View Episode 263
Originally aired 03.21.11
1:14:15
33:33 – Seth watched a guy from The Wall Street Journal on Charlie Rose because he wanted to watch him explain what “the cloud” was. This is all he heard: “Abstraction, geolocation, servers, zips, bits, bytes, browsers, drives, session IDs, plug-ins, cluster, software, interface, data, IT, dynamic provisioning, peer-to-peer, mainframe, processing, grid, infrastructure, access systems, dynamics, metering platform, applications, hardware, network, via, tiers, internals, hybrids, hosting, sourcing, computing, cookies, tablets, torrents, components, flashes, algorithms, viruses, docks, encryption and coding. … That’s the cloud.”
53:54 – Seth watched COPS because it’s the best show ever. A dude is getting arrested and the cop asks him, “Have you ever been arrested?” Seth couldn’t believe he asked him, because every single time the answer is “Yes.”
24:19 – James Lipton: “One of the questions I’m most frequently asked is, ‘Of all the possible guests out there, who’s the one you want the most?’ This is my invariable answer: Since this series is a class in the actor’s studio drama school of Pace University – of which I am the founding dean – the night that one of our graduated students has achieved so much that he or she walks out onto this stage and takes that chair will be the moment I’ve waited for since we began the school and this series 17 years ago. The moment has arrived. The actor’s studio is proud to welcome, from the class of 2000, our graduate, Bradley Cooper.”
17:37 – Owsley Stanley passed away this past week. He was born in 1935 and died in 2011. He was known as the Acid King of the 60s Psychedelic Era. He made more than 1 million hits of what Rolling Stone magazine called “the best LSD in the world, the genuine Owsley.” He found an acid recipe in the UC-Berkeley library and he started a lab with a female chemistry major he knew. Owsley was also The Grateful Dead’s sound engineer, creating a wall of sound – several PA systems slung together that allowed the band to be arranged through the speaker system and phase canceling that featured two mics, one which was phase-reversed to pick up the speakers playing behind it and allowing the performers to hear themselves better and not have the speaker go through the system. He also co-designed with Bob Thomas the band’s logo of the skull emblazoned with a lightning bolt (aka a “Steal Your Face”). He was nicknamed “Bear” for the chest hair he sported as an adolescent. His quote to Rolling Stone: “I remember the first time I took acid and walked outside, and the cars were kissing the parking meters.” He has a daughter named Redbird and a son named Starfinder. He was a famous carnivore who once said that eating broccoli contributed to the heart attack he had. He moved to Australia 30 years ago to avoid natural disasters. He was in a car accident in a storm and died at the scene – his wife, a passenger in the car, survived.
58:43 – There were a couple medical marijuana dispensary raids on Tuesday in West Hollywood, Calif.
2:17 – Jonathan can not stop getting recognized on the street. This show is making him so famous. He is so popular and everybody recognizes him everywhere he goes.
3:10 – Seth was in Larchmont and the Girl Scouts were getting aggressive with their tactics.
29:11 – Seth thinks the first music he purchased was “I’m Bad” by LL Cool J. He thinks he may have purchased it as a cassette single at Sam Goody. Jah remembers he bought “Our House” by Madness on a 7-inch vinyl. The first CD he ever bought was Slayer’s South of Heaven.
35:15 – Seth found one Blockbuster on La Brea and Wilshire. Each individual store says “Store Closing – just this location.”
46:39 – Somebody told Jah this week that many, many episodes ago, they decided they were going to quit at Episode 262. Seth assumes this must have been agreed upon during Episode 131 (57:20).
55:10 – Jah circles back to the story of his arrest last year. The only other time he was arrested was when he was a minor. Seth remembers trying to find the edition of The National Enquirer that featured Jonathan in it for one of J-dawg’s birthday, but the Enquirer building had to be cleared out of all its archives during an anthrax scare (Episode 035, 18:14; and Episode 110, 52:09). When he was arrested, the officer asked him if he’d ever been arrested before. Jah said no, but everyone else he was booked with was arrested. Jah could see the disbelief in the officer’s eyes when he answered that way, but then he moved on.
56:40 – During the anthrax scare, Seth’s friend Sam Ball sent Seth a small package that contained only an Anthrax CD (Episode 057, 47:21).
1:06:12 – Jah thinks his friend Dimitri got a tattoo of the Fibonacci Sequence on his arm today because he’s at South by Southwest and there are free tattoos.
1:12:32 – Seth still owns a fax machine. Jah thinks this is because Seth used to be an actor and used to have sides faxed to him. Except Seth says he read the sides and didn’t get work, except for one little movie called Crossroads. Seth and Jah then discuss Britney Spears coming out with a new album.
7:54 – When booking an airline trip, passengers face a dizzying number of decisions – economy or business class? Or first class? Pay extra to board early or get in line? Buy a refundable or non-refundable ticket. Book a seat with a personal entertainment system or just read a magazine. Travelers have so many choices that, according to a new survey, some passengers spend more time shopping for the flight than they do actually flying. Almost 20% of travelers spent 5 or more hours shopping and booking flights. According to a survey by a division of technology at IBM Corp, more than 2,000 business and leisure travelers were surveyed. Business travelers were generally more efficient in booking a flight as opposed to leisure travelers, but almost 40% of business travelers still spent at least 2 hours shopping and booking.
36:48 – Research presented at the Human Robot Interaction Conference in Switzerland – how do people respond to being touched by a robot? What we found was that how people perceived the intent of the robot was really important to how they responded to the touch of said robot. Even though the robot touched people in the same way, if people thought the robot was doing it to clean them versus doing it to comfort them, it made a significant difference in the way they responded and whether they found that contact favorable or not. In the study, researchers looked at how people responded when a robotic nurse known as Cody touched and wiped a person’s forearm. Although Cody touched subjects in exactly the same way, they reacted more positively when they believed Cody intended to clean their arm versus when they believed Cody intended to comfort them. These results echo similar studies done with humanoid nurses. “There have been studies of nurses and they’ve looked at how people responded to physical contact,” said Charlie Kemp, assistant professor in the Wallace H. Colter Department of Biomedical Engineering at Georgia Tech and Emory University. “They found that, in general, if people interpreted the touch of a nurse as being instrumental, as being important to the task at hand, then people were OK with it. But if people interpreted the touch as trying to provide comfort, they were not so comfortable with that.”
47:30 – One year ago this month in Playboy magazine, a musical entertainer by the name of John Mayer was interviewed. Playboy asks, “Among the things we’ve read about you – one is that you’re gay. Have you ever kissed a man?” John replies, “The only man I’ve ever kissed is Perez Hilton. It was New Year’s Eve. I decided to go out and destroy myself. I was dating Jessica at the time and I remember seeing Perez fleeting about this club and acting as if he had just invented homosexuality. All of a sudden I thought to myself, I can outgay this guy. I grabbed him and gave him the dirtiest, tonguiest kiss I have ever put on anybody. Almost as if I hated fags. I don’t think my mouth was even touching when I was tongue-kissing him. That’s how disgusting this kiss was. I’m a little ashamed. I think it lasted about half a minute. I really think it went on too long.”
50:55 – One-hundred years ago, the first U.S. edition of the Boy Scout Handbook came out. There were a couple of entries in the 1911 edition. One was about confronting a dog in the wild. “To kill a rabid canine, wrap a handkerchief around your hand to prevent its teeth from entering the flesh and then grasp a club and club it to death.” The current edition, 100 years later, shows you how to protect yourself from cyberbullying. Another OG entry 100 years ago concerned first aid: “Treat gushing wounds by fashioning a tourniquet with a stick and a handkerchief.” 100 years later the current edition tells you to treat these wounds by calling 911.
59:57 – Jah begins reading trippy stuff. Many people on Earth are from other star systems, other galaxies, even other universes. These are called star seeds, walk-ins, light workers – human beings with alien DNA, or star-borne mortals. Star seeds have been coming since the beginning of Earth’s history, getting experience in being human – reincarnating over and over again, until they were ready for what’s called an awakening in the age of Aquarius and the ascension in the age of Aquarius that happens in 2012. Jah then reads characteristics of star seeds: compelling eyes, lower-than-normal body temperature, flying dreams, children and animals are attracted to you even though you hate both, hypersensitive to electromagnetic forcefields, and unseen companions as a child.
4:45 – 90% of Italian men have never used a washing machines and 70% of them have never used a stove.
12:04 – A nonprofit child advocacy group called Zero to Three that studies the development in the first three years of life estimates that about 10 percent of very young children have some kind of clinical emotional condition – about the same rate as the adult population. While some of those ills are indeed unique to babies, a growing body of research shows that many others including post traumatic stress disorder, social anxiety disorder, major depression, insomnia and even prolonged bereavement also afflict young children. Disorders we see in adulthood have antecedents in childhood, says Dr. Robert Emde, an emeritus professor of psychiatry at the University of Colorado School of Medicine.
28:17 – A recent study of college students suggests that their declining emotional condition is a critical situation. Schools have failed to fully address this situation, says the Chicago Tribune. “The results are very discouraging,” says Michael Fleming, one of the study’s lead authors and a professor at Northwestern University’s Fienberg School of Medicine. “I think the stress of academic performance has helped cause an increase in the rate of depression among students. That’s why it’s important to take the opportunity to screen at every visit. If colleges boost their depression screening efforts for all students, it would be the first step towards better emotional help.” Fleming tells the Tribune about 25 percent of all students who visited on-campus health centers were diagnosed as depressed, according to the report.
1:07:31 – Seth wonders if it would be crazy if they toured at other cities besides LA, and Jah says it will happen, so he wants people to stop bitching him out for only having shows in LA.