171. Pretty Lady Mouth

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

MaxHello. Hello. Oh, hello. I'm eating my egg of cheese.

AlexI still don't know so there's eggs and well the McDonald's equivalent of egg and cheese and is that a biscuit or like the McGrids

Maxwell this is my new thing that I get which is it's a bacon egg and cheese or it's the sausage egg and cheese McMuffin and look at this you put a little grape jam on there you ask the McDonald's you say do you have any grape jam some of the locations have it and you put that on it There's secret condiments everywhere. Yeah.

AlexOh.

MaxNow, normally I have a bat soup for breakfast.

AlexMm-hmm. Yeah. How are you? Are you feeling better, Merlin?

Speaker BYeah.

AlexI'm getting there. Okay. All right. How are you? On your other programs, I was like, oh, buddy.

MerlinOh, yeah. Oh, buddy. Yeah, I'm getting a new mute, one which I know doesn't work because I bought it once before, but I don't try to get it anyway because I can't find the old one.

AlexAre you sure? Are you sure, though? Are you sure that you bought it? Are you sure?

MerlinIt helped my whole family.

AlexAre you sure?

MerlinAnd so that is a thing. Oh, I had a multisyllabic laugh. So that's all good. No, everybody's a little sick. My lady moved up to her head. She just got head sick. Anyway, but enough of that talking. Let's talk about Meredith Grey.

AlexOh, my God. So you're on season three of the hit indie TV show. Grey's Anatomy. Oh my god. I... Oh my god, this show is...

MerlinIt's... I don't want to say anything because I know it has such a special place for you. My daughter, I think, influenced by you. Oh, hi, good.

MaxI had you guys down for 12.45.

MerlinOkay. Alright, does he know we're doing a podcast?

AlexI'm not sure. Okay.

MerlinCool. So, anyway, she was at a friend's house and they ended up watching, like the kids do, watching a bunch of Grey's Anatomy and then when she came home she wanted to continue with this.

MaxOh no. I'm going to have to run at 12.45 and do an interview. I have to call into a radio show and then I'll be back. A real radio show, not this. Not this tripe.

AlexI mean, is it going to be better than talking about sleepovers and Grey's Anatomy? Which, oh man.

MaxOh, I can't believe I missed that.

MerlinWell, I'll listen on the recording. I'd love to finish my anecdote. Please do. Okay, so here's the funny part. my family is kind of like, sometimes like a super team. I think most families are like this. Yes. Where you think, okay, well, you know, like this is Superman and you know that's Batman. The third one might turn out to be Aquaman. You're not sure. But sometimes you do find yourself underwater needing to control fish. And that's where Aquaman really steps up. So my daughter and I are now heavily invested in this.

Speaker BHow do you describe this show?

MerlinIt's not bad. but it's certainly not good but it's so palatable and it just runs and runs and everybody has a pretty mouth

Alexyes

Merlinthere's so many pretty mouths on this show it's like pretty lady mouth title pretty lady mouth is the star of this show

Alexit's well because it's where all the kissing happens so so much

Speaker Bthis show is so my kid and I just keep turning to each other this show is so horny

Alexit is the horniest show on TV

Speaker Bit's so last night there was a couple who was divorced but his dingus was stuck in her woo-woo because he got a piercing in it,

Merlingrabbed her IUD, no spoilers. Yep, yep. So, speaking of Aquaman, I'll finish the anecdote, which is just to say, our Aquaman, as it happens,

Speaker Bworks in a medical school and knows lots of stuff about doctors.

MerlinOh, doctors don't actually lie about someone needing an organ transplant to teach them about life.

Speaker BOh, no. Oh, they would never do that. You would never let a guy with a shaky hand go in there and his girlfriend covers up for him with the whiteboard. Nobody would ever do that.

AlexOh, no.

Speaker BNobody would do that. You know what we say? Get thee back in the sea, Aquaman.

AlexIt's like when I watch Survivor. Oh, no.

MerlinThen you know what happened?

AlexYes, yes.

MerlinYou know what happened? I said, as I do with my daughter sometimes, when I learn a factoid, I say, hey. Oh, wait, who's the cute guy that looks like Tom Hulse? George?

AlexGeorge. The little gay boy? Little guy. Yeah, yeah. Well, hang on. God damn it. Spoilers for real life, not. I said, oh my God. It's not a spoiler. The man.

Speaker BHave you met people, either of you? So anyways, what happened? So I said, I said, hey, honey, he's gay and he has a husband.

MerlinAnd she goes, oh, that's really cool. Because she thinks he's cool. I said, yeah, he's totally gay and has a husband. And then Aquaman chimes in and goes, mm-hmm. And I said, what does that mean? And she says, well, this show is terrible and very inaccurate. But guess what? Aquaman. Water for Aquaman is reading gossip blogs.

AlexOh.

MerlinSo Aquaman rockets in and says, guess what? Guy with the shaky hand called that guy a bad word before he was even out. Very bad word.

AlexOh, my God.

MerlinHe called him the F double agate.

AlexThe F double agate.

MerlinI don't know. He called him that on the set. I don't know that word. I've never used that word. Is that a voice that I should recognize anyway?

Speaker BThe guy with the shaky hand who's with my slender Asian girlfriend. It's got two F's in it? Oh, my God. Man, that Sandra Oh is a lean, mean little machine.

AlexOh, my God.

MerlinYou could get lost in that hair.

AlexYou know what I'm saying? Yeah, the only thing hotter than Meredith Grey on that show is Sandra Oh's attitude during her tenure there.

MerlinBecause she's a little bit, I missed a ton of this, but I get the idea that she's maybe a little too much of a straight talker. maybe a little bit on the

Alexyou know. Yep, just a little bit.

MerlinWhat's a nicer word for spectrum? She's got something going on and good for her. I don't know what the word means.

AlexWho's these people, Alex? Let me open up a picture.

Speaker BWhich one is this? Sandra? Meredith Gray is now my TV

Merlingirlfriend, but I also now know that George got yelled at by Shaky Hand Man. Yes.

AlexAnd then that man got off the show

Merlinand then George left the show. I think Meredith The Hottest. The Hottest. She's up there with Peggy Lipton and the Green Girl.

AlexMm-hmm. And you know what? For a 50, she's like 53 now.

MerlinYeah, yeah. And rich like shit.

AlexShe and Chanda are just like, yeah, we're running this bitch. And I just love it.

MerlinAnd that's, again, now Aquaman. Aquaman says, well, you know what she says, your TV girlfriend with the nice mouth. You know what she says? She says, hmm, whatevs. I'm just going to keep showing up and getting all the money. Yep, yep.

AlexAnd she's open about it.

MerlinI'm like, why have I never seen her or anything? She's not like a Heigl, where a Heigl will show up in something.

AlexBecause she has two or three kids. You know what? Your Aquaman probably knows this more than me, and Matt, she's going to be upset. I don't know how many kids she has, but she- Meredith? Yeah. Meredith goes to school. Her name is Ellen Pompeo. She's like a real-life adult and was like, I'm not going to do this Hollywood thing.

MaxSecretary of the, isn't that like the Secretary of the Treasury?

AlexIt is possible that I'm getting a name wrong.

MerlinShe's Shadow Secretary of the Exchequer. And she has a really nice mouth. And I don't know, when I had sexuality, I was attracted to slender gals. It was kind of a thing that I had. And so anyways, oh, and then what else did Aquaman pop up with? So Aquaman had facts about Alan Papio, as you say. And I said, yeah, you know what I heard? Like, so now Superman thinks he's tough. And now he's going to step up and go, mm-hmm. You know what I heard? I heard Katherine Heigl is hard to work with. And you know what Aquaman said?

Well, you know, a lot of times we've learned in Hollywood, when you say someone is hard to work with, that's code.

AlexOh, yeah.

MerlinThat's code for now. Guess what? Now you're Annabella Sciorra and you're not in movies anymore.

AlexYeah. A lot of my best friends are very hard to work with.

MerlinOh, so hard to work with. What a bitch. She's a B double itch.

AlexMan.

MerlinThank you for that. It's a thing now that's kind of killing me.

AlexIt's not my fault. It's not my fault. I swear to God.

Speaker BIt's kind of your fault a little bit.

AlexWe've never... No, this is a...

Speaker BYou've osmosis'd my child.

AlexI have tweeted about it. I have tweeted about it and just tweeted about how hot people are.

MerlinIt's very horny. There's a lot of intercourse and implied intercourse. The men, I don't know, man. It already feels like a different time, the way the men look with the steamy and the dreamy and steamy. What's going on with that survivor facial hair? Get it out.

AlexYeah. Well, it was, remember, this is what, 2008?

MerlinIt's a different time. Yeah, yeah, 2005, I think is when it started.

AlexI remember in religion class, we were, an entire religion class was dedicated to talking about how the number one show in America had such, you know, it was, they were deplorable for making this.

MerlinMorally bankrupt. Because it was so horny.

Speaker BIt's so horny.

MerlinThis one episode we watched was like, it was incredibly horny. Oh, oh, oh. And this is also fun. Final, final anecdote. And then we got to get on to the things.

AlexYeah, I want to be happy before I'm incredibly sad.

MerlinWe got to S2E something. And this episode came on and it was the rest of the, it's not a good show. But this episode was so hilariously a sweeps week episode that I said to my kid. I said, look, just real quick.

MaxWhat show is this?

MerlinThis is called Grey's Anatomy with Meredith Grey. Sorry, Meredith Grey. What's the premise? The premise is hospital. It's Seattle Hospital Surgeons, and it's so fucking horny.

AlexIt's doctors having sex for over a decade. That's pretty much the show.

MerlinIt's like if you couldn't afford Cinemax, but you were willing to stay up a little later. That's what it is.

AlexDo they show? Yeah.

MerlinYou mean boning? They don't show boning. Well, the boning is usually shielded, like in the Semitic style. Like there's a sheet or something usually.

MaxWho does this, who is this like, who does, who's the show for? Who's like the, who's. Well. It's for the horny and the young.

AlexYep.

MaxIt's possible Veronica watches this.

AlexIt's, well, it's not very good anymore. It's not, well. Yeah.

MerlinOkay, so here's the episode, Alex.

AlexYeah.

MerlinYep.

AlexThe episode is so fucking good. Yep, you're me in eighth grade. You're literally me in eighth grade right now.

Speaker Bwelcome hey so did you guys want to announce your big thing with your new hole

Maxoh we bought uh cards against humanity has acquired the comedy company click hole

Speaker Bit's our favorite well from i can't speak for myself so many people that i the incredibly

Merlincynical people that i like on the internet are legit excited about this and that made me happy You see Felix from Chapo.

AlexAnd Virgil. I was like, ooh, hello.

MerlinVirgil's in. Oh, cool.

AlexSlip into those DMs. Not DMs, replies.

MerlinHe's the one who set off the alarm in the theater.

AlexDo you have a favorite? I have a favorite ClickHole article. Well, I can tell.

MaxI do have favorites. And there's a funny story of it, which is like for ClickHole launch in 2014, I've literally been reading since day one. and I've been obsessed with it. Was it always part of the Onion, Max? Yeah, it was started by the Onion and originally they had, I believe originally it was like fairly substantial crossover with the Onion and I had always interpreted it as the Onion was like, you know, the Onion is a parody of local newspapers and then local newspapers went out of business and so then they sort of pivoted into being a parody of cable news.

Speaker BOh, yeah, ClickHole was more like a parody

Maxof old BuzzFeed or Uproxx or whatever. Correct, and Upworthy and that kind of a thing, yeah. Yeah, but also it just became this very weird, absurdist voice, and it definitely has a smaller audience than The Onion. It is definitely a niche product. But what are the offshoots, like resistance hole? Just speaking for myself, it's the funniest thing I'm aware of. It's just always been...

MerlinIt does the thing that's so difficult that even The Onion can't... I mean, The Onion is all about the headline, except for the editorials. But in this case, they get the tone of what they're doing a parody of so well. They've lived in the parody that they're doing so well. And it just makes the jokes land so much harder.

MaxYeah, I mean, just speaking for myself, it's definitely a pretty niche comedy thing. I don't know that it's ever going to be the most mainstream thing. But for whatever we're doing at Cards, it's just gotten way deep in our brain stem. And it really tickles us. So basically over the years I've had a number of favorite articles that I've saved. And I think like one of the ones that's my favorites, that's everybody's favorites, is which one of my garbage sons are you? Which I think is probably a little over. I think it's actually overdone to the point of not making the article so good.

But I also love Are You Bonkers for Hanukkah and the Hanukkah Madness. My all-time favorite is probably, well, I have two. It's either my two favorites are either Are You a Big Jazz Boy or a Little Jazz Boy, which is a quiz, or I don't care if this offends all of you social justice warriors, but all the planets are men. And I think those are just two of the funniest things that have ever been written. And I have a – Can I contribute? Oh, sorry.

Speaker BI want to contribute to this one Jen reminded me of.

MerlinMay I, Papa? McDonald's is releasing a new fig in Lady Finger McFlurry for fancy little boys who desire a treat.

Speaker BYeah. Yep.

MaxYep. Yep. So a lot of those favorites that I'm describing that were on my list, I had been saving a little text file on my computer, and I knew there was, like, an author who was writing those. And I was like, that's my guy. Like, there's some phantom at ClickHole who writes these articles, and I just can tell. And they just – I can just tell from the way they're written, and it just really tickles me. And that's one of the original founding members of ClickHole. And, you know, we became friends and became friends with that whole team. and they have been cut back and cut back and cut back

until they're a very small team now. There's just five people who do click call.

Speaker BAre you saying that Spanfeller guy cut corners a little bit?

MaxI'm not allowed to say that.

Speaker BOkay, all right. I wouldn't say that. Is that a remark that I should recognize?

MaxYou know what? It's more of like, you know when a kid breaks a coffee table and it's like the coffee table has become broken. Oh, yes. So click call has been cut back and contributors have been laid off and all this. And I sort of approached Onion Inc. maybe almost a year ago. And I was like, hey, instead of getting rid of this thing, what if you gave it to us? Because we would put the capital in and keep it going. And I was like, then instead of everyone being mad at you,

everyone would be happy with you. And it would be win-win. And that took almost a year of like every day just like negotiating with these people and having phone calls. and lawyers. Did it contribute to your stress at all?

I think that's a fair assumption. Everything contributes to my stress. But now it's over. Now we'll never have to do any more work with it on it ever again, which is great. I never have to think about it. No, but anyway, I just love those guys and we sort of hit on the idea as we were meeting with them of creating like an employee owned structure so that Cards is not a publisher. I don't really know how to do a news website. I'm also not, I mean this is my personal opinion. I can't, it's up to the ClickHole team to figure out what they want to do. But my personal feeling is, I don't know that the news business model is so great for ClickHole, because

they're not a news website, right? They're doing, they're doing comedy. And I would love for them to find other, other ways to make money that aren't, you know, people clicking, tricking people into accidentally clicking on ads or something like that. So I wonder what they might do in the

Alexfuture. Start a cafe. Yeah, they're going to start a restaurant. But that's basically, that's the

Maxlogic as well. Yeah. I don't know. We just, they're cool. We want to work with them. I'm glad. I'm glad that like they're there. It's not, I know everyone says, you know, everyone says this, like remember when Yahoo bought Tumblr and they're like, no, they're going to be completely separate and we're not going to change anything and whatever, whatever. But we're actually, we're really not going to change anything. We don't even have the voting. They own a vast majority of the company is in their hands. Cards is an investor and we have a small minority stake in the company, but we can't make them do anything. Like they're just not, We just don't have basically the votes.

They don't have to do what we tell them. So we have fun ideas and we want to work together and stuff, but we've truly put ourselves in a situation where we're not Yahoo.

AlexThey got the good deal out of Shark Tank. You're not getting out of bed in the morning. Well, they've got to give us a royalty. Yeah, yeah.

Speaker BAll roads lead back to Mr. Max. He pulls out his nameplate. What did I watch? And a pink one for you, Lori. Got you a pink click hole. Mm-hmm.

A key hole.

MerlinWhat's it called? Oh, that's another one. That's another one where Meredith is not going to get to participate in flipping the ding-dong inside out for the trans person.

AlexOh, right? Oh, man. That was a good one.

MerlinThat was a sexy lady mouth episode.

AlexSee, my Aquaman is like, that's not how they do that. And I'm like, I think you're right. That's not how they do that. But neither of us have interests in the bottom situation. It was a different time. It was a different time. Oh, nope, nope. There's a turns out. Turns out they were right and we were wrong because we didn't know how the penis flipping worked. And so, yeah, we're like, oh, good job. Oh, man, there's so many good, like the, oh, God, there's so many gay characters. Alex, Alex, Alex.

Speaker BI'm sorry. Challenge.

AlexOh, I can't, I can't. You can't do that to him? I can't. Yeah, because it's like, I know it's not good. And I know that having other people watch it won't be.

MerlinI know. I know.

AlexI know.

MerlinThat's why I stopped assigning comics for the show. It broke my heart too often.

AlexExactly. Exactly. Like I know.

MerlinMost comics are bad.

AlexThat's not my fault.

MerlinThey're bad. They're for master.

MaxWe got our, we got a big comic delivery from where we have like a whole partnership with Challengers, which is like the good comic shop in the neighborhood. And they're, they're giving us a comic rack at the, on consignment at the game cafe.

Speaker BOh my God. That's so cool.

MaxI asked, we went around and we, They were like, what do you want? So we're only doing, I don't know what the technical terms are, but we're only doing the like collected books of comics. We're not doing the soft, you know, the one issue. TPBs. Take paperbacks and graphic novels instead of floppies. Correct, correct. Because I don't want to get into the business of having to have like every week a new thing.

AlexLong box. Oh, God.

MaxYou super don't want to be in that business. So we have like all the collections. And I asked for, I asked for, we got, yesterday we got like a hundred books in of all different kinds of books. Oh, my God. fucking lumberjanes and all kinds of good stuff. But there were two things that I asked for. I asked for the vision, the two books, the vision books that I love, and I asked for lock and key, number one. Didn't get either. Oh, really? No satisfaction.

AlexThey're my local boys. Come on.

MaxI don't know what happened. I told Eric. I was like, send it back. Eric. Send it back. May I pop up? Bring it back when they have a vision.

MerlinYeah, the comic business is really rough. I mean, in a super-duper nutshell, one of the many reasons things are tough for comic shops is that individual issues are not returnable. So you have to pre-order them weeks before they come out and say, I want this many. And then if you get fewer than demand, well, that's going to suck. People are going to have to wait until the future and a second printing, whereas more common sometimes is getting way too many. And there's a unique codicil of working with the wonderful Diamond Distributors organization, which is that. comic shops cannot return floppies

but trade paperbacks are books consequently they are returnable so that's the huge difference and that's also where the money is for the creators

MaxI assume that's where the that's because the fall off the value of the floppy ones is so steep it's like once it's out what are you going to do with it

Merlinand plus there is this thing that I unfortunately I guess believe in called trade waiting which is when you're not getting every floppy and you're waiting for the collected edition to come out of like five or more. But anyway, enough of this. That's so, this is so cool. And so that, is it a spinner rack

Speaker Bor are you going to have like what's it going to be like?

MaxYeah, it's one spinner rack and it goes way up tall and it just has, I have a, where's it? I'll send you a little thing on the dingus.

AlexSend me a dingus in the thing. While the dingus is being sent, hey, if you live in Chicago, DM me because I always want to buy the floppy of Terry Moore's comics, but there's literally never enough. And they're like, we can't unless we order two dozen or whatever. Talk to your garden. He'll set it up for you. Well, because I want to give the man money, but it's very difficult. I'm trying.

MaxIs this like a comic book, comic book?

AlexYeah, it's a comic book, comic book, but it's, you know, it's indie.

MaxWhy don't you go to Challengers and tell them you want it?

AlexBecause it's just me and like two other people and it's just not enough. And so I just wait till the trades or when it falls off the back of a truck. So, but yeah. Nice man.

Are we going to talk about the sad stuff? or I don't know about this stuff. What's that?

MaxThat we can't eat bats anymore? You can't help me with this bat thing.

AlexI just, yeah, let's first visit in to visit, let's visit with the bats.

Speaker BIs this a Corona, is this a Corona virus bat? Yeah, that's how I got Corona virus. That's how you, because you're eating the bat. That's right. I've been eating the bats.

MerlinOh, that sucks, man. You're so busy and stressed right now. That's gonna really, you're gonna have to, what, more liquids and nap and you probably can't eat bats. You can't eat bats for what, probably a week?

Speaker BI'm having the egg of cheese with a grape jam. Okay, but no bat. No bat cherry.

AlexWhy are people eating bats? Like, I would rather eat a human being than a bat.

Speaker BThat's so Norman.

AlexBecause I can ask a person.

Speaker BAll right, Alex is so bad. Next.

You're canceled.

AlexThere's a great tweet this morning that just says being gay is canceled until the primaries are over.

MerlinI don't get that joke.

AlexBecause it's-

MerlinBecause of Mayor Pete?

AlexBecause Mayor Pete is just, this is totally a Chapo bit, but like he truly feels like a blender of a human. Like he's just a smoothie of, okay, we'll throw gay in there. We'll throw Christian. We'll throw troops in.

Speaker BAnd he's like, he's like, he's like disco, disco Mitt Romney. He's so weird. No, I mean like he's okay, but he's not, he's a humanoid.

AlexIt's just weird. Yeah. Oh, the video of him walking out, and he just has that weird smile on his face. I'm like, yeah, I know that that's what you have to do, but that face sure is something.

MerlinI shot a goat with Mark Zuckerberg.

AlexDid he really?

MerlinI don't know. Boy, could you come up with a more fucked up system than the way that votes are apportioned in Iowa? Yeah, you can. It's called the Electoral College. Welcome. Holy shit. What a goddamn mess. all the people like when they did you know that you guys are following this right the first round

Maxand the second round did you guys see the tweet that i i'd sent in that thing an iowa caucus victory at this time of year at this time of day in this part of the country localized entirely within the app that you own may repeat yes may i see it no

Merlinwhat's the one i liked yesterday oh i'm 62 percent through the great gatsby and i'm so excited uh for for daisy and gatsby you know what we fucked up you guys right now our number one priority is to make sure that all the votes are accounted for and that's all that was on me but listen it's not going to be a problem anyway here's just over 50 of the results that doesn't count all the burn areas

Maxoh boy I think it's you know I try to be stay pretty sober and not go down the conspiracy theory path like I resisted all of the sort of like hashtag resistance stuff and certainly all the QAnon stuff and I got maybe I got a little too into the Jeffrey Epstein stuff but I but maybe not maybe I didn't get into it enough I can't tell that's what I'm thinking I think he might have been fucking children but that's just my belief but I can't allegedly I don't know but anyway oh just in the game in the game yeah But it sure seems like between burying that pole, right, that had Bernie up the night before the thing, and then just absolutely rat-fucking him with the way that they're metering out these results in a way that shows it like he's not going to win Iowa when we all know he's going to win.

Speaker BIf your person is viable, then you get to go to the island of Misfit Toys, where apparently Mayor Pete is the king now.

MaxYeah. What the fuck? You can leave any time, but if you stay and compete in challenges, one person will be admitted back into the game after the merge. Welcome, President Sloppy Seconds. Does the politics have survived? I have thought about this quite a bit. Oh, wait. Let me finish my first thought, which is it sure seems like the party establishment, they basically watched 2016 unfold, and they saw this sort of fucking wrecking ball of Donald Trump come through the Republican Party. And you had all these, like, op-ed columnists and party institutions. They were like, not today, Mr. Trump, you know, never, never Trump.

And it was so hollow. They had no real power to do anything. And it sure seems like Democrats of the Democratic establishment, all the sort of formal institutions where Democrats like get together and plan stuff out in the party. It sure seems to me as an observer that they have made a bunch of plans so that that thing doesn't happen with Bernie Sanders. right like the parallels are so tempting to just be like yeah well Bernie is the sort of he's not really a Democrat and he's sort of this wrecking ball coming through the party and now you see just

every time where there's that fucking primary poll that didn't get released and there's the app that didn't work and now they won't release the results and it's like god damn it's like is there an institution that's going to treat Bernie like any other candidate or this is what it's going to be until he gets the most delegates it's infuriating yeah no he's not he's not allowed he's

Merlinnot allowed into the cafeteria, let alone the good lunch

Maxtable. And ultimately, the absolute incompetence, and again, it just sure seems like blatant, you know, putting your finger on the scale from the Democratic Party, it makes them such a villain, such a fucking heel in this whole process, that let's just posit that there was a candidate in the race that was sort of outside of the party establishment. You think they might profit from that?

Speaker Blike we can't even fucking count up the votes right the first the first role of any Alex you

Merlinknow this you used to go there every Sunday uh the first first rule of every institution is to protect and build the institution it's it's like it's it's it's you know printed right on the tin that you can always look at it's like well the first once you become an institution the first thing you do is seek to protect yourself at almost any cost and so like it's gonna have to necessarily be somewhat counter-revolutionary to say the least and like and yeah and he is a spanner in the works that's his whole value proposition and but like it's it's just so weird i mean two things well first of all it is it is weird how much they're like barely even trying to cover

Alexthat up of like because democrats are bad at their job like republicans are scary because they're

Merlingood they're so bad and hillary just starts seeing me more and more more and more like the emperor all the time. Good. Good. But yeah. God.

AlexI mean, I was, I was like, I of course voted for, I'll vote for Pete if truly he's fucked over.

MaxI won't. I'll sleep right through election day. You think Pete's going to lose to Trump by one vote in Cook County?

AlexThat's, I mean, fair.

MaxYeah. That's the thing. Nope. I'll have a, I'll show up and vote for Water Reclamation District and I'll just leave everything. I just won't vote. I just won't vote for president. You can't make me.

AlexWhat is this, Australia?

MerlinI'm on fire. You can't make me vote.

AlexOh, I'm in a goofy mood today.

Oh, man. And that's the thing. People were so excited. I was watching, like, there were a few periscopes of, you know, what was going on. And I'm like, there's no way. There's no way. This isn't going to happen. And guess what?

MaxSo let me, I don't know how much you guys know about the whole way the process in Iowa works. But one of the weird quirks of the caucus system is that it's an open ballot. People basically go stand in a corner and then you count them. And then that's how it is. And you can look at it and you just go, well, there's 30 people over here and 25 people over there. So the 30 people have more than the 25 and that's that. And it gets written down on a little piece of paper.

AlexIt's like voting in a classroom. Like, okay, you stand over here if you want the grape jelly.

MaxI happen to be on the phone with a buddy of mine who was at the Des Moines headquarters at the Bernie office. And this was as the – so basically what happens is the campaigns all have watchers at all of the poll sites who write down where the people stand and then they report back. And so the campaigns know the number. I mean it's not – like this whole thing where the party is like we want to have an accurate tally and we have to report it back. and it's like, yeah, fine. But it's like, that's fine. I mean, it's all written down on, it's an old, like I said, it's like, it's all out in the open. Like the numbers exist and they're accurate. But also the campaigns have,

they all have the numbers. The campaigns all have the numbers. And I happen to, like I said, I was on the phone with this dude at the Bernie headquarters and everyone starts, as the results are starting to come in internally for the campaign and everyone starts cheering because they were getting the numbers back from all of their poll watchers who were writing down the same number of people standing in the same corners of the room is all the party officials that are going to get tabulated. And they realize that they won Iowa by a substantial margin. I think by one or two points, enough that it's like they clearly, people should acknowledge that Bernie is the winner.

And it's just bizarre that it's like this thing that we all know that Bernie won Iowa and yet, you know. But it's the, it's this. Okay, I'm sorry.

MerlinI can't tell if we're saying the same thing. The problem then is the second part. The second part is where it's fucked up because there's always two things with me. So on the one, okay, so you come in, you go like, oh shit, these three candidates or these four candidates have all substantially scored above or, you know, out or above the 15% limit to be considered viable. Great, great. But what about everybody else? Oh, guess what? All you people who voted for like, I don't know, the down ticket people, your candidate's not viable. Now you have the opportunity, one-time opportunity to choose a different candidate.

Correct. And that's where a ton of Buttigieg's stuff came from, was people who weren't viable in the first round said, eh, I'll take Mayor Pete. And then on top of that, here's the electoral part is up supposedly like the fucking electoral college votes from rural districts end up having much more of an impact. Correct. Because if you're in a rural district and there's seven seven farmers show up and one of them changes their mind. Well, guess what? You get the delegates now. Yeah. So there's all kinds of stuff about this. It's like it's like it's so unfair and it's so fucked up and normative.

MaxIt's normative. I have I've worked in Iowa. I've done I've done presidential primary stuff in Iowa. One, I don't, maybe I'm actually less down on the whole system in Iowa than everyone else. Like, fundamentally, I think it's a, I think there's, it's easy to complain about it and say all the things that are fucked up and wrong and bad about it, which there's plenty. But there's some nice things about the caucus. Actually, there's some things I really like about the caucus.

AlexHonestly, like, it feels better to me than the electoral college because it's all out there. I don't know.

MaxEverything's better. I like the quaint thing of that people go out of their homes and they see their neighbors and everyone makes a little speech and you talk about it.

AlexYeah.

MaxAnd I like how plugged in Iowans are into presidential politics. And I don't know. Maybe that's because I've spent some of my life.

MerlinIt's like making Groundhog Day part of the electoral process. I don't know. It's like that's cute. It's adorable. I'm glad you have foods that you like in polkas and shit. Maybe.

MaxBut like should that. You know how sometimes you get too inside of something, and then you can't? You're like, no, no, I like the way I did it. Or you with your fucking shortcuts and your home automation or whatever. You're like, no, I like how it is this way. Or the TV show Grey's Anatomy. But anyway, maybe that's it for me. But I don't know. If they get rid of the caucus after this, I'll be a little bit bummed because it's familiar and there's some things I like about it. But goddamn, I mean, to me, the big news of the week,

politically well first of all i mean the impeachment turned out to be a big fucking nothing i mean we all knew that right like i was i knew i mean it was apparent to me that nothing was going to happen although it was the chido people who were like this is the end i still allow you remember there were a few articles maybe last week where it was like oh maybe mcconnell doesn't have the votes to not have witnesses and i still got suckered into a little bit of that because i was like oh maybe some people will break and there'll be this like prince some principled people but no of course not that one was a collins was like oh he's learned his lesson boys will be boys he's

learned his lesson i admire your optimism but uh guys are the worst you're the worst the whole impeachment was was big fucking nothing i've heard people use the phrase that we're we're now we're in a post checks and balances era of american history which is very depressing to me you disagree

Speaker Bso you guys are you think you think they still might get him wait wait oh my god no i don't want to go over this for like the fourth time, but I so disagree with all of this. It's, well, what should they have done instead?

AlexOh, okay. No, no, no. No, I, it's.

Speaker BYes. Everybody knew they were going to lose. Just because you're going to lose doesn't mean you don't get on the field. It's, that's crazy.

MaxOh, I'm not, I just, I think that they probably were, it was probably good to impeach him and it made all Republicans take this, this vote, which is good.

Speaker BSo much shit on the record now.

MaxYeah. Right. on the record and there's no end in sight

Speaker Bto what this man will keep doing.

MaxNo, I'm saying that my own hopelessness about it, I saw a lot of people in my world who were every day posting about the impeachment going, we've got him this time, the Republicans are going to flip, we got him, he's going to be removed, and Pence is going to go down too, and Pelosi is going to be president. And I just never allowed myself to believe in it.

MerlinThere's something that I find fundamentally contradictory in your unbridled enthusiasm for Bernie Sanders. It's a tough road to hoe in some ways to get that guy elected. I think he's really cool, personally. But that is a big reach to think that that guy is going to win in November. But I totally applaud so many aspects of that campaign. I'm very excited about it. I just...

Speaker BI'm sorry. I'm not trying to frustrate you.

MaxI think Bernie's the most likely candidate to be Trump. I don't think that. Sorry, it's not even my opinion.

MerlinBut I'm not getting to the point that I'm trying to make, so I'll stop trying to make it. No, make a point. I guess what I'm trying to say is there's a long view to this. Okay, so on the one hand, there's this like, oh boy, we've got to beat him. Oh, maybe this is the silver bullet that'll finally... You know what? There's no fucking silver bullet. Trumpism is fucking real. And that's why, and this is why it's contradictory to me. Because then I guess on the one hand, You can say, well, if we really want to end this Trump thing and get back to normal, you must vote for Joe Biden because he is the only – but the thing is he's not.

Because that is based on this Matrix-style fantasy that anything will ever be like October 2016 ever again. It will never be that way again. That is what should make you bust a gut, just like the Chopo guys doing their final closing arguments on stage and crying. Like that's what this is about. This is about the movement in the moment and whatnot. and anyways I'm just saying like every single one of these people needs to not it's not even about abandoning hope it's about saying like what is my fucking job here what am I trying to accomplish and that to me is why

it was critically important they impeached they should impeach over and over

Speaker Bbecause that's their job it doesn't matter if you're going to win you still take the free throw even if your wrist hurts and like I don't know man I just I don't know I just

MerlinI think that there's still this thing that nobody wants to admit or people are uncomfortable admitting because it makes you seem like a fucking rube, which is like there's so many people out there who support people like Pete and Uncle Joe who really think that they're going to get back

Speaker Bsomething that is gone forever.

AlexWell, and they want that, which is the upsetting part for me.

MerlinHey, he's going to work with Republicans. Well, and also just to finish your anecdote, I'm sure you saw the shot in Chaser. Susan Collins comes out and says, well, you know, I'm going to vote to equip because I feel like this guy has really learned a lesson. and then you know like whatever like you know two minutes later and it's like trump says no no didn't learn a lesson it was a perfect phone call that in response to what she said he just contradicted that that uh that stallion of justice susan collins to say no i didn't need to learn anything my call was perfect fuck you thank you for the acquittal i guess i think that i didn't

Alexmake my point it's not that like i impeach impeach impeach over and over again but it's like Democrats watching it, it's not that I ever got the sense of optimism or sense of like, this will restore anything. It's about slowing things down, hopefully. And well, the thing with Bernie, which I also think like supporters don't really get is like that's, electing Bernie Sanders is like the alpha of like turning things around.

Like I do not believe that I will be alive when we see true Medicare for all. But that shouldn't matter. If you really believe in that, you're right. Impeach, impeach, impeach. Never stop caucusing for this guy, or never stop canvassing for this guy. And I don't know. I don't know. It seems very... I worry that, like a lot of candidates, Bernie is going to again become the reality that he's going to become TV again.

and I don't know. I guess I'm just far less optimistic and I'm not going to stop fighting for that, but it's hard to fake enthusiasm on a podcast. It's easy to fake enthusiasm when you're knocking on doors and like, yeah, we're going to do this, but in my heart of hearts, I'm like, I will definitely die before we actually see this happen.

MaxOne of my biggest takeaways from just watching the 2016 primaries race play out was every indicator from for for quite a while in those races was that trump was going to be the nominee and then real people started voting for him and he started getting real delegates and still when you went on 538 and when you when i listen to all my smart you know fucking the weeds podcasts or whatever everyone would go well yeah that's what the numbers say but we all know better like it's not going to be trump do you guys remember that phase oh yeah

couldn't happen and and they would go well we're adjusting the poll the polls show trump in first but we know that's not going to happen so we're adjusting the polls to make them make sense and surprise trump won and everyone goes where the fuck that's like changing the weather report

Speaker Bbecause it would never rain four days in a row yeah but people would go change the weather report asshole but then he would win in a state and everyone go what the fuck where that wasn't

Maxsupposed to happen adjust the model more and and i'm telling you that it's gonna be bernie like it's going to be Bernie and Bernie's going to be Trump. Like who, Bernie's got, I don't know what you guys are looking at, but Bernie, like look at, like Bernie's going to win California. He's going to do very well in Texas. At some point he's going to have the delegate math in a way that it sort of doesn't matter how much the party rat fucks him.

AlexAnd I truly want to believe that. And again, it's not going to change any of my behavior otherwise because like 2016, like you, it was like, go, go, go. it was clear all right now we're like i think i got on the hill the hill dog train i'm like well this is this feels better than trump like even like a democratic warmonger still feels better i i don't know i i think you're reading this as like i'm because i don't believe it that it's

going to happen that i'm not going to or that i like don't want to put the work in but it's it's the same as like any dsa candidate it's like the dsa in chicago they're all downers and sad and white and angry and it's it's a real bummer the the dsa at the release of people who come to the meetings it's like very i don't know it makes it makes me sad uh i don't know all i'll say is i've

Maxbeen doing politics now for i guess i can i could say i've been i've been doing it for quite a while and this is like the what 50 over a decade i think yeah you're old i've been doing it since i was young and now I'm old enough that I feel like I have a little bit of perspective looking back on it. And there's only one time in my life that I could say where things felt like this, where it felt like something dangerous and new was happening and it wasn't fully understood. And the solid ground underneath our feet was moving in a way that was very scary and threatening to some people

and very exciting to other people. And that was in the 2008 primary when Barack Obama was running. and suddenly you had these people going, I don't actually believe America would elect a black man president, let alone someone who has these anti-war views and whatever.

AlexRemember when he won a peace prize?

MaxPeople want to belong to something bigger than themselves, and that's almost never on the menu. You can almost never order that. I mean in life. Like in American life, you can almost never order that. Because like that maybe used to be church for people, but I don't think, especially in cities, I don't think people just have that same relationship with the church. But certainly you never expect that in politics. But look at what Bernie is doing. Like it's right there.

Like look at it. Like people are – did you see that thing? Like 2,000 people went to Iowa from out of state to go knock on doors. That's more than – 1,700, yep. That's more than went for Obama. That's crazy. It's really like it's right there. It's happening and the polling has him beating beating Trump by the widest margin of any candidate And I think the delegate math is looking very good for him And I think he's he's saying in the same way that Trump did when Trump was was Didn't care about gay people You know, he wasn't anti-gay and he was against the Iraq war

He was saying these things that were heresies within Republican dogma And it was very refreshing for Republicans to finally admit that the Iraq war was a bad idea. You know what I mean? And they're like, oh, my God. Like, he's saying this taboo thing that we all secretly believe. And it sort of liberated Republicans from all this baggage that they had been carrying around and let them move into this new era. Like, it feels so good to believe in what Bernie is saying. Like, everyone is so scared.

of oh we won't get this and we won't get that but guys let's fucking admit that we want it. That's what we want. Oh fuck yeah. Let's just say it. Let's just say it. The worst case is that we negotiate down for something less than that. Exactly. But like I'm tired of pretending that what we want are these like are like Republican just a little bit of most Democrats.

AlexOkay.

MaxMost Democrats go oh what I really want is just to make things a little more fair for people and have this like means tested you know aid program where you know four people can get some food stamps but they can't buy anything they want. They just can buy vegetables. It's like, well, I don't care. Like, give people fucking money. Let them buy. Like, no one should have to be hungry. No one should not have a house. No one should not have health care. Like, well, let's stop fucking pretending that we don't want that stuff. Let's just say that we want it. And all the polling that we have says that the vast majority of American people want those things, too. So why don't we off? Let's try something

different. Let's say what we believe and let's offer people a chance to vote in it. And never in my lifetime ever have we had a candidate that came out and said, Dennis Kucinich, maybe, or like some of these like weird lefty candidates but not that they were taken seriously no one who ever won no one ever won a fucking primary and here we are it's right in front of us the i think that the

Alexhesitation i still have is because there there are so many democrats who truly are like well we can have climate we can regulate banks but you know we we can't do climate change like we can't give everybody a house. And when, when all the, you're wrong about homelessness is very good. Basically, if you give people houses, they'll get jobs. But like Bernie can say that all of

these things are important. You can care about all of them at the same time. And I don't know, I don't have a point. I, the point is I, I feel like 2016 again, I'm more excited than I was in 2016. And that just makes me worried. I don't know. I'm sorry, Merlin. I'm, I found some good,

Merlingood pictures of Ella and Pompeo eating.

AlexUh, okay. Hmm.

MaxHey, you know how I periodically give a little technical challenge or something I'm working on to our listeners if they know something? So I've learned how to use Instagram stories recently, and I've been just going ham on Instagram stories. It's really great. I probably sound like an idiot for discovering this in 2020, but it's a really good product, and it's really fun because each story you get to compose the video and stickers and text,

and it's like a little project for each one. So what I'm looking for is a really easy-to-use and robust video editor for iPhone.

AlexFilmic Pro, or I'm sorry, LumaFusion.

MaxLumaFusion, okay. So what I was thinking yesterday is I had all these little short clips from the game cafe, and I wanted to edit them together into one 15-second clip, which is what you can post on Instagram story and it's like surprisingly hard to do that on an iphone it is there's also a bunch of oh

Alexactually you might this is a good question to leave in actually because you want something that's more um i don't know how to like yeah you want something more influencer-y like a very simple

Maxjust clip and go yeah another thing is like trimming clips so that you can see how long they are is like a feature that's not an ios native it's like nowhere like where the fuck do you see how long it is hey if any of our listeners know um a good app or situation for me to be able to like quickly and easily edit video in a good way on the iphone um how should

Alexyou tell me hi it's mr tortoise i'm so excited you're here you guys make this show so hard to

Speaker Bedit. Ladies and gentlemen, we have a special guest for the challenge this week. It's our friend Greg Pierce from- Wait, we make it hard to edit? Why do we make it hard to edit?

Speaker AOh boy. Hey, Mr. Pierce, how are you? I'm good. Thanks for inviting me to join.

AlexNow, would you like to introduce what you do or should we do that? Because I am not great at doing that and I will get too excited and just, I'll make that noise for about five minutes.

Speaker AWell, I can attempt to do so. I guess the main reason I'm here is I am the developer of an application called Drafts for iOS and Mac. Yeah, Mac! And I'm an indie software guy. I've been doing stuff for Apple platforms for decades now.

MerlinAnd you were here once before, a long time ago, when there was a...

Speaker BHow long ago was it?

MerlinIt's about a year.

Speaker BIt'll be in the show notes.

MerlinI want to give you the opportunity to talk about what is new in drafts, because a lot is new in drafts, including being on the Mac. I don't know if you can remember when you were here. I do. I do. But our listeners might not.

Speaker AYou guys had me on shortly after drafts five ship, which would have been about a year and a half ago. Wow. And at that time, it was an all new ground up rewrite of the app for iOS, just for iOS at the time with a with a lot of new capabilities that hadn't been in the app. And since then, I've shipped a Mac version and, well, a couple of updates to a Mac version, but it's now pretty much a fully feature complete version for the Mac that can do all the things

the iOS version can do. And there's been a lot of other stuff added along the way, different services and integration capabilities and just general flow of improvements. I try to get out a pretty significant feature release every couple of months. So I move at a bit of a blistering pace.

AlexYeah, I feel like what you're trying to say is that you make fucking bitch in apps. You work for a living. Yeah, yeah, and they're amazing. And wow, wow.

Speaker AWell, that would have sounded weird if I put it that way.

MaxMr. Gregg, what was your first app? I know you mentioned you're a longtime Mac developer.

Speaker Athe first app that I like sold as a product was a shareware Yahtzee style game in the late 90s

Maxhell yeah I love Yahtzee

AlexYahtzee oh hold on hold on we should probably explain why Mr. Greg Pierce is here oh that's a good idea it's a challenge yeah

Speaker BChallenge. Challenge. Do more. Do more with drafts. Do more with drafts. You know, you had this bait on the Mac for a while, and then it was great because you could do your files everywhere.

MerlinBut then I have no earthly idea how you figured out a way to make the actions from iOS work on Mac. I don't know nothing. You know me, Mr. Greg. I don't know diddly about the development world. I don't even know how to include once. But geez, Louise, was that hard? Because that must have been hard. You built it all to be this one way, and then there's another way.

Speaker AYeah, there was a lot of aspects of it that were difficult. There were some that were not. I mean, there's some things.

Speaker BBut they're totally different APIs and callbacks and stuff, right?

Speaker AFor a lot of it, but not for some. I mean, things I integrate with, like services like Dropbox and Google Drive and things, I'm integrating directly with their web APIs, and that was all the same. And that just worked across platforms without me having to do a lot of significant work. The things that integrated with the system, you know, each had different APIs and AppKit than they would on iOS. So it was kind of like rewriting a lot of those features along the way. But I'd say we're at the point that about 95% of it works on both platforms without issue.

There's a few exceptions, but I got most of it to work.

AlexAnd this is not a Catalyst app, right?

Speaker ACorrect. It's an AppKit app, a traditional way of developing Mac apps.

MaxIt's a good app. I mean, it doesn't have that famous fit and finish that we all know and love from the Catalyst experience.

MerlinI would like a lot more pull-down menus for stuff that normally would want to gesture. A little more spinner, more choosy spinners. Can you make more choosy spinners, Mr. Gregg?

Speaker AI have actually, you know, for my own illustrative purposes, attempted to build drafts as a catalyst app. Woof! I don't think you want to use that.

MerlinThat's like having a play about airline safety. It's not really going to keep many planes in the air.

MaxMr. Greg, can I ask you a draft question? Sure. So just now I sent a little message to Alex and Merlin. So I have an action that goes, send this draft to Alex and Merlin. And what happens is it opens up a new text thread with Alex and Merlin and sends it to them. It does not send it to our sort of canonical Dubai Friday party line.

Do you know what I'm saying?

Speaker AYeah, there's no way to, you may have named threads and groups and stuff. In theory, it should match those up, but that's in the iOS end of things. So if you have it set to address to the same group of people, it should find the same thread in your messages and when that pops up, but it doesn't always happen. iMessage has its own weirdnesses. And I think sometimes if you've renamed a group or done things like that, it doesn't always find.

MerlinOr if you're using their phone number instead of their email that's associated with that thread. It's messages is so whack sometimes.

MaxOh, that's a good, that's a very interesting theory.

MerlinI would go in and look at Dubai Friday Actual and see what the, what we're using there. And I'll bet that would be more likely to work.

AlexI'm considering just not, like signing out and just not using messages on my Mac. Because it's such a disaster. Is it a disaster? for you guys?

Speaker BYes, there's nothing but sync errors.

AlexYeah.

Speaker BAnd then the one that just,

Merlinas we've talked about pretty much every week on every show that I do, sometimes a photo, an image, like not necessarily a photograph, but an image, sometimes a small image will go fine. Boom, done, gone. Yep. Other images, they just don't go. And then let's say we're doing the kind of thing that the three of us like to do where we're sending each other a bunch of stuff and here's some cats and we're going around. And it will be 15 minutes before I realize the progress bar hasn't moved. It looks like I've sent six photos with six interleaved captions. But no, I've just sent six captions.

And I look insane. Look at that, precious angel. What are you talking about?

Speaker AThe one I always get in messages on the Mac is that I get a thumbnail for one image I've received. And then I click on it to see the full and I get a different image.

Speaker BWhoa.

MerlinSometimes it's just the image won't open. I go click, click, click, click, click, click, click. What's the secret knock to be able to see an image? God damn it, Greg, fix it. Mr. Greg. Sorry, Mr. Greg, fix it.

Speaker Amessages yeah i'd have to go to work at apple like every other indie developer oh don't go don't

Alexleave us don't do it please oh no my drafts uh so like merlin said challenge this week was to do even more with drafts and primarily for me that meant doing another deep dive on the the mac stuff because it all works and it's kind of that's the thing i kind of peanut buttered on this challenge because it just works.

MaxAll right, Alex is fired. It just works.

AlexIt just works.

MaxI haven't used drafts in a little bit. I recognize that for the way that I use text, it's a good habit. And it's like anything else, like building a good habit just because it's a long-term. I would say for me, setting up drafts has been a long-term investment in making my life a little easier and more organized. But just any good habit of eating better or whatever, you have to build that habit. It's hard, right? It's friction, and you have to do it over and over

until it becomes the automatic thing.

MerlinAnd if you're busy and stressed or whatever, in the moment, you've got to shoot out a text. The last thing you're going to think about doing, if you're still in the midst of early building of that habit, is to go, oh, I guess I'll just pop over to this app and go do that. You're like, no, no, no. I have fires to take care of.

MaxThe last time I made this sort of effort in my life and I was like, okay, I'm going all in, and I'm switching to drafts, and that's going to be my thing. The Mac app was not out yet. And I will say it is a game changer to have the Mac app in terms of this really having a big place in my life of where text goes.

MerlinCan I repeat, if I may briefly, and I don't want to take Mr. Gregg's thunder here, but I want to remake the pitch that I always make for drafts, and it's getting briefer and clearer, I hope, which is this. Ordinarily, you, and I am just repeating myself, so I'm sucking that. But ordinarily, you think to yourself, I need to go do a thing. And that do a thing is I need to send a text. I need to write a tweet. I need to do an email, right? And so it's completely reasonable and rational that you would go to the place from which you will send that.

So I will write my email in whatever mail.app. I will write my tweet inside the Twitter app. I will write my text inside of messages. And that works fine for most of us. But here's the thing. Imagine a state of mind, a change in approach, where instead of saying what you're making and where it will go, first thing you do is start writing what that thing is. And it sounds crazy until you do it. But what I want to get to is the point where you folks,

listeners, can understand. You go into drafts and start typing something, and within even three days maybe, you're going to start noticing something wild, which is you didn't really know what you were going to say until you said it. And then once you said it, you go through this amazing cascade where you're like, I thought I was coming here to just make a note. Oh, but now I realize that should be a text. You know what? That text is longer than it should be. Maybe that should be an email. Wow, this email suddenly got really long. Do I need to send this at all? No. And if you start thinking that way in drafts, and you know what? Any point, abandon it. Escape out, and you're done.

Like, your draft is saved and synced. If you ever want to come back to that, you can. But get my back on this, guys. Before we even get into the wealth of things that you can do with a bunch of text, you've got just this basic idea that if all my text starts in drafts, I get to make a decision. When I'm done saying, when I realize I've said what I want to say, then I put it somewhere. Oh, this is a tweet? Guess what? I could start making this like a thread. In my case, I don't even do the fancy stuff. I will just do the write three tweets with line breaks in between and then copy and paste.

I know there's an easier way. But that kind of thing. That's part of the value. That's part of the value to me is just that once you get in that habit, it's a little bit like having a notebook. You can do anything in the world, but do you have your confidence in where you put stuff to know that it will be safe and can turn into anything?

AlexThe thing that I guess I haven't noticed too much that I don't really text via drafts except when I am starting a text. Usually it doesn't change to Oh it turns out that this should be an email But I will decide Midway I'm like writing an Email it's like oh this really Should be this thing Needs a fuck ton of links and I'm like oh Oh look it markdown is right there Oh oh wonderful wonderful

And the It's so powerful that it has Not replaced Yeah I guess it has replaced OmniFocus for me in terms of like, this is my life's brain. Because OmniFocus used to hold everything and I would put every single thought in there and then at the end of the day, like review, okay, is this really a task? Do I change it to a task? Like, whatever. And now I've done the cool thing, you know, where you switch task managers,

like all the cool iOS kids. And I'm using things mostly because I have friends who can build me drafts, actions, and shortcuts for it. But it is, I mean, I don't know. It feels like drafts is what Evernote wanted to be, but with text. And, you know, it just works. It just works. Does that kind of like, what were you, Greg, what were you thinking? Mr. Greg, what were you thinking after the initial text starts here?

Speaker AYeah. I break, in my mind, drafts into three primary sections, I guess. That first part is what you talked about is the capture. Just try to be a ubiquitous capture tool. It's on your Apple Watch and you can dictate a little snippet, or it's in your menu bar on the Mac and you can, without leaving the current app you're in, pop that up. If you've got a stupid song lyric idea or you wake up in the middle of a dream and you want to jot that down. Just having that trusted place to dump that stuff out of your head is number one, the first purpose and to make it as convenient as possible to do that.

The second part is editing that text and providing a powerful and convenient and consistent place to edit your text on all your devices that you can customize the way you want. because you always end up with those snippets. You copy something out of a web page, but you end up getting all that junk in it. You just want to paste it in somewhere and clean it up to make it a note somewhere else or whatever, or you write that email or message or whatever, and having a consistent place with the fonts you like

and a few simple actions and tools to whatever, capitalize things or put stupid emojis in there automatically or whatever you like to do for Twitter and stuff is convenient. And then the third part is the action framework and it's the what you do with the text afterwards and every place you can send it and, you know, manipulate it and make it fit into other systems.

MerlinAnd you know, you know what else Mr. Greg makes, as long as we're pimpin' his skirt, Interact Scratchpad, which is an app that I use pretty much every day.

Speaker BInteract Scratchpad.

Speaker AMerlin, I don't sell that one anymore. You don't?

AlexOh, no.

Speaker Aoff the market oh it's so good it still works great but i don't currently what i love is i love

Merlinan app i love an app for uh adding to contact information if that was shit i use it all the

Speaker Atime god damn it okay hey do you use it on the mac or do you use it on ios because i've been thinking about re-releasing the mac version it still works i have an updated version but both

MerlinI use both. Max has a new assistant, and I created her card using Scratchpad. I do this all. The guy that I'm buying a Libra Drive compatible Blu-ray Ripper from. Ooh. Like, I grab a big glob of his contact information. And now I don't have to sit and... This is a fucking egg. God damn it, Mr. Greg. Because here's the problem. You get a bunch of information. You get this information soup from somebody. And it's got some phone numbers, and it's got some email addresses. and then of course it's got the fucking address.

Now, how are you going to get that address into contacts? You know what you're going to do? Like a fucking monster, you're going to tab through each of those goddamn fields and either type or paste. Garbage. No, you know what you do? You grab that big glob, you paste it into drafts and then you add some carriage returns and then it's going to be formatted in a way that you send it to interact and then interact scratchpad goes, oh, that looks like a name. Is that the name? That looks like an email. Is that the email? That looks like the name of the company and the address and the et cetera, et cetera. and you click it and add the contacts. Shame on you, Mr. Greg. God damn it.

Speaker AI'll tell you, I've got a current build for the Mac. I'm not going to re-release the iOS version, but how about as a gift for your Patreon listeners, we give them a link to the free download of the Mac version. Are you even kidding me, Mr. Greg?

AlexOh, my gosh. Yes, please.

Speaker ABut if it doesn't work right, don't send me a ton of support requests. No, no, none.

Speaker BZero. None. Maybe you'll get acquired by Spotify.

MaxMr. Greg, what's an agile tortoise?

Speaker AIt is a random and arbitrary name I chose for my company, to be honest, that I could get a domain name for. I mean, it's not completely random in that I've always had, you know, turtles are my spirit animal, and I've always had an affinity for them. There's one tattooed on my arm, and I have them all over my desk and stuff. So it was, you know, something that fit in with that.

Speaker BIt's catchy, though.

MerlinThat's why you want something catchy that comes off the top of your head. And that's why, you know, Milf Felching is the name of my company. And it's something because that's my spirit.

MaxRecently acquired by Spotify for $6 million. That's my spirit animal. So much milf inflation. Mr. Greg, can I ask you a question? Do you have a normal drafts on your phone, or is yours all tarted up because you're using it to test stuff?

Speaker AI have a pretty normal drafts. I would say there's about half a dozen things that are core things I do with drafts that are regular user-type things.

MaxCan you open it up for me and make a new note? Yeah. What's in your little tray down there?

Speaker ASo you mean like underneath the text, the action bar? Yeah, the action bar. Below the text? I use the markdown action bar that ships with the app pretty much, which has tools for doing markdown headers, italic, bold links, stuff like that that I use often. That's the one I usually leave selected.

AlexWhat icon color do you – I'm sorry, Max. Go ahead. Go ahead. No, that's a good question. This is not important. I think our listeners were all wondering the same thing. I'm sorry. No, that's good. We should interrupt. We should interrupt.

MerlinSend them your home screen.

AlexI just want to know, Mr. Tortoise, because you are, again, wonderful. And you have provided so many different icons to choose from so that, you know, wherever you put drafts, you should put in the doc. But you need it to, you know, be uniform with the rest of your color scheme. So I have the dark purple, or I'm not sure what it is called because I'm a bad fake fangirl. But what do you use? The original blue?

Speaker AYou know, I better check, double check. On my iPhone, I use the dark one. And on the iPad, I just have the default one selected at the moment. I do change them back and forth just at, you know, that's more of a testing thing for me. So I periodically flip those around. but I have the dark ones. I need to update the dark ones. When I originally created the black and gray ones, I made them perfect matches for the dock on both the iPad and the iPhone so that basically the icon disappeared

except for the logo. But when they put in dark mode on iOS 13, they changed the tints on the dock a little bit and I haven't updated those to work.

MaxWhere the hell do you change the icon? Where's that? I'm in settings.

Speaker ASo the little AA button for editor settings down at the bottom right next to the gear. And then if you tap on the app icon there.

MaxOh, there. Oh, okay. Oh, I see. Wow. Just once. Just once.

AlexAll right. Back to our regularly scheduled programming.

MaxOkay. Here's the two topics I want to get into. I would love to go around the table, and I would like to sort of get – I would like everyone to tell me all the stuff that they – I don't want to know. Okay, here's what I don't want. I do not want all of your Dale Gribble things of like, oh, I figured out how to connect that to that to that. I want to know the ones you use. Like what are the ones that you're hitting every week at least that are actually useful little actions that you have in there that are actually getting pressed? Like if you had a heat map of the ones you use, what's the – give me the purple ones on the heat map because I'm trying to figure that out for myself of like what kind of things –

What categories of things should I be thinking of having this thing hooked up to? And then second, that's my first area of conversation. My second thing I would like to know is what is a workspace and what do I do with it? I don't understand.

MerlinAnd mine is I want to hear all of the fucking Dale Gribble stuff.

Speaker BIn addition, as a contrast to my friend Max.

MaxIt's a land of contrasts.

Speaker BMy friend Max, whom I love, distinguished gentleman from Chicago,

Merlinwho is strangely incurious about things that he's not curious about yet. I like the Dale Gribble shit. And when you look at something like what Rose... So I put a bunch of links in, that'll be in show notes of stuff that the mythical fantastical creature, Rosemary Orchard, has made over time. Fake. Fake. But she's made stuff like her thing for using task paper to export to OmniFocus. It's like a whole omnibus bill. It's like it is a... It's actions.

Am I right, Greg? But it's also got the tool or the extended keyboard, a special keyboard like you get for tasks. But there are things you can get where it's really like a miniature. This is a platform. There's apps within the app that people can make, essentially.

MaxYou can have a model train set for your model train set. Boop, boop, boop. Rusty Sheckleford. All right, so let's take off our conductor hats for just one second.

Speaker BCan everyone just go around and tell me?

MaxI'm really... I'm into this.

MerlinI'm into this.

MaxI super want to know. I'll go... I can go first. Here's what I...

Speaker BYou're saying, what are you actually really using this for?

MaxCorrect. What are you depending on this for? Here's my big ones. I have on the little, what did you call it, Greg, the action bar? So I have whatever I just typed, text it to Veronica. I have whatever I just typed, text it to Alex and Merlin. I have whatever I just typed, send it to Alex, an email to Alex with the subject line, put this in our Cards Live show, right? So like sometimes I find a funny tweet or YouTube video that we want to put in our short videos, and that will send it to Alex.

And then I have, what the hell is this one? Oh, this one just emails Alex for some reason. I don't know why I have that. And then this, okay, and that's down there. Then when I hit the drafts icon, my main ones are copy, send to Bear,

send the list that I typed up to things, create an event in Fantastical, send it as a message, and save to Google Drive. And now I used to have,

wait, shit, what was the one that I was asking for help with?

AlexSave to Google Drive, does that just, that can only save it as like a text file, right?

MaxCorrect. Oh, man. So it takes the text I just typed and puts it in Google Drive so I can share it with people on Google Drive.

AlexI think the Zapier action.

Speaker AYou can also output to a Google Doc. You can't append to Google Docs, but you can create one.

MaxThat's what I think I'm doing. I'm making like a new Google Doc.

Alexi wait greg can you create a new google doc because i can only append it to a google like i have a scratch google doc that i just like append things to um you cannot currently append

Speaker Ato a google doc with actions you can append to text files in google drive but if you you can create a new google doc and what it does is take your markdown converted to html markdown to google Doc? Hold on.

MaxHold on. What? Sometimes I'm typing something up and I'm like okay now I need to share that with it. It's like a press release and it's like okay Jen needs to edit this. So I will go save to, I have one called save to Google Drive and it makes a new Google Doc and it opens up the Google Doc app on my phone and then I go add people and I invite Jen and then it's done and then I can like we can have comments on there.

So those are my big ones. Now I used to have one called I used to have a number of these that were append to a bear note. So here's how I know what to talk about on Dubai Friday. As I'm going through my week, sometimes I walk into a plate glass window and I'm like, that's a funny story. I should talk about that on Dubai Friday. Why are your windows so clean? And I write it down and I open up bear notes and I have a bear note called DBF and I just write down all my little anecdotes to share on the show, my pearls of wisdom and my patented rants. And I used to have a draft action

where I could hit append to DBF and it would do that, but it doesn't work on the new drafts. And I'm confused. And Greg sent me a great deal of information that I was not able to operationalize. But I missed that. That used to be one. Having special little things to append to specific notes in Bear was very valuable to me.

Speaker AYes. It's totally possible. We just need to get you tweaked on what you've got set up there. Yeah.

MaxGreg, tweak me. Tweak me, Mr. Greg.

AlexBecause Bear. Tweak me.

Speaker BTweak me, Mr. Greg.

MerlinI just created a Google Doc out of Markdown. God damn it. Oh, my God. Look at that.

AlexOh, my God.

MerlinWhoa.

Speaker BOkay.

Speaker AThat's a pretty good setup.

Speaker BHey, rusty Shackleford.

Speaker AYou've put some time into getting that set up and configured. So you've got, and like I think most users of drafts, there's probably a half a dozen to a dozen of those sorts of actions they have set up that are what they use all the time. Yep.

MaxCan we hear a few more? Do you guys have some of yours that are like, these are my main ones?

AlexWell, I have Tweet with the Twitter app, so I don't need to open it. Mail and Markdown.

MaxWhat's Mail? Oh, so email this using Markdown formatting. Via Markdown.

AlexTweetStorm. I have a Send to Daily Journal action.

MaxHow often do you use that TweetStorm button, Alex?

AlexOh, not that often. It usually when I'm actually sometimes like if I'm doing a Dubai Friday thread, I might I might use it today or tomorrow, actually, when I'm like, I want to link to a number of things.

MaxAnd then begin thread. I am deeply sorry for my comments about the television program Grey's Anatomy.

AlexOh, boy.

MaxI'm so sorry that I've disappointed my fans.

Speaker BThe photos that were posted to my account of Meredith Grey eating were not indicative of my respect for this program where Shonda Rhimes Incorporated.

MaxFurthermore, I believe I was hacked and my team is looking into this breach of my account.

MerlinIf you saw some voyeuristic incest porn, that was an error on my part. Circle post to Apple Notes.

AlexI also use my processing keyboard. I send things to my shopping list in reminders all the time, my shared shopping list with Maddie. and then I have a separate group that's just like processing and that's where all of my things parsing happens. You're on things now?

MaxYeah. I'm on things now. Yeah. We're only using things? Nope. You're an omni-focus boy.

AlexDon't guess about my life.

Speaker BYou don't know me.

AlexIf you are on omni-focus now.

Speaker BYou know that I mostly use task paper

Alexbut that's okay.

Speaker BI'm a big omni-focus boy and a little jazz girl.

AlexRemember, he's six months behind on all the podcasts. So that's a lot of good.

MerlinThat's a lot of good stuff, Alex. You've thought through what you're doing there in a way that I think is very cool.

AlexI need to. Well, and again, I still haven't done a huge deep dive into the Mac stuff. But now because of your recommendation of the set app, whatever the fuck that is, like the mini app store that is set app, having task paper I really like the syntax but I like writing the oh yeah I forgot I send to Fantahastical but I'm going to write down

I don't know how to send contacts to that's sorry I'm using drafts to make a draft of all the new draft actions I want

Merlinthat's what my grandma did when she got the dementia she had lists also she would do all day long was make lists and then she'd maintain her her list of all her lists and then one time she got her house refinanced uh to get it painted because

Alexthe people said they were christian so put that on your list oh put it on the list in in in the

Merlinlist uh all right how how about you merlin um i'll do a few mine are so boring but so powerful and so heavily used. And it's now become, I think, something close to a running joke, at least with Dan, my friend Dan Benjamin, where I'll say, I need to go all in on drafts. And it's become a bit, but I really do. And the reasons I'm not all in on drafts are just so stupid and embarrassing. Let me just say this, step zero, this is going to sound really underwhelming. It's difficult to overstate how important this is, the sinking. The sinking works. Okay, here's what this means.

So a lot of what I do, my job on various shows sometimes is, part of my job for the various shows is I'm usually the poster to Twitter of things. I'm also the keeper of notes on lots of things. And I've got little using stuff. I use combinations of stuff, right? So I use stuff like shortcuts. I use stuff like text expander, et cetera, et cetera. I name in a very sensible way. But I mean, it's just the most basic thing. There are some things that are, and this is why people think it's nuts that I have like six calendars on my phone. But it's like, well, yeah. But like I said to Max a long time ago, you know, you have a paring knife and a shaft knife for doing different

things, they don't do anything to harm one another. So most basic things, sometimes it's just way easier to type on a Mac, but I need to skate. I'm going to go somewhere else. So I might start the tweet for something on a Mac, forget about it. And then I go somewhere else and there it is on my phone. A lot of times, like for example, when my kid gets out, I like to text my kid when school lets out, you know, with an appropriate greeting, you know, have fun at Starbucks with your friends or whatever. And so I'll kind of stage that in drafts somewhere. But wait, it's not time to send

that yet. Yeah, I know. That's the point. The point is I wrote a thing that I know I'm going to need to send later. And you know what? It doesn't have any fucking typos because I hate typos. And it drives me crazy when I'm reading political Twitter and people will say something. They're so excited about really big news, but then they've got one typo in it and it just grinds my gears. So number one, syncing. The syncing thing is so important. There's so many things that used to be a big, one big deal of drafts used to be that you could get from drafts to other things. I mean, obviously, that's still like a huge, as Mr. Greg said, that's still a huge part of the value.

But just the fact that this sync is so solid is a huge feature all on its own. It's not even, it's all iCloud. It's not Dropbox. The stuff just syncs. And then inside of that, now remember, you can turn on different syntax highlighting. So what you started as a plain text note can now, with one little click turn into a task paper document or a multi-markdown document or javascript for all i care all you do is change the syntax stuff and now you're doing that so uh anyway when to get that out of the way like uh there's a million things about this app that you will not appreciate until you started appreciating this app life is like that

ones that i use a lot oh god it's just so lame uh i think you have this one max copy all of the text in this drafts to my clipboard.

AlexWhich sounds dumb. Oh, yeah. No, I use it the most, actually. Well, like, Alex, do you use an iPad kind of a lot? Only a little. Yep, yep, yep.

MerlinOkay, but, like, for example, did you ever get in the habit on iPad of using the paste button instead of the paste text thing?

AlexThe paste button.

MerlinWell, okay, so here's the thing. When you start using an iPad a lot, you discover there's so much shit that's awesome on an iPad. One of the single hugest game changers on an iPad, because I do a lot of copying and pasting, is that ability to paste using the little button. You've got to cut, a copy, and a paste button on iPad.

AlexOh, right, right, above the keyboard?

MerlinOnce you start using that button to just paste all my shit into here, you feel like a fucking caveman doing that on the iPhone and having to click and get in the right place and have the pop up and fucking wait because we don't have our good things anymore. where it understands what my thumb means.

MaxIsn't there some gesture? Am I crazy or did they announce, isn't there some sort of gesture now for copy and paste?

AlexYeah, but it doesn't really, it's only available on the iPad and it's, correct me if I'm wrong, Merlin, but like they changed it. So in iOS 13, you have to do the fucking hold longer and then you can do like a three finger out.

MerlinGreg will remember this. There's a pinch, there's a pinch in Zoom based on selection that will then turn that into copying and pasting. Is that correct? Like Zoom, I think it's that A, what is it? Greg, what's the mojo for cut and paste on an iPad?

Speaker AI don't know, dude. I put fingers on my iPad and sometimes strange things happen

Merlinand I don't know how they happen. Well, I might put it this way. I'm super excited. I'm learning how to edit podcasts in Fairright. And it's quite a lot of fun and it's super great. And the results are fucking amazing. But I'm still getting the hang. They're leveling. The whole reason I'm doing this is to avoid temporarily learning logic, but also kind of the game, the game that like the Federico Vettici game of being able to actually edit a podcast on an iPad, which Snell does now it's, and it's amazing. But like, for example, one of my, I know there's a key command, you know, email Syracuse, but like when I want to zoom all the way to project view or zoom back all the way into

the tightest, like watch the scrubber move. And the way you do that normally is to zoom. So imagine zooming horizontally or pinching horizontally will either squoze in or unsquoze in the amount that you see horizontally. Whereas pinching and zooming vertically changes how tall the tracks are. Right? Now, if I'm doing that on ferrite, that's the price of admission. To the extent possible, I really want an affordance for just doing the fucking thing with a button.

and that's so what I'm trying to say to you here is if any of you have ever gotten religion about cut copy paste on iPad with those buttons it's crazy in that same way you're going to feel like a fucking caveman all the times that you used to do stuff before you were in drafts and something as simple as clicking a button what happens when I click that button why the fuck do you need a copy button because what's my alternative click to get the cursor somewhere wait to get the select all Get the select all.

Hit copy. That's like at least four steps versus a button that goes, and now that's there.

Speaker BSo number one, far and away. So boring. Copy everything here. I got to go on the radio for a minute. I'll be right back. Bye. The real radio.

MerlinThe other one that is a spackle for an old dead system that's driving Alex up a fucking wall. I still use an editorial with Dropbox for a lot of things. And so one of my top ones is take this top line, add my bespoke long date to make it unique, and then create that as a Dropbox document. So for the years and years and years that I've been primarily on editorial, No Shade, No Lemonade, that's been huge for me. Because that means I go in and I say,

do my Friday episode 155, da-da-da-da, and then I type whatever I want to type, and then that gets pushed into what had been my canonical system of Dropbox editorial NVLT that I'm kind of going to move away from. Those two right there are just huge. I use the I'm really big on, Max is not here to hear this. I'm really big on the action groups for the extended keyboard. I'm telling you, man, looking at this thing on a Mac, I'm still kind of getting my sea legs using it on a Mac, but it really it's like having your own little personal Millennium Falcon.

It's just I don't even know how to get you into what all this will do. I feel like it does This is really boring. Not very Dale Gribble. It does help to start with the basic monkey shit like type. Start typing. Guess what? The first line that you typed is the subject line of an email. You just don't know it yet. Tap, tap. Return, return. Type a short email. Hit a button. That sends an email. You don't have to open an email up. Like I know Alex said that, but I want you to really, really get your head around not needing to look at your inbox to send a text message, to send an email, to create a Google

doc. You're doing all of that structural. You're roughing in all of these things that will eventually turn into this palace with this app that lets you never have another drip that you didn't mean to drop. So those are my big ones. What are my other big ones? I really need to go back through. I need to do some paring down. I've got some that I use occasionally. I've been trying to get into day one. I can't really get into it. I do use Fantastical. And for folks who don't know, that means you create.

You create something like pick up kid at 4.45 p.m. slash B. And that creates an event on Big Family Calendar at that time. Like the slash is huge. Send a bear, send a Ulysses. Oh, you made me one called Is Merlin Awesome?

AlexOh, what's that? You made me an action.

MerlinYeah, yeah. Damn straight. Capture a dream, permiso. And then I got Greg's ideas for an idea thing. So anyway, it's so funny. I am so over the moon for this app. I think there's a reason I'm on the homepage talking about how this is one of my all-time favorite apps. And yet, I still need to fully explore. I need to reassess my whole idea of, I mean, I know I have a very solid base in the 5% of this app that I use a lot. I have a much less solid base on,

if I wanted to go all in on TaskPaper via this, It would be so beneficial to me, and I just need to get my head past a couple conceptual ideas.

Speaker AWhat I was going to try to do here is talk you guys through one of my most common workflows in draft space. A task I do all the time, which is handling grocery shopping lists and recipes and stuff. And it's going to touch on workspaces and actions and a few different things. I'm guessing this is going to be simple list probably, right? So, right. So I start with, I've got an action, new grocery list, right? I click that action and

it creates me a new draft based on a template. I have some template drafts set up that I've tagged with template and it can go find it and pull it up. And it has, you know, it puts groceries and then the date in Merlin's preferred canonical format. And then it has markdown headers and starter tasks for each of the sections of the grocery store, you know, produce, dairy, meat, and stuff, and a section for recipes. And then I take this note, and when I'm going to do

my grocery planning for the week, I'll usually, on the iPad, sit there and open it in split view, and I'll, you know, safari to different recipes I want to make that week. I'll drag the links over and drop them in the meal section so I know what I'm making. Then I'll go through and fill in the different lists with tasks.

MerlinYou're really utilizing the stuff.

Speaker AYeah, and then put the tasks in with checkboxes for all the stuff I need to get at the store, all organized by where it is at the store, et cetera. When I created this grocery list, it also automatically tagged it with groceries. and I have a workspace set up called groceries that shows me just the grocery list that I've tagged and like any workspace in the list it basically filters both your inbox and archive and all by just those tags you've configured so I can go find my current grocery lists will be

in the inbox of that workspace and I usually leave the last couple weeks of grocery lists in the inbox okay once i've made all those recipes i'll archive that grocery list but i can go back because i'll always go back well what was that thing i made four weeks ago that the kids really like right i want to make it again so i can go back to the archive and look up that grocery list and get that link and bring it over to the new list or whatever right yeah now the real kicker is when i go to the grocery store to shop i pull this up and i've got an action called shopping

mode this is one i've published before but it takes in okay with one click does this toggle toggle shopping mode yeah it enables link mode in drafts which turns off editing so when you go to check off those task marks it doesn't automatically start like editing the note by accident show the keyboard real time saver it disables sleep on your phone so that when you put it in the cart in front Like you don't have to, every time you want to check something off,

you don't have to wake your phone back up.

MerlinSo it's like you're a little personal, like escape and eye. Like you've got like, you've made like a little VI for shopping. Exactly. Kind of, right? I mean, like you're escaping out into this other mode and then you're eyeing in to be able to edit. That's so cool.

Speaker AYeah. And then I go through the store and I check off all my stuff. Oh my God, I'm so rigid right now. And then I get home and I can reference my workspace to, you know, when I go to cook dinner, I go, okay, what recipes, that I buy stuff for. I've got the links right there and I pull one up and cook it, you know?

AlexI, well, I'm at full mast.

Speaker AYep, yep, yep. And it's pretty much a complete system for managing your groceries. There's literally no blood in my head right now.

AlexThe, we also haven't even touched on the fact that there, you can go into, I mean, just the character and word count alone is amazing. But then being able to go to the history of each note know where you created it?

MerlinI would bet you so many people have never clicked on a ton of those weird little icons at the bottom. But when you discover like, oh, guess what? Here on a map is where you made an edit to this. What? And then also even stuff like, what do you call the ID of a given draft? Is it not UUID, but what do you call it?

Speaker AYeah, UUID.

MerlinSo what's cool about that, though, is that there are all kinds of, this is not, I don't mean this disparagingly, but interesting and hacky ways to get at individual things from individual things. So frequently there's ways I do stuff like, I will bookmark, essentially bookmark a search in NvAlt that, well, this doesn't work as well as it used to. But you could say like, I do a string of B2W show note X, and then that'll show all my show notes, that kind of thing. But what if you had the ability to not just,

I mean, even if you key by title, exact title, that could still cause some problems unless you're like doing some John Syracuse level stuff. But every draft, every given draft has its own UUID that you can address via shortcuts. So if there's something that you call today or something that you've called capture or something you've called list or garbage pile or junk drawer, or you've got this place where you just want to be able to get to stuff fast, it's really not hard to create a shortcut where you talk into your phone and that just gets added to a draft. Or with the share sheet.

I mean, you said this. I worry we went by this one too fast. But one of the really killer moves is if you're working on something like show notes or similar, right, where you're going to get a lot of stuff, you can create a little template in drafts to say that when I hit the draft, this particular drafts share sheet option, it's going to give me the name of the site in the brackets of Markdown. It's going to give me the URL of the site in the parentheses of Markdown. Then it's going to do two new lines, a greater than, and whatever was selected.

Okay? So, and now imagine that appending to the UUID of that given drafts, or a new one, whatever works for you. But, like, I hope that makes your head swim a little bit, because if you need to blast through a ton of stuff really fast in a repeatable way, it's gotten a lot more scientific. You don't have to just guess that this is roughly the name of what I want. And will the Notes app remember that this is still the one that I want to append to? Like, all that kind of stuff. Yep. I love that. So like I've said before, and I'll shut up after this, but Christmas and birthdays and stuff like that, my wife and I, and increasingly my kid and I,

will have a notes document that's for everybody but the gift receiver. And I'll be in Safari on any platform and just adding cards to that and cannily trying to organize that. But anyway, it's weird, though. I'm trying and stretching here to sell people on this because I love it so much. But draft starts is where it goes.

Speaker AYou know what I do with the gift list? I keep my little gift idea list in drafts, of course. Interesting. Because in drafts, the task marks you can check off are just text. You just type square brackets with a space between them, and you have a clickable task mark, and you can put that anywhere. It doesn't have to be at the beginning of the line like it notes. And when I was doing Christmas shopping this year, I decided to make the list have three task marks at the beginning of each item.

and I would put it in there and the first check mark the first check mark was I've ordered that like I do it mostly online ordering or whatever so it's it was in there as an idea and then once I actually ordered it I checked the first box when I received it you know Amazon delivered it to my door I checked the second box and when I actually wrapped it I checked the third box oh my god Oh, my God. So it was just a quick and easy, dirty way to keep up with the multiple statuses for each of those gift items.

MerlinYou know, crazy suggestion. Let's not do this right now because we've kept you for a super long time. But I have two requests, and I'm going to hijack the show for just a minute. Request number one is if you think this would be interesting to our listeners, may I recommend that you pick no fewer than five. It's your fucking app. Do what you want. But would you please curate a handful of actions that either everybody should be using or, B, people would be surprised to learn they should be using? Would you mind curating three to five of those that we could share with our listeners? Yeah, absolutely.

Speaker AI've posted some of these as tips to the community site, and I can dig some of those up and just send them as a...

MerlinBecause some of them really are. Like, again, a lot of stuff that Magical Rose has made really is like a magic trick. And then, Mr. Greg, we really, I don't know if you've ever listened to our program, we have stood very strongly against call-out culture. And so we try, in what we do, we try to be very prayerful about that. Who do I have to blow to get clickable stuff in a task paper list? Is that possible? Would it require brackets? Is it the non-bracketedness that keeps me from having a clicky thing, which editorial has?

Speaker ARight. Currently, the only task marks supported in drafts are the bracket style that are only active in the markdown syntax because task paper, the spec for that format doesn't have anything like that. How does editorial do that? But if you could, it would require work on my end to implement that.

MerlinNo, I don't want to do that. I don't want to do that. You should keep working on that thing where you can add a 10% asterisk to the 100% between the brackets. That's in show notes. That is wild. What you are doing with bracketed stuff is wild.

Speaker AWhat you need is a simple action that will toggle the done status of one or more selected lines in task paper. That would be a good way to do it. But it's not quite the same as tapping the line.

MerlinI get an Emacs cord for that. Thanks, Dr. Drang. I kid. I kid. Max, I'm going to send you a link to something on Twitter.

Speaker BHello. I'm Mac. Hey, whenever Max is not on screen, people should be asking.

MaxI just had to go talk to any Chicagoans who happened to be trapped in their car and they were trying to listen to the traffic reports I was on WGN News and Traffic on the 7s with Max

Speaker BDumpkin DBF Trap Boys on Clicking so this is wild

Merlinthis is a thing that Greg has been working on

Maxit's a crazy interview because they're like what is ClickHole and I'm like I was not prepared to answer that question so I was like you know I was trying to explain it's like a parody of BuzzFeed and they do quizzes and stuff and the host is like oh I love those quizzes like which Harry Potter are you

Speaker BOh, geez. And I was like, hmm, not quite. How much hand fruit am I?

MerlinSo I wanted to send you this thing. Greg, can you narrate for Mr. Max what it is that we're looking at here? Finishing up some low-level bits in preparation.

Speaker AOh, yeah. Click on that, Max. What am I looking at? The syntax highlighting engine in drafts is getting some upgrades. But right now, it has definitions for clickable task marks that are basically on-off checkboxes. But that's extensible underneath the hood so that a syntax could also define its own custom types of tappable things.

MerlinYeah. Scroll down to testing open-ended features. Scroll on to that one.

AlexOh, my. I didn't even go there.

MaxI'm clicking. I'm dragging. What's a three-state task?

Speaker AWell, you may or may not have a need for them. It's not an uncommon thing in some kind of project management stuff and all.

Speaker BWell, you're present.

MerlinIsn't it your present scenario, Greg? So like this present is something I might get, something I did get, something that is right.

Speaker AExactly. So instead of having separate checkboxes for those states, you could define a checkbox that has multiple different... What do I do with this?

MerlinIt's cool. It's the same as a single selection field in a pulldown, essentially, I think. Am I right?

MaxIs the idea with these that... I'm sorry if this is a stupid question. Is the idea that you write this in drafts and then you send it somewhere that uses this? Or is the idea that you use this in drafts?

Speaker AThis would be a use it in drafts kind of thing, I think. It's basically a way for people who have needs for different state tracking could define custom syntaxes to use in drafts to do that kind of stuff.

MaxHoly shit, look at this percentage one. What the fuck? What the fuck? What would I do with that? I don't know.

Speaker ANothing. It's a dumb idea. It's really.

MaxI can't wait to see what I do with it. There you go.

AlexOh, thank you so much, Greg.

MaxThank you, Mr. Greg. I didn't get. Nobody told me any new thing. I literally do not have. You went away for a radio interview.

AlexJesus Christ.

MaxDid you guys explore? Can I? Can we? Do we have more time or we have to stop?

AlexWell, it's the after show, but.

MaxMr. Greg, can you say for the after show?

Speaker AYes.

MaxCan you explain Is this the after show

Speaker AAfter Greg

MaxIt's the after Greg It's agile after tortoise

Speaker AI've got to go be on TV

Show notes

Transcript

171. Pretty Lady Mouth

Show notes

Transcript

0:05

0:22

0:26

0:39

0:58

0:58

1:01

1:08

1:09

1:15

1:24

1:30

1:31

1:32

1:49

1:59

2:09

2:12

2:15

2:16

2:28

2:38

2:45

2:46

3:19

3:21

3:28

3:29

3:36

3:41

3:46

3:48

3:56

4:07

4:11

4:17

4:24

4:26

4:32

4:35

4:36

4:37

4:46

4:57

5:05

5:25

5:26

5:38

5:38

5:42

5:45

5:50

6:01

6:02

6:04

6:12

6:18

6:21

6:27

6:31

6:35

6:40

6:43

6:53

6:58

7:01

7:06

7:17

7:18

7:23

7:43

7:47

7:49

8:19

8:28

8:29

8:32