Ten Seconds of Joy (feat. Charles Star)

[00:00:00] Remember when I said it used to work that you would just turn the TV on and the TV would start showing things that were on the TV? Not anymore! Now you turn the TV on and there's an ad for another TV!

[00:01:14] I know. I know. I stay young by having brain damage. The brain can't grow old if it can't heal. It's like, you know, they talk about pitchers who have had like they've missed a couple of years rehabbing from surgery. They're like, you know, it doesn't have a lot of miles on it and that's how I use my brain. Hey, it's 48 Minutes of Dogs Barking. My name is Jason. That's Bryan. Hey!

[00:01:41] Today's guest is former co-host of the beloved podcast Mike Dicta and A-Lab. He currently co-hosts No Homework and City Sane Country Sane. He has also written for Vice, Slate, Deadspin and many others. He's also on a mission to be a guest on as many podcasts as possible. He's up into the 30s now. Please welcome all the way from New York City, Charles Starr. What up, buddy? Oh, not a lot. Thank you for having me. I am totally over-scheduled.

[00:02:10] A point of order to everyone out there. Good Deadspin. Good Deadspin. Yes, that's fair. Good to the pre-defector Deadspin when it was all the Defector people. I can't count how many times I've really just gone overboard on a Deadspin article and been like, oh, wow, this is actually somebody I follow now. We were doing, this is a true story, we were doing an episode on Deadspin and we were talking with Ed Zitron. Sure. And I, for some reason, had forgotten that he had written for Deadspin.

[00:02:41] I don't know that he was a regular writer for Deadspin. But he interrupted me mid-show about, you know I wrote for Deadspin, right? Well, Ed, maybe if he hadn't done so much in life. If Deadspin had been all you'd done, maybe I would remember that. I mean, there's no reason to remember that I wrote for Deadspin. I think I wrote one thing when the Supreme Court okayed gambling in, like, state gambling in New Jersey. State sports betting.

[00:03:10] And so it was like they decided it on very constitutionally obscure grounds about state-federal relations. And so I was like, before you get too excited that this is about sports gambling, it is incredibly boring. That's my wheelhouse is writing about boring law things and trying to make it a little more interesting, I hope. I'm into it. I like it. I don't know.

[00:03:40] I also like the article about Michael Avenatti. So what do I know? Yeah, that was probably my biggest one at Vice, which, by the way, I got accused by a federalist writer of plagiarizing her. Because we both wrote about the same thing on the same day. Oh, no.

[00:04:03] And hers came out like four hours before mine did, but like 24 hours after I submitted it to my editor. And I was like, you've got to back off on this bullshit. What happened was he was, Avenatti was trying to get admitted in New York as a visiting attorney because he was barred in, not in New York. He was barred in California and maybe other states, but definitely not New York.

[00:04:31] And so he wanted a guest admission. And what usually happens is the other side is like, fine. But this time they opposed it and they wrote a brief opposing it. And so Vice asked me to write about it. And I'm sure the federalist asked her to write about it. And we wrote the same fucking article. Like, how much can you write about it? You know, like everything about it was tonally different.

[00:05:00] We came to different conclusions. You know, I read the underlying cases that were cited because I had a law student go on their free West law and download them for me. Hell yeah. Hell yeah. Let's go. It was great. Shout out Terp. I don't know. We it was such a dumb accusation. Right. And just because of how long ago everything is, this is going to be so scary.

[00:05:26] I had a normal internet-y kind of friendship with Molly Hemingway, who is like at the time was conservative and socially conservative. And now is like way off the deep end. And I like stopped interacting and following with her like forever ago.

[00:05:52] But at the time I was like, she was the editor at the federalist. And I'm like, would you tell her to back the fuck off? I didn't plagiarize her fucking article. You know, I could prove that I submitted it before then. Jesus. And she like grudgingly backed down from what was a day of yelling at me on Twitter that I stole her article. Jesus. Well, hopefully this experience is better for you.

[00:06:20] What we do on the show, instead of accusing people of plagiarism, instead, is we talk about what's happening on the internet this week in a segment we like to call What's Hot Classic. In the What's Hot Classic this week, we're kicking off with something that I just discovered courtesy of the newsletter Garbage Day. I gotta sell you a garbage day dot email. Get it in your inbox. It's just like listening to this show, only fewer dick jokes somehow.

[00:06:47] But what I discovered via Garbage Day was something that just about broke my brain into. It is a young woman on YouTube by the name of Lumi. And Lumi's got some interesting ideas. This she refers to as Lumi's political yaoi dating simulator master diagram. And then in parentheses, with evidence. If you watch this video, it's about 35 minutes long. There is a big graph of all these people in the Donald Trump's orbit.

[00:07:15] And some of them are lovers and some of it. It's baffling. It's beautiful. I am entranced by it. And it doesn't help that, you know, it's a nice looking young woman telling us all about how everyone is. Everyone's like gay for each other. And they're all in these messy, tragic relationships. It is politics, this parasocial politics, the likes of which I haven't seen in a while. It is truly something else. I'm going to play a little bit of the audio from it. This is love triangle number six, she says.

[00:07:42] The Middle East DLC, she refers to. Mohammed bin Salman. Now, Mohammed bin Salman is the crown prince of Saudi Arabia. This is our royalty route. And they have a love relationship. And you can tell because of this meeting where Trump says this. By formally designating Saudi Arabia as a major non-NATO ally. Next, we have Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani, who is the emir of Qatar.

[00:08:08] And he gave Trump a giant Boeing jet present. If that's not a mutual love, I don't know what is. It goes on like that for 35 minutes. She's talking about all these different people and how this is the romance route. And this is the prince route. And all the different dating sim options that Trump has. It's something else, man. I don't think I've ever approached politics like this.

[00:08:36] It's pretty nice, especially because I only had time to listen, watch, you know, a few minutes of this. And in the first three minutes, I was like, OK, I don't know any of those words. I'm like way too old to be asked to know what Yahweh or Tsundere are. But I was like, I am a context clues guy. I will figure this out.

[00:09:00] And I was like, OK, OK, but yeah, why like listening to listening to the the very compelling evidence of the love relationship is I look you bring receipts. I respect the receipts. And there's multiple. This is probably the most concise one that she's put out. The second link. I mean, the whole thing is very art brute. You know, you kind of respect it.

[00:09:29] Even though it also looks very much like the always sunny Pepe board. Well, kind of. Yeah. I was also thinking it looked like the romance board from this Japanese zoo exhibit. Was it for penguins? It was for penguins, yeah. Who were mated and who were former lovers or former friends. And it was this whole flow chart. And it was I was like, oh, this is like that. But for politics. Yes.

[00:09:57] Point is that she could fix John Nash. Clearly. The other one that I said, Trump yaoi gets realer every day. It's 17 minutes long. And in it, she just compiles all the evidence that Trump is secretly gay and that he's. But it doesn't it's not just like, oh, he looked at somebody. It's like there's a video of him going and all this stuff. You know, just these really like queer coded moments. And there she said, oh, yeah. He just said his sons are going to have a threesome with him.

[00:10:27] Actually, I don't think she addressed that yet. That's coming soon. Oh, yeah. That was yesterday. And I love that when I first read about it, I'm like, it's not no way. It can't be real. I watched a video on Twitter. I'm like, oh, it does what it says on the tin. Yeah. Can't be real. But no. Yeah. No, there it is. Yeah. I mean, look, my response to that was that he's finally given up on Ivanka. Oh, God. She's not putting out. But these two boys get the olive oil.

[00:10:57] As handsome as any general or homecoming king. And, you know, AO3 just lit up with that one. So, you know, it's just next up on our What's Hot classic from the good folks that know your meme. I don't like to cite them unless I have to know your meme talked about this. This to me was new about 10 days ago is when the article was created. But, yeah, June 17th of this year, a paper was published in Evolutionary Human Sciences

[00:11:23] titled Meming Scientific Racism, colon, The Digital Reframing of Racist Ideologies. OK. The description of the paper reads, this article examines how racialized memes circulating on Twitter revive scientific racism, demonstrating that hybrid formats reconfigure biological and centralization within contemporary digital culture. Very cool.

[00:11:48] But my favorite part is the actual meat of this, which is that they featured racist memes, but they redrew them to be, quote, ethically modified. And so. But I you know what? I think it's it is definitely funny. Right. Because because because they absolutely strip out like all of the really grotesque racial imagery. Right.

[00:12:16] But the point of this is this is racist. Yes. Right. They're like, we are showing you something racist without turning your stomach. And all of the riffs on it are terrible. Yeah. None of the riffs get what they're doing. Like it's like so the people, the people who find it funny but understand it find it funny in a coherent way.

[00:12:43] And the people who find it funny and feel obligated to riff on it simply don't understand what is going on in the first instance. And so all of it just falls flat and is stupid. Yeah. Because the original, the one that I keep seeing is the bald guy. But the original was filthy. It was, I'm sorry, your daughter was sexually assaulted by a mentally disabled cannibal. I'm softening some language here.

[00:13:12] But we need him for the football team, which was then ethically modified to I'm sorry, text removed. But we need him for the football team. Right. I think it would have been, to me, the biggest problem with that is that it should say overtly racist text removed. Right. Not just text. Right. Because if you see the one right next to it, it is a physiognomy post where they're like, it's not just skin color.

[00:13:41] And so instead of having like, I don't know what the original is, but, you know, some fucking, you know, bone in the nose kind of disgusting characterization of African. It has a, you know, a side profile of someone who has a kind of more African American hairstyle.

[00:14:03] And, you know, one of the white woman has a very Protestant aquiline nose kind of thing. And so the head shapes are different, but they're different in a way that you would appreciate as normal. Right. Instead of comparing a grotesque to Miss America, you know, kind of homecoming queenie kind of shit. Right.

[00:14:26] So it's like, this is how we are showing you what it was like originally to make a point. And then all of the parodies are just dumb. Yeah. No, it's, it's, it's, they're uniquely terrible in their very own way. Like all the quote tweets of this woman who's, it's Diane Fleischman, who to my mind was one of the first people to bring this to light. All the quote tweets of it are just dumb.

[00:14:55] I can't see them because I'm not on, like I did not even brag because I've been off Twitter for maybe two weeks. But, but like, I can't read the quote tweets because I'm not logged in. Well, one of them is, is someone just posting a crude drawing of Matthew Iglesias's face. And it says, if crime due to Democrats, how come Maine and Vermont have low crime? Okay. All right. Yeah. Very strange.

[00:15:25] Yeah. I'm not a fan. They're very weird. That makes no sense as a parody of that. No, it doesn't. It's just, you have a bone to pick with Matty Iglesias. Right. And are racist. Both can be true. Yeah. Yeah. You have a bone to pick with Matty Iglesias from the right. Yeah. It's very specifically the bone you have to pick with him. Yeah. Some of the parodies, like the one where they just redrew the happy merchants, like, okay, that's still less racist. It still sucks.

[00:15:53] So it just looks like a Jewish guy that plays in a bluegrass band. Like, it's just a really friendly guy. He's like, he's about to tell you about Conway Twitty. Right. I met him once in 1985, you know. Instead of like the thing that looked like it would be on a Nazi propaganda poster, it just looks like the guy in the, you know, call an ambulance meeting, basically, with a yarmulke on. It's a very tiny hat is all. Yeah.

[00:16:21] It's not, it's not a specific yarmulke, but yeah, there's somebody redrew the, the stabbing of Irina Zarutska where it's, it looks like just a shitty political cartoon instead of like having anything to say. Right. It's frustrating. Cause like, and I, as an idea, okay, maybe there's something, but people have taken it and done nothing with it. I don't know, man. Ethically modified memes have a, have a, a possibly a leg to stand on. I just, I think they fumbled, they fumbled really hard with it. You are correct.

[00:16:50] Well, let's move on to a good meme. It's a brand new meme. Everybody folks, this hasn't happened in two days. It felt old. I know. I'm amazed that this is, I didn't, I wasn't familiar with it, but I was amazed that this was actually new, but I thought it was going to be like, it strikes me as something from a long time ago in actual linear time, not internet.

[00:17:15] Well, if you've not seen it at SpongeBob fan 360, love that posted. Wow. Is this real? And it is a video of a train coming at you with the dog's face superimposed on it. But the dog, his breathing sounds like a train. And that's it.

[00:17:43] It's 11 seconds of a dog breathing in the manner of a locomotive. And we refer to him now as train dog. That's it. Not to be confused with the, the glorious heavy rock band from the Midwest train Dodge. Correct. Yes. Very different. Very different. Somebody at, of all places, the Atlantic wrote an article about it. Don't know how that got past the editors, but all right. The headline, the strange explicable appeal of train dog. Well, first of all, it's inexplicable. Wouldn't that be there?

[00:18:12] No, no, they do not mean inexplicable. The person is saying very specifically, you absolutely will understand. As soon as you see this, you will be on board. Like it's weird and it's weird that it exists. But now that it exists, of course it does. Fair enough. And of course you love it. The, uh, the Gidi Bork quote of, uh, that which is good appears, which appears is good. Seems right. Yeah. Let's see. You may have recently seen a mutant creature.

[00:18:41] Uh, this is, uh, Megan Garber. Sorry. This is Megan Garber writing here. You may have recently seen a mutant creature chugging through your feed. A hybrid beast like a centaur or sphinx uniting the head of a dog. And the body of a train. There really is not much more to say about train dog. Except that it is, as one viral Twitter post suggested, very, very fake. And very, very real. And if you haven't seen it yet, you definitely should. It is, it's just chugging along. We love him. Yeah. The train dog, we love you.

[00:19:10] I think the post that I used from Mike Isaac says it best. This is, uh, Mike Isaac. 40th time watching this week and realized just as my joy begins to crest about halfway through the video, the little toot toot of the whistle kicks in and brings about a second wave of happiness. I love you train dog. It's, it's pretty good. It is very adorable. It is 10 seconds of joy.

[00:19:35] It is Ted Lasso during the pandemic that you do not, you do not want to necessarily appreciate in any other context. Well, that's enough for the good stuff. Now it's time for something terrible. Wait, there was, there was good stuff. Shut up. It's crypto scam. Oh great. You've already turned on train dog. It turns out train dog, uh, does not condemn Hamas. Damn it. Oh, no.

[00:20:04] That's how the Atlantic article, or no, I fucked up the joke. Anyways. New York post. Please get it right. No, it would have worked with the Atlantic. I was trying to workshop a way of saying something like that, but they've got away from me. I respect you taking a swing. Bulldozer dog. Thomas Chatterton Williams. Train dog is proof. Of the liberal racism. Yeah.

[00:20:31] Train dog is proof of, of anti Zionist progressiveness being accepted in the mainstream America. Oof. That one feels too real. All right. Anyway, it's crypto scam of the week time. You're listening to 48 minutes of dogs barking the podcast. And now it's time for the crypto scam of the week. This is a segment where we talk about crypto scams. Charles, have you ever been interested in, in scams of the crypto variety? I pay attention to them.

[00:21:00] But my take on crypto is it's stupid and I was right not to ever buy it. And I would be so much richer if I were wrong. Yeah. That being right once again is never rewarded. And so, so much for that. And I mean, you know, the A-Lab guys before I joined A-Lab did an episode about fake Itoshi.

[00:21:27] And so, and so because Andy in particular is very attuned to the crypto scammery. I am like by proxy. I learn a lot about what's going on in like the Wall Street bets community. Because he very much enjoys the schadenfreude of a number go down. Exactly. What's not really totally started doing this show that I started really paying attention to this stuff.

[00:21:56] And yeah, Brian here has opened my eyes to just all sorts of flim flams. And it was really, I was like unemployed during the pandemic. I don't know. I don't understand how the stock market works. Not that I believe that it's true, but like how does this mechanism work? And then I learned about, you know, fucking candles and like the history, like the actual history from like speculation of like rice futures. Hell yeah.

[00:22:20] It was so weird, but it was like the strange thing of like a really like amazing rejuvenation of like web 1.0 internet community, but also scamming each other on top of it. Oh yeah. So it was like everyone's trying to like do like an eBay scam on each other on AOL. They're trying to send each other boxes of rocks with Puto written on it. Puto, yeah. Right. It was so weird.

[00:22:47] Like the thing about financial markets is they all serve at a very basic level, a good purpose in terms of like allocating risk and moving money where it will make the most money, you know, that sort of thing.

[00:23:08] But the biggest but in the universe is that the game isn't necessarily fair and all of the players are trying to maximize how unfair it is to their own advantage.

[00:23:26] And it's at such a scale that the scams vary from the very unsophisticated to the like the one we're about to talk about, for instance, to the very, very, very sophisticated where multinational corporations sort of bury bad acts behind layers of corporate intermediation. So no one person is to blame. Right.

[00:23:53] And so you can't ever hold anyone accountable because you've structured the market in a way that there's no one to blame. But if we're going to talk about the easy end of the scale, if you want to bring us back to Carl Eric Rinch, be my guest. Yes, absolutely.

[00:24:12] This story from Decrypt, the headline 47 Ronin director gets 30 months for spending Netflix's $11 million on Dogecoin. I'm sorry, of all the fucking coins to spend $11 million on? Either he was betting on Elon as, and you never know who's doing what. This is why the market is so fucked.

[00:24:38] Either he's betting on Elon because he's a true believer or he's betting on Elon because he thinks he will be he won't be the guy who gets left holding the bag. Right. Like other Elon fanboys are going to be the ones who he gets rich off of.

[00:24:57] And so it's all of these people at various levels of abstraction trying to like play musical chairs with millions of dollars. And it really does seem like this guy took money from Netflix to make a series. Yeah. And made multiple episodes of it. Like he clearly pissed away some of the money that was supposed to go to the show speculating. Yeah.

[00:25:25] And then went back to Netflix and asked for more money to finish their show just so he could fucking go double or nothing. And then because he was out, he like he was down. And so he's like, well, I better I better bet it all again. And then he lost it again. And so there you go. That's when you lose. Exactly.

[00:25:49] So the article does say that Netflix had paid Rich's production company forty four million to make the sci fi series White Horse, which they later retitled Conquest for reasons I'm not entirely sure. Maybe the heroin joke wasn't hitting. I don't know. But yeah, in 2020, as the pandemic hit, he asked for another 11 mil to finish instead, according to SDNY, according to this press release from the U.S. attorney in Southern District of New York.

[00:26:17] Instead, he turned around and he says he moved most of the money into a personal brokerage account and never delivered the show. says he lost five point nine million within weeks on speculative options, including pandemic era bets on a covid drug maker and a market crash. He then moved four million of what was left onto crypto exchange Kraken to buy Dogecoin. However, this is the fucked up part. He actually made money.

[00:26:45] He cashed out at twenty seven million May twenty twenty one. Wow. Fuck it. And the fact that the government shows you that everything's rigged against the little guy. Yeah. So he made twenty seven million on this trade. Thank you. And God bless crypto. He wrote to a Kraken representative that windfall. Again, this decrypt article funded a spending spree.

[00:27:10] He bought five Rolls Royces and a Ferrari, a three hundred and eighty eight thousand dollar of a Sharon Constantin watch and millions in furniture, antiques and designer clothing, some eight point seven million in all, according to a forensic accountant. hired by his ex-wife. That's right. Never get divorced. Never get divorced. Rather than return the money, he sued Netflix for more than 14 million. He claimed he was owed.

[00:27:37] I would have just given back the initial net, the initial nest egg to Netflix and be like, hey, listen, just make the fucking show. No. That's it. That's it. When you once you've actually made the twenty seven million dollars on Dogecoin and you've actually gotten yourself out from under. Call your DP and get filming again, dummy.

[00:28:06] You actually dug yourself out of the hole. You can do the thing that you're under contract for. But it's like yelling at the television. I know the guy who does this isn't the guy who makes the rational choice once he gets out. No. From under all of his own prior mistakes.

[00:28:30] He's the one who's like, I need a Rolls Royce that acts as a decoy when I'm in my other Rolls Royce. Jesus. Oh, Jesus. Yeah. Pretty dumb. I mean, like, it's really funny how obvious the solution was and that that solution was just make the show. They did convict him in Manhattan in December on charges, including wire fraud and money laundering faced up to 90 years.

[00:28:57] But the judge Rakoff imposed a lighter term after the defense presented evidence of an untreated mental health condition with family, friends and former colleagues describing a marked change in his behavior around 2019. Keanu Reeves, who produced the Doom series, urged leniency in a letter to the court. That's how that's how you know you've made it when you're in court and Keanu Reeves is writing a letter urging leniency on your behalf. The judge was unmoved.

[00:29:27] Quote, improper medication may have, quote, played a role, Rakoff said. But Rich, quote, was determined to lie to get substantial monies from Netflix. They also quote U.S. Attorney Jay Clayton, former SEC chair, said Rich made risky bets on highly speculative stock options and cryptocurrency and that the sentence sends a deterrent message. So they're going to pull him away for the entirety of the bear market and let him back out in the bull?

[00:29:55] I tell you what, the second solution, once you haven't made the series and once the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York appointed by Donald Trump indicts you, it behooves you at that point to Trump wrap one of your Rolls Royces and have it delivered to the White House.

[00:30:21] It is better, a better investment than any lawyer because there is nothing that works better on the office of the pardon attorney than a clearly compromising gift to the president of the United States. Oh, Christ. The fact is, I know you're right. That's the part that really fucks me up. Yeah, it's only half a joke.

[00:30:49] Oh, painful. All right. Well, speaking of painful, our main topic this week, what we asked Charles to come on to talk about was something I've been kind of on a tear on this show and just in general, talking about how the Internet really broke some people's brains and or is bringing people with broken brains together. This we have known. This is kind of a known quantity. I know people know this, but there's some really clear examples.

[00:31:14] Last week, we talked about the epidemic of people claiming to be gang stalked and the resultant Targ the Target comic. But this week, we're talking about something. I think it's a piece of performance art at this point. It is called Temple OS. Yes. Yeah. You know, before we get into Temple OS, I was really confused when we were talking about gang stalking and we didn't bring up Bonnie Blue, but then I realized that was something else. The very different thing. Yeah. Continue. I have no idea what you're talking about. Bonnie Blue is a...

[00:31:44] I know exactly what you're talking about. Got him. Got him. Got his ass. Do you think Bonnie Blue knows how the boot in Temple OS? I don't know. I don't know. At the heart of Temple OS is a gentleman by the name of Terrence Andrew Davis, born in Wisconsin. And he went by the name Terry. Terrence is like the family name.

[00:32:13] Terrence Davis, Terry Davis, had, let's just say, some problems. He did grow up in tech. He grew up surrounded by, you know, an Apple II. He learned how to write assembly on the Commodore. He's a guy who grew up fairly normal. Middle of the road type of dude living in Wisconsin. He hits the age of reason and he starts to decide that he's an atheist. The usual Midwestern dudes rock mentality.

[00:32:43] But then, you know, he started to have some problems. Schizophrenic episodes. Mental health issues. According to this article from Vice. Oh, sorry. From Motherboard, the Vice publication. It talks about his upbringing. He had been diagnosed with schizophrenia. Again, Terry Davis. Having dealt with mental health issues since the mid-1990s. Because Davin often communicates in blocks of text produced by his oracle.

[00:33:11] Or with apparently off-topic declarations about God. He's had accounts banned from something awful. And read it. He can be aggressive and confrontational. Sometimes denouncing critics with profanity. Calling them the N-word. Jesus. You didn't say he got banned from FARC, though. No, it's true. Didn't go for the triple crown. Yeah, it says he's got him shadow banned on Hacker News.

[00:33:37] Meaning he's only visible on users who have explicitly chosen to see his dead posts. He grew up Catholic but later embraced atheism. Quote, He still considers himself scientifically minded. Quote, He says.

[00:34:05] The difference is God has talked to me. So I'm basically like an atheist who God has talked to. Terry Davis believes he has spoken to God. And that God has told him to make an operating system. Temple OS. It is still available, by the way. TempleOS.org. Still sits around. It says download the free public domain 64-bit operating system.

[00:34:34] Temple operating system. It is truly something to behold. Have you ever seen Temple OS in action, fellas? I don't think I have. I've only ever heard about you talk about it. A couple random people on the internet. Whatever conversation is about to come is right up there with Yawai and Sundari. I will not understand anything you say. I treat my computer as an out-of-the-box tool. The same way my car is.

[00:35:03] The same way a knife and fork are. I don't modify them. So are you familiar with Dan Quinn? The weightlifter guy? The guy that thought Stevia, or I guess still thinks Stevia can cure cancer and everything. I think it's the same guy. This is like Dan Quinn, but with computer. No, I understand. I understand the guy.

[00:35:29] I'm just saying if you start talking about the nuts and bolts of Temple OS, I will just glaze over the same way my eyes do when someone says Linux. No, no. Really, it's just that he created something that he claims is the rebuilt temple, but in terms of windows. Windows, but for bringing about the second coming. That's essentially what this operating system is supposed to be.

[00:35:59] It's something else. It's very difficult to navigate. He refers to it as God's official temple. Again, it's an operating system. Just like Solomon's temple, he says, according to the Temple OS Charter, this is a community focal point where offerings are made and God's oracle is consulted. God also told Davis that 64 by 480 16 color graphics is a covenant-like circumcision, making it easier for children to make drawings for God. So, all right.

[00:36:29] I mean, it's no crazier than the gold plates. Oh. I guess my biggest criticism is Solomon was a king and you were not rewarded the same way for your temple. Do you think that is a reflection of anything? Entirely possible. But I think he would just denounce me as a heretic. Essentially.

[00:36:59] He would not be troubled by my stupid jokes. And he, in plenty of ways, was probably more satisfied with his accomplishments than I will ever be. He built it by hand. You have to understand this. This is not an easy thing to do. This is, if you're thinking about programming and you're talking about we have to, it can counter all these things. This is a lot of work. This essentially took, it started out in 2005.

[00:37:26] And then I think by the end of late 2012 was when the first version of Temple OS came out. So, he went from Xbox 360 to Xbox One. Something like that. Yeah. I mean, I think people, like, little I got to read about this because anything in the weeds I wouldn't understand. And anything about his mental health was just sort of too depressing.

[00:37:51] It seems like what he did, even though it isn't like a particularly viable operating system, was impressive for a guy fucking around at home. Absolutely. You know? The description from the Vice article kind of tells you all you need to say. It starts, this is Jesse Hicks writing in 2014. In the beginning there is darkness. The screen erupts in blue and then a cascade of thick white hexadecimal numbers and cracked language. Unused STK and alakmem.

[00:38:20] Black screen seeds to blue to white and a pair of scales appear crossed by a sword. Both images drawn in the jagged bitmap graphics of Windows 1.0 era clip art. Light gray and yellow on a background of light cyan. Blue text proclaims God on tap. This is Temple OS version 2.17. The welcome screen explains a public domain operating system produced by Trivial Solutions of Las Vegas, Nevada. It greets the user with a riot of 16 colors scrolling blinking text.

[00:38:48] Depending on your frame of reference, it might recall DSQ view, the Commodore 64, or other DOS-based graphical user interfaces. If style, and not specifics, it invokes a particular era. A time when the then new concept of personal computing necessarily meant programming and tinkering and breaking things. All of that would be fine if it were not for the whole Jesus shit. That's the part where I start to fall off, right? Like, certain key commands bring up Bible passages.

[00:39:18] There's a program called Jukebox, which has biblically inspired songs with lyrics. It's strange. But again, it's one guy writing 121,000 lines of code, which, according to this, puts it on par with Photoshop 1.0. And like Photoshop 1.0, none of the bugs in that code have been removed. Yeah, talk to this guy who uses Lightroom all the time. We know. Oh, yeah. Jesus. I know.

[00:39:46] I like how no matter how much I upgrade my computer, Lightroom still runs like shit. It's a beautiful thing. Thanks, Adobe. Thanks for everything he did. I feel like I deserve, like, the Fell For It Again award. Each little time. So just last year, Dangerous Minds wrote this article. Will Howard here. Terry Davis, the schizophrenic software engineer who changed the game. I don't know if that's true. He changed all that much. But it does start with an interesting idea.

[00:40:15] After all, for the most part, you can't judge a piece of art on its practicality. What is the utility of a Rothko painting? Or the last Lil' Sims album? Unless you start measuring the amount they emotionally affect their audience. In which case, we're judging quality, and that's absolutely not the same thing as utility. In a strange way, it's the opposite. Utility is undeniability. You might not like the color of a TV remote, but if it turns on the TV, you can't deny its usefulness.

[00:40:40] That said, when the lines start overlapping, you get some seriously brain-boiling questions. I ask this because these are questions raised by the work of Terry Davis. Terry Davis works in a world where the question of whether the product is art sounds kind of ludicrous, yet the more you look, the more you have to question that reaction. Terry Davis is a software designer, one whose work makes a lot more sense as art than it does as craft. And yeah, if you see in that Dangerous Minds article, there is a great screenshot of it.

[00:41:08] This is kind of the boiled down essence. This is what Temple OS is. It's garish. It's a little odd. It's a lot of Jesus stuff, but it's also a functioning operating system. And I gotta say, you can't take out the Jesus stuff because that's like everything. Well, that's the problem, right? The point is that he's not the first artist who was inspired by God.

[00:41:34] You know, I think for thousands of years, that was probably the primary motivating engine for art. When I have my smug moments, I feel above it. When I have my humble moments, you know, I don't believe in any of it, but I am less of a dickhead about it. Well, exactly. I've always found Terry himself more fascinating than Temple OS, though.

[00:42:02] Just because, like, again, according to this Vice article, he's regularly in contact with this writer. He emails me and late into the night in courier font from a two or three-year-old Dell desktop running, of all things, Ubuntu and not Temple OS. What's up, Terry? Unable to work, he collects Social Security, spends most of his time coding, web surfing, and using the output from the National Institute of Standards and Technology Randomness beacon to talk to God. He posts the results on his website as Terry Davis's rants.

[00:42:32] He drinks a lot of caffeine. This is the part that got me. And lives mostly on a 48-hour schedule. I stay awake 16 by 2 and sleep 8 by 2. Okay? Wow. So he stays awake. A little time cube in here. Yeah, there is a little time cube in here. I would love to find Terry's bodybuilding.com account. He's arguing about the days of the week. Days of the week. How many days are in a week?

[00:43:02] There we go. Further in the article, he talks to God constantly. And his God is conversational, even chatty. In fact, Davis believes he's proven God speaks to him. He believes anything can be an oracle, that the divine word can reveal itself through randomness. At least a dozen times on his webpage, he describes putting a question to his mother. If he won the lottery three times, he asks, would she believe? No, she responds, because improbable things happen all the time.

[00:43:30] I can sit down with my parents and praise God and open the Bible randomly, he says, and it will talk. For him, this is both astounding and undeniable. An ongoing revelation. Like winning the lottery ten times every day. Yet, he says, they just ignore it because it's against their way of thinking. They just ignore the facts. His favorite video game apparently is Donkey Kong. God's favorite car is a Beamer. His favorite singer is Mick Jagger. And if God would sing, God would want to sound like Christopher Hall from Stabbing Westward. That's, I think, probably the most surprising.

[00:44:02] Okay. The best thing Bill Gates could do to save lives, God says, is work on earthquake prediction. The 11th commandment is thou shalt not litter. Terry Davis tells God everything seems bad. God replies, plant trees. This is also seeming like early AI psychosis in a way. Kind of. Instead of clawed tokens, it's God tokens. Hell yeah. Let's go. Theophany is the, by the way, it's the temporary awe-inspiring manifestation or appearance of a deity in the form accessible to humans.

[00:44:32] Like the burning bush, Mount Sinai. Those are kind of the examples that are given. But calling Oral Roberts to receive donations or else he will die. So in 2018, this according to Palladium Mag. In 2018, Terry had become homeless, refusing many of the offerings of his disciples.

[00:44:53] His last video message to the world, August 11th, 2018, was about how he was learning to purify himself and respect the purity of the world around him. He concluded with a frank summary of who he had become now that he'd finished his work. Quote, maybe now I'm just a bizarre little person who walks back and forth. Later that day, while walking back and forth on the train tracks in Oregon, Terry Davis was struck by a train and killed. God had used him for a great task and then had taken him home.

[00:45:21] So what a strange man, believing so fervently that God has spoken to you, even though for a long time you were an avowed atheist. How to reconcile that part of yourself? I don't know. That is always strange to me. Because I grew up in a Catholic family and then I became an atheist because, you know, as George Carlin says, I reached the age of reason. But, you know, every once in a while I find myself like, is there some value there? I don't know. It's an odd thought to have in the middle of all this. Because, you know, it's a strange fellow.

[00:45:50] And there was already God's perfect operating system, which was Linux. Yeah, exactly. You know. Now, if Linus Torvalds had gotten out there, you know, God spoke to me and created the kernel. Getting hit by a train, man. If you go to the subreddit, reddit.com r slash templeOS underscore official, there's a lot of Terry Davis videos that just, it's a broken guy. He's a broken man.

[00:46:20] And I know we started out as kind of like, wow, this is weird and we're ending on kind of a bummer. But, like, it's kind of true. Like, every time I read more about him and more about this, just this guy who did a thing and died. I don't know. I mean, I'll never write a religious operating system. Like, I can barely tie my shoes some days. Like, the only thing it feels like I need to really know that templeOS was for real ball knowers is can't run Doom.

[00:46:50] I don't know, actually. I'd have to try it. I'd have to try it, yeah. But a lot of these people on this subreddit are actually putting templeOS on. Like, here's one something eight days ago. Someone saying, using my MacBook like the profits of our time intended. And it's the MacBook running templeOS. So, some of it is people making fun. Some of it is people just like, yeah, here's me doing the thing. Charles, you and I, when we first talked about this, you mentioned something that really struck a chord, too. You talked about. Yeah.

[00:47:20] What were they? They were kosher phones. And kosher phones are, they're sold by and designed for the ultra-Orthodox, like, Hasidic market. And so, they're really stripped down. It's like you are working at the most restrictive employer, right? Like, you can't access the net.

[00:47:48] And it, like, so it has some internet functionality for certain purposes. Like, I think maybe you can get email and stuff like that. Like, it has some smartphone functionality. It's not just like an old Nokia phone, right? You can call and you can text. And I think you can get email and stuff like that. But you can't access the larger web.

[00:48:12] And you can't do any of the things that would get you in trouble with Judaism doesn't have the concept of sin in the same way that others do. But there are things that are, you know, halal and haram, you know? There are good things to do and bad things to do and things that are forbidden to you. And the kosher phone is designed to tie yourself to the mast. Okay.

[00:48:41] But it's like it is sort of very funny conceptually. And I think they understand. Like, from what I've seen, they kind of, they call them kosher phones both for, like, actual religious reasons and because they're well aware that it sounds kind of goofy. Like, it's not like they are, the joke is entirely at their expense.

[00:49:08] You know, like, they're in on it enough to know that this sort of form meeting function and how they advertise it within their community is going to get attention outside the community.

[00:49:23] But in a world where I know people, and I certainly know plenty of people in the internet sense who have decided that they would rather have a Nokia from 2003 than a smartphone. Because that way, when they're away from their desk, they're not constantly looking up shit on the internet. And so they feel more present in the world. I get it. Yeah, absolutely.

[00:49:52] You know, I won't do it. That's the other thing. That's the other thing, yes. I'm not going to do it either. I'd rather kill myself, but I get it. If I can't see Instagram reels of, you know, Cities by Diana, I'm going to throw my phone off a bridge. Yeah. That's just how it goes. I'm thinking of someone like, like a historic person in, like, Milwaukee having, like, the Sabbath goy showing them Cities by Diana videos.

[00:50:21] Just sitting on a bench in a very public apartment. What are you looking at? Just tell me. Well, just even if you just describe it to me. It's a woman. You see, she talks about how we're all going to, we're all baby girls for the industrial complex. Being her own husband for a step. What is that from? Shittington UK's old prospector describes pornography.

[00:50:51] It's Sean Tejirachi who did Liartown. That was it. It was Liartown. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. That was, that was the zine. Shittington UK was the Twitter account and Liartown USA was the zine. Yes. Even if it was also a web zine. That's right. They did the whole social justice kittens calendar. Okay. Yes. That's actually, that feels like a whole episode.

[00:51:16] We should probably, uh, plant, no money down, which was like some guy in South America that did all kinds of crazy stuff. Yeah. There's, there's like a whole era of that. That's really amazing and creative. So this is about part of the show where we tell people where to find us online. Charles, since you're our guest, please tell the people where to find you on the old internet. You can find me at, the easiest thing to do is just search for Senator Lemon Gobert on

[00:51:45] Blue Sky because my name is just hard to spell or say. It's you, Garls. It's Charles with a UG where the CH should be. The No Homework podcast is everywhere you get podcasts. We, if you subscribe via the Patreon, the Patreon is free and that way you'll be in the loop when we start doing any bonusy interesting kind of stuff, but it's free. Awesome. And it'll be free for a while.

[00:52:12] And then City Saint Country Saint is the upcoming season for New Orleans Saints football. We just put out a draft episode with Arif Hassan from Wide Left. He also does a football podcast with the aforementioned Ed Zitron who, and Caleb Bird respecter. So, you know, very, yeah, that's what I'm saying. So it was great. It was really fun to talk to him because I only knew him on the internet.

[00:52:40] It was the first time that we actually spoke. So that was very cool. And then there's the 52 plus one podcast challenge. So if you want me on your podcast, just reach out to me on Blue Sky. It's easier by DM because I have my at settings very restricted so that I don't get distracted and people who annoy me can't get in touch with me.

[00:53:05] But I eventually do read all of the DMs and I respond if you have a fourth tier OnlyFans link that will steal everything in my bank account. I'm at 30 now as of the time of this recording. There are a couple that have been recorded but not released.

[00:53:26] And I am, like I said before, hella overscheduled trying to run the numbers out. It is how it is, man. Well, we appreciate you. Brian, where can they find you on the old internet? Oh, boy. They can find me on Twitter and Blue Sky Under. They're iShotGyDeBoer, I-S-H-O-T-G-Y-D-E-B-O-R-D. And they can find me on Instagram over at amusicphotographer.

[00:53:56] And if you want to check out my well-curated portfolio of people with their mouths open, you can go over to assholemusicphotographer.com. And if you want to check out a woefully neglected substack, amusicphotographer.substack.com. And finally, if you want to check out the last and only good media website left in St. Louis, you can head over to theartsstl.com. Jason, where can you touch God through a kernel? I don't know computer shit. I was trying to make a joke.

[00:54:26] No, that's fine. You can find me on the internet anywhere there's a video crime. Chances are that's me. That's V-I-D-E-O-C-R-I-M-E. I am on Twitter just to promote the show. I'm on Blue Sky most of the time. You can find me on Letterboxd, Discord, whatever the place is. If it's a video crime, that is me. You can also find me on a podcast. It's not this one. It's called Submitted for the Approval of the Midnight Pals. There I play a fictionalized version of horror icon Stephen King. Season two is well underway. Season three still in the works. Go there.

[00:54:55] Midnight-pals.simplecast.com or search wherever podcasts are sold for Midnight Pals. You can contact this show in a myriad of ways. My personal favorite is, of course, the cell phone. 314-246-9766. That's 314. Or Ahoy Poo if you like to spell with your telephone. Shoot us an email. Jason at the number 4 of the number 8 minutes of dogs barking dot com. Or Brian with a Y at the number 4 of the number 8 minutes of dogs barking dot com.

[00:55:21] Support the show at patreon.com slash 48 minutes of dogs for bonus episodes, including Thanks I Hate It with Mr. Charles here. And many other of our guests that we've had on thus far this year. Well, I guess that means it's only time for one thing. Good night. Good luck. And Charles, since you're our guest, we'll leave you with the last word. What do you got to say? Oh my God. That was so unexpected. I don't have anything to say. I riff off of reality.

[00:55:51] I don't have independent thoughts. That seems about right. Alright, good night everybody. I'm sorry.