Endless Thread - Dinner and a (Slide) Show

Episode Date: February 16, 2024

Instead of a typical first date — dinner and light conversation, maybe — he presented 29 slides about one of his favorite movies. The internet loved it. But did his date? Credits: This episode was produced by Dean Russell. Mixing and sound design by Emily Jankowski. Ben Brock Johnson and Amory Sivertson are the co-hosts. Image Credit: X/Jason Carman

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Amaris Severson, happy belated St. Valentino's Day to you. Ben Brockes-Johnsonite. Back at you. And with that in mind, what is the strangest date you've ever been on? Probably like, I'm going to say some dude thinking that we were on a date talking to me about something that he thought that I was interested in and I wasn't and we weren't. What about you? I took out a girl named Amanda. We went to the movies and we watched The Sixth Sense.

Classic love story. Classic love story. And we also broke into a speed bowl. Is that like a go-killed? cart? No, it's like, you know, low-level race car. It's not like a, it's not the Indy 500. I don't know anything about car racing. It's the triple A of race car driving. Something like that. Yeah. And I, she climbed over the fence with me. We definitely trespassed. And it was like, one of those things where like I wanted it to be on, but like, I didn't know it was on, but it was definitely on. Looking back on it, it was on. And then I just dropped her off and was like, have a good night. I hope maybe someday you'll consider dating me. Okay, goodbye. ever after. Yeah, I think she did. She certainly did. You did too. Your wife is like one of my favorite things about you. Yeah, but my wife didn't live happily ever after after. That's the, that's the problem for her. I don't know if either of our dates would have ever gone viral. No. At least not as

viral as the date we're talking about today. This like whole like little Twitter virality stint was basically me capitulating to Twitter every step of the way. That actually worries me deeply. Me too. Jason Carman lives in San Francisco. He makes documentaries about tech startups. He also launches rockets into space. He's a big ex, Twitter, user.

And he's single. So how's dating? How's it going? Dating? Jason is in his early Twitter. what he describes as a transitional period in the dating scene. He says, standing out from the endless feed of men online is more important than ever.

Everyone's beginning to realize like, oh, dating is no longer just like a fun after high school, like in college thing. So thinking about it differently is kind of been a trip. We better get serious put together some PowerPoints now. That's what I thought. Oh, yes. And his creative approach to dating has recently, earned him a bit of a reputation, one he's not so sure about.

I don't know if I want to be totally known as the PowerPoint dating guy. Too late, my friend, Jason Carman is the PowerPoint dating guy. Why? Because about a month ago, Jason decided to go on a first date, and instead of the usual thing, where'd you grow up, how many siblings do you have, he opted to give a lengthy PowerPoint presentation, a slideshow. And he filmed it for all the world to see. Some might call it an odd approach to wooing. Others? I guess it's the modern version of like going and, I don't know,

a night fighting for one's honor, fighting for another night to win the, is the modern version that was making a PowerPoint. Or just like killing a woolly mammoth and bringing it home or something. Oh, I'm sure those nights would really appreciate this comparison. Yeah. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. Today, endless thread listeners,

we bring you the story of one date, two people, and 29 slides that caught the attention of millions. millions online. This is dinner and a slide show. I had seen some of his stuff on Twitter before, so kind of knew of him just through the Twitter scape. Harprea Bagri is a software engineer, also in the Bay Area. She works with artificial intelligence.

And if you're wondering, we interviewed Harprea and Jason separately. Harpria, how would you describe your dating life? You know, not great. Can AI help with that? You know, funny that you mentioned that. I also made an AI agent to background check my hinge dates for me. How's that working out for you? Harprea and Jason didn't meet on hinge.

Their meet cute was a tad more old-fashioned. There was this party. Jason was there. That's how he met. I was telling him about how I really enjoyed his videos and stuff. And he had read my blog. She's great. She's very smart.

And we're both nerds. in the best sense of that. I mean, we met at a tech optimism dinner party at my house. A tech optimism dinner party. Yes, you heard that correctly. They talked about things like AI, podcast audio quality, and they were hitting it off. Then they got to a somewhat contentious subject, one that would go on to have a rather big effect on their soon-to-be romantic lives. If I recall correctly, it was him that had brought it up. This movie comes out with me a in conversation. And I just think it's great. I don't know how I don't like intentionally bring it up. That would be really concerning for my future dating. But I think I had just seen it like a few

weeks before that just very recently. And just telling him how like it was cool and all, but it wasn't like other Christopher Nolan movies. I, you know, maybe some of it went over my head. I didn't really enjoy it as much as I hoped to. All I have for you is a gesture in combination with a word, Tenet. That's all they've told you. Tennant is the most underrated Christopher Nolan movie and hated in many ways.

For the Uninitiated, Tenet is a nearly three-hour action movie written and directed by Christopher Nolan, the guy who brought us mind-bending films like Conception, Memento, Interstellar, Oppenheimer. And Ben, as you know, I am the uninitiated. I've never seen Tenet.

On this timeline. Okay, how would you describe it? the plot of Tenet? There's some good guys and some bad guys, but there's one good guy, and he's trying to travel through time to stop the end of the world. And there's like a machine. There's like a machine they have to go through to like to go through time. And there's a lot of discussion about entropy, which I don't really understand.

And yeah, that's what I got. How'd it go? How'd that go for you? I need some idea of the threat we face. As I understand it, we're trying to prevent World War III. Nuclear Holocaust. No. Something worse.

Apparently, this movie is not for everyone. It was very slow for probably a good chunk of it, probably majority of it. I think I just didn't see how certain things added up. but it is the movie for Jason. I think it's like the most unique take on time travel that I've ever seen in a movie. And I think that's what makes it so cool. They have a lot in common, clearly.

A lot in common. They're both at that tech optimism party. Talking about Tenet, Harprea's like, yeah, too confusing, too long. I don't get what all the fuss is about. Normally this might elicit a head nod and a new topic. But Jason had been in this situation before.

He ended up telling me that he had an ex-girlfriend who he explained the movie Tenant to. And he made this whole like, he did a presentation on it or something. And I was like, oh, interesting. I didn't think I would be at the end of another presentation in the near future, but I thought it was funny in the meantime. Fast forward a couple of weeks. And Jason is on X or Twitter or whatever we call it these days.

And he jumps into a thread with some randos about, Obviously, Tenet. One tweet has a video of a Peloton instructor ranting about the movie mid-workout. Did anybody see this besides me? Because I need a manual. Someone's got to explain this. He ends up tweeting someone else to say,

I have these slides I made for a date three years ago. And people didn't believe me. I went to bed, woke up the tweet. It was many viral, post the slides. That went very viral. And then some guy replied, you should record yourself on a date doing the slides, which I proceeded to do.

Now, Jason is, among other things, a self-described content creator. And he knew Harprea had recently started making her own content. So Jason got an idea. He had just, like, texted me being like, oh, do you remember when I was telling you about tenant, blah, blah, and he was like, how about I give you the presentation? Do you want to go on a date? And I was like, okay, that's fine. She didn't know at the time that it was going to be recorded, but I met her a few times.

She seemed cool. I knew she was thinking about getting into content. He was very explicit to not go on Twitter beforehand. I was just like, I know she would be interested in doing something like this, like when she knew what it really was. And this is another thing I like about tense approach. It's like much of it is like covert. I literally thought we were just going to talk about the movie. But no, it was a lot more than that.

A lot more than that. Here we go. How the date went down in a minute. At Radio Lab, we love nothing more than nerding out about science, neuroscience, chemistry. But, but we do also like to get into other kinds of stories, stories about policing or politics, country music, hockey, sex, of bugs. Regardless of whether we're looking at science or not science, we bring a rigorous curiosity to get you the answers. And hopefully, make you see the world anew. Radio Lab, Adventures on the Edge of what we think we know.

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reach new audiences, whatever your goal, we can help. Discover how the magic is made at WBUR.org slash creative studio. People didn't think I was serious about making a slides show up and move a penknit. But I did. I have it here. So what happens when a guy goes on a date with a PowerPoint presentation and secretly records the whole thing? He might get beat up. He also might get 3.7 million views, obviously, but, you know, let's not get ahead of ourselves.

And so I asked a friend of mine, but I met a few weeks ago, a girl named Harprea. I touched her last night. You want to come to a date, and I'll give you my tenant presentation. So that's what's going to happen since everyone has asked to, well, see the presentation. So I'm going to be able. Okay, so she was warned. A presentation is on the dinner table, is on the menu. He asked for consent before he gave her his tenant presentation. So about an hour before the date, Jason sets up at an Italian restaurant, Norseena, in San Francisco's Marina District. He gets seats in front of a floor-length window.

Meanwhile, two friends with cameras and audio equipment hide behind an outdoor dining booth across the street. Secrecy is critical. There was an area, Mike, I hid under like a flower vase right there. The restaurant was in on it. So the cameras were set up and we were like, worried about the glare of the lighting. It was all stressful. We were, like, having some issues with audio. Then eventually we got everything straight.

As for Harprea, I had researched the restaurant beforehand. I was really excited to eat food and, you know, get to know him better. Hey, how's it going? Nice to see you. It's good. The date starts, like, a lot of first dates. Kind of awkward. There's some nervous, small talk about spritzes.

I'm normally not, like, a spritz flight guy, but it's really good here. and a friend made me get at once? I don't know. Do you like sprits at all? What is the sprits? Great question. I'm with you, girl. But also, I'm in.

I wish someone would take me out for a spritz flight. Let's do that after this. Let's get a sprits. A spritz flight. So there's also this kind of vibe with the date. Like, they both know something is odd. Then Harprea notices that Jason is holding something. a folder.

And I don't think she knew what was in it. She was, like, looking at it a little bit, and then I held it up. And he pulls out, like, 29 pages or something of, like, this printed slides. And, yeah, I was laughing, a little confused. And I was like, is this serious? This is partly a joke. But then he was committed. There's, like, a weird joke in here.

Like, and then he pulled out his slides. It's like, oh, gosh. No. Oh, you're serious. Yeah, no, I mean. You printed it out? I knew you said you had a presentation. I did not think you would fly. Yeah, I thought it'd be like weird if it was like, I don't know, just like, you know, I just printed the slides. It's only like 29 slides. She like looks like over her shoulder almost. Like I'm not sure for what.

Like was she looking for help? Was she looking to leave? Was she looking like, what was it? Yeah, I was like, you know, let's just go with it. Let's just, let's just dive right in. The slideshow is titled, Tenet for Dummies. And it starts with text explaining, quote, if you're reading this, you probably didn't understand the film tenant. It's okay. You're just not as film smart as you thought. You're not the film expert you think you are or something like that.

He had all these like jokes in the beginning. And I was like, what are you trying to do? Oh, boy. I was like, this could be going very downhill if you're starting off with that slide. Oh, I would agree. Yes. I made these like three years ago. This is sasserer than, you know, this isn't about you.

It's about the theoretical person doesn't understand town, which is like, I think most of the population. Okay, okay. You know what? Let's keep going. Yeah. I was just so nervous. I was trying my best to myself, but not be too loud. Be loud enough for the audio. Also just like, the slides suck. The slides are not meant for this.

This video, we should say, is 17 minutes long. So it's edited. I can't believe she stayed that long. It was shocking. Well, the date was longer. This is the edited version. And I have to admit, when I watched this for the first time, I kind of thought the whole thing was a setup. I thought Harprea had to have been in on it.

You could say that there's romantic chemistry and you want to see where this goes. There's another part of me that's like, this is something that we could make content around together and it could do really well. You know what I mean? Well, if anything the first. Whatever he told you what he pulled out was not what you were expecting. No, no, no, no. I literally thought we were going to talk about it. Regardless, this date does not seem like it's starting well for Jason,

the guy who said, you're not as film smart as you think you are. Until... The first time it happened where she actually got interested was like the palindrome. He showed this like very ancient artifact where it's a tenant. And I think that pulled me in. This slide shows a matrix carved into stone. It was discovered in the ruins of Pompeii and later found elsewhere. It kind of looked like a secret code.

There are five words in the matrix, and they all can be read backwards and forwards. The word in the center is tenant. No one knows what it is. Where is it? It's everywhere. Like they've done like, they have it on doors. They have it on like buildings. Wait, I didn't know this.

Like that was really cool. This is where having seen the film actually helps, Amory, because the whole movie is about time inversion. It's inverted. Its entropy runs backwards. So to our eyes, its movement is reversed. Which is different than the time travel we usually imagine, where we get in a machine, press some buttons, and go write a dinosaur. Don't try to understand it. Feel it.

And then, like, the next slide, I think she remembered that it was, like, a PowerPoint slide on a movie on a date. And went back to being like, um, what? How many slides in are we? Oh, no, no, no, halfway there. Halfway there. Part two, part six, but I was like, oh, my God, these slides are just monotonous and unclear and slow. And I, like, I'm getting bored and I'm getting out of it. And so, like, I quickly, like, I was like, okay, this happened, this happened, this happened.

And then, like, when I did that, like, went through, like, four slides that I didn't think were that important, very willy-nilly. She was like, whoa, wait, what was that one? That one was a pretty cool slide, actually. Kind of a timeline of the whole movie, showing at what point the characters are going forwards and backwards. If you ever get confused watching this movie, this is the slide to look at. He talked about that machine that reverses the entropy. And they don't really show this as much in the movie,

which is why I think that was a big point of confusion of me, is when they go backwards in time, they're like reliving every day at this, as like the same unit of time. Like a second is second but backwards. And this is the moment that things really took off. The like awkwardness was gone at that point. It was just like, I want to see this PowerPoint thing through

and then like talk about time travel theory at the end. And so we got really into it. We got into all these details and it was connecting together. And it had a lot of like light bulb moments talking about what that could mean and what our theories were on whether or not it exists. Well, David, I guess my question is, do you think time travel is real? Well, I think the whole point is like, time is relative.

And it's subjective and relative. Right? Lots of different, yeah. You time travel backwards. Now there's two of you. I don't see why that wouldn't happen. But yeah, I think, like, it was really cool to be able to talk about it, just because I feel like it's not a topic I normally talk about.

Ah, that first date, romance. True love. True love. Eventually this PowerPoint date kind of morphs. They get pizza, they put down the slides, they eat. All of a sudden, it's just like a normal date. Except for the secret camera part. Once the pizza moment happened, I like started laughing, like the way that you do when you say cut kind of thing.

I started laughing and like, and I was like and said into my mic like, okay, guys, I think we did it. And then at that point, like, she was totally like knew what was going on. And I was like, I had a little bit of a feeling. Whoa, that was at the end of the date. And I was like, are you, I could totally delete the footage. Like, seriously, it's no problem. Like, I don't even know if it went well. And she was like, let's just see it.

Like, let's go look at it. And later on in the night, we went over to Jason's apartment. And I watched him edit this whole thing. Oh, my God. That night? Yes, that night. Interesting. No, it'll be really cool.

I'm going to give you my presentation, then we'll go back to my apartment, and you can watch me edit the footage of the date that I recorded that I didn't tell you that I was recording until the end. No notes sounds like. Oh, lovely. Can't wait to come up to your place and have a drink. Jason uploaded the video the next day. And that was terrifying. Thankfully, I think it went okay. And like wasn't horrible per se.

People liked it. 16,000 people, to be precise. Millions watch. But some people were not huge fans. No. Yes, believe it or not, some took issue with the surreptitious filming. A lot of my friends have asked me that question, like, were you offended or, you know, whatever else? Like, some of my friends clearly would not be cool with it, but no, I thought it was funny.

I genuinely thought it was funny. Others saw the very premise as a bad idea, like the definition of mansplaining. I can see why people think that. But I think in reality, it didn't, like honestly, didn't feel like that at all. It was definitely more of like a conversation. It was funny. And then there was a lot of banter and back and forth. I don't think he's a mansplainer.

I think he's a great guy. I think it's a person thing. I wouldn't try this on a blind date with someone off of, like, a dating app or, like, just a random. Like, I knew Harpreo was someone that would, like, appreciate something like this. I want to know what movie Harprea would explain to you. It would be funny to do it and then have people vote who did better. I think she would do better 100%. But that would be a great follow-up.

My favorite movie in the whole world is Cars, like the Disney Pixar movie. Yes, I've never seen it, but I love this. I love that we are miles away seemingly from Tenet. It's not just like this. The animation about talking cars, I feel like so deep and has a lot of, like, philosophical meaning to it that people miss. So I would love to give a presentation about cars. I feel like I can really talk about that movie a lot.

Oh, man. All I have to say, Harpri is, Cachow. Meet you dinner. What the? Oh! Tochow! Please. Oh.

In the end, they both said the date was a learning experience, not just. about Tenet, they learn some other things, too. If you're someone who's already anxious and paranoid about what people think of what you're saying, which I certainly am as well, then like your problem is definitely not worrying about like saying too much. You just need to be, you know, out there and confident in what you're saying or your PowerPoint presentation. Maybe it's like in an odd way, the bar of a fun date is higher. It could be so dynamic. It doesn't have to be like, how many siblings do you have? What's your favorite color?

especially like to understand why someone likes something so much is truly like a reflection of themselves that you don't get from the very basic conversations of how many siblings you have and your favorite color and all those, all those basic questions. The tenant date was a few weeks ago. Has there been a second date? No. We have been talking a lot about things, but not, there's not been a second date. Jason and I have kept in touch via text and we'll see. I don't know. Well, now you have a CARs presentation that you have to put together in here. So that's tempting. I think I'll...

Do I tell him? Should I tell him? Or just invite him and... Yeah, that's true. No, just invite him. Give him a taste of his own medicine. I have to say, Emery, that when we first talked to Jason, there were like so many red flags for me where I was like,

here's a guy who's he's explaining a movie to this woman. He's subjecting this poor woman to 29 slides of explanation on their first date. But the more that we talk to Jason, I was like, you know what? This guy's a nice guy, I think. He's actually a nice guy. And he's, it was really nice to hear Harprea say like, no, I was good with this. And like, to me, it's just a reminder that, you know, true love is like very subjective. And also I, Harprea, I really.

look forward to the Carr's slide deck explanation. My kids would also let that. Yeah, I think Harprea is smart as hell. And I think if she had really been miserable, she would have left. And I guess my only thought is that like, a date is not let me tell you about this thing. A date is maybe let's each tell each other about a thing. Yeah. If we can go back in time, time travel, we can do this date again. Oh, let's see it happen. And they can each give their presentation and then they will live happily ever after if they so choose to. Endless Thread is a production of WBUR in Boston.

It was produced by Nieder. Are you trying to say his name backwards? Yeah. This episode was produced by Dean Russell. It was co-hosted by Ben Brock Johnson and... Anne-Marie Siebertson. Mix and sound design by Emily Jenkowski. The rest of our team is Caitlin Harrop,

Summata Joshie, Franny Monaghan, Matt Reed, Grace Tatter, and Paul Vikis. If you have a PowerPoint presentation that you want us to hear, invite us out. We'll give you one as well. Take us out for a spritz flight to cry it out loud. It's about time, don't you think? Yeah.

Yeah, just email endless thread at wbUR.org. That's how the best day is start. You don't even have to call her text. You can just email us. It's fine. Ah. Ugh.