298. Big Red Button

AlexThis is Dubai Friday, a weekly challenge podcast with Alex Cox and Merlin Mann. This week's challenge, learn a faster way.

MerlinHello.

AlexGood after morning, Merlin Mann.

MerlinHi, Alex.

AlexHello. How are you? How are you?

MerlinFine, how are you?

AlexI've decided that a part of my agency is I can attempt to keep my sanity. And that's where I am. And so, yeah, things are well. Things are well.

What's your velocity like today?

MerlinWill that make a ton of sense to our listeners, Alex?

AlexDoes it need to make a lot of sense? But you did say it. I did. I think it is a totally relatable sentiment that one is often trying to just keep their brain in check.

MerlinAll right. Okay. Well, in that case, let's start. Go ahead and ask me how I'm doing again.

AlexMerlin, how are you doing today?

MerlinI'll be fine.

AlexHe'll be fine. I'll be fine.

MerlinNow, see, if I responded like that, you'd probably think that's kind of weird. Does he know he's recording a nominally funny podcast?

AlexNo. You're saying I'm not nominal?

MerlinNominal, nominal, nominal.

AlexNom, nom, nom, nom, nom, nom.

MerlinBoy, you are a real conundrum to be friends with. No, no, it's in a good way, although sometimes it's not useful to our listeners to know this, but sometimes it's confusing to be your parapal.

I don't know what I am, some kind of pal. I think we don't say that anymore. We say differently abled friend.

AlexOh, for fans of the, you know, I guess we'll call it the Alex Foot fandom.

MerlinNot everything needs branding, Alex. Just say words.

AlexListen, are you saying that I don't want to Relay FM switch on? Anyway, I do not have to wear my boot every day now. So I'm walking. I think you mean trunk.

MerlinThat's what they call it in England.

Alexbut I have a cane and canes are deceptively difficult to use. I never know which one that means. Wow.

MerlinIt's like that word belie, right? I don't think I've ever known what it means.

AlexDeceptive?

MerlinWell, they deceptively, they're not as easy as they look.

AlexIs that, yes.

MerlinRight? Because like crutches, crutches and canes both, there's some art, artfulness to learning how to use them, right? You have to like think very deliberately about how you're moving and it's an unusual thing, right?

AlexOh, yeah. It's a very, I almost want to say uncanny experience. Because speaking of canny, like it is canon on this show that I don't necessarily like to think about my body and kind of just keep my brain as far away from it as possible because of dysphoria. But you really need to pay attention to where you are in space.

MerlinProprioception.

AlexYes, that's, thank you. It's a good word. It's a smart people word for it.

MerlinI learned it from my wife. Yeah, it's a word.

AlexWell, she's very smart.

MerlinYeah, she'll do. But like when, it's one of those words where once you learn, you go, oh, I didn't know there was a name for that. And that totally makes sense. It's like, where is my body in three dimensions? And how is it that it's becoming so much less difficult for me to trip on things? I almost fell over a Dyson fan a few minutes ago.

AlexOh my God, really? So did I. I was turning a Dyson. Yeah, because it's hot everywhere in the world right now, especially in England, as the Anglo files will know. But in Chicago, this is very boring. No, it's not.

MerlinI didn't know if we could. What I was going to say, I don't even know how long ago. I am definitely in some kind of. I think I've joined you in a fugue state. Alex, in trying to. Okay. In trying to. I don't. I don't want to. And it's useful to me and perhaps interesting to your pair of friends to know that everything's connected. There's heat. There's electric. There's Wi-Fi. There's a boot, as they say in Canada.

And so I didn't realize that really all of the forces are coming together to make some kind of Alex Cox super shitstorm.

Alexwell that's sort of been the situation for the past two months no no no but now but if you don't have electric a lot of that stops from my pov the i i normally i i've had i would have some opsec concerns but all of chicago is losing power like every 15 minutes um but you're concerned that

Merlinmaybe you'd be like a cartoon character with a cloud just over your house or a power it's just

Alexin your breaker breaker breaker well you can tell too it's it's like there's a telltale sign in chicago where you see what i now know is called a caterpillar thanks to you those bang bang machines and along with the construction equipment where they're doing some sort of street service there is a comcast van right next to it and it's like oh i know what kind of day you're having i can

Merlinalready tell this episode's either gonna go into a museum or on a diagnostic form bang bang bang bang machine go scoot scoot chicago oh my god your problem is you've got all this heat there and you have air conditioning that works to a point and but the thing is it's air conditioning is not doing enough and even when it's doing not quite enough you're now in danger for whatever reason of your power going off.

And if your power goes off, the show is...

AlexAnd the modem goes...

MerlinYeah, it's not really recording in the conventional sense.

AlexYes. Well, I'm reminded...

MerlinSo you're dealing with that and a boot.

AlexAnd a broken foot that is less broken, and it's very exciting. Like the other day, I spent almost the entire day just driving around in my car and like hopping from actually various McDonald's locations because they have Wi-Fi in the parking lot. And this isn't related to anything except agency in that there hasn't been a time for a while where my spouse hasn't known exactly where I am at all times.

And I could just drive around the city.

MerlinYour mind is basically turned into some kind of eldritch salad shooter. And I just keep getting hit in the face with lettuce and wondering why. so you're driving around your agency is driving your busted ass foot around i thought i was

waiting for the Diet Coke reference, but there wasn't one. So, hello. Hello. Hello. At least I

Alexhaven't talked to you about masseuses yet. So. Masseuse? A masseuse. You know, a masseuse.

MerlinHow are you today, Merlin? I'm fine. I'm fine. Yeah. Yeah. You know, friction. Friction's a tough thing. Friction will come up for me in our challenge this week. Had a little bit of a nano breakthrough about friction. But, you know, too much friction can be a lot. And when we're trying to, like in this case, you know, record a program, it's not anything anybody needs to know about, but it has, you know, it's, it can be a little bit trying sometimes. And like I said to

you, I think 15 minutes ago, what did I say? I said, as a society, we're definitely moving backward. And by that, I mean that, that I think it was easier to report a record a podcast in probably 2006 than it is now. And I'm finding that more and more difficult to understand.

AlexWould you say that that's just for this show or podcasts in general? Because...

MerlinWell, I mean, if you've got a studio, if you're at WHYY or something, it's a different animal. But I think if you're asking, I think there's a phenomenon I remember first hearing about in, I don't claim to understand this, but I kind of understand it, in the early 90s. And I forget who said this, probably somebody in a Mac magazine, but, you know, computers get more powerful and then apps get more powerful and computers get more powerful. Well, another way to look at that is that the spec sort of speed and ability of a Mac in this case does get faster.

But just because the computers are faster doesn't mean we should make our apps more bloated. And the case at the time was that the Macs of the early 90s seemed impossibly powerful compared to even five years earlier. But you do have an app that seemed like it shouldn't be so resource intensive, something like Microsoft Word, which suddenly had all these extensions and it ran really slow and et cetera. And I guess what I'm trying to say is I feel like we reached, from my point of view anyway, the ability to have a Rode podcaster, Skype, and this new thing called Recorder.

I mean, that's pretty much where I was. Again, to follow that analogy, where I was with the app called RightNow in 1989. That's all I would ever need in the future for all time from a word processor with the possible exception of like HTML. and you know i mean i i think it's it's wild to me that i think that's still mostly true the idea of writing something that has things like tabs and marches and fonts and like saving that and being able to send it i think we were well over 80 percent there in the 80s and i don't mean to

sound like a luddite but like as far as the recording stuff goes and who do i blame for that well i if i i'm not blaming anybody but all apps well well all apps tend to bloat i mean even with Skype back then, Skype then became this thing where in the pre-Microsoft days or whatever, there were people who treated Skype like a social media app. And there were people, Skype people on some level seem to want you to use it like a social media app with status lines and random contacting of people and just saying hi and all that kind of stuff. Whereas for me,

Skype was, I mean, I'm trying to think of the number of times I ever used Skype for anything but recording a podcast. And I think I can say conservatively well over 99% of the time, it's been to contact one or more other people to record a podcast, which is not what it's for, but any additions to Skype that let it do stuff that wasn't recording a podcast, as long as it didn't get my way, I didn't care. But I don't know if this is making any sense, but like, for example, learning that the reason, the reason that Alex Jones's entire phone with two years of data

accidentally went into the hands of the plaintiff's attorneys. Did you see the reason why that happened?

AlexNo, no. Shared Dropbox folder. Oh, my gosh.

MerlinNow, I'm pulling that on my butt because it's ripped from the headlines. But on more than one occasion, sure, I've shared a – I thought I was sharing a subfolder, but I was sharing the folder above that. And maybe that's pilot error, you know, the nut behind the keyboard, as they say. But, you know, I guess what I'm saying is like when Dropbox was just a thing that let me have a hard drive in the sky, but it was expressed on my Mac that made me really happy. Think about, again, our old friend Evernote.

Evernote went within a period of like, I don't know, I want to say like within like a year or 18 months, it went from like this has more features. It's a platform with more features than you could ever use to, oh, my God, they've really lost the thread. on making this a platform much more than they're making it a personal information manager or personal knowledge manager. You know what I mean? And the thing is you can't help but give certain things away if you refocus on building that platform to do lots of stuff.

I don't know. I'm talking out of my ass. But in this instance, it seems like I don't think we have as a nation experienced that many regressions in terms of like whatever the gross national product is for internet speed might have gone up over the years, gotten faster, been more dependable, been more reliable. Apps running on like the nicest Mac that's ever been made, just about. I mean, it all seems like these pieces, in obscurity, each of these pieces seems like they're at the top of their game. But then when you put it all together, it doesn't always feel like, you know,

stuff you can't write down. Maybe there's stuff you can write to a beta. You could have bad internet weather, you know, bad electric power. It's just, I don't know. There are times when I really feel like, I don't know. I feel like we're sometimes moving in the wrong direction. And I don't think there's a culprit of somebody to blame or, okay, who you blame? Who are we blaming?

AlexYou went in the exact direction that I wanted to. And this isn't a bit, but I immediately thought of the beginning of Podcast Times. And you mentioned specifically the Rode Podcaster, which was like the $60 mic that everybody used.

MerlinWell, a USB mic, which now is – I don't mean to interrupt here, but like just to be clear, like I'm not an audio person. I mean like – I hard disagree.

AlexOkay.

MerlinI figured out enough to know how to record things, whether that's music or voice. But, you know, I'm not the kind of person that's going to show up at McDonald's and want somebody to explain how they filter the oil and clean the shake machine. I just want my goddamn food and I want to leave. I'm not a gearhead. I still, I use Descript when I have to edit anything. I don't like the nuts and bolts stuff of audio. I don't like dealing. I mean, basically in about 1983 or so, maybe 84, I learned enough about Signal Chain to know that the reverb goes after the rat pedal.

and like don't put the reverb before the rap pedal and and like that's mostly been my interest in this stuff for somebody who is a gearhead about all this stuff it's probably the best of times and the incremental changes out of well there's recorders are smaller and more powerful equipment

Alexlike if you're into that aspect of okay i'm gonna do the thing where i am going to interrupt i just

MerlinYou just want to record and have it get into people's ears with as little trouble as possible.

AlexAnd that's not what I am talking about. I'm not talking about that we've regressed in terms of how cool things are and how small things are getting. But the most important thing about the Rodecaster was that it was a USB mic that everybody could use.

MerlinNot an XLR. Meaning if you had a computer, you could plug in this mic without knowing fuck all about any of this stuff. You could mail one to somebody and have it running.

AlexThat's what I do. I mail the current ATR USB-C mic to people if I want to interview them. And I know that they don't even have AirPods, which have great, I think, a great mic if you're doing just a quick interview. But I thought that initially I wanted to go back to the days of the more DIY podcasting stuff. And I realized, no, it is exactly what you said. I miss the fast turnaround of getting podcasts into people's ears when someone wants to.

Not every podcast is like that, but the meaning of the word podcast has changed so much. And sure, that is okay. But if you go to a normie right now and say, do you listen to any podcasts? They will probably name the joke is like serial invented podcast. but they will name some murdery show or something, which is all well and good, but that show probably took six months to produce

and cost Gimlet like a million dollars. Yeah, I mean, it's closer to a book on tape in a lot of ways. Yeah, and like 50 rounds of layoffs. And there's nothing to, there's very little that distinguishes podcast genres, which is such a shame since the tools that we used to use were, I don't want to say simple because there was a ton of tech behind it, but intuitive and accessible.

The original, maybe not the original, but the...

MerlinGarageBand. I mean, GarageBand.

AlexYeah. It had a podcast template. It was amazing.

MerlinWell, it reminds me a little, I mean, this is really random, But like if you think about when we talk about something like a regression or we talk about like let's go back to something that could be a less complicated time. And you could do that by pulling out some equipment and it's probably pretty reverse compatible. But I mean it's almost like saying like I want to re-experience a Saturday from when I was 10, which you could do in some ways. You could pick the time you go to bed or let your mom pick the time you go to bed and get up, whatever. There's a lot of things you could do that would on paper be like a morning in 1977 title.

But that's for a variety of reasons that's going to be hard. Let's even say like, OK, I'm going to go watch whatever it was called, like Justice League on CBS's In the News. Like I could go recreate all those things in this very creepy kind of like Synecdoche, New York way. But like your family members are dead. the places you used to go have been gone for 40 years. You can create some kind of like Potemkin village

and, you know, blur your eyes and act like it's the same. But even though you can plug in, it's like Heraclitus says, you know, you never enter the same Mac twice. You can plug that in and it would be the same. But like because all these other things have moved forward and like you're sort of, I guess, implying is that, you know, audience expectations have changed. Well, I don't think, apart from the way that, for example, say Roderick and I have changed, the way I make that show is almost identical. Except in that case, I used to do it in GarageBand.

Because GarageBand, like you say, was made for, I think the on-label use is making music. But it was very much, it had features that were for making a podcast. And then they just released a version of that where you couldn't do it anymore. It really was no longer a good place to make a podcast. that's where you get a logic to do that, right? That was like, logic is where we do that now. It's like, oh man, I really, I don't need a Ferrari to go to 7-Eleven. I just need to like get milk. And I don't want to lose track of that. I don't want to need a Ferrari mechanic

so my kid can have milk. And that's how it feels sometimes. And I think it's a separate topic. I agree with you about the genre stuff. What most people call a quote unquote podcast, who've gotten into podcasts in the last 10 years, they're definitely podcasts, but it's not what I, I want to say it's not what I like in a podcast. Like, you know, again, it's an old joke, but it's true. Like taking a piece of writing and adding a music bed does not a new genre create.

The live energy of two broken people talking and you getting to listen in on that is really different from here's item four of nine in our outline. and here's you know the dj shadow track that we drop it and i don't want to diminish that though

Alexbecause i really kind of love i know no shay no lemonade people should like what they like yeah but i don't think that the audience has necessarily changed in that it's more so it's just a different bigger audience and a lot of people have gone to chase an audience that they don't necessarily want or need where, and like this could be about aging, but when I go to the very cursed and complicated feelings that I have about TikTok, the controls in that app, you just, you push

some buttons, you make a video and it goes out. And moral implications of the algorithm aside, people are just having often, at least, having fun making things and it's organically going around. It's the way that it's almost like how the algorithm in TikTok and YouTube and all.

MerlinYou're talking about trade-offs of like there's a million things that you can or shouldn't be able to do, but what it does well is it records you and puts it up.

AlexYeah, I'm saying that the tools of when a tool is created that just allows a person to do something quickly and easily if they want to are just as popular as ever. They have just changed. And it's really telling that almost all of the podcast ads I hear now are the shitty dynamic ones because the people who still do ad reads or host – I'm not a professional.

What are they called? Host read – is it just host read ads? What's like the industry term for it?

MerlinThe radio term from a million years ago used to be DJ Reed, but like where it was thought that you maybe would pay a little bit extra and you wouldn't get, you know, the same, you know, Cars for Kids ad that everybody's heard a million times. And I think the DJ Reed, the implication was that it implied, it didn't state, because a lot of people just are okay saying untrue things, that it's an endorsement. Like this drive time, you know, like whatever DJ in the panty liner in the morning or whatever.

Like when they when they do that, like when you hear like that, you know, this this is the crypto hot wallet that they prefer or whatever. It's got more, you know, gravitas to it. But, yeah, I mean, it's as somebody who's been.

AlexNo, that's sorry. The point I was not trying to make, but the thing I've observed is that the reason I'm only hearing dynamic ads isn't because people are doing fewer DJ Red ads. It's because those folks also care – the hosts of those podcasts who do read their own ads or do their own endorsements also provide a way to pay for their podcast without ads, and they actually care about their audience's time.

MerlinThat's very sweet.

AlexWhy? Well –

MerlinWell, I would take that and turn it. I'm just going to –

AlexOh, right. That's you too.

MerlinWell, I'll just put this extremely cynically, which is the thing – I'm not a giant fan of advertising in general. I think it's a pretty blunt instrument. I think it can be very effective. But, like, the more – please don't take this as cynically as it will sound and maybe is. But like the further you get from, hey, here's a thing I made and the further down you get toward everything I make is content that can be productized in various ways.

There's a lot of space in between. I've never been – well, I've certainly been hopefully more of the former than the latter. But I – the thing is the DAI stuff and related things, it's mainly that like – and there's some of our little cuddly local friends networks do this now where it's pretty wild that basically – I don't know. I guess what I'm trying to say is what bums me out is that when somebody, I'll just speak in high terms here, it bums me out when a genre or whatever that I like, so much of it right now is just this churning miasma of content.

And the thing is, what we're describing here, which is a spot read by the host, doesn't scale. If you don't really, if you care about your stuff, it scales fine. If you don't care about your stuff, it doesn't scale. If you don't care about your stuff, my goodness, that's like washing your rice one grain at a time. Why wouldn't you just have some child in Indonesia clean your rice for you? And that's what DAI is. It's like we just throw – you just put those ads wherever you want in here. It will be fine. It doesn't matter what it is.

It doesn't matter if we approved. Like, you know, approve of an ad. Are you kidding me? I know it sounds so quaint. but I'm thinking of what's weird is the ones that are weird are to me like when I listen to The Watch for example and to my ears that is Andy doing when they do the dum dum dum which music gets a little bit scrambled and overcast but when Andy reads an ad like I get the feeling that's him like you know or you know no such thing as a fish I think those

they read a set of ads for the week and they probably like Divvy it up. You draw the short straw. And you got to read the ads.

AlexYou know what I purchased recently?

MerlinI don't.

AlexA burrow couch, which is something that I hadn't thought about in years and years and years. But I think it was a host read ad on some podcast. But now I have a new couch that is delightful. And yes, there are a million new mattresses. But I think it's even though it's anecdotal and doesn't scale, that stayed in my head for like half a decade.

And I don't think.

MerlinBut that business has changed too, Alex. I mean, when's the last time you heard a Casper ad? I bet it's a real long time since you've heard it. I don't think Casper advertises anymore.

AlexNo, they have fucking stores.

MerlinThey and. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But but like, yeah. OK, cool. Yeah. Couches are good. But the ones that are weird to me are when I hear like an NPR ad or an ad for an NPR show, something like Planet Money, right? Or I hear like a WNYC ad and a lot of WNYC's ads are at least in my – and this is getting closer and closer every day to something like Google. So like when Don Jr. goes and shows his Google results, let me just say that you should not take that as the exact same Google results you will get for a variety of reasons.

Point being, like I don't know how much I am affected. I know I get a lot of even running stuff like Guardian. When I get ads for stuff like medical services at Stanford, I always wonder if that's because I'm in the Bay Area and I don't really have a way of knowing. but there are some where like there's that one deep voiced african-american guy who does a lot of the reads for like um planet money type stuff anyway i'm sorry i'm probably on uh but everybody needs to make bank but at a certain point and this hopefully this will be the saddest thing i say

today uh you can be the judge of that you reach a certain point where it's people who don't care about podcasts making podcasts they don't care about to service advertisers they don't care about to then be, you know, milked gently into the ears of people who don't, haven't just haven't realized that they don't actually care that much about podcasts. And if that is sustainable, I don't want to be standing when we reach the point where that has become sustainable because you gross, you know, I mean, like my kids made me some

really stupid shit in their life. Certainly not artisanal crafts or cards or secret notes that I found around the house. A lot of them are frankly illiterate, but I wouldn't trade that for the world. The handwritten note that I didn't find for a year in a drawer. Nothing in this world could possibly make me happier, frankly, make me cry than when I find something like that. My collection of Father's Day cards I have here at the office. I'm playing the kid card and I'll tell Why? Because that matters. It really matters that that dumb baby or that kid's mom caused a mark to be placed on paper that made that a Father's Day card I'll keep forever. That's a long way from here's another ad for Chime or Rocket Mortgage or Medicare Part C. You can call again this year, even if you called last year, and they'll check your zip code.

You know, it's just that at a certain point, it starts to feel very, the phrase you use or that word disassociative, you start to feel very disconnected from all these different things. And if that doesn't bother you, try harder.

AlexAll of you, literally. Yeah, yeah. I'm trying really, really hard. But what broke through my cynicism today was actually a controversy with Snazzy Labs. One of the Quinns got in trouble because people were mad that he did a sponsored video that I really liked. And it was sponsored by Insta360.

MerlinWait, this is Quinn Norton?

AlexQuinn Nelson, I believe. Is there a Quinn?

MerlinWait, who is Quinn Norton?

AlexQuinn.

MerlinIs there a Quinn Norton? Who is our Quinn?

AlexOur Quinn is Quinn Rose. Quinn Norton is an American. Oh, she is a journalist.

MerlinIf it turns out to be somebody in porn, I'm going to be really embarrassed.

AlexNo, no, no, no. I've always called him Quinn snazzy. But I do not envy YouTubers. What happened?

MerlinSo Quinn, the guy with the beard that does YouTube videos and didn't like how many tools Apple sent him, that guy?

AlexYes. He's mad they sent him so many tools? No, no, no, no, no. This is not inherently about Quinn's snazzy laugh.

MerlinHe seems to be getting increasingly frustrated about the world on his YouTube channel.

AlexTrue, true. This is about YouTube and this is just a simple example.

MerlinOh, this is one of those where you've got to put the thing that says it's sponsored, that thing?

AlexRight. And more and more I am seeing, you know, SpawnCon. SpawnCon! SpawnCon. But I have started to notice there are people who are good at it. And they do it almost in a prices...

MerlinOh, that would be Brian David Gilbert, who in the days at Polygon produced the single greatest sponsored video of all time.

AlexYeah, yeah.

MerlinRemember this GamerSpace?

AlexYes, yes.

MerlinRemember we got the banner made?

AlexOh, I love that kid. who is older than me. What is it?

MerlinDon't talk to me before I've had my game or something.

AlexYeah. And this,

Merlinthe milk goes through his body. It feeds a man and cools his computer.

AlexWith the invention of the milk cooled PC, patent pending,

Merlinand the feed bag sustained me, patent pending, the perfect gamer space was complete.

AlexBut what the, the reason for that is as all of this content creation grows and sponsored content exists, I am not... I think there are people who really care. And I know that you don't...

MerlinWhoa, whoa, whoa. Sorry. Because I interrupted you, now I'm lost. Brian David Gilbert. Sponsored content, people really care about what? The video they make be good even though they got paid by a company to do it?

AlexRight. Yeah. Because you do...

MerlinWe used to call it, in my business, we used to call it advertorials.

AlexThe advertorials. No, seriously. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I like that.

MerlinLike in print, In print, you would have a page of something that was sponsored and it was intended to look like editorial content, you know, but it was paid for by somebody. And then I think, I don't know if it was ethics or law that eventually caused that to go out with politics. I'm almost certain it was law or, you know, with elections and stuff.

AlexYeah, it was FCC stuff. And it's absolutely wild that like FCC laws are now.

MerlinSo what happened with Clint Snazman?

AlexClint Snazman ran into, or rather got pulled into the trap that I think every popular YouTuber has, where he made a sponsored video that people clicked on and were like, this is all this is paid for, and they didn't realize it was paid for, even though he has done...

MerlinIt always has to have that, doesn't it have that badge in the upper left at the beginning?

AlexIt does, and it did.

MerlinMy beloved trash theory has those. It'll say right there. Hey, even though I make these great videos, here's a VPN you definitely shouldn't use.

AlexOh, God. Yes. Oh, actually, I do want to endorse.

MerlinRemember when librarians would put up that because like a FISA warrant or a Patriot Act thing. Librarians would put up that sign that says as long as this sign is still here, nobody has subpoenaed the records of who's checked out books.

AlexI've never said that.

MerlinI mean, I don't know how useful that would be if it's your first day at the library and you don't know until all you see is a part that's less dusty on the wall where a sign used to be. I'm not sure. That's not the way I would want, say, fire alarms to work.

AlexI want them to be musical instruments.

MerlinYeah. Someday I will put up a note in my library and it will have almost all the VPNs you shouldn't be using. And it'll be a really long list.

AlexThis is not Guardian. So his listeners just got upset because they felt that it was deceptive. I disagree. In fact, one of my favorite videos he's ever done was a paid for it was BonCon for the litter robot, the cat poop sphere that I use that circles and takes away my cat's poop so that I don't need to touch it. And it was so good.

MerlinDon't worry. I'm going to have plenty of signs about that in my library. Hey, do you feel like a real sucker when you sit around on the floor for hours for no reason? Would you like to be looking into a kitty litter robot that turns a little bit and then throws an arrow? Well, have I got a robot for you?

AlexMy robot is tried and true and lasted four years before we had to replace the motor. Anyway, not spun con.

MerlinWell, to their credit, in fairness, the two that we've had were broken in different ways.

So he did a little robot for SNES.

AlexOh, yeah. Well, and it's fine now. I just found the breakdown of how sponsored videos on YouTube work because, again, I do not envy anybody who makes YouTube videos for a living. I can't imagine the hell. I mean, I can imagine.

MerlinI'm trying to think of anything I've seen. Something I do see often, and just I need your help here to make sure I watch a lot of YouTube. But the thing that I feel like I see a lot when I watch YouTube at home, I'm watching on the Apple TV and I see that thing pop up in the upper left. It's a badge, a superimposed badge that says something like this video contains sponsors paid content or something like that.

AlexYeah.

MerlinAre there any other ones like that out there? You know what I mean? Are there ones where like is there any subtlety to it or is it just because that's I mean, that's what I'm getting at is like I'm not surprised that they do. it, but it's a little bit of a zero and one. Like if you think about the way ratings and anything even more useful, like even think about the stupid goddamn, someday I'm going to do an entire rant about this. Any warning for a TV show that says there's language or says there's foul language, that bugs me because I want to take you at your word and say you're actually trying to help

people. So like, you know, you don't want to be weird about it. You don't want to become like vid angel. but if you know like one of the George Carlin words would be unacceptable but you know uh oh shoot what's the line in Fosse Verdon the line in um in uh Sweet Charity up yours like there's a time where they were like arguing with the studio about whether Shirley MacLaine's character could say up yours I mean what if you could what if you're okay well should it get that specific Probably not, but the movie ratings are so capricious.

PG in 1985 is nothing like PG in 2005. Like one would be Ghostbusters and the other would be Toy Story 2.

AlexYou know what I'm saying?

MerlinOne's got a Beej and the other one's got a doll singing a song that makes you cry. And like what I'm saying is like who? Okay, you know me, Alex, right? So like my test in life when all else fails is to say, what am I supposed to do differently? What am I supposed to think differently? Like when you're emailing somebody, well, what do you want me to do about it? But honestly, that's – no, I mean like the reason we give each other information apart from saying I love you or I hate you, the reason we exchange information is to imply that this is something you should see, do, or think about differently.

Well, when Netflix says language, I mean I'm not trying to – I'm not really not trying to be cute about this. like who should not watch that show as a result of it saying language well i mean a real prude might say if there's any as my kid and i call him tags if there's anything you see smoking self-harm um alcohol you know uh mullets like whatever the warning is like you then what would you do well some people might say well if there's anything that netflix thinks is objectionable or potentially

objectionable, well then my sweet precious angel isn't allowed to watch it. But let's say you're like me, and you know you have a pretty clear sense of what is okay and what's not okay for yourself and your, if I could say, my household. Like, who does that help? And I'm just wondering, I wonder, so like that is that the only kind of warning YouTube puts up? Are there other kinds of warnings I should be watching for that you know of? That's a pretty blind instrument, Alex.

AlexIt is, which is why... Like what if they got that to review

Merlinfor free versus paid for with their own money. Oh, Merlin, why are you making this so complicated? Well, I mean, if I had a- Because it is. Well, it doesn't have to be. That's the problem. And this is the problem. How do you keep the honest people honest? Latching the screen door will not keep John Dillinger out of your house, but you try to keep the honest people honest. Now, let's say, for the sake of argument, and I know this only matters if you're the sort of person who cares about what you watch, but let's say there's a certain person who prides himself on being someone who's never received a junk at a trip, even a free review

unit. Well, it's not free. I'm a reviewer. It's my job. But like, what if you're somebody who only reviews stuff you pay retail for versus another person? Like, it isn't like that person gets a badge that says, hey, this channel, everything in this was paid for by the person who made the video. And even if you've got a review unit you have to send back, that's still not all quite the same. So what do you think that badge is for? Is it just CYA for YouTube?

AlexI feel as if it is just to appease whatever federal laws are in place because the content creators that I like all have sometimes literally written code of ethics over what they will or will not do and what they will disclose. And I mean, I think more disclosure, the better, because it's not just like, ah, you got that for free, but it also provides some context because,

okay, if you got an iPhone from Apple, that's a different experience than setting it up in the store and having to deal with the purchase process. And it's not necessarily better than, But like it's just different, which is why the – I don't know what else to call them right now except creators.

MerlinWell, I mean just another one that's table stakes is the idea of an embargo. So you could say to somebody – like I noticed a lot of people including – look like iJustine. So I have a reminder in my reminders to keep an eye out for that new Belkin thing, the Belkin continuity cam mount. that was mentioned a while back. And I had a reminder in there starting in the next week or so to start watching for it to be out in the market. And I happened to notice just walking around, I think it was on one of the shovel blogs,

that basically, oh, yeah, YouTubers are now testing out the new Belkin continuity cam mount. And I was like, oh, awesome. So I went to Amazon. I went to Apple. I was like, oh, I guess they got like pre-release review units or whatever, which is totally normal. And that's great. That's how you learn about things. But like, for example, I'm not saying I'm saying this, but if you're a person who honors embargoes, if you're somebody who honors embargoes, that's because you get stuff, you agree to terms, and implicitly would like to continue getting stuff where you honor the terms.

and it would be very difficult, even if you kept the embargo, it would be very difficult for you to work against the grain, not to be anti the company that's giving you the stuff, but again, in my notional, my YouTube person I just made up who always buys their own stuff, there's a certain way in which it would be difficult for me not to naturally give a little bit more credence to that wildcat in some ways.

Which is not to say I distrust people who honor embargoes. That's the business. But that is the business.

AlexRight.

MerlinRight.

AlexAnd I think that having a negative opinion, a blanket negative opinion about anyone being paid to make something is not necessarily naive. No, I guess naive because you need to eat. And I think of the, ah, the, what was it?

Advertorial ad? You made a rock opera about an emailing a newsletter service. And that was really fucking cool. And it was just really, I don't know. It was one of those things where I'm like, all right, if this company is someone who cares enough about their product to get it to weirdos via weird ways that are interesting and fun uh i thought i i don't know

i it's an advertising model that works on me because i'm like hey that's that's cool i have

Merlini have a similar feeling i have a similar feeling i'm i'm a really big fan of um oh my gosh now i'm gonna forget his name sam you know the guy the african-american guy from i think you should

Alexleaving detroiter sam uh oh gosh yes um the veep uh think yeah yeah yeah richard splat sam yes

Merlinrichardson sam richardson i love sam richardson he's great in everything um and like when i see him in that tv ad for it's like legal zoom or one of those like we're lawyers but not lawyers kind of places like it's another one of those things like those chime like things it's like you can just tell this is some kind of a grift.

AlexLike everything that makes this celebrity.

MerlinWell, there's this kind of company I've never said this out loud because I've never really thought it out loud, but I think there's a certain kind of company in America, especially that makes almost all of its money off of fine print. So like, for example, I think a classic example might be certain kinds of insurance. We're like the way, how is it that you have not gone broke offering insurance of any kind, whether that's health, life, whatever. But like, you know, I just, I don't know. There's certain kinds of companies out there. Again, like a lot of these ones, these really cute credit card looking companies,

whether that's, whether, I don't just like call it China, but like there's like, you know, there's all these different companies that are like, hey, you have problems with credit? You want to rebuild your credit? You can get our card and you get this and you can get up to $7 million in 24 hours. And there's all these different things. Like every time I see those, I'm like, oh man, this really, this feels like a, like if, God forbid, like Chris Glass, had been allowed to brand like payday loans. Like if you made a really beautiful identity design for something just disastrously damaging,

where they all feel like a racket. But I have mixed feelings about that because I'm not a huge fan of those racket style companies. But I'm like, hey, that's Richard Splatt on TV. I'm glad he got some work out of that. That's cool. You know what I mean? Or like there's a lot of things like that.

AlexThat's another thing I feel conflicted about because, Well, I don't feel conflicted about cryptocurrency, but a lot of famous people who are either famous for being famous, which is no, I hate that term. They're famous for being publicly entertaining, whether that be an actor or Paris Hilton or whatever. They are.

MerlinAlex, I'll say the part you can't or won't. If there was something better to know them for, we would have heard about it by now.

AlexYes, yes. But, you know, I don't think I don't think Kris Jenner.

Merlinhas been fixing diseases and keeping it quiet.

AlexYeah, I don't think so.

MerlinI'd like to see Kris Jenner make their own podcast.

AlexOkay.

MerlinI don't even have a joke about this.

AlexThat would be awesome. That would be awesome. I think she's on that show, The Kardashian Show.

MerlinSee, I'm old enough to know that name from the OJ trial. That's the only way I know that name.

AlexI know that name from watching the American Crime Story series.

MerlinSchwimmer. Schwimmer.

AlexYes, yes. Ross from Friends. Yes, yes. Ross from Friends.

MerlinHe's also the guy from Band of Brothers. Did you ever watch Band of Brothers?

AlexNo, but I – it's on –

MerlinCouragy, S1E1. Very strong episode.

AlexIrma Vep is first on the docket and then Band of Brothers and I'm – I can't believe I'm saying this. I'm looking for TV show recommendations.

MerlinI cut you off after the – you like that I – I did one rock opera for Squarespace and I did another rock opera for MailChimp. I did one about Dan moving to Austin and I did another one where I – I don't want to say the parodies. I did homages to some of my favorite bands. Remember I did a song that sounded like Smiths. I did a song that sounded like Husker Do. I did one that sounded a little bit like Teenage Fan Club. And you were talking about how like it makes you feel good, I think, when the Richard Splets of the world get work. Yeah.

AlexYes, but the Richard Splitz of the world doing a progressive insurance ad.

MerlinGrammy Splett calls it a spletter.

AlexWhen someone's splitting about crypto, for instance.

MerlinYou know what I dean? He faked his own Shang-Ni-Shield. He's such a gift. I love when he walks up to Anne and he's like, he's eating your brain. Ken Jeong.

AlexI take it back. I don't need new TV shows. I'm just going to watch Community over and over again and watch Rick and Morty over and over again.

MerlinI cannot sell that to my stupid kid.

AlexI cannot sell Rick.

MerlinI know. I can't. I'm trying. I've even passed on.

AlexYou like Rick and Morty?

MerlinWell, I like and respect that you have given me the high sign. No, no, no, no, no. You gave me the high sign. And you and Max did this with BoJack and Rick and Morty. And I said, pick one. And I ended up going with BoJack, which is one of the best decisions I ever made. Or that you made for me. But no. Anyway. So, wait. Sorry. You were talking about Ken Jeong.

AlexAh. Oh. No. No. I was talking about celebrities shilling Bitcoin. But that's the only way.

MerlinOh, fortune favors the brave is what you were thinking.

AlexYeah.

MerlinI like the better when we were making potatoes on Mars.

AlexOh, yeah. Well, okay. While he's not making potatoes on Mars.

MerlinWell, he's in that funny Loki play. He's great in the Loki play and the other Loki play.

AlexI don't know what...

MerlinDid you ever see Ragnarok?

AlexNo, no. I still haven't seen any of the Taika Thors. Just real quick.

MerlinAre you fucking kidding me?

AlexNo, no. Have you seen Heart for the Wilder People? No, no. Did you read that article in The Atlantic?

MerlinDid you read that article in Harper's? Did you read that? Did you read that article in Mother Jones? Sorry, now I'm doing the bit from Portlandia.

AlexI know. We don't read the same magazines.

MerlinWell, I read the same magazines as Georgia does.

AlexNo.

MerlinOh, you know what was a big hit the other night? Like an unexpectedly out of the ballpark hit, Get Out.

AlexOh, gosh. I'm so – oh, man.

MerlinYou know we're going to go see it in the theater tomorrow? Nope.

AlexNope. Oh, so am I. So am I. We're going to have a tandem experience.

MerlinOh, well, we'll live stream it. We'll Twitch it.

AlexOh, God.

MerlinFlip it. Reverse it.

AlexDo you – all right. I feel like we didn't close – I feel like we opened a very unsatisfactory. very unsatisfying thread took a shit in it and then walked away no i'm not i am not sympathizing with jimmy fallon or paris hilton for showing off their bored apes but the way that that i i didn't even realize this until someone um oh i think pj vote did a interview with the advertiser slash management company of these famous people.

No, PJ Vogt is doing things entirely on his own. And turns out you can still make a-

MerlinWait, so he's not with Spotify anymore?

AlexNo, remember he was- Oh, he got canceled.

MerlinYeah.

AlexYeah. I mean, he was a big dick about the union and he apologized. And I don't know. I thought it was graceful and he stepped away. But now he's doing a new thing.

MerlinWe should see what the podcast lady would be on our show. We talked about that. You know, that lady with the new podcast. We should see if she wants to be on the show. What's her name? Laura Mayer.

AlexYes. And what's the show called?

MerlinWhat's the show called? Remind me.

AlexShameless Acquisition Target, which is just about.

MerlinYou texted me about it with a time stamp and said, holy shit. I listened to it. I said, holy shit. And then later on, completely independently, friend of the show, Lizzie O'Leary, also said, if I may quote, holy shit. Because the timestamp is where she like, oh, here's a phrase I use once a decade, broke her silence. No, where she basically said what it was like. And see, now I'm going to frustrate people at Slate. Talk about being at Panoply and like what it was like. And I was like, oh, my God.

I would let if this if this was this is Northern Ireland, I'd let somebody else start my car from now on.

AlexYeah.

MerlinLike, oh, my God. I think Mr. Spotify is not going to be very happy about this.

AlexNo. And the stuff that she said is – actually, I am surprised that it surprised you. Because you've heard similar things before.

MerlinOh, absolutely. Your ear is to the ground. You talk to a lot of people. You're in a lot of channels. And you hear things about things.

AlexI'm going to address the audience. Hey, audience. Seriously. Thank you for – no. No, seriously, thank you for supporting our Patreon. Because there are jobs that are similar to the jobs that she's had that after being offered them, you find out that you're basically going, what's okay?

MerlinBut what does it have to do with it? I'm saying you've heard you get inside dope from people.

AlexNo, it's not inside, though. That's the thing. The entire industry of people, like everybody right now who works in that sphere of like nouveau podcast, but it's actually a radio show.

MerlinYou're talking about like fast growing, built to burn, built to sell, flip it and jib it and reverse it. You're talking about like those kinds of like –

AlexPanoply, Gimlet, Panoply.

MerlinWell, Panoply – see, I'm confused. I thought Panoply was like Andy Bowers' Slate thing.

AlexAnd then it changed.

MerlinBut then Andy Bowers was gone. Now, Andy Bowers is a company, I think, with Dan Benjamin and Scott Simpson, but I'm not entirely sure. So Panoply, but Panoply, then what's the angle with the Reply All of Gimlet? What's the Gimlet? Is there a Gimlet angle?

AlexGimlet was bought by Spotify. Right. And the stuff—

MerlinWho was already putting out almost three hours of public content a month.

AlexMm-hmm. Mm-hmm. They started and canceled more shows than I did.

MerlinI get the feeling they were doing like ads for trade shows or something.

AlexOh, yeah, yeah. Wasn't that it though?

MerlinI mean like wasn't that the – I mean like the thing is I think of a podcast now because I'm selfish and old. I think of a podcast studio, company, whatever as a place that puts out shows I listen to. And then at a certain point Reply All was every other week and then it just went away for a while. And then it was mostly ads for other shows in that feed. But like is that partly – I'm guessing. I don't know if I heard this. I think I'm guessing this. That that's because a big part of the money they were making was from like bespoke private content.

Like it wasn't – they were doing shows for other people. Like I feel like white label shows maybe.

AlexYes.

MerlinAnd that's where all the resources of those 80 plus people were going.

AlexCorrect. And the reason Spotify kept making Reply All do feed drops of the other shows is because Reply All was still distributed via RSS anywhere. But all the shows.

MerlinOh, so we've already paid for the room. We might as well have somebody sleep in it.

AlexYep.

MerlinI mean, kind of like we're already.

AlexAnd well, there's there's it's no surprise that Reply All has stopped. did you know it's officially Dunzo, Emanuel

Merlinand Alex left? Yeah, I didn't even listen to the last one but I did send you a screen grab probably a month or so ago of like of the stuff that was on one screen on Overcast I think one or possibly two were actual new content and all the other ones were either I'm not going to use that word because it's a dumb word but they're basically like dropping another show in there to like promote it or like you know chief chick in the city just going like, I'm sorry, we haven't had an update in a while.

AlexAnd I like the guy.

MerlinI like the new guy they got.

AlexWell, and he was very talented. And both of them left for reasons that lawyer mayors. Not great.

MerlinSo it was so like, just so I get my, well, you know, it doesn't matter. We should, we should, you know what? Someone of us should ask. because you know the whole point of her program is that she's had it she's done working with all these places that that like you know well i'm speaking for uh i don't know she's a friend of the show she's a para pal of the show that um there's some pretty extraordinary stuff we're like what was what was the really bad one was it that she was she was sick or somebody was sick there was one where she had to one thing where she had to work under these really it was a maternity

Alexleave she had to um there was i mean that's the thing everything she said was why like uh

Merlineverything this might have been things we've heard before but you rarely hear it from the people that

Alexit happened to more importantly you rarely hear it publicly and this is the first time i had ever heard anyone like that talk about it in public who has worked for one of these companies well

MerlinYeah, I mean, there's probably a time when not that many people talked about what it was like to be a woman working at the Wolf of Wall Street firm. In retrospect, you look back and you go, how was everybody not talking about this? But, you know, and her bit is, OK, well, then that's time for me to get paid. I'm going to this is my new podcast and it's a shameless attempt to get lots of money, which is pretty funny.

AlexI mean, our whole thing, giveusyourfuckingmoney.com. I do not think there's anything shameful in just saying we fucking want and need money and not just.

MerlinThis is why I don't want to be a store, Alex. The one good thing about being a store, being a store in real life is pretty straightforward. I'm thinking, oh, God, a recent signing we watched. It features pre Parks and Rec Don Amiegel. it's the extreme home makeover where they wreck the Mexican family's house and D is speaking broken Spanish but then this is a pairing I love all the pairings but Charlie

and Dennis go to the hardware store to buy a bunch of stuff and it's going to be like $3,000

Alexthat's a different episode same hardware

Merlinsame rat different hat but in this case they go in there and Donna Miegel's checking them out and she goes okay that'll be whatever several thousand dollars and then it goes uh i guess this guy is the home makeover could you put that on the ty pannington account on like like what the what no you got you got to pay for this and like i um what was my point that donna meagle and i guess i i don't know what i'm

Alexgonna say make me sound smart there i i will i will uh it'll come back to me unfortunately i I just enjoy the project, another podcast that I started and didn't release with my friends Chris Lawley and Jay Miller. It's just called Potentially Paid Podcasters.

MerlinIs this the one you did with Savannah where you fired Savannah? Is that a different show?

AlexI didn't fire Savannah.

MerlinIs Dr. Unicorn doing a show with Savannah now or is that I just don't know about? Is that where they talk about their desks? Which one is that?

AlexNo, Dr. Unicorn and I do Roboism. How's Savannah? This is now just talking about... Will you tell Savannah I said hi?

MerlinNot in a creepy way?

AlexI did. I did. Didn't you say hello back? I didn't relay that message. All right.

MerlinI follow her on Twitter. She's really funny. Yeah.

AlexOh, she is one of the funniest people I know and one of the most talented people I know. Welcome to Dubai Friday. We just talked about how much we like our friends, and I'm okay with that this week.

MerlinCan you make that all a different show?

AlexOh, what a different show.

MerlinWhen will you just announce what the show is and talk to your parapals? Maybe I should do that for an hour and see how you like it.

AlexI'm talking to you about being shamelessly acquired, which is just such a good premise. And I mean, I don't know if this woman will ever work.

MerlinYou know, who was I saying this to? Who haven't I said this to? I mean, I probably all told ever, maybe during the height of my McElroy's involvement with MBM and Adventure Zone, I've maybe listened to like three episodes of Besties ever, but I enjoyed it. I really liked the idea of it. I liked how they did it. And my understanding of the way things went with Besties is about as close to a cautionary tale as you get, I feel like.

AlexYep. Yes.

MerlinTell me. You know better than I do. Do you know what happened? Could you describe what Besties is and what happened? And then what happened after that?

AlexBesties was a Polygon show, which is a website about video games. And Besties was one of their podcasts.

MerlinFour good friends slash brothers talk about a video game. But it's really charming in the way that McElroy things so often are.

AlexIt was very entertaining and very sweet.

MerlinWas Pat on there? Who was on there?

AlexBesides Griffin and Justin. Chris, what's his name? Oh, gosh, I have forgotten. That's the one from the Pokemon video, though, right? Yeah. No, no. I think Brian did. It's not important.

MerlinAnyway, it's a totally charming show, and it did well enough, apparently, that then they took it off and made it their own. When they left Polygon, they kept doing it, right?

AlexThey left Polygon to go to Spotify.

MerlinBut this is after none of them were working there, right? Didn't they like get the show? The irony I thought I remembered was that Polygon was cool about them getting to take the show with them someplace else.

AlexNo, I think you know better than I because I am not sure.

MerlinMaybe I don't. But it's not like Spotify acquired it from Polygon. Wasn't there at least some in Oregon where it was independent?

AlexPossibly. I know that it's independent now and only occasionally released. Oh, no.

MerlinI think it's super independent now because ding, ding. That's the sound of dollar signs. Oh, God. What was his name when he turned into a dog and he got a dog body? Chaz. Those are dollar signs in Chaz's eyes.

When he wears a suit, he looks like a very sick boy. So the thing is, though, guess what? Hey, knock, knock, knock. it's me Dr. Spotify calling you know long distance from Sweden and we heard you have this audio podcast that has a pretty good following how would you like to be part of the family right

Alexand how would you like as part of the family we won't let you leave the house ever it's like Daenerys taking away

MerlinJohn's sword you know if you know what I mean when you show up at Dragonstone they impound your weapons and in this case that's your RSS feed we'll take that they got the well i don't think they got the name but they became part of spotify i'm now really really doing all my worst habits right here i'm being ignorant and interrupting and so they became part of spotify and at that point was it a spot i want to say it was a cut

Alexnot a was it only available you could not listen which means and let's let's just pause for a

Merlinminute whenever i talk to my friends who like making money from podcasts even though they don't like podcasts. Let me just pause for a minute. The way you become as popular as a Joe Rogan or a whomever is you have a public podcast feed that's called a podcast. And that way, people can listen to your show and they can listen to it where they like. They can tell their friends about it. Anybody can jump in at any point if they want to download every episode and put it in a protective cave. They can do that. Your stuff is free, free, free. It's all out there, right? Now, I think there are people who feel like they maybe feel like they've arrived.

Oh, we've arrived. So now we're going to take this next level. Well, I mean, I don't think this is gospel, but if your show is doing well, people should be able to, I feel like, continue to get it the place they used to get it. But let's be real selfish about it. Wouldn't it be neat if you could have new listeners? Like if, because I just can't believe it be lies. It just indicates such a misunderstanding of how every single fucking part of this works for people who like are like yum yum yum give me all the money it's like are you fucking kidding

me like the reason it takes a show a really long time if it's a good audience it takes a while to build if it's a shitty audience you could do that overnight shitty audiences are easy title but if you want a good audience that takes time and then like there may be a point when like your friend you don't know you have tell us another friend you don't know you're gonna have hey you should check out this show right there's so many examples of this in our midst just shows that me and all my friends listen to it. It's because, you know, it got around. Well, okay, so then you've arrived. Well, then what happens? The door closes. And we're going to put this behind the

equivalent of a, not a paywall, but an app wall, I guess. You can only get this in Spotify. It is no longer an RSS feed. And for a lot of folks, that means it's no longer really a podcast. But, you know, again, that's a term that now means, you know, talking over a music bed. So

Alexwhat Marco and I think doesn't matter. But. It doesn't just mean that though. It's no longer portable.

MerlinIt's no longer widely available. All the things that remove the friction from attracting the new listeners you would like to have has been reintroduced and possibly multiplied. So strike one, you're no longer independent. You don't get to make decisions. Your shit really belongs to a Swedish company now.

Are they Swedish? Spotify?

AlexGo ahead, sorry. Yeah, I thought they were European. Whatever.

MerlinThey might be European. I guess what I'm trying to say is you go like, well, okay, I guess we, it'll, it'll be annoying because my dad will have to stop listening to it in the Apple podcast player or whatever. But at least we've really arrived now. And so what happens? Spotify says later. Spotify unilaterally, as I understand it, just this happens. Spotify just goes, oh, hey guys, thanks. We're done.

AlexWhat? Sorry.

MerlinWhat? What? Oh yeah, we're done. We're going to go ahead and keep that RSS feed and all the stuff about that. And you're free to go. We're done. We're done now. You just gave away fucking everything to end up with less than nothing. You don't even have – you don't – what was that Henry V says? You know, nothing left but these, my bones. You don't even have your bones left anymore.

AlexI have – or I think I have bummed you out with this.

MerlinYou did that.

AlexBut what I am trying to sort of get into my head is...

MerlinPeople with organic brain diseases who don't really have friends still have a future in this world.

AlexYeah, but podcasting doesn't need to... It means something different. And like YouTuber used to be a vlogger.

MerlinIt doesn't change anything about what I think or do.

AlexNo, no, no.

MerlinIt's just it's difficult to like tune out that particular noise. And as Syracuse and I've talked about, who cares? But if somebody asks you what you do, I mean, think about saying I make podcasts. Do a biopsy over the years, one year at a time, one sample. Ask over five years, over 10 years, on this same day of the year, every year, ask somebody what it's like to say I am on a podcast. And that's gone from what are you talking about to now. Some people probably have a pretty okay idea what that might mean.

Alexwell yeah the same way youtuber was vlogger and now it could be youtuber i barely know her yeah i just want uh i i know you you don't like names for things but words do mean things and i wish there was a a clearer way to define what sort of the the genre that you and I enjoy.

Not just you and I, most of our friends.

MerlinRight. It's almost like I totally know what you mean. I'll give you an example. I think it's germane. I can't figure out how it's germane, but I think that it is. Think about in your corpus back in the day on iTunes when iTunes was like your favorite app and it was really good and it was peak iTunes. Back when iTunes Match worked and it did all the things. But the point is, let's just bitch about one thing at a time. Think about the days when you had all your stuff. And I was just saying to my kid the other day, my kid said they're most listen to song on spotify oh i forget what but i was saying like that's always been such a funny

thing it's the equivalent of like what i put in the watch pocket of my levi's over the years whether that's guitar picks you know video game tokens or imodium and like to like at a point for years anyway for a long time um everlong by foo fighters was a number one and like at a certain point, The Sound of a Dryer was my number one song. At another point, You've Got a Friend in Me was my, well, because we play a dryer sound at night for our baby. Or Jim Dale reading Prisoner of Azkaban, because that's what our toddler, young person went to sleep to most nights was listening to Prisoner of Azkaban. Just look at the state of his robes. Boy, I've heard that chapter a lot.

well then what do you call that well there's music and there's other stuff okay well there's music and then what like spoken word yeah but also there's music and there's also like soundtracks there's lullabies it's like we can all mostly agree on the idea of music but at a certain point if you're trying to taxonomize all the stuff in that collection in your corpus of peak iTunes you have so much stuff I've got accidental like ad read stuff in there I've certainly got Toy Story. I've got a dryer sound.

You know what I mean? All those different kinds of things. And there's a point where you could say, well, we've got music and we've got spoken word. And you've got, oh, okay, well, it's actually a little more subtle than that because like, do I want to hear this collection I downloaded of poets reading their own work? Well, I guess that's under spoken word, et cetera, et cetera. We almost need something like that.

AlexBut in doing something... That's what I want.

MerlinWell, that's what I'm saying.

AlexNo, no, no. I'm weird. I feel like we're too... And it's just that

Merlinit's like majoring the coastline of Scotland, though.

AlexI'm the manic one this week. Woo!

MerlinWell, I have a very clear idea in my own head of what a podcast is. And in my head, a podcast is something like You Look Nice Today. No, but I'm just saying very, very selfishly, it's a handful of people speaking extemporaneously.

AlexBut You Look Nice Today, as you've mentioned, was not edited within an inch of its life, but it was much more...

MerlinYeah, but like most of – you'd be surprised part of what was canny about it, since you love that word, canny agency. Part of what was great about what Adam did, though, was his touch was light in such a way that like you might be surprised how much of that actually – especially as we got more used to what the show was. Like much of – a lot of it got closer and closer to like not needing editing. And then you weren't – there were times when hopefully you never even noticed where Adam would like move entire sections around. And then there's other times where it's like it's pretty much that was over 80% done and then he had to tighten up.

I guess what I'm saying is so, yes, there's editing. I'm not saying you don't need editing, but regardless of how it's made, the result comes across as a handful of people talking extemporaneously, edited or otherwise. And it's just that the handful of people talking extemporaneously falls extremely far short as a genre, the name for a genre. And yet I know it by its obverse. I know reading an essay over a music bed, which is probably 80% of podcasts at this point.

AlexYeah. And a lot of them I like.

MerlinAlmost even the extemporaneous. Like A Planet Money, even their extemporaneous talk sounds written. And I think it is, which is not bad. But that's really different from you and me talking about organic brain disorders for five hours.

AlexThat's what I do. I'm sorry. I have a book. When someone is They ruined Slate has ruined a couple shows And it makes me very sad Which ones?

MerlinDakota Ring is very good This week's Dakota Ring is very good

AlexOh really?

MerlinDan Coyce has a good story

AlexOh the mall one

MerlinThat one's good too But Rod McEwen is this week's The most successful poet in the history of American publishing and nobody knows who he is. Except I know who he is because I was a poetry guy and my teacher used to make fun of him.

AlexI will say this about Slate. They do offer an option where you can pay to not get ads.

MerlinYou can also pay to repeatedly log in.

AlexIt's a feature they share with the Daily Beast.

MerlinOh, Daily Beast. You know, I love when they send you the link via email. I love that.

AlexOh, I know. So now I got two problems. I can't believe I bought or pay for Bloomberg right now. I'm so angry.

MerlinI can't believe it either, Alex. It's really weird that you do that. Was it an accident? Was it accidentally like ordering the same burrito twice or something?

AlexNo, no. I was like, you know what?

MerlinDid you mean to support the man, Bloomberg?

AlexNo, no. Oh, that would be upsetting. Support the man. Mayor Bloomberg. Have you? I like the music comparison a lot because when I, it was, I don't know, a couple weeks ago, I went to see a podcast about your favorite show, Buffering. Sorry, Buffy. Oh, God. I went to see a podcast about your favorite show, Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Is that the Joss Whedon show about

MerlinGruber and Ben Thompson?

AlexOh, that show doesn't come out in a way.

MerlinYou gotta just really stick with it because in the third season Gruber does a musical episode.

AlexOh, my God. Oh, my God.

MerlinDoes a song about the cowboys.

AlexWell, I had actually rarely heard this podcast, but it's very much just a talk about, no, the show, it's called Buffering, and it's just one of those podcasts that is a recap of the show, but it's more so the friends talking and just dicking around.

MerlinI am so deeply sorry. I really hope we're going to be done with this part soon. Buffering is a show. Unless I'm really having a stroke, Buffering is a show.

AlexA podcast. No. that's dithering or i don't know is this a buffering dithering wait then what's the

Merlinbuffering i'm thinking of am i thinking of the analgesic pain pain reliever no no that's buffering

Alexoh my god buffering is a i went to last week i went to a live oh it's a like a rewatch like a rewatchables type situation about buffington yes yes and but it's really a podcast where friends dick around and like talk about being gay and i saw this show live and i was like oh i even though i don't know what's going on i just find friends talking to each other who are having a great time and it's really that was really fun to see live and i'm like holy shit i like this podcast i am

Merlinenjoying this experience because you like you like how they are together yeah and and i had never even seen this. I mean, this is why the Flophouse minis have become so fun to me because I just like how those guys are. And when when Elliot does something really, really stupid, I'm understanding here he's very smart, and even the dumbest thing he's ever done is very smart but still very stupid. When he makes Dan McCoy belly laugh, it makes me

Alexhappy. Because I like those guys and I like

Merlinhow they are. If you like how people are, you don't need to have a music bed.

AlexOh, that's good. don't be bummed out the genre is I'm not bummed out what are you talking about I'm fine I I hmm hmm

Merlinyou know I have a life outside recording podcasts right you know I do a whole other I have a whole other things I do that's where I tell people about the podcast I'm on ask them to invest

Alexum

MerlinAre you McDonald's right now? Be honest. Don't overthink it. Are you McDonald's?

AlexOh, no.

MerlinGo finder.co.uk.

AlexNo.

MerlinHave you ever even watched that Maria Bamford Christmas special? Did you ever watch it?

AlexYes, I just don't know ever. The John Joed? The John Joed?

MerlinThe horseback militia? She wants to do stand-up comedy, but she can't, you know, stand up. She looks in my eyes. Blinking. I'm a fan. Everybody would understand me so much better if they just understood that I'm a fan.

AlexI agree.

MerlinMaybe I'm a creepy fan. Do you think I'm a creepy fan?

AlexI could be creepier.

MerlinI could be a lot creepier.

AlexYeah, I think people would understand you more if you were creepier. You would have a lot of company.

MerlinWell, the blank check I'm listening to right now is on Star 80, the last Bob Fosse film. And their guest for the show, understandably, really does not like Star 80. It's about the – boy, it's a really sad movie.

AlexI don't know if you've even heard of this.

MerlinYeah. So basically there was this woman named Dorothy Stratton who like rocketed into attention as like Playmate of the Year and Playboy. And like she's, you know, like 18, 19 years old. And she was very like beautiful. And like there was just something about her, like the classic sort of ingenue. But like her husband was bad. And Bob Fosse, I don't know. It's a pretty radioactive movie.

But yeah, that led me to watch all that jazz. And I got no complaints about that. Did you watch Fosse, Fosse, Burton?

AlexNo. I don't know what that is

Merlinit's about Bob Fosse and Gwen Verdon and it stars that actor my kid loves Sam who's the guy from the Gong Show movie and Iron Man 2 and Moon and that guy you know that one guy the guy who can dance the guy who's funny Sam Sam

AlexI'm sorry honey

MerlinI don't remember Sam actor wait is that the second Sam in a row I've forgotten. I might have Sam Bligh in this.

AlexWait, Sam Elliott?

MerlinNo, Sam Elliott's other Ron. Sam Rockwell.

AlexSam Rockwell, yeah. Oh, he's handsome.

MerlinHe's Bob Fosse. And Michelle Williams, who's amazing, is Gwen Verdon. And it's kind of about the history of their relationship. And Margaret Qualley from The Leftovers, the dancing girl from the perfume video,

Alexshe plays Anne Reinking.

MerlinWoof. Double woof.

AlexWell, now I have more homework. I'm excited about this.

MerlinOh, I'd love to make Anne Reinking my homework. Work on your extension.

Challenge!

AlexChallenge, challenge, challenge, challenge.

MerlinChallenge, challenge, challenge, challenge, challenge.

AlexIt was your challenge this week.

MerlinI feel like it was kind of a collaborative challenge, but what we ended up with, I think we started out with some ideas about some specific kinds of things that all amounted to learning to do something faster. I mean, gosh, this is half of our challenges. The official challenge was something like, what, make something a little faster?

AlexDo something faster?

MerlinLearn to do something faster.

AlexIs that it? Yes. Yes. Well, learn a faster way.

MerlinLearn a faster way. That's even better. I like that. Let's use that.

AlexYes. uh that's a challenge um i did that did you do that yes yes do you do you want to go first i'll go wherever you want i i i mean mine's pretty tidy the uh go tidy tidy no no no say what you're gonna say um alfred initially i was checking out oh god i've already forgotten the name i feel that uh raycast i think it's an app i was trying out a new app launcher slash

Merlinautomation thing i i opened this i looked at it it looks cool please tell people what this is and how it's different from alfred butler and launch bar it's there there are okay

Alexso alfred launch bar and raycast are all app launchers in the vein of quicksilver and along with being able to simply launch apps like um like the built-in spotlight you can um run scripts open specific files it you can do a bunch of crazy crazy shit and raycaster was different because they have a this like integrated app store that intrigued me but the almost right after we

recorded last week i found out that alfred had an update and alfred 5 totally integrates shortcuts with mac os and you can build like you've always been able to build scripts in it but well by by you i mean me and by me i mean people smarter than me and i would just steal their scripts like uh being able to search and send a gif really quickly uh oh now i know how

i can um create a folder template which is very exciting and i've just whoa whoa whoa whoa whoa

Merlinso the the thing where i just copy the structure of our folders that that can be a thing now in alfred yes yes so you give it it's got arguments something like arguments for like fill it in with

Alexthis episode number the oh see nope that is still i'm sure that that i'm not sure i am 94 percent confident you could just say you have a hunch it could happen but it's more than a hunch I just have not figured out how to do it. Hunch plus for the enterprise. Hunch plus pro max that I'll be able to put in the episode number.

But it does just the date and main and stuff like that.

MerlinI never want to tell you how much time I've spent on stuff like this. Things like – so basically every week mostly we have exactly the same structure, folder structure on Dropbox, which has come to be, at least I don't know, this is what I do. I say episode XXX and then the date. Inside of that, we've got Alex's audio, Merlin's audio, usually a folder called media, where I put anything like YouTube stuff to be ripped or especially images we might use for show art on either of the episodes. And I spent just enough time to get

frustrated with like, it seems like there's got to be a way. I mean, I could probably just do it with text expander, but Hazel seems like a good one. But then the other one is like when I'm doing my Sunday afternoon prep for the week's shows, I've done stuff like, you know, I want to like create show notes, new show notes for all of those. And I haven't come up with anything that's not onesie twosie. My latest thing is playing with Wikilinks as a way inside of drafts and VL.

AlexOh, like backlinks?

MerlinWell, you know, Wikilinks work exactly the same. Well, I don't know if they work exactly the same. They work similarly. So if you put any string of text between two brackets, two sets of brackets, it basically makes it the equivalent of a red link on Wikipedia. So then when you click on it, it generates a file with that name. This is very handy in NvAlt. And I've just been trying to figure out there's got to be some way I can – I don't know of a way to – what's the word in programming? Iterate or increment. Like I wish there was a way to increment everything by one episode,

but some episodes are every other week and some are every week. And there's all this stuff where like, you know, if I were more, if I knew more, I could probably do more. If I knew more, I could do more. But that kind of thing. It's not like it's – it's one of those things though where it's – I think it's a classic of – and this will come up in mine. It's like it's just enough work that it seems like too much work for the benefit of it.

AlexMm-hmm. So that's kind of the thing that I have continued to run into since April and being on my own. It's like, OK, how fiddly is this and how many – how, like, would I disappoint old school Merlin Mann?

MerlinWill this – in my case, will this get the hook in? Will this get, like, you know, will this be something – And one of the reasons that although I love Keyboard Maestro, I feel like it's this whole world. I don't know, ButterTouch is a little similar. But in either case, like they're both, through no fault of the very talented developers, red flag apps for me because I could really disappear down this. As I'll mention in a little bit, I'm going through that right now with Terpster's SearchLink services. But, you know, you do have to balance that kind of thing.

But then at another point, if two years have passed and you're still a little frustrated every time you have, not frustrated, but you're a little feel a little bit of unnecessary friction, that siren song starts getting louder.

AlexAnd it starts to become for me, I think, a false excuse of, well, I'll just do the thing and get it done and figure out a faster way later. and at this point it has become silly for me not to just spend even like an entire week refactoring all of the the little paper cuts is is you call it like the running i have a running

Merlinlist of bugs right the five-year-olds find every like but if you set yourself to it and like i don't know if it would take a week but i think what at least what i'm hearing what you seem to be implying is like, well, do you even know how much friction is in this? Not that it may be interesting to find out. Like if you were to sit down and do some back of the envelope, little spec, like if I, if I were to write out how to go from finishing recording an episode of Roderick on the line to being completely done with it for the week, I mean, I know what all those

are, but I've never written it down. And not that I have to write it down, but like, I've never adopted that as something I want to analyze for ways it could be done better. And when I say done better, not just faster, but where I might be able to actually improve what I'm doing for the listeners. And in your case, it sounds like what you're saying is, well, let's identify this. Let's go ahead and put a sticky note on this piece of my, if you like, workflow as in need of, refactoring is such a fancy word. It's in need of an update and maybe some automation.

And what if I were to allow myself a block of time over blocks of time over a week to identify all of that. And then, you know, and again, you can iterate this where you can go, not increment, but you can iterate that and go like, sort of like I said in the wisdom document, there's a difference between solving a problem and knowing whether it's a problem you can solve. And if you, if you skip the part about whether it's a problem you can solve, there's a good chance you didn't actually solve it. Cause maybe you shouldn't have solved it. Like maybe you shouldn't do your own surgery. In that case you could at least you could do like an in the moment like iterative thing of going like

like like prepping for this episode i realized i went into that thing where i was like oh you know why don't i just try to write what it is i'm trying to say and it only took two sentences before i realized what i did want to say and i can hop back into outlining because i know what it is you know what i'm saying sometimes you just need like a great recent example was my standing desk experiment where there's so many things i hadn't thought about that would be different that I'm glad I only spent $16.99 and one afternoon on it

because it's definitely worth continuing, but it's not just changing one thing. For example, like I can't reach my mute pedal if I'm standing.

AlexHmm. Oh, that sucks.

MerlinNo, no, no, no, no. All I'm saying is I never would have thought of that if I hadn't put my computer on a banker's box. Or, you know, then I also need a way to raise my monitor. It's all these kinds of things where like planning is good and doing is good, but planning, doing, planning, doing in that kind of iterative process can be a really good way to like discover load-bearing walls about your project. I'm sorry, I'm babbling, but you know what I mean? Like some people like go too far one way or the other.

Like if you dive too far into a solution before you know whether you frame the problem correctly, you may not realize it's not a problem worth solving. Like, you know what I mean? If you plan all day long and don't do at all, but if you plan and do and you plan and do and you try, like you get a feel for it and it keeps it much more alive. And so like if you, I mean like I knew going into this week that some of these apps that I use a lot were where I would focus my attention for things that I knew were desire paths that I needed to, wanted to formalize.

But like, I think that's such a good tip in life that's so subtle. it almost feels um like ephemeral but it's it's really true it's am i making any sense you you are until you start building until you start building the mechanism for something you may not realize that you never needed that mechanism and there was a better way it like takes two different parts of your i won't say brain but two different parts of your mind kind of passing the baton back

and forth, you know, it's a little bit almost like that creative process model, the Roger Van Eck model of, you know, the, what is it, you know, the explorer, the artist, the judge and the warrior, where you're like trying to pass off between these different modes. And then there's like, there's like this science mode, at least there's a science mode and there's an art mode and you kind of have to move back and forth. If you just stay in art mode all the time, like you won't realize you're solving the wrong problem. And if you always stay in science mode, you won't realize the opportunities for

Alexdoing or not doing this in a certain way. Infrastructure is the second step.

MerlinIt's always the second step. I don't know if it's always the second step. I like it. So just to pop back, it sounds like you're saying that last week when we were wrapping up, talking about the challenge, you saw Raycast as being the thing that you probably want to work

Alexon this week. Yeah, and quickly, I was like, this is cool. But at the center of my workflows, I guess that's why it was called workflows before it was shortcuts. And shortcuts on Mac OS, I mean, across all of Apple's OSes has kind of become the bedrock of every sort of automation because it like Apple is straight up said this is the future of automation.

So if something isn't super integrated with shortcuts which I'm still not very good at using in terms of like building my own but I'm never very good at making my own Apple scripts or anything either.

MerlinIt is amazing but it's kind of the worst of all worlds. I mean not worst but like even if we set aside the stability you know it just doesn't work sometimes aspect of it. Like, it is just even something as simple as I want to create a shortcut to turn off this light. Well, you know, you forget about, not forget about, but you have to learn stuff like the get command or the control command. Like, you don't just say turn off this light. It's like, whoa, whoa, whoa, back up. Just so you know, first you have to identify, like, which

in my case, which home kit home are we dealing with? And then, you know what I mean? There's stuff like that. And if you make the wrong choice early on, You've probably been, at least I've been in apps, where I realize I can't do what I want to do because first I have to select.

AlexYou know what I mean? And it's just programmary enough to be a little bit like, ugh.

MerlinEven if you just show the stuff that's available for the one app you want to deal with, let alone like learning what a magic variable is, it's like there is a learning curve. And the magic variable is magic.

AlexIt is magical.

MerlinAnd like once you get the hang of it, it's not difficult, but you have to you're going to need to learn a little bit about. This is really dumb for me to say. I do feel like I have to learn to think a little bit more like a programmer than I normally would for these pieces to work in the way that you expect.

AlexI think that programmers really hate when people say like, I'm trying to think more like a programmer, but that is exactly what this week has made me try to do.

MerlinWell, I would hope they would think, well, I can't claim, I can't tell people how they should think, but I would hope you'd accept that as a compliment, which is that I feel like what I need to do is brain dead dumb. I'm just like every dummy you programmers have ever had to deal with. the phrase at my old job that, I mean, there's a few phrases that came out of my old job. When our biz dev guy, we were trying to get him to prioritize, Marco, trying to get him to prioritize our projects in terms of like resources. And at the end of our one hour session,

the quote was, shit, shit, man, they're all number one. That sticks around. And the other one was, It's just a button was a phrase we used to hear a lot. Can you just put up a button that'll do this thing? And you're like, well, making the button is not the hard part. It's having the button do all of that stuff when you've told me fuck all about what this needs to do and the constraints of it. I guess what I'm trying to say is I feel like I come into this as exactly the ding-a-ling civilian that I am thinking like, well, I can imagine a shortcut that would do this.

That can't be that hard to do. And then I open up something like one of Matthew's or one of Federico's and it's like, oh my God, I feel like all I want is a fish and instead I have to learn everything there's to know about aquariums.

AlexThat is still going back to the voice log thing that we both deeply desire and it's so hard.

Merlinhard but certainly not easy it's it feels it feels because what i want is in the end what i the requirements if you like or the like what i want the result to be feels pretty straightforward and i mean i'm programming if you like at the level of basically like hyper card probably less than like hyper card skills i can i mean i've learned how to do a basic if otherwise else because that's how I do switches for my Eve buttons and stuff like that.

But I can handle – I can handle – I used to say this thing about what I liked about This American Life was that so many of my favorite episodes of that show have a twist and then another twist. It's also true in a lot of movies that I like. I can handle one slight twist. I can't handle two big twists. In order to do some really sexy stuff, you're going to have nested things going on. And that's where my brain breaks down because I'm not a programmer. I don't think like a smart developer.

I think like somebody who just wants the light to turn off. But I don't know. I don't have the vocabulary, the skills, the expertise to like see that. I mean, I bet there's a lot of folks out there who we're friends with where I could tell them roughly, even if I avoid the XY problem, and I say, I want to be able to hit this thing and have that happen. I bet a lot of our friends could go into their mind palace and immediately see like three different ways that could be done and even know which one is best suited for my uses. But that's not how my brain works.

And so I end up getting frustrated and I quit, I close. And then I'm probably the only person in the world that has like – I periodically have to go through just to remove everything called whatever untitled shortcut because I have so many things that I never even got close enough to name. It's powerful. It's powerful, but it's not easy.

AlexOh, no, not at all. And even aside from shortcuts, it's not that I want to be able to have that programmer brain that so many of our smart friends have. But the more I talk to programmers and people are just really, really deep in automation, I want to be able to express what I want in a way that we can both understand.

And I know that that kind of sounds like project manager-y, but I guess it is. No, no, no.

MerlinBut it's also what I want a lot of the time is really very close to a hack. So even if I go in and open up, Matthews are a good example where there's ones that feel very simple to me. Like I want some basic things involving sound. So unlike you, I don't always have headphones on. So sometimes I want to say whatever. So there's a device in my world, an Apple device, and I want that device, whatever audio is playing on that, I want that to play on all the speakers in my office or on these speakers in my office. Or one that's got to be quote unquote simple is I want to be able to say into the air at home,

hey dingus uh whatever is involved in saying whatever's playing on the tv right now play that through these four home pods and there's ways you change destination there's there's but there are different ways of doing that the thing is when matthew makes one of those he often makes a little poppy uppy list not just matthew lots of people i think when they're making when they're making something to share with people they make something that i don't know if they're just showing off or being flexible. But when you open up somebody else's shortcut, toward the top, you usually

see something like where you select from a list. And then you select from another list. And it's kind of like a wizard, which is very expansive in what you can do with it. But most of the time, I don't want variables. I know that my specific use case is not that in all of my different environments, I want to be able to play to any available speakers. It's more that I want this device to play to those speakers. I don't even need variables. And that ties me up. So you started out with Raycast. You're thinking Raycast.

AlexI barely even started with Raycast. I played with it before and I'm like, I know this is more powerful and I'm just not digging into it. It's pretty. It's also pretty. It is. It is pretty. But honestly, Alfred is just as pretty for me. And it can now do things to just automatically, you know, either like just convert something from Markdown to Rich Text, which is like very easy and even something like drafts.

But to be able to just run a single thing in Alfred and then boop and then it's on to you.

MerlinI've gone through that with text soap. There's just – that I'll talk about. But look, there's so much stuff it can do. And it's like – I'm going to tell you a little dirty secret. The whole reason I want text soap is to do exactly one thing. I'm glad I can do all those other things. But all I want is a big red button.

I just want a big red button that does this thing. You know what I want? I want what our friend Jack invented long before Odeo, which was Humane Text. And all, quote unquote, all Jack did. This is how I knew about Jack before he was Jack. The way that I very first met Jack, he introduced himself to me at Odeo. And of course, I knew him as the guy who had come up with Humane Text. And Humane Text was a service Jack made that did two things. And it was great. If you hit Command, Shift, greater than, it turned the selected markdown into HTML. HTML, if you

grab the selected text and hit command shift less than, it turned HTML into markdown. And that's what it did. And like, that to me is, that's how my brain works. I just want a big red button. I just want to hit this thing and know that IrmaVep will start playing over these four HomePods. I just, I don't know quite how to get, I can figure, I know I suspect, I have a hunch plus for the Enterprise, that I could do that. but like there's a lot of things i could do and it does help to like kind of restrict yourself

also isn't there something to be said don't you think for wait what's the one you like alfred

Alexthat i've just have been doing a ton of stuff with alfred yeah well no i'm just i'm just i'm sorry i just want to clarify which one but yes isn't there something to be said for figuring

Merlinyes and i like i like launch bar for whatever reason but the point is like i think there is benefit to trying to figure out if the thing you already use can do what you want i think that's a that's a that's a that's a uh and in deference to the the great wire album pink flag it's not a red flag but it's a pink flag like if you if it requires what did thoreau say about beware of enterprises that require new clothes and like in this instance like if something requires this is such a huge thing for me it's going to come up in mine is like wait a minute like do

you really need to go build your own tower of Babel or do you just need a big red button?

AlexRight. And that's why I got excited about the new features of Alfred because I already use it. I already like it. And it is nice to know what's like the opposite of a it's it's like a blue flag to see that they're going even deeper in the direction Apple wants developers to go with automation while still being the Mac-ass Mac app, because now you can, I still don't

understand the majority of Better Touch Tool and Keyboard Maestro, but it now can also run in Alfred. So just-

MerlinAnd I think Better Touch Tool runs on Stream Deck now also.

AlexYes. Brett Terpstra, I know, really wants us to talk about that, which I will- How do you know that? When I figure it out. He taught, because we talked about it and he said it on Twitter and he got mad we didn't do the challenge because we always do the challenge on this show when we played with our stream decks. Oh, and I so so, yeah, the other thing that Alfred, I think, was able to do, but I or was rather it was able to do before, but I didn't know this is just open up the same link in three separate browsers, which, you know, sometimes Patreon makes you do things.

and if you have multiple Patreon accounts, it's not great. So stuff like that. What's another thing? Oh, just a faster, excuse me. You can run HomeKit stuff through Alfred and you don't need to use shortcuts, which is also nice.

MerlinGive me an example of what you're talking about.

AlexSo I can just run the scene. Like set a scene from Alfred. Yeah. That's cool. Yeah, and it's just nice because it's very cool.

MerlinI end up using that home control, I think it's called. Well, here's an example from LaunchBar that I use, I'm sorry to say, every day, that really represents the sweet spot in what I get out of something like LaunchBar where the pieces fit together. And this is maybe not your use case, but it's mine. So like somewhere I get a notification somewhere that something has shipped and it's got a trackable tracking number, like, you know, USPS, FedEx, whatever. And a thing that I, and now just to be clear, I'm giving this as an example of something

where I could do a lot more automation here, but this is exactly as much automation as I need without needing to go create more automation. I'm on a page. There's selectable text. It's one of those 1ZW, you know, UPS numbers. Double-click it with my mouse on my computer. And your mileage may vary or will vary depending on what app you're using and how you have it configured. A really, gosh, just a wonderful thing on LaunchBar that is its own world

is basically the send to LaunchBar feature where you can send stuff from the finder. You select something in the finder. A trivial example might be you select three files with your fingers and you send it to LaunchBar and then you do something with it. You zip it. You enclose it. Very old school Quicksilver. One I do all the time. Double click on that tracking number. In my case, option, option, right? Just hit option twice and I hear a whoosh sound, which means, hey, I just sent it. And I'm also getting that weird orange arrow. Well, what does that mean? That means in a meta keyless way, I can just start typing what I want to pipe that to.

So double click to select or drag, whatever. option option and then type ups enter and in my world in my configuration that means take whatever selected wherever you are send it to launch bar and then knowing that i'm going to pipe it somewhere start typing what you want it to be piped to which in my case is a saved search for all of the different tracking services where it substitutes it takes whatever i sent there

pushes it in there. I know this all sounds really, really straightforward. But if I type DEL and hit enter, that'll take that and send it to deliveries. And then I know I type, I think I hit return three times and it automatically adds that all in. There's all, I could do a lot more. I could use a share sheet. There's a million ways to do it. And that's why we love the Mac. But in that case, like I could come up with a shortcut with switches or arrays for saying, well, do a regex for figuring out which kind of number this is. Like, is it a phone number? No, it's never a phone number. But you know what I'm saying? Like for me, that's the

amount and it's an existing tool. And even though I could automate that more, I don't want to automate it more because, you know, that's as much as I need. And I feel like what I typed while we're on break, I couldn't get quite the right wording for this. I couldn't decide if this theme what's called desire paths and loose ends or desire paths and forced marches. Because a desire path, which we should talk about,

is a wonderful thing. Figuring out where people want to walk, where the cows, the shortest path a cow can have to get to the water, they'll figure it out. And the deeper and wider that path is, as the Wikipedia page says, our listeners know what a desire path is, right? A desire path is the idea that if you've ever gone anywhere and seeing what I'll just call a trail, like walking through the woods, walking on campus, anywhere you go, you'll see a path. And it's a path where people have walked, but again,

where animals can walk. Let's say that the roads of Boston were laid out by cattle. I don't have a feeling about whether that's true, but a desire path is like, rather than being the formal pathway that the man wants you to use, if you see a deep and wide path through a field or woods, there's a pretty good chance that lots of people have walked there. It's kind of like the way ants work in some ways. The wider the path is, the deeper that path is beaten in, you know the more people have used that as a successful way to get through here.

And so a desire path, and I think that's a term people use in architecture. Before we put down the sidewalks, we're going to see what desire paths form. And then because the thing is the ants of Berkeley or whatever, The students, the people walking through the woods to find a place to neck, they'll tell us the shortest path. And then we can pave or not pave that. And I'm trying to learn to distinguish. My intentionality here is to learn how to discover desire paths versus merely assign myself a new forced march.

Where like, oh, I bet I could do this. I bet I could come up with a whole way of tracking all these things. Well, I don't really need to do that. And I also, because one of my other omnibus projects is learning to be more okay with loose ends, learning to just let it go. And go like, I never needed to automate that. And instead, this is a good opportunity for me to leave a wholesome amount of friction because that's good rehearsal for me to not feel like everything has to be a big red button.

AlexOh, that's good. I'd like that.

MerlinIsn't it kind of good?

AlexNo, it's only a little. Yes, it's better than kind of good.

MerlinWell, I only realized that. I only realized we're connected that because of this challenge, Alex.

AlexI see. Oh, man. Sometimes it's good when we do the challenge.

MerlinSometimes it's good. That really should be. We should put that on a shirt. I think our shirt should say, do you think I like being like this?

AlexAlfred is great in what, I mean, the reason I am excited about it again as well, because that was my path. Already used it. And another great feature, if you have their power pack or upgrade.

Power packer. It's my packer of choice. There's my trans joke for the day. It has this usage tab where it can show you where your desired paths have gone. Oh, yeah.

MerlinTextExpander can do that, too. Like, hey, dummy. Don't you know you have a shortcut for your wife's phone number?

Alexdummy yeah yep yep yep it's and and it also just just gave me more of an ins oh god i have used it since december 2021 which is when i uh 13 when i got the power pack i have used it 13,208 times. And that is just the single actions, not the ones with multiple steps

that do a whole workflow. So that is cool. You're telling me I should stop using LaunchBar?

MerlinIs that what it is?

AlexNo, no, no, no. Oh my God, no, no, no, no. Because just LaunchBar as well has a lot of, it just depends on what you're used to and how your brain works. I think, I don't know. After Quicksilver, I started using Alfred because, honestly, I think it was because at the time LaunchBar was more expensive for someone who was in college and Alfred had a free version.

MerlinThat was a big mistake in their pricing model. A doctor and Mrs. LaunchBar actually sat down and said, let's make this more expensive for people in college. That was a big mistake.

Alexthe yep yeah they're like you know i i hear this kid alex cox they just they want to use it but like fuck fuck that fuck that um isn't it like it's not expensive it's like 30 i i don't know like seriously launch bar is very cool um i think about what i spend on takeout food oh i don't know

Merlinlet's just say monthly i wouldn't put it as daily because that would be embarrassing but what i spend

Alexon delivery food you know i i think i can afford it out the no this was over 10 years ago yeah it's

Merlinliterally it's literally 30 no no well i mean i think i'm i mean i think i'm in a not in a not too cynical way describing a lot of people i mean it's kind of a running joke something like under the radar where people who buy a 1 000 phone every year don't want to spend 3.99 on an app

AlexMm-hmm. And at this point, I don't want to say I like subscriptions, but...

MerlinI don't either.

AlexIt's just, I don't know. It is encouraging.

MerlinI wish there was more stuff. I mean, it makes so much sense for some things in my head. It makes so much less sense in others. And the thing is, you're fond of bringing up that line of, Like, I want to pay for this so I know it'll be around, which is, I mean, an interesting piece of logic. But the thing is, just because you paid a lot for something doesn't make it worthwhile. And just because you...

AlexThat's true.

MerlinWell, and all I'm trying to say is sometimes I just want to try your goddamn app without signing up for the seven-day trial that then starts charging. Can I just buy your goddamn app? Charge $10. But like, you know, for some of these things, especially utility type things, it does feel a little nuts to subscribe.

AlexWhat was it I was looking at?

MerlinOh, I've been looking at, like, oh, gosh, Zettelkasten, you know, that personal knowledge management notion.

AlexPKM, yes.

MerlinNo, come on. You know what it is.

AlexWait. No, yeah, Zettelkasten. It's a thing.

MerlinIt's Christian or Christian. Wait. Wait, is this? Wait, is Christian the one who's... I'm probably misnaming somebody. I get my German programmers confused. And I was interested in that. And there's this thing I wanted to run. Somebody told me about called RB. It's really cool. But unfortunately, Brew doesn't support certain things on betas. And my whole Ruby setup is kind of fucked right now on my laptop. But anyway, once my casks are running properly again, I will play with that.

But, you know, I'm very interested in learning about that. But I want to learn about that, like, kind of as a curiosity. I don't want to get, like, totally, like, pot committed to new systems. That's the loose ends part is, like, it's one thing to be an amused Apple tourist and another thing to feel like, you know, I don't need to go native with every single thing I try. It's okay just to, like, learn what's happening with this. Because, you know, Alex, back in the day, in the folders days, like I would very often try out some new app that required moving.

Because you used to have to choose. Like if you want to use this calendar app, you've got to use just that calendar app. If you want to use this contact app, like you, you know, you did not want to put your fingers into the mouth of, you know, in the mouth of back, whatever that's called, me.com or mac.com or like that terrible broken contact syncing stuff and all of that. I'm not sure I'm going with all of this. I think in this instance, moderation can be a good thing. But really, I think the big takeaway in some ways is that whole like iteration thing.

You want to hear some of mine real quick?

AlexYeah, no. Yeah. Well, real, real quick. That's the other thing that when I was figuring out how to just just the little put the the workflows that I made in the show notes that are all stolen. But it is that ability to, okay, let's say LaunchBar comes out with a super cool thing. All of the workflows in Alfred, not all of them, but the majority of the new ones are based on things like shortcuts. And there's a ton of text soap I'm seeing now that are text soap workflows that are in Alfred.

Like the ability to just move your stuff is always really exciting and encouraging to me. Because I don't want to start over every single time.

MerlinRight, right. It's really easy. And again, like I don't mean to always just sort of pathologize myself or fall back on the ADHD card. But it is a known issue. When I talk about that, you know, what gets the hook in kind of thing. It's I will realize way too late, usually in the late morning. That like, oh, man, you just spent like more time than you intended to on this. And you don't have a lot to show for it. and it's, was this ever something you intended to spend this much? I don't know what the answer to that is, but I do know that I have to be careful of those pink and red flags.

One nice thing about writing, just writing it, like what is writing? Well, writing is a way of, if not perfecting yourself, at least improving yourself, just in the sense of, you know, when you, I've said this before, I really do believe this, like learning to write, gosh, the next directives that comes out this week, I really went on a rant about people learning how to write. Not because I want everybody to be, you know, J.D. Salinger or something, but because I just,

I think I see so much poor writing, even amongst people who are nominally professional writers, Like really, really like rookie stuff that indicates that – and I'm not trying to be mean and I'm certainly not trying to piss from the high ground. Like I say in that episode, like it was the physics teacher at New College who told me I should go to the writing teacher. Like me? I'm Merlin Mann. Like I was the features editor in high school. Like I got into college because of my essay. Like I am a good writer.

But it was the physics teacher who was like, no, it's flabby and it's unclear and you could be better. And like one of the best things, the best class I ever in college was 20th century painting. The most valuable that I had was a seven-week writing tutorial where I got my ass kicked by a staff member, not even a full professor. This woman named Jan Wheeler kicked my ass, made me read Strunk and White, made me read On Writing Well, made me do exercises and really showed me, not as a way to shame me, but as a way to say, well, here's the linchpin.

This flabby writing can't help but reflect flabby thinking. And the reason I think writing is powerful is because I cannot promise you that writing more and writing better will make you a better thinker. But it's difficult to become a better thinker until you're a slightly better writer. Because it is in the act of writing that we are forced or encouraged to like do the best we can to state it as clearly and important to me unambiguously as we can.

Like don't put a hat on a hat. Like, you know, it's okay. You can be flower. You can be fun. There's lots of different kinds of good writers. But like, did you say the thing you meant to say? And did you think the thing you didn't know you thought? And so that's why sometimes I ended up, I ended up just like jumping back down into that process of like, try and like treat the reader like a dummy and try to explain what you're doing. If you want to give context, make it a story. Like you have all of that in your power.

AlexI have never been not never but I have not been this excited for a Merlin Man podcast universe release in a while

Merlindon't get your hopes up but the other thing is the other thing is you get to cheat and everybody knows this everybody knows you get to cheat because you get to seem like you know what you're talking about when you write something when you speak some people are better than others at that but like you get to cheat because if you're the one who wrote the story you get to act like you always knew how it was going to end. But you also get to act like you always knew how it was going to begin. And you get to act like you always knew how long it should be.

And you get to just put your finished thing out, such as it is, and go, ain't I smart? And so like, I'm going to do that right now. And I'm going to be a writer. And I'm going to say there are themes to what I did this week. But the truth is, the themes arose out of the doing, not out of design. And when I say things like desire paths, I didn't go into this saying I'm going to formalize my desire paths. But now, six days later, I can say that a lot of what I did this week and what I know I need to continue doing is focusing on looking for a desire path.

And this is very related to the life hack stuff. Like, how do you know what life you want to hack? I mean, are you just inhaling tips or are you getting good at listening or feeling for that little tickle that tells you there's an improvement opportunity there? Because why does it matter? Let me get right to it. I could spend fucking all day doing this stuff. I'd be so happy for a while. All day long, I could do little mosquito tasks and learning a little thing. And then that makes me, oh, let's go try out six apps that do this.

And that's how I am in some ways left to my own devices. I have like a lot of children, I think. I have a begrudging curiosity. There's some things I'm willfully, happily, proudly curious about. And there's other things that I'm kind of shamefully curious about where like I could spend all day figuring out all the things. I'm looking at TechSoap right now. I have it open in front of me. I could spend all day trying every single thing that TechSoup does, then figuring out how to combine those into different things.

I just – I got to really be careful. The theme for this week is desire paths. So start noticing where a path has been beaten deep and wide and then figure out how to operationalize, formalize, or even efficientize that. So that's what I've been doing this week. And I have examples.

AlexAll right. Tell me, tell me. Zoom through the path.

MerlinI don't remember exactly how this – it might have been through Syracusa, but there's so much I have barely even touched on in Better Touch Tool. I feel like I probably came at Better Touch Tool maybe through Terpstra even. But it might have been when I had a Touch Bar laptop because for all the ways that it's great, Better Touch Tool is not a surpassingly beautiful app, but it's crazy functional. And so in terms of Alex's current obsession input devices, you have different input devices in your life.

You've got a keyboard on your Mac. You've got a keyboard on your laptop. I'm just off the dome. But in the world of your Mac, you've also got, you might have a mouse. You might have a touchpad. You've got all these different kinds of things that are a way of getting usually through your hands into the computer. and Better Touch Tool has made a study of making it so that those different kinds of input methods or tools can do more stuff. At the very least, you have a way of customizing it so that when you do

this on your touchpad, that happens on your Mac. When you do this on your touch bar, I mean, I think one of the first things I did in the most recent year or two of Better Touch Tool was to totally turn off my entire touch bar on my old laptop. So I turned off the entire touch bar except for a button that would turn the touch bar on because I was so tired of hitting it. So basically, one of my first uses for this app was to tell the app to make it so it doesn't even use one

of these input devices. But the thing that I've really used it for over the last couple of years like a lot is starting with, you know how you can do, I imagine folks know this, but have spent some time with this, go into settings, preferences, whatever, keyboard, and then go into shortcuts, namespace. But you can go in and you can all over your whole Mac or very usefully in specific apps. There's a great little hack where if you know, you learn the name

of a menu item in the pull down menu, and you can assign your own key command to that. You can do that on any Mac, like straight out of the box, and it's crazy useful. Like if you just wish that you had this, there's this thing and you don't want to have to grab a menu or right-click for a services menu or anything like that, you can make your own custom key. As long as it's not used for anything else, you can, on your Mac, just go in and say, I want my volume button now instead to select, when I'm in Safari, I want my volume up button to do this.

and so a lot of what i've done um because i do like having the full keyboard at my desk is most of my f keys are assigned to different things and better touch tool makes that really easy so like you know nv alt i'm just going across the keyboard here because i put stickers on nv alt drafts uh task paper um like you name it one password like all those things all i want you do is launch the app. It might seem only a little bit faster than LaunchBar or similar, but in

practice, when you're flipping between things, you can really speed things up with dedicated key commands. And so this week, one of my Better Touch Tool desire path projects is to, first of all, lean way into the hyperkey. And hyperkey is this concept, I think coined by David Sparks, but it's this idea that in Better Touch Tool, I don't know what the history of this is, but long story short, you got your caps lock. Now, real heads for a long time have either turned off caps lock altogether, or what I've done since Christ was a corporal was remapped on the Mac

settings, remapped caps lock to control because that's a faster way than putting your pinky down on the left. What Better Touch Tool lets you do instead is to say, do you want to have a hyperkey? Okay, what do you want your hyperkey to be? And I'll tell you what that means in a minute. But You want this new meta key that's untouched by pretty much any command on the keyboard. It gives you this whole new world. So, for example, I can say from now on when I type caps lock, it's going to be a meta key. And caps lock is basically replacing command, option, control, shift, which is quite literally a handful to type.

But you see from now on, whenever I type caps lock, what I really mean is control, option, command, et cetera, right? which you go, okay, so how would you use that? Well, it's like domain names. All the good ones are taken. But if I want to just be able to hit something and the letter T to open Task Paper, I could do that now. So I create a new command in Better Touch Tool for Command Option Shift Control T,

although that really now means Caps Lock T. So wherever I am, so you see where I'm going with this. So I'm leaning way into that. So now T. So caps lock T is test paper. D is drafts. Which is the one I have to look down again. F12 is paste in my Better Touch Tool can paste ad hoc text. I could paste in a date.

AlexOh, sorry.

MerlinYeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

AlexI didn't even know that. That's so cool.

MerlinWait, wait. What was your question about? Yeah, so one of the things in Better Touch Tool is like it could be static text. It could be variable text. Again, this goes a lot of places. This is before we then get into the like, do you want to back up different thing? Like you could have caps lock, for example, mean, depending on how you put this together, mean that when I click this in different situations, I then get a selection of, say, two to five different things that I can choose based on context. I'm not that far in. So, yeah, first one, real straightforward. Long walk to say that I'm trying to consolidate all of that.

And the part where it gets tricky is there is a, I think, currently beta feature that I use where it syncs your Better Touch Tool stuff across devices. But you can even get in and say, for example, this particular key command or thing that I have assigned only works on the keyboard, should only, will only work. I'm choosing to say only use this on the keyboard that I used to create the command. Do you get this? so like if you've got one weirdo keyboard you know when you first like have to identify the

keyboard and goes what's what's the key to the right of this shift key and the one to the left and you've got to identify it well you can go in and say well this will work on all of my keyboards everywhere which could break or only on this one so what i'm trying to do that's taking a little longer than i expected because it's usually happening in two different places at two different times is to consolidate all of those you know first thought best thought same idea is like wherever you look for something is probably where you should store it. Just don't overthink it. What is the one key that represents this thing you do constantly? And then get those to be the same on all of them.

So that's a lot of what I've been working on is hyper key stuff. And, you know, I think actually I want to say Dr. Drang, had to be Dr. Drang, of course, wrote something up about not using text expander for, you know, the basic pasty stuff anymore and now using either keyboard maestro or better touch tool. It's actually not that hard unless you've got like thousands and thousands.

AlexI mean, I still love Tax Expander for filling in form.

MerlinI think he had his reasons.

AlexJust getting rid of a step?

MerlinWell, I don't know. I mean, also, this is way before the news that they'd just taken millions of dollars in funding. Yeah, that's true. But who knows what that'll be. But anyway, that doesn't mean anything. But like, well, also just, you know, see also first principles, Chris, minimizing the number of different tools that you're using to accomplish similar things. It's probably not a bad idea. There's some kinds of things that are going to be in multiple places. Like if I type the letters M-Y-C-E-L-L, buddy, that is at the Mac or sorry, at the Apple level.

That's a, what's the name for abbreviation? That's an abbreviation that works on my Mac, that works on my iOS devices. Because when I type as one word, M-Y-C-E-L-L, that's going to paste in my phone number. Because I want that to work lots of different places, including in a field on iOS, right? But there's kinds of stuff like I've got Shake and Bake Text Expander fill-in forms for all my show notes. So I know all the sections I want to always have in there.

So when I create a new file in NvAlt and I type R-O-T-L-N, bloop, it pops up and I enter what episode number this is and I could change the date optionally in there, et cetera. And then that goes bloop and paste it all in. I couldn't do that with abbreviations. I might could do that with other things like Better Touch Tool. But, you know, the thing is, I don't even know what wild percentage of the time. I'm only ever doing that on a Mac and that's straightforward.

So anyway, better touch tool. And you say you play with it a little bit, but not a lot.

AlexNo. And but now I well, one, the caps lock thing is just fucking blowed. I don't know why I've never done this. Holy fuck. That's something I'm immediately going to do. But on the better touch tool site, there's also it says you can do stuff with the Siri remote like.

MerlinYeah, up at the top. And like I said, not a beautiful app, but there's sections. Oh, boy. So right now, I live my whole life inside keyboard shortcuts, but there's a pulldown that says, show me the kinds of things. And keyboard shortcuts, Command 4 is the one I'm always on. But you've also got Touch Bar, Stream Deck, now in beta, Magic Mouse, Trackpad, key sequences or typed words. Hmm. That sounds kind of like another app I know. A normal-ass mouse. Oh, shit. Siri remote. Better touch tool remote.

Now, that's neat because you can basically open a port on your Mac and send commands from the iOS app to your Mac to do things like turn up volume.

AlexThis is bonkers as fuck.

MerlinYeah, it's really neat. MIDI triggers, drawings and mouse gestures. And there's some of these where I like play with it a little bit. Like I was trying to figure out one where like, oh, God, there was a thing I really wanted to do a lot. And, you know, like, okay, listen to this. Like when you're tapping your fingers like that, you could make that a gesture. So you could say like when I tap my fingers right to left, these four fingers do this thing. There's all kinds of wackadoo. You can really fuck yourself up good on a touchpad with that stuff. Anyway, and now they've got a new section called Notch Bar slash Menu Action Bar, also in beta.

AlexNotch, I like this.

MerlinIf I were going to give you homework, and this is really insulting homework, but just get your legs under you, consider going in and the very first thing I would do is set up Hyperkey.

AlexYep, yep, yep, yep.

MerlinAnd the second thing I would do is pick your all-time favorite app you're always opening and wish there were a key for, and maybe make that. You at least get a feel for using the app, which I think might be available on Setapp. I feel like. I think it's on Setapp.

AlexI do not have a Setapp. Oh, boy, I got so many setups. I still don't know. And it seems to differ between apps or developer to developer. Like, what's a better deal just paying, like, for the, like, who gets more money?

MerlinSome of these I've bought. Yeah. Well, in some cases, though, it's weird. Like, in a lot of cases, like, stuff you get off set app will be the, I think this is true. What's that great sync app?

Omni something. What's the syncing app? Is it Omni something? No, what's it called? Okay, I can click. I'm clicking on, where's my apps? All apps, Optimus, on this Mac. the one I'm thinking of is ChronoSync so you get ChronoSync Express on Setup which is not the fancy version but you do get ChronoSync but I'm looking at stuff, TechSniper these are the ones I have installed right now, Permute TechSniper, Yoink BusyCow, BusyCow is included iFlix which is a really great

quick and dirty clean up a movie to play well with Apple stuff Downy, you can get Downy right in here and yeah better touch tool and TechSoap is included with Setup.

AlexOh, TechSoap. Oh, oh, oh, oh. I feel like they added a bunch since the last time I used this.

MerlinOh, yeah, and CleanMyMac also I used there.

AlexOh, well, hello. So the reason I'm more inclined to just go down...

MerlinSetup is a service where you pay a subscription amount. I'm sorry, our listeners may not know. Setup is one of those, I think one of the better known ones where you go in and you pay a certain amount per month on a certain number of Macs, like you pay per seat, and then it's not very expensive. And then you get access to a bunch of apps for as long as you're subscribed to that app, separate from buying the app on its own.

AlexMm-hmm. And I... God, I'm sorry. You keep making... Or I keep making myself too excited about these things. Why? No, I'm by too excited. I mean, just in the literal moment where I'm like, oh, oh, look at this. Look at this. Look at this.

MerlinJust what you need. Advice from your old pal Merlin to suddenly have access to dozens of apps you didn't have a few minutes ago. Surely this will make me productive.

AlexWell, but ever since the whole self-employment thing, and I was kind of saying this before, I, you know, I'm like, oh, God, this is my time. I want to do something productive that I have an immediate results for. Whereas before I could just commit time theft and learn a bunch of shit and do it. And it had no consequences. But I'm like, okay. I just came up on The Office.

MerlinThe Office episode of business ethics. Which, by the way, Brady's Bits, which episode I talked about with Tiff on that podcast about The Office.

AlexMeredith loves those free steaks. She gets those Outback Steakhouse gift certificates.

MerlinIt's a girl thing. I guess I just felt better about myself. We should get through these other quickies. There's that one. So TechSoap. This is a really interesting app. I mentioned this to Dan the other day. I don't know if that – I don't understand what's happening with Dan. That's going to go on a shirt too. I don't understand what's happening with Dan.

So there's an app that I think paid for with money that's all about title case. But, boy, is it ever a pain in the ass to use. All I want is a service. I just want a service that does Chicago Manual of Style capitalization. And like it has all that in there and it's got all that stuff, but it has to launch the app and it bounces. And TechSoup, which I just grabbed off of setup, you know what I'm using for right now? I'm using for exactly one thing. It's not the best in the world at this, but TechSoup, you can go in and you can. So like, for example, I'm opening TechSoup.

I'm clicking. I'm looking. Examples of things in here. Remove X. So you put in a bunch of text. This is something back in the day you used to have to do quite a lot was a phrase from the ages called you need to zap the gremlins. A lot of times when you got a file, especially from a Windows user, it wasn't uncommon at all. It didn't have the same, you know, used to be to pick which, you know, do you want line feed endings? Do you want like which kinds of endings do you want? And then, of course, there would just be those incredibly wackadoo bad transcodings where like this happens a lot even in, let's say, stolen e-books.

were like my stolen copy of, and shut up because I bought so many fucking copies of 100 Years of Solitude. Give me a break. But one of my stolen copies.

AlexYeah, I'm sure someone's definitely starving because people are stealing.

MerlinWell, you know, Marques can be very litigious. Marques. But like where all the accents are replaced by like a weird character. And Zapping Gremlins used to be this thing where at the very least it would remove garbage characters that weren't supposed to be there. But an even better Zapping Gremlins could like fix things where instead of that blank thing, it would be an E with an accent or whatever. So there's been needs we've always had. And usually you do this in like a competent text editor or something.

But like I'm just going to run through some of these. Remove extra returns, uppercase, lowercase, capitalize sentences, rewrap the text, all these different things that you can do. And then you can make custom ones where you can combine these. Anyway, long story short, I got this app to do exactly one thing, which is to make right click and turn it into title case.

AlexAnd so far it's working pretty well.

MerlinI want to see if you've got this thing called clipboard space. We're like built into the app. You can just paste it. It has its own little like area to like play with. So that's what I did there. And then the one that I just want to learn more about, because boy, this I'm just getting started on this for the third time. Probably finally going to set myself to learning search link. And search link is a very, very clever geeky thing that Brett Terpstra made where, He's basically, as with stuff like Bunch, I guess, he's kind of made a little world. And so, you know, for example, if you're typing, every writer knows if you're typing, don't go right now to look up how long the Golden Gate Bridge is.

Just type Golden Gate Bridge, which since 1935 has been, you know, TK, TK, TK feet long. And then at the end, later on, you go.

AlexHoly shit.

MerlinWhat?

AlexSorry, I didn't. Okay. No, keep going. This is crazy.

MerlinWhat?

Alexyou know tk i i no no no the tk never never mind keep oh just tk tk just in the writer journalism world just means to come no i know that but oh god i always do you need to lay down i just i don't understand which part you're making a noise about no the uh the golden gate bridge 1935 golden gate bridge is tk tk tk i don't know i don't

MerlinThat's mine because I have a shortcut. I have a text expander that puts TK, TK, TK. When I type that, you could just do TK, but I like TK, TK, TK. And I have it in all caps and that makes it impossible not to find.

Unless you work for a shovel blog and you keep forgetting and you leave in the blah, blah text that you wrote last week about whether this thing is going to be minchy quote in time for the new announcements. And would you buy it? We think you shouldn't. More inside.

AlexClick, click, click.

Merlinand I can make that better but you know ultimately I probably I could I've got a lot of computer projects I'm going to put you on I could put Syracuse on this and get me a Perl script you know but text up text up search link search link search link anyway search link sorry sorry sorry sorry hello search link is this canny thing where you're writing and you want to TK in And like Alex and me, like, for example, right now in our doc, I just recently added, under main show links, I just added Raycast.

You added Raycast, I guess. Somebody did. Then Alfred, Setapp. And these are all things we can look up. Now, if you're just purely in Google Docs, there's already a cool way to do this. One thing that's practically a standard in computers that I love is Command K. Almost anywhere you are, Command K means make this into a link. So if you're in Google Docs, you know this probably. If you click on Alfred and hit command K, it'll suggest stuff from Google. Well, Brett's done that with this, I guess, service, this thing,

where basically there's placeholders that you can put while you're writing, or in our case, like putting notes together. And like, what's an example? Like, so I could type in, there's all kinds of ways to do this. There's really good tutorials on this, but it does work and it's extremely cool. I could, for example, type in, here's an example, mailmate app exclamation point, exclamation point, caret, means look for this and put that in my clipboard.

Like go do a Google search. If you preceded like you got exclamation point S, that means look for software called Better Touch Tool, et cetera. Basically, it's just a way where you get these little tokens that you put in and then you run search text on all of your selections and it fills it all in. It could be as simple as the basic, just show me the top Google link for this.

AlexHow does this even work? Like, is it all through, because it's not an app, right? I'm looking at this and it's, is it through terminal? I am not smart enough to understand what it is. This is so cool.

MerlinWell, I'm pretty sure it's workflow or .workflows or ., you know, sorry. What's the, let me just go get it. I think basically these, and so there's probably like bash scripts or similar running. And I imagine it's using a Google or somebody's API for almost all of these. I'm guessing, but I don't know. Let's go look. I think I put it in notes. Is your play with SearchLink?

AlexNo, I didn't even know this existed. He's got too many projects. It's Terp's world and I am just living in it. It's true. Drowning. Oh my God.

MerlinSo exclamation point MAS means search the Mac app store. Let's see. Exclamation point spelling returns the first spelling suggestion. You could look up songs on iTunes. Oh, boy. Pinboard. You use your API key.

AlexYep. Yep.

MerlinAnd so I'm going to keep learning this. And then because I think I'm going to really – think how much this could help us, Alex, right? If we just type natural language. And you see how you can do stuff like you can – you know the way you do a markdown link where you've got the part in brackets that's the anchored text. You've got the URL. And then in quotes, you've got the like mouseover text. In this instance, in Brett's world, whatever you type in those quotes are basically a – it's not just the name. It's a search term. So you could say in the quotes to help it search better, like what would you have typed in Google that you know would give you the result you want?

You type that. into the quotes and it'll search against search on that so even though better touch tool or whatever is your anchor text that shows up as a link whatever you put in the quotes is what it's actually going to search for on google or itunes or whatever pretty clever this is

Alexit's beyond clever it's upsettingly good and yeah then i figure i figure depending on i mean i i

Merlinwould imagine through something like text expander or similar there's got to be a way to like fire these off really fast with a quick fill-in. I'm imagining something where I could fill in what the anchor text should be and then what to search for. But think how fast we could get through notes if the whole time, like, you know, part, well, the second part of what we do is looking up a link and making sure it's right. But the first part is remembering to write it down. Like, think of how many of our, I'm sorry, I'm speaking to the audience here as I speak to Alex.

Like, one of our things is, like, did we get it in the right order? Well, what if all we had to do while recording is get better about recording them, getting them in order, like writing down English words for what we want to find. And then we could just fire off search link and it would fill in all the things. Wouldn't that be cool?

AlexYeah. I, I, my mouth is literally, God, I must have like blowjob phase right now.

MerlinSo last, so as part of this,

Alexthis is where,

Merlinwhere it doesn't come together, but it goes in a different direction. I don't know. I was doing something and I was washing my hands or urinating. or something and I had the fans on and I yelled out something and what do we know about Merlin Merlin uses reminders all the time and reminders generally hear it and get it well long story short this is the loose ends part is I did something I yelled it out and like it got captured fine another time it didn't get captured fine and I felt that slight fretfulness of like is there's some different way I should be doing this am I abusing what's going into reminders because

Remember, the whole genesis of the voice log was I want this to work as well as reminders, but I want geotagging, date, and I don't want to clutter up my reminders. And I just kind of found myself yelling out of scope. Dummy, this is a loose end that you can live with. This is not a thing you need to further automate. without even like thinking about it another minute where I could imagine myself going down rabbit holes inside of rabbit holes. I used it as an opportunity to catch myself trying to unfray

a loose end. And I said, loose ends are rehearsal. Rehearse with your loose ends. Get more okay with them. Don't become careless, but stop thinking that every loose end needs to be unfrayed. Allow some friction to remain because maybe that's how you make a pearl or a shit. I I don't really have an opinion on it.

AlexYou don't want to be pushing rope. That's never good.

MerlinPush, pushing rope.

AlexPushing rope.

MerlinPushing rope. Well, pushing tin is the one about being an air traffic controller.

AlexIs. Is that right? No, I don't know. I only know the penis jokes. Oh, drama film. Mike Newell.

MerlinYou talking about the Hitchcock movie?

AlexThat's about penises? No, pushing rope? No?

MerlinYou're saying it was all done in one shot?

AlexI don't, I don't. Ding, say something. Oh, sorry, Chisholm. I don't know if you're doing a bit. To come.

Show notes

Transcript

298. Big Red Button

Show notes

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