Active Recall!

One of my favorite podcast duos. Others that come to mind that aren’t just the regular hosts

• Jacoby and Wildes
• Parr and Wilkinson
• Puri and his cousin
• Flynn and John

Anyway, great episode again.

UFOs
They talk about all the recent UFO stuff and the most frightening thing being the reactions of the pilots themselves.

Why didn’t they come out about this earlier? They still had their entire careers and whoever spoke about it would become the UFO guy.

They talk about growing up with aliens in pop culture and Klosterman points out that they were awesome at first, including Superman. Then things turned and they were nearly always evil. Still fun movies. Simmons sums it up: “But I didn’t think I’d have to deal with them!”

(They also talk about ghosts and Simmons re-tells the story of staying at an OKC hotel. Not the MVP ghosts of past present and future. But the horrible one that jumped out of the window with her baby.)

Mimetic desire and the NBA
For the 20th time this week I’ll mention that I’m reading Luke Burgis’s “Wanting” so that’s currently my main lens for things. But mimesis is so clear in the evolution of the NBA from a league where you follow one team primarily to many individuals.

I grew up with my dad working the night shift so some mornings I’d be getting ready for school and he’d be watching a recorded Sonics game.

The Sonics don’t exist anymore so now he mostly roots for good passers.

He loved Larry Bird.

Simmons points out that, back then, a photo of Larry Bird smoking a cigar was this big thing. Because it was a glimpse of what a player is like in real life.

Now we have a better sense with all the access the internet and social media gives us. But a mistake is that the combination gives us the full sense of who they are. We think that they’d make decisions the same way we would.

We enjoy “Just Like Us!” moments because it brings the celebristan models appear closer to ourselves.

To the point that we can forget they aren’t like us at all.

Pop culture was how we thought of stuff
They talk about learning things through pop culture. That’s where we learn what aliens are like. Or what people who would be able to fight aliens are like.

Some narratives are passed through centuries of culture. Dan Carlin compares Clint Eastwood to the Spartans. His characters follow the laconic model the Spartans did.

“Stand down and disengage your thermo lasers.”

In the Drone Wars of 2039, one drone lights up, leading the other 299, and sends a reply.

“Come and get them.”