The main topic this week is whether we’re living in a simulation (and how we’d know it).

This week, John and Merlin reminisce about the Flowbee, sea monkeys, and the alternately disappointing and satisfying quality of the action figures in their youth. Merlin briefly impersonates Dan Moren and shares that his iPhone activation problems were not unique. John conclusively demonstrates the mini ways that Merlin can’t hear himself pronouncing everything wrong and bemoans the travails of jumbled Contacts syncing.

Is coffee killing us, saving us, or what exactly is the deal here? Your hosts consider the times when it’s useful to question reality, and John still has concerns about smoking.

They read and discuss Sylvester Stallone’s mail.

(Recorded on Tuesday, October 11, 2016)

An increasing number of iPhone users are experiencing an Activation Lock issue in which the device is linked to an Apple ID email address that does not belong to them, according to crowdsourced information from MacRumors and Twitter.

"There's a billion to one chance we're living in base reality," Elon Musk said tonight on stage at Recode's Code Conference, meaning that one of the most influential and powerful figures in tech thinks that it's overwhelmingly likely we're just characters living inside a simulation.

AKA "Humanity Horse"

In mathematical analysis, the intermediate value theorem states that if a continuous function, f, with an interval, [a, b], as its domain, takes values f(a) and f(b) at each end of the interval, then it also takes any value between f(a) and f(b) at some point within the interval.