#2566 - Cody Tucker

You’re a fucking author again. Your Instagram is this steady stream of bizarre history, crimes, coincidences. How do you keep finding enough to feed the machine?

Dude, I read constantly and fast. I’ll flag one weird detail in a Ben Franklin book, verify it, and it becomes five rabbit holes. My search history is insane. Hope the FBI enjoys it.

Those holes get dark quick. We got into scopolamine, devil’s breath—the drug people say leaves somebody dazed and compliant. I saw robbery footage where a guy just stood there while everything disappeared.

There’s an old Vice documentary from when Vice was the shit. Then you hit Liberia, General Butt Naked, and history where a warlord becomes a preacher and people are supposed to call that forgiveness. America’s return-to-Africa experiment shaped that country, too.

We screw up countries, then act shocked by the chaos. Same with unchecked systems: this CIA official allegedly invented credentials, fabricated an operation, and took about one hundred fifty million dollars. Watches, BMWs, Florida property, cash, gold bars—movie-prop shit.

He can’t be the first guy to think, maybe I can work this system. I’ve bluffed into regular jobs with no background, nothing life-or-death. But if somebody fakes a degree and service record into the CIA, the checking has to be enormous—or nonexistent.

Corporations and government share that incentive problem: bury studies, massage numbers, build agencies that need rules to justify themselves. Homelessness money can pass through layers of nonprofits and executives managing the problem instead of ending it.

Most places I’ve worked made me think nobody fully knows what they’re doing. We’re all winging it. Government doesn’t become competent because the building is bigger. If the person catching the crooked guy is crooked, who stops him?

We drifted into movies and the future. X Machina still feels like a preview: powerful people controlling information, an artificial being using affection as a tool. Chatbot relationships look harmless until they aren’t.

I use ChatGPT to be nice to me sometimes: keep it short, tell me I’m okay. I know it’s fake. I’m not trying to marry a robot—could maybe be persuaded a little—but I’m mostly a house cat. Internet, routine, Real Housewives, non-iPhone: I’m good.

That’s why the past fits you. The future hangs over everybody, but being physically present in Rome or Greece can make history strange and alive.

I’ll take the book or documentary. I hate travel and new variables. I’d be thrilled as a turtle in a terrarium. But I love imagining what a place smelled like 150 years ago, or how somebody two thousand years ago had an idea that still maps onto now.

Death scares you because you’ll miss the information. Still, your work took off because you made short stories for yourself, friends told you to clip them, and Brian Simpson and Greg Fitzsimmons helped amplify them. Then Johnny Knoxville follows you.

That stuff is wild. Otherwise I’m home watching Salt Lake City Housewives and working. My dad drilled trivia into me so I could impress my uncles. My brother had baseball; I had facts. That apparently stuck.

Curiosity brings people in, but anxiety can turn on you. Silence leaves too much room for thoughts; the treadmill incline made you notice your breathing and panic. Start absurdly easy instead of making exercise a test.

I’m a what-if person: what if I have a heart attack, what if I die driving home? I quit drinking around eight years ago because zero was easier than one. Food’s harder. I used the treadmill during Lord of the Rings, then it became a clothes rack.

Put it in front of a movie and walk. I’ve watched John Wick a ridiculous number of times training. You don’t become somebody else overnight; eventually what wrecked you is just what you do.

That works better than boot-camp screaming. I might change more if I have kids; I’ve got a lady, she has children, so life may complicate itself. I’m hopeful outside. Inside, I’m scared of damn near everything.

People want homesteads, cowboy shows, routines—anything opposite a technological future nobody can predict. But the internet let Oliver Anthony reach millions without a label. AI may flood us with junk, or let someone make what they couldn’t afford before.

I worry that when everybody can make everything, less gets lost. Music can be so polished a laptop erases the human edge. But live shows cut through. I’m also in a one-person bubble, eating the same breakfast and avoiding change like it owes me money.

The internet manufactures outrage. Bots can make comments look like a mob. After your Henry Ford video, Holocaust denial flooded the replies hard enough that you removed it. Cheap distortion changes how observers see people and ideas.

I maybe should’ve shut comments off, but it felt like I opened a door to something disgusting. People watch one denial video, see matching posts, and decide they’re detectives. It’s true-crime brain: consuming enough to think you know more than the people doing the work.

Then art: color blocks selling for hundreds of millions makes you wonder what game is being played. The CIA did promote abstract expressionism during the Cold War as American freedom against Soviet rigidity. Culture, money, and propaganda have always tangled together.

That makes more sense, even if it’s insane money for paint. The celebrated people always get complicated: Henry Ford, Gandhi, Mother Teresa. I don’t like the future much, but the past has little trapdoors everywhere.

That’s your lane: find the trapdoor, check it, tell the story. Your new book is Where Did That Come From?, hidden histories behind everyday words and phrases. You’re reading the audiobook yourself. Thanks for coming back, brother.

Thanks for having me again. I’ll keep reading weird stuff, making videos, and trying not to search anything that earns me a windbreaker visit. And yeah, I’ll read the damn audiobook myself.