1. Meth Lab Full of Memories
2016Show notes
Transcript
Tap a timestamp or any sentence to play from there · machine transcribed (mlx:mlx-community/whisper-large-v3-turbo), expect mistakesAlexYou're listening to Do By Friday, the weekly challenge podcast with Merlin Mann, Alex Cox, and Max Tempkin. This week's challenge, throw something away.
MaxI got a 65-inch TV, which is common. I didn't understand what I was getting into. And of course, I'm too physically weak. I lack the upper body strength to manipulate this television in any way i can't take it out of the box or lift it so my contractors my contractors come over and they put the bracket on they lift the tv up and i was there you know we've had it up and down a few times trying to get everything connected and whatever and the yesterday we were some like hdmi cable went bad and we had to replace the cable and they put the tv on they put it on
and they i'm you know standing back because i'm too weak to lift this tv i'm useless with my my scrawny, scrawny little arms. And these huge guys are lifting the TV up and I can see that they're, my, they're, the TV is connected to my Sonos because I've gone now, gone, also gone all in on a, on a Sonos based lifestyle. And they've crushed the optical cable that connects the TV to the Sonos. And a little piece of the optical cable, you know, the little,
Speaker BIs this too soon for you to discuss? You know,
Maxit's very traumatic. Max, do you know the little, do you know the little nubbin that comes out of the optical audio cable? the little snout I know the nubbin the little snout it snapped off in the tv in the receptacle in the tv and I I exclaimed oh no my optical cable and and sure enough I could not get it I could not get it to work and so the contractors were are currently at my place uh taking the you know lifting the tv up and moving it around and I got them a tweezers and we were sort of fishing
around in there with a flashlight trying to extract the nubbin from the tv but it's possible i'm going to have to like rma the whole the entire 65 inch uh wire cutter recommended television because i uh snapped the snout of the optical cable and i i i want to tell you this is about as these are the dramatic stakes of of a white person in america i mean this is it and what else could happen to you
Speaker Bthat is worse than this? I don't know. I honestly don't know what to say. Have you even watched the TV? Have you had it on yet? I have. We watched the debate at my place and we streamed CNN and it mostly worked. But you just had it on the ground like an animal?
Speaker ANo, it was up. Everything was working.
MaxIt was just this... For complicated reasons that I won't go into, there's like cabling that runs through the wall because I'm not an animal and I don't have cables out. And one of these cables had to get replaced which necessitated the whole thing coming down at which point the optical cable was crushed. It's like every time you manipulate this fragile birds, it's like this whole thing is like a sparrow which has these hollow little bones and you could snap it at any time.
MerlinHollow bones. Oh my God. And the thing is, we're like little dinosaur people. We're little people. Little people with our little arms and we don't know how to do stuff and yet we care intensely.
MaxI'm more of an idea guy, you know?
MerlinYeah, right, right, right. But, you know, we care so much about one thing that nobody else. It's kind of this John Syracuse problem where it's like there's these things where I care about this one thing like so much more than anybody else. And I the only way that I can accomplish it is through burlier people. so like for example like i don't think i'm precious about these things but you know for example my wife my wife whom i love shops so much more like a man than i do she surprised us a few
christmases ago by getting us a new refrigerator yay new refrigerator she didn't really she didn't wire cutter it she didn't really like measure stuff it was gonna be as good but she roughly measured it it would be fine it arrived oh god i don't want to tell the story oh god it's triggering The thing arrives, the burly guys bring it up. Doop-de-doop-de-doop. Living in the house from 1928, which has like two electric outlets in the house. And so they bring it up, they put it in. First of all, it turns out the refrigerator will not fit into the refrigerator area.
It's about a quarter of an inch too wide, which is just enough to make a burly guy go, I can make this happen. Side to side, side to side, up down, up down, up down. It ain't going to go. He says, well, I guess we might as well plug in. He plugs it in. there's an explosion.
It isn't that the glass fuse blew. The entire house goes down. There is no power in the house. There's no fuse thing to switch. I have to call PG&E because we have blown out the box by plugging this thing in. So now, oh, did I mention, by the way, it's two days before Christmas. Ding dong, ding dong. So now we have a refrigerator that doesn't fit into the fridge hole plugged into a plug that blew the entire house. We have no electricity in the house. on top of it now all of our christmas food is sitting in the new refrigerator that won't fit
in the food hole and i i started quivering i was like this this this this is not how i wanted my
Speaker Alife to be it is it's always it is surprising i mean going through the move you know i don't know it was it was i mean i mean you know i'm sort of exaggerating the actual stress of this like
Maxwhatever everything i'll figure it out it's stuff will work out you know worst case i don't know None of this is that bad, but it is amazing when you're in that mode, when you're in that stressed out mode, what breaks your spirit. What's the little, it's like.
MerlinYou're so vulnerable.
MaxYeah, it's like a $14 frame that I got on Amazon in one day. Like I cracked the glass moving and I had to sit down and cry because it was just too, it was too much. It was like, it was like my frame.
Speaker BOh no, my optical camera.
Speaker AWell, I'll tell you the other good one. And here's the other. There's one more part to this.
MerlinThe part is after the first of the year. So we got the, the peachy and he came out and they said, we don't know how you did this, but whatever that was, don't do that anymore. They fixed, they fixed our house. So then after the first of the year, we've been living with a refrigerator that won't fit in the fridge hole. We call out a handyman and the handyman comes out and he goes, no problem. I can take care of this. I'm a man who is handy. I don't know if you've seen many shows about serial killers. I don't know if you're familiar with the idea of hesitation marks on stabbing, But now he went to our counter to make the fridge hole larger.
And it basically is like a very strong toddler. Took a very sharp saw and kind of threw it at it for like two hours. And it's just nothing but hacky hesitation marks now. And every morning when I make my coffee now, I have to look at the handyman's hesitation marks. I live with that now.
AlexYou know, Max refers to my apartment as a bachelor pad. and because I'm not a real adult and I don't really have real furniture or decorate, but this sounds, I'm kind of happy with my choices right now.
MerlinI don't want to change anything. You can't change anything because it always gets worse. No matter what you're living with, if you change it, it will get worse. And pretty soon you got a sleeve tattoo to cover up your whole arm and that's your life.
Oops, I guess I better make my arm black.
MaxWell, this will sort of relate to the challenge that we have picked after this week, But the other sort of tension in the move is I have to figure out how to navigate this conversation without ending my relationship. That's a good thing. Okay, so Veronica, my partner, and I have very different values in terms of our relationship to the items in our life and the things that we own. I am very John Syracuse about the whole matter. I try to be very intellectual and very dispassionate in my rational assessment of what I need and what I own.
And I'm always scanning. I go into a room like a Cylon and my eyes are scanning side to side. I'm like, is there anything here I can do? Max has a plan. I do. I have a plan. What can I get rid of? There's got to be something I can purge from this room that's like not serving the design of my life right now. And so that's me. And if it was up to me, the whole house, we'd live in like an Apple store. and Veronica has a very emotional relationship to things where all of the things that she's sort of selected to keep which is everything, it's all tied to a memory of when she got it
so every little vending machine figurine is like oh the date that we went on where we got the plastic monkey out of the vending machine I was, sort of an illustrative story is like I was carrying up this sort of end table that she has we had it by our front door and it was like we put our backpacks on it when we came home from work in the last place. I was carrying this end table up and I saw when I was carrying it up there were these side pocket drawers on the end table which I didn't even know were there. Veronica's had this thing since undergrad, I think. And one of the pockets started to slide open
and all these rocks came pouring out just like beach pebbles. And Veronica went... Oh, and I was like, what the hell?
Speaker AI was like, there's rocks in here? The whole time there was illegal rocks in our house that I wasn't appraised of? and Veronica goes, oh no, my rocks.
MerlinMy beautiful rocks.
MaxThe promise of this whole podcast is every week, myself, Alex or Mullen will issue a challenge to the group and the group will have to do it and report back their findings and we'll see what works and what doesn't. This week, because I didn't really have time to do a more, a big challenge, I sort of tied something into the move, which was we all had to find something that was emotionally difficult to get rid of and get rid of it and talk about what we got rid of. So, you know, for me, like, I'll talk about one thing that I struggled with in this challenge and how it pertains to what we're
talking about. So I have, I think almost every nerd has a box of cords in their house. I have a Tupperware, I have a very modestly sized, like not much bigger in a footprint than like a MacBook Pro sort of a Rubbermaid bin full of cables. And every cable is there. It is not a rats. It's not a rat king. Every cable is individually looped and banded. And I know exactly what they do. So it's a very tidy, organized box of cables. However, I ultimately got rid of the box of cables,
and that was kind of a difficult thing because I felt I was like, you know, I don't really want to have this box of cables. It kind of stresses me out of like, do I need all this stuff or whatever? And what I did was I wound up bringing some of it to the office. I wound up giving stuff away to people because the other thing that was in the box of cables was like all of my old fitness trackers that I had before the Apple Watch. right and it's like well do I really need I mean it's like well what if I want to use the jawbone up again you know right sure but I mean but yeah but at the time it's like well I paid you know I don't know whatever 120 bucks for that thing and and I really enjoyed it for a year when I used it
but realistically I'm never going back from the Apple watch as as if I continue to wear a fitness tracker on my wrist it'll be the Apple watch so uh I gave the jawbone up away and that was sort of an emotional like you know I also feel like maybe I'm like giving up some sort of like DIY geek cred by not having the box of connectors and cables in my office anymore but on the other hand I live within walking distance of an Apple store and a Best Buy so like really how much do I need the box of cables versus how much do I want the empty space on my shelf which is its own you know its
own merit but that's but that but that argument that I'm having internally it's like the do you see how it relates to the same thing of like it's like well what is the how can i really explain the value of empty space on a shelf versus the value of having all the cables that that are right there
Merlini i mean it's very hard when it's a it's a little like it's a little bit like trying to prove a negative i mean i see both sides of it because there there's this one i kind of have so many thoughts on this but you know one of them is there is this uh something we possibly maybe inherited maybe I inherited from my grandparents and maybe to an extent my parents which is like if something is still potentially useful why would you throw it away so now in our the modern parlance now is to say donate it yeah because you know Goodwill could really use some 30 pin
connectors I'm sure
Speaker Athere's a lot of homeless people that really need my
Merlinjawbone up sure you can make a little igloo out of jawbones that'd be a nice place to live that's the thing when I talk about this stuff I use I very specifically use the phrase throw away. Now, I mean, to me, that's a little bit like Gmail and the idea of what is archive versus delete. I don't care. Whatever gets it out of your house is fine. But my concern is that a lot of people, because they keep adding these other verbs about donating or recycling or all of these things. I'm not saying go be a monster and waste things. But like I think as soon as you get anywhere but throw away, your brain flips and you go into that 1935 mode of probation where you go.
you know it's going to kill me if on christmas day i can't run this dingus because i don't have this cable or this power supply for me it's power supplies i have power supplies little bricks i have no idea most of them are the same most of the same you know increasingly they're all the same whatever 12 watt whatever they are you know adapter but you know i have these things where i'm like i can't throw it away why can't you throw it away because obviously it's for something what's it for i don't know well then you should throw it away but see not knowing what it's for means now I got a brick if I can't have my stupid power thing for it. But like, so, but the argue
you're saying, so you're saying like, how do you rationally say like, what is the value of not having something here? It's very hard to articulate because you just sound tightly wound.
MaxAnd you're right that if you, so if you follow the power brick logic to its natural conclusion, I really do think you wind up saving the cat poo in the corner because that, that is where it leads you is like, well, I must save every, you become like a memento guy. You're like, I have to remember it all like I have to I have to consume everything and have it all always or it all loses meaning so where but most people don't get that far so there everyone does some sort of math of like well I'd rather the the um the opportunity cost of having something is that you can't have something else in its place right I mean there's only so much room in your house
so some so everyone does this calculus some way of they're like well this is it's not worth the space it's taking up so it's time to get rid of it but you know i find it so i just find it i find it very difficult within like the maybe just within the framework of like contemporary american you know sort of values and materialism to say to express the psychological benefit of walking into a tidy room with very little in it but and but i will say and i'll cop to this like
I feel great. I feel so much better. I write better. I think better. I feel better if I go into a clean, organized room with all of my stuff where it's supposed to be. So I don't know. Maybe that's supposed to, maybe that's vain. Maybe that makes me weak as a writer that I need these, my precious little requirements to be able to sit down and write. I mean, I just, I don't know, but I can't deny that I'm more at peace and less stressed out and I feel better and I do better work and everything that you could say, I profit psychologically from being in a simple, clean room
where my focus isn't being pulled in a lot of different directions.
AlexI mean, I feel like this is super normal and every object you have in your house and everything that is just in your line of sight is something else you could be doing instead of the thing you're focusing on. So even if it's just the weird wine glasses, it pulls your brain into, oh yeah that's the thing uh the person made in vermont or whatever or then you start thinking oh wow those don't match and they're terrible maybe that's part of the vanity but just i i
don't know just thinking about in college uh and maybe it's different when you have really constrained space but it was like if my desk is not completely clean and like everything is not charged and put away that is something I could be doing instead of writing a paper um but here's
Maxthe thing with constrained space is every time I've ever moved in my life you know starting with college I moved into a progressively bigger room there's always more space and when I remember when I went into my first dorm room which is like now the size of my like bathroom and the house right it's like it was a just a tiny shitty little dorm room I was like this is immense the world is my fingers i could own anything i could have a whole table that's a spool of cable from the street i could anything could go in the storm anything could go in the storm room i could put up the
picture of the naked ladies with the pink floyd albums painted on their backs
Alexi don't know it's also thinking about not just the purpose of objects but like the purpose of where those objects live like you have a space for fancy toilet paper now where in a dorm room there was just a corner for toilet paper to sit. Or maybe that was just my door problem.
MaxYeah. My only point is that I think at least in American materialist culture, people are basically like goldfish in that they will expand to the size of their bowl.
MerlinWell, I come at this from the standpoint, I sent you a photo of, I'd love to talk about this. Well, I wouldn't love to talk about it, but I sent you a photo of one of my office cleanouts, which we should circle back to. But I am a pack rat, and I am aware of these tendencies in myself. And forgive me for anybody who's ever heard another podcast I've done, but I read a book a few years ago called It's All Too Much by this guy who hosts a cable TV show about making overhouses. And I don't care if it was ghostwritten.
I don't care if it's perfect for you. It is the first book about clutter in life that really hit me between the eyes. It's not a philosophical treatise. It's not Marie Condominium. It's not any of those kinds of things. This is a straight between the eyes, like, let's examine why you have this particular irrational series of attachments to things in your life. And spoiler alert, it's because there's something unresolved in your relationship with other people that causes you to have these things. And the single best chapter in this book, I'll be quick about this, but the best chapter in this book, the essential chapter in this book is where he goes through all of the classic reasons why people keep stuff.
and these include, I don't have it in front of me right now, but it's things like this might be really valuable. Somebody who I love in my family or my friends might want this someday.
This is a precious memory that has been given to me by somebody else in my family and I would be a monster to throw this thing away. And basically he goes through and blow by blow, he tears each one of these down. Okay, well, you know, you've got your dad's wedding tuxedo, but it's in a hefty bag in your garage. And so that you're keeping that because why? Like, where is the honor in that? You keep every drawing that your kid has ever done. And, you know, maybe your refrigerator is now, like, unusable because there's so many of these.
And then when you've got to finally make the refrigerator usable, you throw them all in a box and you never look at them again. Well, think about that. all of those things, that's because you feel like if you get rid of that thing, possibly, you feel like you are being disloyal to that person or unloving to that person's memory or something. But that is not the person. That drawing is not the kid. That tuxedo is not your dad. And the thing is, if it is valuable, then why is it in a hefty bag? Well, the truth is, it is not about that object. It is about your mental block about being able to deal with that
particular relationship in general, in specific, or with change in general. So my feeling is when a lot of people come up with these reasons why they do things, it's ultimately a way to say, there's this stuff over here, stuff in the very biggest sense of the word, that I just don't want to deal with. And I have my reasons. You think it's valuable? Go on eBay. Find out what your cracked Cool Cat glass is really worth. All your comic books from the 1990s. Are you really sure? You think somebody's really, really going to want those?
So I find it useful to try and take a rational approach to that. And the times that we have done major purges in our house or in our office, it has been incredibly freeing. And I become Max Temkin for two weeks because suddenly we have areas of the house that we were just dead to that are now usable for living. and it is transformative, but it takes a very somewhat courageous mental leap to be willing to delve into all of the dark bags of your memories before you, you know what I mean? Like to basically be okay with going into
all of these boxes in your life, metaphorical and real, that you don't really want to have to think about or deal with. I think that's why people push back.
MaxHave you ever employed the strategy, which I think it comes from that book of, so let's say you have things that you're maybe on the bubble about or you feel that...
MerlinPut it in a box.
MaxYeah, so you put it in a box and you label the box with a date and you put it in the basement. And you write on it, discard and two years, right? And then when the two years come up, if you haven't opened the tape on the box to take anything out of it because you needed it, you're clear to toss the box.
MerlinI've done it. You might have gotten that idea from me. I think I heard, I wrote about that on 43 Folders, talked about it on Back to Work. I think I first heard about it from, I want to say, like Martha Stewart. It's a very interesting idea that is extremely difficult to do with one box. I find that when I'm under pressure to have to get rid of lots of stuff, like because of a move or because of some kind of thing that suddenly come up, maybe there's water damage somewhere or impending. You know what I mean? Those kinds of emergency situations give me as maybe because of my ADD gives me a sense of clarity that allows me to become much more ruthless about.
In my case, it's sometimes boxes that I haven't opened that I've moved from house to house for something like 30 years and never even looked at.
MaxI'm sorry that I Merlin explained that to you.
Speaker BNo.
Speaker AYou know, Merlin, the thing about writing is you just got to sit down and make the clacky noise. So wait a minute. You sit down. Mm-hmm. Okay. What, are you going to keep working?
Speaker BIt's a verb, not a noun. Hmm. The self-hate that I walk around with, it's...
Speaker AUh, no, those things were great. Those are good. See, I just gave you advice that I got from you.
MerlinIt does work, but you know what it is, man? You just go buy some fucking contractor bags. You cannot, this is, I'll quote myself again, you can't think in teaspoons, you gotta think in shovels. Like, that's the thing. It's like, if you're holding each little object and turning it around in your hand, like, you'll lose your mind. But then, you know, water damage is important. Like, one time I had a box full of photos that basically were getting dripped on for a year and I didn't know it. and they became one uber photo like this big block of photo and it's pretty much every photo
of my my young adult life is now basically this this rat king of photography that i can't do anything with and in some ways it was oddly comforting in a weird dumb way i felt like i got a pass it was like well i guess i got i could keep this i could put this on display and be sad about it but i was like you know that's if i treasured that it would not have been in an area where it could be damaged by water. Bad on me.
MaxLet me talk about the things I got rid of and I'm dying to know what you guys got rid of. So I had to cheat a little bit on this challenge because I truly do not have a lot of things that I can put in a garbage bag and throw out. I am very, very lean. I take up very little closet space. I don't have clothes I can get rid of. I don't have kitchen utensils I can get rid of. I am an active perjurer. I am always scanning, doing my Cylon scan, throwing things out. So there was no low hanging, like I'll just get rid of this stuff or whatever. So I picked three areas where I downsized or
changed habits to reduce stuff. And I hope you guys count it as a, I hope I successfully completed my own challenge here. Oh my God, you did so much more than I did. Okay. So number one, number one, the bedside. I, in my previous place, I had the right next to my headboard on the bed side, I had two daisy chained power strips and I used every single outlet and it became the hub of all the electronics in the house. So my phone, my iPad, my Kindle, my watch,
everything plugged in right by the bed. And I was like, well, that's where I want it because I'm like lying in bed and reading my iPad, right? This was, for a lot of reasons, it was a bad habit and it was also a very huge jumble of power bricks and cords. I had like a sleep tracker back there and any fucking dingus that I bought in Kickstarter was plugged in back there. You know, all my fitness trackers and all that kind of bullshit that you have in your house. in the new place I have reduced to two things plugged in I have and what's really
it's kind of one item which is I got the neat the studio neat Apple watch and iPhone dock which is I got that which is beautiful
Merlinthat's on my bedside stand
Maxright now and that's it I have nothing else plugged in by my bedside wow you don't have a lamp no no there's room there's lights in the room but I don't how do you listen to NPR
Speaker Aon my iPhone
Speaker BWhat do you mean? You Millenniums. Wow.
MaxYeah, no clock.
Speaker BOh, that must have felt so freeing.
MaxIt is. You know, I don't know. The bedroom is very minimalist. We're kind of deciding everything that goes in. The bedroom is my design, and it's very me. It looks like an Apple store. There's very little in there, and it really looks nice, frankly, with very little on the bedside.
MerlinLet's make love on this large, clean table.
Speaker BIt looks cool.
Speaker AIt looks nice. I don't know. It looks great. I think you just made a Tina noise. All right. This is all going to be edited out. So that's number one.
MaxSo that's number one. Now, I didn't get rid of every single item that was by the bedside. I mean, my Kindle I still need to keep. But I've relocated, including the iPad and everything else, as much as possible into other places where there are more at home. So like the iPad charges by my desk. and the Kindle charges in the library, you know, things like that. So, okay, so that's number one. Number two, I did get rid of my box of cords, and I just basically wholesale threw it out, and I was like, listen, all of these, I gave a ton of stuff away, tons of stuff at the office, and anything else I just threw out.
So any loose power bricks that I was saving, it's all gone. So far, I set up the new house, and I didn't really need any of that stuff, so I think I did a nice job. And then number three, this was the part that spoke to doing something that was emotionally difficult. So I have had for as long as I've had a job, I've had a desk at home that has an Apple cinema display and an Apple wireless mouse and Apple keyboard and some little other office supplies. And it mirrors almost exactly my desk at work. So I have the same pad of paper and the same pens in the same jar in the same place on the same desk.
And I have like it's like good for it's like a good muscle memory. It's like when I'm sitting down working, I kind of know where everything is and I use the same keyboard and mouse. and like there's like a fluency of like I can work at home, work at office and I'm not doing any mental, I'm not like burning cycles on like trying to find stuff, right? Like it's the same setup in both places.
MerlinRight, totally sensible.
MaxSo I have, but this year, however, so first of all, I work at home less and less. I really am making a concerted effort to leave my work at the office and work, even if I have to work late, I work at the office and home is for other things. And so that's number one. And number two is I built a gaming PC this year. For the first, really, for the first time in my adult life, I own a gaming PC. And, you know, that doesn't work with the cinema display. It doesn't work with the Apple mouse and keyboard. So it necessitates that I have a tower, a monitor, another mouse, another keyboard. And that, I put that, I set that up all on my desk.
And I've been holding on to, even though I don't really use it anymore, the cinema display, the mouse, the keyboard, my precious little desk workspace. You know, because to me, there's something comforting of like, well, if an emergency happens at two in the morning, I still have all my work stuff. and I could like set it up like Apollo 13. I can reconstruct my like work scene. It's like you have only these supplies.
MerlinWe need to make this fit into that.
MaxYeah. Yeah. You know tear the pages out of the binder to make the mouse pad. But it's like anyway. So I don't know what that fantasy was but I did get rid of that stuff. So I gave some of it to Veronica and some of it I brought into work and gave away. But yeah and I don't have the work set up anymore. And that is a that is a I don't know. It's a small change, but that was an emotional thing for me of like, I'm really kind of giving up some control, some illusion of control here that I don't have an exact mirror of my workspace in my home.
MerlinI just keep thinking of this thing when you were describing, first of all, congratulations. That's really good. I think of this situation that feels like a metaphor for life or something, which is, you know, you get an area like your area, but everybody's got these areas. Even if you're tidy, unless you like are one of those cable people who's really good about like you, you know, you assiduously organize every single thing in your entertainment area, your computer area. Maybe I'm alone in this. I don't want to sound defensive. Maybe I'm alone in this, but I will periodically go through and say, OK, let's start all over.
And what I do is because I realize it's becoming untenable and it's looking dangerous and stupid. And here's the thing that I do is I will go to this is ever since I got my iMac, I've been way better about this because I have an iMac with I think it's called a dock. This OWC thing where you basically have this one way that everything gets into the computer and it's gotten a lot easier. But I used to have this like it looked like somebody threw a giant Rubbermaid tub of some kinds of cords under my desk. And I would just scoot my feet to kind of move them away. It would get bad. And here's what I would do. Total scorched earth.
I would unplug literally everything. Every device would would be unplugged from every other device until I had this giant thing of cords I would just grab and take over to an area. I take every device. I dust it off. I'd say, do I still use this? No, I don't still use this. I don't even use this thing anymore. And then the fun part was to go through the pile of cords. And I don't know if you all have had this experience, but I needed maybe somewhere between a half, half and a fifth of what was actually in that tangle of cords.
When I was done and pulled out the cords I needed to act, the cables that I needed to do the thing that I was doing, I had more cables in the unused pile than the used pile. And yet that was what I lived with for years. Do you know what I'm saying? That feels important. That feels significant to me as a way of thinking about life because I wonder how many of those kinds of cables exist in my life writ large. And then once you're done, you're like, this is a thing that I haven't used. I have not had the thing that this is for in forever. And it's weirdly freeing and weirdly humbling.
and I'm going to do it when I get home because our credenza is a mess. You know, they sent me an Eero, so I tested out the Eero, and like what started out as my beautifully organized credenza for the TV area, it now looks like a family of cables has had like bunny babies, and they're all just shooting out of the front now. I can't even close it. There's like blinking blue lights I have to see now because it's so jammed with all these cables pouring out, and I'm covered with shame.
Alexlet's say there's somebody who uh subscribed to macworld magazine since 2000 when did i start college uh 2000 2010 how many pounds worth of paper is that wow well they did get thinner
Merlinand that was the problem.
AlexOh, they did. The paper got shittier. Oh, and well, I guess also some issues of Mac Life. I think that one's still around and I had various airports.
MerlinEventually, it was like getting a parade magazine with enterprise software ads.
Speaker AI cannot believe both of you
Maxwere print subscribers to Macworld. I don't even think I've ever seen a paper Macworld.
AlexWell, they don't exist anymore.
MerlinI hadn't subscribed for years. It got very expensive and it wasn't actually that useful to me, but I would buy the ones where I had an article in it or something like that. But I've saved things. I was like that with like wired. I had wired from the beginning and things like that. Or, you know, might magazine. I'd have like, you know, these like things that weren't
Alexaround anymore that felt important. That's a lot of pounds of paper, Alex. Yeah. Uh, 256 to what uh because that's an iphone 7 worth of memory in gigabytes that's so true oh my god for some reason i had been keeping all of my old uh apple product boxes that were empty and i don't know i don't know why um so those those were all gone uh and my list is very boring
And most of it, like, the emotional thing for me was getting rid of all of these mackerel issues. But, like, looking through all of them, I tried not to, but it was, like, just the, it was just advertisements.
MaxBut, Alex, what will Apple unveil at WWDC 2011? I mean, it could be anything.
AlexAnd I haven't, I unsubscribed, like, three years ago. I don't know why I had all of these. as well as a lot of souvenir popcorn cups from Disney World. I don't know why we brought those home.
And like flyers from there. There was some stuff like there. There's stuff from college like posters from film festivals I was in or like little trinkets like that where I was like, this is all crumpled up and shitty and I can just scan this. and now I have my paper rat's nest in a folder on Dropbox.
MerlinAnd I never look at it.
AlexI will never look at it, but it gives me some comfort. The one thing that it was, oh, and I have given away all of, or sold all of my Apple products that aren't the most recent ones. Wow. Yeah, that was.
MerlinYou can't take a photo of all your old iPhones.
AlexI know. Oh, well, but that's the thing. There's people with better cameras and better looking newer ones that have that. Like I was looking, the main reason I had my old 3G was to see can I handle the scratches, the shiny scratches on the back of the phone. And yes, I can.
Speaker AI have a question. I have a question for you. Yeah. If you're recording in your office, not to be creepy. Yes. Okay, if you look to your right, what is the situation with LaCroix cans right now?
MerlinOh, okay. Well, turns out, first of all, LaCroix is for hipsters. I am a Safeway refreshing. Okay, excuse me, excuse me. I have right now on my desk, I have two that I'm working on and three that are empty because I cleaned up yesterday and filled a 24-can case with the ones that were on my desk. Good for you.
Speaker AWe should talk about my office. There were a lot of cans there. I mean, that was one of the most striking details of the office. There was a lot of cans going on in there
Alexwhen I was there. I'm also curious. Are you sitting on the same chair that we saw in this photo that you sent us?
MerlinOh, the one that's falling apart a little bit? See, I should never send people photos because people zoom in.
AlexOh, no. So I'm zoomed in now, and I see on your Mac Pro there is a sticker of what appears to be an overweight Ratatouille rat, maybe? I don't know. Oh, yeah, that's probably a meal.
And your desk is a table.
Speaker ANow, Marlon, I noticed that if I zoom into this picture, I can see that you are using the low-throughput cable on your computer. Are you aware of the fact that...
Speaker Blet's set aside the squalor in which you quote unquote work. Let's focus on your iPhone's home screen. What? Why would you have this message around?
AlexI help a lot of people with their home screen.
Speaker AWow, Merlin, your battery level is really stressing me out, Merlin. Charge your phone. That's an original
Merlincomment that I thought of to tweet. I have deliberately never done this because I know how much It's going to fuck you up. But I'm going to send you my home screen and then you can just deal with it. Because here's the thing. I don't think about it.
AlexI don't think about it at all. How do you see it every day? Those fucking red dots. I don't know how Apple is still like.
Speaker BOh my fucking God.
AlexWait, I haven't seen it. Oh no.
Speaker BI have like, you don't even see the other pages.
MerlinWhat? How?
AlexOh my God.
MerlinI got like 40 folders called stuff.
Speaker BThis is. Why? This makes total sense.
Speaker AHow do you know which notes app? This is like Mike. If you've ever seen Mike Hurley's home screen,
MaxMike has eight reminders apps and alarm apps on his home screen.
AlexBut he has a system. He can walk you through.
Speaker AYeah, he sets a do reminder to update OmniFocus to do the review on the project of his drafts. But Merlin, how do you know which text editor? Let's say you need to buy some more Safeway, sparkling water. Seltzer, which... I need all of these. Which app do you open up to put the... You need more seltzer in? Or do you just open drafts and then you send it to one of these other 17 text editors?
The one called Home?
MerlinIn Home, you'll see my Instacart app, so I can request it right from there. See, now this... It's not that this makes sense or doesn't make sense to me. This just seems normal. And to you guys, this seems like a perplexing home.
AlexWait, Reader is in Home. Why?
Speaker AIt's replaced.
MerlinOh, that's apps that go on the homepage.
Speaker ABut you have... I knew this was my page. Okay, I'll save one of my other... I'm going to stop picking on Merlin now, but here's my only other observation about this. I'm going to send you the last page. Merlin, you've selected...
MaxHere's the thing that's killing me about this. You've selected a black background. There's no image on the background of your iPhone, which presumably you did. I mean, the people who do that, like I've done this before, and the idea is... Yeah. It's because I'm organized. It's because it's a readability thing, right? It's that you don't want an image to distract you from what's going on on phones. You can just get down to brass tacks and use the functionality of the phone. But then on top of this background, it's like gazing into the eye of madness.
Speaker AIt's just a swirling chaos of folders and apps. Merlin, I have to say, you have some of the worst tastes on iPhone apps.
AlexTo have Monument Valley and Uno in the same fold.
Speaker AIt's an insult. You guys like Uno? Wait, wait. How many of these podcast apps do you listen to podcasts in? There are six podcast apps on your phone that I can see, that I can see.
MerlinWell, see, it's hard to organize these things. So, you know, when I see things, what I do is sometimes what I'll do is when I'm doing some maintenance, I'll move things out of my little dock area and I'll put a folder down there. And I'll just swipe through and I say, yeah, this thing could belong in there. It's something I just do to pass the time sometimes. But you can see my daughter likes games.
So I try to put the games in folders. The folders are usually called games.
AlexYou can see that. You see four folders here called games.
Speaker AThis is, I mean, this is chaos. This is total fucking chaos.
AlexI feel like you can't, well, you use the creepy betta fish background, stock background on your iPhone. And I don't understand. You're looking at a fish's scale all day. No, I know I'm on the blue sand or whatever the new default is. No, that is a fish. That is a beta fish.
Speaker AOh, I don't know. No, I've got a black background. No, no, no. Alex is talking about my phone.
AlexIt's very upsetting to look at.
MaxI have always, I just decided, so who is it? There's some Mac podcaster who talks about going kit. You know, you use what's the, that comes with, you try and embrace what comes with the Mac.
MerlinDan Benjamin does that.
MaxSo Dan talks about this. And I thought this was a very good idea and it really spoke to me, which is Dan thinks about, you know, there is a temptation to go and you get a new phone, you get a new Mac and you customize everything and you wipe away all the settings and you put it exactly how you like it and you install your third party apps and you replace everything. And what Dan started talking about is like, well, actually it would be a lot, it would be a lot simpler and less maintenance if you sort of embraced the kit stuff that came with the phone to the greatest extent possible. And I'm really into that. Like it feels less, it feels, how do I put it? It's like, it's like less
fiddly and the whole phone is more fungible it sure has gotten more i mean like with the
Merlinlike notes in particular makes that a much more attractive thing there's so much that notes can do that it's it really is a category killer in some ways if you don't need a lot of the nerdy stuff in editorial or drafts like notes i mean is the fact that you can send stuff to notes from anywhere
Maxis huge i think um i think so did notes implement sharing now like you can have a shared note so good so i think that will kill i've been on simple note since geez since you you talked about simple note in 2009 on the mac uh on um david spark oh wow and on mac what's that called uh that's it yep yep yep uh katie floyd and david sparks podcast and uh yeah you talked about simple note and i used it ever since and it changed
it changed my life. I mean, back then... You still use it? It's the only Notes app on my phone. Whoa. But you have to remember, back then, there was a couple things that I liked about it. So back then, there was no round-trip syncing of Notes except for Simple Note.
MerlinIt was the first. It was absolutely, as far as mine, it was absolutely the first one to do that.
MaxYep, and it just worked. It just worked. It worked really well. It synced on Dropbox back in the day. So you also had access to the text files and you could use like the other one on the Mac that people like better. Envy Alt. Envy Alt. Yeah. Or whatever you wanted on the Mac, really. But I took, you know, you talked about your whole text file system where you have like RunX and you have different tags to categorize stuff. And I still, I've never changed. I set it up in college. I trained myself to use it religiously and I never changed. I never went to, I never went to Apple Notes. I never switched to another. I never got into drafts
because I don't need drafts. I don't have 50 things to do with notes. I have one thing to do with notes, which is they go in SimpleNote, and it'll be a big switching cost for me to phase out SimpleNote and migrate the critical notes over to Apple Notes. But I should probably do it, because I frankly trust Apple's backup more than SimpleNote's backup.
AlexI mean, you can still sync with, like, that's how I, I still use SimpleNote too, but have it sync with Dropbox. I don't think you can anymore. I feel like I was like grandfathered in. And this is another thing that, Merlin, I feel like you just sort of influenced my entire adult life because I still have that Dropbox folder called elements because that was actually the first. That's still what mine is called. That's what I used and that's where all of my text files live. Yeah it's also it's also it's like you know when
MaxI think back of it too it's not just that I like picked up the like that you tagged it run x and like copied it but it was also like I it was just the first time in my life where I had had where I heard someone talking about you know actually there is if you're really thoughtful and considerate about it there's a way for this thing to become a supplement to your brain like the like if you write everything down you're you know and don't try to remember like timers and reminders in your head you can actually have a better life looks I really needed someone to make that connection for
me of like uh the what the technology can do in on a personal level and I think the world is caught up and everybody is thinking about that now are you just seeing nice things because you feel bad
Speaker Afor how awful my yeah yeah but but but no but i'm but no seriously that made a big deal that no one
Maxi mean yeah that whole idea you introduced that whole it's a whole way of thinking to me and uh it's really sorely disappointing to see how um poorly you've implemented this in your own life
Merlinyeah it's what's weird is that it doesn't bother me that's the worst part it's like that that really that is the cat poop in the corner is that like i don't see what's wrong with it i could
Alexunderstand if like i i use uh spotlight to find most things on my phone that's that's that's what i do yeah but how do you know what things right and and this might be just a me thing but i my iphone 6 i had to be replaced six times um under warranty because i kept getting the files uh the root file was corrupted um and they're like well you got too many apps and i'm like what does that even...
Speaker AHow many apps does everyone have on their phone? Let's do a look. We've lost our listeners. Goodbye, everyone.
Alex407. 154.
Speaker A87! There's probably a couple that could go. There's probably a couple that could go. I have a few on here that are... 407.
AlexAnd I use like six. You've talked about this on your other program, and you restore from iCloud. How does your phone just not explode?
Speaker AOh my God. Make it, get a new, set your, did you get a seven already? Set it up as a new phone. Liberate yourself from the bondage of. I might need all this stuff. I might need it someday. Oh boy, I see. I smell a challenge coming.
AlexMerlin, you have not even talked about what you have thrown away.
MerlinWell, this week has been hectic because, well, just without going into too much, I suddenly got dad due because of some family stuff. And so I didn't get to do as much as I wanted to. I had very ambitious ideas. But then in the time that I had, I started wandering around the house and I was just going dead. I couldn't figure it out and I was trying to be clever about it.
And I realized, as I've sort of revealed already, that one of my biggest hangups, stuff like clothes, I don't care. Just throw it all out. I don't care.
Speaker AMarlon, I had to interrupt you, but, you know, I just see, I was thinking about your position
Maxhere, and I do see, you know, I'm, as I mentioned, I'm kind of an idea guy, and I do see a big synergy opportunity here where you could really knock out two birds with one stone, which is you're trying to find something emotionally important to get rid of, and you're on dad duty all week. I mean, did you not do this math?
AlexI was like, I'm not going to make that joke.
Speaker BWere you saying I should just get rid of my kid? Yeah. I mean, I mean. No, would I donate her or recycle her? Or how would I do that? Well, I don't know. there's a program. I assume there's a program. Is it like Cars for Kids?
Speaker AWell, you get the new model.
MerlinSo I could go to WBEZ. I donate it. I get a write-off.
MaxThat's right. And click and clack are like, give us your kid.
AlexYou're in San Francisco. Just look at a nice gay couple who's composting their stuff and be like, you know what you could use.
MerlinExcuse me. Just leave it right on the curb. Somebody will get it. We get areas like the area where the cat was hiding and like in the closet. I need to deal with lots of old kid stuff. And my daughter gets very attached to objects and my wife is not attached to it and she would like the house to be easier to deal with. And so sometimes I discover this, she will do some stealth removals and I don't say anything because I know it's the right thing to do. But I need to deal with my volume of nearly meaningless kid memory stuff
because I'm utterly fraught and overwhelmed with the idea that my child is growing up so fast and it completely freaks me out every day and sends me down a shame and anxiety spiral I can't begin to explain. So that's what I've got to deal with. But I made a beachhead today, which is, you know the kind of shit that kids get in bags at birthday parties? You get a gift bag. Oh, yeah. It's just a lot of garbage. So I threw away her purple spider ring because she doesn't need it and I needed to make a beachhead, so I threw that away.
Fuck it. All right, good start. Now I've got to go through all the rocks. My rocks! Now, see, what I do is I put that in one of those little glass pill bags. You get those little pill bags from Walgreens. They're the best. They're good for so many things. You can stash cash in there. You can put pebbles in there. Small things, SIM card. And you always write on the bag with a Sharpie. That's a good idea. But, yeah, I have a lot of those where it's like, Ellie found this at the beach with AJ, 2009. It's like, ugh, all the undifferentiated rocks.
MaxDo you feel, just to connect this, so I don't have the kid thing, so I have a hard time understanding the emotional cost of that, but do you feel, just to connect this to what we were talking to before, that there's some cost of having all the stuff as this way of holding on where you miss what's happening now?
MerlinWell, the first part I totally agree with. I don't know if we're missing too much now because there's always more things we can collect, but you know it's uh it's an affliction that i know i have to deal with and i you know there's i was trying to talk about schizophrenia with my kid the other day and like you know and what it means in my understanding of it and it seems to me like one of the most awful parts all kinds of you know kind of what we loosely call mental illness one of the worst parts is knowing that something is wrong with you and being able to kind of observe yourself being wrong and that that makes it worse and the idea of having something like a voice in your head or uncertainty about
reality or you know that that is in extreme cases i guess we get schizophrenia but i think that's a characteristic of a lot of what troubles us as people is that we know rationally that what we're doing doesn't make any sense and we can look at ourselves even from a remove and you go look at that sad bastard wow well that's crazy what are you doing so i know that what i'm doing is not rational but it doesn't make it any easier to do so like last night mom's away um you know my daughter slept in our bed with me. And for some reason, she brought in a book that we used to read to her every night when she was about two. And I don't know why I'm telling you this anecdote,
except that in that case, I'm really glad we still got that little dumb board book around. But I can't take that pattern and apply it to everything. Not every book can be important. Importance requires curation and rationality. And that's the part that I struggle with. I don't think I'm missing out on anything. I'm pretty engaged, mostly.
AlexDo you have, or does she have any like plush or stuffed animal type thing that's like a sacred being to her that if something happened, the world would just end?
MerlinLike a coochie copie? No, she moves from one to the other. She's got a Pikachu she likes a lot right now. No, she moves around between four or five. There's not one that is like the overriding all-time favorite stuffy.
AlexI just realized something. I don't know how I totally forgot this, but when my childhood bedroom has actually been turned into a scrapbook room by my mom and she's like, do you want any of this? I'm like, no, no, no. Just get get rid of all of it. But then I had like I woke up in the middle of the night, like with a panic attack and called her. I'm like, you didn't get rid of Cubby, did you? Which is my my bear that I was born. it's a precious moments plush bear and she's like oh no of course i didn't because she knows
yeah and i was like what the fuck is wrong with me and i still i and i went home and it's actually uh this bear is up on a shelf um with another uh stuffed animal that i and his name is beachmore he's a large dolphin anyway uh each more what a cute name i'm just realizing now i have no idea what my attachment to that is. Like, I only see this bear when I go home for holidays.
Speaker AI'm going to be able to connect some dots here. Alex, could you describe from Merlin your grandmother's barn with the pigs, please? Oh. I'd like to call a witness to the stand, Alex Cox.
AlexAll right. Okay. So my family, oh God, it's a whole thing. You know, the Polish family comes to America, doesn't have anything um and then slowly over you know over 50 years acquires a lot of things and they become wealthy and like to to buy stuff um and then they need to buy places to put their stuff like a um like two barns in in rural illinois wow um so my grandpa has a collection
of both any pig-related items because that's how he became independently wealthy or whatever.
MerlinThe acquisition of pigs?
AlexWe have these two packing plants.
MerlinOh, duh.
Speaker AOkay, I'm sorry.
AlexChicago. Yep, Chicago. Yeah, Chicago.
Speaker AWait, wait, wait. I'm sorry, Alex. You've not adequately explained the collection of stuff barns. So we go to this barn, and the doors come open, and it's a huge space.
MaxYou can see, even though it's dark, It's a huge space. I'm trying to figure out how to set the scene here for our listeners. And Alex goes in and turns the lights on. And inside of a barn is a large building, a big, big building. And all around the exterior of the barn, there are multiple shelves, like rings of wall-mounted shelves going all the way up to the ceiling. And then in the middle, there's all these display cases, almost like you'd see in a retail store. Every square inch of this barn, from the floor to the ceiling, has neatly, nicely arranged
on these shelves, dusted, cleaned, organized, ceramic pigs. Oh my god, it's harrowing. Ceramic pigs, stuffed pigs, model pigs. There are some vintage tractors. There's a section that has vintage tractors. There are some pig tractor crossovers where there's like pigs on tractors. But it is, I had no idea that humanity had made so much pig apparel, or items.
Speaker AThousands, thousands. you can't fit it all into your field of view this sounds like they're loved they have this like
Alexsort of john roderick irrational thinking of like i i spent my whole life making this and these are the fruits of my labors these tchotchkes and um he he finally actually did sell his like real tractors at the age of 81 and he's like all right i guess we don't need these anymore wow um but yeah it's a little bit crazy um well there is the roderick um you know he mentioned this
Maxthing like i so i've gone um i've done a lot of estate sale shopping i love going to estate sales to get uh you know stuff for for the you know especially when i was like uh um you know younger and like when i was broke like you get really nice stuff honestly at estate sales but much better than a yard sale because it's like good stuff right that someone uh died and and um doesn't you know uh it's getting getting sold off it's not like just the garbage they're getting rid of And, you know, John Roderick has mentioned on his program that, you know, there's something really, there's something especially grim and depressing and existentially sad about going to a state sale.
I can't go. I can't go. Because what you're seeing is that you're seeing the fruits of this person's labor over the course of their entire life acquiring just the right set of things. they had just this silverware and just these china and just these plates and just these drinking glasses and they assembled all the right items and they had their whole life all designed and they still died it's like they had all the right things and they didn't live forever
Merlinit's the little things like going through my grandmother's house when she died it's all it's all just like the little things that obviously this is a can opener that somebody has kept for 30 years or you know this is the bottle opener of your entire youth it's it's really overwhelming But in that case, I mean, my grandmother died and she's in the 80s. This is 1987. And we had to move fast. And there's just became this question of like, you know, you start out going like, oh, you know, grandpa's footstool. And you're like, OK, so who wants that in their house? And it's like, I don't know. Like, I'd love to have that and that. But like, where do you put all that? It's it's an American affliction.
Maxit's um it's a part of the the way that that stuff becomes part of your it's the the idea of of items of these external items as as personality it's consumption as self-improvement or consumption as politics it this is the psychosis that comes with it of like well you can it's like well these were grandpa's special things and we're dishonoring the man do you think it's like that i mean how
Merlinmuch obviously there's some part of that there's all kinds of strains of you know weird thinking involved in that and tradition and handing things down. I mean, do you think it's peculiarly
MaxAmerican to be this hung up about stuff? I do. I mean, I mean, I hate to go to the obvious, but Donald Trump is the Republican nominee and his whole praxis is that he has the best stuff
Speaker Aand the most stuff. And he has lives in a golden house and a golf course. It's like my daughter quotes that all the time. Oh, it's a great. It's an it's a fucking hilarious. Donald Trump is a large man who lives in a golf course. Yeah. He always knows what time it is. That's probably my favorite. It's such a, what a useless thing. But anyway, but it is, I mean, that's the whole,
Maxthat's the whole merit. It's like people are like, well, they're like, you know, I don't agree with him on the issues, but he's great, he's a great businessman, right? You keep hearing that. And he's a shit businessman, but he's built this whole,
Speaker Ahe's built this whole cult of that he had, and his taste is so, oh, so bad. It's so bad. It frustrates me. He's so bourgeois. Do you think about this a lot, Max? Oh, I, well, We need to go down this whole thing. We don't.
He is... You're literally apoplectic. I'm at a loss. It's like I don't know how to describe it.
MaxIt's like if you are bourgeois and you have no taste, what you imagine the pleasures of being rich is is that you can literally have gold furniture.
Speaker BDonald Trump has it. He also keeps doing that okay thing with his right hand.
MerlinDrives me crazy. Oh, that was weird. People get sniffy when they're taking stimulants. I bet he's taking Hitler pills. Okay, we're good.