Good morning Hank, it’s Tuesday.

My mustache is back! It’s a Pizzamas miracle.

Remember, not all miracles are good. This video was filmed in the past because I am scheduled to be away from my computer and all other electronic devices for a period of about 72 hours, which will be the longest I have gone without cyborging myself through a computer power since around 2006. But we’re not here to talk about how the machines have already taken over, we’re to talk about how bad current me is at predicting what life 8 days from now will look like.

But first off, go to Pizzamas.com and get your Pizzamas gear. All of this amazingness is only available for the next few days and all of our proceeds go to charity. Once again, that’s Pizzamas.com.

Ok, that’s the end of the ad. Ok so I am currently living in the late morning of October 5th, 2020, 8 days before this video will be uploaded. And today I’m going to try to predict what the future you are living in will look like.

Now, 8 days is not a hugely long period of time. But nonetheless, my predictions will be pretty terrible. There are some areas where I can use modeling and extensive data to predict what life 8 days from now will look like.

For instance, I can be fairly confident that on your today it is unseasonably warm in Indianapolis. Similarly, it is a reasonably well informed guess to predict that the number of newly diagnosed COVID cases in the United States was higher yesterday than it was a week earlier, probably by around 10-12%. And I can predict about how many people are going to buy this Pizza John shirt today, probably around 40.

Although don’t be afraid to beat that expectation. Then we get to places where I have some data, but not enough to make a confident prediction. Like what happened in AFC’s Wimbledon’s game against Swindon Town that happened in your past but my future.

I think we might eke out a draw based on current form, but that’s a guess. And then we have guesses based on scheduled events, like for instance I know there’s a presidential debate upcoming. I suspect that in your present that’s being much discussed.

But whatever has happened, I suspect that the news of my morning will feel like the very distant past, not like 8 days ago. For the record, this morning the main news was that the president of the United States has been hospitalized for COVID and many people close to him have contracted the illness after a series of indoor maskless gatherings. Even though that feels like very big news to me, I suspect that it is not big news to you, because the news cycles are moving much faster.

Speaking of which, there are also the vague predictions that will always be accurate. Like I predict that 8 days from now, Twitter and Reddit and Facebook will be absolute dumpster fires that I will be unable to stop refreshing until and unless. I physically remove my body from the internet.

And I predict that those platforms will continue to recognize that usage goes up when people feel uncertainty and fear, and so the feeds that they choose to show us will increase our feelings of uncertainty and fear. And I predict that we will like there is cause for alarm, and I also predict that there will be cause for alarm. And we’ll all be left wondering whether the chicken of algorithms wanting us to be scared so as to better capture and monetize our attention, came before or after the egg of our political, social, and economic instability.

But what all these predictions have in common is they say more about the present where I’m living, than they say about the future where you’re living. What’s really freaking me out about the future these days is not the things I know I don’t know, like the AFC Wimbledon score, for instance. What freaks me out are the unknown unknowns.

The things I can’t know I don’t know, like in. November of 2019 I could have never imagined that AFC Wimbledon wouldn’t win a single game in. April of 2020.

Not because they played poorly, but because there was no football. And that is what makes the future really hard to look at right now, so I’m trying not to look at it that much to be honest with you. Have any unknowable unknowns come to pass in the last 8 days?

You know better than I do. Regardless, I hope you’re doing ok, and I hope I’m doing ok too, so far away from the internet. Hank, I’ll see you tomorrow.