🆕 Never Post! Mailbag #10: Bring Back Ringbacks

Happy October! Today we respond to your questions and comments!

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☎️ Call us at 651 615 5007 to leave a voice mail
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📧 Email us at theneverpost at gmail dot com
🌐 Leave a comment at neverpo.st

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Never Post's producers are Audrey Evans, Georgia Hampton and The Mysterious Dr. Firstname Lastname. Our senior producer is Hans Buetow. Our executive producer is Jason Oberholtzer. The show's host is Mike Rugnetta. 

Never Post is a production of Charts & Leisure.

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Emily's Morning Playlists:

I only hear these on Thursdays, when I get up early for a sunrise run:

• 5:18am - Hostile Government Takeover EDM Remix
• 5:20am - Training Montage by the Mountain Goats
• 5:25am - Cinderella by Remi Wolf
• 5:30am - Everybody Wants to Love You by Japanese Breakfast
• 5:45am - Bojack's Theme from Bojack Horseman

These I hear every day, depending on when I run:

• 6:00am - This is PFS -- Final (see below)
• 6:15am - Cloudbusting by Kate Bush
• 6:30am - C'est ma lady by Marilyne Léonard
• 6:45am - What's Next feat. Lin-Manuel Miranda
• 7:00am - Orbit standard ringtone (I rarely hear this one)
• 7:15am - Cao Dai Blowout
• 7:30am - Cinderella by Remi Wolf
• 7:45am - Suddenly I See by KT Tunstall
• 8:00am - Falling of the Rain by Billy Joel
• 8:15am - Everybody Wants to Love You by Japanese Breakfast
• 8:30am - Too Slow by Maude LaTour
• 8:45am - Hey Blondie by Dominic Fike

Friends, hello, and welcome to the never post mailbag episode for subtropical Northeastern September 2025 in which we respond to listener emails, comments, voicemails, voice messages about our segments. Why don't you call me your podcast? Why don't you? I feel like we never hear from you anymore. You can't pick up the phone?

You cannot pick up the phone and call your own? Never post a podcast foreign about the Internet? I raised you.

The only podcast that promises emotional manipulation is the episode.

Call me by your podcast.

I don't

Jason, I don't think that's true. Oh, really, Mike?

You're gonna say that to me? The man who e p's this podcast?

Everything we've been through. Fine. I'll just be quiet then. I'm your host, Mike Rubnetta. I'm in charge here.

Oh, okay.

Joining me today in order of how many US states I think they have visited. Oh. Simply driving through does not count.

Oh. Okay.

Ascending. So lowest first. Never post executive producer Jason Oberholzer.

Alright. I'm thinking like oh, boy. Yeah. Like, 15 to 20 range.

K. Never post producer Georgia Hampton.

I'm doing math as fast as I can. And

for a podcast producer, that's extremely difficult.

Yeah. I'm being very brave right now.

Are you crying?

Is that wait. Hold on. I'm getting a live feed, and Pete Hegseth is on stage right now saying there's one person in the world braver than the war troops, and it's Georgia Hampton doing math live on a podcast.

I've always said this. Jason, I might actually have less than you.

Fewer even.

I think

I okay. Alright. Let's start off.

We're all having a lot fun today.

Oh, it

makes sense now. George is polishing a rifle. I can see it.

I just tried to count as many as I could remember. I think I only got to like 11.

Friend of the show, Meghal Jarnardan.

I'm thinking six oops. 17 is where I'm at right now.

Okay. 17. And finally, never post senior producer Hans Butel.

Yeah. My big my bigs no go spot is the South. I've I've ventured very little in the South and the Southwest, but I've done just about every other state north of the Mason Dixon. 25 by half the states?

Alright. That's pretty good. I assumed that you would have a lot just because you have been on tour.

That's exactly yeah. I have been to a lot of places, but that's also a lot of driving through places. And so if we're not counting those, you end up kinda going to the same spots. Right?

Yeah. I guess that's true.

Yeah. You end up going to Massachusetts. You end up going to New York. You end up going to Illinois. Yeah.

I spent a lot of time in Ohio. Mhmm. If we were to talk about basements, how many basements in Ohio have you been to?

They have a lot of them there. Wow. So this makes sense. Just the lowest capitol.

I would guess you are at the top of this list, Mike. Because you have done things in theaters

Actually, I'd agree.

And you have done things on the Internet that have taken you places.

Yeah. The combination of touring both for performance and music and having to go different places to, like, shoot things like for video. Yeah. Yeah. Puts me, I think, at 27 or 28.

Okay.

Yeah. Nice.

Which was the best one?

I I love Rhode Island. Wow. I love Rhode Island. Think Rhode Island is a great state.

That's a that's very fitting.

Why are you crying while you say this?

Which is funny because it's like growing up in Massachusetts, I this was maybe like a nineties thing and maybe even like a nineties my friends thing. It's like you made fun of Rhode Island if you grew up in a certain part of Massachusetts as like a not serious state because it's so small. Like, that's kind of the joke. There's like nothing there. It's like the size of someone's backyard.

Also, sort of similarly, like, there was this period in the nineties where you just make fun of Canadians, mostly for being nice. Like, Canada is was a good country, and so you kind of made fun of it a little bit. Sure.

Our mailbag.

Yeah. Our comment section.

Agree. And we got a lot of mail to get through here. Meghal Janardan, friend of the show, thank you for joining us specifically to talk about the avalanche of mail that came in after our summer yap fest. Once again, you have bullseye the center of the zeitgeist.

Amazing. Thank you for having me.

So Meghal, for folks who missed it, how would you summarize the Yapfest this year?

You know, we talked a lot about ringtones, you know, back when that was a thing and now everyone is on vibrate and silence and Yeah. You know, what happened to ringtones? Where did they go? What was your first ringtone? Yeah.

How did you go about getting your ringtone?

Sure. Yeah.

And that sort of led into more like customization of our digital experiences and all that good stuff. Well, the people have things they wanna talk about. So I'm gonna read some stuff that came in to our email inbox. And a reminder, if you wanna send us things, you can send us emails, voice messages, all manner of things. The ways to do so are in the show notes.

We do love to hear from you. Alright. Starting us off. I've just labeled this section weird things that people do. The first one I don't think is weird, but is framed as if it were weird, and I wanna see if you agree.

So Mike Turley wrote in to say, you asked to let you know if I was listening to Never Post on my phone speaker. Those words came out of my pocket while I was doing laundry. I work from home and my wife doesn't. So most days, I'm alone in a house where I won't bother anyone. Not having earbuds in or headphones on is slightly more comfortable.

So when I'm just around the house doing chores or making lunch or whatever, I'll blast a podcast from my phone and put it in my pocket. Am I the weird one?

No. Not at all.

No. No. I do that when my wife is home and she has a podcast in her pocket, and we walk past each other and like Doppler affect each other's podcasts.

Podcasts in the night.

Yeah. So not weird at all. I think that's probably, like, the most frequent way I listen to podcasts.

Especially during chore time, I would say. Yes.

Oh, big time.

Right? Do you think it is weirder to have a phone in your pocket listening to a podcast or putting a podcast on surround sound?

That to me is weird. I have never linked a podcast to a real speaker

ever. Ever.

That's actually so That's true. Wacky. That's so much.

I do have a Sonos in the kitchen that I that the podcast will come out of. But more often, it will come out of the phone itself and the Sonos is for music.

Alright. Here's more weird things people do. Dan Foxwell writes in. He says, I have different email and different phone numbers for different things. I give out my home phone number, and my home phone number is connected to my OMA, o o m a, which I was not familiar with.

Is anyone else familiar with OMA?

Oh. No. Never heard

of Never heard

Okay. Of So I'm just learning about this too. I think it's just a VoIP service. So like Google Voice or something like that, I imagine. Probably like, you know, a digital phone number thing.

And if I'm wrong, so what? Ooma hasn't paid me any money to know how to pronounce their product or what it is. You're a man of Anyway

Don't write it. Yeah. Don't talk to me.

It has a spreadsheet with all of my contacts on it says Dan. It doesn't do text. So if someone wants to call, they have to leave a voicemail. Then I use the same email to give to everyone. Now, my wife has, like, seven different email accounts that she gives out depending on the kind of things that she wants coming into that inbox.

Wow. She's also like a privacy activist, so the vigilance is strong.

Honestly, wise, I was gonna say. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. Makes sense.

But I haven't seen the multiple phone numbers for multiple things move. Is that something people do?

I know professional businesses. Right?

Sure. If they have like a business line.

I used to have multiple Google Voice numbers for different projects.

Oh, really?

Yeah. Interesting. So how would you use those?

Both for, like, if people wanted to get ahold of me or if people wanted to text me about a certain project. If it came in via a number, I knew immediately what the context was.

Oh,

cool. Was also a way to sort context related to projects and a way to to have, like, different kinds of two factor verification That it was like my two factor for for things related to certain projects went to a certain phone until the point at which services begin to be able to tell if you were using a Google Voice number for two FA, and then they stopped allowing you to do that. Right. I thought it was a lot to manage, but I found the compartmentalization of it really helpful until maybe, like, 2015 or, like, 2017. Like, around then, I stopped doing it.

I see the appeal. I have just used the one number for everything including the business number. So let chaos reign.

Yeah. I know. I guess a lot of journalists always have a specific number for the pieces that they're working on, if they have to talk to sources and things like that.

But And it feels like I've never done it, but it's not uncommon for people to carry multiple phones.

Yeah. True. That feels like such an old school move. Like, your business BlackBerry and your personal iPhone or whatever.

I think we're getting back in, especially in the age of we're crossing an American border is not an entirely unfraught process. The a the age of the business phone may return.

Oh, yeah. You just stick your phone in a hollow tree next to the border

and get it when you don't cross.

Alright. More weird things people do. And this one's delightful, I promise. Pedro Gomez Mariano writes in greetings from Brazil. Yay.

Brazil. We love you Brazil. Brazil mention. Brazil mention. We got our eyes on you Brazil.

This is foreshadowing.

It's a promise and a threat.

Listeners, this is foreshadowing. Okay. Listening to the latest episode about ringtones made me wanna share my recent experiment with notification sounds. I've recently changed my phone, and the new one came with tons of notification sounds I was unused to. After years of having Samsung, I switched to a Motorola.

First, I thought about changing the sounds to the ones I had on my previous phone, then I had the idea of giving each app a different notification sound so I could recognize the app without looking at the phone. That's weird thing number one. After a few days, I realized that this could be a great way to do some ear training as I'm an amateur musician who's never been able to have good listening skills.

Oh, that's

so so good. Good. I downloaded samples of all of the 12 intervals and assigned each one to a different app or a different email account. WhatsApp is a minor second. Telegram, a minor seventh.

I love it. Google Calendar, a perfect octave. It has been a few weeks and I've gotten able to recognize the app most times, but I don't feel it has made me better at music listening. Let's see if that changes in sub months.

Love it. Love this.

That's the coolest shit ever. Right?

This is like home. I'm on the floor.

I don't know.

That honestly is horrifying. Yeah.

I want to forget the notifications.

No. That's awesome.

Dive in and consider them.

It's like turning notifications into flashcards.

Yeah. Exactly. Yeah. Which is quite cool. Like, imagine if you're doing you're trying to learn a language.

You could turn every app into, like, a vocabulary word. I was thinking you could do, like, different frequency ranges for each one, you could practice, like, your your training on frequency ranges. Like, this is a cool idea.

Sold. Pedro, please write out a detailed description exactly how you did this and send it to me because I have no idea how to do this.

I think I don't think you can do this on an iPhone. You might not be able to do this

on I don't know that you can Yeah.

Customize Get like a job at Apple. Work your way up the ranks. And carefully and quickly as you can to a position where you can authorize this being a standard on all iPhones. Thanks.

Listen, Brazil has a lot of influence on the Internet.

It's so

You can do this. Alright.

Next weird human behavior in our inbox. Emily writes in to say a normal thing. I was listening to the segment of ringtones and customization. I wanted to say the choice of sound is a huge part of my phone experience. During COVID lockdown, when I was home nearly all the time, custom tones let me know who was messaging me, namely my sister or mother or anyone else.

That's nice and normal. And then It would be a shame. I also have alarms set for every fifteen minutes from when I wake up, 6AM on most mornings What? To 08:45AM. What?

Usually run-in the mornings, so I don't necessarily hear all of these. I don't use standard ringtones, and I switch it up every few months so as not to get frustrated. She then gives examples.

Oh. Listeners, it is hard to describe the feeling of looking at what comes next

Yeah.

In the document.

Yeah. Lot of feelings happening right now.

Wow. Emily tells us, I only hear these on Thursdays when I get up early for a sunrise run. 05:18.

Emily, this rules.

05:18AM, hostile government takeover EDM remix. 05:20AM, training montage by the mountain goats. 05:25AM, Cinderella by Remy Wolf. 05:30AM, everybody wants to love you by Japanese breakfast. 05:45AM, BoJack's theme from BoJack Horseman.

Every fifteen minutes.

But that's only on Thursdays. Yeah. Mind you.

You can't even imagine the rest of the week.

And then at 06:00, it picks up with her everyday list, which every fifteen minutes, true to what she promised all the way through 08:45AM is a different song. This rules or is frightening?

I'm scared.

I I still don't understand why.

Why not?

Is it like the is it like the grandfather clock like, bong.

Yeah. Like, bong.

I think that's a perfect analogy. It's to mark the passage of time in a some sort of pleasant way and give you options about, like, to check-in where you are on your morning progression.

Wow.

But why not a playlist?

Why not a playlist is a great question.

Yeah.

The final note about the first thing that plays at 6AM is really great. So at 6AM, Emily listens to this is PFS final, and then there's a note that says see below, which one imagines explains what that is. So the note says, my 6AM song. I really love my local independent film center's bumper music. The little trailer they play before every film advertising the film center has this little upbeat tone that makes me more excited to see the film I'm there for.

I reached out and asked them for the name of the song, and they sent the file. I've attached it. It's royalty free for you to get a sense of how much fun it is. That rules. That rules.

Oh my goodness.

I love this.

And listeners Exciting.

This is what it sounds like. You can see the full playlist, and adapt it for yourself Yeah. On the show notes of this episode.

This blew me away. This is a the apotheosis of weird things people do. So that ends that section. The end. Incredible.

You are all amazing people.

And everyone is okay.

Yeah. Everyone's normal.

Yeah. You're

all doing great.

Yeah. We're fine.

Make it yours.

Next, Brian Strassert wrote in to talk about ring back tones, which is something we did not talk about in our ringtone set. The thing where you would call somebody and your phone ringing would sound like something that they wanted it to sound like to you.

Yeah. Please enjoy this music while your party is reached. Yeah. I remember.

Is that what a ring back tone is? Like instead of instead of a ringing sound, you just listen to a song?

Yeah. You listen to like my humps.

Yeah. What the fuck?

There was actually there was a law for a little bit that it had to be. Yeah.

Nineties kids remember this. Brian

did end the email mentioning my humps. So this this is true. Once again. So Brian did a little research and it says, it looks like a lot of carriers ended the service in 2014 with Verizon being the last one to end it in 2020. Did anyone do this?

I don't think I did, but I definitely had friends who did. It was very much like a cool cool kid thing to do. Mhmm.

Yeah. Imagine looking at the server, like, you're the you're the Verizon engineer in charge of retiring this product. And you go and you look at the server storage and it's just terabytes and terabytes of my humps. You shed a single tear.

Yeah. The

true the

true bad And

pull the big lever.

Anyway, go to sleep forever. Right?

Wow. So, no, I don't remember this. Georgia does. George Meagle, do you remember I it

don't think this ever happened to me.

Wait. Really? Yeah. Oh my gosh.

I don't remember. I know it was a thing, but I don't know if because of my age and when people got individual phones and had ringtones that, like, it got phased out, like, socially.

Megal, we're the same age.

Yeah. Megal and were probably too young

for this.

Probably what happened.

Or maybe I just was I probably was just a loser. Oh I my didn't, you know, call anyone to under no. Which No.

Didn't. No.

What what age do you think you remember this, Georgia?

I wanna say this was like middle school. I also do feel like it matters that I went to an all girls middle school.

That is yes.

Yeah. There was a lot of sort of petri dish type things happening at that middle school while we were also basically doing Lord of the Flies to each other.

Can hate.

I don't think I had it, but absolutely. And I remember being with other girls and then being like, call me right now. And then you'd call and you'd like, oh my god. Like, and you'd hear,

oh, that's fun.

Yeah. Well, thank you for the memory, Brian. Next up, another little bit of customization. Ross writes in to say that they built a program over a decade ago computer that sets it to the astronomy picture of the day, a p o d, an effort by NASA that's been going on for probably decades. It's not always something beautiful, but it's consistently refreshing and novel.

If curious, Ross sent the GitHub.

Nice.

So if you're curious, check out the show notes. That sounds like a delightful way to have computer. Did

anyone do the SETI screensaver?

No. Oh, the one that like uses your extra cycles or whatever to

That's exactly

it. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. It's citizen science, and it would send you the data, and then your your computer would process when it when it went to sleep, it would have this like readout, and it would it would use your extra space on your your CPU, whatever was not being used to process data from the SETI program.

That's rad as hell.

I ran it for years.

Yeah. Wonder if does that still exist? Does it I don't

know. A good question. Or is there other stuff like that? Tell us. I wanna know.

I would do that.

Yeah. That's cool. I love a custom screensaver. Yeah.

Like the milk drop adaptive music thing or whatever.

I had the one that I have right now is a big Neon Genesis Evangelion countdown clock. Cool.

Hell, yeah.

That's like this hyper dramatic, like, big countdown clock, but it just shows the current time.

Wait. Send that to me.

It's cool. It looks cool as hell. It's great.

Do you

make them or

do you find them?

I find them. There are not a lot of people are making them these days. So yeah. I used to have an old school do you remember After Dark? The old Mac?

Oh,

yeah. Screensaver collection from, like Yeah. The late eighties, early nineties. Yeah. So I had I had the flying toasters for a little while.

I wasn't born, you know? Yeah. Yeah.

It was just wasn't alive.

Yeah. I was

just I don't remember.

Yeah. I was alive and I was alive and conscious and had a bank account. Oh, no.

The most dangerous form of consciousness.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That was the year I finished my training. Yeah.

Okay.

Alright. Final piece of mail in in reaction to the ringtones conversation comes from Alex Unipanisis, who suggests that if we send Alex the Bossa file from the show, they will make it their ringtone. Did we ever do that?

Well, I can make this happen.

This is gonna

Alex Alex is friend of the show. So we will send I can send Alex. I'm on it. I'll do it.

This is great.

Do you do you want the do you want the The nine minute. Nine minute version or the ninety minute version?

I think you know

the truth. You know the answer.

Alright. We'll check back into the next mailbag to see how that went.

Okay. With that, we are gonna take a break, and we are gonna say goodbye to Mangle Jnarden.

Oh. No. Bye, Mangle. Goodbye.

Mangle, thank

you for joining us. Will see you at the next Yapfest, if not sooner.

Amazing.

Everyone else is gonna stick around, including, I hope you, our listeners, you're gonna listen to some ads unless you're on the member feed and will be right back. We did it. Georgia, take it away.

Alright. So we got a bunch of really interesting messages about the segment that I produced with friend of the show, Toby, called Assigned Male at Login. As a reminder, that segment was about his experience watching his targeted ads change as he went through his transition. And the first message we got was from another beloved friend of the show, Tom Lum, who writes, when I was in college, all the computers and lecture halls used for lessons ran on ephemeral guest accounts that got wiped each day. So one day, a professor pulled up a website and on the left was a banner ad for guns and on the right, a banner ad for purses.

I find it both hilarious and fascinating that that's how the ad algorithm decided to probe a user profile that was completely blank. Like, that was their first question in a game of 20 questions was, are you a gun or a purse?

Obligatory, the two genders.

The two genders. Yes. Yes. We finally did it, you guys.

Exactly. I helped a friend set up a new TikTok account, like, little while ago. And the first hour was just them trying different races of people on us. Woah. It was just like, hey, black woman, black woman, black woman, Puerto Rican woman, Puerto Rican man, black man, Asian man, Asian woman.

An hour of this. Wow.

That's not surprising to me. Yeah.

I have an aside question that is unrelated to Tom's comment. But related to the fact that we've just got three friend of the show mentions in a row with Alex, Toby, and Tom. Do we need to make friend of the show merch? Should we like send out free t shirts to friends of the show?

I like the idea until they didn't pay me.

We are giving you the exclusive opportunity to give Jason $35.

I like this. We sold a nice chunk of t shirts on our first batch here. Enough to make me think it would be fun to do another limited pressing.

I think friend of the show is really great. Right? I would wear that.

No. Georgia, you get a shirt that just says the show.

Show. Alright. Maybe this is the second piece of foreshadowing in this episode.

Fabulous. The next message comes from Lucas Hunter, who writes, I listened to the segment assigned male at login on the way into work today, and a thought bounced around my brain bones that perhaps would be useful for your approach to Internet discourse. Incentives. I can't help but wonder if the reason social media platforms sell masculine right wing conservatism to their male audience is because of the long term logic. If conservatives are more engaged scrollers and commenters, then it would be to the media's benefit if all their user base was more like that.

Since then, users would scroll more, allowing opportunities for more ads, thus more ad revenue. Is it then to the media's benefit to push as many people as possible in that direction?

I have a conspiracy theory about this, which is that Okay. In a lot of ways, the largest social media platforms are in fact politically retrograde, and Mhmm. The people who run them believe in things that make the world worse. I think that there is also probably the case that, like, they know what certain percentage of the audience has to be people that cause arguments in order to maintain the, like, engagement that they require to be profitable. And so they cater to people who will stay and who will cause fights.

And who will yell.

Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. What they then they then need to do is they need to keep the balance, though. They need to keep enough other people for those people to yell at to be angered by and yell at, and that's that it's a it's a delicate ecosystem they have to maintain.

That's hard.

So I don't know. That makes sense to me.

So is this what we're seeing on x when the ecosystem gets off and is only the yellers left? They're just

I mean, that's what it is right now. Right?

Yeah. Right. They just start yelling at each other. Yeah.

To be fair, though, maybe the counter argument is to go to Blue Sky and then just see a different set of people constantly fucking yelling

at each other. Yeah. Maybe you just gotta you've gotta choose one direction and double down on it. It's really what it is. Like, who who is who here is getting mad first?

I guess. Who here is mad? Raise your hand.

Yeah. And maybe that's the thing, like, proportionally, this is the ways in which boys get mad the most. So they just give the boys the things that make the boys mad most frequently. Yeah. Good shit.

Great system. No

notes. Feels awesome.

I feel good.

Let's keep doing it this way. Yeah. Okay. We got some notes in about my segment on Brain Rot, where I talked to Ryan Broderick and Emily Owens about, what brain rot is and the surprising sort of, like, social role, that it plays. Jack wrote in and said, there was something about the way described the need brain rot was filling that reminded me of a conversation I'd had with my therapist.

What Jack said in therapy is, we still wanna be engaged. We don't want nothing. We just don't want anything asked or expected of us in contrast to every other part of life. That's almost exactly why I find myself doing New York Times crosswords with any empty time I have. It's engaging enough that I'm not worrying about things, but there are no stakes, no expectations or demands other than completing the puzzle.

And I'm not really improving myself in any way. It's a pretty useless activity. My therapist recognized it as a way of managing stress and anxiety, a tool to switch off. But because it's a crossword puzzle and not TikTok or Instagram Reels, there's a pretense that this is acceptable. I could tell my colleagues I do multiple crosswords every day in a way that I would not tell them.

I scroll endlessly. So my provocation, our New York Times games high brow brain rot. This is me, Mike Rugnetta now responding to say, no.

I was gonna say, no. No.

The tell is I could tell my colleagues I do multiple crosswords every day in a way that I would not tell them I scroll endlessly. There you go.

Yeah. Isn't there also like science that crosswords do good stuff for like dementia and

Yeah. Great for Alzheimer's.

Great for dementia.

Yeah. I don't think it's a useless activity. I think it actually is kind of training your brain and and exercising it in a way. That's kinda nice.

Now the New York Times opinion section.

A different kind of brain rot, really.

On that

note, Puzzmo is great. If anybody's not on Puzzmo, highly, highly, highly recommend. Really, really good set of games. Jay McGee also writes in and says, solid Gen Xer here. Just turned 50 who is pissed at AI slop in my feed, so I'm going retro with my rodage with WikiLeaping.

When I grew up, I spent my free time devouring useless information as a kid. I read the world almanac and book of facts with devotion. Hell, yeah. Same. This is kind of that.

WikiLeaping starts with a random Google search on something random, say Wichita, Kansas. Every article has links to many other topics on the platform. My wife went to Wichita State University, so maybe I'll click on that next. Then there's a section for notable alumni, which includes Bill Parcells and the founders of Pizza Hut. And at midnight when I usually do this, pizza sure sounds good.

Rabbit hole to rabbit hole, I go. Wikipedia is devoid of slop. I'll take human crowdsource truth over that any day, So I think of WikiLeaping as more mentally redeeming routage than the algorithms could ever serve up. Again, I think just like a genuinely a good activity.

I was

gonna say, we gotta I have something to say to

your listeners.

You cry. You gotta be nicer to yourself

You're adorable and good.

You stop this now. Because learning something interesting, albeit diverting, albeit not something quote unquote useful in a very capitalistic framework of life is still beneficial to you. Like, it can still be interesting and rewarding to learn something about Wichita, Kansas.

Like I think but I I think that's maybe the thing that we're realizing here that, like, Jack and Jay are saying is that it's like, they feel like they can do these things in a way that is somehow detached from the hustle grind set Yes. That is, like, hyper prevalent in other parts of the Internet. And I think that it's like, it's interesting to think of this as a way of saying, like, these things feel brain rotty simply because they exist on a part of the Internet that hasn't been infected by that attitude.

Yeah.

Right? And so, like, you can do these things without feeling like you're engaging in that kind of space, even if you are bettering yourself in some way.

Right. But I also think I read them, like, internalizing some of the rot of this mindset of, like, they need to make excuses for doing anything that isn't, like, productive immediately to their ability to make money. It makes us feel like they're rotting when they're not, they're learning.

They're Yes.

You can just have a hobby. You can just have a hobby.

You're not rotting. You're like a Like you're composting. You're something else.

Yes. Oh. Composting is

my favorite. Alright.

I'd like to I'd like to just say to Jay, if this is a thing you're down with and you wanna fall asleep while someone else does this for

you Oh.

Come on,

Hans. If you become a member, you would get access to the full catalog and any that I do also apologize to everybody that I haven't done one in a while of slow post, which is a show that I make that does this exact thing. We walk incrementally and slowly through Wikipedia links until we stop.

It's very relaxing.

And now that I have the the microphone, I got some stuff to say about some things that other people had to say about the stuff that I said about

Hans is crying.

You read

If each one of us doesn't cry, it's not a mailbag.

Just around it's a rads a round table of tears. The story that I did about AI and reanimating images. So that's taking still images and using AI to bring them back to life, a thing that we can now do. But should we? Lenny wrote in with a a really lovely little story that I'm gonna now read to you.

Lenny says, you ask what I think about the difference between the still image and moving images, and would I ever reanimate my family in photos? I have a weird, long winded answer that can be summarized as no. In the show, you talked about your connection to the Saigon execution, which stops me in my tracks while I was cutting out my pattern pieces. Often, am sewing while listening to your show. God, love that.

And pulled me back to the photo of war that changed me, the Abu Ghrib Leash photo. I was in five or six when I saw that photo. Our grade five teacher every Friday made us read the paper, noble, combing through articles to complete a bingo card. I can't remember if it was in that class or at home when I saw the photo or on my own reading the paper. That photo still sticks with me and sent me down a path of reading and learning about the Iraq and Afghanistan wars.

I also have the undesirable privilege of seeing those early grainy beheading videos at the beginning of the Iraq war. Someone's older brother found them and made it a thing to show his little brother's friends. Surprisingly, that does not stick with me in the same way. It was too monstrous, too fast, too unreal. Coming back to would I reanimate my family photos?

I think no. For the same reason that a still image of brutality sticks more than the moving violence. Looking at a photo, especially of loved ones, gives you time to appreciate them, sinking into them to notice the details. I recently was home, and we have been slowly putting up the photos from my grandparents who passed in the last few years. My favorite photo is one of them both asleep in shitty outdoor recliners on an unknown deck.

I can tell it's cold because they have long pants under my Bubba, my grandpa, is a shorts at all costs kinda guy. They have beat up baseball caps pulled over their eyes from two different ski resorts. I can hear Zuzu snoring and know when they wake up from that nap that a glass of white wine and popcorn will be on the menu. I have no idea if any of this is true. It is a soft amalgamation of fond memories.

The next time I see this photo, I may come up with another story or have a conversation with someone who's on that trip to add to my cash on my grandparents. Using AI would set my flight of fancy into stone and probably stop that curiosity about the photo. That's so good. Not

knowing is better than finding out.

That's so good. So this I have two things to say. First of all, the Abu Ghraib photo, believing is seeing, the book by Errol Morris that I used for that piece has an entire chapter where he figures out who that guy is and who that guy isn't, and it's wild. That's very Errol Morris. Very much recommend that book.

It's a lot about the same sort of stuff. The other thing I'll say is this is why I think the original star wars are better.

Oh, did not see this coming.

The original star wars, the original three movies, they didn't have the technology to show you everything, so they made you imagine things that were just off screen. And then you started getting I remember viscerally sitting in that first phantom menace movie, and they would do these wide shots of the planet they were about to land on, and it'd be just this digital detail that would show everything in the entire planet. I'd be like, where's there's no room

for me in this.

Like, I can't imagine any. There's nothing what am I gonna do with this except, like, appreciate that you did it? Great. Glad you had fun making this detailed world. I'm not gonna live on your detailed world because It's full.

Yeah. It's full. It's completely full. And this is like I think about this all the time of the stuff. Like, you walk into that cantina and, like, like, they still write stories about those characters in that cantina because it so spills out over the sides of the story so much.

And I think photos can do that too. It's not to say the videos are bad, but I agree.

Well, I also think to Lenny's point about the difference in endurance of the memory of seeing that photo from Abu Ghraib versus, in some ways, far more explicit beheading videos

Mhmm.

Is that, you know, a a photographic cysts that you only see that. A moment that in any other experience would pass in a blink of an eye and you wouldn't really have the time to sit there and watch it and watch it and watch it forever Yeah. And come back to it and it's still there. And I think that is in many instances, the true power of photography, which is that it is always capturing something that otherwise you would spend half a millisecond with. I mean, that photo from Saigon is is incredible because of that.

Because of the exact moment in which it was taken.

Yeah. Right. It's not like a time stamp in the middle of something. It is the entirety of that moment.

Yes. Love it.

I love this email. Y'all are so good.

But need thank for sharing that.

Alright. Next up, we got a submission from our subreddit, which if you are not on it Yes, Jason. You believe this? I, for one, am shocked. From

us, Jason. Is it?

They said it was

best pod ever?

Yes. Oh, no. Turn off

the call.

Is that what you wanted? No, Hans. It's Not yet, at least. Oh. It's r slash never post.

Get there. Share your thoughts. We're in there. Talk to us. We'll talk to you.

To our friends. Talk to other friends of the show.

Friendship is more important now than ever before. But anyway, it's not as important as this submission.

Wow. Elicious.

From a frequent member of the chat during our livestream week, Nondeterminist System, who wrote in about my segment with Gabriela Lewis about recipes online and how to determine if something actually can be made in the real world or just looks pretty on your feed. So they write, it occurs to me that food has always been an integral part of social norming in human history. We bond over food, we build communities over feasts, we create meaning by defining what foods are and are not permitted, and so on. As society has moved from word-of-mouth to print media to mass media to social media, I suppose it's only natural that the way we use food to create social meaning has changed too. I'd need a food historian to provide detailed social context, but I understand that the contemporary recipe with exact amounts, temperatures, times, and step by step instructions has only existed for a few centuries.

But the creation of food as a form of social bonding predated this idea of a recipe and never really went away. It was probably in the era of mass media when the transition was made from social to parasocial. That was when Julia Child became the generally accepted expert on all things food in The United States. And the competence of a household chef was really gauged in terms of her, and it was usually her, ability to hew to that mark. Recipes as vibe posting may represent the reversion of a brief weird blip in human history.

For a while, the canonical text was the joy of cooking. And the cultural leaders were the likes of Childe, Paul Prudhomme, and Gordon Ramsay. Before that, the culture of food was local. Now, it occurs to me that vacuous food blogs and hyper real YouTube videos may represent something of a yearning. A desire to connect our food experiences back to the time in history when your nana would teach you how to make fettuccine or your uncle would teach you how to smoke pork shoulder.

What I worry about is that this desire for connection to the culture of food will become yet another algorithmically driven rabbit hole. Until that video about replicating Dippin' Dots at three in the morning becomes an invitation into a lifestyle that the viewer would never have considered otherwise.

I love this.

This is so good.

I think this is actually the thing that struck me the most about your piece, Georgia, was that, like, I don't disagree that recipes become vibe posting. I but I don't think they've become I think they've returned to being vibe posting. Recipes were kind of the original vibe post. Like, there's a there's a guy, Max Miller, who I really like watching on YouTube, who takes historical recipes and then makes them and then tastes them to see if they're any good. And the wildness of some of these recipes

of how

vibey and like, that's what recipes are. This exact thing of, like, it wasn't exact measurements. Like, we didn't have the standardization. That didn't exist. It was just like like like, I went just now to his website, and I checked out medieval apple pie from the British Isles.

And this is the recipe that he made. Quote. I'm not getting it wrong because there's a bunch of, like, middle English in this, but we'll try. Quote, for to make Tartus an apple ish,

boy. Alright.

Take good apples and good spices and figs and raisins raisins and pears. And when they are well colored with saffron, well, and do it in a coffin and set forth to bake well.

Yeah. Sick. Done. Next That's

the apple pie recipe. Perfect.

That's how you make an apple

possibly need to know. Yeah.

But that's what think. That's the original vibe post. Be like, you get spices, man. You get good apples, man. And you just

like You kinda spice the good ones, You

make it

good. Yeah.

No. I I think you're completely right. And this is such a good point that I I again, I'm no food historian. But absolutely, I think for centuries, there was no measuring. It was just like, you know, the normal amount of good spices.

Because

then there's the there's Max Miller's 16 recipe that comes after that. For the filling, preheat the oven at 375 degrees. Pour a few tablespoons of water over the saffron fries and let them soak while you prepare for fruit.

Corn and

roughly chop the apples.

Know I mean?

You know that that you can if you like. Mash the apples and the pears in a mortar

and pestle. Boo. This man.

But it's wonderful. It's wonderful to watch him struggle and deal with these recipes and be like, how do we think about these old vibes in a modern context? It's one of the reasons I really like his show.

And I also think it's interesting that because kind of what's happening now is another historical tradition which is finagling with recipes.

Yeah yeah yeah.

So if you see a TikTok recipe where they don't offer any measurements of anything and you're just kind of watching someone slap like dough around and you're like, well, did I do that? Like, if you actually wanna do it, you kinda have to poke around or look at someone else's recipe and go refer to something else that shows you how to make dough and how shows you how to measure this out accurately.

That's right.

But I think what what distinguishes this moment of recipes, especially in the sheer number of recipes and food content we're seeing on social feeds, is that you're, I think, far less incentivized to make any of this. That's where, you know, like the Nora Smiths come in. Where like, if I, in some terrible misfortune, see one of her videos about making Dippin' Dots, I'm not like, you know what sounds really good right now? Mhmm. Making Dippin Dots.

Mhmm. Like, I would never do that ever.

I think there's another component here though that I I'd be interested to hear you struggle with at some point, which is recipes are one of the two as far as I'm aware, one of the two most high profile common cultural artifacts that have no copyright. One of them being Woah. Interesting. One of them being recipes, one of them being jokes. Neither of those two are copyrightable, which means Mhmm.

There's a whole set of legal things that then start to cascade from that. And I'd be interested in hearing you grapple with that at some point because that's think it's a weird thing in the middle of it.

Well, yeah. Because also, I mean, with jokes, I feel like somewhat regularly there are scandals where some comedian quote unquote steals a joke Right. From someone else. So there are still sort of social implications and consequences of that. But with food, I do wonder if that's quite different.

Well, the thing you can copyright is all the stuff you put around it.

What do you mean?

So, like, the way you talk about it, the creative elements that surround it, descriptive text, any photographs, anything. So the actual copyrightable thing is the packaging of it. That's the only thing that a content creator can own. They can't own the recipe.

Dare I say the vibes of it.

Dare I say the vibes are the copywritable thing.

Well, yeah. Because like if I, I don't know, made a roast chicken from a recipe from one of Molly Bosses cookbooks.

Yeah.

And I bring it to a dinner party, no one's gonna be like, that's Molly Bosses chicken

recipe? Like yours.

It's more and like, I'm judged more by, like, cool. So like, did you do it well?

Did you execute that?

Yeah. There's so much customization specifically with cooking as well. Like, I've had to do that with so many recipes of being like, God, this broth is so bland. Okay. I need to swap out water for chicken stock.

I need to add a bunch of garlic powder. I need to put in a Parmesan rind or something.

The comment sections and recipes are often the most interesting and helpful places.

Totally.

Oh, big time. People are having entire Shakespearean tragedies in those comments.

Yeah. And I don't I don't mean because of the famous, like, meltdowns that people have in the New York

Times Yes.

Recipes. I mean the actual, like, cooking advice. Yeah. Like like, I swapped out every

yeah. I swapped out everything, and it was disgusting. Yeah. How why did you do this to me?

Explain this, Allison.

It's for Allison.

Yeah. Your ham recipe worked terribly on my Cornish game ham.

This doesn't work at all when it's tempeh.

You know what? I think we should take another break right now. I'm having way too much fun, and it's not good for your health. So listeners, join us in a palliative break. See you on the other side.

Manuel wrote in about my segment on gambling, which is kind of about how increasingly it feels like being online, every aspect of being online. And in a way, aspects of interacting with technology are all a gamble. Everything is both literally and metaphorically sort of like you are inside of a casino. And Manuel writes, when did it happen that updating either an app or an OS became a risk reward assessment? I mean, I was one of those people who wrote tech enthusiast on the CV constantly looking for the most recent releases.

But now, oh, boy, you'll never know what the last update could bring you derogatory. Get the feeling of unpredictability. Sure. But in the sense that if I win, everything stays the same. And if I lose, I'll get a new AI powered calculator that gives me Garfield pictures when I try to split the bill at the restaurant.

Okay. Okay. First of all, there will be no Garfies hate in this house. Yeah. Excuse me.

But I get it. I get it. Yeah. I mean, it is sort of charts the same path as the decreasing effectiveness of the government. Like, the people who are ostensibly the ones who are being served by these things are not actually the ones being served.

And instead, it is some shadow group of people who seek to profit or gain power from those things. So, like, you know, technology gets worse and worse with every update because it's not for you. It's for, like, the shareholders who for some reason want AI inside of everything and think that that's leads to profit, which like in the near term, they're not wrong. So, you know, I feel this very intensely as someone who uses his computer every day to make audio. Yeah.

Which is a very finicky set of pieces of software

The that conversations we've had about Yep. Am I safe to update you guys? What are

you at? Which can I go to?

My god.

We go to our audio professionals channel in Slack that has us and other charts and major engineers, and we all wait and see who's the first one who updates their OS and says, is it okay for us to do this? Are we safe?

Yeah. What's broken?

And will it affect me?

I worked in a studio for a little while where this would have been like in the early twenty tens or like just around 2010. And the guy was the guy who owned the studio was still running OS 8.6.

Hell yeah.

Because he was like, whatever, dog. It works. It's it works.

But it works.

It works.

And his computer's fully air gapped. Yeah.

Yeah. Pro Tools LE. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah.

This makes me I've been thinking about this for a while watching the reaction to Apple announcements events, which I feel like used to dominate.

Oh, yeah. They made a super breakable phone.

But it feels like no one feels like no one for maybe like the last five or six, this it you're not seeing news reports of lines of people waiting. You're not seeing No. Like people are not updating or waiting for the new thing anymore in the same way because it's a gamble.

No. It feels like a big long drag of a cigarette like, what now? What, Tim?

Exactly. But mine works. Mine works. And

finally. We've made it. We've made it. The one we've all been waiting for. An update on cool one word graffiti.

The segment where Jason gets really mad.

Yeah. Well, I think I have been maybe a bit too effective at getting mad at the listener. Yeah. They have stopped sending me multi word graffiti that I get mad at. And they actually are just sending me one word graffiti, but there's not a lot of it because it turns out that's kinda hard to find.

Jason wants to be mad.

Yeah. This is the secret of my power. But we do have two submissions for cool one word graffiti. And the first of them is from friend of the show and future t shirt recipient, Talia. Yeah.

Georgia, what do we have going on in this particular photo?

Well, I'd love to tell you. So we're looking at a street sign that is sort of a chevron pattern. I imagine something to suggest that you have to go in a certain direction. So alternating black and white chevron

Mhmm.

Pointing to the left. And in three of those black Chevron pieces, someone has written snort snort

snort. I believe so. Three words, but the same word thrice. Yes.

I believe We've allowed that in the past.

Yes. Yes. There's a precedent.

Yes. I

don't know why that is there.

No. I hope it's someone's name.

Yeah. Snort was just tagging. Yes. Snort was just doing a whole tag.

I bet someone's tagged.

Yeah. But I

kinda like it. Our second submission is more difficult to describe, which is why I'm gonna make Hans do it.

Oh, I love this. I

knew this was coming. Was like,

oh, I

gotta get myself. So it's it's a close-up, so it's a little unclear as to where it is, but maybe on, you know, the side of a veranda. I don't know. Something like It's a very huge swing. Just just to pull a word from nowhere.

I'm gonna say, oui?

Yeah. Why not? It's boy.

Think it's boy?

It's boy.

It's boy.

Boy because of the line. Yes. The thing the reason it's hard for us to tell Mhmm.

I see.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Is an o, an o, and a y.

No. It's

a d. But it's a

b because it's because not

surrounding the o o y is a whole face drawn on with an exclamation point just off to the side, And part of the face extends up the first o up the left hand side to make an o into a b.

So for any other people who are familiar with the drawing cheat doe job.

What it what the fuck are you saying?

Fellas, this is what an art degree is gonna get you.

Oh, okay.

So if you write doe job, d o j o b.

K. Yeah.

You can basically make a little guy's face. Okay. So the d and the b are his ears. The two o's are his eyes. The j is his nose.

Oh. I will draw

this for you right

I see that. I see that. Now I can see it in my in my head mind.

Yes. So we're I'm gonna get some nice foley.

He can see it in his brain bones. Is that what the earlier

guy did? So cute. In his brain bones. So we got dojob.

Oh, yeah.

You draw a circle around

it. Lower

and this is lowercase, importantly.

Yeah. Lowercase. And all of a sudden

Yeah. Draw a

little draw a little hemisphere around it.

So what has happened here real recognize real is what's happening. Got

it. Okay.

Boy exclamation point.

Boy, the b and the o are sort

of

square. And someone has connected a line between them, so it looks like glasses.

Put dots in the middle for pupils.

And then he put a little smile, put a little half circle to make his face. The y in boy connects the rest of his face and the the sort of stocks of the y turn into a hairline. Yep. Yeah. That can come around.

I love this. Yeah. It's delightful. And I, you know, I think it is one of the more rich examples you can have of actual one word graffiti. Think it What word graffiti?

Yeah. So folks, if I've been too harsh to you in the past and that's why you're not sending graffiti as much You deserve it. I was right. And I honestly I was I see none of

these. No. Jason.

I think we found them all. If we if we have the

Don't listen to him.

Yeah. Anything else would be an exception. I don't think there are more one word graffitis out there. So if I see any, I'm gonna be mad. And if I see ones that aren't one word, I'm gonna be mad.

Listeners,

come over here for a second. Jason's not here. It's just me. You have to send as many as you can. We need to drive this man to the brink of insanity.

I'm back. What were we talking about?

Nothing. Nothing

at all.

We're just wrapping up, I think.

Sweet. My blood pressure is great.

Thank you, friends, for sending in your emails, for sending in your Reddit posts. Very exciting to see some things from the subreddit on here. Go and hang out. It's a great little spot. Yeah.

And we will see you next week with a full episode. Yeah. Thanks, y'all. Pew pew pew pew pew. Call call your podcast.

Call your podcast. Call

your podcast.

Can never

call anyone. Pick up your super breakable phone and call your podcast. Oh, yeah. Sure. It's broken.

Yeah.