Do you ever look back and think about all the mistakes you made, all the stupid things you did in high school?
Have you ever quit something you loved to stop being bullied?
What is it like being away from home and coming back to find your sibling all grown up?
Do you still think about the crush that got away?
My old buddy from high school, Travis Birmley, invited me onto his podcast where we talk about all those things and more!
Check out the video with timestamps below to hear about our experiences being bullied, crazy stories from high school, our first job, growing up, racial identity and racism, and much more!
0:00:00 Travis was technically obese What caused Travis to gain weight?
6:39 Does Travis not want me to tell stories from back in the day?
6:55 We had some fun times in high school How did Travis and I become friends? Travis and I separated for talking too much John being nervous about working a new job
8:28 It was a good job for high school. A wild cowboy job.
10:58 Why does Travis get so much stuff dry-cleaned?
11:50 How does Travis view his own race? How other countries view Americans and race Discussion on race and views between conservative and liberal settings
22:59 Travis’s experiences being bullied Popular kids bullying Travis’s older brother Feeling good seeing a bully doing shitty in life
25:58 Travis being good-looking and Travis’s game back in high school Flirting with our hot older co-worker
27:04 Our work was like the movie Waiting The coworker not to piss off Off-the-wall cowboy shit as a high-schooler Stories from Bakers Square
30:22 Regrets over missed opportunities with girls Travis getting in his own way
31:50 Travis’s dad cockblocking him The one that got away
33:10 Missing out but setting himself up for an adventurous 19 and 20
33:30 Travis reading John’s post on bullying John snapping and turning violent from bullying John carrying steak knives
34:50 Why didn’t we tell people we were bullied? Is girl bullying worse?
36:19 Most of the time you’re getting bullied, it’s when you’re by yourself Travis getting rolled up on by a group of bullies All the kids grew up together and knew each other Wishing he would have punched them in the face. Quitting basketball from being bullied Hindsight is 20/20 like in standing up for yourself
41:53 Why don’t people tell their coaches, teachers, or parents that they’re being bullied? The no-win situation
47:16 Would any of his friends listen to this and think “Yeah, he was kind of a douche.”
47:22 Would John want an apology from his bullies now? Would Travis want an apology? One category of people who are still pieces of shit and one category of people who are sorry
49:50 Why Travis getting bullied might have been a good thing for John
50:22 What would Travis do if he saw his bully later?
51:04 Validation from knowing other people hate your bully
52:13 How would the bully feel about these things now? How would Travis feel if he apologized now? We should do a documentary about it Are his friends even friends with him anymore?
58:26 We had a lot of good times Going to Santa Cruz John getting his first job John getting along really well with Travis’s dad The different array of people we worked with Older woman having John feel her boob Manager of Bakers Square Our fat manager had game John going to a bar looking like he was 12
1:03:18 John spanking the manager with an electric fly swatter
1:03:29 John almost moved in with Travis Travis hanging out with Tanner Seeing a policeman chase and beat a guy down in the middle of nowhere Party stories John watching James Bond while his friend tries to hook up with a girl
1:08:18 Who has Travis seen from back in the day? We haven’t seen each other in 17 years
1:09:08 Embarrassing stories from when Travis was young Does his wife know about them?
He later read it and reached out to me about discussing our thoughts. I asked if I could record it as an interview and here we are!
We dive into topics such as brain preservation, personal identity, life extension, AGI, Rick and Morty, and why he’s worried about the current state of cryonics.
Our interview went for over three hours and we weren’t anywhere close to exhausting our conversation (but we did exhaust my bladder capacity).
We talked a lot about things we don’t actually disagree on, but I’m glad we did because it will help clear up confusion for listeners who aren’t on the same page.
The crux of our actual disagreement is as follows: I wouldn’t destructively copy myself, as in the case of the teletransportation paradox, and he would.
If you’ve read the Three Buckets, you know that I care about my own utility and the utility of my loved ones.
If my copy’s hand was pricked, he would feel the pain but I wouldn’t. If that copy was eating a double-double animal style from In-N-Out, he would be enjoying the taste of that goodness but I wouldn’t be.
While I’d prefer for my copy to be feeling pleasure rather than pain, if I had to choose, I’d prefer to be the one eating In-N-Out and not getting his hand pricked.
It’s not that I don’t care if my copy is enjoying life. It’s that I don’t care as much because I’m not experiencing it. This seems intuitive and obvious to me.
Personal identity is a messy concept. We didn’t evolve for our intuitions to handle complicated and messy scenarios such as being perfectly copied. There was no transporter to Mars in the ancestral environment.
I don’t want to be destructively uploaded because “I” (which, yes, is a messy term) would not be experiencing anything anymore. Yes, in some sense “I” would still exist because my memories would still be in a different copy. But that copy is the one enjoying Mars, not me. And I care about the John who is experiencing my qualia more than another John.
Robert values his memories surviving and the algorithm that is his consciousness running somewhere, so he is fine with his current self being terminated as long as other copies are around with his memories.
Do you agree with Robert? Would you be fine with having copies of yourself and then destroying your current copy?
Let me know your thoughts, what questions I should ask in the future, and who I should talk to next in the comments below! Thanks!
Timestamps below with links to see what topics we covered and where:
00:00:00 Interview with Nectome CEO Robert McIntyre
00:00:41 Covid, moving his lab, and his new human brain banking project
00:01:54 Recommendations for spots in San Francisco
00:18:25 Most people don’t really understand they’re actually going to die
00:19:48 We could have done similar work to what he’s doing in the 1960s We can act now, we don’t have to solve all the problems When do you know enough to make an argument to take action?
00:22:58 How well can you preserve a brain under ideal circumstances?
00:23:54 Interesting surgery and implications for preservation
00:28:10 Why should we be worried about current cryonics protocols?
00:41:47 Have you talked to anyone at Alcor? Would they disagree with you? Is some information better than none? Information theory: levels of resolution/quality
01:32:34 How close does someone have to be to be the same? How valuable are your memories? Would you give up the last minute of your memory for $1000 dollars? How much of your memories do you have to lose to be severely injured? How much of your memories have to be lost to be considered dead?
01:36:37 How old are you? How important are different memories? What determines you being down to be terminated?
01:42:12 Another way of framing this is by causality
01:44:37 What do we disagree on? I wouldn’t take the teleport to Mars and he would
01:48:28 I don’t care about which “copy” is “fake” or “authentic”
01:49:00 What does being killed mean if a copy exists?
01:53:40 How should you relate to yourself? What are adaptive aesthetics?
01:55:08 In most scenarios wouldn’t we be doing the same thing? Not being able to travel fast is a huge loss We are born into twin prisons: gravity and time.
01:57:58 What pathways to flourishing are damaged and what ones are enabled?
02:02:01 You already live in a world divorced from the physical world
02:02:46 You wake up, someone tells you “While you were asleep, you were teleported?”
02:04:55 Do you think it’s bad if people in cults kill themselves?
02:07:25 Philosophical problems will cease to be problems because everyone will do them
Social Media Questions Q and A
02:08:22 Giego Caleiro: How is he doing? When will we have brain preservation? Is most of the hurdle legal/regulatory or the science?
02:09:49 Chris Mcaulay: Is there a difference in therapeutic approaches between preservation and augmentation?
02:10:52 What do you think of Neuralink? What makes it worth getting an invasive brain implant?
02:13:28 Tony Fatica: What percentage of personality needs to be preserved to be “them”? Would you trade a million dollars for 1 IQ point? How much money would you trade off to lose memories?
02:16:48 Peter Singer among others has written a lot about this. Reminds me of that scene from Schindler’s List of how much should we sacrifice for others.
02:17:54 What’s your favorite movie of all time? What would a real alien visitor be like?
02:19:40 Who do you think is the smartest person of all time?
02:21:30 Who is the most capable human to solve problems?
02:23:12 Have you done psychedelics? Are you interested in psychedelics? Have I gotten any insights from psychedelics? Doors of Perception altered experiences model
02:26:05 His memories before his first words What did it take to invent language and spread it? How did writing develop?
2:33:58 What did your parents do? Brothers who win the duck stamp competition Paying his mom to teach him how to draw Genetic differences in skill
02:38:41 Montie Adkins: What about memory limits over hundreds of years and possible augmentation?
02:43:13 DJ Grossman: Knowing what you know about the current state of research in brain and memory science, what are your expectations of those preserved now?
As I said, in my Bob Dylan concert review, I’ve been prioritizing seeing aging legends while I still can, so getting tickets to Elton John was a no-brainer.
Elton is among the top ten bestselling artists of all time, right up there with the Beatles, Elvis, and MJ.
In preparation for seeing him, we watched an Elton John documentary, watched some clips on YouTube, watched part of Rocketman (we weren’t blown away so we stopped), and listened to his complete discography up to 1976 (couldn’t finish it all before the concert).
We parked at an open lot about ten minutes away and nearly froze to death on the walk over — the trade-off for avoiding the vehicle pileup near the venue. We made it inside before dying of frostbite and found our seats.
After a short wait, with no opener, Elton came out wearing his signature loud sunglasses and a colorful suit. He half-joked that people had their tickets for like 700+ days because of COVID.
He started with Benny and the Jets. Initially, he didn’t sound particularly great, and I started worrying that we had made a terribly expensive mistake. Thankfully, he warmed up over the next couple of songs, which sounded better.
Random notes:
I’m never loose enough at concerts. I need to experiment with having a beer or taking MDMA or something. I’d probably enjoy the experience a lot more.
It was cute seeing audience members dress up in loud glasses, platform boots, feather boas, etc. The energy of the crowd can shape the experience. The performer can also influence the crowd somewhat but there’s going to be a selection effect. I think the audience was definitely more lively at the Rolling Stones.
He had like three different drummers and we really liked one of them. He was very lively and had a lot of stage personality. Hearing the history of how long Elton had played with some of the guys and how much he respected them was a particularly nice part of the concert.
Elton has so many hits that he doesn’t have to pad his setlist with too much filler. That said, I would have loved for him to play a Lion King song and maybe my favorite song of his: Daniel.
Elton was quite likable. He talked to the crowd in general and about his history with Detroit and America. I never really care about the “Hi, *insert city here*!” too much, except when the artist mentions some real history they have with the place, which is nice.
He said one guy in the audience has seen him over 200 times in concert and thanked him by name, which must have been nice for the dude. I wonder how Elton found out.
I wasn’t blown away by most of the visuals. Often he would play pre-existing music videos which were kinda mediocre. My favorite of the night was probably Rocketman. The visuals were cool and it made me think of the space program. It reminded Kels of David Bowie, and caused some melancholia thinking about him, aging, and death in general; that stream of thought can be hard to avoid sometimes, especially in this context.
Your Song and Goodbye Yellow Brick Road felt very poignant and were a nice way to finish the night.
Overall: B-/C+ Wasn’t blown away but the quality of his setlist and his charm bumped up the score.
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We’re a bit nervous to share this publicly but we’re taking the plunge: Adriana, Kelsey, and I are all in a polyamorous relationship.
For many of you, this will not be news. It’s been kind of an open secret.
For some of you, it will have confirmed your suspicions. “They sure are close with Kelsey…” you thought to yourself.
For others, it will be a shock.
I’ll try to answer the most common questions we get:
What the hell is polyamory?
There’s an umbrella term called “ethical non-monogamy” (ENM), which is exactly what it sounds like. ENM is where you’re not monogamous but your partner(s) know and are okay with it. There are many iterations underneath this big umbrella, e.g. swinging, open relationships, and polyamory. Plenty of people do *non*-ethical non-monogamy, aka cheating, which is obviously not what I’m talking about.
Polyamory is where all partners involved are open to being in more than one romantic relationship at the same time. (Cue the elevator straight to hell!) This is contrasted with something like an open relationship where you’re allowed to have sex with other people but not a full-on relationship.
What does your relationship look like?
We are in a “triad” or “throuple”, which means that we are all three equal partners with one another.
Some people are in “Vs”, for example if Adri were dating Kelsey and me, but Kelsey and I weren’t dating each other, that would be a V.
It’s important to note that even though we’re in a triad, each of us has our own relationship. Adri and I have our own relationship. Adri and Kelsey have their own relationship. Kelsey and I have our own relationship. And all three of us have our own relationship.
But you don’t look like poly people!
Most people share the beliefs of their tribe. So someone who rides a Harley is more likely to be a conservative, and someone who drinks kombucha is more likely to be liberal, even though those beliefs and interests don’t logically relate to each other.
We’re special snowflakes who try to rationally navigate the world. Just because we’re poly doesn’t mean we hold the same views or have a lot of overlapping culture with most polyamorous people. You may notice we don’t have dyed hair or tattoos, and that we don’t live in a commune in Portland. Not that there’s anything wrong with that!
How long have you been together?
Adri and I celebrated our ten-year anniversary this past year and we’ve all been a triad for five years now.
Do you all live together?
Yes, but we didn’t always. Kelsey moved in with us when the pandemic started. Her lease was up in Boston and with COVID and everything else we felt it was best to all live in the same place. It’s been great.
Do you all sleep in the same bed?
No. Adri and I sleep together and Kelsey sleeps in her own room. This is in part by default and in part because of certain constraints.
I know other polyamorous people who all share a bed, but we never could. I run hot and Adri runs cold, I snore, Kelsey is a light sleeper, etc. Not to mention the most important thing – the person in the middle would be trapped and unable to go to the bathroom in the middle of the night. I actually think there are good arguments that people sleep better individually, which is probably something we will try when we have more space.
What about jealousy?
I think jealousy is partially due to natural temperament and partially due to issues that need to be worked out.
We all get jealous to varying degrees but the old chestnut of good communication and a solid underlying relationship really makes it not an overarching problem.
Do you think polyamory is for everyone?
No, I think what Dan Savage calls “monogamish” is what would be best for most people. Or at least monogamish-lite.
Monogamish is where you’re mostly monogamous but occasionally have sexual experiences with others.
At the very least I think it’s best to work through issues surrounding jealousy, and to be realistic and honest about how attraction to others doesn’t magically turn off when you’re in a relationship.
Do you think poly people should be able to get married? Do you think the government and religious organizations should support it?
It’s complicated. I used to support gay marriage. Then I had a radical genderqueer professor in college who pointed out that it’s the wrong fight — the government shouldn’t be sanctioning any relationships. (The government shouldn’t exist at all, but that’s a topic for another post!)
So I think anyone should be able to get “married” in the sense that they can do whatever they want privately. But I don’t believe in forcing religious institutions into supporting things like gay marriage. (Another topic for another post, but I think people shouldn’t be religious in the first place.)
We may get married for pragmatic reasons (have to play the game): legal rights, ease of navigating medical/hospital situations, etc.
Other Questions?
Feel free to email me.
You may enjoy checking out my recommended relationship resources:
She woke up to damp sheets and a pounding headache.
“No, no, no… This can’t be happening.”
She did stay up later than she should have. The half empty bottle of Jack told her she drank a little more than she should have too. Maybe she wasn’t sick.
She willed herself to sit up and felt her forehead. Hot. Then it happened. She coughed.
“Fuck!” She slammed her arms down on the bed in frustration. “I don’t fucking need this right now. I can’t be sick.” She barely got any hours as it was.
Right then, her app popped up with the latest work schedule. She groaned as she read the notification. Only 25 hours this week?!
She thought about calling in sick but she’d be out for at least two weeks even if she felt better tomorrow. Maybe she wasn’t that sick… As shitty as her job was, there were hordes of people ready to take it with how bad things were. Everyone was asking their friends to get them a job or posting on Facebook asking if anyone knew anywhere that was hiring. The only reason she kept the hours that she did was because her manager liked her, the perv. If she told them, she’d be out at least two weeks and they’d definitely fire her then.
“How did I even get sick?! I bet it was one of the Chinese takeout guys…”
How was she supposed to live? She needed more hours. The Fed checks weren’t enough and everything kept getting more expensive anyway. She couldn’t rely on her OnlyFans to make ends meet anymore. Too much competition now.
She fumbled through her medicine drawer and pulled out a package of generic DayQuil LiquiCaps. She stared at it trying to make out the directions. It said to take no more than two at a time. She popped four into her mouth and a generic Tylenol for good measure.
Aidan was crying. She loved him but the kid never shut up. She opened up the last remaining formula container from the batch the social services drone had dropped off a month ago. “Add one scoop to two ounces of water,” she muttered to herself. She turned on the faucet and let it heat up before filling the bottle to four ounces. She dumped in a scoop and started shaking. Money was tight after all and it was better than having him skip a meal.
She picked him up from his crib and stuck the bottle in his mouth. “Who knows what they even put in this shit?” she said to no one in particular, as if sympathetic responses would materialize from the walls.
She poured some generic Cocoa Puffs, the kind that came in a bag with no box, into some milk. She poured the milk first. It was one of the things she actually listened to her dad about. She couldn’t taste it. “Weird.” she thought to herself.
Almost 9:30. “Fuck.” She fumbled around in the bathroom opening the mascara she ordered off FireBrands. The one from that girl that was on a reality show once. Her dad always bitched about how much money she spent on makeup but he didn’t know what it was like to be single in 2023. Normally she would just go out looking like shit but today was Monday, and Monday was when Cherie worked.
She looked in the mirror one last time. “God, I need to work out.” Maybe she would do one of those 30 days squat challenges, or order those smoothies Jen was always posting about.
She walked over to Nina’s and dropped off Aidan. Boy, did Nina have a sweet gig. Sit on her ass and watch cartoons all day with everyone on the block’s kids while they all went to real work. “She probably makes triple what I do,” she sneered. Still, she couldn’t imagine being responsible for that many kids… Two was enough and she was lucky Jax lived with his dad.
Empty Starbucks cups and Wendy’s wrappers littered the backseat of her car. As she pulled into the parking lot, the car made those sounds that make a mechanic wince. She couldn’t afford a newer car but at least she didn’t have one with the built in thermometer and breathalyzer. Everyone was getting RoboRide passes anyway but she didn’t trust self-driving cars. Besides, the best thing about driving was the feeling of just cruising late at night. No self-driving car would give her that.
She opened up her lunchbox, pulled out an ice pack, and held it to her forehead. Her forehead was starting to go numb but she had to hold it there a bit longer to beat the thermometer.
She smiled. Cherie *was* there, at the entrance as usual. She looked cute as hell even in a mask and face shield.
“Hey, how’s it going, girl?”
“You know how it is. Another day in retail hell with Mark staring at my ass all day but at least I get to see you…” She smiled, trying to fake confidence.
“Can you blame Mark?” Cherie laughed. Seeing that she had made her laugh made her feel all sorts of ways inside.
The enjoyment ended when she remembered that the longer the conversation went on, the warmer her forehead would be. She hoped she had held the ice pack there long enough.
Cherie held up the thermometer and pointed it at her forehead like she was scanning a candy bar.
One.
Two.
Three.
It let out a chirp and lit up green. She let out a sigh. Luckily Cherie didn’t take her pulse too. Caught up in the feeling of relief, she blurted out: “Do you want to hang out at my place on Saturday?”
A pause. Her hands and armpits started to sweat.
Cherie smirked. “Yeah, that sounds like fun…”
That lightheaded rush swept over her. The one you get when your crush says yes that makes you feel like you just got away with pulling a bank heist. Anyone who looked at her face coming inside the store could see she was blushing.
BEEP.
Off-brand makeup.
BEEP.
Donald Duck Orange Juice.
BEEP.
Two pregnancy tests. Always two. No one ever trusted just one pregnancy test that cost a dollar but two…
BEEP.
Those bright cheap toys that come in a big, flat, plastic shell with cardboard backing. She felt bad for the kids that got the toys that would fall apart after one use but hey, the helium-filled balloons weren’t bad. Sometimes she’d even give out free ones if the kids were cute enough.
BEEP.
Plastic storage bins with holes in them. Not all the stuff was bad, you see. If you looked in her apartment, you’d see a lot of it came from work. She’d even take home things to use as props for her OnlyFans pics.
BEEP.
At the end of a shift, her cheeks would hurt from fake smiling all day.
BEEP.
She tried not to panic but her body was starting to ache. It was getting harder to act like nothing was wrong. Her brain felt foggy and it took an awkwardly long time to tell a customer what aisle the cleaning supplies were in.
Maybe another Tylenol would help? She grabbed her drink, took a blister pack off the shelf, and beelined to the bathroom. She shakily popped one out and downed it with some Donald Duck Orange Juice. Vitamin C was good for colds right? She couldn’t taste the orange juice either. “Not good,” she thought to herself. Her hands were shaking as she twisted the cap back on.
She took a deep breath and headed back to her register. It felt like she had just run a mile and she was hoping she didn’t look too sweaty.
It was only an hour into her shift but she couldn’t stifle it any longer. Her cough rang out like a siren. Everyone in the store turned to look at her.
“I promise I’m not sick!” she said, her arm outstretched, pleading for understanding.
Customers backed away in fear and disgust.
“Please! I need the hours!” Tears welled up in her eyes.
They were already hitting the report button on their apps. The contact tracing drone would be there in minutes.
Cherie definitely wasn’t coming over.
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What compliments do women prefer from men and men prefer from women?
Would you prefer to be called handsome or sexy? Good-looking or beautiful?
Do you prefer compliments on your looks or intelligence?
In 2015, I surveyed people on what compliments they preferred from the opposite sex. The results were interesting!
The text of the original post is below:
Introduction and hypothesis:
First off, this isn’t real science. The respondents weren’t randomly selected, there’s no null hypothesis, and my training in data collection and analysis is a B in Research Methods in Psychology and a B+ in Scientific Inquiry in Political Science. I’m not a professional. That said, let’s dive right in!
In a recent discussion about compliments, I was curious about which compliments people prefer to hear and on what.
I hypothesized that women would prefer compliments on their brain more given that comments on looks are more frequent with women (no citation here) and the fact that women want to be respected for more than just their looks.
I expected cute to rank low for both sexes and people to prefer intelligent over smart.
Respondents: Number of respondents that answered in time is a respectable 37: 21 females 16 males
Respondents sexual orientation ranges from heterosexual to pansexual in women to strictly heterosexual in men. Everyone in the survey is cisgender (I think.) I will have to do a survey in the future on homosexual, queer, and trans respondents’ compliment preferences.
The majority of respondents are under 30 with most being in their early to mid-20s.
The word list for women was “pretty, cute, sexy, beautiful, good-looking, attractive, gorgeous”. In formulating the list, I used the adjectives that came to mind most easily and put them in a random order. Gorgeous was added from a discussion with Adriana.
The word list for men was “cute, good-looking, hot, handsome, sexy, attractive”. In formulating the list, I used the adjectives that came to mind most easily and put them in a random order and added “hot” and “sexy” based on obvious perceived omissions of the words by my first two male respondents.
The respondent was to assume to have heard the compliment(s) from a member of the opposite sex.
Both sexes were asked the same questions “Do you prefer compliments on your looks or brain more? Is smart or intelligent better to hear?” or some close variant.
Before you see the results, make some predictions and see if you’re right. Which word(s) do you think women/men or both prefer?
The numbers don’t match the number of respondents because some answers were too specific or only covered some of the compliments in the list. The patterns are still the same.
Looks Compliment Results:
I took the most frequently ranked top two and bottom two to see what the most desirable and least desirable words were. The ones not shown in the charts are therefore clustered in the middle.
Women Top Two:
Wow, beautiful and gorgeous are the overwhelming winners here! Both are fairly gender specific in usage.
Men Top Two:
Men like being called handsome. Like the women’s top, it is fairly gender specific in usage.
Women Bottom Two:
There is a fair amount of dispersion. Cute ranks low like I thought it would and women do not prefer good-looking! This makes sense when I think about it as good-looking as a compliment is uncommon and not as striking sounding as the others for a woman.
Men Bottom Two:
Men’s results are very disperse for what they prefer least. Cute ranks low like I thought but results are way more spread out than I guessed.
Looks or brain results:
Women:
As I suspected, women overwhelming prefer compliments on their intelligence to their looks.
Men:
Men are way more split with an almost even distribution.
Smart or intelligent results:
Women:
Landslide! Only one woman preferred smart.
Men:
What’s this? While not as much as a landslide as with the women, an agreement between the sexes! Maybe intelligent just sounds more intelligent, haha.
Qualifiers:
About a third of subjects expressed situational qualifiers, i.e., whether it was a stranger or someone they knew and a whole other myriad of situational specificities.
Many subjects expressed the importance of genuineness in the compliment.
Two of the female respondents specifically mentioned that if they put effort into their physical appearance than they wanted to be acknowledged on it even though they both preferred compliments on their brain.
Two subjects (both female) expressed uncomfortability at compliments especially in regards to looks.
One respondent mentioned not really liking any after her top three. Two male respondents only preferred one to three of the compliments.
Many female respondents expressed trepidation on strangers complimenting them physically and the awkwardness and uncomfortability that can result.
Of course, with both sexes, circumstances seem to be much more important than the compliment used and besides the two outliers most everyone likes being complimented from someone they’re familiar with regardless of the word or on what.
My reasoning is that I prefer to be sexually attractive instead of just aesthetically pleasing which is why I ranked good-looking and handsome at the bottom. The times I’ve heard I was hot made me feel nicer than the times I’ve heard the rest. While sexy is number two, I think it is used much less frequently than the others so I’m not absolutely certain how I would feel hearing it from someone who wasn’t my partner. Cute may be ranked number four (maybe because of its non-masculine connotation) but it comes with the qualifier that in my experience, it’s what I hear girls use most frequently when they are attracted to and/or like a guy. Overall, I like hearing them all though!
I prefer compliments on my looks over my brain. While I typically feel good about both my looks and intelligence, I can be less sure of if I’m attractive to someone or not. I almost never have anxiety about my intelligence. The closest it can come to that is status anxiety from being around academics/the wealthy and not being in a prestigious academic path or rich. I actually think I prefer smart over intelligent. Maybe this scene has too much of a hold on me:
Thanks to all the beautiful/gorgeous/handsome and intelligent people that were kind enough to respond!
When I was a kid, I used to not want to take my action figures out of the packaging because I knew it would mess up the collector’s value of it. After all, it might be worth a lot in the future! Beanie Babies, football cards, Pokemon cards – these were precious commodities to childhood John and to plenty of adults in the 90s.
How wrong I was. This is obviously not worth doing. You’d get more utility from just playing with them.
First, there’s the cost of storing the damn things for years taking up space in a tub in your attic. Second, it’s very unlikely they’ll be worth any real money in the future. For every one that’s worth hundreds of dollars, there are thousands that are only worth $5. You’ve likely paid hundreds of dollars for them in the first place. Now you have to do the work of listing and selling them, and you’ve made at best triple your money. The returns just aren’t worth it. If you just cared about making money, there are way better opportunities elsewhere (currently cryptocurrency).
If you wanted to store something that would be worth the most value in 100 years, what would you store?
Let’s say you had a budget of $50,000, or $100,000, or $1,000,000.
The most straightforward thing to do is to store $100 bills. But will we use physical currency in a hundred years? Will we even use currency in a hundred years? Even if we still used USD, inflation would just depreciate its value. I doubt any of the cryptos today will be the main one used. Maybe they would be a collectible, though?
Gold, gems, and other precious metals are the most lindy but I don’t know how valuable they’ll still be besides their use in manufacturing.
If I had to pick a precious metal to store, I’d probably pick rhodium which is going for a cool $16,650 to gold’s $1,907.10 and platinum’s $1,059.00. Funnily enough, in looking this up, I just learned platinum is currently worth less than gold. I always thought platinum was worth more than gold but apparently its price fluctuates more. It’s often worth more but not always.
You could store rare comic books or trading cards. Famous paintings. But if the world moves towards VR and such, then maybe people will care much less unless physical copies are still status items.
You could buy Action Comics #1 and hope the superhero franchises keep chugging along into the 22nd century, artistic merit be damned.
Or the T206 Honus Wagner and hope that the rise of blockchain esports cards don’t devalue it.
Unless you had a stupidly large budget, the famous expensive paintings are out of reach. You could buy a piece of art for under $1,000,000 but any art priced that low is unlikely to retain its value the way a super famous piece does.
It’s also important to consider actual rarity vs artificial rarity. Heroin is so expensive because it is currently illegal, not because it’s hard to manufacture. It’s smart to pick things that are intrinsically rare.
You’d also want things that are the least reliant on their value being dependent on trends. It’s hard to predict trends, though.
It would have been hard to predict that elements critical to making computers would become important, or what would become a technology-critical element in the future. The past hundred years were harder to predict than the hundred before that and so on and so forth. Maybe one could have predicted something like LCDs would exist and they would need something like indium, but seems like a stretch to me.
You could pick the rarest stable elements that are likely to be useful, but the scarcity and cost could drop significantly if and when asteroid mining takes off. Actinium is one of the rarest stable elements but doesn’t have much current use.Transuranium elements are among the most expensive substances on earth. Weapons-grade plutonium costs around $4,000/gram and Californium costs more than $60,000,000/gram. Seems unlikely a non-billionaire could get Californium or some other element that is ridiculously difficult to produce. Plutonium would be interesting but it’d also be extremely difficult to acquire. It would also increase the risk to the receiver, and they would incur a cost to safely handle and/or dispose of it depending on future conditions. The half-life is also a problem but could be treated like standard depreciation, though.
Estimates of things running out are usually vastly over-pessimistic. And AGI would just figure out a way around needing what we ran out of.
Storing various types of IP would be interesting. Commission the artist/author you think would still be valued and have them produce a work that you think would be popular or valuable in the future. You can pray either they don’t get cancelled or cancel culture doesn’t last, haha. I can’t imagine an artist doing as good a job on something that wouldn’t be read by anyone for a century, but maybe they imagine everyone in the future opening it and don’t want to disappoint them.
Maybe IP laws won’t be like they are now so people would be reticent to pay.
There are some weird expensive things like truffles or rhino horn. I don’t know how well truffles keep and they aren’t expensive enough. I hope the rhino horn alternative medicine bullshit doesn’t last into the 22nd century. Agarwood is a fragrant wood used in perfume and other good-smelling things. The highest quality stuff goes for $100,000 a kilogram. But the more virtual we become the less perfume we may use.
Every article cites antimatter as the most expensive substance. I don’t know how antimatter is stored but it seems like it falls into the Californium problem but way harder.
One thing that’s not on most lists is Botox which is apparently one of the most expensive substances. But its main uses will be over when we solve aging and disease. Also, it’s one of the most hazardous things to store and handle.
A smart strategy might be to combine some of these. Commission a piece of art by a prominent artist and have them make it out of rhodium, stick some gems on it, and store a Bitcoin wallet in it.
What I like about this thought experiment is it forces us to tease apart the different types of value, the reasons why things are valuable, and to note our predictions about the future.
Ultimately, if we hit a post-scarcity society, maybe “stores of value” will cease to be as meaningful.
These are my notes on Robert McIntyre’s talk at the Long Now Foundation: Engram Preservation: Early Work Towards Mind Uploading | Robert McIntyre
I stumbled across the Long Now Foundation back in 2011 and heard about their 10,000 year clock, a project to design a clock to keep time for 10,000 years (and bring media attention to their project) and it’s cool seeing they’re still doing stuff. (Ten years ago isn’t that far back even in normal time so I hope their foundation lasts longer than that.)
Robert McIntyre is the CEO of a company called Nectome. Nectome’s goal is to try to better understand human memory and preserve brains. I know what you’re thinking… the human memory part seems normal enough but preserving brains? For who, zombies? Stick with me.
I remember hearing something about brain preservation and a thing called the “Large Mammal Brain Preservation Prize” being won and a company called Nectome doing it but didn’t look too much into it.
“I consider myself an archivist. And what I work on archiving are human memories.”
Stages of Information Transmission in History
Robert talks about dividing human history into different stages. We advance from one stage to another by developing technologies that allow better transmission and preservation of information. Every time we invent tech that does this, it radically catapults our society to new heights. Note: Regular people often think about technology as just gadgets like a TV or iPhone but technology (of course, depending on semantics) does include things like language and writing.
This is a similar paradigm to the transition from the hunter-gather stage to the agriculture stage to the industrial revolution. It cannot be overestimated how massive these changes were.
This video discusses this briefly in a nice way:
He calls the pre-language stage intuitive and talks about how weird this must have been. It is a trip to think about what our qualia would have been like in a pre-language era. Like what would our thoughts have been like?
Then we eventually developed language, which was a completely transformative change. The problem with oral communication is it’s extremely low-bandwidth: not a lot of information can be transmitted and it takes a long time to do it. Elon Musk has made the same point about bandwidth for the importance of Neuralink.
Side note: Some of this oral history talk reminds me of Sam Jackson’s speech in this scene in Unbreakable (spoilers).
Then we went from just having oral communication to having symbolic communication with writing. This again was massively game-changing.
Writing is amazing because it can, among other things, preserve and transmit more information than any one person can remember and for much longer periods of time. For instance, Shakespeare has been dead for over 400 years but we can still enjoy his plays.
Writing still has downsides, though. It takes a lot of time to parse it and we still lose a lot of information because it’s hard to record things in writing.
Robert argues we lose most of the value/wisdom by only being able to store writing. He doesn’t talk about video recordings or anything so I think his argument loses some of its strength which I go into more later on.
Information Theory
He then goes into some information theory.
Does information being preserved depend on the technology to read/extract/understand it? Was it always preserved or only preserved after you invent the technology?
(Robert says it was always preserved. Preservation does not equal the ability to read it.)
His very brief dive into information theory reminds me that I wish someone could point me to a post or video on information theory where they showcase all the distilled, useful parts.
He brings up the injective function and says that preservation means that different things remain different. On the one hand, this feels like an elegant way of capturing what preservation is, and on the other hand, it seems like it may not capture what it actually is or only be one part of preservation, but I don’t know.
So he boils it down to:
Preservation = differences stay different
Preservation ≠ Understanding
Example: He can’t read Chinese but he could preserve Chinese books.
In practice, this happened where people started storing DNA back in the 70s before we had the ability to read it (which wouldn’t come for a few decades). More on this later.
How do we know how memories are stored in the brain? The brain is full of electrical activity so how do we know that’s not essential for memory storage?
People who fell into ice were sometimes able to be brought back and then often had their memories or most of their memories intact, so this suggests we don’t need the electrical activity for storage.
Because it’d be way questionable to conduct experiments like this, it’s good we get some value out of accidents like this.
This finding about people falling into ice and being semi-stable/able to be brought back led to some cool developments.
Memories are physical/DHCA
Deep hypothermic circulatory arrest or DHCA is a type of technique where you put someone in a hypothermic state so you can do surgeries on them where you cut off circulation and brain function so it minimizes damage to the brain. Pretty cool stuff.
Because of these things we know that memories are physical. Separately we know that memories are physical because of all the reasons why we know everything including consciousness is physical. (This is a longer discussion but it’s mostly basic to people who aren’t religious. He also very briefly gets into this at the end of the talk.)
Side note: this is about the continuously updating version of death. Back in the day, “death” would have been defined as not breathing or no heartbeat. Now we can “bring people back” with CPR, but were they actually dead? Now we have brain death which is quite complicated. My partner is a neurology resident and has participated in declaring brain death which is quite a complicated and rigorous process (although I would argue that it’s mostly not useful). This point becomes important especially in light of cryonics where if we could bring people back many years after their bodies/brains were preserved, it’s analogous to them not being dead in the same way that someone brought back with CPR isn’t dead.
This whole line of thinking has led to the creation of the very useful concept: information-theoretic death. You think of what makes up someone’s consciousness — their memories and personality and whatnot — and information-theoretic death is about the loss of that information. So if someone is “dead” or “more dead”, the less information you can recover.
Memory Consolidation
He then briefly goes into how memory consolidation works. It is roughly divided into three parts based on how long the memory lasts and how much, if it all, is encoded.
1-30 seconds: electrical signals
(memorizing a phone number or the words you just heard lingering)
<2 hours: unstable changes to synapses
(intermediate process) some changes to synapses but changes are liable, by default will revert back to original stage
(He doesn’t go into what makes them not revert to their original stage but it’d be nice to know more about that.)
>2 hours: structural changes to synapses
(generally encoded as long-term memory, could potentially stay with you your entire life)
Synapses can increase and decrease in size, temporarily or permanently.
He shows this cool, weird image of a synapse. I looked it up and it’s the first scientifically accurate 3D model of one.
Changes happen in thousands of synapses throughout the brain even for the most trivial of memories if you’re going to remember it longer than two hours. One principle of the brain is it’s quite distributed. You can destroy any one synapse and it doesn’t affect anything. Pretty cool.
Encoding memory requires protein synthesis. If you inhibit protein synthesis you can’t encode long-term memories. This manifests in things like being blackout drunk where you can’t remember what happened before despite being conscious at the time.
This reminds me that an important point to appreciate generally is the brain is super duper extremely complicated. Learned this in my brain class in college. It’s arguably the most complicated known thing in the universe.
Can you preserve synapses?
Yes, a chemical called glutaraldehyde can and we’ve been able to preserve them since the 60s.
Synapse preservation is analogous to DNA preservation.
We stored DNA before we could do anything with it and we could only scan it decades after we first started storing it and it was super duper expensive.
First genome scanning was in 2003 and was real expensive. (2.7 billion in 1991 dollars.)
Now you can do it for about $1000 and it’s only getting cheaper. Not bad, huh? (This is one of my main gripes with people who think technology only helps the rich. It’s dumb.)
Minor point he made but with a big implication: We could preserve DNA way before but didn’t know enough about it until the structure was discovered to confidently say we could store it. So this is a strong argument that it’s often best to take action before you know something for sure.
His Background, Q and A, and Random Good Points
Robert says he was always interested in brain preservation but doesn’t go into the actual reasons why, which would have been nice although it’s possible he doesn’t remember.
He volunteered for The Brain Preservation Foundation. He was going to make an explainer video à la Minute Physics but then thought he could just win the Brain Preservation prize the foundation offered.
He briefly mentions the fork in the road of: Do you attack a problem with the tools available now or build better tools? Side note: Better tools are often the big changers of innovation. Think telescope, microscope, transistor, etc.
He won the prize by combining techniques from two different labs. This is a good example of having different disciplines talk to each other and collaboration in general. Reminds me of how Terence Tao is famous for his collaboration even on fields outside of pure maths.
He says preservation is relatively inexpensive but the storage costs are very expensive because it has to be stored at a specific cold but not too cold temperature that’s apparently only currently achievable with explosive gases. It seems like the real next step is figuring out how to preserve it in a way that it can be stored at room temperature or one of the easier cold temperatures. And seems like there’s maybe a startup idea: coming up with a way to create that Goldilocks temperature safer and cheaper, but I don’t know how big the market is for that.
In all this discussion, he knows the landscape of current tech and the costs. How he speaks, like knowing the amounts and costs of things, is very engineer/startup person which is always nice to see.
He thinks it’ll be about 70 years until we can access information in preserved brains. I doubt it’ll be that long if AGI goes right.
He talks about how the San DiegoFrozen Zoo had the foresight and bravery to start preserving DNA of species in 1972. They could have been criticized by (stupid) people saying we’ll never have a gigabyte of storage. Even if you could it would be astoundingly expensive. These imaginary critics could have called up Gordon Moore at Intel at the time.
He talks about how someone who had wanted to do a proof of concept for recording DNA might have started with a single base-pair. His team is trying an analogous thing with C. elegans (a common model organism) and showing how they have memory of their environment being shaken and you can see the changes inside them. So hopefully they’ll be able to preserve and then show that the memory change is still there. Really cool, but don’t know how it would work as a startup.
Fun fact: Spices like vanilla and cinnamon have aldehydes in them.
The host asks about Egyptian preservation and luckily he knows, but it’s sort of a related fun fact vs something he’d need to know for his work. It’s like a doc getting asked a fun fact about the heart but it doesn’t really have anything to do with their profession. This reminds me that it’s probably worth it for people to memorize trivia related to things in their work just to make these kinds of conversations flow better, e.g. how much a brain weighs, or when dogs were domesticated, or the etymology of certain words or whatever.
He brings up a great point that humans are continuously being born into a world with more and more powerful technology but aren’t necessarily being born with more wisdom. This is dangerous. His point is basically that x-risk is going up because of this.
How do we know that using glutaraldehyde in preserving the brain doesn’t harm memory?
He does a good job of breaking down the problem: either some structure of memory preservation is so fragile that glutaraldehyde fixation destroys it but the structure survives all these other things like seizures, depolarization, etc. or it does preserve it.
He talks about encrypted information that you couldn’t unlock would still be preserved because different things are still different. This is a semantic argument to me that isn’t that strong. If you can never get the information it’s not preserved to me. Sure, some super-advanced tech may be able to decrypt it but if different things are different but never readable, that’s not preserved to me.
And sticking with the book example, only preserving the literal words does lose information which you may or may not care about e.g. the paper type, the font, etc.
Someone asks about recording all the activity in the brain, which is currently not possible, and he mentions an interesting idea of programming DNA to self-report what’s going on.
The host tries to mention a movie and Robert keeps talking about the thing and the host immediately turns towards what Robert is saying. Good on the host.
The guy asking a question on 52:24 has a great voice. Can I hire this guy for narration and voice acting?
“Could you retrieve wisdom and experience independent of language?”
He brings up the analogy of a black box of a neural network that does something like telling dogs and cats apart. You can look at it and try to figure it out, but it would be difficult without running it. We may be able to unblack box things in the future too.
He says another thing that seemed to be minor but I think is a big deal. The easiest way to glean the wisdom from a preserved brain would be to simulate the brain and ask them what it was like to be there. I guess, but that’s kind of dumb. I could record them in 4k with my phone and boom, no need for brain preservation.
I get running a brain simulation would be way better but that’s like a trillion times more costly and difficult than just recording the person with the phone. It also reminds me that his concept of transmitting wisdom is really weird. If he’s implying we’ll all be able to upload our minds and meld with other people’s experiences then maybe, but that’s a huge leap that could have been addressed. Otherwise running a brain simulation and asking the person what an event was like is no different from the oral stage of history. And we can preserve that now with video.
Someone asks about ethical concerns and how he thinks about them. Ugh. I usually hate these questions because usually the person is on a moral high horse worried about those less fortunate but has an extremely poor set of ethics where they usually *act* like they care but don’t understand what actually leads to less suffering for people.
In response to ethical questions, he says a good way to think about it is to ask the question, “What’s going to enable human flourishing well?” which I think is great and helps clear up how to proceed ethically sometimes.
My translation of the rest of his ethics answer is that a lot of the ethical concerns are analogous to existing things like medical data and HIPAA, so privacy of information is important, and so are safeguards to ensure control and autonomy and having the information being destroyed if and when the person wanted.
What about the body? He argues quadriplegic people retain memory and personality implying the brain is where it’s at. This reminds me of the argument against souls because when the brain gets messed up, their consciousness does too. One could argue the body is like an antenna receiving the soul that when damaged produces a messed up signal. Still, that’s all bullshit.
Embodied cognition: he argues you have to have a body to learn how the world works.
He points out the brain is the hardest thing to preserve so if we can preserve that we can preserve the rest barring “a few stupid things that aren’t worth going into”. No, go into them! What and why, Robert?
He says it’s a moot point because we can preserve the body as well. I say it’s not moot if you can but aren’t. It’s maybe a moot point technically but it’s not a moot point if you’re not doing it. I’m not saying they should as it’d probably increase the storage cost by 10x or something but still.
At 58:00 he goes into a minefield of topics that have a long history of bullshit mixed with people making real attempts at solving them. Things like free will, souls, consciousness, and such.
He does give the caveat that he’s trying a new argument so it may be less persuasive.
He’s saying the hard problems aren’t that hard or are mostly made up. He presents a simulation of a simple pendulum that exhibits a harmonic motion. He then adds a small pendulum to it and it creates a whole new chaotic motion.
I think I either don’t understand the bullshit arguments he’s refuting that people use to support the existence of free will or a soul or something. But I don’t think he’s really addressing things like the explanatory gap. I certainly believe it’s all physical and there’s nothing supernatural, but he’s not solving or getting rid of the hard problem of consciousness.
This isn’t my area of expertise and I don’t know the history of its controversies or solutions or arguing it isn’t really a thing. I’m curious as to what the QRI guys think.
His arguments sound like something Daniel Dennett would say, by which I mean they’re kind of confusing. It could be confusing because I’m too dumb or it’s not intuitive but it also may be there’s some Eulering going on. Mind you I only know DD as one of the Four Horsemen and him arguing with Sam Harris about free will, so maybe he has tons of good ideas.
Wish they filmed after wrapping up. They could even have little go pros of people going up and talking to him, haha.
End Thoughts
I also just realized that he doesn’t explain the title of his talk: “Engram Preservation: Early Work Towards Mind Uploading”. An engram is a term for a physical unit of memory in the brain and mind uploading is the idea where we’ll be able to copy the information in the brain and upload it to a computer.
This talk also makes me miss college and taking great classes.
Love people like this and engineers and such. Reminds me of how founding a startup and actually trying to build something is one of the best ways to learn the nitty-gritty details about a field. Vinay Gupta was like this.
Ultimately, really interesting, but I care less because it doesn’t help me or my loved ones. Even if you could perfectly extract the information from the brain and upload it to a computer, I still wouldn’t consider this “me”. Why I wouldn’t is a long discussion but is the same reason why I wouldn’t take the transporter in the teletransportation paradox. For more on the messy subject of personal identity (which I haven’t found a satisfying conclusion to, see Tim Urban’s article: https://waitbutwhy.com/2014/12/what-makes-you-you.html and you can also play with some of the scenarios at https://www.philosophyexperiments.com/)
I really love and am sometimes manic about preservation so it scratches that itch, but this is even further away from someone being brought back from cryonics. By the time we get that information, AI will probably have either destroyed us or created a utopia for us where these types of things will matter much less. I care most about my loved ones and myself not dying and this doesn’t affect that.
We seem to be biased to care more about losing an amount than acquiring an equivalent amount. So I would be more upset at losing $100 than gaining it. Or more applicably, I would be more upset at losing my current friends than gaining new ones.
This is related to status quo bias too, where we irrationally favor current circumstances because we’d be more upset by losing what we have than by gaining something else. Whereas if the situation were switched, we’d be worried about losing the other thing now.
Let’s say I live in Jupiter, Florida with my wife Ann and my dog Bobo. I don’t want to change anything in the past because it wouldn’t lead to my current circumstances. Because if I hadn’t gone bankrupt, I never would have moved to Florida living as a pool boy. But if I hadn’t gone bankrupt and was married to Margaret and lived in Long Island with my cat Hazy, then I would feel the same bias in not wanting to change anything because I would lose what I had.
Outside of preventing the loss of people to death, I think there are good arguments that other things are more valuable, like putting effort into creating new experiences versus preserving old. As I’ve said, this is far from my natural inclination, I like doing both, but I do think it’s important to address.
Still, it’s a way cooler project and more important than what most people are working on.
It’d be nice to connect groups like r/DataHoarder to his work. I wonder what they’d think.
I don’t see how it could sustain itself commercially because not enough people are forward-thinking enough to want to preserve their loved ones or their own brains. And those that are are probably more interested in cryonics. I would certainly consider paying for the service if I couldn’t get, say, my dad to sign up for cryonics but could set someone up to preserve his brain instead. So I wonder how funding works. If it’s just sustained on rich people who think it’s interesting and are willing to throw some bucks at it.
Edit: Since writing the finalized draft of this I stumbled across this story written by Sam Hughes about brain uploading:
Note: If you’d like to read it in the fancy magazine layout version, it’s on pages 70-71 in the March 2021 issue of Waste Advantage Magazine.
“Back in the truck, Casanova.”
Matt flashed a smile at the girl. “Don’t mind him. He’s just hating because he’s ‘happily’ married.”
My partner Matt Murphy was a smooth-talker who made us late almost as often as we were on time. But for all his shenanigans, he made a long day at work feel a little shorter. It’s important your coworker is someone you can stand, especially if you spend more time with him than your own wife.
We’d always laugh at the euphemisms people came up with for our job. “Solid waste worker”, “waste management professional”, or the best one: “sanitation engineer”. Engineer? There’s no engineering going on here. We pick up the garbage. Call us garbage men, it’s okay. Unless my wife is around. Then you can call me a sanitation engineer, haha.We’re not the type of guys that care about all that politically correct stuff.
The job’s not for everyone. They’re always trying to get more women CEOs and astronauts, but you don’t hear about them trying to get more women in garbage or logging. My brother’s a logger. You get a beer in him and he won’t shut up about how logging’s actually the most dangerous profession in America, but cops and firefighters get all the credit. I looked it up once and us garbage men are at number five. Way above cops at eighteen and firefighters at twenty-four, but I don’t care about the credit. I’d rather pick up the trash than deal with drunks and junkies or run into burning buildings.
Everyone always imagines the smell is the worst thing. That you get used to. It’s the toll it takes on your body. Running up driveways. Dragging trash up and down everywhere. But it pays well, and I get benefits.
Things change. We used to have to worry about hitting kids that were out riding their bike or kicking a soccer ball. Now we have to worry about hitting one strapped into a VR headset or crashing their drone into the truck. The old timers thought they were safe from the job cuts. After all, garbage has been a constant since the beginning of civilization. Matt even told me about some ancient Egyptian trash heap they had found and studied. He joked about an “Egyptian Matt and Jake”. I wonder how much they got paid. Probably a better gig than hauling rock for the pyramids. Anyway, we knew better than to think we couldn’t get replaced. Matt and I were lucky our town couldn’t afford the fancy trucks they only needed one guy to drive, with no one for the back. California’s had driverless trucks for months now.
I loved the job because I wasn’t cooped up inside somewhere. I ran a paper route with my mom when I was a kid and nothin’ beat that feeling of running around in the early morning before the rest of the world woke up. We used to get donuts after our work for the day was done. Now I do the same with my boy when I get home.
A lot of guys liked looking for stuff worth keeping. I think it’s that former junkie mentality. Always looking out for a score or some angle. Some guys I work with go metal detecting every weekend. Done it for years and never found more than some quarters, broken jewelry, and rusty nails. A waste of time if you ask me. It is crazy some of the things people throw away. Matt found one of those cool neon beer signs. The thing still works; it’s lighting up his garage right now. My wife said no to mongo (that’s the stuff you “rescue” from the garbage) a long time ago. Debra “doesn’t do clutter”. At least my house is clean.
You learn a lot about people when you pick up their trash every week. Little clues to their existence. A box for a crib falls out, someone had a baby. A pinata, a birthday. Rich people recycle and compost more. Poor people have more frozen food boxes. There’s something spiritual about it really, watching the contents of someone’s life spill out.
We’d get to know a few people over the years. Sweet kids who liked seeing the big truck. Young college girls that Matt would flirt with. Bikers with more junk on the lawn than in their can. One of the people we got to know the best was this sweet old lady named Helen. We’d catch each other every few weeks.
“Where you off to, Shirley MacLaine?”
As usual, I was doing the heavy lifting while Matt was running his smooth mouth.
“Visiting my brother in Florida. If your girlfriend isn’t careful, I may just ask you to come along with me…” she said, smiling coyly. “You boys stay safe now!”
She’d bring out a glass of lemonade for us, and not that mix stuff either, hand-squeezed every time.
“Jake, I need a man to help me hang this up.” Hanging the planter put us behind schedule again, but I tell you, I looked forward to seeing the flowers in it every week.
You couldn’t shut her up about music. She’d send us home with CDs to listen to.“Helen, you don’t need CDs. You can just stream all these…”
“I’ll never get rid of my collection. They sound better. Trust me.”
“They said the same thing about records…”
Neither one of us owned a CD player but we’d look up the album on Spotify and play it in the truck.
That was all before the virus of course. Two weeks after it started, we pulled up to a box on top of her bin. The note stuck to it read:
You boys stay safe.
Love,
Helen
The woman was sweeter than pecan pie. I opened the box expecting more CDs but inside were hand sewn masks. After that, you couldn’t catch us out without one on.
It had been a few weeks since she’d had a can out. We were a little worried, but she’d gone to Florida to see her brother before. To tell you the truth, so much was going on I didn’t think much about Helen or anyone else. Debra was furloughed. Luckily, we were essential of course. The garbage must flow.
The company updated our app to show big red Xs on houses that were confirmed positive. Oh, believe me, we still picked up their trash. Officially, we were supposed to take more precautions but what could we do? There’s only so much protective gear and trust me, they weren’t saving it for garbage men. Although if I had to guess, I don’t think their trash was any more dangerous than any of the other nasty stuff we run into.
A few weeks went by.
“Shit, Jake.”
“What? What is it?”
He held up the iPad and showed me the big X over Helen’s house.
“Shit.”
We knew her chances weren’t good, but she was a tough lady, after all.
Another couple weeks went by and still no sign of life from the house. Then I saw it.
“Her can’s out, Matt.”
“It’s overflowing too. Looks like she’s been making up for lost time.”
“We should get her some flowers or something, man. Whatever old ladies like.”
“Haha, yeah right. Are you going to show up in a face mask and one of those ruffled tuxes?”
Like I said, taking out the trash is a spiritual job. It all spills out eventually. A box for a crib. A pinata. I lifted Helen’s can in the air, feeling the weight of it. I tipped it over the edge of the hopper and watched her life spill out in front of me. Some clothes, a nightstand, unopened cans of beans.
A lovely lady’s collection of old CDs. They’re sitting on my desk now, the only mongo Debra let me keep.
If you liked this, you should check out my flash fiction piece “Sunday”:
There’s a great scene in Born on the Fourth of July, Oliver Stone’s second film on Vietnam. (WARNING: SPOILERS) Tom Cruise’s character has been told that the Viet Cong are moving into the area. His commanding officer then asks him if he sees their rifles. The pressure is palpable.
“Look out there, Sergeant.
Can you see them?
Right there. You see them?
They got rifles.
Can you see the rifles?
Right there. You see them?
You see them?
Can you see the rifles?”
How many times does he ask?! The camera quickly pans back and forth. We see nothing and neither does Tom Cruise but we’re under pressure and an authority figure is telling us they’re there. What would you say?
Tom Cruise responds as many of us would: “Yes, sir. Yes, sir.” An American soldier starts shooting. Then more start shooting.
Uh-oh. Did they at least take out some enemy soldiers? We don’t have a good feeling. The shit is fucked up. It’s Vietnam after all.
Tom and co. go to investigate.
Turns out there’s nothing waiting for them in the hut they shot up but dead and grossly wounded villagers, mostly womenand children.
“We got beaucoup wounded. Civilians.”
“We wasted them. Motherfucker! We wasted them!”
“Where are the rifles? Where are the rifles?”
“There ain’t no fucking rifles.”
What lessons can we take from this? Most of us live a fortunate enough life. If we fuck up, the consequences are way more benign than mutilation or murder.
But consider this situation. You have a teenage daughter, and she has a boyfriend, so they’re probably having sex. You want to make sure they’re using protection, so you ask, “You’re using condoms, right?” What are they supposed to say to that? They know that any answer except, “Yes, Mom!” will lead to you getting upset. So they say, “Yes, Mom!” and move on with their day. While it may be true that your kid should be practicing safe sex, the way you phrased the question isn’t conducive to getting an accurate answer.
What can you do about this? Consider asking questions in a broader or less specific way. Instead of asking the kid, “Are you using condoms?” ask what safe sex practices they’re using. After you’ve gone broad and heard what they had to say, you can go into more specific questions if that’s important.
If you feel like being tricksy, you can assume the worst-case scenario (like assuming the sale) where you make it the default or act like you already know. “Why aren’t you using condoms? He doesn’t want to?” This is counterintuitive because it’s even more specific and assumes something but because it’s assuming the worst-case scenario, the kid can talk more freely if it happens to be the case. If it’s not, it’s more casual or less consequential to say the actual truth. “We do actually use condoms.”
Also, don’t be afraid to press. Most people will fold and admit they only use condoms “sometimes”.
Let’s say you’re at a restaurant, and you’re trying to decide if you want fries for an appetizer. But fancy fries often have truffle oil on them and you really dislike truffle oil. If you ask the waiter, “Do the fries have truffle oil on them?” he’ll answer yes or no to the best of his knowledge, but he may be wrong. However, if you say, “Do the fries have truffle oil on them? I’m allergic to truffle oil.” he will find out for sure if the fries have truffle oil or not, maybe even double-checking with the chef, because the restaurant doesn’t want anyone to have an allergic reaction.
It’s been said that the way to see if a server got your drink is to ask if it’s the wrong one. So if you ordered a Coke and they bring out a dark soda, you ask “Is this Diet?” and see what they say. If they say yes, maybe they really thought you ordered a Diet, or they are just incompetent and are answering in the affirmative. If they say, “No, it’s a Coke. Did you want a Diet?” then it’s likely you’re getting what you ordered.
But what about this case? You’re a doctor and you need to get a patient history. Instead of asking a patient the specific question “Do you feel a tingling sensation in your foot?” you ask them the broad question “Do you feel any discomfort?” I can already hear the doctors laughing at me. In the real world, you’re slammed with 20 patients and are running on 3 hours of sleep. Some patients love to ramble and will tell you their whole life story if you let them. If you always asked broad questions, you’d never complete a patient history, let alone get through the rest of your patients. While it might be great for them if you spent hours listening, it’s not optimal in a utilitarian sense.
That’s why it’s important to know your goals and the stakes. If you’re a project manager and trying to figure out what went wrong and why your team didn’t get it done, are you actually trying to find out why Jim didn’t get it done or are you just trying to come up with an acceptable answer for your own boss? Do you already dislike Jim and are trying to find any reason to fire him?
Do you just want someone to rubber-stamp something?
Are you not 100% positive and wanting to double-check?
How important is having the right answer to this? How big are the stakes?
If you already know the answer, ask yourself why you’re asking them for their opinion.
Are you actually trying to teach them the information using the Socratic method?
Are you trying to gauge their level of understanding?
Are you trying to show off how smart or “right” you are?
So don’t be like the Lieutenant in Born on the Fourth of July. Be aware of the incentives you’re operating under and the incentives you’re putting out. Otherwise, there’ll be consequences ranging from mild inconvenience to beaucoup wounded and dead.
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