Episode 44 · September 28, 2017 · 01:40:18

44. Oh No, My Wire!

This week's challengePlay Dream Daddy: A Dad Dating Simulator.

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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, a weekly challenge podcast with Merlin Mann, Alex Cox and Max Temkin. This week's challenge, play Dream Daddy, a dad dating simulator.

Hello. Hello. Hello. How are you? Good. Max has his backpack again. I hope it is just an iPad. Just an iPad. Okay. Ugh.

MaxIt's not mystery pills.

AlexOkay, good. It's not mystery pills.

MaxThat's only on the after show.

AlexWe're not done. That's only on the after show. Follow up for the after show.

MerlinHow are you doing, Merlin? Don't complicate it. Are you going to tell us? Are you going to give us a post-mortem on how that went?

AlexYes, in the after show.

MaxThat's 100% after show talk. Listen, people, if you want to hear about these mystery pills that Alex took, you can go to patreon.com slash Dubai Friday and hear about all the great drugs.

MerlinMax, we are up to 991 members of Powder Nation. I almost said Cuck Nation. I don't think that's a thing.

MaxHoly shit.

MerlinYeah. So thanks, everybody, for doing that.

MaxBut you can go and give us your fucking money. The Doddards? Dutards? No. I read that as Dutard.

MerlinLol.

AlexYeah. Yeah. Yeah. I read that as Dutard. Lol.

Speaker AYeah.

MerlinOh, my God. never mind we can't talk about we can't talk about top dress but oh my god i'm very not caught up on

Maxtop dress but oh you got a lot to look you got a lot to look forward i know so here's what i know i have to look for i'm like maybe two or three episodes behind but i remember in the season premiere where they're like this season on top dress they there was some sort of crazy controversy and that's just that's just cheating right that you're looking you've been waiting the whole time for so they i'm like i'm like i'm like holding my breath every episode i'm like oh there's gonna be some good drama because you got a pretty good guess who that could be about remember the guy the russian guy like sandro or whatever his name was uh the guy which season oh it's a deep cut

Merlinit's a b it's like i remember lots of russian guys i remember my my daughter had a little bit of an unrequited uh crush on dimitri i think that was throwing good love after bad but i love dimitri i i don't think they were playing on the same uh sports team but uh there's dimitri uh there was the bald guy who draped uh who else is russian the draping there's always a draper You ever notice that they bring in a draper?

AlexI don't know what that means.

MaxHe's a draper, Jerry.

MerlinA draper. He's a draper! Yeah, the drapers. You know, see, the interesting one, there's, so, okay, all you need to know is that there are gimmick people. And they're like, the first challenge, they'll go like, the first challenge is... The ding-a-lings. Well, that's not the total ding-a-ling. It's somebody who has a bit. So I'm thinking of Rami, I think his name was.

MaxAnd Rami could drape... All my dresses look like architectures.

MerlinYes. So he could drape a sculpture like ringing a bell. So the first challenge, you go, oh, my God. I'm very impressed. I don't have concerns. You've made it work. And then like every fucking challenge, now he's draping candy. He's draping garbage. He's draping McDrape Drape. And then, of course, Nina and at the time Michael would say, listen, we want to see more from you. I'm starting – you know what? You guys got to catch up. But I'm having those concerns a little bit.

AlexI don't want to catch up.

MerlinReally? Is that – oh, so there's times. I'm out now. Okay, I'm sorry. So I just want to clarify for my records here. I like to just take notes. So what you're saying is you don't like it when you're not watching something other people are watching. And then they command you to watch it. What if I had like two shows? Do you watch Brick and Morty this week, Alex?

MaxWhat about two shows like that that I demand you watch? It was very fucking good. This episode, the nine out of ten episodes of this season of Brick and Morty have aired. And it may be the most solid season of a television show that I can remember.

MerlinI haven't even watched it, and I can promise you that this is literally the greatest thing. If they would just stop hiring women on that show, I would feel so much better.

MaxOh, it's all gone to shit

Merlinsince they hired the SJWs. Oh my God. What about those minor female characters that don't need to be main characters?

MaxIt's a show. It's like, it's a, I've almost, I mean, I can only think of two other, maybe two or three other times in my life that I've watched a show and it's felt like this much of a miracle of like every week you can watch it on and it completely defies your expectations and it's so much, You go in with very high expectations, and it's still incredibly surprising and good. I would say Arrested Development felt like that when I watched it the first time. Season three of Parks and Rec, the first season with Ben and Chris.

MerlinYeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Maybe season four of Seinfeld I think is a pretty miraculous end-to-end season. Ooh, season seven of The Simpsons. That's a pretty good comedy season. I like them a little earlier. but yeah, all the Conan O'Brien years. No, but I'm totally with you. Did they do a retcon where Biff never actually found the sports almanac? Is that part of the show or is that considered, is that in the canon

Speaker Aor is that considered famous?

MaxIt's going to be even worse than when I made fun of musicals and I liked Jakard. Listen, Max, men like you can never, Jakard,

Merlinmen like you can never change. I don't expect you to change. No, I know I'm going to love it. I know I'm going to love it.

MaxThe one with the guy

Merlinand he's the prisoner.

MaxLes Mis. Les Mis, that's the one. That's the one. Remember how I made fun of it and then I liked it and I had to eat crow?

MerlinWell, let me quote the German Bertolt Brecht in saying that he also wrote Mack the Knife. You know what? I know it's going to fire back hard on me. It's going to be a bim-bam all over again type situation. I know that when I watch the Horse Boy and I watch the Back to the Future cartoon, I know I'm going to have all the feels.

MaxI'm going to say that BoJack is not must watch. It's like fine. BoJack is a good show. it's like a better than average like adult cartoon yeah it's i don't think you're like missing out on popular culture okay by not seeing but there's nothing i mean like alex alex says it'll wreck me if i watch it it'll wreck it's very bojack is sad it pull it pushes your buttons in a way that you watch it and you're like um it pushes your buttons in a way that you watch it and you're like this felt important that i watched it and i don't always love that trick especially in a comedy

Rick and Morty is just so fucking funny like I can't it's like I can't stand it it's so funny

MerlinI kid but it is truly miraculous to be there it's one thing to go back and go wow the honeymooners were pretty good for the time but it's another thing to be there I remember feeling this honestly with Seinfeld where it was like week and Simpsons week after week after week each time they would just keep topping themselves with something that you'd never seen before and that's important that's two different things you know what I mean

Maxremember the good tree house of horrors in seasons let's say like three i don't know four four four through ten or something it started i think in season two but

Merlinthey were they were very very good you get the ones with like um oh all the great shows

Maxkonos and krang running for president right uh homework homework going into the 3d world is one of my favorites but i remember watching those even as a kid and going like well we get the raven i

Merlinmean that's i think it's the very first one but it's just so good it's really it's literally just

Alexlike the script from the poem the raven my favorite of all time is when the dolphins take over the worlds and Lisa tries to be nice to them and they just poke her with a spear.

MerlinDolphins are dicks. Everybody knows it.

MaxThey're so bad. They're predators. They're predators. I think they're worse than manatees. Got those Mike Cernovich smooth brains.

MerlinNo, but listen, let me just finish my thought and acknowledge. I want to step out of the bit for a minute and say I absolutely will watch this. But I just think there is something very specialist. But even in the time of peak TV where you could say like Bojack Horseman, like that's obviously a show that is extremely good, but you put it alongside something like that. That's what it was like kind of to be there with The Wire. You should really watch The Wire, Alex. But you watch a show and you turn it on, and every time it comes on, you're like, how is this even more of what this wants to be? It's sort of the compliment I've tried to pay you in the past about what you guys do, not just with your games and your whatnot,

but your communications, your messaging. It's like, is this thing that we're about to do going to make us way more like who we are or way less like who we are? I think that's a fantastic business decision to always be making. And when you can see somebody taking those kinds of chances to become more like what they are and see it happening like day to day, week to week, it's magic. There's nothing like it. That's the best. You're watching Veep. Oh, God, I love Veep. That's my favorite TV show.

MaxSo, you know, there's like some moments of Veep like where, how do I say this without a spoiler, where Selena's in a bathroom with Gary and they get some important news. That's probably one of the fun.

MerlinOh, you're talking about with the Leviathan.

MaxYes. Gary, why do you have this? That may be the single funniest thing. I remember seeing that and saying, this is like nothing will be funny after this. This is it. We've gotten to the end of comedy, and it's just the Trump children after this.

MerlinWhen that show is over, you're like, how was that ever? It sounds like the argument kind of like, how was that ever 22 minutes? Because that felt like maybe a tight eight. How did you get so much stuff into that one? Or like Mike, all the stuff with Mike and the adoption and trying to lose weight and like all of it, the whole adoption thing and the continuings like removal of every ounce of his dignity.

MaxHe is the hero of that show. He's not maybe the most standout character. They're not going to pay him to write the book. He is the fucking anchor that makes that show work. He works. He's like so small. he's so the way he does comedy it's like so like micro he's like a surgeon it's perfect

Merlinyeah i i totally agree were you a fan of uh the the ucb tv show on comedy oh big time big time god i love that show so much i every every time i watch an apple keynote all i can think about is when um when leslie nope goes to uh the job interview and it's the architectural firm that's just in the woods. They're extremely minimalist naturally, and they're just sitting on logs. Berlin, did you know that I had the titular line in Star Wars?

Oh, God, with all this traffic, will we ever get out of Africa?

MaxThere is no titular line in Star Wars. The line that got me on Veep where I was like, I'll just watch this show, I'll watch every minute of this show, and it's the best thing on TV, is when Mike is trying to do the artificial insemination, and he has the cooler full of his semen collections in the office. And Selena finds out, and she just sort of crosses her fingers, and she goes, Mike, would you please do me the honor of your jizz bag for my office?

It's a very, very good show.

Follow-up.

Speaker ADugga, dugga, dugga, dugga.

MaxThe Environmental Protection Agency is spending nearly $25,000 to construct a secure soundproof communications booth in the office of Administrator Scott Pruitt, according to government contracting records. The agency signed a $24,570 contract earlier this summer with Acoustical Solutions, a Richmond-based company, for a, quote, privacy booth for the administrator. The company sells and installs an array of sound dampening and privacy products from ceiling baffles to full-scale enclosures like the one purchased by the EPA. The project is scheduled to be complete by October 9th, according to the contract.

Typically, such soundproofs are used to conduct hearing tests, but the EPA sought a customized version, one that would eventually cost several times more than a typical model that Pruitt can use to communicate privately.

MerlinAnd they think there's a belief, there's somewhere in there, there's a line that's like, you know, really, the truth is everybody should have one of these.

MaxLike, everybody in the cabinet should have their own private booth. Someone said, let's see, EPA spokesman Liz Bowman said, quote, federal agencies need to have one of these so that secured communications not subject to hacking from the outside can be held. It's called a sensitive compartmented information facility, SCIF. This is something which a number, if not all, cabinet offices have and the EPA needs to have updated. But according to former agency employees, the EPA has long maintained an SCIF on a separate floor from the administrator's office where officials with proper clearances can go to share information classified as a secret.

The agency did not specify what aspects of that facility were outdated or whether the unit inside Pruitt's office would meet the physical and technical specifications that an SCIF generally have. I mean, he's one of these crazy Trump cabinet guys who like he probably goes into the office and he has some directive of like, don't look the administrator in the eyes. Don't speak to him. He doesn't want anyone to talk to him. And I mean, I get it. He's like, you know, it's like Betsy DeVos. Like it's like a booed, you know, by people when she goes to like a school, schools or Department of Education functions and stuff like that.

Like she's adversarial, right? Like he's one of these guys who's trying to like actively he's taking political orders from the president. He's sacrificing the independence of the department, taking political orders from the president and basically undermining and dismantling the department that all these civil servants have given years of service to. So it's like, who puts like a decade of their life into being a civil servant for the EPA because they believe that we should have like clean water and then they have any respect for this guy who comes in who does Trump's like political bidding and like, you know, one of Trump's first acts, I actually think it was like the first thing he signed

was an act that like deregulated coal plants so that they could like dump coal power runoff into the clean water. So it's like, who gives 10 years of their life to the EPA and they're like, yeah, I'm going to be like a civil servant and government employee and like go to work protecting the American people. And then this like asshole comes in and he has some memo where it's like, don't make eye contact with the administrator and let me pollute my streams. Like, of course, you'd never leave your office. You're in occupied territory.

MerlinThere's also a knock on the razor to this, though, which is you look at a wonderful story of the New York Times reporter. I forget his name. I know it, but I've forgotten it. He's sitting at lunch outside. He's at a steakhouse outside, I guess, roughly equidistant from the New York Times office and the White House and who but the lawyer Ty Cobb is sitting there talking loudly. I mean, you've heard this story, right? You've heard the story that this Times reporter overheard this discussion about McGahn having documents, et cetera, et cetera. The beautiful little color on that story, and of course, and saying that now there's lots of concerns inside the White House that people might be wearing a wire, like for Mueller

or for somebody else. This is all part of this conversation. The beautiful coloring in of this conversation, it's a New York Times reporter, I think eight feet away from that table, sitting with another New York Times reporter. The New York Times reporter leaves, and on three occasions, the reporter's like, I'm just going to stay here and I'm going to scope out what these guys are saying. On three different occasions, other New York Times reporters walked by, hailed and greeted the New York Times reporter at the table to say, hey, how's it going? And he's all, shh, including Maggie Haberman, who I'm pretty sure most people would recognize in D.C.

Ty Cobb is still enjoying his BLT steak and talking about wires. What I'm trying to say is I think there's a huge amount of concern inside this administration about basically getting narked out, about some kind of low-level commissar overhearing what you're saying and reporting back to somebody else because clearly it's just all full of leaks. So he wants to get this man-sized safe that he can put in there and have this little quiet room that he can be in. And isn't it sad that most of all, I come out of this and say, I wish I had $25,000 because I think I would enjoy having a skiff. Just a little private time. Wouldn't you love to have like a little skiff? It's just like getting a little hug from your room.

Wouldn't that be nice?

AlexNo. uh no no no uh now i'm like claustrophobic okay max you have a lot of friends who've like worked in washington and worked uh in the white house as civil servants and i keep thinking about um the this american life episode the revolution starts at noon and act six there's a change in the office climate and it's all about like the folks who are sticking around and like you said they've been civil servants for like 10 years. Are there like low-level people who are on their way out

and are like, yeah, I'll be wired. I'll be a leak.

MaxWell, there's a division between political employees in the White House who sort of like do communications and do the president's agenda, and then bureaucrats who work in the federal bureaucracy. So the key, I mean, there's, I don't want to get into the whole thing, but the key distinction is the political people, the employees of the White House who work for the president, they leave with the president. The civil servants who work in the bureaucracy, the employees of the EPA, they remain no matter who's the president. The EPA is an independent organization established by Congress that is supposed to be the reason that we have.

The EPA makes and administers law. These federal agencies are structurally weird and possibly somewhat, let's say, constitutionally dubious, although obviously the courts have upheld their rights over the last 200 years. But they're the only place in government where you have all three parts of government basically functioning under one person. They're legislative, right? They make power. They're executive. They have a chief, a top person, you know, Scott Pruitt in this case, appointed by the president who is executive function and makes decisions with the president's constitutional authority.

And they're judicial because they have courts. and like let's say that you live downstream from the coal stream and you want to sue the federal government or challenge the regulation saying my drinking water is unsafe, like that there's a chance that that would become a duty. I actually don't know if this works with the EPA, but some agencies do adjudication. So you would wind up going to them for that. So the reason why do you have this crazy setup with these bureaucracies? Well, the theory when they were created this way by Charter of Congress is that they would be immune to the political winds of Washington.

So whoever the president was comes and goes. Public sentiment comes and goes. People believe one thing one thing one day, one thing the next day. It's crazy. It's very, you know, sports like right in Washington. And you want the environmental policy of the country. The theory is, well, there's no Democratic or Republican way to provide safe drinking water to people. There's just the right way to do it. And you want these like qualified experts to make good law and good policy and enforce it and be immune from the political changes in Washington to push them one way or the other.

And, you know, like a lot of things in America, in democracy, all of these systems and all of this power worked if you had a sort of benevolent philosopher king at the helm. and you know and like we've said this before on the on the on the podcast we've talked about how this works in so many different ways but trump is like trump found the flaw in the american death star and he flew his little x-wing right in there like the system was not built for this

Alexit's not funny i'm just doing the laugh at a funeral god damn what a funny show that was

Merlinvery helpful and interesting no it's true we were never we were never we never figured that that's the kind of attack you never think that that attack could happen like why would you need to defend that you assume that it's going to be a person of goodwill who's a rational actor so why would you need to like you know cover up this two meter hole in your star yeah now i'm sitting here

Maxwith a with a hacked icloud account going well i never thought i'd get hacked that way i didn't defend against that you got hacked no i just some people can i control your screen max yeah how do I'm on my iPad. Yes, yes, yes.

MerlinI'm Apple certified.

MaxZeus Trohan detected. Zeus Trohan.

Speaker AYou guys, you guys. I think Merlin's wearing a wire.

MaxOh, my God. Where's my skiff? I think it's like the famous character Jimmy Wire says on the wire when he says the titular line. You hear it all on the wire. Let me get this straight. You're out here and you're wearing a wire?

Speaker AAre you wearing the wire?

MerlinAnd last we've got it. We have found the wire.

Speaker AOh, no, my wire.

AlexCan we talk about my Lady Gary friend, the clone that was finally caught?

MaxAlex, you've sent a number of texts to our super secret secure channel that was probably hacked in the iCloud breach. I got hacked. And I don't understand any of them. There's like something involving veterans and there was a break in. We've not really cut. Can you explain that? Pretend I don't know anything about the story and then tell me the whole thing from the beginning.

AlexOkay. Part one. My I bet this was during one of like your your important talks or something.

Speaker ANo, I think it's more likely when you're enjoying some special new pills.

AlexNo, no, no.

MerlinThis is like communicating with you. Alex is sometimes a little bit like talking to my daughter where it's it's like we're coming home from school and I can tell she's excited about something, but I can't tell if it's a real thing she read in a book, a fake thing she read in a book, or something someone said to her on the playground. And the more questions I ask, the less sure I am about what's actually happening. Don't ruin it. It's from Prisoner of Azkaban.

Speaker ARejoice, rejoice. Living beverage. Okay. You know the book, bitch.

AlexDon't share religion. Okay, it might have been from the Half-Blood Prince. You can smell

Speaker Aactually yourself. You got cocked by cocks. do do do do do

AlexI should break break Breaking,

Maxbreaking clown girl. We're going to get so many tweets about this segment. People are going to be like, at 02600 in the podcast, I didn't understand the joke. Could you explain it to me?

No, you got to pay $20 on the Patreon a month to get our super secret text message thread. You go to patreon.com slash Dubai Friday. Give us your fucking money. You'll be confused. but you'll have less money. Otherwise, the podcast is only funny to three people. Yeah, yeah, yeah. What? What? What?

AlexOh, sorry.

Speaker AIt's your story. I have not.

MaxAlex, collect yourself. Tell the story.

AlexI'm sorry.

MaxYou ever really look at your hand? I mean, really, really look at your hand.

AlexAll right. This article written by the Palm Beach Post is long and boring, so I'm not going to read the entire thing. But the year I was born, a woman was shot and killed by a clown in her own doorway. So there's this clown, shows up with balloons and some flowers. The clown hands this woman some flowers, shoots her in the head. And for 27 years, this murder went unsolved. but hey, turns out the woman who shot her

was her ex, well, current now ex, I don't know, widower, what would you call him?

MerlinMy ex-widower.

AlexThe ex-widower, the lady that shot her was his special lady friend so for the past 27 years they've been together and other than the two times he went to jail for other shady things. And they caught Crazy Clown Lady because she bought balloons at the Publix across the street. Wait, just now? They just caught her? Yes, they just caught her.

MerlinI followed the article when this was still a mystery. There's such a wonderful...

Speaker AI'm glad you caught that. There's such a wonderful line in this.

MerlinThe focus veered to Keane, a striking young woman with long brown hair and brown eyes after police in October 1990 said the clown was a woman. Deputies found only one Publix in Palm Beach County that sold the kind of Mylar balloons that the clown carried.

Speaker AGood old Publix. Right, that all makes sense.

MerlinI just got one more question for you. These kinds of Mylar balloons. That's some, you know what? That's some pretty good detective work.

AlexYeah, you know what? Good on them. Here's the thing, though. I bet someone was just popping in to Publix to get some of their lovely farm fresh products.

MerlinShopping is a pleasure. They went in to probably get a delicious sandwich.

AlexNot to insult the detectives of Palm Beach County, but it did take 27 years.

MerlinI think as they say on the wire, they liked her for the crime.

MaxThey just couldn't put it together. I caught her, Merlin, and she didn't even fucking know it. At last, we discovered...

AlexPatter on the wire!

MerlinLet's close this chapter about education with our discovery of the wire. Now back to the docks. We're going to shut down these docks with a wire. Dugga Dugga Dugga Dugga Dugga Dateline next door Neighbor Denise Subject line Dog folks beware Kirstal meth Be vigilant about what your dog is sniffing

and tasting out on the streets and in the parks On Saturday my dog walked from Dingle to Dingle Park and then started acting agitated and confused We took her to the ER because apparently there's a dog ER and a urinalysis showed that she had crystal meth otherwise known as speed in her system. We are not sure where she got it. She was hospitalized and is still not entirely well. Please be cautious as the vet said there's a huge upswing in the case that she is seeing of both speed and marijuana poisoning in dogs. Neighbor Jen says, hey Denise, that is not okay. Did the vet say people were doing it intentionally or did someone just drop their stash on an accident?

It's me, Jen. Neighbor Melinda says, if the dog ate human poop that'd be one place it could have happened. And neighbor's niece says, good point. I hadn't thought of that.

MaxOoh. Developing story. The mystery deepens.

MerlinYes. Who's eating meth where? Someone had like intact meth crystals in their poop? I don't think, I think it's like corn. You should ask Veronica about this. Corn has something called a cell wall. And I think meth has a cell wall. It does not fully, it's, well, you ever eat peanuts? And then the meth.

MaxIt's not fully metabolized.

MerlinNo, it doesn't matriculate. What do you ever eat peanuts? What are you talking about? What are you talking about?

MaxYou poop out peanuts when you eat them?

MerlinOh, sure you poop out peanuts. You're like a monkey.

Maxeating are you eating them with the shells i mean sure i mean if they're salted no no guys can i ask you a challenge my friend my friend brent eats a bag of peanuts while he sits on the toilet and then throws the shells into the toilet and flushes it and every so and he owns at his house uh he owns like one of those like roto rooters his own personal roto rooter because the toilet clogs off him because he's flushing the beano shells. Oh, shit, dog. The question is, is it good

Speaker Aor bad? It is Brett good. Oh, that's

Merlincomplicated. Well, first of all, if you have the means, I highly recommend it. Like, if I knew that I could put literally fucking anything in the toilet and then deal with it by myself, I would be flushing so much more stuff

MaxYou own your own personal Roto-Rooter. I mean, you could flush a Chicago Tribune down there for you.

MerlinYou just know, but think about, No, just think about the confidence. Just know that, like setting aside, that you could just shed a monster into there. Like you could make a peanut burrito in there and it would be fine. You could just, you take all the wipes, you guys, all the wipes that you could throw in there. We went camping this weekend and we had to poop in what's called a honey bucket. It's one of those portalets. It's a very large portalet. Like it's a handicap accessible portalet. And there's just a great, great, great steaming pile in there. And it just, it makes like a pitcher's mound of human effluvium. and that's what we had to use for two days for our for our business but you know what was nice

is we brought wipes we brought super wipes we brought super emollient super wipes and i'll tell you man you brought tactical tactical survival wipes these were like these are the thing was these are meant to be i think these are for people who bike to work and can't shower it's like a dude wipe but the thing when you undo it it's like it's like the size of two paper towels You guys, there is nothing. Like dropping into a honey bucket, taking out a wipe the size of a paper towel, and knowing you can just clean that entire area and just say hakuna matate,

you throw it right onto the pile. It's such a good feeling. If I could do that in my home because I own my own Roto-Rooter, you think I wouldn't do that? I'd be eating peanuts like a crazy person.

AlexWell, you live in San Francisco. Have you ever considered getting... Well, all right. Question one. Do you compost anything, Merlin?

MerlinI can already say A, yes, B, no fucking way. Yes, we compost heavily. We do about 60 pounds of compost a week.

AlexHoly heck.

MerlinBecause we've got a separate container. No, no, we don't have some little toy size. We've got like a probably 30, 40 gallon, like separate compost thing. We have garbage, we've got recycling, we've got compost. Composting toilets, you can't flush anything down a toilet in San Francisco. There's signs everywhere, everywhere about what you can't put in a toilet.

AlexI mean, think about the freedom you could have just to have a little bucket by the side of the toilet.

MerlinAlex, when you're pooping, if you knew that you could put anything in there, what kind of stuff would you put in there?

AlexMaybe some special pills that I was nervous about someone finding. I don't know.

MerlinWhat about macaroni and cheese? If you had leftover macaroni and cheese and you knew to a certainty, a near certainty, that you could put half of a pan of macaroni and cheese into a toilet and flush it without consequences, would you do it?

AlexI mean, yeah. Why?

MaxWhat's to be gained?

AlexFreedom. Freedom, Max. Basically, it's a consequence-free garbage can. You're not going to smell anything.

MaxI flushed a pie down a toilet one time.

AlexWhat kind? What flavor? I remember that. It did not go well, did it?

MaxDo you remember what flavor it was, Max? It was a beautiful banana cream pie from a very good bake from... What's that famous bakery in San Francisco?

Speaker AOh, JJ Bakington's.

MerlinYes. Oh, probably... Oh, wait. Or Mendy? Yeah, that might have been it.

MaxNo, they have a famous cookbook. I can't remember. Oh. Tartine. Tartine. Tartine. Tartine, yeah. I had a beautiful banana cream pie from Tartine, and we couldn't finish the whole thing. And then we thought, oh, I wonder if it would be funny if we flush this pie down the toilet. And we did, and it turns out it was very funny.

MerlinAnd in the world of baked goods, that's considered a Viking funeral.

MaxYeah. And it did mostly, to be honest, we had to chunk it up a little bit, but it did flush. And then this was at CBS Studios in San Francisco. and then now in that bathroom at CBS, they put a little plaque on the wall saying, please do not flush anything down the toilet except for toilet paper.

AlexI'm going to put the video in the show notes. Max is downplaying the disaster of this story.

MerlinA little clip art of a pie on the sign. From CorelDrop.

MaxOh, boy. I have a lot of Trump's rowdy adult sons news about them. Do you guys want to hear about Trump's rowdy adult sons? Oh, for sure. So there was a – remember we've been talking about how bad they are at email and, like, how insecure the whole email operation is. Obviously now it's out that Jared Kushner and a bunch of these people just use, like, personal email addresses that can be easily, like, spoofed and faked. So here's a – and we've talked in the past.

We've actually had other stories on the show about this too, about how people spoof their email addresses and trick people into corresponding with them. We think that happened with that whole thing with Scaramucci and Rance Prebus and all that. So it happened again to Jared Kushner. Someone spoofed Jared Kushner's email address and emailed Abby Lowell, one of the attorneys representing Trump. so this is from purportedly from Jared Kushner it's a Kushner.Jarrod at Mail.com

wrote Abby it's only just occurred to me that I had some correspondence on my private email that was of well a sensitive nature namely some exchanges with a website featuring adult content. Can I remove these? Jared sent from my iPhone Abby Lowell writes back forwarded or received from White House officials Jared fake Jared again I think one was forwarded from a White House official. We had discussed a shared interest of sorts. It was unsolicited Then there were a handful more but not from officials sent from my iPhone reply from Abby lol

I need to see I think all emails between you and the White House just for me and us We need to send any official emails to your White House account not stuff like what you asked about none of those are going anywhere Fake jared kushner replies, but we can bury it. I'm so embarrassed It's fairly specialist stuff. Half-naked women on a trampoline, standing on Lego scenes. The tag for the movie was hashtag standing on the little people. Frowny face emoji sent from my iPhone. Abby Lowell writes back, don't delete.

Don't send to anyone. Let's chat in a bit. Fake Jared Kushner writes back one last time. Thank you, Abby. There's one more video link. I'll be sunk if it's found out. The protagonist of the piece looks exactly like a younger Hillary Clinton. hair's got a little more of a choppy fringe though that one I have deleted about a week ago except for my iPhone so this is just what happens in their lives it's like teenagers from the internet spoof their email addresses and start porn crises

Alexoh my god oh boy I'm just waiting for the day that there's a Kushner Ivanka sex tape that's that's yeah no i agree but i know imagine someone who would imagine who he happens to be

Merlinthe leader of our free world no i got two words for you handmaid's tale except there's no woman

Maxin between them they just sit she just sits on the bed thinking about them like fornicating is very upsetting to me they produced an offspring didn't they i think they made several they did Oh, they have like children? Mm-hmm.

Newsweek. Ivanka Trump and Donald Trump Jr. were embroiled in a battle to take away inheritance money from their sister, Tiffany Trump. According to a new archive of conversations Donald Trump had on air with the Howard Stern show.

Donald Trump told Howard Stern that Ivanka and Donald Trump Jr. weren't happy when they discovered they'd have another sibling and agreed when Stern asked whether the two were working together to, quote, bump off a child. Quote, do your older children get nervous every time you have another child? Stern's longtime co-host Robin Quivers asked, referring to the children's inheritance, every time Donald Trump has another child, the others are at risk of receiving less money. Oh, thank you, Newsweek. Exactly how much the Trumps will be inheriting is up for debate. Quote, I have a friend who is also like a very rich guy, Trump said to Stern, according

to the tapes. Quote, and he said how his children hate the new children coming along and everything else. I said, yeah, because every time you have a child, that's 20% less to the people in Audible. the conversation quickly switched paths to the subject of quote making love to melania during the pregnancy but not before serving one last swift blow to tiffany trump stern asked trump if donald jr and ivanka were trying to quote bump off the other child trump responded by saying quote tiffany is great i have a great child and tiffany i have great children

quote tiffany has taken out a hit on melania's new baby is there any truth to that stern asked Trump shot back, quote, well, you know, it does cut up the pie as you keep producing.

AlexAnd I get how people feel bad for Barron, but I just forget Tiffany exists all the time. I know. Oh, poor Peggy.

Speaker ADaddy says we should bow my son down. Yes.

MerlinYeah, that's complicated stuff. There's so much. I think I couldn't stop thinking about it. I mentioned this last night on Twitter, but, you know, when Trump started, well, see, I think it's so silly when people say, when people call Donald Trump's Twitter account Donald Trump. It was silly with Ted Cruz. It's silly with all of these people. Let's just say that somebody who has access to Trump's account started deleting his Big Luther tweets. We should mention this. I did not know about this. Did you know that ProPublica follows, tracks deleted tweets for people?

MaxYeah, it's been, it's actually been controversial. Twitter's held in some cases that that's a violation of their terms of service. Oh, what a shame. That it's like misusing the API. So sometimes that stuff gets shut down. But there's also Congress. There's a couple of these. There's one that deleted tweets from a congressman. And then my favorite one is Congress edits Wikipedia.

MerlinThat's so good.

Speaker AYeah.

MerlinAnd it's often like fantasy, like Marvel movies and Harry Potter and stuff, isn't it? Oh, it's all kinds of crazy shit. Yeah. But I just think it's going to be so interesting. I'm pivoting here. But like last night, I was wondering aloud to myself, like, hmm, it's going to be interesting when the story is told by somebody. When it is in the future, when the story is told and we find out exactly how much and how Trump used Twitter. That's going to be super interesting. I think it's going to be very interesting to find out exactly what Dan Scavino's role in all of this is.

We know that he's basically at the level of a ninth grader in AV club in terms of using iMovie. We know that he loves to use little tools on his Mac to make little things. We know he likes to make jokey memes that are actually not particularly mean. He's not very good at his job.

MaxLittle Ken Burns effect slideshows. Yeah, exactly.

MerlinBut you know what I'm saying? It's going to be fun. Here's the thing, you guys. This story will be told at some day, some point in the future, and we will find out. We will find out there will be reenactments where we'll see his meaty, tiny little girl hands typing on his little Android phone. We're going to see reenactments of all this. we're going to learn someday. But the role of people like Dan Scavino, we're going to find out questions like who decided which big Luther tweets to delete on a Tuesday night? Who did it? Who approved that? I think the crazy stories

are still so much to be told. But basically, I just want to say Dan Scavino is not very talented. He's really not good. He's not good at his job. Whoever is doing, I mean, it's amazing. Here's a fact that gets left on the table a lot. I know this is not going to be a popular thing to say, But we see that anytime Donald Trump's Trump manages not to shit himself in public for 36 hours, people fall all over themselves to talk about. The cliche is how presidential he is. But you can tell that this entire country is dying for him to become less rather than more crazy.

Like everybody that's not in his audience would love the opportunity to go. He's 20 percent less batshit insane than he was last month. And he's sustaining it. This is a story that's it's hiding in plain sight. I imagine this is the kind of thing that John Kelly thinks about every day. It would not be that hard for Trump to pivot to being just a little bit less crazy and people would fall all over themselves. But like, isn't that kind of what makes it extra crazy nutty? Is that he could so easily have such higher approval among people that aren't in his 37%

that he's so attached to all of these ding-a-lings that he can't stop acting crazy.

MaxAnd the people around him just enable it. There was a very good story. I actually don't want to get into this. I don't want to go too far down this rabbit hole, but people should check this story out. It was in the New York Times called Trump's NFL Critique, a calculated attempt to shore up his base on September 25th from Maggie Haberman and Glenn Thrush. We'll put it in the show notes. But, you know, the basis of this story is they talk to all these Trump people and they're like, you know, the White House is at a very difficult impasse right now. Because in order for anything to get done, Trump has to make reasonable bipartisan deals with the Democrats.

So it's going to happen on immigration. It happened on the debt ceiling. It's going to continue to happen. The Republicans can't govern. You have two parties. You have a party that's interested in governing and helping the people. That's the Democrats. And a party that's interested in tearing down the government, the Republicans. And the country can't survive that way. And Trump is – we all know what side he is on. But now he's the president. And in order to carry out the minimum functions of the office, he has to work with the party that wants to govern. So he's going to have to compromise. And whenever he does that, his base revolts, right?

So when he did the debt ceiling deal over Chinese food with Democratic leadership, the Republicans were in, like, open revolt and saying, like, you know, tearing up their – burning their Trump hats and throwing them in the garbage and stuff like that. So what he does – what does he do? And this is the argument that Glenn Thresh and Maggie Haberman make, and they have many, many sources who back them up on this. What does Trump do? He picks some bullshit culture war distraction that really has nothing to do with governing the country and throws a little red meat out to the base, right?

Like here's some bullshit that everyone can get. He's going to poke the hornet's nest and fight some dumb culture war battle because it brings the base back on his side. So I think that's more or less all you need to know to understand why is he engaging with North Korea in the way that he does? Why does he treat all the crazy shit that he does? Why is he doing this nonsense with the NFL? It's like, are these like winning political issues for a majority of Americans? No. Do they make Trump look good to most people? No. It's just that it's his own. It's all. It's like every.

It's his only way to hang on to the base. He's got to throw them some red meese. He's like, you know, hey, here's some. you know charlottesville i think falls into this camp and it's got to be like uh hey here's some uh racist bullshit that everyone can get mad about for a week and and you know you can uh we can engage on these sort of like culture war issues and you know i don't mean to fear people to take from that that like well we shouldn't talk about these things or care about them because i think unfortunately like when the president says it you know listen i no one would love more than me not to care about the nfl but i think once the president says it it's a thing like we have to i'm

I'm talking more just, I'm not talking about, no, no, I'm not talking about strategies for victory.

MerlinI'm talking about like, just if we can take a step out of that partisanship and look at it in a cold way in terms of how effective they are at their job. That's the part I'm talking about, really. When I talk about Scavino and all of these ding-a-lings. And I mean, think about everything we've learned from Parks and Rec. We've learned that like, you shouldn't, you probably shouldn't send a dick pic to everybody in the department. We've learned that when Donna tweeted publicly, when she thought she was tweeting privately, that caused a lot of problems, right? There's all these things we know from Parks and Rec. There's the stuff that these folks are doing, even like the ding-a-lings, are stuff that would not be tolerated.

It would not be tolerated inside of like a medium-sized company. And then to have – it's just so crazy that the CEO at the top of that is doing the craziest of all of it. That's just – that's the part that's nuts. And that's why I keep coming back to when this story will be told. It's going to be funny to see. It's going to be insane to see how many bad decisions compounded to get us to where we are now.

MaxI think one of the really interesting examples of this is the like Luther Strange, like Roy Moore primary that just went down. So basically like the sort of Trump wing of the party led by Steve Bannon got behind this absolute fucking lunatic in the Alabama Republican primary, Roy Moore. And Trump and McConnell and the establishment sort of tried to like fight the Trump base weirdly and back to this guy Luther Strange, who's also kind of a nightmare to be honest, but less so than Roy Moore. and Strange lost pretty badly last night.

But it was very interesting because Bannon did an interview and someone was like, because he was very publicly supporting Warren Moore and someone asked Bannon, like, well, why did Trump back Luther Strange? And Bannon said, well, he's very easily misled. He's very easily persuaded. He's very, he's like a simple guy and he got bad counsel. And like, what a fucking own that is on his previous, on his former employer and his boss, right? The guy that he put in this position to say, the guy's basically a simpleton and he'll listen to whoever's in the room with him.

I mean, I don't doubt that it's true, but it's crazy that people, that they just say that out loud. Like that, I mean, you know, how easily manipulated he is, how little command of the

Merlinissues he has, how little he understands. And how like, it's so clear from his actions. It's, you know, it's so easy to overread into what's happening, but if you just keep coming back to, he cannot be seen to lose. He likes to be associated with winners. So even as he saw, And a little bit of the backstory on this was that he was pulling for Luther Strange, Big Luther, and he kept tooting about it more than he usually does. I mean, not as much as football, but more than Puerto Rico. And so he's been talking a lot about Luther Strange. And then he goes down to Alabama because guess what?

How do you get him? What is fish food for Donald Trump? It's like getting to do a rally. So he goes down there. He does this rally. But he does this really the night before. It's like a very half-hearted endorsement. and he actually says on stage, maybe I made a mistake when talking about endorsing this guy. And then when it does go down, the tweets start disappearing because he, and apparently he's internally furious about this because now he's associated with somebody who's not a winner.

MaxWell, I just want, I mean, so I have a couple of thoughts on this, but number one, first of all, I love delete. I mean, I would love for things when I make say things on the podcast that turn out to be wrong, they absolutely, they should be deleted. I didn't know it was wrong. I think that's Alex's job. It was a philosophy thing. When I say some information that's wrong about the philosophy thing. I was talking about that Bertolt Brecht and I got some information wrong about him. On the podcast, change the facts here. And here we are in our $25,000 isolation booth with all of our equipment technology

and Alex's only job is to delete my old tweets so that I sound smart in retrospect.

MerlinIs that so much to ask? It's not so much to ask.

MaxGo back to the ones before the election when I said Hillary was definitely going to win and be like, I don't know, I don't feel good about this. She should be going to Wisconsin more.

AlexPatreon.com slash Dubai Friday. We'll get a fact checker.

MerlinWe should do a quick check in on what Tiff is eating. Our friend Tiff Arment likes listening to the show on her iPad while she has some food. Can I give you a quick update on what Tiff is eating today?

MaxPlease, Merlin. What do we think Tiff is eating today?

MerlinToday, Tiff is having lunch. She's having deconstructed Bantam goose ham sliders with tessellated frisson of endive and a flight of huckleberry crannyam jams that's served at room temperature and sliced diagonally.

MaxOoh, wow, that really sounds good. You can have all that delivered and more with Blue Apron. Use the checkout code... Slice diagonally. What's the joke from this? Isolation. Use the checkout code IsolationBooth at checkout. Fix it, Alex. Fix that. Fix it and post. Ah!

uh follow up uh new york post a north korean defector is told of kim jong-un's teen sex slaves lavish caviar lunches and gory public executions he yan lim 26 is the daughter of a high-ranking soldier from pyongyang and a member of the regime's inner circle born her father colonel weyun lim 51 passed away she and her family decided to flee the country in 2015 how do people do you guys know how do people flee from north korea how does that work how even do you do that because it's like not easy to get out of the country and like i think there's like

Alexlandmines between north and south korea i had the impression that there were like north korean coyotes basically kind of the same i'm sure there's a lovely planet money episode about it we'll try

Maxto find that and put it in the show notes send alex an email if you know how people uh defect from north korea but now in south korea he yana spoken of what life was like inside the secret of rogue state she told the mirror that she saw quote terrible things in her home city of pyongyang despite her family's relative privilege. She said officials came to her school to pick out teen school girls to work at the chubby dictator's homes. The escapee said they would only choose the prettiest girls who were taught to feed him caviar and massage him. First of all, I don't like how they're saying this like it's so scandalizing. It's like, what are you going to go pick up

teen girls for your palace and you're not going to pick the prettiest ones? Right. They're kind of burying the leaf. First, why do you have to call that out? It's like some sort of like, can you believe they did this? He didn't, and he did, and the worst part, This is such like...

MerlinYou guys, we need to talk about the role of lookism in slave.

MaxIt's such like a crazy liberal perspective on it. And he only picked the pretty ones. Can you believe it? Why don't you abduct the less pretty girls? I don't see ugly girls because every woman is beautiful and should be kidnapped. It's like a teen sex slave. Can we not get a curvy teen sex slave in the dictator's power?

Speaker AOh, I love my curvy teen slave.

MerlinOh my God, look at her. She's so broad. she's only she's only had her lady blood for three years but she has such fecundity in her breath she's so hungry she loves to feed me caviar you can tell she's so hungry and i can see the sweat just pouring down her beautiful beautiful broad back uh he yan who has met the

Maxdespot also said uh told how he would dine out on imported delicacies like caviar and chinese bird's nest soup, which can cost $2,700 a kilo. Here's why this story caught my eye. It's from the New York Post, so it's probably made up, or wildly exaggerated. But this sounds like the kind of racist bullshit that does not pass the smell test and is transparently made up

that we heard before the war in Iraq. Do you guys remember that?

MerlinYeah, about the palaces.

MaxThe palaces. I remember very clearly one day I was in the cafeteria at school, and I was a pretty big asshole, and all I wanted to do was rant and rave about politics, and no one wanted to talk to me about it. But all these fucking kids in my liberal school were very pro-war. They were wearing flag shit, and they were talking about how bad Saddam was. I remember one day at the cafeteria table in high school, Julie Klein sat down and told me that Saddam Hussein had meat grinders in the desert that he would put people into

And it may have specifically been jews, but I can't I don't remember that part and I remember saying Listen to yourself. I was like do you hear what you're saying? You think he has meat grinders in the desert and he feeds human beings into the meat grinder How would you how would you maintain a human meat grinder?

MerlinYou would get hair everywhere. We could gum it up. Yeah, you get hair and you get sand in the grinder

MaxIt would be very hard to maintain. My fucking shower drain clogs with hair, and I'm not even putting a whole person in there.

MerlinRight, right, right, right.

MaxIt would never work. It's one of these things of like, it's like some sort of, it's like some kind of cognitive dissonance or something of like people find themselves about to go to war, and then they're able to make these unbelievable logical leaps, these incredible mental gymnastics to other and dehumanize these people. these people. And like, I'm not trying to say, yeah, like, I don't know, maybe Kim Jong-un like does have teen sex slaves or whatever, but like, so does lots of world leaders. Like, I just like, it's like, that's not a reason to go to war with him. Like, it's just like...

MerlinRight, right. Well, it's not so entirely different from the canonical example of the Jews kidnapping Christian babies to turn them into matzo bread. Isn't that the kind of the canonical classic example of a crowd panic about the other?

MaxI don't appreciate the, you're imposing your normative values on our religious traditions. Do you just get the pretty babies? What, are you going to get an ugly baby to make your matzah?

MerlinWho's going to want to eat an ugly baby?

MaxYeah.

MerlinWhat, Jonathan Swift?

MaxThat's just common sense.

MerlinThere was a really good, I can't believe I've started listening to this. I can't believe I'm listening to a daily news podcast, but it's very, very good. I have to admit. I know it's popular, but the daily. The New York Times' daily podcast with Michael Barbaro is very good. It's different every day. I was just listening when we started recording today to a very chilling episode.

At the height of the 2016 election, exaggerated reports of a brutal crime turned the town of Twin Falls, Idaho upside down. Do you remember the story? Did you hear about this? Go on. So basically, at a town meeting, a bunch in Twin Falls, several people showed up at the same town meeting to talk about what was being done about the crime. And everybody at the meeting is like, what crime are you talking about? Long story short, this meme starts that Syrian refugee teens, this is not pretty, so I'm sorry, I should trigger a warning here.

But the story that they told was that Syrian youths had gang raped a five-year-old girl at knife point and urinated on her. So I'll cut straight to the chase. It's a story that endures today, even though what actually happened in these tiny kernel of truth in that story is not that. What happened was, and it's not pretty, but like basically there were some kids between five, seven, ten years old that had had some sexual contact. The police couldn't talk about it because they are legally barred from discussing cases involving sexual assault in minors.

This got turned into you, the police, are for Sharia law and refuse to talk about this. And now our children are being raped and urinated upon by Syrian refugees. There's no Syrian refugees in the town of Twin Falls. This never happened. There was no knife. There was no urination. But that story was so sticky because of how much it bolsters. And of course, Bannon. Bannon was one of the people out there saying, this is an example of everything you need to know about Islam in America. And that's a story that endures to this day because it supports that worldview.

MaxThat's insane. I was speaking of this just reminding me of another delightful thing I saw last night. I was Googling some fun Roy Moore facts once he won the nomination. And I saw...

MerlinWe need a theme song for that. Fun Roy Moore fact.

MaxFun Roy Moore fact. There's so many. In between talking about what an abomination homosexuality is, there was this amazing interview that he gave during the campaign. So this is with the reporter, Jeff Stein. Stein asks, some right-wing conservatives think Sharia law is a danger to America. Do you? Roy Moore. There are communities under Sharia law right now in our country, up in Illinois, Christian communities. I don't know if they may be Muslim communities. but Sharia law is a little different from American law. It is founded on religious concepts. Stein. A little different.

Stein. Which American communities are under Sharia law? When did they fall under Sharia law? Roy Moore. Well, there's Sharia laws, I understand it, in Illinois, Indiana, up there. I don't know. Oh, Jeff Stein. That seems like an amazing claim for a Senate candidate to make. Roy Moore. Well, let me just put it this way. If they are, they are. If they're not, they're not.

AlexYep, that's true. I don't know how you argue with that. I guess I agree with that Can't really argue with that Dig Dug I don't want to give the melty face Google guy like more attention But did you guys read The New York Times story Called push for gender equality in tech Some men say it's gone too far The thing that really stuck out Okay well this is my favorite part

um the mr altsier i don't know who this guy is um said that in a gathering he hosts in person and online to discuss men's issue had grown by a few dozen numbers this year to more than 200 that the private facebook pages he frequents on men's rights were gaining new members and that a radical subculture calling for total male separatism was emerging it's a witch hunt he said in a phone interview contending men are being fired by quote dangerous human resources departments quote I'm sitting in a soundproof

I'm sitting in a soundproof booth right now because I'm afraid someone will hear me when you're discussing gender issues it's almost religious the response it's almost zealotry and it's a really stupid article but what's worse is they have these like really like incredibly posed photos of like tech dudes in like trying to look very serious. And so you've got this melty face Google guy who I feel like showed up in a

t-shirt and they had like maybe one of their photographers like, oh shit, take off your shirt and give it to him. So he has this like blue button down that doesn't fit. And then the Reid Hoffman, who's the founder of LinkedIn and who has been, has asked investors to sign a decency pledge. And it's kind of unclear what that is, is, is leaning against a banister, trying to look casual, and he's got this weird muffin top thing going on. And it's just, oh, God.

I hate when people are like, oh, this reads like an article from The Onion. But these photos are just so good. They're so good. And I'm glad that we're talking about this on an audio show.

MerlinWell, at the risk of being, I'm only going to say this incredibly on-the-nose thing because I happen to know Max will agree with it. This week's This American Life, episode 66, White Haze, is, okay, all usual provisos. it's This American Life, it's heavily produced, you know, and not everybody likes Zoe's voice. Go listen to episode 626, White Haze. It is essential for five reasons. That's all I'm gonna say about that. It's just like the picture that arises out what you learn about the Proud Boys and what you learn about the incredibly aggrieved.

You know, you get so tired of that cliche about millennials being these snowflakes in their parents' basement. And then you listen to this, the aggrievement of people who actually believe that they are being formally replaced, that white people are being replaced by non-white men.

MaxNon-white non-men is my bottom. I fucking call of them, too, to turn around and call us snowflakes and say that we're doing grievance politics. It's so fucking funny. They're scared of everything. Everything is a threat to them. The whole guy who started the Charlottesville rally, he was radicalized. This is Kessler. Kessler, right? Yeah, he was radicalized because he didn't get a job.

MerlinHe didn't get a job. They gave it to him. there were two jobs available. One was a full-time job and the other one was an as-available job and they gave it to a woman because they always give jobs to women. And that's why he's sad and wants to... And his feelings are so hurt. I'm not a racist. I'm not a racist. My feelings are so hurt that you're calling me a racist. I'm not a white supremacist. Stop saying that.

MaxYeah, I have a... Well, it's interesting. So I was very... I thought that this American Life episode was exemplary. I think it's an incredible piece of journalism. I really don't have any issues with how the episode was produced I mean, it is interesting though So I heard this And all throughout, what I was thinking is It's amazing to me how well Like A, that I wish that they had made Let me not say that I wish they did it If I produced that piece I would have taken it to a systemic critique

Because if you look at the Proud Boys They're a gang, right? Can we just call it a gang? I don't know that we even have time to get into too much detail Everyone go listen to this week

MerlinGo listen to it because they do go into the whole like No masturbation thing you guys told me about That's like a huge part of these guys Huge, yeah

MaxIt's crazy They're an insane fringe gang And we will definitely be making fun of them on the podcast But they're ding-a-lings That's the thing is they're ding-a-lings It's not even like the Klan These guys are like serial ding-a-lings Yeah Well, okay So I listened to this And they formed a gang, right? And I'm thinking Well, why does anyone form a gang? It's because they've been excluded from capitalism and they're not really able to provide for themselves according to the way that American like culture, you know, especially for men, right? There's this whole conception of how men are supposed to provide for themselves within this very sort of narrow parameters of like being a man, pulling yourself up from you to the man's man, pulling yourself up from you on bootstraps, being self-sufficient.

There's this whole, you know, there's a lot of value placed on that. And when that doesn't happen, it's easy to blame everything in your life, not having a girlfriend, not having a good place to live. like all these issues on that. And this is why people form gangs. I'm not talking about white supremacist gangs. This is why people in the ghetto form gangs. It's why people, it's why any, it's why juggalos form a gang. It's why anyone forms a gang. And it's like, it's sort of a response of like, well, we'll do it ourselves. We'll build our own community of mutual interdependence and have our own values that because we can't sort of participate in this capitalist thing. Anyway, that's the-

MerlinWell, and also you create your own symbology. You create your own lore. There's all the ways that they use, like ironically use phrases like taken out of African languages. There's this entire, like code to being inside of there that makes you feel very included.

MaxRight. An initiation of sort of fake sacrifice.

MerlinYou gotta get punched in the face while naming cereals. I mean, it's bizarre.

MaxIt's so weird. But it's like a thing that you sort of earn your way into in increasingly less trivial ways. And then you have this feeling of value and belonging that you're denied from other aspects of society. And I kept waiting for there to be a systemic critique and to say, well, these people have been left behind by the systems that are supposed to be working for them. And so this is what they're turning to. And we've got to do a better job of like providing for these people. And it was sort of denied in that story. And obviously, I think you could say the same thing about Kessler,

although he's more of like an anecdote, right, of the idea that he didn't get this job. So he decided to become like a radicalized, like white terrorist. And that's where you get into this American life part. Well, and that's fine. And that's fine. But it's like, well, if you want to, if they're, you know, it's so whatever. But my response to that anecdote is like, well, maybe he should have had a job and then he wouldn't have become radicalized. And maybe it's not to say that he was owed that job, but you know, whatever it got, dude has a college degree. Like he should be able to get a job in the economy and he wasn't. And that gave him free time to, you know, start this, this unite the right rally or whatever. So, but anyway, it's just interesting that I heard it

and I was like, immediately was like, well, where's my materialist, you know, critique of like how this all fits together. But I then posted it on Twitter and the other, so the other thing that you need to know is like the other character is this like pickup artist guy um black guy who became betrayed by the the proud boys as they became very racist and i posted this on twitter and a number of people were like i hated this story because it's it's like the story is like this this sexist pickup artist is the protagonist and then he's like betrayed when it's like my what my

sexist movement became racist too and you know i i i get that sure that's a fair critique of the guy But it's just interesting that this fall—

MerlinBut it's another example of only kidnapping pretty girls. It's like, well, you know what? This is all ridiculously complicated. There's no clear winner. There's no clear protagonist in all of this. And as long as you're always looking for who's the protagonist and the antagonist, you're going to miss the thread. Nobody thinks they're an antagonist. Everybody thinks they're the hero of the story.

MaxWell, I would—I mean, you know, it's like it falls almost exactly along the lines of this ideological divide on the left, right? Where it's like on the one side you have the people who are, I'm going to use the popular terms here, although I'm not to say I necessarily agree with these, but they're the sort of identity politics people, right, who feel like our most urgent.

MerlinThe intersectional agreement movement.

MaxYeah, and they feel like our most urgent issues are like, you know, gender equity, racial justice. And I don't deny that those are urgent issues. But then on the other side, you have you have the people who are maybe more of what I'm into, which is the like, well, the best way to address racial injustice is like is like basically economically, like you have to like, you have to like give people reparations, make sure everyone has jobs, everyone can participate in in in get a house, participate in the economy and get paid a living wage, like that that's like, you know, that I would view that as sort of

of the top way to do it. And not to say it's like a, not a legitimate debate, but we also did just lose a national election, like leaning heavily into the first camp. So, you know, I'm looking for a way to try the other one now. And it's just fascinating to me that even the story of, you know, the sort of character study of looking at the Proud Boys, like just neatly, like the egg cracks in half and you've got, you know, two people hear this story and they take exactly different things

Merlinaway. Yeah. I mean, we can, we can, we can basically turn something like that, that is so fascinating and such a character study and so indicative of something big in our system. And it always comes down to a way to figure out how we can argue amongst ourselves about who we should dislike more.

MaxRight. Right. Exactly. Is it this group or that group who was hurt more by the story?

MerlinThat's not how you make policy. That's not how you move forward with stuff. You don't, that's basically, that's how you play Pokemon. That's not like how you win an election.

AlexShould we get into the challenge?

MaxLet's talk about the challenge. All right. I feel like we need to segregate this challenge into a couple of... Delete where I said segregate after we just had that conversation. I feel like we need to address this challenge in a couple of different parts. I first think we need to have Merlin's software corner where he talks about Steam, and then we can talk about the Dream Daddy game. Oh, I got a lot more to say about one than the other. That's for dang sure. All right.

AlexOkay.

MaxMerlin, tell us about installing Steam, which was not really part of the challenge, but more a thing that you had to do.

AlexChallenge this week was, I guess, install Steam and play Dream Daddy, a dad dating simulator.

MerlinNo, we don't need to drag this out. This will make the challenge. I just, you know what? We shouldn't talk about it. We should just talk. We should just talk.

MaxI'll talk about it if you want, but I don't want to derail you. So Steam is made by this company called Valve. And Valve, when I was growing up, basically made the coolest video games. Like, they were one of the best computer game companies. They made Half-Life. They made Team Fortress 2. They made Portal. They made all these different extremely cool games. Everything they made, they were one of those companies that for a while, every single thing they put out changed the industry. When Portal came out, it was like video games will never be the same after this. When Half-Life 2 came out, video games will never be the same after this.

Oh, and I think they did Counter-Strike 2, which I never got super into, but that's the number one competitive shooter video game. Is that the one, what's-his-name plays,

Merlinin the Reply All episode? Yes, it is, actually. Yeah.

MaxOkay. Yeah. So these were huge, mega, international blockbuster hits. They were one of the most successful game companies. And they decided, you know, we don't want our games to be sold in stores because the retail business for software was very, very broken and bad. And they had a hard time, you know, obviously negotiating to get their titles into stores and all of that. So they were like, we're just going to build our own digital distribution thing. And they made Steam. And Steam was, when it happened, it was a revolution. It was the first mainstream digital distribution for games thing.

Among the revolutionary things that they created was the idea that once you bought the software, it lived in your library and you could re-download it as many times as you wanted. So you had a true feeling of ownership. they instituted like anti-cheating measures to make sure everyone would played fair so if you got banned for cheating on steam it was like a it was like a real ban um you know all that kind of stuff and eventually everyone went on steam like steam is like the central repository for games it's an it's a it's a really good idea it's a great very very good idea especially if it's cross-platform i mean that's fantastic yeah and the trap the true tragedy to me is that steam

became so lucrative and such a big project and it's so packed with features and now they make like fucking hardware and vr shit and all this different stuff in the steam world that they don't make video games anymore like all their talent is go has gone into doing steam and i think i guess like there was a they just said mike laidlaw blog post alex of like the plot of half-life 3 so it seems like maybe half-life 3 will never come out now but anyway that's that's the true tragedy of it and i think the internal logic over there is like well we shouldn't be making games because we're so good at making software and that was what was going through my

mind when you were talking about your experience of using it i'm trying to find out when steam came

Alexto the mac but i it took a while because i was i i didn't play um portal until it was like uh it was on playstation 3 and because steam well and that's the thing steam does still sell its game their games on other platforms and it's just i don't know it feels like valve used to like there was that article that was like we don't really have like a structure within valve and like we have this um you know horizontal management system and you can tell i feel like now especially with

no half-life no no portal 3 god it ended on a cliffhanger and i don't know it also feels like the actual software of steam is kind of stagnant but i i don't know that's that's my opinion also

Merlinbecause i use it on a mac i don't have much to say about this that's going to be appealing to anybody. I'm just very picky and weird to the verge of being a crazy person about what I put on my computer. Like I consider this an area where like, it's already, you're hanging by a thread, like with the computer as it is. I don't update my OS usually for a year after it's come out at this point. I'm just very conservative about what I put on my computer. And I have very high expectations and a lot of suspicion about everything. So like when I get stuff like pop-ups asking me to like authorize admin things, I usually hit cancel and go figure out what it

looked for. I'm out there, I'm Googling for stuff from the console. Like I'm a paranoiac about what I put on my computer, partly because I have really good taste, but also just because I'm very conscious of the fact that there's a lot of powerful stuff that people click through and that there are signs that you learn from as a user of hardware and software. On the Mac platform, it is sometimes farcical to me if somebody attempts to do some kind of malware it is farcical with how much it is obviously malware because it does not look like anything from the apple world nobody with any taste

would ever ask you to click on that box like you go to some of these like those sites where they get like free hosting and they obviously are trying to give you some malware version of flash you have to update your flash you're like it's obviously not adobe it's obviously you know what i'm saying though you get to this point as an apple and especially mac user going like oh god You're not even trying to make that look real. That is so fucking fake, there's no way I would ever click on that. All right? I know that is an old-fashioned way to be. If I had, as Jeff Venus said, a passionate task of wanting to get to this goddamn video game and I'll hit any button to make it happen, fine.

Hakuna Matata. As somebody who's been doing this stuff since 1987, when I see shit that does not look Apple-like, I am very reluctant to let it do things. So first of all, I tried to download this shit on my MacBook Adorable. It wouldn't let me. The file I was trying to download said Hi Sierra in the name. I don't have Hi Sierra. I have regular Sierra. Fine. I probably don't want it on my laptop anyway. Everybody says it's dog shit.

AlexI called Sober Sierra. Sorry, that was a bad joke. I'm done.

MerlinAnd then I went to my work Mac and I said, okay, I got the challenge. I got to do this. And I went to download it. I went to install it. Every square inch of this looks terrible and looks fake. It has fake. It looks like it's running on, I assume, something like Java. It's doing some kind of runtime bullshit that has absolutely nothing to do with the Apple world. There's nothing standard about it. When they add things like the three little dots in the top of a window, I think they're just little images they dropped in from an old version of the iOS because it looks nothing like the actual iOS.

It's basically like a talented toddler's drawing of an application on a Mac. So when I got to the point where I finally installed that shit, after I went, I got to pick a username and I got to pick a password. I got to get through the caption. I got to get all that bullshit. Great. Now Thor Stenson Finn Lansen is officially on the Steam. I downloaded. I clicked to install it. Wow. Suddenly there's ads popping up everywhere. There's ads popping up. There's bullshit in the background. It's a 35% off Dishonored 2, Merlin. Yeah, rejoice, rejoice.

And I see non-stated UI elements. And guess what? I get a really sketchy looking pop-up that says, this application wants to get into your accessibility to have special controls. I closed all of that. I went into our super secret private channel and I said, I said, this app is bullshit. I don't know, man. I get why you want to get in there. You probably don't want to waste a lot of time making a good application. For a while,

MaxSteam would like render fonts wrong. Like they had like Windows font. Yeah. Like no anti-aliasing on the typeface. Do they still do that shit on the Mac? I don't have Steam on my Mac.

MerlinWhen software is ugly and feels careless, that is a huge fucking red flag.

MaxI will say it looks more at home on a PC. Where everything looks stupid anyway. Where everything looks bad. And there is no standard UI. Nothing is trusted, which is one of the reasons that every PC person has like six bars on their browser that are like virus cleaners or something like that. And it's all just emailing their hard drive to Vladimir Putin one packet at a time.

MerlinThis is not interesting to gamers or to Mac people. That's all I had to say, and I'll be done with it, was just that it was an unpleasant and ugly experience. and the first time you launch an app, having it launch an ad and then want me to do, basically allow accessibility stuff that I let maybe three apps ever do is not a turn on to how to start. Now, maybe that's bad on me. It's like my whole PlayStation sign-up experience where I'm an idiot. I'm not a gamer. I don't care about games. I don't like video games. I don't like this world. But that was a real turn off to me before I even got to the time where I got to make my delicious fuckable dad.

MaxOkay, so that's it for Merlin's Tech Corn. Merlin, what are you going to review next week on Merlin Tech Corner?

MerlinPound sign, Merlin shit list.

MaxPound sign, Merlin shit list.

MerlinI used it, but I don't like it.

AlexReal time follow-up trademark John Sturcusa. It is written in Objective-C on the Mac. All right, let's get into Dream Daddy.

MaxAll right, Alex, please explain this game to our listeners and tell us why you picked it to have us play it.

AlexAll right. So, well, okay. First, were either of you familiar with dating simulators before? I mean, they're pretty self-explanatory.

MerlinOh, my God. But every spare minute of the day, I'm doing dating simulators. Every platform. I get it on Steam. I get it on Vox. I get it on PlayStation. I can't simulate enough dating in my life. I just have so much time to fill with dating simulators.

AlexAll right. Dream Daddy, a dad dating simulator. I chose this game because I know that Merlin isn't a huge fan of video games. And this is sort of like an old school text adventure type of thing, except updated for the modern era where you just date dads.

MerlinAnd I knew you hit return and read as video games, right?

AlexYeah, it's not. I mean, it's a game that is on a video screen.

Speaker AYeah.

AlexYeah, it is. And so at the beginning of the game, you create the dad that you want to embody. And then you are introduced to your young daughter. and you have moved like across town. So you need to meet all of your neighbors who just happen to be hot dads that all live in your cul-de-sac. And you have the option to romance a number of them and eventually fuck some of them. And that's about it. And then the game ends once you have gone on a third date with one of the dads and sealed the deal.

And however, there are different endings. So I want to get into what kind of dads you guys created and what dads you romanced. And most importantly, which I, it took me for a ride, how you interacted with your daughter, Amanda.

MaxWell, I think the first thing is Merlin and I both made dads that looked almost exactly like us. Pretty much 100%. Mine, I made the closest dad possible to me.

MerlinWhy would I go on a video game where I simulate someone that looks like me?

MaxNo, I don't know. If I had any opportunity to be anyone else. Why get out of bed in the morning? It's all, you're going to die eventually. I made it look almost exactly like me and I spent a lot of time in the character creator evaluating all of the different hairstyles and t-shirts that I could be wearing Sorry I did it wrong

MerlinYeah, my guy is super fuckable He's an out and proud happy dad who looks a little bewildered He looks surprised

Speaker AHe's like this

MaxHe's got a shirt with a cheeseburger That your guy would make when he was talking, your guy would go, hmm?

MerlinHe's got a shirt with a cheeseburger on it, and he's surprised. Your guy, wait, now hang on. Is Artemis Longhorn, that's you, Alex?

AlexYes, I named my character. He looks like Travis McElroy. I did that. I designed a man that I would like to embody, but also I wasn't sure how much you played as the dad. So I also wanted a dad that I would ideally fuck. and he has a very smart little jacket and then a button-up shirt that has cats on it.

MaxIs there a picture of your dad somewhere in here?

AlexYeah, it's in the super secret text channel, but I can put it.

MerlinIt's also on the Google Doc.

MaxThe last thing that I see is my funny tweet that Michael Barbaro made. Look at the Google Doc. It's in there.

AlexI named him Artemis Longhorn because he has a big penis. I'm not good at jokes. What did you guys name your dads?

MerlinOh, I don't remember. How can you not remember?

Speaker AYou played them for hours.

MerlinI played for like five minutes. I know his first name is Panzer. I wanted to give him a tank name. Let me find Max's in here somewhere. I named mine Max Temkin. Video games, a chance to really stretch out. Let's see here. Max Temkin. There we are. Oh, look at that. You got Steven Seagal.

Speaker AWow, look at that guy's hair. Astonishing.

MaxOh, Alex.

MerlinOh, there you are.

MaxYours is good, Max.

MerlinThis is really good.

MaxThis looks like someone, and I'm not going to say who it is until after the podcast, but it's very funny who it looks like. I can't say who it looks like.

AlexOkay. All right. I'm nervous. Don't worry about it. Okay. All right.

MaxAnyway, Merlin, did you actually only play for five minutes? Did you meet another dad?

MerlinI looked at some Polaroids. Did you romance anyone? Nope. I looked at some Polaroids with my daughter. It seems like it's going to be a lot of feels is what it feels like.

AlexI don't know. Well, you didn't play, so you didn't get to any of the feels. other than the fact that your husband died.

MerlinListen, listen, I set aside two hours to work on this. I installed Steam. I got an account. I got it installed successfully on a second computer. Then I spent 15 minutes hitting return and reading while a cartoon character moved a little bit.

AlexI should have had you guys play the kitchen dating game.

MerlinI get full fucking credit for this. Full credit for this.

MaxI made a little man. I played this game. I played for an hour, So I didn't get to the end of a story. I think it has like a three-hour play time or something like that. It's about two hours. For like one storyline. So I didn't get to the end of one. But I'll say I'm going to go back and finish it at least once. I'm romancing the guy from the cafe.

AlexOh, he is a hottie.

MaxHe was the first one that jumped out at me. Is it fun? Were you enjoying that? Yeah, it's a wonderful game. It's not a six-course meal. It's a little cookie. It seems sweet. It's a little treat. It's a little treat.

It is not going to win game of the year, but it is uncommonly well-written. The characters are very well-realized for a video game. I thought that it had true moments of shock and delight, like when you get to the Pokemon battle. Yeah, it's so cute. I mean, shit. That's one of, I mean, I was, I stood up out of my chair. I was so excited when that happened. It was so funny and so charming. It was very human for a video game.

I mean, even dating sims tend to just be weirdly cold and inhuman. And I just, I love the daughter character. I love the main character, the dad. I think they did a great job with it. I think really my only critique of it, you know, game designer or game critique is really that I feel like the interaction, like I guess I have a better version of Merlin's complaint, which is the interaction model is very limited.

AlexLike they're just,

MaxI'm familiar with the conventions of dating games and even by the conventions of dating games, I feel like you make too few decisions in the game. And I understand why, which is scope. Like it's hard to make a game where you get to decide everything. So I understand why it is the way it is. But that being said, I wish that there were more opportunities for decision making and role play.

AlexI agree like I was kind of surprised by the limited like text tree if you will however I got to the game and so this is like spoilers for my end of the game and I did not realize how how many choices actually had a very heavy impact on how you played the game where you get so basically just for people

Merlinhaven't played it like there's several points where like you get it's pretty at least in the part I played you get to a pretty simple like do you pick this one or this one you're saying that has an impact down the line like a callback or changes the story well like for example i decided

Alexto romance uh joseph the married youth married youth minister who has four very creepy children um and a wife who hits on you if you go to a bar uh but then um we for one of our dates we go to like this dance and i'm supposed to help out and there's like these options for choosing how to resolve a situation or you choose what dance moves to do. And they're all like very silly.

But by the end of the game, I had chosen, again, like chosen Joseph, given him the rose. We went out on our yacht, had some very romantic, very romantic moments, and eventually went down to the bedroom of the yacht. And he confessed that he was, he had already left his wife, was living in his yacht and he kissed me and then it went, it faded to black and I'm sure we fucked for hours and hours. And then there's like a cut scene, which is the final, it's the very end of the game.

And you realize, you sort of, each character kind of summarizes what you've done with them in the game and like what they've enjoyed or not enjoyed about your interactions. But then Joseph comes up to me and is like, actually, I'm staying with Mary. But, you know, we can have a thing on the side. And that, like, crushed me. He lied. He said they were already gone. And you know what? If he had said, listen, I've got this understanding with Mary, I would have been fine with that. But no, he wanted me to cheat on his wife with him.

And I was super, like, oh, gross. And I was surprised that I cared at all. But then the whole thing with Amanda, your daughter, when there are, like, certain cut scenes where you can make decisions about how to interact with her. like when she's crying or when she's have having friends over like how you're going to discipline her when she doesn't text you back and stays out all night and I must have fucked like royally fucked it up because she went into this speech about how you know I'm going off to college and

I feel like we were so close and you're kind of a helicopter parent and I never got to learn how to be on my own and I'm really stressed about this and at the end of the game my achievement was okay

Merlinish dad and i was like wow fuck me oh no but you were you weren't trying to be a bad dad i was

Alextrying like that's that's that's the thing that surprised me i hope this was just gonna be a funny game about fucking a bunch of dads who happen to live in your neighborhood like they're

Maxall very silly characters but like the why i think that's the beating heart of this game and the reason that it it actually it works emotionally and it's the it's this it's the real it's the sort of subtle brilliance of the writing and the way it's done is like, yeah, it's in on the joke of what daddy means on Twitter and it's, you know, dream daddy and all of that. But the part about daddy is that it's also a dad. Like you, it makes you do both, right? You're, you're, you know, you're, and it, for kids who play this, I really think it, it sort of uniquely uses the tools of

a game to like put you in the point of view of of a parent in a in a way that does not feel cringy or pejorative or you know like after school special right right can I ask a question yes

MerlinI assume we all got the same question early on uh when they say you so you're at the point where you're talking to Amanda and you're supposed to say do you choose either when your mother and I adopted you or when your father and I adopted you. Did you guys get that? Yes. Which one did

Alexyou choose? Mother. What did you choose, Alex? I chose father because I assumed then that there'd be an added like dialogue of like, oh, this is so taboo. I'm this is new to me. And I don't I just didn't want to go through all that because I wanted to get through the game quickly. Was that the case, Max? What? Oh, I'm sorry. Merlin, what did you choose? Oh, no, I choose. I chose dad. Well,

MerlinI guess the reason I'm curious and this I'm not fun in here. Like, no, I'm not into video games, but I am curious about the culture. So Max, when you're playing a video game, in this case, obviously, I guess it makes sense to do straightforward, you equals equals Max Temkin. But when you're playing a video game, what governs, what goes into your character? At what times are you looking for escape? At what times are you looking for change? When you're monster factoring whoever you are in the game, what goes into deciding the personality of the character you're playing in that game when you have the choice?

MaxYeah. Is that a reasonable question? Very much so. it's a super it's a really interesting topic it really gets into how people play games um for myself so just speak for myself it's you know it's complicated um you know you know you know one thing about me is like i don't like to watch bad movies um like i don't like to do things ironically or badly i like feel like i don't have enough time right now in my life for that like i just like to do good things so i i there is a huge culture of people playing games and like making a

Monster Factory guy and playing it, you know, as a goof or breaking the game or whatever. And that is a major part of video gaming culture. It's not what I like. So I am looking for a game that is either, for me, what kind of pushes my buttons in a game is either A, something like PUBG, where there's almost no characterization and the narrative is completely emergent from the gameplay. So the narrative is the thing that happens as a result of what you do in the game and not something that someone wrote, and that very much gets me going.

Or B, something I can earnestly role-play and have a novelistic experience, and Dream Daddy is a very good representation of that second category. So I played it as myself. That's my first playthrough, is I'll play it earnestly as myself. When I played even games like XCOM, there's a light role-playing where you build your squad and send them into battle. I take it very seriously. I try and make a squad that has... you know, some people will do like crazy, like put pink army fatigues and come up with crazy names and distort their faces or whatever. I'm like, I don't know, like I have a lot of fun, like building

a good squad and giving them best equipment. And I really, it really bothers me if they die. That's the first time I play. Like maybe if I love the game and I have time, I'll go back and play again and do a more of a novelty run. Like, okay, I'm only going to play with snipers or something this time. But I do like, you know, like a little bit of a role play of like, I'm going to really get into the story of this thing and engage with it is this i mean and i'd love to hear what

Merlinalex thinks too but like so like with i'm i'm not trying to be that like guy but like is this this is a topic that must come up a lot when people think when smart people think about video games the identity of like where you and your character this has got to be something people have talked

Maxabout a lot right yeah only a little bit yeah i mean there's there's it's a problem it's a problem It's a problem that's so poorly understood in games. So games cater, even though it is a fact that most gamers are women, most people who play games for the most time are women, that's an indisputable fact that industry research bears out over and over. Almost all games are targeted towards young white men. And the problem is so ill understood in gaming that one of the common conventions of the industry is a protagonist character that does not speak.

so there is no there's nothing there because they can't figure it out so most of the top game franchises you you know in dream daddy your dad says stuff and you're like ooh I don't know if I would have said that or whatever that they deal with that by not by having the protagonist literally be a silent kind of

Merlinkiller you just make decisions and listen you're not your decisions

Maxare like where do I aim the reticle and when do I pull the trigger and what knee-high cover do I kneel behind

Alexthere's also two facets of this though where and like you i mean obviously until recently i i had no choice to basically play a guy but and uh it doesn't so much bother me in like a really fantastic world that like mass effect or something before they had the fem chef character it was like oh okay like it's an i'm an alien soldier or rather a human soldier hanging out with aliens whatever but it started to actually bother me when um you could play a female character but the

conventions were just so typical like long hair gigantic eyes really thick eyebrows and then i would usually just end up playing with a dude with short hair because i'm like that's kind of i look more like that anyway um like even the most recent pokemon game like even these like which is a bummer because especially like the games that kids are playing like i as an adult i can be like all right i'm just gonna play as a guy in this game or i'm gonna play as a weird genderless alien and it doesn't bother me but like immediately you're forced to make a choice

in a lot of um you know smaller nintendo games and that just kind of bums me out uh but but

Maxespecially that it's that it's a it's a binary yeah i mean the the the tacit assumptions that go into this question you're talking about of like what character you do are you meant to empathize with and represent as the player. It's so, I mean, this is like one of the many topics that Anita talked about in her very excellent series, Tropes vs. Video Games from Feminist Frequency. And like, she goes into it in great depth, the ways that there's sort of like assumptions made that the default is a male and the way that you engage with it.

But one of my favorites, the one that always sticks in my brain is just like over the top to the point of self-parody and that people should be laughing at this and it's not even noticed is when you play a female character in a game, and I think she shows, for example, Catwoman in a Catwoman game, that you can always position the camera so that you're sort of looking up her ass. And it's meant to sort of have a... It's literally like a male gaze. Her body's on display in a catsuit and you can sort of slowly pan the camera around and look at the invaginations of her butt cheeks.

right but when you play a male protagonist they almost always include a piece in the character model that she refers to as the strategic butt covering so this is sort of a piece of batman's costume like the cape that comes down that covers the butt such that the camera cannot be positioned to look at a part of batman that might make you the male the presumably male player oh my god

Alexthat's fascinating isn't that interesting you can't look at his crotch either it's very disappointing because you can see that bulge from a distance it's like it's like a lot of and there are teams

Maxon these big...

MerlinYou should see the tick. The tick is rocking quite a hog.

MaxOh, good for him. On these video games, these AAA video games that have like hundreds of people work on them, there are literally teams of people that figure out how to prevent the player from seeing the third person character's ass. And there's also teams that do the physics for boob jiggle.

AlexOh, yeah.

MaxSure. There's like engines and math that goes into doing a realistic boob jiggle. And there are games like that...

AlexWhat's that volleyball game?

MaxBeach volleyball game is the famous example where they literally advertised it by saying, we have previously unmatched physics engine for doing the boob jiggle of the female volleyball players. I bet that's a hard problem to solve, like in actuality. It's like Pixar. It's like first you figure out that you're going to know how to do fur, and then you do Monsters, Inc., right? So my wife and my kid and I all use Bitmoji. We create a Bitmoji of ourselves.

MerlinMy wife and I have made Bitmoji of ourselves that I think mostly pretty much looks like us, mostly. and I sweated that. I don't know why, but I went in, I sweated that, picked the right hair, the glasses, the sweatshirt, everything. And so my wife and I use that and it's a fun thing we do. When my daughter does it, when she makes a bitmoji or changes it, she has fun with it. So hers always look like a devil. It doesn't look like her. But she's a fucking kid. You know, at this time, she's nine years old. Why does it drive me crazy that she doesn't make a bitmoji that looks like her? Why do I care? Well, I'll make sexy black dad

in this game I don't care about, but something as stupid as a bitmoji. I guess what I'm saying is like, I could see how this gets really fucking complicated. If people are not playing the game or taking it in the same way that you do, it must be kind of frustrating.

MaxWell, it's like, it's like, it's like anything else, right? It's like if you spend a half hour on the character creator and like lovingly, you know, make a person to role play as and invest a lot of your emotional energy in this thing. And it's part of your identity and your self representation. And then you pour yourself into the game and play it. And then you see someone else like making your character. you're like well that's kind of an insult to me right because it's like well i really invested a lot of my identity and energy into this and you're basically saying like ah fuck this like this is stupid and i don't think i was saying that that's not fair no i'm i wasn't i don't wasn't i'm not

Merlinsaying i'm just i'm positive okay i mean that's your opinion but i mean i was not just so you know

Maxi i it did not even cross my mind that you would be mad how my guy looks fine don't talk about me it's with your wife right it's like you spent all this time doing the bitmoji and it was important And you put, you know, even investing a tiny bit of your self-worth and your identity into making this little thing. And then your wife's like, ah, fuck that. My kid.

MerlinMy kid.

MaxOh, your kid. Oh, sorry. Your kid will just, like, be like, you know, here's, like, a cartoon. It doesn't, I'm not really going to care about this. It's sort of like, there's a little bit of a wound there. It's like, well, wait a minute. Like, what about, like, was I wrong? Like, or, you know, am I, like, lame for caring about this thing? Like, you know, once your identity gets into something, whatever, even if it's as trivial as, like, a character creator or something like that, It's like you have a lot of like infrastructure in your brain designed to like convince you that you're doing the right thing and that the parts of your identity you've invested in are like worthy and important. And that doesn't always like work in your favor.

Like that's why when things become, you know, arguing about politics and religion, like people like lose all rationality because like, no, I've invested my identity in this. Like everyone's wrong but me.

MerlinWell, I apologize. I didn't mean to do that. I didn't realize I was doing something insulting just for what it's worth.

AlexOh, no, not at all. It's more of like it's interesting just to see how people perceive their characters.

MaxI'm no more upset about it than you are about your daughter making a goofy bitmoji. It's just like a little like – Isn't it fascinating? Isn't it fascinating? It's like a little like I feel lame for caring about this now. Okay. You know what I mean? Yeah, I do. I do.

MerlinBut we use them a lot and it's like you don't look like a devil. Why would you do that? Then I go, wait a minute, idiot. The whole point of this is to be somebody else and do your own thing. and it's like then I feel like an idiot yeah you're right I feel then yeah then I'm the asshole

Maxyeah I mean I also want to say the other thing about this is sometimes this goes this discussion of like the character creator and people kids role-playing and stuff it goes like way off the deep end and goes too far and like like I and you get it from two sides right so on one side you have like people saying like uh games are empathy machines and children are role-playing and they're gonna be a more empathetic like a better generation and like like you know transhuman they're gonna to be like more moral beings because they like play with these characters like no they're not they're gonna be the same people as their parents who listen to rock when it's when they said that

their parents were listening to rock and roll music and it was gonna melt their brains like it's it none of this stuff changes human nature that's on the left and then on the right you have like rod drear wrote an op-ed saying that that letting boys play as girls and role-playing games is gonna make them trans like and he said that when he he's like when i was a kid i played dnd and I almost believed I was an elf. So if you're allowed to play as a girl, you might believe that you are a girl.

I'll see if I can find this. Chopo, there was a very funny Chopo Chapos reading series about this op-ed. It's one of the all-time worst op-eds of all time. But I'll see if I can find this Raj Rare trans-elf op-ed. Oh, dear.

AlexOne day I woke up and felt like a Gillette miscue.

MerlinExactly. I love those kinds of cautionary tales that are like, if everybody was as bad at this as I am, can you imagine what the world would be like?

Speaker AOh, my God.

MerlinImagine if everybody were as confused as I am.

MaxLet's make laws. Oh, shit dog, I found it. It's from the American Conservative by Rod Dreher. Can your avatar determine your identity? Okay, I'm sorry. I'm stealing a bit from Chapo, but I'm going to read a small amount of this. Early in my teenage years, I was a miserable nerd. One great joy in my life and in the life of my small nerd circle was Dungeons and Dragons. This was the early 1980s, and I was aware of the D&D panic in some Christian circles, but those weren't my circles, and my parents had no idea what I was doing. It was a heck of a lot of fun, and it became the center of my social life for a year or two.

Yet I remember one night lying in bed trying to fall asleep, thinking about the adventure my character was having in the game. I did this a lot, and that night was no different from any other. For some reason, it struck me that the life of this fictional character whose storyline I was narrating was far more engaging to me than the actual life I was leading as a ninth grade nerd and social outcast. Now, don't get me wrong here. I was not remotely close to thinking that the game was reality. It was a bit unnerving, though, to realize that I preferred to live in the imaginative reality created by the game to real reality in which I was deeply unhappy with myself and everything around me.

MerlinLearn from me.

MaxLearn from me. This character I played, I believe he was a half-elf, but I can't remember. Sure. Sure, Rod. was everything I was not in real life but wanted to be. There was obviously no way to become a half-elf. And if I had started presenting in public as a half-elf, I very quickly would have been made to understand that I was living in a fantasy world and ought to return to reality.

And then he goes in to talk about a New York Times about how the kids are allowing, they're letting boys play as girls and you can pick your gender, right? Which is like, it's like one man, and then he's like, it talks about someone playing a gay character in The Sims. The Sims. And then he says, is there ever a time in one's life when one's identity is more unsettled than adolescence? Even though things are rather more diverse in 2016 than in 1981, we are still not in a culture in which one can declare oneself a half-elf and find oneself affirmed and even valorized by one's

culture, including the institution of high school. We are there, however, with transgenderism and gender fluidity. What if the happiness I thought would be mine And if I could have... have stepped into constructed identity of my dnd character with whom i had come to identify after months of intense playing had been offered to me as something real how would i have reacted at 14 and 15 but there are no such things as half else there are no such creatures as transgenders gender queers and the lot right you guys this is really bringing up some shit for me i i had it

MerlinI had a year of my life where a lot of my identity was formed by playing Monopoly. And I could have been a race car or a shoe or a Scotty dog. I always played the iron.

I played the iron until it seemed, it might have been a half iron. I don't really remember. what I know is that to this day I feel the need to heat my cock and put it on the fancy dress wear and I feel like if someone had been there to step in and say there's no such thing as a half iron right there's no half iron or iron

Maxthe Scotty dog doesn't walk and the money's not real I was played as the shoe and now I can only get off to women stomping on my stamp collection

Speaker Aoh I'm the bank

MaxI'm the bank

MerlinWe'll be right back.

44. Oh No, My Wire!

Show notes

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