Episode 17 · March 3, 2017 · 01:27:48

17. The Whitest Sentence Ever Written

This week's challengeUse Todoist.

dobyfriday.com Apple Podcasts Overcast Patreon

Show notes

Show Notes

Subscribe to Do By Friday in iTunes, Overcast, or via RSS.

Transcript

Tap a timestamp or any sentence to play from there · machine transcribed (mlx:mlx-community/whisper-large-v3-turbo), expect mistakes

AlexThis is Do By Friday, the weekly challenge podcast with Merlin Mann, Alex Cox and Max Temkin. This week's challenge, use the app Todoist.

Hey Merlin!

Speaker AHey, how's it going Alex? Hey! That's a spicy meatball.

MaxOkay, so here's the situation with the 25th anniversary Les Mis concert. Oh, boy. It's very bad. It's not good. No, not good. Almost not good. Almost the whole cast. No, come on. No, I don't like the cast. I don't like the cast, and I don't like the songs. I think they're bad. I think they're like – so here's what I think they're doing is like – Oh, my God. So here's what – it's too schmaltzy, but also like I think they sort of like – there's something weird about the delivery of all the lines. They're like a little off cadence or like a little – it's just like timed a little bit weird.

Speaker AThey're a little late.

MaxA little on everything, though.

MerlinIt's like a constant.

Speaker AI know.

MerlinI really noticed this. I don't know how to pronounce their name, but Borat and his wife, when they do their lines, it sounds like there might be like a delay in the monitors or something. So here's what.

Speaker BI don't think it's a Frank Sinatra move. I think it sounds like it's late. Here's what's happening.

MaxHere's what I think is happening is they, everyone who did this show is just like steeped in Les Mis, and they're intimately familiar with it. So it's like when you listen to a record a million times, then you see the band live. and when the band does it live like sometimes they'll do a little syncopated or they'll like do it out of rhythm and it's like it's fresh it's like oh like i can really hear this new again because it's a little bit off you know it's kind of off in a interesting way and i think that's what's happening here is they're like oh here's like an interesting take of like we're gonna do this on the off beats and we're gonna it's gonna be a little out of rhythm and catch you off guard

a little bit but it just to me i just i don't want that i just sing the song that's what else am I here for?

Speaker AThere's so much to talk about.

MaxIn contrast, in contrast, the 10th anniversary edition has made me very much enjoy the music of Les Mis, and I've been listening to it a lot,

Merlinand I really like it. I'm so sorry you didn't like this, Max. I feel so bad about it. I'm so sorry.

Speaker AI'm so sorry that you've taken the time to watch and listen to this music enough to have a strong opinion about what the top three performances are. I just feel bad that I was involved in making you listen to this horrible thing that you obviously hate. Well, the fact that you changed your Twitter bio, The fact that you now consistently make word-for-word perfect references to Les Mis on Twitter. I just want to say, I want to say it's a very bold, brave statement. I want to apologize on behalf of the podcast you used to be on. I'm sorry we did this to you. I feel like I should resign. I feel like I should step down. I feel like the important anti-Semitic work of this podcast is going to be hindered by the fact that I have needles.

This poor man, this poor impoverished game maker in Chicago. I made him. It wasn't even my challenge, but I want to take responsibility.

Maxthey're looking down he's looking down and smiling right now i'm not that man i'm a i i'm a i'm a new man i i've i've sold my soul to god you've got people to take care of at your factory all right hang on now anyway i like i'm liking it i think the music that you know what's interesting is like there's some like a lot of like little earworms in that thing like a lot of catchy tunes and they kind of come back in surprising ways like throughout the show i

Alextotally agree well okay so i'm literally speechless what the hell is good it's good i like it i'm digging it merlin what's gonna happen when he listens to hamilton your mind's just gonna explode oh my god no okay all right sorry i'm back okay

Speaker Aamerican history it's not a mystery my name is alexander and i'm here to say wiki wiki whack whack constitutional convention anal retention make sure you dot the i's cross

Merlinthe t's i i i don't you know what i don't even know what to say i have so i have so much to say i have so much to say i i i imagine that so much it seems more like a memory i i here's the thing Okay, so 25th anniversary. Let's get this out of the way. I love the sweep of that. I love the, maybe it's because it's HD and it's, the sound is big.

Speaker BIt's a bigger, it's a bigger sound.

Speaker AIt's a big sound. 10th anniversary has it at the end of like one day more. But this, I mean, you get the Angelo Rondras guy, the sexy Adamant guy. Like, oh my gosh, you don't like him? You didn't like that Valjean? You didn't like that Eponine? No, the Eponine is good. You didn't like that Eponine?

Speaker Bthe eponine is good that's the same eponine from the movie yeah that's samantha the corseted

Alexshe's amazing i the thing with the 25th anniversary it's i i feel like the jonas brother there it's almost it's kind of reminding you like oh yep we're we're a little bit more modern we're a little bit on edge maybe not intentionally but it's just he sucks a lot it does feel a little

Maxmore poppy i'll say i don't think that veljan is like a good character i mean i've now i've seen it what three times so i'm a pretty big expert on this and um i would say that that i don't think like hugh jackman makes valjean like a very sympathetic character like i never really gave a shit about him and i found him you think that you put that on him though you don't put that on the filmmakers no i don't know i just that performance as it was presented to me i i was like this guy is kind of a he's just sort of like dramatic and i don't know like i i he he i just

never felt his motivations and he seems more he seems more he's neurotic i i see again i like the

Merlinperformance i always want to bracket that but he seems really neurotic more neurotic than like a colin wilkinson who brings that that's the 10th anniversary one he's the he's the og and yes he's

Maxthe bearded guy who's this guy who sings like this yes so first of all his he i like his singing the best but also like he it's like you hit it exactly right he has such he is like so dignified like you just feel bad for the guy that he's a prisoner.

Speaker AYou can feel the weight on him, the age.

MaxHe has kind of a grimace on his mind. He's acting while he's singing in a way that I don't think any of the other Val Johns are doing. He has this great grimace on his face. I don't know. There's a few. And then he picks. So the Hugh Jackman, the whole performance. Here's the whole problem with the movie. The characters are constantly overwhelmed with emotion and the camera's right in their face and they're just constantly in sort of meltdown. It's unseemly. I mean, yeah, collect yourself, for Christ's sake. Calm down. Yeah, I want to like, you know in an old movie how you'd slap someone and you'd say like, you're being hysterical, calm down.

Speaker AMy catchphrase for 2017, courtesy of Alex, calm down.

MaxWhat's good about his performance is he only picks a few times to really cut loose. And you really feel it. you're like, this guy is at a breaking point. Yeah, yeah.

Speaker AYeah. So, oh, God, I have to compress this. I have so many thoughts.

MaxYou know what I need to say to people is take an eye for an eye. Turn your heart into stone. That's my advice.

MerlinOkay, so here's the problem. I mentioned this last week, the kind of scattershot way that I came to enjoy this particular property, it's really weird. And so it seems odd that I'm kind of like so many things I'm experiencing experiencing this sort of backwards, where my true intro to this as something I heard a lot was the movie and the soundtrack for the movie. So that's a weird place to start for a lot of reasons. 25th anniversary, I was like, wow, I get why this was like a theatrical hit. So then the problem was, from that standpoint, going back, listening to the original original, listening to the early

recordings, even listening to the 10th anniversary, everybody, everybody who's a, not everybody, but a lot of fandom seems to agree the 10th anniversary is is the go-to performance and i would i would

Speaker Alisten to it and i go hmm yeah no this is really good but it's it's not quite as doctor who as the more recent ones but i said this in text yesterday i feel like the 10th anniversary strikes this nice

Merlinbalance from like the early day recordings where they're playing fucking synthesizers and shit and everyone's singing more like they're in a sondheim musical you got that on one end of the

Speaker Aspectrum other end of the spectrum you got you got everybody looking in the camera and crying but go and listen to that one day more now i'm now i'm being max go listen to that thing you sent me max notice how long they hold the notes colin wilkinson holds the notes so much longer well in any later productions and you get this uh not recitative what's the word i'm looking for or like everybody's flowing over each other and suddenly when the five or seven people are all singing different things in one day more it makes a lot more sense you get more of the sense of like

this is like a montage of all these people it makes a lot more sense it's a the 10th anniversary

Maxis the closest one i've heard to an opera uh which is probably why i like it because i like opera and i think musicals are bad and lame i couldn't put my finger on what the difference is

Merlini just like one and i don't like the other did you listen to well it doesn't matter i sent you something late last night i'm sorry sometimes i send things late at night uh syracuse has sent me his hand-picked favorite version like he was of course this is syracuse so he's extremely specific it's not just his favorite eponine it's not it's his favorite particular special

Speaker Bperformance of on my own did you listen to that not yet i saw that you sent it but i was in the

Speaker Abath i was reading yes no i understand you should you know having a chili dog oh no no no no no

Maxthere's no you don't eat in the bathtub ever that is oh my god that is illegal that is illegal no i I will call Javert if you eat in the bath.

Speaker BHuh.

MaxI will report you to Javert.

AlexMax has severed relationships of our bath eating.

Speaker BReally? What about a shower beer?

MaxWe have a shower beer? Let me get this out of the way. It's okay to drink like a beer or something in the shower and not any solid food, but you can have like a beer. And the reason is the water is moving. So if you like spill some beer or whatever, no big deal. It gets washed away down the drain. If you're in the bath, it all sticks around. Here's the one. Really you should not have anything in the bath Here's what's acceptable to have in the bath

MerlinIt becomes like a max stew You're like a Bugs Bunny in a pot

MaxThat is disgusting

Speaker BHere's what you can have in the bath Like a little piece of bread with some tomato sauce falls in You wouldn't like that little bit of cheese

Speaker ALost that one You can have

Speaker BA. You can have a glass of water

AlexAnd the water should be cold

MaxYes B. You could have Also I don't like when people don't drink the water from the tub faucet. It's a little too... No, it's a little too fish tank to do that. You know what? Be an adult. Bring the water from the kitchen faucet and bring it in.

Speaker AYou should do an e-book on this. This could help a lot of people.

MaxIt's not even book-length. Here's what you can have.

Speaker BReady? A, glass of water. B, green tea. That's it. End of story. You're cut off. Nothing else.

Speaker AIt couldn't be any sandwich at all. What if it's a hoagie? Okay, how about this? What if it's what they call a wrap? which is like a white burrito.

MaxYou know that you're going to be eating the wrap and it's going to decouple at the end and some of the mayo is going to come out. You're saying there might be a breach in the wrap.

Speaker BYou're going to lose structural cohesion at some point. Oh my God. See, this is why we need to put money into our infrastructure.

MaxNow, I'm 30 years old now and I have always assumed that at some point you'd grow up to an age where you knew how to eat a wrap without it losing, you know, as they call it on Star Trek, the whole integrity.

Speaker AFirst principles, Clarice.

Speaker BNobody should eat a wrap. My God. But I don't know how to. Now I'm 30, and I still don't know how to do it. I don't think it's possible.

MaxI think it's bad food.

Speaker AIt's all cold. Strong, strong feelings. Anyway, go listen to that on my own, because like I said in my very long text last night, it's got like an element of Kate Bush. It's different than any particular one that I've heard. But I want to say thank you, Max, for your bold, brave decision to suffer through listening to this two-and-a-half-hour musical production numerous times, even though you obviously hate it and don't want it in your life. I just want to say thank you. It's a bold, brave decision to do that.

MaxI found one that I liked. Yeah. I really like that 10th anniversary one. I've been listening to it in the car. It's good. I've been really into it.

MerlinCan we do a quick lightning round? of, okay, so taking into account any you've heard or seen. Give me your, okay, here we go. Ready? Favorite Valjean, go. Oh, 10th anniversary guy. So, Colm Wilkinson. What about you, Alex? Favorite Valjean? Same.

AlexSame. Yeah.

MerlinI like him, and I like 25th anniversary guy, who's very operatic.

Speaker BBut Colm Wilkinson, man, he's the OG. I also like the Javert. The Javert is really good. We have to talk about that video that you sent,

Merlinwhich I would watch this guy talk about all day just max can you describe what it is he sent us oh yeah so i just was

Maxgoogling who that who the uh um what's the javert was in the 10th anniversary one because i like his performance a lot and it's really good performance and i found on youtube this like lecture he did about how he learned how to do the role of javert and uh it's kind of a crazy lecture like he's kind of doing a lot of he's so charismatic talk but he's an interesting guy to hear and I stuck with it. And then he said the most, like the thing that just knocked me off my feet that I thought was so interesting is he's talking about a line where Javert says

something like, Valjean has like dominion over me. And he's like, well, if you think about it. And he described why that word. Right. And he's like, well, if you think about it, he's like, if this was real, like you'd never just pick the word dominion. Like if you just roll through it, it robs it of all its meaning. So he's like, what he has to do is like race ahead a little bit with the words. And then when he gets to the word dominion, and he has to take just enough of a pause to sell the idea that he's struggling to come up with the right word and then picking it. Dominion. Like off the top of his head to give it that, imbue it with some emotional reality.

And then furthermore, he has to coordinate that with the conductor so that the conductor of the orchestra doesn't race ahead with the music to catch up to him. So the conductor keeps the regular time, and he has some fluidity to play with the words. And when you listen to it, to the performance, because then I went and listened to him do it, it's really subtle. I mean, it's not an exaggerated thing. Like, you maybe would never notice it if you didn't hear him talk about it, but it's what makes the performance work because you really buy that this is – it just gives it a – I don't know. It gives it a certain kind of humanity and reality of, like, you really buy that this is a guy who's feeling this way.

It's acting. I don't know.

MerlinJavert seems like a character that would be very easy to get wrong, that you could just turn him into a one- or one-and-a-half-note character. and there's so much and you know he's not in my head when I imagine Les Mis I think of him as being like on almost equal billing with Valjean but he's not in it you know nearly as much and he's a tragic figure so like you have to like compress a lot of what's going on into in his

Maxhead into each performance yeah I it's a reason I actually didn't think um Russell Crowe's performance was that bad because I felt like I mean yeah he I get it he's not a very good singer But I felt that he like brought the character to life and you really got a sense of his like set his determination and his sadness. And I don't know. I felt I liked that character from the movie more than almost any other character from the movie as portrayed by Russell Crowe.

Speaker BAll right. I won't drag this out. I do want to hear all of your choices for others. Maybe we'll save it for other episodes.

Speaker AWho's your who's your Javert? Who's your favorite Javert?

MerlinI don't know. I like the look of that one Frankenstein looking guy. You said you didn't like his performance so much, but I love his look. Who?

Speaker AThe guy. Is it Philip Quast? Who's the guy in 10th anniversary? Yeah, yeah, yeah.

MaxThat's the guy who did the talk.

MerlinYeah, I like him. I think he's got gravitas.

MaxHe's got a little bit of rap going on in his little Javert raps, too, that I find really catchy. What am I thinking of?

AlexI'm thinking of Lon Chaney. Oh, my God.

MerlinA little bit of rap.

AlexI'm in a different universe. I don't know what's happening. Oh, my God. I wonder if Max is also going to, like, hip-hopperas as they – Who was the first person to say that? God, there's not even that much – That's a thing that people say? There's not even that much hip-hoppera. Yes. Oh, yeah, it is. Yeah. Yeah. It's real bad. Hip-hoppera. All right. Hip-hoppera.

Speaker AWikipedia redirects to rap opera. A rap opera or hip hoppera or sometimes urban opera is a musical work in hip hop style with operatic form. This is the whitest sentence anyone has ever written.

MerlinIt's just so you know, hip hoppera is a portmanteau of hip hop and opera.

MaxNow I have one critique. This is my last thing on Les Mis because I've been thinking about it like for literally for an entire week. And also I did not use this stupid to do app at all. I just watched Les Mis for another week. So this is all I have prepared for the podcast. But here's the other thing. Ten points to Slytherin. I felt a little uncomfortable last week about, I was like talking about how it was sort of this like Marxist philosophy going on in the play. And you see this portrayal of people through class. But that I was like a little uncomfortable with it.

And I've like spent a little more time thinking about it. And watching the videos of the 10th anniversary and the 25th anniversary shows really helped me figure out what was bugging me about it. so these shows just to set because i who the fuck has seen these they're these how do you would you even describe them and they're they're uh it's a it's a turbo musical

Speaker Bit's like no talking about this i would call it like you're talking about like what we've been watching i would call it a costumed staging i don't know if that's a thing but i'm just talking about the scale i mean it's so it's like a stadium full of people and there's like 250 people yeah

Maxbut in some of those you mean on the stage i'm talking about the audience the the venue that this is performed in is a mondo venue it's not a theater 25th was at like the o2 center i think it's a huge it's it's like a hockey stadium it's huge right and there's like fucking fireworks and a hundred people on stage i mean it is a it's a it's a turbo play it's like not like i've never seen anything personally on that scale i mean it's more like the super bowl halftime show than like theater that i see um so just keeping that in mind like i guess that's where i felt like

there's something a little weird about maybe it's just like the cultural context that like musicals and Les Mis occupy today like as compared to the allegedly the message of the thing because who's going to see this it's like extremely rich people seeing other extremely rich people perform this thing in a stadium paying hundreds and hundreds of dollars for tickets to this and it's this total bourgeois thing I mean that poor people have working people have no access to this and you're meant to go into it and you know feel very self-congratulatory that you're like doing this

moral act of consumption I guess by seeing this anti-capitalist play like I went with my parents for their birthday to see this thing called Motown the musical in Chicago a few years ago and I was really nauseous by the end of this thing it was really it really upset me and it was I mean super expensive theater Broadway show downtown Chicago a completely white audience everyone was and they're playing Motown music. Everyone in the audience is singing along and clapping and they're all these sort of like rich baby boomers, like white rich baby boomers. And it's a predominantly black cast

and they have like, they like deal with like racism in like a song. And they're like, oh, we solved it through like the magic of music. And I was like, this is absolving. You're kind of the way Ryan Gosling saved jazz.

Speaker AYeah. A movie I loved.

MaxBut you know what I mean? It's like a little like, it's a little bit of like, part of the price of your ticket includes like absolving yourself of your participation in it no one leaves this play going like oh i'm complicit in valjean's suffering because oh no i mean this

Merlinis i'm going to use my my monthly usage of the word problematic it's it problematic in the sense that oh boy there's all kinds of ways this kind of goes wrong and it gives me icky feels like this this i should not be here congratulating myself on wearing a suit and spending spending several

Max$100 to learn about the struggle? Not only does capitalism permit a sort of the consumption of a sort of anti-capitalist piece of media as popular media that the bourgeois go to see and pay a fortune for, but it actually needs that. And I just finished this book that really kind of has me reeling. It's by this guy, Mark Fisher, called Capitalist Realism. And they talked about it on my my favorite podcast, the Chopo Trap House. So that's kind of what got me into it and highly

recommend this book if you're interested. But he it's sort of a pop culture analysis. It's like a little bit of like if you're a philosophy nerd, it's like a little bit of like, like an anti Oedipus. But if you could understand anti Oedipus because the pop culture was relevant to you. So he talks about like one of the things he, Mark Fisher talks about in this book is the film WALL-E. And he's like, well, isn't like, you know, he's like, what's like in WALL-E, like you're seeing this really dystopian vision of the future where capitalism has ruined humanity and ruined the planet but he's like actually that's just part of what capitalism does he says a film like

wally exemplifies what uh robert faller has called interpassivity the film performs our anti-capitalism for us allowing us to continue to consume with impunity and then he has this then he goes into talking about the project red by bono and he says philanthropic but this is a quote from Bono right Bono says philanthropy is like hippie music holding hands Bono proclaimed Bono again red meaning his project red the red iPod is more like punk rock hip-hop this should

feel like hard commerce the point was not to offer an alternative to capitalism on the contrary lost in translation there I don't know what those words mean well I so here so here's what here's what Mark Fisher is says about this he says uh he says the point of project red was not to offer an alternative to capitalism on the contrary product product reds a quote punk rock or quote hip-hop character consisted in its quote-unquote realistic acceptance that capitalism is the only game in town no the aim was only to ensure that some of the proceeds of particular transactions went to

good causes the fantasy being that western consumerism far from being intrinsically implicated in systemic global inequalities could itself solve them all we have to do is buy the

Merlinright products cultural hegemony it ain't just a river in egypt

Maxso here's a big twitter follow-up i have a guy on twitter who harasses me i mean i have many people on twitter who harass me one person is just like beyond the pale so this person like every day at This person, they have like an egg or I think it's like an anime avatar and they're like one of these like alt-right people and they have like 12 followers that are like, you know, other bots or anime avatars.

And what they do that kind of crosses the line for me is rather than just like replying to me so I can just mute them or whatever, they every day go on Twitter and search for at Max Temkin to like find my at mentions and then reply to people like sending like just sending like nasty comments and stuff. so I keep I've reported this guy I feel like that clear and also like if you look at this person's timeline like all it is is harassing me and then like women who make video games and just like

Merlinyelling at them and calling just you you get like 12 of those sock puppet accounts and just like

Maxyou know automate hate yeah I mean I don't I think this was a person typing it so I reported him for harassment and you know I got the standard um twitter thing saying um hello thank you for this doesn't rise to our level yeah exactly our goal is to create a safe environment for everyone on Twitter to express themselves freely. We reviewed your report carefully and found that there was no violation of Twitter's rules regarding abusive behavior. So then Twitter gives you like six things that are actions you can do from this automated reply. And they're all things that like you can do. They're like, well, you could block this person, you can mute them, or you could

contact the police are basically the options they present you. And like, well, none of them really solve this problem of like anyone who interacts with me on Twitter, this crazy person, like tweets it then so i just didn't know what else to do so i just reported him again and i like picked new tweets that he was using to harass me and then just now 20 minutes ago i get an email from twitter and it says hello we've investigated and suspended the account you reported it was found

Speaker Bto be participating in abusive behavior first of all a awesome and b did you see the announcement

Merlinuh the recent announcement i don't know what's happening oh shit they're they're i mean i i'm i'm not a gamer gate target so i'm sure it's not going to fix everything but they're doing all kinds of shit i'll tell you what they're doing buddy you know what they're doing you can say don't show me any eggs oh shit dog oh i know am i right up here turn off the eggs goo goo goo jube it seems it seems so it seems so simple it's see i mean and obviously now you they're gonna be but you know they're gonna have to be bothered to upload a new like anime picture

or something or a picture of a guy in a tie ties and flags and anime avatars moon and june and ferris wheels it's like jesus christ i how so much of the grief that i see comes from anime avatars eggs and men in ties standing in front of flags so a man puts on a tie and stands in front

Speaker Aof a flag he becomes a monster and then people get all mad i wear ties i'm like well yeah where

Alexwhere are all of these men who are like standing in front of flags is that like a thing that happens after boy scouts like i most of the ones of those that i get they look like a 18 to like 31 year old males where and and they're like showing their face and saying terrible things what where do you take your picture in front of a flag that isn't congress that's a really good question maybe you go to like a chuck e cheese maybe well does walmart have one of these it's like a like a sears photo op and it's like yes i would like the flag you're in the troll zone

Speaker Agoing down to the troll zone get your picture taken in a necktie standing in front of a fucking flag Max, can I try and make your day a little bit better?

MerlinThere's now a piece of sketch comedy that is performed several times a day in our house. And basically, we perform it mainly for my wife. But we'll say, OK, Mom, you ready? And then Ellie and I will go sit at the table. And I'll say, well, listen, Eleanor, it's really important that you get your reports in for the night. And she stops you in the middle of the sentence. She stands up like Lemon Grabs.

Speaker AShe stands up with her arms by her side. She looks straight ahead. She says, something came up. And there's none but me who can intercede. And she walks out of the room. Yes. She thinks it's the funniest thing she's ever heard. You know like when Lemon Grabs is screaming and jumps out the window? She walks like that out of the room. There's none but me who can intercede.

So good. That is, talk about a life hack.

MaxI often reply to people on email when they ask me to do something. like go to some meeting or or well i get a lot of emails where people just want to um uh touch base or circle back or check in this must be touched yeah and they're like hey could you spare could i just have 20 minutes to just to circle back up and touch base borrow you yeah and well it's like yeah you could but like it's like i'm gonna have to stop all my shit and drive there and then you were gonna have to make small talk and you're gonna be late and well sorry i'm gonna be late

realistically anyway so i normally say um i normally say that what was it like it was like was like the stanley kubrick thing like i must decline for secret reasons oh yeah that's so great and no one it's amazing no one ever questions that but now i've been saying uh unfortunately something's come up but none but me can intercede and no one also no one questions

Merlinthat i have to go buy an orphan he'd be white uh dear mr adams thank you for your letter inviting me to join the committee for the arts and sciences for eisenhower i must decline for secret reasons sincerely eb white a mini uh i got a question for you can i ask you guys a question please i love questions okay okay so i had for for not very interesting reasons uh the bank behind my bank changed and i had to get

new cards and do the whole thing and so of course you know what that means we've talked about this before. It's time for all your payments to be declined. So what do you do? Used to be back in the day, I had an Omni Outliner document because I was that guy. And I had an Omni Outliner document with every place that I put my credit card in with a link to where to go, the deep link to where to go to change it. And I would, every time my card got stolen every year, I would go and diligently go in and change every single one of those to the updated card. Now, as we've discussed,

A great life hack is to wait for the card to be declined, unless it's like mission critical shit, right? Wait for it to be declined and then have a little moment where you say to yourself, hmm, is this a thing I really want to keep spending money on? I'm talking here about what John Roderick calls eels. I'm talking about repeating expenses. I'm talking about subscriptions. I'm talking about upgrades. I'm talking about all of those kinds of things.

MaxYou got to every year or so, I like to, sometimes I'll just go into the bank and request a new card. just so I can start popping those eels off. It's a forced reset.

MerlinSo here's my question to you. I don't know if y'all use, I think, actually, I know that Max at least uses Mint. My question to you, this is the thought challenge for the week, and it's a quickie. Do you have a sense right now of approximately how much, we'll exclude things like utilities, for example, we'll exclude right up to the line of, say, iCloud storage. Do you have a sense of roughly, you have to say the number, But do you have a sense of roughly how much you spend on recurring expenses, automatic charges? Do you have a rough sense of what you spend on that each month?

No. I didn't. And so here's what I did. And I challenge you guys to do this, too. You go into Mint. And this is a pain in the ass. But, you know, one nice thing Mint can do is it can automate, automatically change things, right? So you can say from now on, instead of saying blah-dee-blah-blah-blah, if this is always this certain thing, give it this human name that I'll recognize. assign it to this expense category, and you can even apply tags to it. You know, tags, it's still a thing. I would say it would be interesting to go in and look at the last three months,

four months even, of charges you've gotten. I'd be curious to see how much stuff is what I've put as a recurring subscription. Because it's kind of mind-blowing. It's the first of the month, my card's getting declined because it's the old card, and I'm already amazed at how much shit I keep paying for and don't even. Like all these little subscriptions, these little pay services, the premium version of this. I don't know. How do you feel about this, Alex?

AlexI just have one card and like every six months I get a new card. And then like this doesn't really happen to me. So if something's declined, I'm just like, oh, OK. It happens fairly regularly. Although now I've signed up for like My Fitness Pal, Lose It, the bear subscription. So I have a recurring monthly $58.62 of internet services.

But I know I've never gotten in the trap where it's like PayPal is charging me $2 every month. But I don't know. Maybe that's a Midwest thing. I get very nervous about putting my debit card anywhere.

MaxYeah, I'm pretty careful about it. I also have another. So I have this app that I recently put on my phone. and I can't say too much about it, but so far I've enjoyed using it. It's called Clarity Money, and it's kind of like a mint light. So you plug all your bank account information in, it scans your bank account, and it finds bills that it thinks it can get you a better rate on by using a competitor. And it identifies recurring charges

and has a button to cancel. So for the one I see right now, is like Netflix, $10.99 a month. And then there's a button right there saying cancel. And if I press that, it will go in and cancel my Netflix account for me.

MerlinWhoa. I need this.

MaxNow, I just want to say like, I know that we say a lot on the podcast like, oh, well, just because we're taking a bunch of powders doesn't mean you at home should just take a bunch of powders. But I do want to say like, if I say on the podcast that I am using some app where I just blind, I don't know who makes this thing, but I just blindly put my bank account information in and hope for the best. I definitely, you should do that. 100%.

Speaker Adid you guys get my kombucha photo yeah boy that's a quite a lineup of beverages

Merlinoh so this morning i sent you my flight i had a flight this morning and my usual three beverages i don't know if you got the one in my filthy bathroom with all the empty bottles i am stacking

Speaker Bup some serious booch oh i did see that okay why wait a minute that was your bathroom why are they in your bathroom well because i don't have to i don't have trash sir you know email john siracusa there's a lot of dander in here all right merlin so in the world in the product you

Maxknow we try to be the leading i think we're obviously the number two hopefully number one antisemitism podcast but i think we also want to be up there for productivity and you know what they call that in the world productivity that's called closing the loop right because you know you're

Speaker Bgoing to close your loop that's right you know you're going to shit yourself so you finish the booch you can't you can't you can't effectively efficiently hate a jew if you're thinking about your inbox exactly you're going to close that loop that's why you fit you have the kombucha

Maxon the toilet.

Speaker AYeah. Oh, yeah, right. Why are you having a sandwich?

Speaker BRight.

Speaker AWhen I was little, I used to not eat on the toilet because I always thought it would go right through and it would be a waste. Mm-hmm. Hakuna Matata, the circle of life. Yeah. Oh, yeah! Oh, lifesavers. Okay, so you say go put your powders into Clarity Money and you will personally vouch for the security of this app. Is that what you're saying?

MaxYeah, I mean, I have not been owned by Russian cyber hackers yet, so I think that probably means that it's trustworthy. so I got a little bit of follow-up here um this was just a really good piece of audio I just wanted to share so you guys know who Paul Manafort is yeah is this answering the question okay but so I just want to make sure I don't know how much you guys know about Paul Manafort but he's a fucking unbelievable character in politics I mean this is the sleazebags sleazebag in the world of

politics. This guy has lobbied in Washington, D.C. on the Hill for every fucking two-bit, tin-pot dictator, human rights abusing, piece of shit strongman in the world. It's unbelievable. He worked for Jonas Swimby. He worked for, I mean, the one I want to bring up is that he worked for Viktor Yanukovych, who won the election for the president of Ukraine when his opponent was uh, poisoned by Daxon. Um, you, I think his, what was the guy who used Cenkiewicz, I think was the

other guy. And that was so like Putin, like poisoned the opposition. And it just so happened that the guy running the pro Putin candidates campaign was Paul Manafort. So Paul Manafort, absolute lowest level piece of shit that there is in the world. Um, he, Oh, he fucking worked for, um, uh, Mobutu Seseko and Ferdinand Marcos, I mean, all these shitty people and took them, what he would do is coach them to talk about free market, these sort of like a freshwater...

He's like the dictator whisperer. Yeah, exactly. And he would teach them how to talk about these free market Paul Ryan sort of principles and then take them through Capitol Hill to make an alliance between them and Republican leadership. So what does he do after he's done working for Viktor Yanukovych? And also there was – I think we maybe even mentioned this on the show before. Like there's a great Trump cast, Slate's a Trump cast where they talk about his ties and his debts to like Russian oligarchs and organized crime.

Like I mean this is just the shadiest guy in the world who we know publicly we know took – was paid a lot of money, does a lot of business in Russia. What does he do? He becomes Donald Trump's campaign manager after Corey Lewandowski was fired for assaulting a reporter. And then he had to resign because of his ties to Russia. So now we know all of the crazy Russia shit is sort of coming to light, and we know that there's probably some crazy shit in Trump's taxes. And Paul Manafort was on the news the other day, and he was doing a little interview.

And this is on CBS this morning. So I just want to play the audio from this interview. and you guys tell me what you think of his comments. Okay.

Speaker BSo to be clear, Mr. Trump has no financial relationships with any Russian oligarchs. That's what he said. That's what I said. That's obviously what our position is.

MerlinIt seems crystal clear.

AlexOh my God.

MaxLet me do it one more time. Let me do it one more time. Let me do it one more time.

AlexThat's what he said.

Speaker BThat's what he said. That's what I said. That's obviously what our position is.

MaxMy papers. You know what he's doing? He's racing ahead so that it seems like he's thinking of the words right as he says them. And he has to tell the orchestra not to keep time with him. I now dominion.

Speaker BVladimir Putin has no dominion over me. That is what he said. That's what I understand is the position.

MaxSo, well, I'm sold. I mean, I feel like that puts the matter to bed. He said it. So that's an answer.

AlexOh, God.

MaxIt's a pivot. It's a pivot.

MerlinOkay, this challenge sucked. This is my challenge. It's such a piece of shit. I'm so sorry. This is the worst challenge. I regretted it as the words were coming out of my mouth. This challenge sucked, and I would just, you know what? I'm going to step away. In order for you to keep doing the important anti-Semitic work and Les Mis work that you're doing on this program, I feel I'm going to have to step aside. You know what? It's really a reminder that I need to grow up. so the challenge this week

was to use the application I don't want to as they say throw it under the bus you were supposed to use the application called Todoist and in particular you're supposed to bring in some of these bullshit templates to do whatever the fuck and struggle your way through using this god damn binary to the best of your abilities and report back on how it went so Max you

Maxwell so I downloaded the app and then I tried to log in and or I tried to make an account it was like you already have an account with this email so I was like oh I guess I must have you know downloaded this to play with it or check it out at some point it's an old app right it's

Speaker Abeen around 10 fucking years 10 10 years so there's still going to be some bugs there's going to be some rough edges if you've only had an app for 10 years there's going to be some problems

MaxYeah. So at some point in the preceding decade, I've downloaded this thing. And then I couldn't get in. And I had to do a password reset. And that kind of put the damper on it. And then I got in there. And I was poking around. And they have some example stuff. And then I see this tab on the app. Let me just go back. I see this tab called labels. And I'm like, oh, OK. I was like, you know, one of my big things of why I can never leave OmniFocus is that the contexts are my whole life. Like I need the context. The context are everything.

MerlinThe context, you get a one and only one context. It always means that thing, and it's how you run your life. It's an incredibly powerful concept.

MaxYes, it truly has changed my life, the context. And so I was like, okay, labels. I was like, maybe I can sort of hack labels into using context. And I go and tap on the labels tab, and I get a little pop-up, and it says, premium, you've discovered labels. Organize your tasks and find the right ones in seconds. With custom labels like at email. Wait a minute. Why would at email be in my to-do? Why would I have emails in my to-do list? at waiting or at five minutes. And it's lost me. Then it says labels are a premium feature. Upgrade now.

And then if I click on upgrade now, it wants me to pay $21 to use labels.

Speaker AWhen you put it that way, it sounds crazy. Free to play. Yeah, well, labels. Well, whoop-de-fucking-do. Labels can be fuck all. It can be anything. You just start typing wrong and you got a new label. Deedle-dee-dee. Oh, you want to enter something. I don't want to get ahead of myself. You want to enter in some tasks from Alexa? Guess what? Now you've got a new label called Alexa. Let me tell you some of my other labels that I have not created. Done underscore 2017-02-26 underscore. Project underscore. Inbox all caps underscore.

MerlinBecause it thinks you really want to know a lot, I guess, about where stuff came from and when it died. It's kind of like little tombstones.

MaxThat's honestly knowing the retention of old data in to-do lists. It seems to be the default. It seems to be what everyone does. and I actually don't really like it.

Speaker BIt's like saving your pee in jars.

MaxLike, what are you doing? Make it go away.

Speaker BWay of the future, way of the future. I need to sleep.

MaxDo you ever go into OmniFocus? Do you ever pick the wrong, like, perspective in OmniFocus and suddenly it's like the ghost of Christmas past? Like, it's like all the failed projects that you never finished?

Speaker AI know. It's like one of those dreams New Yorkers have where in your dream you open the closet and there's another house inside your house. You're like, wait a minute. Whose career is this? Jesus Christ perspective you weren't a fella oh my god that's me I used to be oh my god I was so much skinnier who is this person yeah you know you know yeah you

MerlinOmniFocus is so god damn stable and well built and well thought out and everything that's not in that app guess what turns out everything that's not in that app is something they decided to not put into that app and you can have qualms and people do have qualms with how omni focus is put together but it is fucking rock solid it just doesn't screw up and it is it's like you this is going to be something that you could build a house on like it will just work and this to do this thing

it just it feels like it's feels like it's made out of tissue paper and bad dreams so i i have a

Maxhere's a question just to go along with this conversation so like what i'm always looking for in technology is, you know, I have these problems in my life and I want the piece of technology that answers the problem so completely that, you know, assuming I'm willing, maybe I have to adapt a little bit to the methodology of this piece of technology. But if I do it, it just is dependable and stable and answers the problem so that I never have to think about it again. I don't have a lot of examples of this. One of them is Backblaze. Backblaze has solved online

back up for me in a way where I never think about it. It always works and it's just solved. I just don't ever worry about it and I know that I'm backed up. Once you understand how it works,

Merlinyou do not have to think about it until the day that you really need it. And then it's there.

MaxIt just does the thing. I feel like Gmail, the web client for Gmail, has solved for me my email process, my series of filters and labels and everything in a way that no other email interface or provider has ever come close to. And I feel like for me, OmniFocus solves my task management in a way that is completely rock solid and dependable. And I almost can't imagine wanting anything else out of OmniFocus or wanting it to do anything else.

But so I guess I've sort of two part question for you guys. A, I'm curious, like, what are people's qualms with OmniFocus? Like, how could any, I'm honestly asking this, like, how could people have a sort of a fault with it assuming like you you're willing to bend five percent towards its methodology and be like do you guys have any other technology you feel about that the same way of like this is just like

Alexsolid it's a really good question yeah i i first want to say why i decided to try out to do list because like the the whole idea around it is that it integrates with alexa and iftita and zapier or whatever um but the more i put i the more uh i connected it to like siri and uh alexa and all all this bullshit it just kept breaking down like you said like tissue paper it's like i was filling it up with snot and it was just like falling out of my pocket it was just making duplicates in

Merlindifferent places you wouldn't get duplicates in the same place you get duplicates in different places because sometimes it misunderstood it in different ways right isn't that didn't you get

Alexthat yep it would I had so many problems um and I sent like six different support tickets and none of which got answers and if this is like like if this is the backbone of your day like oh god it's it's just like you you crumble and that I do feel that way about OmniFocus it is it is just like this rock and I've never had any sync discrepancies uh it's I do have projects from like, ah, I can see I did, I finished my homework early, like eight years ago. And it's super cool.

And yes, you don't need that. But the fact that it exists, and it's there, and I can find it, it's, it just, it's mind boggling in a good way. I think, hmm, OmniFocus, and And I want to say Simple Note was also something. Like Simple Note never failed for me. I used Envy Alt with a bunch of stuff like editorial or Elements and Notesy, some of the first iOS text apps.

But now I switched to Bear. And I have had a couple duplicates. I know some people have been having like really big problems, but I have maybe like 300 text files in here. And it's, or I'm sorry, 3000, not 300. And nothing has gone wrong.

And I've got some that have like giant PDFs in them and it hasn't broken.

Speaker AThat's all in bear? You're doing all that in bear? Wow. That's pretty robust.

AlexIt feels like what I wanted Evernote to be. I've never used, I used Evernote for like one month and was like, nope, this, this is, like you said, it gets snotty and you lose things and it's just icky. So, I mean, Bear is not perfect, but it, I feel like I can throw something, something in there and it, I know where it is and it's, it's not going to get lost. And I want to say Gmail, but some of, I don't, it feels increasingly, especially like Drive,

like stuff is getting weirder. Like they want you to use Google Keep and especially because I have like 10 different Gmail accounts.

MaxWhat is the, I'm sorry, what's Google Keep? That's like their Todoist. Sounds like one of those cups that you put on your vagina.

Speaker BHmm. Nice.

MerlinI wish they'd make more messaging apps I think they should really use a couple more messaging apps would be nice Google KeepCup

Alexyeah maybe well but that said like if I just don't use inbox or whatever their new web view is and just go to the regular Gmail interface it is it does feel like I'm in like 2010 but it's I've never had a problem with that so yeah uh oh also spotify is that a weird answer but like i've never had a problem with that and with like trying to use apple music uh like i i want i'm the apple kid i should that i want to use

Merlinapple for everything apple music inherited a lot of the itunes problems there's just you know as much as they want to make this fresh clean streamlined thing hey let's make big helvetica now it's easy to use it's like you still get stuff like last night when i was trying to find that version of On My Own to send you. Of course, I hit the wrong cab, and I hit Apple Music instead of my collection, and it's still baffling. I was around in the early days of OmniFocus getting put together in a very minor role. I don't speak for the company, and I don't speak with authority,

but as somebody who was kind of around when they were thinking about what shape this should be, and then figuring out how to improve it over the next couple years, one of the things that came up a lot was that, I mean, these are old school next people and they believe that basically everything is an outline. Everything is a list. And, you know, there's a certain kind of guiding principle. Again, I don't speak for them, but the folks at Omni Group are like, man, they are wired tight in every good and bad way. Like they are very wonderfully conservative about a lot of what they do.

They have a very strong editorial point of view that I happen to really respect. You can like or not like their apps, but there's a reason why they did everything the way they did. They've really thought it out. They've really tested it. And they put butt-tons of support assets behind everything that they do in a way. Them and, for example, Agile Bits, two companies that I just take my hat off to. Yeah, charge $40. Charge $80. Because if anything ever goes wrong, they will totally help you out. The bitches that I heard in the early days, especially, and I think this continued, were, Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's all well and good, but why can't it also do this?

Right? And so, for example, one that just came up over and over and over, and one reason I'm kind of laughing, and with all due respect to Todoist, I don't want to be a dick about it, but this is flimsy. It's a flimsy app. With OmniFocus in the early days—

AlexIt's 10 years old.

MerlinWell, in the early days, they hewed pretty closely to a basic concept in getting things done, a couple concepts. One of those is that you need a list of projects and you need a list of tasks. The thing that OmniFocus did that was difficult or impossible to do on a Mac before was to have a given task have two views into it. So you could choose to view things by project, which are the big nouns in your life. These are the things that you want to accomplish. And when this is done, it will no longer be a project. The other way to view your tasks is by what we discussed called context.

And a context is more of a verb. I can do these kinds of things under these circumstances, given these tools or given these constraints. And so one fairly early decision that they made that I think was really smart was to not make it the fucking Wild West. We're like, there's a project, and the project has, at that time, you could still have daughter projects. But it's basically projects have tasks. Tasks can have context. And there's an association. There's like a left join. These things are these things. You know what you can't do? You can't assign 16 contexts to a project.

And that was a huge bitch from people. It was, how could I possibly use this stuff?

Speaker AI want to use tags. Don't have context. have tags because I had this incredibly complex taxonomy that I've inherited from my delicious problem. And now I want to be able to tag all the things. And they were like, no, no, no, no,

Merlinwe're not going to do that. And it wasn't just that it was fiddly. It was that it was programmatically a little bit weird. So all along the way, they made those. But here's what happened. I think, I'm not going to say OmniFocus single-handedly did this, but they were, along with idiots like me, they had a big role in getting people interested in this particular part of the practical knowledge worker productivity space, which is how do I manage, you know, different kinds of weird things in my weird job? And there was suddenly a boom and people realized you could make productivity apps and charge

money for them. And there were a couple apps, I'm not going to name names, but there were apps that came along that wrote checks that their ass couldn't cash, right? Like I watched what Omni went through just with syncing, like hundreds of tiny zip files, Like all of these little things that they were doing to make it so you never lose data full stop. There was just one guy in Eastern Europe who had put out this app and it was like, it was updates like almost every day. It was manic. Like where anybody that suggested anything, you'd see it in the app the next day. And people got so excited.

Like, wow, I'd really like to see it. I paid all this money for OmniFocus. I wish they would be this attentive.

Speaker ASo A, this app, you know, it was cool. It grew really fast. And again, I don't want to throw this guy to the bus, but this app grew really fast.

MerlinIt got a lot of traction, right? Suddenly you got a huge influx of users. You got more feature requests. He's putting more stuff in. Didn't take long for shit to fucking break and explode all over the place. And then guess what? The guy disappeared.

I don't know if you remember this saga, but there was this app that was going to be next to the task program that begins with a T and an H and an Ings. This was going to be the undoing of Omni Group.

Speaker Abecause things did all the things and you could, Ooh, it's all groovy, man. And you can just go like, you know, minority report your way through all of your tasks. But all along the way,

MerlinOmniFocus was there, super strong, super stable, super supported. And so like now when I look at Todoist with all due respect, it's like, I have this wonderful, like this wonderful, what do i say loyal like sweet empathetic hard-working smart wife of 60 years and like i start chasing around a girl in high heels by the hot dogs at the 7-eleven and it's like no dude

Speaker Alike go back to her she's the good one oh god i feel the same way i mean i feel dirty i feel dirty i'm sitting here i'm deleting tasks the format of sending things to this god bless them for having this extension, but it's just a shower of sparks. Different apps make different things happen with

Merlinlinks. And it's just like, oh my God, I want the sanity. I want to go home and watch Netflix.

MaxYou know, I also just want to say how much of an important emotional like point you're making of like, you know, like, like I talk about this all the time with like, in like design and design things. And, you know, people, people are bad at thinking about this, but like, there's a difference between how it works and how it feels. And design should be all about how it feels to the user. But if people are really, truly going to actually invest and trust and use a task management or a

to-do thing, for me, I truly trust OmniFocus. I mean, my whole life is in that. All of my responsibilities, my commitments to other people are in OmniFocus. I trust that when this thing says it's going to remind me, it's going to remind me. And if I put something somewhere, it'll be there. And if it doesn't, if it doesn't work, like, you know, it's like, I'm pretty fucked. So like, it took me a long time to like build up that emotional feeling of like, it's for to have how do I put it? It's this feeling of like, it's okay for me not to be carrying this all around in

my head. It's okay for me to write it down in OmniFocus and trust that it will still be there. And then free my mind to think about other things. That was a really hard transition for me to make. and I don't want this software to move really fast and be really dynamic and do a lot of things I want it to work 100% of the time I want it to feel dependable and that's what I get from OmniFocus I don't really trust anything else other than maybe like a pen and paper the same way that I

Alextrust OmniFocus I mean and the thing another reason that I yeah I mentioned before that I went went chasing after the the pretty lady of todoist is because of automation but now they uh omni group hired sal segoyan which is so cool and exciting and i did not hear this yeah yeah yeah and i like and sure maybe like uh full automation isn't going to be around for another like five years but i know that when they implement it it's going to work really really well and it's not going to

be this weird foreign entity that fucks up my life uh i have an important question because i i

Maxdon't want to talk about how i don't want to shit on uh to do list or whatever for the for the whole rest of this thing but uh important question so merlin just sent us a little a screenshot of um his omni focus called my wife and uh my wife and um yeah it's a little master of the house here and uh i don't want to get into into a whole a whole thing but it looks i don't even know what the fuck I'm looking at? Is this the same program I use?

MerlinYeah, you can... It looks very... First of all, I'm using an old version of OmniFocus because I'm a weirdo. But that's why it probably looks weird. But there's just so many little things that you can change. It's like the FFmpeg of task managers. There's an endless number of things that you can do to tweak it how you want. And this is my go-to context. This is called Added This Week, which I just live in. Basically, there's all kinds of stuff that goes on behind the scenes that I do not need to see. This is, show me, what is this?

This is things that are available with any status of any duration

Speaker Bsorted by when it was added. So this one I was going to ask is like,

Maxcan each of us give just a kind of a brief like elevator pitch of like how you do to-dos? I'm super interested in this. So your main view, Merlin, is like you just have like basically like tasks across all projects and contexts that you added in the last week?

MerlinYeah, so there's two big parts to what I do with OmniFocus. A huge part of it, and I say this over and over, but this is really important to me. And I hope that they understand I mean this as a compliment. OmniFocus is where I put everything I don't want to think about. So that could be stuff like watering the plants, whereas you see here refilling the cat boxes. Yes, we have two.

That's a thing I need to do, and I don't want to think about it. The last thing I want on my mind is cat boxes. So that means that you can see here, it's got a start and a due date, and it repeats on a regular basis. I don't want to have to remember when it's time to get a haircut. Every six weeks, give me the ding-a-ling. I have it pop up. So in my case, there's a huge amount of stuff that I just stuff in the closet over here. And I don't do GTD very well. I don't do GTD at all right now, really. I mean, I've got the core concepts you and I, all three of us, like, care about. But, like, I'm not doing reviews.

Frankly, I don't care. In this case, this is all about this. So this is one. This is a, what is this control? I don't even know what it is. Command shift A. Yeah, command shift A added this week. So I have a bunch of perspectives that I just live in. So whether that's on my phone or it's here, show me the stuff I need to be dealing with right now. So on the one hand, there's all the stuff stuffed into all the closets. Yeah, I should probably go in and clear a lot of that out, but who fucking cares? This is the stuff that needs to happen right now. Nothing goes in here unless there's a contract signed in blood as something I need to do.

Nothing gets a due date unless it's really important. My cat will shit on the floor if I don't change the box by the third. That's the thing I need to do. That's how I use it.

MaxYeah, I similarly, due dates are the highest order of a contract with myself.

MerlinDay one, David Allen, don't put a due date on anything that won't literally die if it's not done by that day. That is such a critical point, and that's why people shit all over their own calendar. The second you put something on your calendar with a question mark, you might be screwed. like you make sure everything that's on there is something that would have to be canceled with consequences like if i don't pick up my kid she will go live in a van i need to go do that that's

Maxi mean right because you don't want uh when i go on my calendar or when i look at my omni focus um you know due soon or whatever the forecast like i don't want a list of things that might happen i need to know what is happening like what is i need to know i need to know what dies right i only can do so many things. So I need to know like what's actually critical. So for me, so I use the, I use the inbox. So I have more of just a standard, I don't know what you call it, like out of the box OmniFocus. Like I try to do a little bit of the like Dan Benjamin thing with like not tinker with

this too much because I want to just have it quickly, you know, I put it on every device I have. So I want it to sort of quickly just work. So I use, so I have the inbox and that's where I put like, I don't know, like just like random one off, like, oh, I better talk to this person about, you know, just like dumb shit I just don't want in my brain. I just sort of dump into inbox. And sometimes I work right out of the inbox, but like something usually like I'll try like once or twice a day to like filter from the inbox into projects and contexts. So projects I have just

basically like huge buckets. Like I try not to, I only have like maybe four or five projects. So I have like cards against humanity, personal life, you know, politics, like just things that like I need by maybe by category. And I have to say, I don't really use projects very often. I didn't use it for very much, like, to be honest, but I keep them organized. And then contexts are like everything for me. So a context is for me in OmniFocus, a context is always a dependency. So it's anything that would prevent me from completing a task just on my own doing it right

now, it gets a context indicating why I can't do it. So I have two main branches of context. I have people and places. Places, I have things like home, office, Walgreens, Target, PNC, like, you know, just places I need to go during my everyday life. And then people, I have like Alex as a context on here. And if there's some, I actually don't have anything right now that's hanging on Alex, but like, you know, if something were up, like edit the podcast or post the podcast, like I can't, I'm accountable for that, but I can't really do it myself.

So I would put an Alex context on it. And where this is really powerful for me is context work across the OmniFocus ecosystem. So no matter what project or where a task is or if it's deferred or whatever is going on, I can see everything I'm blocking on Alex for. So when I sit down for my once a week meeting with Alex and I have 20 different projects going that are all sort of touching Alex's areas of responsibility in the company, I can just click on Alex Cox and there pops up all the things that Alex and I need to talk about and that is

That's I mean that's a rev It's the it's like the only way I understand how to work with other people Is that I can have this one context that brings together all the shit I need from them? And the other thing I do is I have this from the David sparks Max Sparky OmniFocus field guide He I'm pretty sure I got this from him. He showed off these like two custom perspectives that he uses. So one of them is called planning and one of them is called today.

MerlinPlanning. Oh, that what the today one is really great. That's I remember that that's really so I

Maxuse this daily. I use this daily. This is my daily sort of check in of what I will do. Here's what I do is like so I have this one view called planning. So every morning I go into the planning view. Planning is don't it show me every available task, meaning every task that's not blocked or deferred or have some reason why I can't do it right now. Anything I can do right now, show it to me. Don't use a project hierarchy. So across everything in my life, show me all the things I could do. And the way I look at that is like, here is the open field of the day. Here's all the things that

could be done today, right? If I go into planning, I just have this long list of open to do items. And it's like, oh, I could go to Walgreens and buy Claritin D. I could finish this design project. I could do this research thing.

Speaker BIt's literally on my list for today. Yeah. Well, it's like, but it's like, you know, it's like, here's the, here's the, like, what is today going to be? Right. It's like, it's like, what does, what does Roderick say when he's like picking his clothes?

MaxOh, what will be the uniform of the day? What will be the uniform of the day? Exactly. And I get to decide and I feel very empowered by that because I see everything and I'm like, well, today I could block off a few hours and go do a bunch of shopping. Like, okay, I could go to Walgreens and get all my shopping done, or I could sit and do a bunch of design work. Like, it's nice to have that, like, moment of decision versus just being a hostage to, like, whatever email's on the top of your inbox or whatever. And then what I do is I pick, you know, three things or whatever I want to do, usually grouped in some way where I can try and get them all done together, and I flag them. You know, flag is that little red thing above, in the corner of the circle.

And then anything... Red. It's the color of blood. The color of my task. and then anything flagged pops up in today and then I can basically pull up a new, you know, you can do like a new window in OmniFocus and I have like a little mini window that just shows the today stuff and all it is is a little itemized to-do list and it's like, all right, here's all the shit I have to get done today.

AlexThe way that my OmniFocus is basically laid out the same way as Max's because we watch all the same stuff and the one difference I think is I am a little more not lax with to-do dates, but I use them a lot more. And the way that I know someone will die or I will be fired is if at the end of the day there's still a badge on the OmniFocus icon on my phone.

Because flagging things, that is when someone will die. That's when I'm evicted from my apartment. because a lot of my days have to be improvised based on like not like email or anything, but like a new project will come up or something has to just something is suddenly due by the end of the day. But with OmniFocus and with the planning mode, I find it really just like relaxing almost

to like know that everything is still there and I can restructure the rest of my week And it's it is really the like place where my brain lives. Like I every single night I do kind of stick to GTD pretty rigorously, I guess, in the sense of reviews, because it's like, ah, end of the day, going to sit with my cat and just go over everything. And it like, oh, man, it's it's just something that I enjoy.

And I don't know. I don't know why. Why would I go to Todoist? And I understand, like, I realized something this year that my wife is only ever going to use the iOS Reminders app. And that is where my grocery shopping list now lives. And I've accepted, like, I can use two apps and the world won't burn down. So if you like using Todoist, that's fine. It just is not how my brain works. And my to-do list should not make me anxious. And that's what Todoist does.

MerlinI've been sitting here trying to figure out exactly what it is that I thought I was going to get out of this. And I got two things that I wanted and then a couple of things that I was pleased with. Let's start with the little ones. The little things I was pleased with, I thought it was kind of neat that you can format tasks with Markdown. Not super critical to me, but that's kind of cool that you can do that. Something I don't need but some people will love is what I will call flexibility. Meaning if you want to tag the shit out of this with a million different, what do they call it, labels, you can do that. But I think the two things I came here for, and you guys tell me what you think, or I guess particularly Alex, I think I was mainly here for what I'm going to call automation and what I'm going to call templates.

Automation in the sense that, and they're kind of related, automation meaning I can hook this up to Lady in a Tube. I can hook this up to Reminders, which you can also do with OmniFocus. But I wanted a way to be able to throw things in here and have it go to the right place. Oh, also automation including natural language, which they're pretty cool about. If you're on the Mac in this weird-ass WebView app that they've got, it is kind of cool that you can just start typing and you can add in a label or a project name. That's pretty cool. And that part I was pretty pleased with. Sitting in front of the computer doing this, pretty good.

I like that automation piece. The template part was very appealing to me too. What is a template? Right now, for example, one file that saves my ass every time I travel is this giant task paper list of all the stuff I need to do. and I've talked about this other places, but this thing just saves my ass. So it's things I need to do up to a week before I travel. Do I need to order anything? Do I need to plan anything? Do I need to do all these things? I basically clone this list every time I have to travel. So there's all the dumb stuff that I've learned and I'll get to that in a sec. But in this case, is there anything I need to order for this? Is there anything I need to plan? Do I need to

book anything for this? And it has this exhaustive, way overblown list of more things than I will ever need. Even if it's winter, it still asks me about my swimsuit because I want to be asked about

Maxthe swimsuit. Can I ask you a quick question about this? So I'm sort of confused. Taskpaper is awesome. I've heard you talk about it a lot and I've played with it and it's a really, really cool piece of software. Why use it? That's where I get a little bit lost in this. Wouldn't your life be just simplified if it was just an OmniFocus list or am I missing something here?

MerlinPossibly, but TaskPaper, unless you really decide to ruin it, you can't fiddle with TaskPaper. It is impossibly simple. You basically get projects, tasks, and nesting. You can do stuff with tags, and that'll work if you're using the TaskPaper app.

MaxOkay, but if the goal is simplicity, which I get it, right? You just want the easiest way to figure out what to take out of town. How is having two apps, one that's complicated and one that's simple, less complexity points than just having everything in your one app?

MerlinPart of it's my mental model of what I, and I assume you're comparing it to OmniFocus. Part of it is my mental model about what belongs in OmniFocus. I may have things in OmniFocus like buy plane tickets or the big tentpole things that I need to do, but I do not have lists of more than three to five things in any project because to me that goes somewhere else. because because just for me for my mental model omni focus is kind of the control center in the brain and then like then there's all kinds of places reference stuff obviously never goes into

omni focus you know links to other things yeah that goes in omni focus so in this instance like to me so where's my travel document it's just it's it's so big and so weird and so unwieldy

Maxand and and one more so like also like why not use like a just like a why not just like make have

Speaker Aa note right um because this is a list with probably about 100 items in it you have to do

Alex100 things every time you go out of town big cup for ice water definitely earplugs gaffers tape

Speaker Bindex cards wait do i need that for every wait do i need that for every trip i do not Why is there gaffers waiting?

Speaker ABag tea, eye shade, ibuprofen, ginseng, Imodium, neck pillow, Ellie's headphones, premium nuts.

Speaker BNice. Why are you traveling with gaffers tape?

AlexWait, why is this? I have like the same list. Why is this funny?

Speaker BYou got to have gaffers tape. You got to put it over all the lights. Have you guys seen the show Veep? Of course.

MaxYou know the scene where Selena learns she's going to be president and Gary starts crying and gets a nosebleed and she's going through the bag and taking everything out of the bag. Why would you have this? And it's a huge magnifying glass.

I mean, it's one of the all time funniest TV scenes of all time. But that's how I imagine your suitcase.

Speaker BYou just have a leviathan.

Speaker AYou're missing the point. Okay, here we go. On day leaving, throw out old leftovers. Close hallway doors so the cat won't get trapped. Unplug the hall nightlight. Find the cat. Make sure the cat has been identified. Make sure the cat is somewhere that is not locked in something. This is how OCD works, Max. Big project folder. iPad.

Where are some of the other ones? Oh, okay. So I do all of that. I got all the... And so here's the thing. Here's the... This is the beauty part.

MaxAre you like going to the... Like some sort of remote like Papua New Guinea where they like don't have Imodium at a drugstore?

Speaker Aoh my god obviously you're not a pilot you get all of these things you click the shit out of all of them and then you have a few things left to do you hit command shift a all of it clears away you archive all those tasks and see just the things that you need to do so the thing is do i ever worry that the pilot light is is not on no i don't because i got a thing here that says hey

Merlindummy check the pilot light and make sure like john circusta will say this is not effective i think it's super effective you do that now then what else do you do when you come back turn the water heater back up turn the air cleaner back on plug and charge the devices refill your pill bags get the mail and then you know what the last thing is update this list anytime something fucks you up on the road write it down and then that gets introduced you're never going to think about what you need until you need it you only think about toilet paper when you're on the can not when you're in the aisle so when it fucks you up in the hotel room get mad write it down put it on

the list and never make that mistake again bag tea kit kat bars premium nuts i always want to

Speaker Aeat chocolate i forget i always eat chocolate in a hotel room and i forget about it until i'm in a hotel room and now i'm looking at a 14 dollar toberon and i feel like an asshole i can't

Alexbelieve you don't have this list fine cat at house i gotta send you an i gotta

Speaker Ato send you a movie from off the Dropbox last night. I'm sitting there watching TV, and I get

Merlina bloop that the front door camera has gone on. I'm like, wow, that's kind of weird. And I open it, and oddly enough, it's like a moth. It's some kind of like a small moth that the LED light

Speaker Ahas picked up, but the audio is gold. It's just, meow, meow, meow. It's like, what madhouse am I

Alexliving in with my moths and my meowing cat. Max, you travel a lot then. So what do you do to prepare? Do you have like a very small, like, is this one of your things where you think that the list should be very short like a uh surgeon's checklist and like fit on a post uh postcard

Maxlike how do you prepare yeah yeah so so specifically for going out of town um I don't have I don't have a checklist I what I have a I approach the problem in a slightly different way which is I have a bag of all of my like how do I put it like all my like bathroom stuff like toothbrush and pharmaceuticals and whatever and it's just constantly ready to go like it's like my go bag and I have two of everything. Do you refill it when you get home? There's very little in it that like really is consumable or needs to be refilled.

So I have, so like one of the things that needs to get refilled is like a small shaving cream thing. And I can either just grab it while I'm on the road. I just run to a CVS and get like a small shaving cream. Or what I've, what I'm trying to do now is I got like a Harry's subscription, the Harry's razors. And I just throw the disposable blades. I have like the lowest subscription i just get like a few things a year and i just throw the blades and the shaving cream in my in my bag and then i also have a suitcase that's like 25 packed all the time so like what

for example one of the things that just lives in my suitcase is i have an extra wall charger and lightning cable and it's not used for anything it's just all it is is that's the one that's in my suitcase so i don't have to remember to pack it and i just have two i just have the extra of

Merlineverything. We're talking about, I think, I'm very silly. I realize I'm silly in how much I overprepare for these things, but I do get neurotic about traveling. It's kind of a hang-up of mine. I'm fine once I'm on the road, but the week before I travel makes me very neurotic, and this helps me keep the demon dogs at bay. And I think everybody's got, once you travel a lot or do whatever a lot, you develop, you learn what you can tolerate and what you can't. You learn what you can be comfortable with and what you can't. I think most people just figure out, how do you get compensatory muscles or redundancies that will allow the

avoidable shit, uh, the, the avoidable shit to be avoided. Do you know what I mean? And that's, I think that's what we're all probably doing.

MaxSo, so in specific, just specifically in terms of travel, um, uh, you know, there's a, I try, I travel a lot. So I just have, I just, I don't know, like, you know, everything that can go wrong is gone wrong and it's just not that bad. But also like, you know, there's a great episode of, um, of, I think it was of back to work and Dan Benjamin was talking about, He has like a lot of anxiety about traveling and, you know, packing his sort of, you know.

MerlinIt used to be a really big, I think he's gotten better at it, but it used to be like kind of crippling.

MaxYeah. I mean, he really struggled with it, with travel anxiety that expressed itself in terms of like what to bring. And, you know, I can relate to that, but he talked about this sort of like exercise he did, like I think maybe even with a therapist or something where they were like, well, and then what? Right. So he'd be like, well, what if I show up and like I get a headache and I don't have Tylenol or something and, you know, I forget it. and they'd be like, well, and then what? Like, what's the worst thing that could happen? You know, you'd go out and you'd get some. And that was really helpful for me. I was like, you know, yeah, you're rarely going anywhere in the world where you can't sort of go into a drugstore.

In fact, in most places in the world, it's easier to go to a drugstore and get whatever you need than it is in the U.S. Because you don't have to put your fucking driver's license in to buy a Claritin. Like a grown-ass man.

AlexGod. Oh, yeah. Well, so on my to-do list, a big thing, like a big subset of the travel to-do list is all of the medications I need to make sure to pack. Because that is the one thing where, like, with, like, the anxiety medication in particular, like, if I am in another country or I'm somewhere else, like, it's a controlled substance. So that is really hard to get.

MaxSmart. Lord knows what would happen if you could just let anyone buy anxiety medication over the counter.

Speaker BI mean, society would crumble. Think about that. Do you really want to live in that world where people are able to just get rid of their anxiety?

MaxThe same is true of like morning after pill and birth control. I mean, you can't just let people have that. No. No. It would all, everything would just go to shit if people could just get that. No, there should be a complicated series of expensive medical visits. For you to get any sort of pharmaceutical product.

Not good. Boy, that is not good, that app. Not good.

Speaker AVery bad.

MerlinDid I tell you the indignities I suffered? I told you the indignity where I went in, and there's a lady who has a thing about Inbox Zero. did i tell you about this please please oh no please do oh god okay so first of all you know all respect to the guy who put this together this is obviously highly tuned to his interests which seemed to be getting ripped getting organized and doing seo blog posts so nothing wrong with that you know hakuna matata uh and i was looking at all the different ones the chat i tried like six

of these and of course with the flames of the dumpster fire it was hard to even get this but But, you know, I tried it. I thought, you know, I'll do this thing. Let me find. Where is this little? Oh, yeah. So, anyway, I ran across one that sounded really interesting. The Top Secret Blueprint to Conquering Your Email by Jill Duffy. And I thought, oh, this is interesting. I would love to conquer my email. And I went and I clicked. I hit import this project. And I found out the project is called mailbox emoji. Getting to inbox zero via jillduffy.csv.

so i got that didn't even import i stopped right there closed the tab uh first day i was able to get done with all of my tasks it congratulated me i got you know how i feel about machines you guys do you know how i feel about machines congratulating me about things enjoy your meal it literally it literally makes me angry and what was the phrase that it gave me uh it told me that i had reached to do a zero i think pound sign excuse me pound sign to do us zero

Speaker Ayou guys did we ever buy that domain name merlin shit list did we ever make that happen

Maxno but i think someone bought uh someone bought daily showa.com and uh has it redirecting to our

Speaker Apodcast so thank you for that how did they not buy the daily show thank you so much to the listener who did that how do you not buy the domain name the daily showa if that's the name of your show

MaxI mean, these are not smart people, Merlin. We're much smarter anti-Semites than they are.

MerlinIt's the love of geld. You know, the Jew thinks ahead. The Jew goes, the Jew goes with his horns.

MaxWell, you're out there knocking over tombstones day and night just hoping that Donald Trump gets the blame for it in an elaborate—

Speaker ABlood bears love honey.

MaxYeah. I mean, you know, what Jew hasn't gone out to knock over a few Jewish tombstones and you just hope that it gets tied to the president?

Speaker BWell, a lot of people do that. They do bad things to make people look bad.

Speaker AThey call it a false flag.

MaxOK, I have a question. This is really something is really bothering me. I feel like I'm in some sort of glitch in the matrix. I have to bring this to your attention. So on Twitter, Lucia tweeted three hours ago. never did my interests come together so beautifully as in hot dogs ladies quote read the color of my task joke on Dubai Friday pure joy how did you not just say that 20 minutes

Speaker Bago how is that possible did I it's called a bootstrap paradox I think I mean I did make

Merlinthat joke on the last episode you did yes how yeah yes I talk fast I say a lot I talk fast I drive fast um you're full of powders you live a fast life i get it see this is the problem john roderick has no idea how funny i am because he doesn't listen to me or the show he misses a lot of jokes it's a there's a lot of there's a lot of material in here if you weren't out if you weren't out there chasing the geld you would know how funny this shit is thanks to everybody who writes in should we also talk about the nice piece of art i don't want to make the show about the show because

who fucking cares but can we also just acknowledge our nice friend this is all going to be this will

Maxall be edited out seriously what was someone explain this to me you just made this joke because we were talking about when you flagged something last week no we would just made it because we were talking about flagging something in omni focus and you did the little song red the color

Alexof my task alex help me out this if you re-listen to the previous episode merlin has indeed made

Speaker Bthat joke before but i'm not going to do that so what was the context the fact that you hate the

Speaker Ared god this is so boring you hate the you don't talk about the show on the show everything that's in the show is in the show you don't like the red and the black it's gonna be i know but what did

Maxthat have to do with the color of my task well it's the color of the blood but why was it a joke about we weren't talking about task management last week yes we were when we were assigning the

Speaker Achallenge why is it that you park on the driveway but you drive on the parkway

Alexwhy we weren't talking about this last week why is it yes we were you just Stop listening.

Speaker AWho are the rocket scientists deciding what's red? Is anybody using this stuff? Is this thing on? I made the joke last week, Max.

Speaker BAll right. All right. End edit. Back to show.

MerlinDo you put any protocols in place to make sure you don't take your pills more than once? Do you do anything? I'm just curious because I don't do this, but do you guys do anything that's incredibly compulsive and weird to make sure you don't accidentally forget and take your pills multiple times? Do you do anything? Because I know that would be crazy. Do you guys do anything like that? Do you do anything like you only put these over on the left and these are over on the right and never the tween shall meet? And if I've taken it off the shelf, that means I haven't taken it yet. Do you do anything like that?

I get really, really worried about that. You guys, I forget. I think I'm pretty sure I took a pill, but I might have already taken it twice. And it really scares me. You've got to control your powders.

Speaker BThat's part of being a man. You take off your shirt. You sit down and eat some fucking barbecue. I don't think we should. I don't know if we want to admit this on the show.

MaxBecause the thing is, why do people listen to the show, Merlin? It's because they know that we're the experts on the dosing, the powders, the whole lifestyle. And I think if we admit that, you know, oh, God, you're right.

MerlinCut that out. Cut that out.

Speaker AHere's what you do. Here's what you do. You get in there. You get a list. You get a test paper list of about 700 items in it. Find the cat. Find the cat. Find the cat. You want to make sure that's not a, you don't want to get that thing locked up in a closet again. Get out there and do your own research.

MaxSo you're saying in order to be, you're saying in order to be productive, I should probably stop working and I should be, I should install task paper and sort of work that into my system.

Speaker AYeah, exactly. work it into your did you look at any of these templates did you look at these i mean nothing against this guy he's doing this out of the goodness of his heart number one project that to do is training project art of manliness art of manliness 31 day journaling challenge art of manliness 30 days to a better man uh the insanity workout a full 63 day schedule for your beach body insanity all caps workout oh you can you know what they got marie

Merlincondominium you can go in and declutter you can have joy in your life you thank your things before you throw them away thank you for your service looking literally looking down from heaven

Alexi kind of feel like merlin and i went on like a rum springa and we have now we're like oh the outside world is terrible and we've returned to omni focus and we just want to churn our butter let me back in the barn i want to get back in the barn

MaxYeah No I really knew that the outside world was terrible That's why I stay in bed and read all day

17. The Whitest Sentence Ever Written

Show notes

Transcript

0:00

0:21

0:23

0:26

0:56

0:57

0:58

0:59

0:59

1:08

1:12

1:43

1:50

1:52

2:00

2:03

2:37

2:45

3:12

3:30

3:44

4:10

4:13

4:27

4:32

4:49

5:20

5:27

5:39

5:50

5:53

6:32

6:37

6:52

6:56

7:04

7:37

7:47

7:57

8:07

8:41

8:46

8:56

9:15

9:21

9:27

9:37

9:38

9:40

9:43

9:45

10:07

10:10

10:11

10:16

10:22

10:24

10:26

10:41

10:43

10:46

10:53

11:02

11:11

11:18

11:31

11:33

11:41

11:43

12:13

12:22

12:35

12:36

12:41

12:51

12:59

13:29