Bonus: 🔓 Feeding Into This Machine
2021Show notes
🔓 Unlocked! This week's after show was really good, so we wanted to make sure you filthy animals could get it for freebies. Just be sure to listen to the main episode first.
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Edited by Quinn Rose
Engineered by Cameron Bopp
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Transcript
Tap a timestamp or any sentence to play from there · machine transcribed (mlx:mlx-community/whisper-large-v3-turbo), expect mistakesAlexAfter show. After show. You're here. Oh, you're here. Oh, yeah. Yep. What's going on? Oh, no, no. I am just sleepy. But that's my own brain's fault.
MerlinWhat's your microdosing?
AlexI mean, if 400 milligrams of caffeine.
MerlinYou moved to Diet Coke?
AlexNo, no. I'm still working on this monster boy right here.
MerlinYou drink it right out of the can? You don't put it on ice or anything?
AlexWhat? What?
MerlinDid I stutter? Okay. Is that the same monster you've been working on for over an hour and a half?
AlexNo, this is number two.
MerlinBecause I can only ever get, I was more of a rocket, is it rocket? Is that what that stuff's called?
AlexRed?
MerlinRocket juice, rocket fuel?
AlexRocket gamer.
MerlinNo. Rocket boy. There used to be this one. I can only drink it because it basically tastes like bull piss, but like.
AlexThey all do.
MerlinI assume. But I can only get it down when it was really, really cold.
AlexOh, yeah, yeah. The, I, in fact, huh, I put mine in the freezer for 45 minutes if it is not. warm because you do a timer when you do that yes yes oh always always yeah no i i'm just double
Merlinchecking because yeah i've had enough uh 12 packs of bush beer blow up that uh you know you learn
Alexyou grow what is the amount of time because i wanted to try this but the amount of time for the average freezer to cause a can to explode?
MerlinI don't know, but there's a thing I do with sous vide. There's a thing I do with various kinds of cooking, even with Kenji Lopez's excellent boiled eggs recipe, where sometimes I'll do two timers. Like when I'm doing garlic bread, I'll do a timer to check on something, and then I'll do a timer to definitely remove it. And that sounds nuts, but on more than one occasion, I have to say one of those timers was not enough. So if I set a timer for 40 minutes for garlic bread and I don't realize until 40 minutes in that it's been in too long, like I miss my window.
But on the other hand, like if I don't have something to say, no, seriously, take it out. You know, I can't forget. There was one I was doing for a while where I could say, hey, dingus to my Amazon device, make a coffee. And it takes me through the steps of my preferred process. So it assumes that, for example, it assumes that, I should play it for you. It's kind of funny. It assumes that the coffee, the water is heated, that the coffee is in the filter in the thing.
And then it says, then I say, make a coffee. And it says, okay, what's the first step? Is the pour it in and stir? So for 30 seconds, I pour slowly and stir. and then I get another reminder when it's done two or three minutes or whatever I said of, you know, let it steep or, you know, sit. Then I do one, which is the, okay, now time's up. Put it, put it on, you know, make them have it be the coffee, like put it on your cup and have
it pour into the coffee. Then I get another reminder that's like, hey, idiot, I think it says something like, drink that sweet bean juice. And that is like a minute or two later, it reminds me, hey, you probably forgot that you have coffee dripping into a cup.
AlexThat's so good. It's like a little, you know, your Amazon lady is hanging out with you.
MerlinIt's not something I'm proud of, but it's something I've learned from experience is like there's very few things make you feel stupider. I mean, if you go back to first principles, the first principles are like, let's try that test that I'm always encouraging, which is, you know, somewhere set a timer for, let's say, a terrible amount of time, like six minutes. Set a six-minute timer and see how close you can get to realizing six minutes have gone by without the timer going off. And I can almost promise you,
like, one of two things will happen. You will look at it after three minutes if you remembered, or the timer will go off and you'll realize, oh my God, I forgot I had a six-minute timer. because then this is why it all begins or that's the beginning. Then that becomes like, God, always set a timer, especially for stuff like pasta because like you will forget. You know what I mean? It's like it's not a thing to be proud of, but like it's like that's what – why would you let yourself be that stupid if you have the compensatory muscles to not be dumb?
AlexBecause we all think we're smarter than we are.
MerlinI know. It's true. And we don't test that assumption, not to go all Syracuse here, but we don't test that assumption about ourselves often enough. And I think it can be really illuminating and in a weird way, oddly freeing to lose, to mindfully, purposefully lose the, my brain is really not working today. The, oh God, there's a word and I can't think of the word.
AlexOh, coxing hard right now. Got to get up your microdose.
MerlinThe, what's the thing when you're really conceited about believing you know something? The conceit that makes us believe that we will remember things that we have no business thinking we'll remember.
AlexDo you, I mean, I'm going back to thinking about, God, you broke my brain. Oh, fuck you. Fuck you. Oh, like, the.
MerlinConceit?
AlexNo, no, no. I wonder. We talked briefly, I think, about like the attention of things like TikTok and the gram reels and all of that stuff. And I think that more people are using timers because we're realizing how broken our brains are and how we continue to break them. I don't know.
MerlinI mean, I agree, but I don't. I don't think our brains are broken. I think our brains are the way that we are. It's our attitude about our brains that's broken. We think it's a sign of weakness because we're used to being young and overstimulated. I'm sorry I interrupted you, but I push back against this idea that there's something broken about our brains. It's our thinking about our brains that's broken most of the time. That's where we won't run into trouble is, as a friend David Allen says, your mind doesn't have a mind. It's like we just assume that we'll always remember things.
We don't need to write things down. We don't need the big print. We don't need the ramp. We don't need any of the things that we look down on other people for quote-unquote needing. It's like we needed it all along. Youth is a temporary and very fleeting thing that feels permanent because it's all you've ever known. And when you realize that there's other things to know, you realize that that was just a little three-day weekend in your life when you were young.
Alexthat's not how you spend your life oh that's terrifying and real but i mean that's i think uh
Merlini don't do you think i'm sorry broken brains attention we're talking about attention broken
Alexbrains and tiktok i do think it's interesting the uh like sort of tiktok trend that's hopefully dying down of um stealing soap dispensers of uh white millennial women like trying to dunk on young zoomers uh or i i don't know it feels like there's this weird intergenerational hostility that we have never experienced before which sounds obvious like duh internet but i don't
I don't know. I don't remember any of my adults having such hostility towards young people. And now my peers are really hostile towards younger people.
MerlinAt the risk of turning to something you said this wasn't 20 seconds ago, can you think of why that might be? could it be that we just never realized how shitty strangers were because we never had access to this many shitty strangers always showing their shittiest side right yeah you know what i mean like it's it's no i mean it's the and there's been so many interesting episodes of podcasts lately that have been thought-provoking to me about this a lot of times stuff again like what
next just you know but but getting you getting us to think about like the thing that's right been right in front of our nose the whole time, which is, you know, not to be all whatever, Malcolm Gladwell, Dan Benjamin here, but we were never intended to have this much access to other people. Chris Hayes, who I think might be the Chris Hayes, had a really good piece in, I want to say, The Atlantic in the past week or so about what it means when we've all become celebrities. He uses the example of the fennec fox, and like if you go to the zoo in, I think,
New York. There's a fennec fox. You know, fennec fox has really cute foxes with the giant ears. And he said it used to be such a fun thing as a kid to go to the zoo. And you could stick your head into this apparatus where you could see what it's like to be a fennec fox. It had giant fennec fox ears where you stuck your head in. And suddenly you're overwhelmed with how many different things you can hear. And in particular, if you like, you're hearing all these conversations of other people who are at the zoo that you were never intended to hear. You realize it's a curse to have ears that big and that that's kind of what's happened now with the internet and we have it all
happened so quickly as much as we all complain about it or talk about it or talk about it on a podcast like we still haven't fully internalized how inhuman it is to have this much access to what other people are saying or claiming to think oh you're overhearing a thousand conversations all the time and sometimes you hear those people having a conversation about you and you're like, ugh, is this healthy? Is this wholesome? And like
now that everybody's got access and we spend all of our days doom scrolling through the shittiest possible takes about all this stuff and going like, I don't understand, why is there so much discord? And it's like, well, we could all have less of that discord if we stop looking at it a little bit. And then eventually if we all stop posting that a little bit. I don't know. I mean, I know that's an old man take, but...
AlexNo, I don't think it is. I do think it's not a really binary take, but just like the internet has—
MerlinUnsubtle, you mean?
AlexI guess so. I mean, there's—we talk about nuance all the time. I really never shut up about nuance.
MerlinNuance and context.
AlexYeah.
MerlinBecause you've got to like peas and carrots.
AlexAnd I don't know where the happy medium is. I don't know if there is a happy medium. I don't know if our brains, like this gets a little Tim Ferriss, Gary Vee, but like when, when will our brains catch up to this? Or when will we accept that this is not a good thing?
MerlinWhen we start really working on our side hustle. Crush it. Crush it, Alex. Why don't you crush it? Crush it. You fucking bitch. Why don't you crush it? Oh, by the way,
Alexmy parents are in a winery. Imagine your, imagine, imagine your father. Now he's shot in the face. Imagine, imagine, Imagine, imagine, he's just been shot, shot every morning, five minutes, shot in the face.
MerlinOh, why would I do that?
AlexOh, have you never seen the Gary Vee?
MerlinNo, no, I met him once at South by Southwest. He seemed nice.
AlexHe, I, his shouting is very interesting.
MerlinHe's not my, not my, not my, not my tempo.
AlexLet's just say not my tempo. No, no, no. Yeah.
MerlinJonathan Colton, I ran into him there and he seemed nice.
AlexThe, the wine guy? Were we talking about the same guy?
MerlinJonathan Colton, the wine guy.
AlexNo.
MerlinJonathan Colton was my buddy once at South by Southwest and we were traveling companions can I read you something? I mentioned this on the Back to Work program. Oh yes please and it's really loud with the shop vac on so I mentioned this yesterday on Back to Work there's a nice new feature in Instapaper that's I think just terrific for me which is sometimes there are things, I get it it's Twitter, it's got to be a thread, it's got to be but sometimes there are really really good things people post and without having to do an unroll me type thing, Instapaper,
if you log in and you basically log in with Twitter for reasons that are understandable, if you're in any Twitter thread, you can add it to Instapaper and it turns it into an actual thing you can read. It's great. And so the first time that I did this was three days ago. A tweet from someone who I enjoy, but drives me a little bit crazy sometimes. But I don't need to say who this is, but I'm going to read you these four paragraphs. Can I do a reading series real quick? Yes, please. Okay, it's Amanda Marcotte and the Amanda
if you don't know the Amanda Marcotte Daily comes out at 4pm every day thank you for paper.li awesome why can't we ban clients anymore in Twitter oof I gotta get on you know what I think I need a different Twitter client okay four tweets ready can I go? go yes I spent the past week off work and doing stuff often for entire days that doesn't involve social media I tweeted a little but haven't read it much. And man, sliding back, I am really seeing the mental health downsides. You and me both,
Amanda. Second tweet. After a few days, I just felt so free. Like I could think and talk without anticipating a bunch of stupid objections, bad faith, and people trying to score points in some imaginary contest for the title of the most self-righteous asshole. Like I touched grass, and it was good. Just days and days. Yeah, but it's true. See, you got Twitter brain. That's why you laughed. Just days and days where nearly all my interactions were with people who replied without trying to one-up you, told stories without trying to show off their moral righteousness,
and acted like, well, complex but still lovable people. It felt good. It felt forgiving, finally. I love, and I'm probably addicted to social media, but man, it would be so much better if we could all just treat each other with a little more grace, and I include myself in that, and yes, reset more often by touching grass. That is all. I, that was, boy, I was right in my wheelhouse. it's all so true. And this goes straight back to months and months and months ago. Twitter only seems real because you think it's real. And that makes it real, consequently. And it's like all of this stuff that is, I don't know if it's breaking our brains, but,
and I certainly don't want to say it's rewiring our pathways, because I don't mean like strictly neurologically in the same way that the hot stove rewires our pathways. But listen to the way I and especially you talk all the time and it's like we're mentally imagining the worst possible person on Twitter maybe the worst possible person who's followed by lots of the worst possible people and you're just you aren't you constantly imagining what's a terrible person who deliberately misunderstands me gonna say about this so maybe that's the person who says
The kind of person who would say, yeah, these kids today with their rock and roll, that ain't money. You make your money on the MTV. Like the kind of thing that used to be the sort of thing you'd say to the person in the checkout line at a grocery store, it's just that now anybody can find and amplify that stupid thing that you said and create a new kind of unintentional sort of class war or generational war. Just to state the obvious, I think the reason that we think so much now about, say, boomers or Gen X bagging on subsequent generations.
People have always done that. There just hasn't been a way to grab the microphone and have 10, 100, or 10,000 people hear it. Because we were never meant to do that. And that's why the stupidest shit becomes the permanent shit. And then now we're mad about it too. And it just goes on and on. Today's What Next was really great. And I say this not for any reason of motive that I'm aware of, but it was a really good interview with a woman who was writing about all the stuff that happened with Time's Up.
And the people who, well, and like it started as like a really good idea. That phrase was very meaningful to a lot of people.
AlexOh, I remember tweeting that because it started in film circles. Oh, well, it didn't, but sort of.
MerlinThe show, it opens with Seth Meyers coming out at the, yeah, I'm not coming out, but going to the mic at the 2017, what's the Hollywood Foreign Press one? Oh, I think so. And it was right, it was right after stuff had started going down and going wide. And where Me Too and Time's Up, you know, almost all the women were wearing all black. Almost all the men were wearing a Time's Up pin, et cetera, et cetera. And I'm not saying this is not a dunk.
It's just this is the kind of thing that I think I really want to think about, stuff like this. And it sounds like the organization that formed, there was a lot about it that was a little whack. I mean, small things like, well, they seem much more interested in producing merchandise than in affecting policy change. The deep divide that began fairly early on. Oh, God, who's that wonderful woman in New York State? Oh, gosh. she has an Italian name I want to say like Alessi or you know that one woman who's you know who I mean but she's the one who's like
hey look we got to really see some serious policy things about how we deal with this and somebody who has always been somewhat at odds with Chris Cuomo for sorry Andrew Cuomo for various reasons but like when you find out that Andrew Cuomo is like the director of Time's Up has been helping him like to besmirch an accuser and it's like oh man like it's it's like both mary and this uh reporter were both saying there's only one word for this which is like messy it's just it's it's so messy
and um i don't know i just think it's really thought-provoking when we and this is a very john dickerson a dickersonian sort of point when he says things like there is a cost which is like there's all this creeping stuff we're all a little bit aware of but i don't know if it's rewired my neurological pathways, but I do think it's had an impact on my cognition and behavior in a way that I'm trying to become more aware of. Not to become a perfect man or person, but to like just become aware of when I'm moving closer to what I'd like to be versus moving further from what I'd like to
be. Because I think it's real easy to find yourself sliding into a situation you never would have
Alexwanted yeah so i guess i'm agreeing with you our brains are broken i guess i agree no no i i mean that's the well where where did john dickerson say i'm not like it's i would never know of or listen to or read john dickerson if it was not for twitter and that's i mean i went through like all of the facebook messages maddie and i sent each other eight fucking years ago now and all of
these things of i don't and then there's that feeling of of guilt obviously like feeding into this machine and like having it part of be part of your living and i i don't know it feels like a you can become like really like i can get real catastrophic real fast about uh yeah we need to burn all of this down and i don't know there's um like okay glass the fun sort of fun
social network with the pictures that i don't know if anybody is using anymore but um i i don't know Like, I truly, and COVID aside, like, I don't really know how I would make or talk to new friends if not for the internet. And I mean, well, when I say internet, I do. I mean social media. Because there's not a time in my life where I did not make friends on social media.
Like, like even in, even in high school, it was like, okay, we will follow each other on, on the things. And that is where we will talk. Cause this, because like, um, AOL Instant Messenger and AIM was kind of before, like I used it, but probably not in a way like in a 10 year old shit was talking to people about like computers and stuff.
MerlinThat's just something, that's something a lot of us started using early on because there really wasn't much else. I mean, you could nerd out and get ICQ and find the equivalent of, I guess, what you'd think of as an IRC type thing. But AOL is something that a lot of us kept using years beyond enjoying using it because it was the fax machine of social media, basically.
AlexThere was that Duck, the open source Duck client, remember?
MerlinYeah, that's ICQ. Oh, I know what you mean. Yeah, I know what you mean.
AlexIt had bonjour and stuff, too.
MerlinYeah, that was cool. I remember that. Yeah, the Duck. It's not CyberDuck. What was it called? I forget. There's a phrase that I'm trying to remember from, I want to say, Mark Crispin Miller. It might have been Todd Gitlin. I think it was Mark Crispin Miller. The primary thing that compelled me to write my shitty undergrad thesis was this book by Mark Crispin Miller called Boxed In, which is a book of his essays from, I forget which magazine. God, I can't believe I don't remember this.
But about TV that he'd written in the 80s. because that's when I was in college. But anyway, I feel like one of the early chapters, maybe even the introduction, as he's kind of closing up his introduction to what he's going to talk about, he says something along the lines of something blah, blah, blah. As a cultural studies guy, right, he's coming at this from this angle where people haven't taken talking about TV particularly seriously, especially from like an ideological standpoint. But he's saying that what was the phrase he used was something like we need to find a way to talk about television
without being either wowed or neutered by it. Oh, fuck, that's good. I really love that phrase because, and I think it applies to so many things in so many contexts. Because what do I mean by wowed or neutered? We'll set aside the gender part of this. Well, what does it mean? It means that like, oh, how do you talk about a really big topic without it being either something that overwhelms you,
that overwhelms you in any way, Either with how big it is, with how bad it is, with how, I mean, again, wasn't that long ago that we thought my space or I thought my space was going to be the big thing for years and years and years. And then suddenly it wasn't. But wild or neutered. Neutered as in like, well, you know, the kind of, what do they call it? Like a, not the conversation terminating, but there's that term for a certain kind of thought terminating cliche, which I'll look up in a second. But like, how do we, how do we be able to talk about this thing that has become like air, but it's like big air?
It's like, how do we talk about this? And I feel like that's where we are. How do we talk about social media now without being wowed or neutered by it? And that means stuff like not saying extreme statements like, oh, Alex, it's fine for you to make friends on the Internet. You could meet more people at Starbucks if everybody wasn't looking at their phone. I'm not saying that. I'm just saying that, like, when something is big enough, it feels permanent. It feels load-bearing. It feels obviously extremely important. but at the point when we start going, well, what are you going to do?
I reluctantly accept that I need this for my work. Or like when you get to that point with anything, like maybe the bigger pattern is what happens when we just keep moving from one thing that neuters us to another and feels overwhelming. And like when, at what points and how often and how deeply do we pause to reflect on the role that we would actually like that to have? And you say something like that and you sound like a, you sound simple. You know what I mean? You sound like Simple Jack. chasing a butterfly with a mallet.
Speaker AIf he can.
MerlinHe has a good, good, good, good brain. Makes my eyes rain. But do you know what I mean? Like that's one problem is like the, let's look up thought-terminating cliche. I associate that with Orwell, but I don't know if it's technically Orwell. Have you ever heard that phrase, thought-terminating cliche?
AlexI feel like I have, but I mean, in a way that I've heard the term Orwellian many times, but never as much as the past year.
MerlinNever by anyone who's actually read the book. A thought-terminating cliche is a form of loaded language commonly used to quell cognitive dizziness. Depending on context in which a phrase or cliche is used, it may actually be valid and not qualify as thought-terminating. It does qualify as such when its application intends to dismiss dissent or justify fallacious logic. Its only function is to stop an argument from proceeding further, In other words, end the debate with a cliche, not a point. The term was popularized by Robert J. Lifton in his 1961 book, Thought Reform and the Psychology of Totalism,
who called the use of the cliche, along with, quote, loading the language, the language of non-thought.
Speaker AI'll put that in notes. That's good.
AlexThat's good. Not in a way I like, but yeah, that's very good.
Speaker AYeah, yeah, yeah.
AlexIs there anything that you wish that you could have or anything you could have done different with your Internet career, let's say?
MerlinI don't know. Something that I don't want to have to state this every time because we have a challenge to stop apologizing. We have a challenge. We have a variety of challenges that in one way or another mean stop saying things that you don't mean or that aren't true in order to defend yourself against non-existent opponents. All your protagonists who will now be, oh, no, now I can't attack Alex because they said hashtag.
There's all those kinds of things. I think it must be, one must be aware of this, even if one doesn't say it to the point of exhaustion, which is, it would be really, it's really easy for me, somebody like me, who was there when blog 2.0 became a thing, when blog for money became a thing, when, you know, where I benefited so heavily from social media things with parts of my career, you know, but like, okay, well, am I being cognizant enough of what it means to be somebody who's newer to the scene, to be one of these young people I read about who's in the vast
majority of people who want to become famous. Another good article I read this week, are you sure you want to be famous? The kind of thing where it's easy for me to say like, oh, you guys, you always look at your phones and you're obsessed with social media and it's breaking your brain kind of stuff. Well, I benefited from that for a long time, perhaps not unlike the way that a lot of people built a career on fucking YouTube and now are mad that they can't play the Beatles or people who built an entire business around Facebook's API and now are bummed that they realize Facebook sucks when the money starts drying up. Isn't it funny how much stuff we accept as long as we're getting more than what
we expected out of it? It's only when we get less than we expected out of it that we become such advocacy warriors about how terrible these companies are. Nobody minds them when they're having fun. We don't interrogate that very deeply when things are mostly okay. What would I do differently? I mean, I don't know. I don't think there's that many things I would do that differently because I am who I am on a given day. But I don't know. I wouldn't say I'm proud of my decisions,
but I don't hate that many of my decisions. It's one thing that makes me insufferable is I do things that seem really dumb at the time, but make a lot of sense later sometimes. How about you? What would you do differently? Or comment on mine, but I would love to hear what you would do
Alexdifferently no i mean i will push back on the idea that we don't well specifically the idea that we uh don't complain or have a problem with this specifically and especially facebook until um we have gotten what we want or we uh no longer are getting what we want from it because from the very beginning it's like okay this was made by a child in college and i'm not saying that there was
like um any sort of like writing no there was there was writing on the walls and even i remember um in high school it was writing on the wall alex it was pretty small it it was okay so
Merlinthese 10 guys like which which thing which thing that you use constantly for your career was created by people that you've never had a single problem with and maybe that's a straw man kind of question but like it's all bullshit in some ways it's just that it's the bullshit we like and can live with it's the new hotness it's the thing we're all into and like i do think tumblr used to be better for any variety of reasons i do think twitter used to be better for any variety of reasons but nobody starts these things out of the goodness of their heart no no no exactly like i'm
AlexNot everybody knew that Facebook was, well, possibly stolen, but two, the idea came from a guy making pig jokes about some lady. But it does, I think it gives a lot of people pause.
And I'm not apologizing. Like, more marginalized communities, like, pause and like, all right, how is this going to be bad eventually? Because it's always great and fun. But, like, when...
MerlinLike, at what point will the basic nature of this come back to bite me in particular in the ass?
Alexyeah yeah when are people going to stop caring um about my space here like like um i still there still isn't a good term for what i think of like the gentrification of uh of an internet community
Merlinlike i like something something like twitch would be a good example of that right uh oh what do you interesting well it just seems to me that a lot of the reasons i don't really understand i don't need to understand why people like Twitch. I have a general idea of why people like Twitch. It's definitely not for me. But that seems like one, on the face of it, printed on the tin, Twitch feels like the answer to a lot of questions or problems we didn't even know we had, especially in marginalized communities. And the reason I'm saying it here is, isn't Twitch,
and you mentioned this with the music stuff, but isn't Twitch in particular, like, aren't there a fair amount of pretty wild and seemingly crazy decisions in the last couple years that are pushing out those people in particular?
AlexI would say damaging. Well, by pushing out, it's more of a-
MerlinLike the classic, you're not allowed, no boobs, no boob talk, so breast cancer people are not welcome. Like one of those kind of things, right?
AlexOh, no more so than any other platform.
MerlinBut don't they have content guidelines that are a little bit crazy in terms of the draconian nature of what could be a fairly innocuous thing?
AlexYes, but they are more upfront about it. You know those crazy rules in advance, right? People will be given a 24-hour ban because there are no guns allowed, and then someone does some airsoft thing, and then they're banned. And we've talked about the time that someone was deplatformed because their kid was like hanging out in front of the camera for a few minutes.
MerlinI've forgotten about that, but that's actually probably the example I should have been thinking of. Where their kid wandered in and because they have a zero tolerance policy on unattended kids.
Even though you could, I mean, your eyes would roll audibly hard at that situation. That's still the letter of the law.
AlexRight. And the thing that's been like Twitch's, I guess, thing from the beginning is, you know, active communities, which is why they kind of police this stuff super hard. But right now, Twitch is going through sort of this reckoning of, oh, right. These really big creators can say, hey, check out this small channel. And then, you know, people are being harassed off the platform or they're doing the thing where, you know, report for inappropriate content, report for inappropriate content.
MerlinAnd does that tend to be all black people getting pulled over for speeding or?
AlexOh, absolutely.
MerlinOkay, because ditto, let's think again about Substack, where if you were to see an actual pie graph, and I'm going to go somewhere materialist with this in a second, so brace yourself. If you're able to see a pie graph of what got people to, let's put it this way. Show me a pie graph of the dollars generated by the decision to do your first Substack subscription. Does that make sense? So there are people out there who subscribe to things on Substack, and there are people out there who have never subscribed to a thing on Substack.
Somebody comes in and subscribes to a Substack, which is the first Substack they paid money for. Okay? So show me a pie graph of that. and I bet a lot of the people making that Taika Waititi face would make it twice as hard to see how many shitty-ish people are what made Substack a thing. Now, does that mean that all the people, that the Jeep here's and the Walt Hickey's and the whomevers, in case you missed a crowd, like, does that mean they're bad people? No, not at all.
But like, and the materialist thing, when you, after you respond to this, and I want to talk about is there's never a good day to realize you should have known that something was a false economy all along. That's the bigger pattern here. And when I say, I'm not trying to be simple about this. Like, oh, you know, you say you're pushing back against this. I'm not saying that nobody could have ever figured out Facebook could be used for something bad. I'm not saying any of that stuff. What I am saying is we tend to go along, get along as long as we're not actively
harmed by something. And boy, if we got something good out of it, whether that's Virgin America having $800 round trip tickets based on having bought fuel futures, that's a false economy. I mean, the ability for you to make money on your sub stack because Andrew Sullivan is making money on his, that's a false economy. There's all kinds of shit where like how many companies out there, a la Amazon, how many companies out there are willing to lose boatloads of money until everybody else goes out of business and then make the thing they want to make for a month.
And then as it starts to go down into the shitter a la Tumblr, that's when things get super shitty and you're like, oh my God, this used to be so good. What happened? Well, it was good because it was a false economy. Somebody was paying for all of that all along. And now we're miffed because we can't have boobs on Tumblr or whatever. And it's like, well, yeah, people are miffed and maybe that's understandable. But like we didn't take the time to interrogate the verifiable realness of that economy. We didn't look at a balance sheet to wonder how this is getting paid for.
We didn't look at the mission statement behind the mission statement behind the mission statement. When we were having fun with our pals, you don't pay attention to that stuff. It's only when you're not having as much fun or you're not making as much money or there are usurious changes to policy. When those things come along, when the economy can no longer afford to be false, that you have to start running it like an actual shitty business, that's when we go, oh, man, this really got ruined for everybody. Why can't it be like the glory days of Web 2.0? Well, like fucking everybody, I mean, in most cases, people either did it in a way that was so cheap to produce and then had to scale it up, which takes money.
I'm just saying like there's nobody in this who has clean hands. We, the participants in all of this, playing along with it, okay, why am I making fun of my very smart friends who said they'd never use a Google product again? Because even leaving out the H word here, like, of course you're going to use Google products again. Like, what, I mean, what are you going to do? Are you just going to like build your entire life from source all the time? Like, you need a place to put your videos.
AlexWait, but isn't that the same, I mean, isn't that the same as Instagram for your work or, you know, Facebook for your work? And yes, we when you say all of us have blood on our hands, I will agree with that. I don't know if it's blood. I'm just saying they're not clean. Well, I would argue perhaps blood at this point, but or at least Amazon worker pee. But I mean, think about I joined Twitter.
What? 2008? Like, OK, I was technically an adult, but definitely wasn't when I was on other website. Like YouTube was a fun place that I got to watch videos for free. And I don't know, man. Like I think about TikTok and people are much more aware of these algorithms and more aware of how sure if our brains aren't breaking, at least our brains aren't wired for this.
MerlinBut aware of the algorithms isn't a little bit like saying they're aware of the fact that the sex worker doesn't actually love them as much as they would hope they would if it was their wife or lover. Because that's part of the that's part of the illusion. You can look at somebody like, I still miss Matt Fraction being on Twitter. He was so funny on Twitter. He's such a charming guy. I think the world needs more people like Matt Fraction. But Matt's reaction was, I cannot be in a place with policy. This is years ago. Years ago. This is when I was still sort of lightly acquainted with him. So probably 2014, maybe.
And I mean, Kelly Sue's still there. She does her stuff. But Matt was like, I've got to bounce, man. the way you don't deal with how women are being treated here is a showstopper for me and I'm gonna bounce. But there are other people who are saying, well, this is my platform to talk about how women should be treated differently here. And it's all fine. I'm just, I don't know how you get away from this whole, like, what is it that suddenly made us so interested in interrogating the badness of all of these things? Well, and I'm not even trying to say,
like, oh, you weren't paying attention. I'm not trying to say any of that stuff. I'm just saying it's like, what are you using right now that you have an unalloyed positive feeling will never, ever, ever be anything that's going to be a problem. And have you applied, not you, but one, has one applied that same critical skill and candor to where things are right now about how that place is operated and run? Whatever Ozzy is, I don't understand what Ozzy is. Everybody's talking about Ozzy today, and I don't know why. Ozzy, why? I don't know what it is. I've tried to figure it out. I went to Ben T's, the BuzzFeed guy.
I went to his Twitter. Of course, it's all just him retweeting nice things people said about his article. I don't know what Ozzy is, but that's the kind of thing where something comes along and now that's-
AlexA modern media company.
MerlinBut it's the main character on a certain part of the internet right now. You know what I mean?
AlexYep.
MerlinI don't know. I just think it's- I don't know. there is a part of me, the, the small, selfish, annoying, contrarian part of me, the part of me that like just wants to sit, sit up in the mezzanine and make fun of the people at the dance. There's that part of me looking down and just going like, Oh, you poor fuckers. You you're soaking in it. You just, you, you, you think you found a way to float on it. And it's just because somebody lent you water wings for the week and you, you don't you don't realize the lead weights that you agreed to have on your feet before they gave
Alexyou your pretty water wings but i'm probably stretching this too far but if you don't what if you can't get your own water wings you know like i the only well it depends on what you're
Merlintrying it depends on what you're trying to do if you're if your primary interest or need or aspiration is to reach a lot of people, that's okay. But I think it's a little naive to think that just because you have a good purpose in mind for what you want to do with the place where people are, that then all the other people who are there are just ding-a-lings who are not as worldly wise as you are.
AlexOh, no, for sure. I guess it's a like, ah, think of the children or think of the poors type of thing where so much of this is, I mean, even fucking YouTube premium red plus max, whatever it's called. I am not, I bitched about it for an hour, but I don't have to see any of the ads. I think my brain would break if every five minutes.
MerlinIt's the best money I spend every month. I really, really like YouTube. I mean, yeah, they're bad. But I can watch the stuff I want to watch on YouTube. And I was able to sit around yesterday afternoon and watch a bunch of System Over Down videos I would not have been able to find any other way.
I get a lot of value out of that. I get a lot of value out of Gmail, which is the exact same thing I said many years ago when all my friends said, Fah, I'm never going to use any of this stuff ever again. I'm like, well, good for you. I hope you find things that work for you. What I'm trying to say here in the shittiest possible way, probably, is if you, what we so rarely take off the table, this goes back to the original, my original bitch about this. Well, we, sometimes we, like we, at our, when it suits us, we take off the table, this thing that otherwise is just part of the table, which is I need to be where the eyeballs are.
and the thing is if that is even in the top five of what needs to be happening you've got to take the bitter with the sweet i don't know how you get around that if you want to be somewhere i said this a very very very long time ago on twitter is that the the one of the problems with twitter is you think twitter one thing's twitter is about what you want to say about yourself when it's much more about what other people have to say about you and if you don't accept and understand Well, how many people think about that every day when they're actually posting?
Well, you and I think about it as we sit here and tear ourselves apart over this bullshit. But how often do you think about that when you're out there posting? And like, well, that's the thing. You went to a place. You went to a place and stepped up to the mic and said something. And now you're mad that people heard it and have a thought. And it's like, I don't know how to get around this. Just sorry. Sorry. This is going nowhere.
AlexNo, no. I mean, feelings often go nowhere. Feelings are real. Feelings are valid. See, it's so easy.
MerlinDon't say it like that.
AlexNo, that's Mike who used to be in the long winter.
MerlinIt's Mike Squires. Feelings are real.
AlexNo, exactly. And the thing that I guess is gnawing at my brain is also I have friends who have left social media and they're not really any happier and their brains haven't i mean or is it just that you
Merlincan't tell their brains are better because they're not posting about it on social media
Alexno no no like people i talk to every day and i there's always kind of not always but if you have created this community and there was the it's the only place to do it uh discord actually That's like the one I've been thinking about a lot is that's going to go. It's super cool now. Like it's very think about like, OK, what is the thing that's going to fuck this up?
Because, oh, yeah, it's super cool. It's it's free. We get to make all of these bots for it so we can kick out folks who are doing like really terrible shit. and like uh and the tables are going to turn and it's gonna get bad but nobody and it's not like people aren't thinking or talking about what that'll look like because the same thing sort of happened with um like even though twitch has those like absolutely wild
guidelines, it was sort of like, okay, yes, this used to be Justin TV. This is now Twitch for gaming. Okay, Amazon bought this.
MerlinOh, is that a fact? I didn't know that.
AlexYeah, yeah.
MerlinSo the lady with the camera in her hat, that's what became Twitch?
AlexNo, no, no. I don't, no, no, no. Not Internet Justine, but.
MerlinInternet Justine was part of Justin TV. What are you talking about?
AlexOh, really? Oh, yeah.
MerlinThat's why she had a camera in her hat. Seriously.
AlexI'm looking, that's, oh, yeah, no. Okay, so it was, oh, yeah, she was.
MerlinAnyway, I take your point. I did not know that. And also, because I'm really dumb in 54, I'm probably also very much confusing Discord and Twitch in my head. So I may have said some things.
AlexThe communities are very, oh, no, Discord is like, if anything goes, that's where, you know, it's your own server. Like, they're called Discord servers, but they're all hosted, you know.
MerlinIt's an instance that belongs to you.
AlexExactly. They're Discord servers. Yeah, it's, quote, yours, but... I don't know. I just like to... I am glad, at the very least, I feel like there's a lot more literacy around what you have talked about for years and years, the time and attention as the main resources that companies want from you because then that leads to your third most precious resource of money.
And I just want people to be happy, Merlin.
MerlinI got a lot of things to find for notes. I got to quit committing to finding things. Also, what else do we have here? Music Man, Gene Gene, Microdressing, Not Following. Was there anything else we promised to talk about? I don't think.
AlexNo.
MerlinOh, we didn't look at your Joe Rogan video. Is it good? No, you know, we've had a lot of negativity. Let's talk about happy things.
AlexWe've had... He might be getting kicked off of Spotify, so that's fun.
MerlinHow'd you hear that? What's that? What the fuck are you talking about?
AlexOh, because he's gone... Because of his, like...
MerlinNo, no, I understand why, but where did you hear that?
AlexThe rumblings.
MerlinOkay. Have you looked at the privacy report thing yet?
AlexNo, I have not. Oh. Where is that?
Merlinyou can see look at show notes for back to work you can both see that macworld post where i learned about it via marco and listen people you gotta you gotta you gotta stop saying via when you mean by by and via mean different things by means someone wrote it via means you heard about it from someone this is this is this is known everyone has to stop doing that via marco i learned about this macworld article of like cool ios 15 things you should know about and like half of them were things i didn't know including the new privacy report thing so you go to privacy you Scroll down.
You can flip a bit that says start doing a privacy report and record up to seven days of what apps sent to the mothership about you. And then the reason I mention it here is on GitHub, you'll see this guy made a fairly easy to set up thing that will take that JSON file and let you look at it in a browser. And it'll show all the things we've phoned home. It's pretty cool.
AlexOh, I mean, cool. And that's terrifying. Oh, oh, no.
MerlinHmm.
AlexAh, I mean, I love this.
MerlinI just thought you should know about that and check it out. I'm trying to test it with Guardian to see what differences there are. And I do feel like I'm seeing a difference.
AlexOh.
MerlinWith Guardian on versus off.
AlexInteresting.
MerlinLike if I use DoorDash, DoorDash does DoorDash things. I saw it because Marco remarked that he'd been doing it and was, I don't think he said surprised, but just took note of the fact that, wow, a lot of these things are sending info to Google, a lot of things.
AlexMm-hmm. I'm more interested in sort of, oh, here we go, tracking. Do you, oh, wow, I have no apps allowed to request a track. Oh, this is different.
MerlinIt's at the very bottom. So you go to privacy and then scroll all the way down. Yeah. I can pull it up.
Speaker AHang on. Where is it?
AlexOh, my phone's charging. Okay. Oh, okay.
MerlinWell, actually, you know how to find things.
AlexThis is an interesting challenge. What? But it'll be sad.
MerlinOh, oh, oh. Did you see what I'm talking about, though? So you go to privacy. And you'll need to, I would say, go ahead, if you're into it. So record app activity, click. And then flip that bit and then check back in probably a couple days. The directions for what to do after that are in that very good GitHub thing. You can download, install via the terminal. and then you basically drop it onto a web page and it shows you your report.
AlexOoh, I am going to break some things in a fun way.
MerlinThat was the last thing of the main topic stuff I had. Cuck device. Do you want to talk about challenges?
AlexYes.
MerlinDo, do, do, do, do, challenge. What you doing?
AlexWhat am I doing? I'm scrolling.
MerlinOh, scrolling, scrolling. Oh, scrolling in the big doc?
AlexYes, yes.
MerlinI've got to figure out a way to jump down. I gotta figure this out. Not enough hours in the day.
AlexWhat's anime blind? I put stuff...
MerlinLet's see. You added interview a stranger, line 662.
AlexI have not contacted Gabe.
MerlinI still need to do that.
AlexTaste test night. Oh, I think that was a try on an idea. I just saw play with workbench crossed out and oh my god
Merlinwell it's around for a little while longer but I'm so excited to play with this what's the latest has it been saved let's see what is it even on their actual website workbench god this thing looks so cool I mean is it just going to go away entirely or is it going to go like enterprise like what's the what's the deal where did i read that i don't even see anything about it here blog here we go blog blog we don't have news sections anymore we
have blog oh and that's from 2019 on medium okay uh-huh but this thing man oh man i was so bummed because now i don't want to spend a ton of time with it so uh listener hello workbench is a thing in this sort of great tradition of web-based data munging that's been around for a while, where it's just really smart about giving you a web interface for getting and doing interesting stuff with data,
with spreadsheets, basically. Go scrape this page off Wikipedia. Did you look at the examples of what people have done with this? It's so fucking cool.
AlexI mean, I watched the video.
MerlinBut I feel like I read, I don't know if I remember now, I feel like I remember them saying they're closing down in like October or something. I don't see. The copyright on their page is 2019.
AlexCan I? Yeah, I can't even sign. Yeah, Workbench will go offline October 15th, 2021. So it won't let me even create an account.
MerlinWe did not succeed in creating enough revenue to make Workbench sustainable. Oh, man.
AlexI mean, good for them, at least not being like, we are censoring a product. Oh, the body keeps score.
MerlinOh, yeah, right. Trauma book.
AlexI would do that. Mm. Mm. You want to do that?
MerlinYeah, sure. That's a good one.
AlexIt is. It'll be a very sad. It'll be another upsetting. Not upsetting. I don't know.
MerlinYou don't know that. You don't know that. You don't know that.
AlexThat's true. That's true. I've been trying to tell people to stop saying that they have a little bit of trauma or a little bit of PTSD because that's not a thing.
MerlinIt's called pseudo trauma.
AlexOh, my God.
MerlinIf you're stealing valor from people with real trauma, like Four Leaf Tabak.
AlexWhat? What? Huh? Munchausen?
MerlinNick Nolte's character. Pair of pimples for hairy fish nuts. Nick Nolte's character in Tropic Thunder, the guy who wrote the book that the movie is based on.
Alexand then you discover there we go all right it's just in the coast guard i for i'm like that's that's a real person is that a real person do you know if that's a real person oh that movie's so
Merlingood watch it again less well and then because i so i signed up for i was watching i mean adam neely keeps talking about this whole rat king of you know nebula and skillshare and it's pretty fucking bananas i went in and using his code i signed up for one year of pro 4k hd skillshare which comes with nebula and topic and psalm you get like this whole bunch of the whole thing was 59 for a year and i thought okay what's the worst thing that can happen so i went and i signed up
for it and i'm still i still so i've got um i haven't done much with skillshare yet but uh i went in and watched a really good nebula video and one of the first nebula videos i found that was not adam neely was that lady who i'm pretty sure i think the internet doesn't like her now but she's a very funny woman who i'm pretty sure is the woman in the thanks i hate it meme and she did an amazing thing on topic yes that's her name oh my god you know of her okay
Alexoh yeah the the internet she's like contra points and the internet um i hate her every
MerlinIsn't she cancel canceled? She's like cancel canceled?
AlexNo.
MerlinI read in some headlines that she doesn't understand what cancellation means, and here's why. Here's my reaction video.
AlexShe, well, I don't know if I've mentioned this. She writes books now. So she was like, oh, I don't need to do YouTube as much.
MerlinYeah, yeah, yeah.
AlexShe has some videos about that. Yep, yep, yep, yep.
MerlinAs I wish I'd known before I wrote my novel.
AlexYes. because oh my god yeah her thumbnails too oh boy I'm interested in this Skillshare thing too
Merlinyeah me too Adam Neely in his very latest video was talking about MKBHD has one about doing video that just seems like in terms of supporting people I like and enjoy and respect combined with cool treats that's a no brainer you buy Skillshare you get Nebula. It's wild.
AlexInteresting.
MerlinYeah, like I say, there's different packages, but I'm happy. $60 for a year of stuff? Really? Yeah, I'll do that. But anyway, she did a video on Tropic Thunder that I watched twice yesterday afternoon, and then I made my family watch Tropic Thunder, and we watched it again. Because I want to watch it almost every day, basically.
AlexOh, that's...
MerlinWhere do you begin with this goddamn movie? There's so much to it. It's a really good video. She's basically talking about kind of keying off of this, I guess I'd never heard of this, but a pretty famous essay from the 70s about Chinatown and about basically, I don't know if I totally agree with all of her points, but she does a good job with it, which is this, the cliches, speaking of terminating cliches, that like there are certain kind of events that come along and if not cause an end to a genre,
at least make it so that you'll remember everything after that as post-genre. So like, you know, Cormac McCarthy wrote a Western book in the 80s called Blood Meridian. But that's really a post-Western book. You wouldn't think of that in the same way that you would of like a Roy Rogers movie. And she's saying that, OK, so 1974, what an incredible year. I mean, Young Frankenstein and Blazing Saddles.
AlexThat was the same year? Holy shit.
MerlinYeah. Two of his best movies come out that same year. And really, it's not that Blazing Saddles put an end to Westerns, but how many Westerns have you seen after 1975 or 6 that are anywhere near what we typically think of as a Western? And I think what she's trying to say here is that Tropic Thunder does this for so many kinds of cliches. The star comedian comedy, like Eddie Murphy in The Clumps. well you know the what are they called the fatties
fart too you know they direct the Jack Black thing where it's like obviously they're just making fun of the clumps but also Vietnam War movies Oscar the race to get an Oscar without like having done anything actually good like there's just a bunch of stuff it was a really good video and I liked it I wish I could share it with you but it's on Nebula go sign up for Nebula so you can watch it thanks I hate it
AlexI'm literally doing that now because I think nebula slash
Merlinyou need to activate all the different things after so you're signing up for Skillshare use Adam's code or whomever, whoever you like and then once you're in you'll get a pretty easy to deal with page that says okay, you're on Skillshare now do you want to activate Nebula? and you may need to generate a password for it but you'll figure it out
AlexI just realized I'm on the beta for Nebula why am I on or at least the test well I have an account for that fun that wasn't a flex I was just so confused I'm like why was this
Merlinsure it was yeah I've been using the beta for a few weeks no I literally
Alexno I didn't oh this is you're so cool you didn't know you're on the beta
Merlinyou're on so many betas that's why you're the alpha
AlexI do wish that you could get rid of those little dots because then when you share funny screenshots it does feel like a flex of like
Merlinoh like you're getting outed you know outing yourself
Alexlike hey look I'm a slack beta person
Merlinit's getting late it's we're gonna do paint your nails
Alexlet's do the fun fun trauma book and I it the parts I've read it are already really good I know I've heard just the first chapter of
Merlinthe body keeps score 2021 so I've already done this challenge but I would like to talk about it and I would like to bring this book to the attention of others yeah
AlexEspecially because it's old. Well, not old. It is.
MerlinI had no idea. I feel nuts. Sorry, we don't say crazy. That I did not know about this book. That's from 2014?
AlexYeah. The only reason I think I sent it to you via the Ezra Klein show, which I love the show notes for. And I sent this into the actual interview with the person.
MerlinWe should talk to Overcast about getting an Ezra Klein note.
AlexThank you.