10. You Said I Could Have a Suitcase

MaxThis is Do By Friday, the weekly challenge podcast with Alex Cox, Merlin Mann, and me, Max Tumpkin. This week's challenge, rearrange your iPhone home screen according to some rules that Alex made up.

AlexOh boy.

MerlinI had a feeling this is how it was going to be.

Speaker BOh, God. Don't kink shame him.

MerlinI'm going to trim my nose hair.

I got an ear hair that's really...

Speaker AOh, yeah. Oh, there it is.

MaxCan I ask you an ear and nose hair question? Yes, yes. I know you consider yourself an ENTH, an ear, nose, and throat hair professional.

Speaker AOh, yeah. I consider myself more of an INTJ. That means I'm a millennium with a phone.

MerlinI think I'm an infinite jest. Oh, we got to talk about him. I watched so many David Foster Wallace videos last night. Anyway, continue. Yes, I consider myself very much an ear, nose, and throat man.

Speaker ANow, okay.

MaxNow, I'm not. I'm a throat man. Now, Merlin, as you know, I'm about to turn 30. So I'm becoming quite an old man and I'm starting to get some, uh, some, some hair, some long wizard hairs in my nose and in my ears. And let me tell you what I do is I sort of save them until they get just long enough for me to get at. And then I pluck them out. You're using your finger with your nails? You just get in there and you just pluck them right out. They come right out. Pluck them right out. It's a harvest.

MerlinOh, I agree. And then the nice thing to do is when you get them, when you get some good wizard hairs, you kind of line them up in front of you. and you can really get a sense of how it's going. You can see how wiggly they are, how gray they are, how wizardly they are. And it makes you cry a little bit, which is nice.

MaxOh, your tear ducts activate. And I've got... I'll probably get in one a month. One good hair a month. Maybe a little less frequently than that.

AlexYou have like a nose hair period?

MaxYeah. All the cards partners were all linked. Our cycles were all linked.

AlexCan you call each other? I got my...

Speaker AI can't swim or ride horses, and I need to lay down. The period cycles linking the Wellesley effect.

MaxDavid Pinzoff, one of the card partners, is getting his PhD in psychology. He studies evo psych, and he was showing us all this new research that shows that that's probably not real.

Speaker ATurns out that it's basically confirmation bias. I bet it's the birthday problem. You know, it's one of those, like, it's not that much of a coincidence. There's only 30-ish days in a month.

MaxExactly. And then it's a confirmation bias.

Speaker ASo you sort of notice when it happens, and you don't notice when it doesn't happen. How's that different from an availability heuristic, Max?

MaxWell, the availability heuristic is if you just looked at you and your friends, just the data that was available. So it is that a little bit, too, because the sample size, and how big is the sample of

Speaker Athese, like, period cycle syncing studies? Certainly very small. You know what? I'm going to add a topic.

MerlinWe have to do something about Daniel Kahneman at some point. Wouldn't that be an interesting show to do? Absolutely. Now, who is that?

MaxIs that a naked economist?

MerlinAll of the words that you're using were invented by him and his partner in the 1970s. I thought Malcolm Gladwell made those words. Oh, it turns out, you know, yes. So Daniel Kahneman, he's kind of this is not the show. He's come into.

Well, how can I say this? Okay, so a lot of the stuff that the turns out people cream their jeans over has some basis in the massive amount of work that Kahneman and his partner, whose name escapes me right now, did.

A lot of the bias stuff. So basically his whole deal is what has come to be called behavioral economics, which is like the biggest turns out of all the turns outs. But he's like an actual, like, you know, he's a science-y guy. and you know the thing like i think the thing like you know will the kid wait to get the marshmallow like that all has a basis in in the work that they did many years ago so right now he's coming so a couple years three years ago or so uh he put out a book called thinking fast and slow that i never finished reading oh that's the pencil book that i still haven't read yeah basically you know the nut in a nut like there's these two different modes of thinking that are

really quite different and explain a fair amount about merlin according to the malcolm gabble book

MaxI read. You shouldn't actually spend too long on this kind of stuff. What you really want to do is sort of take it in quickly and make like a gut decision. You want to make a flash decision. So could you just sort of summarize it from the

Speaker Aback flap and I'll decide whether I agree with it or not? Oh yeah. Okay, sorry. There's two kinds of expertise. The kind that takes 10,000 hours

Merlinand look at it, a statue for a second. Sounds pretty good to me. I don't know. Michael Lewis, the money ball guy and the big short guy has now written a book basically about these two guys and their relationship so I think Daniel Kahneman would be an interesting topic to talk

Maxabout this is not the show well as you know I read about this in the number one national best-selling Malcolm Gladwell book dipshit why stupid people are

Merlinactually smart I read I read of a short discussion of that in the New Yorker so I didn't have to read the whole dip shit mm-hmm well it's also released as a

Speaker Apodcast hey guys please remember to like and subscribe let's uh let's start the show here

Merlinoh god we have so much to talk about wait now i had another thing we're talking about oh yeah anyway with nose hairs um incredible tremendous very very successful so what you want to do what you might want to do is get yourself some really nice Japanese tweezers which sounds like a euphemism

MaxI don't want to brag but I do own the number one highest rated tweezers on the wire cutter

Speaker Aoh you got the sweet home tweezers the sweet home tweezers god damn it Max I'm trying to buy a motherfucking television and it is so can I tell you go on the

Maxget the one on the wire cutter are the biggest one that fits on your wall. What's wrong with that?

Speaker AYeah, we don't really have walls.

MerlinBut it's really, really hard.

MaxAnd then you hire a big burly man, and he comes in, diggadah, diggadah, diggadah, and hoists it up on the wall.

MerlinBreaks your optical cable.

MaxWell, you can't make an armlet without breaking a few optical cables. That's what they say. That's what Malcolm Gladwell says.

Speaker BI should get a water.

MaxDid you guys see that Trump paid some hookers to pee in the bed?

That's fake news. That's probably fake news.

Speaker AI know that it's probably fake news, but let me have it. can i i want like 48 hours oh there's so much so much i'm not saying i just i was sitting there

Merlinlast night and like i almost tweeted it and i was like no don't let this be the hill you die on

Speaker Ai know that it's probably fake and it did not stop me from tweeting 500 piss jokes i was born for

Merlinthis do you understand this i know i know but you think you're you think you've hit rock bottom you think you're done you think it's not getting any weirder and then you're thinking like the thought going through my mind at 10 30 last night 10 30 pacific is um wow you know it's probably not true but like regardless of whether or not it's true the man who is going to be the next president of the united states you know you fucking know that he was up all night reading every tweet that everybody had everything that anyone had to say about the fact that he might have paid people to

pee on each other and that i just couldn't get that thought out of my mind whether or not it's

Speaker Atrue because you know he's obsessed with what people think of him the news it started as a

Maxtrickle but by the time that trump went to sleep it was it was a full-blown stream of hot frothy news you know that you know when you wake up and you have that first news in the

Alexmorning yeah really brought our office together last night as we were waiting for the farewell speech we it was like a collective twitter effort to like search to make sure that all of the puns had indeed been made uh just just in case and then there was an exercise in self-control and not you know throwing up on our own keyboards um it was a good night i think i think i think a best practice

Merlinfor this i don't always follow this but i've always believed this you get one joke if it's a meme, you get one joke. Give me your best joke and then shut the fuck up. It's not a writer's room. Like I want, I want to hear your best joke. And then I don't want to hear another one. Now I know that's not how Twitter works, but that's how I work on Twitter on a good day. And I had one really good joke yesterday and I walked away. I muted the, by the way, mute, mute. This conversation has got to be the greatest invention in the history of the internet because you can go and you can go drop a tinkle on, on the, uh, on the internet. And then you say, mute this conversation

and then go let them argue about it. But that's my feeling. You don't want to go on and on about it. I mean, eh. But still, it is kind of funny to have the Republican candidate do this all caps toot and then just see every single response is a really, really stupid pun about peeing. And there was something glorious, gloriously American about that. And knowing he had to fucking sit there and go like, I'm not going to read this. I'm not going to read this. And then go, oh, come on.

Speaker AThat's not even funny. That's not even a joke.

MaxIt was, so I was at the speech last night, the Obama's farewell speech. Yes, it was very emotional. Oh, yeah, I watched it, yeah. A uniquely, I sincerely do not mean this as like a dig or anything, but it was like a uniquely poorly logistically orchestrated event. I have to imagine it was done with like a skeleton staff at the last second, and it was like, it was kind of, the event was a little, it was a little sloppy for an Obama. Like I Obama events are so polished and and run with a military precision. And this one, the echo was pretty distracting.

It was it was not the best event, but it was very fun. You know, sort of also staff reunion. So everybody flew every party who's part of the Obama kind of universe flew in. So, you know, get to see all all the old friends from the campaign and people who, you know, you've met over the years, like working for this guy. And it was fun having everyone come together and like piss gate broke while we were all waiting in line to get into the speech. That was fun. And then you get in there and it's in a, it's in a, one of the, it's in the main, the speech was in the main convention hall of McCormick Place, which I don't know if you've ever been

to McCormick for a convention, but, and it's pretty like, and there was nothing in there. Normally there's like a boat show or a food show or something going on in there, but there was nothing there. It was all empty except for this like tiny little, you know, in, in, in perspective, this tiny little stage that Obama was on. And it was almost like dizzying being in this building with all these people. I mean, it was, it was enormous. And when you, of course, when you're all packed in there, like nobody has cell reception because then there's too much congestion and like your phone just can't connect. Plus, it's possible for security reasons they might actually be like jamming the cell signals during the event.

But then everyone gets out of this like very poignant historic speech where the president was sort of this. The president urged the American people to take politics seriously and be hopeful. And like everyone walks out and your phone lights up and you have all your tweets and your text messages. And it's just like wall to wall coverage of Trump. You know, the people pissing on Trump or whatever. Like it was quite a contrast.

MerlinYeah. Sandra Newman. They say Trump is such a great dealmaker, but there are millions of women who would piss on him for free.

MaxYou know, that's the thing about the pissing is there are what happened. I thought there was a lot of American prostitutes who need jobs, Merlin. And this is just one more industry that Trump has outsourced.

MerlinYou know what? That's another one. That's another one that's in the drafts folder. Bring these jobs home.

Speaker AYeah.

MerlinYeah. That's fake news. I mean, Trump said it.

MaxSo it's obviously we know the truth now because he said that it was fake news.

MerlinOkay. Are we going to talk about this? Are we going to talk about this? Let's talk about this.

AlexAbout piss game. Alex, how's it going, man?

MerlinCan I tell you about something I like?

AlexListen, I kind of broke myself because I was trying. People comment on my laugh a lot. I was trying so hard not to laugh. And God damn.

Speaker BThat's the best part of the show. Don't be a dick. I'm water. Don't withhold. God, Max, when is he so withholding?

Speaker APlease proceed, Governor.

Speaker BI would like to use the balance of my time to the distinguished lair from Cook County.

Speaker ANow, Senator Mann, I'd like to congratulate your Alabama football team on their excellent performance this season. I would like to thank the distinguished cocksmoker from Chicago. for his sense of plurality. Please continue. Now, Senator Mann, let me ask you this. Do you quarrel with your wife?

I've been tempted. Let me remind you, Senator, you are under oath. Well, no, you are. You're the one under oath.

MaxYou're under oath. Senator Mann, would you feel that it's fair to characterize your marriage

Speaker Aonly in terms of when you're quarreling with your wife? Tell me, in single words, only the good things about your mother. Wouldn't it similarly be unfair to characterize your record purely based on the many racist actions you have taken? Well, that was a different time, and now people don't even listen to records anymore. They got the iPods.

It's the 10-year anniversary of the iPod, you guys. I gotta go Google my iPod. Alex, please.

MerlinYou there.

AlexWhat? Huh?

MerlinSorry, go ahead. You're trying not to laugh and pee.

Speaker BGod.

MerlinI feel like... Is this the detox? This is the detox, right? Are we talking about this? I got a feeling we're going to talk about this. It's either this or I figured Max was just going to tweet through the entire thing. He wasn't going to talk at all. Is he tweeting well? I'm going to go look. I'm reading Twitter.

Okay.

Now, okay, so let's assume – okay, so here's the question. What parts, if any, of these things do you think are likely to be true or likely to be corroborated? One of the many criticisms of these documents that came out is they don't have the traditional, first of all, like the vetting. Like this is raw intel, right? And it sounds like it's kind of poorly copyedited raw intel. Like how much of this do you think is true and how certain are they of which parts of this?

Speaker AWhat do you think is really happening here?

MaxI also just want to say it's not intel. When you say it's not intel of any kind, this is like a report written by a guy. So intel would be intelligence. It's more like reporting. Exactly. It's like a summary of Intel.

I don't know. I mean, does anyone want to? I will. I'm happy to prognosticate. I mean, listen, fucking when I turn on CNN to watch Trump's rambling press conference this morning, like they had Rick Santorum was on talking about how he's an expert in cybersecurity. And so now just anyone can say whatever the fuck they want about anything. So I'm happy to prognosticate about this. But I mean, you just want sort of my gut instinct about this.

MerlinYou spend a lot of mental and emotional energy on these things because they matter to you. And I think you think about it. And then, you know, it comes out in the steam of a show like this. You care a lot about this. And I want to ask you what you really think is going on, not just as a Obama-loving liberal flack, but as a rational person. What do you think is really going on and what can be proven or will be proven?

Speaker AWhat do you think?

MaxSo here's where we are right now. I just I guess we now we need to get into this for the audience. So it's Wednesday morning. And what happened is BuzzFeed published this thing from possibly a British intelligence officer. We're not really sure, but it's some document and it's got the pissing story, but also some very compromising information that shows that Trump's staff is talking to the Russians and there's business dealings and so on and so forth.

Speaker ATo me.

MerlinBut I mean, like there's the one big arc of it is and this is to me, this is the big right kahuna that everyone's been wondering about is like well you know why is he why is he and maybe i'm changing the topic but why is he so positive on russia and and what this seems to say whether or not it's true accurate complete or anything like that what it seems to say is there's a lot of evidence that however it was gotten they the russians in some form or fashion have compromising information about donald trump that they are keeping on file for when they need that is almost

Maxcertainly true, but that's true of everyone. But I'll tell you this. I don't know. The pissing story, not only does, is it not, probably it's not true, but it's, although it is hilarious, but I don't know, maybe it's true. Who the fuck knows with Trump? Like maybe it is, maybe it's not, but also it doesn't really matter because that's not really the thing at play here. What I can say I am very confident about is that there is a relationship that sort of compromises the integrity of Trump's foreign policy decision making with Russia. It really

doesn't. I mean, this report adds a lot of new damning detail to it. We'll see if anything, if any of those details are true or not. CNN's already corroborating independently with fucking Carl Bernstein on the byline. They're corroborating a lot of this. So there is something there to some of these details. But just to zoom out and look at the big picture, like we've known about this for a long time. I mean, if you want to get a very good perspective on the Trump and his inner circle and their relationship with Russia, I recommend an episode of Slate's Trumpcast,

the excellent Trump podcast with Jacob Weisberg. This one is from May 2nd, 2016. So it has nothing to do with any of this new intelligence. And it's just a story about Paul Manafort, who was at the time, it was Trump's campaign manager. And the title of the episode is Dictator's Favorite Sleazebag, Paul Manafort. And it talks about how Paul Manafort has been working for Putin in elections in the Ukraine, and probably we know he has some debts to Russian oligarchs and possibly ties to organized crime. I mean, there's a lot of unsavory characters who are deeply

sort of enmeshed in Russian economics and politics, who are in Trump's inner circle. And we also know that during the RNC, one of the only changes that the Trump campaign forced through the party platform was that they weakened the Republican Party's stance on sanctions against Russia. So we already know that there's this relationship of influence where somehow through his inner circle, through Trump directly, or through the pissing video or whatever,

somehow the Russians have a line of dialogue with Trump, and Trump is accommodating them with deals and lifting sanctions and that kind of a thing. And I guess you can say, well, how bad is that? Does that disqualify you for being president? Personally, for me, I would prefer a president who purely represents the interests of the American people and they don't also have any sort of side dealings going on, but that's my own taste.

AlexChris Lettner works at Tesla now. How crazy

Merlinis that, man?

AlexMy very first thought was P is too normal. Like, if something...

MerlinP is too normal. and you know the whole like i'm a germaphobe thing well yeah exactly that's what makes it dirty like that's the thing like you think german people don't know poop is gross no it's the

Maxgross it's the grossness that makes it fun i made a joke on a podcast it may have been this very podcast as a matter of fact and it was around the time when a pussygate came out and trump you know had that tape where trump was said he was assaulting women and uh i had sort of predicted There was this question at the week that that was in the news cycle. There's this question of, is Trump going to have to withdraw from the ticket or not? Is Trump done? Right. And people have asked this a hundred times about Trump. And the answer is he's never done because he has no shame.

I said at the time I made this joke and I was like, you know, honestly, Trump could go on CNN right now and say, yeah, I piss in women's mouths. That's my thing. I love to piss in women's mouths and there's nothing they can do about it. And you're still going to elect me president. And it still wouldn't slow him down or stop him because these kind of things are only damaging to people who have shame and people who care. And Trump has no shame. His voters don't care. You know, for a while on Twitter, among the like Republican friends that I have and people I follow, there was a strong like hashtag never Trump movement where there are all these Republicans who are anti Trump.

And I'll tell you, I like a lot of these people. I respect them professionally and I really respected them for coming out against Trump when he was the nominee. But as soon as trump won they flipped and they were so happy and they were dancing on obama's grave and they were gonna get obamacare now So it turns out what people didn't like about trump was that they felt that he was a loser and that he couldn't win And as soon as he won they had no reason not to like him anymore. So all of this like Unprincipled or excuse me all of this like all this like principled politics of the left Where we're like this guy isn't a dignity and he's a joke and there's all these scandals like only we just know that only

we care about that. The American people don't care about that. Not with Trump anyway. Maybe if there was a politician with dignity like Mitt Romney, it would sort of stick. If Mitt Romney paid women to piss on him, that would probably stick because he's a man with dignity. But Trump has no dignity.

You're going to cut all this out, right? No, this is gold.

MerlinOkay. This is a gold

Speaker Ashower of information.

MerlinThis is the thing that I have not said except to my wife because Because the whole idea of this makes me so uncomfortable. And saying it anywhere to anybody that is not a very close person to me invokes Godwin's law in a way that I'm not comfortable with. But to something you said this morning, you kind of said the thing that has been on my mind for months and months and months, which is, first of all, yes, I agree with you. that not simply the people who support him, but the people who are in a position of power,

they have a lot to lose. I mean, they have little to gain by going against Trump and a lot to lose by, you know what I mean? He's going to be supported by a lot of these folks unless something really different from what's happened before happens. But here's the problem. No matter how wackadoodle his ideas are, no matter how crazy his schemes, no matter how impractical anything that he – this is the problem with entering into an authoritarian world is that no matter what happens, he will never fail.

It's always going to be the fault of the Jews. It's going to be the fault of the immigrants. And it's going to be the fault of all those perfidious liberals who just can't accept that they lost. So every time, you know, when we get bombed, it's not going to be his fault. It's going to be the fault of, I mean, I don't want to just say the Jews, but like that I'm saying that for a reason. It's going to be all of these people that all of his supporters already are at least extremely suspicious of. It's going to be their fault. If the wall, if the wall, it's not a fence, if the wall does not get built in the way that he wants and paid for in the way that he wants, it's not because it was a terrible idea to begin with.

It's because of all those bad people. And that's the thing that for months has been dogging me is like no matter what, it's never going to turn out that it was his fault. It's always somebody else's fault. And that's how an authoritarian regime works. And that's the part that really scares me. If you if we win, if we get, you know, you back in the days, oh, we got to get the faithless electors. No matter what happens, he's going to win, win, win, because that's how this works. And that's what scares the shit out of me.

MaxListen, I made a pretty low place in terms of my own sort of feelings about politics and stuff. So I don't, you know, people had a lot of people ask me like, oh, like, what do we do or whatever? And it's not clear to me yet. I don't know. I myself have just been like reading a lot because I feel like at least it's something I can do. And probably like weirdly the best thing that I read that helps me get some insight into it. It just helps me get my head around what's happening in a way where at least it's a framework where things make sense again is this book that Sartre wrote in 1945 called The Anti-Semite and the Jew.

And it's sort of this study of the German anti-Semites in Germany and Jews in Germany and their place and their sort of codependent relationship because the anti-Semites, they hate the Jew and they want to exterminate the Jews. But they created the Jew. They need the Jew. The Jew is their center of power. in the same way that for now Trump's Jew would be like, I don't know, Hillary Clinton or the dishonest media or something. There's this great quote Sartre says, I mentioned a while back some remarks by anti-Semites, all of them absurd. I hate Jews because they make servants and subordinate

because a Jewish furrier robbed me, etc. Never believe that anti-Semites are completely unaware of the absurdity of their replies. They know that their remarks are frivolous, open to challenge, But they're amusing themselves, for it is their adversary who is obliged to use words responsibly, since he believes in words. The anti-Semites have the right to play. They even like to play with the discourse for, by giving ridiculous reasons, they discredit the seriousness of their interlocutors. They delight in acting in bad faith, since they seek not to persuade by sound argument, but to intimidate and disconcert.

If you press them too closely, they will abruptly fall silent, loftily indicating by some phrase that the time for argument is past. And this, to me, this helped me understand the power politics of what's happening on the right. And again, not to say that they're anti—I'm not literally saying that they're anti-Semitic or Nazis. It's just—it's a way of saying—what I'm trying to say here is we're the side that cares about words and the meaning of words. And saying, ah, we've got you. By your own logic, you've contradicted yourself. that's when we sort of that's our we jewishly reply this you know these like these like uh

logical uh counter arguments and rebuttals to trump uh we're like you're having tea and talking

Speaker Aabout the talmud exactly it's like it's not this is the they're they know that this is the game they

Merlinknow that what the game is right they're toying and it's like it's like there's somebody i forgot i gotta find this article uh this woman wrote a few years ago about basically about twitter that It was so influential in my thinking about what's broken about Twitter. And one of the things about her, what she was saying was basically, I'm probably going to mangle this, but it was along the lines of like when you argue with somebody on the Internet, whoever cares more will lose in a lot of ways. It's the person who doesn't care or the person who doesn't have a stake in that particular argument that will always win. They don't have skin in the game.

And that's why trolls win. And what you're saying here, that provocation, that provocative language, it's very casual. And then you come in, you seem like somebody with a stick up their ass. You seem like Eddie Albert on Green Acres when you come in and you're the one who wants to talk about logic.

MaxRight. But we're the ones who care about politics with dignity. We're the ones who care about internal consistency and specific language and saying what you mean. And when Trump comes in and he sounds like a buffoon and he's giving, like the Sartre thing said, but when he gives ridiculous reasons and uses unspecific language and makes a fool of himself and everyone around him, what he's doing is he's discrediting the seriousness of politics, of the dialogue. And this is not a that's not actually a a how do I put this?

It's not actually a bad thing for Trump. What Trump's audience loves is that they feel that the whole system is false and corrupt and they love that Trump comes in and destroys it. And so when the more that we get into these like you've made a post hoc ergo proctor hoc error, Mr. Trump, like when will you be resigning? it's like that's we're actually playing right into their game like that's that is anticipated but now that being said one of the reasons i'm and and it helps me to understand that but one

of the reasons one of the things i'm a little bit at a loss for is um absent making good faith arguments and trying to persuade people and having a conversation and using words that mean things i

Merlindon't actually know what to do yeah you feel like somebody walking out of the ghetto in uh in warsaw saying hey why are you taking my bag you said i could keep a bag right like yeah okay we said that

Speaker Bbut like believe me it's gonna get worse okay you guys ready to start the show uh how's your app Hang on. Hang on. Point of order.

Follow up. God damn it, Max.

AlexOh, Max, do you see the Google Doc?

MaxWe have a doc?

Alexmerlin you you seem concerned about mentioning your sleep herbs people people know you're

Maxnot a doctor we can talk about i actually take a little sleep herb as well

Merlinyes that way you can really really look at your hand um okay we can talk about that i here's the thing just just tell people what it is alex i put that in brackets in 10 point type

Alexin gray here's uh there's something that uh that's not gonna make sense because alex is

Merlincutting out the last half hour before this

Speaker Aif not going in the show. We'll see.

MaxNothing matters anymore, Merlin. I used to be concerned about saying crazy things on politics and in podcasts and let me tell you, nothing fucking matters anymore. It doesn't matter. It doesn't matter. It does not matter. It's all going in. None of it matters.

Speaker ABy your logic, no one should have a suitcase.

Maxactually technically that is a classic uh no true scotsman uh argument and i have thus defeated you

Merlinyou have been disarmed my good sir line to the right so my question is i don't i don't like giving advice that gets too near to health things and I don't want to accidentally have somebody go oh you know a formerly famous podcaster Merlin Mann says I should go eat this pill and then they fucking die and shit like I don't want to I can't have that on me I will tell people because people seem to want to know and maybe we can just close the thread this is not mysterious you can go find it

Maxyou gotta have a lot of powers you gotta

Speaker Btake a lot of risk you gotta push your body to the limits sleep is weakness you need to get in there and do your own research.

Speaker AYour body, it's one big experiment, and I'm the scientist. Now, let's get in there with some powders.

Speaker BYour body's a boiler. I'm the fire.

MaxLet's raise that testosterone and take our sleep herbs. Let's be well-rested so that we can express our true masculine identity.

Speaker AIs paying the women... I'm sort of confused because if Trump was peeing on the women, that's more of an alpha male move. I don't think he was peeing on them.

MerlinI think you've got to remember his relationship with his father. You're going to cut all this out. In order to understand the peeing, it's helpful to understand the relationship with his father. He never got the approval of his father.

Speaker AAre we doing a bit? Is this real or is this a bit? No, this is being cut out.

MaxWhat, you don't watch Frontline? Let me clarify one thing about the peeing that maybe I think has gotten lost in a lot of the very good Twitter dialogue about the pissed Twitter. But here's the thing is that So the deal was Trump stayed in a fancy hotel, allegedly Trump stayed in a fancy hotel and it was, he got put in the same room that President Obama had stayed in.

MerlinHe knew there was a bed in this room that the president and the first lady had slept in.

MaxThe first black president who Trump has spent his entire political career slandering and discrediting.

Speaker ASo he thinks, you know what, I'll get some pay-per-view and get a fucking Toblerone and just lay down and enjoy sleeping in the bed that the president had been in. And that's how the story ended. Well, and also, yeah, well, no, he had to defile the bed.

MaxAnd let me tell you, I've defiled some hotel beds. I mean, I've eaten a sandwich in there. I've eaten a meatball sub in a hotel bed. I stay, I've slept in hungover until noon.

No hotel bed escapes me unscathed. But this is what Trump did. He really defiled it. allegedly allegedly so it's not that's the thing is where i'm confused here is if he pissed on these women i could see that being like um the trump base being like oh that's cool he's like a alpha male like like i want to be that's like yeah he's not one of those peacocks they call that the the gorilla mindset oh is that right are you familiar with that no that's where when you go to a business meeting you you have to uh urinate on um your opponents on their largest son to

Speaker Aestablished dominance oh okay you know what I have heard of that I remember that from interest like yeah they call that the gorilla mindset but girl mindset you come in and maybe pee on the oldest son exactly top but but here's the thing is Trump just paid some women to pee on each other and he watched and that's kind of a cuck move to me yeah totally cuck yeah so I don't know how this fits into the cuck alpha spectrum and then at 1040 last night I found

Merlinmyself sitting there thinking and you know and all this you know what he's thinking i wonder if there's a video i wonder if i can get it and i wonder how i look in it you know that's got to be going through his mind if there is a video and you know he's in it you know uh working or working working little don with those tiny hands i mean you know you think about that i mean you know you know he's just wondering what how if he looks good in that video do you think he's wearing like a smock do you think he's got like a towel because he

I believe he's a germaphobe

Speaker Ais that what I said? he's germaphobic I mean he didn't sleep in that bed afterwards

Merlinno no no see I think that room I think he had two rooms probably allegedly I bet he had the one for sleeping and the one for watching the ladies pee allegedly

Speaker Aoh I see

Maxbecause when you're that

Speaker AI mean when you're that rich Jerump is a very wealthy man oh you get a suite of rooms you get rooms and rooms he might have wanted a room on a different floor when he's done oh okay

Merlinyou gotta really think this through gotta really look at the original research so it's called um source naturals night rest with melatonin and there's a we can put a link

Maxto it in notes did you guys ever try this yeah you could go right now to merlin man herbs.com

Speaker Aand use the use the offer code piscae hamilton

Speaker Bbelieve me buddy you're not gonna be throwing away your shot

Merlinso did you end up trying it i think alex didn't probably trying what oh so you guys never okay so i had suggested you guys could try these if you wanted to i'm just curious if you had

Speaker Awhere do i don't know where to buy these herbs i don't think it's even legalized in chicago oh my god people ask get it online put it in show notes please you know drink responsibly like i i don't want you to die can i tell you if you take some powder from what you hear about on

Maxa podcast you're the dumbest person alive you deserve to die so take it and listen if you're going to take this advice at face value and just take some take some powders that merlin says to take that's natural selection doing its job please take them i endorse this take them take as much as

Alexyou want the thing is you you mystify it it's it's just fancy melatonin people are like oh what is

Merlinthis sleep hack merlin just fancy melatonin i'm sorry who does not nap it's got gaba it's got Gabba, and Gabba is very important.

Speaker ADo you know about Gabba?

AlexNow I do. Yeah.

Speaker AThat's the kids show, Yo Gabba Gabba.

MerlinMaybe you should get a little more well-informed before you interrupt the men to say that something is just melatonin.

Speaker BYou've got a good doctor. I'm really going to Wikipedia that.

MerlinOkay, cut all of this out. Cut all of this out.

MaxNothing is getting cut out. This is a great episode.

MerlinThis is what the people tune in for. It's so important to edit the show. follow up. What happened? What is the resolution of the noise on the roof? You guys, last time we talked, you were going to strafe the roof and try to find out whether it was a rolling armadillo or some golf golf balls on a settee. What did you discover about what's happening on the roof?

MaxSo we went out immediately following the podcast with a recorder and it was like zero degrees. So and the drone was acting up. So probably actually because of the temperature and we, I was trying to fix it but it we did not we could not stay outside long enough to do it and then it was too cold for a couple more days and then it was raining and today is actually the first day that was i think nice enough to go out and fly it so we may go back out after the episode and um see if we can find that armadillo or i don't know what because so i think we it's not the armadillo i think we decided it's a raccoon he's got the walnut and he's rolling it around like a wheelbarrow i have a

Alexfeeling we're gonna find a dead raccoon because like oh you think we missed our opportunity that

MaxHe was up there, but we took too long.

AlexIt was too cold. Oh, he never got the walnut open. And he was trying to escape. He had no food.

MerlinMaybe he took some powders he heard about on a podcast.

MaxListen, that's a very... We were talking years ago about whether we should put a card about Muhammad in Cards Against Humanity. And I said I ultimately vetoed it, even though we thought of some funny jokes. Because that's not how I want to die. Like I don't because the thing is if we if I get killed because we put a joke about Muhammad and cards against humanity The headline on the obituary is gonna be like he finally went too far

Speaker BBut

MaxThis guy right and I don't need that's all I want is I just don't want the way that I die to be some sort of Teachable moment You know what I mean? Yeah, I do I think about it a lot Like I'd love to go out and like a shark attack because it would be totally random and no one

Speaker AYou couldn't draw much from it, really. You don't want it to be instructive about where you went wrong. Exactly, exactly.

MaxAnd dying because I took a powder that I heard about on a podcast, that honestly sounds like something that might happen to me.

MerlinIt appeared that his cause of death was stuffing powders into his ass while he was doing self-asphyxiation. Turns out it was actually an infection from a nose hair.

MaxYeah. That's a life hack.

Speaker AYou stuff the powder up your ass. And you get MRSA virus. Yeah. No, I heard that on the Tim Ferriss podcast. Number one podcast. Gotta eat those almonds. You can come across a room. So, does the noise persist? I'm not here. I cannot report hearing any noise right now. Alex, you're a listener. You're a listener zero of the noise.

MerlinAre you hearing the noise still?

AlexA little bit last week when it was windy. So, it's either orphans, a raccoon, or a ghost. Because, you know, so we'll see.

I've lived with the noise so long that it's just, it's a part of me now. All right. Just turn it out. I'm sending you a picture of my home screen. And I anxiously await your response.

Speaker AMax, did you want to tell me about something you like? Yeah, I do, Merlin. This episode of what podcast is this? Dubai Friday is sponsored by our friends at MailChimp. Ah, server submerged in oil. They make underpants for cats and dogs.

MerlinI love MailChimp. But if you don't like the chimp after 100 nights, they'll deliver silver underpants instead. Freddy is his name. I love Freddy. And they had that big book about Freddy. I know one of the other programs. I've made a career on MailChimp. No. On one of the other programs I do yesterday, I publicly implored the Mack Weldon Company to please send some underpants to Alex. Because she's been left out of the surfeit of silver underpants with which so many male podcasters have succeeded.

Speaker AListen, this podcast is doing very well. I think we need to get, let's get some sponsors. Who do we want the stuff from? Oh, that's a really good point. Oh, geez.

MerlinOkay, so if we are doing a swag-based bears in your dock. does Fabergé eggs sponsor podcasts let's let's workshop it let's workshop we could also we could

Speaker Ado it for a charity although you know seriously fuck charities but uh well listen I feel that we

Maxshould be seriously considering we listen we've made some very provocative statements on this podcast and I think that we could make it brave right and now I don't want to become a target so I'm wondering maybe we should give a little money to the Trump foundation oh that's a good idea and he won't even know about it he'll read about it in the papers like

Alexeverybody else right so with the mac weldon underwear there's there's like silver is the brand and then there's air knit there's woven there so is only one of them antimicrobial

Merlinyeah i think so that they've got a jersey thing and then they've got like silver

Alexin the threads i think all of these men are very hairy i don't know

MerlinRumpelstiltskin was his name. Also, airmail has added custom actions.

Speaker AThat hair, Alex, that means they're alpha males.

Speaker BHigh T, they're taking a lot of powders.

MaxGot the douche right here. You take your powders. Here's the deal. You take your powders, then you lift. You get a lot of energy at the gym.

MerlinI should do that. I'll pack a bowl in my douche. Dude, you could totally make a bong out of this. People love their marijuana. Yeah. So anyway, I guess that's about it for this week. I want to thank our sponsors for this week. Alex Jones, Alex Ross, Alex Temkin. I want to thank really everybody who's been contributing, and it's been a great time. We'll see you next time.

MaxWell, this podcast, let's not forget to thank the Tim Ferriss podcast, and we'll hear a clip from that now. Here's Tim.

Speaker Boh god that was amazing how does he do it he's like a human guinea pig

Speaker Ayou just can't be afraid to experiment on yourself if you hear about some you know herb

Maxon a podcast the brave courageous thing to do is you take it immediately

Speaker AHmm. Kind of like a Johnny Knoxville type situation.

MaxCan I describe the thing that I got from ThinkGeek today? Yes. I got a Star Trek The Next Generation magnetic communicator badge that goes on your shirt with a magnet. I've seen that. And you tap it and it's Bluetooth. Let's see what happens. I just charged it. Let's see what happens.

Was that the thing? What the? Is it playing music?

Speaker AIt's playing music. Hang on. How do I Siri? How do I do Siri? Nice. Voice recognition. Is that from the show, that music? Voice indication. Chirp. Do you think?

MaxHmm. See if it will. It's just playing random music from my iPhone.

MerlinAll right, I just need some more work.

Speaker BYeah.

MerlinWell, you know, in the future, they don't need money anymore. They've worked everything out. And, uh, yeah. So anyway, Air Mail has added custom actions. That should be good for you guys. Is there anything else you want to cover this week, or we're pretty much done, right?

AlexNow watching Max Fiddle with his, what are they, is that a badge? What are they called?

MaxIsn't it a communicator?

AlexThe little things are there?

MaxHere we go. All right. Here. I'm now going to demo the communicator badge. Call Trin.

Speaker BCall Trin. We're almost there.

Call Alex. Call Alex. I hear something.

Speaker ANot Alex Sobol. Call Alex Cox. They edited a lot of this they would edit out of the program before they aired it. Okay, one more time.

MaxGoing very, very well.

Speaker AIt's a good demo.

MaxCall Alex Cox.

Speaker BCall Alex Cox. Oh, look, it worked.

Alexhi max hey how's it going all right that was fun we're done with this

Maxwait i was gonna i had questions to talk to you about that sounds horrible oh that

Alexso wait do you talk into the badge is clear to me i'm holding them both up to my mouth

Maxjust like on the tv show this does seem like the kind of device that we would have

Alexright before civilization collapses merlin people are okay i i need to know what was your dream with

Merlinsteve jobs about it's really hard to explain but basically uh i was i was living in a large verdant tube that was slightly too small to accommodate standing up and it was very very long and all i knew was that steve jobs had died but steve job was was there and i had to be in a play about steve jobs. I had almost no time to learn my parts and I wasn't even sure who I was supposed to be. I was given a small pamphlet, much like a religious tract that I did not have time to read, let alone to memorize. And this made me stressed out probably because I was living in a verdant

tube. And then at one point I started freaking out a little bit and I realized that I had parked my car in the wrong place, even though I don't have a car. And I found out Phil Schiller had told me, look, the way you are parked in a very dangerous place. And then when I went out to find the car it wasn't my car but it was my car and it had a very very very very large parking ticket at this point i'm freaking out i don't have any pants i'm out of the tube and i'm waiting backstage to go into this play that i haven't even read yet and phil schiller walks up and uh and he

says uh listen don't worry about it michael damian's here we're giving the part to michael damian and uh and then i went out and uh that was pretty much the end of the dream michael damian was a soap opera star who had a hit in the 80s with a cover of the song rock on

Speaker Awow what a what a story yeah i was just wow from beginning to end but he was dead but he wasn't

Maxdead ah do you feel that maybe you were now i'm not you know a very religious person but do you think that maybe you were visited by steve job's angel because that you know that can happen to

Merlinpeople right no no I'm really I'm mulling it over I believe in dragons so what did he what did he what was he trying to communicate to you in this vision less the problem is he was dead but he wasn't dead so he was kind of there but he wasn't there he was not in the verdant tube he was in a different part of the warehouse oh this is all happening in aware do you think he's doing an Andy Kaufman like I don't think so I don't think so I don't I don't dream about famous people very often. The main thing, though, was the tube.

I did not like the tube. When I say verdant, it was like there was grass growing around the ring, like interstellar style. It was a big, curvy, grassy tube. And the parking, when I say this is a very, very... I couldn't fit the parking ticket in the car if I wanted to. I parked in a very inconvenient place.

So, Airmail has added custom actions is this one gonna go the way of parks and recreation episode you think no i like airmail

Maxi'm getting a lot of use out of airmail and i think it's probably it's probably the best mail app for phone for the iphone right now i'm gonna come on and say that confidently i think it's the

Speaker Abest mail app for the iphone right now oh you want to tell us about something you like i do i'm uh This episode is brought to you by... Wait, did I do that?

Speaker BYes. Did someone just make that sound? What the fuck did I do?

Speaker AJimmy Wire, you make me laugh. Who is sponsoring this episode?

MaxWho is sponsoring this episode?

MerlinAlex, can you hear what it's saying?

Alexif I turn the gain up

Merlinis he wearing a headset? no, no, I just want to know because it sounds like he's just talking into his shirt

Alexhe is

Speaker AAlexa, is Max almost done? who is the sponsor of this episode?

Speaker Ballow me to direct you to Apple's rather fabulous website wow

Speaker Athat settles it this episode is brought to you by the computer company Apple Apple.

AlexNo, they're a lifestyle company.

Speaker AWe don't make apples. That's my pick of the week. Diggit, diggit, diggit. Apple. Yeah.

MerlinYou guys want a story?

AlexOh, gosh. Well, you know what? Last time we were about an hour in before it started to get good. So here we are.

MerlinYeah.

AlexHow you doing, Marlon?

MerlinBig week. Yeah, we cut out of S4E2 of Sherlock just at the right time.

MaxOh! I watched Sherlock and it was a bunch of British people who I didn't like mumbling autistically at each other. It's not for me, right?

Speaker AIt's the guy who does Doctor Who. Of course he did. Okay, all right, of course.

AlexYou like House. So, like, do you ironically enjoy House M.D.?

MerlinHe doesn't like beautiful things is the problem.

MaxHouse is a dumb but very well executed drama with, like, perfect episode structure, great acting. And, like, Sherlock was just so, like, goofy and they were showing people's, like, phones on the screen. The characters talk too quietly. They do. They do. You got to try with subtitles. It's, like, a real problem. okay but that's not just me right they like it's hard it's legitimately hard to hear the dialogue

Alexin the show it's because we're dumb americans and we we can't understand british speak but also

Merlinthe the music i mean like uh i've said this other places but the music bed is pretty loud at points when it's the most interesting part of the show when like sherlock is explaining the thing here's the thing about stephen moffat like and everybody who likes stephen moffat or doesn't like stephen moffat shut up but don't listen to this but basically stephen moffat shows are about feeling smart and crying. And if you feel pandered to about how you're supposed to feel smart about a Steven Moffat show, or you don't want stuff that's overtly there to make you cry, you're not going to enjoy it. If you don't embrace that, a lot of Steven Moffat is about feeling smart.

MaxI just, I just made a huge, I have a, all right, I have an insight. Here we go. This is why people listen to this podcast. Hang on. I just rubbed two brain cells together and I, and I thought something smart to say all right did you guys go back and watch the iphone um a keynote because it was we just had the 10-year anniversary of it yes twice in two days i've been thinking about it because it's a perfect i mean it really is one of the best like speech like forget like apple keynotes it's like one of the best speeches ever like i still get excited about the iphone and i like own it right it's like it's just an amazing presentation and here's what i think is

the difference between the Steve Jobs presentation of 2007, 2006 when that came out? Seven. Seven. And a sort of Apple keynote now, which is the Steve Jobs thing. We talked about this last week that there's a coolness to it, but it's so underplayed. He underplays everything and he doesn't over explain it. And you as the audience, you get to actually feel smart for understanding the importance of what he's saying. He leaves just a little bit there for you. and lets you connect all the dots

so you understand why the product is so great. And he doesn't spend a lot of time telling you that it's great. He just sort of presents it in a very underplayed, he presents a legitimately cool thing in an underplayed way and sets you to understand, sets you up to understand why it's so good. And you just feel like a genius watching that because you're like, yes, I'm on the same side as Steve Jobs and this is brilliant and I get it. And I'm one of the cool, smart people who gets it. That is what I do not like about the current Apple keynotes. and that's what I don't like about Sherlock and Doctor Who is they're setting it up for you.

It's just telling you how great it is. Right there. I do not like that.

Speaker BI know this is an area of importance for you.

MerlinDo you want to talk? I have thoughts here, but you should jump in about the keynote if you want.

AlexOkay.

MerlinOr would you rather talk about Sherlock?

Maxit's uh the screen is has over one million nits of brightness and it's a great screen you're really going to be able to see the pictures of bumblebees that you take we're really excited

Merlinto see what people are going to do with this honestly we're legitimately like we're quivering with excitement because we sure as fuck haven't figured out what we're doing with it and this

Alexand this one here uh i do i do like how steve is like in a phone an ipod and an internet communicator and when when he says internet well but then when he says internet communicator people people are just like whoa they don't get it it's it's really i mean uh i don't know i his keynotes when they were at mac world were amazing because he was a rock star in that room and it's easy to be the cool guy there and i'm not downplaying how amazing the iphone keynote is

because I've watched it three times in the past week.

MaxYou have to understand how that at that time people carried three devices in their pockets. They had a phone, they had a Palm Pilot, and they had an iPod.

Speaker ASo when he is saying... Well, you know, in my case, like a flip camera.

MerlinLike I carried my flip camera almost everywhere.

MaxYes, and that's right. The camera wasn't even a major part of that product. Like the camera, it was a long time before the photos weren't like potato quality on the iPhone. but it was you have to understand like when the gears in people's minds i mean yeah i remember when i saw it for the first time and i was thinking like oh this is cool but it's like fuck like i don't want to buy three things like you know that's and and when the gears start turning and you realize you know it's set up so you get it one second before he says it right and when you start to see that it's coming together and they're making one product and

it does all this shit and it's going to not have to make you carry three things around and the benefits of all these things working together as he's listing the features, you just feel like a genius because you're getting the same moment of invention that Apple had.

AlexBut that's exactly how Stephen Moffat and how all of House MD has written.

MaxNo, in a Stephen Moffat show, a character looks into the camera and goes, I'm very smart. Let's travel through time. You're smart too. Are you crying yet?

MerlinHere's my scarf. I have one old note, one new note. My old note is I've always really, one thing was with uh steve's presentations yeah sure he was kind of a cocky asshole but you could also in the really good ones for a really good product and in this case i think maybe more than ever um without being over the top about it you could feel how happy he was and how proud he was of this thing and what it did and how many times he just like runs his finger across to unlock and goes isn't that cool and like he's i don't think he's saying that to like get a just to get a

reaction, I think he's honestly going, isn't that cool? His enthusiasm for that product is shot through everything that he's doing. The thing that I only got in the last couple of viewings that I probably should have earlier is, I almost want to call this storytelling, but the masterful order in which he lays out each one of these new things that this does. If you think about it, if you got the order of, and here's the thing, there's so many new things in this. The idea of not having a keyboard the idea of this being a touch screen like as i said in texts earlier today

when he first shows how scrolling works well he doesn't show scrolling the first time you flip your finger to scroll he doesn't do that for voicemail messages he does that for um music for ipod but he's showing you how to flip that's something you're already familiar with but don't

Maxyou see the contrast of of you as the audience are seeing this and your mind is racing with possibilities as you're understanding this it's literally the coolest shit ever and he is standing there going isn't that neat like the contrast of that where he's downplaying it and making and he's being cool and withholding and you're sitting there going holy shit give me this thing and he's

Merlinlike hey isn't that isn't that neato and stuff that seems i showed this to my daughter i was telling you i showed this to my daughter last night she's like yeah it's a phone that's what phones do and i had to go out and pull out an old samsung and show it to her it looked like something from the 50s and she's like well you know she obviously she's not she's not going to get this but that's that's the revolution is watching this thing 10 years ago he's doing stuff nobody had seen all in one place before i mean it was i mean anything you ever try and use a touch screen how about this did you ever have a chumby did you ever try and use a chumby it's one of those little

Alexbeanbag flash space uh this is a public space i'm not trying to give russian intelligence any

Speaker Aleverage over me, Merlin. It's not a bit.

MerlinI mean, Chumbie was an open source project to have a home device with a very tiny little capacitive screen. It looked like a little bean bag and you could develop flash apps and there was a little community around it. It was all open source. But you had to get a button to click. Think about using a GPS in 2006 or 2007. You had to use a pencil to make it like, oh, you want that button. And the idea of just going flip and flying through your songs, Nobody had seen that. But then, I mean, stuff even today, and this is the funny part, today is so much that you go, oh, that's dumb.

But it turns sideways. He turns it sideways. And the orientation changes. And not only does the orientation change, like an adaptive web design. Oh, no, now you're in CoverFlow. Holy shit. Is there a wizard in there? Like, how did he do it? And then flip, flip, flip. No lag. I mean, it's just, but he did it in a certain order where like so much of the entire rollout of the iPhone in some ways, he was, it was so masterful in the way that they gave it to you. It's like bringing in the grays, right? We're just going to give you enough to get you like comfortable with what this thing

is. We have to call this a phone, even though the phone's not the big part of it, but like, that's what you're going to understand. And as I roll out these features and you know, he doesn't even start with the phone, right? He starts with the iPod part because that's the part everybody knows. and he's able to demo these crazy UI features and stuff you already understand before he moves into the new technology and explains what he means by internet communicator. I just thought that was masterful.

MaxSay what you will about Steve Jobs, but he would have gone all the way and pissed on those hookers. Himself. Jazz break. He probably would have had a huge chumbie while he did it, too.

AlexAll right, Merlin.

MerlinThis is why we can't have nice things.

AlexMerlin. How's it going, Alex?

MerlinI should probably go in a minute.

AlexHow, how, how.

Speaker AAll right, let's start this thing.

MerlinChallenge. Alex, this week you had a challenge for us.

AlexAll right. The challenge was really just because I want to see if Merlin can get all of his icons on one screen on his iPhone. and you've yet to share your home screen with me, Merlin.

Speaker ANo, I haven't done that yet. What just happened? Why did that happen? What happened? Did you pinch yourself on the mic? What happened? My thing happened. My thing went off. Oh, was that you?

MaxThe little... Can your voice activate it? Is that what's happening? I...

AlexI really wish that this was a bit and I was the one doing it, but it's just... Alexa, who's the mother of dragons?

Speaker BDaenerys, stormborn of the house Targaryen, the first of her name, the unburnt, queen of Meereen, queen of the Andals and the Roigar and the first men, Khaleesi of the great grass sea, breaker of chains, and mother of dragons.

That's so cool.

MerlinWell, it's been a big week. I think we covered a lot of good stuff. We learned that Steve Jobs probably would have peed on the hooker himself because he ain't no cuck. Isn't that cool?

Speaker Aboom ah well i i can report on doing my icons i um yeah yeah i want to hear this

Merlini'm like the kid who keeps sliding down the bench hoping he'll never have to go to the principal's office maybe they won't notice me in the school clothes i uh i so i uh let's see i started by

Maxchanging the weather app on my phone. So I went from dark sky to weatherline. Then I went, I realized that weatherline has a, I don't know what you call it, a widget in the pull down screen. Yes. And then, so I added that widget and then I realized I needed to reorganize all my widgets. So I did that and I have a very clean, I have a very efficient widget ecosystem now on my phone. And then I ran out of time and the challenge was over. So that's as far as I got.

Alexhow many how many widgets would you have Alex I'm glad that you asked me that um I have uh let's

Maxsee I'm running a seven widgets right now so I've got batteries on top and that the batteries I don't know if you guys have noticed this it tells you how much juice is left in your Siri balls they're right in there and then I got weather line that tells me the weather I have the fantastical widget which is like honestly that I use that widget 20 times a day it's a very good widget uh the omni focus widget um just press record deliveries and i have and here's my hot pick do you guys know about fessa i don't know if this is relevant to you but no do you i have a nest

learning thermostat in my house you guys know that i didn't do you have that no oh the nest is

Alexjust like a internet connected thermostat oh no i know what it is we're not animals oh i'm sorry i

Speaker AWait a minute. You have a way to make heat come in house? How is possible for this? Where you put rock collection? All right. Calm down, everyone. I'm strong like bull.

MaxFESA is a third-party interface that can talk to your nest, and you can control the temperature right in the widget. So if I want to change the temperature, I don't have to like – oh, and it also puts it on your Apple Watch. But I don't have to like open up the – I find the app and open it up. I just pull right down, zoop, and there's the temperature, and I can be like plus or minus a few degrees. Nice.

AlexHow do you spell this thing?

MaxI'm just kidding. T-H-E-S-S-A. Ah. Thessa. Sometimes I'm lying in bed, and I'm like, you know what? It's too cold. I require more heat. And the nest itself is clear across the bedroom. So I have to get out of bed and take upwards of 20 steps.

Merlinall right so merlin that's what goes through my mind whenever i text my wife we're in the same room the other night she for my birthday um back in november she got me this i won't say the name of the company because they're kind of eating the booger but since uh you get like a delivery of grass-fed meats once a month and so did she get you a theranos machine technically beer teal did

Speaker Ahook this up to your body

Maxlet me tell you about something i like this podcast is brought to you by theranos the uh the all-in-one testing solution they take one drop of blood listen it's supposed to be medically impossible but these people have it figured out you should get a lot listen if there's one thing i know it's that you should get a lot of your medical and science news or podcasts and i have a good feeling about this company theranos their ceo she's the female steve jobs she's been a lot

Speaker Amagazine covers yep yeah she wears black and i think their main revenue model is laying people

Merlinoff uh that's got it that's a model zero is a percentage so the meat um you know uh you got a got a little warning that hey the meat's on the way fedex is sending your meat and uh that was on the third now fedex has had a lot of problems because of weather and uh so i've been tracking it. And I've been watching this box of meat be passed around the Midwest for coming up on 10 days now. And finally, I wanted to contact these people and say, hey, what's up with the meat?

I don't think I'm going to want this meat when it arrives. So now it's going to be my job to get rid of all this dead meat. But yeah, she was there on the couch and I sent her a screenshot of FedEx and had remarks about it because I didn't want to actually talk about it.

AlexAre you saying that's bad?

MerlinI don't know. I'm not even sure. You know. Yeah, they just laid off 40% of their staff. Theranos. But they still find a way to sponsor podcasts, so God bless them. Thank you, Theranos, for supporting Dubai Friday.

MaxYes, and make sure you use the offer code STEVEJOBSFULLPISS on checkout when you order your Theranos machine.

Speaker ASteve's no cuck. One word. Steve's no cuck. Our thanks to Theranos. Isn't that cool? Boom. I just urinated on two ladies.

Merlinlet me show you how slide to unlock works no oh anyway big week go ahead all right go ahead so the bench is empty the principal has come out of the office i am the only one sitting on the bench and i urinated myself like a cuck

Maxthat can happen when you take a lot of powders

Merlinclassic misdirection

Speaker Aanyway what's the challenge for next week i think it's uh oh god i uh i need to buy some time here merlin what'd you do with your phone

Merlinsorry what oh okay okay i hate i hate this challenge i hate everything about this challenge no i love alex i hate the whole i hate the premise of this challenge i hate what i'm required to do for this challenge but more importantly i hate the premise of this challenge but that's why's that why is that you need to explain to the internet as you say a whole nother episode about

why i don't like the premise of this challenge because i feel like i i don't like the feeling the need to generate care about things that i i don't think need care and i don't like getting beat up for being unwilling to generate that care and it's it's why i uh as my friend john Syracuse says sometimes I return no where it's like I I I wish it were okay for me to just not care what how my phone looks you know what I mean and it's like and now the thing is even having

this program it's not about you Alex this is about those those horrible people they're gonna like have all these remarks about how I do or don't do things on an iPhone and it's just like the ultimate personalization is doing fuck all title and like to me like the buttons are there I can find them. I don't think about any of this ever. Now you can respond to that or I can tell you what I did.

MaxWell, that's the old way of doing things, Merlin, but here's the new way. Open

Speaker BOvercast. Was that you?

MaxOpen Overcast.

Speaker BGod, so bad. Nothing works.

AlexSee, Merlin, Why can't I just not care about myself and my sleep?

MerlinWell, okay. So here's what I tried to do. And I think this is maybe my own headcanon, as we say in the Doctor Who community. This might be my own headcanon about how this show works. But I think part of the show is you try to do the challenge. Ideally, you do the challenge. But I think also you can try to do the challenge and explain why it was difficult. So here's what I did. And boy, you know, this is a whole nother show. It's just we've got to talk about Apple things at some point. Oh, my God. So I am an inveterate backer-upper of my phone. I do iCloud nightly, and I try to make a point of backing up,

doing iTunes encrypted backup, I want to say once a week, but more like every 10 to 14 days, because I just know that that's the only way to really back up your phone. So I do that a lot. So I was backing up my phone. I had it hooked up, and I thought, okay, I've got to do the challenge. And so I teleported back to something like 2009 and opened up iTunes. I think I sent you a screen grab of this.

And I said, okay, step one, I got to go in and just delete all of this shit I know I don't need. Right? You with me so far?

Speaker BMm-hmm.

MerlinDoesn't that make sense? Like, it's like the whole tidying thing. It's like the whole Marie condominium thing. Like, first you got to get rid of stuff before you buy boxes for the shit you've got. And the thing is, the affordances for doing this in any kind of a – like, so much shit on iOS. The affordances for doing stuff that almost everybody wants to do are virtually non-existent. So, like, for me, okay, how about this? How about this? This probably won't go for you guys. Have you ever opened up a really, really, really old app on your phone or iPad, and it pops up with that message?

Basically, this application may make your iPad run slowly.

AlexNo.

MerlinI've gotten that. I've gotten that. Okay. Okay, so I don't know what – I mean, I can intuit that that is an app that has not been updated for some improvement in the technology, whether that's for battery life or for some kind of functionality. But that's a pretty good sign, wouldn't you say, the fact that that app is so old that they have now added some bit of code that detects that it's shitty and throws up that dialog box or that interstitial, right? That makes sense. That's not something the developer put in there, probably.

Let people know that my app sucks. It's the fact that it's a four or five year old app and it has not been updated to, you know, deal with the modernness of a new iOS. So Apple's solution to that is to have that thing pop up. Like, why in the fuck can't I go to some kind of a smart folder that shows me every single app that would produce that message if I opened it? Doesn't that make sense? Doesn't that seem like really sensible? But you can't. You go through and you go onesie twosie. And you go through and if you're in iTunes, you can see like by date added. You can see by size.

you can't see by frequency. You can't see by last launched. You can't see by every conceivable way that you would want to remove the majority of over 400 apps from your phone. And now, welcome to the land of clicky-draggy, where Steve Jobs is no cuck. Because now you're going to go into clicky-draggy land, and onesie, twosie, threesie, you're going to go in, oh, you got two copies of this app because one's really old and one's, which Instapaper do I delete? Ha ha! Don't ask me, I'm iTunes. Dur-dur-dur-dur-dur. so I sit there like a fucking animal

and I'm clicking onesie twosie clicky draggy trying like a motherfucker to get rid of as many apps as I can and by the time I was done I still had I want to say 350 apps

Speaker BJesus Christ well you see my problem I need this for my work I'm very

Speaker Awhat work though I don't really have a job I mean

Maxhonestly because I have a few things on my phone So I go through this all the time, just when I'm stuck on a train without Wi-Fi or without signal or something. I periodically just open my phone and start clearing stuff away. Because here we go. I'm opening it up right now. And here we go. I have the Arclight Theaters app. Because one time I needed to book tickets for a group to see the Star Wars movie at Arclight. Stop it. Why is this happening to me? One time I needed to book tickets to see Star Wars at Arclight. And I don't need that.

So I'm going to delete it. And like, that's the thing is like, if I need that app, it's, it's, it's in the cloud. I can get it. It's all in the cloud now.

MerlinOkay. So you've got 10 or 15 pages of apps and you've decided to get rid or to organize all of those apps. I know you guys don't get this problem because you're not a hoarder, but just for a minute, pretend that there are people in the world that have 15 pages of apps. Okay. So how do you start getting rid of it? How do you decide what to get rid of before you even organize?

MaxYou're going to need, you're going to need a lot of Kleenex and then you're going to go to the fetal position in the corner and say, way of the future, way of the future, way of the future.

Merlinbecause there's no equivalent of show in finder. If you go and do a search and you go like, oh, I'm pretty sure this dumbass app, if I can remember the name and go find it, there's no show in finder. You just go flipping through.

MaxEventually, Alec Baldwin will come to the door and then your butler will become very concerned about you and he'll give you a sponge bath.

MerlinOh, nice. Oh, of course. The guy from, was it Eastern Airlines or is that Alan Alda? Who am I thinking of? Alan Alda is the senator, right? Alec Baldwin is the airlines guy.

Speaker ARight. Remember, he comes outside the room and condescendingly talks to Leonardo DiCaprio? When he's in the theater? Oh, my God.

MerlinIt's so rough. So anyway, that's, you know, setting aside for just a moment that, like, getting organized on my phone does not matter to me. To do this challenge, I was trying, and I don't mean to turn this around and just yell at Apple, but, like, you know, it's, you know, I'm very, I have to say, I'm very tempted to, I don't want to say start over because I don't want to lose all my logins and stuff. One thing that Apple has gotten knock on wood, Apple has gotten quite good at is if you, for the sake of argument, got a new phone,

hypothetically, and you had an encrypted backup, you might go from out of the box to running in well under two hours, which is a revelation. Don't you think? I mean, isn't that kind of still amazing? If you've got an iCloud backup and the weather's right that day, you might be able to do it in like three or four hours. That part is amazing. I just, I didn't want to have to reset up everything from nothing and I got all this shit on there and it's like iTunes is just like laughing at me. Laughing and pointing, pointing and laughing and I'm the cuck.

So I sent you a screenshot.

Speaker AI'm down to 376 apps.

MaxI'm just gonna say, I think what happened here

Speaker AAlex, did you get on, or you were already

Maxon one screen. This wasn't even a challenge for you.

AlexNo. Well, I did have Alex, I think you cucked us. Yeah, well you know me. Who's doing on whom? I don't know how your phone

Merlinworks like it is say you keep saying these words i i i got the iphone when i was 41 and i got lots of apps because that's what i did and over time i've gotten rid of a bunch of them

Speaker Abut you still have the app where you can tilt the phone and it drinks the beer oh yeah and it gives you a mustache yeah i use that all the time i need that for my work

Merlinnothing i do to explain this to you is going to make a whole lot of sense no it's more of like i

Alexliterally don't know how the phone does not constantly crash do you understand how computers work well the people at the apple store don't because they keep telling me to delete all your

Merlinapps to free up the memory god it's good for the battery yeah let me ask you this question when you

Maxbuy a new phone uh do you restore from backup or do you do you set it up as a new device me or alex uh just general conversation for the whole table

Alexam i allowed to participate this is something i like i always restore from uh backup alex why uh it depends i usually if it is a new number of a phone like perhaps going from the six to the seven uh then yes but if it's like the six to the success or i'm sorry i got backwards yeah yeah

MerlinIf it's a talk update, you'll do it, but for a full number, you start fresh?

MaxRight. I feel very strongly about this, and here's my opinion. I always set it up as a new phone. And here's the reason, is the Apple ecosystem has, I think rightly, has gotten a lot more complicated than it once was. And there's all kinds of permissions and notifications and all kinds of craziness that apps can get to communicate with each other and get your location and all this kind of stuff. and this is good it's like the natural evolution of the app ecosystem apps are getting a little more power on the phone access to more stuff they can do more things for you but it also means you

have to keep in mind everyone's trying to fuck you and you don't want to get fucked you know all these apps you have a thousand little apps on your phone they're all trying to fuck you all the time and here's the thing is you get cruft when you as you're putting all these apps on your phone you get you open it up and you're like sure i'll share access to my location sure i'll let you send me notifications sure i'll do this or that you're you're all you're doing is you're getting fucked over and over and over in a million little ways until your phone is peeing on you and when you get that new phone you set it up as a new phone and at least you have to think for one second

before you put in an app on the phone and it goes uh this app is requesting permission to fuck you would you like to get fucked and that's how you pee on the phone do you see what i'm saying

Merlinevery time i get a new one like there's that that horrible like 95 horrible feeling when your credit card is compromised and you have to get a new credit card. But then also that's really an opportunity. Like every time you have to go back in and reenter your credit card for all of those things. In the past, in the past, I've done the thing where I just wait until I like I had a Google save search for like credit card update rejected, whatever. It was so much easier to just wait for stuff to break and then only update. I know that's not very responsible, but it was so much easier than going in and rotely reentering it for everything. And all

Maxthose eels get all over you. I'm telling you, I the other day, I like went into my PayPal account to like, I was trying to do some business in PayPal. And I went into this tab within a tab within a folder that's hit the some hidden option screen. And you know, on PayPal, there's this whole thing of like recurring payments that you can authorize like apps and services to do a little recurring payment within PayPal. I was paying for 40 fucking things 99 cents a month for the pro feature of this or that or some some goddamn like ad free time thing that you recommended Merlin, that was it was in there and these things they they they they they're they sucker onto you and

they just suck your blood until you until you cancel the credit card or set the new phone up and i feel very strongly that part of having good like digital hygiene and not getting fucked all

Merlinthe time is you got to set that phone up new that's a that's really that's really good advice um somebody the other day i just happened across something that uh somebody retweeted from this guy saying, I'm not even sure why, but the guy's like, hey, go in and like delete all of the things that all the applications that you have authorized for Twitter.

And I went ahead and I checked the link, I followed the link and I was like, you know, I'm not sure why I'm doing this, but it'd be fun to just go look. And, you know, to their credit, Twitter doesn't does a good thing of like saying like, here's the app, here's the description, here's the icon when appropriate. And here's the date that you authorized this. Guys, I mean, it must have been, it was at least dozens of apps. So many apps that I haven't even thought about. Like the old original Twitter apps, like the Birdseed, like back in the day, all the old apps.

So much stuff from 2010 that I was still authorized for. So I agree. I think there's definitely something. I do that frequently with Google and Dropbox, where I will go in and like, is if there's something I haven't used in a while, I hit the X. But you're right. That is an understandably sensible way to do that, Max. Do you feel the same way, Alex, or a similar way?

AlexI'm just now looking at all the applications that I've approved with Twitter. I almost don't want to revoke access to Birdhouse.

MerlinI know. Doesn't it hurt your heart? You're like, oh. It's like keeping contacts for people who've died.

AlexYou're like, I can't do this. Merlin, can you briefly tell us what Birdhouse is?

MerlinBirdhouse.

Alexsome people are here for me you know they don't know why don't you tell people what Birdhouse is oh man I'm going to put it in a note Birdhouse was this application that I truly loved that you could put all of your mean tweets into and then later when you were less mad you could look at them and delete them or tweet them if you really wanted to no but it was

Merlinto put the drafts that you were thinking about yeah

Alexthe description is perfect a notepad for twitter on your iPhone oh

MerlinYep. That was a good app.

MaxAll right. I now drank a lot of water for the bit earlier, and I really need to pee.

Speaker BI have to pee so badly. And we've had a lot of pee talk.

MaxI hit the bucket once.

Speaker AProblematic. All right. I'm muted. Listen, I have a challenge. Can we progress to my challenge?

MerlinWe can, and I will take more cannon fire about this. I realize we're running a little bit long because we had two hours of politics we're cutting out. But, no, I'm willing to be in the line of fire about this. And I'm also willing to, if you're interested, to defend to the extent I can, like why I am this way. But, like, you know, I tried. But, like, it's just now I am just blaming Apple. But, like, they do not make it very easy.

Okay, so here's one of my classic bits about the Apple TV that I think you can expand to a whole lot of Apple devices. I'm about to bitch about Apple so everybody can just suck a nut. all their apps work fine as long as you never use them. Their apps will work mostly okay if you use them just a little bit. If you use Apple's products a lot, a lot, a lot, and you have not found how they're fucked up, you're not actually using them a lot, a lot, a lot. And so the scalability of like, hey, I'll move all my Apple stock apps

into this thing called neat Apple thingies that does not scale up to 400 apps. And there is no accommodation for taking care of that in any way but onesie-twosie, clicky-draggy, either in iTunes or on the phone, and that drives me nuts. So is it my own fault for getting into that situation? Well, it's my own fault for agreeing to do this podcast, but I don't think there are all kinds of things, and I would love to talk about this at some point. To me, there are all kinds of things that you could introduce into the iOS ecosystem that would improve things. Things like, the Siri app suggestions

seem so random sometimes. Why don't you just follow like what five apps I use all the time and make a smart folder that will let me launch those or make a suggestion to put that in the dock. Hey, you've had this thing in the dock for four years, whatever the fuck you call it. In your little bottom thingy, you've had this in here for years and you never use it. Would you prefer to have this there? That's the intelligence I want is like, you tell me how to organize my screen. You know what I mean?

Speaker AYou wanna hear a good one? Yes. Siri, play over cat. Oh, God damn it. three two one siri play overcast

Maxoh now it just does nothing sometimes what it does is it plays a heavy metal band

Alexnamed overcast oh yeah oh nice we've all experienced that uh i feel like they're one of my

Merlinhave you tried asking for us on the lady in a tube

Alexoh uh oh you don't want to people no i've not um talk the response is kind of funny

Speaker Awhat is that what i am you lost me is this your dream again um cut this out alexa play do by friday

Speaker Bi can't find the song what we do on friday

Maxthere's another one alexa order condoms leave that in

Merlincut this out alexa play do by friday on tune in

Speaker Astation for friday right anyway uh so i'm working on getting us into tune uh leave this one in alexa Order a book on how to give the correct voice commands to Alexa. Alexa, stop.

MerlinQuite a world we got. 376 apps. It pains you. It pains you to know that. How does my phone even work?

AlexWell, but like seriously, I have, I think it was the iPhone 4. I went through like seven phones all under warranty. and they kept just being like, oh, something with the logic board, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. You need to, you can't use so many apps. And I'm like, what the fuck is happening?

And now I feel like it doesn't happen quite as often.

MerlinBut that's caused you to be a little more conservative about shoveling tons of crap.

AlexOh, yeah. No, I completely agree with you. And I just haven't, this challenge was mostly to make you squirm because I hated napping so much.

MerlinThat'll show me.

AlexListen, my favorite thing ever is to make men on the internet mad about my home screen. And it just, it brings me joy every Thanksgiving.

MerlinWait, what people get mad about your home screen? Or you're mad about theirs?

AlexBoth, both. It's just one big hate fest of meaningless dialogue and I love it. That's all. It's fun, you know, to care about things that are completely arbitrary

Merlinand mean nothing. Well, it's a little bit of a milk for me. I mean, I realize you're being somewhat jokey about it, but like, I feel like you are like the person in Blink, the book by Malcolm Gladwell. I feel like you are seeing things that I don't see. I don't say that I can't see, but I kind of feel like I can't see. Like you are seeing decisions, distinctions that I just, I'm like, what, what made you make that noise about a home screen? It's just apps. Like, and I'm not criticizing, but that's, that's the fascinating part to me is I think

you do have, I don't know if it's an aesthetic, a sensibility, if it's taste, if it's functionality, but like, it feels like you are, you're like the guy who can look at the statue and tell whether it's fake in the movie or in the book Blink. You can do that. And I don't know how you do it. I think it's amazing and I'm not sure what it is. What is it that you see when you look at a screen and go, whoa, that's all wrong?

AlexWell, that's the thing. Like I can recognize that there's no wrong way to organize your home screen.

MerlinWhat do you what do you think? What do you see where you go? Like in this case, I don't understand why you have this giant blank space at the bottom. You have a reason for that.

AlexBecause my thumb is not big enough to access all the icons. Like really, if I have the same number of icons as in the original iPhone up until the iPhone 4. so now and now i have this new theory that the reason i just can't like i everyone hears me every five minutes about how hard it is is that you doing this are you doing this why is it going

Merlini don't know we should go back and time it i think it might be on some kind of an automated and maybe it's a mindfulness app max have you thought of that it's remembering you oh be mindful

Alexyeah we we were all typing on the same phone for like seven years and then suddenly these two monster phones came um and i'm i'm wondering i don't know like if i i feel like i'm the cranky old man with the um with the cherry switch keyboard because i'm like oh my keyboard's too

Maxwide uh but yeah no i i don't care that much i also have two rows of blank icons on the bottom of my home screen and it's important to me i actually i've been very careful not to put icons down there and here's the here's the reason there's and it has nothing to do with that for me my hand size because i have huge normal hands you know what that means it means i can reach all the icons so you're no cuck i'm not a cuck uh i'm not gonna be fucked i pee right on that bum uh but

here's the thing for me is when i open the phone a lot of times i know i have a task that i'm quickly trying to accomplish. So an example of that would be I'm trying to write something in OmniFocus that I don't want to forget, or I'm trying to send a quick text to Veronica, or I'm trying to like start a podcast in Overcast while I'm cooking and like, you know, I'm not trying to like have my phone out a lot. So I'm trying to like hit and run, like get this quick thing done. And when I open up my phone, I don't want 50 options. I want just the few that I need right there. So that's why I have this like my first screen. It's very sparse. And all I have

are like the key things that I use every day on my phone in like a pinch, you know, things like the timer and text messages and the phone application. Because when I open my phone, I don't need to visually, you know, process 70 things and try and find the one that I want. Like I'm looking for very few options. I find that white space on the bottom of the phone and just the few small apps that I need, I find that really helpful to like quickly get in, get out.

AlexI genuinely think about what Donald Trump's phone like don't you just wonder I don't think he's I

Maxdon't think I don't think he puts a lot of like I he's horrible technology it's kind of amazing that he like knows how to use Twitter as as he does but he like famously has people print his emails and stuff for him so I honestly think someone just like hands him a phone right like he has his own phone that he tweets on journalists have seen him do it it's it's real he tweets on his own android phone but i think he has like basically a stock android phone like i don't think he's customized anything on there i don't think he's running any you know third party like

Alexwidgets or anything well that's that's what i mean like i don't even know i i feel like someone had to install twitter for him and log in for him and just be like all right there's like if like if he gets logged out or like if if his phone does he plug his phone into charge it i genuinely wonder

Merlinlike if he sees a micro i think about stuff like this all the time i totally agree with you The thing is, when you think about people in their life, and that's why I made some in the part that we'll cut out earlier, thinking about like walking through like what actual things are like for him in certain events. Allegedly, it's the implementation and the specifics that like go through my mind. It's not the whether or not this happened. But if this does happen, how does it happen? He clearly has virtually no attention span. And especially if it's an attention span for anything that he finds annoying, tiresome or that is not about him.

so like how is his phone not drained all the time he must just be flinging across maybe he's got three or four of them but like i agree with you i totally agree with you i just there was shit what

Alexwas the episode uh it was not trump cast maybe it was it was some npr or something that was talking about like how the uh like this the server hillary email hillary server is just the most boring thing ever it's just an iMac in their basement um but then talking about how like she really wanted to keep her Blackberry and like there was like the whole drama like it's crazy like what happens when someone hands Trump a USB-C Android phone and we can't plug it in it's just I I don't know

why these thoughts just pop up but they do um wasn't that it wasn't that like a big part of

Merlinthis well I don't know you guys tell me you follow this better than I do but it wasn't that part of the whole email thing like at the heart of it it was nothing nefarious it was just that she didn't want to give up her blackberry it's that's what the episode seemed to say she didn't want two devices that is correct right right i mean it's i don't know that's that's interesting to me and then i remember i feel like hearing a dust up about when obama was going in it was gonna be hard because he couldn't be seen smoking even though he was totally going to keep smoking and that i think there was something about i want to say like people wanting to use iphones but not

being able to possibly well the staff the staff wanted to use i guess i could talk about this now

Maxa couple of fun stories so obama was a blackberry guy he's never been a big uh iphone guy as far as i know and he uh really wanted to keep his blackberry and they created rim created some sort of hard special hardened blackberry for the president to use and i don't know whatever became of that but it was um of course it was like when you know when you work in the government You have to use whatever shitty technology they give you. You can't just be like, yeah, I'm going to use my own computer. That's a big no-no. So the computers are all like IBM workstations in the White House.

Speaker AI just want to say in passing, I think that is so weird.

MerlinIt would be one thing to go to FedEx and say, I want to drive a different brand of truck. It's so strange to me, though, that you would tell somebody what kind of computer they have to use. That still feels so strange to me.

MaxThere are reasons behind it, which I'll get to. I mean, I can explain a little bit of this, but there are reasons behind it having to do with cybersecurity and requisition process and all of this kind of stuff. But it was a big issue. The staff, obviously, you know, if you're a web designer and you're coming in, you have to make the White House website. And it's like you have to use like a PC, basically. Like, it's hard because the software is the tools aren't as good. So people wanted to use Macs and iPhones. And it was accommodated. I think the staff can can do that kind of stuff now. But famously, there's a thing called the Paperwork Reduction Act. So the Federal Paperwork Reduction Act says that before the government petitions the people to do anything, like ask them any sort of question or make them fill out any sort of form, they have to create an impact study analyzing the number of hours of lost productivity to the American workers caused by asking that question.

So the idea is this is like a Republican like, you know, anti big government measure where it's like we don't want the IRS like adding a bunch of tax forms. We want to like, you know, analyze the impact of that before it happens to save people's time. You guys with me?

Speaker BYeah.

MaxYeah. It's one of those that makes a lot of sense on the face of it. Right. Correct. So when the White House took over, they decided they wanted to when the Obama administration took over the White House, they decided they wanted a White House Twitter account. And it became a major legal issue whether they were allowed to tweet or not without doing a multi-month impact study on each tweet. Because did that constitute asking a question and asking for a response from the American people? And it was decided that they could tweet but not use a question mark. Because if they used a question mark, that constituted asking the American people a question.

And that would have been like issuing them paperwork and an impact study would have to be done. Talk about playing by two sets of rules. My God. Now, I'm telling you, like, if you again, this is the thing that only affects our side. We're the ones who care about procedure and following. That's what I meant. That's exactly. Right. So but it is it is. And that's not even our rule. Right. That's like a Republican like rule that's like meant to hamper government functioning and make small government or whatever. But anyway, all this stuff is just by way of saying like it's so fucked, like it's so hard for any government person for Obama or whatever to have the phone he wants.

And I – God knows what's going to happen with the Trump White House. Like it's going to be – it's just – and also like how small an issue that is in context, but it's sort of representative of like the bigger thing of like – I keep saying this, but like so much of what we think of as like the lawful continuity of American democracy is just people, good people deciding to do the right thing. It's like no one would have like the military wouldn't have like staged a coup and like forced Obama out of office. He wouldn't have been impeached if he used the wrong phone. It's that experts around him said you're putting the nation at risk by using this phone that could be hacked.

So, you know, please don't do it. And by convention and because he has good judgment, Obama was like, OK, I'll do it for the good of the country. Wow

Speaker AWhat about the smoking And plus he never pissed on anyone Probably

Speaker BA little too much of that piss Oh sorry um

10. You Said I Could Have a Suitcase

Show notes

Transcript

10. You Said I Could Have a Suitcase

Show notes

Transcript

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