What gave you that idea?

I love the 99% Invisible podcast so much.

Starlee Kine guides us back through the surprising, culturally rich path of inspiration that ultimately resulted in a commercial for an insurance company.

This episode called “What gave you that idea?” was one of those where I lost track of where I was and how much time passed by the end. When it goes all the way back to Charle’s Dicken’s pet bird that ate too many paint chips – just so cool.

Please listen to this. You won’t regret it. Then subscribe to the podcast after you’re done.

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A list of all the cool discoveries I made so far this week:

1. I didn’t know that they found evidence that the mark of the beast might actually be 616 and not 666. They’re even going to notate it in new versions of the Bible. It’s going to cost a fortune to revise all the incorrect tattoos and heavy metal album covers.

2. Spotify. I know I am late to the party on this one. Amazing service – makes Pandora look old. I am on the free trial and I discovered so many new bands I love already (see #3). Awesome. Awesome. Double Awesome.

3. How did I not know about the band: be your own PET? Also I found Operator Please, Rival Schools, and the Wavves song “I Wanna Meet Dave Groehl” (again, late to the party on that one).

4. The Lose It! iPhone app (It’s free!). Late to the party one last time. How cool is it to scan a bar-code and then it captures all the data about what you just ate and have it track it for the whole week? I am eating waaaay too much sodium. Found this via Quantified Self. Which is a cool website, and I also discovered it this week.

5. Found an envelope of old letters written from my Dad to his sister from an aircraft carrier where he was a crewman during WWII in the Pacific Islands. They are dated from 1945 and 1946 and they are such a window into my dad. He passed away in 1995 and I hear his voice when I read the letters. I am not through all of them yet. I might post snippets of them on here – it’s so weird looking back at that time in history through your own father. Very cool.

“Creating our own butcher…”

I have become a huge fan of Joe Rogan’s Podcast. There’s always something interesting on there and Joe is actually a super-intelligent guy, despite the stoner reputation. Don’t get me wrong, a lot of the conversation does sounds like stoner talk, but if you stick with it, there’s some cool things being said. Like this quote I am paraphrasing from frequent guest and comedian Duncan Trussel. They were discussing apocalyptic situations and how technology could be our undoing. When chatting about how the evolution of Artificial Intelligence could be humans creating something super-intelligent that could ultimately destroy us, he said (remember paraphrased):

Humans creating AI are almost like a herd of sheep creating their own butcher.

Stoner talk? Maybe. Super cool sentence there, I think so. Duncan has a cool imagination. They’ve talked about so many interesting things on there in recent weeks I am going to mention some of the stuff again, I am sure. For instance, Duncan was reading this book called The Harvard Psychedelic Club, which seems really interesting. I plan to pick it up. If you haven’t already checked out Joe Rogan’s podcast, you really should. He’s not just the “Fear Factor” TV Show guy. There’s a lot going on in Joe Rogan’s head.