Do By Friday
Episode 4 artwork
Episode 4 · November 25, 2016 · 01:06:25

4. Your Little Hitler Game

This week's challengePlay Really Bad Chess.
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Tap a timestamp or any sentence to play from there · machine transcribed (mlx:mlx-community/whisper-large-v3-turbo), expect mistakes

AlexThis is Do By Friday, the weekly challenge podcast from Merlin Mann, Alex Cox, and Max Temkin. This week's challenge, play really bad chess.

MerlinI got a tip on a new thing that I'm following, and I'm going to be following this one very carefully. I have a special friend that I correspond with periodically, and we're trying to fix ourselves. and we're always looking for new ways to fix ourselves with something that we can swallow. And the latest one is that you can get a kind of relatively inexpensive insulin that you buy at Walmart for $25. And you put it in like a napherin squirter and you squirt it and apparently you squirt it in your nose

and apparently you get a lot of focus out of that.

MaxOkay, wait.

AlexIs your special friend a drug dealer?

MerlinNo, he's a web cartoonist

AlexOh, okay

MaxThose guys are the worst Yeah, I'll try anything Okay, talk me through this So the insulin, I know it's like something to do with sugar Yeah, I mean, I think it's titular use or its nominal use is for the diabetes That's its on-label use

MerlinHere for Rich Stevens And

MaxLet's see Listen, if you and Rich are experimenting with self-medication for ADD, I can't tell you how into this I am. I will make first contact with the meth dealer if that's where this goes.

MerlinSee, I think I could use – I think the problem is a lot of people don't know how to use meth responsibly. I feel like that's something where I could really be a Viking. I think I could use meth very, very responsibly for a while.

Maxthe only person who watched Breaking Bad and was like, actually, meth doesn't seem that bad. I'd be up to try that.

AlexWell, it didn't really fuck anybody up except Jesse, but he had other issues. If you're like us and very stable people with no emotional problems, I'm sure it'd be fine.

MerlinI think meth is good for people with no emotional problems. Oh, I just sent you a link to this. You can see there's lots of diagrams with arrows to the human mind. You get some synapses. Because I'll do

Maxa lot of time boxing systems and like a GTD productivity app, and how different is meth, really?

MerlinIt's really not that different.

MaxI mean, it's like getting a good pen, right? I'll do whatever gets me through the day with a little more productivity. I totally agree. It's a meth hack.

AlexAll right. So I'm sure the listeners are here to hear about Merlin and Max playing a video game that I recommended, and my challenge to the both of you, I don't know if you actually did it, but it was to play Really Bad Chess by Zach Gage. Did this actually happen?

MerlinIt happened. I did it. I think this is a very new game. I went and checked on the internet, and it's only been out for just a couple weeks.

AlexRight, right, right.

MaxThis was a freebie for me, because I've already been playing the game and doing the daily challenge. This is going to be, I can tell you already,

Merlinthis is going to be a good one. Do you want to describe what this game is and what's really bad about it?

AlexI love this game so much. So Zach Gage, the concept of like most of his games is sort of turning a traditional genre on its head. He made a fantastic game called Sage Solitaire. I think so. Yes. And it's like the best version of Solitaire I've ever played. And he's done like variations of poker and slap and stuff like that. But he recently released Really Bad Chess, which is a chess game which uses traditional chess AIs that were developed, like, in the 70s, except it's completely randomized pieces.

So you can, like, you could have an incredibly shitty game just based on a random algorithm. And you can kind of tune it to, like, your level of experience. Like you can have the, uh, the AI be like, have the sort of shittier pieces and you have like Queens across the board. Um, but it, it, it's, I've given it to a ton of people who have never played chess before and they've just found it delightful. Um, and I've just been talking to more and more people this week about chess and like

the problems you around it. Like it's, it's not fun for me to play chess with anybody who is, uh, good at it. Like they know all of the moves. They know exactly how to murder me in five turns.

And Zach Gage mentioned this. It's like with poker, there's always like a sense of beginner's luck because you can, the pro players are like, what the fuck is this person doing? But in chess, there's no way for that to happen.

MerlinIn poker, you could try something really crazy, and because you don't know how dumb a move it is, you wouldn't have a tell about what's actually happening, and they can't see your cards. In this case, people can see all the pieces and go, oh, well, that's this one opening gambit that everybody learns their first week.

AlexRight.

MerlinYou could see transparently, oh, this person's using a trick they saw on the internet or something.

AlexSo, Max, you have been playing the daily boards, right?

MaxYeah, but I don't think I've ever won a daily.

AlexOh, really?

MaxYeah. I mostly just play against the computer and match my skill level where I get like three queens. Because the worse you are, the better pieces you get.

AlexSo what's your rank?

MaxThat's a great question. I will look that up. I am rank 21. I don't know what that means, though. I mean, I assume it means I'm quite bad.

AlexI mean, I've seen people in the 60s, but that's like at the top of Game Center. I think I'm the only person who still uses Game Center but ranked mode is yeah it tells you how much you suck basically but you can also yeah yeah and yeah I'm sure this is very very exciting to you Mertland can you go into your phone and check how you are ranked

MerlinI could I think it's 15 as I remember seeing a 15 I still haven't finished a game I want to hear more about what you guys have to say before we get to me because I have a very very bold very brave realization to share but i i want to keep it keep my powder dry for now all right but i i thought it was a very interesting idea my history with chess is uh oh my god i just did such a save i almost said my history with chess is checkered wow i just saved a lot of lives um i played some chess as a kid i never really understood it i

learned a few tricks my daughter got interested in chess and so uh we got a copy of the game called No Stress Chess, which I think is a pretty good way to learn chess. Are you guys familiar with No Stress Chess?

AlexYep. That's how I taught my lady friend to play chess, actually.

MerlinI've never heard of this in my life. It's a really, I think it's a really, I mean, I'm not a chess person, so feel free to say this is a terrible way to learn. But the idea is, it's one way in which it's like other sets, is that each piece, you don't even have to know how to read. Each piece shows you the moves on the little figure. It says, this is the name, this is a pawn, a pawn can do this and this and this, right? And so the idea is the very first thing you have to learn is like what the pieces are and what they do. But you could even teach it to a kid who's not much of a reader. The other part that then makes it really interesting and not chess, this is another not chess that I think is fun, is you pick a card.

And so you pick a card, and the card is you have to move this piece. And I think the rules are if you have that piece and it can move, you have to move it. And then if it fails those conditions, it goes to the other person. And the idea is you just get, I mean, one of my biggest failings has always been, I play so conservatively because I'm so scared of how bad I am. With this, it really encourages you to get ambitious about moving pieces out and trying different things. Does that comport, Alex?

AlexYeah, it's almost like a game in itself.

MerlinIt is a different game.

AlexBut it's a lot of fun, I think, especially someone who grew up playing chess and is still terrible at it. Max, when did you learn how to play chess?

MaxI don't know. I have no memory of learning chess, but I remember I had a phase when I was a kid, maybe in middle school, where I got pretty into chess. But I quickly, like I was playing against, well, it's all the other cards guys, so like Josh and Ben and them. And they're like actual geniuses, and they're extremely analytical, and they're very, very, very smart. And their brains are very big, and they move very quickly. and I never could keep pace with them like I just so I just sort of I don't know I've just always

put it in that do you have like a do you ever have do you have like a category of things in your life where like I like I'll never be good at this no matter how hard I try so I'm just gonna sort of like put this off to the side and do something else with my life I mean most things yeah I have like I have like all this stuff where it's just like doing like a really deep dive into Ruby is one of those things so like if I spent the rest of my life doing that I'd still not be as good as like Scott and John. So I'm, I'm going to focus on other things. And chess is just in that bucket. It's just like, it never held a ton of interest to me because, uh, it's, it's a, I'm,

I'm terrible at it. And I, and I just, as hard as I concentrate and as hard as I think, I just suck so bad at it. But also it's extremely boring to me. Like I just don't enjoy staring at the

Merlinboard until my, I find it like mind numbing. I'm actually super interested in this idea because I think it keys into a lot of different things. For example, in America, it's not considered at all weird that 50-year-old men go out and buy jerseys and then sit around and yell at the television while a sports game is on. That's considered so normal. And I realize I'm taking the piss a little bit here, but honestly, it's okay in America to really enjoy watching sports without having the slightest skill in sports. You can enjoy it because of your allegiance to the team. You can enjoy it

because you like the skill. You can enjoy it because you like gambling on it. There could be lots of reasons, but I think it's interesting how that's considered acceptable. Up until a few years ago, it was considered, including by people like me, I think it was a very strange phenomenon, the idea that your kid is watching someone play a video game on the internet. That seemed so bizarre. And now today, apparently, there are people who make a living from that, and you got the Twitch, and you guys know all this better than I do, but people tune in to watch you guys play your little Hitler game. like people enjoy watching people do things that's uh we're gonna be we're gonna be saying

Maxthe same thing when donald trump launches his uh tv network trump tv we're gonna be like i can't believe people tune in to watch him play his little hitler game are you gonna get a jersey

Merlindo you think max would you get a germany and get a weimar what are you gonna get yeah i'm gonna uh

Maxi'm gonna get a uh too big to jail jersey with a picture of hillary's face on it so i can blend in in the uh uh trump america that's nice i'll have the sights on it um yeah but um and like i say i

Merlinwant to circle back to this because i i it's interesting like i'm very interested in the idea of chess but like like we're describing here um i i don't look at a chess board in the way that somebody who plays a lot of chess does and i admire i imagine the terminator heads up display like somebody could look at a chess board and go and see things in that that i can't and i i i admire that and i think it's cool but um there's all kinds of things like this and i if we have time later, I want to talk about this in the context of D&D because I don't know. I think

I'm realizing that I want to be okay with the fact there's some things I like that other people like and that I can appreciate, but I actually have very little interest in actually doing it myself. I'm reminded of something. This is a really silly thing somebody said to me in college, and I've never bothered to check if this holds any water, but there's this girl I went to school with, a young woman at my college, and she was very arty. We were talking one time, and I said, well, are you an artist? Do you like drawing or painting or sculpting or anything like that? And she says, no, I never bothered to check this word.

She said, no, I'm more of an artiste. She said, I enjoy other people's art and I enjoy that other people enjoy their art. And that's probably, I don't know if that's even a word, but there should be a word for that, which is I enjoy you enjoying that thing. And that's a fun thing for me to watch. Do you know what I'm saying? And like, but this, again, for me, this keys into D&D work, spoiler alert, The gross number of hours I spent playing D&D as against thinking about, planning, reading about, doing all the D&D porn, vastly, I mean probably 20 times more time, 30 times more time I spent doing D&D meta stuff versus actually being involved in a campaign.

Speaker AAnd I loved it.

MerlinI sucked at this game. I didn't get this game. It broke my brain. I didn't understand what I was supposed to do. I kept trying to do it. It kept showing me how I was doing it wrong. And I get it. I get the game, but I sucked at it, and I didn't have fun with it. My bold, brave realization is I think maybe I don't like games.

AlexYou like threes, though, right?

MerlinI play threes. You know that? Uno? Uno? I've never played your game. I take the cards out, and I look at them, and I make funny combinations. but probably because of my station in life and the way my day has to go. I've never had occasion to play that game with other people. I love that it exists. I love playing with the cards. I love looking at them. I keep them away from my daughter. I love the whole phenomenon of your company, but like I've never played the game.

AlexDo you play board games in general with your family? I know that you had sort of a Candyland mod that you made. Yeah, right.

MerlinWell, that's the other funny part of this is, yeah, like we would play little kid games. I don't mean to monopolize this, but I thought this might be an interesting thought experiment to figure out what's wrong with me. But then I kept hearing about things like Lords of Waterdeep. I kept hearing about all these other games. And we would get as far as getting the pieces punched out of the board and we'd be like, well, that's good for today. We're done here. It was just too much to learn.

MaxThat's a huge point of friction is the learning curve on these games is really bad. And something that I learned from our friend Matthew Baldwin, one of his big rallying cries.

MerlinYou know Matthew Baldwin? He's a good man.

MaxOh, the best man. Yeah, he's a wonderful, wonderful guy, and he's kind of a role model for me. It's interesting, going back, I found out about half of the things that I really like in life from Defective Yeti, including board games. I would have never played a board game. Cards Against Humanity would not exist had Defective Yeti not started writing about board games back in the day. anyway it's all a tangential but one of math Matthew's a big rallying cries in life as around board games is like if you're hosting a board game event it is socially unacceptable to open the game

while your guests are there like the same way that like if you're having a dinner party you wouldn't unpack the grocery bags as your guests are arriving like learning the game and being prepared to like quickly synthesize it and teach it and start people playing is the core requirement of of playing a game that that's like that's like two-thirds of the work in the same way of like if you gm dungeons and dragons you can't like open up the dungeon master guide while when everyone sits down to play like you have to do your work in advance you're you're so you're you're a host

exactly and learning all the fiddly rules and deciding which rules do people need to know before they start playing which ones can you teach as you go and what's the best framework for learning this i mean quickly synthesizing the system and then understanding what to do with it that is what what i like about board games like that that it's not that's not like to me that's not like a tedious uh a chore that that's like oh i have to like do this work to like get into the fun part of playing the game like reading the rules understanding the system um teaching it and then furthermore coming up quickly devising a strategy to like uh model the system in my head

and come up with a strategy to do really well with it. That is the fun. Like, I enjoy that. And I get that. I know that's weird. I don't think it is.

MerlinBut why do you think some people are not game people? I mean, I can understand why some people are game people in the same way that I understand why there are sports fans. Or you said, take something like a John Gruber, who really intensely loves sports and loves betting about sports and loves thinking about sports. And it's almost like a little, I think it's probably a pretty big part of his life, is thinking about sports. But why do you think there are some not game people?

MaxThe thing John says about baseball that really interests me is he says there's like two different kinds of people who like baseball. There's the people who like the numbers and there's the people who like the stories. I'm neither. I don't give a fuck about it. But that's interesting to me that there's like a lot of ways into it. And it's sort of wrong to say like, well, there's sports people and there's not sports people and you're either on the thing or you're not because that's not how reality is. The same is true of games. Like, first of all, all people like games. It's fundamental to the human condition, and across all cultures and all demographics, all children play games.

They invent their own games. There's games passed down by world tradition. The play instinct is a highly evolved, very well-documented, very well-studied thing. All children and all cultures have a play instinct, and they all play games. And some cultures, depending on what the deal is of what it means to work and be an adult, games are more or less important later in life. But there's many, many ways as an adult to keep the play instinct and the game instinct going in your life.

I think for a lot of people, for some people, they might want to watch games on Twitch. And that's more of the story based, like, I want to hang out with these personalities while they play games. For other people, for me, you know, I've accepted that, like, part of my very nerdy engineer's mindset about games is I really get off on, like, modeling systems in my head and, like, quickly coming up with solutions. Like, I know that sounds extremely boring to say.

MerlinNo, it's like you and Pat. Like, Pat, you talked about this on your other program, but I love that show. And I really see that commonality. I don't know if you've ever expressed it, put it this way, but a big part, it seems to me a big part of what Pat, I don't say what he likes about it, but what he ends up doing is enjoying that world building. You're both world builders.

MaxYeah. So I like the world building. I mean, maybe I like that for the same reason or the same reason I love like a David Simon show where David Simon talks about in his shows. He wants, there's not, you know, there's no, as you know, Bob in the wire, right? You're just in it. There's no like new guy who everything gets explained to as the viewer proxy. When you watch a David Simon show, there's very little exposition. is just like, you know, pow, you're in the story, and you have to figure out how these people talk and what the power structures are, and that puzzling it out, like, that is the thrill of the show for me. Like, I love that. Like, the first season of Treme, as you're, like, learning all these characters' relationships,

like, I totally, you know, get off on that. But this is all just to bring this back a little bit to the chess game. Like, I think the chess game is very much for the gamer profile that is like me, and also I know that's very much like Zach. Um, and, um, I just thought I brought this little, this little thing I would read. So this is something Zach, um, actually turned me on to and I, and I really love it. It's from a book by Matthew Frederick called 101 Things I Learned in Architecture School. I have not read the whole book. I have it, but I haven't read it yet. But there's this page in the book that Zach showed me.

And, um, cause we were talking, Zach and I were talking one time. We were sort of, um, lamenting how hard it is when people come to us for advice on like making games or whatever. It's like nearly impossible to give them good advice. because good advice is always like, well, it depends on the context. And like, you have to like think for yourself and figure out problems, but that's sort of not really advice. But it's the only valid advice there is. And there's this great page in 101 Things I Learned in Architecture School. The title of this page is process-oriented, not product-driven,

is the most important and difficult step for a designer to develop. And then he has nine points about what this means. Number one, oh, sorry, being process-oriented means, number one, seeking to understand a design problem before chasing after solutions. Number two, not force-fitting solutions to old problems onto new problems. Number three, removing yourself from prideful investment in your projects and being slow to fall in love with your ideas. Number four, making design investigations and decisions holistically that addresses several aspects of a design problem at once

rather than sequentially that finalize one aspect of a solution before investigating the next. Number five, making design decisions conditionally, that is with the awareness that they may or may not work out as you continue towards a final solution. Six, knowing when to change and when to stick with the previous decisions. Number seven, accepting as normal the anxiety that comes from not knowing what to do. Number eight, working fluidly between concept scale and detail scale to see how each informs the other. And number nine, always asking what if, regardless of how satisfied you are with your solution. So I think this idea of like conditional decision making as a designer is like

the, I would say that's like for me the, when I get into like a flow state or when I feel good at something, it's because I'm doing that. I'm like modeling a system in my head and conditionally making decisions as things change. And I know Zach's really into that too. And we're both really interested in like making art and making work that gives people that feeling, but in a safe environment and uh that that's for me that's what what really clicks with me about really bad chess and why i think it's a truly genius game is it takes this very staid robotic uh pre-programmed

um thing where you're you're sort of following these set strategies and these set paths and you're you're memorizing rote things right right to the degree that a computer has been better better at a human than chess for a long time and it completely flips it on its head so all there is is thinking in the moment. It takes chess from being a product-driven solution to a process-oriented solution with this one small change. And I just find that completely beautiful.

AlexThere's this game designer. He's almost more of a philosopher, Bernie Decovin, who created this thing called, like, the, what was it, Max? The New Games Foundation?

MaxWhat is this, the Bernie Decovan?

AlexYeah.

MaxYeah, it's called, well, it was this thing in the 70s called the New Games Movement, and it was, like, hippie communal games, like, you play with, like, parachutes and balls and, like, field games and things like that.

AlexYeah, and it was, a lot of the games are really, really stupid and such a delight, And he focuses both on world building, but also the storytelling idea of the magic circle. We are going to agree on these set of rules, and we are going to transport ourselves to this universe where a parachute is where we live. And that's why I like Zach Gage's games is because you can choose to make them high stress or just like sort of chill out and like accept these systems and accept I'm going to lose.

But this is an interesting world that I am in right now.

MerlinI want to stipulate like I really admire and appreciate this game. And I'm not trying to criticize the game at all. I think it's very clever. I think it's a little bit like I've never, it's almost as though I've never read Pride and Prejudice and my introduction is basically, like I know the plot maybe, but I learn about it by reading fan fiction of the zombies version. I feel like I'm not familiar enough and like I don't have the original version in my bones, but I definitely appreciate it. So it's so fun to see the board come up and you've got like four or five queens

and three bishops. It's like, what is going on? So it's a super clever idea.

AlexSo you're saying you are not a game person. Merlin, did you not play, how old are you Merlin? Did you play any video games growing up or board games?

MerlinYeah, I'll be 50 next month. I played Atari mostly on other people's, at the 2600. My friend's house, as far as games we played, I mean we played Monopoly. We played, I always loved Uno, I still do. My daughter and I still play that a few times a week. What's funny about Uno? I don't know.

AlexI should play Uno again. I guess it's just because it's become this like branded commodity of I can't find an Uno set that's like just Uno. It's all Batman Uno or Harry Potter Uno.

MerlinThey introduced a new thing where you get blank cards and you can write things on it. Basically, it's a wild card, but it has wackadoodle stuff on it. So my daughter has one like when I get it, like dad has to do a funny dance like when you get that card. And it's kind of it's but yeah. So but yeah, I don't know. But the thing is, for example, on the JoCo cruise, when we went almost a couple years ago, the entire whatever they call the bottom of the boat, they've got this huge area with all these people playing games. And they were so kind and nice and gregarious.

And everybody went way out of their way to say, hey, if you want to try this game, if you want to play Cones of Dunshire, we'll explain the rules to you. But I really loved that environment. It felt like a real subculture where like all kinds of different stuff was, well, this is a JoCo Cruise thing in general, but all kinds of different stuff was okay and everybody was welcome. And it was one of the highlights for me was even though I didn't play any of the games, I enjoyed walking around and seeing people doing it. But I don't know what it is. I think there's just, I'm really, I'm really super competitive about a few weird things and not very competitive about other things.

and while again now I appreciate I absolutely appreciate what you are both saying especially you know Max's thing about planning the game when I was a terrible DM that was my favorite part was making the maps and all that stuff but I don't know I think I lack some kind of gene to like enjoy gaming as like a thing I would go and seek out and I don't know exactly why.

AlexDungeons and Dragons is so nerdy and and I I get why you know you don't want to watch three-hour playthroughs of a game I love Spelunky which which is like my NFL it's amazing but what so it sounds like you didn't actually like playing you just like the preparation and the storytelling that took place beforehand like did you build characters for oh gosh yes yeah yeah I

Merlinused to just make fun of it for for years and then around ninth grade I tagged along one time and I like the stuff. I like the books. I like the dice. I was not super into the, like, Raoul Partha figs, but, like, I thought those were cool, too. Anyway, the thing is, I've still never read Lord of the Rings. I'm not even a big fantasy or not that big of a sci-fi fan. I wasn't reading, I mean, I hadn't read any science fiction books, like, famous science fiction books. I was just attracted to the meta world.

I really like going to the hobby shop. You could look at Estes Rockets and Dungeon Master's guides. I had all those books. I carried them around at school until I practically had scoliosis from carrying around 50 pounds of books every day. And I don't know why. I mean, yes, it is nerdy, but it was, I was very attracted to the world and the gear. I mean, maybe not so different from somebody goes to REI and buys a bunch of stuff to climb Mount Everest and then basically just goes to Trader Joe's. I mean, I was a D&D poser in a lot of ways, but it didn't make it any less fun, you know?

AlexYou were a fake geek girl.

Maxmerlin are you familiar with uh ransom repose yeah blog do you know his uh kind of a pretty well-known post called the nerd handbook yeah i think i do yeah that's a old classic yeah it's um when is this from like maybe 2011 um or something like that but basically he wrote this article that's like, here's the handbook to living with a nerd or understanding the nerd mindset.

And so he has, there's sections in here like, understand your nerd's relationship to the computer. Your nerd has control issues. Your nerd has built himself a cave. Your nerd loves toys and puzzles. Nerds are funny. Your nerd has an amazing appetite for information, and so on and so forth. I love this article. I really recommend it. Reading it, I got a lot of insight into myself of like, I was like, oh, these things are not necessarily like my unique idiosyncrasies that like uh make me different from everyone else you know it's not like all nerds love role-playing games and all nerds love world building and all

nerds love the little pieces and parts and stuff that come with all of uh you know that come with a hobby or a system or whatever and and nerds love to optimize all that stuff it's not like it's that's a little too like much of a generalization but it's more of like uh there's a thing in the nerd brain that where these where dnd learning all the facts about dnd and like getting into that system it like scratches an itch that nerds have i yeah i i first of all

Merlinterrific post uh very very interesting very thoughtful guy and uh yeah there's a lot there's a lot to get from that but i also think there's there's so many different flavors of i don't know if it's nerd dork geek what it is but like something i i now know in retrospect i was not alone in but i felt alone in was in just wanting to read reference books all day all i wanted to do as a kid was when I went to the library, I would just grab the World Book Encyclopedia and just

Maxstart reading. Because hierarchies and categories and making rational sense out of systems, that's the Syracuse impulse. That is the thing that makes nerds nerds. And it can express itself in lots of different ways of like, oh, well, I'm obsessive about music and I know every fact about every album or, you know, oh, well, I'm a geologist and I know every thing about every rock and every, you know, fact about geology. It's not like all nerds are into one thing or another, but it is

this, like, hyper-rational way of looking at the world, categorizing, collecting, you know, all of that stuff that makes these things appealing, the same sort of tendencies. Because, like, This whole thing of, like, I like collecting computer and camera stuff more than I, like, use it creatively, I think.

MerlinThat's a good example, yeah.

AlexI'm so thirsty for a MacBook Pro. don't worry I've definitely been paying attention and not uh reading this article uh the nerd handbook but I I love understand your nerds relation to the computer just uh like how how it's like a magical um or rather it's not magical i don't know okay maybe i disagree with this um

it's like it's magic to me but understanding how it works is even more magical um which is why i think i get frustrated with icloud is because i'm like why the why don't i know how this works i want to know i want the file system uh but anyway and they're like you don't need to know all you

Maxneed to know is it's problematic move on but you can understand but just but this doesn't this explain like the whole like why nerds and the internet and computers like it sort of all clicks together because the computer is this magical box through which all of the random the sloppiness and the randomness of the natural world and of human affairs gets filtered through this magic box and comes out in this orderly uh uh semantic uh you know text-based uh categorizable loggable uh thing

You know, this also speaks to that the Adam Curtis documentary that that you center on Merlin, the hyper normalization. Right. It's like that's a nice way to spend an evening. Oh, that was depressing. But but do you see what I'm saying? I'm like, there is that. And I think the nerd mindset. And this is where, you know, when when when the political and the the the personal like do come into play on Twitter, where on the one hand, you have these people who want to use these tools to talk about that, like that messy world of human affairs. And on the other hand, you have these nerds going like, I don't take your politics out of my rational little enclave that I've built.

And on the one hand, they're mad about people bringing their politics in and, of course, not seeing at all the implicit political assumptions that they brought to the system. But on the other hand, these people who go on Twitter and they yell at women and they're like, actually, you've committed a post hoc ergo propter hoc logical fallacy.

Speaker ALadies.

MaxYeah. Well, by your logic.

MerlinYeah, the computer is a complicated thing because it's, you know, once you get your own computer and you get to set it up the way you want and you run your own distro and whatever you want to do with your computer, it becomes like the world's greatest nine-year-old's bedroom where you can make it so much the way you want. And in the days before the internet, I mean, for me, it was all about, you know, running these themes in the finder and being able to trick everything out exactly the way you want and get all John Syracuse with where your windows go.

AlexBut then at some point it also became a portal key.

MerlinAnd that's it. You touch the boot and you go to the Quidditch tournament. It's the craziest thing in the world. But the other thing is people can touch that boot and come to your Quidditch tournament. And I think that, you know, get out of my nine-year-old's room. What are you doing in here? This is my place.

MaxCan you imagine a bunch of nine-year-olds arguing about how to decorate the room with the same intensity that Hacker News argues about computers? They'd be like, well, if you put your Han Solo sticker under the light switch, you're a fucking idiot and your room sucks and you could never sleep. Only an asshole like you would do an ad hominem argument.

Actually, that's begging the question.

MerlinActually, that is not the true meaning of begging the question.

AlexI'm not smart enough for this show

MerlinActually you are That's the problem with women is they don't have good self esteem

AlexClassic straw man

MerlinYou look so much prettier without makeup Alex You should smile more

MaxSo Merlin you did not get into the The really bad chest

MerlinNo no I didn't but like I say I get it I think I get why is such a sensation. And I like the fact that, I'm just repeating myself at this point, but I like the fact that it takes something you think you understand and changes the way you understand it. I think anything like that is fun. It's like any kind of a remix. You take this idea of something you feel like, assuming you are a person who is very familiar with chess, it must be so exciting to be able to go into this and see all this in a completely different context where you're forced to combine something extremely familiar

with something very foreign. And for myself, that is that is in the same way that I liked he was really into hip hop in the 80s I I love the idea of taking a Jackson 5 song and putting it over like you know an Eric B and Rakim beat like that that made both of them more interesting to me and that so that kind of thing will always

Maxthrill me just to know that exists I feel the same way about mashups my friend Tommy's uh uh said this but it's so it's so true for me too of like whenever a mashup comes on like I know the trick that's happening i know what's happening but my brain cannot help but just being overjoyed it's like two songs at once and they go together like this is this is incredible i'm still stunned

Merlini mean like um i've listened to john sarcus has sent me a great collection of his favorite mashups from over the years which is terrific but i know this is really quotidian but i still really like girl talk the combination of like something i've never heard like something about your ice cream ride and then like combining that with like Fleetwood Mac like will never stop blowing me out of the water and I think I mean maybe it's pretty obvious what it's doing it's taking these it's breaking your brain on purpose a little bit but in a really delightful way it's you know it's it's this whole new way of taking things in different contexts and like just frying your brain a little

Maxbit highly recommend uh uh I can I I cannot super get into girl talk because it's a little too like frenetic and and and crazy is it too polished do you think a little no no it's just like it's a too crazy i just don't like the pace that everything like changes at like i i'm i get like straight i get like uh it's like too much it's like overstimulation but uh i'm a huge fan of the hood internet they do these um mashup of mixtapes they're uh they're all on soundcloud but i highly recommend the hood internet mixtape number nine uh just like one of the greatest uh mashup albums of all time soundcloud boy we should do a soundcloud challenge at some point just so

we can talk about how shitty soundcloud is every day every day is a soundcloud challenge it's

Merlinhere's the thing here's let's just make this real simple if there's not a link on a page to a file that somebody can download it's not a podcast you disagree alex oh no no no no i i 100

Maxpercent agree um someone write this down so we can do a soundcloud episode i already have gaming question gaming question alex yes you there alex you so you recommended this game you and i both love this game do you have any other um iphone games that that like scratch the same

Alexitch as the uh as a really bad chess for you i keep thinking about uh merlin's wonderful uh home screen and all the games that were featured on there uh real quick before i answer this do you

Merlinplay any any of those um they're mostly my daughter's games she loves games where you make food she likes minecraft i play what do i play i play threes i played monument valley for a while I still play threes several times a week, but there are not games that I play regularly. I've never played Pokemon Go. I never played floppy things.

MaxDo you not play any games in your life? You just go day to day, and in the course of 24 hours, you don't play any game in any context? Sometimes I try to get support from Comcast. That's so weird. It's such a big part of my life.

MerlinThis is why I say it. I'm not trying to make a false dichotomy or I'm not trying to say something controversial, but what I'm getting, and I have believed this. This is a thought that I have realized and believed for probably coming up on 10 years now. I have frequently scoffed at video games as a culture. Maybe not as bad as Roger Ebert, but I've frequently gone like, oh my God, honestly, the same way you are about comic books. I have just not understood how people could pour so many hours into trying to eat a mushroom. I don't understand why you would do that.

I mean, so 10 years, 15 years ago, here's 10 or 15 years ago me, it's like, you've got to be kidding me. Like, yeah, I like Stargate, but I didn't marry it. Like, how are you an adult who's still spending time playing video games? It seems so strange to me. But you know, the truth is that culture was so emergent. That culture is so broad. There's so many things. Well, first of all, let's state the obvious. There's so many fucking people who play video games as one of the primary ways that they enjoy themselves,

Maxdeal with the world. It's a far bigger industry than film or music or literature. It's by far the number one entertainment industry.

AlexIt's super strange, though, because we're not quite in that world, except for maybe Overwatch, which I think is now currently the biggest game other than Battlefield and Call of Duty. There we go. the shooty shooty games um like i'm so i'm looking at my games and the ones that are beige desert shooters number one and two yep oh they recall they named it battlefield one like

Maxxbox anyway um isn't that wasn't the new one like uh like call of duty like uh infinite combat or something like that it's just like no it sounds like uh well it sounds like that uh that merlin tweet uh and it was isn't that your tweet merlin uh endless shrimp sounds like an existential threat

MerlinRight. Are these all screamy white guy games? Are these those games where a man's face is yelling on the iTunes store?

MaxNo, these are ultra-realistic military shooters.

AlexI mean, they are screaming white guys.

MaxYeah, they're all sort of like sepia-toned games, like set in the desert where you're sort of like indiscriminately killing some sort of minority group where they're like the evil terrorists or whatever, and they sort of compete on each other where it's like seven different new kinds of bullets and realistic blood splatter and you can pilot some sort of helicopter.

MerlinIs this where you wear a headphone and call your friends homosexuals?

AlexYes. Okay. I think so, yeah.

MerlinIsn't that a thing? Don't you have freakouts and yell at your friends for doing it wrong? Is it that kind of a game? That kind of shooty game?

MaxSo in Overwatch, one of the reasons Overwatch has an above average community playing it is they filter out, by default, profanity is filtered out and then if you like, there's like, people basically invent like new um not quite profanity but like new ways to like insult the other team over chat so you can say like um you can type in um so traditionally say gg which means good game and that's sort of like shaking hands at the end of a baseball game it's like sportsmanlike and pretty much everyone does it after after a highly competitive game but sometimes what people will say after they like

crush you like sometimes you just get like demolished by the other team and then one of So people will go in the all chat for both teams and they'll type GGEZ, which means like good game. Like it was easy for us to destroy you, which is like it's just such an insult after you just get crushed and someone's like GGEZ. Like they can't even spell it out.

MerlinI bet that guy mains Hanzo.

MaxNo, he doesn't main Hanzo because they won. But now what Blizzard does is they find these things like GGEZ or like if you call someone gay or whatever it is. I get it. And they replace in their own text. So you type in GGEZ, but what comes out is like, gentlemen, it was a privilege playing with you this fine evening, and I relish our next encounter. And it's really funny because every once in a while someone gets real steamed and they start trying to type something, and then this very complimentary polite text comes out. Oh, that's so great.

AlexOne of my favorite things about Twitch, which is the biggest game streaming site, is you can make a list of banned words. So one day, it took me the entire day, just looking up horrible slurs and making a big list. And then it instantly bans them from your chat. But we had some drama the other day where somebody commented on our stream and said, talk less, smile more, like trying to compliment a woman on the stream.

And she did not get the Hamilton reference. And like it just normally, you know, we only have like a couple hundred people watching. But I think that was the most drama we've ever had. It was delightful.

MerlinOh, I just want to ask some advice. do you have other other um other uh ios games that you think could be good for for a dork to

Maxtry i think finding uh again let me suggest this let me see what you think about this alex i think that over the course of this program um uh over the course of many months and challenges we should uh attempt to diagnose uh merlin's uh game uh particular like game deficiency and like find the thing that he thinks is fun and then find some games that like fit into there because like i guarantee you there's some sort of iphone thing like the pl i i like the pleasure that i get from like um uh taking a shit and playing a tower defense game it's like it's basically i mean i

think it's basically like smoking opium it's like i feel i feel nothing it's it's amazing

Alexyeah that does sound nice there's there's a game uh that i really enjoy uh clash royale and i i used to be a very very strict about i will never take my phone in the bathroom and this year uh a a clash royale uh game round takes about three minutes or so and it's like the perfect healthy

Maxshit time clash royale it's it's like i i it's like being in an abusive relationship honestly because like i know that it's i know that it's like manipulating me and that i've spent um a good amount of money. I probably spent like 60 bucks on Clash Royale to date. But it's also such a good game. It's so fun. I'm just in awe of how good this game is. I think playing a Clash Royale and talking about that is definitely a challenge. That might be one Merlin kind of likes. I think we can drill down into this and find an iPhone game that

Merlin's into.

MerlinI don't want to make it about you don't have to fix my brokenness, but I would be willing to try almost anything. PlayStation games are a little more of a ramp up. Even when we're on PlayStation, we just go to Infinity and stay in Toy Box. And we just run around changing the figures and Spider-Man-ing all around.

MaxWhat do you have, a PS? Do you have a PlayStation 4?

MerlinYeah. Oh, that opens up a lot of game possibilities.

MaxDid you play Journey, the game that Syracuse has talked about?

MerlinYeah, he's told me several times I'm playing it wrong.

AlexDid you not play it in one sitting?

MerlinNo. I watched the first half.

AlexiOS games. I'm thinking, I'm trying to think about threes, because if you are still like me playing this game multiple times a week, like you, there is something in your brain that makes like you, you are a games person. If, if that like brings you some kind of joy or just, uh, for me, it's like an anxiety reliever. I love, um, sort of how it feels like you're, you're moving actual cards around. Yeah. Which is just fun for me. Do you like sort of physics-based stuff, like seeing things jump around in a weird way?

MerlinI think I could probably enjoy that.

AlexThere's this great game called Desert Golfing, which is just this infinite game where you try to play golf, and you're in a desert. And it's incredibly boring, and I played probably 100 hours of it on planes.

MerlinA bunch of my friends were playing that, and it just goes on and on and on, right? Yep.

MaxWould you rather play a puzzle where you're staring at this thing and you're trying to get the solution and then you feel good when you solve it? Or would you rather play with Legos, like Minecraft, where you're just sort of putting stuff together and it looks cool?

MerlinI think the latter. I mean, I think the very first game I ever put on my phone was probably Cannibal. And I thought it very satisfying that I could run for a little while and then die. And then I'd start over. And the simple mechanics of that appealed to me. I can work with that.

MaxAll right. Well, I'll mull this over, and the next time I have a challenge, maybe I'll throw out a couple of different iPhone games, and we'll do a little smorgasbord of play 15 minutes of a bunch of iPhone games.

MerlinI am very buoyed that games thrive. Well, how can I put this? I have mixed feelings about this. I am excited that games interest my friends and thrive on the App Store, not because of it, but in spite of Apple. I think it's really interesting that they, it seems like every few years, they, like the dad that's going to swear off the sauce, and this time they really, really care about video games. And I don't think, I don't think it's in their bones. I don't think it's in their blood. I don't think it's even, I don't think it's in their DNA. I don't think games are an Apple thing.

But I still think it's really cool that you'll occasionally see these things come along that delight, you know, millions of people. I'm glad that is still happening, even though there's no reason for it to keep happening.

AlexHave I asked you this, Merlin? Do you think that, and well, this is a question for both of you. Do you think the intention of Steve Jobs and even Forstall was to never have an app store? Or was it just we are going to teach people how to use this platform and then open up the floodgates?

MerlinI have never thought about it, and it's a really good question. So the question, did they, were they just not ready? Right. And so they came up with the sweet solution.

Alexor look at you can do an app on a website or um was it just not ready or did they never want was

Merlinthis one of those steve jobs nobody's going to watch video on a small screen was it was it is so i i honestly i don't know the it's so difficult to believe that there wasn't a contingent of people saying why boy would be really great if we could have apps for this thing but i don't i don't

Alexknow what do you what do you think i don't know and uh i'm not the kind of person who thinks about this at least once a month or anything um but i i think about sort of uh jobs in his uh you know history with atari and his obsession with systems and uh i i agree with you that um games aren't in apple's dna but it makes them a shit ton of money so i don't think they're going anywhere um i'm looking now what's what's the most uh the biggest revenue i don't think games do make apple

Maxany money i don't think the whole app store makes apple any money i mean i know it's like money i'd be happy to have but i think on apple scale like all they care about as i understand it all apple cares about is selling devices and i think the idea that they have the best app store and they have all these games that are like ios exclusive and special to um ios and they're they run the best on iOS and they're the best to play on iOS, it's not like Apple's like, oh, we're like raking it in from our 30% on the App Store. It's that people will buy an iPhone because these games

Alexare there. Yeah, I think I misspoke. It's more of like that is what brings people to the App Store and it's also, I bet it probably pays for the App Store in itself. You know, there's a very

Maxinteresting story with really bad chess as well to be told just on like the business case for it. So there's like a mythology in gaming that like in like classic games like Solitaire and Chess, you know, it's impossible to market. It's very hard to sell. No one's going to buy it. And twice now, Zach, just in 2016, Zach has sort of defied market logic and he did Sage Solitaire, which is a Solitaire game. Did extremely well financially. And then he did a really bad chess. And I think in the first week that surpassed lifetime sales of Sage Solitaire.

Wow. So very, very interesting that Zach is sort of, I don't know, he's just sort of, I don't know that it's much of a trick beyond making really thoughtful, really good, really well-designed games. In fact, I know for sure that there isn't any trick beyond that. But it's just interesting he's managed to do that. But also very interesting that broadly across all categories on the App Store, but specifically in games, there are very few profitable developers who make a living making things on the App Store anymore and almost no game developers.

In fact, almost everyone I know who makes iPhone games has left iOS as their primary platform because it's nearly impossible to make money there. The reason is consumers don't want to pay for an app. They want to download a free thing, and they expect a lot of features and stuff to come out of it. And there's already huge billion-dollar behemoths in the space where it's like, well, do I really want to make an iOS game and compete against Clash of Clans?

MerlinOh, it's so brutal right now.

MaxZach has this great thing he's told me where he's like, you think of across the whole ecosystem of the App Store, there's this thing he told me about fine artists. because Zach also is a fine artist. He does digital installation art. It's very, very good and interesting and funny and thoughtful. And he has, Zach and I have said it's like, or Zach has told me, I mean, he thinks there's only about 3,000 people who make a living making fine art in the world living.

MerlinWow, really?

MaxWhich if you think about, like, on the one hand, if you think about all the museums and the art programs and how big the culture of fine art seems to be, it seems like an impossibly small clique of people who are making art that could basically all know each other.

But on the other hand, it's really fucking hard to make a living making art. I mean, almost nobody can do it. So it's like, it does kind of, that does sound like about right in my gut. And we've speculated that if it's not already at this point, it will contract to the point where there's really only about 3,000 people who make a living independently, you know, making software on the App Store. I mean, it's a very, very tough market.

AlexI don't want this to become this week in punditry, but I'm confident, I think, I don't know, maybe I'm overly, I know I'm overly optimistic, but the whole idea of subscriptions seems very cool. Like, I would absolutely pay for, well, I'm going to pay for, like, a subscription to OmniFocus or even a game like, oh, oh, Mini Metro. That's another one, I think.

MerlinOh, yeah, yeah. I saw that.

AlexYeah.

MerlinIs that one to try? Jason Snell was saying that's a lot of fun.

MaxOh, incredible. I haven't played it on iOS, but I assume it's good.

AlexYeah. Well, and that's the other thing, too. Most of my favorite games are released on Steam as well as iOS. And they're like $5 more on Steam, and nobody has a problem paying for that. It's, I don't know. Now I'm sad.

MaxPart of that trend of what you're seeing is like indie developers are a lot more clever and nimble than big developers. They can like move more quickly. They don't need like corporate approval. They just sort of like have an idea. They seize the opportunity quickly. You know, just like we were talking about board games. game designers and app developers especially like in the indie world they're very quick to like model the system in their head and like create the exploit to like win right so so i think of like marco's career a little bit like marco's had all these like very clever arbitrages on um sort of

exciting things happening in the app store ecosystem so you know instapaper was big because he he kind of created this concept of a new way to read on your phone and and was the first to market with it. And then, you know, obviously the magazine was big because he was like sort of arbitraging the fact that the newsstand was on the front page of everyone's iPhone and no one knew what to do with the thing. You know, Overcast, maybe a little bit of an outlier because that's a little late to the category. But, you know, eventually all that stuff fades away. Like

eventually you can be the first person to have a time-synced reading app on the App Store. But, you know, over time, like a huge developer will come in and start chipping away at you because they have more people, more resources, etc. I just think it's like there was this gold rush of indie developers saw the space in the app store and rushed in and they were the first to seize the opportunity. And now things are sort of like the balance of power is like restored to the universe. And like these big companies, EA has the biggest games because they can throw thousands

Alexof people and millions of dollars at the problem. I use Marco's both Instapaper and Overcast every single day but my favorite app he's ever made is uh his his nipple app that uh what was oh nursing clock and it was taken down because the icon looks like a nipple and i just sent it oh it's so good it was so good i i had uh a friend at the time who used it all right that's all

MerlinCan I circle back to, because I've been ruminating on what you asked about the App Store. Oh, please. And this might be way off topic and Max might need to go. But just fairly quickly. Hang on, I'm just going to shoot on my insulin here.

I would not be surprised to find out that Steve in particular did not want third-party apps on the phone. because I feel like there's little bits of this story over time that end up leading to where we are today, and that is this. Apple wants to own the entire stack. They want to control what happens inside that stack. And this is not necessarily about money. It's about something else, that they want to control that whole stack,

and they want fewer and fewer pieces of anything that's not their stack involved. And you could look at that so many different ways. Think about, I don't know who first put it this way. It might have been Gruber. But the first time I heard somebody say, well, what if Apple's not trying to get rid of ports? What if Apple's trying to get rid of cables? Which is kind of a different paradigm, if you think about it. Where you think about what Steve Jobs, or between Steve Jobs and eventually Johnny Ive, if they could have something that's like an unbreakable, beautiful piece of glass you could hold in your hand

and not even realize you're interacting with, that's much closer to the vision. obviously than trying to make some kind of Dell thing with 45 ports that fits standard hard drives. If you think about the overall taste and direction of the company, I bet they had some very heated discussions about whether they even want the filthy lucre of people trying to put video games on the phone. That's going to take up space, fill it up.

MaxI know for sure that that's the case because there's some Steve Jobs quotes on the record to that effect. He didn't want to have iPods work with Windows. That's how much he wanted to own the stack. But if you think about, another way to think of it is to put a more, because owning the stack maybe sounds like greedy or cynical. I don't think it is. I think it's in the service of-

MerlinI think controlling the stack is the important part.

MaxControlling the stack. But I think it's in the service of a strong editorial opinion about design that's good. So I'm mostly at peace with it. But here's another way to think of it. People forget, Apple pundits look at what's one inch away from their nose. of like, well, what's happening this, what's this week's, you know, big controversy, right? Is, oh, is Flash ever going to be on iOS or whatever? If you take a step back to like the historical context of Apple and like what Steve Jobs did was, you know, he took computers from being this thing of like from the same people who

love to like study the D&D manuals, right? And they were like, hmm, like how many, you know, cycles can it compute? and I've created a more optimal software disk. You know, the stuff that was just like impossibly nerdy, could never connect with the public, where one of the main things you did with computers was you played games with it. So you would have very serious people, people in the liberal arts, you'd have intellectuals, and they'd say, well, what good is a computer? You just play your little games on it. And Steve Jobs saw the potential as a tool for making art

and for thinking, changing how we think of the world. I mean, he was truly, I think that, you know, the whole bicycle from mine thing was like truly like his romantic idea of how computers could fit into society. And I think he spent his entire life pushing back against this idea that computers were like a toy where you played games on them. And I think it was offensive to his dying day to him, the idea that you could, you would get an iPhone because it was good at running games. Like it was so much more important and beautiful and so much more high stakes and intellectual

than that to him. And, you know, to me, one of the clearest articulations of Apple and Steve Jobs' editorial viewpoint on what games are and the relationship of games to technology was the original Game Center app icon when they launched Game Center, which was like a casino kind of thing. It was a felt casino with gambling games, and then it got updated to the three primary color balls, like a children's toy. So it's somewhere from a vice to a children's entertainment thing.

But the idea that games are an art or games are an engine to themselves was just like it's totally antithetical to the whole Apple worldview of liberal arts meets a technology.

AlexWell, so then let's step back from that. and just go back to the idea of just having third-party apps on the phone at all. Because I don't know if you ever watched the interview, Max, but he just keeps reiterating software is art, and he refers a lot of times to third-party software and actually praises Adobe. So I want to believe that he recognized that other people would make tools to make art on the phone.

because the first phone, it was like, there was voice memos and what? You couldn't make anything interesting. So I don't think, I mean, same with Roger Ebert. Like he didn't, he famously condemned video games as not being art. And I think at the time, Jobs probably would have said the same thing. But I don't know. I think today's Apple has hopefully a more evolved worldview. Like the editorial picks in the App Store, I don't really know how they work, but they're generally very good games.

MerlinOh, no, I think the people, I meant it more in the higher levels up. I bet everybody who's working in Apple is doing the best they can with what they've got. But take a simple example. I mean, do you imagine, this is so speculative, do you imagine Steve Jobs used a third-party app for email on the iPhone? I mean, think about that for a minute. Do you think he used, like, an early calendar app, a different calendar app than the calendar app? I mean, when they were available, how much time do you think Steve Jobs spent even looking at those apps?

Because I feel like in his mind, he would say, no, look, we've already made, we made the phone and we've made the app for the phone. This is the app for doing this. There's no need to. And so the thing is, Adobe is a really interesting example because Adobe was what let them make the leap to desktop publishing. That partnership was so important back in the day. That was, that's such a different era. I'm just imagining that in, like, I wonder how Steve Jobs would feel if he walked by somebody in the break room and they were playing solitaire on their phone. I bet there's all kinds of ways in which that would really rankle him.

MaxBut it's such a, when Apple's like, when someone's like, asks an Apple person, like, why doesn't this particular feature or thing occur in the Apple app? Like, there's such condescension when they say, like, oh, well, it sounds like a great third party opportunity. that's like that's like apple that's like apple's buzzword for like uh we've looked at the problem and you're a moron if you want that right like nobody nobody wants that uh it's like yeah there's

Merlinthere's a certain arrogance about that and there's there are other companies that i feel this way about whose work output i love but who are extremely dismissive about anybody having anything to say about uh what they do pixar but there there are people whose work i really love that that are like they really like oh yeah really you think we didn't think of that we're fucking pixar dude of course we thought of that it's like okay sorry i really like your movies

MaxNo offense. Like, do you buy the thing where it's like all these people love to like, for example, like people love to criticize Obama for his like drone policy. And they're like, oh, Obama doesn't have the international authority to do these drone strikes. I love that guy on the internet voice.

He's really coming out. He's really coming out today. He's like, well, according to the subtenants of international law, it's like we actually don't have the airspace authorization to launch these unarmed drone strikes. and uh sure i'm sure that's i'm sure it's true but uh don't you think like uh uh not that i'm like uh like on the face of it like i love like drone strikes or anything but don't you think like don't you think like obama probably don't you think obama like probably has some information that we're not privy to where he's like as he's evaluating whether or not to make a drone strike

like he's aware of some of the costs and benefits that we might not get from like occasionally reading the new yorker it's like you know what i mean it's like it's like you can sit yeah sure you can like sit back and be like uh oh well i i don't i don't like this or that policy on on national security but there is always that thing hanging over the debate of like well the stakeholders know so much more than you and they are not free to discuss it so it's like the debate is not really unequal unequal playing terms and when people have this argument about like oh well should apple like how should they like organize the like email threads like uh chronologically or a chronologically

in their email app it's like i mean i know everyone has sits back in their chair and they have these strong opinions like well obviously uh the apple ecosystem would be uh it's doomed if they don't fix this or that but it's like really like you like don't you think like the people who are like developing these apps like are privy to a lot more of the like costs and benefits of these decisions than you are like don't you think it's so it's such an obvious thing like you don't think they've

Merlinthought of it yeah i take i take that that counterpoint the the other part of this that is so interesting to me with apple is um i'm not interested in what apple is doing tomorrow and nearly as much as I'm interested in what they're doing in two years, because what they're doing in two to five years, we are seeing just the tiniest little glances out of the corner of our eye when anything happens at Apple. I think it's important to keep in mind that there's probably handsets in a room somewhere there that we're not going to see for a year or two, that they are so far ahead of the curve.

And, like, you talk about, you know, skating to where the puck is. That's one thing to keep in mind. We're sitting here being all fixated about the past and how our email is sorted, And there's probably a really good chance that, you know, they're thinking really far down the road about a whole different, to use that word again, paradigm for how we approach that stuff.

MaxNo ports. You're going to spray the headphones up your nose out of a spray nozzle and hear the music in perfect fidelity. Can I get some insulin with that?

MerlinThe chamfered edges of the insulin squirter.

Transcribed by ESO, translated by —

4. Your Little Hitler Game 0:00 / 01:06:25