Hello hello hello good morning afternoon. Sorry I’m late. But I woke up early this time, honest. Been on the phone for four hours for work. Three different meetings. have an other three hours of calls for work this afternoon. All day job stuff. Business business business numbers numbers is this working. I can’t convey to you how much mental prep I have to do to talk on the phone this much in a single day. I have been planning it for, like, two weeks. And it is raining which makes it so much harder. I strongly prefer one-on-one calls, especially non-recurring ones, while Sorkin-ing it. Can’t Sorkin a call in the rain, man. Can’t Sorkin a call in the rain. Take that pearl of wisdom to HBS.

Saline, almonds, baby corn, sprouts. Oh wait. Wrong list. Hold please. Switching from grocery list to GMHHAY list. Ha I am so funny.

COVID guy is pooping in Cary again. That guy gets around. Also, I read a great article this morning about how they are doing a pilot study with our poop in the Triangle. Triangle poop. They are using the sewage now not just for COVID and Measles monitoring, but to do geographic nutritional analysis. Finding all sorts of things out that offer insights into socioeconomic data, like that Morrisville — the nation’s highest concentration of Indian immigrants — eats more mangoes. Higher-income regions in the Triangle drink more beer. People in the Coastal regions of NC eat more indigenous (and presumably fresh) fish than in our Piedmont, where Salmon is more frequent.

Good shit, good shit.

This is a timely article for me since I’ve been thinking a lot about poop. Been thinking about the poop knife family again, still have questions. Been questioning every deviation from my pooping norms and thinking I might have Cyclospora.

That got me thinking about AI and how awesome it would have been could have been if the first AI wearable solely consumed itself with what we consume, and what we shit out. IMAGINE HOW USEFUL THAT WOULD HAVE BEEN. We could all wear a Poop Pin™ and it would give us calorie counts and nutrition counts and look at our poop in the toilet (cuz who doesn’t look at their poop in the toilet don’t pretend you don’t) and tell us why it was weird this week. Was it because you ate a pound of blueberries yesterday along with a pound of almonds? What the fuck is wrong with you, Rick? You know. Hypothetically.

Maybe you could even, you know, choose your LLM model running it so the lunatics could choose Grok or something, hahaha.

And the device has auditable (-able who knew) security protocols to ensure you’re only filming your food and shit and, you know, it would be pointing down, so everyone knew it wasn’t pervware.

(Quote me on that word, Pervware. It needs to exist).

Anyway, this is, I think, Sam Altman’s greatest failing. And man, that is a rough competition, lotta potential greatest failings in Sam Altman. But imagine if he actually thought of a great product the moment OpenAI stumbled upon the GPT fools-gold-moment and made some product other than chat. So many better possibilities. Imagine if the first major generative/llm/gpt/bad/whatever-you-wanna-call-it AI product was a health product instead of a fuckin porn-and-nerd-bot. Lost opportunity. Real dearth of real product people left in SV.

Join the GMHHAY slack! Reply to this email and ask for an invite if you’re a human who likes chatting with other humans about topics such as these within!

Continuing, or perhaps because of, our poop thinking this week, we are listening to the (sort of) new Butthole Surfers album, After the Astronaut. I am still trying to parse the lore of this album. It is, apparently, the album they recorded after Electric Larryland, which included their breakout hit “Pepper.” Thusly it has that kinda catchy, weird dub feel of Pepper, though not its catchy chorus that took America’s indie world by storm:

They were all in love with dyin'/ They were drinking from a fountain / That was pouring like an avalanche / Coming down the mountain

They had some problems with their label, so their followup was lost. Imagine that. A band called The Butthole Surfers had trouble being on a major. The confusion is, however, that I was of the understanding that 2001’s Surfers album Weird Revolution was this lost album. I guess the deal is that Weird Revolution was a “re-recording” whereas this is the actual recording. They are pretty different though. But I guess they had to be, if EMI owned After the Astronaut. I don’t know. I am still confused. I should watch that documentary. I think we might be looking at a Smile/Smiley-type situation here.

Good record, though. Bought a copy.

Along with, like, fuck, like… eight records yesterday?? I am so fucked. I bought so many stinkin records yesterday. It was out of control. Emails just kept coming in saying “Rick, Rick, you need this, pick me.” I don’t think I could even list them all. Charlie XCX, Surfers… that Italian 4AD-adjacent thing with Heidi Berry it al… um… That’s all I got. Fuck. This is bad. There as a Ghostly one in there, though those bastards are putting out like four good records this month (hi Sam). Oh and a Ida reissue. God I am screwed. I am now dreading payday/credit-card-paying-day Friday. Hold me.

Watched Masters of the Universe last night with Sean. On the nights home during Boston summers, Emma goes upstairs and watches, like, dog-adopting reality shows or something with Jussi and I watch movies with Sean. This movie was two hours and twenty minutes long. Sean and I are absolutely the target market. Maybe? one of them? This movie did not know what it wanted to be. You could have cut all the non-jokey parts, amped up the surrealism and made something wonderful like the Lego Movie. As it was it had too many endless fight scenes, too much (so much) parental trauma porn, weird BJ jokes that meant it wasn’t for kids. Just a muddled mess. Trim Trim Trim. Not absolutely horrible. But a looooot of us twiddling on our phones in boredom.

Jane is back on her shit with OH SHIT SHE JUST WALKED IN. Okay she is not looking. Back on her stubbornness with not brushing teeth. It is tedious. Real commitment to the bit. Might just give up. Who needs teeth anyway.

Hrm I am so close on a new playlist but don’t have time today to fill one out. Closest ones are punk, smooooth and industrial, each clocking in at 45 minutes and those are all pretty slow to fill up. Did listen to a pretty solid new industrial song yesterday from a new Dias signing and I did not purchase it because I had already purchased eight records yesterday and cmon man I just bought the Stephen O’Malley record from you last week. It was pretty solid, though. Here let’s given em a shout-out today.

PUREST FORMANIMAL

Oh right Buttondown doesn’t unfurl Bandcamp URLs. Coulda been a match made in heaven. Here’s Youtube:

Righty-oh. Much to do, much to do. Until tomorrow.