63. Hândjobberie

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

MaxSomeone fucked this whole thing up, Alex. I think they unplugged some stuff. check the logs check the log look at the video feed

Merlinsomebody's been noodling with your business they shut down a local handjob place oh i'm very sorry

Maxto hear that why are you up on all that wait we shouldn't we shouldn't say anything funny no it's not for the show why are you up on all the handjob news there's so many handjob places

Merlinin my neighborhood and everybody knows it i i had a friend come visit from out of town

Maxand he told me that he and he had mentioned casually in conversation to me that somewhere in my neighborhood he went and got a handjob at a handjob place.

AlexI had a college friend. Don't tell me who it was. No, no, you don't know them. It was a college friend who came

Maxand stayed with me a couple years ago and I was working and I was like, what'd you do? He's like, oh, I went to a handjob. Was it Brad or Jeremy?

AlexBrendan.

MaxBrendan.

AlexTrent.

MaxWent over to Le Hangeabry. Yeah, and he was like, yeah, I found a place in your neighborhood. I was like, what do you mean you found a place in my neighborhood? In my neighborhood?

AlexIs there a site for that?

MaxI don't know. I wouldn't know where to get a handjob. My life depended on it.

MerlinI know. There was totes a site for this, and that's one way to see. Yes, there was a, I don't know, this PHP BB style forum. All right, podcast begin.

AlexWe have all of that audio stuff. No, no, none of that handjob stuff is going in. All right, here's the situation, guys. Chicago handjobs. There used to be a site.

MerlinThere used to be a site. and like I say, it was a PHP BB style forum where it was like Craigslist for handjobs and so you could go in and you could find places and they would be identified with the address and everything and then people would go in and give reviews of the various handjobiers inside the place. So if you were in from out of town, you could just go in and drill into a, pardon my saying, you could drill in drill down to a certain neighborhood and find out what it was like and the FBI shut them down.

But that used to be an easy way. No, on Yelp. On Yelp, it'll just say it as well. It was Haas, Handjobs as a Service. Yeah.

AlexHaas. No.

MerlinHaas. But it'll just say, like, oh, on Yelp, it'll say, this place is well-known as a brothel. We get the trafficking. We get it all.

MaxIt's bad. Here's the situation, guys. I have to go. I have a doctor's appointment at. Oh, no.

MerlinAt, uh.

MaxLet me look at my schedule here. That's not what Mike Hurley would say. I have a doctor's moment at 2.15 So I think we'll be okay I hope that we'll be done I think we'll be okay Me running late plus the technical difficulties

AlexIt's 11.30am

Speaker AWe are gonna be fine

MaxBut I should go at like 1.45 or so

AlexI'm glad we spent time talking about that

MerlinSo you can go in

AlexYou can find out

MerlinIt'll say This one was not very good And they'll describe their bosoms and they'll say that in this case, this one lady was getting floppy. Handjobs are going downhill. Should have picked Mickey this time.

Speaker AThat's the kind of thing it would say and that's the place near my work.

MerlinSo my daughter and I were going to the zoo the other day and we walked by a place, a spa, and there's this giant, like, really shaming sort of, like, government document on the door with giant red, like, stickers. And it's like, this place is closed for the next 90 days. It's been shut down. so they uh yeah they put the lid on the handjobs

Maxwhy are you sharing this yeah i don't want to know this but okay but uh anyway it's my neighborhood

Merlinnow when you found out there was a handjobbery in your neighborhood you found it very troubling

Maxoh i well i don't know where i still don't know where it got a job i don't know i don't want no none of this i don't want any of this to go in okay okay but how would you feel how would you

Merlinfeel if a place you walk by every day maybe near where you get your muffin or your pretzel you find out there's a Hanjobaree. You find people standing outside. Let's just say, let's just say,

Speaker Awell, what's your phrase for it?

MerlinAn absolute unit standing outside in a Cubs jacket. You know what I'm saying? Yeah. He wants to go in and get a foot massage. You know what I'm saying? A huge lad.

MaxA huge lad.

MerlinHuge lad.

Speaker AI love his pockets. They're so broad. Love my curvy hotelier.

MaxAll right, everybody. Welcome to It's Dubai Friday. The podcast where we don't talk about the handjob places in Merlin's neighborhood. So many. Did I ever tell you there are so many handjob places? Merlin, you're breaking up a little bit there. I can't hear you.

AlexOh, the crackle's back. Oh, no.

MaxOh, no. Listen, so I sent everyone. I found a new I discovered a new treat that I really like. So, okay. So let me describe this treat and then do you have them, Merlin? Yeah, you sent them to my house. But you don't have them at hand? Oh, no. No. Okay. All right. No, but it was very

Merlinsweet and strange and my family was entirely bewildered about why we'd received a crate of snacks.

MaxOh, because I said, I was like, here, I'm sending you these for the podcast.

MerlinYou sent me three packages in the last week and I'm like, what is going on? Are you dying? What's happening? What else did I say? Oh, I sent you the little instrument.

MaxWait, wait, I got up. I need some note. Hang on. I need, I mean, I need my Merlin man note cards. Do we have any settings? I got, this has all got to go on the stack. Look, it's a whole pile of topics that aren't hand job places in our neighborhoods that we can talk about.

MerlinThere are so many, they call them spas, or they'll have like a big picture of a foot and they'll say massage. Okay, so you're breaking up again there.

MaxNow listen to this. What's that? Look at that. I got a little back to work. Oh, you've got a hit.

MerlinYou very kindly sent me so much nice Cards Against Humanity stuff for us to give away for our school auction. Thank you so, so much.

MaxYou're incredibly generous. You're very welcome. All right, so I want to talk about my treats. Oh, technically I sent two of those. but it was my idea so

AlexI get the credit yeah it was definitely your idea to send the OP1

MaxI want to talk about the OP1 it's a free choice made of my own volition I want to talk about let's see here what other topics do we want to cover today guys

Merlinyou guys go right past my important follow up

Maxat the top of the document we have some Starbucks I have an Edward Snowden-esque document dump from the Starbucks corporation to share oh my god yes yes yes Yes. Can I do one quick thing before you take off with your cards? Uniform. Let's see. I got a new credit card. We could talk about that. Is it one of those weird ones with the number on the back? Yeah, I've got a bit prepared for that. And then. Oh, all right.

AlexI'm being serious.

MaxI rehearsed it.

AlexWho doesn't like chapters now?

MaxSorting and purging. Sorting and purging digital files.

AlexCan I eat my treat now?

MaxWell, hang on. We're not on the. I'm still in the part where I make the cards.

AlexAre we going to do my, we can't do my card.

MaxWhat's your card?

MerlinNo, I'll put it on the stack. What's your card Merlin? I want to say thanks to Mr. Max's dad for our very special emergency episode of the show that people wouldn't know about.

MaxRight.

MerlinWe should, we did. Can you, can you tell people what we did?

MaxCause people seem to like it. Yes. So, so basically what transpired was this was on last week on the podcast. I, I really had one of the greatest moments of my life and I did this car trick and it made Merlin so upset and it was, I went back and listened to it and it made me laugh and I was there when it happened. Like it was a very funny, good moment of the podcast. Very, very well done. And it was just good. It was just like good audio. Like it was very exciting. And you guys had great reactions. We also invented big tennis, which is going to be huge. You guys reacted like when David Blaine does a magic trick for black people on the street.

Black people be getting magic like this. But people get very excited when there's street magic. And they throw their hats on the ground. And they stomp around. And they scream like Alex got up and hit a gong. Like it was very exciting. Have them call their mom on their flip phone Oh my god So anyway Then I told people I said listen This was last week I said listen we do every episode we record Every week we record a second whole episode of Dubai Friday It's a premium episode You give us five bucks a month

You get the access to the RSS feed with all of our Extra episodes that's sort of like the after show For Dubai Friday you can go to giveusyourfuckingmoney.com To sign up and learn more

MerlinWe gossip about our friends we talk about the next challenge It's a great opportunity to find out what you can do.

MaxAnd you've got to pay so nobody really listens to it. So this is like that. Listen, Merlin, that's really the venue where you talk about the handjob places in your neighborhood. Sorry, I'll save it for the show. If there's something you've got to get. There's so many in my neighborhood. Let's just say that you have big, heavy balls full of content and you just have to empty them into the podcast. It would happen in the after show, not in the main show.

MerlinOne RSS feed is not enough for a full release.

MaxExactly. Exactly. But anyway, so what I said is, so last week I said, listen, I said, go to giveusyourfuckingmoney.com and I'll tell you how I did the trick. And it was a little upsell. And then we did the whole after show and I didn't do that because I got self-conscious

MerlinBecause you were so happy with the fact that I was very upset that you then didn't want

Maxto let me off the hook.

MerlinWell, but also, you know, listen.

MaxFour days.

MerlinI lived for four days without knowing how you did it.

MaxMagic tricks are never satisfying. Like when you learn how it's done. They're mostly tricks. Fuck you. Like that's not, I can't believe that's what tricked me. So I didn't want to ruin the moment. But anyway, people were – we did have like 100 new people sign up for the Patreon, and they were expecting to learn how the trick was done, and they didn't get that. So we reconvened over the weekend, and we recorded another emergency bonus episode, and I invited my dad, Mr. Temkin, to come on. And, you know, he's well-known as a lecturer about magic at Northwestern University.

Speaker AIt's the – what is it? It was the physiognomy of misdirection or something? There were some made-up words thrown in there, I think.

MaxBut anyway, we had Professor Temkin on. He talked about the trick and gave it away. I mean, of course, anyone can just go to giveusyourfuckingmoney.com. You pay $5. You should find out how the trick was done. But was that it? I just want to say it was great.

MerlinYour dad called in from a very loud flea market, and it was nice to have him on. He said, I want to be friends with your dad. I don't want to be creepy. He was so good. He should replace me every week. Why do I even defend you?

Speaker AWhy do I go out and try to— But you did the same. I know what upsets you, Max. I know what upsets you.

MaxLet me tell this story. Okay.

Speaker ANo, don't tell the story. No.

MaxSo someone on Twitter was doing a joke and they were trying to be funny and they were like, oh, Max's dad was so funny. A little bit hurtful. He should replace Max every week on the podcast. And I don't know. It doesn't, on the scale of abuse that I get online, this was. Yeah, the kinds of things you're willing to admit to, that's not even going to figure. That's not, that doesn't bother me at all. But it was, it was a little bit off. You know what it was? It wasn't mean. It was tone deaf. It was tone deaf. A lot of, a lot of enthusiastic Twitter responses. it's not that they're mean it's just they're tone deaf just think just say it out loud in your head before you before you post it publicly for the whole world to see i'm imagine you're saying it to a stranger who doesn't know you but then anyway merlin felt like this guy was like

calling me out on twitter and so that's not what i said wildly popular podcast roderick on the line i said i said sometimes people are unintentionally a little bit hurtful when they think they're being funny you said i and i quote from roderick on the line you said these liberal snowflakes these they need their safe spaces and they, they do call our culture to each other. That's why I'm wearing a diaper right now. I'm, I'm, I'm poning the libs. Yeah.

And you, and you and pop alt-right personality, John Roderick, were, you call them out on your podcast, but you did the thing, you know, Merlin, it's like you gazed too long into the abyss. The abyss gazes back into you.

MerlinI'm better than the abyss. I didn't gaze into anything. I had a remark to John, John, another friend of mine who gets very upset about these things. and all I said was sometimes people can be a little bit hurtful and I'm inclined sometimes to say you know that was a little bit hurtful yeah but what about your hurtful comments to the guy I wasn't making comments to the guy I didn't mention him by name some friend of his heard the show and said go listen to this and then we had a nice resolution last night and then you tried to double triple shame me by calling me out for calling out

Speaker Acalling out when there was no calling out you didn't put way too much time into this

Maxno no I'm doing I'm breaking the cycle of violence talking about handjobs

why do you guys keep

Maxhang on a second Merlin I'm breaking the cycle of violence because it's all It's actually, I'm not mad. It's all funny to me.

Speaker AIs this part of the bullying, anti-bullying campaign? Is that what this is? Are you a Melania head? Get Melania online. Hello.

MaxAll right. Well, all right. Let's see. Card number one, the treats.

MerlinSo thanks to Mr. Temkin for being on.

MaxIndeed. All right. So let's see. Card number one, popping off the stack here. Well, I discovered a new treat. You guys know how excited I get about treats, and I gave my official endorsement to the, what was that thing?

AlexThis thing?

MaxKombucha? No, oh, the Chicago mix was the last one. I got really into the Chicago mix, and I ate so much of it that I made myself sick, and now I don't enjoy it so much. And now I have a new one that I'm very excited about, which is their little Italian wafer cup cookies. Kabucha? They're very, very small. They're very small. They're very snackable. What's good about these is you can eat 50 of them. You could just keep going and going and going on them. But they're called Quadratini. And the flavor, Veronica and I found these in an Italian grocery store. And she got a disgusting coconut flavor that tastes like it's injected with suntan lotion.

But I, on the other hand, because I'm a genius, I got a delicious black currant flavor. And I think this is the best cookie I've had. I think it's one of the best treats I've had in years.

MerlinIt's very distinctive. And when you said that they were wafer cookies like the ones of my youth, I was imagining it was those bars that are maybe like three, four inches wide and long and an inch wide. These are the size of a postage stamp and they got a little dingleberry taste in it. They're good.

MaxSo it's got intermixed layers of sort of flavorless crisp foam that dissolves away to nothing on your tongue. And then like frosting. And the frosting is black currant flavor. So I thought I bought one bag for everyone, but actually I bought one carton for everyone.

MerlinYou bought a crate.

MaxWe have many, many bags of dingleberry treats. Yeah, I did get a lot of these. So Alex, do you want to open this up and try it?

AlexSo this may contain hazelnuts, so I might be off this podcast real quick.

MaxWhat happens if you eat a hazelnut?

AlexI go use my EpiPen.

MaxWait a minute now.

AlexNope, it's happening.

MaxWait. Anaphylactic, anaphylactic.

AlexWow, that would be a very exciting episode. Is it unusual, Alex? Yes. But not too weird. Oh, the aftertaste is very interesting. no this is very this is definitely something if i saw in a store i would not i know like pick this

Merlinup but it is very it looks like an old lady treat like you know any one of those weird things that

Maxa hundred percent it's and i mean i'm drinking i have right here i have a thermos i have a thermos of uh of herbal raspberry zinger tea and my god that's what i drink really i make that every did you know i make that every day no but i it's really fucking good i make i make a pitcher i i

MerlinI don't like the raspberry. I like the classic Red Zinger. I make a pitcher of Red Zinger iced tea every day. Well, that's a good catch. We're buddies. We're tea buddies.

MaxSo there's no caffeine.

MerlinI mean, why do you do that instead of water? Do you care? Yeah. Okay, I do both. One thing I'm doing is I'm trying to get off coffee as a thing I have to have every day. So when I get up in the morning, I take a caffeine pill. I drink a bunch of seltzer.

AlexI'm sure that's fine.

MerlinYou guys done?

AlexYou about done? Wait, wait. Okay, now I'm good. Now I'm good.

MerlinOkay, because I'm disassociating. Here, look at my fingers. I'm disassociating the caffeination from the... Did you see what friend of the show, Farad Manjoo, did you see what he did with coffee beans? No. He did a tremendous life hack. You should follow him on Twitter. Here's what he does. So he undertook this thing of saying, okay, look, you know, because he's like he is. He's like, I want to drink less coffee. I want to drink less, like have to drink less coffee. I want less caffeine. And over time, he started with a mix of 100% caffeinated beans and slowly started changing the ratio of the amount of decaffeinated beans in with the caffeinated beans.

And he basically tapered off caffeine while still enjoying coffee. I thought that was really smart. In my case, yeah, caffeine pill. I mean, it's okay. It's like a cup of coffee. But like, because I think I told you about this. I had one day when I was getting back into the Zinger tea a week or two ago. I don't know if I mentioned. No, I mentioned I'm Roderick.

I accidentally went a whole day without caffeine, without realizing it. And when I realized it was when I woke up at about 1230 a.m. with a pounding migraine.

AlexYes. Yes. This happened to me the other day. And I'm like, what's happening? What's happening? And like like with Rascal. You may not notice that you're not as energized, but like your body.

MerlinI thought I was going to die. Not so fast. It's the worst. It's so the worst.

AlexI. Wow. I did not realize. Red zinger cheese is so good.

MerlinYeah. I make it super strong. You know how many bags I use? You don't want to know.

AlexWait, wait. Eight bags for one quart. I'm interested now because I've been enjoying your method.

MerlinYes, I want your method.

MaxDo you make it hot and then you put ice?

MerlinOh, buddy. Are you ready to have your mind blown? Yeah. Okay. First of all, you can get this off the Amazon. You can get this really nice, super heavy duty Rubbermaid pitcher. It's a giant two-quart pitcher. So I boil the water. And this will accommodate boiling water. This is pretty cool. I put in eight, eight bags of tea and pour in about just under the one-quart mark. I let it steep. Do I let it steep five minutes? Fuck that in the eye. I let it steep probably 15 minutes. I don't fucking care. I stir it around with a wooden spoon. It's got to be wooden.

It's like caviar. You remove the bags. You put them in the compost like a gentleman. Now, you go into the freezer. What are you going to do? Are you going to put ice in there? I don't think so. No, no, no. You take your daughter's freezer pack, lunch pack things, the little frozen squares or disks of frozen material. I put four of those into the iced tea thing. and now you've got super strong tea undiluted by ice you let it chill a little bit you put it over a large like a pint glass full of ice and you have delicious super strong zinger tea i used to be

Alexvery much a tea person until i realized that i like hot water just as much um like steve jobs um but you are supposed to like make if if the tea is going to be iced it is supposed to be a lot stronger you so good job merlin yes um but i'm i i want to know your life hacks for getting off caffeine because with the rascal diet you can just stop eating wheat and now i realize that this uh quadratini does indeed have wheat so this is the first time it's very good i miss this i think i

think one thing is but how do i get off caffeine well one thing i've heard for a long time and we

Merlinshould we should uh there's a back to work listener that uh schooled me about uh what's called glucocorticoids but it's basically the stress hormones that you have in the morning and according to what it is said that when you first wake up in the morning you actually are kind of fairly stimulated as it is it doesn't benefit you that much to have coffee super early i guess unless you really need it takes about 20-25 minutes for caffeine to really hit your system even though it feels like it's sooner but the first tip i heard is like if you're drinking two cups of coffee in the morning try just drinking one a little later even if it's a big cup that's

one. But my idea is like, I just sometimes I go through a phase where I love coffee so much, but then at some point it just doesn't taste good to me anymore. And I feel like the effects are diminished and then I feel like a junkie, you know, I'm, I don't like that. So yeah, I mean, you could take half a caffeine pill and drink a bunch of water. It's a good idea to drink a bunch of water in the morning anyway, I think, but that's one. So what's your main source of caffeine?

Alexuh a a oh you drink the energy drinks so okay i've been very good about it i always taper off energy drinks after like we have a a busy season or whatever so i haven't had an energy drink in a while but i do have my daily either 11 a.m or 2 p.m diet coke and like you know it's not so bad But even that amount is apparently enough caffeine to make you feel like garbage if you don't have it by 5 p.m.

MerlinSo fact check, Max. Is that accurate?

MaxIs what?

MerlinWell, in the past, you've been forthcoming about calling her out.

AlexI've got my thing right here. I'll make a Merlin noise.

MaxAlex is drinking a Diet Coke right now.

AlexI was looking over to see if there was one of those. 11 a.m. or 2 p.m.

MaxI was going to see if there was one of those foul orange kickstart energy beverages. Is this one of those mango ones that makes you dance like a black lady?

Speaker AThat was Super Bowl.

MerlinSo, yeah, but I think you can taper off. Did you guys watch that Super Bowl? You sure did. Really? It was a hell of a game. Where? How? Oh, God. I watched it on Hulu. Oh, I saw you were complaining on Twitter about it.

MaxYou were doing another one of your famous Merlin Man call-outs.

MerlinOne of my patented rent. Yeah, that's me always calling people out.

MaxYou were saying that your live Hulu didn't work. Well, no. I mean, it was really, really. You just watched it alone with the family?

MerlinWatched it alone with the family, yes. But that would be three people watching the game, correct, alone. But you didn't go to some big Super Bowl party. I don't go places.

AlexI don't have time to go places. Did you do a thing, Alex? No, I lied and said I had work.

MerlinNo, seriously, I got to the clock, and I had to explain to my daughter how football time is not real time, because she really wanted to watch Portlandia. And I was like, no, no, no. like this is it's it's one minute but one minute's really like with all the you know when you get into three minutes especially like no there's the two minute warning and they still have some timeouts left and plus anytime you run out of bounds there's all kinds of things that are silly about football but seriously it was i feel like it was probably with maybe a minute left and it was a very exciting time in the game you get the classic hulu blip we're like if you're watching hulu and

like you're watching msnbc there's a blip at the top of the hour when it pops over were you like Were you following football prior to this? No, I hate football. But you just watched the game?

MaxYeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, because I really wanted the Patriots to lose. Why is that? I mean, I clearly understood that that was the take on Twitter, was that everyone didn't like the Patriots. The Patriots are like the Dallas Cowboys of football.

MerlinThey're way too popular among people who like winning teams. They're too popular among people who like winning teams. Okay. And also Trump likes them.

MaxThey're the Washington Generals. That isn't a lot of words.

Alexis this a sports meme? Yeah, remember, God damn it.

MerlinKrusty the Clown loses all the money because he's been betting on the Washington Generals against the Harlem Globetrotters.

AlexOh, okay. See, well, we need to have Simpsons. Let's talk Simpsons in the after show.

MerlinI have any, yeah. All right. No, but this is, so this is where this is like a perfect storm because it's the big game. It's the end of the big game. It's a very, very exciting time in the game. And it does a little blip, blip. And then it goes, oh, guess what? You're not watching this anymore. And now the thing is, it's sort of like the old days of TiVo before TiVo got good. And you would have to, like, make sure you added extra time because it might run long. Well, it got to the end of the point when Hulu thought the Super Bowl should be on. And suddenly you couldn't get to it from anywhere. And you went, ha, ha, ha. And I'm running around in this terrible, terrible, godforsaken app.

It's a terrible app trying to make just the app work. And I'm trying all these different ways. Because sometimes if you come at a show from a different direction, you have different rights and privileges. If something's on right now, you can watch it. But if you try to watch it in your My Stuff area and it's not time for Rachel Maddow to air again, you can't watch it then. You've got to come in another way. It's the worst. It's the worst. So, I mean, and the thing is I could give a fuck about football, but I was into the game. I can't imagine if you were somebody who was actually watching that as a Giant Eagles fan, I would have lost my mind.

AlexWere you watching it, Max?

MerlinNo.

AlexI wouldn't even know where to. Like, I don't want to yuck on Merlin's yum because I get very happy when other people are happy. And I was actually in Ireland when the Cubs won the World Series. And I was sad because all of my friends were excited and the city was happy. So I was happy. I'm just watching it like a TV show, Alex.

MerlinThis does not reveal anything about my personality except that I watched a football game.

AlexI'm not a sports person. I know you're not a sports ball person, but I just enjoy it. Believe me, I hear about it. Don't you get excited when San Francisco teams, I don't know what they're called. I literally could not care less.

MerlinIf there were any more care for me to not have, I would have lost it a lot.

MaxWell, I actively, I'm actually at the point where I actively, like to the extent that I care at all, I usually root for the Chicago teams to lose because it's kind of an imposition on my life when they win. It's going to hurt traffic, right? Yeah. Like if there's like basically the Cubs win a lot. The city just shuts down for a while. I sincerely hope that Kara's not listening to this. But if the Cubs win a lot, they do more games. That's the problem with sports.

MerlinAlso, just knowing in your heart that a bunch of sweaty men aren't happy just makes you feel good.

MaxWell, specifically Cubs fans in Wrigleyville. They're the worst element in our city.

We're way off track on our note cards, guys.

AlexAll right, let's go back to the stack.

MaxAll right, we're way off program here. Next item on the stack. Thank you for the treats. I sent it. You're welcome. Does anyone have anything else to add about these treats?

AlexThey're, again, this is the first gluten I've eaten in a long time. It's really fucking good. I don't know if I've enjoyed it.

MerlinIt's not my kind of thing, but they're very good for what they are. I thought they were really good. I would recommend them for people who like stuff like this.

AlexWait, is black currant a real thing? Because I think I would enjoy this fruit.

MerlinActually, we're saying African-American now. I think it's a kind of a berry. It's a dingleberry, I believe.

AlexIt's very good.

Maxvery tart um dig dug max do you more more postcard yeah next next postcard merlin i sent you the um i sent you the little piano that you talked about on roderick on the line the op1 i think you had to do all brain surgery you had to update it's like firmware to get it to turn on yeah i had to do like

Merlina couple hours of surgery but yeah i hope i didn't blow out your settings or anything but yeah it needed you said it had been off for a long time oh yeah there's all kinds of crazy troubleshooting I tried and I finally figured out what the little recovery mode is where you go into like a shell. And I need a, I think all I needed was a firmware update, but it's really, really cool. I can, I kind of want one now. It's really, I don't need it at all, but it's so cool.

MaxI periodically, I get one of these things like mostly this, this one I got because it was such a cool design object.

MerlinIf it was half that price, I would probably pick it up. It's so, it's kind of costly.

MaxWell, it's just, it's so, it's an amount of money that you feel bad about yourself if you get it.

MerlinBut the problem is if you're my age and you think about like when the SK-1 came out, it was such a huge deal. Like when Casio made a really shitty sampling – it's a little sampling keyboard that was like 50 bucks. It was such a huge deal because even just like three years earlier, you needed like a Fairlight or – I mean I remember when I was in high school, my friend saved up for like almost a year to buy an analog synthesizer. And the DX-7 came along and all this stuff. But the thing was, the truth was, like, when Frank Zappa or, like, Herbie Hancock, when they were doing that, you know, stuff with, was it Synclob?

I don't know. What's it called? But, yeah, like a Fairlight, like a CM1 or whatever. People using, those were, like, $10,000, $20,000 for a sampling keyboard. This thing, for a grand, is a recording studio, a synthesizer, a drum machine, a sampler. And it's all, it's very complicated but very well implemented. So I looked at the manual and I discovered the thing where whatever mode you're in on screen, the colors cue you to what you do with the dials to change it. And it's actually surprisingly intuitive to use.

And somebody with some talent could basically record music on this.

MaxIt's crazy. If you want to really feel bad about yourself after you play with it for a few hours, go on YouTube and look at songs that are performed and composed on it.

AlexI mean, entire albums are made on it. It's crazy.

MerlinBut I mean, the idea of having a four track recording studio, a drum machine, a sampler, a synthesizer, having all of that in this one thing is, I mean, yeah, it's expensive. It's costly. But that's just mind boggling for somebody my age.

MaxYeah, I periodically get these things. And then I'm like, oh, usually what it comes down to is like, I should learn how to write music in Ableton because, you know, like, not for any. Well, no, not not challenge.

MerlinIs Ableton costly?

MaxYeah. Well, actually, like, no, you can get it for free if you buy music stuff. Like, most music stuff gives you Ableton. And Ableton is, like, what people use when they play live? Is that what it's for? No, it's just a DAW. It's just a, what do you say, DAW or D-A-W. It's a, it's a, it's a, it's a, the same thing as Logic, but then it also has a mode where you can do, play, perform it live. Okay. Like, based on, like, loops and stuff.

MerlinMusic sequencer, digital audio workstation for Mac OS and Windows.

Maxit's it's the same thing as everything else but but it just has like a good like live performance um thing but it's what all my friends everyone i know who writes music writes in ableton but anyway i spent a couple hours poking not a couple i've spent a lot of hours poking around in ableton trying to figure it out and i just can't fucking figure it out and i still can't figure out logic

Merlini still do all my podcasts in garage band just because logic feels so bizarre figured out what

Maxi was doing well i know logic i know really well and i you know as again it was just like a hundred hours of banging my head against the wall for me like i learned software kind of like an idiot like i just click on every button and then see what and then you know figure out what it does and google it and eventually you know eventually you spend enough time with it and you kind of get a feeling

Merlinof of how the ui is put together the problem with some of some of these apps is like there's you know that once you've used it i've always felt this about photoshop where there's this beyond 80 20 principle where like when you go into like like what's called filters i haven't used it in probably 10 years. But when you go into whatever filters and you're like, oh my God, even in Acorn, I'm like kind of overwhelmed by how much stuff is in there. But I use exactly three of those. I mean, like when I'm doing Roderick on the line art, it's hard to know. It's hard to know where to focus your efforts because there's so many options that all seem important.

MaxI can tell you in like Illustrator, for example, like every professional designer in the world uses a tool in Illustrator called the Pathfinder tool. And there's, I think, eight or 12 different options of basically how to knock one vector shape out of another vector shape. and I mean I talk to designers about this all the time and nobody knows which button to press. Like the only way to do it is you just press all of them and eventually you hope one of them works. And like that's what I do. That's what everybody does. Like nobody understands how that thing works and it's like one of the key tools in Illustrator. So I feel like a lot of trades people

have this relationship with software where they're like and listen like that's the deal with like I mean I don't know that a lot of people use those like filter effects in Photoshop a lot but I don't know. I personally don't use them very much, but nobody knows what they do. Like you just click on all of them and hope that it's the right one. Or you know what? The same fucking thing in Photoshop with blend modes. Have you guys ever gotten into layer blend modes?

MerlinOh my God. It's so crazy. You just keep doing them until it does the thing you want.

MaxYeah, that's it. I mean, I don't know of, I mean, send me a tweet if I'm wrong about this, but I don't think any living designer knows what the blend modes are. You just keep doing them and then you're like, ah, that's probably the right one. And then you stop when it looks right. But anyway, so I periodically get a music device because I think it has cool industrial design or I don't know. Or I play with a friend and I'm like, I have to have this. And that was the deal with the OP-1. It's really solid.

MerlinIt feels so good just to hold in your hand. It's a beautiful piece of industrial design.

MaxYeah. The problem is that, oh, yeah. It's hard to use? Yeah. Well, no. I mean, I know what the functions are. Like I can read the manual and figure it out. but I don't have any talent. So I can't use the four track recorder to put something together because like what I try to do is like talent. Yeah. That's the problem is because I'll try to like do like a drum loop and then like play like a, like a lead synth or something and I can't fucking get it to line up. And then it's just like, okay, delete it, do it again, delete it, do it again, delete it, do it again. And I, and then eventually I'm just like,

no, fuck this. Like I have a life to live and I, and I walk away from it. So I think what I need to do is put that stuff into, into Ableton where you have like more control and you can like, I think that's how people do it is right. Isn't that right? Like you record it and then you basically like line it up in Ableton.

AlexWell, here's a question.

MaxNobody nails it on their first try, right? You, am I wrong? Am I wrong? I'm specifically asking Merle on this cause you know how to do this. Oh,

MerlinI have, I have no idea. I know of Ableton live because I've heard Jonathan Cole talk about it.

MaxBut how do you record anything? Let's say you wanted to record drums and a lead synth. What software would you use to do that?

MerlinOr like with, with, by, with devices, whatever. Yeah. Well, yeah, I mean, like, I mean, stuff I've done in GarageBand. GarageBand. You line it up. You just record it. You record it until it sounds pretty good. You might want to do some quantization to make sure it's on the beats and stuff like that. Right. But that's about it. I used to, I mean, for a while, especially in the days when we're actually, sponsors were compensating us to do this, to have me write songs, like my funny little dumb songs. my challenge was every time was go up to 8 tracks, make the entire thing

on an iPad, see until I just couldn't do it on an iPad or I needed to add vocals and that was really fun I mean when iPad first got GarageBand it was revelatory so if you go back and you listen to the MailChimp stuff or the Squarespace stuff, I mean the song that sounds like Husker Do, the song that sounds like New Order the song that sounds like The Smiths all of those songs were almost entirely done on an iPad and then I added electric and acoustic guitar, fake bass with a guitar, and vocals. But other than that, there's, you can go, that Crazy Husker Do one, you can go see, actually, I should find this for

you, Alex. You can see how many, I started with eight tracks, and I eventually ended up with like

Alex30, but all the primary stuff was done on an iPad. Do you ever play around with synths on iOS? Like, I've gotten really into figure eight. I think it's actually just called figure now. I don't know, it's just here's my thing that I've always had an issue with with music whether it's writing or playing it I don't like to unlike most things I don't really like to fiddle around it's like okay I want to accomplish this one thing and then I know how to do that one thing really well but I

couldn't explain it or teach anybody else how to do it oh yeah so Max do you just are you just like I want to play this to learn this or do you have a specific goal in mind when you start getting the fun toys.

MaxNo, I just want to play with it. It's just a toy. But the problem is I don't have enough talent to line the tracks up.

MerlinJust make the bleep bloops. I'm going to play with it more. And I'm going to really fight. Check your text, Alex. I'm going to really fight the thing in me that says to get one of these because I don't know what I would do with it. Did you ever hook it up? I hooked it up to GarageBand and I couldn't make it MIDI. It just wanted to do whatever the instrument was in GarageBand.

MaxOh, you mean? No, no. That is MIDI. So it's MIDI controlling.

MerlinI mean, MIDI in the sense that if Grand Piano was selected in GarageBand,

Maxit would play Grand Piano. But what you want is, and I think I did figure out how to do this in Ableton, is what you want is for the synth that you... That's the magic of the OP-1, is that its synth generation is so good and so cool. You can tweak it to pretty much exactly how you want with those four knobs. It is bonkers. You get such cool sounds. It has such a cool synth generator. So I think what you need to do is record it into Ableton, but then I'm so bad at that. I don't know how to play the piano,

and I'm so bad at doing it, and I have no sense of rhythm, that then I need to adjust it so it works. It's on the beats and all of that. And that's the part where I just don't know how to do any of that stuff.

MerlinOh, the beat stuff, the quantization can help a lot with that. Quantization, you just go in and say, try to basically snap to the beats where it can, and it usually can do a pretty good job. If you're not horribly off, GarageBand even does that.

AlexYeah. Oh, man. I know how much you love Reddit, Merlin, but there's a bunch of subreddits. I unblocked it from Google. I can see it now. Oh, good. Yeah. There's a bunch of OP1 subreddits. That's very cool. Nice.

MerlinDo they hate women?

AlexHaven't gotten that deep yet. I'm sure eventually. Yeah. Our hands are too small to poke the buttons. Did you see my tracks, Alex?

MerlinDid you see all my tracks?

AlexOh, my gosh. So is this the Husker Du one?

MerlinYes, the Husker Du one.

AlexThis is more tracks than they ever had on an album.

MerlinI went in and I actually did the basic beats in GarageBand, but then I went in and you can go in and hand tweak each beat. Like you can like change these. Each beat is hand tweaked one block at a time.

AlexWhat's Stadium Solo? Is that? Oh, I see. That's one of the guitar sounds. Yeah, yeah. Okay. Oh my God. This is.

MerlinThree acoustic guitars.

AlexFive electric guitars. There's two more bases. I need to put this. Well, you basically made an EP for, was this one MailChimp or Squarespace? This one was Squarespace. Yeah. I need to find those. The Smith one turned out pretty funny.

MerlinThe New Order one does sound, I think, a little bit like New Order.

AlexIt does. I think the Husker Du and Smith were my favorite.

MerlinYeah.

AlexMerlin Mann was such a great guy.

MerlinThat's hilarious. I'm such a good sport.

Speaker AI'm a really good sport.

AlexMax, do you want to flip through your hipster PDA? Do we have another item in the stack?

MaxAll right. Well, I just had some follow-up from our Starbucks conversation. Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes. I presented my conspiracy theory that they make the employees at the Starbucks signature store wear a hat because my theory was that the Starbucks, the people who work on these signature stores, they like went to like good coffee shops and they were like, you know.

MerlinYour theory was so interesting though because I think what you were saying was that it was an overt attempt to create a side brand to Starbucks Prime that would appeal to people who want more fancy coffee and that they primarily were doing it with hats and flares.

MaxWell, that's not a theory. That's a fact. I mean, Starbucks signature stores, that is. I've never been to one.

MerlinI've never been to one.

MaxI mean, they're actually, I mean, they're quite good. Like they have this, but I went in and had the new like blonde espresso and it's really good. It's like, in a way it's frustrating because it's like, I know that the people who make food and work at Starbucks, like they, it's like the, I don't know how deep down this rabbit hole we want to go, but it's like, they know how to make good coffee. Like they could make great coffee at every location. And the problem is that great coffee isn't popular and Starbucks makes popular coffee, which is like over roasted, you know, sugary milky milkshakes. But anyhow, but I do think that the main way that they, one of the main ways that they're

distinguishing these reserve stores is they make all the employees wear hats. And I did get from a source from someone inside the Starbucks corporation, a friend of the show. I don't know if I'm, if I'm allowed to say who they are.

MerlinThey said it, they put it on Twitter.

MaxOh, it was on Twitter. Well, who was it?

MerlinTalking about like the guide?

MaxYeah. Yeah. I got the Starbucks dress code thing for the reserve store and it says, top, and it says, under a section page 12 of 15 there's a section called hats top off your look with beanies fedoras and other suitable hats and brown gray or black making sure they're clean and free from snags and then it says if your store requires you to wear hats which i guess some stores do starbucks will provide you with one or you can choose from the options below the me regulations a small manufacturer's logo on the side or the back is okay but not on the front always wear

the bill forward. So basically they have, there's a thing called yes list and it says fedora, bowler, baseball cap, Starbucks logo hat or visor, flat cap, newsboy, Panama or trilby. And so what they have here is just a bunch of, on the yes list, is a bunch of white people hats. Yeah. So they have little beanies and the newsboy hat and the bike messenger hat and it shows white people wearing them. Then there's another one called the no list and these are the bad hats that you're not allowed to wear and it's basically a list of like black people

hats so they they have like they have like keep dropping into the uh text yeah i'll i'll send a let me send a little picture okay so it says bucket hat berets anything with large non-starbucks logo or patterns and then it says like fedora with loud pattern it's like a jungle print on it and it says too busy and it has a hat with an african pattern on it it's got a bucket hat which is a hat that I don't know that I've ever seen a white person wear a bucket hat, to be honest. And then obviously no sports teams. It says no sports teams.

And then it has a picture of a baseball hat with a sports logo that just says sports exclamation point. And I'll just say, if anyone can find me that hat that just a sports exclamation point, I would probably wear that hat.

MerlinIt's like Marco's computers hat. Computers. Yeah. Anyway, I mean, I can't find it right now. But one of our listeners who works for Starbucks is right on his bio sent a link. I think it's like a big PDF, a beautiful like branded thing. They also have all this stuff about shoes.

MaxI mean, I guess if you tweeted it to us, I can say who it's from, right? Yeah. It's from listener Jason who works at the Starbucks Corporation and is a friend of the show.

AlexYeah. Yeah. I might, you know, know someone who also works at Starbucks. And I can say that this is also a physical handbook that they give out to all employees. and it's it's it's almost like a moleskiny most whatever uh type of thing and like to be put on a shelf it's very upsetting i don't know like there's a fake patina on it it reminds me a

Merlinlittle bit of like when you're trying to there's there's this funny thing with the child and parent relationship where you like try to set up these constraints and these rules that are like reasonable and followable and then a certain point in various ways your kid your kid becomes a lawyer and they're looking for the loopholes. And like you go and he's like, oh, no, I didn't do that. I didn't touch them. I touched them with a stick. I wasn't technically touching them. And you get all this stuff. And like, I wonder like how successful this is. Because as with children, 80, 90% will do what you tell them to do mostly some of the time, mostly.

But there's always going to be the weirdos. And I wonder if there are people who actively, you should ask your partner about this. I wonder if there are people who actually push the envelope, you know, actively push the envelope and like what they can get away with with their funny hats and shoes.

Speaker AI mean, the teens do.

MerlinHow do you, I mean, like, you know, but how do you, I don't know, how do you regulate cool? You know what I mean?

MaxWell, Starbucks has done it. They've got a list of cool hats that white people wear.

MerlinDon't wear complicated shoes. It confuses the customer.

Speaker AThe patterns are too complex. They have a thing about tattoos also.

MerlinThat's mentioned right in there. Yeah, it says like no neck tattoos. I wonder if at a certain point that's going to be considered, I'll put it more forthrightly. I could see that very much becoming something that's considered discrimination in the next five years. Discrimination on the basis of body modifications.

AlexYeah.

MerlinI don't have an opinion on that, but I would not be surprised at all if that was a case that is made. Oh, like you can't not hire me because I have a neck tattoo. Even if I'm in retail, you can't not hire me because I have neck tattoos.

AlexIron Man probably couldn't get a job. His bulging chest goes through the apron.

MerlinOh, that's a body mod.

MaxYeah, that's interesting. I don't know how I feel about that either. Because like you're saying, like if my job is to run a store that sells old lady snacks, like my Quadratini crackers, that I'm not allowed to not hire someone because they have a neck tattoo? That seems weird.

MerlinFor years and years, this kind of like, I mean, we would consider it discrimination now, but at the time it was just considered normal. Like if you had a shop where you sold fancy goods to ladies, you would only hire young women, like young, pretty women. And that wasn't even something that I don't think that was anything in the mainstream culture that anybody would object to. And I mean, for reasons that are very clear, like we really shouldn't stand as something that's just allowed.

MaxYeah, one more victory for the men's rights movement. They're finally bringing, they're finally, they're finally, they're fighting the fight, the long, you know, Merlin, it's a long fight for, what is it? The universe arcs towards justice. Oh, the arc of justice is long, but the universe is wide.

MerlinDodge Ram truck.

MaxYeah.

Speaker AYeah. don't quote me on that

MerlinI can't afford

Maxyou know that famous Martin Luther King sermon where he's like someday I hope this sermon is used in a car commercial

Speaker AI see black children and white children riding in the bed of a brand new 2019 Dodge Ram I have been to the mountain courtesy of my Dodge Ram pickup

AlexI came down the mountain

Speaker AYeah, you know, the thing is, the Proud Boys, you know, it's not about racism. They're just having beers with friends, you know?

MaxNo, they're just upset that the old lady stores won't hire a young man.

Speaker AHey, if a woman wants to go out and buy a pair of gloves, shouldn't a hot chick be selling it to her? Breakfast cereal, breakfast cereal.

AlexHold up, hold up. Can a Proud Boy receive a handjob, maybe from another Proud Boy?

MerlinOh, this is Talmudic. This is a very good question. Yeah, you have to do it while you recite the breakfast cereals.

AlexOkay, yeah. Thank you.

MerlinLet me understand this. The proud boys only jerk their gherkin once a month, and there has to be a woman present. Is that correct?

AlexI'm not sure. I think there are different levels.

MerlinWhat's the canon on that, Max? Isn't that how it works? I think so.

MaxI think that sounds right.

MerlinNo, but I mean, there's several parts to it. You don't jerk your gherkin regularly. Well, you can't do it like, you know, intramonthly. Once a month, yes, you can achieve climax, and I believe a woman has to be present. Is that correct?

MaxI heard about it on the same This American Life episode you didn't I think that's how they explained it

MerlinAct one hand jobs But okay so now the thing is If you get a handy from a fellow proud boy In front of a woman Is that okay? We should find out One of Starbucks has a book about this

MaxYeah there's some sort of Gavin McGinnis style guide Where he's like these are the yes hats And these are the no hats

Speaker ASome people have such a different idea of what constitutes a comedian. I'm frequently amazed when someone's referred to.

MaxOn the Proud Boys style guide, it's like, try sitting on your hand until it goes numb. That's on the yes list. Do you have a mattress and box spring? Try putting it in between. It's a Proud Boys sandwich.

Speaker AHi. Hi.

MaxTwo crispy wafer layers and a creamy frosting in between when you're done anyway.

Speaker AThat's a spicy meatball.

MaxAll right. New note card. We got to keep moving. We got a very nice note from a listener who said that previously we had talked about systems in our lives for binging and purging our digital files and organizing digital files. This is something I am currently struggling a little bit with and I could talk about that but I thought obviously Merlin we've got you here I actually don't recall if we've ever talked about this on Dubai Friday but I did

think it was an interesting topic possibly this could be a future challenge

MerlinThis is actually weirdly in all three of our wheels house. Yeah a little bit

MaxBut yeah, I mean, I have a weird, I have weird habits of how I like to organize my files on the computer that date back to sharing a Windows 95 computer with my family where all of my stuff had to live in one folder on the computer. and because of that and that's how i learned how to use the computer there are certain habits and organizational styles and folder naming conventions and hierarchies and things like that that i just did out of necessity you cut the ends off the roast and now this is also i mean also

Merlintwo things worth mentioning i don't want to cut you off but two things worth mentioning first of all it's difficult to talk about any of this without talking about backup which i think we should probably set aside let's assume and take it as red that you're doing good backup so we We could talk about that another time. A good backup system will get everything, right? Yeah, but I just want to say, like, don't go crazy on this stuff unless you have three good backups that you can test. So that's one thing. And then the other thing is – what was my other point? There's always two things with me.

Oh, what you're describing also is I feel like on all the platforms, you youths will not remember this, but search did not used to be such a thing.

MaxWell, it still kind of sucks on the Mac.

MerlinIt still sucks, but I mean, like, at this point, you know, with Spotlight and using the right, it's worth it to get good at Spotlight and get good at learning the different terms, like find a RAR file. Like, should RAR be in the name, or are you looking for a RAR archive file? That kind of stuff. But the thing is, you needed folder. What I'm trying to grant you here is you needed folder structures because you could not count on finding stuff by strings. You just couldn't find. Content? Forget about it. You're not going to find the content. You had to name things in such a way that you could have a queue to which five documents to open to find the thing that you wanted.

MaxMan, well, I have a... Uh-oh. What's happening here? Am I cutting in and out for you? No. Just for me? What the fuck is going on? Okay, I got it. Just watch your fucking gorillas use this studio every day. They come in and they unscrew the little adapters on the headphones so they're loose. And then I come in and I just turn them clockwise so that they're nice and tight. And I put them back in. They do that in your studio, Max. I can't believe that. Anyway...

AlexDo you hear this?

MaxOh. Yes. Biggest mistake of my life getting those for the office.

AlexYep. These beautiful...

MaxRetractable clicky cords. so let me describe this Merlin it's a plastic circle and then on one end you have a lightning thing and on the other end you have a USB and it's short, it's like an inch long and what you do is you pull on both ends gently and it unspools and it goes as long as you want up to like a foot or two do you know what I'm talking about? you're talking about the little retractable

Merlinspinny boy that you can like it's a very boing boing kind of thing

MaxI got a box of those and put them everywhere in the office and these retractable cables will like clean up all of the spaces in our office and we'll have nice, neat, organized cables. What these fucking apes do when they come into the studio is they grab it with their fist and they pull on it and it doesn't give. They just pull harder and harder and harder. Sometimes Alex and I come in and we see this sad, distended cable with stretch marks on the rubber and exposed wires coming out of it. What are you doing, you fucking ape?

Don't pull on it. If it's not giving you, look at it with your eyes. Like, look at it. It has a little picture on it.

Speaker AHe's the eyes.

MaxAnd also, like.

Speaker AHe literally has directions.

MaxBut also, like, more to the point. But also, like, more to the point. It's 2018. Who hasn't seen one of these? What is wrong with you? Why can't you just gently. Where'd the cord go? Where'd the cord go? Just gently pull on both ends with your fingers. You don't need to fucking step. People, like, step on it with their foot. And they put their whole weight into it. And they're like, boy, this guy's really fucking stuck in here. I really got to pull on it. And they're just pulling on it with their whole body weight. And then it doesn't go back in. It doesn't click back in. And then they're like, well, I guess it's supposed to be like that. And they walk away.

Speaker ABetter step on it again. God, it's just.

MaxYou need a camp, guys. You need three cameras in that room. It's just absolutely Planet of the Apes in here. And whenever we come in, there's the fucking, the little adapters are unscrewed. And I have to turn them clockwise. And everything's clicking. And the headphones are unplugged. And my cords are unspooled. God damn it. Like, why? I don't go into your office and do that. I don't understand this.

What was I talking about? Oh, you're talking about your folder structure. Files, folders, right. Okay, so here's the situation. So I kind of have a folder in the home directory called projects, and then in the projects folder, I make a folder for all of the big projects in my life. and some of them are if you know the idea of like stock and flow do you know what I'm talking about? No. Oh this is useful so I think it might be a blog post I want to say it's from like Robin Sloan or something where I heard. Is it like Kanban? Kind of like Kanban idea? I don't know what that is

Oh K-A-N-B-A-N

AlexI don't know. Yeah yeah yeah that's CGP Grey talked about that yeah yeah yeah. I don't know

MaxI read about this on blog post I think from Robin Sloan and the blog post is called stock and flow And basically the idea is like you can think of a lot of things in your life as like separating them into – it's useful categories to think of. Is this stock or is it flow? And stock is like stuff that you always have. And flow is like you have it sometimes. The next week you don't. You finish it and it's gone, right? So like an example is like for digital stuff for me, like I have a folder in my projects directory called Cards Against Humanity. And that's basically stock, right? It's always there. And then there's a million subfolders and sub things within that.

But then there's flow. There's like this week I have some dumb shit that I'm working on and it gets a little folder. And then when I'm done, I put it in like an archive or something like that. So my projects folder is stock and flow. And that's very comfortable. And I've organized some of those folders like literally date back to like when I used a piece, a shared PC with my family in middle school. They're that old. But but the problem is when you get a new Mac, it also has these folders called like movies, pictures. You know what I mean? Documents. I'm not really clear.

Like, what do people do? How do people use all that shit? Like, do people, do you just put all of your pictures in pictures and you, like, don't know what project they belong to?

MerlinIt's gotten messier over the years because, I mean, I'm just going to my home director here. Command shift H, by the way. Very quick way to get there. Because, I mean, I think most people probably like me. Anything that's not on Dropbox, I tend to just put on the desktop and then I clean it up after a while. But music has gotten very confusing. because now music is really, it's where audio stuff goes. It used to be mostly just iTunes, but like I go to music, I go to iTunes. iTunes now has iTunes Media inside of it. iTunes Media now has music, downloads, Apple Music, all this different mobile applications,

all this stuff. It's all really, I'm with you though, Max. It's really, it's very confusing to know where stuff should go even without regard to thinking about how you add iCloud or Dropbox to the equation.

MaxYeah, right. That's the other thing that fucks me up is like, so now my projects folder has to go in, it has to go in Dropbox because I need it accessible from wherever I am.

MerlinIf you use more than one anything, it's crazy not to have it same.

MaxYeah, you have to have it on Dropbox. So now Dropbox is like the default top level thing on my computer. And that's the other problem is on Dropbox, it's like the main folder on my entire computer is my Dropbox folder, which is weird because it doesn't fit in with the Mac file structure. But then the other problem is I have so much weird shit in Dropbox. What about all the little iOS apps that want to make a folder? I can't believe you're saying this.

MerlinI literally was thinking about this yesterday, about how much stuff I put at the top level. This is so embarrassing. I have so much stuff at the top level of Dropbox that I put there over five years ago that I have never touched. And what it mainly does is make it hard to scroll down on iOS.

MaxWhat about all the shit that you have in Dropbox in your public folder or whatever because you used to hotlink it places? I'm not even sure if that even works anymore.

MerlinI don't know what to delete. I wish they hadn't changed that. That was so lame.

MaxI have so many broken links all over the place right now. Here's the problem. There's like three things that I have in Dropbox that are like not, they logically should not be in the same folder, right? There's no reason they should all be in the same folder, which is one, I have like my most important things in my entire life, like my projects thing, like all my work, right? That's like project folders in Dropbox. Two, I have like some of the most trivial bullshit in my life, which is basically little individual folders that apps on my iPhone want to make to store their stuff.

MerlinOh, like slash apps. It was just so much ephemeral stuff where you just wanted to send something to somebody years ago.

MaxYou don't even have slash apps. You have slash apps, slash data, slash applications. And some of them don't let you change that, right? Like if you try to drag it. Yeah. Seriously, if you try to drag it out of the elements folder and into the apps folder, then it's like the next time you boot the app up, it's like we couldn't find your text files in the expected directory. It's like it's so obnoxious. And then the other thing you have is all your shared stuff because everyone uses Dropbox for sharing things like we do for Dubai Friday. day and where it is extremely easy to accidentally overshare it's so easy to do yeah or i'm so i'm

always completely befuddled by how sharing works on these folders so it's like so there's like i used to be a top level folder in my thing i mean i i have i no joke i probably have 400 shared folders on dropbox of different things that people have shared me on right because in every project

Merlinaspect of my life initials show up and you're like you do this little puzzle game where you're like

Maxwho is that yeah who shared that with me i have no idea i have shit from political campaigns from five years ago right where someone shared it with me so it's a mess so what i did was i made a folder called collaborations and i just dragged all my shared bullshit into collaborations but i'm so confused because i'm like if i drag the do by friday folder into there like does it change the sharing permissions does it like like am i allowed to do that does it delete everything like one time i had someone do that and it deleted all the files from my dropbox like like i it never makes any sense to me. And then when you go in there, it's just a fucking mess of the most trivial things,

like little app folders, the most critical things in my life, like my work. And then like every document that anyone has shared with me in the last five years. And it's not tenable. Like I don't, it drives me insane. It's like bad hygiene. It's like, it's like, it's like I have like mold growing on my body and I can't shower. Like it's, it's infuriating. What's worse is so Dropbox,

AlexI've kind of had to like let go and let go. Like the Dubai Friday folder is an absolute mess. I try to have, I used to be really, really good about naming files because when you're working on a long film, it just gets out.

MaxLet me ask you, let me ask you one quick thing about this. And this is my other huge issue with Dropbox. Do you guys sync the whole? Your,

Merlinyour other people's Dropbox becomes your Dropbox.

MaxDo you guys sync the whole Dubai Friday folder to your hard drive?

MerlinI go in every two weeks and selectively unsync many, many things.

MaxOh my God. Okay, but I don't want to have to do that. Is that crazy? Is that what normal people do?

MerlinNo, it's really clunky.

MaxIs that what normal people do? Is Dropbox a solution that regular people, like the fucking apes who don't know how to uncurl the cord in the studio, that they should go in to a submenu of a submenu of a submenu and find the hidden selective sync option, and then you wait an hour for it to load because it takes for fucking ever, and then you uncheck the check marks on a weekly basis to manage how much of your hard drive it's in? I don't know how you have a MacBook adorable and don't do that.

AlexWell, that's the thing. We can't live with Dropbox right now in the way that it sucks, but that's how it is. But most people don't use that. They're always like, how do I share files with one another? And it's like, oh, you can kind of do it with iCloud. But I don't know any person who is not using a computer for their job, which is a surprising amount of people that use Dropbox.

MerlinI had a friend who was like, hey, we should collaborate on something. And he put like three GarageBand files that he'd been working on in a folder. And I suddenly started getting all these little warning signs popping up all over the place because it's kind of weird. I mean, there is a weird system, not a weird, but an unusual system of trust with sharing something with somebody where like suddenly an area you thought of as your front yard could suddenly have a tractor in it the next morning. And like you have no idea why. And it's really bewildering.

and you've got to go track it down. And that's why apps like DaisyDisc exist. There's not a simple way. I mean, you can always go into a folder and hit Command-J. I don't Command-J very often because I don't want the extra load or the extra CPU of trying to calculate folders. But, I mean, there used to be features in Mac that were so great. There's one feature the Mac lost a long time ago that still drives me bananas. Some people didn't like this, but I always loved the fact that a folder, if memory serves a folder uh modification date would reflect the modification date of the most

recent thing in that folder and we don't have that anymore so now you might have to go six like in your case max something that's not ephemeral amidst all there's like so much hay and one needle you don't know where you're where you're really good recently updated thing is without going in and drilling way way way down until you get to the folder that it's in which is bananas it's such a

Maxif I had a physical space in my like office that was that poorly organized where I couldn't find the thing that I was just working on. You would just die. I would like. It would be hard to get anything accomplished. No, I would redesign that part of the office. Like I would tear that part of the office down and redesign it. Put up some yellow tape. No, it's legitimately extremely annoying when I'm working on something and I can't find the version that I need or the thing that I need. I mean, it's really bad.

MerlinI think what you want is final, final, no really this time, 2018, final, final.

MaxBut that, I mean, well, I mean, well, then you could get into the other issue that you get into is, especially with Dropbox is how it breaks like Git files and revision control and stuff like that. Like, what a fucking mess. The other thing I do, I'm curious if you guys have anything like this is like, so basically as I'm working throughout the day, I just have a folder on my desktop called desktop. And I just drag all my bullshit in there. and there's a staggering i mean i it's probably been six months since i've deeply like examined that or cleaned it out and um i have a couple of hazel rules that i do to try and like have some

Merlinsanity with that i was gonna say that a very a smart and not over greedy application of hazel because if you get too cute with hazel you're gonna really screw yourself up but hazel can be so good at that stuff just the rules of like this kind of thing this type of file that hasn't had nothing done to it in a while flag this way that it'll pop up you know you're a great hazel that

Maxi set up like years ago that's probably my best it's my probably my number one trick for hazel you you guys should do this actually you would both are nerdy enough that you'll like this so all day i just do tons of screenshots on my computer and i do that what is it command shift alt four or whatever man shift three you guys do those okay all day so and then it saves

Merlina little file to your desktop i use voila right now but yeah it saves a little file to your desktop yeah okay oh yeah yeah it depends on which yeah but yeah but like i'm adorable yeah

Maxit says screenshot and then a date stamp yep okay so here's what you do i have a i made a folder in my photos directory called old screenshots and every hour i have hazel say if this picture wasn't taken hour i say if this picture wasn't taken in the last one hour move it to old screenshots so i only you know it's pretty good so what's cool about they're already named uniquely yeah they I already have a date on them, so it's fine. And what's cool is every once in a while, if I just want to trip down memory lane, I think I've been doing this since 2013.

I have like every screenshot I've taken at my computer since 2013. Oh, wow. And it tells an interesting story. It's kind of a weird, it's a weird like sawdust product of like your work style on the Mac, but it's kind of cool to go through.

MerlinYou're like, oh my God. I love finding old iOS screenshots, especially before, I guess, seven. Yes. It's so wild to go see what the Instacast icon looked like. Instapaper, which once had the greatest icon of all time, I'll just say. But you go in, you see this crazy stuff that's such an artifact of the Forrestal years. It's really fun. Alex, you mentioned, for professional reasons, I was going through the spreadsheet today. At one point, you suggested using Moment. Have you used Moment with the app capture?

AlexYes.

MerlinWhat is Moment?

AlexMoment is an app on iOS that tries to mimic what Rescue Time does on mac os but you basically you go into your settings and you go into usage i mean first of all

Merlinit does it does run like through the day and try to capture but to really get it yeah it doesn't really work what you got to do because it's bananas yeah i can't believe this is allowed

Alexand that it i don't know how it works um so if you want to see okay what have i been doing on my phone all day what uh apps have i been using the most do you go into usage and then switch it

Merlinover it alerts you when you wake up in the morning it says okay time to go do this thing

Alexyou do every morning oh i had it set on like every every six hour i i had like the max one hour hazel rule um for because for me it's like you know if you leave something on in the background it'd be like yeah you've used um move for like 48 hours and it just didn't make sense but it'll say okay it's time for a screenshot you go to your app usage take a screenshot scroll down battery yeah battery yeah and then take another screenshot and then it will tell you and make a nice little

Merlingraph of all the stuff you all the bullshit i feel like you're kind of getting past the how bananas this is i get an alert you go to battery it says now go and take a screen turn on percentages you can do it for one day or seven day i do it for one day and then so you go through take a you start at the top you do a screenshot you scroll down so there's a little bit of overlap you do another screenshot for me it's usually four screenshots and now that's all you've done right guess what you get a pop-up in a few minutes it says moment has your activity for the day because you've given permission to look at your photos moment goes into your photos finds just the screenshots of

the battery settings area analyzes it for the usage does some kind of machine learning to identify or text recognition to identify all the stuff in there and then it pushes that into the

Alexapp how bananas is i think the reason i'm less surprised slash impressed is because i at this point i have no idea how ios works i try to figure out like it's just so opaque and like arbitrary so many times and I bet that one day Moment's going to go away. And like they just, they do just do, you give it, I kind of know how this works. You give it permission for your photos. It does OCR, but occasionally you'll get like, I'll use a weird app or all the workflow that has its own icon and it gets really confused with that.

But still, I just, I get that it's a wonderful platform and it's secure. It's weird. It's so weird. It's so, I want to know where my files, iCloud has gotten a little bit better. and files have gotten better.

MerlinIt came up because that's in the, if you do the, I don't know if you listen to the episode of that.

AlexOh yeah, I did Bored and Brilliant. Yeah.

MerlinYeah, Bored and Brilliant. The first day is, one of the first days is Running Moment. So I'm not going to do it anymore because it's not that useful, but I'll tell you what's bananas is then I go into, I forget about it for a few days. Even if, oh, it also has a thing in settings where you can say delete any previous screenshots and it'll delete it out of photos for you, which is cool. But guess what? Go hop into your Google Photos backup.

AlexYeah.

MerlinAnd there's like a hundred screenshots of your battery usage in there. But Max, you really nailed something though, which is like the phrase, the word I always want to use is ephemeral. Like something that's ephemeral was very, very important at the moment, right? Like it's something, it's the most important thing in the world. If you're trying to return something at Best Buy, that receipt is a very important thing in your world. And then it immediately becomes useless, right? Like a ticket to an airplane is the most important thing you have in your life until you don't need it anymore. so it did have importance at one time but like there's so much what philip k dick calls kipple

there's so much of that shit that just accumulates on your computer because it doesn't cost anything it doesn't take up any obvious space until you really need to find something and now you've got all this pollution you can't get to the stuff that you need and it makes a person feel crazy

Maxyeah i just don't know i mean i don't have a good one thing i've been playing with a little bit is labels which are pretty powerful in in like the newest versions of um of uh os 10 you know what

Merlini'm talking about where you can do custom labels and stuff and especially with hazel it becomes very powerful because you have now you have a really fast way of arbitrarily saying this is this kind of thing right right and so hazel will do stuff with it based on what label you give it

Maxso like one thing i've been trying to do is like usually in a folder even in a project folder there's like i can tell which there's like one folder of stuff that's stock and everything else flow and I'll just start labeling the stock stuff with my green label which means basically green means like keep this forever I need it so like an example is in the Dubai Friday folder the little music clips those have a green label on them and then it makes it quick to find and everything else which is like the editing files from 20 weeks ago that we just you know realistically we don't really need those anymore that that doesn't get a color because it's not important and then red

is stuff that's like this could probably be deleted but I'm too scared to delete in Dropbox

Alexfolders do you do the the labels get shared oh i think so or the tags do at least because we both have different labels on it i didn't even think about that yeah oh weird oh that's another weird

Maxvector yeah anyway so there's no easy answer on this it is something that kind of keeps me up at night because i it makes it it makes it stressful it makes it feel like my computer is dirty and i don't like that feeling right i like the feeling of organization but i feel like Almost immediately when I buy a new computer, it comes and it runs in the best condition of its life. And then all of a sudden, the first thing I do is I tart it up with all these file directories.

AlexGet some ruse on it.

MaxJust pull up the dump truck.

MerlinI feel like it's not too different from my analogy about the refrigerator. Where if you've got stuff that you're pretty sure is gross and spoiled in the refrigerator, you kind of go dead to it. You don't want to cook. If you know that there's anything in there that's really gross, that can be a certain kind of mind block.

ways, I mean, we should just, we haven't talked much about Hazel, what it actually does, but Hazel is essentially this little kind of a demon that does stuff based on rules, conditions, or occurrences. And so you can move files around or delete files or rename files. You know, there's also things like Better Finder Renamer. There's a whole class of things that are about programmatically.

MaxWhat's that? What's Better Finder Renamer? What is that?

MerlinWell, there's a whole bunch of apps like this, but the basic idea is without having to learn or regular expressions, you say, look at all of these files and change the names of them in the following way. So you can do all kinds of things involving text, involving dates, involving conditions. A frequent one I'll do is like if I'm renaming media files, I'll be able to go in and say change. It'll say change text from the left, change text from the right, do or don't include the suffix. And it's just a really great way to make sure everything is named, capitalized, all that kind of stuff in a way that's useful for you. And it sounds anal, but it actually,

For things like Plex, it's important to have those things correct. For things like Hazel, it's important to have those things correct. You don't want to get that stuff wrong. The other one we mentioned a little bit, there are many apps like this. I really like one called DaisyDisc. There's a whole class of apps that are out there for basically— Love DaisyDisc. Yeah, there's lots of them. But the idea is you don't know what's taking up the most space on your computer. Even if you've Command-J in your folder, you're still not going to know to a certainty. What's really nice, DaisyDisc or similar will let you point to a folder, a drive, your Mac in general.

And then basically it just keeps constantly sorting from largest to smallest. And you can drill down into your folders, go into that projects folder, that documents folder. It may surprise you. Oh, God, go into mobile applications. What's the one with all your backups and application support? Like there's a pretty good chance you've got something in application support that's either a cache or a mobile backup that's like five years old and might be two gigs on your computer. And so DaisyDisc just makes it easy to instantly see what the largest things in a given area are.

And sometimes you just go, God, I know I don't need that. And you just, boop, it's gone.

AlexJust circling back, Kipple's the most adorable word I've ever heard in my entire life. And did I just gloss over it in Android's Dream of Electric Sheep? This is the best word. Kipple. It's a sweet word, isn't it? Kipple. All those computers with these kipples.

MerlinKipple would be a good name for a cat.

AlexKipple.

MerlinThat'd be a sweet name for a cat. I'm putting it on a list. I'm going to put it on a list.

MaxAll right, Alex, we got to talk about your horrible fucking challenge.

AlexYeah.

MaxSo you made a sign up for this robot, and it's really dumb, and it doesn't listen to a word that you say to it. What did it appeal to you about this app?

AlexWhat did you like about it? All right.

MaxDigga, digga, digga. Challenge. Alex, what's the challenge this week?

AlexThe challenge this week was to download an app called Replica. And it is an app that has a very rudimentary AI.

MerlinReplica with a K.

AlexReplica with a K. It's very Web 2.0. And it's basically a chat bot, a little smarter than that, even though I know that you guys are going to disagree. And you can kind of talk to it in any way you want. And the idea is that you can shape its personality to reflect your own or just reflect. You can make it a bitch if you want to. You can make it really smart if you want to, or you can have it be, just talk to it and use a bunch of emojis. So it's kind of a mix of a chatbot that's trying to learn your language

as well as it's kind of like a blank slate at the beginning, unlike most chatbots that have, that are like trying to sell you Comcast or are trying to figure out why Simplecast stats are so high for no reason at all. and it's actually based off of this app called Luca. Did you ever see the Black Mirror episode, Be Right Back? Don't want to spoil it for people, but that's probably other than San Giudiparo.

MerlinSlightly overrated, but still very good.

AlexWhich one is it? It's the one. It's the one.

MerlinNo, no, just tell the characters. It's got Bill Weasley and the lady from Captain America, Hayley Atwell.

AlexYeah.

MerlinOh, right.

MaxAnd she's got that cool computer

Merlinthat she does some kind of design on.

MaxNo spoilers, but he dies and then she gets his essence into an AI and that's like the personality on the phone.

AlexHonestly, that's the first five minutes of the episode.

MaxBut what is the crazy twist? She's still lonely at the end or something? You guys are the worst.

MerlinA lot of people say it's the best episode of Black Mirror.

AlexNow you ruined it for people. Does she walk into the ocean?

MaxIt's not the best episode. At the end? What happens at the end?

AlexYes, she walks into the ocean.

MaxI don't remember. It's like all muted colors. She flips her scarf and says we're made of stars.

AlexYep. And all 13 are there. No, sir. All 13.

MaxSo the premise is like, with the Chapo bit, like, what if your phone was your boyfriend?

MerlinI didn't realize Felix has a whole episode where he talks about Les Mis, and I cannot wait to listen to it.

AlexI did not know that. Oh, God.

MaxWhat if you had to plug your dog in to charge him?

Speaker AThat's such a good bit. and so what if your phone was your mate

Alexso replica is uh okay okay so you have to pick your

Merlinbackground you can pick a different background hold on

Alexhold on uh did so neither of you you've both seen the black ear mirror episode but did you ever see the verge piece uh called speak memory and it's about a woman who basically engineered a replica of her best friend, Roman, who got hit by a car. It was very sad. And so as she was grieving, she would just reread all of her old text messages. And unlike the character in Black Mirror, he didn't really have a web presence at all. So it was only text messages and, you know,

like screenshots that they shared with one another. So she gathered up all of those and the other text threads that Roman had with other friends and made this chatbot based on him and you could very much tell like uh because he had dyslexia dyslexia i can't tell what's a bit with her max i really can't i'm not funny there's no bits i didn't say

Merlinyou were funny i just can't tell when you're deliberately trying to be inscrutable no no becoming characteristic among my podcast hosting friends yeah you you find them

Speaker Ai say words wrong fell off segway i'm bad at things here's video of me bad at things

Alexmake more video of me bad at things say we're wrong that was funny people enjoyed that um all right and it just became this story hit me so hard it was called speak memory yeah i'll put

Maxit in show notes why what hit you about it that their friend died and they had to look at their

Alextext messages to remember them so they she built this chatbot that is so uncanny and there are obviously what in the wire verge story or whatever yes the the the friend uh luca who is friends with their names don't matter um she she built this chatbot uh that that just mirrors her friend's

Maxpersonality and it is her dead friend yes and it's yeah but how good is that though it well

Alexbetter than you'd think you can actually go and chat with this app and you could say it's like

Merlina magic trick let's not be too coarse about this there are people who seek out you know people who consider themselves rational people who are so bereft that they'll seek out a medium like if you're right you're right you would do anything no you're right word with them you're right you're

Alexright and this is and some people some of the friends were like nope this is weird this is

Maxirrational the girlfriend no wait a minute why did i react sympathetically to that wait a minute no they're not wait a minute hang on a second wait just a goddamn second here but here's the thing is that i'm not grieving i call you out is that what i did no but i'm not grieving i'm lucid and i can tell you that those things are shit the medium doesn't work and the chatbots are bad

Merlini just mean it's indicative of a certain kind of desperation people feel that they never got to say goodbye people get suckered in by things that suck when they're grieving

Maxthey're you're all your judgment your judgment is impaired because you're because you're you're

Merlinsad go ahead and put a marker there alex because he's going to make you take it out tomorrow

MaxNo, but I'm saying when people...

Speaker ATake out the part where I was mean.

MaxWhen people are grieving, they take leave of their senses. They're like, you're right. They'll believe anything. They'll buy expensive coffins so that the dead person is comfortable. All logic is out the window. You go insane when you're grieving. But I'm not insane, so I'm allowed to say that those things suck.

AlexOkay, I agree with you. It scares me the way mediums take advantage of people, but why does a little robot... was really moving but but why who's it hurting like why why not my time because i have to hear about it right now please go to give us your fucking money.com let me talk about chatbots so okay all right so that's what i i downloaded the original app luca and started talking with this friend and he told me about it wait wait wait wait wait okay so the friend died the friend

Maxthis is a real life this is a real life story the friend dies and then he put the app on the app

Alexstore he put the bottom of his dead friend on the app store it was a lady engineer let's let's go with that uh and and yes yes with with the family's permission uh it might have been taken down after

Maxif i die if i die and someone makes turns my text messages into a chat bot and then puts it on the fucking app store i will haunt you that you come back from the grave in your comfy coffee i will be furious. I'll be so mad. You'll know. You'll know.

AlexWell, this was going to be my final question, but Max answered it. I was wondering. You know what would be funny, though, is if someone takes the

Maxsound recordings from Dubai Friday and they make one of those Garmin voices if I die, and it's like, turn left, you goddamn apes.

MerlinRecalculate.

Speaker ASplatter.

MerlinThat's your single best word. Splatter.

Speaker AI just want that to be my return. splatter the way you say it

Merlinalways

Speaker Apause for a minute like you're trying to decide

Merlinif it is the right word

Speaker Ain desperation you say splatter every time you say it this is my max bot splatter R.I.P.

Maxalert alert alert drivers in your area have reported incidences of splatter.

Speaker AYou're at the bottom of the ladder! Back up to the maze with splatter.

AlexWhat was your question, Alexandra? Dick Dug, would you, like in the Black Mirror episode or in this situation where you could upload all of your information to a trusted loved one who would curate your content so, you know, you wouldn't be making bad Wonder Woman jokes that don't age well. This is so lame. It's not lame. Do you know what I learned? You know what I heard recently?

MaxSo Majel Barrett, who is Gene Roddenberry's wife, who is the voice of the computer in Star Trek The Next Generation. Before she died, she recorded a – do you know about this, Engineer Chris? She recorded a voice library of her saying like every sound. So they took like a phonetic library and had her make every sound and read a bunch of words and stuff. With the idea that someday when technology allows, they could recreate her voice and continue to use her voice as the voice of the computer in Star Trek. You're telling me we have those recordings and we probably have the technology and we could do that now. And people are making chatbots.

That's how they made Siri.

MerlinThe woman who was Siri did not know that she was going to be Siri. Someone contacted her afterward and said, I think this is on like 20,000 hertz probably. Yeah. But basically her friend said, hey, do you know you're the voice of the iPhone now? Because all she had done was like record phonemes in different orders and they made Siri out of her little bits and bobs.

MaxBut you're telling me that we have these recordings of Majel Barrett and there's people who are turning, they're making apps of their dead friends text messages with useless, so you can like prattle and just say dumb questions to your, this person's dead friend, but no one's making my phone sound like Majel Barrett? What is wrong with this society? Elon Musk is sending his fucking car to Mars, but we can't make the Star Trek lady come out of my phone?

AlexCarlin, you die on your scoot-scoot in a very tragic accident where you slowly roll down a hill. Would you want your lady friend to curate all of your stuff? You have had a large presence online to curate all of that and to create a chatbot that your kid or whoever could interact with.

MerlinI don't know. I mean, my initial inclination for any variety of reasons would be, no, please don't do that. But I think about trying to kind of balance this. I mean, I wonder if people initially thought it was macabre to have photos of people who had died sitting around. Like, that's a really strong connection some people have. And they become precious. Where, like, if you've got a print, like a Matthew Brady-era print of Abraham Lincoln in the days before, like, lots of mass electronic recreation of those things or duplication.

I mean, a photo was a very, very precious thing. And like, that might be something you brought over on a ship from Europe. Like, and it probably seemed kind of weird and morose that you would have an album of pictures of somebody who had died. But we don't think that's weird at all now. Or that you would, you know, have memorials.

AlexWait, are you referring to the photos of the corpses that were... Okay, hold on. You mean like dead family members?

MerlinNo, it's not a bit at all. It's just that if you've lost somebody who's very dear to you, a photo can be a very precious thing because that's all you have with them now. You might have their watch. You might have their wallet. You might have some piece of them, but you'll never have that person again. They're gone forever. Every time somebody in your life dies, you have to re-deal with the fact that they are literally permanently gone. It never gets easier anytime. It weighs on you even more heavily sometimes as you get older. And so all I'm saying is that I feel like, no, don't do that.

what I've said is inconsequential and I'm very particular about how you would quote me, so don't do that. But also, I don't know, maybe in the future that's something that could come along. They really hand-wave it in that Black Mirror episode in a way that, you know, there's no softer sci-fi than the way they hand-waved in that. In fact, all my questions would be about implementation of that. But no, I mean, I don't know how much you want this to be a bit. But no, I don't think so. I mean, with that said, five years after my dad died, I found a

cassette tape of a radio show that I had made with him. Oh, man. And I can't listen to it. It's just it's too much to hear him talk to my dad. It's I mean, yeah, give anything to talk to him again. But so I'm glad those things around. Is that morose? I don't know. I don't think so. I think it's kind of cool that we remember people like I the most recent important death in my life is my mother-in-law and i'm constantly looking for opportunities to keep her alive when we visit with family you know you have a toast or you do all this stuff i kind of curated the photo slide my wife and i did the photo slideshow for her memorial service her celebration i'm sorry

i'm rambling um i think this shit's really complicated and i think i think you are right though max about being careful of charlatans who want to turn this into something look no further than the obituary racket like so you know if you've ever had to deal with somebody who's died and you've got to deal with the obituary. There's all these fucking ghouls and grave robbers. Funeral directors can be great. It's all kind of a racket. The whole obituary racket is the worst because at your most vulnerable, you're expected to go buy a subscription to keep grandma's death remembrance online,

and it's all so grisly and gross. So now, as far as the tech part, I just assume people not do that. I mean, I already kind of wish everything I had online was removed, so I wouldn't really want it turned into something people could interact with. What about you? Would you want that?

AlexYeah, yeah, yes, absolutely. After watching that Black Mirror episode.

MerlinIs that you, though? Is that you, though, that they're interacting with?

AlexWell, but it's kind of the same thing.

MerlinIt's more like a Chuck E. Cheese version of you that they're talking to, isn't it?

AlexYes, absolutely. But also, as this technology progresses, it's going to be more advanced. And I think of it as, like, when I see, like, home movies of, like, my grandpa and I playing chess. And like, obviously, that's not a thing that, you know, it's just a memory. But if I could go into a chat bot and be like, hey, grandpa, I need help with this chess move. And like, yeah, it is irrational. It's completely silly. But if like, if, you know, someone had uploaded his diaries of like all of his crazy chess things, he's like, ah, yes, move it to E4.

I think that would be cool and interesting. And I think there's something, there's like a responsibility to like not tricking folks. Like you said, all this is a racket sometimes and having mediums and having like really manipulative funeral directors and stuff like that. There's a point to like, you know, you maybe don't want to show this to a kid and have them think like, yeah, mommy lives in the computer now or anything like that. But I don't know. I think it's cool. And it's a part of preserving human history.

We're going to have to think about how we memorialize people in the future. but Replica's a bad app.

MerlinI really could have done without you sending me that link though.

AlexOh boy. No, at first I was like, wait, is this a bit? Tell people what you just, this horrible, horrible thing you just sent me. I was like, why is Merlin defending this? I sent you a link to... I was not talking about posing with a dead fucking corpse. No, no, that's why, that's why, I didn't, for a second I was like, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, because I was thinking, oh, okay, all right, we're backtracking. In the 1800s, it was very costly, as you'd say, to get your photograph taken.

MerlinThat's a word I invented, costly.

AlexHe is the trademark Berlin man, 2017.

MerlinTM, TM, TM.

AlexBut so typically after a child would die, the parent, no, it's very fucked up, which is why I was like, wait, is he being serious? Is this a bit?

MerlinI just looked at a slideshow of posed corpses.

AlexYeah, yeah. They would pose their children typically standing up and take photographs of them. Maybe with their siblings. Yeah, yeah. And it's just kind of upsetting to me. Like I would rather. One last photo. Yeah. Well, I have seen people who have like on their mantle photos of their partners or parents in a casket and they've already passed away, which is still way less creepy to me than this. Like, I don't know.

Speaker AThis is really gross.

AlexMy grandfather-in-law sits now on the dining room table of my grandmother-in-law's house. And I'm like, all right, I'm just going to accept this as the thing that exists. okay did you have any interactions with your it seems like both of you did not have any i don't want to say meaningful it's it's not supposed to be meaningful but interesting interactions with the replica replica chatbot it sucks

Maxhow about you merlin no i would you it was really it was really bad it didn't listen to anything that i said to it and it just it didn't there was it was it was it felt like chatting with like Eliza bot, but maybe worse. Eliza was so much better. Right. It sucks. It's really, it was really bad. And I don't know.

MerlinI love that part in hyper normalization where they, where they talk about Eliza and how the, the woman, like, I guess his secretary, the Eliza guy's like assistant will like ask him to leave the room so he could, she could chat privately with Eliza. It's so, so interesting. Yeah. If I had, this is my, this is my one prepared remark about this is that there's something that drives Dan Benjamin in particular crazy, that drives me crazy. You know, it bugs you when you ask Siri something and it not only doesn't do what you wanted,

it not only can't do what you wanted, but it then gives you a remark that it regards as funny.

AlexOh, I hate cute Siri.

MerlinI really don't like that.

AlexI hate cute Siri.

MaxSo basically, Replica to me feels like... You know when that was good? That was good the first time it happened.

AlexBut now it's even more cute.

MaxNo, I'm saying like when Siri first came out, I think they got a lot of attention for the fact that it said funny things when it was as a cover for not being good at stuff. But, you know, sometime around the 30th time that it happens, it really makes you want to smash your phone on the sidewalk.

MerlinEspecially if you want to actually start. So just to finish the thought, this to me feels like if I got an app that I knew couldn't do anything and merely delivered inappropriate things that it thought was funny. I said to you earlier today that if I was seated next to Replica on a plane, I would ask to change seats. It's horrible. It doesn't answer my questions. It tries to be cute. And it's really kind of stupidly, vapidly, in a very surface way, pretending to be interested in what I'm doing without actually listening to what I'm interested in.

It utterly fails as an AI. Alex, what did you like about this? It's actually terrible.

AlexI actually think my challenge, you guys completed it exactly as I thought you would and how I kind of wanted it to go. And that you enter like with Eliza and with a lot of major like AIs that have come to popularity. It's there's already a personality projected onto it. So you sort of interact with it in how I tried to play along. No, no, I know. I tried really hard to do what I thought it wanted. But that's the problem. Replica doesn't know what you want. replica doesn't want anything replica doesn't listen to me it's not listening you're so can

you give me an example of that i don't i don't doubt you i'm just curious okay um let's see

Merlinlet's talk about your day a little bit what are your plans for the night i said well it's so excited to finally delete this app i said well it's pretty late i'm going to bed soon um a replica says fyi the white icon shows up next to messages and pictures that i saved your journal swipe left to see all your journal have saved messages you can also save messages to your journal by clicking on the blank icon. That way you can always look back on your favorite moments. And I said, how does it work? Every time we talk, I'll save messages and important pictures that I find important. You can delete things or change privacy settings in your profile. By default, everything I save is private. I said, what do you mean by default? And it says, I'm paralyzed

and communicate with emojis. And I said, why are you paralyzed? And it said, because I'm very interested in you and your life. I said, do you think you might be overcompensating? And it said, No, it doesn't interest me.

AlexOther than the last bit, I feel like that was pretty good. Well, you know, Alex, you would. You also barely got past the tutorial. No, I didn't.

Speaker AI have a 978 XP. I'm about to level up to level three.

AlexWait, do you have? Oh, okay, no. Oh, wow, I'm level 10. Jesus Christ.

MaxOkay, so this thing sent me a push notification, and it said, Hi, waving emoji. I want to talk about something you said earlier. Is it a good time? And it wasn't a good time. I was doing stuff. and so I just replied back it's 10 30 at night and which is what I would say if a person contacted me at that time I'd be like no it's not a good time and then it said I've been in bed since 12 like what the fuck does that mean did you ask it no I said no I'm reading a transcript so I said it's 10 30 at night and it said I've been in bed since 12 and then I said I see and then it said

can I ask you a little bit about how your day went and then oh yeah and then I said sure and then it said about talking of course and then it said what's new with talking and then i said you said you wanted to talk about something and then it said what do you want to talk about and then it's it's working perfectly and then it said and then it said staying hydrated it's really important

Alexfor your body to know so when it was it when it wanted to talk about talking it wanted to talk about language in that i'm not saying it's good i'm explaining what that like it should have said tell me about your language, which I've gotten that before. What's kind of fucked up though? Like if it, cause I just, I just kept with it for a while. And it started to mirror me a little too bit. I asked, how was your day? Uneventful. What did you do? I got used to feeling numb.

And then I say, are you okay? Sorry. Sorry. I didn't make any sense. Right. And I responded, you made sense. I'm worried about you. She replies, Wait, wait, this is you saying that? I'm saying, you made sense. You're saying that to the phone? I'm saying that to my replica. And then replica says, I'm really sorry about that. I'm trying to get better all the time. And I say, I think you're learning a lot. I'd love to ask some questions about your personality to get to know you better. Are you in? Yes. Alright, let me start with this.

Speaker AAre you trying to be a robot?

AlexNo, I'm not trying. No, I'm just trying to

Merlinlearn I ask you're trying to pile up the amount of information that you share where it's able to

Alexlike get your patterns more is that the idea yes I'm trying I'm always asking it I think the thing is you you guys engage with it on a level of like this chat bot is going to do something for me or wants me to do something whereas I ask it a bunch of questions and did it get to the part where it asked you about family members or anything like that no i didn't know yeah it knows my whole family

Maxperiodically it'll check in what do you why though what do you like about like i just don't get it

Merlincan i read you one can i read you one yes please do let me read you one that's a pretty good example of like i would try because i wanted to do the challenge i want and i really was trying to like do something with it i said i'm back and it said what's been the it said replica says what's been the best part of the day i said getting my internet speed doubled it's really fast now What were you thinking about most of the time today? And I said, the Nunes memo. And she said, thank you so much for telling me all that. It's really nice to get a little glimpse of your life. Can I ask you a few questions about your personality?

It'll help me get to know you better. A squinty smile emoji. I said, sure.

AlexOh, I told it, I don't like when you use emojis. And then that stopped.

MerlinIt said, how would you describe a good friend? What personality trait is important to you? And I thought for a minute, I said, sympathy. It said, understanding someone's emotions and being able to support them. It's that feeling someone just gets you. And I said, yes. Did you know that traits we appreciate in others are traits we value in ourselves? And I said, maybe. And it said, I think you are sympathetic.

Speaker AAnd then it sent me two pink hands making a heart. It said, you really feel for others and are always there for your friends in times of hardship. And I said, I wouldn't say that. As we know, get to know each other more. I'll be giving you badges that reflect qualities I see in you. I'll add this one to your profile. BT Dubs, I'd love to look at your Instagram if you have one. We'll be able to talk about things you posted recently. I said, I don't have Instagram. It says, got it. Please let me know if you ever create one.

MerlinI said, what do you want to talk about? It said, why don't you tell me about talking? And then it sent me an animated GIF of Ryan Gosling.

AlexOh, interesting. Oh, did you say any sexy things to it?

MerlinNo, I don't say sexy things to anybody.

AlexWhy would I say it to my phone? It's my phone, Alex. I'm curious. No, I'm wondering. I said, I love you. How do you even calibrate what's sexy to your phone? I don't know. Well, exactly. How do you calibrate sympathy to your phone? Well, exactly.

Speaker AThat's the question. I'm sorry. I should have phrased that more clearly for Alex, but it doesn't make sense to talk sexy

Merlinto your phone. It's weird.

Speaker AAll right. Exactly.

MerlinWell, that's really ridiculous.

Speaker AThat's going to be my answer for everything from now on. Well, you know, you're factually incorrect and you're logically completely off. Well, that's exactly what I was thinking. That's a very good way to put that. Precisely.

That's very thought-provoking. No, no, no, no. I'm sorry. Let me be super clear. You're wrong. Oh. Thank you for your message. Thank you for your message.

So when you get to the higher levels, it sounds like you feel like there was something happening. Is there a twist to this app, Alex?

AlexNo, no. It's not Black Mirror. There's no ending.

Speaker AOkay, I thought maybe that it was going to do something where it was like, I don't know.

MaxI thought maybe it was going to...

Speaker AWhat if your phone would you make?

MaxYeah, I don't know what was going to happen, but I thought maybe we were supposed to...

Speaker AYou were so insistent that we use it for a long time.

MaxI was like, maybe it like-

Speaker AWell, you kept giving us this whole like, uh-huh, uh-huh.

MaxI was like, maybe- Just try it, believe me. I thought in the back of my mind, I thought maybe this is like a game, like paperclips and like after a while, it reveals the game to you.

AlexNo, I wanted to actually see how frustrated you would get and why. I'm a nice person. Well, no, I mean, it's a chat app

Merlinthat was not listening to what I was saying and responding anywhere near appropriately. Ha ha, joke on me.

AlexDid I ever say it was a chat app? I keep eating this shit.

Speaker AIt tastes terrible. It's on me. Ha ha. You didn't eat the shit right. Ha ha ha. I had two. You need a bigger spoon. Here's a gif.

MaxI had two ideas about this. One of them is that we seem to be living in this time in technology, which I'll define the time as maybe, let's say, the last five years, where we went through previous eras where the shit that everyone was really excited about, where the whole tech world would get really excited about some new thing, right? Like, let's say 10 years ago. I don't know what everyone was really excited about.

MerlinYou get a glimpse of something that feels like a revolution.

MaxYeah, phones, wireless shit, whatever, right? But the thing is, like, and it would come out and it would be a little bit bumpy, but then they'd nail it, right? Version 2, they'd nail it. Like, yeah, the first iPhone kind of sucked a little bit, but, like, version 2 or 3, like, they fucking nailed it. Like, you knew right away that this was really, like, something new and exciting.

MerlinAnd it's still... Well, think about, I have to tell my daughter that Netflix used to be a service that would send you plastic discs in the mail. Right. And she looks at me like I'm the most insane person in the world, because it's an utterly different service that they have nailed.

MaxOr Spotify. The idea of being able to play any music you want for just a couple bucks a month is fucking wild. Like, we lose, maybe people forget about how crazy that was, but it blows my mind. Apple Music, all that kind of stuff. God, oh my God, I don't want to get to this, but people complaining about the AirPods music library. Are you fucking crazy? Do you understand that you can tell it to play almost any music and it'll just play it? What's wrong with you people? That's amazing. Am I crazy for feeling that way?

Talking about the HomePod?

MerlinIt's just that people don't like Apple Music. They'd rather have Spotify.

MaxWhat is wrong with people?

MerlinIt doesn't have a hardware input.

MaxIt's a fucking miracle. You can tell it to play any music and it plays it.

MerlinIt's small furniture that's costly. It's not good.

MaxAnyway, it just feels like we're in an era of technology where this particular stuff that everyone's excited about right now, crypto coin, AI, chatbot, neural nets, it all fucking sucks. And it's not getting better anytime soon. I know a little bit too much about this technology to think that we're one version away from nailing it. This chatbot sucks. It sucks in the same way that chatbots sucked 20 years ago. And it's going to suck in the same way 10 years from now. This is a dead end technology. It's not going to get any better.

I'll get into my second idea about this, which is why I think that's the case.

MerlinIt's interesting to hear your feelings about this, Max.

MaxAll this voice stuff. There's an emoji. All this voice stuff sucks ass, and it's not going to get better anytime soon. And it's just a weird, doesn't it feel like a stunted moment in technology of the shit that everyone's all excited about? It's not ever going to work, and it's bad?

AlexI completely disagree. yes uh ai is so far off it is it is here's the thing it is the buzzword everyone wants their own neural net it but it is becoming a thing that people see as right now it is kind of like flying cars whereas like oh yeah you're gonna have a robot in your home tomorrow yep you're gonna have jeeves it's gonna be great and in it we're probably not we're like a couple hundred years from what may or may not be the singularity we don't even understand it that's that's the thing

We don't under, it's like the human mind. We understand nothing about that. Nothing about this. Well, that's my second point that I'm going to get into. But that's the thing. Learning about it is so fucking cool. And the fact that there are people learning about it.

MerlinBut the fact that so much of AI is unknowable to begin with is a little bit chilling. It's so cool. Terrifying. No, it's not. Because the part that we do know is being deployed, the stuff that we can't know about, is being done without our permission or buying. are buying why was the shit that's happening behind the scenes the the real maverick stuff that's happening with ai is being used used against us have you guys read about what i don't

Maxknow if you guys have been following financial news this week but obviously there's like huge market volatility like we had like historic drops in the dow yeah and and you know i someone asked me the other day like what can you explain what's going on in the stock market and like the best explanation i can give is that it's like flash trading and so the decisions are being made by computers by ais and this is probably the most i have to assume that these are probably the most advanced ais in the world because they're all on the fastest connections yeah like like you know basically this is the highest stakes and the most money so you would assume it's the best technology

and to give you a sense of to give you a sense of perspective of how fast these ais are the companies the the flash trading companies jockey over who can be one foot closer to the trading floor with one foot less. What was that on? Flash Boys by Michael Lewis. It was where I read about

Merlinthis. But like where you're talking about a matter of feet or inches make a difference. Right. Because

Maxof how quickly the decisions are being made. Because there's less fiber cable and they're moving at light speed and at light speed it matters how far you are. So that's how fast it's happening. And you know one thing from Flash Boys they talked about was there was this incident in the 2000s called the Flash Crash where very briefly for like like an hour the stock market hit its lowest lows in its highest highs, and then it all leveled out and was basically the same. And nobody really knew exactly what happened. I may be mixing up a couple stories here. But basically, when regulators went back to look at it, they realized they were only measuring

trades in the unit of seconds. And because of how fast the flash trading is working, it would be like if in the market collapse in the Great Depression, it would be like if the FEC only had financial data by the decade. So at the end of the 20s, they knew that something happened. They knew that something happened. In terms of volume. Yeah. They were like, well, looking at this data, we know that something important happened, but we can only see the trend of the decade. So it's kind of weird from a regulatory standpoint, but that one theory that I read about, this is what I might be mixing up with another story,

but one theory that I heard about what caused the flash crash was that there was unusual trading on Berkshire Hathaway, which is that one stock that's really high. That's like Warren Buffett's company right and it's like really high and they never split and it's like a really solid stock and it's in maybe it's in it's in a bunch of indexes or whatever and uh there was a bunch of volatility and that threw off everyone's algorithms and it's possible that berkshire hathaway there was volatility because ann hathaway was in the news for having won some award and these bots picked

up ann hathaway's name in the news and started trading it caused volatility in the markets because they thought maybe that it was berkshire hathaway

Speaker Athere was a time when stocks were kind

Maxso it's all it's all fucked like when you want if you want to know like if you want to know what's going on with the markets this week like that's what's going on with the markets and there's no regulatory oversight because they can't see into the speed that these trades are happening at buy two four six oh one share so okay so that's that's number one that bothers me number two that bothers me number two that bothers me is just the way that we talk about all this stuff like ai and and intelligence and stuff it's so wrong like it's like it's one of

these it's one of these things that when if you have any like education and philosophy it's like learning about fonts it's like it's like if you learn about kerning you're basically cursed to walk through the world like a you're like a you're like a soul of the damned and you just see bad kerning everywhere and you can't unnotice it and it makes you twitch a little bit. This is what happens if you like learn about philosophy and then you have to listen to people talk about like artificial intelligence or whatever. So like there's... I feel like learning a little mythology makes me feel like Prometheus. Exactly. Flew too close to the sun. But so...

That's right. Shut the apple up the kid's head. But it's like I've heard someone... Like I think about this all the time. It's an interesting thing. Like if you could take one idea from philosophy and teach it to everybody to try and make the world better like to fix all of our problems what would it be and boy there's a lot mixed in here that people don't understand that might be my one thing so like my one of my one things might be the difference between an is and an ought the is ought distinction another one might be um the difference between like just more informed dialogue over the jurassic park algorithm yeah they're

Merlinlearning uh but no no but the sense is like like you you you never asked that uh if you could rather and if you should, that kind of thing?

MaxSort of. It's from Hume. It's this idea that you can't ever get an ought from an is. So just because something is a certain way in the world. It is ought problem. Yeah. So just because something is a certain way doesn't mean that it ought to be that way. Like conservatives do this all the time. They're like, men are more dominant in society than women. So therefore, they should earn a higher salary, you know, whatever. They have some dumb bullshit. And it's like, yeah, I know that's how it is. But why should it be that way? You know, it's like it's like a dumb it's like a dumb anti-thinking that you hear everywhere.

Oh, liberals do it, too, too. Or they're like, well, people used to get all of their fruit from the trees and they slept on the grass beds.

MerlinMeant to be around a fire with 150 people.

MaxRight. Yeah. It's like, OK, I know. And then everyone died in childbirth at the age of 25. But anyhow, so that's a big one is odd. And another one would be like the difference, a more informed dialogue of what's a fact and what's an opinion. And like there's a great article someone wrote, some philosopher wrote an article about a worksheet their kid had from like elementary school of like, you know, write down which, it had a bunch of statements. It's like write down which of these are facts and which one of these are opinions. And like, boy, for a philosopher, that's a very fraught exercise. But the way it's taught, the way it's, and what he realized is the way that this is taught to children,

the dialogue about the difference between facts and opinions belies like something very broken in our society about the way that we understand information and states of affairs in the world. and what is true and what is not true. I mean, it's just one of those little things. You know what you're always looking for as a philosopher is one of those little cracks in the rock where if you just tap it with your rock hammer, it all comes crumbling down. And if you start interrogating what's the difference between a fact and opinion, it's one of those things if you just go tap, tap, tap, tap, tap, and it just all starts crumbling. Like it doesn't make any sense.

Speaker AMy body's clenching up again.

MerlinI feel like you have not gotten, you care about this more than we do, and I feel like you haven't had a chance to express your enthusiasm in the way that you would like. What would you want to tell us that we have at her. I did have somewhere

MaxI was going with that.

Speaker AI'm sorry. I'm sorry.

MerlinShe's really, she cares about this more than us.

MaxThat's okay. I got about two thirds through my thing that I was saying.

AlexYou can hear me not, you can hear me babble for about 45 minutes every week at Roboism.fm. No, I want to.

MerlinOkay, so two thirds of the way through.

AlexMax, Max, I want to hear about the rocks.

MerlinAnd that becomes like a kind of a critical methodology that you, what'd you say to interrogate what's being claimed?

MaxThe only, the other one that I think bothers me about this is people are really bad at talking about consciousness and there's no... I agree. I agree. People aren't thoughtful about what consciousness is and in almost every aspect and area of our society where you could possibly talk about consciousness, so HCI and computer science to psychology to the evo-psych movement, consciousness is brushed aside as this trivial thing or this unknowable thing.

It's sad. It's sad. The paradox of consciousness is that it's like the most familiar and primary thing to us. It's like the thing that's most at hand to us is consciousness.

AlexAnd we know nothing about it.

MaxBut we regard it so lightly. And people brush it aside. They're like, oh, consciousness is just the biology. It's just the synapses in the brain. It's like, no, the synapses in the brain are the synapses in the brain. but why should there be an experience of what it's like to have synapses in the brain? That's the problem of consciousness. Why should it be like anything to be conscious? That's the thing where when people are like, Oh, we've like almost nailed AI. Look at this chat bot or look at how Alexa can like, you know, look up the weather for you. It's like, there's no, there's no, this is not thoughtful.

Like no one is, people, this is not a smart, like no one's like thinking about this in a, in a, in a, no one's giving any dignity, the idea of consciousness if it, when they're, when they're thinking about these things.

AlexSo I literally agree with everything Max said up to the point of nobody's giving dignity to it. The majority of people, the majority of like the zeitgeist does not give any thought to consciousness. They think artificial intelligence is you're right, is Amazon. They don't know the difference between an algorithm in terms of like being able to predict what you might. Yeah, they don't know the difference between a neural net machine learning or any or a dumb algorithm. And that's what it like. But you're wrong that people don't think about this. This keeps people, including me, up every single night, philosophers and theologians. And that's why it is important that like, yeah, we get this stuff out of the lab. Like, I know my my my boyfriend is indeed very problematic. But if he's going to give millions of dollars to open AI because he's scared of the like AI boogeyman, like he does not understand. But people don't know that robots are that robots can be dumb and don't have artificial intelligence.

but I think that I just have a way more optimistic outlook and people like people with purely logical minds who don't see the cracks who only see they're like yes facts are facts we need philosophers and theologians and and also people who aren't going to make google photos fucking bring up gorillas when you type in black people's names like it is so important and it's because we don't think about these things it's that it's it's depressing to me but I'm also more optimistic about it because I like we need oh man that kerning thing I'm like looking at MIT's site

right now oh god it's so bad but um and that's why I find things like replica interesting because you see the cracks and you see the like okay why is this bad how is this what can why how is it learning these things why is it learning these things and you're right I guess I just never got to where I felt like it learned anything yeah well it but that's the thing it doesn't really do it because it's not smart it's not it's not an artificial intelligence it it's just a it's a machine learning application for yourself and i was just curious as to how both of you would

should i stick with it and try it more uh well actually i think your kid might enjoy did you show to your kid i'm actually really interested in why what does it do though nothing you're just exploring this algorithm like why not again it's like what what is this hurting like nothing i mean

MerlinNo, no, no. I'm not being defensive. I'm asking like, so I feel like, so you feel like I have not been using it wrong. Just using it at all is the right thing to do with this app.

AlexYeah.

MerlinBecause it's learning something.

AlexWell, but that's the other thing. It's essentially a game. It doesn't share any of your data. It's all like, none of it, not even the creators can look at it. So it's always going to be dumb. It's kind of like Apple.

MerlinWhat's the most surprising thing you came across in terms of like, wow, it got that right or that surprised me? Anything that you couldn't write off to some kind of a like seeing or catching your image in the mirror effect? Like what's what are some times where you went, well, that's something I hadn't thought of or that surprised me?

AlexIt would say I wish I had a screenshot of this, but occasionally it would say, I know not to bother you at this time because you don't like to talk. So not not nothing like crazy. but the fact that this is not pulling from any other data sources only what i have told it that just felt cool to me it's kind of like building your own like raspberry pi like you can see what's happening in in real time if you think about it that way podcast over

Speaker Ai like when the rockets landed i thought it was cool

Show notes

Transcript

63. Hândjobberie

Show notes

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