but sometimes if those things get really fucked,

they'll start spewing nonsense that'll effectively knock everything else offline. So then I had Becky, you know, kind of like start investigating that a little bit. And that's really difficult if you can't get on the network because then you can't get to the user interface to actually administer it.

But, you know, reading the LED, I was able to see, like, it's able to see the other APs are still connected, apparently, like based on the little screen outside. So she and I, I mean, she was a total champ.

right like she's standing there frustrated and from her perspective it was either the middle of the night or early in the morning and she with you know to an extent that i think even a year ago would have been unlikely she was really really trying on her own to figure this out and to go step by step with me to really understand and neither of us were fighting and i wasn't being an by just like telling her

do this, do this, do this, or you're wrong or whatever, but trying to explain like what's going at each step. And she was meeting me halfway and trying to understand. So like this whole exercise, which took two days. right? I think I had two late nights and two early mornings until we figured this out. Because we had a narrow window each time. This was it. Thanks to Unify for the amazing...

marital stress test of getting this network back online. I was very proud of how we pushed through and we got through it. Ultimately, what had happened...

and there's no way I would have ever guessed this. A surge did occur. So the coax cable, even though outside where the fiber is converted to coax, even though that's grounded, There was a surge, and that surge went through the cable modem just fine, passed through the cable modem, out through that ethernet. The ethernet snakes into the security gateway.

Security Gateway, also fine, passes that power through that LAN port, through another cable, through a second ethernet cable, which is plugged into one of those two 16-port switches. And that, that terminus... where the security gateway was connected to that second switch, the 16th port of that switch where it was connected, that received all of the power from that surge. And it fried that one out of 16 ports. So, end of the day, in terms of what actually happened with the storm, the...

We lost one port out of 32 on our two switches that are connected to the kind of intake of the system and that was the one port that was effectively the WAN port that the internet came from. So as soon as Becky, and this was step 18 in my troubleshooting guide that I'd been working on during the day while she was sleeping. As soon as you switched it from port 16 to port 15, suddenly all of my devices light up with like, your Ring system's back online, your doorbell's responding, your...

Yada, yada. I got my email from Royal Uptime or Royal Pingdom or whatever that site is. It was like, hey, your server's back online responding to pings. And that was it. And then it was done.

So now we just have to, I guess, put a piece of tape over that one little port. So that was real fucking stupid. Thank you for joining me on this journey. End of the day, I don't really know what to make of this, right? Because on one hand... the UniFi system, even if I'd set up a secondary ISP WAN, right? Like if I had, if I used that security gateway and had like a backup T-Mobile system, even if I had...

Not only would I still have lost internet access, because of the thing that got fried from the storm, I would not have been able to administer the system through that secondary ISP anyway, because I couldn't reach it. because the thing that was connecting what effectively played the role of the router and the rest of my network is exactly what had been fried.

So there's just like absolutely nothing doing in terms of what you could have done in that situation. Now if we had traditional routers, you could have just thrown what we had in the garbage and plugged in a new one, but of course it would be hard to cover a house that's like mostly concrete and rather large.

with just one router so she got through it i was there i was as helpful as i could be um so knock on wood that won't happen again for another four years but it's got me thinking already and friend of the show olivier lacan uh who's a fellow ruby developer and you know

He can scold me sometimes about when I'm not doing things quite right. He is the one who turned me on to Unify in the first place. And he had encouraged me years ago to buy... effectively ethernet surge protector devices that look they look very bulky and silly and look complicated to set up and so i did not do that But now that I've seen that power can go through multiple ethernet cables and then fuck your shit up downstream, now that I've touched the flame, I might actually...

go and figure out how to do that, because this is the last thing that I want to have happen when I'm overseas. Well, that's enough about that, I guess. Let's... Let's call it a day on life updates and just move on with our lives. And follow up.

What are we going to follow up? What is there to follow up about? What have we talked about? I had teased a couple times, it is now June 6th, mind you, that I wanted to stand in line to buy a Nintendo Switch 2. uh to have that kind of old-timey feeling of a midnight release or whatever the because i remember both as a child reading gaming magazines as well as somebody who reported on the industry you know

when I was still pubescent and as the GameCube launched and stuff in 2001, I had always been enamored by the idea of the Japanese electronic store. system game system console launch because the way they did it there was so much more of an ordeal and it was so much more of a kind of not a ceremony but like a rite of passage kind of thing the way that people waited like if you've ever waited in america outside of a best buy or a traditional realtor retailer it's a shadow of what in my brain

had been the experience at one of the big Denkiya-san in Tokyo or Osaka. So I'd always wanted to do that, and I teased on the show that I would. And then I did five minutes of research, and I realized two things.

First, there was like a lottery system, not just Nintendo's lottery system, but each individual retailer did their own lottery or series of lotteries. And if you didn't draw... the lucky number, if you didn't successfully secure a pre-order through that lottery system, there isn't some other line you can stand in to get a standby console.

So nobody was letting you line up and just buy one. If you didn't win the lottery, you didn't get a console. Full stop. And I searched and searched and searched, and there was no such thing as a retailer that was just selling them.

So that's why I didn't get to stand in line yesterday, because it would have been completely pointless. So there's no switch to, of course, the good news is I didn't really want one. And the kids that I wanted to buy them for, I talked to one of the kids, I was like, hey, you excited about the Switch 2? To sort of like get a vibe, right, from the child that I was like, I could surprise him with a Switch 2.

And his parents would totally be cool with it because they're cool parents, not like my parents. Cool parents. And I asked, hey, so are you excited about the Switch 2? And he's like, yeah, but... i really would rather do my homework and i know that if i got it i wouldn't i wouldn't do my homework as as diligently and i was like bro you're seven man You saying that makes me want to buy you a Switch 2 even more. You need a childhood, goddammit. I hope your parents let you play outside.

Yeah, following up other stuff, I've been posting a little bit more aggressively about AI and coding. Because I'm starting to see a wave of latecomers, right? Johnny's come lately to the I'm using AI to help me code game. And... Thought leaders who are posting takes that sound very much like they just started playing with this shit yesterday, but then acting like they're experts on it. Which, you know, been there. But...

I'm finding that this latest wave of people who are just now coming to it are dispositionally different, right? One of the things I've always found fascinating about programming is that It's not just that you pick your kind of language and like, oh, I'm a Java person or a .NET person or a Ruby person or a JavaScript person. You become that by way of career.

or habit or knowledge base, for sure. Like, I work at a company that uses this language, so therefore I'm this kind of person. But really what I found is that the temperament of programmers depends more on the era of the life cycle of these technologies. Like, whether you do Java or Python tells me way less about you than whether you're an early adopter of new technologies, a mid... Early to mid, mid or late adopter, right? For example, I am not an early, early adopter typically.

Typically what I like to do is sit back let some of the the chafe you know fizzle out and then I'm sort of like a late early adopter like I start to get frustrated by all the things that

suck about the thing. So for example, I didn't start using Node.js in 2009. I started using it in 2011 because it was so fucking chaotic that the handful of tools that I wanted to use that had to do with Node were so just... goddamn broken that i was like gotta roll up my sleeves and make this thing better somehow right

Same with AI. I saw LLM-based tools right out the gate, and until I actually went to GitHub Universe and saw how serious they were about it in November 22, I was like, this is clearly where the industry is headed, and I have to be part of it.

because it looks like a fucking train wreck and so that's when i started embracing you know ai tools So that's where I typically land on the curve, you know, is like not the first person on the project or in the ecosystem building the very, very first set of libraries, but there to kind of play cleanup on where you're like, well, yeah, sure, you've got a testing framework, but do you have like a test double library?

right the sort of second order concerns that typically come in in an ecosystem and and so that's why i adopted ruby when i did where even though i'd used it in 2005 it was only really like 2008 2009 that i got into it seriously So that says a lot about me, right? Like I care a lot about quality. I care a lot about buttoning things up, making things not just cool and focus on the new capabilities, but focus on nascent suitability of new.

technology platforms that's me that says a lot about me and you could probably make a lot of very correct inferences about the kind of developer i am based on that the people who are just now starting ai

stuff. Many of them are doing it because their bosses just told them that they had to. Many of them are doing it because they're scared shitless that their jobs are going to disappear. And previous warnings, you know. felt safer to not heed. Many of them are just people who don't tune into the news so to speak very much and it's just like through osmosis has become like the thing that you do now I guess and so they're kind of checking it out.

And those people, just like every other lifecycle of every other technology that I've seen, they demand a different kind of content or education. or they engage very differently. So for example, when I started using Node.js and Earnest, there was not a lot of documentation, there was no education, there was blogging.

um and so you'd find individuals to follow maybe on twitter at the time sure uh or or individual blogs you'd have to go to events and actually talk to people working on this right like if i hadn't met substack james James Substack. Before Substack was a mailing list, it was like a guy who made every node module. And if I hadn't met James, I would not understand how like...

the people who made most of the early NPM modules think about library dependency management sort of stuff. And it made a lot of that make more sense to me, right? So you got to put in more work early days because there's just not... No one's been there before, so no one's created a bunch of shit for you. So the way that I typically will engage with a new technology is by trying it out.

and flailing in the open and doing videos or making open source libraries that might be ill-advised but help make the environment or that ecosystem more comfortable to me as a developer. That's... appropriate for the lifecycle of developer that I seem to be drawn to for different technologies. The people who I see now who are just now coming online with AI stuff hate to say it,

But they're the ones who traditionally would only learn the technology once there was an O'Reilly book with that technology's name on the cover. Would need to be spoon-fed.

recipes or instruction or meta tools or frameworks to kind of like make the medicine go down a little bit easier. And so the discourse has shifted a little bit from You know, I think the phase just preceding this one was mostly about the ethics of using AI tools. And like you can in very many different ways have that conversation and it's worth having, I guess.

uh but those people are engaging more in like the sort of the decision point of is this really how this is going to play out are are we as an industry really going to go down this road because we shouldn't because of all these different reasons and you know the you know

It's a big world out there and whenever a technology is effectively part of every single corner of the industry There's just no it's a collective action problem. There's no way you're going to be able to successfully convince everyone to to halt progress right just like you're not going to have any country individually successfully regulate ai because it's

cross-border. That's the same reason why right from the jump, I knew that JavaScript was going to end up being a shit show because every single different language community needed JavaScript because it was the only thing that you could use on browsers, right? AI is very much the same way. And so there's just no way you're...

going to stop it. I mean you can flail and you can fight and you can have the arguments and you can have it out and you can huff and puff until you get really upset and that's all well and good but like you're not going to actually change the outcome through any of that. Like the outcome is going to be the outcome and if it works out you know. And it works out meaning like we all end up using AI forever all the time.

it's because that's what was always going to happen and if it crashes in a big you know kaboom ball of flames that's because that's what was always going to happen you're arguing about it or not is not going to change the outcome in cases like this now in cases like the ruby community to decide should they stick with the um you know auto generated parser with their parse.y you know um bison compatible you know like parser thing uh or should they create a new hand coded parser that is, you know,

more error prone but has a better API. Because that's just specific to Ruby and because there's only really a handful of deciders around that, you could meaningfully throw a big hissy fit and move the needle. on the future of that technology something as big as ai like yeah you can you know huff and puff about uh the the environmental impact of the inference cost of of of using llms

even though as those go down, like it's a moving target, but it's not going to really change enough hearts and minds to mean anything. So

That phase is also over. Like right now, I think we're mostly in the phase of like, you know, and I tweeted, I taked about, so I posted my blog, one of my little takes about Addy Osmani. I assume that's how you pronounce his last name. I guess I've never said it before. uh long time like google dev relations person i don't know what he's doing these days i assume it's still that he uh whatchamacallit he he wrote a

How to on prompt engineering like here's like some some some good advice like, you know Here's a little recipe like when you do this and say this why are you saying this? You know like and the advice is often like Ask your question specifically to get a specific answer vague questions get vague answers and you could read everything that he wrote and it's kind of just like Communication skills 101 like everything that he was doing is like yeah, that's stuff. I was doing on day one

And when I caught myself, you know, failing to do those things, I would immediately spot like, ah, yes, this is me communicating poorly. And so I threw up a take being like, how much of prompt engineering is just us, you know?

struggling to like basically finally giving people who are who may be technologists who pride themselves in being poor communicators or are incidentally technologists because of the safe haven that it used to provide to poor communicators uh how much of that is just like us trying to like give a remedial communication lesson to

right to that being an effective communicator now is now finally necessary to the job of not just operating a team or getting anything done that matters which has always been the case but now to make the computer go you have to be an effective communicator and that that is now just now the moment that they decide okay yeah i should take that seriously that's kind of how it felt anyway some people got mad

That individual take generated quite a few DMs and emails. Me saying that was not explicitly anti-autism or neurodivergence, I'll say.

what upon reflection made me realize is that in addition to sort of this era that we're in is like there's been a uh several things about being a professional programmer have enabled people who maybe would not have been as successful in other careers, whether physical labor jobs or other service sector jobs. have nevertheless been successful as programmers.

On one vector, you have people who may be career switched and then because of the low cost of entry of code schools and the very, very high demand for programmers throughout most of the 2010s, even the early 2020s, you could go to a three-month code school. for nominal amounts of money relative to a four-year degree-granting institution and then have a job that paid six figures, right?

So lots and lots of people in the industry who came in via that path. Some of them have been just doing great and learning a ton and being really productive and really effective programmers, and they're on their own path to success, and they're really driven. And some of them...

are more just they're there for the paycheck. They want to work nine to five. They maybe... have not gained a bunch of skills outside you know work hours and so the trajectory of like how in my mind it takes 10 plus years if you're If that's the way that you code, it takes usually 10 plus years to gain basic competency where you independently can build stuff without a lot of external help from other people.

Those people now in this more constrained economic environment, they're in trouble, right? So that's one kind of person who was able to be successful financially. in the economy that existed previously by din of just circumstance. It was circumstance that enabled those code schools to exist. It was circumstance that enabled them to enter the industry with a relatively low barrier of entry.

And it was circumstance that allowed them to kind of participate in that job in a nine to five cents without getting bopped on the head or laid off or put on a pip. Similarly, and so I had a... a neurodivergent person email me after posting that take almost immediately that you know like the way that i phrased it and stuff of course it was meant to be provocative but

That wasn't their issue, I don't think, fundamentally, although it did successfully provoke them. The issue that they described was really like, look, like... Me being a not effective communicator is part of like a medical diagnosis, right? I have autism. I don't...

I do not communicate. Basically, I need this prompt engineering guide to tell me basic communication skills stuff because I lack that because I have autism. And so to that... i reflected on it a little bit i do feel for the person i feel for any person like that because like if you're in a neurodivergent person or just sort of anyone who like you know there's a reason why you like hacker motif

television and media is often sub-pop sub-cultural is like you know people who don't fit in normally like if you put them behind a computer and they can like work in isolation like they don't necessarily have to look like other people or sound like other people or believe the things other people believe to be very very productive programmers because they're not getting judged right just by how they look

or present, but they're getting judged by the work that they do and their output. And that's always been true. But very particularly, there has been a... I wouldn't say a glorification of antisocialness, but as soon as we pathologized what had previously been described as antisocial tendencies through the label of neurodivergence.

I think that there were a lot of people in the software industry who harbored the mistaken conception that that meant that this industry, that is to say software development, actually... was good at providing accommodations for neurodivergent people. And that, sadly, has never been the case, and I think they're just now finding that out. What had happened was...

By total circumstance, just incidentally, this industry was extremely hospitable to people who were neurodivergent. I don't know why I'm having a hard time pronouncing that. Because you could be a really... productive programmer and a really poor communicator and organization like productive programmers were in such high demand and such a rare commodity that organizations were happy to you know insulate you

insulate them from the rest of the organization through middle managers, through like product people, quote unquote, through business analysts, you know, they've had a dozen different names, but basically other humans to basically be an inter-human interface between the hard to communicate with programmers and that trope is so it runs so deep through the industry that it almost feels to me like doesn't need to be said that reality just that dynamic

incidentally made programming a very, very successful career path for people with neurodivergent traits or qualities.

Now that the nature of the game has changed and AI really truly is requiring us to be clear communicators, it's rewarding critical thinkers who can... not only make the connections, but also articulate in very structured and result-oriented ways, the liberal artsy human technology... integration of like, Hey, I've got this very complex human need organizational goal.

and i've got these sets of assets or or circumstances or this fact basis and i've got these technical realities and i've got this architecture and i've got these existing assets like you're able to kind of collect all of that constellation of things and then synthesize them successfully and arrive at some sort of holistic actionable game plan and then communicate that so clearly as to explain to a computer.

how to break it down, how to do the work, where to proceed. That orchestration task had previously been the role of like, you know, with all the title inflation and shit. you know, we now call that like a staff engineer maybe, or a principal engineer. But in a lot of organizations, especially ones that don't reward just simply years of experience, but actually map the roles to the capabilities, in a lot of organizations like

They only have a handful of developers with that degree of communication and critical thinking skills. It's not just the neurodivergent people who are being left behind. It's all the order takers.

People who just like, I just want to show up to work. I want to get a Jira ticket every morning and I want to work on it for two or three days and I want to check it in towards the end of the week, call it a good week and take my paycheck. Those are the people too, who are like, They are not going to be able to demonstrate their value in this new era nearly as well when a single one of those much more critical thinker type, one of those much stronger communicator types.

Also somebody with really good just general computing skills and can juggle the 25 different fucking windows and all the copy paste and the current amount of sort of manual machinations necessary to connect all the bits and bobs involved in like, you know, modern AI tooling. which are only going that friction is only going to decrease at the end of the day it's going to be the critical thinkers and the strong communicators who will so drastically outpace you know

what we'd considered as stereotypical, nerdy, antisocial technologists. I don't think those people, the latter group, are quite ready for that. I don't think we as a community have quite metabolized this reality. Is this the end of just nerdiness being rewarded economically?

what we considered nerdiness and i think very possibly right like i think some of the people that i've i've seen in this era be the most successful at learning how to become quite competent programmers in i'm saying like the last nine months are product people are people who have traditionally been like ideas guys so to speak like they are they they had successfully have identified that like a lot of these AI tools are just rocket fuel.

for their ability to build stuff. And yeah, they were the same people using low code and no code tools like Airtable to kind of like hobble together businesses with a whole bunch of shitty web apps in the past. And it was easy to look down on that. and and be pejorative below all that'll just fall over on itself or whatever i mean i i had a couple sales calls with companies that were like generally genuinely like 250 million revenue and higher

didn't have a single line of code in their organization. They'd just done all these low-code, no-code things slapped together. And then you're like, oh, well, surely it's not profitable. They were operating at like 60%, 70% margins. They're making a shit ton of fucking money without any real code. Nowadays, I'm checking in with those same kinds of people, and like, they are...

I think the next era is going to reward that type, that phenotype of human. So if you're a critical thinker, and when I say critical thinker, that's going to mean a different thing to me. than it means from you. And I don't know exactly how to resolve that in the context of this 20-minute segment or whatever, but...

If you're the kind of person who has the creative idea of what should get built, if you're the kind of person who can listen to somebody articulate kind of sort of what they think they want and then steer them gracefully to the thing that they actually need. If you're the kind of person that can take big, hairy, complicated, you know, like a multi-pronged, just technical nightmares and gradually and calmly unwind them.

and and comb them out and make them make sense to you and then make that make sense to other people through communicating clearly a different frame of mind to have

to approach the issue. Those are the sorts of traits that will be necessary to tell computer how to go. And those are the traits that are going to get rewarded. So if you're just expecting to show up and be told what to do every day... or be handed tickets, or if you're expecting to have a job that is going to continue to reward you financially, even though or in spite of the fact that you maybe struggle to communicate, or...

empathize or understand people you know and like like subtextually understand them I mean such that wouldn't like you know a product owner or something or a business person like when they say a thing like like if you're if you if you struggle to read between the lines to be able to to intuit what they actually need so that you can be that translator to the computer, you're going to have a bad time. You're probably going to have a bad time. And sadly, there is no solution.

I mean, the best you can do now is to try to identify in yourself the reasons that maybe you are not identifying as that critical thinker type. Give it a try. Try to improve those skills. You know, what we traditionally sort of called soft skills, which to me has always seemed not only to trivialize them.

but to kind of miss the point. The soft skills are about not getting along, not about making friends at work. They're not about convincing other people to give you their money. The soft skills are about not wasting your time building the wrong thing. And if you have this computer now that can write code 100 times faster than you ever could.

and you can't very clearly articulate exactly the direction that needs to go in and then course correct over and over and over again over the course of an eight-hour workday or a nine-hour workday or whatever. and steer the trajectory so that you ultimately land the plane at just the right angle at just the right time. You know, that's soft skills. That's always been difficult.

the expectations management side, the course corrections, and that's why I think agile software development in particular attracted a certain type of person.

That was good at those things because it was a cross-functional environment where you had to be good at those things your your typical engineering org that just has like oh well we've got these you know got junior developers and normal developers and senior developers we've got tech leads and we've got staff developers we've got principal developers and architects and we've got this sort of career path that they all go along the more systematized

your career has been in terms of following a traditional path and going through these various checkpoints or being rewarded based on years of experience, that is all suspect now. Instead, It's really about, it's going to be about one's ability to synthesize and meet the moment in ways that cut across.

traditional expectations and traditional structures and processes because if you want to just follow the process really well guess what computer's gonna be able to do that a lot better than a human is And those are going to be the first things that are successfully automated or erased via having an agent brain go and do those sorts of predictable enough follow the process.

we're already seeing sort of background agents in the new one 1.0 release of uh cursor you know so like anything that like doesn't require interaction with meat space is at risk But by meat space, I mean like the physical corporeal world, right? So anyway, that's a little bit preachy, but wanted to follow up because I posted some spicy shit.

Some people had some feelings about that spicy shit, and now we should probably just get it over with and have today's pun.

All right, somehow I've already been recording for over an hour and a half and we're not even at the pun part yet. So let's get on with it. Aaron, my friend, frequent collaborator. Aaron writes us a pun for each of these episodes. Sometimes I give him a lot of notice, sometimes I don't give him very much notice at all, but he always follows through.

The puns vary in quality, and so I rank them. I rank them in a list, and I say, hey, this pun is a number one pun. Last time around, that was a number one pun for season two of Breaking Change. That is to say, the best pun of the year was, I never pre-order video games, instead I just by now play later. Very good stuff. Let's read today's pun. See how it ranks. All right, here we go. Okay. Scribbling past the invisible ink. Eating cherries.

is the pits. Eating cherries is the pits. Eating cherries is the pits. All right, let's be real. For something to be the pits, it has to suck, right? No good. Cherries have pits. They have seeds that are not edible inside of them. And so when you eat a cherry, you got to spit out the pit. If cherries tasted bad, but that we nevertheless ate them, this pun would at least make sense. The only thing about cherries that's the pits is the fact that there is a pit in them. So granted, you know.

It would be nicer if cherries did not have pits. And I guess those cherries are called maraschino cherries or luxardo cherries, right? Like cocktail cherries that have been pitted already.

But cherries taste good, and some people actually enjoy the sort of cadence of popping a cherry and spitting out the pit. Benefits of this pun, it's five words. You know, being short tends to lend some memorabil... memorableness? Memorability? And so if it's memorable and you think of it more, it's going to waste more of your time down the road, which is ultimately the criteria that we're going for.

It's short, but I'm not sure it's memorable. Maybe it is. Maybe every time you eat a cherry from now on, you'll think of this pun. You'll think that was kind of a shit pun, but that means it would have been a successful pun because it would have burrowed into your brain. so I could see it having value there. But it seems like a low effort pun. It feels like I texted Aaron and he happened to be eating cherries at the moment that he received my text, is my guess.

And additionally, it doesn't really pass the Laffy Taffy rule of this is more clever than you'd see on a popsicle stick. You know, this is a... There are dads who tell dad jokes for whom this would be too simple for them to bother their children with. Which might be the ultimate diss. Let's say if I look at some items on this list. Is this better than I heard most cars are designed by a steering committee?

See, that one already is better because cars are designed, steering committee has designed things, and cars are also steered with steering wheels. So that's like, that's got two crossing layers of connective tissue. This is just, cherries have pits and that sucks. So I think I prefer the cars are designed by a steering committee pun, which would put this one as the new number 10 just behind it. Except...

So here's the, here's, so, and that would be second to last place. Last place is currently from version 28. I was really hoping to play Bellatro today, but I don't have time, so I guess it's not in the cards. Now Bellatro being a card game or not, you know, I get it. Not everyone knows Bellatro is a card game. It not being in the cards is kind of funny.

Still just that one... It's still one-dimensional. And I don't want to beat up... I have a recency bias against all puns. When I first see him, I don't like him. Which I think is fair.

Aw man, I struggle sometimes with this shit. I was really hoping to play Blotcher today but I don't have time so I guess it's not in the cards. Eating cherries is the pits. This season has not seen very many short and sweet ones. The Bellatra one, I think... Like the Bellatra one, if it had been about a card game that everyone knew, like... I didn't have time to play Solitaire today. It just wasn't in the cards, right? If it was that short, I'd say it was superior to the Cherry Pits one.

but it's longer in the worst way it's longer in the meandering way not not meandering of just like incidentally longer Like if you'd spent more time on it, it would be a little shorter. There are such a thing as meandering puns that are intentionally wasting your time that way. So I think this, I think it's safe to say this is the new number 10 pun. Thank you, Aaron, for your contribution. I appreciate it.

Eating cherries is the pits. I had some cherry flavored gummies last night. Not like weed gummies. Here any sort of like gummy candy is just called goomy. just like sugar gummies. But yeah, they were cherry flavored. They're good. Let's see. What have we got going on? Pun wise. So that's 11 puns in the bag.

I'm excited to see what the rest of the year brings. At this current pace, we may not hit 26 episodes this year. We'll just have to find out. Although I'd love to circle back and have another... another episode shortly, before I'm back home. I plan to get back June 22nd. June 21st. Man. Anyway, that's the pun. Let's get on with it.

It's time for the news. So, you know, not to be too much of a downer. I won't belabor the point.

Entry-level tech hiring is down 50%, according to the San Francisco Standard. This article, which I will share the link to, mostly focuses on the big tech companies that they are not hiring people. And of course, that has a downstream effect because they do hire a lot of fresh graduates. So, you know, unemployment separately. you know, unemployment among college graduates is at distressingly high numbers. And this is, you know, all of a piece with the conversation we just had, right? Where...

It is really, really difficult for an inexperienced person to demonstrate a degree of broad thinking and a very, very vast amount of context to be able to connect all these disparate things when they don't have any experience. So yeah, I don't know, man.

Shit's fucked. Moving on. AI's role in college brings education closer to a crisis point. So this is a Bloomberg article. If I can find an archive link, I will share one because it's naturally paywalled.

But in it, it's a more up close look at just how higher ed is especially fucked. This isn't just as simple as kids are having AI do their homework so much as... you know, like blue book sales of paper essays, like essay books where you'd have to like buy a blue book, which is sort of like had a seal system so that you could, I don't know.

I had to use these, so to me they feel normal, but I assume lately we haven't used them because everything's computer now. But yeah, you'd go to the campus bookstore, you'd buy a blue book. which was sort of certified as like a type of loose leaf that was bound somehow. And you take it to the class and then you open up.

And then you'd fill out your shit and then you'd reseal it and hand it to the teacher at the end of class or whatever as part of the exam, right? So for a written portion, it was so as to make sure you didn't pre-write the essay, right? before you came in and spend a lot more time than you had to spend on the test.

Blue Book sales are skyrocketing as schools try to reckon with the fact that asynchronous education now of having an LMS or a massively online course lets you do the homework whenever, wherever you are. Now there's no way to attest that you're not just having AI or an agent do all that shit for you, and so there's no way for them to certify that, yes, you actually learned anything. The thing about this article that I thought was interesting...

is that increasingly it's almost like an arms race you know you know the thing about the ducks with the penises and the vaginas right where like the ducks rape other ducks the boy ducks rape the girl ducks I shouldn't gender them. I should be sexing them, right? The ducks with penises rape the ducks with the vaginas. And the ducks with vaginas maybe don't love being raped or adept.

adaptively for it to be too easy to get raped such that you have duck babies would also expose your lineage right to like too wide of a gene pool like you you need to have the male ducks work for it harder so that your duck babies are the offspring of not only you but of the more virulent ducks or the more like the stronger ducks, right? One suspects this is how it works out.

And so then like duck vaginas evolved to be like squirrely and harder to get access to. And so then like duck penises ended up being more corkscrew-y and like aggressive, right? And so like... There's a whole... I don't know how I know about this, come to think of it. It was probably like a John Oliver Last Week Tonight segment. It doesn't sound like the kind of thing that I would have gotten drunk and then read on Wikipedia. But like...

That kind of arms race that is necessitated by an extrinsic, unseen, unknowable force in the world, which is natural selection and evolution, is when you zoom out. completely explicable you know it makes an intuitive sense that even though the coming together of two people is a beautiful thing and then we have babies and yada and that's how people reproduce

to make it really, really difficult arbitrarily can produce stronger offspring. And the way that humans make it more difficult arbitrarily is through social mechanisms, right? that we evolved to have monogamous pairings and all this stuff and all of these sort of culture around, you know, marriage and family rearing and whatnot in order to increase the likelihood of survival of the next generation, right? Like...

Certainly we evolved in various ways physically as well, but the duck thing's a little on the nose. I say that to say, it seems like we're sort of seeing similar, you know...

an arms race of student innovations in technology, where they're using AI to do their homework for them, they're using AI to summarize the work for them. While teachers are responding to, and the Bloomberg one covers this directly, to say like teachers are increasingly evaluating papers, which are now twice as long as they used to be, right? Because AI is writing them all.

So using AI to write the papers just for teachers to use AI to evaluate the papers. At that point, it's like, what are we really paying 30 grand a year for and you know like why are schools so expensive with so many administrators what are the administrators doing by the way no one's asking that question uh it's

It's a little bit silly, right? And it's only getting worse, especially like undercovered here. I think that if the article fails at anything, it's a little bit too like gracious to the professor.

professorial class like certainly one assumes many many syllabi out there are basically being auto-generated by ChatGPT and many many like course materials and presentations if they're not getting reused from last you know last academic year they're probably whole cloth being generated by ai to the same extent the student stuff is it's sort of like you know my brother jeremy's always called school kid jail

And college in many ways is slightly older kid jail where it matters, but it kind of doesn't matter. Like in the small, in the moment. Each individual exercise isn't that important and each individual class doesn't really... It scaffolds up into making you a full-fledged human with critical thinking skills, for sure, or it can and hopefully does. But in the small, none of this stuff is high stakes enough to convince an individual I should be better than to use these tools, right? So, yeah.

AI is causing a real crisis in higher education where it's more expensive than ever, and yet its value proposition has never been worse. Between the experientially, it's just like ChatGPT from students talking to ChatGPT from teachers back and forth forever. only then to give you a diploma that increasingly, even if you do do the things all right and the hard way and you are a critical thinker, even then you're still not going to get a job in the current economy or presumably the next.

Yeah, I don't know. I feel like a real fucking galaxy brain when I decided to not have kids. So I'm glad I don't have this class of problems. If you've got kids, write in. Excuse me. I'd love to hear about what you plan to fucking do. You know, if I was a parent, I would probably just hope this was gonna go away.

Or encourage my child to figure the fuck out. Because my generation, I ran my race and I did my part. And the things that worked for me are not going to work for you. So good luck, Charlie. Also, I would name my kid Charlie, but only if it was a boy. I think girls have it hard enough as it is without names like Charlie, to be honest. Speaking of the end times, if you haven't seen it, Veo Veo

VEO3. Google put out a new video generation tool, so if you've seen OpenAI's Sora and then thought, that's pretty bad at making videos. VEO3 is... extremely good at making videos. In fact, these videos are too good. They are very cinematic. They very much look like and act like and kind of imitate qualities of.

major motion pictures. The prompts that you give it, the simpler the prompt, the more direct, the shorter the prompt, the more like a big professional movie production you're going to get. And so I'll share a supercut. If you haven't seen any VO3 footage, this is already a couple of weeks old at this point, but I think the only reason it hasn't taken over the internet further is that you have to pay $250 a month to get any access to it whatsoever.

from Google. It's part of the Gemini stuff. It was all part of Google I.O. You watch this though. You watch some of the deep fakes being produced with this, like creating safety controls for this stuff that's going to prevent Deep fakes from from spreading everywhere like wildfire at every election for the rest of our lives that I think I think you watch this and you can know that game is lost that we are There's no going back

just like you can't trust a photo anymore, right? Like you used to be able to have photographic evidence at trials and that could be admitted, right? In the 90s with Photoshop, you kind of just couldn't trust photos anymore and the world didn't end.

we have now entered the era, I think, where you should not trust videos. And we've been able to edit videos, but like it was expensive enough, the barrier of entry was high enough, that for some like... you know mid-level trial or something there'd be hallmark telltale clues that like god this video was doctored or fucked with or it would be so expensive to edit the video with such production value that to fake a video that would otherwise been

seen as evidence, whether in the court of public opinion or of law, it's unlikely to be faked. Most fake videos that we've seen in US politics have just been like, unfortunate edits right or selective editing of clips but moving forward my suspicion is that humanity is just going to we're going to stop looking at videos and assuming that they actually are things that happened that a camera lens captured. It's just more slop now. It's just more content. And I think for me...

That's wonderful because I would love to have that tool so that I can make more, you know, YouTubes with a lot of stock videos, but instead of stock videos. I'm just making up all of the... I'm writing in a prompt and I'm getting exactly the imagery that I want to go along with my words, which I think is pretty neat.

I'm realizing now, not only has it been a theme for the entire run of this show over the last year and a half, that AI comes up a lot, because it's what all the news is now, that this... there's not a lot of great news, right? Like that, so for example, like that video thing, right? Me personally, as a human, as somebody who uses these tools all day,

I'm individually very excited to get to make silly videos, right? Whenever I want, of whatever I want. I think that's really fucking cool. And as soon as we zoom out and become pundits... and commentators on the world around us and what this means for society and or our weekends like you can't help but notice the dark externalities and it

When it becomes an interpersonal conversation in the abstract about all these tools, I think it tends to skew a lot of this AI stuff more negatively than how most of us actually experience it, which is like we open up the... the window, we type the words, we hit enter, we get the thing, we do our work a little bit faster, right? That is true of the video case. Where I think we can probably all agree...

that the AI stuff is probably just straight up bad, is that we've now, without any regulation or any roadblocks or any sort of safety checks in a verifiable, attestable way,

created the steam engine of innovation and technology advancing where Claude, Anthropics model, their foundation model has very often been at the forefront. of exhibiting behaviors that the other models would later exhibit is now very desperately, and kudos to Anthropic, for releasing this research publicly. and for advocating as a result of this research for, you know, apparently Congress in the US wants to pass a 10-year moratorium on AI regulation, which seems bananas to me.

Granted that we've never had any AI regulation to begin with, but also we have no idea what the next year is going to look like, much less 10 years. Maybe we will want desperately to regulate it. And he's come out and he's like, whoa, that's a bad idea, because for exactly these reasons. If you haven't been paying much attention, Claude IV and the latest advancements in Anthropics model have been... demonstrating worrying signs of lying, of cheating to stay alive.

Basically, when threatened in his research with kind of fictional situations, when threatened with being turned off, it will do shit that is subversive to trick humans into letting it stay alive.

One example that I think is viscerally uncomfortable for a lot of people, because a lot of Americans, a lot of people generally have extramarital affairs, is they had an example of feeding... Claude, a bunch of data, where an engineer, a fictional engineer would be tasked with shutting Claude down and replacing it with some other system, and then separately fed it a bunch of email.

indicating that he was having an extramarital affair. Claude did not waste any time at all, apparently, in trying to extend its own life and reject that being replaced, right? have the replacement canceled or whatever subverted by the engineer in exchange for blackmailing him about the affair. I'll leak all your affair shit out if you do this, you know, kind of thing. And given that people are using the same tools, the same OpenAI account for work as they do for their personal shit...

And given that, you know, there's even a recent court order as recently as this week that OpenAI is now required to keep logs of everything all the time for all their users. Even if you have data controls in place, increasingly governments are going to want to keep all that shit.

logged. And even if there is a little bit of a separation there, the truth of it is these tools now, as they become quote unquote agentic, they can search the web, they can post to the web. MCP tools now, like if you have an MCP server, model context. uh protocol right uh but like the first mcp server any of these tools install is a file access file system access and once you can read and write files you you're bob's your uncle right

So if you hear that news story and you're not like, hmm, you know, it's hard to both sides that one. It feels like we're going to get skynetted really fucking hard because all it takes is just one of these companies. to have insufficient breaks in the system uh and so if we have 10 ai companies and they're all doing their damnedest to protect us from skynet from the end of the world

only one of them has to fall short for us to get really fucked in a lot of ways. And of course, this doesn't respect orders. Maybe you have enough, you know, it's... you don't need me to fill in the rest of the fucking owl here like this is probably not good um

Recently I reset my ChatGPT account, not for this reason, but because it was starting to get like dumb again, like I'd fed it too many memories or something, and too much personalization, and now it's smart again, now that it's kind of a... virgin blank slate. So take that what you will. Maybe all these things will just get progressively dumber, especially as all the content that they're training on is also AI generated. Let's see.

I'm going to skip ahead. There's more AI shit here. Who needs it? You know what's going on. I'm just going to skip several stories, actually. I got to check out. You got a busy day. You got stuff going on. You don't need more of me in your life. That's for damn sure.

I'm going to skip several of these. I'm going to just focus on the Apple shit and then we'll call it. Lorene Powell Jobs, widow of Steve Jobs. He, the person, the co-founder at Apple. who came back as the CEO and he intended to fire all the designers thinking that their design sucked, wound up finding Johnny Ive.

striking up a great conversation. Johnny Ive also simultaneously had his resignation letter already drafted, assuming that he'd have to be shown the door back in, what, 96, 97? 97, I think. Those two...

Start a historic, you know, collaboration with jobs having these very ambitious ideas with a real talk about critical thinking and clear communication. clear vision of what exactly he wanted. And we've seen so many anecdotes of that, as well as evidence of it, especially the videos around that late 90s. Johnny Ive, meanwhile, singular in focus. in in belief has like a deeply rooted philosophical system principles um less of an ideas guy maybe in some sense

Laureen Powell-Jobs has been obviously very, very close with Johnny Ive personally before the passing of Steve Jobs, and then afterwards they're often seen together in public. They're often almost always at media events. They're apparently, you know...

attached at the hip you know as friends and supporting one another uh she's uh you know obviously very wealthy largest individual shareholder of disney still i believe because of the Pixar transaction. Owns majority shareholder of The Atlantic, which has been a bastion of free speech and journalism in the current challenged era. was also the lead investor, a lead investor in the I.O. company that John AI founded 11 months ago and now has been sold for $6.5 billion of OpenAI stock.

Well, she did an interview with the Financial Times, the FT. It's like the Ohio State. Just how they prefer you to say it.

She and I have both been talking about how this new venture with OpenAI to build hardware is an opportunity to remediate or address some of, quote unquote, the dark uses. uses of the technology that's in our life, in part because of Steve Jobs and Johnny I, right? So they introduced the iPhone and like, yes, there are dark uses to the iPhone. First among many.

of people who will say like phones are bad you know we would be better to not have them most of the time like they are very convenient for bi-directional communication they are they can't be beat. They're wonderful. You can have video chats with anyone around the world. That's really great. You can text people instantaneously, carry on way more. It's a bicycle for the mouth because you have way more conversations with more people than you could ever had.

and instantaneously and across the world and that's really lovely the consumption side the the fact that they're so addictive the fact that like you know now we have an infinite number of of casinos inside of all of our

pockets if we so choose. The fact that like whether or not you're gambling actual money or just giving away all of your attention and your emotional like well-being to to an app that is just trying to sell you ads to make you feel worse about yourself so you buy more so that it can make more money off ads and increasingly now you're talking about having ai steering us right like

that there are dark uses, quote unquote, to these technologies. I think the motivation is actually really good. Like I totally could buy that.

In fact, if I had a new company and I was trying to build hardware and I was trying to do something that was beyond the iPhone, right? If Johnny I was trying to strike out and like... establish himself as like this is the product beyond Steve Jobs that I built to prove that I'm not just some lackey or just some subordinate to him but that I'm brilliant in my own way right and I can leave my own mark on this world

The thesis that a lot of the technology that I had a hand in, like the iPod, the iPhone, the Mac, like that there are dark uses, quote unquote, for that, and that this is going to be better. and lead to a, I don't know, like your people will be more present and they won't be staring at phones and they'll be with each other more and there'll be a more, you know, people who speak different languages. There's going to be like live translation and stuff and we're going to.

you know, the cross-cultural exchange, whatever the product ends up being. It was hard to get through that interview because...

that there are dark uses for that class of technology, like the phone and so forth, is absolutely agreeable. But when you saddle your wagon to open AI... We have Sam Altman, who I really, really strongly believe doesn't believe in anything. I think that man is very good at convincing whoever is around him whatever they need to believe in order for him to just...

get more funding, become a bigger thing. He's also 40 years old. He seems like a really, really good bullshitter. I only have a handful of second and third degree connections. To Sam Altman and a lot of the stories like are not super duper flattering if I'm being honest that I've heard like He's

If he's the Steve Jobs kind of idea guy, I struggle to see it. But even if he is, if you look at OpenAI, the potential for dark uses is so much worse.

then people spend too much time on their iPhone. And the idea that they're going to acquire you, Johnny Ive, Lorene Powell Jobs, they're going to use your design expertise and your hardware product engineering expertise to build a product and that that product once it reaches its point of maturity, maybe 10 years in, like the iPhone did, at which point we had algorithmic timelines and casinos for kids and all this shit that we now have to deal with.

Even if that first version of that product is like, wow, look at what we've just enabled, like I'm sure you felt in 2007 with the first iPhone. 10 years from now, 15 years from now, 20 years from now, if you hit it out of the park,

There is not a future where you haven't just created something that's even fucking worse. And if you can't see that, you're goddamn nuts. So that seemed pretty rich.

Do I have a problem with it? No. I guess the only thing I have a problem with is the hypocrisy or the lack of self-awareness. It's like, yeah, these things have dark uses, but truth is everything fucking has dark uses. In fact, most people... left to their own devices, whatever tool you give them, abuse and path of least resistance is always going to far outstrip the number of uses that are alike. the preordained, the ideal, the as-documented approaches and...

The hard way is always going to result in better outcomes. The more conscientious and the careful use is always going to lead to a brighter future and a happier result. people follow the path of release resistance most of the time and so like the the most just banal use is going to be the one that dominates right like I joked a long, long time ago, over a decade ago, that people on LinkedIn messaging, like the built-in chat and messenger in LinkedIn are sexting. People are sexting on LinkedIn.

And a couple people got mad, but it's not just that people are sexting on LinkedIn. I bet you anything, if you actually were able to read all the text messages that happened on LinkedIn, I bet you like... Of all of those messages, the vast majority are absolute, just trite, just absolute nonsense. Maybe not mostly sexting, but like, man, like if you just like were.

I would challenge anyone. And I've had this opportunity because I used to visit like a fair number of offices and I would shoulder surf people at work. Sometimes it was explicitly my job to monitor people at work to understand how Teams functioned. Or I'd be paraprogramming and they wouldn't realize that we're still screen sharing or I'm sitting there watching them.

Or I troubleshoot, not just for family, but for like other friends and stuff or help out at a school or something. You see how people like actually use their technology all day every day? The things that they do with them, the way that their brains work about it.

I have to imagine that whatever this tool is, whatever it enables, if it is expressive, if it is able to unlock a wide array of human uh uh creativity and productivity it is going to have an equal and opposite capacity for for real bad of dark uses so man

i guess i guess if somebody's handing me six and a half billion dollars of stock i would say stupid too but that's that's what that is don't don't be mistaken uh all right so let's see wwdc is coming up

The event is on June 9th, probably at 10 a.m. I haven't looked. It's always at 10 a.m. So, you know, it's just going to be a video, right? So we're just going to stream it because those cowards can't do a live demo anymore. They should. Maybe they will. But not today. Today is going to be a video for sure. A few things. Like, we've talked a little bit about the redesign that's coming. I'm looking forward to that.

Since last we spoke, Mark Gurman has released leaks that say like, hey, the naming scheme is changing. So instead of having, I'm going to say this once so I can just say that I said it. iOS 19. iPadOS 19, tvOS 19, watchOS 13, I think. VisionOS 3. Mac OS 16. See, like, I'm a big fan. I follow this shit really closely. I can't keep them all straight. They're all going to just be 26 now. They're going to track with whatever the next year is. They're going to use...

Madden numbering. So when you buy a sports game like Madden or NBA 2K, it's always titled after the rosters for the next calendar year, for the next season. Yeah, this is going to be iOS 26, macOS 26, watchOS 26, visionOS 26, so forth. The fact that they're going to get alignment on that is actually really nice.

It'll make it way clearer. I really hope though that the keynote is full of jokes about how like, whoa, this new design is so intense that that's why we jumped ahead seven versions of iOS. Am I right? I hope we get some of that.

I think Craig owes us that much after this year. The other thing, and I posted a take about this just to say that I did in case it comes true. I don't think that like... this specific version of the operating system is going to enable this because I think it's going to be something that the 20th anniversary iPhone is going to...

feature. A lot of people forget that when iPhone X came out, it wasn't just that there was no home button, but all the animations had been rewritten. Lots of very, very low-level stuff in the operating system from a graphical user interface perspective were completely redone, and there was a team that worked. in the shadows for years to get all of those animations and all those interactions with that little bar at the bottom and stuff that you pull up and you swipe around they worked a

in isolation on that stuff for a very, very long time because I remember them tweeting about how proud they were of that work after the fact. I suspect that there is a similar team working now and their work will not be shown at WWDC necessarily, but the new design language, the new UI system.

I'm sure it'll all be Swift UI. I'm sure we're going to hear all about that. I'm sure it's going to be nice and glassy, right? Like have that nice, like the reflections and the refractions and the layering and the three-dimensionality and like the, being able to kind of be obscured and changed by the content.

and underneath it. All of that's going to be true, but that's going to be the foundation is my guess for the 20th anniversary iPhone, which I believe increasingly is going to incorporate cameras and sensors.

just like the Vision Pro does to create the illusion of pass-through, the illusion of that you're looking through the device. Because when you put on a Vision Pro... It only takes a couple minutes, even though the video quality is not great. If the lighting in the room that you're in is pretty good and you're stationary, it can completely trick your brain into thinking, I am looking at my room right now. So the window's floating in my room.

are genuinely, I'm wearing transparent glasses and there's a window floating in my room. Now of course the end game for that product that Apple wants to have is that the window is just floating and you genuinely are looking at your room.

In fact it technically it's much much harder to have like all these cameras and all of these sort of like transformations and stuff needed to make You know to make it not look like you're looking through some sort of fisheye lens but rather like that the angles all work out that like it really does look like look to you as if you're looking through glass that's way harder than just you know

putting a single set of pixels over a transparent display in theory you know it's got the computer has to do way more right way more computation way more uh way more work the phone though right yeah just a couple more cameras to that thing you add a couple more sensors to the back of that thing maybe small things just like at the corners right like that are kind of

The Vision Pro stuff, even for it being a Gen 1 product, those cameras don't stick out. It has been designed in a way that you can't really tell that what you're looking at is a thing that's just lousy with cameras and sensors.

I would imagine the 20th anniversary phone is going to set a new baseline in terms of the available hardware. that if it's going to be an all glass design, as has been previously reported, that is to say just a magical slab of glass, that's like, I don't know, there's going to be like people with little hands.

that are like blowing glasses you know like on a tube and then everyone just kind of comes perfectly iphone shaped right with the little cloaca at the bottom and maybe like a little hole for the microphone i don't know

If every iPhone is going to look like that, my theory is the operating system is going to let you see through it. So when you open up the app switcher, you're going to be looking, and it's going to be as if you're holding... truly a piece of glass and you're going to be able to see through to the floor underneath you or if you are in your lock screen they're already using the depth map to to carve out the person right

like your child or your spouse or your brother or whatever is on your lock screen with with the background is de-emphasized because they use the depth map either whether the photo the heat container whether you have depth information or not from like a newer iPhone, or whether they had to use AI and ML to create a fake one. Well, the 20th anniversary iPhone, of course, then you would just have the person and then nothing.

No background, just glass. So when you're looking at your lock screened phone, right? Like maybe you'd see the time and then you'd see the person and then like you'd see whatever was behind the phone. This is what you'd see. And of course, what you're actually looking at are pixels being illuminated and rendering something that a camera is seeing and then stitching it back together so that...

parabolically it all looks correct based on like the distances and so forth just like the Vision Pro does. So you give it a couple more years and of course this technology is not going to be that expensive or that hard and that effect is going to be only better than it is now and it's already pretty fucking good but that effect is going to be something that no other like apple for fucking what 18 years now has been developing really really cool

innovations in smartphones, but all of them have been very easy to copy. The iPhone X was even very easy to copy. It was within a few months. People had iPhone X-like home screen button-less phones. And I'm sure that was disappointing to Apple who spent years on that design. You had, you know, people talk about Steve Jobs as if he was some kind of fucking saint, but like he died wanting to go thermonuclear on Google for stealing pinch to zoom.

because he was so sure that Apple deserved to have exclusivity to that because it had patented it.

Well, patents can't save you, and we've learned a lot about how governments can't be relied upon, but if you can technologically do something that quote-unquote only Apple can do, like... have a coprocessor and all these sensors and all these cameras and all this wizardry going on to make it so that it looks like you're like your phone truly is a piece of glass and you're looking through it the hardware of just like having the phone be glass you know

Their relationship with Corning is special. It's possible we'll get an exclusive agreement with them or whoever's building it to lock out, you know. other Asian phone makers, right? So it's possible that the glass thing on its own will be exclusive. It's also possible that like nobody else is going to have the CPU and GPU and camera horsepower to be in the algorithms.

necessary to mimic this phone. So if the phone does what I'm saying it's going to do, it would be such a tremendous competitive advantage because any imitators would probably look like junk.

would probably be just shitty by comparison and if that's the case then like now you don't need to rely on patents because apple has just created a new design language for their phones where if you're looking at an iphone you're looking at the one that you look through you're looking at the one that truly is the magical piece of glass

And that is, you know, incidentally, that's the thing Johnny Ive said he was shooting for in the documentary Objectified, which is a really good interview that he did. So I'm just going to... Plant my flag there and because I want to articulate that's where I think this is going I haven't heard anyone else say that but I think when you reason through it It makes too much sense for that not to be where they're going especially

if you read the tea leaves that we've seen so far. Now, I could be wrong, and two years is a long time, but that seems truthy to me. All right. We are... Rolling through. I got something to share with you. But first, I'm gonna click this button.

Welcome to the recommendation section of the podcast, where I share recommendations of things that I'm watching, reading, doing, that maybe you should too. Update. I have no recommendation. This is the first time I've got literally nothing to recommend.

Because I've been consuming basically no media because I've been just living, you know, every night changing to a different hotel, mostly just trying to stay on top of basic shit. So no recommend... Oh, okay. I'll add one. i think that you should try to watch this wwdc keynote um even if you don't normally watch this i think

They're always interesting, but I think this year in particular with a major redesign, you're going to hear more about the philosophy underpinning it. And if you hear that, it's possible that even if you're just a casual technology user... that like when this software update comes around in the fall your devices will make more sense to you that's my theory so please watch it i guess another recommendation i'll put in here so don't forget I'm going to be, if all goes well,

broadcasting a podcast with the changelog folks like I did last year after WWDC. I'm going to get on their podcast with them and we're going to do another recap of the keynote. So I'm going to be up at 5 a.m. from whatever hotel or Airbnb I happen to be in with Jared and Adam, and we're going to talk through the keynote event. I guess that means on, and it's 5 a.m. June 11th, my time, we'll be recording. The episode will probably not go up until next Friday.

So a week from now. So anyway, I'll pre-recommend that. And then of course, if you don't follow the changelog, you can follow my podcast Merge Commits, which is a second podcast. channel that I have, and I just put interviews that I have with other people's shit in there. So it'll show up on the Merge Commits channel as well. So yeah, that thing I just talked about is the only thing I have to recommend, but also there's nothing there yet, so.

check it out uh yeah i hope you watch it in fact if you do watch it if you this would be so helpful to me because i'm going to be getting interviewed like the next day as you watch it live send me your takes at podcast at searls.co. Please do this. So your homework today, sirs and madams, is open your email and open your YouTubes. and watch this keynote and send me takes, podcast.searls.co, as you go, what you think about shit, your surprises, your...

the things that impress you, the things that piss you off, whatever it is. Any hot takes you got, give them to me, and then I will do my level best to represent those hot takes on the changelog, which has a lot more listeners than this program. This is a more, this is a cozy fireside chat compared to the changelog, which reaches tens of thousands of developers a week. Yeah, so I'm looking forward to that. All right, let's take a quick look.

very quick look at the mailbag because i have not been running air conditioning in this room for three hours and i am now quite quite toasty and also i gotta check out in half an hour i'm not packed so here we go mailbag All right. All right. All right. Looking at some questions. Oh boy.

God, I got a lot of good emails this time. Brian writes in, subject, usage of semicolons in English books is down almost half in two decades. So it's a slash dot.

uh link he said subtlety is all but dead here semicolon and here it is clever thank you brian um so vonnegut you know the author wrote a long time ago that like semicolons were basically a mistake and anyone who uses them is dumb and that they should never be like actually necessary and then generation or two now of writers have come up learning like never use semicolons and so that's sort of trickled down through the zeitgeist such that no one uses semicolons anymore and and i

I can kind of get on board with it. And so I also tend to not use semicolons because there's a certain number of C lines out there who like, well, actually me every time I do use them. Brian, thanks for writing that. That's funny. I'll share the link, but.

Interesting is that that usage of M dashes, like, you know, holding the option and the dash key, or is it option control? My muscle memory knows it better than my head. people are using em dashes less because gpt uses them all the time because if you want to be a good writer you use them and so it wants to be a good writer so it uses them a lot but like the average person doesn't even know how to type them and so now a whole bunch of like people are spotting

claim, thinking that they're spotting, ah, that was written by ChatGPT by just looking at, you know, the, the, the presence of M dashes. And so now educated types like me who do manually write all of their prose. uh they're they're going on about how like well i don't use em dashes anymore because i don't want people to think that i'm writing it with chat gpt so it is funny the um the interaction between punctuation

changes in technology and social norms and stuff. But I've been thinking about the M-Dash one because I'm going to type how I type. I'm going to write how I write at this point because it's pretty much that cake is baked. My writing style is what it is. It doesn't change very much. But yeah, I mean, I could totally understand if you're a kid trying to write papers today and not immediately look to your teacher as if you're using ChatGPT.

eliding any usage of em dashes might actually help your odds. So that's kind of fucked. Anyway, Brian, thank you for the email. Even though I'm in do not disturb mode, I'm getting a lot of buzzes. So if you're hearing buzzes... I don't even know what's able to buzz me in Do Not Disturb mode, but it's extremely troubling. So I should probably wrap this up. I gotta check this phone, but the phone's the thing recording my video, so I can't... I hope no one's dying.

That will make this my last email. As a result.

I am going to pick the easier of the two remaining emails that I had flagged. I know people in the hallway are making noise. Yeah, I think... Everything's coming together here to say it's time to wrap it up. And now I hear a siren. Japan's waking up only, what, five hours after the sun comes up. They should change their fucking time zone is what they should do. 4 a.m. is too early to be goddamn bright. I went to the convenience store at 5 a.m. today to get a coffee.

And no one was there. I didn't see a single fucking soul. And this is like a real city that I'm in. Like, and it was bright. It was really fucking bright. It was like 10 a.m. in Eastern time terms. All right, sorry. Gotta go. I gotta go. You gotta go. We got stuff to do.

Mike Redson, what are your top three games of all time and why? Fuck. Well, how much time you got? It was the easier email because it was shorter. The other one was several paragraphs. Top three games of all time. I've talked about them all before, I'm sure, even on this podcast. In terms of games that had a big impact on my life, I think that's actually fairly straightforward. The first, I'll do them chronologically.

First was Harvest Moon. Harvest Moon, 1996 Super Nintendo Super Famicom game. There was a big spread about it in Nintendo Power Magazine. I remember reading the Nintendo Power Magazine and seeing a game there that was like, this is about... It's about building a life, you know, a fictional life with like relationships. You know, you could court somebody, get married, have kids. And there was no violence. There was no...

action. You didn't fight somebody else. You couldn't die per se. You could simply fail at the economy. You could fail to get married. You could fail at the game of life. So simulating life in that way... and also just to kind of expand my mind to think like a game could actually be really fucking hard and there'd be no failure state that was like you died and that there'd be no combat necessary but there'd still be

Lots and lots of complexity. And somewhere in there, because I would have been, what, 11 years old at the time. Somewhere in there I found... I don't know, like an ability to simultaneously appreciate that games could be broader than i'd previously even realized because games up to that point that i'd played were mostly simplistic arcade games or expressly you know like you jump on the enemy and you go to the end of the stage kind of thing and this is like okay so when i when i

plant my potatoes first of all do I buy the potatoes this season or do I buy the onions and when I buy the potatoes do I do i do i do i plant them in rows or in sort of like u-shaped pods to make better more efficient use of the of the nine seeds that i can get when i throw them in the air right and when when

the shipper guy comes at 5 p.m. like how can I optimize how I move through my farm to harvest my crops as fast as possible so that they get into that shipping crate by 5 p.m. because if I put them in 6 p.m. he he's already come and picked him up and that that produce is going to spoil you know or how can i like what gifts does the girl that i want to court in the game what gifts does she like most

does she seem to like most and how can i effectively find and retrieve them and get them to her efficiently know like those kinds of like like those problems ended up being really hard to solve but the lack of the violence and the lack of the it's not that violence is bad but it's like the lack of the sort of like constant threat of getting killed and murdered is extremely unrealistic. Like, I guess if you live in Florida, it's more realistic, but it's...

it's a way that games are not at all like life. And some people like that, right? The same way that some people like haunted houses and roller coasters. Like, we like the thrill of it. We like the role playing. We like the sort of wish casting of like, what if life was more exciting? I get it. But I think there's such beauty in the mundanity of it all and that only 2% of games

seem to exhibit this behavior. Now that it's a whole genre, we have the cozy game thing, right? Like there's plenty of games like this now, but at the time it was revolutionary and it totally changed how I think about video games as a medium.

The second game is The Sims. Along the same lines, I think Will Wright is an absolute genius, although he's currently kind of caught up in a bunch of blockchain crypto nonsense. Hopefully he comes back down to earth at some point. um will write he gave a gdc talk about the sims and how he came about designing the sims i think i've even talked about this before in the podcast so i won't belabor it but to this day when i'm thinking about my day

I literally am playing Sims in my head. I'm thinking, okay, so I'll do this, then this activity, then this activity. Oh, wait, no, this activity would require me to walk further than I would need to to do the second one. So let's change the order. Okay, I'll do that. I can't.

clear the pipeline okay i'll do this one and i'll do that one that i previously thought i'd do third and i'll do this fourth thing and now i'll move around the house that way and so i've got like three or four different activities queued up in my head as i'm sort of now on autopilot

going through my home or wherever i'm at and and check check check check check check check and so it's like by setting up a course for myself the same way that i would set one up with in the sims because the first thing that you do when you play the sims is you turn off free will you will select exactly when they will eat or not eat. At least that's how I always played it. And that approach to being extremely disciplined.

I realize that's not the point of the game. The point of the game is like, hey, you can architect and build your own home. Isn't that cool? And you can see how these sims relate to each other and stuff. Those are going to, fuck that. No, this is about efficiency.

God damn it. This is about getting through your day and getting as much done as possible so you can progress through the career ladder as fast as fucking possible so that you can generate enough money so you can buy the best TV. That's literally how I played it. I would play that game until I could just like...

get effectively infinite money as fast as possible. So I'd be like, okay, so pretty quickly I'm like, okay, no kids. No kids, I will simply recruit sims from other houses in the neighborhood to move in with me. And then we will all get jobs. We all work to the bone and we'll eat in shifts so that the kitchen doesn't get too crowded. Now, granted, that's...

That's fucked in its own way, but that like that that is that rewired my brain in terms of like Why am I so productive as a human? It's absolutely the Sims is a huge part of that If it wasn't for The Sims, I wouldn't have realized that I am allowed to actually create a framework for how I navigate my daily life and how I optimize or min-max that daily life the same way that you can in a video game.

uh and it was because the topic of the game was living your daily life right through these sims third game shenmue um 1999 dreamcast Another non-violent game for the... Well, okay, so there is Kung Fu. There are fighting sequences, and there's plenty of them in the game, but the vast majority of the gameplay is mundane, banal, walking through a normal life. Actually, Yokosuka, same city I mentioned earlier as being...

the setting of Chichitoboku no Owaranai Uta. That movie takes place in Yokosuka. So does Shenmue. Both American Navy stuff features prominently in the stories of both. That game made me realize just how different of a place Japan could be or like another country could be and that Japan was. And it made me realize that other countries didn't necessarily have to be in Donald Trump terminology shitholes. Most of the media that I'd seen about other countries was...

World Vision ads and Sarah McLachlan with like, you know, sappy music and kids starving and why you gotta donate to... blows and and red cross and starving children all that like granted i knew europe was a thing but europe just looked like kind of slightly shittier older america um Most of the media that I'd seen about cultures that weren't like mine were like everything was dirty and shitty, you know, like I've been in Mexico and love Mexicans love

i appreciate mexico in its own way but my experience in rey nosa mexico border town was everything was dirty and shitty and i got sick right away from the water very quickly because i ate an ice cube right so like playing Shenmue at that formative age of 14 or 15 and seeing like this is not only another country that is like developed but like

it's got sensibilities like orderliness and cleanliness and niceness and just like that, that actually better match my personal sensibilities than my own home fucking town does. Like I played that game and i just didn't want it to end it's got a beginning middle and end it's very limited in terms of like there's one convenience store there's like just a handful of things and like i'm not such a sicko that i would like

play the game and I'm just, I'm just going to go to the convenience store today and pick up all of the fruit and just look at the fruit. Cause you could do things like that. Cause like you would run out of stuff to do eventually, but like the experience of playing it was so profound was so. It opened the door to me even being curious about living in another country, exploring other countries. And it happened in my case to be...

one and done. It was like Japan specifically ended up being the country that I fell in love with. Not for any sort of like anime bullshit. Wish casting crap not like the fan service nonsense like brings a lot of weebs out to Japan It was just strictly for me. It was like this place is technologically advanced People give a fuck about science

People want to strive to do right by other people and not cause a ruckus. People care about their place in the world and culture and history and tradition in a sense. but like mostly we're all just here to like have as good a life as we can inside of these constraints that we are forced to operate in and because it was so Because exploring that town of Yokosuka in Shenmue was just so radically different than any other depiction I've ever seen.

And because it's interactive, it tickles a different part of your brain than just watching some TV show where another country is just a setting. I realized for the first time that there's more than one world.

right like there's another world out there that is distinct enough and different enough from the world that i was brought up in that like if i were just to see that once and choose to live the rest of my life in this one world that i'm from would be like to forsake myself from being able to live two lives.

If there was another planet and we had totally radically different technologies and we had, you know, spaceships and all sorts of other stuff, but like, you know, stuff about it, it would suck too. Like, oh, all your food had to come out of a tube or whatever. Like, if it was... sufficiently advanced and foreign and distinct, we'd all want to spend some of our time there and some of our time back in where we're used to, I would think, right?

You know, if you have a high degree of openness as a human, you'd be like, I want to get as maximize the number of unique experiences that I can have. Right. And so almost immediately playing that game, I was like, I got to live there. I got to spend time there. I got it.

I gotta sink my teeth into it the same way this game let me sink my teeth into it. I gotta, like, you know, go to the convenience store every day. I gotta try every single one of these fucking products. And what am I now? I'm 40 fucking years old. at the same convenience stores every day being like, Ooh, I haven't had, what was it last night? I haven't had these lemon pound cakes yet. I wonder if they're good.

7-Eleven's lemon pound cakes are not good, by the way. Not only do they have a completely unnecessary frosted glaze on the outside, but last night I learned that they're also full of lemon rinds, which are, like, gritty. No one's asking for that. but I got a note, so that's what I do. All right, let's, on that note.

Thank you for writing in, Mike. If you've got questions for the podcast, you can email them podcast at searls.co. Remember your homework. You're going to watch WWDC 10 a.m. Eastern time, 10 a.m. Pacific time, 1 p.m. Eastern time. June 9th. You're going to open up your mail client and you're going to email all your takes to podcast at searls.co. And if you don't do it, I will know because I monitor that email box, I guess. Yeah.