Cyrano de Bergerac

Do you think these Coca-Vine, Bullaboss, Ratatouille, Quiche Lorraine, macaron-eating fucks care about the National Football League? They're just trying to survive their businesses and buildings from being burnt down.

I haven't seen a fire like this in France since 2019 when Cyrano de Bergerac was trying to romance Roxanne, took a drag of a cigarette, flicked it as far as he could, and set the Notre Dame of Paris aflame.

The good news is, Casey, is that I'm told that the anarchists are nice, misunderstood, and are just looking for some Bitcoin shares.

All is well.

The proof that stories get there first, after all, is extraordinary.

Cyrano de Bergerac imagined sequences of firecrackers powering a machine toward the moon 300 years before a rocket ever did.

Ray Bradbury described little seashells, the thimble radios tamped tight nearly half a century before wireless headphones filled ears everywhere.

And there are coinages writers might live or not live long enough to regret, make America great again, and both the idea and phrase atomic bomb, both made their debut in novels.

It has its roots in our social, political, and economic surroundings, in our physical, mental, and psychic capacities.

Did not the fate of Cyrano de Bergerac lie in his gigantic nose? With others, fate lies in their vocation in life, in their mental and emotional tendencies, which either submerge them into the hurry and rush of a commonplace existence or bring them into the most annoying conflicts with the dicta of society.

Indeed, it is often seen that a human being, apparently of a cheerful nature, but who has failed to establish a durable relation with society, often leads a most tragic inner life.

Should he find the cause in his own inclinations and suffer agonizing reproaches therefrom, he becomes a misanthrope.

[upbeat music] Hey, what's going on everybody? Welcome to another Saturday conundrum.

This Saturday, we're talking about the Cyrano in your ear conundrum, and that's Cyrano as in Cyrano de Bergerac, uh, the famous story of the poet who is whispering all the right things to say into a guy's ear so he can win the girl, right? But what we're talking about is the idea that sort of everybody has a Cyrano in their ear, and what I'm talking about is wearables, essentially.

So we already know about meta glasses.

We, we know about other, you know, pendants that have come out and stuff, but this is a Brian take on this, but it's my personal feeling that these are gonna become ubiquitous.

We're looking at fresh news articles from literally just this week, mid-October 2026, from Business Insider, The Verge, The Guardian.

Plus, uh, we're diving into a bunch of peer-reviewed psychological and sociological research and some really tricky EU and US regulatory texts.

Because the tech has evolved from a tool you consult into what's basically a modern Cyrano de Bergerac scenario.

Yes.

Yeah, I've been ganging, uh, gagging on the 20 pound weight, working my way up to 50.

You have some sort of Cyrano de Bergerac kinda guy next to you telling you [laughs] what to say and stuff?

Hell yeah.

Hey man, you know what?

Get my qualifications next week.

Yeah, you know, you got, you need all the help one can get, you know? You got, you got your own Cyrano de Bergerac.

You ever see Roxanne?

Roxanne?

Oh, yeah, I can do that.

I, I could be like your, um, what's that called? Cyrano de Bergerac.

Yes.

Oh, yeah.

With Steve Martin? Roseanne Roseanne, with Steve Martin.

He plays basically a modern-day Cyrano de Bergerac.

Yeah.

Do you know that character or no?

It was a long, convoluted way to get there, but I got there, damn it.

Nailed it.

Cyrano de Bergerac.

Yeah.

Well, we can laugh about some of these fantastical science fiction ideas, but you write about some ideas that seemed crazy at first but eventually came true.

For example, you write about French novelist Cyrano de Bergerac, who in the 1650s imagined a book for the ears, a device that sounds a lot like the phonograph which indeed arrived two centuries later.

To what extent did you come across ideas like that that may have seemed strange to contemporaries at the time, but then later became actual objects?

Often you can see an orienting desire, a desire that is there for a very long time before the technology does exist to match.