201. I Was on the Dance Floor

AlexThis is Do By Friday, a weekly challenge podcast. This week's challenge, learn to steal.

MerlinSee, now this is awkward. We don't usually plan anything.

AlexWell, that's why everything that's in the show is in the show, because now this is the show, but before it was in the show, and it's very weird.

MerlinHi, Alex. Hello. How are you? Alex, we have a guest this week. Were you aware of that?

AlexI think I was. Is Mr. Will on the line?

MerlinMr. Will, we have another trophy for our case. We're going to put right alongside Alexander Petrae. Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome. Oh, my God. One of the best people on the Internet. Please welcome Will Sommer. Hi, Will.

Speaker AHey, gang. Thanks for having me.

AlexThank you.

MerlinIt's a thrill to have you. For those who don't know, shame on you. You're a monster. Will is a reporter for The Daily Beast. Will is the person who's writing. I'm going to embarrass him a little. Who's writing him and probably, well, I'm going to say Will is the one that got me to sign up and pay for a Daily Beast subscription.

Speaker ASame. Oh, that's great.

MerlinNow, if I'm having trouble with it logging me out a lot, is that you that I talk to about that?

Speaker AYeah, let's do a screen share. I'll get that resolved.

MerlinLachlan, who do I talk to? I have a lot of problems with that. But he also, I think, first landed on a lot of people's radar through an amazing newsletter about conservative media called Wright Richter.

So, wow. Welcome to the year of our Lord, 2020, August 26th. Unsurvivable hurricane coming. Melania Trump has many learnings from the continent of Africa. A lot is going on right now, Will. Is your life crazy right now?

Speaker AIt is really wild. I mean, there's, you know, with all this QAnon stuff happening, you know, someone called it the Will Summer Full Employment Act of 2020. There's no shortage of stuff going on.

MerlinOh, let's talk a little bit about that. So, I mean, I would describe, well, you've heard how I describe your beat. I'm curious how, when you, God forbid, you meet a stranger, how do you describe what it is that you cover, what your beat is? How do you describe that to people who are not as extremely online as we are?

Speaker Auh yeah you know and you know to kind of preface it it often you know no matter how i describe it it often comes off like i'm i'm a crazy person um and so you know it's like uh you know i would say conservative media and kind of uh far-right internet and conspiracy theories right fun dinner table conversation well no you kind of drop that one and people go excuse me what bury the lead

MerlinExactly. It's so wild, though, because I'm a huge fan of a 90s TV show called Mr. Show. And there are so many things with Bob Odenkirk and David Cross. And there's so many things that happened on that show in the 90s that seem more relevant and real today than they did in the mid 90s. Like there was an early episode where this, you know, do you remember when we first started like in the era of like Waco, you first started hearing about the militias and you started hearing about the people who wanted to secede and start their own subcountry in Montana. And that seemed so wild at the time. And now today, especially I would love to hear you talk more about QAnon, because your recent reporting on that especially is highlighting how much this is not just a crazy uncle, that these are people with guns who think there are child molesters.

that are being paid by George Soros. Did I get that right, Will? Is that what it is that's happening?

Speaker AYeah, I mean, that pretty much sums it up. I mean, I think what sort of is hard for people to, even who are aware of QAnon and all that, but kind of making the jump from this is a crazy thing on the internet, you know, that a lot of people believe in, but who cares, to like, suddenly this is potentially affecting our lives, just as regular people, this is affecting our politics and, you know, is getting dangerous. And so, I mean, just to ask probably an obvious

Merlinquestion, do you regard QAnon as a sort of amplification, if not just an offshoot of Pizzagate? I mean, obviously, it seems to me they must be heavily related. Do you see, what is the relationship you see between QAnon and Pizzagate?

Speaker AYeah, I mean, I think Pizzagate in a lot of ways sort of laid the seeds for QAnon. And, you know, people have called QAnon like mega pizza gate. And so the, you know, the QAnon sort of pulls in pizza gate and it pulls in, you know, all sorts of other stuff like JFK assassination, satanic panic, 9-11 truth, anti-vaccine stuff. And it pulls it all in and then kind of wraps it in this fun game where it's like clues and, you know, you got to do your own research and all this.

MerlinYeah. Yeah. It's there's Alex and I've talked about this a little bit. But, you know, one likes to think of oneself as a rational person. And so I think something that started happening around, let's say, 2015, that is absolutely is continuing to happen today is that I think our mind wants to reject certain kinds of ideas, regardless of how widespread they are, because it's so difficult to wrap your head around how somebody could arrive at that. But it feels like for the folks who are inside something like QAnon, there is no disincentive

going nuttier. Because when your evidence is so strange and flimsy, and if you're the one who feels like you discovered that, you know how you fooled Dad into doing stuff by making it seem like it's his idea? It just seems to me that in that kind of a community, the crazier, to my mind, their stuff gets, the more likely we are to reject it or just say, oh, that's just a few nuts. Because it's so hard to fathom how somebody could spend this much energy and time on something that

Speaker Aseems so outlandish. Yeah, I mean, one of the most interesting things just from talking to sort of rank and file QAnon believers is how, you know, they are for the most part just totally normal people existing in society. But they'll also, you know, they'll tell you about the weather or what they had for breakfast. And then they'll say, you know, Hillary Clinton needs babies. Like,

Merlinit's just a normal thing. Right. And then the president really sets the tone for that when he He does that increasingly bizarre thing where it's a different low-key version of very fine people on both sides. Well, who wrote this? Was it you? Somebody wrote that wonderful piece about how everything's become gossip with him. Did you write that? Or who wrote that? I forget.

Speaker ANo, I think that was in The New Republic. I want to say David Roth.

MerlinYeah.

Speaker AOh, of course.

MerlinMy other hero. Yeah, because he'll come up there and say, like, you know, I hear very strongly that, you know, dry cleaner bags over your head. People say this, people say that. A lot of people do this. Some of the governors are very happy. Some are very protest. Some people don't like the test. He's constantly equivocating between these. Either of these things might be true. Hyper normalization idea of what we can empirically trust as being a fact. How does that key into QAnon, folks?

Is that they're still looking for cues from the president. Cues?

AlexWhoa.

MerlinWhoa.

AlexI think you got something there.

MerlinI think I'm on to something here. Seven meats, three cheeses. Can't melt steel beams. I don't know. Do you feel sometimes like you're going to lose your mind? I remember there was one. I want to say when you were reporting, I feel like from maybe the Jefferson Memorial one time, and it got pretty hot. Didn't it get pretty hot for you one time reporting there?

Speaker AOh, yeah. I mean, yeah, so there was a QAnon rally at the Washington Monument. And, you know, unfortunately, I sort of am for lack of a sort of a mini celebrity within QAnon world because I'm kind of this like kind of foe of theirs or they certainly see me that way. But, you know, so, you know, people come up and they want, you know, they want to live stream with you, which like God knows. No, thank you. But but at the same time, they'll be like there was one point where I was sitting up front. I mean, it was really obvious where I was. And this guy goes, he sees another guy and he's like, I guess the guy kind of looked like me.

And he was like, and that's Will Summer there sneaking in the back. And everyone's like, boo. And this guy's like, I'm not Will. And they're like, that's just Will in one of his disguises.

MerlinPut your finger up under your nose like a fake mustache. Yes, go get the man Will Summer. No one likes him.

Speaker AYes, exactly.

AlexI'm really curious. You mentioned that you are definitely a micro celebrity amongst these people. But do you ever encounter Q people in your life? Is there ever something like outside of your regular jobby job? You're at the grocery store and someone like comments on your mask and then they're like, so you hear about that pizza parlor?

like I am still trying to figure out how these people exist outside of the internet and I mean you just said like they're typically normal uh but also think that there's a satanic cabal so I it's just sort of shocking to me even even now like running into folks who are like Jeffrey Epstein wasn't so bad and I'm like oh that's a thing that just came out of that's the thing that came out of your mouth and you said to me verbally all right so has it ramped

up to that scale where people who have no idea who you are just bring this around yeah I mean I

Speaker Awas at a I was at a wedding um and these people had said like oh our mom really wants to talk to you because she does not like your QAnon reporting and I was like oh god um and then I was on the dance floor and uh this woman kind of grabs my arm and she's like I gotta talk to you about QAnon and then she said um you know she she was just like now be honest do you really think q anon's fake like like there's this big thing that a q anon people think i'm kind of like i just know

Merlinso much about it that i must really believe in it everything's a clue yes exactly so just really bizarre interactions i um i was just my mom i think it was when my mom might have had when she had surgery but in any case i visited my mom and i want to say 2004 and i only mention this because to me, this was the first time that this happened, and I still think about it a lot, because it felt like a black swan at the time, but we were out to dinner, and I happened to be seated next to her best friend, who was a dear, dear friend of our whole family, and

I basically grew up with this woman, and she was just awesome, and we were talking about, I think this is, obviously this would be before gay marriage, it might have been talking about any kind of way to legally ensconce a non-heterosexual couple. And of course, I know better than to go into Pasco County, Florida, flying my freak flag, especially at an Applebee's. But we were just having a totally normal conversation about the riblets or whatever.

And I said, oh, something in passing about gay people. And she said, yeah, yeah, I guess the thing that bothers me the most is if they make that legal, you'll be able to marry your dog. And I said, Janet, I'm sorry, the steely damn is very loud in here. You're concerned that someone will get to marry their dog? And she said, well, that would be the implication, is that if we break up this law, that's what it will be. I said, well, there's a couple problems with that, I think, Janet. I'm not a legal scholar, but first of all,

the dog is not old enough to get married without his parents' permission. And also, it's not human. So I think you have to be human to get married. She said, well, I don't know. That's what I'm worried about. I just don't know how far that will go. I still think about that. That was somebody who I really love. And like you say, I mean, she would drop that the same way that she would say, you know, the Mets don't have any pitching this year. It was so odd. And it only pops up from time to time. Is Facebook the big vector for this now?

Speaker AYeah, you know, I would say Facebook is probably the biggest one. The interesting thing about QAnon is that it's especially reliant on social media because the original Q clues are being dropped on 8kun, which is like an incredibly hard website to navigate. It looks really ugly. You don't really want to spend time there. so the basically all these boomers and and frankly you know younger people now who are getting red pilled on q anon um they need they're not going to go hang out on eight coon so you need like a more presentable website uh to host it generally um and so facebook has sort of turned into one of

the main ones um obviously a lot of q anon videos on youtube and a lot of q anon activity on twitter too um but really facebook seems to be where i think people who are otherwise apolitical um kind of get sucked in.

And I should also mention, I mean, QAnon's also getting really big right now on TikTok. So, you know, the young people are getting into it as well.

AlexOh, boy. There goes my afternoon. I did not know that.

MerlinGreat. My kid is spending like 19 hours a day on TikTok. So I'm sure that's going to be fun to get. She'll have a second obsession after Dr. McCoy. Oh, my God.

Speaker AThese videos are formatted in very TikTok ways. But, you know, instead of like a dance thing or being about Fortnite, it's like, you know, it's like someone with green hair who will say like, hey, fam, Barack Obama drinks blood. Oh, my God.

MerlinAnd that's the tea, sis. Hit that bell. I remember seeing, I feel like it must have been very early on, definitely during like the Steve Bannon era, the first Steve Bannon era. But I remember seeing perhaps an infographic. But it was, and again, it might have been you or one of your colleagues. But I remember somebody talking about the way that weird ideas get passed down and laundered through this sort of hierarchy where before they ever make it to Lou Dobbs, they've been sort of laundered almost like money laundering.

It's idea laundering. It starts with the craziest fucking thing you've ever heard in your life on the most obscure dark website. And then it gets slightly, the edges get slightly sanded off and it gets passed through. Eventually it gets to Breitbart. From Breitbart it gets to Fox, et cetera. And then eventually it gets to Lou Dobbs. is it fair to say that that is still, well, I don't know if you agree with that, but is it fair to say that that's the kind of thing that's still happening today? And how do you evaluate that in an era where it's difficult to tell whether anything is a strategy? Do you know what I mean?

Speaker AYeah, absolutely. I mean, I think it's very sort of organic ecosystem where, you know, kind of the craziest ideas originate on, let's say, Reddit or Twitter or 4chan. And then they sort of filter up and, you know, right now they might make it to like the gateway pundit. And then maybe they end up from there on Fox or really more likely One America News. And then from there, like, they get on Fox or the president says it. And so, like, you know, we saw this example of, you know, the elderly protester got pushed by the cops.

And then he like, you know, his brain started bleeding, all that stuff. So, you know, the basically that started with some QAnon people, I believe. And then One America News just grabs it, makes a kind of a slick package out of it. And then Trump sees it from there. So that ecosystem certainly still exists. And it sort of, I think, serves to identify sort of the most compelling nonsense or conspiracy theories. And it's sort of a survival of the fittest thing to see who makes it to kind of the more mainstream conservative media.

Merlinbut doesn't it seem i mean i refer to that movie i think alex gibney movie called hyper normalization i don't know if you've ever seen that but it's it's a pretty wild ride you know just you know basically we've talked about it here on the show before just this idea that at least in um russia and the soviet union and um all kinds of syria all these places like you end up creating this kind of unreality and that's in some ways the the thing that i worry about it's one thing to worry about steven the work of steven miller it's one thing to worry about the work of Mike Pence, of any of the competent C-minus fascists that are out there.

But the problem with the president is, I thought George W. Bush would be the most incurious president we ever had. But now we have President Plasma, or President 1917. So many things where he has so many opportunities to learn something and does it. And I think that The thing that we still have not quite settled about him is whether he's playing 75-dimensional chess or one-sided checkers.

Because it seems like, I do mean this as a question, would you agree? It seems like a lot of times he just thrives on attention and chaos. And so whatever will make those two things increase gets his attention. How do you look at it?

Speaker AYeah, I mean, I think that's a great way of looking at it. You know, I think sort of this issue we're facing with, you know, kind of with Trump at the top. But then, you know, so many Trump supporters below is people who are sort of just being divorced from what we would call like standards of evidence or basic facts. um so like with q anon you see these people who are um you know being you this segment of the electorate that's just being like divorced from reality um you know and and how do you win that person's vote or you know if they think democrats are satanists or how do you compromise with that

person now the q anon people are winning votes in congress um yes you know so i think it sort of just ends up deranging uh our politics and obviously trump is kind of the center of that with this, you know, as you mentioned, the David Roth story, this kind of like, well, you know, I guess it remains to be seen whether that's true or not. And it's like, well, you're the president,

Merlinyou could figure it out. You have a lot of people on speed dial who could help you with this. What year was the pandemic? Did it stop World War Two? Now that one, I think he probably in his poor melted down syphilitic brain. I think what he what he was trying to say was that the I don't know what he's trying to say but i think he probably meant to say world war one not world war two but i don't know if it even matters it sucks to be reading this guy's tea leaves alex

Alexsay something i'm so worried well no i mean i will i just don't know how you sleep basically uh because you know this morning uh wake up and see the stuff with the especially after he's

Merlineating all those babies.

AlexIsn't that a sudden tummy? I know. They're so hard to catch.

MerlinYou see the spine spinning around trying to get away from the suction.

AlexI mean, and as this is ramping and ramping up and as younger and younger folks, oh God, I'm the old man shouting at the cloud. But like, I mean, what happens when, let's say TikTok goes away and like these young people actually mobilize in the real world? Or do you think there's just not enough momentum for that? Do you see other than, again, like the fringes? Also, I mean, like the fringes of the left are not outside right now,

but the, you know, I know Q is different typically than like the Boogaloo or Proud Boys and stuff, but I'm like, are younger folks going to start popping up? I mean, are you afraid to go outside sometimes? I feel like I'd be just afraid to leave the house 10 times more than usual.

MerlinIt's really more a comment than a question.

AlexYeah. Do you agree we should stay inside? I have a question. I'm afraid of children and of germs.

Speaker AYeah, I mean, it really sort of feels like we're just in a sort of accelerating moment of just like crazy stuff just happening all the time. And I think what you see a lot, you know, is even beyond QAnon, you know, you mentioned Boogaloo people, Proud Boys. Obviously there's some element of, you know, people on the left are also abandoning sort of the traditional political process. And so it sort of seems like there's this sense of, you know, kind of possibility, but in sort of a very dangerous way of what could happen.

MerlinWe should probably let you go. I have a feeling you're probably having a busy week. There's so many things I want to ask you about and talk to you about. I enjoy your work so much, but I think it's very important we talk a little bit about Wohl and Berkman.

What are you looking for from them? When you're looking at their pitching, when you're looking at their coaching, what do you see coming up next for Wohl and Berkman? What's going to be the next big dinger? Who's having intercourse with what kind of mad libs will they announce from that man's porch in the near future? What are you looking forward to from those two guys?

Speaker AYeah. So, I mean, Jacob Wohl and Jack Berkman are, you know, as you say, they're really kind of they thrive on this attention. I think, you know, what's kind of still unanswered is like why they do this so much. But the I mean, they're obviously scheming on something. You know, lately, they've kind of been turning their fire on other Republicans. there was kind of this weird incident the most recent one where jacob wall was dating this woman who worked in the government apparently like legitimately um and then he convinced her to uh you know kind of attack her agency and the political appointees there and then suddenly

she was like no they kidnapped me and took my phone and you know it was kind of this just bizarre thing and i don't think they actually kidnapped her but um you know those guys are always up to something and um you know i i think there's kind of some shoes to drop that i'm very curious about But but I think maybe the most interesting thing that kind of doesn't really get a lot of doesn't normally reach the public eye about them is that they're constantly feeding reporters fake tips about themselves. You know, they hire these women to call up, call me up or call other people up and say, oh, I really got the skinny on Jacob Wool.

He's but it's always kind of flattering. It's like Jacob Wool.

MerlinI did hand stuff with Colin Powell.

Speaker ARight. It's like, it's like, yeah, I'm Jacob was like secretly working for the Trump administration. He's just like super powerful operative. And it's like, well, that's clearly a lie that he wants me to report. And so, you know, sometimes you see people running with these stories that clearly, I think, were planted by Jacob just to keep himself in the news. So those guys are pretty nuts. Yeah, that is definitely true.

MerlinWhat a time. You have any more, Alex?

Alexplease keep doing what you're doing so nobody else has to and so that you don't die thank you

Merlinfor your service mr will yeah stay inside stay inside we'll be safe stop answering the phone and for the love of god we'll stop eating babies that's not cool i don't know what george soros

Alexis paying you but whatever it is it's not enough and stay off yachts those have not been great

Speaker Aabout our beautiful boaters oh yeah you know i talked to the heads of the beautiful boaters pack and um they they're i i said so like you guys all have boats right and one of the guys was like i don't have a boat you think i'm nuts like no way

Merlinit's whenever every time every time our boy gets up there and you know he's got i've said to alex i and i've watched way too much of this stuff will i watch all of the things i don't know what's wrong with me i just i just need to feel something it's like cutting myself i guess but it just he gets up there and he has his same line, his line about how great the stock market is doing. Just look at your 401ks. And I feel in the audience, the same feeling that I have when guys want to talk about

all the sex we definitely had in junior high. And I'm like, yeah, my 401k. Yeah, I'm almost three months behind on rent, but I totally have a boat. Come on, I'm a beautiful boater.

Speaker AIt's very strange to make these boat parades kind of the measure. You know, I saw the Trump campaign was complaining the media isn't writing enough about the boat parades. And I mean, it would be sort of like if Biden was like, you know, I don't know what a liberal token would be, like the BMW parades or something. I mean, it's just very bizarre that that is kind of the symbol of

MerlinTesla parade, Tesla parade, or maybe like an electric scooter meetup. Yeah, let's go scoot. Scoot. You know, it's always been, I think, so much of his self branding and the way people have benefited from marketing him comes down to this, who was it? It was a friend of Leibovitz that said, you know, he's the, what is it, the poor person's idea of a rich person. But it's so aspirational. It's been so clear in every message that we're going to cosplay the kind of success that Mr.

Trump, sir, has. And I feel like that's still such a big part of it is that he represents an aspiration for dealing with a system that has treated you very unfairly, very nasty system. and and is that still is that still part of the appeal is that he just is the totemic idea of

Speaker Aputting it to the man i think so i mean you know i i think there's just sort of this sense that you know trump is kind of gonna gonna either get revenge sort of in the case of q anon is the most extreme example of like trump's gonna kill your enemies or your cultural uh people your people you resent culturally perhaps um up to you know i mean so much of it is just like triggering the libs and we're gonna do things that upset liberals and and that's kind of the end of it you know, the end goal.

MerlinIt's working. Will Sommer, thank you so much for joining us today with your precious time in this insane week. Stay away from the unsurvivable weather. And we really appreciate it. Like we said, Will's at the Daily Beast. Will, people can find you. You are W-I-L-L-S-O-M-M-E-R, Will Sommer on Twitter. Is that correct?

Speaker AYes, that's right.

MerlinAnd then tell people where to get your newsletter.

Speaker AYeah, so it's Right Richter, Richter, like the Richter scale. So RightRichter.com, and that'll take you to the signup page of the Daily Beast for the newsletter.

MerlinWell, Summer, thank you so much. Stay safe and stop beating those goddamn babies.

Speaker AThanks for having me.

MerlinHow about that guy?

AlexAh, he's so good.

Speaker AHe's so good. He's so good.

AlexI am the bad, bad, bad, bad, bad person.

MerlinYou're bad, bad, bad, bad. Wait, wait, wait. Alexandra, why are you bad, bad, bad, bad, bad?

AlexBecause I didn't know he had a newsletter until the middle of this week because I don't know why. I don't know. He doesn't self-promote enough. He just talks about those Q people. And I'm also being logged out of the Daily Beast all the time.

MerlinHe should learn from Jonathan Axios. If you really want to get big, you're going to need to retweet your own shit seven to 35 times.

AlexYeah.

MerlinYeah. I mean, I had a ton of questions I wanted to ask, but I think I definitely already talked quite enough. But I don't know. I had this like little kind of fucking stupid, but a little mini breakthrough last night. Because you think about like how people get mad about journalists because of all kinds of different reasons. But I don't know. It's just like I think one of the things that's important to realize is that a journalist should be more than a stenographer for powerful people, obviously.

I mean, I've heard it said that, you know, you hear that phrase investigative reporting. Well, it has been said that all reporting should be investigative reporting. You know, otherwise you're just basically doing PR. But instead of looking at I guess in some sense you must look at what somebody's if you like bias. I would put it more as point of view is, yes, there are certainly people who have an agenda. But if you report on, for example, politics or in his case, the right wing beat, it seems like you must have to develop a really good nose, not simply for why someone did or said something now, but also why they didn't say or do 10,000 other things now.

and exploring the things, you know what I mean? You have to understand, like, if you're reporting regularly on something, you know when something feels off or you know when something feels incomplete. And, like, to understand political Twitter, I think it helps to understand, it would help me to understand, like, that that process maybe doesn't, I don't know how it wouldn't make you cynical, but it would definitely have to make you at least skeptical.

AlexYeah. I keep thinking about why there are certain writers and journalists that we really like, and there is a certain internet thing. and i think i think john oliver might have or some some late night tv guy uh did did this a while back looking about how we don't have that anymore for um not not just print journalists uh

or like journalists strictly in print but any sort of local journalist in the legacy media there's there's no i mean i still can't remember the name of the woman from palm springs who broke the jeffrey epstein case in like the early 2000s oh yeah yeah the woman yeah the woman at the miami herald yeah she's great yeah yeah yeah there we go and i don't know i i it freaks me out um that there aren't enough people like will and and i can say that because he will never hear this i

hope oh my god um but it's and and to like a lesser extent like talia levin who uh technically she's like the New York Times style reporter, but she writes about TikTok and stuff.

I don't know, man. It's weird.

MerlinI think a lot about people. I think about the two that come straight to mind for me, Daniel Dale with I think he's with CNN now technically, but of course you know Daniel Dale, the great Canadian Daniel Dale. And I also think about Ben Jacobs, who I think writes for reports for NBC News. But like in the case of Daniel Dale, obviously, I'll never retire of saying this. What a fucking job to try and watch everything this guy says and then be able to fact check it in real time and less real time. And like what a thankless job it is to have to

sit there and go for at least the 150th time the president claims that he passed, you know, veteran's choice that is not true he's got you know talk about sisyphus or like like ben jacobs who's who's reporting i really like a lot it's kind of been frustrating to me that like i don't know if it's his choice or his assignment but i don't know if you ever see him on political twitter but his beat right now is kanye west's uh candidacy and like i i have such weird feelings about that

because, and again, I'm not trying to throw any shade here, but like, you can't even talk about this guy anymore. I think it's not controversial to say that Kanye West has a lot going on.

AlexThat's not controversial to say.

MerlinBut then you have to be, somehow you have to treat this, obviously you take, anyone wants to take their work seriously, but to do any kind of credulous reporting on this, it has to begin with the idea that like, this thing is happening. Kanye West is running for president. And then you have to, like with a fairly straight face, report on what that means. Will he be on the ballot in Wisconsin? Will he be on the ballot in West Virginia? And it's like, I have such mixed feelings about that because there's a part of me that thinks like, when that kind of reporting happens,

you're really amplifying. It is happening. It is deserving of some kind of attention, but you're also like, is the right word normalizing? You're like kind of making it into more of a thing than it obviously is just by reporting on how maybe it's not a thing. It's it's how do you feel about that? Do you ever get that that weird feeling about what somebody's beat is?

AlexYeah, because it I think you're right, because when you see it change, it kind of changed drastically and not always for the better. Like, I don't really have a huge opinion on the Kanye or I don't know. Like, I see the way that Kanye is being covered, and it's like, yeah, we know the story. And maybe it's me as a former youth being like, well, yeah, he's always pulled this crazy shit.

And seeing it.

MerlinHe's a local boy, right?

AlexYeah, he is. He had been.

MerlinChicago's where he came up, right?

AlexYep. And was doing weird shit. Like, not clearly unmedicated weird shit, but like, you know. um i uh yeah well this this isn't about kanye but he doesn't he doesn't have he doesn't i mean at

Merlinthe very least i think it's fair to say he does not have what we would normally classically consider like a conventional filter for a good thing to say but also he is a showman who likes obviously enjoys setting aside whatever is happening you know in his pipes and wires that he is a showman who likes a spectacle.

AlexYeah.

MerlinBut then, I mean, the elephant in the room is, I mean, is he definitely bipolar? We know that, right? No, sorry. I put that poorly. What is the preferred nomenclature for our time? He has, he seems to have bipolar.

AlexYeah. Well, I mean, he's said it.

MerlinYeah. But don't we try to avoid saying things like he is bipolar? We try to avoid that, right?

AlexI don't think so. I mean, well, oh, I see what you're saying.

MerlinHe got the bipolar.

AlexYeah.

MerlinI don't want to be defined by my wheelchair kind of thing, right? I mean, I'm more than this big file card on how I'm different from you. But it's so...

AlexNo, but he's totally using that, though. That's why it's hard. Because he talks about his whole rant about going off of the medication. And that is very much part of his brand. So it's this awkward thing of like, okay, I'm doing celebrity news along with politics, along with like this dance of like, what is a politician or public figure? Like, how much privacy should they be allowed?

Like, I mean, this, I know that this holds on for a second. like like jacob blake like god forbid any like there was a while there where it's like okay this man was brutally shot and we saw what was like uh what i assumed immediately to be a murder and then i'm it's like okay everyone wants to know who this guy is and you're talking about do you talk about the the guy in kenosha who was shot by police okay and so it's like okay this

is a huge huge deal but this this obviously poor guy but this this poor guy just try like what seems to be like just helping out in his neighborhood and like as more reporting came out like no he was not a part of a domestic dispute he was trying to or uh he hadn't committed he was trying to break up a fight he was trying to break up a fight and initially it was like oh this guy died right there oh this guy was like beating his wife and it's like well does any of this matter at all like is

this a story or is the story that uh a man was shot seven times and we we saw it and and then the same thing it's like all right is kanye west the story or is the fact that uh people are have to report on this and it is being taken by some as like a serious bid for the presidency uh like is that the story or should we be i mean because he's a public public figure he he is out there

saying uh like he is bipolar he is uh running for president he believes in jesus he has his own

Merlinchurch like these are all things that he's getting a huge amount of assistance from people who are whose whole history, their whole career is in helping Republican candidates.

AlexYeah. And it just happens.

MerlinWhich, you know, I'm certainly like you could I mean, the thing is, you could if anybody else out there was trying to do some wackadoo, you know, out of nowhere campaign running, you know, against. I think that would be relevant to report about anybody.

AlexIt feels there are some echoes of how people. Honestly, there's some echoes of how Trump was covered in 2016. And I don't know. It just makes me wary, I guess. Like, what is the story here? Is it, haha, this reality star is running for president? or is it that we're letting this reality star run for president?

MerlinWell, and because we're liberal cucks.

AlexThey fucked us real good.

MerlinI'm the most deeply closeted Kanye West fan that can possibly exist. I don't like to talk about it a lot, but my beautiful, dark, twisted fantasy is probably one of my all-time favorite albums.

AlexIt's amazing.

MerlinIt's an amazing album. And I mean, I like a lot of his other stuff too, and I like the stuff he's done with Jay-Z. and like all kinds of stuff I love about his work. And he's a black guy. So like in any other universe, we would be like, we find ourselves saying, oh, that's so cool. The black rapper's running for president. But it's like so fucking complicated. Would you abide some 10 minute old breaking news?

AlexYes.

MerlinWhere is Antioch, Illinois?

AlexOh, tell me, Merlin, where is Antioch, Illinois?

MerlinKyle Rittenhouse of Antioch, Illinois, arrested in Illinois related to the Kenosha shooting. He will be charged with first degree intentional homicide.

AlexOh, thank God. See, well, again, this is this is this, you know, liberal.

MerlinThis whole year is an unsurvivable hurricane.

AlexBut like I watched a video of what I presume to be a murder about 12 times the other day. And like, that's not healthy, but I think necessary.

MerlinYou know what Merlin Mann would say? He'd say that's not wholesome.

AlexThat's not wholesome.

MerlinWell, me watching the president be congratulated by various CEOs wearing crosses is probably not that great either.

AlexHow much?

MerlinWhy can't it be our pillow? Why does it have to be my pillow?

AlexYou didn't deserve that laugh. I'm in a silly mood.

Merlinwhat do they call you call them lindale lindale heads uh pillow boys

Alexor the pillow pals did you oh that's that's what you may have a cuddle puddle in your with your pillow pals oh boy i love you uh i'm just trying to think of um oh i'm i'm uh uh let's circle let's circle back to to kanye for and trump for a second um i you know um friend of chicago chance the rapper uh you know big fan big oh i mean he's he's our wonder boy the same way kanye west was because that's what that's that's what white people in

chicago do they're like we're all like yeah they're ours and it's true but anyway he has done like some amazing things for for chicago and has always been just like oh my god like i i was brought up basically with kanye like he's my mentor i love him and i mean i've felt that way before obviously and like seeing that conflict is that we're getting into a problematic faves uh yeah well in in like the problematic faves of like when do you when do you as like he uh chance is

also like super involved with um hyper local politics in uh did you follow any of that like

Merlina teacher's i i feel like i feel like uh what i don't know i don't follow his stuff super carefully but my my my sense is that as you say he's he seems like a very creative i don't like that word philanthropist but he his his charitability seems very creative and purposeful

Alexyes especially in the the sense of like this shouldn't be this charity shouldn't have to exist type of thing um and what i think what i really kind of like is about that is you did not have a clear answer because you are not uh immediately in chicago and like you don't need to know how many tissue boxes uh that the cps needs right um all right sure and But that's the thing.

It's like when your mentor goes on a public stage and starts saying incredibly damaging things and your whole world is like turned around. It's like, oh, fuck. And so I use this. I always think about this personal relationship and this like, oh, like he finally was like, oh, shit. Yeah. Connie needs some help after he did like an All Lives Matter thing.

MerlinBut so I'm struggling a little bit to follow you, but I think you're referring to the way he came out to seem to at least tentatively, if not actively say like, oh, this is a cool thing that Kanye is doing.

AlexWell, he did not come out and super say that. He's like, oh, it's my buddy's running for president. That's that's great. That's cool. But it was just so different from his norm. And I think that's I mean, that is what the 2016 election was for so many. Well, at least the journalists I've talked to who are like, these are you know, these are also our our pal. Like some of these people are our pals. Like we've known each other forever. And so we all reported on this dingling and it was business as usual.

So that's kind of like I mean, that's why I'm fascinated with Will. It's like, what is business as usual now? And what is something truly outlandish? And it scares me.

MerlinSo, yeah. And I mean, I think implicit in a lot of our, you know, my appreciation of him, but also like the concern is like, I don't know, there's that phrase you hear like in a spy thriller, you're in too deep. You know, you do. I mean, I know how I feel. I still have a list on Twitter called A Lot Going On. And that is a handful of people who are particularly interesting to me in their...

So basically, it's a lot of targeted individuals. We know that phrase, right?

AlexYes.

MerlinSo you know that phrase, targeted individuals.

AlexYes, yes. these are not the victims of Q, but the victims of the deep state, correct?

MerlinYeah. And so there is a there's a belief. And these folks, I think they very much do seek community. I don't think it's as heavily. It's very online, of course. But, you know, there's people in there. There's this one woman that is all she does all day long is post photos and screen grabs on which she scrawls with like red, you know, finger scrawls to indicate that like people are using mind control weapons on her.

In particular, like the people are burning her feet through the floor of her apartment. And then there's that other woman here in California who I'm super obsessed with. Remember the woman who thinks that everybody's messing with their security cameras and raping her and her daughter psychically at night?

AlexNo. Oh, wait. Yeah. Yeah. Sorry. So push that way back.

MerlinIt's OK. So like that is that is part of it. There is some increasingly increasingly small part of me that goes, ha ha, because Jesus Christ, people, you're just you just you've got this nutty ball stuff going on. And then you find people who are equally nutty ball, and then you kind of egg each other on with it. Again, I'll IQ in that case, but I have to be honest with you. I haven't even looked at that list in months. I don't know if it's COVID. I don't know what it is, but part of it is, you know, maybe that joke's just not so funny anymore to me,

or that situation is not so funny to me anymore. And the analogy here or the echo, the rhyme, the rhyme with 2016 is we thought this was a silly fringe thing until it wasn't. And that feels so real right now. I mean, you've got the president basically trying to either throw the election or to undermine the election so much that he's willing to screw up. This is so related to that Michael Lewis book.

it's like he's willing to fuck up so many different institutions break so many norms break so many laws to just keep generating chaos that he finds i guess advantageous i don't know if he just does it as a hobby i sometimes i can't tell sometimes i don't think he knows

Alexi i do not think think he knows um this is depressing this is very depressing Oh, actually, I retract that. I mean, I don't think he knows part because I think I'm now kind of on. I don't want to say side. That's that's gross. But I think he knows what he's doing. I think.

MerlinWell, I mean, I think one thing that's uncontroversial is that he has a certain kind of instinct that is much closer to an animal in the sense of having an instant sense of, you know, so what do they say? What's the phrase you brought? I'd always heard fight or flight. And you said fight, flight, or freeze. Is that what you said?

AlexHe is not a freezer.

MerlinHe's not. And if he can't punch it, he turns it into a problem that he can punch. I think that is very much one of his instincts. And however he got that way and what Mary Trump and Fred Trump think about it, I think it is fairly uncontroversial. Again, my catchphrase this week to say that he turns he wants to turn everything into something he can punch. Yeah. And that's and that's that's really not the comportment that we need from somebody in this position. Surprise, surprise.

AlexI don't know if this is even relevant. I don't even know if this is relevant to even like national or international politics. But I am fascinated by the brains of, well, the entire Trump administration, especially his family.

Merlinbut like the different not just the intellectual but the intellectual the emotional the all of the way that those systems interoperate to get it's difficult to reverse engineer that but it's it certainly is fascinating when you see what comes out the other end you know when you see it when you see these folks coming up and doing their little speeches um at the for the convention the rnc convention it's like you just i i see i i see sometimes you see like the the bald face

sort of opportunism like the way the anti-abortion lady like basically has made a career out of being the anti-abortion lady that you know she has this very uh this this dewy-eyed pitch oh and why did

Alexit take until 2020 for people to finally write anti-abortion instead of sorry sorry go instead

Merlinof pro-life yeah pro-life pro-life yeah i think they could they could have stuck with that when it was 15 cases but when it's 175 000 deaths it gets harder to uh do and yet they still do i heard um on atc yesterday they interviewed with regard to primarily with regard to the hurricane oh i'm

Alexsorry, A.T. what was it?

MerlinAll Things Considered.

AlexOh, sorry.

MerlinAll Things Considered. Nerd. They talked to, wow, liberal cuck, please.

AlexOkay, but.

MerlinNerd is my father. And they talked to, I think it's John Bel Edwards, the guy's name is, the governor of Louisiana, and they had a very cordial interview, and I think it was Mary Louise Kelly probably, interviewing him and trying to dig in a little bit on, And, you know, so they talked about the hurricane. It was it was very nice. And but like he's he has no problem at all. Very.

OK, so some of the Trump people who are really like more traditional, formerly traditional or old school Republicans, they are so good at making it sound like what he's doing is not a big deal. And not even like in a Don Jr. way of being the meme general, but more in the way of like there was that one guy who was that economist with the glasses who they get on MSNBC sometimes. Oh, yeah.

AlexYou know that one guy?

MerlinHe seems so nice and he seems so smart and he seems so even. But like one doesn't like to go full Hannah Arendt on this, but like, dude, really? Like you were there. You know more about this than I do. And what do you know that I don't that makes this OK and where you would choose to launder what's happening into making it seem not just normal, but like the smartest thing the president could choose to do? It's so bizarre.

AlexAnd that's why I've been go. I've kind of been like circling around the word evil because that doesn't.

MerlinEvil is such a such a it's such a cop out.

AlexIt is. It truly is.

MerlinIt's when your mind rejects the idea that this person had reasons for doing what they do, even though it's unpleasant reasons, if it's reasons you don't like, maybe it's reasons you can't understand. But when you call somebody evil, you're basically hitting the escape key on a deeper understanding.

AlexYes. And that's why I've always resisted, obviously not the denouncement of anything and everything, but the Trump administration has done. But I joke about my Catholicism because I don't take talking about my faith seriously when necessary.

MerlinWell, you have distance from it that you probably didn't have when you were still an ardent papist.

AlexYeah. And while I am still like, and I am still a problematic papist, but like some of the lately, I don't know, especially maybe after hearing, I still haven't read the Mary Trump book because again, it feels like a cop out to say like, not like yes unequivocally bad but is it unequivocally bad because of a mental illness or is it a deep like evil and also does being a does being a sociopath or a psychopath make you

evil like I don't know but watching the Donald the the Donnie Jr. the other night like it sent chills down my spine of like this is like i know i know you are lying and i know that this is exactly what so many people want to hear and it scares the shit out of it like i that was not a wholesome thing for me to keep watching uh and yeah i don't i i don't know and i think maybe that's why his base i mean i keep seeing like his his uh base is crumbling meet the republicans who

of abandoned Trump. And I want to believe that, but watching that, I haven't seen Eric's or Melania. I know I was stoked for Tiffany, but...

MerlinMelania's was interesting.

AlexOh, I plan on watching it, but...

MerlinI had to record with Squidward last night, so I didn't watch the whole thing. But I caught a little bit of Melania's. We had a break, and of course I used the opportunity to urinate and watch her talk about what she learned in Africa. now you know tiffany uh and by the way just i think i i think i know the name for what you're describing if you'd allow it please governor i think you talk about somebody getting a little bit jokerfied is that what you're talking about you're talking about somebody getting a little bit jokerfied wait i i'm sorry go no when you're talking about the dons and the people and all the

things and wondering why they're how they're are they evil no no no no no no they're a little bit jokerfied that's what they are they get jokerfied well that's but but that's the thing is

Alexlike what is the now now i'm getting like again like chapoey as well as like shroomy right now of like what what is the nature of evil and does it even matter like does does it matter like the the priority is to get these people to fuck away from every any and every source of power that we we can take away. Right. And, um, I mean, that's why, honestly, I think it would be damaging if I were to try to campaign for Biden slash

Harris. Like I'd go to the door and be like, Hey, please vote. I'm very excited to go. I, I am excited. Like I don't, I don't think that's a helping anybody, but like, how can you not, how can you not, not, How can you not vote for that? But like how I.

MerlinBut this one on Twitter the other night, something I said in a fit of peak was, you know, hey, if my if my car were stranded on a road, I would happily take a ride from Joe Biden.

AlexYeah, that's so good.

MerlinI don't if I don't have an option here and I might die on a cliff. I don't think it's that controversial. I mean, there's a lot of things I'd like to be different in life. Like welcome to adulthood. It sucks.

AlexYeah, this is this is terrible.

MerlinWelcome to the world of like deciding which hypocrite you can live with today. It fucking sucks. But like, what are you going to do? You know, I mean, I don't need everybody to feel the way that I do. But it's very, it's very painful for me to watch.

I don't know.

Speaker AIt's just, what the fuck are you going to do?

MerlinYou're going to write in Donald Duck and be cute about it? Or you're not going to vote at all? I mean, that kind of thinking is so, it's mental to me.

AlexYeah.

MerlinI don't know.

AlexWell, but, and then there's also the people who will not vote and none of this is on their radar at all. And I, again, don't know if that is irresponsible.

MerlinThey just want to get back to their pool cleaning business.

AlexUnderstandably. Yeah, which is, yeah, exactly. Like, my mom and dad just want to go back to work. And they until Trump were like, well, they could they still consider themselves like independent fiscal conservatives. And we disagree on all all that nonsense.

MerlinLike sort of like classic old school Republicans in that sense. Yeah. They're not so much there for the culture war as for like the economic policy. Yeah. Like, well, because, you know, like which which which I think a learned person will agree today has more political valence to it than a lot of people like to admit.

AlexYeah, well, I actually, I don't know. I think the, hmm, maybe not.

MerlinI just mean that emerging idea that a lot of the things we've typically thought of as not being political or being immune from political or ideological, let's say that, ideological influence. Well, then as the assholes on Twitter like to say, then you haven't been paying attention. Like if you think these things don't affect these people more than those people, wow. I mean, it really does make a difference. Climate change, like whether any of this stuff is, it's football, like you name it.

There is nothing that, you know, again, it's like like a lot of black folks say, where it's like the reason I think I make everything about race is because for me, everything is about race. It doesn't have to be about race for you. It has to be about race for me, you know, or class.

AlexWell, and that's, again, part of Donnie J's talk, which, oh, this is when I knew, like, oh, fuck. Like, I have been called a radical leftist most of my life. And considering that-

MerlinMostly by yourself.

AlexMostly, no. I think that I'm a coward little baby. Like, I'm not at most protests. I'm just like trying to get people home safe and not have my friends murdered by police. Like that's the fucking kettling. OK.

MerlinOh, that shit is fucked up. Alexandra. Ding, ding, ding. Where's my goddamn bell? Oh, I feel like and we can cut this out if you want. But I feel like you had something you wanted to say. I didn't completely understand, but it was something like an apology or a clarification. Was there something you wanted to talk about here?

AlexOh, oh, you mean about. I mean well the the the um oh like Reagan conservatives versus well there was something

Merlinyou texted me about in our super secret private text channel we said if you'll allow it something

AlexI want to talk about blah blah blah oh oh we need a oh here we here we go hold on well we can't we can't finish uh uh the say something funny about about kettling oh oh okay hang on hang on hang

Merlinon i got i got something i got something for you um um i used to follow this account but i i don't anymore because it's it's not that nutritional but we need a depressing ding hey i'm getting there Shut your dirty mouth.

So there's this site that or this bot that monitors the goings on of various people in the Trump administration to see who they follow and unfollow.

AlexYes. On Twitter. Like some Ashley Feinberg type of shit.

MerlinYeah. But it was like this morning there was something like Donald Trump Jr. has stopped following like zit fart king. Something like that. and I just it's it's just these people man

AlexI mean I started another twitter account for video games so you know collecting coins on maine uh oh oh man the the raid's been going on not being able to catch like the shiny dino catch was down to like what in the fuck are you talking about is that is this secret island ding last week um i spread some fake news did you were you aware of

Merlinthis? I don't know if I was. I trust you as one of my trusted news

Alexsources. No, no, no, no, no. I made some comments about Mr. Mike and Mr. Jason of the program Upgrade and their premium program Upgrade Plus, and I've prepared a

Merlinstatement, I think. Oh, right, of course.

AlexYes, yes. Yes, yes. I would like to address some comments I made on the previous show. I stated that my Upgrade Plus... Was it hurtful?

MerlinWas it hurtful?

AlexIt hurt a lot of people. A lot of people. I stated that my Upgrade Plus premium feed had stopped updating. While this was true, it was no fault. And please note that no in fault are camel-cased? I don't know. It's capitalized.

MerlinJesus Christ, Alex. You're having a morning.

AlexIt was no fault of Mr. Michael or Mr. Jason. I had, in fact, let my Upgrade Plus membership lapse. This was not my intention. I did not do my due diligence in remembering that the credit card I had used to describe to said Upgrade Plus membership had been turned off because I bought $50 worth of Pokecoins in the Apple App Store. JP Morgan was right to do this as it's an extremely embarrassing and irresponsible purchase that I've made related to the Pocket Monsters.

I've renewed my Upgrade Plus membership and deeply regret my error in these actions. I apologize to Mr. Michael and Mr. Jason for slandering their good name on this internet broadcast. Now, more than ever, I hope that Mr. Jason and Mr. Michael can forgive me for this egregious oversight, and I choose to learn and grow in this moment.

End of statement. Thank you. I apologize, Mr. Mike. I'm sorry, Mr. Jason.

MerlinWill you be disappearing from public life to spend more time with your Pokecoins?

Alexno you gotta yeah you gotta pokemon go to the polls which i will be doing

Merlinfight song fight song um oh boy sometimes i just listen to it and cry oh god oh there are there are some things that are just still so triggering like um you know like american pie being played when he's in the box in patriot and like you know there's there's certain kinds of things or like the song yeah that um the um harry nilson song in gotta get up gotta get up

in um you know the show with natasha what's her name what's that called uh rebirth new york blazers what's it called you know what's the show called you want to start this you want to start the show let's start the show do you ever get a

Alextriggered by the uh watchman intro the the movie to the film the watchman uh the the you mean the the bob dylan song yep times that they are changing that that's one of my all-time favorite credit sequences it is one of the best that was before uh even people who really greatly dislike

Merlinthat movie seem to like the credit sequence and i i because i am a cock uh i i i like that movie a

Alexlot more than everyone you do i thought i was the loner in this i'm still the loner who uh like

Merlinsucker punch but oh really i've been avoiding that i don't know how uh you know uh a while ago you

Alexasked if i could choose would i have you watch rick and morty or bojack horsemen and my stance is still Rick and Morty. But I would say if you were, if you ever wanted to see a movie that you would be shocked that I would endorse, that would be Sucker Punch.

MerlinI heard the Flophouse episode. Have you heard this week's?

AlexI haven't. I am stoked. And where could people find the episode that you did with Squidward? What? You did an episode with Squidward. And was it Stuart? I haven't I haven't listened I know that it was one of the floppy boys oh oh wait when we talked

Merlinto Dan McCoy on the secret episode I'm so confused what are we talking about oh oh you mean the secret

Alexmember episode yeah yeah yeah the one that I didn't pay for oh oh let's it's under the drop

Merlindown menu I don't want to get into it I would like to apologize for misunderstanding of how the CMS works there's a pretty this is a pretty very again I think my bim bam is is having a pretty good time right now they oh they seem to be i don't for a long time they seem like like a little i don't know like sad tomatoes a little bit but they're having fun with it and there's there's one bit where griffin is is finally like it's like what is this niter cut like what who is this guy like why do i keep hearing about him and them explaining it uh travis and justin explaining it

to uh to griffin is is pretty funny also very good uh three-part uh munch squad this week very

AlexOh, yeah, I dip in and out because I'm like, I don't want to hear these boys be sad. Like, I know probably what's making them sad. Like, well, just the that's not being coy, like just the Internet in general, like the state of podcasting. And like, yeah.

MerlinYeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, it's the same way I said. I mean, I'm having to tell people this like and I don't know how to say this without sounding like it's some kind of important statement. but like when I was talking to Brett Herbstra and I was like, oh, I didn't even realize your show had stopped because I don't even remember what things I stopped subscribing to for some reason. Because one of my, you know, the way some people like to, for me, it's Criterion. For other people, it's Netflix. You'll spend your evening choosing shows like rather than watching shows. And like I have a regular practice

of trying to trim down my overcast. Like I try to realize, I almost, I would never ask for this, but I almost wish there was a functionality where, you know, Skip Count, for example, in iTunes, where you could view by Skip Count, which is a great way to realize this is a song you don't like as much as you think.

AlexCan you still do that in music?

MerlinYou can't do anything in these apps. All your music is gone. It's gone. It's just bad Spotify now. All your demos, sorry, gone. But I almost, because like, I will find myself having unintentionally subscribed to something. That happens sometimes, which is not, but no shame, no lemonade. There's just a ton of tech shows where I'm like, I really, I don't need this much tech stuff on a weekly basis. And it's, I'm lying to myself. In addition to all the mini, mini slate shows that are in the Firehost feed

that I just never want to hear. Like I have to spend like 10 minutes a day just deleting 40 podcast episodes. And that's just, I'm just, I'm just like, I don't need that much Macintosh update information. Personally. Personally. It's not wholesome.

AlexNormally, I would agree, but why am I like, as we've said before, this, I don't know. I'm self-conscious about people thinking that I don't remember things. No, you're not. You're not self-conscious. Don't worry. You're good. The mother of fuck. Remember how I just said that I was self-conscious about people thinking that I can't remember things and then i was talking about something and then i and then you said moves you said

oh boy i have an actual problem right now oh not enough caffeine really what were we oh sorry we we talked about how i yes really actually this is just claritin d and day quill so that's probably

Merlini mean i think it's actually on the track it's technically claritin d featuring day quill that's one of those things where it's a band with the exact same name ends up in my spotify recommendations oh my god they should just add a button they should just so the button right now is when you hit the buster it's either i don't like this song or i don't like this band there should be another button in there for this is not who you think it is this is not the disco band chic this is not the canadian pop band sloan like this is something with a different name and it's almost

always like trap music, which is fine, but it's not what I expected. And I don't want to screw up my algo because you guys got namespace pollution.

AlexYes. Yes. Right now I am like piggybacking. I'm doing the both music and Spotify.

MerlinI stay subscribed. I don't know why I stay subscribed to Apple Music, but I do. Nobody uses it. I mean, we're fully Spotify family.

AlexI do.

MerlinBecause of your tube, because you're a costly tube lady.

AlexI, no, no, I do not use the tube lady at all. Uh, my spouse, matchy does.

MerlinYou're not using, I thought you were all in on HomePod.

AlexUh, oh, oh yes. I'm sorry. Um, I have. No, no.

MerlinI just mean that like natively, I mean, I don't even know if you can do Spotify on HomePod right now, but like it is way easier. If you ask it for music, it's going to give you Apple music, right? So if you're using HomePod a lot, which is probably the nicest speaker in both of our houses, it's, it's beneficial to have that, I guess.

AlexI thought by Lady in the Tube, you meant Alexa Stop.

MerlinYeah, the Amazon product.

AlexBut I have it to be the British man because I think it's fun to boss around like a little butler. Sorry, Mr. Michael.

MerlinIt's so funny. One thing that's actually so clever in terms of like, I guess you call it a localization, is I do like, I like an English lady or a Scottish lady. But it's funny because like when we were on our little trip and using CarPlay, it's really cool to me that when the English lady is your voice, you not only get an English voice or accent, you also get, in that case, British pronunciations. Bare left. Yeah, exactly. You also get British words where you're like, your destination is on the right.

Pull into the car park. Which is like, that's the English word for parking lot. They call it a car park. You're like, oh, that's adorable. Get the torch in your lorry and Bob's your uncle.

Speaker ARecalculating.

MerlinChallenge.

AlexOh, challenge.

MerlinI don't know what the challenge is this week. in a former life, our co-host never wanted to talk about this guy, and I always have. The challenge is something, basically, I want to talk about Apollo Robbins.

AlexThe challenge was, well, I guess technically it was my challenge because I wanted to...

MerlinYou do this. You do this. You want to turn it into something.

AlexI wanted to learn how to steal.

MerlinLearn how to steal. Okay. I was looking at it as a more intellectual enterprise in how attention can be redirected, but stealing is good too.

AlexWell, I, you know, it's, remember when you liked OmniFocus, I like to turn everything into a, you know, an action item. So I was like.

MerlinYeah, you gotta get more consistent. You gotta get more consistent though. You have consistency. I love you so much. You're one of my dearest friends. The consistency in how, the nomenclature, the capitalization, whether we mentioned the guest in this area, We need to redo this entire document. We need to start this off. Well, did you?

AlexI mean, Quinn and I discussed this. Without me? Well, did you even listen to the show Quinn and I did? Producer Quinn.

MerlinI listened to the first 10 minutes. It seems very ambitious.

AlexWhat was it?

MerlinNo, there was a lot of pussy talking. You know how I feel. I think we talked about this. I have a moisture pussy down below.

AlexWell, I mean, the whole Apollo Robbins thing, I guess I peanut buttered in that I did not was not able to steal something off of anybody. But I tried to steal my my.

MerlinYou stole my heart.

AlexThank you. I did successfully steal a mouse from one of my cats by misdirecting their attention to food. But I don't know if that counts.

Merlinbut then they is it the the the other cat or the idiot it's it was both of them uh oh wow because

Alexthe the the smart one nass like has doesn't i don't see i don't know if how much like object permanence animals have uh but but the dumb one francis was like afterwards was like well i'm never gonna see my fish again i'm never going to see my fish again and i'm like why are you just crying and I'm like oh I took your toy please don't cancel me for animal abuse and then I tried to steal Matt's wallet and he was like are you touching

my butt? I'm like yes but not for the reasons you'd like and I was

MerlinIt's like in the My Chemical Romance video where the guy goes to like it seems like you know he's going to kiss her but then just like swipes her face I

AlexI think I know why Max never wanted to talk about Apollo Robbins, but why do you want to talk about him? Is it just the misdirection? Or is it misdirection?

MerlinI can do this. I don't know. I don't remember how I first learned about him. It might have been from YouTube, but I don't remember. So just real quick in terms of introduction here. so Apollo Robbins is this guy I guess I think he probably dubbed himself the Gentleman Thief and he is I'm not familiar with the community I don't know if the pickpocket community agrees with this but he's one of those wild almost Ricky Jay like characters where he has really I mean one reason I love

Ricky Jay is not just because of how good his effects are but how hard he works and how much he cared about that he was a scholar of magic in a way that I found like it's impossible not to fall in love with Ricky Jay. And Apollo Robbins, it feels to me that he's somewhat similar with what we would call pickpocketing, but what ultimately is about, as you say, misdirection. And it's about managing people's attention. So the first thing is just straight off. And we'll have a show note, or excuse me, we'll have my very short four-video playlist

to introduce you to Apollo Robbins. That will be in show notes. And I deliberately put them in a certain order. So why is the first video a fairly short appearance on, of all things, Fox and Friends? Well, because if you only have time to watch a short segment, you're going to get this real fast. And your brain is going to curl up real good, real fast, because it's your introduction to how quickly you are not seeing how many different things he's doing at once.

And more saliently, the thing you really enjoy is how the people he's doing it to don't realize it. The people who are watching it. once they're aware of what he's doing, he still does it. So he can, I mean, and you'll see this in the video. I don't want to spoil it for you. But like, so at the base of it, he's really gifted at being able to walk up to you. And without you realizing it, he takes your wallet or he takes your iPhone or he takes a pen out of your pocket. And, you know, this obviously does shade into what we think of as close magic because then he also does stuff like he puts things in other things

and you never saw him do it. The way that he can drop a wallet out of somebody's jacket pocket, catch it down below, fling it behind his back and put it into his pocket is wild. But then the typical kind of stuff like, oh, here's your pen with your hundred dollar bill in it or whatever. You're like, how in the fuck did you do that? You keep putting things on this man's shoulder and he didn't see it and I didn't see it. How do you keep doing that? And then while I was then paying attention to how you were doing the shoulder thing, you also got it. You got his phone and put it into. But it's just, so number one, fascinating just from an entertainment standpoint.

He's quite a showman. He's obviously done this a lot. He's very good at it. But the deeper level that I'd like to chat about a little bit, my deeper interest in is his own little sort of, and we get into longer videos where he explains what he's doing. But there's also a really good onstage interview with this very, very cool, like adorable old guy where they're talking about sort of the science behind this. And that misdirection is really about if you I'm sorry, I'm talking a lot.

Apollo Robbins is basic thing in some ways is that you can think of your attention as being you can only kind of look at one thing at a time. You can only monitor this one camera at a time. And if I can get you to pay attention to this thing over here, whether or not that thing is real, if I can simulate something that feels like a hand here, you will not be able to control where your attention goes. And as long as he can guide your attention, he can do whatever he wants. You know? I mean, think about the thing people say where, like, you think about the way, like, Icy Hot works.

You know, or any kind of, like, you say you get lower back pain and you're going to put this stuff on your back. Icy Hot does not make your pain go away. It just creates a stronger sensation than the sensation you have. So now you notice the yummy feeling of Icy Hot rather than the pain in your back. It's not actually making the pain go away. It's redirecting your attention. So yeah, that's my pitch. And I think he's endlessly entertaining and fascinating.

AlexI think he is. I mean, I've been familiar with him for a while because he does a lot of those like morning talk show appearances. And I think the reason a lot of magicians don't like him is he, I mean, there's so many like trade secrets in terms of magic, but the real secret is that all of the effects are just misdirection. It's like,

Merlinmaybe in a similar way. So it's not like that masked magician guy who deliberately gives away how you saw the lady.

AlexWho's like, there's a secret department. Exactly.

MerlinWell, the beauty part with him and with Penn and Teller, to my mind, the thing that made Penn and Teller Penn and Teller is not that they were revealing the arcane secrets of magic. It's that whatever their explanation was, plausible, canny, or not, they could still do what they were doing. And even after, they made it so much better because even after you understood the explanation that they gave, you still can't figure out what they're doing. Or you can't, you know what I mean? There's a level of art to it that I think is shared. magicians. We demand to be taken seriously.

AlexHave you ever gone frame by frame with one of his videos?

MerlinSorry, I have a new... I got a freezer so now I can have ice at the office.

AlexThis is a... You got it? It arrived?

MerlinOh my god. It's small but it is a game changer. So this is a Pyrex 1000 milliliter, which you call liter. and so I can have ice in here and my seltzer, but it's very loud on a podcast.

AlexMmm, I like it.

MerlinI have not, I don't think, because as you know, hitting the left side of the diving board is useless on an Apple TV. I have not done it frame by frame, but the one with the dark background and the guy from, I want to say Vanity Fair, that's a really good intermediate Apollo Robbins video because he does, they do the slow-mo. They show what he's doing. And he explains it in like much detail with replays. And I have watched, Alex, I have watched all of those videos so many times.

So, but you tell me, you're doing, what happens when you do it frame by frame?

AlexOh, so you still can't, I still can't, unless, except for that video, like I can't see it. Like during that TED Talk video and the TED Talk.

MerlinJust all I ask is don't spoil the reveal of the TED Talk.

AlexOh, oh no, not at all. Like I just kept doing.

MerlinBecause I still, I mean, like there are people who have watched that video a bunch of times. And like you do that. I can almost promise you right now that if you actually watch his TED Talk video, which I think is very good, there's going to be something in that video that happens where I can almost promise you that no one has ever watched that video once.

AlexOh, interesting.

MerlinYou know, without saying anything, you know where it happened, right?

AlexI don't know if I should. I'm not going to say. But I.

MerlinSo, OK, never mind.

Alexnever mind uh great let's not talk about it uh okay well that's well i i think that is part of the if you will magic of it oh in the after show we should talk about how i think ted is an mlm uh but the like ted lm ted lm ml ted ml uh ted talks are an mlm but the it's it's network market

Merlinmarketing it's it's not it's not mlm can i tell you about my essential oils

Alexthe feels uh the the thing you don't want that stuff from a gas station

Merlinyou should only get you should only get pasta sauce at gas stations

Alexwell i was gonna say that i i have only watched the ted talk once but i guess i haven't because i've gone you know i put in final cut to watch like frame by frame uh and i i i was in my head making fun of you for all of uh the podcasts that you put in our beloved app descript that you think

Merlinthat adam told you about except i told you about it oh my god it is it is so amazing oh wow wow wow wow it's so amazing but i mean i use it all the time just to go find where somebody said something yeah yeah when i when i did that bit talking about tignataro i'm back to work that was made easier because i had dropped dropped it into descript and i searched for the word rule which immediately made it easy for me to find the five times that um dude had used the word rule and i

Alexcould just pull out the five rules it was amazing i'm really i'm really glad that i told you about that and not adam have you heard about nuts.com but but they have nuts okay okay so so i upload or not up whatever i put it in final cut pro and i just went frame by frame trying to see like how he he does it and i can't like but i i don't think it's intentionally based on the camera angle but you just can't see but but if you go frame by frame and watch the audience that is fascinating

like what they are paying attention to and where like they're they're all over the place like like one person is like looking not at the ceiling but but like you can you can tell they're trying to look like where the misdirection is so good that it's it's like I don't even know you're you're directing people in different ways the more the more that you over oversubscribe to your own

Merlinintelligence and canniness and inability to be fooled I mean this sounds obvious but I feel like it's not, the more you feel like you are not susceptible, the more susceptible you become.

AlexOh, yeah.

MerlinYou have to have the Zen-like child's mind in order to really see something for what it is, rather than what you have decided that it is. And that's why, I mean, it's a trick. That's how it works. What he's doing, like any of these things is like, well, yeah, it's a trick. We're cheating. I didn't actually shoot him with that bullet, believe it or not.

AlexIt's not cheating.

MerlinWell, I mean, what I'm saying is there's not like a Wingardium Leviosa going on here. There's not actual literal witch magic going on.

AlexI would like to retract a previous statement I have said many times, which is that I don't think multitasking exists. It's just rapid. I actually don't think I got this from Merlin Man at some point. It's just kind of always been in my brain of like, if I'm multitasking, I'm not doing anything well. I'm just doing lots of, I'm changing tasks very quickly. But I think the brilliant thing about magicians is they are true multitaskers.

Like, or they are good at rapidly changing tasks. And you can really, really see it in this video. Like I.

MerlinThat's what when you see people like when my friend Jamie, I told you this. My friend Jamie is a magician. He used to drive me nuts because he was always fiddling with something in his hands. And I think that's partly just because he has a fiddly personality to like needs to like have a, you know, a worry stone of some kind in his hand. He used to spin his iPhone on his fingertip, which made me insane. insane, but also he was always just like compulsively, almost uncontrollably practicing like a coin trick.

And I think that's the physical manifestation of that. But then you also, there's a reason like Ricky Jay practices in front of a mirror. You also have to think about how it looks to the other person. Just getting the general misdirection right versus just getting the physical part right, they have to work together. It has to not look like you're doing a trick. And that's the art.

Alexand I mean I'm sort of the same way except that my fidget I'm not talented but my fidget toys are my iPhone cases and my iPhone is just really the most expensive fidget toy of them all thank you is this a show is this is this a show I I'm I'm really glad that you've I finally sat down and watched all this mostly because yeah i don't know i don't i don't know how good he is like i

and obviously i've watched a whole lot of if he's bad it works for me let's put it that way do you think it would have the same i don't i don't know no let's say your words the mrs direction is less impressive. Did you say Mrs. Direction? Is there a Mr. Direction?

201. I Was on the Dance Floor

Show notes

Transcript

201. I Was on the Dance Floor

Show notes

Transcript

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