259. Lampy & Fanny

AlexThis is Do By Friday with Merlin Mann and Alex Cox. This week's challenge. Read the body keep score brain mind and body in the healing of trauma hello

Hello. Hello. Hello. Hello. Hello. Hello. Hello. Hello. Hello. Hello. Hello. Hello. Hello. Hello. Hello. Hello. Hello. Hello. Hello. Hello. Hello. Hello. Hello. Hello.

MerlinHello. Hello. Hello. Hello. Hello. Hello. Hello. Hello. Hello. Hello. Hello. Hello. Hello. Hello. Hello. Hello. Hello. Hello.

AlexOh, hello.

MerlinHello.

AlexOh, happy October, sir.

MerlinYeah. Happy October to you there.

AlexWe have a lot of we have a lot of things. We have so many things.

MerlinDo we have a lot of content?

AlexI think we have a lot of content. But first and foremost, I would like to know about me gaslighting you over Zoom. I don't doubt that I'm gaslighting you. I just am interested in the semantics.

MerlinYeah, I think anytime somebody says that they're not gaslighting you, you should believe them. You know, when they tell you the first time, believe them or something like that. Hang on, let me do my sidecar. Get my sidecar back. Get back your sidecar. I'm updating all the OS's right now because that's the kind of thing I like to do when I'm recording a podcast.

AlexOh, is Big Monty out today?

MerlinBig Monty's out. Still no word. Fingers crossed. I hope that it's there. You know what I'm talking about.

AlexOh, are we talking about sharing?

MerlinThe universal control. I'm hoping that arrives soon because I really, really want it. And even though I know it's not in any of them. You know what it is? It's like when you keep going to the refrigerator and you're not hungry enough to have clarity. But you're also just like you just keep staring at the refrigerator like a weirdo. And you're like, is it really about eating or is it really more about some weird compulsion? So like every time I get a new mantra, I still do like, oh, look here.

AlexOh, yeah. Well, show her.

MerlinAnd because I'm already doing the sidecar. I'm all in on sidecar. You know, when you when you forced me to buy that iPad that I didn't need.

AlexI didn't. I'm trying to force you to buy a phone.

MerlinRemember that when you made me do that? You made me get a nicer one than I needed because I could have it delivered.

AlexDo you remember when you did that? I'm sorry.

MerlinYou did that. You gaslit me.

AlexUh-huh. Oh, oh, side car.

MerlinSide car.

AlexDo you have the Apple Store app installed?

MerlinYes.

AlexOkay, pop that open right now.

MerlinOkay. Oh, I also got a white battery pack. I don't win when I bought a battery pack.

AlexOh, the little, it's like a little humpback, hunchback. I don't want to.

MerlinYeah, it's fine. It's, boy, when you're really, I, of course, so long story short, we got, I think I told you we went to see Free Guy. And, of course, we went to the Apple store and had a nice visit with my friend Melissa. She, her. And we looked at things. And I was trying to get my kid to, you know, I try to check her into talking to people because I figure it's good for her. Oh, you monster. Anyways, I ended up, well, you've got to practice. It's been too many years of, you know. So, anyhow, I ended up buying this pack.

AlexOh, I see. Okay. Yeah.

MerlinI bought the pack.

AlexI literally paid to practice. All right. You got the pack.

MerlinI got a sticker of Thor on it, and I was reading while we were waiting for the movie to start. And again, this is such a down market theater, even though it's new and nominally fancy. We didn't even get any Maria Menudos. It was really weird. So anyhow, I don't miss the movies as much as I thought.

AlexMaria Menudos. Okay.

MerlinYou know, she's the lady at the beginning, you know, and she talks to you about what's happening in the world of YouTube original series. she talks to you about the microsoft surface which is revolutionizing oh in a theater you mean so what i did was alex you know what we do you know you do this yes i went of course i uh the first thing i do sometimes before i acquire the thing this was an impulse purchase 90 bucks 99 bucks um i uh i downloaded the pdf and i was i was reading about it of the battery pack yes okay

AlexI'm sorry that I'm sorry.

MerlinOrdinarily, I would say, yeah, right. Because like usually that flimsy little onion paper thing they give you, it tells you everything you need to know. It's a battery. Use it. Idiot.

AlexOh, now I know where you're going. I'm sorry. Continue.

MerlinBut OK. OK. Wait, are you keeping track of where we are in the stack?

AlexWe are. We're only one away from this. No, we were. We've taken two sidecars. zoom to to the

Merlinoh yeah Alice and Bob

Alexand now we are visiting the Apple store

MerlinI tried to get my kid to talk

Alexsidecar

Merlinwas it hard? which part?

Alexoh difficult? yeah I wonder if she's finding it as difficult as

Merlinoh no she's great I mean, God, she's so, I don't even want to say anything. She's so fucking healthy. But it says here, so I'm on the page for this. I'll put this in show notes. This is the page for the ugly MagSafe battery pack. I adore it. And, you know, I was saying to my family, I was saying to my family, yeah, I bought this. And I was like, because they don't make a battery case for my model of phone. And they, my wife, who's very intelligent, said very intelligently, well, why wouldn't they? And I said, well, I don't know if this is true.

But my suspicion and the suspicion of some people I know is that Apple feels that it looks like an admission of weakness to provide a battery case for a recent model of phone. Because it seems to be saying there's not enough battery in here, which is anathema in the company, which is kind of a bummer. So, yeah, it's got all this stuff. And it's not helpful enough. It's in the section called overview, second paragraph. If your desk can need a charge, just plug a lightning cable into the MagSafe battery pack for up to 15 watts of wireless charging.

I don't know what that means. Short on time. With a higher than 20-watt power adapter, you can charge both the MagSafe battery pack and your iPhone even faster. That's great. Then you get into highlights and it lets you know the details, the Fs and Bs on what you get with different models of phone. And this is why it pays to read.

Knowledge is power. You get up to 70% additional charge with iPhone 12 mini or 13 mini and the MagSafe battery pack. And there's a footnote. Up to 60% charge with iPhone 12 or iPhone 13. Up to 60% charge with iPhone 12 Pro or iPhone 13 Pro and MagSafe battery pack. Up to 40% additional charge with iPhone 12 Pro Max or iPhone 13 Pro Max. So it varies a lot. And you've got to have the big boy battery pack. and given that this is such a normie like this is for people who do shit like keep their driver's

license in their phone this is like normie mag safe culture it just seems this whole thing seems so weird to me so i get 40 additional charge out of this that's it oh because you got the big boy that makes sense yes i got a 12 pro max anyway i'm happy enough with it i don't i have no idea why I said this to you. We went to the Apple store. I saw a white Tesla.

Let's see. What else did we do? Where were we in the stack, Alex? I'm really at sixes and sevens about this whole experience of going to the movies.

AlexOh. Mmm. Mmm.

MerlinThey didn't have coffee.

AlexSo, mmm. Oh, huh.

MerlinI did get asked for vaccine proof for the very first time, which made me happy.

AlexOh, hooray. Good. I feel like in California, most people assume the best where, you know, Even in Chicago, it's like... Do you have a way of displaying your vaccination card that is quickly accessible other than a shortcut that links to a PDF?

MerlinI'm grateful that you asked me that. There's a thing that I did when we had our ill-advised trip to New England. I'll tell you about that in a second.

AlexOh, where you punched a lady?

MerlinYeah. Oh, you were assaulted that poor woman.

Alexbecause I do that.

MerlinI do that. No, but I'll tell you the clever thing I did there, which I thought was pretty clever. I'm at a young tip from one of these generic Apple sites. But what I did do, perhaps two betas ago, was when they first introduced the thing where you could add your vaccine card to wallet.

AlexHuh.

MerlinLike there's a 15.1 thing where, I know this works in California. I think it works in other places. Well, there's been a thing. I think this is a 15 thing, But the regular 15 thing is you can now put your immunization record into health, which I love. And then the 15.1 edition a couple betas ago was that you could just put it into your wallet. I think you still, you might need to unlock your phone to actually look at it, which is dumb. Because the whole point to me was not having to unlock your phone. But then that stopped working. And it isn't working now.

So I bet that'll come back. What I did when we went to New England, because this is the kind of weirdo I am, is I took, So in California, you get this thing that's like basically you get your card like everybody's got. And I would take a photo of that personally and put it into 1Password, which I did while we were still on the drive home from my April immunization, whatever it's called. What's it called? Shots in arms? Jab?

AlexThe Jabzies, yeah.

MerlinSo I put that into 1Password. But then what I did was California introduced this thing was a little confusing at first, which is this – I'm sure this is considered a vaccine passport by somebody who looks like a thumb. But no, what you do is you get this QR code that somebody can scan. And there's even an app you can get on the App Store to see what happens when you scan that code, which basically says, hey, you got the J&J in April. Good on you. What I did was I created two Apple Notes. One Apple Note had everybody's cards front and back, the three of us, and the three of us, all of our separate QR codes.

And then I made one for just myself. I made a note with the QR code for showing I got immunized. And I put that into the today view at the very top.

AlexOh, that's smart.

MerlinThe note widget. Doesn't that seem kind of smart?

AlexIt is. It does not seem smart. I would say that it objectively is smart, but I...

MerlinIt is smart. Now, how many times have you been... I know you don't go places so much, but like you and Machi, how often have you been asked to show that you've been vaccinated?

AlexI don't know.

MerlinI'd like to be asked a lot more.

AlexYeah. I probably like any any place we go for recreational purposes.

MerlinDid you go to a baseball game after this? Did you have to show it when you went to the baseball game?

AlexYes. Yes. And that was fairly early on, actually.

MerlinYeah, absolutely.

AlexBut but like stores and stuff, none of that is required. No, no doctor's office is required, which I, you know, understand that one. Fine. But yeah, I wish that there was, you know, the Gatsapo right outside my door. What is it? Biden's troops that are going to be over.

MerlinOh, yeah, absolutely. I want them taking my guns away. I want them asking. I want the jackbooted thugs to be asking me if my papers are in order. I would really like that. But when my mom, my mom used to work at a retail chain in the 90s. And, you know, my mom's my mom. She's weird. You know, like I'm weird, but she's weird in similar ways, but about different things. And one of her things has always been that, like, you know, she's so old-fashioned. It's so sweet. But for years, every time she got a new credit card, she would do this thing. She probably read about this in a magazine.

But on the signature line, you know what you do? You don't put your signature. You say, please ask for ID.

AlexHuh.

MerlinBecause she would always, whenever somebody came in and used their credit card, she'd always ask for ID. Because this is when we still thought we had control over these things. And it would drive my mother crazy that nobody hardly ever, ever, ever would ask her to CID, which just proved that they didn't even look at the signature to see if it matched back in the day. Right. I feel that way about vaccines. I'm like, please hassle me. In the same way that when I have a call with some kind of service provider, I'm always on the rare occasions that they ask me for information instead of telling me information and asking if it's right.

in a large call center where everything yeah or just scream it all out like why don't you just not hone in me in front of all your co-workers okay so anyway uh those are the zoom links i have that's not funny i don't want to talk about it i might want to talk about metasyntactic variables but i clicked on the link i have the app i'm looking at you sent me a link i opened the apple app app app huh and it's saying here you want me

to buy an eye oh you want me to buy this uh yes yes you're telling me i should get the iphone 13

Alexpro it looks like it's in that uh casey list blue oh well i mean any i don't know i just oh oh so

Merlinyou're just saying buy a phone just here okay and you you really feel like the camera's worth it

AlexOh, yeah. Yep, yep, yep, yep, yep.

MerlinTalk more about that. Tell me, and I imagine you're doing those videos that Joe Steele loves where you get like 16 by 16 pixels of actual bokeh.

AlexI honestly have been, yes, that is very cool. I have not found a use for it. I'm like, okay, I'm sure there is some TikTok content.

MerlinSome filmmaker you are.

AlexOh, that's been, I've retired from that. Oh, I'm a Vimeo-er these days. But the macro, oh God, I just forgot though, Halide now has this. So you might want to try the wonderful app Halide.

MerlinYeah, I got it. Love it. Yeah.

AlexI mean, just wow. The macro photography and just night mode getting better and better and better.

MerlinOh, I'm sorry. Okay. Okay. So sorry. Let me translate from Alex to listener, or at least Alex to Merlin. There's a new thing, which is that you can invoke a mode that lets you do macro shooting, which is from like a very short distance. You can get a pretty sharp photo of something in like a coin or something in great detail. That's one of the new features on the 13 Pro.

One of the 13 Pros. And you're saying Halide has added that for non-13 phones?

AlexYeah, I have not tried it yet.

MerlinI'm going to try it right now. You're welcome. Thank you so much for supporting our program where we use apps. I'm clicking. Okay. And then what's the, oh, I do find the interface a little confusing. I probably swipe up. And you sure about this? I don't see it.

AlexIt just, maybe it's fake news. I think I did see it on Instagram.

MerlinConfigure advanced camera parameters, prevent Facebook spying. Oh, that's cool. Embed precise location. Nope. All right. I'll come back to this. I would love that. The thing is, I think I got, I want to say I got this in like January and I don't want to sound like a cheapskate. I think I already said this to you, but like the problem was I looked at it in the cart in the Bastic and it was the one I, I don't know. I just, you know, I did the thing where I went in and I, I done the pre thing that kind of works. The old thing used to be you favorite it and have it in the cart. The new thing is you can go in pre preorder.

Did you do that? Were you going like everything you want, like up to the day before and then it reminds you and you click through. and if it works the way it's supposed to, which apparently it didn't, you just click and buy. It sounds like Marco, that's how Marco ended up with four phones.

AlexI actually accidentally, oh, thank you for your money, everybody. I'm not keeping the second phone, but I accidentally, yes, ordered two.

MerlinIs it a good one? Because if it's a good one, you could sell it to me.

AlexNo, it's not. It's not. It's the silver. No, no, no. And also it's on its way back to being returned.

But yeah, thank you for my valor for giving.

MerlinThere's going to be a new challenge. And that challenge for every episode is to stop doing this.

AlexOh, OK. Well, you're good. We've talked about this, about how my phone for me is my main side piece, my main squeeze, even more so than my Mac. And at this point, for jokes outside.

MerlinYou buy yourself a new phone every year because it makes you happy and even your partner says this makes you very happy.

AlexOh, I'm not even doing that. No, no, no. I'm saying how useful and how much better the 13 is than the 12 that I thought.

MerlinExactly. Oh, come on. I've been so good. The point is I just wanted to say that I did the pre-preorder, and I clicked all the things that were what I thought I wanted. I don't care about the color, really. It's whatever's available. I wish I could just say – I wish it was like the project management triangle. I wish you could just go in and say the most important thing to me is that it be a Pro Max. And the second most important thing is that it be available quicker than other ones.

Because that's part of the fun.

AlexOh, to play with the toy all the same.

MerlinBut I clicked through. I said, okay. I said, phone. I said, this size. I said, whatever, this color. Fine. I said, yes, AppleCare. I said, yes, unlocked. And my hand to God, if memory serves, I think it was $1,800.

AlexThat makes sense. because you have the big boy.

MerlinAnd the fact that it wasn't going to be available for a month. I'm sorry. I keep cutting you off. I'm so sorry.

AlexOh, I think it's my bad, a mix of allergies. And I mean, if we ever want to leave this sidecar and go back to Zoom, I immediately go from, you know, what, four hours on Zoom, typically, right to this. So I don't know.

MerlinMaybe we should go back to Skype. We should go back to Skype, maybe.

AlexDoes it even, I'm on an M1. Does it even work? That would be interesting.

MerlinI use Audio Hijack. Yeah, Audio Hijack. That's what I do the three other shows on.

AlexOh, what? So this is the only... Oh, yeah. Oh, gosh. I am your burden.

MerlinOh, man. You're the white man's burden.

AlexOh, that's interesting. I'm going to... Let me put a pen... Oh, God. Where did my notebook go? Oh, my chair is sliding. Fuck.

MerlinFuck. I'm back.

AlexOh. Okay. I... Did... Have you ever lived in... Well, you live in an older home.

MerlinYou could say, yeah.

AlexIs everything level? Because we have a slight downward slope.

MerlinIt's no Syracuse house, but no. I mean, a famous one is our bathroom door. It doesn't want to be open and it doesn't want to be closed. So every time John Roderick comes to our house and walks in to pee and just kind of lightly pushes the door, it opens very slowly while he's urinating.

Look, honey, it's the guy from that band. usually look at the other side.

AlexSpotify recommended Pushover to me this morning. Oh, that's a good song. I love that song.

MerlinI need to figure out if I need this. There's other things. I don't think I need a watch and I don't think I need a phone. I sound like I'm being a cheap ski. I kid, but that iPad I ended up getting a few months ago, that's what led me to have this, my old iPad be a sidecar.

AlexOh, okay.

MerlinIt's actually been really cool and handy. But, yeah, I mean, that might be too many treats. Also, I should probably get that, like, whatever, like an $11,000 scooter. I should support that on. I sent you that, right? That crazy.

AlexIs it still on Indiegogo? Is this the Unagi?

MerlinYeah, yeah, yeah. The one that the new Unagi that, like, will read you. It does Tesla-like cameras to detect things in the road.

Alexi i'm not a fan of this brand brandy i i don't know it seems sus as the among us players say

Merlinno that means does that mean okay my my kids started using that and i thought it meant suspicious and then she said no and she she roughly translated because i'm stupid she goes well just think of it as meaning like gay i was like what huh but but still it has a meaning in Among Us, a game that she...

AlexOh, like the slur of what

Merlingay used to mean. I guess, but she's right in that spot where I can't even tell. Again, she's just like the kid in The Simpsons. I don't know. I don't think she knows when she's being sarcastic anymore. Because she likes Among Us, but mostly hates Among Us, and it's fun to make fun of Among Us. There's text threads making fun of Among Us. I don't understand. I don't need to understand. It's not for me. That's what Dave Eggers would say.

AlexHis new book is coming out soon.

MerlinAnyway, Oh So Pro. we're leaving Alice and Bob aside I did put a couple articles in because I was thinking, actually who cares what do we have to talk about here, we got a lot of stuff

AlexI care, I care so much, you've got the you've got the you've got a medicine

MerlinAre we still on the phone, you want me to buy this phone?

AlexNo, well I sent you the one that isn't the big boy, I forgot you like those, and mine

MerlinWell isn't there a benefit to the big boy in terms of the camera you get the Joe Rosenstiel feature? Not this year Not this year So I could get a smaller phone?

AlexYes, you can.

MerlinI think I own. And the same camera. Okay, I'm going to open it and look. It's still going to be too expensive.

AlexAnd you've got the camera bump anyway.

MerlinYou've got the bump. So the 13 Pro. Oh, it starts at $1,000. That's bad, but not that bad.

AlexI mean, we were in a super secret text channel. Our friends were sharing pictures of first-tush computers.

MerlinTheir old computers. That was so fun.

AlexAnd I was just thinking, I mean, we revisit this all the time, but I just thinking about the power of my phone and the editing power of my phone, like popping a LumaFusion out or up on an iPhone is just astounding to me.

MerlinLuma what?

AlexLumaFusion, it's this editing app on iOS, in iPadOS. I'd say it's sort of equivalent to FairWrite, the podcast editing app, in that it's like first in class for iOS. But unfortunately, there's no Mac version, so it's not something I stick with typically. Very good, though, for the people. I mean, I know not just the Christopher Lawleys of the world, but lots of people have that as their main nonlinear editing program because both Adobe and Final Cut are just too expensive.

And 20 bucks is a lot better than 200. And it has almost all of the same features. Anyway, I'm going on because I'm excited about computers.

MerlinI've mostly been listening to you, but I've also been looking at the phone. Okay, so right now I've got, what's my storage on this current phone?

Horses in the drift, 15.1, AppleCare. If I go to, what's it called? Usage? Is that what it's called? Is that what it'll tell me?

AlexI think so.

MerliniPhone storage. Here we go. iPhone storage. Okay, so this one's 512, my current phone, which is, I think, judging by this, way more than I need. Alex, this is really upsetting. Okay. I could get... Oh, this gold is ugly.

What's the one people are going to want the least?

AlexProbably the midnight something or other.

MerlinNo, it's four colors. There's the blue...

AlexBlack, but called fancy something.

MerlinBlue, black, silver, and gold.

AlexYes.

MerlinOkay. So if I say $2.56 in silver... Oh, Alex, this is way cheaper than what I was looking at. So I don't get no way. No, there's got to be something I'm missing here. Am I not? You sure I'm not getting the bad camera?

AlexI swear because I would not. I would have gone with the mini.

MerlinBefore Apple Pay or excuse me, before Apple Care, it's $1099. That's $800 less than I thought it would be.

AlexYeah, for a astounding computer. It's just amazing.

MerlinBut see, once it delivers in like next year. okay all right i will i will take it under advisement i don't need it but i'll think about

Alexit you don't need it but it if it uh will spark some joy and i'll talk to joe you know oh all

Merlinright and talk to joe you know joe's one of those people oh did i also tell you i'm um i'm all in on twitterific oh oh shit dog we got to talk about this i'm putting it in the after show twitter i have discovered or rediscovered twitterific and it's changed my entire world i'm so much happier now oh and not tweet bot i have both and i love both um but the muffles baby the muffles right i had no okay i'm saving for the show what i've got what i've got for after show stuff hi

everybody sorry we'll start in a second i have three things so far and none of them are essential one is that i want to talk to you about delta uh the three chi uh whatever it's called delta eight

AlexThe science-y... Yeah, yeah.

MerlinI got a bunch and I need to understand it. Okay. I also want to ask you if you want to try FaceTime together, but that would probably be hard to record. And then I also want to talk about Twitterrific. That's what we would talk about. These are things... We don't always get to these, but these are potential topics for us to discuss on the after show, which you can be hearing if you either steal those or if you give us a little bit of money each month at patreon.com slash do by Friday.

AlexThank you very much.

MerlinThank you very much. We appreciate it. We need the money. We do.

AlexBy the way, Did you get the money this month? No. It's very funny. Oh, my God. I'm going to send you this. Quinn and I were goofing around.

MerlinJust pay Quinn. Don't worry about me, but get Quinn paid. But no, it didn't. That was on Sunday?

AlexMonday you said that?

MerlinWhy are we talking about money on the show?

AlexBecause I hear. Okay.

MerlinOkay.

AlexThe reason we are talking. Okay. The reason.

MerlinI'm from Ohio. We don't even acknowledge money.

AlexAnd don't you think that that was or rather it has become a detriment to you and how like not not you, but how the Midwest thought about money and how we Midwesterners think of it now?

MerlinI can, I mean, I'm reluctant to admit that, but I think you're probably right. So you're talking here about the rat king of we don't talk about money issues that ends up getting weaponized. The sort of like salary equality stuff or the, you know, I mean, just being straight up about like, you know, well, yeah, it's easy enough for your parents to say all the advantages you've had. But like, let's look side by side at what it costs for your particular liberal arts education versus mine. Right. I'm sorry, I'm jumping in, but is that what you're talking about?

AlexOh, absolutely.

MerlinWhen we don't talk about money, we allow a lot of injustice to thrive.

AlexWell, we are blind to injustices because we don't...

MerlinIt's not just a joke. Injustice is a thing, and we don't like it. We hate to see it.

AlexAnd it's not even that you're allowing injustices. You just don't know they exist because, oh, it's not flattering to talk about money.

MerlinBecause you shut off the conversation as soon as it comes up because that's déclasse to talk about money.

AlexIt's just on my mind because Twitch had some sort of data breach where everybody's subscriber count was public and people were in a tizzy. Like, oh, my God, people who have.

MerlinBecause that's the new money.

AlexWell, that's I mean, it is because usually it's five bucks a month with subscribers. and most of the Twitch streamers I watch have that public because, surprise, most of them are like socialists. And they're like, yeah, guys, I'm a millionaire. Like, yep, I'm a millionaire. You guys did it. So here you go. I'm not going to hide that. Kind of in the same way that I don't like hiding. I don't like it when people don't show how much. I guess it depends.

Most Patreon pages, I don't.

MerlinYou're talking about where we have not made a secret of how many people and how much money we get.

AlexRight. And there's reasons to do that.

MerlinYou can really gauge the level of cancellation we're at in a given month.

AlexIt's true. Yeah, it's true.

MerlinIt's true.

AlexTwo hundred girls actually nose dove because it's a queer traitor. But I think that, I mean, I have definitely contributed to a lot of unhealthy things by discouraging talking about money in the past. And it's very much a Midwestern middle class thing. And it's even more, I don't want to say lower, lower middle class thing, but I know I'll say it. It's definitely a lower middle class thing because you don't want to be the one talking about money now because when you eventually have money, it would be even worse to talk about having a lot of money because you resent the people who have it.

I don't know.

MerlinWell, you know, time for my monthly paraphrase of Raymond Carver. what we talk about when we talk about money. Because, I mean, there's all kinds of, God, I hate this. There's all kinds of downsides to that from my point of view to when we talk about money. And I understand, like, you're leaving these off because they're mostly social awkwardness rather than justice issues. But I can tell you where I live. Okay, like, I made a joke earlier about being from, you know, the Midwest.

So, like, in Cincinnati, like, I could say, oh, you never talk about money, but you say, oh, are you going to the Reds-Dodgers game this weekend? They're like, oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. And somebody might say, oh, yeah, and we got box seats in the blue seats. And then somebody else would go, oh, yeah, yeah, our scouts are going to go up. We're in the red seats. Now, nobody's going to know what that means, but that says so much. All you have to say is blue seats. When you say blue seats, you know that at Riverfront Stadium, RIP, those are the good seats, red seats.

Those are the ones way up at the very, very top of Riverfront, like a 50,000 person stadium. So like that's a kind of code, right? And so you can talk about how much money you have without talking about how much money you have. Yep. And in San Francisco, it's, I mean, I'm fortunate to not have to talk to people much anymore. But when you go to parties and stuff, even with like normal people, there's all of this like talking about money, I think is considered a new money thing. People who've had money most of their life don't talk about money because they don't really need to.

And yet that signification, that semiotic code that people have with each other enables you to say things that telegraph a lot about your wealth. If you're a kid, there's a – oh, God, I wish my family wouldn't even talk about this. They're considering this arts school in town that almost everybody gets a scholarship for if they're accepted. I'm not even going to tell you how much this thing cost, but it made me have to leave the room and mop my brow for freaking high school.

But if you say your kid goes to the School of the Arts, well, there's a lot of signification in that. It's a little bit of a flex. and so anyway all i'm trying to say is like i am i'm very i'm not saying that i'm above status or above like my the display of my potlatch or whatever i'm probably not above that but it does make me uncomfortable being somebody who came from not a lot of money and was touchy about it uh you know i i'm i really especially in person-to-person relationships i'm very

concerned about making somebody feel bad about their life yes yes i know i realize it sounds like a cop out or a merley man thing but like i when you i've had plenty of times where like i said here i think here somewhere there's been plenty of times in my life uh really most of my life where i really could have used a lot more money and i think maybe we talked about that here maybe we talked i talked about with syracuse but that thing of like well you know somebody else with some dough and a little bit more time can have changes to plans that don't have an impact

on their life. Whereas like other people changes at those plans. Like one reason a lot of people aren't getting vaccinated or some people aren't is they just can't get the time off of work. And they got kids, their kid, you know, sits at the Burger King getting wifi or whatever. And I just, I don't, I don't gain anything from that kind of flex. I would like you to think that I'm clever and funny sometimes.

I don't even need you to think I'm smart. I would like you to think, if I had a way to make you think a thing about me, I would like you to think that I'm clever and maybe kind of funny. And I don't think there's almost any other positive thing that I'm obsessed with making you think about me. So I gain less than zero, as Elvis Costello would say. I gain less than zero from an economic flex. and that's one reason I am it just makes me feel like shit when people start talking about money because you know there's at least one person

in that group that doesn't have as much as the other people and I didn't like feeling that way my whole life I hate it but I take I understand what you're saying like so like the ability to like have a way in a slack channel to realize well isn't it strange that all these women with equivalent experience or queer people like aren't getting the same salary as these other people that's the kind of thing you're talking about right

Alexabsolutely absolutely and well by slack i mean i work slack and uh which um tip everybody don't talk about your salaries in a work slack make your own slack it's it's uh that's it is illegal

Merlinfor good practice to just stop assuming that people can't see what you type on slack yeah

Alexyep yep yep yep and i mean the reason i don't know maybe it's a millennial thing but i I especially because I am in tech or in tech, but because of my job, I am often like the quote poorest. I don't that's such a dumb word because I'm not. But like I typically make less than everybody else. And that's never really made me self-conscious because we're not necessarily peers.

And I don't know. Like I I don't know. Like like I have talked many times about my feelings towards billionaires. Now you can typically count them on the number.

MerlinYou really don't like those billionaires, do you?

AlexI don't like those billionaires, but I'm going to say I'm pro-millionaire, and people should have their millions and live happily and healthily if it's not hurting anybody else. And I don't know.

MerlinYou're just one of those self-hating queers. No, no, no, no, no. You have such a hard-on for billionaires. You are so obsessed with these sexy, No, your sexy billionaire problematic boyfriend.

AlexThat leads, I think.

MerlinThat leads to one of our items. Anyway, I admit that I'm old fashioned and I could probably improve here. I just, the color of my crystal is that I'm touchy about money because I had to be touchy about money my whole life. and I just that's my hang up is I just I think when we talk about this stuff I mean like I don't feel that uncomfortable talking about wanting this a phone right it's weird because that obviously would indicate something but like it's

remember that thing I said that now feels very profound to me I said a thing I think it might be profound that it feels like nowadays the only things that are private things are shameful things

AlexYep.

MerlinI've been thinking about that a lot. I think that I accidentally said something really good and true. And that's the thing. It's like we all have our own internal barometer about what we're ashamed of. And I think it's possible in the United States to be shameful of not having enough money and to be shameful of having too much money. Because there's a lot of people in this country. And you know a lot of people. You run into a lot of people. And hopefully sometimes that'll be the thing that keeps you from leaving a shitty review for your DoorDash driver. You know, maybe that will make you think twice about like the advantages that one has. But I admit that I'm behind the times on this. It's just it's a thorny topic for me that has more downsides than benefits to me.

AlexWell, and I think for exactly also because your peers aren't necessarily like there's when I say we don't talk about money, I am definitely talking about the scope of like, you know, white by working like people need to stop saying that you're not working class. If you work in a fancy office, you're still. Oh, God, I'm getting very OC right now.

MerlinNo, no, no. But there's so many old ideas about those kinds of status that have not been updated in a very long time. And like anybody who thinks that there is not an actual concept to being what they call house poor, just because somebody else, like I can't afford to buy a house. I'll never be able to afford to buy a house. But my friends, I have a friend, a pretty good friend of mine who also happens to be a neighbor who's buying a house. And I'm not envious of that.

I mean, I'd like to have had a house, but I don't envy he and his wife going into the process of buying a house. God. And then once you're in, all you ever hear about is how costly it is to have a house. Which, again, it sounds pretty unsympathetic to somebody who's going to be paying rent for the rest of their lives, I imagine, like me. but I also think that's not invalid. I mean, it makes sense to want that but to your point though, and God, we should write this down and talk about it. There's so many ideas in American culture

that are so far behind, almost like the way that the internet has evolved so quickly and the evolution has been fast, the changes have been fast and we're always fighting like four wars ago because so much changes so quickly.

AlexOh, that's so good.

MerlinAnd a good example of that for me is screen time, where there was a time like we were told under, you know, and again, I know I'm a broken record about this, but I think somebody needs to be. We were told that, you know, and I think the, whatever, the American Pediatric Association, but there's a pretty solid like line in the sand, which is your kid should not be exposed to screens until they're at least two. Which, I mean, I had no choice in that matter. That was my wife's decision. And I happen to agree with it. But she felt much more strongly.

than I did about it. But now you flash forward to today, and my kid's 13, and has spent almost two years of her life unable to have anything approaching what we think of as normal American teenage contact with people, where her screen is school, like screen is friend. Like not as in like the screen is your friend, but your friends live in that screen. What kind of monster would say to their kid you get like half an hour of screen time after, I mean, that's so blinkered.

AlexSomeone who likes to post onto a screen about how they only give their kid two hours.

MerlinI wasn't going to say it, but yeah, the behavior that we have modeled is that we look at our screens a ton. Sometimes we look at a screen where we're watching another screen. And somehow it takes a tremendous amount of, a tremendous lack of self-knowledge as well as kind of just baseline cruelty to be able to sit there and watch Grey's Anatomy and look at your phone and then tell your kid to put the screen away. It's like, well, what's not screens now? I don't want to be an idiot about it, but it is a little bit like saying, well, you can't read books because that could corrupt you or something.

Anyway, but that's an example of where we still haven't caught up. The internet, the stuff, the way information moves, we haven't caught up with how that happens. And then on top of it all, I said this to Syracuse last night. Right now there's so many people behaving very emotionally in America, and then people are reacting to that in ways that are very emotional. and there's like there's not that many great things that have happened in my life because i insisted on being emotional about emotional about every aspect of it but that's where we are and so oh screens mad next door ah just everybody's so fucking mad and you know and the money's hard

Alexsorry i'm done cut all that out no no no no i why do i do this well as people talk about trickle-down economics. I like to, it's like, no, I mean, that's true, but also it trickles, it's like trickle-down injustice. Like, when we, last year, I had a, I might have had a small hand in forming a few unions, and unionizing with white-collar jobs

is very, I think it's very important, you know, gonna put on my squad hat, But also it's behind the times and we don't really know what we're doing, which is why it's very difficult and weird.

MerlinYeah, a lot of people are going to hear, not necessarily the people you're trying to get to become part of your union, but other people that maybe even like me are going to go, oh, you mean like Jimmy Hoffa and the Teamsters? yep it's like no more like matt pierce and the la times more like we're trying we have we serve like the the kinds of it's it's not as bad as being a door dash delivery person which is comically robber baron shit uh the like basically you have it's almost like you know steve rubell and studio 54 getting a cabaret license every night because they can't get your license it's like you oh hi

welcome you work for me today come back tomorrow oh hi you work for me like go rent a bathroom somewhere. But people who are journalists, they're not getting a surpassing amount of knowledge workers in general, right? I mean, isn't that fair to say? Unless you're in a position where you're, say, out of Google, at a director level where your skills are considered so valuable that you don't even have to have big negotiations, but everybody else, you serve at their pleasure. It's a right-to-work state, most of these.

AlexYep, yep. Here we, yeah, especially in the Midwest.

MerlinWhat a phrase, right to work state. Florida's a right to work state. You have a right to work, but not a right to a union.

AlexYeah. Well, and one thing that was super important for us when we were unionizing was being able to publicly talk about our salaries because and it was never it was never explicitly like, oh, you guys can't talk about how much you're making. But we had that Midwest thing of like, oh, I've been here a couple years longer. Like, I don't want to make, you know, this really talented person who's just started feel bad. and like, and when we started-

MerlinDidn't you find out they make more than you?

AlexAnd well, so, okay, wait, let me, I will talk about this. So now, after we unionized, I got the title, the official title, title of senior producer. And for the, well, for the six months that I was there, made, or my yearly salary would have been 65K, which is much much much more than no i'm fine with no yeah and that is a sum of money that uh

a few years ago i would have thought i would never see in my entire life uh until seeing other people who were usually men and usually um men had were getting much more who were in a lower position and i don't know but talking about it had this weird thing of like there was no anger or at least i hope not like it was super super weird and awkward at first and then i don't know that melts away very quickly when you are talking in person oh or well through a screen um and i i

don't know it got less weird for our bosses too even honestly it just needed to like need like pierce the surface of that to make it okay it i mean it's like i i don't know it was like um what's an i'm trying to think of a good example of like another social oh gay marriage it's like once once we ripped that band-aid off it's like sure there's still monsters out there but most people if you're in a certain area like you're you're good you're fine um and i i don't know i guess that's also why i uh i i don't know that's probably

why i'm over i overshare a lot about everything is because growing up every not just money everything was kind of in the closet um yeah everything was all the private things are the shameful things yeah my mom didn't fucking tell us she had cancer like let alone like all of the mental illnesses that ran through my family that and she lied about a vaccination what a monster oh my god yeah uh we're we're working on it um i was we're at a point where i'm like mom i you know

i've been saving up for top surgery i will literally pay you i will put this off for like five years if you just get vaccinated um and then i called her a bitch and i and it made her cry

Merlinbut i've never yes called her a bitch before in my life uh yeah yeah i might my method of persuasion was, for the love of Christ, mom, please stop letting the idiot box quit brainwashing you, which is the kind of thing you say when you're 14, which you are when you talk to your mom.

AlexYeah.

MerlinI become 14 when I talk to my mom. I become, I start swinging wildly at the person who's dearest to me in my whole life. I just start swinging because I'm just so goddamn mad and, you know, I'm perma-14.

AlexPerma-14. god i i wish she would i wish my mom was like a crazy fox news lady because then it would be or a crazy trump lady because you know he made a beautiful vaccine but no it's the oh gosh get vaccinated if you can't tell me tell me oh she is dead terrified of the side effects

just absolutely side effects of the vaccine yes um and not even because of like like yeah it is because of you know facebook and her friends sharing things but it's not like q anon stuff it's like oh god i i've uh i heard about my friend who's been she's worried of medical medical side effects yeah like i was laid up for a month and like her balls will get swollen right oh the swollen balls well my balls oh we've made everybody uncomfortable now I've made Berlin uncomfortable

I've made everybody

MerlinI'm trying to find my old business card because as it happens you and I have had the same title I gotta find this old business card I was a senior producer

Alexwhich basically means I don't think it really means anything

Merlinthat might have been what I was paid too

Alexyeah 1999 oh god oh my fuck sorry hey it's .com

Merlin.com

Alexwell and that's funny too is like as i'm like interviewing at places and or i'm not interviewing if i were to be interviewing at places the amount of money is obscene but it's like okay san francisco also we are working in an office also you don't want to work here you don't want to live here yeah yeah i don't i don't i i'm it's old it's very fun to visit san francisco or it was um i I don't want to.

MerlinAll right. I'll find a business card later. A lot of pictures of my kid and my cat.

AlexI never had a business card. I should probably have a lot of stickers. Oh, yeah.

MerlinI used to make my own. I used to be really into the... I didn't need a business card at that job, but we all got them. But, yeah, I would make my own when Moo first came along.

AlexOh, yeah. Fucking challenge. adding this to the sheet oh my god all right i'm gonna close the photos app um anyway anyway everybody thank you thank you for your money i know that a lot of you make a lot more than what we were talking about or a lot less merlin hey para pals um i if the if this conversation made you uncomfortable i'm i am sorry that you're uncomfortable but i'm not sorry that i talk about these things i've had a lot of caffeine i think good for you you seem very healthy this

week i have to say oh i mean i you know what thank you which which is funny because i do have a sinus infection but i am wearing a nose strip right now and or a breath strip oh my god oh isn't it the best during the day game changer you just you just like you can just breathe like a person yes it is like i do sound my throat's a little uh but but it's not like i god you can go and listen back to old episodes of us. And I typically, I like literally talk like this

because that is how it just was.

MerlinI know I snort a lot on these shows, but you should hear how much I'm muting. Oof.

AlexI don't.

MerlinYou should see the other guy.

AlexThanks for editing, Quinn.

MerlinSo I'd be better if I could. 50 tips and tricks, iPhone, a list. Everybody's mad. Oh, did you want to talk about, we're popping up to the Zuck?

AlexOh, but first, can you hear this?

MerlinIt's either a keyboard or a can.

AlexOh, see, oh.

MerlinYou're breaking up super bad. Am I really? Let me make sure nothing's backing up. Hazel. Twitter.

AlexNo snudgy, no dropbacks.

MerlinDropbacks. Is it doing anything? Black Blaze isn't doing anything. I don't know. Oh, well.

AlexI must be doing something.

MerlinI'm pretty sure it's on my end.

AlexUsually by...

MerlinWhat kind of router? If you could say... Can you say what kind of router you have? Are you comfortable saying that? Well, let me ask you this. The kind of router that you have... Well, I mean, one thing we lost when we stopped having stuff like the WRT54G, all the great hackable routers, used to be you'd get you a Linksys and just hack the shit out of it. You had many options for what you wanted to flash onto it. But the one thing, I have an Eero thing. And it has... Eero, I like the Eero. It offers lots of things, but sometimes it doesn't really describe from even a middling tech standpoint what it's doing.

I hate that. So I know there's a way to opt... Well, it's not a huge problem. I mean, our internet here is fast enough that it's not an issue. Now, with you, I bet it is an issue.

AlexMm-hmm. Yeah.

MerlinI mean, I'm getting generally 600 and 900 down and exactly 17 up. Thank you, John Syracuse. Yes, it is very funny. And that's just how it is. But supposedly, there's a bit you can flip with the Eero and it will optimize for, quote, streaming and gaming and video and stuff like that. But time was that you could flash your WRT54G and say, always prioritize this. I forget the tech term for it. But like this kind of thing always gets priority and these other things.

In other words, like, you know, it's sort of like, you know, how when you upload something, a smart uploader will upload all the tiny text files, like 100 tiny text files before it uploads like one giant video. It's smart about knowing what's a problem and what's not. Well, if those text files got the same amount of constant bandwidth allocated as that video file, that would be a bummer. So then you can say sometimes, you could say something like, for this protocol, I guess, or for this client, give it all the bandwidth. And we can't do that so much, I don't think, with an arrow.

AlexYou know, I might be able to do that with what I have.

MerlinThis is the worst episode of the show we've ever done.

AlexIt's either the worst episode or the best episode. I've accepted that it's either way. One goes, what is it? One goes one way, one goes the other way.

MerlinOne goes east, one goes west. So what?

AlexThe Archer AX73. Meep moop.

MerlinMeep moop, meep zorp.

AlexWhich is the, like, God, what's the brand?

MerlinYou said it's the Archer.

AlexArcher AX73, which is the Wi-Fi 6. I don't know if someone... Oh, it's one of those ones that looks like a spider. Yeah, it's very upsetting. It's behind... I try to hide it because I don't like

Merlinlooking at it. AK streaming. I'll believe it when I see it. Oh, look at this. Wow, this is cool. In theory,

Alexit would be awesome. But... It's not. Why do you say that? It's just... I've tried an Eero. I've tried whatever the Wirecutter said. I know, I know. I got a like I tried a different like the new surfboard modem but it we just have slow internet here I might have to actually go wired again if this keeps being

Merlinyou're not wired

AlexI used to be okay alright

MerlinI'm just getting flashbacks to the early days with John Roderick where it's just like dude you're doing a podcast please plug in

Alexethernet please it i never even with going up doing up and down it was such a small difference

Merlinand now that i am but it's solid that's the thing it doesn't fluctuate like wi-fi does you can get fast wi-fi but then you'll suddenly get in my experience anyway it's not so much i I mean, if I could get Wi-Fi pounding, pounding my ass super hard and consistently, and that was one number that never went down, it would be OK. It's just that Wi-Fi sometimes gets a little bit flighty. It's just that with Ethernet, whatever your shitty speed is, it's what I feel like anyway for me when it's wired, regardless of the speed, it's just more consistently whatever that speed is.

You don't get the weird dropouts.

AlexWell, I mean, while I guess I'm being Sally Socialist, there is that landlord that I have that sometimes pops by.

MerlinComrade Dougie.

AlexAnd has a Dougie.

MerlinComrade Dougie, that's funny.

AlexDougie thinks that it might be a fire hazard. So now it's like a gamble.

MerlinWhat's a fire hazard?

AlexThe Cat5 Ethernet cable going from my bedroom all the way across the living room, which is very ugly. But I tried to explain.

No, it's not.

MerlinGod, you're living in 2002.

AlexI well I well everybody go to giveusherfuckingmoney.com and you can see exactly how much I make and

Merlinfor a socialist for a socialist you sure have a lot of interest in other people's money

AlexI know

Merlinmaybe that's how it works that is how it works

Alexoh gosh goodness gracious

Merlinoh look at me I'm Alex and I want services that work I want bridges that don't collapse

Alexoh me me oh they're fucking up this infrastructure bill shoulders

Merlinoh my god Alex oh my god What has happened to you? What is happening?

AlexWhat do you... I'm sorry. I'm done. I'm going to open my LaCroix. And here's the thing. I was on Twitter this morning. That seemed bad. I was bad.

MerlinYou've got to get on that Twitter-ific, boy. Muffle, muffle, muffle.

AlexI downloaded. I like the Icon Factory people. Aren't they nice? I feel like one of them was nice to me.

MerlinYeah, they are nice. I first became acquainted with them through their literal icons. They used to have packs of icons. You could have icons on your computer.

AlexWas it crunchy? Is that what it was called?

MerlinI don't know. But they had icons. But it used to be even before.

AlexCandy bar. Yes. Sorry.

MerlinBut even before. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But even before that time was, you could just go, oh, here's a bunch of icons. You can make your computer look like Kraftwerk or whatever. And you copy paste. It's not a res edit thing, but you copy it out of the get info or whatever. Anyway. God, I'm tired.

AlexThat's what made me super thirsty for jailbreaking back in the day. was because I got to, I was like, I want my home screen to look like my doc, damn it. Anyway, sorry for interrupting.

MerlinGenie effect, they call it. You know, in our pissing and moaning about YouTube last week, I forgot one of these. I think I've mentioned this to you, but I did want to mention one channel that I should have mentioned last week because it's new to me. And I think a lot of our listeners would like it, perhaps including you. I think perhaps including John Siracusa. Have you seen or have we talked about the Computer History Archives Project?

AlexI think you mentioned it.

MerlinI feel like I must have sent this to you.

AlexYeah, because I did. I watched so much. I think it's great.

MerlinRecommend it. It's in notes. You'll find it in notes. Computer History Archives Project is a... It's meant to look sort of official. They even went with copper plate, which is fine. But I don't know if it's very official. I think it's somebody... What is it? Well, it's what I would call... You don't hear this phrase much anymore. Ephemeral videos. like education videos or like marketing videos for technology from different times. So the one I watched recently was a Sony video from 1990 on how they make Trinitron TVs.

So if you like stuff like technology connections. What? Oh, my God. Click the link. Yeah, go check it out. AT&T Bell Labs, The Far Sound, a 1973 video about satellites. 1962 video about how transistors work an IBM film from 1963 yeah I just think for folks who like this kind of stuff maybe like I do it could be kind of fun

AlexI what's oh I loved the the one about IBM's and they've got an old Apple one I'm trying I don't know if I watched it here

Merlinthis 1982 telephone exchange one is fun I think that's the English one. Anyway, check it out. I felt like the goal that we did, well, the goal that I had for last week, which I utterly did not even go near touching, is saying like, hey, here's a YouTube channel you might not have seen that you might like. And that's what I want to recommend. I have a lot, but I'm really, I'm real normie.

AlexI don't think you are. I think you do a lot of YouTube deep dives, which is why I was shocked. Well, you're not a normie. You don't know All Gas No Brakes or Channel 5, which is why I didn't even mention it. I can't tell if this is, and I discovered it and didn't like it.

MerlinAll Gas No Brakes means you're driving a car really fast.

AlexYes.

MerlinAlso, you spelled brakes, B-R-E-A-K-S, but I'm not that guy.

AlexOh, I forget because they, no, no, no, the show spells it differently. That's why, like, it's a little clever.

MerlinThen it's not about cars. It's about braking things.

AlexIt's not. No, it's about, oh, gosh.

MerlinAll Gas No Brakes.

AlexI don't even, I assume, I made the incorrect assumption.

MerlinAlex, why would you assume that this is a bit? I know, I know. I have no idea what the fuck you're talking about. I know, I know. You get a different internet than I do. When you accidentally paste whatever's in your clipboard, it's always a monstrosity.

AlexIt's not.

MerlinYou look at terrible shit on the internet all day long, and then you're the one who feel bad about yourself? You feel bad about yourself?

AlexI have plenty, listen, I have plenty of shame not related to the internet.

MerlinDon't duck any of that. Quinn, don't duck that. I want people to hear us talking. Stop ducking so much.

Alexwe need to be heard talking over each other over all right over over um yeah i really want you to get into or at least try andrew callahan stuff and i'm working on a playlist but i don't know who is andrew callahan he is the host of channel five yes and okay yeah i oh gosh i'm why is this

Merlinso difficult just say go watch to go find one video of this that you like and send it to me Oh, is this the Vice? No, not Vice. No, what is this? He was featured

Alexon Vice a while back.

MerlinOkay. All Gas, No Brakes. Oh, All Gas, No Brakes, Documenting America's Underbelly is what this one's called. Okay.

AlexYeah, but then he talked about his salary and then they were like, and then he lost. And then Tim and Eric offered him a deal and now he's doing a show called Channel 5. I'll put all of this in notes. People either know exactly what I'm talking about or not

Merlinit all i have i've developed uh as you say praxis uh when i want to recommend something to someone my habit used to be to say just say something as dumb as like oh uh you know you know it's really good cooking videos or like then you go oh no you know it's really good is kenji lopez alt or then you go like specifically like oh here's kenji lopez alt's channel my practice nowadays is to do the cognitive load where i can and to say and to do that thing that i do and i don't mean the movie with tom hanks the thing that i do i do this is i will say hey check out this kenji lopez

alt video where he shows you how to boil eggs because on the one hand he's basically saying boil water and then put eggs in but you also learn a lot about why he does that so very adam adam neely kind of thing is like i'm not going to just send you the the channel because then what you're going to go look at the most recent video or you're not going to know where to start if i send you an actual video that i think you in particular would like then you know how to find where the channel is. I think that's the handy thing. It doesn't even need to be, unless you think it needs to be a playlist.

AlexOh, we should go back to

Merlinour happy place. I slowly, slowly add things to my happy place list. It's got to be pretty good to make it out of my happy place list.

AlexYeah, I, that's kind of like my sacred space.

MerlinI added the time celebrities met their celebrity crush, which I admit is very normie, but I think it's also very sweet. Birdhouse in Your Soul, I recently added when they might be giants were on the tonight show uh very good live version of video killed the radio star or the buggles oh undercover office potty remember that on snl undercover office potty no we're gonna be watching that in the after show and i will put this entire list into show notes did you want to talk and as long as you're wallowing and sad did you want to talk

about mark zuckerberg you sent me a link about something oh did i you told me he's poor now

AlexHe is poorer than Bill Gates. This is a big money episode. When Facebook was down yesterday, right, for like six hours or something?

MerlinA couple days ago, all the Facebook, somebody, I was trying to explain to my wife because I didn't really understand it, but supposedly somebody goofed at Facebook and hit a button that told the world their DNS's just didn't exist anymore or something, which ordinarily, if I understand correctly, that would be a bummer that you can fix pretty quickly most places. but they run all of Facebook and Facebook things through Facebook. So they kind of unintentionally like, I don't even want to say lock their keys in the car. I think they exploded their keys because they had to send somebody to a

physical data center to get around, like have an actual physical key to like restart a server. Right.

AlexOh, so you mean they have a private and secure enclave? I don't, I'm, it's fine. It's fine. I'm sorry. I was listening.

MerlinBut people were all upset because, and boo on you for making fun of that because, you know, they're starving African children that can't use WhatsApp now. Had you thought about that? Had you thought about that? The indigenous peoples? Had you thought about that?

AlexOh, gosh. I don't know what there is to say other than.

MerlinIt's a big deal. And it's all anybody talked about for like half a day.

AlexWhich I thought was interesting because I didn't know about it until you mentioned something to me. And I'm like, what? And I was not on Twitter.

MerlinOh, only to send you exactly the kind of shitty tweet that I'd like to send you of the, hey, you guys, had you thought about the indigenous peoples?

AlexYeah.

MerlinYou can say what you want about Facebook, but that's how a lot of starving African children get their Bitcoin.

AlexIt was an interesting, very like Bo Burnham backlash to the backlash. And just there were so many main characters that like, God, Facebook is an ensemble cast at this point. And I mean.

MerlinInstead of just the main character.

AlexYeah. Yeah. It's an ensemble.

MerlinMy kid said that to me the other day. She actually said Facebook's the main character on Twitter today. How did you learn that? Never mind.

AlexOh, God. But I just think it's remarkable. What is it?

MerlinIt very much shows you how extremely stable and sensible our entire economic system is.

AlexYeah, totally, totally fine.

MerlinIt's definitely very normal.

AlexUh-huh.

MerlinRead what you sent me. You sent it to me. I didn't know why. You put something inscrutable in the doc. Please read if you'd like to. Oh, God, there's Danny DeVito all oiled up. Yeah. Thank you for that in particular.

AlexThat's such a good tweet.

MerlinYou sent me an Apple News link, which we will talk about. And I'm going to Apple News on my Mac.

AlexOh, this should be fun.

MerlinAre you going to do this reading series or am I? No, you can't know my current location. Ugh. Mark Zuckerberg. This is in Entrepreneur Magazine.

AlexThat's also funny that there's an Entrepreneur Magazine.

MerlinI watch this. I'm going to be Groover now. This is Alto Nivelle reporting for Entrepreneur. Mark Zuckerberg loses $7 billion after WhatsApp, Facebook, and Instagram crash. I bet there's at least two misleading things about that headline. Did he lose it? Will he never get it back? Is it gone? And did they crash? Did they crash or did the server go down? Anyway.

AlexI mean, it's Entrepreneur Magazine, so.

MerlinEntrepreneur. In just a few hours, Mark Zuckerberg's personal wealth was reduced by nearly $7 billion. That's a lot of money.

AlexI think I'll agree.

MerlinI don't like talking about money, but even I can see that. That's a lot of money. The reason? Oh, God. Does anybody write anymore? The worldwide fall. I just fucking hate the way people pretend to write nowadays. That's why I said it.

AlexI knew it would be triggering.

MerlinIt's like a fourth order impression of a shitty writer. Broke their silence. In just a few hours, Mark Zuckerberg's personal wealth was reduced by nearly $7 billion. The reason? The worldwide fall of Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp, which even caused a position in the list of the richest people in the world to drop. Was this written by a bot?

AlexI mean, it was that or like a 12-year-old who's definitely making more than $70,000 a year.

MerlinShares of the social media – so social media, bold. Shares of the social media, single quotes, giant, unquote, plummeted about 5%, adding to a 15% drop since mid-September. According to Bloomberg Billionaires Index, this has cost Zuckerberg the fifth position among billionaires. Wow.

AlexMm-hmm. Yeah. Think about that. Think about that.

MerlinDo you read Entrepreneur a lot or do you just read Apple News a lot?

AlexI don't read Apple News a lot. I turned off focus mode I thought I deleted it from everything I thought that I turned off all notifications for anything Apple related but nope it really needed to let me know that entrepreneur magazine wanted to tell me now that he stands with only 120.9 billion and six plays behind Bill Gates um i really really oh my god it's gates space period oh my even i'm upset now oh this is worse

Merlinthan syracusa every single one of these sentences which i'm guessing got some weird apple scraper thing set to it i'll bet you the bold i bet you the bold are all internal links that's what i'm i'm opening in safari and that's what's screwing up the spacing i bet is their weird scraper so everything that was bold, I bet, is a link, an internal link to another entrepreneur article. Because that's super helpful. You know what's upsetting?

AlexNope. Nope, nope, nope. No? Nope. Unless I'm...

MerlinAre you looking at it on the internet? Yeah.

AlexYeah. Or here. Let me open...

MerlinOkay. There we go. Firefox.

AlexI don't think that has any of my ad blocky things.

MerlinLoses. Dollar sign space seven space billion. Mm-hmm. Okay.

AlexI thought... I wanted it to just be a formatting error or something oh page not found what did i break um oh nope nope this is an amp

Merlinis it amp no no that's my next cream dream is something that turns off amp forever and just

Alexshoots it right into the sun oh there's a um ios extension for no yeah they've been promising for

Merlinlike two years they're gonna turn this bullshit off but if you try and do it with your with all your shield's on. So what I'm describing here is like to get featured in Google stuff, I think you generally need, you get a much better chance of being on say Google News if you're doing the full on AMP bullshit. And so you go to a Google page when you click on something in Google News, which is maddening. But then there's a little thing up at the top that's almost impossible to click on. It says, okay, just give me the actual real thing. But I've discovered that for myself

with the gates I have up right now, it sometimes won't go through or it won't go through for like a minute oh wow because you know i'm always fighting back i'm always fighting the fighting the power what over amped oh and it's oh the devil you say i'm gonna grab this you should listen to the last episode of the podcast i do back to work because i talked about some of my

Alexfavorite extensions oh let me or i could just go to the show notes and which is okay like no no no I feel I feel I have been a time constrained. So I've fallen into that trap where I feel guilty about not listening to friends podcasts.

MerlinIt was just silly.

AlexIt shouldn't be.

MerlinNo, no. I feel that way, too. I'm afraid I'm going to run into them somewhere on the Internet and they're going to find out.

AlexJason Snell has a new show and I didn't know that.

MerlinYeah.

AlexSounds good.

MerlinSo Noir, which I think is right up your alley. Dark Mode.

AlexOh, I've already have that installed and I have it set.

MerlinI talked about Downey. I talked about Super Agent.

AlexWait, is Downey on iOS?

MerlinNo.

AlexThat's not possible.

MerlinNo, I have a whole grid. Anyways, there's some good ones. Super Agent. I'm very interested in the future of Super Agent. Automatically avoid the pop-up and automatically say, these are the only cookies that all accept, which in my case is not.

AlexOh, where? Oh, is I'm? Oh, oh, oh.

MerlinSo click on that in the show notes and you'll see. and i'm not entirely sure that or when it's working but um i'm gonna keep running it because

Alexit makes me happy super agent that's the problem with me and all of my various tracker blocking is it's kind of a whack-a-mole of trying to figure out which is doing what i can't believe

Merlinhow much shit just won't even work if you've got content blockers on i mean i'm assuming that it's trying i bet a lot of the times it's getting confused about what i would call and i could be saying this wrong but like frames or remote css includes or something but there's something that is a gating factor where it goes nope nope nope can't show you that and so like there's whole pages that won't load until i turn off content blockers

Alexso i'm also trying magic glass that's my other one i'm trying magic glass i still got adblock

Merlinpro running because you know i'm a belt and belt guy this is really boring let's talk about something fun i'm so tired i actually slept well last night like trawling trauma um oh yeah oh shit fuck we got trauma okay yeah right here in river city okay let me go look at

AlexI got five hours and 20 minutes of sleep.

MerlinWell, I got a re-up of my preferred edible because I think the other edible was giving me fitful sleep is the thing I think.

AlexI've had that.

MerlinAnd that's why we're going to talk about that on the after show. I was looking for, wait, what am I doing on my phone? What am I doing? I'm looking for something you were talking about.

AlexI sent you over and. Oh, auto sleep. I was going to go to auto sleep.

MerlinNine hours and 12 minutes from, see, sometimes it gets a little wrong. I went to bed around a little before 1230. And then this is, as I've told you, I've been adapting to the scheduling changes. This is one of my sleep in a little bit days. And so I slept till 930. My lady friend was already, at that point, of course, it was already her office. And she was doing one of her innumerable meetings. But I did good. I still want to bring down that BPM, 80 BPM, which is still way higher than I'd like. Three hours and 19 of deep and 734 of quality.

AlexOh, damn.

MerlinThat's pretty good. Now, my wife, man, she gets way less of all the things. Partly because I heard she sleeps with a guy who snores.

AlexWell, and since she's a runner, does she have like 40 BPM while she sleeps? Oh.

MerlinYeah. I think her BPM is like 60 or something.

AlexThat's, oh my God.

MerlinMine, like, let's go look just for fun. Right this very second. Let's see. the very latest one in Apple Health. I am getting an insane bug. Oh, I think I might have been fixed with the new iOS. Great, great, great. Okay, let's go look. Blood oxygen as of 723, 98%. That's disco. 12.47 p.m., which is 10 minutes ago, 87 BPM. Sitting at my desk recording a podcast, 87.

AlexI mean, you say that's bad, except mine is... Well, mine has gone up quite a bit lately, but that's because I'm not thinking about pleasant things most of the time. So I'm pretty much...

MerlinThinking about money, that's your problem.

AlexNo, no. I am, you know, when you're in a, like, stressful group therapy session for a couple hours, I'm basically straight 90.

MerlinDoes it ever get awkward? Does it, like, without speaking out of school, like, are there ever times, like, are there certain people where you're, like, you find yourself, like, dreading their thing because it makes you feel uncomfortable?

AlexOnly one. I mean, in theory, it's, you know, anonymous, but in theory... someone who uh was a adamant anti-vaxxer and then slowly we realized that they were a q person and oh alex no you gotta spend hours a day with a q person no well then um the well the other part of the even though this a lot of the um a lot of it's remote most folks are like it's a chicago

program so we have most mostly the same like opinions um and i well and you're not supposed to even like bring those anyway but when there's somebody interrupting everybody and saying well actually you can't trust the cdc well actually that even if you vote it's not gonna it doesn't matter like but uh yeah but but uh that person is gone now so um i know what you are saying though and I've definitely been in those situations in the past,

but thank you for your fucking money, everybody. Like, this is a very specialized group, so we're pretty similar in-

MerlinHour and 15 minutes?

AlexOh, good Lord.

MerlinOh, Jesus. Oh, boy. Challenge. We're going to talk about pseudotrauma.

AlexNo! There's no such thing as pseudotrauma. It's like being-

MerlinI hope there's no such thing as a chicken.

AlexOh, it's, I've got a pseudo-COVID.

MerlinOh, I see you're pseudo-pregnant. Well, a pseudo-code, I've heard of that. And then the pseudo, you know, make me a sandwich.

AlexSo... Been pseudo, not gaslit, pseudo-lit.

MerlinYou introduced me to the work of a guy in Dutch who put out a book in 2014 called The Body Tells... Wait, The Body Keeps the Score. and you were acquainted with him through a visit with friend of the show Ezra Klein and this is a doctor, a psychiatrist who has had a long history of interest with a topic that's, you know, I think people are talking about it now but they weren't talking about it a long time ago, which is trauma. Trauma.

AlexAnd it started with PTSD, like what the, I mean, is it a stereotype if it's correct?

MerlinHe got to veterans, but it started, I think, before that. It was with veterans where we had that idea of shell shock. And then PTSD is, like I say, one reason I really like this book is I think the guy's a very lucid and clear writer. You know, like when you watch a fight scene in a movie, like, you know, it's a good fight scene if you can always tell where everybody is. Yes. That's true in any movie scene. But with this guy, you always know where you are. I think he's very good. It's slightly personal, but it's also, I don't know, I like the way this fellow writes. And he just learned over time that he was seeing patterns of things that were not considered sort of canonical medical things.

That there was no even anomalous explanation for in people who seemed, what, healthy neurotypical? What do you say? But like that – anyway, what he basically eventually came up with, and as I understand it – you know more about this than I do. So I'm going to stop talking after this is that he came to realize that there are the trauma has an impact on us. That's way more deep and real than a lot of us would like to know or believe that there are actual things that happen with the way your brain sort of operates that will have an impact on your behavior for years after the trauma.

And so a lot of what he talks about it. Yes, trauma. Like, God, that horrible story of the guy in Vietnam. like god that's so difficult to listen to that we like basically lost his squad yeah that was rough and like and then what he did after that but the but the yeah i was just really intrigued by this idea that because i wondered if i have something like ptsd in the past it would certainly help to explain a lot of strange things about my cognition and behavior but he started to realize that the

The body is keeping the score that like and then, you know, the part that I've spent less time on is the novel ways that he thinks you can treat that, whether that's yoga or dancing or whatever it is. But so, yeah, that's a good setup for what the challenge was. Read the first chapter of his book.

Alexyeah um the i mean reading this book i it may not surprise you that it if you have any sort of trauma it'll probably not trigger you but like it hits you real fast of like oh oh yeah that's a

Merlinthing yeah i definitely had a couple times just listening to the podcast where i went oh because one of the things he kept describing are these outbursts of uh not even anger but people with what we would later come to call PTSD, who seem like the nicest person in the world, suddenly have these irrationally over-the-top,

like they have like this rage, right, out of nowhere. And, you know, like why is that? Why is that happening? You know, they haven't had like physical damage to their brain. Like why are they acting so crazy? I know we don't say crazy. And not because I have a lot of rages, but I do feel like in my life there are things where, the way I described it to you a long time ago was that in the context of what I feel, what I experience as anxiety, is that things that other people, I'm sorry, I'm using experience as a verb, things that other people experience

and it's NBD affect me much more deeply and maybe more importantly for a much longer period of time. And I'm not talking about playing a conversation in my head over and over. I'm talking about like I can re-experience the injury of something that other people would consider really trivial and that generates anxiety. It generates fear and it generates avoidant behavior for sure. So that was my moment. I just listened to the podcast where I was like, oh, that's I sometimes behave very strangely about something that's not happening right now.

Why is that?

AlexI don't want to. It's not that I don't want to say too much because I it's not shame. It's more of I don't want to make folks uncomfortable in that it will upset anybody because, you know, sometimes you're just not in the mood for that.

MerlinBut I think it's totally reasonable to say that. Yeah. You should say what you want to say about that right now, because we should warn people off if this is the kind of thing they're not ready for or not into.

AlexYeah, well, let's not super get into that now. But I will say like, when I had, you know, the whole nervous breakdown go to brain school time, I thought it was mostly, okay, we are going to readjust all of my bipolar meds and gonna get this sorted out.

MerlinSort of like when Comcast came to my house that one time after years of just adding new coax that weakened the signal. I told you this story. The woman who came out, the one helpful ex-woman. I've had others. I've had many. But this one lady, she's a veteran. She came out and she was like, yeah, I figured it out. And she pointed to this pile of coax. And I think this analogy works because for years people would come out and there was an XY problem. They would come out and try to fix this one problem. And it almost always required the addition of more coaxial cable without, oh, God, this is another term, the Chesterton fence.

We should talk about this, too. People didn't really take the time to figure out why that extra coax was there, and it ended up weakening the signal. So it wasn't until somebody came out to fix the weak signal that she did what I think you're talking about here, which is, wait a minute. Rather than just doing the easy thing, which is me pulling out my crimper and making another 35 feet of coax, Why don't we start by trying to figure out if there's any of this coax that is not only maybe not helping, but might be harming? Can we experiment with removing? Is that kind of close?

Like to get a better signal, you need to figure out what coax you really need up there.

AlexAnd part of this program, like I was right in that, like all my meds needed to be adjusted. I needed to go on a new antipsychotic and everything was. So now I don't have most of my hallucinations are gone. And so I kept but I kept talking to my doctor. That's great.

MerlinWell. Isn't that good? But the side effects to what makes them go away?

AlexOh, I mean, well, that's the thing. For such a long time, I've always had hallucinations, but I've always known that they are hallucinations.

Merlinhallucinations and that they are it doesn't make hallucinations go away but you are aware that it's

Alexa hallucination right right but um the majority of the time being on medications they they didn't most most of them did not uh bother me like it was like furniture talking to one another um and i i had a lovely fake friend called um lampy and fan two friends lampy and fanny they would always talk

Merlinto each other in my very first apartment that's so cute and horrifying it's it was adorable yeah well well that's the thing though did they have cute voices or what did they have like donnie

Alexdarko voices oh they had cute voices unless they were fighting um oh you don't want to be in that

Merlinroom lampy's getting a little hot I need to change.

Alexand that was i think we may have talked about this before but it was like one of those things especially like i was on um on all of my i i was like very balanced high functioning it was it was all good and uh there and so now like we're uh so i'm getting you know um current day 2021 alex um one nice thing about yeah you might be wondering um but because that

this is my uh basically going to brain school and working on my brain health is my main job uh it became like all of my hallucinations started to disappear except for one and my doctor was like

MerlinThe one in the kitchen?

AlexYeah. And my doctor was like, well, why is that, you think? And so then I would, upon like talking about it, she was like, that's not normal. What happened to you? Not normal. Not normal.

MerlinI'm sorry, that the hallucination was not normal or what you experienced in the hospital?

AlexUh, no, that, that, um, the, the trauma, I, I did not know that what I experienced was traumatic or, or as traumatic as I thought it was because you don't know something's not normal until someone tells you.

MerlinNo.

AlexUsually.

MerlinIt doesn't take that much resistance to like not even want to look at it, let alone really like tear it apart and like, God, the last thing you want to do is reopen that semi-closed wound, right?

AlexYeah, well, that's what we're doing now. And that's, I mean, it's, I know it sounds like a cute Instagram infographic, but it's true that like progress, whatever sort of progress is typically not linear, especially when we're working on our brains, whether it be like writing or, you know.

MerlinWho said that? Was that Michael Hobbs? No, who said that? Somebody smart said that.

AlexI think it's been around for like I've I don't know. It's been around for a long time. We'll figure out. Maybe maybe it was Martin Luther King. Who's to say?

MerlinOh, yeah.

AlexBenjamin Franklin. But that part of why I love this book is that it emphasizes. Oh, yes. Here are the like, I guess, like, yeah, the the the soldier, the assault victim, like all of these things. the typical types that we like usually associate with trauma but well actually turns out there are way more things that are traumatic and i'm not talking about like the tiktok like i have a trauma response to seeing i i don't know i don't want to like um well it's like you know this is a joke

Merlinit's not a joke that i said for a long time um and i've phrased this in different ways depending on how humorous I wanted to be about it or appear. But like we don't, I think a really ugly way to put it is nobody gets to choose what they want to fuck. So like, and again, to paraphrase, equest moments snap together like magnets. It's sometimes difficult to admit what it is that you find yourself attracted to, especially sexually maybe. And it's very shameful, perhaps.

Maybe that's shame that comes out of your community or something about your upbringing, but like that's that's that talk about shame and privacy like and it's like the thing is though how can i put this like like there was a time in my life where i thought ladies in fancy underwear was very attractive because i was a real normie like zz top video kind of guy but like it doesn't mean that i was incapable of finding love unless underwear was involved and not that i'm not shaming that at all all i'm trying to say is there's a difference in degree there's a difference in

agree, like, is this a load-bearing fetish title, or is this something that's just kind of fun on my birthday, right? Because if you discover that, like, then that leads to, again, like, a million Hollywood stories about the gay who dies, you know, in the third reel, the Salminio kind of shit, or, like, the alfalfa from Our Gang stuff. Like, just these tragic stories of people or, you know, the guy from Steptoe and Son, the grandfather in A Hard Day's Night. These are all people,

Well, sometimes in America, but in England, it was illegal to be gay and to be cottaging and caught as the star of a TV show was really bad news.

AlexThey killed the inventor of the computer.

MerlinOh, that's now that's upsetting with a cumble ditch bummer batch. But but what I'm trying to say is that, OK, well, I think I feel like I hope I didn't say anything hurtful there because I sure didn't mean it because I got things I like. believe me but um i guess what i'm saying is that if a thing where like you could take it back to under let's say your fetish is butts now what does that mean well that means maybe just you like looking at butts or you like touching butts or maybe you like kind of kind of laying your

equipment into that area or maybe you like fully spelunking into that area or maybe you want to cut them off and hang them up in your clown dungeon. Just saying butts is difficult because everybody likes a butt. Mostly if it's a clean, but you're going to like the butt just to look at maybe in pants. Right. But if you start to feel like there's, this has become a thing in your life where like you wonder to yourself, will I ever be able to, for myself, find happiness in a relationship until I understand this butt issue,

let alone like what's going to happen when the person I do love, I'm deliberately trying to say something kind of comical here. But if, for example, you've never been comfortable talking about a time you're pretty sure you got molested or you've never been – I hope – sorry, that's a triggering thing. But you know what I mean? If you've gotten to where like, oh, you slough it off or you think like, oh, you know, I really had trouble with authority because of this reason I'm willing to accept rather than the fact that the people in my life who were – this is such a huge deal in this guy's book.

There are people out there who are supposed to protect me and that they didn't protect me. But I love that person or I need that person. Maybe their love, maybe their protection. I'll defend that person. I was talking to Syracuse. We're asking each other which cults we've ever been in in life. And we're talking about that NXIVM documentary. And that woman, remember the really attractive slender blonde woman with the eating disorder? And it's like she was a monster, but she was also a victim of a monster. Where she was like defending that guy to the end.

It's like, well, what makes that happen? Well, from the outside, it's like I said to Syracuse, nobody ever feels like they've been in a cult. It's only other people who are in cults. What I'm trying to say is like when you start having this persistent thing that is so shameful and dangerous and potentially hurtful that it's difficult to even think about it, is it surprising that we have consequences of that for years? If you can't handle your own intimate relationship with yourself and your past, and a lot of us can't, what's that foretell for your future? Are you ever going to be emotionally available?

Are you ever going to be living anywhere but the past or the future? And that's what I think what he's trying to say is we want to get people to the point where they can feel alive again. And like that has to be treated in a way where like just because you have a different feeling about butts from this other person doesn't mean that you have to be a monster forever. I don't know. What do you think?

AlexI'm just thinking of a butts now, but.

MerlinButts are funny, you know. Butts.

AlexOh, I, well, to make this, I think, more comical. Well, I have an unironic deep respect for furries because that is a group of folks who do not, or at least the ones that I've met.

MerlinYou've got to really go out on a limb just to find other people that like your special thing. It can really be a vulnerable experience.

AlexYeah, yeah, yeah.

MerlinBut you have to allow yourself to be vulnerable. If there's a thing out there, I mean, again, just think about how many people feel total shame for things that any of us would look at and go, God, that's really normal. That's actually kind of boring. Your fetish is breasts. Guess what, bud? That's not a fetish. I mean, again, unless it's in a clown's basement with some tasteful music. But, you know.

AlexOh, man.

MerlinI get that. I get that. I've looked down my nose and laughed at that and on the geek hierarchy or whatever.

AlexBut what's awesome, at least, is that they don't care. Or at least the people I've talked to where I'm like another thing with like I don't think that I have a kink. I kind of wish I did. So that'd be like another thing to define myself instead of being the sad trans one.

Merlinunfortunately they have not picked that up after the pilot hbo passed

AlexI think that's I that could be the end do you think there's do we have more? I don't know if I have more I think we covered the good

MerlinI'm trying to, given that I am so bad at giving myself advice, and I'm generally reluctant to give other people advice, I would say if you're up to it, at least check out the podcast. You can always, you know, look at the waveform and skip over a lot of the Klein.

Does Klein mean little? Like Kleiner? Ezra Klein?

AlexI'm afraid of saying something anti-Semitic. I don't know.

MerlinNot all German people are Jewish, Alex.

AlexWait, no, no, no.

MerlinThat's funny.

AlexKlein, Klein. Ezra.

MerlinOh, I just, I would say, all I can say is, and this is very emotional, which is a very emotional response to this. You know, like a lot of things in my life, it might start as something starts as an intellectual, like, tickle. Like, it turns out sort of like, hmm, isn't that interesting? But then there are things in life that come along. And if you get past that interesting turns out thing, you go like, oh, this actually has a lot to do with things I didn't have a name for or emotions I did not have a box for. And I can't tell you what that box looks like for your particular journey, but I would say check out – this will be in the show notes – check out the podcast with Ezra Klein.

We haven't said this guy's name because he's Dutch and I don't want to say it wrong. But he's got like a – he's from somewhere in Northern Europe. I would say check it out because I'm intrigued by the perspicacity of his insights into what trauma is or can be very much. And I'm also, given I haven't gotten very far in the book, I'm also intrigued with where he goes with stuff like these sort of physical, nonverbal responses. What's the eye thing? N-M-R-A or something?

AlexE-M-D-R.

MerlinE-M-D-R, which sounds fascinating.

AlexIt's super cool. It doesn't work for everybody.

MerlinAnd it sounds like it works. Like you move your eyes and you're thinking about a thing, but you're not talking about it.

AlexWell, and there's different versions of it. I got to check this stuff out. Yeah, yeah.

MerlinOh, is this like the girl from Mrs. Doubtfire with the tapping for anxiety?

AlexOh, I don't know.

MerlinSorry. Not Mara Tierney. She's from Rooz Radio. The little girl who's on the internet now.

AlexMara Wilson, yes. She has a lot of opinions.

MerlinShe introduced me via the internet to this anxiety tapping thing. Have you ever been trained in that?

AlexNo, I don't think so.

MerlinIt's a thing though, right? It's supposedly a thing. it's a specific sequence of taps mostly on your head and face and if you do this tapping in a

Alexcertain order yes i've heard of that no this is this is different this is something this is with your eyes someone does uh or like instead of your eyes darting back and forth like i i've i've had one where um like a doctor taps like your your knees and it's it's like whatever your body will respond to the most. Kind of like, I don't know. It's hard to make a comparison because...

MerlinSort of like the girl in Scott Pilgrim in the back of her knee.

AlexWhy can't I remember this movie? I've seen 400 million times.

MerlinOh, it's Anne Veal. The woman who played Anne Veal is also... Remember we discovered that it's not ex-boyfriends. It's exes. Roxy, I think her name is. Roxy with the eye makeup.

AlexYeah, not an egg. Oh, that's such a good movie.

MerlinHer? anyway uh funny laughs i would say if you're up for it check this out um um you could also do what i always do now if you like which is that before you ever buy a book get the kindle sample if you don't read the kindle sample why would you buy the book you can get the kindle sample check it out but i think and it's very well written i thought it gets my okie dokie for well-written I'm not a scientist. I'm not a scientician.

AlexActually, asterisk. I think the sample is not as it's not representative of doesn't get into this stuff.

MerlinIt's got it's well written, good backstory on the kind of it's not a bust a gut thing, but he's also talking about like kind of what he's been through and trying to convince other people that this is even a thing.

AlexRight. Like if you're reading this and you're like, well, duh, like I know this. This was 2014 and also written for a really mainstream audience. And there is like, God, yeah, you hear the Vietnam stuff and like the assault stuff.

MerlinThe Vietnam story is. And also just the fact that he keeps, I think, in a way that might be useful. I don't want to be triggering here, but there's a couple kinds of things often involving family members that cause a lot of trauma in our life. Yes. And that has happened, and he just keeps reminding us in probably a useful way that those things that happen in families have happened to a lot more people than we've previously known. Should it be surprising that there's a lot of trauma? Because guess what? Nobody's even going to talk to you.

Nobody's going to let you talk. It is not okay to talk about that. Oh, goddammit, Alex. We left out the most interesting part. Tell them the interesting part about the self-protection to stay part of the group.

Alexuh what uh what hmm i i'm having a neurological event he has he's uh i guess i don't know if

Merlindiscovered is the right word for it but he talks about like okay so i'm just gonna say this like you know there's a lot of times where you're like you know there's like i can tell you can tell something crazy is going on with somebody's family and you know anyway let's say there's there's something some monkey business happening in the family i'm not trying to avoid i just don't want to hurt anybody's feelings or be hurtful but like sometimes grown-ups do terrible stuff to kids and for years and years and years and really up through today almost everywhere it's like it's kind of tacitly if something happened which we don't believe happened because he's a good man

and a minister or whatever everybody's always trying to protect the uh integrity of the group so that's not it doesn't just go for nexium cult leader guys but like if you've got things where you want to cast an aspersion about your dad's older brother, I mean, there are not that many times or environments in which that has been welcome, let alone taken seriously, right? And so I think what he's saying, though, is that there's a reason that we ourselves, the joke here

is we keep saying, I keep saying, you know, pseudo traumas, because I'm not willing to call this a trauma. Why is that? It's a form of self-protection. Because your mind, something in your mind is trying to convince you that this didn't happen or was not a big deal. And why is that? Well, it helps to you to survive and get on with your life in this really kind of blunt, well, really blunt way. But the other thing is, and this to me was the part I thought you had said you thought was fascinating too, was that like, it's an impulse from real deep inside this middle

part of our brain, or I guess it could be your amygdala, but it's somewhere in your limbic system that's also you've got this old brain and this younger brain. And one thing the old brain is trying to do is to help you to learn and make associations. And one problem is that we also want to stay part of the tribe.

AlexOh, yeah.

MerlinAnd so your mind is trying to give you plausible deniability to really believe yourself that nothing bad actually happened. You must have been confused. It wasn't what it seemed. Why would that happen? Why would this person do that? They could have any girl they wanted, right? That kind of stuff. And you're like, well, no. But like once you crack open that particular magnum of pain, there's so much inside of there to go. And that's when you start discovering, wow, it's not just the Jeffrey Epstein's in the world. There's some real bad dudes out there. It's just my brain knew that if I wanted to, I don't think it's callow to say, I want to keep my job.

I want to keep my family. I want to keep these relationships. And your mind will do the best that it can, even in the most toxic and debilitating ways, to keep you part of the tribe and not make you seem like an outcast because you're the one who can't get along. Fair?

AlexOh, yeah. Absolutely. And I want to make sure that we also mention that this isn't like a recovered memory type of thing. It's not like Michelle remembers or some like satanic panic. Like it's it's like I always quote quote new like something bad happened to me in the hospital sort of kind of. But it's like, ah, no. But it's not until. But look at you.

MerlinWhy are you in there? Why would you be trusted?

AlexExactly. Exactly. It's like, well, and I think that this book also goes into the nuances of that and doesn't also goes into the nuances of there's not really a blunt instrument that you can use to treat all of this. It's like trauma is almost a and he goes into this a little bit towards the end.

MerlinYeah, it's just not there's not like a single microwave oven that will cook all of your pain the same way.

AlexRight. It would be like saying there's one type of there's one way to treat anxiety. And for a really long time, that's how we treated like PTSD and trauma was like, all right, we just talked about this and here's a tranquilizer.

MerlinYeah. Or like, how do we distract you? How do we distract you rather than getting you to like focus on what this thing that happened was like, oh, instead, like, what if we like, oh, hey, squirrel, look over there.

AlexAnd the other unfortunate but true thing is that it can also be as horrifying as it is, even if you were like totally like neurotypical, nothing like a totally fine, stable chemical. Not that, you know, not.

MerlinIf Alex were comfortable saying it, the word we'd be using that we're not going to use is normal.

AlexIf you're if you're what we used to call normal. basically if you're a normie and you watch regular things on YouTube some things can happen to you that

MerlinI've seen this white guy that talks about music he's really cool

Alexnow that he has his nice haircuts again

Merlinoh man cut me off a slice of that guy

Alexyeah he's very good at fingering

Merlintake care of yourself everybody and if it's not too painful just go have a poke around you can skip the Ezra Klein parts that's entirely on you

AlexOh, God. Put strip silence on in 30 seconds. 30 seconds. 30 seconds. 30 seconds.

MerlinDoes IZotope make a strip climb?

AlexMe. And then you get it.

Show notes

Transcript

259. Lampy & Fanny

Show notes

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