133. Covered in Syrup

AlexThis is Do By Friday, a weekly challenge podcast with Merlin Mann, Alex Cox and Max Temkin. This week's challenge, start your texts in drafts.

Good morning.

Speaker BGood morning, Merlin. Good morning. Hello. Hello. Wow, lots of energy. Oh.

AlexOh.

Speaker BIt's going to be one of those weeks. I don't have anything to talk about.

Speaker AOh, come on, Max.

AlexDid you even look at the doc? Oh, my gosh. Oh, my God. I have so much to talk about on your... Your check-ins. The Twitter. Your Twitter check-in. Your check-in.

MaxCheck-in?

AlexTwitter check-in.

MaxOh, my God.

Speaker BOh, okay. Here's something I could talk about. So I have not been using Twitter. Now, you're pretty much off it.

Maxthis point as an interesting benchmark I you know I haven't really been thinking about this but I did talk about last week on the show that I deleted all my tweets and I wasn't on Twitter and I really haven't been on there since I went I went on I've probably been on it's so obvious that you're really not I'm not posting and because if and I said this last week but if you don't post there's no activity I go on and you know my alert my you know the little alarm bell icon it always used to be like 99 plus and that's how i knew people were real mad at me notifications on

no no no no no no no no the the tab in twitter you know that's still oh i see like the little i don't have ios notifications on what i'm saying is the tab in twitter there's no way to turn it off it shows you like how many replies you have and whenever i'd open the app it would go 99 plus and then i would know oh boy people are good and i and i want i want to reiterate that you said

Merlinsomething last week that at first seemed like a kind of obvious thing but i've been thinking about what you said. What you said is basically if you don't post stuff on Twitter,

Speaker Apeople don't have anything to respond to. But further to that, if you deleted all your old tweets, they don't have old tweets to respond to. They can't do a you forgot about or this is problematic or have you considered the children because there's

Speaker Bno tweets to respond to. What are they going to say? When I would go on, I would have

Maxthis feeling of oh man, everyone needs to talk to me. I have to get in here and deal with these people because they'd be asking me questions. I have to collect my morning admonitions yeah like they're mad at me about something i said on the podcast and they're they're uh i don't know they're sending me like some survivor meme and i it's just like and i'd be like i gotta get in the mix like these people need me and and i'll say like it was it was a feedback like i was creating you sent up the max signal i was making the iron man suits that

went rogue and then i had to fight them i would yes was i saving earth yes but i was what was i saving them from it was my own cost at what cost it was my own iron man suits that were then turning around and fighting me ain't that ironical and now and now that i just don't post i go on there and i have like one reply and it's and it's like no one it's like it's a and on the one hand i feel like i'm i feel like a little like it's a little embarrassing i'm like boy these like i really didn't need to be here

MerlinMax, Max, Max, when I used to, when I used to follow statistics about things, I'm going to tell you, I have two very embarrassing things to tell you today. My first embarrassing thing is that when I would track those things, sometimes I would do this. I'd go, meh, I'm done with Twitter for a while. You guys are all bleh.

Speaker AAnd I would go away. and my follower count would disproportionately go up when I didn't post. I have gained many new followers since I stopped posting.

MaxOh, gosh.

Speaker AYou've unlocked the secret.

MaxOh, my God. Now, I'll say the thing that stings a little is like, I guess I had this, I don't know what, it's like I don't know what the fantasy was really, but I had this thought that maybe when I stopped using it, people would be like, where's Max? I want to know what Max thinks about this. He's got to have a hot take on this. Nobody thinks that. there's only i'm i miss um matt matt howey stopped using twitter a while a lot of here's part of the problem a lot of the people that i really liked on twitter and i was sort of there to interact with are don't use it anymore and um matt howey is one of them uh will wheaton is one of them i i really

enjoyed like like just bullshitting with will i mean the mccleroy brothers were on the forefront

Merlinof this years ago you can just hear it in the evolution of the podcast where there's the first tentative steps to do the things that they're doing. And yes, I love them so much. I love their program. But you can hear over time where more and more you get, especially with Griffin and Justin, obviously, you get this feeling of, wow, they're really feeling very ground down by all of this. And eventually they did the thing that a lot of people do now, which is, well, I use it to promote stuff. And I'm there to say thank you and respond to people. Not in a callow way, but you certainly

don't want to make yourself any more vulnerable than you need to be because then then all the

Maxyou know the golden company is going to come in and be all over your shit i uh oh one more to throw out was i remember defective yeti oh god yes yeah he left he left twitter as well he was one of the last people that was like you know twitter what okay let me let me say one more thing about this why did i start using twitter so i started using twitter in 2008 i made a twitter account because when I was working on the Obama presidential campaign in the office, people would use Twitter every day to post where they were going to lunch. And then you could sort of you could meet up with a group and go out to lunch with a

group. And otherwise, like we didn't have Slack back in those days. There were some like IRC stuff going on, but like there was no and like AIM and stuff. But like Twitter was like the tool where everyone would just say where they were getting lunch. And it was more of like almost a group texting was like, I think, a better description of Twitter. Oh, absolutely.

MerlinYeah, yeah, yeah.

MaxAnd which group texting I don't think existed. But anyway, then so I used it for that. And then I really quickly found this group of people that were making they were using Twitter to make jokes. And I thought that was really cool. Like that's really different. You know, what do you think of when people would think of how you're supposed to use Twitter? I guess you'd use it as like, I don't know, like gossiping and talking about the news.

MerlinI would think of I think I think excellent, excellent Twitter back in the day would be somebody like Fireland. it would be somebody like Adam Lissagor but like people who had really mastered like what to do in that space

Speaker Bbut what I'm saying is that was a hack

Maxlike I don't think that like the Twitter the general use case of Twitter was I'm doing jokes the general use case was people posting pictures of their lunch and stuff

Merlinyeah I got diarrhea from Thai food had a great run

Maxand then then the joke guys

Speaker Bcame and then there was like Favard and that's how I Favard was great because you could find the joke people initially it was the greatest thing i ever had in my life for a while yeah it was it was it was a

Speaker Aconstant delight and even i'm gonna say even before it tipped because eventually it just came all about i'm home alone eating ice cream and playing with my dildo saturday night it's like oh fuck it's like it became this way of like uh you look at me i'm talking about finger banging and like it turned into this like oh man there's just like easy easy hearts for all this stuff but like it was so gold for this little period probably shorter than i even remember but i mean that's how

MerlinI met Scott and Adam was, was, was through that. Honestly, that's how we kind of, that's how we became friends and people like molts who I knew a little bit, but like there are all these people who were, who were fucking with what Twitter was for with, and this kind of leads to our challenge a little bit today,

Speaker Awhich is people were crafting something where the spelling was right and the punctuation was right. And it was so funny and they learned how to put the funny part at the end of the tweet. And they were all like, and now some of them are writing for comedy shows cause they're really fucking good.

MerlinAnyway, sorry. That's why you came though.

Speaker AYou came because of Obama. Obama made you come.

MaxAnd now those people... Obama made a lot of people come.

Speaker BPhraising! Now all those people are gone and Twitter sucks ass. Yep. We've all muted each other. We all live in our own little bubble and we don't see each other anymore.

MaxPornhub, Xtube. I know the names. Better than my grandmother's names.

Speaker BWe used to talk... We used to tell people how we felt. Now we text each other an emoji.

Speaker AMax, it's clear to me that you are pretty much almost completely off Twitter at this point. You deleted it from your phone. You have to enter it manually into your location bar.

Speaker BHave you done any check-ins on Twitter? Oh, yes. So I went on Twitter the other night.

MaxSo I still have the Twitter. I realized I still have the Twitter app on my iPad. And I was on the iPad. And I was like, I wonder what's happened on the old Twitter. Oh, no. You're like John Roderick with a cigarette over the door.

Speaker BOh, no. Yes.

Speaker AOh, no.

MaxOh, shit. I didn't know I still had this weed. So I fired it up, and I looked at my minchies, and it was fine. There wasn't many of them. And then I just sort of scrolled down the timeline. I immediately got spoiled on Game of Thrones, and I came across three Twitter ads, which are pretty incredible. One of them I haven't sent to you guys yet. You sent two dinners. Let me send. All right. Here, I'll just describe it. Okay. So the first one is from.

Speaker BThese are promoted tweets. These are promoted tweets that were in my feed. Someone paid for this thing to be in your face.

MaxYes. Now, the first one is from John Legere, who's the CEO of T-Mobile. And it's a goofy-looking guy, and he's wearing a pink T-shirt, and he has a black chef's hat on. And he looks very manic. He has crazy eyes. And he's staring right into the camera in his profile picture. And there's a promoted tweet. He's got big tax haven energy. Yeah.

Speaker BLike, you know, who's the antivirus software guy?

MaxI was just about to say, he's got big John McAfee energy. That's it. He probably owns a lot of automatic weapons. His face is really upsetting. So it's a promoted tweet from Jean Legere, and it shows me like a whole card, you know, those Twitter cards of his profile. So like his banner image and his thing, and it's like, follow Jean Legere. And then it says, stop, exclamation point. You, yeah, you, why aren't you following me, comma, T-Mobile CEO? Do you not like free stuff or something?

And then it just has a call to action, like a button in line in Twitter that says, follow Jean Legere. And then it's promoted.

Speaker A24,300 likes.

AlexMerlin, could you read Jean Legere's bio for us?

MerlinYes, I'd love to. Do you have a sense? Do you know what country he's from? Is there a voice that I could do for Mr. Legere? I'm pretty sure French. Sounds French. You also know they have a service mark on magenta. Do you know that?

AlexNo, I do not.

MerlinThey have a service mark on the color magenta.

AlexHow is that possible? That's incredible, actually.

MerlinI don't know. EU?

Speaker AMagenta wearing, customer loving, at T-Mobile, USA CEO. No, I'm Italian. USA CEO focused on editing. Oh, fuck me. Gently. Magenta wearing. Customer loving. Acti Mobile. USA CEO focused on ending wireless pain points, ampersand, scaring our competitors. Also, pounce sign, I'm Batman.

AlexOh, God. It's almost as bad as the three things bio. Oh, God. Oh, my God.

Speaker AWriter. Writer. Lover.

MerlinHuman.

Speaker BDisruptor. That promoted tweet upsets me so much. Stop. Why aren't you following me? You guys got to see this has got to be show art because he's got such fucking weird energy in his weird magenta.

AlexYeah. He's.

MerlinYeah.

MaxOh.

AlexSo then I saw. His thing says his apron says in exclamation point.

MaxSo then I saw another one. And this is a tweet. This is another promoted tweet. I'm going to send you the screen grab. So here it is. So it's right in the middle there. And it says and it's from at Mr. Peanut. And it's a promoted tweet. And it's a picture of Mr. Peanut in the avatar. And she says, anybody want a peanut?

Speaker BThat's a reference. That's a reference.

MerlinThat's a reference. Andre the Giant in The Princess Bride. Anybody want a peanut? Anybody want a peanut? That's funny. That's funny. Mr. Peanut said that. The peanut man.

MaxWhy are they paying to make me see that?

Speaker AWhy does he need a monocle? I mean, did he have an injury in the war? Was he a nom? What happened? Why does he have a monocle? He's very fancy. Now, I always liked the pretzel guy. you remember the pretzel guy who's the pretzel guy anybody want a peanut mr. I think his name was I think his name was improbably mr. salty

Maxone of the all-time great uh tweets is from uh uh Cohen at skull mandible and he said uh is there anything more capitalist than a peanut wearing a top hat cane and monocle selling you other peanuts to eat.

And then the last one, and this is the one that really broke my spirit. So this is another promoted tweet, and it's one of these. Have you guys seen these? It's Twitter surveys, and it comes up as a tweet, and it's like, Twitter would like your feedback, and then it's a poll, and obviously someone's paying for this.

MerlinI only ever see promoted tweets in, forgive me, I only ever see it in Twitter moments. And it's always like, you know, oh, you know, everyone is wrecked about this YouTuber's haircut and nails. And then it'll be a promoted tweet for fucking T-Mobile or whatever. You're getting it in your menchies or in your main timeline?

MaxYeah, but I don't remember previously getting promoted tweets. And then when I went on, it was just like, wow, just in my face, just ads. So this one is from at Twitter surveys. And it says, Twitter would like your feedback. And it says promoted on the bottom. So I know that someone paid for me to see this in my feed. But it's not branded in any way. And so it just says, question one of three. Which of the following do you most associate with supporting gender equality? A, American Express. B, Visa. C, PayPal.

D, MasterCard. E, none of the above.

Speaker AThat's a real thinker. I got to think on that. it's not an angle that had ever been presented to me before and i i i'm gonna stop i'm gonna look for that for a look at that for a while because i don't i don't i don't know what the answer is i gotta think about that it's what now alex alex you're alex you're interested in gender

Alexequality how do you how do you feel about mastercard i'm mastercard you know they've got two circles they're the same they they go over each other to form a diagram it's so weird come on in

MaxIf you go to at Twitter, so I just went to Twitter.com slash Twitter surveys, and it says these tweets are protected. They have a locked account.

Speaker AOh. That's weird.

MerlinDo you remember that one time that there was the, was it Tim Cook or Apple? There was a tweet around the time an Apple event started, and, like, you could only, do you remember this, Alex? It was so fucking weird. It was this tweet that went up. They never tweeted from this new account before, was it? But you could only see it if you went to the detail page for that tweet. It wasn't like available in like a regular.

Speaker BIt was really strange. It was something that nobody had ever seen before. So Twitter, one thing I've observed about Twitter is they have a lot of ad tech.

MaxI mean they don't really advance their own platform very much for regular users. But their ad platform is super advanced. And they're constantly doing new shit. It's very experimental. And they're rolling out new features all the time. I mean they're just like rocket fuel behind that ad platform. and I think a lot of times there's like weird shit weird incongruous shit happens on Twitter like this like branded Twitter surveys like accounts that break the rules like you know all kinds of weird stuff like that and I think it's like a result of that they'll basically do anything for their ad platform like all their like alleged like rules are out the window when

Alexit comes to the ad platform I wonder if it's intentionally experimental or they're just trying so hard to like hit a really specific mark like Facebook that they just shoot way too far because I get like ads for mortgages and like shit that I am not interested in. Whereas as I go on Instagram, it's like very specific. Like, yeah, you want this toothbrush flavored purple? Yep. Okay. Moving on. And iPhone case. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Speaker AYou know what? No, no. I know exactly what you mean.

MerlinAnd you know, what was funny was, you know, it was really interesting and fun and exciting to be there as Google got good. Initially, when Google came straight out of the box, they were instantly, because of the way they use relevance and page rank, they instantly were better than AltaVista, which had previously been the really good one. But they continued to do such fascinating stuff. Something pretty much all of us very online people know today is that your Google search returns will vary based upon your history and what they think you want. And they're actually pretty shockingly good at it.

They got rid of spam. But you see stuff where somebody goes, oh, my gosh, look at this. Look at the returns for this thing. and you're like, dude, that's because you're you. Like, what I'm trying to get at is, ever since then, we all see a different internet in a lot of ways. It's, I mean, I guess on Facebook, this is really true, but I bet it's also pretty true on Twitter, which is the Twitter that you have, you know, based on like whether you're verified or not, or whether you're this and where you live. You're gonna see a different internet. No two people are looking at the same internet so much anymore.

Speaker AYeah, it's... Yeah. You made me sad, that's all. Well, no, it's just that we – I mean that's important to keep in mind.

MerlinI mean we talk about the bubbles that we all live in and the – on the one hand, the comfort of having people who you have common cause with but also the fact that we – the people, our perceived enemies out there or our adversaries are seeing such different things than we are. I mean, I imagine I'm speculating, but I'm pretty sure that's kind of the problem in some ways with Facebook is that you're getting this incredibly tailored idea of what the truth is or what's current or what other importantly, what other people truly believe.

And I think that is that's I'm sorry, I've made the show upsetting.

MaxHere's here's one thing I love. I now I get my news when I wake up. I used to go on Twitter and be like, what's everyone mad about today? Now I open up Apple News, which is like it's I don't know why. It's just the one that I've stuck with. I feel like I guess I find the most stories relevant to me on Apple News. But then they have this thing, if you scroll down, called Trending Stories. And when you talk about, like, boy, I'm really living somewhere else. I'm on some sort of weird asteroid compared to the rest of civilization. Like, it's wild on Trending Stories.

Speaker BYeah.

MerlinI mean, some of the people on Nectar Twitter have been talking a lot about this lately.

MaxAmy Schumer shares pumping photo and sends love to those who mom shamed her for returning to work. Yes, queen.

AlexWow. My trending stories are not super, yeah, political.

MaxGold miners must focus on returns, mergers to attract investment, Baron Baron CEO.

AlexThis is the world's rarest form of gold. New clues are revealing why.

MaxFactbox Graybull Capital Faces More Public Ire After British Steel Collapse And then they have These ones where It's like It's called It's like a Collection I guess And it's like And so the headline Is what's Britney What's really going On with Britney Spears And then the sub Headline is Her personal battles Are back in the Spotlight Plus why middle Age millennials Are in crisis How one man Made sperm donation A full time job And more

MerlinI just sent you A link I can't promise that this still works, because it's hard to tell if it works. Oh, God, he's a Bitcoin guy. Check that out. If you add the following words, quote, I'm going to the phrases, basically with underscores. If you add these three, I think I sent it to the right place. Are you guys seeing that, the muted words thing?

AlexIt's taking a very long time to load. Oh, I see. Okay, got it.

MerlinSo this is a little trick that I think still works, which is this guy says, if you add the following three items to your muted word list, It seems to remove the liked by and followed by tweets from your timeline and restores it to chronological order. But like there are like contra codes out there for doing stuff with Twitter. And it would be really interesting to see if there's any more like this. This is just like a little hack that, you know, they might have even closed the loop by now. But that's what we've resorted to.

MaxListen, one thing I do like about Twitter and I did, you know, one of the things I'll always go is I'll search. I'll do a little name search for Dubai Friday and just see what people are posting. One thing that has made Twitter honestly much more cool is the clip sharing from Overcast. We have not talked about that very much on the show except to say that is probably one of my favorite software features of any software I use of the last decade. I use it several times a day to send people something I listen to.

It's so easy to use. It's so well designed. Some tech is like, okay, I recognize that it's a personal convenience for me, but I think it's bad for the world. and this is the opposite of that. It's like great for me but then I also love the effect it has on the world because like people are sharing more audio and it encourages me to like find new shows and listen to them. So kudos to Marco for making, I mean honestly one of the coolest, best software things I have played with in a long time. And also thank you to all of the Dubai Friday listeners who are posting funny clips.

Like a lot of people clipped that. Oh my God, the egg drop. The egg drop, yeah. It made me laugh every time. but if you do listen we have this thing set up if you go to giveusyourfuckingtime.com and it's a spreadsheet where listeners of the show have sort of put in all a lot of their favorite moments of Dubai Friday and people should start clipping that and putting it on Twitter and we will at least I'll try and retweet it if I see it

Speaker Byeah yeah well like they used to say in the old

Merlincommercial I like making it and eating it like it's fun to hear people find an old bit and post it on something I'm involved with. You know, if it's like a great moment with Dan or John or somebody, it makes me really happy. But honestly, I like doing it too. I'm trying not to overwhelm people, you know, with too much of it. But there are sometimes, you know, in the one minute limit, I think I like the one minute limit. Although sometimes it's a little frustrating that you can't really get the whole thing up.

MaxMarco, listen to me. This is Max. Marco, I will give you, I will deliver a briefcase of cash to your house if you give me a special

Speaker Btest flight build of Overcast. He tried that bag and didn't like it. What's that?

MerlinOh, whatever you give him. Yeah, I know. He tried the Synapse. Whatever bag you give him. He'll just throw out the money and return the bag. He's very picky about his backpacks.

MaxYeah, that's fine. I'll bring it in a reusable grocery bag or something.

Speaker BNo, listen. You should bring him several bags, and they can pick the top four, but not really. Please, I'm begging you. Please let me clip private RSS feeds. Oh.

MaxYeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Please.

Speaker BI don't want everyone to have it because I make it. Somebody posted my Max impersonation from the after show using screen cap. I think they did the iOS screen cap. They did screen cap, yeah.

MaxSo listen, here's my argument for Marco to do it. You can already do it. You can already do it using the native software in the phone. And also, let me also be clear. As someone who makes a private RSS feed for money, I don't want other people to be able to do this. It's very important that I'm the only one who'd be able to do it.

MerlinThey call that an exception. Yeah. in his MySQL, he'd make it so that yours can't be given to the hog.

MaxJust hard code, exactly. Hard code my, you know, account. That's not a lot to ask. Into the build. And I want to be able to do any length, and I want private RSS, but I want to be the only one, okay? And Marco, I will give you just cash. I'll drop a duffel bag of cash at your doorstop. Just tell me how much.

AlexYeah, I'm sure this will happen.

MaxI'll be overcast double premium. Tier three overcast, baby.

AlexOh, interesting.

Speaker BDouble secret level

MaxDouble secret Probationary overcast

Speaker AYou have to go to the top, rubber band down three times Do face ID You have been identified as Max, premium, premium Premium

AlexHello Max

Speaker BOkay, and I don't want this for everyone

MaxI want only kids with money

Speaker ASynapse Synapse backpacks outside

MaxDuffel bags of cash outside Only kids with money

Speaker Aokay can i say my other thing yes please i don't know why i feel the need to share this i imagine i have to imagine that quinn has said something to you alex uh to cut a long story short you know i'm on a journey with um podcast recording i used to think i was pretty good at because for years

MerlinAll I would do was record using Call Recorder, which produces a two-track movie where you get both sides of the conversation. It's been a real easy thing to do. And the thing is now, even as we speak, I'm recording with audio hijacked so that I can give you a higher quality version. Good man. Why do I say this? Yeah, well, thank you. I've played with various mute buttons and stuff like that, and I haven't found any that I liked. But so what I normally do, if I have to make a noise like all this coughing that I'm doing this morning, making mucus, I just go over and I hit the little microphone in Skype and then that mutes it.

Now, here's the thing.

Speaker AI'm pretty sure that when I hit the mute in Skype, it's not muting the recording and audio hijack. And it only occurred to me yesterday. So I just want to say Everyone should be aware of this

MerlinAnd if anybody has ever heard me Literally peeing into a bucket During the show

AlexI still don't know if it's real I think about it once a week

Speaker BI think it's a bit

MaxI don't think he's really doing that

AlexI don't know

Speaker AClorox 3.78 quart Regular bleach Merlin if you're peeing Clorox

MaxThat's a problem

Speaker AOh no it helps with my spectrum disorders oh did you read that oh i read the bleach drinking oh god that really anyway my apology to quinn and everybody else so sorry i'm gonna get i'm gonna get a mute switch so people are drinking bleach then people were mad about the bleach reporter and then q anon says oh i've been drinking bleach i call it mms i've been drinking it it fixed everything i'll brush my

Alexteeth with it all right somewhere i missed the thread what how did the bleach story so let me

Maxstart i can merlin private facebook groups i can fill in the first part of this story but you're

Speaker Bgonna have to explain i didn't know the whole thing with uh with uh the q anon connection talk about the uh was it brandy i forget her name but she did a piece yeah there was like a story in

Maxmaybe i think it was the new york times this week and basically there's these private facebook groups for um parents of autistic children and uh what they do sometimes what they do in these groups is they post their quote-unquote miracle cures for autism. And as you can imagine, it's pretty uneducated. And a lot of it is kind of private groups, though.

MerlinIt's people who are, I would speculate, people who are, I don't want to say desperate, but people who are looking for a solution. They want something that's going to help with this kid that they love.

Speaker BAnd so they're in there swinging at the fences for whatever's available. Some of it is goofy.

Maxof like there was like some something in that article about exposing your kid to moonlight I mean like like literally it's like crazy it's like it's crazy stuff but then there's a darker side of it where some of it is basically just child abuse and there's these people who believe it's sort of this conspiracy that there's like a chemical that you can that you can make your kid drink and it will treat their autism and the chemical is really dangerous and it's basically bleach it's like it's it's like on label use as an industrial like cleaning agent. Yeah. And yeah, people are making their kids drink it and they're telling

stories. They go on their group and like, hey, I've been force feeding my kid this bleach and they really hate it. And they cough and they spit it out all the time. What am I doing? How do I make my kid drink this bleach more efficiently?

So anyway, that was the article I read. Oh, and then so basically the article was about these moms who have infiltrated these groups and

Speaker Bthey're sort of exposing them and notifying authorities. And in some cases, like trying to talk people out of it and go, you're like, you know, that's really not such a good idea. This is a very dangerous thing. Yeah. You know, I mentioned,

MaxI have a very quick divergent thing on this, but I mentioned this once before on the podcast, but there's a new book of Cory Doctorow short stories out called Radicalized. Yes, you recommended it and it's amazing. And Cory sent me a really nice, I don't know if he listens to Do By Friday, but he sent me a really nice message and he was like, thanks for mentioning the book on the podcast.

Speaker BWell, that's so nice.

MaxAnd so now I'm confused if he listens to it or not. But I just want to say,

Speaker Bhe's got people.

Maxsure he's got people. I just want to say, I'm a big Cory Doctorow fan. I love his sci-fi. He's a really smart guy. Yeah, I really feel like he's a pretty, how do we put it? There's a lot of people in sci-fi who are very smart and they think about the future and what it all means. And Cory's the one who is the right most of the time, to put it bluntly. And so he writes sort of near future science fiction. At the time I recommended it, I was recommending the first story in this anthology called Radicalized, which is still my favorite one in the book but I've since finished the book and it fucked me up like I think about

it constantly it was so so good it is my favorite thing that Corey's written since probably since like little brother like it just really it's just sometimes you read something and it just gets under your skin and this one just got right under my skin and I think about it all the time and everywhere I go in the world I see something I'm like god damn that's the thing from the story in the book and there's anyway there's a story about these um men who have a Facebook group because their family members of dying of cancer and they become radicalized and they decide how

to get vengeance on the insurance companies. And he just nails this whole culture, the secret Facebook group, the emotions of it, the tech side of it, the political implications, like just nails it. And it's funny and it's like chilling and it makes you mad and like, I just can't recommend this book enough. So it's radicalized by Cory Doctorow. And there is a story that is just totally about this. Like, I wish everyone had read it because it's like the smartest commentary on this whole thing. Sorry.

AlexWell, the other thing just I want to recommend it, too, because it's obviously he takes it. Did you read it? Yeah, I read all the stories.

MaxDid you read the last one? It made me almost want to throw up.

Speaker BI've had nightmares about this.

MaxYeah.

Speaker BLike actual wake up in the middle of the night scared about it. Can I unsend the sample to my Kindle? It's fantastic though.

AlexThat last story was freaked me out. Well, the thing that I thought was brilliant was actually the first part because you see he makes, I think, the right assumptions about how people get into these groups and how these people are radicalized. And it was chilling and just so upsetting. But funny.

MaxWell, the Facebook one was very funny.

AlexI mean, yeah, but also. It was very funny. I still like the bread one the most. But obviously If you want a happy one Read the bread story Alright Merlin Please tell me the rest Of the upsetting bleach story

MaxThe Superman was good They're all good That was funny too Now we've literally said all of them But they're all good But the last one is about A rich guy I sort of imagine him As almost like an Elon Musk figure And he builds this bunker For when the collapse comes And then it's just sort of like What happens to him When that plays out And oh boy, it is imagined in a detail that I didn't necessarily want to have that imagined in.

It was really something.

AlexIf you've ever seen like 13, what is it, 13 Cloverfield Lane? Oh, yeah. It's like that, but way better and just a lot more detail and what's going to actually happen and very upsetting. All great. Not great to read at 2 a.m., but okay. Bleach.

MerlinSo just a couple quick things. So the way I saw this was that then after that article went up, there was a lot of backlash, including, I guess, from what let's generally call the alternative medicine community. And so second, I just sent you the link for the Internet Science page for something called Miracle Mineral Supplement, known as MMS. referred to as MMS is chlorine dioxide and industrial bleach. It is made by mixing 28% sodium chloride solution with an acid such as citrus juice.

This mixture produces chlorine dioxide, a toxic chemical that in the doses recommended on the labeling can cause nausea, vomiting, diarrhea, severe dehydration, etc. Cutting down a little bit here. MMS is falsely promoted as a cure for HIV, malaria, hepatitis, H1N1, common colds, autism, acne, cancer, and much more.

Maxwow if it i can't believe it cures all those things and yet people still want to um keep it the medical industrial complex still wants to keep it from the people with their lies

Speaker Athank you thank you that's part of the problem and so uh what does one want to say q anon uh people in the community uh let me read you some things uh to tweet responses community oh i'm actually drinking mms right now for strep and guess what it's working F you big pharma and yo fake news BS and that was quote tweeted by a fella who says oh I drank MMS aka chlorine dioxide brushed my teeth with it breathed it clean with it

used it topically if it was toxic bleach I should be dead sorry FDA and fake news media you lose this one

Maxpeople it was originally published by this guy Jim I'm just reading the Wikipedia now but it was originally published by the Scientologist Jim Humble in his 2006 self published book, The Miracle Mineral Solution of the 21st Century. Now, people need to be, I think people should be a little

Speaker AI would look out for the word miracle in anything you use for medicine. That's just me. Maybe I'm a secular, maybe I'm a secular humanist.

AlexSelf-published is also a trigger word for me. I

Maxwould just say like people should be a little less proud of having written a book, you know? Yeah. Oh, God, yes. Everyone needs to chill out with their

Merlinbook. Okay, we get it. I'm Jon Snow. I live at Winterfell.

Speaker AYeah, no, I yeah so that's been some of the backlash but you know bleach this is fun so there's a whole there's a whole whole series on the internet science site called alternative and pseudo medicine oh there's so much stuff i don't know about here we oh we might have a challenge here cupping therapy crystal healing oh we have cupping i am doing cupping soon we have cupping happening

Alexin our very office you're gonna get cupped right under your nose is that a hot is that a hot cup Well, we're talking about the Michael Phelps thing, right, where you get a massage.

MaxCan you explain it?

AlexI'll try. Cupping is like this alternative massage, and a lot of athletes and swimmers get it done where a suction cup is put on your back.

Speaker BThat's why he had all those hickeys.

MaxI can see why we're paying for that to happen in our office because we have a lot of pretty high-performance people in this office. We've got people writing jokes and spreadsheets. We've got people making InDesign files.

MerlinYou know, Max, if you add that 1% to your performance, just add 1% to your performance and you become an elite athlete or comedian.

MaxYeah.

AlexI mean, I stand all day except for the two hours I sit on the couch by my desk. What are you standing for? I don't know. Because someone gave me a standing desk.

MaxOh, you're voluntarily standing at your desk when you write things in this desk.

AlexI mean, is it voluntary? Is it?

MaxThis whole office, all we do, everyone just types things in as spreadsheets.

Speaker BNobody needs athleisure wear. Nobody needs cupping. Okay? Wear a fucking tie. Man up.

AlexYou know what I'm saying? I'm sorry. I have a button-down shirt today. It's, yeah, mm-hmm. It's wrinkled in front of Old Navy.

MerlinUrine therapy, ear candling, body work, bone cellar.

AlexMm-hmm.

MerlinThe Bates method. Oh. The Bates method is aimed at improving eyesight. Oh, throw your glasses away. Sure, sure, sure. Applied kinesiology. Huh, huh, huh. Maybe we should try some, what they call, oh, fringe medicine and science.

Speaker AThat's a little normative.

MaxMm. I don't want to, you know, Merlin, what if we, can I just throw this out? What if we do some sort of one of these alternative medicine things? We, we, granted, we snort some crystals or something. Yes. And then we find, and then the big pharma comes for us because we find out we're going to expose that it actually works. Right.

AlexLike eating your sunscreen. I don't need that.

Speaker BI don't need that. Drinking your urine. I have the whole book on drinking your urine. Oh, you sure do. I could use that, that deer attractor you sent me.

MerlinMade my whole office stink.

Speaker AIs that a therapy? It could be a therapy.

Speaker BYou sprayed it in your office?

Speaker AWell, I don't know. I was trying to do some deer candling.

Speaker BOh, okay.

AlexThat's funny.

Speaker AHow are those ladybugs doing? I let the ladybugs settle in the box for a while. Settle? And then put it in the compost. Hakuna Matata.

AlexOh, they're not moving anymore. I guess it's time to set them free. That means they're ready.

Speaker AI didn't see the part where it said live animals on the side. I should have looked. I was trying no spoilers

Alexoh god oh dear you know what we could do another Amazon challenge possibly but we need your help Max can you tell the nice people about Patreon

Maxoh yes do you play Friday listen guys here's the deal this is a completely ad free show We don't have Mr. Peanut telling you a message. We don't have a Twitter survey asking you which American Express card is the most supportive reparations. Okay. We don't have the CEO of the T-Mobile Corporation crushing Epic Code and firing his assault weapons on air. We don't have any of that stuff. Okay. Okay. Anything that we talk about.

Here's the thing is we haven't been corrupted by Big Pharma. Okay. we're gonna tell you we're gonna tell you about the miracle mineral supplement okay you're gonna hear about this what are you gonna hear about chlorine dioxide you're gonna hear about um do the research of jim humble you're gonna hear about mms technologies like literally peeing into a

Speaker Ableach bottle and then drinking that on air because you didn't know now that could be it that could be a special treat for people who are at the premium premium premium level it's cleansed

Maxokay it's cleansed now now okay why do you listen to Dubai Friday it's so that you can hear about all of these miracle treatments that you can be doing and okay we're not we got we don't have anything to sell we're not selling you anything all we have to offer is the truth and if that's what you're here for I would recommend that you go to give us your fucking money.com okay you give us five dollars and you'll receive a package of supplements that what do you have you have pain You have multiple chemical sensitivities. No. You've got that one where you're sleepy all the time.

No.

AlexNo.

MaxOkay. You're going to take these. What is this happening? You're going to receive a package in the mail of pills and powders.

Speaker AI'm like a bear.

Speaker BYep. What do you got? Generalized. Oh, God. You got generalized anxiety disorder. Generalized anxiety. You've got unexpected rashes.

Speaker Ayou got piles

Speaker Bchronic fatigue foot spaghetti going untreated oh Morgellons well you could have the Morgellons disease oh no you get the Joni Mitchell problem

Maxoh yes yes yes

Merlinoh gang stalking if you have gang stalking

Maxyeah oh boy now you're gonna receive a now you go on giveusyourfuckingmoney.com okay that's the Dubai Friday Patreon you give us $5 a month now what does that do first of all it keeps the sponsors off the show that's why we can talk about all of the all of these treatments okay that you're candling all the stuff that you love We can talk about the truth for once. We tell you the truth. But what else? You're going to receive a box of supplements in the mail. You take these guaranteed.

Speaker BGuaranteed. What do you got? Pain? You're dizzy? You take these. These are going to be things that we designed in our own, let's say, lab.

Speaker AThese are all new versions of the truth that we are going to send to you.

MaxNow, if you order now, I will throw in my special high testosterone supplement. Okay? Oh, absolutely.

MerlinWe're going to do our co-branded Tim Ferriss almond jizz.

MaxYou're out there eating too much soy and you've got low tea. And you don't support our commander in chief because your tea is too low. Oh,

AlexOh, Oh, Oh, Oh, Oh, Oh, Oh, Oh,

Oh, Oh, Oh, Oh, Oh,

MaxOh, Oh, Oh, So that's go to www.giveusyourfuckinmoney.com. Oh, Oh, And I think we did update. We have like a new, you know, on Patreon you're supposed to set these like tiers of like if we get this much money we'll show our ass on the subway or whatever. Yeah. And we have a new one which Alex, will you say what it is? I obviously know. I'm just testing you to make sure you know.

AlexYeah, yeah. We're going to have an extreme Amazon challenge because as people may know. What's extreme about it? It's extreme because you know how you return things from Amazon? like every day because I know that you responsibly return things instead of throwing them away.

MaxI actually returned something to Amazon yesterday.

AlexI was throwing shade at Merlin, actually.

Speaker BI've never returned anything. I just threw it out. But I ordered a book. I've stopped reporting things that just didn't show up.

MerlinI just buy it again. We didn't get our protein drink. What am I going to do? I'm going to talk to them on the phone. They're going to say, oh, I looked at your house on Google Street View. Do you still have a bush there? Could the protein drinks be in the bush?

MaxI ordered a picture book And it showed up And it was just covered in syrup Put some jelly on it

Speaker AIt smelled like coffee

MaxLike some sort of coffee syrup Got into the book

Speaker BYou ever do the thing where you buy something And you're pretty sure it's supposed to be new And it arrives and it's not new

MaxI pre-ordered the book And it was a new book from an illustrator Anyway, so I go on Amazon. And now, have you ever tried to find the button to tell Amazon something is wrong?

MerlinOh, it's a very... Well, first of all, once you get in there, you see that the button is completely different than their design. It's clearly designed in 1998. And they're like, oh, nobody will find this old thing. It's like in a broom closet of Amazon.

MaxYeah, you have to fucking go through the hedge maze. First, you must solve my riddle. Yeah, there's a minotaur chasing you. And you're just like, where is the button to tell you that my thing's not here? It's covered in syrup.

And then they had a drop-down menu, and they're like, why are you returning this item? Aren't you happy? Why are you not happy? It wasn't the item I expected. Like, it didn't work how I intended. I was like, there's no option for it's covered in syrup.

Speaker AThey didn't anticipate this. Max, it seems like it's something they're optimized in so many ways. I mean, it seems like that's something they'd want to know. What percentage of our products show up covered with syrup? They would want to know that.

MaxWhat I imagine happened is there was someone ordered a gallon drum of syrup in one of those barrels from Breaking Bad. And some poor Amazon warehouse employee was trying to take it down off the shelf. And it crushed him. And the syrup went everywhere. And it got on everyone else. And they were like, back to work. He was wearing skates. He was wearing skates. Back to work.

Speaker ANo breaks. No breaks. I'll urinate when I'm dead. So it's going to be an upsetting challenge where we are going to.

AlexWe're going to buy one of the Amazon boxes that have been sent to liquidation.com. Because when you return something to Amazon, usually it just goes into a literal box of garbage. They sell it to some, just some company that either repurposes it or throws it away. And I've sent in our super secret text channel my new favorite thing of the day at liquidation.com, which is a box that supposedly is filled with grocery, tea, coffee, snacks, pet food, and more.

MSRP, $2,519. But what you do is bid on these items, and it is currently going for $220. The minimum bid suggested is $230. 91% savings.

MerlinI guess, should I click it? Is it going to upset me?

AlexIt's a sealed box.

MaxSo we're going to buy these boxes for each other, and that will be our...

AlexWe're going to reap up this. It's just a box. No, look inside. Look inside.

Speaker ABut some of them are like, they're in clear, like transparent plastic, and you see it's full of return blankets and Elmo dolls. Yes. And you're like, what?

MaxHow did you decide this was the palette to go with? Well, I'm excited to get someone else's syrupy books. I'm moist.

Speaker BI just want a palette of someone else's returned syrupy books.

Speaker AI believe you'll find my library is rather unique. Hello, I'm the chef from T-Mobile. Follow me.

Speaker BI want the syrupy books and their jizzy blankets. And their cum-stained elbow.

MaxTheir pharmaceutical products just covered in human hair.

AlexOh, God, this one's sad. Baby, tell me. finds this unconsensual. No, no, no.

Speaker AStop tickling me.

MaxI want that. I want that. I want one of those. I hope that I get one of those sex toys. It's just a rubber foot, but it's covered in olive oil.

Speaker AOh, the fuckable foot. I love the fuckable foot. Yeah. It's got labia on the sole of the foot. La, la, la. You put your spaghetti in there. You take it to your workplace. You work at Amazon. You're on roller skates. are constantly falling on you. And you say, lunchtime, and you pull out your fake human foot with a vagina full of spaghetti.

MaxIt's 180 degrees in there. You're sweating. You can't pee. You're telling me you're not going to fuck a foot if you get a chance?

Speaker ANo. Oh, boy. Dick dog challenge. Court says T-Mobile owns the color magenta.

AlexOkay. Did anybody do the challenge?

Speaker BFuck that. We should make our podcast magenta. Let them sue us. Ooh. That's a spicy meatball.

AlexNow we're officially... Well, if we were a Magenta podcast, what does that mean? It seems like we're co-opting some, I mean, I guess we're co-opting T-Mobile.

MerlinOh, like the breast cancer people, like the yogurt, eat yogurt for breast cancer. Like we're against it. Like that kind of stuff where they don't want you putting pink on things.

AlexI want to know what I am for or against if I'm going to identify as a Magenta.

Speaker AYou're a human, you're a human hanky code. Yeah.

MaxLet me tell you what I'm for, guys. You have the pink one in your left back. I am for relief from wireless pain points. Okay? Okay? I'm against high prices for my mobile data. I'm not going to pay a lot for this data. I'm for scaring our customers. And also, I am Batman.

Speaker AI am for this recently returned Himalayan salt lamp full of jizz. I am for the human solution. Hi, welcome to D by Friday. Enjoy your Himalayan salt lamp, if you know what I mean. It takes Wi-Fi out of the air, removes toxins.

Alexdick doug how much money do we have to get to buy our amazon our amazon jizz box $20,000 because these can go up to $1,000

MaxDubai Friday powder nation freeloading you're listening to the show you're not getting the after show they're freebooting go to giveusyourfuckingmoney.com drink your bleach man up you go to giveusyourfuckingmoney.com I personally endorse drinking the bleach and I guarantee that it will cure your sicknesses

Speaker Bwe tested it in our lab I give my personal guarantee that it will work. Do you have any idea how much of other people's urine I've been drinking?

Speaker AI have a lab coat and a bachelor's degree. Yeah, okay. Buy this cum-stiffened Elmo and put it in the Himalayan salt lake. Record yourself fucking the foot with Elmo.

MaxDo you think we'd be recommending these miracle cures if we hadn't personally drank the urine and fucked the foot? We couldn't do it.

Speaker ALegally.

MaxPersonally.

Speaker AWe legally would not be able to talk about the way that this truth is going to improve your life.

Speaker BYeah. Well, pyramid scheme is illegal. Oh, no, it's an inverted triangle. Inverted.

Speaker AYeah.

Speaker BWhat is it? The triangles of the convergent triangle?

MaxOh, right. Yes. Yeah. Listen, go to giveusyourfuckmoney.com. Stop freeloading. Honestly. Come on. Be a good person. Drink the bleach. Let's go. Giveusyourfuckmoney.com. Give us $5 a month You get the Dubai Friday After show Give us the $20 We'll buy the Amazon Jizz box We'll open it on air If you come on

MerlinAnomo this much You better give us $5 You cuck

MaxWhat else are you going to do

MerlinWhat else are you going to do

MaxWith your life What are you going to do Honest to God Honest to God Fuck Dig dug Dig dug

AlexChallenge Oh my god

MaxAnd do clip us Find those old clips From the back catalog And put them on Twitter And if we like it We'll send you out A Dubai Friday Wind jacket Windbreaker you get one of those windbreakers

Speaker Bwait a minute was there a meeting I didn't get invited to yeah Alex if you

Speaker Awe need to go make some co-branded duct tape don't ask why I gotta go

Speaker Blisten if you find one of those

Maxclips and we all like

Speaker Awe're gonna make a tub of Elmer's glue with our faces on it

Speaker Bwhat I'm just trying to make dinner

Speaker A47 text

Maxif you find one of those clips and you post it we will send you in the mail One of our exclusive Dubai Friday windbreakers. The wind jacket. Wind jacket.

AlexOkay.

MaxAlex, you'll make those and send them to people, right?

AlexI'm going to make some bespoke jackets. Do it out of pocket. I don't want to spend any podcast money on them. But I have to like it. That's the problem. Okay. Dig dug. Dig dug. It was my challenge this week, and the challenge was to start all of the text that you're writing in the application drafts.

MaxHmm. Hmm. Hmm. Hmm. Hmm. Well, I'll go first. I pretty much straight up didn't do this. All right. So I got drafts and I started, so here's what would happen is like I would receive a text message and I'd be like, okay, I need to reply. And so then I would open drafts and I would start typing the message and I would then go like to the share sheet and share it to messages and send it to the person who's going to.

AlexNo, that's. No. No.

Speaker AI mean, you're moving to like, you're moving to drafts like 303 when you haven't done 101.

Speaker Bso I did it wrong no no you did well you didn't do the challenge which is a kind of doing the challenge but I gave up on it I mean I did that like four times and I was like

Maxthis sucks ass that's shocking I mean doing your text messages and drafts is not great now I did see that Merlin sent a list of like the top drafts actions and I was pretty excited by that but I have not had time to go back and start adding stuff to drafts but that is going to give me I did get a little bit of more wind in my sails to keep playing with it after I saw that because there's some stuff in

Alexthere I didn't even know it did yeah yeah I I actually I guess failed at this challenge too only because uh we would you know how our survivor text threads get and I would just get a little too excited and then forget to go to another application to immediately reply well I I know I just want to

Merlinclarify, at least in my dumb head, I did not hear that as every text you ever write, even if it's a response to one of Max's 47 tweet threads about the Survivor spoilers, I absolutely don't want to hear. I didn't, for me, just because of the way I'm already wired, my reading of it, and I guess we talked about this before, and we talked about this some in the after show, and it seems silly to be serious now after all this come, but for me, this is why I say drafts is where text begins.

And that might even be their thing. I don't know. But it's where stuff starts. And just very briefly, can I briefly do a pitch here?

AlexDo the thing. Do the thing. Yeah.

MerlinYeah. So we talked about this in the after show last week. But I just want to clarify why I think the general idea of this is very interesting. I traced it back to the days of early Twitter and wanting to try hard, be a try hard, to do a really good job with a Twitter and make a nice Twitter that's the right length. And that was when I had a little bit of a breakthrough of like, I got better when I wasn't, when I was separating the thing I used to write versus the thing I used to send. That's just, that's the little silly basic distinction. So one benefit, that was a breakthrough.

But then the real benefit is this, which is if you realize you have to communicate something to somebody, and this, I realize this seems weird, Max, but I think it can work. Go outside the thing you used to send it to a place where you want to write it. and we can get to some of the functionality of drafts in a sec, but here's the distinction.

You go in and you say, okay, I've got to send somebody an email. So I could do that in the horrible mail.app, but no, I'm going to go into this drafts thing, and then I start typing it and typing it. Like, oh, it could be you say I've got to text somebody, but then you realize it's longer than a text, and you go, oh, this is actually probably two or three texts, and you can mentally separate it into which text those would be. And you say, oh, no, wait a minute. I don't want to send this person four texts. Fuck. Why don't I send them an email? And so now it's changed the thing that you're writing in front of you without any commitment to where that will end up or how.

You now have the opportunity to pivot on what it really should be. And then the beauty part and the spoiler for the ending is sometimes you go, shit, I don't need to send this. But if you do that, if you're doing that inside the app you use to send it, you just go, and you just jam on the keyboard and send it. So it's just a nice opportunity to be able to do that. And then once you are in drafts, as you've noted, there are numerous things. The whole point of drafts beyond having a place to write is now you can do stuff with it. You can do so much amazing automation for sending this to that place. One of the pieces of pure gold for me, because, you know, the email guy, is it's a great place if you just need to send an email and you don't want to look at your fucking inbox.

It interprets that the first line is the subject line. You get two spaces and then everything else is the body of the email. You can send that from drafts without having to open an email up. So stuff like that. That's why I think it's interesting. Like you don't have to do this all the time. But if you open your mind to the idea that this could turn into anything, it's in this very, there's a lot of fecundity to anything that you put into drafts. It could turn into almost anything. So, yeah, that's why I think it's useful. But I don't think you need to write all your responses in there. You're not a monster.

AlexIt was just an experiment in sort of more so of mindfulness than the actual functionality of drafts. Because I get into all the weird automation and stuff and like everything does start there and then it goes to an email or to, you know, things or OmniFocus and whatever.

And I love the new thing in drafts. Are we on five? Yeah, we're on five. Where if you do an action, you can have that. Like, let's say I there's one there's one called Sweet Storm where you can basically. Oh, my gosh, really? Yep. Wow. That you just, it'll turn your thing into tweets and it'll do like the one out of four or whatever. And then you can send it off to Twitter. But then you don't have to like.

MaxJust snort a big line of bleach and go off and pop off on a 400 tweet rant.

AlexI know people use drafts only for this. But then it will tag and archive or delete whatever you decide to do with it. it will automatically do that after it's performed in action. And I don't think that was a part of DressFore, or maybe it was and I didn't utilize it. But then at the end of the day, like if there's anything left in my inbox, I know that it's either not important or it needs to go somewhere.

MerlinYeah. Oh, interesting. I just keep everything. This is the opposite of how I do email. I should probably come up with a name for this. But the way that I do in Dress, I just let everything be in the inbox. And then I just do little subsorts. And you can do that thing like save searches or what I call it, workspaces. You're not replying to every email? Well, I reply until I literally fall down on my keyboard

Speaker Abecause I kind of give a couple good ones

Merlinthat are just real dumb and obvious and old school. And I apologize in advance to Agile Tortoise that I have not spent tons more time learning new things. But here's a real dumb one. You type something in drafts, there's a copy button. You hit copy, you copied it, that's easy. Here's what I really love. This is so useful for me in my workflow. which is I know I've got to type a thing. I start typing a thing. I'm not sure what it's going to be yet, right? It could be a text. It could be an email. Workflow. Workflow. Workflow. You will get your serious hot cuts.

So I type something. And then let's say I get to where I'm like, you know what? Shit dog, this is not for anybody else. This is just for me. For like this is some kind of a note. Maybe it's like an idea for a bit or whatever. At that point, I add a couple spaces at the beginning and I type a unique-ish name or an identifying name. And then when I hit my button called new file, it creates, it takes the contents of that thing and it creates a new file in Dropbox that goes to my text file system of NBL, et cetera, with the top line as the first part of the document's name.

And then it adds a unique timestamp to it so I don't get anything clobbered. So I can just jump into address, go ticca, ticca, ticca, and then say save file. And now that's in my system for where I want to look at it later. Love stuff like that. I've got a journal in iCloud that you can send to. You can save stuff to files. There's a really tricked out one for Fantastical.

Speaker BI'm kind of off Fantastical as my main one. Boy, I am living that Fantastical lifestyle.

MerlinWell, you should see in that list that I sent you, there's some pretty bananas. There's a new-ish Fantastical one that is wild.

MaxCan you – so, okay, I have a couple of – can I ask a couple of questions about this? Please. First of all, you don't need to say why you don't like anything or whatever, but I'm curious what you're doing for your calendar now and what you liked and didn't like about Fantastic Cal. Because for me, it feels like such a good fit. I like everything about it for me personally.

MerlinOh, no, it is. It really is.

Speaker BDo you have a thought on this, Alex?

AlexI am actually really curious to hear that, too. Okay. I sort of—

MerlinDo you remember Calvetica? I sure do.

AlexBack in the day?

MaxYeah, but— That was the first one I had.

MerlinThat one and the Moleskine one were actually pretty good and super pretty.

MaxBut Calvetica, in addition to displaying your calendar in a very useful way, it had the first sort of soft calendar, soft text recognition calendar entry. Do you know what I'm talking about? Yeah. Yeah, yeah.

MerlinLike where it's doing the, not natural language, but where it's parsing.

MaxYou know, I would say it's almost, for me, like it's almost closest to knowing some regular expressions of like if you just know what symbols to use and the order to type it. Oh, yeah.

MerlinOmniFocus used to have that. Yeah, yeah.

MaxAnyhow. Yeah, I'm curious what you're using now.

MerlinSure, sure, sure, sure. Well, let me talk about iOS in a second. I no longer hate the calendar app on Mac OS, Pounce on Merlin's shit list. The one I do like, I got to say, is BusyCal, and that's my primary on desktop where I do a lot of my stuff. Huh.

What's that? BusyCal. Busy Cow by the Busy Mac people. When Christ was a corporal. Busy Apps FZE. The folks who do Busy Mac are also the same people that created NowUpToDate and NowContact in the 90s, which are still, NowContact in 1995 is still light years away from what Contacts can do today. How about this? You ever think it's a little bit nuts that everybody you know who works for the company called Cards Against Humanity does not have it? You don't have a semantic way to see everybody who works at Cards Against Humanity.

They had that in the mid-90s. Like, it's pretty crazy. So anyway, it's a great company. They do good stuff. And they do have a BusyCal for iOS that I like pretty well. And I'm going to get to my beefs with iOS calendars in a sec. But I really like BusyCal.

It's probably not, you don't probably need a lot of this stuff. It's one of those where, like, calendar might be fine for you. But this has so much great tricked out stuff, including a very good natural language. So if you hit, like, option command and you get a, you know, it parses the way that Fantastic Cal does. It also does this really cool thing where you can have sets of calendars that it remembers. So you want to see, I won't call the fire hose, which is everything. And I have another one, which is called core. And so if I click on those without having to do anything, you know, special or tweetily, it, like, brings up all of that stuff.

I really, I do really like Busy Cal on the Mac.

MaxGo ahead.

MerlinYou want to say something?

Maxoh i i know i'm i just i'm downloading busy call on my phone now i'm excited to poke around at it

Merlini think ios calendars are um it's complicated because there's all these different things we i personally want out of a calendar i i really do love one of the things i use my home pod for is um i'll just say hey dingus um let's see what god see now i can't even i can't i did it this

Maxmorning the problem the problem with that is it so i'm i have my calendar which i keep fairly under control like i prune it but then there's i'm subscribed to about 40 calendars yeah like you know we have a calendar for example that i'm subscribed to that shows every podcast that records in our podcast studio and when i ask my siri ball to tell me hey hey siri ball what's on my schedule today shut up stop it and oh yeah and it also does that whole like you already you're

Speaker Bdoing a thing at the time you're like i know and like yeah and i don't know how to have it i only want my calendar i don't want the other 39 calendars that i'm subscribed to

Merlinit's very frustrating well so um let me see if i can send this i'm probably going to show my balls in this but here's here is uh so uh so it does have those groups but yeah but it's also got um folder level sorting. So if you don't need it, you can just hide the sidebar. Like, you don't need to see it. And don't do a home screen thing on me here, Alex. I'm sorry. I know my life is weird. But in addition to the, like, groups you can show up,

you have these folders where you can say, like, show these things, show those things, and you can have these sort of concentric circles of things. So, like, if I don't want to see the Warriors schedule that I'm subscribed to, I can shut that off, et cetera. So just even that ability to click or command click.

AlexOh, I didn't know you could have. So I use this too, but I'm like just an animal unchecking things that I don't want to see. Yes. Like, oh, my God. Wait, so say that again. This is perfect.

Speaker BWhat's the difference? What are you doing?

MerlinSo I sent it in the screen grab I sent you. So for example, I have one here. So there's a folder in my side rail for my Google calendars. I'm not saying too much. Everybody has their primary Google Calendar that has special things about it. As you probably know, it's got different abilities than other things. And that's the one I use for all the stuff that really pretty much only I need to know about. But my family has access to it. They can see what I'm doing. That's no problem. I won't call it alcove hides that I use historically as for like journal or ephemeral stuff. Like here's the day I changed my medication.

And I don't use it too much anymore.

Speaker BThat's so smart. You don't put that on your main calendar.

MerlinYeah, no. Now, increasingly, I use that one under Section 4 Blorp. I have one called Journal that I use for that now. I don't even really use Aquafides. Environment and Big Family Calendar is the shared family calendar where anything that the family needs to know about, whether it involves you or not, goes on Big Family Calendar. And then I won't call it Environment, which sounds nuts, but it's sort of a meta infrastructure one. That's also where all my deliveries from the deliveries app get piped into Environment. So it's all stuff that Max is in town this week. you know, Alex is out of town

that week. It could just be stuff where like, I don't

Speaker Bneed to... God, this is a better...

MaxMy life is a fucking mess compared to this. I really should be doing this.

Speaker BWell, it's, you know, you need to get the system that works for you, but like... Man, this is one of

Maxthose like Merlin Man things where you're like, it's like, it's something small, but you're just, it's like, you know, it's like the hey, the Earth is not in the center of the solar system. Like, it's better to look at it this way. And then all of a sudden you're like,

Speaker Bfuck me. I was worshipping the wrong sun

MerlinI mean, I would be more than happy to talk about any aspect of that. But just to highlight why I like this on the desktop in particular, like I say, it's easy and fast to create events. And then so having these folders and the folders just makes it real easy to keep things pared down. Now, normally, I click that thing up on the left that's similar to OmniFocus where, like, I don't need to see the side rail. Like, I know what calendars I mostly want to see. So that works great. So let's get to why iOS is rough, because I want an iOS account.

And I have, as you're going to find out in a minute, an embarrassment of riches for these. Why? Some do stuff better than others. And whatever I'm using, it needs to work for what I need right that second. And I'm phrasing this in an important way. What I need right that second on an iPhone. OK, so what is it I might need? Well, I might need to create an event. I might need to see what's happening today. I might need to see, importantly for me, like what's happening this week when I plan things because I'm Merlin Mann.

I always look at whenever I plan fucking anything that I have control over, I look at what's happening two days before, two days after. Do I have an early day and didn't know about it? Is somebody traveling and I didn't know about it? I need situational awareness into the context that lets me make a good decision. And then finally, I might want to look at the month. These are just a few of the things. Now, is there any one app that is awesome at all of those things? Maybe. But some apps have a great list view for the day that pulls in my reminders that I want to see there.

That's really cool. Like Fantastic Out is actually pretty good for the week. At the point of week and month, you start breaking down a little bit with the screen size, and you start getting, like, colored dots. And it's like, eh. You know? And so I'm resistant to just sticking with one, and there's no cost to having more than one on here. I've already bought them with money. It all syncs. We're done with the sync problem. and I can tell you the ones I use and like for different kinds of things. Are there any questions at this point?

AlexI don't think so. My mind is blind. I realize I'm definitely underutilizing this.

Speaker AI have six calendars. I have six calendars on my phone, six calendar apps.

MerlinAnd so like one that I've discovered recently that I really like as a go-to, just show me what's happening today, is called Calendar 366. and it's got several different really good and customizable views.

MaxDo you use all, but see, it's like weird to me to have more than one calendar.

Speaker BWhy do you own more than one knife? Because I lose them and then I need another one. Exactly. The same happens to me. I'm constantly losing calendars. What?

Speaker AA paring knife, a butcher knife, a Japanese knife,

Merlinthose are all for different things. The knife I use to like slice a roast is different than the knife I use to unscrew, a screw on some kind of a thing. No, it's basically like that. Once I bought the knives, there's no cost to keeping them around apart from cutting myself. Calendar 366 for all your plans. But this is part of the challenge, and Calendar 366 is also what I have as my display calendar in my menu bar on macOS

Speaker Bbecause I like the way you can configure what it looks like. I'm going to buy it for $699. Well, as you can maybe see from screenshots, and you guys jump in at any point,

Merlinis that you can see how this is a really good, hey, show me what's happening today. But in my case, I have the month calendar above and the list of what's happening below. And that works so well for me. And again, this has grouping of calendars that you can have however you want. I've got a fire hose in there. I've got Fantastical.

Speaker AI was really into calendars five for a long time. I still like it. The one I mainly look at, I've got BusyCal for iOS, but I haven't spent a ton of time with it. you know it's just whatever I need to do I have this intuition about which one of these knives I need and does it all sync seamlessly like some pretty much flawlessly better than better than Apple Notes sometimes oh I forgot to sync Apple Notes before I got on the plane right sometimes

MaxI I have a if I'm using Fantastical and Google Calendar like on the web I get like air I get

Speaker Bproblems like an ants you get um that's how you get ants is it because you're getting duplicates i don't know what's happening it's just time zone she gets put in at the we'll see if they still

Maxhave this functionality uh uh okay i had a subtopic i have a i have a little rant to pop off on that this is something the drafts challenge made me think about but it's not really this is i don't know maybe it's sort of addressed by drafts but uh i feel like i'm perpetually oh Oh my God, Alex.

AlexWait, what? Oh, sorry. No, this was from before and then I accidentally hit enter. But this is kind of how I... No, no, no. Okay. Yeah, so that's what Alex has to do today. So you see how... Alex, I'm going to need you to go pick up...

MaxI'm going to need you to do my drag queen.

AlexWell, we need to wrap this up because we've got to go somewhere. But like those...

Speaker BOkay, so some of these are subscribed things.

AlexRight. This is giving me an anxiety disorder just looking at this.

MerlinYou have so much overlap.

AlexFor example, if there wasn't, so those red and green calendars, those are the studios, right? And if I see that there's a day where there's not a ton of red or there's not a ton of green.

MerlinThey're essentially like informationally, they're read only for making a situational awareness decision.

AlexThat's kind of how it is. I'm like, okay, is there a reason someone isn't using that? Oh, it's Memorial Day. Okay. So then I like let people know, hey, studio's not being utilized, like stuff like that. But there's nothing like this on iOS that can, I don't know, what would you call it? Spatial awareness?

MaxAlex, it looks like that Calendar 366 does that.

AlexOh, interesting.

MerlinIt does have the groups. It has the groups that you can flick on and off pretty easily. That might be handy for you. I'm not here to sell that particular one, but that's the one that I've gotten lately. Also, the truth is I'm still in a state of mind. I don't want to hear you pop off. I'm still in a state of mind where if I've got to do fucking shit, like real shit, I'd do it on my Mac. I'm still that guy. Or the iPad. I don't want to do a ton of what this calendar presents to me on my phone. It would just be excruciating to me.

MaxAll right. So back to the draft thing for a second. So I feel like one of the most common messages that I send people like just several times a day is, can you please email this to me? Please send me an email. I'm constantly replying people with just like, you know, would you max.temp.com? Email me, email me, email me. And I feel like people are very thoughtless in like the way that they contact you And then I always think people always think i'm like a pedant or like a like a like a i'm like a They always think i'm people always think i'm an asshole because i'm constantly like please text me about that

Please email me about that like this is a phone call like there's a meeting, you know, whatever it is um Because I think it must drive people insane but like So let me I just want to go through like my my philosophy on this because I probably thought about this like too much but basically if you have a short piece of information that is time sensitive that you need to if i it basically if it's like alex i have locked myself out of the studio and i need help that's a text message because it's gonna i know that it's gonna make alex's phone buzz it's gonna interrupt what she's doing she's gonna see it and then have to like make a decision and reply to me

and it's just like a quick message right on the other hand quick quick quick time sensitive and actionable yeah like like i need a thing to happen right now you're asking for a specific

Merlinthing in the universe to change at a certain time yeah like now yeah and and similarly there's lots

Maxof things where it's like people want to like download a bunch of information to me like i am having people over for dinner on this date at this time and could you bring an appetizer and email me any dietary restrictions and you know your guest list or whatever and it's like god damn like don't send me that as a text like what am i supposed to do with this because that's an email like i need

Merlinto be like at my computer and do like i need to like to me it would be an email with a bulleted list inside of it it almost looks like a checklist of like here's an array of things that i know but

Maxi'm constantly writing people back and going like i can't i'm not equipped to handle this on my

Speaker Biphone like to email me like someone should write a book about this but this is one of the challenges

Merlinof being accessible to other people it's something i've said for a long time and i really believe and I really try to keep in mind, even when I fail terribly, is that there's a real disadvantage to being widely available to lots of people at lots of different times in lots of different ways, in no small part because there's a thing that we want or need right now more than anything in the world. And that could be getting the key to the office, but it could also be like, I just need to get this off my plate.

And I think there is a tendency that all these options have afforded us that causes us to be somewhat careless with the way that we contact and essentially assign time and attention to other people. Meaning, you don't think about the best way to consume it. You think about the most fun way to make it. You might be making the shittiest fucking popcorn in the world, but that's what you feel like making right now. And then you dump it all over your fucking team. And that's the problem. And so people think about it.

Speaker AOh, I got to go do the thing right now. and they go and they do the thing. And it's like,

Merlinif they had stopped and thought about it and done a drafts like mindfulness, they would look at that and go, you know, how would I feel about getting this message in this way through this medium? And would it be something that I find effective and something I'm even looking forward to doing? No, I'm not. Now I'm fucking mad because now I got a bunch of texts that are just like, it's just like angry garbage monsters are waiting for me on my phone. And now I'm, and now I'm sad. Well, like if you had paused on that, you could even, you could text somebody and say, I got a bunch of stuff. I want to send you about the party on Saturday is email the best way to do that.

Like do, I mean, you don't have to be totally millennial about it, but like don't just do the thing that's most convenient or easy for you.

Speaker BDon't be a dick. Yeah, along those lines,

Maxwhat this is making me think of is like, this is like a good like leadership skill that I've learned in my life of having to figure this shit out on the fly is like, so like I manage like a team of people at cards and it's very, like something I've learned that you're like allowed to say is like sometimes I have a meeting with people and they bring me lots of problems. And they're like, here's a bunch of problems I've encountered.

You're allowed to say to people, I don't want your problems. You figure out how to fix this and give me some options of how to solve this problem. I know it's a problem. That's why I hired you. That's why you're here.

Speaker BYeah. Don't dump your problems on my desk. What am I supposed to do with this? I mean, yeah.

MerlinAnd this is something when I was a bad project manager, as I recently revealed on another podcast. But it is something I did learn is that a lot of my goals when I would send people an email in particular was to, with a combination of timing, subject, and message, it was my idea to make it clear to people without having to read the email what it was about. I mean, so just from the subject line, they should be able to grok what it's about and why they're getting it from the subject line, which I think is surprising. number uh surprisingly few number people like spend a lot of time on today that's goal number

one is like let this be the one thing in this person's inbox that they have no trouble having

Speaker Bto taxonomize uh in their life yes yes like it you have no idea like i get so much email and if

Maxsomeone takes the time to just don't send a subject line update yeah what the fuck does that mean if someone takes the time to say at the end of their email or like just to lead off and say Max I would like you to speak at our conference I cannot offer you money Here's the dates you know And this is the decision point And then give me your 12 paragraphs Of what your mission is or whatever Like I can't tell you how much I appreciate it Because like otherwise

Speaker BLike I'm sitting there staring at this thing And I'm like what are they asking me for Oh I know and it's always down in the penultimate Of the 35 paragraphs where you get to the thing They're actually asking you to do I also have another thing like this is pretty rude that I do this

MaxBut I do do it all the time is a lot of times I get a long email and I'll just reply back and say, what are you asking me? Or like, or I've also emailed people back. What am I looking at? I literally hit reply and I'm like, I don't understand your email. I've sent this email dozens of times.

Speaker BI'm like, I'll say, I didn't understand this. Can you write me a shorter email? This gets to part two.

MerlinAnd I'm gonna ask myself, my co-hosts and our listeners to, I'm gonna encourage you to do a thing that is virtually impossible, let alone impossible to do all the time. So part one is subject line or similar, however you're communicating with people, you need a headline that really fairly explains what it is you're asking and why them. Now part two, I don't know if this is true, but something I've learned to believe is true, that people, especially busy people, most enjoy or prefer being asked something that can be answered with yes or no.

Without even necessarily having to explain why. But like if you – again, when I was a project manager, I had some success with that subject line trick but then also with a very short thing that could include like – it could even be as simple as quick question. Do you want me to take care of Muffin Choices for the meeting in the Whale Room on Monday? Something like that. Right? So like whatever it is that you're going to do, like don't let them – don't make it so that they have to do fucking forensics on what you want. busy people want to say yes

Speaker Ano diet coke they would love to be able to answer shit with yes or no and be just be unambiguous in what it is that you're asking them to do to the point of saying they can always ask for more information they're big boys they know how to use the keyboard if they need more

Maxinformation they'll ask a lot of times people send me their whole essay and their whole life story or whatever and then there's no I can't figure out what they want and so I just where's the recipe

Speaker Awhere's the recipe all you're doing is telling me about your grandmother's

Maxporch

Speaker Alazy sundae filled with lemonade and hugs. Shut up.

MaxSo what do I do? I read this whole thing and then I just hit, and then I just hit. And then my junior year. I scan it over and I'm like, I cannot figure out what this is about. And then I just hit E and I archive it. And then guess what? Two days later, we're back on top of the inbox. Just checking in, wanted to make sure you got my message. You know, E to archive. Now I'm getting it. And you say, I did not receive it. I don't have email. That's pretty good. Sometimes I'll say to people, another one that I've sent to people is if I get this whole spiel about their thing or whatever and I'll read it and I'm like, this makes no fucking sense.

I do not understand this. I'll write back and I'll say, could you pretend that I don't already know everything about this and start from the beginning and tell me the whole story? Give it to me in Pigs and Bunnies.

Speaker BGive it to me in Pigs and Bunnies.

Show notes

Transcript

133. Covered in Syrup

Show notes

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