Why did DJ Khaled say “have you ever played rugby?”

One hallmark of the modern era is that each of us is always temporarily haunted by a particular video, and for the last week, mine has been this clip of DJ Khaled hearing the name of a shrimp dish and then asking “have you ever played rugby?” 

I’m not alone in being momentarily obsessed with this video; countless comments revel in its absurdity, there are t-shirts, and at least one swaggering child has made a perfect tribute. But nobody seems to care why the video exists in the first place. Sometimes we have to accept that things don’t happen for any satisfying reason, but this is not one of those times. Our minds crave order, and I crave an explanation for why DJ Khaled said this particular wild thing instead of any other combination of words he may have called upon in that moment. Let’s consider the following possibilities:

DJ Khaled lacks self-awareness and it’s futile to assign intent to anything he says

Certainly, some people think that Khaled is a buffoon who is only unintentionally funny (or not funny at all). I disagree, but I also don’t think it would be a satisfying origin story for “rugby” or any other Khaled catchphrase. I’ve always felt like I’m laughing with Khaled, not at him – and similarly, laughing at this video feels like laughing at a joke, not at a situation.

Some aspect the scene made him think about rugby

Is there some connection between shrimp and rugby? Does the server look like a famous rugby player? Is the cameraman wearing a rugby jersey? I don’t know much about rugby, so I can’t thoroughly evaluate this one. But I don’t think this is the answer – the video’s virality is at least partly due to its apparent randomness.

He had rugby on the brain and couldn’t wait for it to come up organically

Who among us has not committed a similar social faux pas? Maybe you’ve just read something interesting and you’re thinking about that when you really should be responding to what’s happening in front of you, and so you blurt out “Cleopatra was alive closer to the invention of the iPhone than to the construction of the Great Pyramid” or whatever the thing is. It happens, everyone looks sort of embarrassed to have been part of the interaction, and you move on. But that’s not what happens here. Khaled smiles confidently as he says the line – it doesn’t seem like an accident. He meant to say this particular thing, which leads us to:

Just another day in the content mines

Of course, this is not the first instant-classic DJ Khaled catchphrase. At this point, he’s more famous for short motivational videos and memorable quotes than he is for being a DJ, and he’s always making videos. Most of them, though, are fairly straightforward, even if they’re very funny – he’ll be at a restaurant eating lobster and say “tell ‘em to bring out the whole ocean” four times in a row, or he’ll show up in a golf outfit and say “let’s go golfing” four times in a row (repetition is key). The best Khaled videos are all silly, but the catchphrases are usually clearly correlated with the content of the video. I can’t put “rugby” in the same category. It’s content, yes, but there has to be more going on. 

DJ Khaled is a character played by an actor of the same name

Technically DJ Khaled’s real name is Khaled Khaled, but maybe he’s doing a Stephen Colbert. The comment sections of Khaled videos are mostly filled with other Khaled catchphrases, but there are also comments saying things like “there’s no way this dude is real.” They mean it figuratively, but what if it’s literally correct? There are lots of straightforward Khaled videos that could just be a naturally funny and somewhat oblivious guy repeating catchphrases into the void like a human soundboard, but there are also videos that border on performance art. Take this interview, where Khaled explains why he hasn’t lost weight despite his many gym-related videos (“I don’t lose, you know what I’m saying, all I do is win”). Or the greatest Hot Ones episode of all time, where Khaled taps out early and insists knowing his own limits is a moral victory (fair). Or this clip where he repeatedly mispronounces “jewelry” until it goads the interviewers into a reaction, upon which Khaled smirks and moves on. To me, this is the work of a professional comedian. Yes, everyone is sort of playing a character online, and famous “content creators” are doing it way more than everyday people. But I think DJ Khaled has crossed the line between exaggerated version of a real person (Like Karl Pilkington in An Idiot Abroad or Michael Jordan in Space Jam) and fictional character. A real human being does not hear “shrimp shumai” and say “have you ever played rugby?” But a comedic character designed to make people laugh and make videos go viral? Absolutely. The key difference is intent – Stephen Colbert, the conservative anchor of The Colbert Report, is not trying to be funny, but the actor Stephen Colbert is. Ali G is not trying to be funny, but Sacha Baron Cohen is. I think that’s what’s going on with DJ Khaled. DJ Khaled is a clown, but the real Khaled Mohammed Khaled is in on the joke. 

Whichever explanation for “rugby” you prefer, I suppose there are multiple ways to enjoy DJ Khaled videos – maybe he’s just a guy living his life and saying whatever he feels like saying, or maybe he’s a calculating comedic genius playing a character intended to make us laugh. Maybe your opinion of DJ Khaled and the level of intent behind his catchphrases affects the way you watch the videos, or maybe that doesn’t matter to you at all. That’s right, this has been yet another post about artist’s intent, gottem

It was never about running from the grind

It’s good to take career advice from professional athletes, right? Maybe not, but I do think sports can give us interesting ways to think about decisions we encounter in regular life. What can Damian Lillard teach us about finding a new job?

It’s likely that many of you reading this are familiar with the context, but just in case, here’s a short primer on the history of “running from the grind,” a perfectly memeable and succinct phrase that’s become common in NBA discourse, especially conversations involving Damian Lillard or the Portland Trail Blazers. 

Lillard was drafted in 2012 by Portland, and, as of this writing, has only ever played for the Blazers. In an era defined by superstar team-ups and breakneck player movement, Lillard has publicly expressed loyalty to the Trail Blazers on multiple occasions, often expressing his intention to retire with the organization. Portland has been good or decent for most of Lillard’s tenure there, but has never been a true championship contender – and the last couple of years, the team has been bad despite Lillard’s brilliance. Lillard, known around the NBA as a great leader and deadly clutch performer, is a seven-time all-star and one of the most exciting players in league, but he’s not the kind of reality-bending superstar whose mere presence on a team demands championship aspirations.

In 2019, Lillard’s deep buzzer-beater in the first round of the playoffs sent the Oklahoma City Thunder home and the Blazers to the second round. Paul George, the closest Thunder defender, was obviously frustrated in his postgame press conference. “That’s a bad shot. I don’t care what anybody says. That’s a bad shot. But, hey, he made it.”

That was the last play of George’s stint in OKC, as he requested and received a trade to the LA Clippers shortly after that playoff exit. He and Lillard continued to trade curt remarks in press conferences and on social media, usually after their teams played each other.

On August 8th, 2020, the simmering beef resulted in a now-legendary piece of Lillard lore. Via Instagram, the famously loyal Lillard said “Keep switching teams…running from the grind. You boys is chumps.” (The other chump was, of course, Patrick Beverley). 

For the last couple years, Lillard trade chatter has been getting louder. The narrative has been that Portland failed to ever build a contender around Dame, and that he’d be justified in asking for a trade so that he can chase a championship elsewhere, with a better roster supporting him. Until recently, Lillard had been reluctant to request a trade publicly or privately, whether out of continued loyalty or a desire to maintain his image, or some combination of both. Lillard has said in the past that he’d love to win a championship, but that winning isn’t the only important thing. He’s a legend in Portland – would it really be so bad to finish out his career there, mentoring younger players, and never winning a title? For years, NBA fans (and, it seemed, Lillard) agreed that there were worse fates.

But now, it seems like Lillard might be on the move. Or he might not. But this whole conversation has me thinking about the idea of “running from the grind” and, uh, what it means to us in our everyday lives and careers. I don’t think professional sport is a regular job and I don’t think it’s fair to view players or teams through that lens, but I do think the idea of running from the grind, or not, is universal.

In its original context, Lillard meant “the grind” to be sticking it out in your current situation, working hard, and hopefully seeing results that would be even more fulfilling because of the journey you took to get there. By teaming up with Kawhi Leonard in LA, Paul George was “running from the grind,” taking a shortcut to success, and skipping out on the honest work of making your own team into the kind of place others would want to run towards. 

The reason I find Lillard’s original jab fascinating is that “the grind” could just as easily mean the opposite of what he meant by it. Lillard had (has?) it pretty good in Portland – he’s a beloved star who is mostly free from the burden of championship expectations. Blazers fans have widely accepted that he won’t win a title, and most everyone’s cool with it. It’s easy to imagine that as a better, less grind-y situation than that of Kevin Durant, whose career is defined by decisions informed by legacy and public perception. That Durant keeps “running from the grind” is proof that the weight of expectations is the grind. Maybe the grind is bouncing around from team to team, desperate to prove something, never letting roots take hold? Maybe it’s focusing on success at the expense of everything else that might make you happy? Maybe there wasn’t a grind to run from in Portland?

Sports dialogue, and specifically NBA discussion, is all about rings, Ernie. That discussion always downplays how difficult it is to win a ring, and how much luck is involved. Only one team wins a ring each year – does every player on every other team feel like a failure? Some do, some don’t. It all depends on goals and expectations. Fans and media like to think that the only goal, the only expectation, is a championship. But it’s not, and for a long time Damian Lillard was an example of a fulfilling path that didn’t lead to a championship. 

So I think ‘the grind’ means something different to everyone, based on our priorities. I recently changed jobs, and one thing I found tremendously helpful was writing (and never sending) an “honest cover letter” that plainly stated aspects of a job that were important to me. It forced me to think about priorities in a way I hadn’t in the past – real cover letters often focus so much on what we can offer to a company that we don’t seriously consider what we want out of the arrangement.

I think Lillard assessed his priorities and found that they had changed since he told PG to keep running from the grind. He’s not running from the grind now, it’s just that something else has become the grind. Before, the situation in Portland was great and the idea of being a basketball mercenary didn’t seem desirable in comparison. But now, playing in Portland with a young, developing roster seems like a chore, and going to Miami to compete for a ring sounds better. 

What can we learn from Lillard? In typical irrational confidence fashion, my takeaway is something that sounds obvious but gets complicated in practice. In order to go where we want to be in life and work, we have to understand what we want. If you feel unfulfilled, it might be because, like Lillard, your priorities have changed and you haven’t realized it yet. Only by knowing our own priorities can we decide whether to stay a current job or look for a new one (or choose between multiple opportunities). It’s not easy, but we need to define what the grind is so we can run from it.

The Rehearsal is an infinity mirror illusion

Creative works take many different paths to greatness. Sometimes they crystallize abstract feelings in ways that feel both universal and personal. Sometimes they capture a moment in cultural history. Sometimes they make absolutely no sense at all, but in a way that accurately reflects the way in which modern life makes no sense at all. My favorite piece of media from 2022, an HBO TV show called The Rehearsal, falls into this last category.

My favorite media experiences tend to be those with no obvious point of comparison, and The Rehearsal is no exception. It’s a “reality show” in constant chaos; it’s also a meticulously crafted narrative. Any attempt to describe the show is futile. It’s about trying to prepare for everything and why that’s impossible, I guess. But this is like describing The Lord of the Rings as a book about birthday parties.

I’ve read other reviews, but none of them quite capture what makes The Rehearsal so special. Yes, it’s a bizarre dissection of the difference between performance and authenticity; yes, it’s about the way anxiety cultivates subtle narcissism; yes, it’s constantly pulling at the edges of its format and inviting us to think about why it’s doing any of this. But I don’t think that’s quite what makes The Rehearsal such a unique experience.

The Rehearsal is a self-contained media ouroboros. Doritos were a chip, which led to Doritos Locos Tacos, and then Doritos Locos Tacos-flavored Doritos. Mean Girls was a movie (based on a book), and then a musical, and will soon be another movie based on the musical. The Rehearsal understands that life can feel like everything exists between two mirrors, and we’re all watching identical copies of everything recede into infinity in both directions. Showing remarkable restraint, the show waits a whole episode before turning a mirror on itself and cannibalizing the idea of plot in favor of metanarrative and structural deconstruction.

To the extent that The Rehearsal has a traditional plot, it’s about creator Nathan Fielder arranging elaborate simulations so that he can practice raising a child (and this is a gross oversimplification, even though the plot is largely unimportant). But plot is just the scaffolding that allows the show to unravel whichever theme it’s most interested in at any given moment. I find it annoying when stories feint towards realism only to have themes manifest at the end as something supernatural (looking your way, Sorry to Bother You), and while The Rehearsal never strays away from realism and it informs the viewer almost immediately that it’s going to be strange, it does literalize its themes. This literalization is the entire concept of the show, rather than a twist ending.

For instance, at one point Fielder teaches a class about acting, ostensibly preparing actors to play parts in the child-raising simulation. But when he notices one of the students seems disengaged, he stages a second acting class, with himself playing the part of the disengaged student. In this role, he starts noticing the weirdness of it all. Why do we need special training to play these parts? Is it ethical to shadow real people so that we can replicate their mannerisms and say what they would say? Why are there cameras in the classroom? Is this part of the show? If it is, what is the show about?

The Rehearsal pulls back the curtain on its process just enough to get us asking the questions it wants us to ask. When a character says something a little too wild, or a little too perfect, we are pushed to wonder: was that person an actor or an innocent bystander? How did editing shape the way we saw that interaction? Why don’t we ask those questions of every piece of media that presents itself as reality?

That acting class situation is just the first beat of an episode that scrutinizes the fine line between reality and performance. And the show examines several different themes with equal commitment. As I mentioned above, it tackles anxiety, control, and emotional numbness in ways that are truly affecting as the last episode comes to a close. And the unifying thread through all of it is the show’s maniacal dedication to deconstructivism. Above all, The Rehearsal is about itself.

And that’s what I think it so interesting about The Rehearsal. It’s six episodes of this Stewart Lee bit; it spends nearly its whole runtime dissecting itself by layering on new perspectives, a bottomless version of the reaction video gag in Bo Burnham’s Inside.

Most normal reviews of The Rehearsal dedicate plenty of space to the resume of its creator and star, Nathan Fielder, and to the lineage from which this show springs, but I think the show works better as a monolith. I found The Rehearsal instantly captivating; I found Fielder’s previous show, Nathan for You, nearly unbearable (despite is preoccupation with many of the same themes that show up in The Rehearsal). In my opinion this thing should be consumed as a standalone piece of art.

The Rehearsal is a universe unto itself. Commitment to the bit is more important than the bit itself. The format is the content. Everything is surrounded by mirrors.

Pasta sauce recipe

This story is about a house. It’s about moving in and learning to live somewhere new. 

I had moved many times before, of course, but I always forget how tiring it is – how all the little inconveniences build and intertwine in whichever ways will fray my nerves and make simple tasks feel unbearably heavy. How could I have forgotten to leave out a towel? Where’s the screwdriver I used three minutes ago? Was that scuff on the wall there yesterday?

I wasn’t sleeping very well. Everything sounded wrong. The groan of an unfamiliar furnace, the creak of old stairs I didn’t yet trust. Aren’t floors supposed to be level and stiff, instead of uneven and spongy? I found myself avoiding certain spots on the upper floor, stepping around them as if this house that had stood for forty years were waiting for me to finally give in. It took all my energy to keep moving forward, to keep unpacking, to keep from crumbling. I delayed doing laundry because it felt like too much effort, and because I was sure the washing machine was one cycle away from grinding to a halt and dumping water all over the floor. I went days and then weeks without cooking a proper meal. 

It had only been a year or so since I’d last moved, but already the memories of how I’d felt then were inaccessible to me. I couldn’t remember if the last move had caused this much distress. I certainly didn’t remember lying awake until I was too tired to keep my eyes open, waiting for an electrical fire or burst pipe or collapsed floor joist. I had obviously made it through somehow, and it was frustrating that whatever fortitude or emotional stability my past self possessed was somehow locked away, unavailable even as study material. Trying to remember how I’d felt a year ago was like hearing a story about somebody else who’d moved and been completely fine. Useless. 

And this became another layer of angst atop the house itself – I realized that I have always had a problem drawing meaningful resolve or insight from past versions of myself. I remember things that happened to me and details about what I saw or experienced, or I remember describing those things later – but I so rarely remember how those experiences felt. There are self-help books about living in the moment, but I seem incapable of doing anything else. Past and future selves are strangers. 

Futile as it might be, I found myself dwelling on those inscrutable past selves as I carried out the tiring, meditative labor of unpacking boxes and organizing drawers. Folding clothes and uncovering forgotten keepsakes.

Team-building

Imagine you’re putting a team together. This could be any kind of team you can think of: a world-saving crew of former street racers, a basketball squad, a startup company, a Dungeons and Dragons party, whatever. How do you go about choosing the team members? How do you assign roles to maximize their strengths? 

Let’s explore these questions and challenge some conventional team-building wisdom with a simple visual framework often seen in video games. We can think of every team as having a stat distribution that can be graphed on the chart below – this is just a visual indicator of how good our team is at certain things that the team needs to be good at. 

For a Fast and Furious style crew, we might choose to look at these five characteristics:

1. driving
2. fighting
3. charisma
4. intelligence
5. trustworthiness

For a basketball team, maybe we choose 

1. shooting
2. on-ball defense
3. shot creation
4. off-ball defense 
5. ballhandling

For any team, there will be more than five relevant metrics; five is just a manageable number to keep the graphics clean and easy to follow. And for any team, the ideal stat distribution (obviously) is to be great at everything:

So the overall team building goal is to get our graphic looking as similar to the one above as we possibly can. How do we start building the team and filling in our graph? Each member of the team has strengths and weaknesses that can be represented with the same framework. And like with the collective team, the best possible stat distribution for an individual looks like the one below.

The frail beauty of curiosities without context, part 2: artist’s intent

In November of last year, a team of biologists discovered a ten-foot-tall metal sculpture in the desert of eastern Utah. You might remember the news story – the delightfully dubbed “Utah monolith” fascinated people around the world (for about a week; there was other stuff competing for our attention). I recently looked up the sculpture on a whim, and was happy to learn that its origin is still a mystery.

Even if you’re familiar with the story, I highly recommend checking out this all-time-great Wikipedia article about the monolith. I could spend this entire post basking in the narrative drama this supposedly neutral article cultivates, but instead, I’ll highlight only my favorite elements: the evocative use of past tense, the phrase “unlawfully placed on public land,” the way the first subheading (discovery) glosses right over the sculpture’s creation, the subheading “legality,” and the description of sculptor John McCracken (whose work is cited as a possible inspiration for the monolith) as someone who “lived in the southwestern desert, believed in the existence of extraterrestrials, and expressed an interest in leaving behind a piece of artwork in the desert.” (Actually, I can’t leave that line alone. Just masterful writing. It’s possible that this description of McCracken is true and paints an accurate picture of who he was, but I absolutely love the idea of just listing three disparate attributes about someone that, together, present an obvious implication that might be completely wrong. If I’m ever described in a Wikipedia article, I want it to be as someone who “never felt at home under cloudless skies, believed in the power of selective apathy, and frequently expressed a desire to escape the tyranny of monthly fixed expenses.”)

The Utah monolith is the kind of mystery that I’ve written about before; the kind that ought to be reveled in before rationality erodes its wonder. But unlike Fred, who was without context only by the happenstance of my own experience, the monolith seems to have been specifically designed to lack context. We now know the sculpture was installed in 2016; it waited quietly for years before its discovery and brief life in the public eye. This origin story, in addition to being very cool, strips away much of the normal metadata we use to process art. The monument’s creator is unknown. At first, its age was unclear. Even its location wasn’t obviously important to the piece itself; was the monolith installed in this remote Utah canyon for any particular reason other than to delay its discovery and obscure the circumstances of its creation? 

Location is often so essential to sculpture – and I’m fascinated by art that plays with or inverts the relationship of artwork and setting, like Donald Judd’s untitled concrete frames or Nancy Holt’s Sun Tunnels. But the Utah monolith strikes me as fundamentally different from this genre of sculpture, whose primary goal is to act as a focus for its surroundings. The monolith feels like the object, not the context. It’s a mystery made more compelling by the lack of contextual information. The fact that its creator still hasn’t attempted to claim credit suggests that they understand, and perhaps intended, the pull of this mystery. 

A new fantasy sport – the NBA stock market

I love fantasy basketball, but lots of people say they prefer fantasy football because it’s easier to understand. I’d like to propose a new kind of fantasy sport for people who either think fantasy football is too complicated or think fantasy basketball is not complicated enough. Since it’s basketball season, I’m going to use basketball as an example – but this format could be applied to any sport.

If you like the idea of fantasy sports but aren’t deep into statistics, this idea is for you. It’s a fantasy basketball stock market. The stats don’t matter – all that matters is how other people value the players. Say you’re in a ten-person league. Your goal is, given an initial budget of fake money, to invest in basketball players and have the most money at the end of the season. This is fun because if you like a player and want to follow him, just buy some stock – multiple people can have stock in a single player. But we’re getting ahead of ourselves – the basic mechanism of this game would be as follows:

My favorite albums of 2020

It’s 5:21, and it’s dark outside. It looks like it might rain, but I know it won’t. The deadline is in a week, and even though I’m as focused as I’ve been all year, I notice the headlights pass by outside. The heater’s on, but it’s always cold here by the window. I’m in an oversized, ten-year-old hoodie, under a blanket. My phone lies forgotten an arm’s length away. All that matters is finishing the list. I have a week to get everything done.

It’s 7:50, and I’m back in front of the computer after a break for dinner and to watch an episode of The Great British Baking Show with Julie. This is how it’s been for a couple weeks, and that part’s nice. Working, scrambling, all day, but knowing that I get a couple hours in the evening to rest, and to root for charming amateur bakers who are also racing against the clock. I’m reluctant to get back to work, but I slide quickly and easily into a flow. I don’t have any choice.

It’s 10:13, and Julie’s asleep. So, I assume, are our upstairs neighbors, since the traditional thunks and knocks have subsided. My laptop’s volume is set to two, where I’m confident the speakers won’t disturb anyone. I haven’t even unplugged those speakers in a couple days, because I’ve been working exclusively from home since mid-November. I’m listening to Punisher by Phoebe Bridgers – it’s the album I’ve spent the most time with this year, and it’s definitely the one that feels most appropriate to soundtrack these late nights and tired eyes. I just want to go to bed, but I can’t. I’m miserable, but it could be worse; at least this exhaustion and frustration is not directly of my own doing. There’s a measure of freedom in that, and in the imposition of priority. In any case, I only have to play this character for seven more days. A character who cares enough about a job well done to actually complete it. Who won’t burn out just yet.

Like always, I harbor an unspoken hope that I just need to make it to the deadline. That once I reach that milestone, the universe will speak to me and say, “congratulations – you made it. You’ve lived thirty years and mostly done your best. You didn’t cause any great harm on purpose and you went about things as honestly as possible, given the circumstances. But it’s over now. This was the last hurdle. You couldn’t have been expected to put up with all that for another fifty years, could you?”

Dorm room philosophy: Neuralink and memory

Elon Musk’s company Neuralink recently livestreamed a “product update” for their forthcoming wireless brain implant. This is an absolutely wild sentence, even though there won’t be an available “product” for quite a while – Musk presented a concept for a brain-surgery robot that would be able to install the implant in under an hour, and Neuralink showed off real-time brain activity signals from a pig with the implant. The presentation was full of harrowing sentences like “it fits quite nicely within the thickness of your skull” and “there will be no noticeable neurological damage.” Musk touched on applications from controlling a smartphone with your mind to curing full-body paralysis to treating neurochemical disorders like depression. But the offhand claim that stood out most to me, and seemingly to many people on the internet, was Musk’s affirmative response to the viewer-submitted question of whether Neuralink would eventually allow people to “save and replay memories.”

This is a fascinating and alluring concept. Memories change and fade over time – imagine being able to encode a memory minutes after it happened and relive it years later, untainted by time. Or imagine getting to experience other people’s memories, or to feel someone else’s emotional response to something you’ve only ever experienced as yourself. For the optimists among us, such a technology could lead to a golden age of self-awareness and empathy. Of course, that technology could just as easily be used to mislead, or control, or force people to watch ads to unlock smells. But before that conversation becomes urgent, we need to know if saving and replaying memories via brain implant is actually possible. And most of the internet, it seems, has decided that it isn’t. Twitter isn’t to be taken seriously, but I saw many versions of this criticism on there: “a brain isn’t a computer. You can’t just save and replay memories – that’s not how memory works.” Pop science outlets like Wired and Technology Review echoed the sentiment, saying that Musk was confusing metaphors for practical realities, or that reading brain activity and using it to move a robotic hand is a far cry from manipulating abstract thoughts like emotions or memories.

Dorm room philosophy: constellations

Take a look at the numbers below, and see if you can figure out the pattern. Before you read on, really give it a try – but don’t worry, I’ll take you through my thought process even if you don’t put in too much effort.

852 375

230 801

585 903

155 536