289. Defective by Design

AlexThis is Do By Friday, a weekly challenge podcast with Alex Cox and Merlin Mann. This week's challenge, quantify yourself.

MerlinRabbit, rabbit.

AlexRabbit, rabbit, rabbit, rabbit.

MerlinRabbit, rabbit, rabbit. How are you? Happy June to you. Happy June. I'm so excited to hear your voice, murder man. Why? Why do you say lies? Lies.

Lies.

AlexYou're slandering me. I am not lying.

MerlinWe should sue each other in court for six weeks.

AlexOh, God. No.

MerlinDid you see the jury? The jury's back.

AlexOh, yeah. I had no, just I never thought that a woman could win in court. he suggested Amber Heard

Merlinchange sides

Alexoh god what I don't know no yeah people

Merlinshe's in ADAB assigned defendant at birth Alex can I take my cut at a content warning and you can tell me this is a jokes have left the room I'm gonna try this and you tell me if I got it even close to right I wrote this last night after I had a lot of drinks at a concert but you tell me if this sounds okay all right

AlexAll right.

MerlinOkay, this is a, I'm calling this a content warning, and we're going to workshop this. This episode contains discussions of using personal quantification to affect physical, mental, and emotional change. It includes topics like self-measurement, calorie counting, and dieting. If you prefer to avoid these kinds of topics or you're just not in the right place to listen in today, you might want to skip this one. That's the warning. How do you feel about that?

AlexI feel good about that.

MerlinAnything else to add? or subtract or change my wording?

AlexI would say just you're not in trouble. Like typically, you know.

MerlinWho's not in trouble?

AlexNo, the listener. In fact, if they're.

MerlinNo, the listener's not in trouble. But listening to, well, when I was an ardent listener of the Maintenance Face Show, I didn't know the calorie counting thing. We've discussed this. I did not know that was a thing. Now I know that that's a thing. And I want to be, this entire fucking episode is the kind of thing that sounds like it might make Audrey, Aubrey, Audrey, Aubrey, Audrey.

AlexI am not sure.

MerlinKetzer. Your fat friend might, you know, throw a chair at you or something, but being sort of insensitive to. And now that I know that, I want to be less of a dick about it, but that is kind of what we're going to talk about. So if measuring your body stuff freaks you out, understandably, it's okay to bounce. That's all. Good?

AlexYes.

MerlinWe have many other episodes.

AlexSee you next week. Bye.

MerlinWell, there are many other episodes that you might find offensive within normal parameters. Okay, jokes are allowed back in. Come in, guys. All right, we're back.

AlexWe're back. Oh, man.

MerlinButts and pussies and dicks and things. Met a nice family. We were in the parking garage near the venue where we were off to see Richard Montgomery. And we met this wonderful family. Oh, my God, I love them so much. This great family from Davis. And we had a really nice visit with them and shared an elevator ride and then walked to the venue and waited in line together. And it was really fun. We talked about, you know, stuff. They have kids who are one year older than my kid and then two years younger.

And they're a wonderful family. And they're from France. And the father is a baker in Davis, which is a city out on the way to Sacto. and anyway it was really it was really a nice visit and why did I want to tell you this because I was like oh it's so cool I was like oh do your parents work you know because a lot of people like work something adjacent to the university it's a little bit of a company town UC Davis because big in veterinary stuff a lot of farming academic farming

stuff goes on there and they have a very famous veterinary school farm things but a UC

Alexlike a good school like they jack off cows and stuff and then take care of them right well given

Merlinthat you are the uh you would be in as judith butler calls it gender trouble if you try to jack off a cow because a cow does not have a dick it's a it's an assigned cow at birth a cab all cops are bad assign cow at birth come on come on let's go all right let's go let's go get in the car stay stay with me nice family yes and now the joke's not funny i've already done the best material I can do. But I was like, oh my god, you're a baker, that's so cool, that must be like such a crazy job, you know, you have to get up early and stuff. And I go, what are you doing? I'm like, ooh.

I make podcasts. And of course, what do you make podcasts about? And I'm like, oh, you know, they're nominally funny. And then we talked about what podcast people like. And the kid who's my kid's age likes things about Star Wars, and so we talked about that instead.

AlexOh, thank God. Thank God. Got yourself in out.

MerlinOh, they were so nice. What a nice group. It's been, like, I don't like to talk about my life too much, but it's been a crazy time. There's been a lot of crazy times and crazy things and internal, external. There's just a lot to deal with in our life right now, including school stuff that's been a real full-color shit show this year. and yeah I can tell you more off air but anyway it's really sucked but it was so nice to go and see this nice boy Ricky Montgomery and his

nice band I think they're called something like the Bit of Honeys or something and they came out and they played a bunch of songs it was really loud as I complained on Twitter but we had such a good time we let them just cut the kid loose I said look I know you hate turning off DND could you please un-DND mom and me so we can find you if somebody tries to throw you in a van but apart from that go do your thing and then we sat down and we had my lady friend and I found a place to sit because this is Great American Music Hall which happens to be my favorite place to see music in San Francisco and they have a whole upstairs like a mezzanine

where you can get food and sit down and it was great and I had a burger and I had fries and I tweeted on the internet and I read some of the Christopher Alexander book on my phone and it was really it was such a nice way to end the absolute paint job of the last few years of my child's, my youngsters, middle school experience. The night that we went and saw Ricky Montgomery and every single person we met was really cool

and really nice. These young people are so much better than us.

AlexSo much better. It makes me really happy.

MerlinI said to the kid, the kid who's a year older than my kid, I said, because we'd established a relationship, you know, we're line buddies. And I was like, everything's such a mess. Are you people going to fix this?

Speaker AAnd she's so awesome.

MerlinShe looks straight at me. She goes, why didn't your generation fix it when you had the chance? And I said, because I'm Gen X and I don't care about anyone.

AlexIncluding myself.

MerlinI have more lead poisoning than any other generation. And I didn't bother to fix the environment when it would have been easy. pump the brakes star wars oh gosh it was really nice and now here i am do you think that there's

Alexany correlation between i don't want to say exercise but i guess i'm going to say exercise your vast increase in exercise and in time outside it's not that vast it's it's big but

Merlinwhat the baseline it's comparing to i'm sorry i interrupted you does it have an effect on

Alexwell just mood mood and i guess as the youngsters would say just the the vibe ah fuck you i knew

Merlinyou're gonna say that god damn it it's a good word it's a good nope that's a word that's good it's it is it is it's one okay um i don't know candidly i thought after uh there's several and this gets to our topic that we'll get to. My expectations, modest though they were, about the, as John Syracuse and I might call it, Unreconcilable Differences, bicycle results. The bicycle results are different than I had expected in ways that are a little bit surprising

to me. And that'll come up, I think, somewhat in our talk. But I don't know the answer to that. And so I'm going to answer a different question, which is something that I've realized sometimes via medications. Like we talked about daddy mustn't have too much stimulation, especially Adderall. And I always want to clarify, I still really miss Adderall. Never let it be forgotten. My flag would be at half mast forever for Adderall. And my other mast is like one eighth mast.

but um thank you for its service what i was kind of what i do find interesting is that i don't know how to describe this without sounding like a lunatic but i sometimes discover i have accessibility to to at least emotions and often thought patterns that i didn't realize were a little bit locked up and you could you could write that down to something like what we've historically called a like a rut or like you know oh it's covid so you're inside and that explains everything like yeah i guess but like like i said last week or

whatever like stuff like my senses like when i'm out riding a bike and i'm paying attention to stuff and i like smell stuff i don't normally smell and i'm like i never noticed this eucalyptus pine-ish smell just in this one area of golden gate park and there's like a shortcut or a shortcut it's a bike path that you can take to get to where the bison are and i always know i'm close because, I mean, somewhat unrelated, they have an area where they do compost and gathering all kinds of different stuff, like effluvium, the effluvium of Golden Gate Park title,

and it gets collected in this sort of working area with practically a barn, and that includes manure, which, if you're outside and aren't stuck with it, can be such a nice smell, and driving and riding around and smelling that. So the ones I'm very aware of are, there's some sensory things, but there's also, So, see if this makes any sense. Like what I said, thought patterns or thought opportunities, emotional opportunities that got unlocked that I didn't expect. So like when I first get on new ADD drugs.

AlexHonestly, what you seem to be describing, and I only interrupt because I'm finding this fascinating. No, please, please, please. It's the only way you'll get in. And it's like you're describing being the after effects of being on acid or something. And I know that that's like a fetal position. No, no, no, no. Just like you've you have or are having an experience that, as you said, like has unlocked a lot of emotions and almost like prayer to not.

MerlinIt's not just to be clear. It's not profound, but it is interesting and fun. I don't want to, well, you can tell me, I guess, when I'm profound. I don't think it's, and like I said, this will come up again, but what I'm trying to get at here is like, and I think this could, if one were being cynical and trying to hear, you know, horses instead of zebras, you would go, well, dude, you never fucking leave the house. You never leave, let's be honest, the same, I very rarely, I don't need to leave literally the same block. Like if I want to go to Walgreens, I got to go two blocks.

But like my house and my office are closer than is really wholesome. And I like that for a variety of reasons. The scooter has been a mixed blessing. The Segway thing that we've done over time here has been a mixed blessing just in the sense that it's so great at getting me from here to there. If it's less than a mile, I mean, if it's less than half a mile, it's a no brainer. I mean, walking is the most convenient way to do that. But the segue is like right there for like you need to go somewhere a quarter mile, quarter mile back. You forgot to get something.

You forgot to pick something up. I left something at the office. This file transfer is done. That kind of stuff. Zoops up, beep, boop, and you're back before anybody even realizes you're gone. Tell me you could do that faster and more efficiently in a car. You're lying. Even a bike, you'd have to like lock your bike and that would take longer. That's the very different show. But the beauty of personal transportation, as I call it, is that personal transportation gives you so many more options for doing things. And you get to pick what is going to fit how you want to do what you're doing.

And the stakes are pound for pound impossibly low. Like worst case, you're like, oh, this is too much to carry on my bike. Or like, oh, darn, I wish I hadn't driven because now I have to find a parking space. but so I accept that that just could be because I really don't go places I don't like going places I don't like being around people where I am out of control I mean I don't think I have social anxiety I don't like being stuck somewhere there's a grave part of my mind that makes every decision you know there's like

that thing like the wisdom document thing if something's very precious to you never put it down anywhere you wouldn't want it to be overnight and I think the same thing about myself which is I sometimes and this has been a bit on like you look nice today but like when you enter a store you get on an airline you go in a classroom and you wonder uh what if i have to be here a lot longer than i had anticipated for whatever reason and it's out of my control and that's such a bizarre thing to think but then i think it and i go like not but weigh it out weigh it out and let's put let's take

this entire terrine of sauce and put it all over my extremely old idea that precedes the segue right even in the pre-segue times you know is merlin i johnny come lately to a lot of ideas

Alexyes many and that's fine oh god forbid you change and embrace new interesting things right i don't

Merlini don't i don't i don't need your i don't need your loyalty um no no no but you know what i mean like the just in sense of like okay do you remember me saying this a million years ago is like if you had to summarize a lot of how I feel, how I get frustrated about a lot of life, getting in a car to drive somewhere to spend money and then drive directly back, it feels like an L to me.

AlexIt is. And that is something that a lot of people-

MerlinPay a bill, buy a thing. Yeah. But the idea of like one person in a car, and I want you to really, I want you to slurp up every drop of that bowl of soup because it's not just about boo cars. It's also about the way that we, I mean, like, should you need to go? Alex, when I was an adult your age, I had to do things like drive somewhere to pay a bill. I had to drive through a, I had to do, if I wanted money from the bank, I had to go to the drive-thru and wait to, like, cash a check or do a withdrawal, right?

ATMs were not a fact of life like they are today, right? Especially in smaller denominations. It often seemed crazy. but like you have to go to like the cable company and pay your bill. I guess you could mail it, but there's a lot of stuff like that. You got to go straighten something out. So you get in a car and you drive there and give somebody $11 and then you drive back and you're like, this is my life now. So what I'm trying to get at is if you will, if we can go back in the archives and find the numerous times I've said that let's lay that against. Now I'm choosing to go somewhere on a bike.

I just want to go see the bison today. I just want to go interact with some German tourists and try to be helpful. I just want a little bit of exercise. Or in the case of yesterday, candidly, I've been real frustrated with a lot of what my young person has had to deal with on a lot of levels for a while. And it has really come to a head in a comical way in the last week and a half. And I felt like one day it would be very beneficial to go see the bison. And it worked out great.

Now, yeah, I think this will be interesting to talk about when we get to the challenge, but I don't know. Do you have experiences like that? Like, do you have things where you find yourself – I know you're a little bit of an edge case, but do you find yourself sometimes having unexpected emotions or unexpected access to memories, for example? Are there events that come along? It's just a general question, but I'm just curious how the mind works. That we could not consciously think about something for dozens of years and then suddenly – it doesn't have to be trauma. It could just be like a funny memory that you suddenly do.

Are there things in your life that jar loose your personal effluvium and manure?

AlexYeah, but I can't really name any except drugs, which I wasn't going there when I said that what you're talking about reminded me a little bit of LSD.

MerlinYou are going to turn into a 90s wire magazine cover. You're going to turn into a VR. You might as well grow dreadlocks. Just give it up.

AlexWell, I was going to say the other part.

MerlinI get a virtual wig. Bleep bloop. Expansion pack includes Jaron Lanier wig. Ha ha. I don't use computers now. Ha ha. Meat moop. He uses computers.

AlexHe uses. Yes. But I continue to be a little bit afraid of LSD and acid. But.

MerlinThere are other ways to. Or not. Anyway.

AlexNo, no, no.

MerlinThat could rewire you in a non-positive way.

AlexOh, yes. I don't know if I sent you – I might have sent you the podcast that you probably wouldn't like, but the story is super interesting about the –

MerlinIs that the one with the show you like where the woman keeps talking about the show?

AlexNo, no.

MerlinI'm still not going to get into it. You can't get me into it. No, no, no.

Speaker ADon't mention it. Don't say the name.

MerlinDon't say the name. Don't say the name. Okay, okay, okay. You're not allowed to drag me. If I know what things are called, Alex, if I don't include the handle in the tweet, You don't need to tell the person.

AlexNo, no. Okay. This is a different show. But the other-

MerlinWe want to introduce you to a new show on our network we think you're really going to enjoy.

AlexOh, God. I had like the opposite of ASMR with that.

MerlinIs that right? You don't like my Spotify recommendation voice?

AlexWe're off this week, but instead we've had-

MerlinYeah. Yeah, right. And it's still a commercial.

AlexOkay. Okay. But the idea of revisiting memories isn't something I like to do, not out of any sort of like trauma or out of like, oh, I don't want to reminisce.

MerlinIt's not avoidant behavior. It's just something that doesn't come up.

AlexIt's not because I heard something a long time ago, which probably isn't true, but that the more you access a memory, the more unclear it gets and the more you rewrite.

MerlinThere's almost no way that's true. And yet I 1000% believe that. You will crush the bunny. If you talk about a dream too much, you're just telling a story now. That's not a dream anymore. Like it has to like, and if you read, it's almost like every time you think, think about like an old newspaper, like when newspapers were made, like in the eighties or nineties where like you'd read a Sunday paper and your hands would be covered with ink by the time you're done, you know, not covered with ink, but you know what I mean? You're grubby sort of, and you can feel it. It's, I feel like I, that's exactly how I think about memories where I'm like, if I handle this unprotected, so like that newspaper was never intended to last longer than, be

around longer than 24 hours, really. The cheapest conceivable way to keep this paper from dying in 24 hours. It was never meant to be handled for 35 years. So you put on gloves, you put in a protector, but every time I take a precious memory, I feel like it's like a clipping, a yellowed clipping from 1972 that's already falling apart. And every time I put my grubby fingers on it, it loses 10 words.

AlexWell, this is where, unironically, jokes being shoved out of the room, the drug part comes in. And I don't just mean like weed. I mean like the first time. No, by drugs. Okay, by drugs, I am talking about my 5-milligram CBD THC edibles and my prescribed Klonopin, which I – oh, man, I'm almost off of it.

I'm not proud of it.

MerlinThat would be a pretty name for a girl.

AlexKlonopin. Anyway, but I've realized through a lot of your discussions lately on your more popular shows that I am really good at meditating and terrible at relaxing.

MerlinOh, man. Alex, that's such a great insight. Well done.

AlexI can. Yeah, I am very good at it.

MerlinI mean, and a great distinction. Yeah.

AlexYeah, and I don't think it's a bad thing.

MerlinIt doesn't make you relax, but that doesn't mean you're bad at it. Right.

AlexBut with, I mean, like, Klonopin is a prescription drug to help with anxiety and seizures. Please, God, no one take that without any, like, I don't know. It makes me nervous.

MerlinAnd isn't that habit-forming?

AlexIt is super habit-forming. Like, it is the kind of thing where I'm very careful.

MerlinI took it very, very, very briefly, and the benefits were not enough to offset, in the view of my libertarian doctor and myself, the improvements were not adequate to offset the risks.

AlexYeah. My use is break in case of emergency.

MerlinXanax is the other one, though, right? Xanax, you've got to really watch your ass with that one.

AlexIt's in the whole – that's what Jordan Peterson supposedly got addicted to, was the whole Benzo family.

MerlinI thought I was thinking he's right.

Speaker AI feel myself...

AlexLet's bring him out, Mr. Fonzie Bear! I don't think this is attractive. No, she's not.

Speaker AI don't think you're really quite nailing the Kermit the Frog aspect of Jordan Peterson's voice.

AlexI just can't really make his voice be as, like, nasally.

Speaker AI told the young woman that I made my bed almost every day. But this was inadequate to secure her affections. I didn't sleep for one month.

AlexOne month I didn't sleep, but then I ate meat. God. Well, okay, all right. I am not telling people to do it. Let me finish my little drug spiel. I so what you're kind of saying is you've been thinking about taking something more. No, no, no, no, I have not. I have not recently like post quote post COVID. But as I've been returning to places like friends and families, apartments and houses, specifically like my

childhood home uh when i am relaxing and by that yes i mean taking a my five milligram thc gumming gummy and i start to really relax like memories start to kind of not flood in but sort of seep

Merlinand it's you nailed it exactly it's when you say seep in or whatever like it's like you're like unbidden you go like you think of a thing and you're like and then for me anyway like i think of a thing and then i think of two more things like immediately then i'm like wait i forgot about that too. I forgot about this alleyway next to my mom's real estate office that I used to like to throw a ball in when I was a kid. And that was next to the United Dairy Farmers. I hadn't thought about this stuff. And I won't say 40 years, but it happened 45 years ago, but before college

probably. And suddenly you're like, oh wait, hey, look at all you guys. It's like discovering an emotional box of baseball cards or something. What are you guys doing here? Have you been here the whole time?

Speaker AYeah.

MerlinKind of, right? But it takes the right state of mind to, like, unclench.

AlexAnd I really want to work on relaxing more to sort of allow more things to seep in. There's no way to say that doesn't sound gross.

MerlinAnd you're contrasting against meditation here, right?

AlexYeah, contrasting against meditation and I guess, like, I don't know. There needs to be a difference between relaxing with media and just relaxing as a sort of state.

MerlinCan I make a confession that it's not going to come off very nice?

AlexPlease.

MerlinBecause I'm, I guess, a geek, and geeks like projects, especially projects that involve gear. I think we may have shown this numerous times on this show.

AlexDoing a lot of things with the computers.

MerlinWell, and this, again, this will also get to our challenge when I talk about the hacker's diet. There's stuff in life where you're more, I am anyway, I'll speak for myself, I am more likely to be interested in something. If it has a geek angle and it has a gadget or some gear or something that lets me, and it isn't just because I want to spend money. It's more like, oh, I already have a blood oximeter. I can totally use that to work on one of my projects, heart recovery. Like I already have that. I don't need to buy that. But I'm whatever for whatever reason. I like that stuff. I have a Dremel arriving today, Alex.

I don't need a Dremel. I don't need a Dremel. But I have like three things I've been wanting to do. And I realize the Dremel is the answer. It's like 30 bucks getting a Dremel.

AlexWhy? Why?

MerlinBecause I have things I want to do with the Dremel.

AlexOkay.

MerlinDoes it matter to you? Write it down. I'll tell you later.

AlexOkay. I'm doing it.

MerlinOkay. Now I'm angry. Dremel is a fun word. But the geek. Dremel. Dremel. But you. Dremel, Dremel.

Speaker AJemani. I wasn't thinking.

MerlinDremel, Dremel. Dremel. The Dremel, what was I talking about? The point of this is a thing, a project.

AlexYou're more interested in something when it has a geeky opponent.

MerlinBut how did I interrupt you to say that? I had something important to say.

AlexYou like things that have gadgets associated with it?

MerlinOkay, so, yes. so naturally over the years i'm gonna pin this back to pizziz so pizziz came along oh fuck yes pizziz is such an interesting idea um well i won't go into too much about i used to talk about all the time on mac break weekly and it became a bit to like make fun of me for taking a pizziz but pizziz and then then they were sponsored at some point which was funny but pizziz was this very interesting app that i don't know i cannot prove to you that it did the things it said it did, but it sure seemed like it did, you go into Paziz and you'd say, hey, buddy, I want to take a

nap. I want to take a nap for this long. So at the most basic level, you go into this very, this is such, this is what, this has got to be like 2005 or 2006? Yeah, but it's still around. No way, it had to be later because iPhone wasn't until 2007 and then 2008. But anyway, in the early days of this, you would go into Paziz and you would basically punch in the recipe, if you like for what you want. I want to take a 50-minute nap. I want this amount of guided voice stuff.

I want this kind of music, and I want it to be this loud. And at the end, I want it to do this. And then you could save them and get ready for a different era, Alex. And every paziz that you had made to your own desires, like every time you played it, it was a slightly different paziz. It was doing stuff that made it so it wasn't identical every time. But you could export that as an MP3 and put it wherever you want it and just play it.

Speaker AYes.

MerlinWhich is the kind of thing that now you need another app to do on top. Like you would need something like Downy for iOS to do that now. But anyway, so that's probably where this starts. Although you go further back, like at the end of, in drama class, at the end of each class, we would do the corpse pose and listen to music. and like our teacher was trying to like backdoor acquaint us with yoga um which you know is the kind of thing that helps a lot of people in actors anyway um but no that got my that but then okay so

over time i don't dislike headspace i think headspace is good why am i saying all these things because these are like this you're using an apparatus next to just your body and gravity so like you know whether that is the classics i always joke about this but there used to be apps you could get that would play like a singing bowl kind of sound, or you could get fucking wind chimes playing, and they call it a meditation app. Because I guess it's ching-chong bing-bong enough that if you play it in the background and burn some incense,

you can feel like you're in the dojo or whatever.

Speaker AYep.

MerlinThat's all fine. That's all fine. But it sounds like we have both gotten to a place where we distinguish relaxation versus meditation. And none of those things are bad, I don't think. I mean, I imagine there are people in the trade that will say, hey, look, I'm a relaxation expert. Don't call it meditation. I'm a meditation expert. Don't call it relaxation. But it's very qualitatively different from learning to just be there with your dumb fucking meat body and your dumb, like your dumb, greasy meat brain and trying to figure out how to deal with yourself.

Because you've spent so much of your life learning how to clench unintentionally. so much and yeah that touches on trauma but like you spent so much of your life building a wonderful phrase unscalable fence as opposed to all those fences that are scalable i guess but you've built these on you've built all of these you know battlements and you know walls to protect yourself and like it's once you've done that and gotten good at it's pretty

hard to let go. You know what that means? That means it might be more difficult than you realize to really relax. You might be able to get a little bit more relaxed, but it's difficult to get the level you're talking about, Alex, to the part where you say, you know what, it's cool if the portcullis is up. Don't sweat it. Don't worry. Shield's down. Not a problem. It's very difficult to get to that because you spent your entire youth and adulthood learning to clench. right and but how do you you can't just go punch it it's like you know there's a program you're

going to pull up you know and have you know and run celery man like you're not just going to run the celery man on how to relax now tame i can get um but but like it's at a certain point you know this is this has got to be in some kind of uh book of uh somewhere in the world in some language, there must be a discussion of the idea of training wheels somewhere in the Buddhist oeuvre, because training wheels are such an interesting thing. Training wheels you put on a two-wheeled bike. And that's because it's difficult, while famously, perhaps canonically,

a bicycle is the thing you never forget how to ride once you know how. But everything up to the point where you can balance for the first time on a bike is very difficult. So one way to deal with that is training wheels. And training wheels are the most maddening fucking thing in the world. It's like the most Buddhist thing that you could imagine. Like the way that, like, my understanding of Buddhism got a little more nuanced when it went from being like, life is suffering, whatever that means in English, to, no, imagine instead that life is a wobbly wheel. And the wobbly wheel never goes away.

It's just, it's a different wobbly wheel. Right? But like that sense of being off kilter. Right? But did you have training wheels on a bike as a kid?

AlexYeah. another emotion seeping in is the frustration around those but but but it's double frustrating

Merlinobviously it's frustrating because can i just ride this bike like all my friends i feel like such a you know syracuse and i talked about this on that recent episode of like well every other kid can ride a bike why can't my kid ride a bike and you feel it yourself although that's again the sense of disappointment where you're like oh shit i better learn to ride a bike or my parents are going to think I'm a dope. But okay, so on the one hand, the obvious on-label annoyance is you

Alexcan't ride a bike without... Not just your parents will think you're a dope. You start to think that

Merlinyou are... Oh, no, a thousand percent. I want to go to the strip mall or whatever. But then what do you do? And I remember very clearly complaining to my father in particular that he had done a bad job because these training wheels were not working. And do we know why that is? Because I thought the training wheels should both basically it would be a second set of two wheels for the bike.

Speaker ARight?

MerlinFor those who don't know this yet, hang around because I swear to God this is worth the return.

AlexAre you going to explain the concept of...

MerlinA two-wheel bike is something where a bike... Webster's defines... It's difficult the first time. It's really odd the first time you realize you're riding a bike and like on two wheels and then you of course you instantly fall over because you're like wily coyote and realize there's no cliff under you anymore um but to get to that point we need to like move you along i thought so and the training wheels are little wheels on these sort of like l or v-shaped brackets that you put on the back uh wheel of

the bike and and my frustration with my with mine and the fact that i was berating my dear father was I think you did this wrong because they're all supposed to be touching. And right now it's very wobbly. So when I'm trying to ride the bike, of course, I'm falling over because I don't know how to ride a bike. And it's very frustrating to keep wobbling left and wobbling right. Here's the dirty little secret of training wheels. If they're working correctly, they cannot both touch the ground at the same point.

That's the point. the point of training wheels is not to and i've said this before in other places whatever it's really good you guys the point of training wheels is not to give you a permanent set of two more wheels so you never have to learn how to ride a bike the point of training wheels is to annoy the fucking shit out of you with how wobbly your bike is and you can't help but unintentionally attempt to balance and what you're going to still be annoyed with those wheels right up to and through the moment when you haven't yet realized you're riding a bike there is also something to

Alexthat's so bananas if you think about it i do i've thought about this before they don't touch

Merlinthey're meant not to touch they're defective by design title i think it's interesting that

Alexboth of us assumed that they were broken and uh why don't did you did you think the same thing

MerlinWhy did no one tell me? I guess that's the point. The point is you're supposed to go, this thing sucks.

AlexWell, yeah. Yeah. And I'm like, why? That's how that's why I am struggling with this, because I don't know if it was a great

MerlinCan't you just give me one of those big tricycles like grandpa rides?

AlexNo, but like I. Like the Florida trike? I don't mean this as a complaint against my parents, but maybe at least you could give a heads up of, yeah, these are to help you learn. These aren't to help you ride a bike. This is to help you learn how to ride a bike.

MerlinOr how to make not riding a bike so insufferable that you – and again, as with biofeedback, the way biofeedback works is I didn't know what I was doing when I got good at biofeedback. And that's why I always wonder, should you tell people what the trick is? Well, the trick is you accidentally figured out how to calm the fuck down on your own. so how ironic is it that in that case this incredibly primitive little dumb machine way dumber than like even like a polygraph i mean probably at this point apart from the gal gal

gal galvanic uh response it's probably way less powerful than a blood oximeter i mean obviously the galvanic stuff is super important but like you know if you figured out with this dumb box with lights on it. You figured out how to calm down, Merlin man. And how amazing is that? And here with it, with this, these stupid training wheels, you were so annoyed with the training wheels. You were so mad at us for giving you training wheels. You accidentally figured out

Alexhow to ride a bike on your own. And you think that's a good thing? I'm, I think sometimes,

Merlinagain, this is touching back on the geek stuff. And do you want to have the singing bowl? And do you want to have a timer for your naps and all that kind of stuff? And do you want to have guided meditation, whatever that means. Like, it's true. I mean, look, I like, even Dan approves of the Insight Meditation Center talks, you know.

What's her name? I got that one lady I like a lot there. I love hers, and I guess that's a form of guided meditation. But we, how do you put this? There's that cliche of, like, he's not the hero we wanted, but he's the hero we need. And like sometimes if you're the one responsible for choosing and operationalizing your, what can I say? It's not crutch. You're like, I'm not using crutch to be ableist. I'm using it. I'm sorry. I mean it just in the sense of when there's something, actually, I mean the opposite of crutch.

Crutch in the sense of like I hurt my leg and I need a crutch is terrific. But are you unintentionally installing a MacGuffin in your life where you've got this thing you've come along with? Okay, okay, okay. You're gay bones for Sherlock. Think about John's cane.

John's cane is a personal set of training wheels, right? He didn't realize he'd left it in the restaurant until he'd already learned how to ride a bike, which is to say walk without a limp.

So if you get to pick your cane in life, you may get the cane you want, but it's not the cane that you need. And when you keep looking for a new flight of apps that make a singing bowl sound, there's nothing wrong with that. Of course, there's something slightly wrong with that, or I wouldn't be saying it. But like you may just be getting a set of bespoke canes that's not going to ever help you balance the bike in that instance. And again, not to sound ableist, except to say that there are methods in life by which we go from this to that.

And the thing that's going to make that easy for us is not necessarily the thing that's going to make it enduring for us. And that's what turns it into a MacGuffin. Because now you've gotten into a relationship with this particular affordance and it starts to feel like Lisa's magic rock or something. But anyway, I'm not sure where I'm going with this.

But you – and is that when you visit family? You say like when you go back to your childhood home, that's when the memories slip through?

AlexOr anywhere I have spent a significant amount of time, but that period of my life is over. And that could be like something that was like six months ago. You know, it doesn't.

MerlinOh, again, there's that existential distance again.

AlexRight. and sometimes it's something I've intentionally tried to get out of my brain not even for a negative reason more of a this is no longer a part of my life I should focus uh and get serious about different things that are our priority rather than something I want learned right and

Merlinit's in this oddly also touches on Csikszentmihalyi's um you know matrix of like challenge to expertise, we're like, you know, we're most likely to get into what Csikszentmihalyi calls a flow state when we're highly challenged by something in which we have high levels of expertise. And until, I don't know, a year or two ago, I had this hanging over my desk right where I'm staring right now. Now it's an Eve room that says it's 49% humidity. But it used to be a Csikszentmihalyi diagram. And like I found when I discovered that, and I'm not like a giant scholar of his work,

But that diagram alone, like, opened my mind. It's like, oh, how is it that, like, time disappears when you're doing something difficult that you're great at? And how is it that, like, you get so bored, like, for example, when you're stuck doing something not interesting that you're not great at? Or, no, that's not bored. Bored is when you're doing something that you have a high level of skill at but is not engaging or interesting. And then, like, what, but, like, the other one is indifference. Like, this is boring and I'm bad at it. I don't even feel bad.

I just feel indifferent to it. And like that's – if you don't challenge yourself to kind of selling a reality show, but not to get out of your comfort zone exactly, but to allow yourself to experiment in the areas of the stuff that are not as convenient as the way you like to do it, you know, you may not grow.

AlexSo that's what I've been trying to do is push myself into, I guess what you would call a flow state, but a uncomfortable one because.

MerlinIn the sense that the challenge remains high, but your expertise is not quite up to it.

AlexAnd time might not disappear the way that at least I, when I am doing something like editing something I really enjoy or writing something.

MerlinAnd just to be clear here, as people with ADHD, it's useful at this point to also say time can also disappear when you're doing something that's extremely low challenge that you're great at. I could tag MP3s all day as a person with ADHD. That's what I need to watch for. Like there's something that feels like a flow state that's really just like, I don't know, long form masturbation if you're not careful.

AlexYeah. A lot of more and more. My flow states have just become coping mechanisms rather than actual productivity. Like my new time addiction.

MerlinThis is why we need mind palaces. We should make a challenge to get a mind palace.

AlexOh, dude. Yeah. Yeah. I don't want to say that I've gotten really into consciousness because I sound like Michael fucking Pollen.

MerlinWell, have I ever got a link for you? And I swear to Christ, I almost sent this to you yesterday for two reasons. And now I'm going to break down. I'm going to send it to you now. And this week's episode of Dubai Friday is brought to you by Professor Seagull Smart Shop.

AlexOh, no.

MerlinNo, it's not. But this is a new store in San Francisco that just opened recently, and they sell basically legal, mostly legal. Well, the existence of them and the selling of them is legal. The use of them is a little more dodgy. But they sell basically the shit that I took in college. They sell organic psychedelics.

AlexOh, hmm.

MerlinLike, for example, the first time I ever tripped ever, ever, ever was the third one down, Hawaiian baby wood rose seeds. And because they were known to be, boy, this is awesome. This is another one of those why I love cops things. Hawaiian baby woodrow seeds, like I think you can die from taking them. But mainly you trip. Well, you trip balls. So they cover them with, I believe it's, I want to say, strychnine. So you have to sit there with a razor blade and scrape off the poison.

Speaker AAll the woodrow's poison.

MerlinYou have to scrape your seeds to get all the poison off. And then you make a tea out of it. and eat trip balls. But their big specialty at this place is Egyptian blue lotus.

AlexMushroom-infused organic coffee. What could go wrong with caffeine and shrooms? All right, I'm sorry.

MerlinBut anyway, so I was there, and at the bottom of the page it says, powered by SF Smart Shop. And I said, I'm not so sure. Hit escape.

AlexYeah, oh, oh, the whatchamashit. I see Squarespace.

Speaker ASquarespace!

Alexface how awesome is that the favicon is is even the default square yeah i know that's the giveaway

Merlinit's got the little box yeah i was like but you know this kind of stuff though like i'm glad it's around glad a person you know can i tell you a weird secret and a flex that is a little bit of a lie it seems like a lie because i've probably implied that i've taken mushrooms i've never taken mushrooms well well but i've taken a lot of shit dude i haven't i i but you're but you're

Speaker Amaking can we make it about me i'm what i'm trying to say is i've had hawaiian wood rose seeds i've

Merlinhad san um not san pellegrino what's it called san pedro i've had i've had cactus i have had i've had so many different kinds i've had 2cb i've had mdma i have had many alex pump the brakes I have had so many different psychotropic drugs.

AlexI forgot how cool you were.

MerlinAnd now knowing that, doesn't it seem weird that I've never had mushrooms? The one that almost, the gateway drug, the only thing like beyond pot maybe that's like at the like relatively harmless level.

AlexYes.

MerlinDoesn't it seem weird?

AlexWas it a choice or just?

MerlinI was a little freaked out by mushrooms, even though the way it was described by all of my friends was so much more pleasant than shitty acid, for sure. There's a lot of discussion of large cartoon animals, and I thought that's 80% going to be the greatest experience I've ever had, or maybe 20% going to put me in an asylum.

AlexInteresting.

MerlinBecause knowing me. Well, knowing me. Like, who knows that cartoon cat might not want to leave. I may be in his trip. Had you thought about that?

AlexOh, no. I don't like that. I don't like that.

MerlinWell, now you know.

AlexDon't like that.

MerlinSo come on down to Professor Siegel's Smertship.

AlexSmertship, sure. I have, I technically, I guess, have, quote, done mushrooms. But it was a candy bar from my friend, from, of course, Cara Fagan. Was like, no, no, no. Founder of Cox's Cucks. Yes, founder of Cox's Cucks, Cara Fagan. Was like, no, no, just do it. I'm sad. And the best way to get me to do something is to say, I am sad. And if you do this thing, it will make me happy. No shit. Yeah.

MerlinSo you're not watching Under the Banner of Heaven, right?

AlexNo, I don't. Oh, wait. Is that Andrew Garfield's show?

MerlinIt's got Tick-Tick-Boom in it.

AlexOh, yes. Not yet.

MerlinI'm enjoying it more than I expected. It takes place in the early 80s in Salt Lake City. I think it's Salt Lake City. It's definitely Utah, and it's very Mormon-y.

Speaker AOh, that's where I'm going.

MerlinWell, you reminded me of this great scene in the latest episode. This will not spoil the show, but there's a lot of constraints and rules inside of LDS, like things you're not allowed to do. And famous ones include things like you're not supposed to have drugs and you can't even have caffeine. And there's this wonderful scene where, let's just say, there's a guy who knows he's really in trouble with his father-in-law. And it's a really well-done scene.

And he knows he's in big trouble with the father-in-law because he knows he's done something he shouldn't have done. And this could turn into we don't even know what. Obviously, this could turn into violence. The father reaches into this, like, I guess a drawer and pulls out a box. And it's Whitman, a chocolate sampler. And he's having this very intense, like, everything's great. Everything's great. And then he opens up the box. And he's like, oh, you know, sometimes it's nice to have a chocolate. And the guy's like, why don't you have this one?

He says, and the guy, the son-in-law is like, and he quotes a verse and says, which has led us to believe that we are not supposed to have chocolate because chocolate has a small amount of caffeine.

Speaker AAnd he goes, yeah, yeah, has a small amount of caffeine.

MerlinWhy don't you have this? Oh, boy. That's you. That's you. You're the kid. Because what if it's a trick? What if it's a test? What if it's testing you failed because you accepted the chocolate or the mushrooms? The chocolate is a mushroom.

Maybe I'm in your dream.

AlexHello.

MerlinAh!

AlexOh, speaking of dreams, the end of that story is I had a little tiny bit of mushrooms. And then I spent the evening watching Inception, which is such a stereotype. And then we ended up laughing and crying about gender. And it was beautiful. So I would encourage.

Speaker AI think that's a good idea.

AlexYes. Take mushrooms, everybody.

MerlinAll I was going to say was like, and judging again from the logo, which is, you know, fun.

Alexthis this is i don't want this i want my i don't want mushrooms growing in my green beard that i'm

Merlineating um personally but maybe that's the journey and that's the problem so like i've been extremely tempted to take some shit because i hear there's a lot of shit out there that like is pretty good this is according to friend of the show michael uh pollen there's a lot of stuff i'm trying to be cool about that but there's apparently you know people talk about this we've heard many podcast episodes about this oh many including that really good remember the reply all with

Alexmicrodosing that was so good that was so have you heard pj's new show i don't want to get no i haven't

Merlinoh it's interesting let's yeah yeah okay so um but i've thought about that but i do still have and this probably tells me all i need to know if i went in maybe if i went into this like with the like pre dragnet era hell yeah this is fine it'll just be fun it's a movie eat an orange slice but There's the part of me that's a little bit hung up and knows I've had some really fucking bad trips that I think had a long-term impact on me. I mean, I know they did.

Speaker AInteresting.

MerlinOh, I've been fucked up a couple times. Real bad for like weeks. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.

AlexWhoa. See, that scares me.

MerlinYeah, save it for the show. No, no, see, but that's the problem. And now maybe I'm not the guy. I shouldn't be eating my own beer with Professor Seagull. Let me understand this, Mr. Man. You're living in San Francisco with your family for something like 20 years. And you decided, I guess I proposed nothing. that you wanted to accept some plans from a man who's eating his own green beard with mushrooms. And you decided to do that on your own while your family was out of town. And then you were found, how do we say out there, sans pants in the dream of an Alexandra Cox. Is that an accurate estimation

when you eat your green beard with mushrooms, is it? Oh, no. Boop, boop, clown music comes to boop, boop, boop, boop, boop.

Speaker AAh! Kara!

AlexKara! No!

Speaker ASave me. Save me. Get the beard out of my mouth. Trim my mushrooms.

AlexWe just talked about Elliot Smith and Matthew supervised us. And now we just giggled and talked about Elliot Smith and it was beautiful.

Speaker ABut it's fine.

AlexI'm not. I'm too old. Situations get fucked up.

MerlinSorry. Go. What?

AlexOh, no. I'm too old to take. What is this? Ayahuasca. Botanica. Oh, no. No. I just don't want to be one of these.

MerlinYou put it in everybody's drink on the flight to the Pussyhat March, like in Sunny.

AlexIsn't that what?

MerlinDidn't she do that?

AlexYeah. No. Yes. It's like the Wade Boggs remake where-

MerlinOh, yeah. So ladies beat Boggs or whatever. Yeah. Oh, shit. What's her name? The character. I love her so much. She directs the play.

AlexNot Aster.

MerlinOh, shit. What's her name? It'll come back.

AlexGod, she's like one of my favorite.

MerlinShe's great. And she's really good in the live performance too. When they do the Nightmare Live, she's great in that.

AlexMan.

MerlinOh my God. No, I'm not going to look it up. Sorry, everybody. Egyptian Blue Lotus. But then when I look at this, and I'm being honest, I have thought about, because there will be times over the next few months when our family's doing the equivalent of separate vacations. And I've thought about it. I wonder if I would want to do this. aquatic plant of freshwater lakes. There are typos in here which I don't love. The plant be made into a tea, smoked, made into edibles, or put into bottles of wine.

Now, I want to tell you my concern about that. My concern about that is really? Like, oughtn't you tell us the way to do this? Yeah, that's the thing. Is that not cool, man?

AlexI want a pill. I just want

Merlina little pill. Well, edibles have ruined me now. The O? No, in the sense of like I know exactly what I'm getting out of this oh right half of this edible is exactly knowable doesn't matter how much I slept doesn't matter how much I ate like alcohol is much more

Alexof a x factor for me than half of a grape edible I don't know if I will ever not I don't know if I will ever drink again but like I never seek out alcohol well no I don't know if I'll ever smoke

Merlinagain if I were the one inhabiting that phrase. I don't want to run into somebody's random weed that might have... Who knows? Pretty soon fentanyl's going to be in weed, too. You know fentanyl's hurting a lot of people here. People don't know. It's that old problem. You go out and buy your heroin. You think you know what you're getting. And then it's cut with all kinds of shit. Usually back in the day, that used to be like... Remember, they used to cut cocaine with ground glass so it would be more effective at a lower purity. And now there's fentanyl in everything and people are just dropping like flies because they take the normal amount

not knowing it's been cut with fentanyl.

AlexThat's terrifying.

MerlinFucking insane. I'm going to call this guy. I'm going to contact Professor Segal. I assume he has some kind of like an old-timey phone, you know, and ask him about it. Do I have to scrape my wood rose, sir? It's not for human consumption. Yeah, all right. But the Squarespace site is nice. Thanks to Squarespace for supporting Dubai Friday and all the great shows.

AlexDon't say it. No, no. I want Squarespace's money. They don't. No, no. Squarespace, you're bad. You don't give us-

MerlinI just want their love. I want their affection. What else did I have in notes or should we get- They have your loyalty. What's your something else? Rabbit Rabbit. I want to ask you about your middle name someday. I want to learn why. No, we don't have time. We got to do the- Okay, okay. Challenge.

AlexYes.

MerlinDid you- What's your go-forward strategy on having a middle name? Have you thought about it?

AlexOn having a middle name?

MerlinWell, because you- I have fun with, because I really enjoy saying your at birth first name. I have to imagine at some point you would go completely to Alex probably, right?

AlexI would out of.

MerlinI haven't asked you this. Sorry. Is it okay that I'm asking you this?

AlexYes, absolutely.

MerlinAre you going to stick with Alex or are you going to do something? Are you going to go Alexander or just Alex? What's your plan for first name before we get to middle name?

AlexThat is something that actually my mom and Maddie and I were talking about. And most of my gender stuff is like, I want it to be a snap to grid sort of thing. Like pretty much.

MerlinI mean, not that many people get the chance to reboot. And like, if you could change Daenerys to Dany, like maybe you should. No, I'm serious. Like I said, my friend, my kid's friend had a sister named Daenerys, which is funny, but terrible. I have two Daenerys figures in eye view right now and I still can't spell it right on the first try. Why would you name a child that? But if you're assigned Daenerys at birth is going to become a trans man, boy, I would say take Dany.

AlexYep. I mean, that's...

MerlinOr you could be one of the Daniels.

AlexOh.

MerlinOh.

AlexRight. Oh, God.

MerlinWayman.

Speaker AWayman. Why is he called Wayman? I don't know.

AlexI love it.

Speaker AIt looks like a type racist typo.

AlexIt does. Yes, fuck, it does. Oh, smiling Asian boy. I hope he's happy. My name of... Hey, pair of pals. My full name is Alexandra Elizabeth Cox.

MerlinAnd my mother's maiden name is Social Security number.

AlexYes.

MerlinMy first car is called elementary school.

AlexYes.

MerlinI killed a dog just to watch him die. It's all available in those forms.

AlexI truly, at this point, don't have any plans to legally change my name unless I move to a state in which it would be easier. Yep, yep, yep.

MerlinTotally get it.

AlexYeah. Because it's a hassle.

MerlinBecause you know your middle name was my first pick for my AFAB kid.

AlexYeah. And I really –

MerlinAnd I keep bringing it up. I like to rub it in. Because we were watching, were we watching The Boys? No, we were watching something and somebody was, not a Liz. Oh, you know what it was? We were watching Riverdale. And I was like, see, see, see? Because of course, I have a huge crush on Betty. I'm very much like, I like Betty. I like Marianne. You know, I always like the Betty-ish girl. Although the Veronica girl is very cute too. I was like, Betty. See, see, see smart ass? If you had been an Elizabeth,

you could have been a Betty. But then it also makes you a Liz.

AlexWell, this is this is something I should have asked my mom. And I I really should, because I I was assigned Alex at birth, actually. Like I have all they never.

My mom and dad always used Alex. Nothing else. I mean, like legally, Alexandra. Yes.

MerlinBut like when you're like yelling at you when you're in trouble, did they say? I use it because it feels really good to say. And it's a bit that I do that I say somebody's name. It's a bit that I do and it makes me happy. It's very reminiscent of the Tony Roberts bit in Annie Hall. But I do it and I think it's funny. And so I like to say something like, I'll say, we talked about this, Alexandra. Which is somehow to me 30% funnier than we talked about this, Alex.

AlexYes. I don't know why, but it is.

MerlinBecause it does kind of sound like you're in trouble.

AlexIt does. Exactly. Well, and it sometimes means I am.

MerlinHey, I'm not above lying. You are in trouble, but you're not in trouble. I just need you to pick up the phone.

AlexJust pretend.

MerlinLike Professor Segal. Ring, ring.

AlexBut it's interesting.

MerlinGet me pictures of Spider-Man. Okay, sorry. No, I think I did have mushrooms.

AlexGod.

MerlinGriffin did all three in the wonderful Chris Gathart, Spider-Man 2. Holy fucking shit. Three-hour episode with Chris Gathart. Griffin did do all three segments as J. Jonah Jameson.

AlexOh, my God.

MerlinGet me pictures of Spider-Man. It's really funny. I won't do it justice.

AlexI need to listen to that one.

MerlinAlways called you Alex, mostly.

AlexOh, yeah. Alex, I didn't really, this might shock you, but I didn't really get into trouble as a kid because mostly I sat in a corner and read and then.

MerlinWell, you gave yourself ulcers because you know what you did. Let's remind our audience, Alexandra, when you gave yourself ulcers from worrying about schoolwork and not being perfect enough, can I ask you what grade, what age you were at that point? I was third grade. Alex was in third grade when they gave themselves ulcers.

It was really... The same age as Olive. The same age as Olive in Little Miss Sunshine. my grandpa taught me these moves oh where's your grandpa is he here today he's in the trunk of our car we watched it again yesterday because it's the best movie ever it's so good

Alexwhat is your I'm very confused so are you asking will I change will I give myself a middle name

Merlinwell I was probably very as being a guy and guessing that Alex is your name and I mean if my name were Alex I'd like it personally regardless of my you know what I fill in on forms Alex is a cool name and like I would imagine that like in figuring out shit I shouldn't say fucking anything but in your because it's like I'm like I'm revealing how much I assume about other people but I would think that in the journey that you've been on

and will be on for a while if there are parts if there are parts that you've kind of always wanted to be a little bit different. This is an opportunity to examine that. And if there are parts you thought were kind of cool, you keep it. Like at this point, I mean, I like my name. I didn't like it when I was younger, but I do now. And I've just wondered, like, let's put it this way. If I were you, I'd keep Alex. And that's been what made me wonder, are you just going to drop Elizabeth or do you go for something else?

Do you get cute about it? I mean, you don't need it. You can just drop it.

AlexThe I probably would just drop it because, again, if I were to legally change my name, it truly would be out.

MerlinAlex Cox is a good name.

AlexYes, it is. I used to hate it because it.

MerlinWell, of course. It meant we both have names that can be abused for, you know, gender things.

AlexAnd the like it's I don't know if I've ever talked about this, but my mom still uses she her pronouns for me. And I literally have never told her that I use they them. And I'm like, why haven't I done that? Oh, because I have like always been gay and genderqueer to that. Like they didn't have the words. But it's no one, truly, like no one knows me better than my parents.

MerlinThere should be a law. You get one giant gender pivot per decade because it's really hard to catch up.

AlexYeah. But that's the thing because I'm very bad.

MerlinCalifornia has no such law.

Speaker AWait, what now?

Merlinand so you don't but and and then you so uh you don't quote unquote correct her it seems like you're not a big correct or in general but is the reason for the correct you don't really doesn't well not that you don't care is it that it doesn't bother you or like you don't want to upset her or like do you have a thought about why you haven't said hey just fyi or maybe had somebody

Alexelse go hey just fyi yeah people have uh hey fyi'd her and then she's like oh yes of course but she's still um and this could be an age thing it's like evelyn it's like evelyn and the girlfriend i don't i don't know i don't know what she's called but she still calls me um murphy that the name accidentally the name of my late great departed dog oh that's so freaking

Merlincute. I love that. I thought it was because of RoboCop.

AlexShe also calls me occasionally Jote, Tommy or Johnny. The names of my siblings. Jode? From Grapes of Wrath? Oh, I see. And not out of

MerlinI have John Steinbeck disorder. I frequently call people the wrong name. Have you ever noticed that, Lenny, when I do that? Want to do the challenge?

Alexyes

Merlinmy lady sent me a picture of a mountain lion oh my god a mountain lion is currently contained inside a classroom at Pescadero High School in San Mateo students and staff are safe

Alexit's so cute

Merlinoh my god my wife did the joke and she did it really well I'm going to send it to you she's adopted the very heavily Darth influenced bando speak

Alexlet me send this to you

MerlinOkay, and let me know when you've gotten it, and I'll tell you what my wife said.

AlexOh, I got it, got it.

MerlinI can have laptop. I am desk now. All right. God damn it, I'm tired.

Dig it, dig it, dig it challenge. God, it's so goddamn late. Are you doing okay, time-wise?

AlexI am indeed, yes.

MerlinOkay, cool. Is it okay? We'll do maybe 10, 15 on this?

AlexYes, yes, yes, yes.

MerlinBecause we still need to do the after show.

AlexMm-hmm, yes.

MerlinYou can hear the after show, which I think is becoming a very good part of the show. Not as good as the mini episodes of the Flophouse. That's a lot to aspire to. My God, they've gotten so good. But yeah, we do an after show here that you might enjoy, and they're usually at least half an hour or so long. But the point is we do stuff that's a little different, and it definitely goes places I didn't expect a lot of the time. And you can get that by joining our Patreon and giving us $5 or $10 a month, which is awesome and helpful for us.

And if you're like me, and I hope you're not, I pay for a lot of stuff and don't even listen to this stuff. If you want to support us, you don't have to listen to this show. If you just like supporting what we do, I know that sounds weird, except I know there's at least four people on Patreon who I just like supporting. On the off chance, you're one of those people. I hope you will enjoy the shows. I hope you will listen. We try to keep it all in canon. You know what I'm saying?

AlexNo. In canon?

MerlinWell, you know, like, I don't know. We don't do alternate universes. It's not like we're on mushrooms. Oh, no. What about the professor? What about Professor Segal? Call me Dr. Segal. Oh, goodness. So you can go to patreon.com slash do by Friday or giveusyourfuckingmoney.com. And I think we bought another one because people got confused. Giveusmymoney.com. I don't know. Just go give us money.

AlexMany people have adopted various URLs and send it to patreon.com.

MerlinYou know I got givesyracusayourmoney.com. You know I got that, right?

AlexYes, yes.

MerlinI did that. You did.

AlexYou did.

MerlinYou know he's unemployed. He's had a really rough time. He's got a lot of problems. He tried to install a fan in his Blu-ray player and it didn't work out.

AlexGod, I...

MerlinThat story was so stressful to me. I listened to it yesterday on the way to the ATM before Ricky Montgomery. and it was very funny. I love that they're doing the bit about preparing the way. I love it all. I like those guys. Fuck them. I hate them. No, I love them. I love that show so much. And I love

Speaker Awhen they got to the part and you're like, oh my god,

MerlinI really hope the fan worked. He's like, it started spinning, but I could stop it with my finger.

Speaker AI'm like, oh no.

MerlinYour fan installation didn't work.

AlexThat's not a fan. That's just a fan.

MerlinThis is a fan. Sorry, that was Crocodile Tundee pulling out a huge fan. You call that a fan? This is a fan. And he pulls out an industrial fan.

Did I get dosed by Professor Siegel?

AlexThey call me

MerlinMr. Siegel.

AlexYou have a happy hangover,

MerlinI think. Oh, no, I'm fine. I really want to refill my iced tea, but I don't want to do...

AlexThen let's do this challenge. Let's crank it.

MerlinYou say I got to earn it, is what you're saying? Yes, yes. Did you see how big the rabbits I made are in the dock?

AlexYou got some big emoji rabbits.

MerlinBecause I'm always on the horns of a dilemma. Do I want the adorable bunny face for Rabbit Rabbit, or do I want the full-body side-view bunny? And the truth is, I've never loved the full-body side-view bunny, but if you crank it up to 100, is this 100? Yeah, this is Libra, it doesn't matter, 100, 100 points or whatever. You don't want to see what those other bunnies look like, because they are very upsetting. They do look like they are about to devour something precious.

AlexMuch like the rabbits I sent you earlier.

MerlinYeah. Rabbits are dicks. That's Mountainland's adorable, though. He just wants to use his Mac.

AlexOh, I love him.

MerlinThis week's challenge is to quantify yourself, which sounds like a song from the early police. But that's rehumanize yourself. Quantify yourself. This is something that has come up and actually been in challenges before. Now that Daddy rides a bike like a dork, I think that's kind of how we got to it. And we were looking at the self-quantization stuff and what you can do with Apple Health. So really, just simple, basic stuff. Quantify yourself. Now, the way I took that was, I mean, obviously, and you know how we loved it. You and I, we love to tick and turn it.

You could choose to quantify something new you hadn't quantified before. In my world, as we'll talk about, a lot of it is about realizing what I didn't know I was quantifying and deciding whether it's interesting and whether I want to affect a change in what and how that, not that it is quantified, but is that a thing I want to improve? Is that a thing I want to change? Again, content warning, we're going to be talking about body stuff, we're going to be talking about tracking stuff. I have a couple notes about stuff related to diet mostly to, you know,

spoiler alert, like complain about how terrible diets are, but nevertheless. Fair enough. Is that good? Anything else I missed?

Alexno i i don't think so i will be talking i guess talking about uh weight and x yeah you you covered

Merlinit like um and sorry if it's hurtful we don't mean it to be and this is i'm still learning okay oh

Alexokay actually i'm going to do a reverse content warning in that i really well as in you need to hear this fatty no no listen fatties i really wait jesus that's funny oh leave it please please leave it oh so listen up fatties and former fatties it's funny when we can't be sarcastic

Merlinanymore what's the point i wish i'd never invented sarcasm i i i was sincere before it was cool

AlexI really like the ability to, as an adult, say whatever I want about my body. And it has been incredibly liberating. And I like the people who are actually fat activists and who really care about bodily autonomy and liberation. Don't get mad when like talking about like.

MerlinBecause it really isn't in some ways the ultimate good faith attempt to talk about that.

AlexRight. Yes.

MerlinYou can't shame me into being the person you wish I were.

AlexRight. There's no such thing as skinny shaming. That's just someone being dumb and a dick.

MerlinOh, that's like saying reverse racism. Yeah. You can't land on a fraction. Reverse racism is not a thing. I don't know. I could see people who are like, you know, really their feelings get hurt about that. Totally. But like from like an institutional standpoint, I don't think it really stands up sort of side to side with the historical vilification of people who are ectomorphic, endomorphic, not skinny.

AlexNo, still have to. You still need to fucking call an airline if you need a seat that is wider than like the regular like economy seat.

MerlinThey've had to change the seats on ferries and on a lot of public transit. A lot of that stuff has changed because of cost cutting. And that puts more and more people in the position of going to go, hey, can I get a free fatty pass?

AlexThat's so fucking insane. That's just absolutely.

MerlinIt's just weird. You shouldn't. I don't know. And this is one reason. Even though I really enjoy making fun of people's names and the way that they look, it's two things that can't change. Well. Like, oh, sorry, you never made fun of Steve Bannon and the way he looks ever?

AlexOh, that's okay, because he's bad.

MerlinWell, yes, but if we conceptually agree that, like, I shouldn't say that Stephen Miller, like, looks like a Dracula that bought a second Dracula. Like, I can't, there's all kinds of shit I can't say about these horrible, horrible people. Because I don't think it's reasonable and kind to say things about the way people look. I fight it, but it is very funny, and that's part of my job.

AlexIt is difficult to do. Being hurtful for coins. Oh, happy Pride Month, everybody. QueerCoin. That's what I'm only paid in now. That is a real thing. QueerCoin is crypto.

MerlinNow, I thought you people used $2. I remember you people used to use $2 bills.

AlexReally? Wait, is that a thing?

MerlinOh, yeah. I'm a fake gay. Really? Yeah, yeah, yeah. There was a way of showing, like, I mean, it's kind of an interesting idea, but, well, I could be wrong, but you can, you know how the internet works. I believe what the idea was you'd go and you cash a check or whatever and say, give me all this money in $2 bills. Give me all of your $2 bills. And then some people would stamp it, but mostly it was just a way of saying, hey, every time you see a $2 bill in circulation, it's because of a queer person. And it's to make you more aware that we're not just weirdos who are trying to fuck up your concept of marriage.

We also represent financial power.

AlexOh, my God. is this why my parents always gave me $2? My parents didn't even fucking let me to come out. They were so accepting.

MerlinNo, they gave you $3 bills. You couldn't even spend them. You're so fucking weird, you only get a $3 bill.

AlexYeah.

MerlinBecause you are literally, literally as gay as a $3 bill. Alex, please read your email. We've been trying to tell you for months you're gay.

Alexoh okay god okay we even talking about um oh uh the the reason oh oh oh a bodily agency blah blah i like the ability now to just uh talk about my uh body in an honest way and the last i wish you

Merlinstill talked about periods i miss that i miss when you talked about periods i would you i mean

Alexit's still...

MerlinI have a very healthy attitude about menstruation. Alex, I need another tea. Can I get another tea? Do you want to talk to the people? It's only going to take me 45 seconds.

AlexGo get the tea. Please, don't spill it.

MerlinOkay, you do you, but also please be admonished not to do anything that's going to make me uncomfortable. If I put these headphones back on and you're saying something weird, I'm going to be upset, okay?

AlexOkay, alright. Are you sure? I'm walking away. Alright, bye. I'm still honestly I'm still a little convinced that Merlin is listening because I will be in trouble but hey everybody thank you very very very very much for listening it means the world to me and the fact that I get to talk to Merlin every week like it's been a lonely week for me

and I'm not really sure why have you ever had one of those weeks where you're just feel lonely and it's not quite depression it's just and it's not like a social media thing it's not a fomo thing it's just a weird loneliness thing that's that's something that like this alleviates every week and it's really really nice wondering if merlin's back what's she talking about very self-conscious uh oh no she's talking about loneliness and how oh god yeah it's one of it's american affliction yeah yeah no i've had a very lonely week and it's been weird um and i don't

know why. Lonesome or lonely? Ooh, interesting. Interesting. This is one of those times where I'm not sure, but it is probably one or the other, but I, is it costly or expensive?

MerlinThere's a movie or a book where somebody says to another guy, when you're in a bar, you want to look lonesome, but never lonely. And I think there's a difference.

AlexWell, what is the definition of each? I don't know the definition, but the way that I interpret

MerlinLonely is very rarely positive, almost always negative, because it is, to me, definitionally about feeling alone in the sense of like there's nobody. Nobody agrees with me. Nobody likes me. Nobody is here to comfort me. lonely is you cry when you're lonely because it's a way of giving up socially where you feel like you may never sort of fit in

but lonesome is just like hey I'm just over here nursing a drink and reading this book of Rilke poems or whatever lonesome to me is more like a cowboy and lonely is more like a tower sniper

Alexoh jeez well I did not want to or plan on sniping anyone. You're the one saying you like tower sniping, not me. No. No. Okay. So this week you were quantifying things. Yes, I quantified things.

MerlinYeah. It's just again to reiterate what we've talked about here. We've talked about this so much and we've tried and abandoned so many different things, but a couple sort of, to me, I don't know, sticks in the ground that we've talked about in the past include, hey, you know, it's probably a neat idea. If there's a way for stuff to track what you do and it is private,

I'm not going to get into that topic today. But like what I'm saying is I have stuff in my world, including my watch, including my phone, including my smart devices. And so I'm not just talking about like having data about my body. I'm talking about having data about how my body operates, right? So it's not just like tracking weight. It could also be like, and when I say tracking, what I mean is like I've got devices that will tell me how much I slept, how well I slept, and how much I slept if I want to know.

I've got things that will tell me the amount that I exerted on this bike ride today differs from the previous day by this much. Again, I don't need to look at that. This is so critical. If it's all being captured, it's going somewhere. There's an entire world of that stuff. And this is one reason I really do encourage people, if you haven't looked in a while, to go open up Apple Health because you may be really intrigued. Did you know, did you knew that Apple Health, your watch, at least in my case, is keeping track of, well, let's start, let's do an easy one.

How many flights of steps did you go up today? Well, it's kind of interesting that they keep track of that. How fast did you go up those steps today? What was your basically miles per hour of how fast you go up steps? That's an interesting thing to keep a look at. Because, you know, as we learned from, you know, Mike on Veep, you can get a lot more steps in if you're, you know, doing actual steps. You're competing. He's walking in place.

But, no, but, like, then let's take that even further. This is relatively new to me. I think this is within the last year or two. And it'll keep track of, like, your gait. How long are the steps that you take? As in how many inches long is your stride? which is super interesting because when you get a Fitbit, you have to measure that and tell them what it is so that it can properly guesstimate the distance that you cover. So if you take, and the way the Fitbit recommended it is something like, take eight steps, 10 steps,

measure that whole distance, walk like a normal person, don't be weird, and then divide it by the number and that'll tell you your stride length. Well, now devices are keeping track of that for you. They're keeping track of, like obviously things like falls, but they can also keep track of like, this is all just in walking as in like movement around your house. How steady is your gait? So, you know, like we saw even just this week, I haven't read the paper, but it is believed that their disturbances in gait can be an early sign of dementia. That might be a good thing to know or not.

What I'm saying is that's all just walking. So if you wanted to start noticing that you're, let's, let's start with a really easy one. Most basic one. huh, I guess if I look at this graph, I used to do a lot more steps, like, you know, more flights of stairs in a day than I do now. Is that anything I want to change? Not really. Okay. Well, when I do go up steps, do I want to try and do it faster? Like maybe try and pick that up a little bit?

Noticing now that it's keeping track of my gait, is that anything that I want to watch and be more mindful about? Do I want to just in general walk more because maybe I'll get better at walking? That's all just walking. Do you know any of that is in there? Probably not. And you don't need to. because that's the point. The self-quantification, unlike even a couple years ago, let alone 20 years ago, back when Daniel Bryan showed me the first sleep watch I've ever seen, which looked like a diver's watch, it was huge, it was really bad. Now today, all that stuff can be done for you. You never even need to know that it's there.

Second tentpole of this show is that it is conceivable that data you didn't even know was being captured, whether that's about your smart bulb or your butt or whatever, can be combined in interesting ways to show you patterns or opportunities for improvement you didn't know about. And I think the goal this week for me was, I mean, not very big, was just to start looking at stuff that's being tracked. See if you find anything interesting. And if you do, find something you might want to think about having an effect upon.

What about you? What did you think of this?

AlexI mean, I'm always digging around in Apple Health because I just, like you, think it is interesting. And a lot of times I can't understand what the trends are, but I finally...

MerlinWhat the trends are or what the trends mean?

AlexOh, sorry, what the trends mean.

MerlinThey've started doing more in the last... I'm going to say, because at least I don't remember this being in there. Literally, trends are something that they're putting more focus on. It's very interesting. Like over X period of units, like there's been this change, this trend. So like in mine, like a pretty straightforward one is exercise minutes or cycling miles has gone up. And it wants to highlight that to you. This can also be valuable if something changed the other way. And so at the beginning of COVID, I reset all of my ring goals to be like ridiculously low because I wanted to keep doing it.

But I don't want to be I don't want to have to feel stupid and guilty about it every day. But like you might, again, the thing about like flights of stairs. Well, if your brain, this is a pretty straightforward one. If your brain is telling you, yeah, you know, last time I looked, I was doing, let's even say four flights of stairs up a day. You know, as low as three and as high as eight. And you go like, oh, I assume that's the same. It might be instructive to go and look and just say like, oh, like first of all, is it still working? Is it tracking? And if it is tracking correctly and you discover that it's less than one flight of stairs a day, that's something that you can look at.

And you could say like, oh, actually, I would like to do more flights of stairs. I would like to take more walks. I would like to, and in my case, for unavoidable reasons, we're going to be talking about the Apple ecosphere and the things that touch that. So I'm very interested in the Wything stuff, but only really insofar as it gets back into Apple Health. Yes, I use Strava. I subscribe to Strava. but, and please don't ask to follow me, is that you get that information pushed into, and, you know, my Strava information now goes to Wythings as well as Apple Health. Because believe it or not, Wythings Health Mate has some really, really good graphs.

I had no idea were even in there. Some of their sleep stuff is super interesting. And then the dream that really isn't there yet with stuff like, say, Exist.io, The dream someday is for like unbelievably, there are probably unbelievably obvious associations that a human being would never see. But a smart robot could. Like obviously you go like, oh, COVID started. I walked less. Well, that's not surpassingly helpful. But, you know, stuff exists, tries to do, and it frequently becomes comical.

I would like to know, for example, that like, I'm just tossing this out. like, oh, there's a pattern where I sleep poorly and have a higher heartbeat at the end of the month. For example, like I'm thinking of the days like when you get paid, like a certain day of the month or something, where you might be nervous about money or like, let's go all the way down. Like every time I have a phone call with my make-believe sister, like I have higher stress and I eat more for the next two days. Like, I don't know what those would be, but a computer sure would.

And as we've joked about here, that leads to stuff like... Exist.io is a very interesting idea that's not quite there yet, where it basically grabs all of your data that you let it have access to and finds interesting correlations and then gives you a level of confidence. But that does lead to things like the temperature in San Francisco is higher when you're in Washington, D.C. I remember that. I can see how you got to that. but that is,

um, yeah, I'm not a hundred percent sure about your police work. But isn't, did you discover any new things in Apple health that you had not, you say you look at it often. So there's probably not, but in digging down,

AlexOh,

MerlinI got two noise notifications because of the concert last night.

AlexOh, that's funny.

MerlinThere it is. Right inside, right at the top of the summary. It's like, Hey buddy, sound levels hit a hundred decibels. See, I love stuff like that. I think that's brilliant.

AlexI don't know if I have. I don't know if I have.

MerlinBecause your watch will do it. That's also how I know when I snore. Because my watch is not recording, but it's generating data out of what it hears. And I can go and I can look. Okay, so here's a good example also inside of Autosleep. I open up Autosleep, and it's a little bit of a UX nightmare. Oh, God. Well, but you can get – like their graph is really confusing. But once you're kind of used to it, it's less totally confusing. But I can promise you there will be – if I see a spot where there's a bunch of big orange vertical lines, which means I snored, I can almost promise you that my sleep is going to be less deep at that point.

And at some point there will be a waking – a wake event because that's my poor wife like just gently or not gently trying to get me out of the snoring that's happening. But that's all right there. But that's just one app tracking one quote-unquote thing. Actually, it's four things. It's doing like what's your heartbeat? What's your O2? Like what's your blood oxygenation? What's the noise in the room? And then what is your sleep state, which it derives out of what? A bunch of stuff. It's derived like when you're sleeping.

But I'll just trust that it's a solved problem. It knows whether I'm sleeping and how deeply. All the apps have nailed that. David's app as well as SleepWatch. all of those. Do you agree? They do mostly the same good job of knowing that and how deeply you slept. But then that's all good to know. But then someday, someday, I can very much imagine a world where it's going to prompt me for patterns that took 10 years of data to emerge.

AlexYep. And that's awesome. And I don't have to do anything to make it happen, which I love. The passive collection of data has gone against the, I think, the needs slash wants of consumers for so long. It's just been ads, ads, ads, ads. And I really think the way that...

MerlinOh, in terms of the way that it's used to get your information to serve the privacy shit show.

AlexYeah, and this is the one type of sort of gata. Wow. Oh, boy.

MerlinData gathering. I really hope you just invented that because that needs to be a thing. Just write that down. All of my gata.

AlexAll of my gata.

MerlinIs that G-A-D-T-A or G-A-Y?

AlexG-A-Y.

MerlinGata. Gata.

AlexI think it should be T-A.

MerlinG-A-Y-T-A. Gata.

AlexGata.

MerlinGata. It sounds like a merchant on Tatooine.

AlexYou must go and find Gaeta. Go find Gaeta. One thing I immediately noticed that was a new trend that starting in May, my resting heart rate went way down, which...

Ah, spoilers.

MerlinWhy did it go down, Alex?

AlexOh, and you'd think that after getting...

MerlinBecause you're not bracing, anticipating that something in your life will buzz with something you weren't expecting to have to do right now? We need all of the grass in the front of the office to move to the grass in the back of the office. Do we have grass? Get on it! What?

AlexI don't have any conclusions here, but you would think that after getting laid off, you would be more stressed. But in May, I sure did have a lot of my sleep.

Merlinis better. How interesting is that?

AlexYeah. I should have expected it, but I didn't. my steps went up. My sleep's been a little wonky the past few weeks, but my allergies have been shit, so that wasn't surprising. That sucks.

Speaker AAnd just, yeah, everything's a lot

Alexbetter. And been drinking more water. Oh, and I found out So I honestly just was kind of like dicking around and like, oh, this is even better.

MerlinDicking around is the perfect way to put what I do in this app. Right. Because one thing I love about Apple Health is there's so much. I do think it's a little bit of a marvel of design, like many good iOS apps. There's a lot of stuff in here, but you don't have to deal with it all at once. There's a way. It can be a little frustrating. Like when you're trying to deal like anything on.

AlexIt's gotten a lot better, though.

MerlinYeah, but like anything on iOS, anytime you have to deal with a lot of instances of one kind of thing, it's rough. So like if you wanted to go give yourself a little privacy audit and you had to look at all those little switches and decide what to do or – you know what I'm saying? There's all those different places in the iOS settings app where it's just pages and pages and pages of radio buttons and that doesn't feel that. So like if you're trying to figure out something, in my case where a lot of my movement is being – if I'm doing – so I say, hey, dingus to my wristwatch. I say, hey, dingus, start an outdoor bike workout.

And it's amazing to go and scroll all the way to the bottom of, you know, basically anytime you're in a metric of any kind, you can scroll to the bottom. It'll show you what, where it's getting data, Apple Health, and where it's allowing data to be shared. And then there's a cascade of which device or app should win. What a lot of people don't know, it is very beneficial to go in, edit that, and change the order of those to make sure the one, I mean, they don't tell you this. And it's so fucking important. If your sleep stuff is all screwed up, you never realize that the two good sleep apps you have installed are below Apple Watches that you used five years ago.

You can really improve your results. Also, Apple Health is uncanny most of the time about detecting and dealing with duplicate data. So I could run three different apps to take a bike ride, and it doesn't record that as 3x of the workout unless something went wrong. But anyway, but if you scroll all the way down, you get – there's so many things in all of these things. But you really only have like these three tabs. But then you go in, you drill down a little bit. You could say go to like general areas like activity or what is it, like body measurements or whatever, heart.

And it's all just there and very easy to deal with. I forgot what I was going to say. But the Wythings thing, the Health Mate app, is really interesting. Okay, so go ahead. I have two things that I'm doing differently, but what are you doing differently?

AlexI am still using the Tracker app, which just every hour asks me my energy level. And I finally downloaded the JSON file with all that information. And this is where, like, how do you feel from one to five? write that up? Yes. I've got a high energy, good energy, average, low, and tired. And now I have this big old JSON file for months and months of data, and I don't know what to do with it. So I

will be... I thought that I'd be like, oh, I can figure out how to make this into a graph. And I've seen people do it. So it's not that I peanut buttered. I didn't finish my jar.

MerlinWe already know how to do this stuff. It's just a question of, is there a new way to look at what's in there or to discover what's in there? And what is that? I know you didn't peanut butter at all. What are you talking about?

AlexOh, no, I want to finish my peanut butter jar and I want to put this energy. I want to put this next to the sleep. See, I don't know. I got the sleep watch app to do, I think, a JSON file and I figured out how to make that into a fancy little graph. So I just want to see how like my energy levels, like if there's any correlation, because I'm sure there probably is.

MerlinI would love to see that. And I wish, remember Yahoo Pipes back in the day?

AlexYes. Oh, my God.

MerlinI mean, there's been other things like it.

AlexNow that's a flashbulb memory. Yeah.

MerlinWell, Yahoo Pipes was, again, there's been a lot of things like this, but Yahoo Pipes was one of the first one of these things that I ran across. There's another one that was even better, more popular, more indie. But Yahoo Pipes was just this great thing where it was just, it was kind of like, almost like loopback. The way what you do is loopback an audio on a Mac, but it doesn't help if you don't know what that is. So imagine at Yahoo, you go and you say, you go to this Yahoo Pipes and you say, Okay, there's a source of information. There's a source of data over here. There's a source of data over there. And basically, you just drag these little – it's ironic. It's funny because a pipe.

They're referring – I think the pun is on the word pipe or the – you know, like the vertical, the single vertical line. And pipes in the command line often mean you're sending data to someplace else. But they're also using – it's very clever. I love it when I explain a joke. They're also using pipes to refer to imagine like a telephone operator. You grab this pipe and go connect to that pipe. And Yahoo Pipes will let you build out these pretty neat things of taking seemingly unrelated sets of data and spitting out different sorts of things in a graphical interface, which is really clever.

That's what I'm dying for. I'm dying for a rollyourownexist.io. But even as I say that, I accept that the discovery of patterns – how can I put this? You really do need ML or AI. You really need something to just – you just set it loose on finding interesting patterns without giving it too much help, I bet. I bet you would – am I wrong? Am I using those words wrong? You would need AI to really do a good job of this because only AI – like a person is going to have so much sort of prejudice.

And like even the way Exist.io would spit out these things and go, here's something that's crazy interesting but has a low interval of confidence. I just feel like AI, that's to me a great use of AI, as long as it's not by an insurance company or the government.

AlexThat's what I worry about. And that's why I don't really like putting any data. Well, but there is something to be said of putting all of your data in Fitbit and then having, let's say, Google buy it and then scrambling to delete all of it. because Google has a history of giving that data over versus Apple, who's like, no, thank you, FBI.

MerlinI mean, sometimes Google just doesn't seem as like, I mean, this is really, I'm, never mind. I don't like that thing where we act like a company as a person. I think it's really a bad idea for a lot of reasons. But even, setting that aside.

Speaker AWait, what is a person?

MerlinWell, okay, like what I was about to say that I believe, but I don't think is a very helpful idea, is that I think Facebook as a company, if you think of it in terms of this company as a person, I think Facebook is and has always been up to some shit and acts like it's not. I think Google, or rather Facebook, mostly knows exactly how shitty they're being. Somebody at Facebook understands if something got funded and then continued to be around at Facebook,

it's because it served a purpose that was often very creatively nefarious. I don't know why exactly, but I don't think Google is that bad. I don't think Google is as, I don't think they're deliberately trying to fuck people up. And maybe they got a little bit, in fact, of some Apple gospel that like, hey, you know what would be nice is for you to like think of us as being better than Facebook because we're not deliberately trying to fuck you for nickels.

AlexRight. And it's not a paranoia. It's not so much a paranoia around what they will do with my data, but more of my own accidental ignorance that could happen.

MerlinYeah, but companies and services may have a role, whether intentional or not, often intentional, of leaving it pretty ambiguous, except as required by law, leaving it pretty ambiguous what you're in for, what you're committing to, what you're allowing. And when's the last time you read a EULA all the way through? I mean, I'm not Kent from Veep.

I bet Kent reads every EULA.

AlexI hope. Absolutely.

Merlinhe doesn't nevada nevada nevada and now i say it right pretty much every time because of kent

Alexi still nevada nevada hey nevada is the great novel being reissued next week anyway uh people should read it what the fuck does that mean there's a book called nevada coming out june 7th go nevada

Thank you.

289. Defective by Design

Show notes

Transcript

289. Defective by Design

Show notes

Transcript

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