View Episode 216
Originally aired 05.02.10
1:02:50
13:54 – 60 Minutes did a piece called “San Francisco’s Next Earthquake.” The San Andreas Fault caused the giant earthquake in 1906, while the Hayward Fault is known to erupt every 130-140 years. It hasn’t erupted in 141 years. While this is happening, there is a frenzied, mad rush to rebuild the New Bay Bridge that connects San Francisco to Oakland.
16:20 – Seth was watching Dateline NBC with Dr. Chris Hansen. He did an exposÈ called “What Were You Thinking?,” featuring a person on hidden camera who reacts to the popular crowd sentiments among them. One scenario features a group of job applicants filling out paperwork for a prospective job. They’re all Dateline employees with the exception of one test subject. They take a smoke machine from outside the room and pump in smoke to fill up the room. All the people on camera just looked around kind of panicky while the Dateline people did nothing, and eventually didn’t get up and do anything. Only one subject, black girl Ramona, said “Oh hell no!” and took off out of there.
19:18 – There was a report on NOVA called “Money and the Mind” about behavioral economics. They offered people this scenario: One year from today I give you $100, or one calendar year and a day I give you $102. Everybody chose the $102. The other question was, I’ll give you $100 today or $102 tomorrow. Every person chose the $100 today.
33:01 – Seth watched Into The Universe With Steven Hawking on The Discovery Channel. His take on things was that we might not want to find these alien guys because if they came down here they would wreck us.
37:56 – Seth watched a 20/20 report on USA Swimming. Apparently there’s an epidemic of coaches boning down on their swimmers, hiding cameras in the locker rooms, etc. Several coaches took on multiple lovers. One dude went up and down the coast looking at different high schools to impregnate swimmers.
51:55 – Seth watched Hallmark’s When Love Is Not Enough about Bill Wilson’s wife Lois Wilson, who founded Alcoholics Anonymous. Lois is played by Winona Ryder and Barry Pepper plays Bill W. They wear a lot of old-timey garb and there’s a lot of emotional scenes. The commercials are 9-minute long Hallmark commercials. One featured a dude in his 60s walking into a child’s classroom, and it turns out he’s illiterate and needs to be taught how to read. They show 4 different stages of learning and by the end of it he goes into his closet, takes out a shoebox (“and shoots himself,” says Jah), which is a lifetime’s worth of Father’s Day cards from his daughter. He reads them all out loud.
46:06 – Tinnitis – a constant ringing or buzzing in your ears
3:54 – IHOP Pancake Stackers are two pancakes with a piece of cheesecake in between them. They’re available in strawberry, blueberry and cinnamon apple.
46:06 – Do you want the ringing to stop? Tinnitis is a real thing. Quietus can stop the ringing in your ears.
1:02:15 – The Unabomber Ted Kaczynski, in 1995: “As machines become more and more intelligent, people will let machines make more of their decisions for them, simply because machine-made decisions will bring better decisions than man-made ones. Eventually a stage may be reached at which the decisions necessary to keep the system running will be so complex that human beings will be incapable of making them intelligently. At that stage the machines will be in effective control. People won’t be able to just turn the machines off because they will be so dependent on them that turning them off would amount to suicide.”
22:39 – Cosmetic neurology is brain boosting for ultimate brain performance. College students and professors are on the Adderall.
23:01 – Provigil is 100 milligrams of Modafinil (Episode 100 - Part I, 6:25). It’s a drug created for narcolepsy but has been given to 2 million people for brain enhancement. Doctors, fighter pilots and truck drivers are all taking it.
2:26 – Jah asks Seth if he has seemed “dark” to him lately. Seth thinks Jah might be cloaking it in front of him so he doesn’t know. Jah hates that he might be coming off as dark, but if he has he wants listeners to let him know.
6:15 – Jah remembers when boxed wine started really showing up at parties. He recalls a lot of weddings having them. Seth had them in droves in his childhood kitchen.
11:25 – Jah reveals that he spent some time recently in a city called San Francisco. He’s been going up to that city periodically throughout his life. He describes it as a triple-decker of a city. The dudes ghost-riding the whip were right next to four dudes shooting up in a doorway right next to the two richest .com guys eating at a restaurant, etc. He also remembered thinking that the place rattles like crazy. Earthquakes are no joke there.
40:20 – Jah recalls that he had teachers that were in their late 20s when he was in high school. He was having sex with women that were the same age as the teachers he was in high school with. But he thinks now that the sexual activity of people has increased so much – people fuck quicker and sooner and more often. Seth just wants to know how much quicker their ejaculate shoots out.
48:44 – Jah reveals that he had an episode happen recently, but he then loses his train of thought.
55:29 – Jah was walking through a mall the other day and walked somewhere else and there were still a billion kiosks around, and he kept thinking they were endangered. He thinks the amount of money it takes to print magazines is going to be impossible to make for big companies in the future.
56:01 – Seth was driving on Vine and was at a red light and saw a store called Video Box. The logo was a cassette tape.
56:53 – Jah walked into a restaurant yesterday. There was a table of seven people with an iPad sitting at the center of the table. Every single person at the table was holding an iPhone. They’re all playing Scrabble on their iPhones, and when they spell the letter out it shows up on the iPad wirelessly via wi-fi.
5:45 – Seth’s mother says hello to everybody and she wanted Seth to mention that Thomas Angove has passed away at 92. He was the inventor of boxed wine.
6:52 – 23-year-old LaShawn Merritt is the reigning Olympic and world 400-meter track champion. He has accepted a two-year ban from running after failing a USA Track & Field drug test that was the result of his use of over-the-counter penis enlargement product Extenze (Episode 062, 44:46). Explaining his mistake of not knowing the ingredients in it, he says “To know that I’ve tested positive is extremely difficult to wrap my hands around.”
9:03 – Adam Jones, a 24-year-old centerfielder for the Baltimore Orioles, is the only black dude on the Orioles’ roster. The Orioles are 4-18, worst in the MLB at air time. Jah wonders how lame the bus rides are when they’re all singing along to Dave Matthews Band and he’s rolling his eyes.
10:13 – Kathryn Bigelow has announced a follow-up to her film The Hurt Locker, which won her a Best Director Oscar this year. Next month in L.A. she’s going to be shooting a Revlong lipstick commercial with Jessica Biel. 25:52 – The average speed, in miles per hour, of a man’s ejaculate, is 28 miles per hour. Seth thinks Jah’s is 33. Seth and Jah say Jim Carrey is the Nolan Ryan of jizz, reaching 96-97 miles per hour
28:02 – 75-year-old Ronald Wayne, who lives in a modest home on a small state pension in the retiree town of Pahrump, Nev., is often referred to as the “third founder of Apple Computers.” He worked side-by-side with Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak in the early to mid-1970s. Wayne had a 10% share of the Apple Computer Company and sold them in 1976 for $800. They would be worth in the billions at this point if he had kept them.
31:26 – SETI (The Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence) has an array of radio telescopes, about 350 high-tech dishes spread out over the 90 acres of the Northern California wilderness. They’ve decided they’re going to give their raw data and algorithms out to the public so they can harness the power of everyone’s findings.
32:47 – NASA just held a conference to discuss alien life in Houston to commemorate 50 years of research.
36:17 – Just like when he donated $27,777 in late 1978 to save the “Y” in the HOLLYWOOD sign (Episode 049, 43:41), Hugh Hefner came in at the very last second and gave $900,000 to the Trust for Public Land, giving them the $12.5 million they needed to buy the Cahuenga Peak from a development firm and make it a permanent part of Griffith Park.
49:00 – This month marks the 50th anniversary of “the pill” in the U.S. Nowadays women can choose between the pill, patches, rings, implants and even the morning-after pill. Yet despite all these options, one-half of all pregnancies in the U.S. – more than 3 million a year – are unintended. Jah thinks the better option would be for guys to take a pill that makes “dum-dum sperm” that don’t know how to swim for 24 hours.
1:13 – Episode 216 is dedicated to the craft and ever-expanding world of crystal healing.
54:12 – Jah wonders how endangered the general cosmetic feel of newstands are. He wonders if they’ll completely evaporate in our lifetime. Jah thinks they will.
41:38 – Seth reads some Ask Amy from the Los Angeles Times: “Dear Amy, My mother gets her hair done at a very expensive salon and as a surprise offered to pay for me to have my hair done there by her stylist. I went there without my mom and the stylist was very flirty. At the end of my appointment he asked for my number. He’s 24. I’m 17. Mistake No. 1? I love the attention so I wrote my phone number on his tip. When he actually called that night and asked me to meet him at a party in the city, I was totally taken aback and I told him I was busy. He asked me to call him this weekend to set something else up. I’m freaking out because I have absolutely no desire to ever go out with a man seven years older. I can’t tell my mom because he does her hair. I can never go back there. I have no idea how to handle the mess I made. Signed, Flirting Failure.” The response from Amy: “Dear Flirting, We moms really don’t like it when trusted adults hit on our daughters. I realize that many women absolutely love their hair stylist but we love our daughters more. You can assume your mother will deal with him directly. If this guy calls, tell him, ‘I’m sorry, I don’t know what I was thinking. You’re way too old for me. I only go out with guys my age.’ The ‘way too old for me’ line will give this obnoxious guy something to think about.”
2:11 – Seth rips on Iron Man 2 and the 17 times he had to watch a trailer for it this week. “How about Double Nope?”
59:52 – Seth goes off on the fact that no one listening to this show has an hour left in their days to go to bed and their lives are spinning out of control.