304. Not-Pilled
2022Show notes
You can hear the after show and support Do By Friday on Patreon!
Edited by Quinn Rose
Engineered by Cameron Bopp
Transcript
Tap a timestamp or any sentence to play from there · machine transcribed (mlx:mlx-community/whisper-large-v3-turbo), expect mistakesAlexThis is Do By Friday, a weekly challenge podcast with Alex Cox and Merlin Mann. This week's challenge, make a blot.
MerlinI think, you know, as they say, if it ain't broke, don't fix it. But, you know, but then we don't grow, I guess. I don't know, but it's...
AlexI can hear you. Hello, Merlin.
MerlinI'm doing a podcast here.
AlexOh, I'm sorry.
MerlinOh my God, what is up with you?
AlexI mean...
MerlinHow are you?
AlexMany things. I am alive and I am doing my best. How are you today?
MerlinDo you want to talk about this?
AlexOh, I mean, do you want to do some emotional labor? Yeah, sure.
MerlinOh, well, I'm still shaking off the idea. It's Dubai Friday. As Alex said, I was admonished last week for reminding people that. Anyway, that's my feelings about Mike Pence. And so I – it seems like you're having a day. And I was, as you youths like to say, I was triggered by the idea that Dougie continues to just enter your home. Is this correct?
AlexYes.
MerlinSo Doug, you were laying on the floor. I believe the word you used was unconscious.
AlexI was having a bit of a panic attack. So I decided to lay on the floor. No, it was okay. I've got pretty good coping skills with that.
MerlinThe guy on the plane tells Bruce Willis you make little fists with your toes in the carpeting. Have you tried that?
AlexNo, that sounds weird.
MerlinIf you do, photograph it and put it on Patreon.
AlexGive us your fucking money.com. I have some great pictures of my Pikachu socks. Maybe those will appear. Giveusyourfuckingmoney.com. Oh, that's terrific. But I was calm and pretty chill, and I must have fallen asleep. And I assume my landlord knocked in order to gain entry into our apartment.
MerlinI don't understand this, Alex. Does he think that's okay?
AlexBut, yeah, he opened the door. I mean, I'm sure he knocked.
MerlinHe's not supposed to do anything. I mean, I feel like in the tradition, and people like to talk about law. I'm not going to get involved in law. I'm not going to sue somebody. But what I'm talking about, what we're talking about here is conventions of human behavior in America, and really clawing our way back. And I think it's considered normal. Well, there's a lot of things my landlord does and doesn't do that are not normal because they're landlords. They're built different than you and me. But the whole like popping in thing is weird.
The whole like just showing up thing is weird. But the letting himself in thing is – I find it really perplexing. I think you might need to, well, it's not my place to say, and I don't know if you could get Matt on board with this. I think it's time for you to create a truly shocking tableau that's going to make this young man think twice about just entering.
AlexWell, that's the thing. He walked in and I was splayed on the floor.
MerlinWhat if you had like a strap-on giant dong and you're dressed as Darth Vader or something?
AlexI would hope that I would be conscious during that. Oh, are you saying I should do some cosplay?
MerlinWell, I'm saying you need to give him some nightmare fuel, and I would be happy. I've spent a lot of my last two days on Mike Pence. I would be happy to help you create truly eldritch images, and then you could sort of play them out. I'm thinking about a cabinet of Dr. Caligari. Like there's going to be some very upsetting cardboard sets. And Doug walks in, you know, and does he have a thing that he, oh, is he like a funny neighbor? Does he have like a catchphrase?
AlexNo, that would give him some sort of redemption as a character. But he doesn't.
MerlinHe's like a hidey-ho neighbor or whatnot.
AlexNo, no.
MerlinJust hi. Is he an observant person? Is he a spiritual person? Does he worship any lord as far as you know?
AlexThe land. that he owns, I assume.
MerlinHe's the little lordling, the lord of the land. Exactly. Wherever you may be, you are the lord of the land, is he? Anyways, hello. I'm sorry you had a panic attack. That sucks.
AlexIt does indeed suck, but I am feeling less bad. Since we're doing some emotional labor, I would like to know how you've been sleeping, especially because you're going to have an aneurysm? What's happening? You keep dropping. I stopped taking ADD meds because my doctor is afraid you're going to have a stroke.
Or we don't have to talk about it. You just keep breezing by.
MerlinWe can do it if it's a bit. I don't necessarily want to go deeply into my own physical and emotional and mental health, although that's kind of what we do here. So I guess it's a...
AlexIt's your least popular show. This is where the feelings happen. Okay.
MerlinThe problem is that, as they say on Law and Order, in the second half and the order half, I open the door to that. You know what I'm saying? I think I open the door to this line of inquiry, and that's bad on me. I'm like my own public defender.
AlexOh, you were vulnerable with someone whose job it is to literally and figuratively probe, basically, is the problem.
MerlinOkay. My sleep's been better. It's going okay, mostly. But I'm still not noshing on that deep sleep that I really like. I have been good at bringing – I've been – part of – one of my efforts is I'm trying to bring my breathing rate and pulse rate down, and I've been working on that because, you know, as we've said for years now, you can't really sleep well if your pulse is – you feel like you're sleeping, but you're kind of not, you know.
This is the problem with the apnea stuff.
AlexBut when you say working on it, is there an action item? Yeah, of course. What are you doing to lower it?
MerlinThe pulse and breathing part?
AlexYeah, yeah.
MerlinWell, what I do is, unrelated to COVID, before COVID, my libertarian shrink suggested, and this is before we had looked at it, really explored much formal sleep improvement stuff, and said, why don't you get a blood oximeter and wear it at night? and then we can see what's happening at night, you know. And like, are you oxygenated? Like, you know, and is there like an apnea thing? This is like a proto easy, you know, kind of early approach to that.
So what I, the thing is I still have that blood oximeter and I did use it during COVID. I still haven't got it. I thought I had it last night and I still don't have it.
AlexReally? Oh.
MerlinYeah. We went back to school night last night and I was feeling kind of a little bit crappy. and I was like, you know what, I should probably do another COVID test, and I was fine, but then I was kind of like, some people get it over and over, and I even had it once. I feel like I'm not in the club. Marco's out there sucking up all the COVID for all of us.
AlexI know. It's very impressive. Matchy has not had it, and it's still a little very upsetting to me, mostly because I think he is the one. The first time, I probably got it from a doctor's office. Second time, it was definitely him. I'm pretty sure he's immune, and it's shocking.
MerlinWell, as you know, I've got brain fog. So now I wonder which part of my various infirmities is that owed to. You know what I mean? Okay, so if you're asking, here's what I do.
I have this blood oximeter, and God, this is boring, but it's okay. Listen, everybody, Alex is having a crazy day. I have a lot to do with Mike Pence. This is going to be a probably slightly abbreviated episode, but I do have some very good content for you.
Speaker AOh, good.
MerlinBut just to get this out of the way. So what you do is you put this thing on your finger. You get to play hospital. And you put it on your finger. And then the company that makes this, I think they're called Massimo, who has the worst. Massimo.
AlexI'm literally holding it right now because I put it on when I have a panic attack.
MerlinBut look, why is it so compressed and skinny? I don't know. Why is the font like that? I don't like it. What you do is when you've got this on your finger, you open up their app, and you get a historical view, you can see a live view. There's two ways of looking at live view, either as a trend line or as just a dashboard. And so it tells you, here's your percent of blood oxygenation. Here's your pulse. Here's your breathing rate, number of breaths per minute.
Here's your breath variability, whatever that means. I think that usually means my hands are cold if I have low blood. But anyway, what I'll do is I'll – like the night before I go to bed because I'm a pretty sexy guy with a pretty international lifestyle. I'll sit there and I'll have my telephone on a mountain where I can look at it and I'll look at that screen. Now, let's – why would I do that? Because what I want is a guarantee. I want biofeedback. I always want to say biorhythm. I want biofeedback.
I just want the fucking biofeedback app. I did in 1987. I want a thing where I know how the trick works and I need to make the light turn green, right? And so, but that's what this kind of does. I don't have galvanic response or anything like that. Really, when you do biofeedback, I think it's a little bit like a lie detector. It's somewhere between a lie detector and like the, not the Gamja bar, but the thing you put your hand in and do. Anyway, I'll look at that. And as I said before, I always got an angle on these things. like my my angle on the on the weight issue is one that is really fucked right now because i'm
not riding my bike i don't know whatever but um i um like i didn't want to lose weight i wanted to increase muscle mass right the losing weight is fine but the big thing is i like muscle mass and more muscle less fat uh you know let's talk more rock and um same thing here where my goal is i i I think it's, oh, see, I was going to say pushing a rope, but then you'd make a jizz joke about it. I think it is like pushing a rope to try and reduce your, it can be like that, whether it's in meditation, which I want to talk to you about, or with, you know, what have you.
I have found that one thing I do control, why am I saying it's like meditation? Well, because meditation is.
AlexBecause it's mindful. Oh, man, see, I'm interrupting.
MerlinNo, not at all. But meditation started making more sense from a physical standpoint when I learned that trick of focusing on the breath moving through your nostrils. Like everybody's got a different thing. Some people like to feel their tummy go up and down. But like that, as Max would say, operationalize that for me. Oh, I can do that. Whether or not I'm good at meditation and breathing stuff is a separate issue, which I do want to talk to you about because I'm reading that book you were talking about, Why Buddhism is True. Oh. Didn't you read that?
AlexYes. I'm in the middle of it. It's very good.
MerlinYeah, me too. I'm kind of stuck on Chapter 4 because I listen to it a lot when I'm falling asleep, ironically enough. But in this instance, I don't want to push rope. I don't want to jizz on my oximeter. And so what I do is I'm focusing on number of breaths. And like day to day, I'm in the 20s, like probably like a lot of people, I'm guessing, like 20 breaths per minute. But what I do is I'll sit there in my repose and I'll look at my little dashboard. and all I'm trying to do is breathe slower and consequently a little bit deeper.
But I'm not trying to be cartoonish about it. I'm not trying to go like, I'm trying to just be chill and I want to bring down the number of breaths. And ain't it ironical that when you bring down the number of breaths, often your pulse goes down as well and your blood pressure. So that's what I do there. I'm basically doing like hillbilly biofeedback.
AlexThat title. I'm that's better than what I do well by better I I guess I mean you put more effort into it I just watch my I just watch my watch and there's do you get breaths on that breaths no no no I am just using the heart watch app that you turned me on to and it used to be
that watching it would make me more anxious and go up, up, up.
MerlinWhy are people talking about this? I think that is definitely true. Boy, you don't want to get me into this because I got a whole thing about this. It's fascinating, though.
AlexBut we got to keep it short, bright and tight.
MerlinWell, I suppose so. But I keep trying to kind of try to get at this with the program I do with Dan. I don't ever, I rarely like fully get there, but like, it's that, you know, if you had to kind of, um, boil it all down to, to one point, it's, it's that not very useful notion on the face of it, that, um, feeling bad is not optional in life, but feeling bad about feeling bad is optional, which most people I think either aren't aware of or don't believe, or they go, but like, I think that's true.
And that is also a point that is made in that book. His name is Robert Wright. And he's an evolutionary psychologist who is talking. And like, okay, I get it. He's written this book and it's going to be like, oh, hey, turns out there's all this stuff that Buddhism addresses that represents sort of the vestigial matter of our paleolithic past or whatever. And I'm naturally pretty skeptical of stuff like that because I consider that a form of science sauce.
And like, well, OK, like I guess that'll help somebody to go like, well, I guess it's OK to do meditation because it's science and stuff. But like in the same way that I like to razz Dan about the whole like sitting around a fire eating elk kind of thing. Like all this, like, whether it's the paleo diet or whether it just is all these different things where people talk about our human-ish ancestors in this way that seems really blinkered to me.
You know what I mean? It's like, you know, there's so much stuff in life where you're like, well, OK, well, yeah, that was a true fact at this point. And then that changed. And there were other things and blah, blah, blah. But like this whole like speculation about like – and I realize like the paleo diet is a little silly. But that's one example where people were very credulously announcing that like this is how our ancestors ate and that's how we should eat. And it's like, well.
AlexThey also used lambskins on their dicks. And there was a lot of things.
MerlinI used to use those. But then I heard they don't prevent STDs.
AlexI heard they don't feel very good but what do I know
Merlinno the lambskins are way nicer than the well I don't know my relationship with my penis is very historical at this point but that's why I'm a pro bono penis lawyer
The, uh, no, but there's something in that book that like, you know, and there's just, there's those points and things in life, Alex, that I need to hear over and over. I say them over and over cause I need to hear them over. I need to remember them over and over. And isn't that really in some ways what mindfulness is. It's an over and over process. It's like you keep doing the thing and maybe, maybe you focus better. Maybe you, but like the way he talks about, gosh, what was the example?
there's that there's a whole chapter about feelings and like how do we know if he phrases it in this kind of funny way like how do we know if our feelings are true right yeah and which is um i i just want to say i love i really really like this book and i'm finding it i'm finding it useful i'm finding it entertaining he's a funny writer and i'm learning a lot from it but um i don't know personally let's just set all that aside i don't i don't need all this science sauce that's okay i can i make my own gravy um but but um but when he's talking about this idea
of in some ways like i like i tried to say to dan yesterday it's a it's a little bit like the trauma book in a lot of ways too the trauma book the the dude our dutchman goes into a lot of the i think pretty plausible sounding ideas about like how we get how we are i go here and i find calorie rich food and I don't die. One time I went there, I almost died. And then that's a basis for certain kinds of trauma. Like, I buy that. There's that point. I thought I invented this at one point.
But when I realized that being bad at meditation is the point of meditation, guess what? I didn't feel as bad about it. And he specifically talks, what was the example? Remind me what the example was but he's talking about this this idea of like oh you know what it is he's talking about having to do a presentation and having to do like a powerpoint and like you know how how many of us get a kind of i don't know what performance anxiety stage fright whatever it is and like and he has a very funny bit where he talks about like the night before
some most of the time now i'm better at this i know that i will not perish pretty much no matter what happens with this presentation, but I still have those nights the night before. And he describes it so well and so in a way that really, I feel like he gets me because he's saying basically, look, you know, the night before this presentation, I feel like I can't sleep. So what does that mean? Well, one of the things is I go, well, if I don't sleep, I'm not going to do well tomorrow.
I'm already worried about doing poorly tomorrow and I'm not sleeping well. And now it's not very long before he's mad at himself about being a person who sits up thinking about not sleeping at a time when he's supposed to sleep. You know what I'm saying? Like that to me is a really good example of feeling bad about feeling bad. And he – so just to close this bit. He's like talking about, you know, I don't know if it's real but it seems real. You know, I only got a presentation tomorrow. I can't sleep. And then he said I sat up and I did some mindfulness meditation.
and in a surprisingly small amount of time, that feeling bad about feeling bad went away and I fell asleep. And I think that's, I can't promise everybody that will work all the time. But the point I was struggling to make with Dan on Back to Work yesterday was, well, you get a new chance every day. You're going to always have another day until you're dead and then it won't matter. But you've always got another day to do better at whatever that is, whether that's sleeping or waking or fucking or like making a Hawaiian luau or whatever it is,
like not everything has to be impossibly high stakes with giant downsides. And like we do that to ourselves. And as an anxious person, I do that to myself. I increase the level of, you know, fear to where like I'm, you know, becoming not a way that I would prefer to be. And yeah, that's one thing I took away from that book that I find really handy. It's another just more good mental and emotional fuel for understanding that there is a role that we can have in being our own pal sometimes.
And sometimes being a pal is just saying, hey, that's fine. Don't worry. It'll be OK.
AlexOh, that that was more wholesome than I expected. Not that I.
MerlinIs that going to be dirty? I might work through.
AlexI was really hesitant to read this book for a while because of the title. It sounds like a YouTube video, and I was pleasantly surprised that it does not read like a Michael Pollan or Malcolm Gladwell book. but I do think and this is more towards the end I believe I don't know I saw a TED talk that the guy did
but talking about our ancestors or whatever also makes me pause because sure we were around the fire and eating Dan's elk and it was great but now we have information being pumped into our brains and everyone's writing a book about how we're having information constantly pumped into our brains blah blah blah but and how we're not designed to deal including
Merlina new raft of books that i have to read about all the information being pumped into my brain
Alexyes and i'm i literally have two books right now i'm reading about about youtube and fuck I'll put it in notes
MerlinIs that like Netflix and chill? YouTube and fuck
AlexNo
MerlinBut I mean like I'm not saying this is easy I'm not even saying in some instances that it's simple but I No but don't you Yeah go
AlexDon't you think though a lot of these books are just not necessarily not giving humanity enough credit but sort of discrediting the ways that we we have evolved chemically and we just don't necessarily know how that is happening yet because we still don't know why we sleep or maybe we do and that's just
Merlina uh like sleepism at the same time we're all still blessed or cursed with consciousness and metacognition and sometimes it's not clear what the role of that sort of you know should be um but and i don't know i feel like i'm trying to be clever here and i'm really i'm not trying
Alexto be clever about this. That's because you are clever.
MerlinWell, I'm fast, but I'm not smart. That's a big difference.
AlexI hate that. I hate you.
MerlinI know. And your stupid fucking face. But no, I mean it's, I'm trying to, this is going to seem really random, but like, and when you think about the human condition, and again, forgive me, I said a lot of this yesterday on the program with Dan, but like it's on my mind, right? So like the that word, I don't know if it's Pali or Sanskrit or whatever, but it gets translated as, you know, I guess dukkha, right? Dukkha gets translated as like suffering, like life is suffering. And it's like, well, is it that life is suffering or is it that like most of our human tendencies
will tend to gravitate toward you do and you do and you do until you suffer? Like there's not that many of us where we do and we do and we do and then we go, oh, I could just let this go. Like, you know what I mean? Like, I don't know. I don't know how to put it, like, in a way that's plainer than that. But, like, you can't, you can't, like, complaining about writer's block will not get you out of writer's block. Drinking sea salt will not.
AlexIt just gets you on the floor and has a landlord looking down at you as he taps you awake.
MerlinI'm telling you, man, we've got to work on this tableau. We're going to do some real fucked up stuff and I want to be involved. um no but like um it is it is in this instance it can be although it's not easy it can be simple which is just like i say there's that there's that image that you you've heard me say so many times like imagine you're holding your fingers like your thumb to your fingertip as though you're holding a fly and trying not to harm it and all you have to do is let go and that fly flies away um that that's become a useful metaphor i guess an analogy like but like because there's so much
stuff where like i'll think myself down the deepest rabbit hole in the world and like there's but there's problems in life that you can't think your way out of and thinking too much about it because it's what we do and that's how we're i assume that's in part at least how i'm wired is like, I'll think my way out of this problem. And it's like, well, sometimes you need a really different angle on that. And that's where stuff like all that dumb stuff that people in the world, including me, tell you to do, like splash some water on your face. There's a really nice scene
in The Walking Dead where, who was it? Was it maybe Daryl trying to calm somebody down? And he's kind of like wetting his fingers and kind of like sprinkling it on the inside of their elbow. And I was like, oh, I would like it if somebody did that to me. I think that would calm me down. That seems like a good way to calm someone the fuck down. Well, how about instead of that, why don't we just go think some more? Or why don't we just go get more worked up? And like all that stuff, like if it's not helping, why do we do it? And we do it because, you know, like I said, we're trying to knock down a door.
Like I got to get to sleep. I got to get to sleep. And it's like, nope, just let go of that fly. You know, let it fly away or fall to the ground, like whatever it's going to be. And I, because this stuff is, talking about this stuff is very strange because a lot of it is very, I mean, co-8, very ineffable, very ephemeral. Stuff that's kind of difficult to put in a way that doesn't sound very woo-woo. But, you know, maybe step zero in some ways for me is when I just realize how much my brain is just a wide open tap of just like stuff happening.
right and then i i don't know i guess i i guess sometimes in the same way that sometimes when you're meditating you realize you need to bring yourself back to your breath or as he talks about that expansiveness of being able to encompass checking in on my breath and feeling okay about the fact that i've had too much instant coffee and i'm clenching my jaw like there's you can do both of those you can handle all of that and the the breathing as i understand it is is in its own way a kind of a macguffin and it depends on the kind of kind of meditation you're doing but like it's not to be great at counting to 10 over and over.
It's about having a, an affordance for understanding what your mind does when it's left to its own devices and how you can gently incline your mind in these, in these other directions. And that's the kind of thing I, I try to work on. So like at the end of the day, like if I, or at the beginning of the day, I guess I should say, um, I wake up and if I feel like shit, it's like, well, that's okay. Like, you know, let that fly go. You get another try tonight. You know what I mean? But the not feeling bad about feeling bad thing is, boy, that's a – Alex, that's a powerful thought technology, don't you think?
AlexYou were the first person, at least to my knowledge, to say that everyone is doing the best they can every day. I really don't know.
MerlinIt's harrowing when you – if you really let that settle in. And yeah, the basic idea is that every – people are always like, oh, do better. Well, you know, let me give you a thought technology. What if it turned out that everybody continues to and always has been doing their best every day, whether deliberately or not? But like if you could have done better, you would have done better, but you didn't. So what are you going to do about it? You know what I mean? I think that's extremely powerful and I think there's a lot of people who will probably not be persuaded by that.
They go like, well, I'm a real self-starter and bootstraps and grit and stuff. And like, oh, I'm a very successful business person or whatever. But, you know, it's – and then everybody else, of course, is either an idiot or a villain. Like, and I'm the only one that's always actually doing their best. And it's like, well, I don't know if that's useful, I guess. Sure, run with it. But the thing with this stuff and like, you know, and I'm not much of a meditator really, but I am somebody who is very interested in like being able to observe the comings and goings or for that matter, the open tap of my mind.
And because it if I suddenly just kind of yell, stop. OK, like are you like you ever you've been in. I don't even know what this does exactly. Syracuse could tell me, but you're an activity monitor and something's fucked up and beach balling. And there's that button you can click that says sample. And I think what that's doing is grabbing a bunch of the, you know, the code and the results flying by.
AlexOh, we're on computers now. Sorry.
MerlinWell, that's what I'm trying to do is hit sample.
AlexNo, I know. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
MerlinAnd just like give me a little taste of this data stream going by to give me some idea. And like if you see like how open that tap is, that might be all you need to go, oh, well, maybe thinking harder and getting madder at myself is not the route to, you know, making this better. I mean, you know, the whole idea of my, well, there's not a whole idea. There's a bunch of ideas to mindfulness. But one of the ideas of mindfulness that I find very attractive is that as you work on this and that process, you may find yourself having less difficulty being in the moment.
You know what I mean? Yes. Whatever that is. What does it mean to be in the moment? Well, you know, I think a dumb guy like me, let me put it this way. you're not obsessing about the past and you're not fretting about the future and whatever's happening right now whether you feel good about it, bad about it, whatever like they're like some of your most precious memories in life if you were to really have like an exact carbon copy of what happened, you might feel like oh yeah that day was really good when I was with my family but there was dumb shit that happened as well but you remember
it as like having been a good day and maybe you even blow that up into something much bigger than it ever was because you have a a very strong sentimental sort of nostalgic feeling about it. This is a pet theory of mine about what Americans do. But what it comes down to is like once you say to yourself, like I'm not going to feel bad about feeling bad or I'm going to choose not to feel, put differently, I'm going to assertively choose not to feel bad about feeling bad means, well, first of all, I've got to catch myself. Do I feel bad? Yeah, I do feel kind of bad. Why do you feel bad? Well, I feel bad because I feel bad. And that can mean lots of different things.
Like I, as somebody who procrastinates, Like that means that like I get mad at myself that I'm procrastinating. Well, that's a version of feeling bad about feeling bad. There's just all of these different kinds of things. But like there is something to use our favorite word after agency. It's wholesome. There's something extremely wholesome about going, come on, guy. Like just it's OK. You don't you don't need to knock down the door. You don't need to solve anything right now. One of my earliest sleep strategies that I found useful was going, it's not time for
that now. It's not time for that. It's time for sleeping now. And when you're ready, go to sleep. It's not time for interrogating all the ways you fucked up in the world. If you want to do that, maybe make an appointment with yourself to do that later. But this is not the time for that. And that ability, though, to be in the moment, well, you might be having a really shitty time in the moment. Being in the moment also goes for sitting in a hospital waiting room. But the thing is you can experience you can have the experience of doing that in a way that's less um
riven with the bad feelings about what's happening and like i don't know i just it
Alexfeels like such a powerful thought technology to me it is which is why i hope you take this question, I know you'll take this question in a good way. You're not a freak who isn't like, shut up. I do that. I make that noise.
MerlinI make that noise all the time.
AlexHave you ever...
MerlinInternet sing-along day.
AlexHas there ever been a time where you have used that technology to be in the moment and it has backfired because you are just so present that sort of the useful demon dogs the the service dogs not the demon dogs
Merlinthe self the self the self the self-preserving mistruths that let us get through a lot of the day in some ways right mistruths that could be about status it could be about you know lots of different things, but like there are certain kinds of things that protect us. You even think about, and I don't mean to be all evolutionary whatever here, but like, like for example, you get those sort of, um, um, uh, concept in psychology, uh, chunking, right. That like, oh, this represents
this kind of thing that I know I don't need to think about. And I certainly do a ton of that. There's a lot of news I don't need to know about. There's a lot of TikTok I don't need to know about. There's a lot of YouTube romantic drama that I don't need to know about. Like there's There's just a whole bunch of that stuff where, like, I do find myself asking that question, you know, is there something potentially valuable here that might be useful to me? And sometimes it's a laugh. But, you know, a lot of times it's just, wow, why do I do this to myself? Why would I do this to myself? Why would I, you know, increase my level of engagement with stuff that's ultimately worse than empty?
AlexBecause it feels great is my only answer.
MerlinIt doesn't to me. I really, like, I really desperately despise the whole set of what people tend to call drama. Like, it really makes me very sad. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
But to answer your question, I don't know. I mean, I guess you do, it does feel a little bit like you're in danger of, like, touching the third rail. If you, I mean, I've never been in a position where all of my apprehensions about the world have fallen away and I see pure truth. you know I don't I'm not pilled at all really I wouldn't even accept the blue pill I don't take pills from strangers but I could see
how that would be harmful or it could just be different because if you're used to saying and I'm trying to answer your extra question because you're talking about situations where like you catch yourself you know falling back on some kind of like relatively unexamined like half truth that you've been living about life and you know what i mean that kind of
Alexthing right yeah i think often at least i can confuse or conflate being in the moment with being up my own ass or you can't you can't do it all the time there's no way you would lose your
Merlinmind if you were that oh it's been gone just but like just i didn't want to say emotionally or mentally vulnerable perceptually vulnerable like that's what these things like chunking and all our different kinds of uh biases like are what helps us to like you know just as they say in england for a happy life you know the kind of thing that just helps you like do your shit but i don't know I am at the risk of sounding naive or simple, like simple jack, simple. Like I, I,
I do feel like everybody needs different help. Everybody needs different advice, all those different things. Advice that would be useful for one person could be pretty dangerous to somebody else because context is everything. And I'll, I'll like, I do feel like though, that given what I know about myself and how left to my own devices, how my whole system will work. I don't think I'm in danger. Sort of like when I got this high blood pressure medication and they were like, well, you want to be careful
because if your blood pressure gets too low, you might pass out. And I was like, I don't think that's going to happen. I don't think we're in any imminent danger of me passing out from low blood pressure, but I take the note. In that instance, that's the thing. That is for, and yeah, you keep an eye on it whatever but like you know the the advice we give to somebody about like oh you know be yourself or do this thing or like blah blah blah i mean i don't i can't speak to all of that but like i wow that's a very heavy piece of equipment going by um but i do think that like i'm there are other
areas that get closer to what you're talking about here of like if i really see things exactly how they are if i'm really really i mean can you even do that but if you do does that you're sort of asking like does that does that put you at risk of getting overwhelmed or getting fucked up
Alexbecause you ask you ask has that ever had like a negative effect has has it for you personally or just can you think of a concrete example where it's just like backfired i i know i don't i don't
Merlinthink so because I'm bad at it in part. Like I'm not very successful at that exercise most of the time, but that doesn't mean I'm not going to try. I mean, I can't draw, but that hasn't stopped me, you know? But like what you're getting at though, I think in some ways, or what we're getting at is that, I don't know, I think we know ourselves better than we think sometimes. And I think that in the same way that we try to protect a child from ever feeling anything negative, I think there's this way that we like, we build up all these layers with ourself of, you know,
oh, I'm not gonna feel that again. I don't want that to happen again. I don't want, you know, whatever that kind of stuff is. And I guess I just feel like, you know, the part that does feel simple sometimes is, and I know you're not crazy about when I say this, the I'm just a guy in a room thing. I move past that thing of saying, I'm rejecting trauma because that's only for people in Birkenau. Like, I don't do that anymore. Like, I am, I understand, like, trauma has had an impact on me. Watching, re-watching The Walking Dead for the third time certainly makes me think about it. The kind of thing where you really imprint on something and like now you've got to deal
with that.
AlexThree times? Oh my goodness.
MerlinYou are a brave man.
AlexOh.
MerlinYeah. But, um, uh, well, you know how like sometimes when you're sad, you want to listen to sad music? I'm not sad, but like I, I, I, I don't know. One way I'm maybe a little like Syracuse. I like this kind of shit. But, um, no, I don't think it ever has done that. But I mean, how much are we – I'll tell you a thing that would scare me more just because I'm so broken inside is the like, please tell me what you really think about me kind of thing. Like, oh, I don't want to know what you really think about me because I'm not sure I can take that.
That is an example for me of like I'm just happy to live in my little swamp shack made of lies. Like I'm fine over here. Don't worry about me. I'll just be here gnawing on some crawdad here in my sad little shack all by myself.
Expensing advice.
AlexWhere did you become Ray Gillette from Archer? No, it's got a little bit of a Kenneth from 30 Rock.
MerlinWe're kind of doing a Cajun Creole kind of thing.
AlexI know they're different. I don't care.
MerlinBut, yeah, I like that book. And I'm trying to think about a way there must be some kind of angle for how we could talk about that book on here. But I'm sorry you're having a weird day. And I appreciate your doing the show, despite that.
AlexThank you. You're welcome. Thank you. I don't know. I'm glad to be here in the moment as I drink my Monster Energy drink.
MerlinCan I do one bit and then we'll do the challenge?
AlexWe'll do one bit. except did you know Monster Energy Drink was created in a response to 9-11?
MerlinOh.
AlexThat's not even a bit. I just wanted to share that fact because I didn't know.
MerlinWas that all printed on the cap like a Snapple?
AlexI think it was. I learned this about an hour ago and I'm still reeling. We've all lost our fucking mind.
MerlinI'd like to learn monster in particular, huh?
AlexYeah, yeah. Lots of, oh, that's an, oh, putting this in a challenge. 9-11 capitalism responses.
MerlinSo I recently added Fubo to my channel. I recently added Fubo. And Fubo has one thing that it can do that I haven't seen in other places, which you can have up to.
AlexWait, Fubo is, sorry, Fubo is the Hulu replacement for live TV, sort of, right?
MerlinYeah, yeah. I learned about it from Jason because it's like the people say that it's good for sports fans in particular. But anyway, it does kind of a funny, neat thing that I've been doing. Just I was looking for a reason to do this is you can have one, two, three, four channels. Ha, ha, ha. All up at the same time. And it splits, you know, sort of like Steve Jobs' laptop grid. You get a two-by-two. And you can pick up to four channels that will be showing. And then you, like, you –
AlexOh, literally showing, not just recording, like, four on the screen?
MerlinYeah, yeah. I'll send you an image. I think I can send you an image. But what was I watching? Oh, so the point was, of course, I was watching Queen stuff. I was – as you'll see in this image I sent you, I recently learned that Fubo has something called the Elvis Presley channel. So I had four different things on, and then you four-way through them, like up and down, you know, up, down, left, right, to like change focus. And then that's the one that plays sound. And it's one of those, like when you are having one of those multi-screen kind of things.
Anyway, that's not something I'm going to do all the time. I only mention it because I was mainly watching something else. And I saw on MSNBC, they were showing these bar graphs about 9-11. This must have been on the other day.
Speaker AOh, no. Oh, no.
MerlinYeah. I wish – I'm not going to look it up. But one of them was something like 19% of young people aren't sure what they're supposed to never forget. And I was like, you know what? I can understand that. I'm not – I mean, like I was around. I was in my 30s. But like which part of it do you want me to never forget?
AlexYeah. Yeah, I distinctly remember having that feeling. God, that came out like two days after it happened, I think. But when I didn't even know what the World Trade Center was when all the teachers came in crying into our classroom. What the fuck is that? but I have some as you noted I I have friends I don't know how but uh the zoomer friends I have
are like this is our it's it's not our holocaust but this is all we know and all this this is our it exists.
MerlinIt's like the vast percentage of Britons or UKers who've never known any Queen, you know, but Elizabeth II. And like, you know, you think about like, wow, probably what? What percentage? Maybe, what, 30? Like, what would that be? That would be 21 years ago? I mean, that's a fair number of people that are all like post 9-11. And I actually did forget. I did forget.
Alexyou did oh you forgot that oh man just i'm not somebody who looks at i'm not somebody who looks
Merlindown on my watch sees what date it is and wonders how i'm supposed to feel about it or what i'm supposed to remember about it like that's not how my brain works
Alexthe only well i don't want to say that it's a film festival but every year on 9-11 i have a like a trauma porn viewing.
MerlinYou can get on YouTube and find, I think CNN is up. There might be, there might be, I want to say, was it Fox News? There's definitely CNN. But you can just go like turn it on and it opens with a commercial that was running on somebody's TiVo or similar or VHS or whatever. And then they cut to, hey, we just got a report of this thing. That is a wild ass thing to watch. It goes by. What a day. I don't want to talk about this.
AlexNo, I'm sorry. It is just a founder of Cox's Cox. Kara Fagan has, as they say, taught me more about 9-11 than I ever wanted to know. And every.
MerlinWhether you wanted to or not.
AlexOh, I never wanted to hear the 9-11, the 9-1-1 phone calls. But yeah, it's, oh, woof.
MerlinYeah, yeah, it's not good.
AlexIt would have been a little bit funny if the queen died on 9-11.
MerlinOkay. Sorry, okay, moving on. We have fun.
AlexMerlin, will you describe the image you have sent me?
MerlinOh, that's nothing. That's just the four screens. So it's the BBC.
AlexWhat a day.
MerlinWhat? Well, okay. I was just sending you to see what the four images looks like. It's BBC, MSNBC, something called Ticker News, and then the Elvis Presley Channel.
AlexWhat is the Elvis Presley?
MerlinThey show the 68 comeback special a lot.
AlexOkay.
MerlinBut it's Elvis stuff. We've got to get on to more important things because we've still got to talk about the challenge. Alex, as you know, there's a trademark feature of Dubai Friday. and it's a feature we call man of the week and it's our exploration of of men masturbating in public mostly and by the way I did have an idea now this is a little bit Max Temkin but I wonder by the way just in passing if a bonus that we should make for our friends our
patrons whatever maybe you know like you join Kiss Army or like you're in this thus and such fan club. I wonder if we should create a printable medical masturbation card.
AlexOh, interesting.
MerlinBecause then you can whip that out, so to speak, whip that out on the plane and say, excuse me, waitress, just so you know, this is my card. I will be jacking my mean bone on this one because it's medicine.
AlexThere's a lot to consider here.
MerlinIt's prescription masturbation.
AlexYes. And, you know, it's a little bit like medical marijuana.
MerlinThat's exactly right.
AlexYou need to take into consideration, though.
MerlinI have to masturbate because of my glaucoma.
AlexIt's got to be laminated. I'm thinking more of the logistics. It's probably got to be laminated. Where do you keep the card?
MerlinWipes clean with a damp cloth. You could wear it around your neck like a bus pass.
AlexI see. because that's the thing i would i assume normally keep a card in my wallet but you want that easily
Merlinaccessible and but it's medical so like at first glance you go oh that's obviously like a like a caduceus right that's that medical symbol like with a little snake on it but that's no snake
This is a story I found. It's from a website. This was published last month. Headline, pampered monkeys in Bali are masturbating using stone sex toys.
AlexOh. Oh.
MerlinOh, please send me this link. Please. Well, hang on. Researchers say the monkeys have too much free time on their hands, so they got busy. Wow. That's really unkind. Huh. Let me just read you a little bit here.
AlexThey're doing their best.
MerlinLong-tailed macaques are frisky devils. They often roam the ancient site of the Uluwatu Temple in Bali, where they rob unsuspecting tourists, cling to their possessions until the food is offered as ransom. So, like, they'll steal your camera. And they're good at knowing what's an expensive camera and stuff, you know. Clearly, long-tailed macaques are clever, playful, and inquisitive. And this is, really, Alex is going to bring it all together. This is about insight. This is about...
AlexWould you say it's going to come together?
MerlinMm-hmm.
AlexGo on.
MerlinWell, come alone, as we'll see in a second. But it also brings together, you know, our evolutionary biology and stuff like that. These macaques are the only old world monkeys who use stone tools in their daily foraging. Good for them. Especially around the coasts to prey on oyster crabs and mussels. The monkeys also employ stones to have fun throwing them around in a non-threatening manner, but nothing could really prepare scientists for the next iteration of stone tool use. Boy, this is some really strong science writing.
Scientists collected video footage from 2016. At this point, I will paste in a link that is something I'm sorry to say I do need you to look at. Scientists collected video footage from 2016 to 2019 filmed at the Sacred Monkey Forest Sanctuary, finding hundreds of examples of both male and female monkeys using stones to pleasure themselves. A not very safe for work video exemplifying this has just been sent to Alex.
AlexAlex, would you mind clicking on this? Tell me what you see. Okay. So we've got examples of tap on groin in male and female. Yep.
MerlinExamples of tap on groin. Examples of tap on groin. Oh, boy. Examples of tap on groin in – well, anyway, then what do you see after that?
AlexOh, I might go – describing what I am –
MerlinWhat do you see a little monkey doing? What's he doing?
AlexI am seeing a little monkey using two stones to rub himself, his groin. Oh, and now there is a –
MerlinI kind of jiggle him around like – Almost like they're like dice. It's like a little juggling act. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Like the way you'd shake dice before you throw them.
AlexIt's really impressive.
MerlinThe rub on groin in male and female Balinese long-tailed macaques. So he's sitting there and they're kind of jiggling. Oh, that's a lady. But they're sitting legs akimbo, right? Uh-huh. Like all kind of stretched out. And really the definition of macaque diddling, really.
AlexWhat do you think of that? I am really impressed that it's stones. Like the endurance they must have.
MerlinWhat's it not like being a teenage boy?
AlexI, uh.
MerlinYou know?
AlexUsing rocks to cum? What?
MerlinWell, I mean, Philip Roth talked about this. Important to nice complaint. I think he fucked some raw liver. Boys have fucked a lot of weird stuff. And then sometimes you develop an attachment to it. You know what I'm saying?
Alexbut a rock no sorry I'm not saying a judgment of like oh you fucked a rock like oh you fucked your car
Merlinyou're just saying like they don't it's not like they can go they can get in a frame of mind with like you know what I'm thinking I'm gonna wanna I think I'm gonna wanna jerk my gherkin later maybe I'll just go to the hardware store and see what they've got and you can pick up stuff in this case it's rocks I mean I think really if we're being honest we should salute them for their ability to use technology like that
AlexI agree, but there has to be a reason that it's rocks and not something softer like a fruit or leaves or something like that.
MerlinI bet they like the way it sounds.
AlexThat's, oh my goodness.
MerlinMaybe this is a macaque ASMR. This is not a sexy thing. This is not a sexy thing. This is a rock thing. Jiggle them. Jiggle the rocks. Jiggle them. Jiggle them on your macaque pussy.
Autosexual behavior or masturbation is far from a novelty among non-human primates. Yeah, you think. Chimpanzees, orangutans, golden lion tamarins. Oh, they're so cute. They look like Dr. Seuss characters. We've got those at ours, the tamarins. They've all been observed stimulating their penis or clitoris using their fingers or tails. Ooh, good use for tail. Oh, yeah.
AlexOh.
MerlinThey took and they turned it. They're getting some tail, but not the one you expected.
AlexYeah. I do wonder, because young human men, I'm told, have tried slash talked about the ability to put one's penis in your own mouth.
Speaker AYeah.
AlexAnd I wonder if you could put it, if humans had a tail, I assume that it would, I would have the desire just to see where I could put the tail. Are you saying that the monkeys are putting tails places? Was that implied?
MerlinWell, I'm not a monkey masturbation scientist. I don't know. I'm just a laity, as you say.
AlexI mean, if they can do, well, it might not be, it might just be pushing tail, essentially, because they need rocks.
MerlinYeah, I don't know, man. I mean, and like, are they, because like, you remember bonobos, right? Bonobos are the ones that have sex to unwind. Isn't that bonobos?
AlexI don't know. There's many, many horny monkeys.
MerlinHorny monkeys. but do you think they feel embarrassed like if if their if their wife gets home early or something or they're like you know hanging from a belt or something like that they feel bad about it listen
Alexi don't know if this is a bit but i bet there is some situation in i there's well think about when a cat falls and or a dog does something stupid and they oh yeah they do feel embarrassed like They're not using rocks to jack off. I have to assume there's some faux pas that must exist within tribes. Oh, that's interesting.
MerlinI used to know a chihuahua that would fuck the shit out of a stuffed Winnie the Pooh. And it was the most sad and desperate thing I think I've ever seen. I mean, apart from stuff involving, like, Mike Lindell. But, like, he would fuck. But, like, if you can imagine, like, we're talking about, like, a teacup chihuahua just happy-go-jappy on this poor little Pooh bear. I bet he can't wait to get back to the 100 acre wood
Speaker A100 acre wood
Merlinchallenge did you peanut butter this one?
Alexyes and no the challenge this week was to you, I forget what we called it. Make a blot. I think I, to, yeah, make a blot. Make a blot. Make a blot. And blot is blogging software hosting service. What would you call it?
MerlinI would say blot is a blogging service that's meant to be a lightweight way to post things to the internet that utilizes some different kind of cool, thin technologies like Markdown files, Dropbox, GitHub. You just throw stuff in a folder and it posts. And I don't have that much to say about it, except I fucking love this thing. I love playing with this service. It's so well made. I wrote fan mail.
I'll tell you a funny story. I wrote, well, I shouldn't say this. It sounds like I'm trying to flex, and I don't mean it this way. But I wrote fan mail to the contact address. And I was like, hey, this is just fan mail. I just wanted to tell you I am having so much fun playing with blot. I'm really enjoying using it. And I just wanted to say I'm really glad you made it, blah, blah, blah, blah. And this person, David, wrote me back and said, yeah, somebody sent me up a podcast, I guess a podcast that you're on. What was the wonderful phrase he used? Were you bothered the other person for a long time about how much you liked blot?
That would be Dan Benjamin.
AlexAll he wants is his food, Merlin. Don't talk about the fun technology that brings people joy literally every single day.
MerlinI'm willing to go on and on about this, but I've been having fun with it. I've been playing with it, really, actually, for a couple of months, a couple, three months, maybe. And it's got lots of stuff. It's difficult to explain exactly.
AlexWell, you're, I think, underplaying one of the features. When you say, like, throw something into a folder, the first time I heard about Blot, I didn't realize.
MerlinBy the time you open Safari, it's already up.
AlexYeah. You just put a text file in. You don't even need to push or pull any rope or stones. You just drop it in a folder, and it's there.
MerlinAnd if you want, it can stop right there. Like two really basic on-label uses for this, and basic in the best way, is you've got something called, you know, hello world.txt or hello world.md for markdown or whatever it is. If you've written something in the text editor or whatever of your choice and you get it into a text format like .txt or .md, really all you do is drop it into the right folder and it goes up. What's neat is that's true for images too. This can be a little bit annoying,
but any image you drop into a folder on its own, and I'll have an asterisk on this in a minute, you drop an image in there, I guess what it makes a post and the post is named after whatever the image is called and you have options and it's all smart and everything works. So like if you start it with a date, like in my case, 2022 dash Oh nine dash 14 space name of file. Like it makes that the day that it published and it makes it, even though it is just an image, it treats it like,
like a post or a, you know, but then on top of it all, you've got all this great YAML-ish metadata stuff. Did you get into that at all?
AlexI did not. Well, I got into reading about it and looking at your samples, which are very good. I didn't realize just how powerful it could get.
MerlinIt's clever. And I think David did a really nice, the documentation is great, as we talked about weeks ago.
AlexWell, it's clever, but I think often when things are clever, it can also be cute as you like to say like this makes total sense along with being clever
Merlinbut it's it's really neat because it gives you uh you know me i love options and so for example like if you you got a file and it's called let's call it hello world dot md right and that goes and it lives there and all the things being equal you put no and what we're talking about here with metadata is like in I'm trying not to I'm trying to be useful and not insulting but like there's usually with the YAML stuff you do like three dashes or actually most most things that interpret
markdown know what the little pairs of data again I've forgotten what it's called value key value pairs that's what it's called right
Alexyes
Merlinso no but like this goes all the way MMD has this like Fletcher's multi-markdown has this. You can do author colon space Alex Cox. And it understands that everything after the colon is a, you know, is a data, right? Date colon. And you can put all different formats for that. Very good. So, so far so good. A lot of the same stuff that works in multi-markdown metadata works in this. And there's even more here because it's for blogging. So there's all this stuff where like, if you just had that file, you can go find that file at that place. But guess
what you can have one called link in your metadata which is just you know text at the top of the document link colon and then like what you want the as we say slug for it to be so your thing called hello space world dot ml md rather you could say that's called alex bio is the alex dash bio is the slug for that you can also then when you put in a title you can put a title with one Octothorpe as the H1. Or you can do it, it says like, okay, if there's an H1 in here, that's like
what I'm going to use as the slug for this. But you can also define title up in the metadata. It gives you all these different options for doing it. If you drop in, this is a little biz masterisk. I'm still trying to figure out exactly how I want to work this. But if you drop an image anywhere in your blogs folder, mine's on Dropbox, yours I think is on GitHub. Is that right?
AlexNo, I switched to Dropbox because the images kind of, yeah, it's so, so easy.
MerlinBut if you drop in an image and you don't want it to be a post, there's a variety of ways to do this. The easiest, well, easiest, the simplest way is to begin the name of that file with an underscore. And if it sees an underscore, it knows that.
AlexOh, shit, really?
MerlinYeah, yeah, yeah.
AlexSorry, I just have a folder called drafts, which I believe is officially supported.
MerlinBut you can do stuff like I did in the usual post-Zeldman style. I always have a folder called just the letter lowercase i. Because back in the day when bytes mattered, you'd want everything to be short. You drop something into i and then that'll show up as its own thing. But you can also do stuff, did you catch this? You can do a thing where you create a folder and let's say it's the word Macintosh. but it's between opening and closing brackets,
those will all automatically get tagged as Macintosh images. You can also put things in by date. But you're not constrained by the usual implied blog structure of like, you know, this has to go live there and do this thing. You can do stuff like, say, like my About page.
When you're doing pages versus posts, you can do, for example, say, do you want this to appear in the menu? Yes or no? Should this be a draft? Yes or no. Do you want a thumbnail image for this? Or should I just pick the biggest image in the post and stuff like that? It's very, I feel it's very well thought out. And as a result of it being so well thought out, it's fun. I mean, you feel kind of taken care of when somebody's done a good job designing something and documenting it. And you can just play and try things. And that's where I'm putting a bunch of my Mike Pence images now.
I think I'm probably going to lose dozens of followers with my Mike Pence work. but um but um it's all just so fun i spent a lot of time playing with the metadata stuff um but what else about anything strike you about it playing with it oh by the way mine is mine is up currently at ungainly.me it's really not much to look at it's just a silly thing we're doing you know here and i'm playing and i want to learn it and i like it and it makes me happy but um and you know just save it all up in vscode it'll all be like you know wrapped up in a workspace
I can just open it up and do stuff anytime.
AlexIs that how you are publishing things in VS Code? Because I keep... Here was my thing other than completely procrastinating. I'd like to say I was busy all week.
MerlinThat's okay. That's okay. That's why shoulders come in pairs, Alex.
AlexYes. I did the best I could. but that actually did mean playing around with this stuff a lot and found that the images stuff didn't really, I mean, you can do images with GitHub, but it was kind of a pain.
MerlinYeah, it handles that fine. And I did finally make a repo of this, although I don't really need to have done that. But I really, on the one hand, I really want to learn how to do branches. And I had a use case for finally learning how to do a branch and what that means. And I wanted to have like, okay, here's the in-situ good version of this. You know, let's make a branch. But no, really, it is as simple as that. And I mean, you know, if anybody out there is like a – what's that horrible phrase? Pro blogger. You're probably going to get on WordPress and do WordPress things.
AlexPro blogger? Like a professional blogger? Wait, wait, what?
MerlinYeah, yeah. Somebody who makes money from having a blog.
AlexDo people say –
MerlinThat was a big phrase back in the day. Pro blogger. Oh, pro blog.
AlexHmm.
MerlinSo, I mean, I don't know if it's necessarily for those kinds of folks, but it's all, I don't know.
AlexI disagree. I think it is a couple of pro bloggers, I know, use that. And they use the templates. Like, that's just super, super cool.
MerlinWell, hidden away. So he's got these. I haven't followed this all very closely. But I get the sense that the templates like magazine and blog and reference and all of those templates are that you see are kind of a 2.0 version of templates. If you dig into that unsupported templates folder, you'll find a whole bunch of like old templates that don't do all the cool stuff that templates do now. But I mean, it isn't like there's a whole ecosystem supporting this. It isn't like you're going to go out and be able to get some shovel blog skin to put on your WordPress blog.
AlexThere is a lot on GitHub, though. I was surprised. Yeah, yeah.
MerlinOh, I want to see that. Will you put that in notes?
AlexYeah, let me find some.
MerlinI don't need it right now. But no, I like having guardrails and limitations. And this is, I was about to say chock-a-block with limitations. That's not true. There's a million different things you can do with this, but I like the fact that I'm not going to do that thing that I know is a known issue, a red flag for me, which is I just play with configuration stuff. Why is Wisdom Project more successful than other Merlin projects? Well, partly because I made it all about typing
and not about themes and Scrivener settings and stuff like that.
AlexWell, we are going to successful. I am just talking to myself.
MerlinWhat just happened, Alex? What just happened?
AlexI am somewhat shocked that you said the reason that the Wisdom Project is more successful than other Merlin Man projects because I have no idea what that means for you.
MerlinWell, it's more done than a lot of them.
AlexThat's, well, that's, I'm pinning, pin, pin, pin.
MerlinOh, for example, like if you want to see the talk where I cried, click on classics over on my side rails. This is ungainly.me. So I dropped, just for fun, I dropped in some old things of mine. Those were in there.
AlexSorry, which the classic? Oh, look, I love Scared Shitless. So good.
MerlinTalk about it, right?
AlexAll of the classics.
MerlinAnd let's see. So you get what the deal is with all the metadata stuff.
AlexYes.
MerlinOkay. I mean, it is pretty freaking powerful. One thing I have not quite dicked yet is understanding how to use the more tag. Because you can have teasers. You can have summaries. You can also have like a manual sort of a la, I guess, WordPress. You could have like a more tag. Like at this point, there's a break on the page. Like don't show the whole page.
But yeah, I love this. So just to finish that one thought, though, and the way that I arrived at this is for quite a while now, I've wished that I had a way to post stuff that doesn't require a CMS. I guess it would be one way to put it. And there are things out there, like I think Jekyll is a very popular one. There's things out there or things you can host on your Synology, you know, and do our sync with or whatever. But like this was really in the, I decided to commit to really play with this starting a few months ago because it really was, it's fun.
It's easy. It's weirdly powerful. and it's text. That's all there is. And then if you're using VS Code, in my case, you can just drag images out of VS, your folder, and it'll put it in for you. It's just really
Alexfun. I need to learn how to use VS Code more.
MerlinOh boy, it's a world.
AlexIt's so powerful to the point where... I love it
Merlinso much.
AlexSee, I don't even want to get... I do want to get
Merlininto it but i mean you could really just you could start just with i mean it's got git built into it and so consequently github like it's all built in if you don't want to have another app um really i mean i could share with you like the extensions that i think that i think are good but um oh i
Alexmeant i think it would be very interesting again pin pin pin pin pin but to i i wonder what makes this software more interesting to you versus something not more interesting like squarespace or similar uh oh no sorry no love squarespace um but what attracts like why are you attracted to this for things like the wisdom project and stuff like that i like writing in things like
MerlinI like not having to write anything. One nice benefit of not having a real job is I'm not obligated. It's ironic given that I'm talking here about two major Microsoft products being GitHub and Visual Studio Code. But I like that I don't have to spend my day in a DocX document. In this instance, text is text, man. It just depends on the suffix. The suffix means it thinks it's Instapaper. It's all still the same text, right?
Like I really like that I can open this in, you know, most of the time when I type stuff, it's in, I mean, drafts is where a lot of stuff starts. But for reasons that are too complicated to get into, I end up in NvAlt a lot because that syncs everything up. But I can open it if I want. I could do it in IA Writer. I could do it in Ulysses, any of the very good like writing apps. and um i just that's really appealing to me that you can see you can see what you're doing like it's all like pretty clear it's almost i don't say it's difficult to confuse yourself but as long as your
internet connection works i can hardly imagine anything simpler that's this powerful and i just
Alexwant to use it because it's fun did you look at my mike penson pulp fiction i oh did i ever i I love, love, love what you are doing with.
Speaker AI'm currently obsessed with Mike Pence.
AlexI was going to say AI, but also I love what you're doing with Mike Pence.
MerlinI explained this when we were having trouble hearing each other. There's a long extended piece that if you have any sense, you'll cut out where I talk to our audience. And I was just saying what I love about it. Well, the reason I feel like I found my sweet spot is, first of all, Mike Pence is impossibly funny to me as a person.
Speaker AHe's just funny.
MerlinHe's funny in the way he looks. He's funny in the way that he acts. He's funny in all those ways. And so putting Mike Pence into what an AI thinks an Alejandro Jodorowsky movie looks like is funny. But I feel like my skeleton key for this is the beginning each one of these with generate a Norman Rockwell painting of Mike Pence doing something. And it's just so fucking funny to me. And I've just amused myself for two days doing nothing but reloading that over and over and over. You think the ones I share, oh boy, that's not even like, and I'm doing it on my fancy computer, so it's fast.
I can make a lot of these. But these are like, it is like the most kind of surreal imagery that you could not imagine. It's so bizarre. Extra legs, extra arms. It's all so upsetting. It's so good. It's my pants. Look at those dead doll eyes.
AlexIt's so good. Challenge, challenge. um i i don't i didn't quite peanut butter on this but i one thing that i got a little too into was the themes and uh let me send this oh yeah do that hold on i'm just i'm just doing i'm
Merlindoing well and i see there's a lot of stuff you wouldn't see here like for example i wanted a different font and i still like i'm doing local editing of the template files which are in mustache and like i just i don't want to i don't want to break it and i don't want to get derailed but i wish i could change the typeface a little more they he has a he has like a cms like thing for saying like oh do you want charter or do you want system you know but this doesn't look very san
Alexfrancisco-y to me no i i agree but the sorry when you say inline um well i i sent you did did you oh look at that it's just oh no no that is just magazine with i tweak some stuff but i am going to i'm in uh templates right now and just hitting use and i think you're talking about the supporter
Merlinor unsupported?
AlexWell, what does no, supported, supported.
MerlinUnsupported one, see this is I'm intuiting this but it's my impression that David and whomever like that there is a new version of how he does templates that is maybe perhaps somewhat closer in spirit to something like movable type where like in the sense that like there's like a sort of a meta language for doing stuff if you're doing this and mustache is a whole templating language for HTML in particular, I think. And it's all abstracted in different files. This is the head. This is the header.
This is the footer. This is entries. This is, you know, whatever it is. And you do each of those separately and then they kind of include them together. But like you don't get, like for example, some of those weird hangs and floats and stuff won't work in those older ones. And I think some of the metadata features don't work exactly the same in the old ones.
AlexInteresting. This is one that I got and modded a bit from, oh, look at that.
MerlinOh, God, this is so old school. Oh, my God. This is like a Tumblr. This is like a Tumblr theme. Oh, my God.
AlexRight? No, and that's what I immediately, like, I was, there are a lot of things on Blot that I didn't know, kind of, in the Squarespace sort of way. But, well, I mean, there's a lot of things on WordPress and everything.
MerlinBut it's a very well-done site. It's, I think, very affordable for what you get.
AlexOh, so $20 a year? Oh, my God. That's amazing.
MerlinYeah, yeah. I mean, there are going to be people from a previous age who go like, well, I feel like I should get unlimited blogs for X dollars. And it's like, well, it's $4 a blog. I think it makes a lot of sense.
AlexAre those kind of people called assholes? Who's like that?
MerlinI don't know. I don't know. But it did what I wanted. It made me happy. What was the other thing we were talking about? Yeah, I mean, one of my ideas for this was to have some kind of like something nobody asked for, which was like kind of like a little bike journal. That was around the time of the genesis of the bike log idea. but yeah I could see this being extremely handy for somebody who just like I just want to get the stuff
up but to take my point though about what you name the file does not have to have any relationship you don't have to come up with wackadoo names for stuff you can call it whatever you want but then what you have the title of that be what you that's all controlled by the metadata and it's all just text and it's all just lines and it makes me happy and my pants likes it too
Alexdid you uh take your data out and and export everything because that's that's well that's no it oh it it just gives you you you have the option to do that or yeah it just um basically mirrors your folders and if you wanted to you could just pull it out of dropbox and it's just
fucking crazy to me still that it's just all possible oh yeah just finish out one thought
Merlinthough do us i continue to congratulate this guy i think his documentation is great i think the design of this is great i think we talked about that section called notes where he just kind of thinks out loud about what he's trying to do with the site and i think it's that's very well done all that kind of stuff. I want to look at some more of these now that I've finished my, I've eaten my vegetables now I want to play with templates. And you just go to, you're going to GitHub and looking for searching for blot related
Alexthings? Yes. I think actually, you know, the new Google, I found them via Reddit, but actually does blot have a Reddit itself? I didn't even check. that should be a thing. It should. Do you have a Reddit account Merlin Mann? Do you have a... What? Do you have a Reddit account? Do you have a TikTok account?
MerlinYou made me get a fucking Reddit account for this goddamn godforsaken show. Oh, I didn't.
AlexMax made you get a Reddit account. I'm FannyBoz 69. No.
MerlinThis was right after our Scottish cursing challenge. FannyBoz 69, I think. Get that off on the roof. Yeah. It makes me happy. Now where am I going to find me some templates?
AlexI'm trying. Now I'm, did I get hit on the head and Dougie made me imagine these? Where the fuck is this?
MerlinWe'll work on this some more. We'll workshop it. But I think we need to start, or you know what? Can I just say turnabout is fair play. Maybe you start showing up at his house.
AlexI've thought about it. His business.
MerlinJust let yourself in. by which I mean knock down the door wearing a giant giant strap on dong
Alexoh absolutely
Merlinand then you say y'all ready for this and Dougie's like no I'm not ready for this could you leave please
AlexI'm gonna just take some rocks and give them a little bit of education
Merlinoh and put them on your monkey cooch
Alexyeah oh is it I'm gonna be like the monkey Louis C.K. no
MerlinMonkey, monkey, monkey. Monkey, monkey, monkey. Monkey, man.