Do By Friday
Episode 19 artwork
Episode 19 · March 16, 2017 · 01:43:27

19. The Ennoblement of Water

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

AlexThis is Do By Friday, the weekly challenge podcast with Merlin Mann, Alex Cox and Max Temkin. This week's challenge, meditate like a venture capitalist.

MerlinHi, how's it going? What's happening? What's happening with the show?

AlexWe've just been sitting here waiting for you. Oh, my God.

MerlinYou guys are so sorry. I haven't urinated yet.

AlexDo you need to go do that?

MerlinWell, I mean, I could use the jug.

AlexI could mute it. I don't know if it's real, and I don't know if I want to know if it's real.

MerlinJust listen. I just emptied it last night. I try to empty it at least a couple times a week. It's the Clorox 3.78 quart regular bleach. Kills cold and flu viruses.

Alexit's pretty empty there's a little bit in there uh well you shouldn't need that though because it isn't pee sterile or is that just something that sitcoms i've heard i've heard mixed things

Merlinabout this i know there's a thing where people drink their pee in the morning uh that's a thing i think it's a life that's a life hacker kind of thing you need to be a 90s kid to understand to deal with this fee 15 times your urine was all of us this jug of pee is everything

Alexi bet tim ferris just wakes up in the morning turns over and is like he takes out his catheter and he's oh my god you think he's into the catheter no i don't know you know his body is is an experiment

Merlinhis body is a lab his body's a microchip yeah the microchip has been compromised all right i'm not going to talk this week i talked too much last week i disagree okay i'm gonna go pp on a mute it and I'll be right back.

MaxGuess what musical I'm going to see tonight? I don't know. What? Hamilton.

MerlinOh, come on. You are not. I am with Wayne Brady playing Hamilton. Oh, I've heard he's really nice. Is Dave Chappelle going to be Aaron Burr? Wait, is he? No.

Wait, okay. how much like real talk uh how much do you actually know or have heard from hamilton

Maxi i've listened to the soundtrack you have heard it okay yeah i've like listened to some songs okay listen to some songs i have not listened to the whole soundtrack i've like listened to like it's really some songs yeah it is it's long yeah i think i'm gonna be bored but we'll see what

Merlinhappens. You're going to be sobbing. Sobbing.

MaxIt's no Les Mis. I'll tell you that right now. Right out of the gate. No castle in the cloud. No castle in the cloud. I'm going to go to a castle in the cloud in my imagination while I'm bored with Hamilton. You on your phone the whole time. I'll be tweeting.

I'm applying for this law program in Northwestern. I'm actually going through with this thing. And the application was due on March 15th, which is today. So I took the application. I actually had my assistant, Kara, print out all the requirements for applying to this thing. And I put together a little folder of all the work I needed to do and brought it on the cruise. And I was like, on the cruise, I'm going to finish.

I'm going to start read this information, figure out what needs to happen, and then prepare my application and write my personal statement and do all this nonsense that needs to happen. Make a resume. My last resume that I made was in 2011. And get all this nonsense together and then apply for this law program that I'm going to do. Obviously, did not open the folder or look at it once during the cruise. I was way too drunk and eating way too many gravies and to do anything productive. And then I got home from the cruise on the 13th and I was like, well, I'm pretty sleepy

and I have to unpack, so I'm not going to deal with it today, but I do have two more days. And then yesterday I wound up pretty busy, so I was like, well, I'll just do it after work. I'll stay late. And then so I started working on it at like five o'clock and I opened it up and boy, it's a lot of work. it's like hard to update your resume and like you know boil yourself down into into just like a page of information and plus I needed like transcripts from my college and like letters of recommendation from people oh boy are you sure all that's really necessary it says right there on the website that you need it all so so I started going through and I got the resume done and you know I got this piece

and that piece done and then I eventually got to the letters of recommendation and I asked a former employer of mine to write one and she's writing it and then I was like you can submit like supplemental letters of recommendation so i was like uh i think i was like okay i'll have like jen write me a letter of recommendation because i'm pretty sure she can get it done tomorrow you know meaning today like in time for this deadline and you know she jen's a great writer and she knows me really well so she write a good letter and you know isn't she your employee yeah is that bad the first

Merlinemployee is that bad that's a really interesting idea more people should get letters of recommendation

Maxfrom people that they pay that's a good idea well it was a supplement you only have to you have to have one from a former like teacher or employer which I did and then but then I was like you can

Merlinjust have other people write letters yeah I mean a lot of this stuff see Max the thing is a lot of this it's it's it's a life hack it's a way to sort out the riffraff I'm sure you're gonna get into

Maxlaw school I wouldn't sweat this too much whatever anyway so I sent Jen this thing and I was like would you do it and she was like yes and I said you have to write me a good letter because if I don't get in you're fired and she said okay and then this was at nine o'clock at night and then um and i said i reminded her i said i'm literally paying you to write me a good recommendation letter and she said okay i understand and then she texts me back and she's like hey listen are you sure that the application deadline is march 15th because it says on this letter on this form i got to do the letter that it's due april 15th and i was like oh shit dog

yeah i was like and i was like so i was just like never mind i'll email you on april 14th at nine o'clock

Merlinat night well you know one way to avoid time theft though is to get her to go ahead and finish it early you know what i'm saying because even if you're not done it'd be nice if everybody else

Maxwere done oh i see so you're saying i should say to jen i should be like oh no it's a typo it is

Merlindue on march 14th or you could just say you know by fiat you know uh you know restore the dictator to health get this thing done like i don't care what date date schmate that's what i say you uh I'm paying you good money to recommend me.

MaxI hope she relays to the law school the hilarious anecdote where I stood too close to a bomb and splinters went into my body and then the doctor took them out and I experienced no pain. Because I was all hopped up on dictator goofballs.

AlexSo you've both had assistants in the past, right?

MerlinYeah.

AlexDid you ever ask them to create fake deadlines for you? Just like fudge a deadline so that you would get something done at a time that was appropriate and you weren't doing it the last second in case you did indeed procrastinate and did not get it done.

MerlinThat sounds like something I would do. It was more like I hired somebody to help me fake my death. A lot of what my assistant did was just lie to people about my availability. And just, you know, he's super busy. And, you know, I wasn't. I just didn't like talking to people. And so that was a lot of what we did. I did not have a particularly good relationship with my assistant. And it was one of those terrible cases where, you know, bad on me, bad manager. I don't know how to manage people. And, you know, it was one of those things where, like, you end up doing more of it yourself.

And, like, you know, hey, you know, if Seth Godin emails me, you should probably give me a heads up. But, you know, that wasn't – that's not her wheelhouse. But, no, I have known people to do this. Now, like, some people like a deadline. They live by deadlines. Has Max done this with Kara?

MaxNo, I don't do fake deadlines. Like, well, we talked about this, I think, two weeks ago during our, like, task management thing. But for me, like, I've tried all this business of, like, changing the deadline or, like, setting my clocks a little bit ahead so I think I have less time than I do. But to me, it's like, if there's any chance of me doing something on time, like, there has to be, like, a sanctity to the time and the deadline and the information I have. because I'm always, listen, here's the reason I do things late. It's not because, well, it's only

partially because I'm a lazy, bad person. It's also because I'm too time constrained. Like I'm doing too many things. So I'm constantly in triage and I'm constantly every minute of every day, I'm deciding who to disappoint. And I'm like, just by recording this podcast, I'm disappointing people who need me to do things for them that aren't this podcast. But if I did those things for them, then I would be disappointing you guys because I'd be late for the podcast that we scheduled. So I'm always just deciding who's going to get let down and like what thing I'm not going to finish and what disaster I'm going to incur in my life. And at least I want to make an educated

choice. Like at least I want the information of all the things that are due and all the numbers on my OmniFocus and my calendar or whatever. At least I want that stuff to be right. So I don't find it helpful to lie to myself about the deadlines. The one thing that we have found

Alexhelpful uh there was there was a there's been a number of times where jen and trin have needed max to open an email and sometimes we'll write fun subject lines like top 10 serial killers in illinois new asteroids found do you think this serial killer screwed up by not starting with the cheerleaders because i do oh i gotta click on that one that's a good one that's the best thing I've ever written for cards. Serial killer subject line. You got to figure out, I think it's

Merlinhelpful to know, uh, first of all, that everybody lies to themselves about certain things. And like, that's how you cope in life. Like if you don't lie to yourself about some things, I don't know how you exist. That sounds like, you know, utter total clinical depression, 24 seven to me. You have to lie to yourself about some things where you have to hide and compartmentalize some things, but you also have to pick like the areas where you like will choose not to fib to yourself and i think that's one way to look at due dates we're like like you're describing i mean it has a practical component which is like hey i need to know what i can cancel if i have to today

um you're right right so like i'm having a situation at home right now i should tell you about but something came up in the middle of the night last night that i'm dealing with now and it's really helpful to know like okay here's all this stuff that i can absolutely skip today and by virtue of the fact that I only have three things today that have a date and a time on them that gives me this the big rocks right like these are the these are the in the rally of my day these are the places I need to be doing a thing on the planet at a certain time and like the thing is I think the the minute I'm repeating myself here but the minute you start putting something

on there that's not really a deadline but you want it to like fake psych you into doing it you're screwed like that's an area where like I cannot afford of all the other myriad ways I can lie to myself. That's one way where I can't or it would all fall apart. Everything becomes bullshit at that point. Merlin, what happened last night? Did you get a hockey goalie in the house?

Our water heater got a leak last night in the middle of the night. My wife shakes me awake at like 4.35. Wait a minute.

MaxDo you suspect foul play? Do you think it was sabotage?

MerlinWell, I'm going to let the intelligence committee decide that and let the tweet stand for itself. That's what I'm going to say. It's a matter of trust. It's not a matter of law. I don't know. So anyway, we're dealing with that. And I was like, just freaking out. Like, oh, my God, our downstairs neighbors are going to be flooded. And now we've got to deal with this. And nobody wants to deal with the dishonest water heater industry. You should see the Yelp reviews for these people. They're overrated. Animals. Oh, very low energy. But, you know, this comes up. You know, once every once in a while, something comes along and you're like,

boop, boop, boop, clear the deck. It doesn't have to be death in the family. That's a pretty good example. But sometimes stuff comes along where, like, the last thing you want to do is have to sort through, like, mounds of bullshit you deliberately created in order to figure out what actually is a thing that you have. Sorry, I'm ranting. But that's one way that that is my – I have two – as I've said before, I have two bulwarks against insanity. One is I always put my wallet in the same place. And the other one is I don't put fake deadlines on things.

MaxSo what happens with the water heater? I don't know this as a recent homeowner.

MerlinOur landlord's coming over today to check it out.

MaxIt is kind of a death in the family in a way because I consider the water heater to be a member of the family.

MerlinI know. It's always there when you need it. It's an adoptive member. That doesn't make it any less of a member of the family. No, it'll be fine. But, you know, you know me. I'm always on the verge of panic all the time no matter what. It doesn't take that much to send me over to legitimate panic and, like, dry heaving at 4 in the morning. So, yeah, that's a good place to be. So I haven't had a shower, but, you know, I do have a Clorox bottle here in case I need to pee. So everything's coming up in Milhouse.

AlexI feel you have, as much as I enjoy all of your home stories, you have, like, all of the drawbacks of owning a home while not owning a home. Does that, like, ah, man, I'm sorry. That just sucks. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

MerlinI'll be fine. Oh, wait. Motion detection. Looks like he's coming in. All right. Good. All right. Well, that's getting worked on. You got a little hockey goalie? Yeah.

MaxGot a little push notification. I have some hot follow-up coming in hot. Let's see. Where to start? I have a big Overcast podcast player update. So I had mentioned, I think on the podcast or something, I was complaining that I can't listen to... A lot of times I want to listen to podcasts while I'm working. There's some work I can do where I'm able to listen to a podcast while I do it. Essentially, it's not writing-based. It's design-based or whatever.

A friend of the pod, Skullface on Twitter, sent me this amazing thing. It's called Podcast Menu. You can actually just get it on GitHub. It's kind of a rogue menu bar item. It's a little application that puts overcast and a little pop-up that comes from the menu bar So you can click on the menu bar and it brings up your overcast like playlist I think it's kind of just scraping it from the website. Maybe it looks like kind of a web view However, but check this shit out. It works with the media keys So you can hit the pause on your keyboard and pause and start the podcast

And what's cool and what's cool about listening to it that way is also like it obviously it like syncs with all your other overcast information So if you listen to a little bit of a podcast on the computer, when you start it on your phone, it starts at that time code. Oh, I love that.

AlexOh, and look at the menu bar icon. Oh, it's so good. Looking at this, this does not look like a hack. This looks beautiful.

MaxIt's a game changer. You don't have to build it from source? Is it a – oh, look at that.

MerlinIt's a regular old app binary. Check it out.

MaxYeah, so you just scroll down, and there's like the – I think there's like nightlies, but then you can just get the latest, you know, whatever, stable release or whatever.

MerlinOh, great. life hack. I'm so going to use this.

MaxYes. So thank you to, I don't know who made this, InsideGUI on GitHub. Thanks for making this. And thanks to Friend of the Pod, Jessica, for sending that over. Follow-up number two. You just said Friend of the Pod.

MerlinFriend of the Pod. I've broken up for ten minutes. Friend of the Pod. Okay.

MaxItem number two, I saw yesterday that Lucky Peach Magazine, my beloved lucky peach magazine the one thing in this world that brings me some solace and happiness uh laid off their whole staff and they're probably going under in may so that's cool i i feel like whatever simulation we're living in is now designed specifically to fuck with me like i think it's personal i don't quite understand how the surprising super bowl results fit into that because i don't know anything about the super bowl but possibly i'm not even aware of all of the consequences of

Merlinthat yet it sucks how everything has become meaningful like everything has become an analogy or a metaphor or an avatar of this other thing and it's just you can't even make a dumb joke on twitter without people going yeah like trump am i right it's like oh my god so what's lucky

Alexpeach lucky oh you're gonna be kidding me merlin even i the me the weirdo knows what lucky peach

Maxis you're gonna be kidding me this is why they're going under jesus thanks for like me if only you a Merlin man. Why'd you fuck me like this? You should, listen, if you don't get Lucky Peach, someone's getting

Merlinfucked. In this case, it's me. I don't want to be fucked. I'm sorry, I didn't mean to fuck you. How to skim stock? Should you wash your

Maxchicken or not? Lucky Peach is a food magazine, but it's, I don't even, how do you describe it? It's like food writing, but not bad. It's like not annoying and bad. I don't know how to put it. The best

AlexI would compare it to a lot of the writing that happened in the magazine. Marco Arment's old publication and then it was moved to Glenn Fleischman and it just had food writing but it was more like food culture and not foodie culture. Does that sort of make sense?

MaxIt was about how food is a window into humans.

AlexYeah, yeah. Oh, nice. It was really just charming. There's a new magazine. Have you heard of Mold Magazine? No. Okay. Is it a kombucha magazine? it's okay it's one of those weird things and they they're having a kickstarter they're just this site and they they're into like my stuff like grow a pill that gives you protein and uh ah the steak was in a lab but also they they do have some stories that are the same like uh lucky peach style like um oh god i don't want to say in like interest piece but it seems cool

wait was this mold making mold I'm gonna put it in the secret chat network

Merlinmold the future of print the first print magazine about the future of food

Alexthis is something that's either gonna be very very cool or incredibly stupid we'll see how it goes

MerlinI got my fidget cubes

Maxare they real ones or are they

Alexare they the ones that are beating us on Amazon

Merlinoh no they're from the kickstarter update 28 and you know it's fine it's fine it's you know I wouldn't do it again but you know

AlexI don't know why I haven't got my fidget cube

Maxyeah they seem to be having some issues oh yeah did you guys see I have big powder follow up this is big powder news so Mike Cernovich author of the gorilla mindset he has a line of like supplements and powders that you can take and he has two new ones out there smart brain pills and one of them is called because his thing is the gorilla mindset it's like how to be the like alpha gorilla no no no this is his famous book that made that makes him a big deal um um so one he has two sort

of like smart brain pills that you can take one of them is called this is real and it's called brain health nootropic formula and they make you they make you smart you take these and uh and you become smart you become a genius oh good guaranteed but the first one is called gorilla mind rush and the other one is called Gorilla Mind Smooth, which like having a smooth brain, that's an insult that people say.

MerlinYeah, I mean, you want all those little invaginations. That's where the memories go. Gorilla Mindset and Smooth and what's the other one?

MaxRush? Gorilla Mind Smooth and Gorilla Mind Rush. So I've got an idea for a challenge this week.

AlexHold on to it for next week. Hold on, hold on.

MaxAnyway, if you want a perfectly smooth brain, you should take this Mike Cernovich Gorilla Pills for your brain. Your smart brain pills.

AlexI also have some powder follow-up. You know, there's a lot of testosterone-based powders, but I found something called Pregnitude, which is, as we talked about, I'm getting really into period science. And this will help your fertility cycle. I'm not sure how you get the powders. It's available exclusively at Walgreens.

MaxAlex, is this relevant to anyone on this podcast?

AlexIt is.

MerlinI love hearing about your periods, and I love you telling people to calm down because you're going to talk about your periods. I would love to hear more about your periods.

AlexYeah, for the three women who listen to this podcast. Hello. Oh, God. Let's see. So wait a minute.

MerlinHang on. Hang on. Bad on you. If anybody needs to hear about periods, it is not women.

AlexExactly.

MerlinIt is men who need to hear about periods.

AlexWell, I just want my friends to also make fun of this.

MerlinI don't want to hear about this. It's disgusting.

AlexYeah, yeah. We really should be put in tents.

MerlinYou should value her fecundity, Max.

AlexI mean.

MerlinValue her fecundity.

AlexHonestly, like, here's the thing. We don't know about how bad the period tents were in, you know, the olden times. It sounds like, you know, and it was primarily the many wives of rich men. And I think that like a big, nice tent with like fluffy pillows and, you know, your kombucha, it would be nice. Just take a week off.

MerlinDoes this spin out of, how does one say? Okay, certain cultures hold that when a woman is having her lady time, that she is unclean, and therefore she shouldn't be hanging around. You don't go swimming, you don't ride horses, and go get in the tent. Is that the idea?

AlexOh, this is straight from the Old Testament. I believe Leviticus, the best of the books.

MaxDaily showing. Here we come. Yeah, I have a lot of concerns about this.

AlexYou know, actually, Merlin, you have a pee bucket. Maybe I should just have a period bucket.

MaxThe Google? No, you do the Google Keep. It's a little period bucket.

MerlinIt's a personal period bucket. You know, shaped like daisies and are pink and shit. You should just have something called period bucket. And it's just like the kind of thing you put a citronella candle in. It's just like a really shitty, cheap, leaky tin bucket.

AlexI mean, I have a lot of friends who use, are you familiar with diva cups?

MaxYes.

AlexI have a lot of friends that use them. They're not for me.

MaxThe Google Keep.

AlexYeah, Google Keep of your vagina blood.

MerlinDo you save it? I mean, do you make it into like a kombucha? Is it like eating the afterbirth?

AlexLike keeping the jellyfish?

MerlinDo you bury it under a tree for good luck?

AlexLike how does it work? I'm going to follow up with some folks who use it. However, I did back a Kickstarter that was a Bluetooth-enabled DivaCup, just because I was curious. They did not get funded, unfortunately.

MerlinAlex, what kind of push notifications do you get from that?

AlexNo, no, no.

MerlinJust in case you lose it, you get a clapper?

AlexWell, the idea is when it's filled up, you get...

MerlinI'm almost full. I'm almost full. Drain your fecundity.

AlexI wanted this to be a thing so badly. Internet of peace.

MerlinYou look nice in those pants. Enjoy your meal.

MaxDo you know why you call when you learn something new, why you say it makes an impression on you. It's because early philosophers like Descartes, they used to vivisect animals and look at human brains, and they saw the wrinkles in the brain, and they were like, oh, every one of those little crevices, that's a thought that that person had or a thing they learned. So that's why when you learn something, it impresses upon your brain, makes an impression. Wow. I didn't know that.

MerlinI was a Descartes man. I enjoyed me some Descartes. He's a very interesting pivot point in Western philosophy, it seems to me. Because he had a lot of ideas that are still, that are just like basic, like pillars of what we think of as Western philosophy. But he also had so much awesome wackadoo. You get into Barkley and the perception stuff. Like there's so much great stuff in continental philosophy back then.

MaxOne of the big ideas he had was to vivisect live dogs. And you cut them in half and you'd find out that the soul, ah, the pineal gland in the brain, that's where the soul lives. Yes. That's where the little man is.

MerlinYou can stimulate your pineal gland. You know, you get in the shower, and you just bang on it real hard with your shower vibrator. Now without that water heater, you don't. I know you got soul. I'm super bad. Let's keep still milling around in there. See what happens.

AlexI have a bit more follow-up. Yeah. I got an unsolicited Amazon email, and it's, Hi, Alex. Thank you for your recent purchase of our product and your support for our company. our goal is always to provide our very best products so that our customers are completely satisfied we're committed to innovation and that's why we value your feedback and i have no idea what the fuck i ordered or what this was for it was not attached to any order number new policy i could

Maxnot i went into the amazon settings could not figure out how to turn off these emails so maybe i gotta call you gotta call oh that's fucking absolutely never gonna happen so now whenever anyone emails me, I click on the link to leave a review and I leave them a one-star review. So I know that all the people selling Glad Sandwich Bags are listening to this podcast and I'm telling you right now, I vow to you, if you email me to leave a review for your Glad Sandwich Bags, I will leave you a one-star review. And under reason, I will say, I did not give this company permission to contact me and they

contacted me about their sandwich bags. I don't want to hear about the bags after I order them. I want to put my sandwiches in them and move on with my life. You're not done yet. Can you imagine if you went to the industry? If you went to the grocery store and you bought a bag of 100 Glad sandwich bags, and the next week the grocery store called you and they said, how are your bags? What kind of sandwiches are you putting in there? Are they good? Are you liking them?

Please remember to like and subscribe. How dare they?

AlexDo you guys mind if I call these guys?

MaxThere's a number?

AlexYeah, there is a number.

MaxCall them up. You have to say that the call is being recorded for quality assurance. purposes of course of course this is big yes yes

Alexhi uh is this jason cases.com it is all right uh oh great great um i recently got a uh basically a thank you email and a request to review a product that i bought from you guys, except I have no idea what the product is. It was not attached to any order number or anything. Also, this call is being recorded for

quality assurance. Is there any way to figure out what I bought from you?

Speaker AYeah, sure. Let's see. Alex Cox

Alexagainst humanity. Wait, wait. Yes, I am Alex Cox from Cards Against Humanity. How did you know that?

Speaker AI think you said it when you when you called in.

AlexOh, okay. Sorry about that. That's funny. Sorry. I'm having a day, man.

Speaker AOkay. Yeah. The order is for the Sony FS7 plus lens and bottom plate case.

AlexOh, so a hard case for a camera. Okay. Oh, that's interesting. I just, we bought that about a year ago. So it's a great case and I'm happy with it. So I guess I'll leave you guys a good review. Thank you so much for clearing that up.

Speaker AYeah, am I allowed to use your feedback to put up on the website?

AlexSure, it is a great hard case. It has been through many, many, many security, both checkpoints and it has been checked many times and nothing has been broken or stolen. And it's great. I think it fell down an escalator once. Yeah. And our very expensive camera is still safe. So thanks.

MaxAsk him if he'll review our game.

AlexWill you guys review our game?

Speaker AYou have a game?

AlexI do it is a it is the best selling game on Amazon it's called cards against humanity

Maxleave a five-star review okay

Alexleave a five-star review on Amazon I never played the game but um I'll tell them

Maxtake our word tell them take it take your word for it it's really funny that you you give good reviews

Alexall right it's it's really really funny trust me trust me

Speaker AIt's a funny game?

AlexIt is a funny, it's a pretty funny game. It's a pretty funny game. Well, I don't want to take up more of your time, but thank you so much.

Speaker AOkay.

AlexAll right.

Speaker AThis is Alex?

AlexYep. From Cards Against Humanity. Alex from Cards Against Humanity. I appreciate it. Thanks, Alex. Thanks for your feedback. Bye-bye. Goddamn. Oh, that's so funny. I don't know if it was funny, as funny as I thought.

Oh, well, the thing is now, I don't think that this was from Amazon, but also this is actually something we ordered like a year ago. I guess it just got around.

MerlinOh, God. Can he be a regular?

AlexI love him so much. This is red the color of my task all over again.

MaxHow did he know? I think he said so.

MerlinI got to roll that back. You should do a sandwich here and roll back because I don't remember you saying Cards Against Humanity, but maybe you did.

MaxI think we should pivot. Okay, hear me out. I think we should pivot into a prank phone call podcast.

MerlinGold, the color of my stars. Five, the number of my game. Oh, that was well done, Alex. Hakuna Matata.

AlexHe was a good sport about it. Thank you, Jason from Jason's Jason.

MerlinI think that had a little bit of Starly Kahn to it. I mean, you took it and you turned it, and then that guy kind of put it back on you, and he was great. I thought that guy handled that extremely well. He did not sound like a ding-a-ling. But I would be watching out for that review because, I mean, you know, quid pro quo, Clarice.

AlexDo you know about the Nintendo Switch taste thing, Merlin?

MerlinOoh.

AlexOh, I haven't gotten... Well, I'm trying to get rid of all of my physical media, so I didn't... I haven't bought a cartridge, but I want to lick one so bad. I just need to know.

MaxI've got one in my backpack. You want to lick a cartridge?

AlexSure. I can sanitize it afterwards.

MaxYeah. Super interested in that.

AlexThis is the new thing on podcasts, too.

MaxDo you want to lick... Well, don't lick Call of the Wild. I want to play that. Why don't you... You can lick Bomberman.

AlexOkay, okay. All right, there you go. Oh, wow, there's a lot.

MaxNow, what's the procedure? Do you just pop the whole thing in your mouth like a potato chip? You know what?

AlexI'm going to lick both sides because I wonder if it's the whole thing.

MaxYou getting anything?

AlexI mean, it tastes bad, but it's maybe. Okay, the whole thing is in my mouth.

MaxWow, you really went for it.

AlexThe whole thing is in my mouth. Oh, my Bomberman.

MaxOh, no, my Bomberman. You're just going at it like a Jolly Rancher here.

AlexSo, oh, wow, wow. Okay, so if you keep it in.

MaxAlex looks very unhappy right now.

AlexThe thing is, if you keep it in, that's when it starts to get you. But, like, if you're a kid, you just swallow it.

MaxIt's going to be so ironic if you swallow it. You can go ahead and keep that, Alex.

AlexOh, yeah. Free game.

MaxAll right. There you go. I wasn't playing that. I wasn't really playing that anyway. So go ahead and keep that, Bomberman. Yeah. this is like so if you go on amazon and you look go on cards against humanity and you sort by one star reviews of cards against humanity i mean first of all people who leave one star

reviews on amazon are the are really anywhere they're the dumbest living humans i mean they're the people who have a little bit i think they're like part neanderthal or something like that but they might have been taking too many of this uh the mike cernovich uh smooth brain gorilla pills but oh because they got gorilla mindset well they they smooth their brains out a little too much you know not enough impressions in there but basically if you go in there there's a lot of like um uh comments or like one star reviews with comments on cards against shaman do you like um i bought

this gift as a christmas present for my niece and christmas was bad like or like or like uh i don't know just like crazy circumstances beyond our control yeah and you're like well you know it's

Merlinwhat's the what's the deck or what's the um yeah what's the deck you've got cards against humanity colon is it a game for terrible people well it's not that i don't even think that their issue is

Maxthat we offended someone, which actually would be a fine one-star review to read.

MerlinShe was literally reviewing Christmas.

MaxYes, exactly. She's like, the Christmas party was boring. Yeah, it was like, yeah. I'm pulling some of these up here. So let's see, one-star review.

AlexI like the one that is titled One Star, and it just says, this was highly recommended, but we tired of it very quickly. I guess it's fair. Like, all right. Yeah.

MaxHere's one, verified purchase. Too many duplicates. Not very fun when you have two of the same card in your hand. There is no duplicates in the game. Maybe they're unstuck in time.

MerlinGreat theory. It's fun sometimes to click through on the names. I love doing this on the App Store. I don't read reviews for stuff I do. I very rarely read reviews for apps. But it is fun when you see somebody who's clearly unhinged. It is fun to click on their name and go read about what else. Because really, the funny thing is you'll discover that a lot of the one-star review people are also some of the five-star review people. And everything they do is a personal vendetta about this one time in high school. And that's just them down the line. And you can go and see all of their incredibly wackadoo. Like, this lawn chair reminds me of Stacy or whatever.

MaxYou're like, ah, fuck, what is happening? Here's a good one. One star does not contain labels.

AlexThat was what I just saw. I don't understand. What does that mean? I don't know.

MerlinThey thought it would be... Does not contain labels.

Alexokay um x-rated definitely an adult game that's that's it you're just describing oh my god this

Maxis so awesome the photo okay so if you go on cards against humanity the product photo that amazon has sort of algorithmically chosen as the representative photo it's a photo of the box where there's like one standing up and one lying down so it's showing you the box from two different angles and here's a one star review the picture is not what you get I only got the small box on the left that's sitting vertically oh my god

AlexKara Max's assistant is here and you need why is this happening? you need to go get no you do not need to do it you do because I just put this in my mouth and I still taste it and I need another disgusting thing to put in my mouth to get rid of it this is a Nintendo Switch cartridge i need to book max and i need kombucha yes the uh no i haven't so i might it's not a tea stuff

it's a fermented fungus beverage yeah it does not look good but if i might i'm already eating

Maxgross stuff at rejoice it's a living beverage thank you very much okay do you have time wait a minute wait a minute wait a minute why is alex do it wait a minute do you have time for this

Alexyou delegated this to me and I'm delegating it to Kara I didn't delegate this to anyone

Maxthank you Kara I'm so sorry to everyone who has to listen to this episode

Alexthis is for sure

Maxthe worst episode of the show I think we've done all we can with this show I think we're good we had a good run

AlexI want to check if we have any reviews on iTunes

Maxoh no please don't oh my god Listen, everybody, leave us a one-star review on iTunes.

AlexNo. No, don't do that.

MaxTell us your complaints.

AlexDon't do that.

MerlinOh, no, please, please.

AlexOh, my God, please. No, no, no, no, no. Oh, no.

MerlinI've seen a lot of what you're describing. It's very memorable how many people bought incredibly inappropriate things for a grandchild, niece, or nephew, and are very upset about how it worked out and that the child wasn't happy or that it was wildly inappropriate for them. So you give your kid like a Fabergé egg and like very fragile for the price. You're like, oh my God.

MaxIt's ponderous. One star by Valerie. Perverted, crude, inappropriate. We should put that on the box.

Alexso alex you're reading blitzed right i am so i'm just balls deep into blitz i actually got the audiobook because i had a lot of driving to do and i oh god it's so good i i thought it was going to be all hitler all the time and at first i was disappointed but i did not realize slight spoilers for Blitz that basically all of Germany was addicted to meth for a few years.

I'm sure that was fine. It was like coffee.

MerlinIt was just like, hey, have some meth. Gotta go to Leningrad.

AlexI like the bit particularly about how it was believed to be less dangerous than caffeine.

MaxOne Star by Brian West. This game is not what I expected. It is a poor attempt at recreating a TV show. Nothing about the question or responses are funny. What TV show were you guys recreating, Max? Well, I mean, hopefully Arrested Development. That's a show that's really funny. They weren't.

AlexI think you on your next writer's retreat should just recreate Veep, really.

MerlinOh, Christ, I wish we could. Oh, my God. Nevada.

AlexAll right, we should start the show. Say something funny so I can put in a good transition.

MaxI'm like, I think it's because Tommy, last night, Ila and Tommy and I went out to, after I realized at 1030 at night that my application wasn't due, I was just like high. I was like, I felt like I did heroin. I was just like flying high. I was like, oh my God, I have a whole month to procrastinate on this still.

And we went out to Korean barbecue and we got a whole bottle of soju of the like, I think it's like Korean like plum wine. and it sounds so pleasant. It's like, oh, a Korean plum wine. That sounds like a delightful treat and it tastes pretty sweet and mild. It's plum wine. It's wine from plums. How bad could it be? It's basically the same alcohol content as whiskey and we just drank an entire bottle. We were just shooting it all night and it's so pleasant. I think the reason I'm feeling so bad is that I drank a lot of the Korean plum wine.

MerlinThey should warn you about that. One star said plum, got very drunk. More like whiskey. Low energy. Sad.

MaxDrink too much of it. One star. Very disappointing.

AlexAre you a big drinker, Merlin?

MaxYes. Merlin works hard. Your party's hard.

MerlinYeah, I talk fast. I drive fast. Yeah. Yeah, you know, I can't drink a lot of stuff other people like. Like, I can't drink a lot of beer. It makes me really, really low-key.

AlexYeah, you think that I would like beer because I'm quite a bread enthusiast and it's basically just liquid bread. But I'm not a fan. I'm, oh, wow.

Whiskey's great. Anyway.

MaxOne Star by Richard Zambicki. It is a great game. Everybody really enjoys it. We'll contact you around Christmas. They will make super presents. Thanks, Rich. One Star. Let's see what other reviews. Oh, it's his only content on all of Amazon. user tomb raider oh my god this person who left a one-star review on cards said what uh left a book a review on a book and it says one star this this book makes you think

wow that is interesting or wow i didn't know that but i found it interesting how the book talks about how humans did not come from monkeys no no we actually come from an ancestor quote that has not been found yet. First of all, macroevolution has not been proven. Microevolution has, but not macro.

I was very disappointed when I read this section, having read several sections before it, filling my brain with possible non-facts. Oh, also the title of the book is The Book of General Ignorance, Everything You Think You Know Is Wrong.

MerlinTomb Raider is his name? Is that Dutch?

MaxNo, no, they leave a lot of reviews. They've left like 40. Oh, they're from Chicago. We should have them on the podcast. Call them. Call them.

MerlinGet them on the phone. Get them on the blower. Hello, may I speak with Mr. Raider? Oh, Mr. Raider is my father. Call me Toom.

AlexHitler, you're enjoying Blitz. So what have you taken away that you did not previously know about Hitler's drug use?

MerlinWell, I mean, one thing I got from listening, I feel like I got from listening to that interview on Fresh Air. Reading between the lines a little bit, Terry Gross, it seemed to me, did you listen to it by any chance?

AlexI did, yes.

Merlinshe felt heavily briefed on cautiously making sure that this person that basically that their ass was covered in case what he's saying wasn't true like are we really sure that x means oxy and stuff like that did you catch that did you get that feeling of like she was really in a way that she doesn't often do with authors there wasn't this sort of like implicit credibility question it wasn't huge but it was there so you know i'm reading it first of all i'm thinking it's this is you know in translation i'm thinking you know i want to make sure and sometimes when he editorializes it is a

little bit out of nowhere and a little jarring it doesn't feel like a really straightforward non-fiction like you know there are times so i'm you know i'm reading it in a somewhat circumspect way with that said yeah i mean just just how pervasive everything was and like and just the gnawing sensation of this whole like well we've all had our reckons about why things went the way they did you know is it a is it a micro penis is it failed art like is it all these different things but you know again we're back to Occam's razor like what if he was just really fucked up on drugs a lot of the time and and you know had a job to do every day some of the things

Alexthat feel a little bit um like like an opinion piece I wonder if that's just kind of lost in translation um or me too well did you get that impression I don't know I don't know um it there were just some parts that read red salty i don't know well yeah this did read a little salty but

Merlinthere were points i'm trying to i can't think of an exact thing but in the high high hitler section there was he would say things like no no no facty facty fact fact fact fact facty fact riding on a train which would be very unexpected for unexpected for such a terrible dictator it's like kind of

Alexlike you know the intimate lives of all the dictators yeah right right but i mean great

Merlinlittle factoids like morel like morel was really proud of the fact that he had the doc his hitler's doctor his personal doctor very proud of this role that he had and stuff like the fact that to give hitler his injections they would have to stop the train and he was very excited like oh they had to stop the train today so you give hitler his injections like yay four stars like stuff like that i thought was that those are interesting i love those little kinds of turns out uh insights but yeah i'm glad i got it it's it's it's very uh very interesting book all right

AlexSomeone say something funny.

MaxTrump's taxes. Rachel Maddow got them. I think this is it, guys. I think we got them. He's on the ropes. Yep. He filed some paperwork. Yeah, he filed some paperwork incorrectly. And, you know, that's how he got Capone tax evasion.

AlexI was so excited. I was so excited.

MaxWhy? I don't understand that. Every time there's Trump news, it ends with you being kicked in the balls. Yeah, yeah. How is this ever going to be? There's never going to be Trump news that doesn't end with you being kicked in the balls. Here's the deal. The guy's going to be president for eight years. You're going to get kicked in the balls every day for eight years, and then we'll get a new president and he'll be good. Or she.

MerlinThe fact that there's still a way to make this about Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama is staggering. I mean, it's like, you know, I'll talk to my kid about this. I'll just be like, oh, he's at it again. And she's like, he won the election. I'm like, exactly. He won the election. But he's still making this about the election.

Alexit's like it's so i mean it's weird for me because i grew up in uh wait i i think i was 10 no no i was 15 when obama was elected for the first time no i'm sorry man this is getting cut out like uh like obama was the first president i ever voted for and so i sort of grew up in the Bush era um but my entire adult life it and but my entire adult life has been Obama and we

MerlinI don't like do you do you worry about your kid like yeah sure it's like my mom was born in the early 30s and she Franklin uh Franklin D. Roosevelt was president until she was a teenager from the time of her birth to when she was a teenager like think about that for me that's It's pretty wild stuff.

So, yeah, I mean, of course I worry about it. I mean, it's not just this one guy.

MaxShe'll be like 16, and she'll never have known a president that didn't pay ladies to pee in the bed.

Oh, I see Alex has got some bags.

AlexThe kombucha has arrived.

MaxThe booch is here.

AlexTwo gigantic bags.

MaxWhat flavors do we have?

AlexIt seems to be all the flavors. We got original, organic, and raw.

MaxI like that original.

AlexLemonade.

MaxToo sour.

AlexToo sour. All right. There's Cosmic Cranberry. Have not tried it. I feel like that's the one that I...

MaxThat's my go-to. Cosmic Cranberry.

AlexCosmic Cranberry

MaxMay the great Cosmic Cranberry carry you on its back Sounds like a good omen

AlexOh boy

MaxWait wait wait is there a gingerade? I don't think so

AlexWhat? Alright we're looking for some gingerade

MerlinI'll tell you man It's Cosmic Cranberry, Gingerberry And Gingerade that's my three goals

AlexWhat is Multigreen?

MaxMultigreen's got the al that's my favorite one It's green tea and algae That's the one that was your original I love the OG. That's my favorite flavor. That's one of the best beverages of all time.

You do have to factor in that it's going to make you shit your pants.

MerlinBoy, you know, yeah, I've had some looseness that wasn't explained. I mean, it's nothing I'm losing sleep over, not like my water heater raining down.

AlexSo I have not tried this ever. so if I just spontaneously shit myself that's going to be some great content

MerlinI'm sorry is this your first booch?

Maxwhat flavor are you going with?

AlexI'm going with cranberry because there's alcohol in this right so really it's just like a cranberry right?

Maxthere's not enough there's not enough alcohol in it that they card you when you buy it

Alexokay there seems to be a lot of debris at the bottom I assume that's

Maxthose are the cosmic cranberries

Alexdo you shake it?

MaxI like to think that we all go to the Cosmic Cranberry when we die.

MerlinWe all get the heaven we deserve. Well, as previously discussed, I would not shake it because it is carbonated. Rejoice, rejoice. I would gently flip it over slowly twice. I would flip it over once, get the butt up in the air like you just don't care, let it settle, gently flip it back, and then enjoy, enjoy. It's a living beverage.

AlexThis seems like a very costly drink. it's got it's pretty yep synergy all right uh oh yeah it's all floating to the top you are

Maxlooking for is also looking for you inquire within living food for the living body intention

Merlinis the soul of action you know what i just want to say i want to put a fucking stake in the ground I've had it with fortune cookies that are aphorisms. This is a blight. It's been happening slowly for like 40 years. Don't give me lotto numbers. I don't want lotto numbers, and I do not want an aphorism. I want to know what the fuck is going to happen in my life. Is that too much to ask from a cookie?

The love you are looking for. Yeah, okay. That's the one you got. What else we got?

AlexIt sort of smells like cider. All right, let's see how this is.

MerlinWhat did you have for lunch, Alex? So I had a Nintendo card with the Booch finish.

AlexHmm. I'm not getting a ton of flavor, which is strange for me.

MerlinI think by the time you get to your – it gets better as you drink it, especially if it's still really cold. But by the time you get to your third one of these, I think you're – in my case, for myself, I was sold.

AlexHow many – so, okay. So let's – real talk.

MerlinReal talk. Real talk. We're going to flip the chair around. Yeah, put your arms up on the chair.

AlexWhat does this actually like make you like is this a Gabba type thing? Does it is it the flavor? What does this do for you?

MerlinI honestly do not get a ton of energy out of this that I couldn't write down to my normal powders.

AlexI see.

MerlinI enjoy the taste of it and I thought I would try it for a few weeks just to see if it does anything, you know, with my butt and my thinking and whatnot.

MaxWell, I was just thinking, could I introduce a new recurring character into the Dubai Friday mythology?

AlexYes, please.

MaxSo are you guys aware of one of my favorite people in the world, David Avocado Wolf? No. Okay. Let me read from his Wikipedia article. I'm trying to decide the best way to introduce him. So this is David Avocado Wolf, nutritionist. David Avocado Wolf, born August 6, 1970 Is a raw foodist, promoter of alternative medicine Conspiracy theorist, entrepreneur And spokesman for the Nutribullet Okay

Health and diet Wolf promotes a diet based on raw plants He has stated that this also has a detoxification effect Wolf advocates that people with cancer Take dietary supplements Instead of getting medical attention perfectly sensible wolf believes that chemtrails exist and are harmful to people and animals that's well proven check wolf has consumed considered cocoa to be one of several superfoods wolf says that he has a deer antler spray that is quote levitational and an androgynic force okay and

sells deer antler spray products of course um wolf claims that mushrooms have an advanced intelligence and consciousness uh okay he has stated that mushroom spores can quote levitate off the planet and believes that they are trying to quote get to the center of the sun he has stated that mushroom spores originally came from quote distant planets and were quote carried by cosmic winds or meteors into earth's atmosphere stating that quote the preliminary work develops

as the mushroom micellum sets itself up to network and nourish multi-celled carbohydrate forming organisms well that's just science yeah i mean that's i don't understand why that would be

Alexcontroversial so is this like drug mushrooms or just just mushrooms it's a great question

Maxhe doesn't let me just scroll down to under views it just says physics wolf believes that the earth is flat and that gravity is a hoax and there's a citation for

Merlinthis oh it's it's from one of the flat earth panel uh lightning in a bottle 2016 interview from the temple of consciousness bradley california i don't know why i don't know

Maxwhat made me think of this i just i just really like this guy i've read a bunch of his interviews we got i'm just really interested in in his views i have a question about his name um because there's

Merlinthese certain kinds of names like you get like the bass player donald duck dunn who i only ever hear referred to as donald duck dunn i've never heard him called donald dunn i've never heard him called duck dunn he's always called donald duck dunn my question for you david avocado wolf do most of his friends call him avocado does his mom call him david or is he one of those people that everybody

Maxjust calls david avocado wolf oh i know why okay i'm sorry i know why i brought david avocado wolf into this conversation so i was reading the side of my kombucha bottle and there's a little quote here and it says words of enlightenment the love you are looking for is also looking for you inquire within and then underneath it's attributed to apollo poetry entrepreneur and speaker oakland california and i was thinking to myself boy it's a huge missed opportunity that david avocado wolf my main man, isn't on the side of the kombucha bottle, and I feel like we should write a letter or something.

I want David Avocado Wolf on the side of the bottle, and he should be saying something like, love is the one true spirit in the world, and chemtrails are real. David Avocado Wolf, Nutribullet spokesman and conspiracy theorist.

AlexReal-time follow-up. Just got an email from Jason of Jason's Cases.

MaxDid he leave a review?

AlexHe said nice speaking to you I found someone in our office who has played your game So they will be leaving you a review

MaxHello We've got it made

AlexThanks for your review we truly appreciate it Thanks Jason That's great Alright let's challenge Doug Gummerland

MaxCan I read you a quote I found a page of inspirational quotes By my main man David Avocado Wolf I just want to get it started with one

AlexAll right, all right.

MaxThank you, thank you, thank you. Thoughts are things. Everything you do are things is a cause set in motion. Every thought sent forth is a never-ending vibration spiraling its way across the universe and returning us what we have sent with interest. David Avocado Wolf.

AlexThoughts are things. All right. It was my challenge this week. Basically, I wanted both of you to every day kind of meditate like a venture capitalist. Meditate like a venture capitalist. So you were instructed to each day to use an aid such as an app or a book to just, you know, get in touch with your inner self.

MaxWell, you know, as my main man David Avocado Wolf says, out of 40,000 plus herbs used worldwide, perhaps only 50 to 60 of them are tonic super herbs. These super herbs should be taken for long periods because like all tonics, obviously, they are more like food and they build health treasures within and nourish our, quote, stress defense field.

AlexOh, no. David Avocado Wolf. merlin it sounded like you you had a tough time with this challenge

Merlinoh just another quick question about david avocado wolf you mentioned wanting to have

Maxa recurring character on the show uh yeah yeah i know he's part of the canon now he's canonical my main man david avocado wolf you know alex with regards to this challenge when i sat down to meditate i really brought to mind the teachings of my main man david avocado wolf when he said paradise is a state of consciousness. All you have to do is purify yourself and you automatically arrive. David Avocado Wolf. Every organism exists as a vehicle for the ennoblement of water into consciousness.

AlexOh, what a guy. What a guy. Merlin, Merlin. You struggled with this.

MerlinSo this week was rough. I guess I would say in the words of David Avocado Wolf that every organism exists as a vehicle for the ennoblement of water into consciousness. That was David Avocado Wolf.

Now, but I mean, there's one overriding principle to the way that I approach meditation. I guess I'd want to paraphrase David Avocado Wolf, who says, until further notice, celebrate everything. Life is a mirror that magnifies what we see out there is only a duplication of what we are inside, David Avocado Wolf. So wise. I mean, he's got so many layers. He's got a Nutribullet. No, I pretty much – I've been having trouble sleeping. I've been really struggling. I've been anxious. And, like, days just went by before I realized it and I didn't do it.

I've been trying some things involving sleep and dreams that I've been working on, doing some self-work, as I call it, or as David Avocado Wolf might call it. No, I didn't really do it. I didn't really do the challenge, and I'm really sorry.

Alexuh so when you say experimenting with like dreams are you trying to become a lucid dreamer i'm a

Merlinlittle i'm fairly lucid some of the time oh interesting i've always been very interested in trying to remember my dreams and developing means and methods of being able to remember them and figure out why i feel the way i feel about them even if they are nonsensical and given that I've been having some anxiety lately. That's just the thing that I was doing. I don't know why I didn't do the meditation. I think it's really hard to do meditation.

And I dread, I think about it, and then I dread the way I know I will procrastinate doing it. And it makes me feel terrible about myself.

AlexGood, good. I kind of feel the same way every day. I just sat down and dreaded going through with it. And I should say, the maximum amount that I meditated each day was 10 minutes.

MaxThat's not bad. 10 whole minutes. 10 minutes is great.

AlexWell, and I used a number of apps, of course, the GoToHeadspace, and I just can't do the guy's voice.

MaxI have a couple of questions about meditation stuff. Question number one. Do you guys have any sort of meditation practice or experience with this prior to this week? Like, have you ever gotten into meditation and done it for any serious amount of time or anything like that?

AlexYeah. I had a period where it was really my doctors were really like pushing it. Like, yeah, meditation is a good thing that you should do. And especially when like you're manic, like that's a good thing to fight that.

And it's I don't know. It's hard. it i okay so i i kind of get to cheat with meditation because i will i will take a benzo beforehand because otherwise it's i my brain just spirals and uh and especially with this challenge i wanted to take notes uh you know i you're supposed to let the thoughts flow like a river and get it and get them away um and not even gonna lie uh when i was even younger the fact

that Steve Jobs meditated. Well, you know, you got to get on that. But I read a lot about meditation and sleep, and I don't do either very well. But I know that you, Max, have had experience with it. Have you ever gone, done meditation, for lack of a better word, with a guru?

MaxYeah, when I was in Baltimore, um we we my friends and i used to go to the baltimore like shambhala center and we'd go sit um so that's about as organized as i've as i've ever been and uh you know meditation is a big net like i think it kind of describes all these different things activities that people can do um you know i spent a little time going through some of the meditation apps and i've seen a number of them already and you know most of these apps are business they're trying to make some money

selling people meditation or the fantasy of meditation or a meditative experience or whatever. And so the way they work is there has to be stuff in the app for you to transact, for you to spend money on. And so they do so predominantly almost everything in the app store. I mean, literally like every app that you can get is some sort of guided meditation. And what I mean by this is some sort of program happens or audio plays while you sit and meditate. more than more in the tradition of like self-hypnosis or relaxation yes and and i don't

want to take away from this um you know i truly think if people do this and it helps them and they feel some benefit then it's a benefit i mean if it works it works people should absolutely continue doing it and i have nothing against it however that being said it's not for me and the specific kind of meditation i'm interested in would be mindfulness meditation um and this is like buddhist meditation and when with buddhist meditation what you want to do is you sit in a specific comfortable posture with your legs crossed under you and your back straight and you sit up straight

and that's not for any spiritual or traditional reason it's purely because it lets you breathe better it's just it's just your body is in a state of alertness and you can like breathe and it lets you like basically like focus for a minute it's the only reason i'm aware of that that tradition exists of sitting in a certain way. But basically, you sit on this cushion with your feet folded under you. And there should not, I mean, really, you should be able to meditate no matter what's happening, whether there's like audio playing or a guide guided thing or whatever, it doesn't matter what the environment is. But you're actually supposed to like not focus on

anything, you're supposed to not do a program or not be thinking about an idea. You're supposed to empty your mind of thoughts. And that's allegedly what the Buddha was able to do after like a lifetime of training. Certainly I've never been able to do that. And it's an impossible task. You spend your whole life trying to empty your mind of thoughts and you can never do it because it's impossible. But the practice of trying to empty your mind of thoughts, it has a couple of positive benefits, which is one you for me, you just realize it's just a remind. I don't know

what to say. It's like I have I live in a perpetual fear of like boredom. Like I like don't go to parties and I don't go do things because I fear being bored. Like I don't want to go see Hamilton. I'm already dreading it because I know that I'm going to be, but seriously, I know I'm going to be, I'm committing to be there for hours and I might be bored and I'm really kind of anxious about it. One thing that meditation helps me like get my head screwed on straight about is like boredom. You don't actually die from boredom. It's okay. You just sit there and nothing happens and that's okay. You'll come out the other side and you're fine. And it's nice to have a structured

way to learn that lesson every day for a little bit because if you're constantly fleeing any moment of boredom and like living in fear of that and constantly cramming content and entertainment into your holes because you're concerned about a momentary experience of boredom that's a pretty bad life like I don't think you can really leave or like for me it's like thoughts I don't want to

Merlinthink yes yeah that's the other thing and you know I mean this is such a great piece of advice that I wish I took more often is that, you know, it's in choking back these feelings you don't want to feel or thoughts you don't want to think or discomfort you don't want to experience, as they say, it's the trying to stop that that makes it so much worse. And it seems like one benefit of what you're describing. And I've tried it a little bit. I mean, in the past, like over the last 20 years, I've had phases where I've tried this, not anything like what you've done. But it is, even if you're not going to get to this, you know, even if you don't clear your mind of thoughts,

you're going to become aware of things and maybe slightly detached from things in a way that you, while feeling at once like I can own that this is a thought that I'm thinking, you also realize that that does mean that the thought is me.

MaxWhen you're sitting and you're meditating and you're just trying, I mean, I'll get into what I do in a minute, but the idea is you're not really supposed to be fixated on anything or thinking about anything. You're just supposed to be present in the moment and think about your breathing and just not really have any thoughts in your head. Inevitably, you sit there and you're just assaulted by things that are stressing you out. like holy shit like I was supposed to call this person back or I'm late for this thing or suddenly it all comes rushing back to you you know I get the same thing when I'm in the shower or when I'm going to sleep or just any other moment or when I'm sitting at a stoplight any other moment of quiet in my life I'm just like inundated with these like panics of like oh fuck like that thing

this thing and the thing with when you're meditating is you're supposed to you get those thoughts or you're sometimes I'll be like oh my god that embarrassing thing I said to a girl in high school. Jesus Christ. And what you're supposed to do is you're supposed to say, I recognize that I'm having this thought. I mean, first you're overtake. First, the experiences. I mean, just to describe it like phenomenologically, here's what it feels like. You're overtaken by the thought. You become the thought. You're not even thinking about thinking. You're just consumed by it. What meditation is, the training of meditation is you pull yourself back and you say,

okay, hang on a second. I am not that thought. I'm sort of experiencing this thought. It's just a thought, I'm going to let it go. And Merlin's brought the example up that I think about all the time of like, can you say you're like watching the cars go by, that thing?

MerlinYeah, two examples I like. The one we talked about on here was the idea, and this is out of the Headspace app, but the idea is, can you imagine standing by a highway and watching the cars go by without feeling the need to get into any of the cars? Well, why do your thoughts have to be any different? The other one I heard that I want to say maybe in a Steve Hagen book that I thought was pretty great was uh imagine standing on a bridge you know over like a river and trying

Maxnot to catch a fish and so there's there's two i will identify just personally two times in my life where this like thought technology of being able to say like i'm having a thought i'm not the thought it's okay i'm gonna let it go i'm gonna let that car drive by here are two times in my life where i have a practical benefit of this helping me the first time is um when i get angry Like I don't think I'm like a super angry person, but sometimes like something happens that really pisses me off. Usually it's like it could be something really dumb, like the glad Ziploc people emailing me to leave them a review for my box of 100 glad sandwich backs.

Right. On Amazon. That like really upsets me or like, I don't know, sometimes people will email me asking me to like tweet about their I haven't even met them. And they're asking me to like tweet about their project. And I want to write them back and be like, what the fuck are you doing? Like have some respect. And what's nice is like I think everyone probably is prone to those moments of anger that are kind of irrational and they just push your buttons or whatever. And what's nice about, you know, anger is one of those emotions that totally overtakes you. You know, no one is like no one has. You don't notice it till it's right. No one has a mindful experience of anger.

You become anger. You're just like consume it. Just, you know, you're so hot. You can't even slow down to think about it, you know, rationally. and that training of meditation of just returning to the breath and being like okay I'm having a thought it's cool I'm gonna let it go very helpful to understand that that's happening to you I mean it's not it's not easy it's not instant it's like I've been meditating for since college so it's you know years of that practice and like now I'm better at it of like when I start to get mad I'm like all right I'm getting mad I'm just gonna let that one go and recognize what's happening it sounds

stupid but it's really hard it's actually very hard to do and I and you know no yeah it sounds that's not I there's no way to put into words where it doesn't sound like super lame and dumb no it doesn't sound stupid at all the other one is like so Pat Rothfuss and I've talked about this a lot on our podcast like Pat I didn't know this until I talked to Pat Pat actually taught me this term but Pat and I have a similar tendency which is whenever we hear about anything whether it's like our partner telling us about a problem or something they have going on at work or we meet with someone we like and they're telling us about their project or I'm watching the news and listening

to politics. Here's a thought that I have all the time, which is, oh, I should fix that. Like, I could do that much better. And it usually comes from a place of like, I don't actually know too much about it. So I'm like too ignorant to understand why my very obvious idea doesn't work. But Pat, Pat is like, he's been in therapy a lot. And, and his, what he says is that's actually like a psychological condition called grandiosity, which is this like, it's an unhealthy condition where it's just like, oh, everything is about me and I can insert myself into every situation

and make it right and fix it. Now, I don't think I suffer from this at a clinical level, but I'm definitely prone to it. If I see someone working on something, I'm like, oh, I should insert myself into here and make it better in some way,

Merlineven whether I really know too much about it or not. Because on some level, pretty much everything is kind of about me. You don't think that way, but unless you're mindful of it, every bit of information that comes into your life will be parsed based on like how it affects you

Maxyeah and also like and also like i think it's just also just part of being a nerd and and part of having you know whatever the personality maybe part of i think it's part of the personality type that all of we have is that if we look at something and it's a system and it's really inefficient or someone's doing something in a crazy way it drives us insane like have you ever have you ever seen um whenever my parents use the computer they click on the address bar and they go to google.com And then they type in the thing they're searching for and I want to be like stop stop stop do not go to Google

Just type it right in and then hit enter like you don't actually need to type Google and go to google.com every time But it's like, you know really like it's like doing that helps my my my parents understand The taxonomy of how the computer works. So what is what do I care? It doesn't bother me But it's like it's very hard for me It's like it's honestly like a thing I need to practice every day to be like to have that feeling of like oh I should to have that thought of like I should fix this I should insert myself into this situation and then to catch myself and say I actually don't need to do that just because I have the thought or

I know the knowledge doesn't actually mean that I need to fix it or do anything or say anything

Alexit's okay for someone to be wrong and not repair it whenever I see someone force quitting iOS apps

MerlinI just oh I'm on the train that's what people do to just kill time and people just did dinner uh

AlexGod, I have a question for both of you. Like, I totally understand they're trying to get rid of anger.

MerlinI would be game, just for what it's worth, I would be game for re-challenging this as a side challenge because I do want to do this.

AlexYeah, I have future challenges that are related to this. But I'm curious, especially with Max, like we both do a lot of things. And I think really my biggest challenge with this was I felt like I can be doing so much more. Not necessarily I haven't done something that I should have done, but it's like I could be doing this cool project. I could be learning more. I could be reading this thing. I could be making myself smarter.

MerlinSo like a use of time.

MaxYeah. Well, I have that. So I have that feeling about exercise, which is like every time I find myself in a situation where I'm trying to exercise, if I'm like going to the gym or whatever, or like, you know, I had a trainer for a while last year. and I was constantly consumed by this feeling that I was wasting my time. But I think the reality is that, you know, going to the gym and being healthy, well, it's more, it's not really fair to say you're wasting your time. It's more of an investment of time. You're saying, well, I'm going to spend, you know, a couple hours a week doing this now, but really what's going to happen is the rest of the week,

I'm going to have much more energy and focus because I'm, you know, have physical health. And then also like in 10 years, my body will not deteriorate to the point where it prevents me from doing any work at all. and that's how I feel about the meditation is like for me it's such an important way of of just of a mode that I if I'm gonna get if I'm gonna have any control so like the default all right let me put it this way if I don't do anything to control my day the state of my day

is that I'm constantly being texted and emailed and people are coming to tap on my shoulder and I'm getting pulled in a thousand directions doing whatever pops in anyone's head and then I do that all day and I go home at the end of the day and nothing has gotten done. Like I have all these responsibilities and none of them are done. So I need to exercise some sort of control over the day. I need to come in and say no to a lot of things in order to pick the things that need to get done and do them. Otherwise I'll never do anything. That's like one of the big challenges

of my job that kind of sucks and I have to learn how to deal with. And for me, wasting the, you on how much time I have, 15 minutes or 30 minutes, wasting that 15 minutes or 30 minutes in the morning where I'm just sitting there doing nothing, I just know because I've sort of done the experiment a lot of times that if I do it, I have a much better chance of having some control over my day, of being able to say, I'm not going to do that just because it's in my inbox right now.

I'm going to save that for later. Whereas if I don't take a minute to collect myself and meditate and like take a shower if I just get up in a panic and start rushing in and I had to run to the office for something like usually the rest of my day is shit do you have a particular time

Alexthen like uh because because you do the buddhist approach I assume you have uh like a specific place that you sit uh but is is it a morning thing or a nighttime thing or just whenever it can

Maxfit in um well I think it's like one of it's like writing it's like one of the big fallacies we've talked about this I think on this podcast yeah one of the big fallacies about writing is It's like, oh, I can't get my writing done because, well, I don't have quite the right pen and I'm not in a forest and the right background music isn't playing and it's not the right time of day. And it's like, well, you're kind of a shit writer. You're not really a writer if you have to have this like Disney World, you know, experience to be able to put words on the page. And the same is true of mindfulness meditation. Mindfulness meditation is just about being present wherever you are.

and in fact a lot there is a whole practice of mindfulness meditation where you're just like making tea or doing the dishes or going for a walk but doing that in in a mindful way and that's a fair I think that's all fair game but the idea is like you shouldn't need anything special you shouldn't need any special circumstances you should meditate in the middle of a crowded you know space it's all about just sitting there and being present um that being said like I of course have my preferences like I have a little special cushion that I got on the internet and I sit there in my bedroom usually after I shower in the morning and you know I turn on a timer app on

my phone and just sit there for 15 minutes and that's that it's not a whole production but if I'm traveling or whatever like I I catch myself falling into that trap of like I don't have the right kind of cushion and you know there's too much background noise and the light's not right and it's like no fuck that like the whole point is just to sit there with a soft focus a soft visual focus and look at the wall. It just doesn't matter. You should be able, you know, it's sort of like you're not, you can't, if you can't really meditate anywhere, regardless of what your situation is, you're not really doing it correctly.

MerlinThe only time I've had anything, I don't even want to say success. The only time I've ever had anything except failure with this though, is to treat it more like working out. And so like, you know, in the same way you're like, you're saying like, oh, you should need to be, you know, Ron Swanson in a cabin somewhere with the right new age music in order to write. And by the same token, you should be able, as long as you've got your workout clothes, you should be able to do some kind of a workout anywhere. But with all of that said, like any kind of a new habit you're trying to build, one tries to build, I feel like I have had the best success with trying to be consistent in terms of how and when I do it, especially. And because that's the only way,

it's like, I can tell you this, for one thing, I've never had any luck with trying to do it at night. That is not going to happen. For me, just for myself, like if it is going to happen, it's going to be 20 minutes in the morning. So I'm not saying that that's a guarantee that it's going to work, but I do know. And again, but now on the other hand, that is also what has me pushing back sometimes. It's like, oh, it's already 2 p.m. I'm going to pick up my kids soon. Like with the time that I've got, the last thing I'm going to do is sit on an internet cushion and stare at a wall. But I do think having some kind of a structure to it and, you know, not too much structure, like you don't want to get Byzantine, but I think it does help to have a place that you do it. If

you need to change it, change it, but stick with, have a program and stick with it.

AlexOne thing that I actually found really helpful because I sort of dove into this with the full on intention of just doing a mindfulness practice. And I like we we made fun of people this week and last week that need to be in a special place. But just having waves music in the background like that was huge because I realized the only time that I've truly been present in a place is on this beach that my family has property on.

And the only time I go there is when I have no responsibilities and I can just like sit and be.

MerlinThat's super interesting.

AlexYeah. And I and so maybe that I just need to sort of build on that.

MaxJust do, yeah. I mean, you know, if it's something you're interested in pursuing, like do whatever works. Like, listen, here's my advice to someone who wants to start meditating. Like in some ways, there's too much out there about meditation and too much is made of it. It's actually incredibly simple. All you need to do is sit there and try not to think of anything. And there's not really a wrong way to do it. really the only wrong way to do it is to over intellectualize it or over systematize it to the point where you're not you don't do it but it's like you it's like it's honestly like i mean

that's part of what appeals to me about meditation is that you don't need anything to do it it's a thought technology that you can take with you wherever you go it's doing it doing it wrong

Merlinas part of doing it that was that was the big breakthrough for me when i finally was able to do this for a little bit at a time. It was when I realized that doing it wrong is part of it. You know what I mean? I always felt like, oh God, what's wrong with me? I'm not zenned out. I'm not relaxed. I don't... And then I realized, no, that that agitation and sitting with it is part of what that thing is. It's basically, here's your job. Your job is to sit here and maybe with a timer or whatever it is and just be with this. There aren't that many... I mean, there are like... I guess there are behavioral life hacks that get you to where you can do this, but once you're doing

it, it's, uh, it's improbably simple. And what you have to do, even if it is not, it's not, it's not, it's simple, but it's not easy. Right. Right. Yes. Kind of definitely used apps. So you

Maxwere doing apps though, right? Um, let's talk about the world of meditation apps. So, so here's my, okay. So I've tried, I've tried a lot of these. I think they're all shit. And the reason is I don't want some, I don't want to pay a microtransaction for a voice to tell me how to feel. That's, I mean, I'm sure that's a good activity that a lot of people, obviously a lot of people get some benefit out of. It's emphatically not what I want. Like I want to sit there and try to empty my mind of thoughts. I'm not actually trying to have a voice guide me through a meditation on, you know, gratefulness or whatever. That's, that's a very different experience than

I'm trying to have meditating. To me, that's like almost one of the reasons for my suspicion of this, although again, like keep doing it if it works for you. I'm not saying don't do it or whatever. the reason I'm suspicious of it for me is like it's to me it feels like an overly like productized experience which is like where you you like press a button and you complete it and you check it off and that's like the whole point of meditation is that you do it for your whole life and you never do it right you're always fail at it every time you sit down that is the experience that's not

separate from the experience that is the experience so all these meditation apps I'm very suspicious of and they all suck but here's really all i want in life is like could someone just make a fucking timer that reports to health kit when you use it oh right oh wow that's a really obvious idea that you do not see but of course no one's made it because you couldn't really make a lot of money on it but just fucking make a timer that dings a bell and then puts the dad on health kit saying

Merlini meditated for without having an orange background and a buddha or a lady uh lady in yoga pants

Maxsitting on a rock just i don't know i mean it's like if i knew if i sort of understood the ios environment well enough to like bang out an app i feel like this is an app i could bang out in a weekend like literally just play a bell sound effect have have it have it here's your options do you want to sit for five minutes 10 minutes 15 minutes 30 minutes or an hour that's it those are your options and then you press that and it plays one bell to start one bell to end and then when you're done it posts the data to health kit as far as i know i've downloaded like every meditation app and none of them do this? Well, they're all about gongs and singing bowls and

Merlinstuff, but I don't want to beat this to death, but I do think there's a valuable distinction to make. If one is doing this to get zenned out, as Dan likes to say, if one is doing this for relaxation or for straight up, if you have, how can I put this? If you are doing what you're calling meditation for a functional reason, which is okay, right? You go and read something like Jon Kabat-Zinn. And for him, mindfulness meditation can have a huge role in things like recovering from cancer and all these different kinds of things. There's nothing wrong with wanting that functional piece. But it seems like the kind of meditation that you're talking about here and

that I'm talking about is something, I don't want to say purer, but I'm not doing it for a reason. I'm doing it because it's what I do. With that said, I think there is something to be said for what I'm going to call self-hypnosis or what I will call relaxation. I think that's very useful. I just think that concatenating those as being similar things is like, are you familiar with the idea of passive exercise have you ever seen the machines that like move your arms for you

Alexlike if you have like mobility problems or is that still a thing for like one second don't have

Maxand unclench i'm sorry merlin you were saying

Alexuh remember the butt exercises that were a thing do i i i don't know

Maxtwo three four and i'm sorry alex what was that god butt exercises oh boy oh see now i want to i'm

Alexthinking like okay this is actually a pretty simple simple app and i've been playing with swift uh and i want to try to make this but uh then i won't meditate i'm just gonna try to make a meditation app actually matt from lookability might be able to do this you listen to the show matt

Maxemail me Matt make me a goddamn timer that just post a health kit is that even I don't even I don't I honestly don't even know how complicated the SDK for like posting a health kit is but it's that's that's the question I have yeah what are you talking about MB yeah I love MB I saw him at the comic meetup a little bit ago big fan yeah all right here's the other thing I'm very and Alex you had mentioned you read about meditation a lot and like it concerns me that there's this like meditation industry and like we like Veronica and I were going to this escape room and we wound up in this like crazy mall like the other day and we were like looking at all the stores in this crazy

mall and there was literally like a meditation store and they sold like crystals and dvds and like scents and stuff like that and i was like how could this be possible it's like it's like it feels very cynical to me but it's also like if you know anything about buddhism it's like very suspicious the idea that you would need to buy the right things or like overly intellectualize it at all and um i thought i had this great little thing can i can i read a long boring thing as is my tradition on the podcast.

AlexPlease do.

MaxWouldn't be an episode without it. Thank you. So this is a little excerpt I prepared. This is from a book I love that I really, really liked, although it may be too kind of boring and technical for most listeners. But anyway, it's by this psychologist named Mark Epstein, and he's a pretty accomplished practitioner and writer about Buddhism, as well as a pretty accomplished psychotherapist. And he wrote a book about, it's called Thoughts Without a Thinker, about psychology and Buddhism. um it's pretty cool um so he has this great um he has this great story in here about um the sort of

buddhism as it relates to the intellectual tradition i should just preface this by saying like this is interesting to me because like i have the like philosophy personality type like tommy and i were just joking about this the other night where it was like um in every other i like failed in every academic pursuit in my entire life like i was like constantly getting in trouble

Alexin school and because real quick uh to preface uh tommy is one of our office mates and a game designer and would you classify him as a philosopher yeah yeah he's a philosophy writer yeah he's fantastic are there two tommy's yeah there's a bunch of tommy's i would assume many

Merlintoms oh okay thanks so no who's who's the tommy who you're always talking about is that one of

Maxyour co-founders or is this different tommy who's who's the tommy i'm following on twitter who is that oh co-creator of a secret hitler tommy tommy rangies so tommy tommy writes uh he had he created this character uh years ago called philosophy bro that explains philosophy like a bro and i i thought it was really funny and i'm a fan um so tommy and i were talking about how we constantly like got in trouble in school and it was because like in any discipline like if you're in like math class and and they're like just do it this way and you're like why you get in trouble you get like yelled

at or even when i was in college and i was a political science major and i'd be like well why Like, why would we do it that way? Non-compliant. Non-compliant. Yeah. You'd be like, you're going to lose a letter grade for like not formatting your paper right or, you know, whatever. That was constantly how I was getting in trouble and I hated all academics. Until you find philosophy. And in philosophy, if someone tells you something is a certain way and you say why, you get published. That's the whole game. That's all there is. So philosophy is like the troublemaker's discipline. And I love that. That's my whole worldview. Oh, that's good. I love that. I love that you're supposed to overly sort of think about everything.

But one of the reasons that Buddhism and mindfulness meditation is like really meaningful to me is it's almost like an answer to that. And this is the story from Mark Epstein that I wanted to read that kind of talks about that. So he says, a wealthy patient confided to me that after having a gourmet meal, he craves a cognac. After the cognac, a cigarette. After the cigarette, he'll start to think about making love. After making love, perhaps another cigarette. Soon he begins to crave sleep, preferably without any disturbing dreams. The search for comfort through sense pleasures rarely has an end.

The second noble truth of the Buddha takes its cue from this experience. It is traditionally described as the truth of the arising of Dukkha, and its central tenet is that the cause of suffering is craving or thirst. The Buddha was concerned with how to escape from just this kind of self-created suffering, with how to avoid the pitfalls of self-inflation or debasement. Buddha, we must remember, did not teach a speculative psychology. he taught a practical one designed to liberate practitioners from dissatisfaction. I do not teach theory, he said. I analyze.

He refused to answer questions that would feed either the tendency to cling to some kind of absolute romanticized ideal or that would enable nihilistic distancing, the two trends that are subsumed under the headings of existence and non-existence and that became the basis for many powerful religions, psychological and philosophical dogmas. There were, in fact, 14 subjects that the Buddha repeatedly refused to discuss, all of them searching for absolute certainty. Whether the world is eternal or not or both or neither.

Whether the world is finite in space or infinite or both or neither. Whether an enlightened being exists after death or does not or both or neither. Whether the soul is identical with the body or different from it. The Buddha taught that to attempt a definitive answer to these questions would give the wrong idea, that to do so would only feed the tendency to cling to an absolute or to nihilistically reject, neither of which he found useful. He never taught the existence of a true self, nor did he ever support the idea of a chaotic universe in which, quote-unquote,

nothing matters, and individual actions are of no importance. Rather, he encouraged a consistent doubting of all fixed assumptions about the nature of things. in the teaching he gave to a skeptical follower named malon capita he likened the asking of questions about the ultimate nature of things to a man wounded by an arrow refusing to have the arrow taken out until all of his questions about who the assassin was where he came from what he looked like what kind of bow he was using and what make of arrow had been shot had been addressed

that man would die emphasized the buddha without ever having learned this it's pretty good good shit really good shit so the point isn't to like anyway my whole thing is the point isn't to like read it in a book and get it right and then do it it's you just have to fucking sit there i've read i've read that several times uh as this book clearly demonstrates and all of the things that i just read clearly prove there's no right way to do it right you're just supposed to sit there

and suck at it and the whole notion of an app where you just follow the instructions and tick the box off is well you're denying yourself the whole point of it one thing that really killed me

Alexabout the apps uh like there are a lot of guided meditations but there's also just like straight up instructions um and and like they're very very costly i am all for like the the new app subscription model like i want to give all my money to uh to the omni group and bear but like $10 a month for five minutes of some guy telling me to sit up, sit straight up. I, I, I don't know.

I, I kind of got some icky feelings about, uh, the 10% happier, uh, as well as, uh, there's, there's a new one making the rounds. What is it? Time timeless. Um, but there, I, I do want to recommend two apps because I know people are still going to ask what we should use. There's this, like, it's almost a game. It's called pause. And what happens is there's just a little dot on the screen and you follow, you put your finger on it and you just follow it around. And if you

go too fast, it's like, Hey, slow down. And it's kind of weird. And I don't know. I just found it pleasant um in the way that I find a lot of uh the more like relaxing video games where you just kind of explore and walk around uh but it's just incredibly simple uh as well as Pacifica it's not super popular but it's uh kind of like an all-in-one health thing and it does integrate with uh Apple Health and does uh sleep and actually I'm I'm looking I think it might do Mindful Minutes

um yeah huh i i should look into this more but it like will take in data from if you use uh sleep plus plus or uh automatic sleep or auto sleep whatever it's called so pacifica pacifica yeah and and it's also i i um mel super is super into it too because if you're the kind of person who wants to just like journal your thoughts and and see like the correlation between like did a did i

sit today did i exercise today that sort of thing and um i think this is the only app that does it specifically with mood um which was interesting yeah sort of like exist uh yeah yeah as well yeah but i see what you're saying this is interesting it's it's not it doesn't look very ios-y i i think I'm biased because oh look at those pretty waves going oh and it's a sunset oh I didn't I think I got rid of the couple um yeah yeah and and there are some guided meditations if that's your thing

but there's just also like nice campfire noises and stuff like that um but yeah I I don't know I pay for apps but 10 bucks a month like I don't know but you know it's I'm with you and I have

Merlinlots of books I've read a lot. I'm practically an amateur scholar on this stuff, even as I have not had much success with doing it. And that is really telling. It's beyond ironic that I know all of these kinds of things, but knowing all those things has not made me one iota better about doing it. I can explain why I'm doing it or more often not doing it, but that's not the point. The point is not the reading. The point is doing the thing. And it's like there are certain kinds of – I don't want to say I joked.

I was telling you about how if I start following my breathing, sometimes I feel a little panicky. I've turned down my breathe reminder on my watch to the least often setting because I was failing at it so much.

AlexYeah.

MerlinI would just dismiss it. It was causing me stress that I wasn't doing the thing that's supposed to make me less stressed out, which is silly. But, I mean, that's a thing that was happening.

Maxwhat what so merlin you've mentioned like or i think you said on our text chain or whatever like when you whenever you sat down to meditate this week you got like too stressed out and you couldn't

Merlindo it uh i just haven't been sleeping as well as i usually do it's not like anything like catastrophic has happened this week it was just this is a if you look at my uh my fitbit is very erratic this week my sleep is very strange like last night owing to the incident uh i slept for like four hours and i usually sleep like at least eight so that's one reason i'm so goofy today here's my here's my question if you sit down and meditate and it makes you like incredibly anxious sometimes yes then what then what happens then what happens oh you mean in terms of like the um

in terms of like dealing with the dreading it or no in terms of sitting there and doing it and feeling really anxious well my resistance to doing that keeps me from even getting to the point where I'll feel that, which is why I kind of want to do over with this. And I don't know where my internet cushion is. Like, I'll find every reason in the world to not do this. And I'll just lay here and do it. Like, one of the things I do know that I do believe is, like, laying down doesn't count. Unless you have, like, a physical reason for needing to lay down. Like, the idea of the dignity of sitting there and the breathing and whatnot is very important.

I want to do over with this because I want to do this legit. And maybe without an app, you know. um doesn't have to be for this week but i i'm gonna let me put it this way i'm gonna really

Maxi'm gonna try and start doing this in the morning well i'm just saying like nobody like i've meditate like i have a pretty pretty consistent like meditation practice like i'm i'm pretty good with it but like it's never like it's never appealing to meditate i'm never like oh boy like now i get to sit here and do nothing for 20 minutes i can't wait for this like it's always

Merlinit's like any kind of habit where like there have been times whether it's a habit of writing or a or a habit of, in my case in the past, like not eating a certain kind of food. And they all go in a somewhat similar fashion, a somewhat similar arc. If they succeed at all, they succeed because I said, or I realized that this is something I'm not gonna fix today, right? Like this is something I am not going to fix by doing this a couple of times. It's something where like, I'm gonna have to keep doing this, whether I feel like it or not,

I'm gonna have to just keep doing this until it's like not a thing that I'm thinking about doing anymore because it's a thing that I do.

AlexI'm interested in why you think lying down doesn't count. So the days that I did do it, I would do it in the morning and have a more traditional, you know, just sitting up lotus position, whatever. And at night I was like, you know what, I'm just going to lie down. And then you sort of, it's like a different sensation with like how you're breathing and how your muscles relax. I don't know. It's interesting. Like, although maybe you're right.

It's like a horizontal, horizontal prayer. Doesn't, doesn't.

MerlinI buy the idea that part of the exercise is, is maintaining a certain amount of alertness. Right. That really works for me. I get that. And, and maybe again, this is maybe my own mental hangup, but this thing of like, oh, I'm doing this. As I said last week, I'm doing this because I'm stressed out. so therefore this is a thing that I'm going to do to not stress out probably not the best day to start doing it when you're feeling stressed out but in that case I'm doing it for the wrong reasons and with the wrong sort of intention as they say just break

MaxDo you guys want to hear what my main man David Avocado Wolf says about gravity? He says, gravity is not intrinsic to matter. The Carl Sagan idea that was sold to us on Cosmos on PBS was sold to us deliberately to actually confuse us just so you know that. There's people who have known that gravity is a force that can be displaced. There's people that have known that since the 50s or even earlier than that. But by screwing up, confusing our mind about things and giving us incorrect theories, we were brainwashed into a totally different belief system that gravity is intrinsic to all matter.

We're fighting gravity. We have to push our way through gravity to launch a craft up into outer space. All this nonsense.

AlexThere's people all around the globe who believe the Earth is flat.

MaxI think that having a lot of knowledge of gravity and having all the equations that describe gravity is really holding rocket scientists back. and if they would just be willing to get rid of that, we'd launch a lot more stuff into space successfully.

MerlinIf we stopped listening to fucking science cucks like fucking Carl Sagan, we could finally get our mushrooms up into the biome. What is he? He's big science. Rejoice, rejoice. He's huge science.

AlexIf only we could get to Mars. Merlin, it's your challenge this week.

MerlinChallenge. Challenge. This is a thing that I would like you guys to try, and I'm willing to tune this challenge to your own interests and enthusiasm for doing this. I want you to join me in an experiment I've been doing. I've been talking about this on Back to Work. I want you to use your voice for more things. Oh, I'm into this.

This is what I've been doing. Hang on, we'll make this if Max is balking about this.

MaxSiri, send a text to Merlin Mann. Oh, God. Mann? No. Send a text to Merlin Mann. tell max temkin suck my balls it says it says siri send a text to maryland hang on let me try one more time hang on hang on siri send a text to merlin question okay siri send a text to merlin

Merlinman you're doing it wrong listen tell max temkin to suck my balls

Maxstop okay all right all right hang on hang on siri tell merlin man to suck my balls okay it's sending it to the no no no no no don't send that it started composing it to the campaign finance chair of a major campaign that i worked on no it didn't actually send that did it whoa whoa whoa wait oh okay okay okay why won't it send you this message do you understand this well yeah I mean like it takes time it's all part of the challenge

Siri send a text to Merlin man tell Merlin to suck my balls

Merlinoh my god oh my god oh the straws are too short the showers are too narrow.

19. The Ennoblement of Water 0:00 / 01:43:27