Episode 030 - William Wong

Special episode with William Wong, Senior Building Analyst at WeWork. We mostly eat cereal and talk about the topology of food. 

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Show Notes:

1. WKRP in Cincinnati was a sitcom about oddball staff at a Cincinnati radio station that was on TV from 1978 to 1982

2. Brian has voice immodulation disorder

3. Tyler Goss suffers from misophonia

   1. So, for example, he wouldn’t appreciate this

4. William works at WeWork, a coworking company, where he implements new technologies and ways of thinking by adopting software development and BIM

5. The millennials at WeWork sometimes have “cereal Friday,” where for some reason no one over the age of 28 understands, it is fun and novel for adults to purchase and consume cereal

   1. Apparently they do not enjoy cereal as much outside of the workplace, as they would then be forced to do their own dishes, which is a skill they do not possess due to baby boomers being terrible at parenting and also terrible at not ruining the economy

6. In cereal or otherwise, fuck low-fat milk

7. A cereal wet dream: marshmallow-only Lucky Charms

8. If you don’t Instagram what you eat, have you really eaten it?

9. Rene Descartes’ Principles of Philosophy

10. FIKA is the Swedish coffee joint where Brian and Zach meet their guests every Saturday morning before recording the podcast

    1. How to make Swedish Egg Coffee

    2. Brian’s favorite: Swedish Vacuum Cleaner Cake

11. William is getting us the coveted Yale demographic

    1. Also Brian is looking for a way to get into the Yale Club

12. A mathematician’s tips for the perfect March Madness bracket

    1. You don’t have to be a mathematician to understand that reading the article above would be pointless

    2. Brian’s tip is to have no knowledge whatsoever about basketball

13. Students are really intelligent about selecting colleges

14. Pop-a-Point Pencils

15. Whole milk makes Zach whole gassy

16. What’s at stake in the FBI vs. Apple encryption battle?

17. Slurp it up, y’all

18. The history of Lucky Charms “marbits”

19. Google’s Project Tango is a handheld device equipped with sensors (gyroscope, accelerometer, GPS, etc.) that can construct virtual models of the spaces around you through realtime point cloud scanning and mesh reconstruction

    1. It’s basically just the Prometheus tunnel-mapping drone

    2. It is also capable of finding hot young singles in your area

20. William is actually 14 and Doogie-Howsered his way into the industry

21. Brian swiped right so hard on William he broke his arm

22. Brian would rather find girls in the meatspace

23. William grew up in Coney Island

24. Hubert Selby Jr.’s cameo in Requiem For a Dream (Selby Jr. wrote the novel the movie was based on)

25. Jennifer Connelly and 2 out of the 3 Beastie Boys went to St. Ann’s School in Brooklyn Heights

26. Brian once got extra IKEA Swedish meatballs for wearing a Beastie Boys concert shirt

27. Zach takes his twins to IKEA for dollar breakfast and drawing with golf pencils

    1. It’s the Downey version of the Brady’s going to Sears

28. The Warriors’ path from the Bronx to Coney actually started in Riverside Park, Manhattan

29. Bensonhurst’s 86th St makes appearances in the opening of Saturday Night Fever and the chase scene in The French Connection

30. Don’t worry William, McDonald’s has added the McGriddle to it’s All-Day Breakfast Menu

    1. WHAT ABOUT ALL DAY LUNCH

31. Is a hot dog a sandwich?

32. Do you know a heel from a crown?

33. All burgers are sandwiches but not all sandwiches are burgers

34. Hot dog buns are the bivalves of the bread world

35. A burrito is a hot dog topologically

36. We are not here to give you a happy ending

37. The Ivy League is a sham

38. Yale’s early exit from March Madness can be explained by the fact that they were playing their 2nd string rapists

39. 99% Invisible episode on designing prisons

    1. Not to be confused with Designing Women starring Blanche Dubois

       1. Oh wait Blanche DuBois is a fictional character in Tennessee Williams’ A Streetcar Named Desire

    2. Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan starred together in Joe Versus the Volcano, Sleepless in Seattle, and You’ve Got Mail which take place in the South Pacific, Seattle, and New York, respectively

40. I bet the “You’ve Got Mail” guy gets so much asss

    1. But clearly not as much as the “OK Glass” girl

41. Slack is just Google Wave is just an AOL chatroom is just IRC

    1. a/s/l?

42. The history of hashtags

43. That weird Twitter period

44. Kaizen, or Continuous Improvement, is a strategy where all employees proactively achieve regular, incremental improvements in a manufacturing process

45. Here’s a guy just sitting and smiling for 4 hours. Oh also this is NUMBER 25 OUT OF 196

46. The Spyro Egg Thief is a dick

47. Dreamcast consoles made before October 2000 can run games burned to CDs

    1. And then Sega just kind of gave up

    2. SEGAAAAA

48. The UFO Super Drive Pro 6 for Super Nintendo/Super Famico allowed users to save games to floppies

49. The Virtual Boy made you cross-eyed and pukey

    1. For extra puking, try emulating the Virtual Boy in your Oculus Rift

50. AR vs VR

51. Alexa has an API!

    1. Alexa runs off tiny animals like a Flintstones appliance

52. Who pays for porn?!

Lightning round:

1. What book(s) are you reading?

   • Sprint: How to Solve Big Problems and Test New Ideas in Just Five Days, by Jake Knapp

2. What music are you listening to right now?

   • Hamilton soundtrack

3. What’s your favorite sci-fi film?

   • Minority Report

     • Fox TV show is terrible and was canceled

4. What’s your favorite retro-game?

   • Side-scrolling

     • Contra (NES)

     • Ninja Gaiden (NES)

     • Ghosts N’ Goblins (NES)

       • Considered one of the most difficult games ever, you actually have to beat the entire game twice to win

   • Shooting games

     • 1942 (NES)

     • Top Gun (NES)

       • Impossible to land the damn plane

   • Chrono Trigger (SNES)

   • Final Fantasy 7 (PS1)

     • Aeris death scene

     • PS4 Remake

   • Dreamcast games

     • Crazy Taxi

     • Jet Set Radio

       • Graffiti

5. What’s your favorite childhood cartoon?

   • TMNT

     • Secret of the Ooze

       • Training in Dumbo with the Foot

       • Super Shredder

     • People complain about Michael Bay ruining the Turtles but check this shit out

6. Who’s your favorite TMNT villain?

   • William

     • Krang

   • Brian

     • In the cartoon - Baxter Stockman (who is basically just Seth Brundle)

     • In the movies - Tokka and Rahzar

     • The toys were great!

     • “No anchovies, I mean no anchovies”

7. If you could have a tea party with any three people, dead or alive, who would they be?

   • William and three mirrors

8. WHAT IS ARCHITECTURE???!!! In one sentence.

   • The physical manifestation of a society’s idealized vision of their way of living