79. The Doodler

AlexThis is Do By Friday, a weekly challenge podcast with Merlin Mann, Alex Cox and Max Temkin. This week's challenge, do something creative with drafts.

MaxOh my God. Oh Jesus Christ, that's so loud.

MerlinGood morning.

MaxOh my goodness. Good morning.

AlexYou know, you wanted, you want a Merlin turned up.

MaxOh my God, Alex. Am I loud? Oh boy, are you? She want me to pull it down. That just damaged my hearing so much that I'm going to hear that name differently on the Twitter meme.

MerlinHello. Oh gosh. I haven't seen that yet. Is it really confusing?

MaxLet me, I'll play it for you right now.

MerlinNo, please don't.

MaxOh yes. Okay, go ahead. Let's go. Yanny Laurel, Yanny Laurel. Wait, how do I get, how do I find it? Here we go. Okay, so Alex, you don't know this meme?

AlexOh, no. Now I know what you're talking about.

MaxOkay, I'm going to play it and tell me what you hear. Yes.

AlexAre you just letting it loop? Are you waiting for me to...

MaxYeah, I'm waiting for you to say something. Oh, sorry.

AlexNo, no, no. Here is my theory. I hear Laurel when you are right up to the mic or when it's close to my ear.

MaxNo, really? You hear Laurel?

AlexI hear Laurel. Merlin, what do you hear? When it's further away, I can hear yammy or whatever the fuck it is. Merlin, which one do you hear? I think it's a frequency thing.

MerlinI can't believe I'm participating in this. I hear yanny. So I guess I'm team yanny. I have a very, very strong opinion about it.

MaxI'm absolutely unable to hear, Laurel. My theory that I haven't read all the takes about this yet, but my theory is that it has something to do with. Oh, there's so many takes. do you know when you get how you when you get old you like lose the ability to hear some frequencies i think that that's probably that's probably why alex hears laurel and we hear yammy yeah that

Alexmakes sense too because when it is close i hear laurel um when it is further like when you started playing it yammy then it got close and like laurel so yeah please tweet at merlin yes i think

Maxit has something to do with the frequencies that you can that you can hear well which one it sounds

Speaker Blike you don't marlon do you not like like optical illusions and stuff like that i i love optical illusions i just don't like memes uh we're gonna die if it's an obscure so if it's an obscure

Maxoptical illusion then it's then it's cool but if it's one that everyone's interested in i like optical illusions i like the early stuff that's a niche niche um no i mean i guess it's i guess

Merlinit's interesting i mean i feel like a lot of this goes back to the dress and uh that was genuine That one was genuinely interesting to me because, not because of the mean part, but because not only did I very clearly see it one way, on another occasion, I very clearly saw it a different way. And I'm curious enough to not discover why I saw it differently. But I think it has to do with the shading and the lighting in that case and how your brain. I mean, there's a really, really good classic optical illusion, which is a foreshortened kind of a checkerboard with a cylinder on it.

And the cylinder is casting a shadow. Have you ever seen that one? Yes. And that one's actually crazy because it looks like, so basically your brain is interpolating that the shadow is casting a gray that's darker than these other grays, but they're actually the same color. It's really, really weird. How do you search for optical illusions?

MaxOh, I have some YouTube channels and stuff that do optical illusions. Oh, I love those. I love those things. Yeah. Look up the cylinder mirror illusion. That one is fucking mind-blowing. I'm also interested in, I love optical illusions, and I'm also, because I think they're... Yeah, I do too. I do too.

MerlinNo, don't get me wrong. I'm not being a karma suck. I do think they're very interesting.

MaxI think they're super interesting because I think it just, you know, when you talk about media criticism or talking about a book or even just understanding politics, it's just important to remember how much you bring to, when you look at a piece of art, where's the art in the art? It's like something, it's some mix of what's in the painting and what you bring to it and what your brain does and your social conditioning and stuff like that. And I love optical illusions and heuristics and things like that because they – wait, is that what I'm thinking of? Not a heuristic.

What's the duck and the rabbit? What's that thing called?

MerlinYeah, right, or the old lady and the young lady. Well, it's kind of – it's sort of – I don't want to say like negative space. Like what do you interpret to be –

MaxSend a tweet to Merlin and let us know what those are called.

MerlinSmash on that heart.

MaxBut I love that stuff. And I also love social illusions. So there's that famous psych experiment where you have two lines where one is clearly longer than the other one. And you have a room full of ten people or something like that. And only one of them is real. The other nine are confederates. And you go down the line and you ask everyone which line is longer, A or B. And everyone agrees to say the shorter line is longer. And then when you get to the real person, most of the time, they'll just say that the shorter line is longer, too, because they don't want to stick out.

MerlinTurns out.

MaxYeah. It's like a classic, classic, classic psych experiment. So I'm also interested in that, of optical illusions aren't just a trick of the eye. They can also be a trick of the society that you live in and social pressures and things that you're not even aware of.

AlexHave you seen the selective attention test

Maxwith the basketball players? Did you?

AlexWow.

MaxNo, I missed it.

AlexReally?

MaxOh, yeah. Now I can see. I mean, now if I watch it again, I can see.

MerlinYou don't want to spoil it for people, but this went around in the fairly early days of the Web 2.0 era. There was basically without spoiling it, you can find it. Just search for something like, what would you say? Basketball?

AlexNo, I would say I will put it in the show notes and the link just says.

MaxIt's very important that you just click the link and don't look at any anything because it's full. It's obviously it's there. It's a trick. It's like there is that we're talking about optical illusions. So don't spoil yourself. This is such a good podcast.

MerlinWe should do a whole podcast on things we can't say because it's a spoiler and explain and explaining optical illusions. I think would be a good thing. That'd be a good show. Oh, a magic eye theorist. Welcome to my close magic podcast.

MaxCan you guys, if you squint your eyes, can you see the eagle? Which eagle? Let's see.

MerlinOh, wait a minute.

Speaker BIs that Abraham Lincoln?

MerlinI see Abraham Lincoln. He's rimming something. Wait a minute. I, you know, God damn it. I had a really good Turns Out podcast that fell out of my feed. Damn it. What show was it? But one of the shows I listened to did a pretty good piece on, what do they call it? Bystander apathy and the Kitty Genovese case. You're aware of that famous story, right? Yeah, but it's not true, right?

MaxThe bystander effect.

MerlinI know it's not true. So in 1963, in the middle of the night in Queens, I want to say, a woman is brutally attacked, like horribly violently attacked and raped. And the story in the New York Times the next day was that like dozens of people – well, the story – the original story was like dozens of people like watched like from their windows and not a single person called the police. And that story still gets told like on the floor of Congress. It's still told over and over and over again like as this cautionary tale.

We must never let this happen again. Like, you know, Kitty Genovese died alone because we wouldn't be good citizens. And there's like turns out upon turns out on the story. I'll try to find it for notes.

MaxWell, and then Donald Trump wrote an op-ed in the New York Times saying that they should give the death penalty to those kids that did the attack. Give them all the death penalty. It's called wilding.

MerlinOh, my God. He still has never taken that back, has he?

MaxCan I – I have a little bit of podcast follow-up. This is very quick. This is just a little note to our listeners. I don't want to know every time you see a hand dryer. I mean, I appreciate that everyone's – I mean, I genuinely appreciate that people are enthusiastic about our show. And I actually really love, I really like hearing from people on Twitter. Like, I think it's great if people like a bit or they don't or whatever. Like, send it my way. I think it's great. It's very low bandwidth for me to see. I'm all in favor of people contacting us and participating. What about kombucha? Do you want people to send you kombucha?

Yeah, sure. If you see some, but don't just send me that you're drinking that one kombucha that we talked about in the show. Mix it up a little bit. Like, have an interesting story. Don't tell me every time you see a white Tesla. You see what I'm saying?

Speaker BYeah.

Maxi i appreciate it i have gotten how many tweets have we gotten of people just posting a picture

Alexof a hand dryer going oh here we go in all fairness i've just been texting dr john most times i see one and being like what what about this what about this see i do this i do the same

Merlinthing i told alex yesterday i almost reached out to griffin mcelroy to see if he wanted to talk about pooping and i realized that i probably shouldn't reach out to griffin mcelroy to ask if he wants to talk about pooping. Because I have a lot to say about pooping. And I know he and Justin struggle with poopy pants. And I wanted to talk to him about that. And then I realized what I say, Alex. I said I should probably wait till the third date to bring it up.

AlexI still think if there's cuddling, you can do it on the first time.

Speaker BListen, Griffin, before we talk about poop, do you want to cuddle? Merlin, what do you just... You just email someone that you're a fan of

Maxand you just become friends with them? You imagine that worked.

Speaker BFriendship is the ultimate... What is this?

MaxYou just email him. You say, I want to talk about pooping. And then your friend says, ah. That's Squidward. Also, here's another thing. We have some sort of air affecting the way that our domain works on our Simplecast website. You're making it worse. If you Google Dubai Friday. No, I'm not. I promise I'm not. Listen, we know it says Google has a little thing that says your site might be hacked. And I know we have a bit on the show where Merlin goes, you've been hacked. I know that that's the bit Do you know that bit? Please know that we're

Please know that we're aware of the situation that Google thinks that our site may be hacked As far as we know, it's not hacked It's just some weird, Google does not like the way that we're doing the domain forwarding We're trying to fix it, but stop telling us

AlexYou can tweet at Simplecast Oh no you didn't But oh no You guys, this could all be

MerlinFirst of all, I'm trying to evolve my POV about this I really am I'm trying. Wait a minute. Why is it warning you about street cleaning? Go away. I get too many notifications. I'm trying to evolve my feelings about this.

AlexHold on.

MerlinWhat?

AlexDo you have... No, no, no, Merlin. Do you have a service that tells you when there's street cleaning?

MerlinThere's an app and there's a website.

AlexOkay, so it's not an email. You have an app for street cleaning.

MerlinI do not, but I do have a reminder because it is a regular thing. But, you know, places like Manhattan, it's a huge deal. like opposite side of the street parking. It's totally mental what the rules are. It's like doing a word problem.

MaxBut you don't, do you live in Manhattan where it's a big deal?

MerlinSee, here's the thing. I feel you guys drawing me into this thing where you're going to make fun of me for a non-existent app that I don't own. And I'm trying to get away from that because I do not have an app for this. I went and looked it up on the municipal website. And then my watch just told me incorrectly that there's street parking tomorrow. So the system is broken.

AlexOkay. So you have an app that tells you the wrong. Okay. Hack, uh, hacking. The site's been hacked. You have different feelings.

MerlinWhat's happening? Hey, everybody, this is Max from Dubai Friday, and I want to let you know that if you want your poster. So I'm trying to evolve my feelings. I have to remind myself more than once a year that when somebody does something like that, you must assume good intentions and you must assume that what somebody is really saying is I love you. Sometimes when people email you, they're just saying I love you. When people say here's a hand dryer, they're saying I love you. It could be so much worse. At least people are not sending you pictures of their poop.

MaxYeah, we were texting about this, but, you know, for me, like, I think you did, I think my, I'm very grateful in a lot of ways that, like, I started off doing politics before I did anything involving, like, the internet or having people contact me on the internet. And I do think politics teaches you to have a pretty thick hide, but also pretty...

You know how we talked earlier in the show about Martian thinking, of capabilities thinking, just in terms of what can you do with this kind of thinking, threat assessment thinking? You really do learn that in politics. Because in politics, if you're running a good campaign and you're going to win, like only slightly less than 50% of the people like hate you and actively root for your destruction. And you actually, in many cases, like you actually get death threats and there's like security issues and people break into the office.

And there's actually people actually get like hacked and their emails get leaked and things like that. So like it's like it's a pretty dirty game and you just learn, you know, you just sort of quickly develop a filter for like, is this going to get me or is this not going to get me? and I definitely, you know, whatever it is if people are mad at me online or if they're sending tweets of hand dryers or whatever I don't know, it just doesn't affect me it doesn't affect me one way or the other I'm not as, I don't I haven't built it up I think as much as you have Merlin of how bad it would be to get lots of comments

I thought you liked Donnie Focus

MerlinNow I'm fucking angry again because I went to try and find the exact quote that I was misremembering There's a quote, it might be Dale Carnegie I don't know who it is, but somebody said I thought it was assume good intent. I think it's assume positive intent. And I went to find the fucking quote. And all it is, it's all douchebag weblogs and fucking Pinterest. Can anybody tell me? Actually, don't email me. Oh, my God. I'm so deep in this rabbit hole. Oh, my God. Here's Indra Nooyi. Assume positive intent. That's from my incredible website.com. Assume positive.

Jesus Christ.

MaxBoy, Pinterest is really doing some sort of magic to Google. They've really, they're all up in there. They have Google images has been overtaken. They're just all up in Google's guts right now. You can't fucking search for anything without finding Pinterest and finding results on Pinterest is like it's almost worse than nothing. It's like you get access to a contact sheet.

MerlinRight. Like you get to like go log in if you want to see the picture of the giant foot on the beach.

MaxYou're tantalizingly close to the thing that you're looking for. But then it's like ultimately completely not helpful because it's just like, yeah, here's a picture of it with no link or information. or context or nothing.

MerlinYeah, right. Do you guys use, on desktop, do you primarily use Safari or do you use Chrome or Firefox? What do you use as your primary desktop browser?

AlexSafari for personal stuff, Chrome for work stuff.

MaxI do everything in Chrome and the reason is because Chrome has a better bookmark organization than Safari. I like how it displays the bookmarks.

MerlinBut there's a pretty neat new extension I saw for Safari that puts the kibosh selectively on a... So, you know, you know about stuff like ad blockers, you know about things like tracker blockers. There's a pretty neat new one who I will find in a second that undoes a lot of the shitty, like JavaScript, you're not allowed to do this stuff. Have you seen that?

AlexYeah, like the putting in your credit card. It turns off autofill.

MerlinAutofilling your name and stuff like that. Things that turn off copy and paste. Things that add, like you copy some lyrics from the thing and it adds a URL and a bunch of nonsense to it. Yeah, I'll find the name of it. That's pretty nice.

MaxI feel like I try to be, I'm pretty lean on my plugins because I feel like that might be how they get me. I just feel like you're giving, I don't really understand how plugins work and they seem to have.

Speaker BI feel that way about VPNs.

MaxI feel that I've gotten to feel that way. Oh, I could talk, boy, I could get into VPNs. But I feel like you're giving plugins a lot of permission. Plugins have a lot of power, right? They're like in between you and what you're reading and what you're doing. and I don't necessarily trust the developer of all these plugins to like see what websites I'm on and so I don't really know what they're doing I mean I assume most of them are benign but like boy if you got me to install a plugin that had access to like yeah reading and what I'm looking

Merlinat and all that kind of stuff like maybe they're it's amazing how often you click something in uh to enable a chrome extension or to enable anytime you like do an oauth for something I always try to I don't know how much this protects me but I always try to look at like all the things it's asking to do and it's like this gives access to all of your contacts and email and it's like really you need all of that yeah yeah i just realized looking at my chrome they're not even

Alexcalled extensions are they they're i think they're plugins on safari and extensions on chrome yeah

Maxmerlin you're you're very right to be suspicious of vpns and um basically you recommend that torrent tracker article i do i have two two things that i recommend about this but uh basically um The one takeaway I think anyone listening to this should have is there are many free VPNs. Does everyone know what a VPN is? Should I say what it is?

MerlinNo, tell our listeners what a VPN is.

MaxA VPN is a little service or a program on your computer that you route all your internet traffic to. So let's say my ISP is Comcast. Comcast can only see that I'm talking to the VPN, and then the VPN is like a router, and all my traffic goes to and from the VPN.

MerlinAnd it obfuscates what IP address and consequently location you're coming from.

MaxCorrect. So to the end, like they can't see who I am. Like if I go to, you know, whatever, if I go to Merlin's website, you know, Merlin's website can't see, really can't see any information from me. All they see is the VPN. But mostly I care about my ISP not seeing what I'm accessing, right? So I often use it. Now, the best use case for a VPN is if you're at a Starbucks or on an airplane or something where you're on a, if you're on a local network with other people, they have a boy they could do some really evil shit to you that's how i think it's the best theory i think of how all those celebrities got their iCloud photos stolen was that someone was

that they connected to a local network at like an awards show and someone made a network called like starbucks wi-fi and they packet sniffed everyone's like iCloud passwords well yeah i mean and like

Merlinthere's so many things there's so many things to this uh i mean the one thing is like i think what you're alluding to is, well, I mean, you know, it used to be that like you, you know, when you go to someplace like a Starbucks or a whatever, they might have the ability to run WPA2, but they probably aren't. And on top of it, you don't know what that access point is actually doing. You don't know if it is Starbucks. You don't know if it is, I mean, I remember when there was this extension you get for Firefox that would basically sniff cookies. So it was fucking bananas. I would demo

of this for people. You would go somewhere, this is before everything went HTTPS on social media sites, and you could basically just turn it on for a minute in Starbucks and steal the cookies of everybody in the Starbucks. It would just basically sniff. You could instantly become anybody in that Starbucks, like in real time, because it wasn't protected. So on the one hand, even if there is a password to get in, like you go to your local, you know, the beanery, and they give you the password, well, you still, there's no guarantee that your stuff is safe. And then I think what you're alluding to that is really scary is when somebody makes an access point called starbucks

or just makes an access point because if you you know do not have auto join turn on full stop and periodically delete all the access points that you don't need right now you can always sign back in but somebody could very easily just throw up there's all kinds of ways this is in all kinds of movies you just throw up this little like an arduino kind of thing that just like sniffs throws out this thing oh look i'm officially starbucks or like if you're signed on to always join a local Comcast network. I'm sorry, I'm talking too much. But like, that's, to me, that's the real danger is, you know, or the deeper danger. I guess the simple danger is like,

Maxyou just don't want Starbucks knowing your shit. I mean, I use free Wi-Fi all the time, but it's definitely a use case where you use the VPN, it routes your traffic through this anonymous thing, and then you're much safer. It's not 100%, but you're much safer than if you don't use the VPN in that scenario. So the only thing I was going to say is there's a lot of, I think everyone should have a VPN, and there's a lot of free VPNs out there. But the thing to know, This is like the one takeaway I want everyone to have is that many free VPNs are operated by bad actors who want your traffic. That's why they're offering a free VPN is they want to know that's how they get you.

They want to know what you they want your logins and they want your info and they really can't be trusted. I've heard from my friends at the EFF that a lot of free VPNs are actually operated by state actors. So they might be the U.S. government or China or Russia. But why wouldn't you? Listen, if you're the NSA and your whole job is to get information from people, of course you would run a free VPN. Because you're getting the people who least want their stuff to be out there, right? So I recommend there's this – every year the website Torrent Freak does a – they just do a roundup and they do interviews with –

Which VPN services keep you anonymous in 2018? And they ask questions like, do you keep logs? Do you have servers in the U.S.? All that kind of good stuff. But also, I think a more accessible article that just came out is the Wirecutter just did a very comprehensive VPN review. And I think they had some good suggestions in there. So if you trust the Wirecutter, that's another place you can go to check this stuff out.

MerlinThat's how – see, I don't even want to say the name now because I might get hacked. But I signed up for the Wirecutter one, and it seemed pretty good. It was priced high enough that it seemed like it was –

AlexWow. That's – What? Maybe it's not expensive. I don't know. now i'm worried because i don't what's the what what are you looking at um ivpn it is 70 a month

Merlinno no you sign up it's like it's like a hundred bucks a year oh i'm not saying that's the one i

Maxsigned up for but that's i use i use one called hide.me that that is rated highly by torrent freak and they have very user-friendly um mac and ios apps and um i i like that but you're right

Merlinthough it's you think about like the it's i mean it's such a basic little piece of human psychology that the way you're able to operate any kind of con, it's con means confidence, right? So like you say to somebody, hey, you have this concern and you don't know what to do about it. Well, I have a solution for this that will take away your concern about that. It's like such an obvious, like creepy thing to do. And then what's the first thing you do? You download the certificate, not the certificate, what's it called? You download the thing for your phone that enables, it's like similar to what like doing MDM on your phone, but you install this thing that gives that service

like really basic access to your phone. it's mental if you think about it you don't just go clicking around on that stuff what's that you know what all sucks the other reason to use a vpn that used to be really cool and isn't as cool anymore i think a lot of the services like netflix etc um i used to have one called ad free

Maxtime did you ever use that oh yeah i had that that was like at your it was what was it it was a dns it was at your router at your router level a dns on your router and it did some some sort of spooky

Merlinbut it was really cool because you could go in and so once you had logged in to add free time from where you wanted it to be you change your dns but then you could say like where you want to be from so i think this is a vatici type thing where like if you're in italy but you want american netflix you could say you're in america and it provides um an isp and there's a whole bunch of different things and it blocks ads etc etc etc at the router level open dns does this to some extent but I think a lot of the services have copped to that

and they figured out how to route around it but that used to be another reason to do it was you just wanted different content

Maxit's always a game with Netflix and all of that it's always a game of whack-a-mole because they want US users to see US Netflix and you know

Merlinwell and they need to show their partners that they're prohibiting access to places that it's not licensed

Maxright so it's like it's always whack-a-mole right it's like a new one pops up and they ban it and a new one pops up and they ban it but I think if you're savvy you can always find a VPN or something, you know, some technology like that that Netflix hasn't gotten yet. Because obviously the location hacking of Netflix is like rampant.

MerlinOne more follow up. Do you have a feeling about, well, first the thesis. The thesis being that I'm a Comcast consumer. I'm an Xfinity-ite. And I have found over the many years of having Comcast that maybe over 50% of the time when the cable is quote unquote out, It's not actually out. It's that the Comcast DNS is down. A lot of people feel it's beneficial to have a separate DNS service from your ISP just for performance reasons. Some people like Google.

Some people like OpenDNS. Do you have a feeling one way or another about is that a good idea to change your DNS? And if you are, do you have a suggestion? Even if you're not using a VPN, what DNS provider would you use?

MaxI'm not super educated about this, but I definitely have that issue that you're talking about of like the, you know, the Internet is down and then it turns out it's really just like a DNS problem. So in my house, I just long ago set my DNS to Google, which is 4.4.4.4 and 8.8.8.8. And I just said it and I think I'm sure it's still that because I never said it back.

MerlinCloudflare just started offering one not long ago that was they were showing the performance on it was greatly improved over any of the other ones.

MaxThey have a cool DNS, too. Is it 1.1.1.1? I think it was 1.1.1.1.

MerlinBut now, apparently, AT&T is blocking it because they suck. I fucking hate AT&T so much right now.

MaxI wonder if they got that tip from Essential Consulting Services, LLC.

MerlinA Delaware, LLC.

AlexMax, you follow... Man, I'm sorry, guys. I'm so tired. And also, ever since you said the word celebrities, I'm just thinking about how I've seen Matt Smith's penis.

MaxWait, where did we see Matt Smith's penis?

AlexHe was part of the leak.

MaxOh, really?

AlexYeah, and if you possibly just... He took a dick pic? The doctor took a dick pic? He did. It was a very tasteful one. If I had seen it... All right, Max, you follow...

MaxGeronimo. I saw some of those celebrities.

MerlinI accidentally ran across some of those and they're pretty fucking chilling. And I closed that tab.

MaxIn the moral panic following the, what was it called? There was a kind of a funny name.

MerlinIt was the iCloud. It was an iCloud thing. There's lots of Jennifer Lawrence, I think.

MaxBut in the moral panic following it, like, boy, like, did people really do a good job of like, in their alleged outrage, did they do a good job of spreading those photos, right?

Speaker BYeah.

MaxI feel like I like never purposely set out to look at the leaked photos. No. But I saw a lot of them just because people were like, I can't believe this was posted. And then they share it to their three million Twitter followers or whatever. Like, I don't know. Don't throw me in the porno patch. It was so fucking funny. Like the like, I don't know. Anyway, it's just like it's like the flaw in the American Death Star. Right. That it's like that there's that all this stuff, all these evils just feed off of our attention.

Speaker BAnd yet, well, it's a different flavor of Gary.

MaxDon't you think it's that it's it's a social ill like Trump or or Kanye. right it's like it's like they're feeding on our like a parasite that eats our attention but we yet and yet and we all hate the effect and yet here we are talking about it on the podcast but anyway i found all those pictures to be very sad and not sexy in any way i mean they were just normal people like not in makeup and not photoshopped just like posing weird and mirrors yeah with their stupid presumption of privacy yeah how dare they how dare they how dare you your boobs are mine

Merlinyou look prettier with less makeup uh i have

Maxgary likes you without makeup take it take it take it take it bloomberg donald trump has traded cheeseburgers for salads in the presidential diet at least some of the time the president who's trademark campaign trail dinner consisted of two mcdonald's big macs two fisher fillet sandwiches and a chocolate milkshake is cutting back on doctor's orders to drop a few pounds according to three people familiar with the matter. Less red meat, more fish. So I guess less Big Macs, more fish.

One person said it's been two weeks since he saw the president eat a hamburger. Trump weighed in borderline obese at his first presidential physical in January, and his doctor, Rear Admiral Ronnie Jackson, advised him to eat less fat and carbohydrates and to exercise regularly. At 239 pounds and 6 feet 3 inches tall, Trump measured just one pound below obese under guidelines issued by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

MerlinAnd then he, did you get to the part with dinner with Rudy?

MaxI did not. Trump so far has embraced the new regimen, giving the aides the impression that he feels he is thriving on his new diet, they said. Still, he is allowing himself indulgences. He ate bacon at breakfast one day this week.

Speaker BOh, that's nice.

MaxThat's nice for the president. How poorly sourced is that article, by the way? Like a source close to the president said he hasn't seen him eat a burger in nearly a week. It's like, how often would this fucking guy see the president eat?

AlexI mean, sometimes I eat a salad, too. No one can just prove that.

MaxWho sees the president eat? He eats alone in his White House room that Melania doesn't share with him on the phone with Sean Hannity.

AlexExactly.

MaxAnd he throws his robes on the ground and yells at the White House attendants for picking them up. These are real facts that we know.

AlexYeah, so it is true. Someone has not seen the president eat a burger in two weeks because he's in his room.

MerlinDiggit, diggit, diggit. Washington Post. Washington Post. For now, Trump and Giuliani are inextricably bound. The two men huddled for five hours on May 6th at Trump National Golf Club in Virginia, Giuliani said, eating a Cobb salad, Giuliani, and a well-done burger, Trump, with half a bun in service to his health. Quote, I do that sometimes, Giuliani said about the half bun. It's a good way to do it.

MaxWait, Giuliani? Trump was eating the half burger.

MerlinGiuliani had a Cobb salad and the president had a well-done burger with half a bun in service to his health.

Speaker BI love that phrase. Being in service to his house. Oh, he gives so much. Oh, my goodness. Some gave all.

MaxWow. Wow. So he's only eating half the bun. That was one of our big complaints, honestly, when we were eating the McDonald's. When we did the President Challenge and we ate the McDonald's, it was almost like a loaf of bread that you eat in that meal.

Speaker BYeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, eight pieces of bread.

MerlinI have to admit I'm kind of obsessed with this. So I was watching a Twilight Zone not long ago, an old Twilight Zone, and this guy's eating breakfast by himself and he has four slices of toast and a little holder. I'm like, who eats fucking four slices of toast? Like my daughter, like a 10-year-old eats that. But like when we did that challenge, the only way I could, you remember I did pretty well on that challenge. I do still have my McFlurry or whatever it is in the fridge and it is getting stinky. But the- You should probably hang on to that for your work. I should probably hang on to that. I also found another Petri dish I forgot to get rid of.

Speaker BOh no. You got to treat that like raw chicken, Merlin. I'm going to. It's a Logitech keyboard, and it's got quite a splurge on it.

MerlinOh, no.

Speaker BBut, yeah.

MerlinYou know, did you see him visit his wife? And The Hill reports that the president went to see his wife in the hospital, quote, two days in a row. And as a woman on Twitter, a comedian on Twitter said, what, is she a golf course?

MaxI mean, that's, you know, game recognized game. I hope to have that kind of relationship someday. My wife is in the hospital, and I see her on two concurrent days.

Speaker BBack to back. Question, will this kidney situation affect either her vag or boobs?

AlexI mean, so we all read the hand idea. Merlin, they're not fucking. There's no way.

MerlinYou don't think they're? It's completely immaterial to him. What about finger blasting? Do you think they do any finger blasting?

AlexOh, like he, oh, oh, like in the bum blast? No.

MaxThey have some sort of. He hasn't pulled into that garage for a while. They have some sort of weird house of cards marriage.

AlexYeah.

MaxI mean, but the president hasn't fucked. One of them fucks boys in London.

AlexProbably. I mean.

MaxWell, I mean, it would be. Cut that out. It wouldn't be in London so much as on, you know, allegedly Jeffrey Epstein's plane, allegedly, which Trump did fly on many times.

Speaker BBut anyway, leaving that aside. Now, what about, what about, who's the X-Men guy? Is that Brian Fuller?

MaxJeffrey Epstein, his super, his X-Men mutant ability was that he fucked boys. Okay.

AlexOh, dear.

MaxHe's called the Doodler.

AlexOh, no. There it is. No.

Speaker BTo me, my X-Men. No. Doodler, why are you in that closet? Oh, man, that's a very funny bit. The Doodler. He's in the rectory. He's in the what? He's down in the rectory. The Doodler. What? The Doodler.

MaxSo, Jeffrey, welcome to the team. What would you say your main powers are that you can use to help us fight Magneto? Is it okay if I explain it to Rogue over here? Well, I have a private island.

And an airplane.

AlexAll right, let's make fun of the Adidas. Don't tell your mother about my superpower.

Speaker BI'll find her. I'm the doodler. No, no. Should that be a DC villain? Maybe that should be a Batman villain. The doodler sounds more like a Batman villain. Oh my god, this is the funniest bit we've ever done. Doodle me this.

Hello, I need some help fighting my puppy. Would you like to get in my van? I'm the doodler, welcome to the doodle van.

AlexOh my god. Alright.

Speaker BOh, we have fun, don't we?

AlexDig Dug, New Yorker. Wait, no, New York Magazine. I don't fucking know. Dig it, dig it, dig it. Alex. On Sean Hannity and the president.

Their chats begin casually with, how are yous and what's going on? On some days, they speak multiple times with one calling the other to inform him of the latest developments. White House staff are aware that the calls happen thanks to the president entering the room and announcing, I just hung up with Hannity or referring to what Hannity said during their conversations or even ringing Hannity up from his desk in their presence. That he talks to Hannity more than I talk to my wife. Like, what is, it's weird.

MerlinYou hang up first, you hang up first.

AlexHe like falls asleep.

MerlinIt is so strange.

Maxand like you know but they both i mean one of the just one of the dumbest people in the country and he's got the he's got the president's like the red phone in the white house well the story goes

Merlinthat he they pump each other up they say the f word a lot and that in particular uh mr hannity like feeds him a pretty steady line of like be careful not to trust the people around you and like he that he is supposedly one of the ones who's really encouraging him to stay tough and do

Alexthe wrong thing yeah that's has to calm him down think of how many people are probably trying to

Maxget the country into a war right now like it's kind of amazing that we're not in a war honestly

Merlinit's absolutely amazing you know they fully expected this thing with uh north korea to blow up that's what that's what that's what sarah says sarah says oh we knew all along this wouldn't happen even though we also said he should get a nobel i felt all along that they were i mean i

Maxdon't know to the extent that this administration is capable of doing a plan i mean i think for the most part they're just sort of bumbling their way through through all of this with with really just like moment to moment i mean you know just i don't even know if you want to call it decision making but it's sort of just like they're just along for the ride like everyone else on a lot of this stuff but i i did for a minute get the feeling that they were purposefully sabotaging the peace talks with north korea to so that they'd be able to throw their hands up and be like well we tried and then you know do do a ground invasion or some some sort of insane you know ill-fated uh

an ill-fated war. But I don't know. What war ever is like,

Alexoh, good. Good thing that happened.

MaxWorld War II? Yeah, the horrible war. The good one? Okay. We took houses away from all those Japanese people. We've never done a war in Korea. Who knows how it could turn out. There's a police action. It might work out.

But I don't know. I don't even know that they have even that much of a plan. I really don't. I mean, I also felt like maybe they were scared of risking the political capital of doing a war because it was like, oh, well, then they'd never be able to build a legislative coalition. But it's like the fucking, what was it, five Democrats cross lines to vote for Gina Haspel? Oh, my God. What?

MerlinLike, what is this in service of? Like, why are they doing that?

MaxWhat's the fucking point of having Democrats? You know how Democrats are always like, oh, well, we've got to keep the moderates because otherwise we'll lose those seats. Right. It's like, okay, well, it's like we have to be comfortable with some pro-life Democrats in there. You know, we can't be a pro-choice party, for example, because we'll lose the center, the moderates. Well, what fucking good, why, what's the point of having the moderates if they vote for Gina Haspel? It's like, why, what are they doing for me there? Like, I could give a shit whether they're a Democrat or a Republican. They vote with the Republicans. So what is it, what good does it do me to have Joe Lieberman in the party?

It's like, or, or any of the, you know what, you know what I mean? It's like, what's the point?

MerlinAll this tut-tutting from the theoretically left wing that's just – it's what is kind of really – it's what is sadly quietly rotten about politics. It's one thing to say that there's a bunch of lunatics on the right who are just like just so out of control and so away from the values of their party if they ever had any. But it's not like we're doing that much better. We're not really doing that much to oppose them. We just keep going. We just keep placating them. We're like perma-vishy.

MaxWell, I think a lesson, I actually take a lesson, an important lesson from what's going on with the Republican Party, which is, I was thinking about this this weekend. I was thinking back on the, I was watching like Mitt Romney videos on YouTube because it was, I was depressed and it was cheering me up. And watching him like bumble through that presidential campaign. And, you know, it was, so that guy ran for president about six years ago. That is not that long in history, right? Six years is not like ancient history. It basically just happened. And if you think back on what Romney's, what the Romney-Ryan ticket, like what their positions were, he was anti-Russia.

That was one of his main things, right, was that he was talking about that Russia was our number one geopolitical foe and that he was going to be tough on Russia and Obama wasn't being tough enough on Russia. He was in favor of free trade and they were like strongly anti-deficit. That was the biggest knock against Obama was that he was running up the deficits. Now it's six years, and not even six, because if you just think about the Trump campaign, it was like three years after that, really. There was not really any public comments or debate. The Republican Party never decided to abandon that.

They just did immediately. They flipped 180 degrees on all that stuff, right? They're pro-Russia. They are anti-free trade, and they don't give a shit about deficits. and all the voters, the Republican voters, if you look at polling, they're pretty much just as fired up about Trump as they always were.

MerlinOh yeah, more so.

MaxYeah, so I just think people are not ideologues on issues. People can be led by vision. Trump did it, right? I don't agree with his vision, but he had a vision and he turned that party around 180 degrees on its biggest issues. Where is the movement in the Democratic Party to focus our party on our issues that would get our people excited. Like, why is it always a compromise of like, oh, well, it's like we have to get Gina Haspel

in there because she's an experienced military person and we have to respect her or whatever.

MerlinWell, did you see the behind the scenes stuff where like previous CIA people have quietly been lobbying behind the scenes with Congress? People like I think Panetta have been contacting Congress behind the scenes going, yeah, you got to get these guys. You got to get her in there.

MaxYeah. Yeah, I know this is. Well, some of those some of these fucking these clueless Democrats who voted for one of them gave a quote of like, well, I never saw any compelling evidence that she participated in the torture program. It's like, yeah, because one of the things that we she did was destroy the evidence. That's like that's like a knock against her.

MerlinYeah, but she but she did that to protect her people, you know.

AlexMerlin, are you there?

MerlinYeah, yeah. I'm sorry. Did I bloop?

AlexYou blooped. Everything's good.

MerlinYou blooped yourself. I blooped myself. You know, this is admittedly very naive and very Holden Caulfield, and I can't believe I'm saying these words. But, you know, I think that the reluctance to nail down what your actual values are is such an advantage in Washington, in any kind of politics, but especially in Washington right now. Because if you do nail down your values, then you're going to be expected to actually do shit. And it's so much easier to say, like, I have a very strong opposition to this immigration bill for the following reasons. And you come up with all these lawyerly reasons why you do or don't want something.

But at the heart of it, it's that it doesn't benefit you to say, this is what I really believe. You can't say, I believe that a woman has the right to get an abortion anytime she fucking feels like it. You can't say that. You will never make it. Instead, you play lawyer ball and you say a bunch of stuff about right to choose and things like that. Don't play lawyer ball, son.

AlexI'm getting all worked up.

MaxMerlin, have you ever heard of this musical, Hamilton? because I think this guy makes a similar point to what you're talking about. Oh, Hamilton. Huh.

Speaker BDugga, dugga, dugga, dugga, dugga,

Maxdugga, dugga, challenge. The challenge this week is... Oh, wait, I was not done with follow... I had another piece of follow-up. I have a fucking grand finale of follow-up here.

AlexAll right, well, before the grand finale...

MaxI gotta beat the doodler. The doodler is the one to beat this week.

Speaker BWhat is the legacy? Designer lobby. Writer of the cards make extra follow-up that goes on too long. Go. Dig a, dig a, dig a, dig a, dig a, dig a, dig a, Washington Post.

MaxIt was a disturbingly normal discovery for the students and faculty at Holmdel High School in New Jersey. Holmdel. Human feces on or near the track and football field found there before the school day began. The school's administrators turned up.

Speaker BThe game is afoot. The game is afoot. the school's administrators I won't ever solve this one

Maxyou gotta get your calipers and measure the diameter now who could have perpetrated such a crime the school's administrators turned to law enforcement to launch a whodunit investigation Thursday they got an answer a school district superintendent Thomas Tragmalini 42 who led the Kenilworth school district since August 2015 was arrested at 5.50 a.m. Monday after he was seen defecating on the football field, according to police. Hmm.

AlexI don't see why that's funny. No. What do you guys think that's about?

Speaker BThat's fine. You know, when you get out there early, you have a big thing of coffee, you know, running can be intense. What do you guys think that's about?

MerlinSometimes you just need to drop a deuce on the field for the kids.

Speaker BYeah. Is that a sex thing?

MaxIs it a sex thing or is it a masculinity thing, like a mark your territory thing?

MerlinI think it's, I wish it were that. I think it's just, it's so simple, which is there wasn't an open bathroom. See, this is the kind of thing I'd like to talk to Griffin McElroy about. Like in that case, you know, but the weird part is like, it sounds like he did it more than once.

MaxWell, yeah. I mean, if we go back and look at the story, Merlin, I mean, let's do an exegesis of this story and really, you know, consider it in its own merits here. I mean, it says it was a disturbingly normal discovery for the students at the school. Human feces found on or near the track and football field before school began. so it was happening enough that they eventually went to law enforcement to launch the whodunit investigation and then they caught the guy in the act so you're saying that this happened all the time to him that he couldn't get to the bathroom i mean no you're right you're right and also he

Merlinwasn't being very classy about it like did it have to be like out in the middle of everything

Maxif i was in an emergency situation on the school grounds and i needed to take a shit i mean i would probably i don't know i guess i'd go behind a tree but then i'd pick it up or bury it or

Alexsomething yes because you have shame do you have a bag in this situation sure sure you get a little

Maxnewspaper bag with you like a dog i mean i i just think there's i do you think it was or the other thing i was thinking is like do you think that he was trying to instigate a more was it a false flag operation he was trying to instigate like a moral panic like you know to crack down on the students like can you believe they're doing this oh man you see what i'm saying yeah yeah yeah i do maybe

Alexit was a teacher and like it was an administrator of some sort and was like let's distract from the tide pod and and the fidget spinners like he just got on twitter yesterday and well i don't know i

Merlinmean it's driving me crazy what do you guys think he was doing why was he doing it i mean i understand why it happens once i have on more than one occasion dropped a deuce in an unconventional place i can totally get that it happens it's the repeatedly doing it and doing it somewhere where everybody's going to see it that is a little hard to understand.

MaxI think it's a, I think, yeah, that's a good point. Cause you're right out in the middle of the field or whatever. I think it's a sex thing. It's got to be like an exhibitionism poop. Maybe it's a shame thing. Do you think he wiped? How could he have with what? Exactly.

MerlinYeah. But then he's going to run more after. Cause you get chafing is an issue.

MaxI don't even know if he was chafing. I think it's just part of his day, you know, you know, just walking. Oh,

Merlinhe likes, he likes that little squish. Like that's his confidence.

AlexThat's his,

Merlinwhat?

AlexMaybe it's lubricant. Like, it's a special... Oh, no, he's the doodler.

MaxNo.

AlexNo, I mean, it makes him run faster.

MaxI don't know. We have no reason to believe that anyone was being doodled in this situation.

AlexNo.

MaxHow far down does this rabbit hole go? We have no reason to think that there's any doodling happening in this story at all.

MerlinHe could have shot in his own white van any time.

AlexDick Doug Challenge! Challenge!

Speaker BIt was Merlin's challenge this week. It was nominally my challenge this week.

MerlinAnd I think it was actually kind of Max's idea, but the idea is Max, I feel like, sometimes expresses a public frustration with productivity apps and what and how they're useful. And we decided this week that we were going to look at the app drafts for iOS, which recently had a big update, and look at fun stuff you can do with drafts. Did anybody peanut butter on this?

MaxWell, not only did I do the challenge, but I also went ahead and recorded a supplemental podcast to surprise you guys with, with a friend of the show, Tim Nahamak, who wrote the drafts review for Mac Stories. Are you springing this on us? I am, I'm fucking springing it on you. And we recorded an hour long. I was like, dude, I do not know what to do with this app. Can you walk me through it? And he gave me a little drafts class, and we recorded it. Oh, my God. I'll send it along to Alex, and we'll post that audio up.

I can't believe you wouldn't tell us about that. How can you just fucking scream that on us? I just went and did it.

AlexOh, God.

MaxGod damn it. I feel like you're being disloyal. Well, it's not a Dubai Friday thing. I just recorded my class with him. Huh. And then I made a markdown. I made a drafts action that took the show notes, formatted them into Markdown, and sent it to Alex, and then archived the note all in one tap. And so I have an action called send show notes to Alex. And look, it's even got a little picture of Alex in there. What?

So you were a good boy this week.

AlexYou love putting faces on things, and I don't know why.

MaxAnd then I sent the show notes to Alex, and she didn't ask me what it was for.

AlexI said, I responded to you with a emoji saying, uh, already read and added to the show notes. Yeah. Uh huh. Uh, snapping in a triangle as Marilyn would say. Triangle snaps. Yeah. Two, three. Uh, I've also, I also read this and loved it. And, uh, I think I can say this. He's working on another story about drafts five that is kind of mind blowing. and just the way he thinks about not only text, but the automation of text is brilliant.

So many people who, if you're like in the drafts, what's it called? The site with all the cool workflows and stuff like that. The website? Yeah. Well, it's kind of like how Iftata used to be. Now it's like it doesn't feel useful. But drafts five, people are coming up with bonkers stuff. I love it.

MerlinI can't get past the disloyalty. I think it was disloyal of you to spring this on us without any kind of warning. And frankly, it sickens me. What do you think, Greg?

Speaker AI think that it's good. I mean, he took the time and invested in it. And, you know, he's not doing anything he wasn't supposed to do. He just had an online conversation with a friend of the helper. What is happening right now?

MerlinWhat is happening right now? Can you hang on a minute, Max? So you Greg is Tim the guy's name is that who that is The guy who wrote it He's a good guy oh sorry sorry Max I should have mentioned this is Greg Pierce the developer

Speaker BOf drafts what is happening right now

MaxWhat is this an effect You got doodled Am I hacked

Speaker BLadies and gentlemen welcome to the show Greg Pierce the developer at Agile Tortoise Who has brought us the wonderful app drafts Greg how long were you were you here for the doodler

Speaker Aum i was which was a he brought me in right in the middle of that and that was a good introduction it could be something to think about the next time i'm out running at the track

Speaker Boh no do you think the doodler leverages automation greg um i think he's probably

Speaker Agot a reminder set up that you know goes digging while he's out there on the track He's got a little workflow.

MaxHe's not using an app. He has a giant oversized alarm clock and a little hammer rings the bells back and forth and he goes, time for a doodling. That's one of his catchphrases.

I think we've really fleshed this character out, you know? Yeah, yeah. He's very realized. And he'll never be mentioned again. He's going to be introduced to the MCU.

AlexOh, God.

MaxThat's the most ambitious crossover event in history. But I'll show myself out.

Speaker BYeah.

Speaker ABut he could just snap his fingers and make it disappear. So why don't he do that?

Speaker BThis is how all my problems go away.

MerlinYou're a very bad boy. So anyways, thanks for coming on, Greg. I thought it would be fun to have you on because I have to tell you, I thought Max was going to be, I thought he was going to peanut butter on this because he's Max, but it sounds like Max was a good boy. I thought it'd be fun to have you on because you could give us some context for why you made this app, how you know people are using it, and maybe you could give us some tips for things that we could be doing that we didn't know about. Does that work for everybody?

Speaker AYes, please. All right. Well, I mean, I'll try to run through it. The essential conceit of drafts is that it wants to be the place you start all your text on your devices. You know, so anytime you've got something to write down or type or dictate, you just launch drafts. You put it in your doc and you've got a trusted system to just jot things down. That's the beginning point of drafts. Whether it's an idea, whether it's something that's going to become a task in your task manager or an email or an iMessage or a tweet, you just have one convenient place to go put this stuff.

And you can do something with it right away or you can do something with it later. But that's the first and most important bit of what drafts tries to be. because it launches ready to type all the time. So you don't have to dig around and find the right app to put that note in or put that task in or find the right folder or give it a file name or whatever else. You just kind of have a place to jot stuff down.

MerlinThat's the way it really got me. Even before I learned all the cool stuff I could do once I typed was that I mentioned this to you before, Greg, but it became a kind of a paradigmatic shift for me where I stopped thinking about what app I wanted to use and I started focusing more on what I wanted to say. And then once I did that, I discovered how often I actually wanted it to go someplace different than where I originally thought, which sometimes was no place at all. And then it just goes down in the list. You can always find it again. But like that was, I mean, I don't know if other people feel that as profoundly as I do,

but like once I started using that as the place where tech starts, I mean, it was just so easy to always know this is where I go. But then, you know, knowing what all you can do with it is so sexy. It's sexy, it's sexy, Alexander.

AlexIt is. I know. I know. No, I know. It's upset that I'm upset because I agree.

Speaker AAnd I mean, the other, I would say there's essentially three things people do with drafts. One is that capture aspect. The second is editing text. And once you start to make it your place to always do text, you have one convenient, customizable and consistent interface to edit text on iOS. Because there's so much variation. I mean, sure, the iOS keyboard's the same in every app, but they have different fonts and font sizes and things. And anytime you're going to work on a chunk of text, it's nice to have a text editor that you like that's set up the way you want to

use it, even if you end up copying the text out of that and pasting it into some other app. So it's that convenient bit. And then the third part is acting on the text, doing something with it, sending it somewhere else. And that's kind of the Pandora's box of drafts when the app first launched more than six years ago now. It didn't have a whole lot of actions. You could email, you could tweet, but now it's got a full-fledged JavaScript engine. It can integrate with web services. It's got actions that work with files and calendars and third-party apps.

And it's a little overwhelming to new users. And I think most people who use the app a lot probably maybe have a half a dozen of these actions set up that they use regularly. But the fact that it could do so many different things is just out there to meet everybody's needs.

MaxGreg, if you swipe right on your personal drafts app, well, is yours all weird a minute? Is yours all weird because you have like a developer version of it? Or do you have one that you use for your like daily use, like a normal consumer drafts?

Speaker AI mean, there's no doubt that due to the nature of the fact that I developed the app, my primary use of it is testing and stuff. I have my own set of actions that I have labeled personal that are the things I use most. And the stuff I use most in it are messaging type capabilities. Like I've got actions set up to pre-address iMessages to all my family members or to some common group messages, like my wife and all three of my kids, so that I could just tap once to send something to all of them

without having to go dig around in messages and find that conversation or whatever else. And then I do most of my tweets out of it. You know, I just open it and draft tweets in there. Kind of like people used to use the old Birdhouse app, if you remember it. Of course. That's kind of a way.

And, you know, and then I have several journaling type actions that send off to append to files in different places. or to even append to other drafts in the app, like for keeping lists of movies I want to see that you hear about or stuff like that. I've just got a thing where I can launch drafts. Somebody tells me about a movie, I type it in and hit that, and it gets added to my list, and then I can go look it up later when I'm looking for something to watch. That kind of stuff is what I use it for most.

And then I have about a dozen other action groups that are just kind of a dumping ground of things like, you know, actions I get through user support requests that I'm trying to help them with or

Maxfind out issues. Do you have one that, do you have an action that someone's done or just a general use case of drafts that someone's done that's like totally blown your mind? Like I cannot believe someone figured out how to make my app do this? Yeah, very much. Over the years,

Speaker Athere's been, you know, several breaking points with that, people chaining together multiple apps in a series of things. The ones that are blowing me away right now are integration with things, culture codes, task manager, and there's several people who have written, I mean, they've essentially written sort of domain specific languages where they can, you know, markup languages where they can write in drafts and put in some, you know, at signs or hashtags or emojis even in the right places. You know, it's their own little virtual text language, and then they tap

in action and they've got javascripts that go through and read through that and convert it into projects and tasks with due dates and tags and send it all with one tap it goes off and becomes a whole full-fledged project in the task manager those sorts of things blow me away I've seen people doing the same sort of stuff with like meeting notes they've you know got a little template they do for their meeting notes and they put in the attendees at the top and they have a

little language where they can put an at sign in front of a line or whatever to say this is a task or an actionable item and then at the end of the meeting they tap a button and it creates tasks from the lines in the draft that were marked as such it emails the meeting notes to everyone who was in the attendees list you know and it creates calendar events in fantastic cal for some of the other lines. That sort of stuff is mind-blowing. And it's a little, I like to talk about stuff like that because it's neat to hear about the possibilities, but at the same time, it's a

little overwhelming for some people because most people are going to use it in much simpler ways. If you'll entertain a strained analogy, if drafts is a motorcycle, most people are going to use it to run up to the store and get their groceries. There's some people who are going to strap on a red, white, and blue leather suit and jump over 10 school buses with it. But just because you have a motorcycle, that's what you're going to do.

MerlinOther people will use it to pull a trailer of 100 motorcycles. That's the part with these apps is they can feel so fiddly, but you're getting at a couple things that are, well, one thing that's always been really neat about drafts is once you've acclimated yourself to starting your text there, I think one thing that's easy to overlook is the power of that extension in iOS, where you can, as you say, append and pre-pend to any note. And that's just gotten better and better over the years. That's a fantastic one, though. So if I'm trying to do show notes on the fly with iOS

and I'm out there and I want to add a bunch of links, I have a little template that will take, that will basically, we'll do a markdown link, you know, with the brackets in the parentheses, couple line breaks, and then a greater than for quoting whatever it is that I want to be the note for that. and just like with movies or anything else, you can do that from anywhere. The other neat thing, and I'd love for you to talk about this when we get around to it, is how many, it seems like there's new actions that more and more don't require fiddling. You've got, there's one action on the director that I love

where, you know, it used to be you'd have to get a group of actions and kind of loop them all together and it started to feel like, you know, a hobby project, but you've got one that I love. You are one of your contributors where you could say, okay, I want to create a new list. I want to make a list of movies. I want to make a list of books, whatever. So, I mean, I'm telling you, it's your app. But just so the listeners know, if you're in a draft and you type The Godfather, you could say, add this to a list. And it'll say, OK, it'll pop up and it'll say, do you want this to be a new list or an existing list? Or do you want this to be an existing list? You say a new list. You say, OK, what kind of bullets do you want for this?

And what do you want it to be called? And so now you've created a new list called movies. Now, anytime that you pop up in a new draft, you hit that, it automatically tags it as lists. but I thought that was really cool in how little overhead there was to creating that list. I didn't have to go and manually create a new list and tag it as lists. All that was happening in the

Speaker Abackground. Right. And it saves you the, a lot of people are already keeping stuff like that in Apple notes or whatever else. But every time you got to go write down the new movie, you've probably, you're 12 taps away from that. You've got to go find the notes app. You've got to launch it. You got to go dig through and find the actual note you keep your list in. And then you got to scroll to the bottom and you know blah blah blah and if you haven't opened it in a while you got to hope that it's updated on your mac yeah you've got a whole lot of cruft and friction and i have a

Maxquestion about this a question for the whole panel uh so i feel like i'm like i'm constantly drowning in a sea of text notes for myself right i've got stuff in bear and i've got emails and i've got sticky notes on my desktop and i have like a literal field notes in my backpack where i have like reading notes written down i'm my greatest fear i'm just starting to use drafts My greatest fear about using it is like I don't really want another place that's full of notes that I have to remember and act on and deal with. How much weight do you guys give to like the inbox and drafts? Like what do you do with those little scraps?

You know what I'm saying? Does this make sense what I'm saying?

MerlinYeah, absolutely. But what about you, Alex?

AlexFor me, drafts, like Merlin, it's very much the place where text begins. but especially like what Greg was talking about, and now with task paper, like doing a whole project in OmniFocus. I was playing around, I still don't like things, but just playing around with different automation stuff, nothing really stays in drafts like forever, I guess, for me.

I will make, and I hope we talk about this, I will make a little workflow, or sorry, workspace, and that's like a good place to do show notes or go over meetings or stuff like that. But everything, it either goes, my main things are it goes to Bear, OmniFocus, or Fantastic L. Or I do also have a tag that's just tweets that will never be seen.

Speaker AI use it and it's sort of an advantage of having a front end like that, but you can set up actions and drafts to automatically archive the draft after the action's been run so that it goes out of your inbox, right? But it also keeps a log of the actions performed on these notes. So I kind of, I started drafts to find those things. You know, when I want to look up that note and you don't remember if you put it in a text file or you send it to Evernote or it's in bear, I say, well, it's

more than likely I started it in drafts and I open up drafts and search for it there. And then I can see either I can get the reference I need the information's right there in drafts or if I want to know where it went I've got a log that said oh yeah I sent this one to bear on April 22nd and then you could go find it there so it's kind of adds a meta level to keeping up with what you've

Alexdone with those things another thing that's kind of like I didn't realize this was in here I don't know i think i just missed it but um when you go into detail and like the action log i forgot that it shows when it's created and modified because sometimes i'm like what the fuck is what why and

Maxa little map and a little map of where it happened that's so cool i love yes is there some way i can see all of my notes from a location is the search do that or something there's not a way to see it

Speaker Aon a map right now um there's not a something in the app that lets you start at a location

MaxThat'd be a pretty cool feature. Like Photos does that, right? Like I use that all the time. Like show me all the photos from when we were in Italy, right?

MerlinI feel like I'm on the cusp of making a change. And it's very awkward for me to say this thing that I haven't said publicly. But okay, so historically, Drafts has for many years now been where I start all text. But candidly, for many years, I preferred doing most stuff in editorial, which is another app. They're both really good. The main thing was, I mean, there was a long time where, candidly, I did most of my stuff in editorial. But creating a new editorial document and giving it a title, because, you know, I don't want to have 50 things called Untitled, Untitled 35, Untitled 36.

It was just, it was way easier to create stuff in drafts. But for some reason, I had this thing where I always enjoyed, preferred doing writing in editorial. Um, but I feel awkward saying this, especially with Greg here, but like the truth is, um, editorial has not been seeing a lot of updates for a pretty long time. And please everybody, I'm not that guy. I'm not like throwing an app under the bus guy, but, uh, it's been a pretty long time. And as I increasingly do stuff, let's be honest.

One thing is as I do more stuff with an iPad and a keyboard, I really notice who puts lots of good key commands in an app. Drafts has a lot of very good key commands. I notice what works and doesn't work in various places. I guess I'm saying, gosh, I sure hope editorial stays at it because that app has been good to me. But the truth is I am kind of on the cusp of moving totally over to Drafts. The reason I haven't up till now is for a mental model for me, it has always made a ton of sense that Drafts is this incredibly valuable source of capture

and occasionally recall, maybe even more than occasionally. It was great. Like you said, Greg, if you know you make everything in drafts and it's synced up on all of your iOS devices, you always know where something probably started. And I find tons of stuff that way. It's just that in the past, I didn't find it as easy to like have that left rail open. You know, that always felt easier to me in an editorial. But I'm I'm it's going to take a mental shift, but I'm considering moving all the way over to just drafts. It's just that it will require a mental change and probably a way of auto archiving certain kinds of things.

but I mean I guess I just want to say to you know just to kiss your butt a little bit is the drafts has always felt very robust to me as a place to write stuff down and do stuff with it it's just that now it really is its own little ecosystem in a way that can be extremely powerful and I feel like I'm really just kind of getting started with what all of that can be that can be stuff like workspaces but also like just the maturity I'm ready to go and spend the amount of time I spent setting up drafts I'm now ready to go back through trim out the stuff I haven't used for years All the social services that don't exist anymore that I can trim out of there.

And I will at some point probably look to you, Greg, for advice on how to handle my groups and tabs because I'm doing that very inefficiently now. But that's where I am with this. Historically, it's been just almost exclusively a source of capture. But the source of capture. Every tweet I make starts in drafts, period. But I don't know. I think this is a very thank you to our guests for making this because it's a very robust and mature app that has a lot going for it. And I do feel like I could trust that at this point is the place where I do the stuff.

MaxDoes Drafts make money?

Speaker AWell, that's our goal. We just with Drafts 5 was just released last month and we've switched over to a subscription model. And, you know, the goal is to make it a more sustainable thing that can be working on full time. Thank you.

Maxthank you for doing it working on yeah i'll say like i downloaded it and i immediately paid for a subscription i didn't even do the free trial i just immediately paid for the subscription because to me it was like well if i'm gonna buy if i'm gonna do this i'm gonna buy in like i'm i mean

Merlinyeah like vote early you know i mean that first week you want to get in there and vote early

Speaker Ayeah well there's a there's a very robust free version you know that you download and try for as long as you like and when you get into the more advanced features of customizing the actions or if you want to use themes and stuff, you have to pay for the pro version. But a lot of users will be able to get value out of this without paying anything really. And my goal with that is that I understand that a lot of this complexity takes it. I know so many people have told me they had drafts on their phone for six months before it clicked with them and stuff.

So I wanna give the opportunity to get on people's devices, give them a chance to use it for a while and figure out what those things are they need. And once it gets into their workflow, they can get the pro subscription.

MerlinI'm guessing you probably can't and won't say this, so I will, Greg. It's time for us to change our model about how this stuff works because the model itself has changed. If you want to have, you the listener, if you want to have decent apps on your iOS devices, and really what is your iOS device without the decent apps? If you want to have those decent apps, you need to start opening your wallet. It is really time. I mean, the race to the bottom with this stuff has been so, so frustrating. And now we're seeing, I mean, look, we're seeing it everywhere now.

All the services, there's so many services and apps that are just going away or sitting there fallow because there's no way. Here's the thing. Here's the thing about a free app. This is something very important, so please listen carefully. A free app does not generally make the person who developed that app a lot of money. There are ways to make money from free apps. but one problem is that by making it totally free is they don't actually make any money off of that which i think would be very valuable to know if somebody if you had your job and you went and you worked for 12 hours a day at your job and you gave it away for free because it was good exposure

not such a great thing if you like things like omni focus and you like things like drafts or whatever these apps are me like with uh brett turp is marked i always insta buy like i bought multiple copies of the same version of mark just because i want him to have my money i want him to continue to see value. I'm sorry, I don't mean to make this a soapbox. I get super frustrated with people who are like, oh, I can't believe you're moving a subscription. Like, I'm used to paying a nickel and having this for 12 years. It's like, that's not sustainable. It's not going to get better. It's going to keep looking like the Scott Forstall years. Everything's going to have paneling and bevels on it unless you

Maxfund it. Well, also, it's not, it's just, to the point of drafts, too, like, it's not a weather app. It's a productivity app. It's a thing that you use for your...

MerlinYou're using it for new stuff. You're finding new ways

Maxto use it every week. But you're, it's saving your time and your, and for me, at least, I'm using it as part of my work. So like, I just don't understand. Yeah, I agree with you. The expectation of getting productivity software and creative software for free is really toxic and bad. And as someone who needs that software to make a living, like it bothers me that it's, that I've heard at least from my friends in this business that it's hard to make a living doing this. What about drafts on Mac? That feels like a thing that now, that I'm going to need if I really buy into this whole ecosystem.

Speaker AWe're working on it. Really? I hope, I'm certainly aiming for. color me surprised I would not have guessed that I don't like to pre-announce things in the sense that I don't want anyone coming up and saying well where is it I can't tell you a date

Alexdon't worry no one listens to this show yeah we lost them with the doodler

Maxso on May 16th you were working on a version of Mac OS

Speaker AI bought this version

Merlinexpecting a Mac app

Speaker Athat was a big part of the whole process of developing drafts five was to make all the underpinnings the data layers the sync the stuff like that all cross-platform and ready so we still have to build the the actual mac ui but uh hopefully later this year if apple doesn't do anything really in wdc in a couple weeks shut your dirty mouth

Maxboy man am i gonna am i gonna go i'm just gonna be all the way into the drafts ecosystem if it's

Alexon if it's cross-platform that's gonna be killer for me i mean i love you bear but that's out the window no that was mean wow wow wow there may be some stages to it we may get out a version oh here

Speaker Ahe goes here he goes oh typical i want to get out something useful as soon as possible so there may be a version that comes out that lets you create and edit and access your notes first and then the whole action aspect of it will come along a little bit later but we'll see how quickly it moves and

MerlinI have a really quick dingling question for you, though, that might be useful to listeners as well. When I use drafts, so like, for example, when I use editorial on iOS, I have the option to click and say, like, make this Dropbox folder the stuff that syncs automatically here. And that's the same Dropbox folder that I'm using with NvAlt on the desktop. I like that flexibility. As a Drafts iOS user, where do the individual files, where does the corpus of Drafts data live and can it be changed, altered, depending on how you like to roll?

Like right now, for example, if I go and click on Drafts in, if I go to iCloud Drive on my Mac and I open Drafts 5, I see a folder of backups and I see some text file that I don't remember putting there. But where do the actual files live, Greg?

Speaker AThe underpinnings are CloudKit, which is Apple's data storage and cloud platform. And it's the same thing that underlies iCloud Drive and underlies PhotoSync and Apple's own NotesSync and stuff. So there's no actual files. Basically, it's a database. and we store a lot of information like the location and things like that about drafts that you know don't lend themselves to just being a text file so you know it is in a private data

store at apple and synced across all your devices but it's not in a file on a on a drive somewhere you have to export or take actions to send it to a file and you can import files you can export

Merlinfiles, but it doesn't sync that way. I was so amazed when you had me on the beta of this, and I was pausing over that button. It's like, do you want to import all of your things from Draft4? And I was like, hmm, I don't think this is going to work. This is going to be one of those things that doesn't work. And then I'm sad, and it's gone. I was amazed at how well it worked. So that was very comforting to me. But right now, I mean, not to put you on the spot, but right now, If I want to have a corpus of data that's accessible by my Mac,

Drafts is not the place to do that right now.

Speaker ANo.

MerlinOkay.

Speaker ANo. I would not want to mislead anyone there. You can get it out in a lot of different ways. You can bulk export. You can select all the drafts in your drafts list and say run action and have them all saved out to files.

MerlinI have so many questions.

Speaker AWith only a few tabs. but it's not going to be two-way sync with those files, which is more, it's becoming more of a thing now that we've added tagging and other types of long-term storage to drafts. It's become more something that you want to carry across. In the past, people have used it more to forward to other systems, so it was less of an issue, but yeah, we're certainly aware of that. We're trying to get there.

AlexMy spouse wanted me to mention that, so they used Drafts 4 for a while. But never really used, you know, any of the like extensions or stuff like that. It was just where the tweets that couldn't be twatted lived. But now just with, shut up Merlin.

But with Drafts 5, I don't know. I didn't import my stuff from Drafts 4 just because I wanted like the pure beta experience, I guess. But just showing them that and it feels so much cleaner when you start. and obviously like nerds automatically go and add all of their cool stuff. But I don't know. There's something about it that just feels more clean and more accessible.

Also, that dark mode. Whew. That's gorgeous. Thank you for that.

Speaker AYeah. There's other things coming like customization of themes is on the roadmap too. Oh. And stuff. So we've got a lot. And I hope with the subscription model, I feel like things are going well and we're going to be in a position to, you know, deliver regular updates. I mean, that's the other big part of moving to the subscription model is to not be back in this situation where I'm releasing one major update every three years or something. You know, I want to be constantly updating the app and adding stuff to it and unlocking these additional features,

and the subscription model better allows for supporting that.

MaxShould we get down to business? Should we talk about doing stuff? Wait, I have another question. How many people work on drafts?

Speaker Auh one it's a one man it's completely a one-man show it's me yeah my company agile tortoise is

Maxjust me that's that's incredible this is this is a huge undertaking and it does a lot of stuff for one person making it i'm i'm surprised by that well it's been a part-time job now it's going to

Alexbe a full-time job so oh my gosh congratulations thank you merlin do you want to talk about the specifics of what oh wait wait i i'm sorry one more question greg is there something that you didn't anticipate that uh someone would do like something uh someone has done with drafts that you never thought would happen great question alex i don't know if you're being sarcastic i didn't i'm sorry words are hard it's a flavor of what max has already asked but i think he could

take it in a different direction yeah just one specific thing that one specific use okay

Speaker Aum i've seen people tie it into various home automation stuff so they have turn on and off their lights what and or put their mac to sleep or so rather than so rather

Maxthan like use voice commands or like use the the like javascript you would like open up drafts You type in like, turn off the lights. And then you'd go to the action share sheet and you'd scroll down. Say hello, commander.

AlexSend to Lutron. Yeah. Oh, my God.

MerlinSpeak. You know how to turn me on.

AlexIt was a good question, guys.

MerlinThat's a great question. Good story, Alex.

Speaker AOh, God. There was one on the community site just a couple weeks ago that was the same. Someone wrote a stopwatch in drafts. Oh, no. It's essentially an action. You just tap. It supports lap timing, and it records every time you start and stop in this one draft. It makes a whole log of them and then sums it up and tells you.

MerlinI guess I could see that being useful to someone somehow.

MaxHas anyone made like a Space Invader in drafts yet? It's like only a matter of time, I feel like.

Speaker AI have not seen it. There's a lot of the dumb actions for all the things people like to do on Twitter, like convert your text to the upside down unicode letters or weird script letters and stuff people have written scripted actions that just take the text you selected and do those weird conversions

Maxoh yeah can i can i make a draft so that every time the president tweets it replies with a gif

Speaker Aof michael jackson eating popcorn unfortunately you couldn't quite automate it in that way

Maxcurrently hey what how come there's no how come there's no images and drafts that that threw me

Speaker AThat's a difficult one to answer completely. Attachments are something that I'd like to eventually do with it, but mostly resource-wise. And it adds a whole lot of complexity to the automation end of it. If you can put images in there, you're going to want to be able to manipulate those images and script them and publish them to places and stuff. And that's easy to do if you have a very focused app that's more focused on writers like Ulysses is or something that you just need to be able to put it in a PDF or publish it to WordPress and that's all people care about.

Then the scope is pretty limited and you can handle those resources. But when you have something as open-ended as drafts, it's kind of a big Pandora's box. And I would like to eventually do it, but it's not there yet.

MerlinI have a question. And a long time ago, I mean, for me, gosh, since the Quicksilver days, I've been so fascinated by the idea of append and prepend. I love the ability to not have to open a document to add to it. What is your preferred or canonical or best way at this point to have a running journal? That could be a programmer's journal. It could just be something where you're writing down what you ate or whatever it is. Do you have a preferred action or group of actions for appending to an iCloud or Dropbox journal? How do you like to do it?

Speaker AYeah, I do it basically the way there's some default actions that ship as examples in the app. And I have slightly tweaked versions of those. But same concept, whether your preferred service is Dropbox or Evernote or Google Drive or OneDrive or whatever. But the way that you configure the action in drafts is that it has a template language. And you could include template tags in the file name you want to output to. And I have a little date format thing so that it writes to a file named journal and then the year dash the month, you know, dot markdown.

MerlinGod's preferred way of formatting dates.

Speaker ARight. And then in the template for the contents of the file, it automatically adds a timestamp for when it was actually appended and then the content of your current draft. so when i tap that action drafts takes the content of my current draft whatever i type and it either creates a file so it'll create a journal dash 2018 dash 05 dot markdown file

Merlinthat's what that text file is that's what that random text file was it's adding to my journal

Speaker Alook at that it worked and uh if it already exists it will add to the content of that file and then every month it automatically rolls over to the new file without me having to make any changes and without creating this one journal file that goes on forever and you could do depending on how often you journal you could tweak that to roll over weekly or daily or

Merlinwhatever so mine is currently called journal dash and then double brackets of date ym can i or should i change the name of that or is that date thing indicating how it should be formatted you might

Speaker AIt got a bad version of that action, like during the beta cycle or something.

MerlinIt got a bad version.

Speaker AIt should have, before you tap that, it should have converted that to numbers.

MerlinOh, Greg, I wouldn't assume for a minute it's anything but my fault. I'm really, really good at almost understanding a thing I just did. So that's why, so when I see append to iCloud Journal, append to Dropbox Journal, those are defaults now under Basic?

Speaker BYeah. Oh, badass.

Speaker AYou can change them and modify or tweak based on the file names or folders you want that to go to and stuff.

MerlinI'll help start the conversation on this one. Here's one that I use a lot, a lot, a lot, a lot, which is, and again, in my current setup, my goal for where stuff eventually goes to, I love that stuff I could need but don't necessarily need and may not need stays in drafts. I, at this point, make an overt decision about when something needs to go into Dropbox and into my living system of 2600 files. And that is, so what I do for that is I'll start a new drafts. You hit the plus or have it pop open. And just for what it's worth, my default is five minutes.

It creates a new file after five minutes. But then what I'll do is I have templates for this, but I will name the first line something like, oh, nobody cares but me.

Speaker BOh, I care. Something like B2.

MaxI'm actually extremely interested in this.

MerlinSo the way that I – this goes way back to a million shows with Max Barkey a million years ago. B2W space show. So B2W, show, note X, E376, date 2018, 0515, right? So there's several pieces of metadata in the title. It always starts with the most important piece. Like if you jammed this column all the way left, I'd still be able to mostly know what it is from what the first three or four letters are. So that's very important to me. B2W, show notes.

But I don't call it notes. I call it note X. Why do I call it note X? Because I want to use, don't listen British people. I want to use a nonce word. I want to use a word that's not a doodler, but I want to use a word that will not appear in normal text and only exists as metadata but is still meaningful. BTW, show, NodeX. E, always named the same way, E376. And then the proper way to do a date, 2018, 515. So that way you can get – I showed my daughter this, and she was really unimpressed. But I can go find the show notes for every episode of anything I've ever done by just taking off everything at the end. If I want to see just things from the last episodes in the 370s, I do everything up to E3 7 space, right?

So what I'll do is that'll be the first line in a drafts file. I'll type whatever the hell I want. And then I have an action that sends that to Dropbox into the folder that I want it to go. And guess what? Use the first line of the draft as the title of the document. As the, yeah, the title of the document. Which sounds so simple, but brother, do I ever use that all the time? similar to the way that you can send email by using the top line as the subject line. I'll tell you, man, that is, I mash on that thing all the time.

That and copy to clipboard are the two most common things I use in drafts.

Speaker AWell, the one you're describing, you can automate a lot of that in drafts too. You could simply, like you could use template tags that pull out any line, you know, by line number. So if you just have a format and you could say, what are you going to do? Show notes, right? The first line is the show title and the second line is the episode number. and the third line is B2W or whatever show you're writing. And then the rest of it is the show notes. You're a wizard. You can have the action configured to write to the folder B2W based on line number two.

Where do I do that? Episode number based on line number three. And it'll automatically create that folder if it doesn't exist and create the file when you tap that action.

MaxOh, my God. Someone please, some listener, please make that. I need that for my podcast. Just someone make it for us and send it to us. I don't want to do any work. Also send him a picture of a hand dryer.

Speaker AI probably someone on our community site will do that for you once they hear this.

MaxThat's what I'm guessing. Thank you, community. Just send it to me too. Merlin will send you a treat if you make that for him. Listen, I haven't really.

Speaker ASo it's a challenge this week to convince someone else to do something for you?

MaxWell, that's more of just a thing that'll probably happen. That's a good idea.

MerlinYou know what? Stick around. That'd be a great challenge.

MaxOkay. So I have not really put the time in. I'm now convinced that I should be using this. I've put a little bit of time into configuring it, but I do not really have it all the way there yet for doing everything I needed to do. It's definitely – like I have this big old list of things I need to figure out how to make it do. I want to make an action for just tap out a text in drafts and then one button send to Veronica. I just realized from this conversation I can do that. But the one thing I just wanted to call out that I think is a mind-blowingly good feature

that probably currently makes drafts my favorite text editor on my phone is this little button on the bottom. It's the little hamburger button, and it's called arrange mode. And you can go by line, and you can just drag your bullet point lists and your to-do items around in order. Why doesn't every time? Is that proprietary? Why doesn't everyone do that? It's the smartest thing I've ever seen in my life.

Speaker AIt's just an idea I came up with. It was actually in a writing app I had before Drafts called Phraseology in similar format. And I brought it over to Drafts when I did it. And yeah, it's just a handy using basic iOS conventions to make something easier.

MerlinYeah, and let's make sure the people understand what we're talking about here. It is not surpassingly easy to move lines or paragraphs. Forgive me if I'm over explaining this, but it's so powerful. There's many times where I will be in something like TextMate, and it's just in my muscle memory to go, I don't even know what the fuck it is. It's like command shift up and down.

MaxLet me make this easy for you. You guys make grocery lists on your phone, right? Yes. And then before you go to the grocery store, do you sort them by department in the grocery store? So all the meat goes over here, the vegetables go over here? Yeah, but what if you add something at the bottom that you want to be up in vegetables? But even the sorting, it fucking sucks cutting and pasting all the lines. I do it in like Bear as a to-do list or something. And just moving the little like meat lines into one thing.

MerlinWell, if you're using bullets, you lose a line break. This happens in fucking Google Docs all the time where you lose its bulletedness if you even like triple click. Right.

MaxYeah, so anyway, this just has a thing where you can go into a mode where you can just click and drag either blocks of text or lines of text. And it saves its formatting. It all works how it's supposed to. And you can just quickly rearrange everything. And God, that is just so smart. And then there's some other buttons down there. And at some point there was some help text, but I didn't read it. And I don't know how to get the help text back. But what does the little eyeball do? And then what does the little chain link fence do?

Speaker AThe eyeball is called focus mode. And what that does, it does two things. It disables the new draft creation timer. So drafts comes back. There's a timer in settings on how long. But when you come back to it, you have a new draft, right? Well, when you're in focus mode, it'll just always come back to the last draft you're editing. So if you're doing a more longer project or grabbing a bunch of things and you don't want to keep going to new notes, you just turn that on and it'll stay where you were. The second thing it does is when the actions which automatically archive or trash a draft take place, when focus mode is off, it sends that draft to the archive and starts you on a new draft.

when you're in focus mode it archives that draft and then loads the next one in your inbox so when you want to process a whole bunch of things in your inbox all at once uh you don't have to keep loading new drafts it'll just keep giving you the next one uh to act on that's so good and what does the little fence do uh the little chain uh the chain that is called link mode and essentially what that does is it disables editing and it turns uh anything that you might want to tap on

in the draft into something you can tap on oh it's like a preview mode links uh it's like like when you're reading a message in mail and you can tap on the links or you know so physical addresses phone numbers email addresses web links will all get hot linked and you can tap on them you know to

Merlinto act on so you could still be looking at something in unrendered markdown but then it

Speaker Aturns it into links when you're in that mode right oh and if you tap on a web link it'll open in safari if it you tap on an email it'll totally work oh look at that that's so good hey let's say

Maxthat um i wanted to um write out a little note and have it on letterhead right so like like i need to like send someone like let's just say it's like a quick invoice or something right and I want to basically take the text in a draft and then have it put in a little graphical template, write a little image on top or something like that or just append the text into a pre-prepared PDF. Is there anything like that? It seems like the kind of thing I could do with JavaScript, but I don't really know.

Speaker ASort of. So there's an HTML preview function and also the print function is based on HTML. And you can build any template you want in there. If you're familiar with HTML and CSS, you know, there's standard markdown previews that come with it, but you can build any HTML template you want, right?

MerlinOh, so you can just have like an image on, not Dropbox, bad example, but you could have an image somewhere that's accessible. This seems like something Dr. Drang has probably already done, but with LaTeX.

Speaker AWell, a lot of people have set up like people who blog in it and stuff have set up custom previews that have the CSS from their blog already configured. So when they preview it, they see what it'll look like on their blog.

MaxDo I do that in drafts?

Speaker AYeah, so you can set up an action, and if you just want to be able to preview it, there's an HTML preview action step, and it just has an HTML template. And you put the same tags in it you would in any of the other drafts actions to insert your draft text, but you could have any template content you want or link to CSS files. you can load like well you mentioned dr drang like he has one setup that loads math jacks you know to do rendering of equations oh my god of course he does wait so where am i where do i

Maxso i went to these step i'm looking at step type right now and then is there something in there

Speaker Athat should be html html preview is the type of step and you could just put anything you want in

Merlinhere yeah exactly i used to do that with mars edit where i would put in the all the you can wrap around the content and you can look like your website so you can see what it would actually look like when it was posted that's such a great feature and the print action works the same way

Speaker Athe print action just has an html template and can you can have you know you spit out a print job with header information or whatever else you want you could do anything with this i got a good one

Merlini just found truly amazing here's a good one from the drafts action director you're gonna like this one max let's see you're walking around the city and there's a shared bike service somebody left a fucking bike on the sidewalk and you're mad there's a service called uh an action called bike on

Speaker Bsidewalk this reads the name of a street or address from the input draft and asks which

Merlinservice the offending bike belongs to it then generates an email to that bike company asking

Speaker Bthem to please come pick up that bike i need this oh this is going to change everything on next door

Merlinfor me. Oh, boy. What is the color of the person you're concerned about? Dark brown.

MaxHey, Greg, has anyone done any sort of political activism templates and draft, like write up a little message to your congressman or something like that and send it off?

Speaker AI have not specifically seen any, but that would be a great, great action. There's no reason it It wouldn't be easy to even load the information based on your current location. Which drafts knows you could use a web service to find out who the representative for that area is. Yeah, that would be a fun action for somebody to write.

MerlinThat'd be pretty cool. Well, we should make sure people know you can go to actions.getdrafts.com. And there's just a whole bunch of these that people – actually, a lot of names I recognize on here. You've got, of course, you've got Greg. You've got, oh, who's the lady that does the automation website? She's got some. Rosemary Orchard is on here.

MaxThat's not a real person's name.

MerlinYes, it is. Yeah, Automation Orchard. Yeah. Okay. She's the real deal. Even, look at that. You've got, what's his name? The writer guy. Matt Camel has some in here.

Speaker AI wrote an example last week for doing tweet storms. It's the kind of thing you can do in drafts. It just takes every paragraph in your draft, breaks it up into a separate tweet, adds the one of five, two of five numbering. It shows you an HTML preview. It uses that stuff we just discussed to show a custom HTML preview of here's what it's going to look like on Twitter. And then if you say, go ahead, it'll tweet all of those out all at once.

Speaker BThread.

Speaker AAnd they're properly threaded and all. This. This.

MaxIs there a way to check the length, though, to make sure that each one is the appropriate length?

Speaker ASo the preview comes up, and the preview, anything that's short enough to fit in a tweet, it breaks it based on paragraph. There's other ways you could do it. But if anything's longer than it'll fit in a tweet, it outlines that, have a little CSS that tells you how many characters it is and that it won't post. And the action won't continue if you have any errors. So in the preview, you can say, oh, I need to go break that paragraph up and just cancel it and fix it and try again.

AlexIt's like you've made a weapon with this. I love it.

MerlinHave you guys done the thing yet where you can – I was thinking of sending this to you. This is so nerdy. Have you done the thing yet where you get a bulleted list, but you use dashes as the delimiters? And then you use – say, I should just send this to you. This is so badass. It's so small, but it's so cool. So this thing I'm sending you, copy and paste that into a...

MaxOh, I'm doing that right now.

MerlinSo if you do a dash, space, open bracket, space, close bracket, space, and then whatever the content, the string for your line is, you can actually click inside. It changes colors, and you can click inside the bracket to tick things off a list.

MaxWhy? Help me understand this. Greg, what's your background? Are you a product designer? I just feel like every little interaction and feature in drafts is just so considerate and so well thought through. And now I'm like mad that every other text app doesn't do these things.

Speaker BYou bastards.

MaxNo, I mean, seriously. It's like, why would there be a text app that doesn't do the little checklist functionality?

AlexAnd they have full teams.

Speaker AHaving been a person who was shipping one just months ago that didn't do that. No. I have a bachelor of music from NYU. I think that prepared me well for this. Fancy Duchess. Look at you. That's a good school. Did you know that? It felt like it when I was there. What do you play primarily? Guitar. Wow, sexy.

MaxI'm finally a real musician on this podcast.

MerlinYou know, Max, part of it, I really feel like this goes all the way back to Birdhouse and certainly further back. But, you know, how do you put it? Taste. Like, finding somebody with a similar taste to yours, where isn't it funny how, we've talked about this before, the editorial nature of, editorial in the, like, Project Runway sense, of, like, where you open something up and you're like, whoa, this is not for me. You know, in some ways that was, hmm, for Drewist in lots of ways. But there are so many apps out there that nominally do good stuff or do things you want to do, but it doesn't match your taste and it doesn't match the way you think about stuff.

and like you know rare is the app that encourages me to think better and differently rather than me wanting to bend the app to me like there's a lot of stuff in here where i'm like oh god i have just been pushing a rope for fucking 20 years with this thing that i'm trying to do why would i ever do this more than once when this app could be taking care of it for me and it looked good i feel like

Maxthat about podcast apps i mean it's it's like it's it's challenging for me to explain to people like why i think they should be using overcast except to say that it's just it's just so to my taste and it's just every design decision and interaction overcast is so tasteful and then i look at people's podcast apps and they're all on something called like you know like feed rodeo or

Speaker Bsome bullshit it's got an uncanny ability with names i don't know it's the one i've always used

Merlinit came free with a fill up feed rodeo yeah i feel like that with the apple podcast app we started listening so we started listening to adventure zone um and i wanted it some way we could listen to it on Apple TV, so I subscribed in the podcast app, and I was like,

Speaker Bwhat fresh hell is this? This is the way most people are...

MaxWait, you could do over... I do overcast on Apple TV all the time. It works like a charm. You mean throw there with AirPlay?

MerlinYeah, AirPlay. Yeah, I mean, yeah, I get that, but... No, but I'm sorry I interrupted you, but I'm trying to agree with you. Like, it's just so funny how often you can open up, you know, nine apps, 90 apps, and go, wow, this is really not for me. There's other ones where you open and go, hmm, this is a sexy little reveal. This is something I think I might be able to love. And I think, I don't know a better word than taste. Not in a classist way, but in the sense of like sensibility and fit and finish and feeling like somebody's really thought through all of this stuff. You know, in the same way that the Mac, you know, there's a funny phenomenon I used to observe, which was that people going from Mac

to Windows for work, let's say, they would frequently get back to the Mac and be like, oh my god i cannot believe i had to go live in that world the funny phenomenon was that a lot of people who went from windows to mac would then go back to windows and frequently be like i can't

Maxbelieve i used this for 10 years yeah that's how i mean i have the gaming pc i go on it every night and occasionally i'm in the you know i'm sitting at the pc and i'm i'm you know waiting for i don't know a match of overwatch or whatever to start and it's like i'll just pop open chrome and try to do something on the pc and it's like oh my god there's just so much friction everything is just friction, friction, friction. And there's pop-ups stopping me from doing what I want all the time. And everything is broken and needs updates. And it's not the right driver. And it's just, it's such a goddamn mess. There's so many things that you have to do on a PC that aren't what you want to be doing. And I just take for granted, like I forgot how awful that ecosystem is.

I just take, completely take for granted that on the Mac, like if you're in the middle of work, you're generally not going to be interrupted by 17 pop-ups of different things that are, you know, want your attention and need an update. And they're restarting the computer in 16 seconds. What?

AlexAnd then you need to race to make sure that everything is wonderful.

MerlinHey, Greg, do you feel like, so like I've been at this for a while and there's still so much for me to learn. Do you feel like for folks who have taken two drafts and are enjoying it, do you feel like there are features that might be overlooked? Are there things that are kind of like no-brainers for people who know about it, you know what I mean, but that are like utterly unknown to others? Are there things we should be trying that we might not be thinking about?

Speaker AThat's a good question. I think that's something I've struggled with, and I'm investing more and more. I started last year with having David Sparks do a series of videos for me, and he's going to be doing some more. and I'm having some other outside writers do some materials because I think presenting use cases is the thing that helps people get the light bulb turned on. And there's a lot of different areas that I think, you know, everybody's busy and, you know, the people who find uses for drafts probably don't realize there's another dozen things

that it could be doing for them to make their life easier, but they just haven't had the time to invest to figure it out or find the actions or just didn't know they exist. And, you know, it's on me to kind of communicate that stuff better to people, which is why I set up the community site and stuff. But it's so hard to envision what those things are that it's difficult to, you know, for any individual user. Like I said, I think early in the show, there's probably most users of drafts have maybe half a dozen things they do with it regularly, actions they use.

But those are different for every person, you know. And I can't really predict what those use cases are, but I hope by presenting ones, people think, well, that's like what I need to do, but it's just a little different. And, you know, those light bulbs will go on.

AlexGreg, I don't do you guys have. Thank you for giving so much time to us, Greg. Do you need to head out or Max Merlin? Do you have any more questions?

MaxI feel, I mean, I just feel like this, uh, I, I've really not felt like this with a lot of the nonsense that you guys, that, you know, smart light bulbs and whatever apps you could timer.

MerlinYou keep us honest about this stuff, Max. You are frequently the person who's there to point out something, a role I've tried to have in the past is like, are you sure your head is not just going up your ass more efficiently? I think I'm glad you play that role because it does make me reconsider if I'm actually accomplishing anything with all this productivity.

MaxWell, it's a little bit like the Apple thing of like it's not what it can do. It's what the user can do with it. And I feel like a lot of this stuff, the hook is what it can do. And a lot of times I get it into my hands and I'm like, oh, okay, the light can change colors. But that's like a thing it can do. Like what can I do with it? And I don't have any need for the light to change colors. So anyway, it's been a long time since I've seen something like this where I just clicked with it right away. And I felt like this is a game changer for me. Like this, this will probably change how I work from here on out.

Yeah, no pressure. That's awesome.

Speaker AI mean, for me, I fell in love with computers because I saw that they could make my life easier. You know, I didn't fall in love with computers through gaming. I didn't fall in love with computers through, you know, something that was in my life that I hated because I had to use it for a job and didn't, you know, and it caused me stress. I fell in love with computers because I saw things I could do with them, you know. And I guess drafts make sense in terms of my career because I taught myself to program to make my life easier and to make the lives of people I worked with easier, you know, to do more productive things.

And if you find that passion for computers in your life, you know, then drafts is the tool for you because, you know, you'll find those places that it'll save you time, it'll save you energy, and it'll let you control the devices, not the devices control you. And that's the way I always try to approach computers is how to use them as a tool.

MaxI just have a tough question for you. What happens – let's say tomorrow Apple approaches you and they're like, hey, we bought Workflow. We loved what the guys at Workflow were doing. We bought that. We want to buy drafts and make that part of the – we want you to come and work in Cupertino or join Apple. We want an app like Notes, but we want it to work. Well, or just – or like Workflow is like still available as Workflow, right? So it's like maybe they just make drafts available, but it's like bought by Apple. What would you make? What would you how would you how would you go? How would you think through that? Like, do you think they've done a good job with workflow?

Do you think that they would be like a good steward of draft? Does that interest you at all?

Speaker AOn a personal basis, it doesn't interest me. Like, I'm not going to go move to Cupertino and work for Apple. Not that they're not a great company. Not that I have a lot of great friends that work there. But there's a reason I'm an indie. It just in terms of my lifestyle, my interests. And, you know, I'm not going to go join a corporate entity. You're in Indianapolis. I'm in Texas, Dallas.

MaxOh, in Texas. OK, got it, got it, got it. Oh, I said you said you said you're an indie.

Speaker AYeah, yeah.

MaxI see. I see.

Speaker BI'm going to hear about that. Can't believe you didn't correct your house. Shut up.

Speaker AI'm not saying there's not a number Apple could come to me with that. You're not made of stone. But yeah, I don't come with it.

MaxIt's not the end game of drafts. I love hearing that as a user because to me it means this thing is going to be maintained for a long time in the best possible way.

AlexI worry that workflows, it's just going to turn off one day.

MaxAnd then you'll be walking through, you'll be going through your life and you'll be like, I wish that I had a button on my home screen that could immediately order a pizza to my house and I don't have that anymore. And how could I wake up in the morning?

AlexYeah, exactly.

MaxHow are we going to know who pretends to like us without Favstar?

MerlinIt's going to be super weird. Hey, Greg, we're probably getting to the end of the regular episode. Give us some data on where you would like people to find you and your application drafts.

Speaker ADrafts, best place is getdrafts.com or just look it up on the App Store. And I'm Agile Tortoise on pretty much all of the social media channels.

AlexOh, and you have the best company name ever. Just so good. Wow.

Speaker AI've always loved turtles. I have kind of a personal obsession with turtles. And when I came to form the company. Are you a doodler?

Speaker BI heard don't tortoises have diseases and stuff. Don't they make a salmonella on you? No, I'm asking out of curiosity because everybody likes tortoises.

Merlinbut I've heard that they're sketchy as pets because they make salmonellas on you. Do you have any knowledge about that, Greg?

Speaker AI think you could look that one up on Snopes. But yes, there was a fad to have the miniature turtles as pets. And I'm going to say that goes back to like the 60s even. And there were some issues with salmonella and they banned them from the pet stores.

MerlinYou think it's a form of tortoise racism?

Speaker AI do not think turtles make good pets, but I do love them.

MerlinLooking at Snopes for turtles.

Speaker AWhen you went to find a domain name that was available, it made a good combination.

MerlinWell, per your advice, smartass, I'm looking at things about turtles on Snopes. Dugga-dugga Snopes, man caught with 51 turtles down his pants. True. A man was stopped at the U.S.-Canadian border with 51 tortoises hidden in his pants.

His name is Kai Shu. He was 26 years old, appeared in federal court in Detroit, related to smuggling turtles across the border to Windsor, Ontario. Can you imagine all the salmon all those tortoises could make on you?

Speaker AThey actually, like around Texas and stuff, they have a real problem with poaching of the turtles. And they have some programs out there to count them and stuff because apparently they're somewhat questionable medical practices on the Asian continent that find parts of turtles.

MerlinOh, toothsome. They went into a little bit more detail. During the secondary inspection, she was found to have 51 live turtles taped to his person. Specifically, Shu had 41 turtles taped to his legs and 10 hidden between his legs.

MaxI'm already uncomfortable enough on a long airplane flight. Imagine having 57 turtles duct taped to your body, just writhing around and peeing on you.

Speaker AI never do more than a dozen.

Speaker BAll right.

Show notes

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