Good morning, John.  That's the River Thames.  

It was named that by the Celts, or it was named something close to that.  It's literally from a Sanskrit word.  We can feel the age of this place linguistically, but that's true of a lot of words, like for example, the word 'linguistics' is rooted in a word for 'tongue' that stretches back even before Sanskrit, but the Thames hasn't just been there in name.  It's actually been there the whole time.  It was there before it was called the Thames.  It was there when the first people came, when the Celts came, when the Romans came, when the Normans came, and during that entire time, up until about 50 years ago, it was the default garbage dump for all of those people.  

Got something you don't want?  Throw it in the Thames.  Another important bit of context here, the Thames is a tidal river.  It's close enough to the ocean that its levels are affected by the tides so sometimes it's full and sometimes it empties out and during those times when it empties, there are places where the shore gets exposed and in that mud you can find the leavings of millennia.  Coins, pipes, bottles, pottery shards, musketballs, toothbrushes, human remains.

John, right now, I'm on my way to see a mudlark, the self-assigned name for people who walk in muddy places in England to see what they can find.  This mudlark has a YouTube channel, link in the description, and I watch that channel and I love it and I find myself in the enviable position of being able to fairly easily get in touch with and meet the YouTube creators that I absolute lovely, so I wanted to do it.  

Oh, here we are!  

Do your neighbors know you're a weirdo?

Nicola: They don't know.  Well, I mean, they kind of know.  They don't know about this weird room.  

Hank: It's a secret weird room.  Is that a horse?

Nicola: Yes, that's a horse skull.  It could well be Roman.  You know, 90% of this has been washed up by the river, just a few things.

Hank: Look at all your pipes.  

Nicola: Oh gosh, that's just a few.  Oh, see, now I've got some lovely Roman pottery.  

Hank: Oh my God.

Nicola: A Roman pot here from well, probably from 200 AD.  You know, just to think, you know, that it's survived so long.

Hank: Just give your child some lead.

Nicola: Yeah, to chew on.  This is an old Victorian baby bottle.  Just a perfect breeding ground for bacteria so that it was just terrible for babies to be given the milk in this.  

Hank: But it is okay to have the worst looking Teletubby.

Nicola: Oh, yes. [laughing] I had to get him out.

Nicola: Yeah, it is nice, isn't it, (?~2:41)

Hank: For a thing that is--that you're just gonna throw away.

N: I know.  I was delighted when I put that out of the wood.  

H: I believe you.  

I'm in London for VidCon and it's hard not to feel the context of history in this place.  I know that's probably not true if you live here, unless you're the kind of person who dips their hand into the banks of the Thames river to see what comes out, but I feel it and it's also hard for me not to feel the history of my own life and my own industry and work when I'm at VidCon, and it's good to have a chance to think about what we will leave and are leaving behind.  How much more we are creating and what pieces of it will be found in the future and what they will mean to the people who find them.  I don't think about that a lot.  It's probably best not to think about it too much, but maybe I should think about it some.  

John, I'll see you on Tuesday.  

Yeah, I'm in the airport hotel so I gotta wait for a spell.  There's something high in the sky, I'm waiting for the plane to go by.  Waiting for the plane to go by.  Waiting for the plane to go by.  There's people flying in the sky, so I'm waiting for the plane to go by.