294. Keep the Button

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

Oh, who's calling me? Wait. Oh, I'm calling Merlin. I'm so good at this. what nothing i didn't say anything did you say something you said something i heard sibilance i i was talking to our editor quinn about how normally i start recording before is quinn is quinn there right now no quinn is not there but well but is she is she which timeline is it

Am I the, are we? Down that hall. Yeah, yeah. Oh, boy.

Speaker AMarlon, how are you today?

AlexI'm fine, Alex. How are you?

Speaker AOh, my God.

AlexIs that, is that what I sound like? I'm. Hey. Hey. Hey. Hey. This is Dubai Friday, a weekly challenge podcast. Oh, God.

MerlinOoh. Starting early.

AlexOh, boy. You texted me moments ago.

MerlinWhy do we do this? I'm sorry. Why do you do this?

AlexYes, this is the show. This is the show because I want a treat. And you said, I have automations in Revolts. And I beg you.

MerlinI thought you were going to talk about how you forgot we were doing the show.

AlexOh, no, no. I am now literally getting what I'm going to call my calendar jar for when I mess up with mine or someone else's calendar or a shared calendar event. which, yeah, I need it. I need it. You know what? You made yourself a better person by having a pronoun jar, and I'm going to be a better person by having a calendar jar.

MerlinProceeds go to Howard Brown Health. Who's it go to?

AlexWhat? Oh, that's such a good idea. Okay, okay. This is the real thing now.

MerlinMy proceeds went to Howard Brown Health or whoever got to the jar. but but yours so yours is uh oh it could be it could be uh well one doesn't want to be uh ableist but you know for people who have um uh you know is that is it ableist to make that noise

Alexi don't even know what marginalized group we're making fun of hang on that's you um you can or

Merlinis it people who just have trouble with calendars is there a foundation i don't know you know what There's a genius grant for calendars.

AlexI am going to take this time to grow and learn as a calendar user.

MerlinOh, my gosh.

AlexYou're welcome. But as your friend, I beg you, I beg you, tell me what automations you had in Revolts because this is my wheelhouse. I'm the one who breaks things.

MerlinOh, sure. Yeah, absolutely.

AlexYes, please.

MerlinWell, I texted Alexandra to say, because anyway, the point is that I needed a couple minutes because, as I said, I think I said I have automations in revolt. Now, listen.

AlexIn revolt. Those are strong words.

MerlinI'm going to talk about my lived experience or as we used to say. I'm going to stand in my truth.

Alexone of the chapo guys said uh my lived experience in an unironic way and i dm'd and then made fun of them and i got a response and i felt happy it's everyone's experience what is a not lived

Merlinexperience i truly well we'll put that in notes kieran healy's great tweet which is really you know i like to be kind of a i don't know i like to be a piece of shit sometimes about how people add unnecessary words or in this in that case the word unnecessary was kind of unnecessary mm-hmm yeah yep i'm not no comment they had words you know like a classic classic i actually wrote a whole bit about this one time while i was waiting for a plane to take off i wrote a whole bit about the redundancy of flight attendant speak the classic being full and complete stop

which i'm sure it must that must have a legal meaning maybe but like there's all kinds of things because you don't want you uh you know your trade table what position should that be in

Alexthe upright position.

MerlinUpright and locked position.

AlexOh, I'm sorry. I've not been on play.

MerlinOh, because if you put it upright and you don't get locked, you're going to get a pussy punch. That's going to happen. Just get ready for that. Sharon's having a really tough day.

AlexI felt that on my clit. Yikes. All right, proceed.

MerlinWow. You still got that. Cool.

AlexNo, that's not going anywhere.

MerlinNo. Good for you. Good for you. Throw out the computer. Keep the button. You know, we have a day, those days sometimes where, I'm having a good day, I'm fine. But you have those days where I think I've described it as feeling like you're fighting five-year-olds.

Yes. You know, there's the old meme about how many five-year-olds could you beat in a fight. and it's like, well, you know, if it's just one and they're little and shy, I could just body slam it or whatever.

AlexOr they'll be like me and get an ulcer and have a panic attack and then you can just be like, boom, and done.

MerlinYou were seven when you had an ulcer, Alex. Oh, I apologize. I'm familiar with the APU. I do. So, well, one is that, you know, I know you're not supposed to put betas on your stuff, but, of course, I didn't put it on my... What's funny?

AlexI just went...

MerlinDid you make another sibilant noise? Are you making unintentional sibilants, or am I hearing unintentional sibilants, or is it neither?

AlexOr, I mean, is this the sibilants universe? I don't know if we'll ever know, but I have my betas on everything.

MerlinIt's a sibilants rivalry.

AlexAh!

MerlinThe thing is that, first of all, everything's been coming up Milhouse with these betas, because I think, I hear you, Jason Snell, never put a beta on. You have to do it for your work. But here's the thing. I want the betas, and I'm loving the betas. Loving, loving the betas. but you know the the conventional wisdom i think kind of is one reason they're so much more mature than they used to be a long time ago at least some word on the street is well you know these betas have been worked on for a very long time and even by the time the developer beta is out

you know it's it's gotten a fair amount of love and then the public beta you know it's a long way from what a public beta used to be but i do have a thing where on the two laptops that i have the beta on, they both just shut down sometimes.

Speaker AWhat?

MerlinAnd I thought, no, no, no. Like Colonel Panic? That's on me. I just, yeah, Colonel Panic, Lieutenant Colonel Panic. No, but like I go to the computer and, you know, the telltale sign is that your pad don't got no thump to it. You type, you hit with your finger.

AlexYep, yep.

MerlinAnd nothing happens and then you do the thing. And I thought that was owing to, I still have a, I have a, doesn't matter. So that's context, is that, like, first of all, I'm getting my computer's view back up. None of them are doing anything mission critical. But, yeah, all that happened this morning was what had happened was, and this is not aimed at anybody. This is just, who knows, pilot error. I hit the button on my stream deck that launches the bunch that then bunches the great app of the great Brett Terpstra that does stuff we've talked about here.

I hit the button on my stream deck that opens the bunch you know for one of a nail the war was lost and then that does some stuff and a couple of the things went and then I got the little pop up that says bunch isn't responding and I forced it quitted it and then I got it back up but the thing is so my fans are still running I'm not sure like what state things are in also my nanoleafs have really they're doing their own thing now.

The Nanoleaf shapes just don't want to cooperate. I think I have five thread networks associated with my Nanoleafs.

AlexOh, goodness gracious. That is...

MerlinDo you get one? Do you get one?

AlexToo many.

MerlinToo many. Well, okay, and this is kind of like I was chatting with somebody on Twitter. Oh, you know what? You were in the responses for this talking about HomeKit. And like, I think I get weird cases because I have two locations for HomeKit things. I have a house and I have an office. And then inside of that, I have multiple homes pod. and plus an Apple TV at home. And so I imagine I get stuff other people don't get where it's like, oh, you know, if you've got one HomePod, like a person, HomePod Mini, which is a thread thing and a, you know, HomeKit hub,

you just unplug it and replug it and Bob's your uncle.

AlexOr, wait, really? Do you often unplug your HomePod? Slash does it actually help?

MerlinNo, but this person was kind enough, I want to say Ellie maybe, was saying, well, you and Alex have been having this weird home kit problem. Have you tried this? Have I tried that? And it was being very helpful. And I was describing the odd thing I get where, and this is just kind of described my lived experience. But I go and I look, things are acting a little bit focaccia. I got rid of all the home assistant stuff just because, as good as home assistant was, it was too much. I'm trying to isolate, isolate, isolate. I got rid of my Eve's room because I thought they might have a role in weird stuff.

but the one that I still I do not understand this and I don't know how to fix it like actually fix it my favorite one of these is uh let's put it this way I'll be at the office and I'll think ha home gets act a little weird open up the home echo to home settings drill down go into home hubs and I get down into there and I find out that my office when you know you see the like standby standby standby standby and then one that's connected and the one that's connected will be like the one in our hallway at the house.

AlexOh.

MerlinSo the HomePod mini in the hallway at our house is the hub for my office.

AlexOh, that's so...

MerlinAnd you can guess, you know, the rest of the story, which is I go into the home instance of HomeKit, house instance of HomeKit, and I see, for example, that my house HomeKit hub is the HomePod mini I have in the bathroom at work.

AlexWhat? I mean...

MerlinWell, which part? Did I have one in the bathroom? I like to have sound around me.

AlexI also have one in the bathroom. It is not a hub. Maybe it should be, though.

MerlinBut you don't get to pick, right?

AlexOkay. I don't know. I caught up on ATP this weekend, And I'm so glad that Marco Armentz.

MerlinCasey's real close to pricing out fiber. He's very, very close. He's got the spreadsheet ready to be created.

AlexI'm so happy that Marco is standing in his truth with his lived experience of the HomePod. Because like me, I adore them.

But they're just slowly dying.

MerlinYou're talking about the big boys, not the original big boys. Or HomePod's mini. Which one are you talking about?

AlexNo, no, no. I'm talking about the OG HomePod's.

MerlinYeah, yeah, yeah. The big boys.

AlexYes. That I continue to think were not overpriced because they sound amazing.

MerlinThey sound great.

AlexShut up. Amazing. Especially for the same sound that I have experienced.

MerlinBut those cannot, just to clarify for our audience and you tell me otherwise, HomePod big boys cannot be a home hub, whereas HomePod's mini can and will be a home hub.

AlexThat is what I have been led to believe by all of Apple's support documents.

MerlinWell, they'd have to update the software for it to do that, I guess.

AlexBut, gosh, what?

MerlinI moved it and it started playing pavement everywhere. Can't I just turn that off?

AlexOh, that sounds like a feature.

MerlinOh, my God. I want it off on every single one of them. I hate it so much. I dusted them yesterday. Dusted them. And I started playing pavement. Nothing against pavement. I'm glad he's standing in the street, though. I agree. I have to imagine.

AlexThey must. They must. And by saying they must, I mean, I do mean that I literally have dreams. For once, not nightmares. dreams where there is an iPad-like device that is basically Apple's version of the Amazon show, and it just makes me so happy every time. Yeah, I mean, as long as we're down the rabbit hole,

MerlinI mean, the thing that I think everybody has talked about at some point, including very much me, is like, you know, in the home market, they have not showed much interest in making their own stuff like you know hue stuff will work with home kit mostly and you know all these things will work with home kit you know nano leaf will work with home kit um but they don't make the stuff they haven't made a um you know they haven't made something like the what they call it the airport

time capsule those kinds of they haven't made those in a while and i just there's something you think about what is an apple tv well apart from being very long in the tooth you got this overpriced Apple TV thing that I love because I need to love it. And I've got these HomePod things. And my question at this point is, whatever thing they make to go in your house and to be your home hub and your other stuff, is it going to be closer to an Apple TV or is it going to be closer to a HomePod? Part of me thinks it's going to be closer to an Apple TV.

AlexInteresting.

MerlinI don't think they're that interested in like...

AlexOh, hard disagree.

MerlinNo, say.

AlexThink about how much...

MerlinI'm going to explain the Marco's truth.

AlexI will think about how much time they have spent in both forward-facing advertising. Talk about redundancy. What's not forward-facing advertising? But they're advertising. Full and complete stop. Yeah. Yeah. And they have the lived experience of always talking about spatial audio. And I love spatial audio. I know that it's- I do too.

MerlinMy kid despises it full stop, and I like it.

AlexI get it. I get why it's weird to some people, but I can't imagine a world in which now spatial audio goes away since it's baked into everything to the point where it feels like they shut up about the Mac not having it.

MerlinAlmost like the dumb camera thing that doesn't work where it follows you around a little bit. It's like how they want to start.

AlexOh, stage preview back.

MerlinPreview Boy, Continuity, FaceTime. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You think it's going to be – that's so interesting.

AlexWell, think about how many people are familiar with the Apple TV interface versus an iPad or iOS, whatever. And I know many people now – by many, I mean three. People have called me out for reading too much. But the –

MerlinWe should get an 800 number. People can call you out.

Speaker Ahey this is uh this is morris uh and uh i live in uh in el cerrito and i just want to call alex out for uh for being a bad queer and uh for reading too much and for having a clitoris i'll take my answer off here

MerlinI just can't tell what Arrow is going to get any wood. I agree with you. They love that stuff. But couldn't there be a case to be made? Oh, God. Now we sound like a shovel blog.

AlexWe are an incidental computer show right now.

MerlinHere's everything we know about Apple Watch 38.

AlexMm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

MerlinI mean, she grew.

AlexIf you work for a shovel, hey, pair of pals, if you work for a shovel blog, it must suck. And I'm sorry.

Speaker AWork is hard.

MerlinI'm sorry, I don't make that. But like there's – I don't disagree and that's an interesting way to go. But like they – also though a case could be made – okay. So on the one hand, here's my pro and my con for the closer to an Apple TV slash router is like the – well, I mean the con is I think people who have Wi-Fi in their house, which is a lot of people, it's – how can I put this? you know there's there's been things in the past maybe one reason people said apple will never get

into cell phones because one does not just walk into cell phone like that's a whole thing the blackberry guy you remember claim claim chowder thing about you can't just go start your own phone um that kind of stuff but the like with so many apple things apple has expressed zero public interest in a given technology but really especially in a given line of computer products until they do. And then they seem to be there. They cannot wait to see what we do with it. And I think what's interesting, though, like I'm just speculating,

but the people I know who are normal civilians, like there's people like us who go out and buy an Eero. I do not have an Eero. Or I'm sorry, a ubiquity. You buy something besides that monstrosity, that Xfinity. Xfinity, like the modem they wanted me to use, at one point I upgraded and they sent me this thing that I feel like it had to be, it was like it was deliberately designed to not fit anywhere. It was like 12 or 14 inches high and it did everything. It's your cable box.

It's your all-in-one. But it's also got that nonsense where it's like technically sharing some sidewalk mode or whatever. It's kind of sharing some portion of your bandwidth. You don't have to control over it. But as with so many things, again, that Apple ignores, if people have the crappy commodity version or something and don't seem to mind, Apple tends to hang back a little bit. I think the case at one time could be made. Well, yeah, I mean, I like having a link says WRT54G that I could flash. But I think most people just want to have the tech come out and install a thing.

And you don't have to think about routers or Wi-Fi or cable or any of that stuff anymore. Right. But then so like everybody who wants Wi-Fi can mostly get Wi-Fi plus or minus. I mean, again, they're not going to be able to change who can get fiber or who can get coax or anything if you're stuck somewhere.

AlexI mean, they're a bank. I don't know. Don't rule it out. This is my pipe dream.

MerlinI know. But if you're living in the sticks, if you're living in our beloved sticks, if you're somewhere and all you can get is like satellite, well, they can't address that. But I, so like the downside is like, do they really want to, you know, walk into Mordor with some kind of consumer technology there where people are like, I have a what? I mean, ask people to like describe what I, I yesterday rewired a ton of stuff in our little tech area. And I wonder how many people that just live a life like a person and like go to buffets, like know the difference between like a router and a modem because they don't need to know the difference.

And also there is no difference because Comcast just made you get this giant tower that you put up and it does all the things. So on the one hand, I could see Apple thinking, we'll just keep an eye on that for now. But on the other hand, think about the Apple thing about privacy. And this is really pure wish casting on my part. But like to know that you could fuck with my LG TV and all the garbage that I know it's sending. if you had a way to, I don't even know if that's a good example, but something similar to like a

VPN like Guardian or a way to have filters that, you know what I mean? Stuff where like this is not going to harm your user experience. I mean, could you have imagined five years ago that Facebook would be seeing such a ding in their bottom line because of what Apple was introducing at the level of the consumer purchased phone? Doesn't that seem kind of surprising? I could, And on the pro side, see Apple saying, well, this new Dongus you're going to get, it does A, B, C, and D. And finally, it's worth it because you get 4K TV or whatever, blah, blah, blah.

But I would love to see a privacy-forward managed system from Apple that does that. Boy, that was boring.

AlexDon't do it. Don't do it, Gwen. The whole speculating about names is also sort of weird. But I will shovel onto this pod blog and think about how few people have an Apple TV and how like now Apple TV.

MerlinYou could buy a Roku or a Google Chromecast or, you know, an Amazon stick. You could like buy that at a gas station.

AlexNo, I know. But I mean the namespace pollution.

MerlinWell, I just meant in terms of like why people don't see the benefit of $100 for the, you know, they're always bringing up, you can put video games on it. I could.

AlexSometimes it's fun.

MerlinI mean, I could cook on my automobile hood, but I don't want to.

AlexBut people don't, a lot of people don't even know that the Apple TV is a hardware product because you can get the service Apple TV on Roku, I believe now. And it's on my LG. Yep, yep. But you're going to watch Ted Lasso. Exactly.

MerlinSo where do you go? Are you going to go, you're going to watch, and I know this is an old joke, but it's a very good joke. It is bananas when you say to somebody, hey, you should check out this Ted Lasso or whatever. Or I was watching the not very good show Loot.

And you say, okay, go check this out. It's on Apple TV. So you're going to watch Apple TV Plus, which until recently didn't even have a dedicated area.

AlexSee, I just forgot that it's Apple TV+.

MerlinApple TV+. Apple TV+, is the name of a service for which there is also an app across many platforms called Apple TV. And one of those platforms is called Apple TV. And that's where you watch it. Now, I'll tell you one thing that's interesting, in fairness, is that I am warming up to being the sort of person who the first minute I had the remote, where I could change the button to go to up instead of Apple TV,

you know what I mean, on the remote. But I kind of like the way stuff shows up in a row on Apple TV. It's not perfect, but it's a step closer to the omnivorous box in some ways. I liked it. Like last night, so I watched We Own the City by David Simon and Pelicanos. I've been watching that on HBO, and I love that that shows up in the Apple TV row, like right next to stuff from, you know, almost everything but Hulu.

AlexOh, Hulu works for me, just not Netflix.

MerlinNo, I'm sorry. I meant Netflix. I apologize. I meant Netflix.

AlexI'm a fake nerd.

MerlinSo I don't know. But the thing is, so I'm ready to record with Alexandra and Clint Haver, and I'm fixing to do my stuff. And like, again, once again, you know, my Imperator Furiosa, I need to spend more time being ready before because I run right up to the end because my time management skills are poor in the moment sometimes. But yeah, and stuff didn't want to go. And then the other thing is my lights were all white and I like them to be warm and that wasn't working.

So I don't know if it's a stream deck problem. I don't know if it's a bunch problem. but like the automations it's like it's like getting a transfer on public transit you know in the early days of my kid riding public transit there's a thing i said you know like all things just you know tears and rain i was like the thing is if you can get on in particular a street car that takes you where you want to go you are like you're a one percenter like you're gonna have unless something goes really wrong especially where we live out in the boondocks you can generally get a seat pretty early you know because it's you know the closer you are to the zoo the

less likely anybody wants to do anything. And then you, but you get on and that'll take you where you want to go. But like, okay, if there's a transfer, train bus or otherwise, transfers add so much chaos and buses, buses add chaos because buses, you know, but the point being like if you, I can't even describe, I'm going to say at least half an order of magnitude chance, your trip will be screwed up for all the obvious reasons and many of the unobvious reasons. The obvious reason is that if you have, unless you're very lucky and it's what at least, On Muni, they call it time transfer, quote unquote.

It's like a time transfer, especially at night when they're running even fewer vehicles. Is that like, okay, and then at 1.21, this arrives at Kestron Market. And then you get on the bus. It's the El Terroval, OWL bus that will then take you, et cetera. But first thing is, it's not necessarily a time transfer, right? You don't know how long you're going to wait for that bus. The classic, am I right, San Francisco? The classic Muni thing is you're waiting for your 22 Fillmore. Nothing happens. Nothing happens. Next bus, you know, says, oh, it'll be here when it feels like it.

And then three 22 film wars literally like butt to tail go by because they weren't spread out enough. You know what I'm saying? That automations are like that. Where if your automation literally does one thing one way, you know, you have the usual vagaries of technology. but in my case a stream deck hardware device where i hit a button that button sends basically you know a web request it's really simple the way it works right to bunch which is awesome

and then bunch says hey let's shut off the fans and open skype and do all the things you're adding

Alexa lot of transfers to your route is what i'm saying that is a very good analogy metaphor i I don't know where to stay. Sibilance, especially since the oh, and that's why I think it's it has to be a solution that Apple comes up with. Like, what does this have to do with automation?

According to Apple, like everything, they say automation all the time now. And that's what I had noticed that. Do they in in even in some. like, what was I saying? Normies know about shortcuts now. No kidding. Well, because they're throughout, you know that tip apps or the tip app thingy where it's like, here, hey, did you know you do this?

MerlinWhat's new with Safari?

AlexYeah. And I just kind of check it out every time a new OS is publicly released because I'm like, what are people learning? And shortcuts is everywhere.

MerlinBut I mean, doesn't it feel, I don't know, this is going to sound mean or something, but like Apple's answer to a lot of stuff is, I don't know, their answer to some stuff from time to time will be, well, just go down this really long hallway. There's this door you've never noticed before and you open that and you go down this long hallway. At the end of that long hallway, there's all this stuff. And then there's this like, I don't know, Like the duo, the nerd duos you'll see in so many 90s action movies, whether that's Jurassic Park or Silence of the Lambs. There's like two people who don't like – or like Pacific Rim for that.

But like you go and you're like, okay, you're going to have to go deal with these two Normans down at the end of the hallway to do this thing. And so somebody goes, hey, Apple, wouldn't it be cool if you did this? And go, you guys – I'm sorry because apparently Tim Cook is Bill Clinton. You guys should check out Shortcuts. You can do a lot with it. Which feels like 20 years ago, somebody would say, like, oh, just learn Pearl. It's like, you know, Shortcuts is cool. And as we'll talk about in this very special triple challenge week.

AlexOh, Big, big week.

MerlinShortcuts is cool, but that's neato. I like that. And so they're mainly folks more like me who are, like, using other people's shortcuts. There aren't that many, you know, bishops and deacons and den mothers out there making their own from scratch, right?

AlexThey it's not even using other people's shortcuts unless you count the gallery, which some of them have been like have been made or have have just been pulled over from the really old school workflow days before Apple acquired it. But the main focus is actually Apple's own, you know, their apps like, hey, you can have a shortcut to create this calendar event.

Or, yeah, this is something you can use with messages to automatically.

MerlinThey must get. Do you think they get they must get data on that where they could see? You know what I mean? There must be something like just even general data, the kind of like just even performance data. It would be interesting to see how many people open shortcuts, how many people use shortcuts, and how many people make shortcuts, and what that distribution is on the curve.

AlexHuh. That's actually really interesting.

MerlinWell, this is a thing. I only know about this from stuff like Under the Radar where, I mean, is there anybody who wants your data less than Marco Arment? Probably maybe just I would say it's a tie. Like, I don't want your data. I don't want to know anything about you. I don't want to know if you like the show. I don't want to know if you dislike me. I don't collect that data, and I do not want it.

AlexYou don't want people to send you bike underwear. It just happens. It's just a curse.

MerlinThe feeling in our house is that it was you who sent the bike underwear.

AlexI return no.

MerlinDid you buy me padded panties?

AlexI did. I did.

MerlinLike I said, it feels like I'm menstruating in the 19th century.

AlexI feel like I thought it would be funny for a bit.

MerlinWait, did you actually do it?

AlexYeah. Oh, yes.

MerlinI do have a friend. My friend buys me panties in the mail. I got a thing from Amazon just so our listeners know. I received something and opened it up. And what's interesting, here's what's interesting. And I'm going to tell you a secret. Well, I shouldn't tell the secret because it's a really good secret.

You know how you establish an address, perhaps an address early on, and that's the address that gets used for things like wish list items? My experience is that there is an address, which is probably the normal address that you use for everything. There's multiple addresses I've addressed for you in Amazon because I've sent stuff to you. But there's an address that's like this almost like canonical address, but there's an address that is used for anything that you subscribe to on Amazon.

Like if you subscribe to like, you know, oh, send me all purpose cleaner every six months or something like that.

AlexOh, yeah. I used to send my deodorant to Max every six months on accident because I don't know if there is there a canonical address, though, because.

MerlinWell, no. Well, there's – I mean, my understanding of it is – and nobody cares, but there's the address you chose at some point when you've been buying things and if you're a power user. And who really wants to be an Amazon power user? But, you know, when you buy stuff a lot, you've got whatever your settings are. And you can say like, oh, now from now on, remember in the future, send it to this particular address via this particular method of shipping and payment, right? And I think that's somewhere above a cookie, but somewhere below, you know, canonical.

But let's just say for the sake of argument, if I had said, hey, my name is, you know, Mortimer Snurd and I live at the White House. Like from now on and that becomes my like anything. Somebody bought me off a wish list, a thing that was like an anonymous gift thing. I shouldn't say the secret or, you know, my APC all purpose cleaner. If I see Mortimer Snurred at the White House, I know that that was either a wish list item or a gift or a, you know what I'm saying?

AlexYeah, yeah.

MerlinThis one arrived with not my Mortimer Snurred address. It had my me address. And that's what made me go, ha, because if some joker had bought me underpants, please don't. But if some, besides Alex, if some joker bought me underpants and had it sent, it would have been in my Mortimer Snurred address. You understand? Yes. And that's what made me, in a probably equally efficient way, I explained that to my family who wasn't listening. You sent me panties.

AlexI did.

MerlinAnd so what they are is they look like they're like – they kind of look like a man who regarded himself at some point as being sexy. They're sort of meshy briefs. But then, oh, so much padding. It looks like – I look like a crotch cop. there's all these like nodules of gel in a pattern you know what it reminds me of like a modern not like an old school umpires you know uh protective vest because those just basically

like a pool floaty but this has that like slightly anatomical looking like this this is for your the southeast part of your taint or whatever and i put them on like i said i felt like i was menstruating in england in the 19th century which is a terrific morrissey album um and you

Alexsent that you did that i did because i i was like i wore them i wore them on my bicycle right up against my southeast taint well i just was wondering kind of what you just said i'm like can i just send stuff to people and not mark it as a gift and it'll just show up and i did that

Merlinwith a few people it's kind of amazing amazon's gift shop stuff has not advanced further that Like what you get, if you get it, is like a slip of paper.

AlexYes.

MerlinWith like, you know, all the great shows, you know, whatever on it. But like sometimes I guess it comes with the code you can scan to like write a thank you note, which I try to always do if it's in there. But like you ever bought gift wrapping, quote unquote, for a large item? Yes. I remember. It's a big blue sad plastic bag.

AlexIt's so sad. sad. And I think one time you sent me a video of your family opening like I was so excited. I'm like, oh yes, there's, oh god, this was like six years ago.

MerlinYou just put it in like a drawstring. It's just a mesh piece of crap. It's like recycled material, but it's the most unpleasant hand feel you've ever experienced in your life. It's like an old Chinese lady bag, but cheaper, like real, real cheap, and then that's got your, you know,

the big TV in it or whatever. It seems like there's opportunities there. So what were we talking about? Automations?

AlexI need to ask, though. The thing that excited me about these panties was the description of sweat, both sweat repellent and absorbency, I guess. And I actually wonder.

MerlinDo you have that in front of you? And I just want to really clarify here. This is not even like a ha-ha joke. I swear to Christ, if somebody sends me anonymous panties, I'm going to be very frustrated and I will find you. And you will be banned from the show.

AlexOh, absolutely.

MerlinDo you have it in front of you that you could find it?

AlexYeah, let's see.

MerlinOh, you did because you posted a photo. I should have known that was you.

AlexYes.

MerlinIt's like you've got a six-pack for your team.

AlexOh, yeah. I'm like, is it like a fucking pad?

MerlinIt's mini pads and it says gel, gel, gel. all over them. It'll probably be show art for this week, I'm guessing.

AlexIt's so weird looking.

MerlinCould you send me a link to it?

AlexOh, God, it's so good. Oh, yeah. Last purchase, June 28th. I forgot that I did this until you posted on Twitter. Well, imagine how I

Merlinfelt, Alex. Probably terrible.

AlexI immediately felt guilty.

MerlinI'm not above having a drink and going online shopping. I'm not made of stone. But I was like, I honestly don't remember ordering, you know, taint panties.

AlexCould be the edibles.

MerlinI've driven myself a little bit crazy with it. Yeah. I got a new load yesterday.

AlexI'm off the eddies.

MerlinSeal them up in the food saver bags.

AlexOh. I do a once a year purge because I'm a weirdo who, I think this is very surprising to anybody listening. I really like to track what my brain is doing and how my body feels.

MerlinOh, this is all relevant to the triple challenge this week.

AlexOh, indeed. Yeah. And so I usually do a month of no weed just to reset my –

MerlinOh, reestablish a baseline.

AlexThis is no judgment whatsoever.

MerlinActually, it turned out I was not that into your hair. You ever really think about your hands? Yes, I have. I'm in the month where I don't think about hands.

AlexI have to say, it is kind of a bummer, though, when your spouse is just really enjoying Steven Universe more than you.

MerlinOh, yeah, it was like dry January kind of situation.

Speaker AI want to point out, so can I do a reading here real quick?

MerlinPlease. Okay, first of all, I need to say, and I'm so sorry to have to be the one who says this, this amazing photograph, which will pretty definitely be show art. If you notice, you see the tag? These are turned inside out to show you. You don't actually look like a baboon when you wear them unless you wear them inside out. The gel part, those blue things are like on the inside, as you can see from the tag here. Right? That's so misleading. Yeah. No, they still look real silly. Don't worry about that. I'll get a photo for you of me wearing them.

This is X-Tiger, X-Tiger, X-Tiger men cycling underwear, shorts, 5D padded gel, MTB biking shorts, pants with breathable adsorbent design.

AlexOh, God. I wrote that copy. Oof.

MerlinLet's see about the size. Tag size is Asia size. Oof. Whoa. Asia size? Whoa. Sorry. First bullet, 100% polyester. Hakuna Matata. Second bullet. And this is in those weird Amazon, those brackets you only ever see on Amazon items. What is that? They've got to be some kind of Unicode thing. But it's basically you make bold brackets. I'm going to find out what character this is. About the size. Cycling shorts and then the phrase tag size, but it's inside of Unicode hearts, which are basically used like quotation marks.

I'm sorry. I could wind up in details. Cycle shorts tag size is Asia size. Oh, boy. That runs smaller than U.S. standard. Please check the size chart for cycling clothes.

AlexHow? That's an interesting little micro-racism.

MerlinWell, then they couldn't afford spaces. between the words.

AlexYeah, yeah.

MerlinLet's see. Machine wash brand of 5G. These are tremendous. These will all get this for show notes. Thank you so much, Alexandra, and for solving the mystery of the anonymous panties.

AlexYeah. Title. Merlin, I've monopolized this episode. Fuck you. Yes, I agree. Actually, no, no one should fuck me. I am, God, I'm like you now, just not horny ever at all. Huh.

MerlinYou get enough sleep?

AlexOh, interesting. Interesting.

MerlinBecause I heard that when you get more sleep sometimes, that helps with your whatever the they version of a boner is.

AlexYeah. On my, you know, the other podcast that's only going to have three episodes, Technically Queer, I'm like, guys, we can't describe this as a horny podcast because I've been married for six years. No, no. Oh. I am the most boring queer person. I'm so happy to be that way.

MerlinI don't know. We got some neighbors who are really boring. Ooh. I mean, they've lived next door to us for 20 years. But yeah, they've been together that whole time. Two dudes. And probably a little younger than me, not a lot younger. And they're really boring.

AlexOh, good to hear.

MerlinI think it's one of the benefits of the old queer couple. The mystery of the old queer couple.

AlexAbsolutely. featuring just the hard boys. They don't wear those cool chest straps or anything.

MerlinThey slam the door when they take out the trash, which I don't love.

AlexMaybe that's their kink. Don't shame them.

MerlinOh my God, I'm so sorry. Stop standing in my truth. Sticky down there. What is adsorbent? Because sometimes I do that thing. I do that where I need to learn the difference of something Because like if you say to somebody, oh, I judge that to be the best candidate. And sometimes I will say I adjudged that. Because maybe it feels more like a verb to me. I'm not sure.

Adsorbent. So absorbent, I'm going to guess. And I never studied Latin. I'm not going to look. You can hear me. I'm not typing. I think absorbent is like it absorbs. It like sucks up the liquid. I'm going to guess adsorbent. So what is ad? Add is the prefix. addenda, addition. I'm going to guess it repels moisture. Is that

Alexadsorbency? That's what's confusing me. It's too close. Yeah, yeah. Okay, I'm going to look it up. Oh, gosh. Adsorb.

MerlinYou know, if I've been good in science classes, I probably know that. Does this have to do with cell walls, Alex? Maybe mitochondria? They say that's the engine of the cell.

AlexOh, I'm just going to agree because I remember nothing from AP Bio

MerlinDid you watch that CGP Grey video on Paper Sauce? Did you watch that?

AlexOh, heck yeah. That is.

MerlinTalk about getting some new edibles.

AlexExactly.

MerlinAbsorbent is a, adsorbent used as a noun. It's a substance that, oh, fuck me gently. According to something on the internet, an adsorbent, I hate the mouthfeel of that. It's the noun. Do you want to know what that is? This was not a past in Ms. Hare's fourth grade class. A substance that adsorbs another.

AlexOh, come on.

MerlinOkay, well, hang on. Let me get you the adjective because this clears it up. Adjective is like using to describe, you know. It's able to adsorb substances.

AlexOh, good. Good.

MerlinIt's adsorption all the way down.

AlexMm-hmm. Yep.

MerlinAdsorbent. Solid substance used to remove contaminants from liquid or gas that can harm the environment. Oh, that's me. Alex, how is this week different from other weeks?

AlexHow is this week different than other weeks? This feels like a trap.

MerlinNever mind. You're not doing the bit. We might, depending on how this goes. Hello. We should get to it. Oh, shit. I'm sorry. I'm cutting you off. but we kind of have a triple challenge i think the carryover from last week's challenge is going to be oh very quick uh and then we kind of have two other uh challenge related things i'm excited to talk about all of them did we have anything else in notes here to talk about when we are i just

Alexnoticed i don't believe so you might have a man of the week am i saying yes yes yes yes i i have

Merlinmultiple met of the week we gotta talk about these poor first responders who keep touching fentanyl We've got to talk about that.

AlexPatreon.com slash Dubai Friday. No promises. Alex, no. No alarms and no promises, please. I need to talk about the fentanyl boys. I just, it's so funny.

MerlinOh, no. I'm high on drugs. It's so funny. I'm so sick. It's so funny. I had a funny tweet about that.

Speaker AOh, really?

MerlinDid you see the funny thread the other night? There was a funny thread on the internet about this. I'll see if I can find it. I just liked it because I got to use the word corn, which is one of the funniest words.

AlexCorn?

MerlinYeah, it's a very funny word. Yeah, you'll get there. Okay, so how did this – okay. So, okay, okay, okay. I'm going to read this. So like perhaps Havana syndrome, there's a lot of folks out there who are pretty convinced there's all these cops that are getting extremely sick because they go and they're going to go apprehend some perps, some particular individuals, and then they get exposed to fentanyl. Right? Because there's just fentanyl fucking everywhere in these places. They have fentanyl. It's almost like a clown with seltzer or like balloons falling out of Democratic Convention.

There's fentanyl guns everywhere. It's like running through the Indiana Jones cave and instead of blow darts, fentanyl is aimed at the officer.

AlexIt's an epidemic.

MerlinThis is a person on Twitter. I'll jump through this quick. Legalizing pot seems like a common sense policy, but in fact, it's a public health disaster that the MJ, the Mary Jane industry, is doing its darndest to cover up. totally unwoke, I know, etc.

Three more in this thread. Two days ago, this is a person on Twitter, two days ago, I was outside a children's gymnastics santa watching my two-year-old niece do a class and the smell of weed was stifling. Doctors out here have told me they're seeing cases of cannabis poisoning most days. It's the most common form of any type of poisoning in adolescents in California. Now, please hang on. And this goes out to you if you're still out there, Max Temkin.

Oh, and there's also a doubling of something odd called scrommeting. That's screaming and vomiting, which lasts for weeks on end with no treatment. A result of long-term use of high-potency cannabis. Have you heard of scrommeting? The kids are calling it scrommeting.

AlexScrommet. God, it's a Muppet.

MerlinYeah, that definitely sounds like something a cop would make up full stop.

AlexOh, God. You know what? Let's do a quick little bonus for the people who are not pay pigs and don't go to patreon.com slash Dubai Friday. May I do a very brief reading series?

MerlinSure, but can I just finish this thread thing? Oh, I didn't realize it keeps going. No, no, no. Then everybody went fucking ham on this hilarious thing. So this person, user John F. Ketamine, Poppy Hustle, says, my cousin, who's a police officer, was exposed to some high grade, quote unquote, skunk during an investigation. A few hours later, something crazy happened. His dick and balls switched places. His balls are now on top and his dick is on the bottom. The doctors say nothing can be done. And then my addition to this was my buddy was executing a warrant on a stash house when he fell on a beanbag chair full of pure Appalachian corn, quote unquote.

And he accidentally snorted over a quarter of an ounce, and now he's retired because he thinks he's corn. Really sad. Do a reading series for us. Appalachian corn.

AlexI think I lost the tab because I was like, God.

MerlinNo, don't fake it.

Speaker ACorn. Did Aaron Copeland write that, Appalachian corn?

MerlinAppalachian corn. It's what's for dinner.

AlexOh, gosh. This is from CBS News. News. Tennessee officials warn of potential...

MerlinThe drugstore? Oh, CBS. Okay.

AlexCBS Logreens.

MerlinI love their grease letter.

AlexTennessee officials warn of potential danger of fentanyl-laced dollar bills.

MerlinOh my God! That I give to my children?

AlexMm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Tennessee authorities are warning against picking up folded dollar bills of unknown origin after reporting two separate incidents where the synthetic opioid fentanyl was found inside folded cash.

MerlinBecause most dollar bills are of known origin. You get the papers for the entire provenance of your fucking currency.

Speaker AThat's what money is.

MerlinGo ahead. Sorry.

Alexand there's a photograph of a little dollar bill folded up um but the like a photo photo or like a

Merlinstock photo is it like like a hacker in a hood kind of thing blah blah no a literal photo uh

Alexellis it's it's like uh oh look at we we got one the kind you put into your swimsuit so you can buy a snow cone when you go to the pool actually yes oh i was just thinking about this i'm like this is the kind of thing that i would put yeah yeah i would like put in my shoe oh man in that

MerlinA little secret pocket, but what bills?

AlexOh, my God. That's where I keep my fentanyl.

MerlinThis is already making me so angry, Alex. What they do to our children.

AlexOh, and the sheriff's office said it plans to push for legislation, quote, that would intensify the punishment if someone is caught using money as a carrying pouch for such poison, unquote. Oh, no, wait, it keeps going. It enrages me as a father and the sheriff that people can act so carelessly and have no regard for others' well-being, read a statement posted on the sheriff's office Facebook page.

MerlinYou know, I'm mad. I don't even like my kid. No, I'm mad. That you would use currency like that?

AlexAs a pouch?

MerlinAs a pouch? And so the idea here is that this really has the feel of a, you know, Snopesy thing. So like back in the day, if you were like the guy in Die Hard in Holly's office, you're doing cocaine. You're snorting it through like a $20 bill, right? Or $100 bill, I guess, you know, right? So there's that. There's that kind of a feel. But in this case, what they're saying is somebody goes and says, hello, may I please have some fentanyl? And they say, yes, the way that we're doing that, this is your first time drugging with us, things are a little different here.

We're going to serve your fentanyl to you in a folded up like origami style dollar bill. Is that the idea that you're using it as a little pouch, like a drug wallet?

AlexThat is what they are. They're making that assumption.

MerlinAnd this is, I'm not going to click on this because I like Walgreens, not CVS. It says, Tennessee officials warn of potential, Jesus Christ, every single one of the people involved in any part in the story should be fired immediately. Tennessee officials, officials, you know, that's not an adjective anymore. That's a noun. Tennessee officials, what officials? Who do they work for? Warn of potential danger of fentanyl-laced dollar bills.

AlexYeah, just. And the thing is, there's no mention of like a plastic baggie or anything. It's just, nope, just the fentanyls in this little, just this little folded up dollar bill.

MerlinCan you imagine how many cops get exposed to airborne fentanyl because of currency every day? Our first responders, Alex.

AlexYeah, thoughts and prayers. Thoughts and prayers. This July 4th, so much fentanyl.

MerlinI picked the wrong week to watch David Simon Properties. So I was like I say, I was watching, oh God, Jon Bernthal. You know that guy that's in everything. He's Punisher. He's Rick's partner on Walking Dead.

AlexYes, he's the brother, right? Yeah. Well, spoilers for challenge. Yes.

MerlinOh, wait. No, no, no, no, no, no, no. No, he's not the brother. I fucked that up. But also that's Jon Carrey Rue guy you're thinking of, right?

AlexNo, I'm thinking of the guy. Oh, shit. Yes, yes, yes. Oh, my fucking God.

Speaker AYou're absolutely right. It's just in like one episode.

MerlinStop it, stop it, stop it. Spoilers, no spoilers. Yes. I love that actor. I think he's terrific. And so I don't know how I came across this, but I'm pretty sure HBO. There's this show called, I think it's called We Own This City. And it's based on what happened in Baltimore after Freddie Gray. And basically they discovered, this is news, this is not a spoiler. they discovered there's some pretty rogue shit going on amongst plainclothes detectives in this thing called the gun task force.

And you might remember this from a few years ago, maybe four or five years ago, but they busted this group of guys who were, I mean, where do you begin? They were obviously trying to get their arrests up. They were doing stuff like planning drugs on people. But what they were really doing was robbing the shit out of everybody. So they would take all the drugs. They would steal the drugs and just have a small amount that basically got reported. They would steal. I mean, in this sense, they were effective.

They would go to some super rich drug dealer's house and steal $100,000, but then report like $300 or something like that and split it up. And it's so fucked up. And like they were using informants to like try and find more places they could bust. And Jon Bernthal is like the head of that group. And it's very good, very Baltimore. And perhaps unsurprisingly, it's by George Pelicanos and the great David Simon.

Speaker ASo I blasted through that.

MerlinNow, if you enjoyed that TV show, The Wire, of course, perhaps unsurprisingly, again, I had a toot about this the other night. A bunch of people you know from The Wire are also on this show. So if you remember Marla Stanfield, he's in that. If you like there's so unfortunately no bubbles, but there's a lot of extremely good. I'll send you a photo. It's going to blow your mind. so good almost like too short i blew right through it as soon as i watched the end of the last episode last night of course i fired up the show and started watching the show oh i went back around

one more time it's american man i'm watching the wire again are you going straight through not not gonna skip oh i don't know i i'm gonna i'll probably what i was thinking was i just got to the first i think it's in the second episode the first scene with omar where they're at the not the low rise the terraces and they're like omar and his two dudes are like his boyfriend and the other guy are like scoping out he's like what is and oh god that actor omar he's so goddamn good

Alexsloppy operation so good i'm coming i mean i i r.i.p dude oh i love like okay so yeah i know

MerlinThat fucking sucks. But the – but like, you know, so why am I saying that? Because like let's just say, you know, my ardor for the first responders is not super high right now. And then – so then a la Havana Syndrome, we start hearing about all these cops who are suddenly exposed to this giant blast of fentanyl. It's like the people who think gays want to turn children gay or people who like think, oh, I'm going to put costly drugs into Halloween candy.

And it's like, have you ever met another person? Do you understand anything about human motivation and economics? Oh, I'm going to buy all these drugs and give them to children. Why? Oh, because I'm evil.

AlexYeah, I just want to lace weed with kids. I just want to give it away. I just want to give it away.

MerlinBut there's the epidemic, Alex. Get my back here. The epidemic we've been hearing about is all these poor first responders, like very nearly dying. They got to go get the narco camera or whatever. Because they've been exposed to fentanyl at a drug bust, right? And these cops, these wonderful cops, these heroic cops are laid low by this fucking airborne fentanyl. Is that the basic idea?

AlexYes.

MerlinDefinitely not because they're taking fentanyl at the scene. Definitely not that they're using fentanyl that they just found. Definitely not. It's definitely blasts of Indiana Jones airborne air darts of fentanyl that are harming our dear first responders. Dollar bills, handling a dollar bill. They go in to buy a Snapple, you know, and then they get high.

AlexI just don't even think all of these cases. I don't even know if they're actually using it because so many of these stories are like there's like footage, I believe, of a cop just like touching it and freaking out.

MerlinI'm not saying it's never happened. Fentanyl is a huge deal in San Francisco right now because for whatever reason, they're cutting a bunch of heroin is getting not cut. I mean, shit. But I guess maybe there's a shortage of heroin, but so many people. Fentanyl is no joke, man. Like it's fucked up. There are so many people like in the Tenderloin. This is a huge deal right now. People buying what they think is heroin, but it's got fentanyl in it. And people are dying from overdoses constantly in San Francisco.

Fentanyls, I'm not making fun of fentanyl as a dangerous thing. I'm just curious about this cop-centric affliction.

AlexIt is. I am not. I am definitively saying I am going to take the bold, brave stance that none of these cops have actually been. They have not overdosed based on fentanyl going into their lungs or their skin. And it's no.

MerlinUnless it's like that scene in Annie Hall where Woody Allen sneezes on the mirror full of cocaine and the entire, like, the cocaine goes everywhere. Like, I mean, I don't know. I don't. It's just.

AlexThere's plenty of, like, debunking. But what's so funny is that all of the descriptions are clearly panic attacks.

MerlinOh, say more about that. That's interesting.

AlexOh, yeah. This was the.

MerlinHaving trouble breathing. Yep.

AlexYep. They feel like they're going to pass out, that their vision, you know, the tunnel vision and the like their face gets red. All of these read like panic attacks. And I will find one of the OG stories about the first fentanyl, the cop fentanyl panic. but he was treated and taken to the hospital and turned out he was fine but the hospital cannot confirm or deny what happened.

MerlinI mean, wouldn't they be able to run a panel of some kind to see definitively?

AlexWell, yes, they can but they're not gonna tell anybody. They're not gonna tell anyone how kids got shot. You're not gonna say your buddy panicked and passed out.

MerlinLike a girl.

AlexOh, I fucking, I just, I mean, as someone who is very familiar, as a child of a father who has, I'm fairly familiar with Panika Jax and all of these stories just are, oh God, it's so, it is, fuck it, it's funny. I think it is funny and fuck these guys.

MerlinI mean, it's like Havana Syndrome where it's like I'm not saying that something didn't happen. I'm just not 100 percent sure about your police work there, Lou. I mean, literally, like the Havana Syndrome thing. God, it's so fucking weird and strange. And like it feels very of – this is really pussy hat logic. But like it feels very of this time right now that we've decided that the Cubans are shooting laser beams at us to make us lose our minds.

AlexYeah.

MerlinAnd it's like I could be lots of things. You know what, dude? I look at the groundwater. There's a lot of stuff I would look at before laser beams. You know, I mean, like, I don't know. It's just I'm not an epidemiologist or, you know, think about like I know it's a little bit. it hasn't aged super well maybe but i don't know when it was on hbo in the 90s i love the movie and the band played on because i love following along just like the tracking down of this it's so it

opens with you know him and with the congo dealing with um not dengue fever but you know the one where people bleed out their eyes or whatever it's like just trying to track down what this was and for you youngs i mean 1980 81 didn't have a name they did have a name i think they called a grid or gay cancer and like certainly no that's what they call it it was like it was called gay cancer

Alexi i know and i it's not funny but it oh god have you seen the documentary about uh dick on duga

Merlinhave you seen the no oh shit dog do you remember the handsome uh the patient zero there's a really good documentary about him.

AlexOh, shit.

MerlinYeah, let's put it in notes. But no, but just following that, and there's a scene where Phil Collins is the guy that runs the bathhouse here in the city by the bay, and they're wondering, is it poppers? Is it like amyl nitrate that's causing AIDS? Is it being, you know, and I think one thing, you know, as my friend Dennis used to say, sometimes even a blind hog finds an acorn. Like I think in shutting down the bathhouses, vis-a-vis the public sex clubs that people had fought so hard to have the liberation to have sex, you know, they weren't going to let go of that.

They didn't want those clothes. But that might – I don't think it helped a ton. But I don't think it was because of porcelain, white towels, and bathwater that something was happening. You know what I'm saying? It's like things can be – just because something – what is the word I want to use here? Just because something isn't completely wrong doesn't make it right or correct, I should say. Just because something isn't 100% incorrect – I mean it's like that phrase, even a stop clock is right twice a day.

Well, it is. It never was really right, but it was correct, right? And so like you can – I mean I'm not saying that there hasn't been, on the one hand, terrible shit that happens to cops. Sorry. Welcome to our world. But I'm also saying like I don't know, man. It seems pretty wild that like suddenly they're really raiding that much fentanyl and that much fentanyl is getting into the air. A term that was so important at my old corporate job because we were doing toxicology – toxic tort litigations and doing toxicology.

Oh. Well, I mean, there's a phrase originally invented by a medieval alchemist of all people named Paracelsus. And he said the dose makes the poison. And I think that's true. Right. So like just because you read an article about fentanyl doesn't mean you got poisoned by it. And if you got all of the fentanyl and like started up yum, that's bad. But somewhere in between. Right. And the way we would talk about this is, again, you know me awards, dose versus exposure.

Just because you were exposed to anything does not mean that you got a dose of it. So if you hold an Advil to your forehead, you're exposed to Advil, but you're not receiving a dose. Because then it's like exposure. Now let's figure out what your dose was and then what was your dosage? Like how much did you get, right? so i'm not saying it doesn't happen but i am saying huh maybe they just do a lot of drugs on the scene and this one just happens to be really fucking strong i don't know all right i

Alexfound the paragraph of the um who who is this guy uh dan mcquaid he's been following this for a while uh the toxicologists i've talked to have basically settled on what's happening here And it's the same conclusion that my own experience with the drugs pointed to. Cops are having panic attacks upon encountering fentanyl because they believe they are overdosing.

MerlinThe panic attack is because the panic is coming from inside the fentanyl.

AlexExactly.

MerlinHoly shit. And they're scared. They're worried. They're anxious that they're going to get sick or die.

AlexExactly. Which is what, like, a panic, if you don't know what a panic attack feels like, it usually feels like you're dying.

MerlinYou feel like you're having a heart attack, can't breathe.

AlexRight, exactly. And the symptoms seem to never match up with those of an actual opiate overdose. For one thing, these reports of overdoses never include the officer reporting a wave of euphoria before collapsing. There's a reason people use opiates, which just feels like, ah, which I don't know why I never thought about that.

MerlinOfficer Bagatarski says, I'm really into your hair right now. I was exposed to Molly Exposed to Molly Sounds like a Pogue song

AlexNo it sounds like an American girl Just epidemic

MerlinAn American girl doll? Oh no That's the worst American girl doll ever

AlexI know

MerlinDrugs-y challenge challenge challenge challenge challenge challenge challenge this week kind of three challenges we had a challenge that's continuing a challenge the first continuation from the previous challenge keep working on this voice log idea woof spoiler alert that's

going to be a quickie um we'd also talked about discussing the app bearable that really intrigued

Alexme and i'm guessing intrigues you oh my goodness this promising am i right might yes this this might be what i want for energy and mood and seeing we'll talk about it you gotta focus on

Merlina few, don't focus on it. You know what I'm saying now when I was saying don't track everything, track a few things. Well,

Alexthat's the thing is I am already you know, I've rolled my own mood and energy type thing that just goes

Merlininto... Yeah, you'll know if getting good sleep makes you feel three. Yeah. And then finally our third challenge, but the second in our bear-related challenges is to talk about the... I thought it was FX, but maybe Hulu TV series The Bear.

AlexIt is one of the FX. I was confused by this too. It is an FX show. It's not on

MerlinFX yet, supposedly. It's not going to

Alexair on FX. It's just

Merlinon Hulu, but it's

Alexby FX. Yeah, yeah.

MerlinOkay, well, we, you know, we talked a lot and we still got to do an after show. So, what would you think about I'm cheating here, you guys, because I actually did talk to Alex about this suggestion will you will you confirm that alex i'm not just being a user we talked about this we we did we did indeed we're going to quickly dispense with voice love because there's not a lot to say there alex is uh be smitten be smotched with a bearable but hasn't had a super a lot of time to use it and see results correct yeah because right right now like there are some

Alexmood insights but mostly early god i love how it slurps in the sleep and yeah we might talk about

Merlinthat a little bit in the after show, but how about this? We'll dispense with voice log because, boy, talk about landing with a thud. We'll talk about that, and then we'll talk about the TV show The Bear, and then we'll record an after show for Patreon people.

AlexYes, patreon.com slash Dubai Friday. I have never wanted to find a way to get someone to make me an app more than I do right now with this voice log thing.

MerlinThis is regard. Oh, I totally agree.

AlexIt's all I think about. It's just like any VC listeners. Yeah.

MerlinIt seems so simple. And we'll get through this fast. First of all, I think we got, I counted two submissions from listeners. There might be more that I missed, but that's two. There's two.

AlexYeah, I don't think. I should tweet and not delete said tweet. And we have a GitHub repo, right? And will every suggestion and I guess submission, they're all good. And they're all so slow through no fault of the mix.

MerlinYeah, this is, well, let me, previously on Dubai Friday and elsewhere, I've talked about how this is going to seem bike related, but I think it's really not. Uh, long story short, what I want, what I wanted was a way to be on my bike, possibly I'll allow it with one air pod in, um, but, but really to be able to yell into the air. Boy, this is so goddamn crazy. I realize now how crazy this is. What I wanted was to be able to yell into the air and say, Hey dingus, say one, one or two sentences, have that captured to a file somewhere and for it to include, you know, time date and location.

So basically all I want – it seems I thought this was going to be simple. I want to know when I said this thing out loud. And the specific example was, God, I've got to remember which streets to just avoid because there's such garbage to ride a bike on. But also let's extend it to I think what – I don't want to speak for Alex. But what got me excited is, damn, man, I want this all the time. I want a way to yell into the air and have Siri write it down somewhere. and each one of these sounds like a small addition but with you know I don't want to have to say I

want to be able to yell out for example uh shitty road here and it knows the address that I was at when I said that but I want it for all the things I want something that is as fast and reliable as reminders via Siri but isn't going to clot up my reminders app with a bunch of blah blah which blah blah by the way does not include as far as i know without a shortcut does not include uh date time stamp it was recorded um and it doesn't have location i mean i guess you could

hack it a little bit by yelling you know you know remind me the road is bad when i leave here

Alexyeah but i i don't want that i don't want that like yeah i want not what i prefer

Merlinso i laid out i wrote big strong man king in the castle i wrote a big spec blah blah blah look at me i'm merlin i got a bike it weighs almost as much as i do i'm an idiot i have the suv of e-bikes and i want to yell in the air and have people get the fuck out of my yeah and so what i laid out in the spec was it seemed like you know and again not a spec a true like requirements or spec document But the idea was I just said, hey, look, I tried to describe how I thought of this, how I want to use it.

That I think it would be useful for other things. You get the idea, right? That pretty much sums it up. And my guess, and then I included a couple additions of things I've either looked at or did try. Do I want to do this with drafts? Direly, I think it's pronounced day one.

My itch from the beginning was that somebody smart could make a shortcut of this, which people did. A couple of our listeners did. And I tweaked one of them a little bit. We'll get to the results of this in a second. But, you know, I had asked for a lot of stuff. You know, give me the location as lat long. Give it to me as an address. Do all this stuff. And like I think I mentioned last time, I don't remember. When these two arrived, I tried them at my desk with, you know, okay, good internet. And they seemed fine.

And they each wrote to a file on iCloud, which was great. But Alex, what did we discover through no fault of anybody, any listeners, any helpers, any good doobies who made these? What did we learn very quickly, Alex?

AlexJust that it's so slow that it becomes so unreliable that I've, I don't want to say I've given up. I mean, I don't know where you're leading me other than it's just, it's slow and inconsistent.

MerlinNo, no. I just wanted to verify that our very, very good listener boys, whose names I'm going to say right now. I remember there's Metal Matt and there was, who's the first one that sent one in? Remind me. Not Ryan. What was his name? I don't remember. I'm going to GitHub. I'm clicking. I have gotten into a bad habit because I don't like to over-prepare for things. I've gotten into a bad habit of forgetting to acknowledge or thank people for things. And that's something I'd like to work on. dbf voice log is this the good one or the old one um that's the old one so yeah i started a repo for

alex and me on my github so the three candidates that i've seen anyway are something called voice log from andrew litican we'll drop a link in to his twitter in notes and also bike log by metal Matt, which I decided to swoop in and take a crack at. I made one called Real Quick, which is almost a thousand percent his work, which is a couple of tweaks from me. And like, it was like, how is this slow? Why is this slow? Well, it's slow for like, let's just start with first principles, Clarice,

which is like reminders. I don't know. You can tell me your experience, but my experience is if I yell out and I do this a lot, like mainly admittedly on Wi-Fi, I yell out, hey, dingus and this entire array of different devices, something will hear me. That's important to know, right? If I'm doing this in my office, there's like I've had to turn off Siri detection on some things because like I turn it off on my iPad here because that's not what I want responding.

AlexOh, so you've turned. Oh, OK. So if you say.

MerlinLike if I'm watching TV or I'm watching a movie on an iPad and of all the things that could, you know, I could still get it manually by hitting the top button and talking. But if I want to say play this everywhere, for example, which will then attempt to play it on every speaker in your location, which sometimes works, sometimes doesn't. But let's go very, very, very first thing. Like did it hear me? And I'll try to make this fast. And like if I'm at the office, yeah, something heard me. my watch, my phone, you know, all this, something heard me. Okay. Well, it heard me. Did it

understand me? Yeah. It mostly understands me. If I yell out, Hey dingus, remind me to, remind me to grab some ice when I leave the office in one hour. Like at least in my experience, that works very well. I do like everyone sometimes get some very, very strange mystery me mishearings of what I said, but generally it does hear me. It does get it mostly right. And my gut is, you could tell me again what your experience is, but my gut is if it is something like reminders or a timer or any of those like stock built in things, I wouldn't

be surprised to know that it's especially serious tuned to be good at, if you've got to do a snap to grid or a rounding error or whatever, like, yeah, if you heard something that sounded like remind me to, like, you know, be more liberal about understanding and processing that. Whereas almost anything else that just, so I don't, my baseline for this was I'm starting with

Alexreminders. So tell me your, you use reminders, right? I do, but not, like I use it for just reminding me of things. Like I don't really use it as a task manager thing. Yeah. I don't use it

Merlinas a to-do, I don't use it as a task manager, but I don't, I just, like, sometimes if I'm really, like, just, I really don't want to forget something. And, like, honestly, the way that I just described using it is how it has been very effective for me, is a combination of time and location. It's pretty good at that. But it does here, but that was maybe, I don't know, maybe doing that over with many devices in my 300 square feet over fast Wi-Fi probably has set a fairly unrealistic expectation for what I wanted to be able to do riding a bike because every single one

of those is so different this is before we even get into the shortcuts our friends made so did it hear me maybe not like if I'm driving by the beach and it's you know 10 to 20 mile per hour winds like even in the best of circumstances in the time that I've had this almost two months if I yell out it doesn't hear me not that it didn't understand me it didn't even hear me And I'm looking down, looking down, looking down. Do I see the little kaleidoscope? And then if it does hear me, did it get what I said? Sometimes, sometimes not.

But just right there. You're on, you know, cellular. And you're out in the world. And all that.

AlexAnd in your case, you're moving fairly quickly.

MerlinYes. And I don't want to have to look down. I don't want to have to. So, like, those conditions right there have already created. Even just doing reminders, which I haven't done a ton of while I'm riding a bike at 20 miles an hour. But I've done enough that it kind of works. So then our friends went and made this thing. And I tried one out. And that's, I think, when I very first realized, oh, before we ever get to the shortcut, it's going to need to get up into the cloud and do things.

But then on top of it, anything you have the shortcut do, it feels like it takes forever.

AlexYeah. And it's not just that it takes forever. I don't know how to like, I don't know where to direct my frustration with this because it's probably the location stuff that is bogging it down. But the fact that Reminders is part of it.

MerlinYes. But like, like, you know, again, if I wanted to be more scientific about this, I would try some other things and not like related to location things. I would, you know, one that I've done a lot on a bike is say, hey, dingus, get cycling directions to the bison paddock. and it's pretty good at that, you know? But again, that's all, some of that's probably happening like on device, like some of the heavy lifting. But I just want to say thank you to our two friends,

Andrew and Metal Matt, who submitted those. And my initial inkling was, oh yeah, it's because I'm a hog and ask for too much information, which I can, you know, I don't know how to test this in the Shortcuts app. I wish there was a way, I feel like I've seen this in other development environments where you see how long it took for different things to happen, you know? Oh. Anyway.

AlexWait, so that's not in Shortcuts, right?

MerlinIf it is in Shortcuts, I did not see it. And as with the namespace pollution of all Apple things, it's so difficult to, like, there's so, I mean, first of all, if you say Shortcuts, Alex, I'm sorry, this is really an unnecessary derail, but if you search for, what do you call Siri Shortcuts, right?

AlexYeah, well.

MerlinWell, if you search for Siri shortcuts, the first thing you're going to get is how to turn Siri on with a keyboard command on your Mac. Because the shortcut, the keyboard shortcut for that, this is before we even get into Macs and Macs and X and X and X and all that. There's just so much namespace pollution with all those different things. And even if you're getting into quotation marks, long story short. So I hand that – I think both Andrew and Matt, Metal Matt, did similar things and in an efficient way.

And they both worked, which is they got it and they wrote it out to like a .csv in the shortcuts folder on iCloud, which was all great. Now, just to be clear here, I thought, oh, well, I asked for too much and bogged it down. And so me, the idiot who never felt qualified to make one of these in the first place, I very gallantly took metal mats and made some tweaks to it. So I took out a couple of things. For one thing, like mats was doing text entry, not dictation.

So I changed that to dictation. I just changed a couple little things and it was not a lot faster, which makes Alex and me really want an app. So if you didn't do it before, now's your chance to go fire up Xcode and make it be spoke out for us.

AlexIf you would like to do – yeah. Hey, Mark – what's his name, Mark Andreessen? Who's the evil one who gives money?

MerlinI don't know.

AlexNo, no. Not Peter Thiel. The Y Combinator?

MerlinNo. Mark Andreessen has an egg for a head. Were you aware of that?

AlexOh, is what?

MerlinI don't want to talk about people's appearance, but you should Google a photo of him.

AlexOh. Oh.

MerlinWell, it's even tapered on the top a little bit. It's really upsetting. No comment. It looks like he has two different heads. You know, Josiah Bear, the great hairstylist in the 90s, he used to say a famous thing to people who say, oh, darling, your problem is you have two different haircuts. Marc Andreas' problem, amongst many, is that he has two different heads.

AlexIt's, uh, no comment. No comment.

MerlinA mullet. A mullet is the ultimate two different haircuts. So, I don't know, man. It's not that important. Mainly I'm just mad. I couldn't figure it out and figure out a way to do it faster.

AlexThe one thing that made it a little bit faster for me was just a one word.

MerlinThe first thing I did was take out address and just say, dude, just pull that long. Like I can get the address later. And the versions I tried of that didn't make any difference.

AlexI now just have – well, I say, hey, dingus, teeth because I couldn't think of another word that was just never going to be associated with like good to do or omni or whatever. And it ended up being a little bit faster and more successful, my very scientific –

MerlinBut it also does – do you still get the prompts where it's like, OK, what's your message? And it's like, oh, God. And I even tried, like, yelling because the Amazon family of products is okay good at this, which is act like it hears you before it hears you because it probably hears you before it hears you. And you yell out, hey, hey, dingus, lights off. And, like, have you ever tried that? Like, it kind of works more often than you'd expect. You don't need to wait for it to, like, light up and hear you in some cases.

AlexWell, and sometimes that's also true with the HomePods, but some of, this is why it's so frustrating.

MerlinOkay, making you a playlist based on pavement.

AlexWell, it's just, like, this is also a problem I've noticed in the iOS beta. They have the amazing dictation that the idea is it can.

MerlinOh, yeah, where you can interact as you're speaking and typing?

AlexYes, but it will also try to parse when you want punctuation. And that hasn't been too successful for me because I'm used to talking to a robot. So like pausing, hoping it will hear certain things.

MerlinYeah, I got that. I got that as well. Yeah.

AlexSo filed, not radar, feedback.

MerlinYesterday I texted my family. I've had a low-key private project that's kind of like the things we've done in the past. We've had those challenges where you try to just use your voice for one Saturday and all those different ways. I've really been trying to lean into things like launch bar and keyboard shortcuts. But I've also been trying to make myself use dictation more because as much as my kid hates it when I do anything with my voice, like speak, it is so much faster to speak than to type.

If you're going to do more than one sentence, and even the time, if you allow the time for correcting somewhere between one sentence and a short paragraph, I can almost promise you, even with time for correction, it's still faster than typing, unless you're really fast.

AlexAbsolutely, which is why I am obsessed with this and corded keyboards, which are, I mean, it is what it sounds like.

Merlininstead of typing each individual the what oh i thought you were talking about corded as in

Alexnot as against bluetooth oh no ch no ch o r d like you we got another one now no no no no no no no no i no i am i do not i found a fancy keyboard i like and i'm done with that. I'm very happy. Is this like swiping?

MerlinYou're talking about on your phone? You have cords? You have to learn a new way of typing? No.

AlexThere are two business companies that I do not remember the name of right now, but they did create this weird device that you do need to learn. It's like a game controller, and the idea is you just move your fingers and it's like very Dvorak. But they also make a basic QWERTY keyboard where instead of doing T-H-E,

you just hold down the T-H-E at once. And then you... With your thumb? Hopefully... Yeah, like you... I feel like I am not explaining this well. So instead of typing the letter A and the letter S, you would just hold down A and S with your finger, you know, like doing piano chords versus.

MerlinOh, and then autofill based on that.

AlexRight.

MerlinAnd I should see this in action.

AlexThe idea just being that you can hopefully get faster to typing at the speed of thinking. And it still doesn't.

MerlinAnd also, because I am – it's sort of like the early days of any of these voice control things where like – I don't know about you. Well, I think almost everybody was self-conscious about – I mean, let alone in public. Like even in your own house, you feel like an ignoramus talking to a tube, asking it to turn on a light. I think – I've gotten over a lot of that and I'm even pretty comfortable doing it publicly where I can just hold it up to my mouth. and you know the other day I saw somebody doing the really dumb thing

you know the dumb thing where like you used to be on a corded like iPod headphones people do that thing like they're on a reality show where they hold up the phone like a pizza slice and talk into the end like they do that I saw a person doing that the other day wearing AirPods

Speaker Awearing AirPods and they still

Merlinthey didn't need to hold it up like a pizza They've watched too much reality TV and they don't know how to use a phone anymore.

AlexThat's actually amazing.

MerlinBut I still am a little bit – I do – I think this might be a little bit of a Daniel Kahneman thing. Like it's one thing for me to talk to you like I am right now without giving any thought to what I'm saying because I'm just speaking extemporaneously. But I do feel like I stiffen my spine a little bit to do dictation. And sometimes I think I overcorrect and it confuses it. There was one yesterday I was texting the family and I said something about – I was trying to say that I had eaten three of something. And I said, oh, I ate three yesterday.

And, of course, it made the numeral 83. Because it thought I was doing the thing where you spell out, you know.

AlexThat is a very – hopefully this will get better. But that is definitely a beta thing right now. Because it used to, or that's like the one thing in the beta that I'm like, ah, God. But I don't know if, I was trying to figure this out, but I don't know if the dictation or in voice to text is different in like, let's say drafts, because that's my primary way of dictation now.

Yeah, me too. And it's so much.

MerlinI start writing in drafts and now I also start speaking in drafts.

AlexIn your aborted books, did you?

MerlinOh, God. I tried it all.

AlexNo.

MerlinI tried it all.

AlexOh, speaking into?

MerlinOh, I bought the dragon. What's it called? You know.

AlexOh, dragon dictate or whatever the fancy one and the lawyers use it. Yeah.

MerlinIt was basically like learning to masturbate faster. We're not calling this an abandoned challenge, though. If anybody out there has ideas about this sort of thing, and maybe we can eventually contact Mr. Greg, but we've got to move on. We're going to maybe talk about Bearable a little bit, but Dugga Dugga Dugga Challenge. What a janky fucking episode.

AlexThe Bear.

MerlinThe Bear. These Bears.

AlexThese Bears.

MerlinThis came up, and then we're going to bounce. Okay, so, but, but, boy, oof. I was listening to, I was waiting for my bike to get fixed, and I was listening to, wait, it's called The Watch? That podcast I like? With Andy and, what's his name? I think so. Yeah, but the guys, the guy who wrote the punk rock book.

AlexOh, The Ringer guys, yeah.

MerlinThe Ringer, that's it, not The Watch. The Ringer. I was listening to The Ringer, and they kept talking about, they were talking about the bear, and like, you know, talking about what they loved about the bear and what they found a little frustrating about the bear. I was like, I don't know. What's the bear? I don't know. I don't know. But it sounded like they liked it a lot. So I immediately hit pause, found out where the bear was located, and I started watching it. And I was, you know, sometimes you're in the right mood. You know, sometimes you're in the wrong mood. I just was pretty much maybe in the right mood for those lights coming up on the bridge and he goes up to the cage.

and then oh my god i was so hooked on this goddamn show challenge for this week watch season one episode one of the hulu you can find this on hulu uh tv show called the bear

Alexi challenged you to do that and i did watch the first three episodes because they're or at least a few of them are are you up to the part have you gotten to the party yet

Merlinthe the what have you gotten to where they have to go cater a party no i think that's probably

Alexokay well yeah but you're i mean am i right huh i started watching it and uh immediately brought my spouse over because it's also so much his shit i i did the same thing because

Merlini'm getting a real good i'm always on the lookout for something madeline and i can watch together whether that's you know when the kid takes a shower like when we get five minutes away from watching community like what's something that the two of us would want to watch i immediately hit pause and i was like i didn't even text i literally walked two rooms away and i said i found a show for us it was immediately like can i give the quick log line on it without spoilers and we'll avoid spoilers in this one we can always talk more about it later but yeah don't yeah don't

AlexSpoiler for me. Don't, don't, don't.

MerlinNo, no, no.

AlexI'm so, oh.

MerlinThis is a TV show about, I think I'll describe it the way I described it probably last time, which is there's a family in Chicago. And one of the members of that family had sort of achieved escape velocity and became, had become a very fancy fine dining chef working in California. And like he'd worked at the French Laundry and some other place where Joel McHale was really mean to him. But that kind of like, you know, what was the joke?

Like applying time with tweezers. One of those crazy, you know, really nice like French laundry. But even more like fancy white outfit sort of places. Long story short, he's got a – he's got his family back in Chicago.

Well, what's left of his family, you know. There was a loss, a tragic loss in their family that is – and just as a heads up, I'll tell you what I tell my kid. you're not missing anything here it's not that you missed something it's just they're not always telling you everything or they're not always explaining everything but what you know in that first episode is that there has been a loss and his name's carm carmen aka the bear carm comes back to chicago to help run this restaurant that their dad had acquired um ill-advisedly a long

time ago and you call it italian beef is that the kind of uh food yes and it sure ain't the french laundry and boy has he ever got to deal with a crazy crew at this place including the john carrey root guy who's fucking amazing um but that's the basic in like we get from the cold open this place is having big money problems they're having all kinds of problems these people it's not like working in a brigade at a Thomas Keller restaurant

and he comes back and he has to deal with that alongside of dealing with his family and his estranged relationship with his sister

Speaker Aanything I missed for setup

Merlinand it's incredibly compelling and tense and upsetting to watch oh my god but all those tight shots that's what initially got me was like those those close shots, pretty fast cuts. Not like, you know, not trying to like fatigue you, but I was right there with him from the beginning of like, I got to get the denim, I got to get the coins, all the things like so tight. There's one episode where I just watched Sidney cut carrots and I would just like rewind and watch Sidney cut carrots.

AlexOh my God. This show, like I said, based in Chicago and I was really, I had really low expectations coming into this as I do most shows or movies based in Chicago. But as soon as I saw the shot of the, you know, him on the state street bridge that is the cold open, I was like, okay, this is made by someone who is not from Chicago,

but they sure do love Chicago, which is also, you know, super my shit.

MerlinAnd that weird overflow. You know how, like, where Syracuse is from? I really don't mean this in a hurtful or unkind or hateful way, but, like, I think even Syracuse had joked about, on Long Island, you got a lot of Italian Catholic people, and you got a lot of Jewish people, and there's this weird Venn diagram of the, like, overlap in concerns and behavior, And I got that here from like Polish and Italian. Like, you know, they're really in the mix, in the salad of ethnicities and traditions and background kind of running up against each other.

Right.

AlexYeah. At one point, someone says about a labeling system, oh, this is so Polish. And I'm like, yep, that is something an Italian says. And the other part about another thing that is, I think, in our wheelhouses is the sort of competency porn that is part of this.

MerlinWashing calm, like, have to – because at first you don't know, I mean, what is this restaurant? What's he doing? Why – he can't afford to buy the meat. He needs to get different meat, which needs to cook longer. And, like, I just kept thinking about Max Temkin the whole time. Like, oh, my God. This is so our shit. and especially I think probably Max's ship. But like, and just to clarify here though, I mean, like it's, I don't know. I mean, again, I'm not fond of saying this is for everybody, but this is a fine dining show.

AlexOh, this is def, I do not think this is for everybody.

MerlinYeah, but like if you're interested, you don't even have to be the kind of person who watches Top Scallops or cares a lot about fine dining, but you'll appreciate how good Karm is at his job, even if it's just emptying the coins out of the video game machine so he can afford to buy food for the day, for the restaurant. But then the staff in the kitchen is so great.

There's another character who I erroneously, because I'm dumb and probably was on edibles, said, I refer to you as his brother. It's not his brother. It's his, because he even says in the first episode, the John Carreyrou guy, I gotta find the name of this actor. The actor who kind of runs the place now, has worked there forever. That woman who works on the grill, she's worked there forever. She stays there because of Carm's late father.

And it's just, there's a guy there who really wants to be like a, all he does now is make shitty bread for Italian beef sandwiches, but he really wants to make pastries and donuts that are beautiful. Did you get his little speech about how when they had donuts, everybody was happy?

AlexIs then the first to...

MerlinThere's a scene where he's talking about why he loves, it's not probably the second or third, but he's talking about like, but the way he says it is so sweet. He's talking about coming from this, you know, he's an African-American guy and coming from this family. But the way he phrases it is so sweet. He's like, yeah, because when I was a kid, when there was donuts, everybody was happy. And it's like, I thought, I kept thinking about that, like the three times I saw that episode and I kept thinking like, oh, that's such an interesting way, like the way a child would put it. Like when you get donuts, everybody's happy. Or is it because everybody finally got a little break from their troubles and the donuts are the MacGuffin title?

It's like the donuts happen to be here, but we're just having this family moment all together. It's so sweet. Anyway, most of what's great in this is the actor who plays Carm, who apparently was on the show, Alex watches with their great grandmother or something called Shameless.

AlexYes, it is another show based in Chicago, specifically based in.

MerlinWhich I don't know anything about. I don't know anything about Shameless.

AlexI mean, it's like a dark sitcom. I don't know if it's for you. It's not for everybody.

MerlinIt's fine. That guy's really the focus of the show, but his relationship and the relationship between everybody in the kitchen and what everybody brings to it, it's such a fast-paced, loud, profane show that I give it full credit for the moments where something really sweet happens. and like you know there's a scene involving mashed potatoes that'll almost break your heart it's so sweet um and but like yeah you got to watch people deal with this you got to in this tiny fucking kitchen making these sandwiches and like it's really just about how karm deals with that

but also how karm's dealing with like he basically kind of he wasn't there when this thing happened that's causing trouble, causing so much sadness for the family. So he's kind of, he's back home. He's dealing with a lot of shit.

AlexI don't think you anticipated this, but I was not ready for how viscerally this would remind me of my own family and also growing up. Well, because the Cox meat empire of having, yeah. So my family, the Pollux came and decided to start a meat packing company, specifically pork.

And I have been like we've never had a restaurant or anything, but I've been in those spaces and those tiny kitchens and everyone, you know, just behind corner, behind corner. Thank you, Jeff. Yeah.

MerlinShe calls me Jeff. I love that stuff in this one. I always thought that seemed affected on Top Chef, but now I get that like if you are like a brigade, that is your training.

AlexOh, it's totally a thing.

MerlinAnd I love it. Do you remember there's a challenge that's been sitting in there for a few weeks? That was something like learn to speak like a chef.

AlexOh.

MerlinGo up a couple dozen. You'll see one in there where it's like I was looking at all the words like in brigade, like language. But I love that phrase heard. because heard is kind of a little bit like Roger.

AlexIt's like copy. Yeah, yeah.

MerlinRoger, but it may imply a little bit of Wilco, but it's mainly, yeah, I heard what you said, heard chef.

AlexI, ooh, I like this. Well, no, the after show. But the, it was almost like you could totally binge this in a day, but I couldn't.

MerlinOh man, they go by so fast. Oh my God.

AlexIt was like, I don't want to say triggering, but this was.

MerlinBecause it reminded you of your childhood and family stuff?

AlexOh, yeah. This was, I was like, oh, holy shit. Holy shit. Like the, I mean, everything down from the seasoning and like, you know, you're calling the John Kerry Rue and Carmen are not related, but they are basically brothers and they call each other cousin. Yeah.

MerlinOh, my kid hates that. Is that something that people, do people call each other? I thought that was because they're not related at all, right?

AlexRight. Mm-hmm.

MerlinThey just grew up together.

AlexRight. And that's more of an Italian thing. But I have many aunts, I quote, aunts and uncles who are not related to us at all. But, you know, they.

MerlinDutch aunts, Dutch uncles.

AlexYeah. Oh, that's right. That's what they're called. But, like, I mean, with especially I think with like Eastern European families, there's a lot of chosen family stuff, which is, you know, like what we associate. I'm gonna do the queer card again. Like we associate chosen family with that. But so much of growing up was, you know, just your family is based around your community. And for my family specifically, based around the food you make together.

And I'm a super taster. So I am the black sheep in that regard. And I don't, oh, I don't like looking at the meat. And like, there's gorgeous shots of like meat and seasoning. And I'm just like, oh, no, I don't like that. But that's because I'm a weirdo.

MerlinI can't believe how often I'm holding my breath, hoping like somebody doesn't sabotage somebody's dish or something. And it's like because they're not professionals in the sense that Karm is a professional.

AlexOh, hard. Oh, oh. Well, what do you mean by that?

MerlinWell, no, no. Well, OK. Like maybe a better word. Sorry. I didn't mean that they're not good, but they're not trained in the same way that he is. I think one thing, I've said this before and it seems kind of random, but like I've always really enjoyed working with people who've been in the military.

And like there's a guy I used to work with who was, I don't know. I mean he was sort of a pain in the ass. He was funny, but like he just was, he was too funny. He was too like joking all the time and like, but, but. and he'd gone to VMI and he'd been in gosh I feel so bad I don't remember but he'd been you know been an officer he'd been like a second lieutenant in probably the army or whatever anyway but like when it came time to get the work done that guy was fucking all business and here's what I love

about that I think a misapprehension people have possibly about people who've been in the military is that everybody wants to be the boss everybody wants the leader no quite the opposite it's more like you know they say that you know dogs are happy in packs because they know who the leader is. They want to know what needs to be done and who they're supposed to listen to. And like they say in the military, you know, you know, if it moves, salute it. If it doesn't move, paint it. Like, you know where you stand in that pecking order and you know what your fucking job is. And it's really unambiguous.

You never have to wonder, I guess, ideally, which one of these people to listen to. And what I get, what I got from Paul, that guy, and what I get from Karm is, hey, look, You know, we all, even Bono's got a boss. Everybody here has somebody they need to listen to. And there's, you know what I mean? Like, and it's not that he like wants to be the leader. He wants everybody to understand what their job is. Or more saliently, he wants everybody to understand what their role is. There's roles that we all share, like communicating unambiguously, very clearly, very loudly, very audibly.

Right? It's the same kind of Gordon Ramsay yelling at you to communicate in the kitchen stuff. Right? But like it's that we each know what our job is to do. So each one of us has a skill, although probably a lot of the people in a good kitchen can do a lot of things.

But it's that you know how to be part of that team and how to as quickly as possible ramp up to what we're doing today, what the focus is. And that even plays out in stuff like what they call family, which is the dinner that they have together each night. It's like, oh, God, there's so much to this that I just love. I knew it, staging. I'd never heard that word, which I guess is staging, like what Sydney's job is. But you have your role for that day or that kitchen, right? Carm was probably not the head of the kitchen when he was in California, but he knew what his role was.

You always say herd chef. You always say corner. You always say back or behind or whatever. But like that's so intriguing to me and I really – that's why I've enjoyed mostly pound for pound working with people who've been in – when I say the military, what I mean is they've been in a situation where they know the job takes precedence over anything else and that our shared vocabulary and our shared understanding of how we do this is a priori what makes us a team. We can't be a team if somebody decides that they're just in a bad mood today.

Suck it up, man. Have a cigarette. Be back here in five. Get your fucking mind right, chef. You know what I mean? I love that idea of like, you know, and it makes me realize, honestly, it was really working in jobs like that where I'm used to being like the funny guy who shows up late and still gets a C+. No way, man. We don't need that guy today. You know, like they say in my military school, there's three answers. There's yes sir, no sir, and no excuse sir. If you don't get to explain anything, you just say no excuse sir.

That can mean I don't know. That can mean I apologize. It can mean lots of things. But like you don't get a fourth or ninth option. You show up, you grab a broom, and you do the fucking work. And it's not just the jargon porn that appeals to me. It's like watching the show and as it develops and some people warm to this environment, let's say a lot more than others. Like Richard is having a pretty tough, Richard being his childhood friend and the guy who's run the restaurant forever,

is having a tougher time, not just in these roles, but in the changes that Karm is trying to make because demonstrably what he was doing was not working. And Karm doesn't take the piss, but he says, look, this is what we're doing. Like I'm running this because somebody needs to run this. If somebody else can run this well, like everybody needs to line up, But, you know, I'm saying like that there's something really appealing about watching a team struggle to find out what it's here for, what its roles are and what kind of stuff you leave outside the door when it's time to work.

I wish every company took their work as seriously as people like this.

AlexI have to acknowledge that this is based on Mr. Beef on Orleans, which is a Chicago – I hate the word institution, but it is a Chicago institution.

MerlinSame thing where families have gone there for a really long time. It's like this is a thing I do with my dad. And we always get the same thing. It's always this way. and then of course when wrinkle is carm comes in and says well we're gonna do things things a little we do things a little different and and it's uh you're going to a burrito place and being offered i don't know chateaubriand or something you're like well i like that but we come here for burritos

Alexdude the i mean well that's also i mean i haven't gotten that far i think of this show but there's also that vibe of oh our neighborhood is changing and uh it's on the near north side and a big criticism a lot of people have is that it's like that's not what the near north side

Merlinlooks like it's not that gritty is it being more as they say gentrified i yeah honestly it's never

Alexbeen like i mean yeah yes it has been completely gentrified but for ever and ever um and i just The one thing that rang real false is when John Carey Rue shoots a gun into the air.

MerlinI'm going to find his name right now.

AlexIf that was on the near north side, a million cops would be there in less than 30 seconds.

MerlinOh, what the fuck? Why is he waving a pistol around with the furries? That's so weird.

AlexYeah, that was one thing I'm like, well, that is not the thing that would happen.

MerlinHow much do you love Thack? Oh, my God.

AlexOh, my God, fact. Oh, another, actually, Gab Fest was like, why is there a famous pastry chef at this little dive? And that is very common also in Chicago restaurants, that there's, you know, some, there's like one thing that is kind of off the wall and weird. Like a, I don't have like a good example. Oh, the soft Mr. Orlean's Mr. Beef has soft serve.

And there's a wonderful little reference to that. Or if you go to a different hot dog place, sometimes they will have an amazing Asian dish. Because there just happens to be. Yeah.

MerlinI bet that's how you get something like a chop suey sandwich. Which is a thing. Yes. You'll get these weird crossover things. And it's like, well, we did it and it caught on. and that's like a thing we do now.

AlexRight. And this show, I know that it can probably seem too fast-paced, but I love how it doesn't treat the audience like a bunch of ding-a-lings. Like we are thrown into this family in just, I mean, you feel it. You feel the chaos because you don't know what's going on.

MerlinOh, and I've been, when I first started, I was a very fragile little flower, as you can imagine throughout my life. I was a very coddled mama's boy who was always told I was the smartest person in the world. So, you know, blame her. But no, being thrust into a situation like that. Like when I first got into drum and bugle corps very briefly and like this guy would just – I didn't know how to play trumpet. I was thrown into the deep end. I'd never read music. And like I'm supposed to just like get a rented trumpet and start playing. And it was, you know, like a stress dream.

Like and I haven't studied for the test thing. Imagine a guy who's screaming at you about like not playing the trumpet right and you've never even picked up a trumpet before. That feeling. And I got that same feeling when I worked in kitchens. When I very first started working in kitchens, I was not used to certainly the aggressiveness but also just the vibe. Like they're not in a well-run kitchen where there's not too much cocaine. Like they're not doing it to be a dick or to be abusive or whatever. But like you're only as good as your last dish. and everybody in there is hustling to get the shit done

so they can drink Sambuca and go home.

Speaker AIt is very stressful and I think not too fast-paced.

MerlinHow much do you love Sydney? Sydney's the big hit in our house.

AlexOh my God, she is wonderful. And she reminds me of other people who have come into, I don't know what to say except institutions, totally well-meaning, likable, lovable.

MerlinSomebody comes in from the outside and in a slightly aggressive environment with high expectations.

AlexI mean, oh, God. And she makes that fucking, honestly, like, she was me in my family. Like, she has that pamphlet of all the things that could be better. You were always making fennel salad. Everyone said so. Yeah.

Heard, chef. Thank you, Jeff. Say something funny. Oh, do you know, did you, there's so many Chicago references that I also don't know.

MerlinI want to say the name of this man. The reason we keep saying the John Kerry Rue guy is there's an actor whose name is, oh boy, Eben. See, that's a snap to grid name. E-B-O-N.

AlexEben.

MerlinEben.

AlexEben.

MerlinMos Bacharach. So I don't know if he's related to how. Mos Bacharach.

AlexMos Bacharach.

MerlinWell, you know it's not Carol Bear Sager because then it would be Eben Carol Bear Sager Bacharach. I'm not sure how names accumulate. I don't read the trades. Eben Moss Bacharach plays Richard, not Rick, in this, oh, my God, fucking Oliver Platt. Just you wait. Holy shit, Oliver Platt's so good in this. Okay, so Eben Moss Bacharach. And the reason we keep calling him John Kerry-Roo is in the show that Alex didn't like and I did called The Dropout. he plays John Carew who's the guy who wrote The Dropout he was a reporter

they're so mean to him

Alexin that show they're so mean to him

Merlinbut he handles it so well but boy talk about a fucking different character apparently also now I'm going to say some things phonetically he played someone called Desi Harperan on the TV show Girls

Alexyeah

Merlinand he also played David Lieberman on The Punisher with Jon Bernthal

Alexyeah

Merlinhe was Jon Quincy Adams in the Jon Adams thing I love this actor Boy, what a great cast. Hey, so two thumbs up for me. Check it out. And I want to check back in with you when you've watched some more.

AlexYes. I plan to sit and cry in front of the TV tonight for three hours. It's going to be great. Just great.

Speaker AIt's a very good show.

MerlinGender. Something. Jokes. Jokes. Jokes. I got nothing. Do you have anything? What's funny?

AlexOh, yeah. I got nothing. Something will happen after the ding.

MerlinOkay. Do we need to wait here until then?

AlexNo. Oh, what? No, no, no.

MerlinLet's be done. Wait. Do we just sit here the whole time? How do we get out?

AlexHow do we... What do you mean, how do we get out?

MerlinI don't know.

AlexAre we trapped?

MerlinI feel like we're trapped. Doesn't it feel like there needs to be a ding for us to get out? I can't finish without a ding.

AlexAh! No!

Show notes

Transcript

294. Keep the Button

Show notes

Transcript

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