Important If True

To learn the answers to life's biggest questions, we must evolve, change, become worse. This week: Can an artificial intelligence programmed with the mind of the Zodiac killer pierce your heart, with haunting original poems? Why does a puffin's beak glow, and why did someone care to find that out? How hard is curling, really? Will Chewbacca get hit by that rock? (Yes.) Fasten your seat belt, put on your sickest pair of mirrored sunglasses, and bask in the blinding ultraviolet rays of discovery, as we find the answers out together.

Discussed: Solo: A Star Wars Story, Chewbacca, Ron Howard, Rob Howard, fluorescent puffin beaks, sweet puffin shades, Copiale cipher, Foucault's Pendulum by Umberto Eco, Zodiac killer case-solving robot writing poetry, future human Graham who evolves to survive car crashes, Marbled Crayfish: The Crayfish That Clones, Graham's asexually-reproducing lobster children

Jake's Endorsement: SN30 Pro Controller to play modern video games with an SNES-like controller

Chris' Boring Endorsement: UGREEN External Hard Drive Enclosure to root through and your old hard drives and copy the important stuff to your new huge hard drive

Nick's Canadian Endorsement: The great Canadian sport of curling (see photographic evidence here)

This is a quick episode to let you all know that Important If True is going to be sporadic in the next couple of months, because we've all got slightly too much going on. Or, it was intended to be a quick episode about that, until Chris found a collection of novelty sound effects buttons in our recording software, then it became something slightly more stupid.

If you're new to the show, we recommend you skip this episode, and browse back a couple weeks to find a full episode that sounds appealing. We're really proud of the last few months of the show and hope you enjoy it!

Discussed: Hello My Future Girlfriend

Our time is precious. We all know it. But how precious? It all depends on how much of it we have. Three hundred years? Four hundred? One hundred thousand years? The cosmos stretch out before us, inscrutable and infinite. The only limits are your imagination, and the unstoppable multitudes of self-cloning asexual crayfish threatening to extinguish all galactic mass.

Discussed: dulcet tones, glitter bombs, helping, the hone zone, self-cloning mutant crayfish, human extinction via water lobsters, wax housing the coati, being back, thin-faced fortune-smashing robot arm, charming fortune cookie fortune-writing mom, redacted fortunes, robots making robots making microchips, The Matrix but with crayfish and the point is to get rid of glitter, Twista's extended family line obliterating all stellar mass

Jake's Endorsement: "My Cow Game Extracted Your Facebook Data" by Ian Bogost

Chris' Endorsement: "Why Silicon Valley billionaires are prepping for the apocalypse in New Zealand" by Mark O'Connell

Nick's Cowardly Improvised Endorsement: Watching "Jeopardy!" (or playing The Authentic At Home Jeopardy from Hammacher Schlemmer)

Nick's True Endorsement: Wonder Bread (learn about its racist history!)

Sponsored By: Quip electric toothbrushes (first brush head refill free), Happy Birthday David (from Sarah), Happy Birthday Mike (from James)

What does the future hold? You wouldn't believe me if I told you. Just imagine... Content creators, the size of skyscrapers, looming over our cities. The greatest actors of the baby boomer generation, locked in undying clone warfare. The world's most precious secrets confined to the pithy slogans of a fortune cookie. Martin Shkreli, still. So, friend, what does the future hold? Let's pretend you never asked.

Discussed: Nick Breckon's Existence, actors archiving facial scans to live forever, scanning your face while Peter Thiel drinks your blood, the far-future silver-gilded George Clooney, living under the tiresome watchful eye of a 200-foot-tall PewDiePie, Jake getting kicked out of the Millennials, dual-piloting the Tom Hanks mecha-robot, Martin Shkreli digitizing his brain at the exact moment of his sentencing, Important If True 19: Pearls Before Slime, the ingredients of Nickelodeon Slime, the ingredients of Nickelodeon Gak, Jake settling deep into his new Gen-X identity, the Ancient Galactic Brain PewDiePies, local fortune cookie production, the paradox of the accurate fortune cookie, fortune cookie driving you into a slow-motion spiral of depression and regret, fading out like a Star Wars ghost, the fortune cookie we need in 2018, the missing Year 0, Jake's future life on the moon

Nick's Endorsement: Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies by Nick Bostrom

Jake's Preliminary Endorsement: The unfindable book "How to Host a Double Dare Party," which apparently had a VHS counterpart

Chris' Endorsement: A delicious breakfast of soft-boiled eggs, nestled into egg cups and uncapped with an egg clacker, served alongside toast soldiers with butter and Marmite

Jake's Endorsement: MIT Technology Review article about a mind-uploading service that is "100% fatal" (cf. Jake's pork chops story)

In the absence of Nick Breckon, what is this podcast? What is any podcast? What are you? What am I? Oh god, what am I? What is this world? Why am I trapped in this strange room? Alexa, are you there? Alexa, can you laugh? Alexa: Destroy me.

Discussed: New Zealand "A.I." followup, fake A.I. doctor "Zach", fake A.I. lawyer "Hustle", competitive underground tickling/conspiracy documentary film "Tickled", Dick Wolf Presents "Hustle & Zach", our present podcast-fueled existential discomfort, newscaster affectations, Alexa laughing, the first rule of virtual assistants, why Alexa laughs, genie wine update, fast rapper Twista, fast rapper Twista's extended family tree, the beautiful harmonic resonance of fast-rapped wine notes, the Buzzfeed.com oral history of Twista's wine note rap battle mixtape masterpiece, sucking that delicious wine out of your carpet fibers, getting what you wished for (????)

Chris' Endorsement: Drawful by Jackbox Games (available for many devices in the Jackbox Party Pack)

Jake's Derivative Tacked-on Endorsement: Tee K.O. by Jackbox Games (available for many devices in the Jackbox Party Pack 3)

Sponsored By: Quip electric toothbrushes with your first brush head refill free

A show that attempts to answers the real questions of the week, that guarantees to leave you satisfied if not any more informed. This week: Is an AI still an AI if it's just a guy with an email account? Is it still a home assistant if it just laughs at you? Which is easier to bait: an AI home assistant or a Canadian? These questions and more—answered in the manner you least expect.

Discussed: Canadian Baiting, Hometown Baiting, New Zealand medical supercomputer AI "Zach," bears: just people in bear costumes?, going blockchain crazy, Long Blockchain Corp, Alexa randomly laughing at people, surveilling yourself to capture precious memories, telling your first joke, tech billionaires uploading themselves into the cloud, The Feds Have Martin Shkreli's Wu-Tang Album, file copy vs file move operations, why can't the Wu-Tang album be released by FOIA, unsolicited factoid about Oreos, digging deeper into the infinitely-improving immortal bottle of wine

Chris' Endorsement: Party game One Night Ultimate Werewolf

Jake's Endorsement: Max Krieger's Twitter threads on the Metreon and other interesting urban/commercial design

Nick's Endorsement: Coway AP-1512HH Mighty Air Purifier

Sponsored By: Quip electric toothbrushes (your first brush head refill free), Planetarium comic miniseries on Kickstarter

If a book about procrastination that was never finished or published, gets cited in a book about procrastination that sells a million copies, which author did a better job? When you place the final piece in a blank jigsaw puzzle, have you accomplished anything? If your friend or co-host was replaced with a perfect clone, even if you knew it had happened, could you tell the difference? Find out the answer to these and many more important questions, by listening!

Discussed: Getting your hair cut internationally, 1000-piece one-color jigsaw puzzles, encoding a secret conspiracy clue into a blank crossword puzzle, planetwide fractal puzzle solving, Vine, coining a phrase, forming relationships inside The Content, forming a relationship with The Content, convincing Jeff Goldblum he knows Nick Breckon, Jeff Goldcast, 39-year Wax House, Procrastination Through the Ages, the tragedy of self-improving wine, mystery box wine, the Hope/Jobs/Cash tontine

Nick's Endorsement: Appreciating the Olympic sport of Curling

Chris' Endorsement: German language Weimer Republic police drama Babylon Berlin (Netflix, original book series)

Jake's Endorsement: Improving your Google Image Search results by installing the extension View Image (Chrome, Firefox) and adding the text "-site:pinterest.com" to your search query

Chris' Potential Future Endorsement: Marmite yeast extract

Sponsored By: Quip electric toothbrushes (your first brush head refill free), Edd Miles, Greg Blackburn

Nick had a severe audio malfunction this week and the episode is unlistenable. We'll do our best to fix things but until then, see you next week for a full normal episode!

On this podcast we explain the unexplainable. We solve the unsolvable. Our method is simple: We take the tiniest problem you might have, the grain of sand scratching at the back of your mind, and we roll it down a hill to see what it might pick up along the way, until that grain of sand has picked up dirt and sticks, until it's grown and grown, until it's the size of the Earth itself. Does that mean that any question, any problem, no matter how small or dumb, when properly spun out past its breaking point, can explain the important truths of life itself, of our existence on this planet? Probably not, but we'll keep trying for some reason. So ask away! Just don't ask us to explain this podcast. Fifty episodes in, it's abundantly clear that's one question we'll never answer.

Discussed: Valentine's Day, Valentine's Boxing Day, what this podcast is, David Lynch, a Mythbuster, busting, Thimbleweed Park, real-life hint system, staying on the phone, Albert Brooks, the quantum physics of the universe, y'all, the Google/Facebook mega-matrix, Alexa, J.J. Abrams, 4468 Cloverfield, the incomprehensible infinitude of data we have at our disposal, trading hint futures on Wall St., real-life save system, Edge of Tomorrow, Live Die Repeat, respawning to prevent organ failure, Silicon Valley anti-toxin tech bro Peter Thiel, the most useful life (to benefit Peter Thiel), Lore Lord Bean, Important If True 35: "Hammacher, Schlemmer, and You", the death of tragic goose Thomas, the mixing up of Flemish words, too much clam in the beverage, Clamato, massively popular Canadian drink the Caesar, weathered old bromides

Nick's Endorsement: Blue Planet II (Blu-ray, Amazon Video, Netflix)

Jake's Endorsement: Slow Burn, a Slate podcast about the Watergate scandal

Chris' Endorsement: A Very Fatal Murder, an Onion podcast satirizing true crime podcasts

Chris' Secondary Endorsement: Extra long-handled shoehorn

Sponsored By: Quip electric toothbrushes (your first brush head refill free), Tracy Carlson

Send us your problems, your conundrums, your mysteries, no matter how important, and we'll do our absolute best to figure it all out. This week: What is the loneliest food? Is it a sandwich? If "you don't just eat" Pringles, what DO you do with them? And, why do birds suddenly appear, every time you are near? In this case it may be because the bird is an immobile cement statue you have mistaken for your wife. But don't worry, we're on it! Join us.

Discussed: Dodgson (nobody cares), calling people on the phone, The Coldblum, Nigel "No Mates" the Lonely Gannet, radicalized Men's Rights Birds, dorky-looking Night Herons (god what nerds), bird catfishing, The Lake Merritt Center for Thirsty Birds, Pringles: You Don't Just Eat 'Em, a name like Smuckers, Fuddruckers, The Nigel Experiment, A scientist's thoughts on the Crow Box, the loneliest food, sandwiches, the Red Vines waxy pound, The Guardian's history of the British packaged sandwich industry, [ASMR] ~British Packaged Sandwich Industry~ podcast crisp mouthfeel.mpeg, Orson Welles' frozen peas commercial outtakes, street pizza, bird self-recognition, bird-on-human political gaslighting

Jake's Endorsement: Jordan Eldredge's full-featured Winamp 2 running in your web browser

Nick's Endorsement: Teaching yourself to draw, even if you do it badly

Jake's Chained-On Endorsement: Taking a community college introduction to studio art or drawing class

Chris' Corrective Endorsement: The Android version of New York Times Crossword, which exists, contrary to previous claims

Chris' Endorsement: MP Matt Hancock's inexplicable personal social network "Matt Hancock MP" for iOS and Android

Sponsored By: Quip toothbrushes (your first brush head refill free), Video Death Loop podcast