It's the end of the year, so let's take stock of 2024 with a big ol' year-in-review monologue! Your intrepid/decrepit host, Gil Roth, gets personal while talking about what he's learned from the podcast & his guests this year, how they continue to change each other's lives, the moment he found his Spirit Jacket, his communion with a Roman sculpture, the validation of his year-long photo-book project, the joy of hiking the Catskills with an old friend, a big work-anniversary, the thrilling circumstances of his debilitating neck injury, the best non-clinical moment you can have in an oncology setting, the new addition to the Virtual Memories family, his 2025 wants, and above all, the question of whether a person can really change (and okay, above that, the question of what 'change' means). Follow Gil on Bluesky, Instagram, and LinkedIn • More info at our site • Support The Virtual Memories Show via Patreon or Paypal and via our e-newsletter
The Virtual Memories Show
Episode 619 - 2024 Recap
(upbeat music) - So welcome to the 2024 recap/wrapup episode of the virtual memories show. Rather than do an interview this week or conversation, we're gonna have a conversation with myself, frankly. I, well, my whole thing is I'm obsessive-compulsive and lots of interesting and, well, really boring ways. This is gonna be the 50th episode of the year, not including two bonus episodes I did. And because I've got this fixation on round numbers, I couldn't possibly let last week's 49th episode be the last one. So you're getting Gil talking to himself for a while and some of you guys seem to dig that. So I hope you'll stick around for it. Now, as I mentioned, this is the 50th legit episode of the year that is one that actually gets numbered as opposed to the bonus ones that don't, blah, blah, blah. I've also done two newsletters a week, so 100 plus of those. I've posted way too many selfies on Instagram to count, but this is all part of 2024 and what a recap means. According to the Marriott website, I spent 31 nights in their hotels this year. There were a few non-Mariot stays also. So more than a month of the year was spent traveling and in hotels, almost all of that was for business, although my wife and I did get away to Toronto over July 4th weekend for, well, record a couple of podcasts, see some friends and just get away from America for a bit. I also traveled for the show, for the podcast. Again, some of that was tied into travel. Other stuff was Gil driving out on his own. Sorry, the locations when I went over the list of people I recorded with this year includes New York City, Los Angeles, Providence, Rhode Island, upstate New York several times, New Haven, Connecticut, Toronto, Hull, Amherst, Wellfleet, and Boston, Massachusetts, and Princeton, New Jersey. I've already traveled to Philadelphia for several of 2025 shows, so you'll probably end up hearing about that when this sort of episode runs up again next December. So what I wanna tell you, first, I'm gonna generally avoid world situation. I'll probably allude to it in some way, shape or form, but I'm really not gonna go into what 2024 wrought in that respect. We'll talk about me and we'll talk about the show. I'll say last week I posted the guest list episode where I have a whole bunch of the past year's guests talk about the favorite books they read in the past year and who they hope to read in 2025. And I had my own monologue at the end of that and I talked about a bunch of books and podcast conversations that I'll say triggered a lot of changes in my life. And in case you didn't listen to those, that includes the ones with Edith Hall, Shalom Oslander, Joe Coleman, Simon Critchley, and a whole bunch of others. And their books and their, and the things they kind of triggered through the course of conversation led to some changes for me, like I was saying, some transformations. And I wanna talk about the notion of transformation and what it means for a person to change. We'll get to that. Every time I say we, of course, you're the passive listener here. It's just the royal we do and all is gabbing. But the books meant a lot to me this year. The guests I spoke to mattered in ways that maybe they hadn't in the past. Maybe I made connections that I wasn't ready to make previously. And also some of the extracurricular reading, like I also talked about in the guest list episode, like reading my struggle. The canals guard, not Hitler for the first time and some other things. I'll say I also had some really fruitful non podcast talks during the year with past guests, with people I've met through the show who I've stayed in touch with. And that's helped and created some more opportunities for change just a couple of days ago. I spoke with Jeff Nookawa, the Princeton professor who I recorded with in like 2016 or 2017 for a project that I'll talk about in a minute, but we had a really good talk about what I do with the show and what it means to put yourself out in the world and experience things. And I'll say there's been a whole bunch of others like Dean Haspiel, Jerry Saltz, these people who I've met through the show and with whom my experience is an ongoing conversations have sort of validated what I've been doing here. They have, I don't want to say they follow what I'm doing and they're not listening every week and they're not reading all the newsletters. It doesn't matter, they get that I'm doing this and that this is something bigger, that these things that I do add up to something. So the biggest and most important exchange I had for the past guest turned out to be with Jonathan Ames back in like October, November and I was going through some stuff with my father who was in significant health and mental decline and my reactions to that, which were strong, but not for reasons I could clarify to myself or enumerate exactly. I'm not going to go into too much detail here 'cause I'll end up crying and it's also a privacy thing, but I shared in an email with Ames some of what was going on and why I was kind of under the surface for a couple of days after this experience with my dad and he wrote something back to me a week or so later that helped me see something. That's been at the root of my personal issues and mental health for basically all my life and it helped. It really got me to see things differently because somebody with whom I had, we've Ames and I have talked a few times since we recorded a podcast. He grew up in the town next to mine here in Northern New Jersey, a little bit older than me. We never interacted when we were young, but we had some strange sympathy in each other's lives, it seems. And he really saw something in a way that I think not knowing me too well helped, like people who know me particularly well, like my brother and I could never have had this break through a realization that I had in this exchange with Ames because we know too many of the stories and because we have too many tendencies to just fall into certain patterns and conversation. So I thanked him profusely for all this and also thanked myself for being able to reach out and open up about something that was going on inside me instead of just internalizing as I had tended to do for all my life and creating that opportunity for him to see something and to offer up a couple of words that really changed things for me. Again, all of which is vague and elusive, I understand, but the point is not just the podcast, but the conversations that follow after the friendships that build the relationships and the network, which sounds formulaic, but what it means to make friends when you get older, I guess, that's part of it. Anyway, it's all been meaningful for me. Now, I talked about the podcast, the newsletter, some of the work travel and other stuff. The big thing that defined 2024 for me has been this book project that I've given myself. I was inspired and I've written about this and blabbed about it before, but I was inspired by the last guest I recorded with in 2023, Jared Earnest, the art critic. He put out a book called "Valid Until Sunset," which was a collection of his Polaroids on the left page and text on the right. And they were memoiristic in a lot of ways, written in the second person and other stuff. But anyway, I was inspired just by the parameters of what he had there, just the images and the text confined to essentially the same space, about three and three quarters inches by five inches when I've measured it because I'm making a book just like this, except very different writing, different subject matter. In this case, I gave myself the parameters of the pictures will only be from my in-person podcast sessions and drop-ins or hangouts with past guests during 2024 and the pictures will not be of the guests themselves but of something in the environment, whether it's an object or an emblem of theirs, a light coming through the window, whatever it is, it's not gonna be the person, but it's gonna be something and it'll be around that meeting with somebody I've met through the show. And I've been doing this. I started in late December. My wife bought me a mini Evo Fujifilm camera, which is digital and also kicks out Polaroids when you choose which ones to print. I'm probably gonna reproduce from the digital files instead of the printed and scanned ones, but whatever. The point is, I started doing this. I started taking these pictures and some of it is just that it's a different sort of lens and a different way of seeing them. We see with an iPhone or a smartphone camera, but also that it made me look, made me keep trying to see something and to see different things and to stop in the middle of a conversation and take a photo of the light coming through a window onto some bamboo shoots with bookshelf bisecting the frame, or stairs actually, diagonally bisecting a frame, just got me to see stuff differently. And I mentioned those drop-ins and hangouts where I would just go visit a past guest and shoot. And I came to realize, only in the last couple of weeks, when I've really blitzed to hit the magic number of these that I'm trying to get for the sake of the book, 78, so it'll be like a tarot. I'm a very different person when I'm dropping in on somebody without a podcast to record. 'Cause I kept thinking, I'll go in, I'll be there for three or four minutes with person X, take a picture and leave and not take up too much of their time and we would end up talking 30 to 40 minutes to an hour or whatever, and not recording and just talking like friends. And that's turned out to be incredibly, again, I'll say fruitful, meaningful to me, that these people, we don't have to have a couple of mics in front of us, but we can just keep talking. Keep the conversation going, as I say, at the end of every episode. So yeah, so I finished taking all the pictures yesterday. That was the final ones that I took, and I have to start writing next, which is gonna be, well, I consider doing the photos and hitting my magic number of photos to be like a scavenger hunt. That's challenging, but it's logistics and chasing stuff and planning. And that's my thing, man, but after this, I have to sit and write about each one of these. And I don't know what the writing is gonna be. Some of them might be referring to the thing itself that we're looking at or my history with a guest, but I don't know. Some of them might be more vague, oblique, elusive, whatever. I'm gonna find out. And that's scary and daunting and challenging, and it's also gonna be incredibly meaningful, even the ones that I've already started making notes for. I didn't know that something like this was in me exactly. There's gonna be a page in there, 'cause I took one outside of Milton Glaser's, the late Milton Glaser's studio, Friday, which was an incredible experience the whole day. But anyway, I wrote about it in the last newsletter. Go read that. Milton had an idea for what a book around the podcast should be. This is not that idea, but I think it's gonna be something. And more importantly, it's something only I could do. And that's what really has occurred to me in recent weeks or months around this, that everybody could do this. This is something only Gil can do. These are Gil's past guests. This is Gil's eye. These are Gil's words. That's what's gonna be hard. And having that as a central focus for all of this year has really been, I'll say it's been eye-opening, it's been transforming for me. And especially since my, I had a lot of craziness going on this fall with business travel and other stuff and all the anxiety building up to the election and all that. Since all that, I've never been more focused on something. I am driven to do this. And as I wrote about, well, whatever, on the way into New York on Friday when I was gonna shoot with Jeff Nunakawa and then go over to Glaser's Place, all these ideas started coming to me of what different pages are gonna be and something I'd thought about writing it now made sense to associate it with a certain picture. And I brought a little notepad with me and was able to scribble down notes about this stuff. And it's like my mind has been preparing for this all year. And now as we're getting to the end of the harvest, the scavenger hunt, the photos, the writing mind is already there making these associations and building stuff. And it's, I'm filled with terror at this whole idea, but I am so looking forward to what comes from it and then sharing that with the world. So never been more focused in my life. And along those same lines, I will say I have never felt more in tune with myself than I feel like what I'm doing in this whole sphere is art. In this gestalt of all this stuff, the podcast, the newsletter, the Instax photos, the postcards I write every day, the books that I'm reading, the extracurricular ones, even making over my body the way I have, it's all of a piece in a way, maybe it never had been that I'm willing to take in and try to make something of, try to, again, try to make art, I guess, which again, some banal in a certain way, but that's the mind that I'm in. And I'm gonna be balancing that with work and all the requirements of making a living and all that. But at the same time, things feel different this year, this past year. And there's personal growth, artistic growth, professional growth, et cetera. They all seem to be interweaving in some ways. And there's backsliding and other stuff that's not so great, but anyway, I'm gonna keep talking, okay. 'Cause this is my 2024, you can have yours all you want. There's non-podcast stuff that happened in my life. I should go into the other things that were special to me and things that are meaningful, I'll say, and it'll be weird to say, but the very first thing that happened was that I found my spirit jacket. I know people have spirit animals. I had this moment when I was in San Francisco for a biotech investors conference, bored out of my mind because no one was there to see me and everybody who I wanted to see had investors to talk to. So I stopped in at this really stodgy menswear place and was bored silly, couldn't find anything. And then I came across a Barracuda G9 Harrington jacket and navy in my size. And I put that thing on and I became Steve McQueen and Paul Weller and decided I need to own this and bought it and it has become an absolute staple for me. It is one of those pieces of clothing that you know, it's like the magic jacket. I think there's an episode of Brooklyn Nine-Nine like this when Joe LaTrulyo's character has this leather jacket that makes him cool. That's what I felt like and I'm willing to ride that as far as I can. So finding my spirit jacket in January was a good sign for 2024. The bad sign was a couple days later when I pinched a nerve in my neck while I was, I'll be honest here, I've been telling everybody it's because I turned my head while I was driving and you're not supposed to do that at 53. But what really happened was I was driving and I was chair dancing to Thriller by Michael Jackson and I took one turn, one tilt of my head to the right and something exploded into my neck and I had to deal with that for months. I blame Michael Jackson for this and you're the first person I've told. You're the second person I've told. I told one friend, nobody else knows this but you. Anyway, this neck injury screwed me up pretty extensively, led to X-ray, MRI, rehab, couldn't work out for months. Finally got back into the swing of things. I'm still cautious about it but don't feel it as much. But that sucked and that was one of those moments of, okay, yeah, this is Gil in his 50s. You know, you can't do things you were perfectly comfortable doing aren't necessarily as easy at this point in your life. My health otherwise is just fine. My CLL, chronic lymphocytic leukemia, numbers are great. Nothing is progressed badly. I don't need to start treatment or anything. I just go every three or four months to the oncologist. They check for my blood. They look at my white blood cell count and a few other things and those numbers are just fine. I will say actually I had, and it's something I wrote about in the newsletter I think. I did have a great moment in my last visit at the oncologist. I had a nurse this time instead of the doctor. They needed me to lie back, pull up my shirt so they could palpate my abdomen, figure out if the spleen or anything else was swollen. I did so and the nurses line was, do you work out? And I felt really good about that to be honest. It's probably the best I felt in an oncology setting in a long time, but yes, I do work out and I was glad that lying back like that, my core impressed the nurse enough to trigger that response. Anyway, my numbers were fine that time. No abnormal swelling, no lymph nodes or anything like that. I'll say an interesting conversation with my mom a couple of days ago where she, we talked about our respective experiences with cancer and how she marvels over my openness about this stuff 'cause she had her own experience with something else, solid tumor and not hematological like mine and doesn't really talk about it. She's been fine since it's been years and years and years, but I told her that part of the reason I'm open about this stuff is just to make sure people go out and get their physicals and all that, which is how we came across my situation. But also if somebody is going through this or just discovered they've got this diagnosis and don't know what they're in for, maybe this will help and maybe they can say, oh, Gil told me or I heard from Gil all this stuff about when he got diagnosed, I'm more at ease because I'm in the same boat or my situation's completely different. Just like when I came out about my diagnosis after getting it confirmed and everything, the number of people who reached out to me to talk about their experiences and their families helped me incredibly. So that's part of the openness thing. This is not a 2024 thing in particular, but this is about realizing why I do some of the things I do and it's just being open about some of this stuff can help other people in need. So that's part of my thing. This year, this cancer year, my closest work related, one of my closest work related friends died of a brain tumor this year. Got diagnosed in 2023. Took about 17 months before he died, it was terrible. Near the end, when we talked, it was clearly not him, him and that was really rough on me 'cause the person I was talking to was making some demands that I could not meet without violating his family's trust and felt terrible because I knew if I just delayed for a couple of weeks, he was clearly on the way out and would be dead and I felt bad that that calculus went through my head, but that's what it was. And he died and his memorial a little later I went to and talked to the family members and they pretty much said thank you for not doing what John asked you to do because he wasn't in his right mind and things were terrible and it would have just created more strife, so that helped. The memorial was good. It was 13 hours of train travel down and back to Charlottesville and an odyssey of sorts. But I paid tribute to somebody who meant a lot to me and someone who I loved and we only talked in those terms after his diagnosis and the terminology of it meant we should be more open about who we both are. But yeah, I lost John and that was sad. I mean, knowing it was coming didn't help. I mean, it helped in terms of being able to say everything we needed to say to each other, but you know, you're still a big loss. I met John through the Trade Association that I run. He ran an association similar to mine and we connected because we had this big FDA negotiation. We were engaged in and we became allies that way and blah, blah, blah. The reason I bring it up is because this year was also the 10th anniversary of my founding as Trade Association where I quit my job as a trade magazine editor and discovered I had to become a lobbyist and do all this nonprofit paperwork and filing every year and recruit companies and do all the crazy work that I do to work with the FDA and Congress and the industry and all this other stuff. And the 10th anniversary aspect of it kind of also hit me in terms of like, wow, you actually built a small business and run this whole thing and you've sustained it. This is something significant as professional development goes and your responsibility as a person. Like doing the podcast and making sure that comes out every week is great and the newsletters and everything else. Obviously none of that happens if I can't pay the bills with work, but this isn't just work. This is something I actually made and I sustain. And that's been it's been illuminating. The looking back at 10 years is kind of something to me as the industry has changed in incredibly bizarre ways in this election. Just like the previous 2017 to 2021 is gonna be an interesting time for what I do and who I have to interact with. But it's it's been meaningful. You know, it's it's all the piece, like we said, and I think some of the aspects of what I do professionally, I would not be able to do without the podcast, the experience of it and the being able to talk to people as easily as I do. I don't I was always a schmoozer, but I don't think I really could do that in a professional level until, you know, the experience of the show and giving me these interactions with people I'd never met before and the deep conversations that come out of that. It's taught me to read people a lot more and a lot better and to be more readable, to open up myself and not just kind of be stone faced and such, I guess. Anyway, so that was a thing for this year. The other major, well, there's several major things that happened. One of the big things is that I did these, these hikes with my oldest friend. He's a big hiker and outdoors guy and he came up with the thought that we should hike the five significant fire towers and the cat skills because there was this challenge by the New York, New York Department of Environmental Conservation where if you do those plus the sixth one, which isn't really a hike and you send your photo evidence of this, they send you this nice patch and more to the point you accomplish the five or the the fire tower hike challenge. And so we did, we went every month starting in May, we skipped August and we just hung out and we drove two hours every, he drove every time. We drove up to the cat skills and we charged up his tesla usually at the same quick check in Kingston, although we had a couple other places we discovered at the end and we just talked and talked about our pasts and our presence and our futures and our families. And we hiked and those hikes, some of them were arduous as fuck but they were great and we had funny experiences with people we passed along the way and stories we heard and the places we went to chow down afterwards and it was just wonderful. It was just this really great experience, just reconnecting, we'd always stayed in touch but just spending that time with someone and having those monthly meetings and the physical exertion of it just going up these trails and getting to the top of these towers and seeing these incredible views and the cat skills and thinking about the stuff we wanted to do when we were young and what we have and haven't accomplished. That was really meaningful. The hikes were really something for me. We're trying to figure out if we're gonna do the Highlands Trail in New Jersey or New York, and New Jersey in the next year. Not the entire Shebang, some of it is just road walking but there's like 150 miles of trails that way and they would not be as arduous as some of the climbs we had on the hiking trails. So yeah, go out and see friends. I know this is more of a recap than Gil gives advice but this is advice, go outdoors, see friends. Put your phones down and just get into conversations with people and just go gavin' for a while with somebody you've known for 30, 40, 50 years. The other major, major thing that isn't sad is that I finally got to see this sculpture that I've been kind of fixated on. We'll say for 30 years, since I read the short story, The Pugilist at Rest by Tom Jones. I had this business trip to Milan, so my wife and I went to Rome for a few days before that. She had all sorts of things she wanted to do there. I had one thing that I wanted to do there and that was to go see The Boxer at Rest, this bronze statue. And I did. We went to the museum and we did other stuff that she wanted to do and this great tour that she put together or that she booked for us. We thought it was just the Colosseum, but it turned out to be the Roman Forum and all this other stuff too and it was great. But for me, I got to see this sculpture that I'd drawn a bunch of times that I'd really looked at on screen because that's the only way to interact with it at this point and then I got to see it. And the moment I was in front of it in the museum, I just sat on the floor, took out my sketch pad and started drawing and I just kept drawing it from angle after angle after angle and just standing and looking at it. Maybe spent 30, 40 minutes, maybe longer. I didn't bother keeping track and Amy went off and did her thing in the museum for a while. But it was a sense of communion that I had with a piece of art that again was incredibly meaningful to me. I saw it in ways that you don't see on screen, you don't see flat, seeing something in three dimensions, taking in its totality as best you can. You can't go all the way around the back of it, which is part of what I wanted to see, but it's okay. I saw enough, I saw through the eyes, these empty eye sockets of this sculpture. I think I knew the sculpture was hollow but didn't know until I really looked at it and stared into the eyes and realized I was looking into the head of it inside the head and there was a little pinprick of light inside in the back of the head and I wasn't sure where it was coming from. Could have been a camera obscura effect through the eyes or may have been a pinhole in the head itself in the scalp somewhere, but the act of seeing and trying to represent it on paper and letting the hand do what it could and just taking in this piece of art and as much of a moment as I could have with it, again, it's been a year full of meaningful activities like that and this was one of the greatest for me. So that was something, something non-podcast but really, really good. There is a podcast high-end because Jerry Saltz, the New York Magazine, art critic did a piece about the boxer at Rass back in 2011 when it was showing at the Met. Then I mentioned it to him when we got together when I was shooting an instax a couple of weeks later and he'd never heard of the Tom Jones stories or turned them onto that and blah, blah, blah, blah, this is Gil just dropping names and making connections but that's what I do. But I saw the art, I saw the boxer, I took in the immensity of him. The, I don't, his head is turned up into the right, like he's listening to someone or someone is about to address or has just addressed him and he's still got his leather wraps on his wrists and hands and I guess he's just come out of the ring or maybe he's about to go in. And I don't know what he's hearing and it doesn't matter. What matters is the art, the art that was made and this is the Roman version, which is a copy of a Greek version that doesn't exist anymore and still it's just the, taking in this man's profound sense of duty, I guess. You look at the boxer and this is what he is, well, this is who he is. He is the boxer at rest and I was at rest. So that was October of this year. Really good experience from there, went on to Milan, did the trade show, came back, more travel, more running around, more client visits, more podcasts. And in the midst of all that, the worst thing happened, which was that our dog, Bendiko, while I was traveling up to Boston in mid-November to give yet another presentation and do yet more schmoozing. While I was on the train, he heard himself just shaking himself out in the backyard. Something happened in his leg, Amy got very worried, took him to the vet, turned out to be a break, turned out to be cancer. And that day, while I was on the train back from Boston in a hurry instead of staying over for two days as I'd planned, blah, blah, blah, while I was on the train, she was there while they put him down. And I felt terrible not being there for him. We knew from Sunday night when they found the break, we were pretty sure this was gonna be cancer, took them into the next day to diagnose it at another place. But she and I had agreed not to wait, that keeping him alive in a drug-induced stupor from my travel convenience is not cool. It's not, he did not deserve that. And so, she did that and I cried on the Ocella from Boston to Stanford. And that was six weeks ago today. His leash is still hanging in the doorway. As you come into the house, we both see it every time and neither of us has picked it up and put it down in the storage area where the collars for our previous Greyhounds also lie. It was really sad. I was really sad. And I'm not gonna go into that too much further 'cause I'll just cry and it'll be, you know, guilt being emotional for the sake of being emotional. The upside of all this is sometime in the next few hours we're gonna get a text from the dog transport from Virginia, Kentucky, to Virginia, to New Jersey, bringing us the dog that we are adopting who Amy has tentatively settled on the name of Birdie for. She is not a Greyhound. She is a she, unlike the three male dogs we've had previously. She is not going to be as big as a Greyhound, which is good because if I'm traveling and Amy has to get a injured dog into her car, it will be easier this time. We have to think about that stuff now. 31 nights in Marriott hotels this past year and additional travel and we're both in our 50s and blah, blah, blah. So we're having a new dog entering our home, our family, that is gonna be our new year's present to ourselves. It's also a great present because it means I have an excuse to leave the New Year's Eve party across the street early to say, oh, well, with the dog, I wanna make sure she's doing okay. So that's something too. You will see plenty of pictures of Birdie on Instagram. I'm sure if that stays her name as she enters our home and our family and our lives. And losing Benny was really tough. He was with us for almost eight years and he was a good dog and he and I had a lot of walks and that's where I did a lot of thinking but where I also didn't think, where I just walked with him and just looked at his silly ass Greyhound gate and so it's been a tough stretch without him and getting used to a new dog will be a process for all of us. But anyway, that's what's coming. That's the good side and what I hope to talk about next year and the recap is all the silly stuff of, you know, the new dog and their role in our lives. So that is the non-podcast self. I don't know, I could tell you more stuff. A friend of mine yesterday talked about wants. She doesn't do resolutions, she doesn't want. So I'll tell you what my wants are. There's not a lot because I, well, let me just tell you. I want to write my book, Guest Host and I want to print it, crowdfund it, publish it, et cetera. I do not want to go find a publisher. I'm not interested in that. If somebody comes to me and says, we want to republish it and do something, that's cool, but I want to make something and I'm going to make it. I'm going to make the third issue of my haiku for business traveler, Zeen, two. That's been, I'm almost done with it but doing the work on that while doing the podcast, day job and guest host stuff, the book. It's kind of gotten me in the, if I devote time to the Zeen, I'm not devoting it to this other stuff. But I'll get to all that too. There's a couple of comics that I want to draw for that and that's a difference out of skills that I have to really work on or compromise on. Anyway, I want to do the book, I want to do the Zeen. I want to run, I want to run a marathon. I've never run one. I was getting into that shape back in 2019, even 2020 but my body sort of breaking down from doing too much running. I'm going to try it. I'm going to keep up with the weights and the yoga and get my running back up and see if I can build up to that. One of my pals from my running group about the same age as me. He's never done a marathon either. His daughter just ran one and that's kind of giving him the bug. So I told him, Tom, why don't you and I work on that next year? We're going to see. 50 more shows and I hope to God, I'm not in the position of Jesus. I need to do a recap episode, so I hit 50 next year. That's where we are right now. 50 more shows, however, I've already recorded the first five. They're already in the can. We'll see where the rest of this goes for the year. I've got a bunch of great guests lined up. There are always going to be surprises and books I've never heard of. I've already booked somebody for the middle of March. Dan Nadell, we're going to record for his biography of Robert Crum. I think it was like October, maybe even September, when I first heard about it and his publicist set up the time for us. And I thought, that's six months from now. Am I still going to be alive? But anyway, the show must go on and it will. Five episodes already done. We'll see what the other 45 turned out to be. Making my art, whatever form that takes, whether it's more drawing, writing, all the other stuff that I do, that comprises this artwork that is Gill, I'm going to do that. That's what I want to do. That's what I want to be. The thing that I want more than anything else is to keep changing or transforming. And that kind of gets back at the thing that I alluded to at the beginning of this about the nature of change. And, you see, I'm of a couple of different minds about this. And I don't think they're exclusive, but I need... I want to figure out whether a man can change. I'll put it that way. And then what change actually means because some of the changes I've undergone this year have been, as I mentioned earlier, the thing with Jonathan Ames and a few of the other conversations I've had have been about in a very per se, a banal way of saying it, getting in touch with my inner child, which means getting past the, we'll say, trauma, even though I'd still consider my life not to have been particularly traumatic, getting past the trauma of my youth, and clearing out the underbrush of slights, insults, pain, etc. that are associated with key family member, and finding out what lies underneath. So I've done a lot of the work towards that, and Ames really helped trigger that this fall. It's gotten me much more in touch with this, this little kid inside of me who was hurt, wounded. And I've cleared out the underbrush of all that awfulness in my life, and this has involved me seeing what lies underneath and finding this kid, and that is a very positive form of change for me. But that is change that is associated with some sense of an essential self that lies underneath or inside, deep inside like a seed or the core of who we are. And what I wonder is, is that the only change? In terms of what identity means, can we become something other than who we were? Can we unfold and transform outwards and not go deeper inside? Deeper inside in a good way, like I'm engaged in now, it's great. But I've had this ongoing feeling that I'm transforming into something else, or that I've undergone numerous transformations outwards, not denying an inner nature, but finding something past that. And I don't know how legit that is, or whether anything we conceive of like that is still defined by the parameters of our basic human nature, or who we were from birth, upbringing, onwards. But just like my leukemia, I wonder whether I'm mutating, whether mutation is possible, I guess, whether we can become something we weren't that surprises us, that is, I don't want to say against nature, but against our nature, or different than our nature. So that's what I'm sort of exploring at present. I don't think there is an answer, answer. I do think the answers people have for that, say something about themselves, but that's part of what I'm engaged in. That ties back to last week's guest list episode, and those authors who I mentioned previously, Edith Hall, Shalomo Slander, Joe Coleman, Critchley, and a bunch of the others. There have been these various senses of transcendence, I guess, finding something outside of yourself, or expanding to fill that. I don't know. I'm going to keep exploring that. It's going to be the undertone, as it has been, for 13 years now, of a lot of these conversations as to who we are and how we get that way and who we become, whether we can only become ourselves, whether there is just a seed that if we're lucky blossoms and flowers into something, or whether we change in ways that are not foreseeable. Anyway, I hate to leave off of that note. So again, this is the virtual memory show, basically. You're getting the Gilroth experience. I've had an interesting 2024. I've had a lot of great conversations. I've learned to see in different ways. I hope those of you who've listened to the show, and not just an individual one here or there, that it's been meaningful for you, too. I've had some really great tuning my own horn thing. I've heard some really wonderful things from some past guests and some friends recently about what the show means to them. What am I doing this? Me, even if they're not listening weekly, blah, blah, blah. The fact that I'm out here doing this is meaningful to them, or inspiring in some way, or whatever. And that's part of what I'm glad to be part of, just as all these artists and writers and painters and cartoonists and everybody else inspire me. I'm glad to be part of that chain, I guess. I'm going to keep doing this as long as I can. If any part of this has been, has touched you in any sort of way, drop me a line, you know? If you have thoughts about human nature and change and all that stuff, I'd love to hear it. I'd love to get, you know, I'd love to commune with other people. And that's what we're doing here, I guess. So it has been a 2024. Thank you for listening. Thank you for being part of my life and part of the show and part of my art. I will be back next week with, I believe, my conversation with Damien Surls about the philosophy of translation. That's another one that got me seeing the world in a different way, seeing language in a different way, and how we interact with each other. Every single conversation I have just seems to keep transforming me. And what I talked about with Jeff Nunakawa a couple of days ago, it transforms the guest too. He told me about things that we talked about years ago that I'd forgotten that have stuck with him and that have changed his mindset. And I hope as the listeners go, this also, this helps you mutate to, man. Let's all be mutants in 2025, okay? I'm Gil Roth. This has been the virtual memory show. Thanks so much for listening. [Music] [BLANK_AUDIO]