Ep. 104: "Talismans of a Dead Age"
Hello.
Hi, John.
Hi, Merlin.
How's it going?
Good.
How are you?
I'm very well.
It's early.
Yeah.
Is this still, honestly, is this still early for you?
Yeah.
Well, I mean, yeah.
Yeah.
The thing is, I've set all the clocks in my house.
Uh, 10 minutes fast.
Like Vince Lombardi.
So I, uh, so I always am running around like, Oh God, I'm late.
So late.
Oh, Oh no.
And then, uh, then I get, you know, I get to where I'm going.
Like I sat down here thinking I was 10 minutes late for your, for your call.
And then I looked up, I was like, Oh, I'm right on time.
Oh, it worked.
Wow.
My plan worked.
Do you, Hmm.
Myself fooling.
Do you forget that they're set forward?
Oh yeah.
Yeah.
I read a biography of... Clocks don't lie.
It's a clock.
It's a clock.
It's called a clock.
I have enlisted them in my service.
It's a life hack.
I am making those clocks... I'm sure that those clocks, when they go to clock heaven, have to answer to clock St.
Peter.
LAUGHTER
For all the years that they were 10 minutes fast.
And even still they had to wait because they got there 10 minutes early.
That sounds like a bad Irish proverb.
May the clocks be 10 minutes early for your day twits.
Peter the clock, saint.
You're saying Vince Lombardi did this?
I'm trying to remember.
I've always been a fan of biographies.
When I was a little kid, I would always read biographies.
I remember reading a biography of Vince Lombardi.
I don't know if this is true.
I think it's him.
Supposedly, he set his watch forward some end number of minutes, like 10 minutes.
And I heard that.
And however the actual facts in the matter are, I started setting all of our clocks forward five minutes because I thought this is brilliant.
I'll never be late again because as it is, even today, I'm still late for everything all the time.
But you've answered the question.
The question is, it seems like you would – see, my problem is I would remember that they're five minutes.
And then I would recompensate in my lateness and it might make it even worse.
It seems to me that what you could do is –
It would be nice if they had built a purpose clock that could randomly be a certain amount fast and you wouldn't know how much.
Right?
Right.
You had to introduce a little entropy to the clock.
The problem is that with this system now is that everybody has a phone and the phone is always exactly right.
And so, but...
working in my advantage is that i lose my phone all the time so when i look so i having a phone that is always right causes me to forget that i have set the clocks in my house all wrong and i have innumerable clocks in my house partly because i collect clocks
And so I'm always looking up at the clock that's shaped like the state of Alaska or the clock that is made out of 1964 silver coins.
Or, you know, I have a microwave and an oven and they both have clocks that are right above one another.
And sometimes I will sit for a full minute with my finger on the start clock button of one of them waiting for the other one to turn so that they are exactly in sync.
Oh, my God.
John, I am sorry to say I am so glad you said that.
I don't know.
I've had the reputation, I think, at sometimes of being somebody – I think erroneously, somebody who's tightly wound.
There are a handful of things that I'm really tightly wound, if you like, about.
And one of them is it drives me nuts because we've got like a radio on top of the refrigerator, which is one of those.
It's not like a fancy Bose, but it's one of those like little like nice radios.
It's got a clock.
Yeah.
You got a clock on the microwave.
Yeah.
And it drives me crazy when they don't match.
Me too.
It feels like something's fundamentally wrong.
Something is fundamentally wrong.
And the clocks know it too.
The clocks are very upset when they're here.
Here on my desk in my private office, I've got this dingus.
It's probably 10 bucks.
It says atomic clock on it.
And this clock automatically sets itself using science.
Right, science.
Some proton is vibrating at a million miles an hour and that clock knows it.
I know you're not a scientist.
I think there are protons vibrating and somewhere there's some cadmium that's degrading.
Oh, right.
And that's GMT.
Actually, I know a guy up here that really gets off on degrading cadmium.
Jason Finn.
Ding.
Mix in blue.
Why do I say ding when I have a bell right in front of me?
I pioneered this technology.
Yeah, I don't like being that way.
The only way that would work for me, I think, is if they were all wrong.
But part of it is also, I hate to admit it, but I listen to the NPR a lot.
And that's coming off the radio, and that's a straight shot right off the radio.
It's calibrated to the time.
Yeah, with the cadmium and whatnot.
And so if it gets, if I hear... You know you're late.
And it says 459, I'm livid.
Yeah.
Well, I just had a very interesting conversation kind of on this exact topic.
This weekend, your friend of mine, Ben Acker, stayed here at my house.
Ha ha!
Oh, boy.
I bet that was funny.
It was fun because also staying here with Paul and Storm.
Paul and Storm and Ben Acker all staying at my home.
This is like the worst love boat ever.
On the little farm.
That's right.
No girls allowed.
This way I have of anthropomorphizing not just animals, but also inanimate objects.
I was telling Ben Acker about my coffee maker saga, where I had the one coffee maker that was fine.
And then I got the other coffee maker because it was going to solve all my problems, but it was a piece of shit.
And then I told you about it, and you additionally solved my problem by sending me a third coffee maker.
Sorry.
And I was like, Merry Christmas.
Now I have all these coffee makers, and I can't get rid of them because I'm not a monster.
You're a collector.
And Ben very sagely said, Do you...
mean that you're not a monster in that you don't get rid of those superfluous coffee makers because you're afraid to hurt their feelings?
And I said, yes.
What's your point?
Thank you for knowing me.
And he said, it's interesting that, and I said, do you, you know, because that's such a penetrating observation.
I said, do you feel that inanimate objects have feelings and you're afraid of hurting them?
And he said, well, no, in fact, I'm sort of the great Santini of inanimate objects.
I walk around my house yelling at them for failing to meet my expectations.
And so now I'm very curious.
I pull up a chair, even though I'm late for the podcast, but I'm not because my clocks are all 10 minutes fast.
And I say, tell me more about this.
Is he still there right now?
Yeah, he's downstairs.
And I said, tell me more about this.
And he said...
Well, I walk around the house and I'm like, God damn it, socks, where are you?
Why aren't you on my feet?
God damn it, television set, why doesn't the channel come in?
And I recognized immediately that the voice that he was using to speak to inanimate objects was the voice that a depressed person uses to talk to themselves.
The Welsh troll.
That's right.
And I said, but you never talked that way to yourself.
And he said, oh, no, I'm great with myself.
Me and myself are good together.
But he does have that voice.
He's just directing it at the dumb things.
And I immediately was playing this scenario out, like, what happens when I can't find my socks?
Yeah.
And what happens when I can't find my socks is in, in my inner monologue, I'm saying, asshole, why the, you know, why can't you find your socks?
How hard is it?
How hard is it to keep you?
You're such an idiot.
You know, you should have a system for having socks and you don't even have, you don't have a system.
And so the socks are everywhere and now you're laid and you're an idiot.
And he is saying that same thing except to the socks.
Wow.
Wow.
And he honestly, you know Ben Acker, he's not a depressed person.
Not really.
And yet he has the same voice, the same impulse.
It's just he has miraculously figured out or like been raised to or in his beautiful mind has transferred that responsibility to the dumb thing.
And I'm just reeling from it.
I think it's fantastic.
It's, it's, it's, it takes, it takes years to realize that the voice is even there.
Let's be honest.
I mean, you may, you may be aware occasionally of like feeling bad about yourself, but to really recognize that there is a Welsh troll in your head, take, it's going to take years to really finally acknowledge that and notice it when it's there and go, I know that guy, but what a move to be able to know that that voice is there and then take it as your own and directed towards socks.
Isn't that something?
That's a thought technology.
Yeah.
i really really i'm i'm looking around my room and i'm so angry at everything here now you're ready to start kicking some ass well because all this has been failing me this entire time and i thought it was my fault no and it's really all these dumb things that are not where they belong and they're not helping me the way they should and i should be bad at them i thought we i thought we had reached a point i really did it felt like even as recently as a couple years ago and i'm not gonna go into the iphone thing
But I'm just going to say, it seemed like up to, maybe in the last couple years, you could do stuff that started to seem like magic.
Like you had a phone that you could look at the internet on and it worked.
And in my case, something I don't want to go too far into because it's not super interesting, but apparently I have cable TV and didn't know it.
What?
You?
Well, yeah, we got it at some point.
And I guess I forgot to cancel it or whatever.
We got cable TV.
And then I sat down one night because my wife said, let's watch the Oscars.
And I said, that's good.
We've got cable TV, I think.
And I went and I collected all the things, all the pieces of technology that Comcast has been sending me without my asking over the years that I'm supposed to connect up.
But do you remember – I mean as recently as like a couple, three years ago, we had gotten to the point – like you and I, of course, you remember what was involved in getting the special cable back in – was it Anchorage?
Yeah, you had to crouch down and stick the parental key in the wrong – The parental key, turn your key, sir.
You had the thing on your box you could slip a piece of cardboard into to get the porno channels.
But there was always an intermediary thing, and it seemed like we got to a point where maybe even since college, on a modern setup, all you had to do was take your coaxial cable from out of the wall and plug it into your TV, and now you had TV.
You had all the TV.
You had all the TV, and that was it.
I mean, the worst thing was, I mean, figuring out are you on channel three or four, right?
And that was it, and you're done, and you don't touch it again until the TV explodes and you buy another one.
Right.
And, you know, I'm not the sharpest knife in the drawer, but I can usually figure these things.
You should see this octopus of junk that we've got.
And what I finally discovered was that one of the things that they sent us was like a converter that you would use for like, basically, it's like a tiny cable box, like the size of a box of matches.
And you use their Comcast remote to change the channels with that.
I don't know how to do this, John.
It just feels like I want to yell.
I want to yell at all the devices now.
And I fight it because I know the Welshman's in there.
I would like to think I can rise above it, and I think that's killing me.
Yeah.
No, no, no.
I believe in this new technology.
I believe in yelling at things.
The problem is that with technology –
And I will get into the iPhone thing.
Oh, my God.
Fucking God.
John, if you want to talk about the iPhone thing, I'll talk to you about the iPhone thing.
I'm so mad at them.
I got a couple of thoughts.
I'm so mad at them.
I'm so fucking mad at my iPhone right now.
Because, you know, I'm entirely dependent on it.
And yet there is still that suggestion.
And it's the false suggestion.
that's suggested by like false options.
We have four or five options and they're all false.
It's like AT&T or Verizon.
Do I get a Microsoft phone or a Google phone or an iPhone?
And
United or Delta.
Exactly.
United or Delta.
And so when the system isn't working, there's that little element of doubt in your mind that maybe you made the wrong choice.
And if you had just chosen better, if you had done more research, if you were a more moral person...
That's the whole iPhone, Microsoft thing is that the two sides argue with each other and there's always this tinge of like, you're an immoral person for having chosen the wrong operating system or the wrong corporate overlord.
And so there's always this tinge of suggestion of culpability in the fact that I am standing somewhere and my mapping program is lying to me.
And then I get a text from somebody saying, where are you?
The building's on fire.
And then the phone dies.
And then all of a sudden I'm just like covered in, I'm covered in ectoplasm.
Wow.
I mean, I've been slimed, basically, by Microsoft or by Macintosh.
And humiliated and furious.
And who am I mad at?
There's no one to direct the anger at.
And that little doubt of choice that's in there causes me to be mad at myself.
And I don't know how that is.
The other day I was downtown.
I'm with my baby.
I'm supposed to meet my baby's mama.
Wow.
I'm then supposed to meet, I'm then supposed to pick up my mom who is having some dental surgery and my phone dies.
And my phone dies not because I failed to charge it.
My phone dies because it is a piece of garbage.
Point of information, did it go, did it crash or did it go all the way down and you can't get it back up?
Can't get it back up.
So you got that thing where my wife has this.
If my wife at some point between 30 and 60 percent stops working.
Yeah, just goes... That's just the thing it does.
Fucking tits up.
And it always happens when it's like, okay, it's 5 p.m.
and I'm in downtown Seattle on a Friday afternoon.
Every single worker bee in the hive is trying to get out of the city at this exact same moment.
So there's no loading zones.
There's no place to pull over.
Just to even collect your thoughts because the whole big anthill is just gorging.
Yeah, the city requires all of your attention.
100% attention.
And my child is in the backseat doing her thing where she lists every word ever spoken by man at the top of her voice in a kind of incantation that will raise the pharaohs.
And I'm saying to her, darling, right now daddy needs just a little bit of quiet, just a moment of quiet.
Now, now, now, now.
Her response is, now?
Yeah, quiet?
You want me to stop talking?
You want talking to stop?
And I'm like, ah.
And then the phone goes from, yeah, 30% battery power, which...
I mean, I've only been out in the town a couple of hours where it had 100% before.
So it's already an instant.
Just for what it's worth, that's a three times a week thing for my wife with a two-year-old phone.
Yeah, there you go.
And my phone is just about that same age.
Oh, yeah, like a 4S.
It's a 5.
Oh, God.
And this is the thing about the choice.
Like, I was rocking a 3S.
And the 3S was rocking.
But it no longer could handle any of the new apps.
And so I had to upgrade.
And so I waited for the 5.
And I spent a whole summer with the 3 kind of like shaking, shimmering, almost not working.
And I was like, I can wait, I can wait until the five comes out.
I can wait, I can wait.
Then the five came out and the first thing they did was they fucked me with the, I had to buy all new cabling.
And then the second thing was, it's a piece of shit.
And I felt like, and then also all my friends that still have four S's are like, oh, mine still works fine.
And I'm like, oh my God, I made the wrong choice.
It's my fault somehow.
Anyway, I'm downtown, and it's like now I'm dead in the water.
I'm paralyzed.
I don't even know these people's actual phone numbers because I have become – because the thing is such a crutch now.
I used to carry a little laminated card with all of my people's phone numbers on it.
Because you're a Wes Anderson character.
And as time went on, oh my God, I still have all these cards.
As time went on, you know, I had, I have a lot of friends, right?
So I would make a double-sided card and it ended up being about a three by five card.
with microscopic little writing on filling up like sometimes three columns on both sides of this car your little like personal human information codex it's exactly right and it had all of the it had all of the key code numbers everything that i needed every pin number and the pin numbers were all disguised as like the second half of phone numbers that didn't exist that only i could read you know
All these codes and keys and people that I knew that had six different phone numbers, I would have all those arranged as subheadings and stuff.
I still have these little cards and they're my favorite little talismans of a dead age.
But now I'm standing there and I'm realizing I don't even know the phone number of my daughter's mother.
Like, I couldn't tell you what it is.
And as the camera zooms straight up,
And I turn to the heavens and go, God damn it!
You know, I am like... I'm stuck.
I'm in my own city, surrounded by my own people, and I have no ability to... This thing dies, and I am just like...
It's like my battery died.
But it's also for you, it seems like it's morally antithetical.
As a man who would like to have all knowledge available after the apocalypse to be able to recreate society, it must be galling to know that there's one little battery blip between you and all of the world's information and you can't do anything about it.
Well, it keeps me ever vigilant.
And so what happened in this situation was the backup plan was initiated.
And in our family, we have several backup plans.
The first one being in the event of a catastrophic emergency, everyone in my family knows to convene at a certain spot.
Do you drill them on it occasionally?
We are all drilled.
And that spot is our secret spot, which is also somewhat fortified against intrusion.
I think you've said enough.
And everyone knows it.
And the idea being, in the event of a true massive earthquake or massive... Electromagnetic pulse.
Some kind of EMP...
It's actually going to take me the longest to get to this place.
It is closest to the people that will have the hardest time getting there.
But we have stocked it and so forth.
And the assumption being that it's going to take me the longest to get there, but I'm the one that's most capable of journeying in a post-apocalyptic landscape.
Mm-hmm.
And presumably as I am journeying in the post-apocalyptic landscape, I will also be gathering other material.
So I'm standing in the town and I'm like, I'm supposed to get my mom from the doctor.
I don't know how in need she is.
I'm supposed to meet the baby's mother and hand the baby off.
All these things are supposed to happen and then everybody else in the story has to then go to another event.
Like this all has to happen within a compressed time frame.
And I just said, I'm going to the bunker.
I'm going to the mattresses.
And I turned the car around and I went to the rendezvous point.
And I sat there and I was like...
This is all I can think of to do.
Like, my phone battery has died, and I've gone to the apocalypse rendezvous.
Because... What else can you do?
What else can I do?
You don't have a bat signal?
You don't have, like, a pneumatic tube?
Every other option is wrong.
And so I sat there and of course, of course, the baby is like, what are we doing?
Why are we here?
Where's mama?
And I'm like, I just, I, you know what?
I still need you to be quiet.
Not because daddy needs his attention anymore, but because daddy really doesn't, daddy doesn't know what's happening now.
Daddy is covered in confusion because his one little fucking stupid brick is dead.
And, you know, the baby's just like, well, I can play with dolls.
And that's, you know, that's all the technology that she needs.
And so we're sitting there just like dummies.
I mean, I'm just sitting there like a dummy.
And then one by one, all the clan arrives.
They knew.
They were drilled.
And they walked in one after another, not mad.
Just like, oh, I figured you would be here.
This is the, like, something must have happened.
And I was like, yeah, my phone died.
And they were like, oh, right.
And everybody understood immediately that that was something, A, I was powerless about.
And B, in the event that it happens, you might as well just have...
Like, it really is an apocalypse.
And so, my mom came, the baby was collected, the projects continued, and, you know, I kind of walked back out into the daylight like, well, I guess I'm...
ah what can i do now i guess i have to go home and look at my phone there's no other like i could i guess i could go like window shopping in the town right i guess i could go walk down the street twirling my cane and looking at flower arrangements
But if I have anything else to do, if I have any other appointment or anybody else to talk to today, I've got... And the problem is, you know, at our rendezvous point, there is no iPhone 5 charger.
Oh.
Because I bought five of them, and there's one at my house, and there's one in the car, and there's one at the baby mama's house, and there's one at the... There's the iPhone 5 chargers everywhere, but there's not one at the bunker.
Oh.
That's really disquieting.
Here at my house, of course, I have all the Boy Scout manuals, all of the introduction to electronics reference guides that will allow me to recreate civilization.
Yeah.
And so the reality is I cannot store things that matter on my phone.
I have to go back and start making a laminate card.
I think you're really describing that kind of desolate existential feeling is a pretty good depiction of what a lot of
users feel like right now because the thing is you know you and i both know there is a reason for everything there's a solution for everything and so you might get a whole bunch of email after this from people going oh you can get a little adapter uh for your old charger you could always just uh you know update your laminated card you could do this you could do that you could do that but that's not the point the point is that and and this is i think where it gets tricky is that if if you are a person like me and i think
Yeah, obviously to an extent like you, you have agreed to use that device in exactly the way this company has begged you to use it.
You are not doing anything unconventional.
You are doing something extremely conventional, which is they would like you to use that as the center of your digital world, which is increasingly your world.
So you did exactly what you're supposed to do.
That's the troubling part is that there's nothing I have done to my phone.
Yeah.
There's nothing – even if I wanted to, I don't even know how to jailbreak my phone.
I could figure it out.
But the point is I bought this phone, whatever, last summer or fall whenever the 5S came out.
And it crashed three times a week.
Is it pink?
Did you get a pink one?
No, no.
That's the C for color.
Sorry.
I got the fancy one.
Is it gold?
Did you get the gold one?
I did not.
I got the least – I don't know.
I think it's kind of a thing in the Apple nerd world to have like the most low-key thing you can with no case.
That's why I have a low-key phone with no case.
But anyway, I think the bummer about what you're describing is like anybody out there – it's like I remember when our neighbors, our next-door neighbors got burglarized.
Burglarized?
Burgled.
Burgled.
When I was maybe 14.
And I remember having this very strong feeling, this impulse that everybody else on the block had, which is we stood outside while the police were there and we all whispered to each other about what they had done wrong.
Oh, wow.
Don't you think?
Yeah, sure, of course.
They left their window open.
Yeah, they really should have had the porch light on.
They should have gotten better windows, you know, da-da-da-da.
And you come up with, you whistle past the graveyard for all these reasons why somebody else, it's like, you know, Shirley Jackson's the lottery.
Like, why did that person get picked?
Well, they got picked because that's how the lottery works.
That's right.
And you come up with all these reasons.
So anybody out there who's listening to this could be very unsympathetic because their thing works today.
But the thing is, the part about it that I feel like I sound like you.
I understand.
I understand that there are ways.
I know I could probably take it to the Apple Genius and have them give me a new phone.
No, but the Apple Genius is going to tell me that one time I had the phone in the bathroom with me while I was showering.
Yeah.
The chili sensor went off.
That's right.
The amount of water that somehow got in there is enough to... But you know what I mean?
In other words, we sound crazy when one sounds crazy in this situation because you're concatenating all these different frustrations that all have a perfectly valid reason for being the way that they are.
You know, physics is complicated.
Engineering is hard.
I understand all of these things.
It's just that we finally got to a point where I was okay in trusting...
Things like, in this case, what, you got your calendar, you got your communication device, you know, all the ways that we could communicate with other people on the go, I've entrusted to that thing.
And when it does what happened with you, we do, the troll ends up yelling at us.
Like, what did we do wrong in that case?
Well, in particular, when, you know, Seattle is a Microsoft town, and so there are a lot of people walking around now with these phones that are the size of like a...
terabyte uh like hard drive if you see phones i think if you see phones or phablets as we like to call them if you see giant ass phones that look like something a cocktail waitress would use it's probably a samsung running android yeah right it looks like something that you would be handed at a museum to walk around and and get a guided tour of the art or to paddle a boat it's the size of a vintage distortion box
the samsung big muff yeah exactly it's the super fuzz samsung and it uh it you know it glows with this like almost television like glow yeah and so people are manipulating these things in public places and it's this giant like wow it's very impressive uh
just to see kind of out of the corner of your eye.
It is.
It does feel like the future.
I'd like to thank the lady at the Muppet movie yesterday for illuminating the entire fucking theater while she looked at her Facebook for the first 20 minutes of the movie.
Oh, I just want... You know, those are situations... Full brightness, John.
...where I want to carry around a completely operable fire hose with, like, a giant fire truck outside full of water where I could just, like, hit somebody like that with just a...
It's just like a riot control level of fire.
You think a fire engine stops working at 30% power?
No, hell no.
A fire engine's going to go down to the last drop.
Sorry about the fire.
It's a bug.
We hope to fix it in the next month or so.
You know what I mean?
That 777 flew all the way down into the Indian Ocean because it still had some gas.
I've been kind of avoiding that, but I do want to talk to you about that.
Everybody on the plane was probably dead for hours, but the plane keeps flying.
Let me put a little bit of sriracha on this rice.
My wife and I employ – for a long time, when you got a person, you got a kid and you got stuff, we like to know where each other are.
It's kind of creepy but kind of cool and there's an Apple – there's an app on the iPhone you can use where you can allow people to see your location and you can allow them to see yours.
And in theory, it works really well.
So you don't have to constantly say, hey, how's it going?
Are you almost home?
Yeah.
I can see.
I can watch my wife on the bus going through the mission.
I can see.
And so that's great.
And we've consented to do that.
And we've kind of both said to each other, hey, if you ever just want to go disappear, that's fine.
But at the same time, knowing what happens with my wife's phone, I'm not compulsive about it, but I'll go like, oh, she's still at her exercise class.
Could I get home and do the dishes before she gets home or whatever?
Yeah.
and and the thing is though what happens when your phone dies in that case when her phone dies she's no longer seeable number one okay so that's important now i've relied on this as a way to know where my wife is maybe bad on me because i'm a dummy the point is though think about the cascade of events when that happens my wife was running home
Through the mission.
And suddenly, her location is not available.
Now, I know.
I know.
That's probably because her phone sucks.
Oh, no, no, no.
This is the beginning of a Liam Neeson movie.
This is The Taken.
Is that right?
Should I see that?
Is that a good movie?
No, I have never seen it.
But I can't imagine it's good.
It has to be terrible.
But, you know, if you're like me, you always assume the worst conceivable thing has always happened.
Absolutely.
Someone in a panel van has pulled up.
Right.
She's already probably making phones in China or something.
She's been bundled off.
She's crossing into Tijuana in a 50-gallon drum.
sure she's gonna she's gonna play in a mariachi band for a drug lord and but but you know you got anyway not to belabor it but i mean you start to rely on that to just kind of go blip and and if you see like oh you know this person has moved in a while or whatever in this case now i also because her phone died i have no way to contact her so that anxiety multiplies for me and i maybe that's silly you know that's dumb and of course she gets home you know 45 minutes later goes oh my phone died
No, I don't think it is dumb.
Without getting too conspiratorial, the fact that we are now living in a state of constant anxiety is not bad for our corporate overlords.
This is the moment where we veer off into the socialist workers.
You're drinking emotional salt water, though.
Oh, yeah, I can understand why you're upset.
Here's the fix for that.
yeah right right and that's the and that's the that's the tech response but the tech response is always yeah it's always like oh buy an app or buy a buy an additional battery pack or buy a adapter or wait six months and we'll mostly kind of fix this problem but but in fact i am now i have a as a fully grown adult i now am tethered to a thing and this was this was my complaint
When the Walkman first came out in 1980, and I know you remember this moment, the Walkman arrived on the scene.
And at first, it was inconceivable that that much technology, the entire technology of a stereo system, had been reduced to the size of a paperback book.
Yeah.
For what you would think you would pay for a crappy stereo, you could now have on your belt.
You could wear it on your goddamn belt.
Listen to anything you want, anytime you want.
Anytime you want it.
And all around the city of Anchorage...
All the cool kids had Walkmans instantly.
And I remember being just in awe of this new capability.
And everyone was.
I mean, the entire world was just like, you mean I can just walk around listening to my tapes?
And so I couldn't afford a Walkman.
Because it was $100 or something, which was a lot of money.
Even though it wasn't that much money.
And I don't even think it was $100.
But whatever amount it was, it was more than I was prepared to spend.
It was definitely out of my reach.
But I was actually at the arcade playing elevator action one afternoon.
I guess this was probably pre-elevator action.
But I was at the video game arcade...
And I walked past a store and they had a knockoff Walkman for sale that included, in addition to a tape machine, an AM FM radio.
Wow.
Which really appealed to me because, of course, you could be listening to, you could be, in the event of an emergency, you could tune to the emergency channel.
And if you got tired of your tapes or whatever, you could listen to the FM K-Whale 107.7.
K-Whale.
K-Whale.
Uh, and so I, and the thing was, it was like, it was 15 or $20 new in the window of this place.
And for whatever reason, at that point, I had that much money in my little Velcro wallet.
And I walked into this place and I was so astonished.
As I handed the money over and they handed me this new product that I was making this adult transaction, I was buying into the future right now.
This technology was so transformative and it had already gone through Maslow's seven stages of technology and there was a cheaper knockoff that was better.
It was happening so fast, and I bought this thing, and I didn't have a tape with me, but I had the radio, and I clipped it on my belt like you were supposed to do, put the headphones on, and I'm walking down the street listening to the radio, and it's like my black and white world went into Technicolor.
Yeah.
i'm listening to music as i'm walking down the street hello are you ready for the future hands free you're not holding a radio i'm not i'm just walking like arms swinging and i'm listening to uh uriah heap and it's and and i i had never had my own life soundtracked before and
And now I'm realizing that I am living a dramatic life too.
Like my progress walking down Fireweed Boulevard in Anchorage is now cinematic.
Because as I jump off the, you know, as I jump off the sidewalk into the street, into the muddy street, I have a big guitar part to emphasize it.
And I was so thrilled.
And for...
a week or whatever i walked around with this thing just like it never got old it was tremendous and then the batteries died and i was like whatever it costs i went to the grocery store and i realized what batteries cost
which at the time was, just as they are now, pretty exorbitant relative to the cost of the device itself.
And if you were using that thing and fast-forwarding and rewinding, you would really go through them.
Well, and that's the thing.
So I started using tapes instead of... Once I got home, I had started using tapes instead of
instead of listening to the radio.
And I think I had run out of batteries and replaced them with some batteries we had in the house and had run through those batteries.
And now I was responsible for buying my own batteries to put into the machine.
And when I saw the price of batteries and I reflected on how quickly I had run through two sets of batteries, I realized, oh my God, this technology is amazing.
This is basically just a battery-using device.
The reason that this thing was $14 at 21... It's a cipher.
Yeah.
This is a loss leader for battery companies.
And I'm sure that whatever the company is that made this machine for so cheap, they're just a front company for EverReady.
I don't even know if they still make Ever Ready batteries.
It has a little cat on it, right?
Yeah, a little black cat.
I like that cat.
But I think I might have, in that moment, still been so enraptured by this technology that I was like, I will buy $5 worth of batteries for my $15 tape machine.
And by the time those batteries ran out again...
And the feeling of betrayal or the feeling of having been roped into a kind of thing where they are giving me this wonderful experience and all I need to do is just start directing people.
a constant stream of my resources toward them and they will just pirate my resources.
And in return, they will give me this, this like drug like transformation that I can have music with me all the time.
And realizing that that was the transaction, and that if I mentally acquiesced to this, that I had basically handcuffed myself to, you know, not just to the device, but to the whole support system, and I would never be free.
And I put my Walkman on the shelf.
I put my dead battery Walkman on the shelf and I was like, I can live without that.
I can live without it because I can't, because it is to the degree to which I am like mourning the loss of a constant soundtrack.
Um,
I cannot sell my soul that cheaply.
And I feel that I have felt that way about every new technology just as just as I and it took me many years to retroactively connect my experience as a drug user to that experience of just like, yes, the drug does this amazing thing.
But you are handcuffing yourself to it and to that whole complex relationship of like, these are my resources I am giving away in order to have this, and the trade is never worth it.
But now at 45 years old, they finally got me with this goddamn phone.
And I am 100% tied now to this machine and all the support network and all of the, you know, and the promise.
I remember...
Sitting in your kitchen and you describing for me that right over the horizon, there was going to be a time when your phone and your computer were synced.
And your calendar on your computer and your photographs and all the things that were on your computer were also going to be on your phone and they would talk to each other.
And I was like, what?
This is back when phones had two sides.
And even then, that particular dream would involve lots of cables and third-party software.
But still, the fact that you could even conceptually take the world of your desk...
And, and bring it with you when you go somewhere like on a trip was completely mind boggling.
Yeah.
And you were, you were describing it and you were like, this is, this is not a fantasy.
This is happening.
And I was just like, and I think I spent a year or two then like, I'm not going to upgrade my phone.
I'm going to wait until the phone comes out that can talk to my computer.
But with every step of this, you know, this tying together of things, it's just like, well, now I need to upgrade my other thing.
And now I need to buy the other upgrade.
And now I'm just like the octopus of the octopus of like half agreed to.
End user agreements.
You know, unread end user agreements.
It's just slowly, it's like a creeping vine that is slowly squeezing the life out of me.
It was only a few hundred dollars to get started.
My kids are so right.
It's all a loss leader.
And I feel like now it's not the battery companies.
It's a loss leader for the Illuminati.
laughter
So sad.
Oh, man.
I had – I used to try and read the agreements.
No.
Well, you know, there's a time when they were a little more modest.
They come in a booklet and you can flip through and see the headings on my little set top.
box called a Roku which is like an Apple TV and there was some kind of an update in the software and I said there's been a change in the terms read this and click to agree and of course they conveniently have a I have read and agreed to this but then I noticed what was on screen was page screen one of I think it was 106 I would have had to read 106 screens
To read the entire agreement.
Let me just, I got my red line version here.
I just had a couple quick questions about force majeure.
Before I agree to this, I'd love to talk to somebody from tech support.
I wonder if you had a chance to look at my corrections.
No, no, no, no, no, really.
It's like, are you ready to put your hand into the machine, yes or no?
That's exactly right.
Are you ready to put your hand into the stump?
And if you put your hand in and pull it back out.
It's covered with bees.
And if not, if it stings you, then I guess you die.
And then, yeah, then you don't join the clan of the bird men.
Merlin, what can I say?
No.
No, I know, I know.
And, you know, here's the thing.
If it were like, say, for example, this will not mean a huge amount to you because you weren't as into this stuff then, but if this were 1999, in 1999, there were all these layers of hacks that enabled certain interesting things to happen.
Like in 1999, you could have a modem at your house that would let you use your
telephone system to get on the internet which is pretty hacky but it worked i mean if you think about it i mean that's a pretty unconventional thing to do in a home the kind of thing where 10 years earlier you would have sounded like the weirdest person in the world to say no i'm sorry i can't take calls for four hours a day because i'm using this device to let my computer connect to a network you would seem so strange you would sound you would seem like a guy that had a uh tandy sweatshirt
Right.
And so, but that was a hack and that worked.
I think about stuff like the MP3 devices, you know, for listening like to MP3s.
And it was a pretty great thing that, you know, you could hack together this system for getting your CDs into MP3s.
And if you're a little more gray hat, you could go get them for free off of the internet and you could connect this wire up.
And if you had this extra software, you'd be able to connect it and do this.
But it was really like a series of hacks.
So I really felt like all along the way, when that all worked...
And you can even take that a few years forward to the early days of like PDA syncing where, you know, anytime I wanted to sync my Palm Pilot with my Mac, you had to put it in the cradle.
You had to do this.
There's all kinds of stuff, as you know, over the years, even as a recent Mac user, you know that as a computer user, there's constantly stuff where you got to go, oh, I probably got to go delete this file and try it again.
That kind of thing happens.
And you live with that, right?
Because you go like, okay, this is something where like this really kind of feels, this feels a little magical that I'm able to do this.
I'll put up with some stuff to do it.
uh so anyway what i'm trying to get is that the irony is that like back then when stuff didn't work right or you ended up with five copies of the same contact you kind of write it down to the hackiness of it and saying like well you know this this uh they really developed this system for windows first and there's this whack-a-doodle third-party software they put together so it even works at all on a mac so i should just be grateful yeah it's still bicycle powered
Yeah, and I really don't – I don't mean this as a huge indictment, but it is a statement of fact that I think lines up with what you're saying, which is it is weird that we've gotten to a point where we've gotten okay with pouring a really –
I know compared to a Walkman, it's pretty amazing what you can do with an iPhone, but still, they're not cheap to go out and buy these devices.
It's not cheap to buy apps for them.
In my case, it has not been cheap to go cock deep in the Apple ecosystem for things like I bought over 100 movies on iTunes that I can only watch on those devices.
Because they're stored in the cloud.
Well, yeah, I could also download them and do magic with them.
That's a little bit gray hat.
But, you know, the point is I have gotten into that because it – I guess what I'm trying to say is it used to be that you had to be a hobbyist in order to make any of that stuff work.
Same way that if you wanted a nice hi-fi in the 50s, you had to be willing to go get a kit and put it together.
Yeah.
If you wanted to have a home computer, quote unquote, in the 70s for a long time, you would have to go as a hobbyist and go make that thing yourself.
And so you learned a lot about it.
Maybe you're not like an IBM engineer, but you could put it together.
I bet your mom could have put together a computer pretty good in the early to mid-70s.
Oh, yeah.
But I'm getting to the obvious irony here, which is that there's one company that's putting all of that – that's organizing all of that and integrating all of that for us.
And for the last – for like five or six years, it really felt like, man, what a solid, amazing device this is.
I mean they really hit it out of the park.
The battery life is so long.
It looks so much better than all the other things.
It really is.
The iPhone is the industry leader in half a dozen ways with these kinds of devices.
And what made it great, not to go too techie here, but what made it great was the total integration.
It was Apple's software.
running on Apple's firmware, on Apple's hardware, with Apple's manufacturing and QA and QC.
And it was just the fact that we were able to hand over that money and trust to them.
Give me the Nikes, get me the tracksuit, and I will cut my penis off and go with Apple...
Behind the Hale Bob Comet.
I am a member.
Yeah, right.
But didn't – I mean I know you've sometimes – like a lot of people struggle with devices.
But I have to say that up until a couple years ago, it all felt pretty solid.
And around the time that they introduced – I don't know if you –
But around the time they – whenever they introduced Wi-Fi syncing to iOS devices to where you could have syncing between your computer and your iPhone without having to hook it up, that I think – that felt like the singularity.
At that point, it really felt like we had gotten to a point of magic.
You can update apps and whatnot.
I know it all comes at different times, but it's just really – maybe it's me because that's the Welsh troll.
The Welsh troll says maybe it's me that now today I have so much less confidence in a basic thing, the most basic thing, which is that when I turn this on, I'm going to quickly be able to do a thing that used to seem kind of simple.
And I just feel like my confidence in picking that thing up and knowing that everything's going to go okay has dropped probably 30% in the last two years.
And again, you can come up with a reason for why every single thing, including pilot error, nut behind the keyboard, whatever you want to call it.
But all I know is that at least 25% or more of my confidence level has dropped.
As my Apple TV can't get to iTunes because it's, quote, currently unavailable, where suddenly my wife's phone dies at 30% power.
I know there's a reason for all of those, but maybe it's just because I use it more that I notice it now.
But that confidence is not where it used to be.
And there was a time when I could have said, well, maybe this didn't work because of my Apple computer.
Maybe it didn't work because of my Hayes modem.
Maybe it didn't work because of this really cheap cord that I got to go between them.
Maybe it's because my local service provider for the internet is oversold and is dropping connections because the call quality is not good.
Who knows why?
But I could find half a dozen reasons why it just didn't work.
And now today –
It's hard not to kind of point a finger a little bit and say, guys, this is all stuff that you have chosen to take control of and give me no way of getting my hands around.
Right.
I can't go see what's inside the apps.
I can't go debug what's going on with this.
I could look at this console log and try to figure out what all this stuff means.
You can't even tell what currently unavailable means.
Right.
You know what currently unavailable means to me?
A guy who went to college and has worked on computers full-time since 1989.
For me, that means I turn off two power strips, count to ten, sing the bridge from September Girls by Big Star, and then I turn it back on.
Right.
And then 85% of the time it works.
Yep.
Well, for me, the – like, for instance, I was thinking about this the other day.
I have been using my calendar as a diary.
Right.
for as long as I've had an iPhone calendar.
And before that, I went into my calendar in my computer, even as long ago as 10 years ago,
Right.
And I didn't quite understand how to use the different colors of like, well, this is a work thing and this is a home thing.
So a lot of the old stuff that I put in there, like the day I lost my front tooth for the first time.
March 17th, 1977.
That day I lost my front tooth for the first time.
The day, you know, the day that Kelly started going out with David Brust and ruined my teenage life.
She took a chunk out of you, John.
She really did.
You know, I put all those dates into my calendar because my whole life I've been, you know, like 1980 is this great cutoff because 1980 obviously is a nice round number.
It was the year that Reagan was elected to the presidency.
It was the year that I graduated from sixth grade in the spring of 1980 and started seventh grade in the fall of 1980.
Wow.
So, 1980, in the cosmology of my, in the mapping of time in my own mind, 1980 is a corner.
I don't know if you map things.
I absolutely do.
Map time in your mind.
Oh, yeah.
Always have.
But it's a corner, and it's also kind of a rounded corner, but it's a very prominent little, well, really promenatory.
in my uh in the geography of time in my mind 1980 and so if i'm like well what year was i what year what day was the day when i'd i start at 1980 and i go right 80 81 81 82 seventh and eighth grade then i started high school in the fall of 82 and from there i can count this way or that and figure out what the dates are anyway all that stuff is in my calendar and and for the last five years
I've also been adding every little dumb thing I do so that if I find a receipt in a box and I'm like, wait a minute, when was I ever in Indianapolis?
When did I ever go to a sushi restaurant in Indianapolis?
That violates five core rules.
Never get seafood in an inland state.
You know, never, ever get sushi in Indianapolis.
Never eat out in Indiana.
How did I... Where did this receipt come from?
I go in, I scroll back in my calendar, and I'm like, oh, right.
I was with Joe Pernice, and we got a flat tire that day, and we didn't actually get sushi at that place.
It was a sushi taco restaurant, and we got tacos on the taco side or whatever.
But all of that information...
The value of which vastly exceeds its useful value.
It is emotional value to me.
It is biographical value.
I could probably reproduce a lot of the big dates, but I'm never, ever, ever going to remember I was in Indianapolis with Joe Pernice in June of 2002 or whatever.
That is all stored now in the cloud.
The cloud.
It's stored in the cloud.
And I do not believe in the cloud.
I do not trust the cloud.
I think the cloud is a giant fucking ripoff.
And the cloud is just a system by which these companies are jostling with one another to charge us fees.
Okay.
to charge us access fees to the cloud.
And I will put all of this information into my system.
They will migrate it to the cloud.
And then one day, they're going to slam a door shut and go, oh, do you want that stuff that's in the cloud?
Well, you have to pay the cloud access fee.
And I'm going to say, what?
No, you didn't do that for me.
You didn't put that there for me.
I put it into my things.
I did a ton of work to organize my life.
And I never asked it to be in the cloud.
You just put it there and now you're charging me to get it.
And fuck you forever a thousand million times.
Because that information...
I should have just written down in a book and would have at any time up until just recently and would have carried that book with me as I did with paper calendars.
And now I'm not, you know, so, so I have, it's again, it's like now I am buying ever ready stock basically.
And I'm just hoping that the cloud survives because I know that it's an interim idea.
And I know that eventually there will be no hard drive.
and it will all be stored, it will all be encoded into, um, into, like, millennia computer, or whatever, like, uh, uh, what am I trying to say?
Not, not phantom computers, but, um, um,
Like one big god computer?
Like a god computer.
I'm thinking of... What movie are you trying to reference?
I'm thinking of... It's quantum computers.
Oh, sure.
Made of quanta.
Yeah, made of quanta, where it's the... Schrodenberger's cat is alive or dead, and that is how my calendar is saved.
Yeah.
in the computer i wish you'd write the spec for that goddamn schrodenberger's cat you can't count on that is he alive or dead i don't know and i can't access my cloud he might be in that's exactly it i can't even tell if he's alive i think he might be in the cloud i'm not sure he's in the cloud what about your photos you feel great about your photos on your phone if you lost your phone if you lost your phone do you know where you go to get your photos
Well, here's what happened.
So we were on the Oregon coast around Christmas, and I'm out there, and we're out on the mud flat.
You know, the Oregon coast is this fantastic place.
It's really one of the great places in the world.
And what's wonderful about it is that the beaches are very, very flat and shallow.
So when the tide goes out, the tide goes way out.
And it goes, and then it keeps going.
So you can stand on the beach at the point where high tide is, and when the tide is fully out, you can see the surf in the very distant, the shimmering distance.
Wow.
So you have this fantastic wet, flat...
Sand.
Stretching to infinity.
And so we're out on the sand.
And my daughter and I are out there.
Walking around.
And we're looking at little crabs.
And poking in the.
Seeing where the little clams are spurting.
And we're having a good time.
But.
One of the other factors.
Of the Oregon coast is.
When the tide is all the way out.
Every hundredth wave.
Is a rogue wave.
And if your beach is a mile wide and super flat and an outsized wave comes, it can travel hundreds of yards.
Wow.
Hundreds of yards further than what you are assuming is the tideline at any given moment.
So she and I are out walking on the beach, looking and poking it at crabs and going like, oh, look at this.
And she's like, oh, wow.
And I'm filming her.
walking on the beach and all of a sudden I look up and here comes a two foot wave and I've got the camera pointed at her and I see this thing and she looks up and sees this wave and I'm 15 feet from her at this point and I go run knowing that she's two and a half
Cannot outrun the wave.
Does not even understand.
With that command from Daddy, might just run toward the wave.
And she takes a step to the left, takes a step to the right, and the wave hits her.
And this is...
This is New Year's.
It's not a warm wave.
And she goes, as you can imagine, like apeshit.
And she tries to keep her feet.
And, you know, one second, two second, three seconds, she's fighting.
She mentioned she's two.
She's two and a half.
She's fighting the wave.
And Daddy is like, holy shit, and trying to get to her.
And just as I arrive...
At her, she goes down into the water.
And I have this daddy moment where I'm like, I've just lost my daughter to Poseidon.
Hmm.
And I grab her out of the froth.
And she... The look on her face is tremendous.
And she is berserk.
And I am berserk with panic.
And of course, all the womenfolk who are part of my tribe, who have the good sense not to be anywhere near the inner tidal zone, are standing up on the dry sand, shrieking.
And I'm like, I gotcha.
I gotcha.
We're fine.
We're fine.
And she's like kicking and going crazy.
And I carry her up the beach.
And then the other last salient feature of the Oregon coast is that there are sand dunes.
where we were staying.
There are sand dunes that are maybe a quarter of a mile that we have to traverse to get back to the town.
So I'm carrying this very wet, very cold, very angry child.
uh, you know, and I put her inside my coat and I'm the whole time I'm talking to her like, it's okay.
You're fine.
That that's sometimes the waves.
This is the thing about the ocean.
The ocean is wonderful, but sometimes the waves are unpredictable and daddy really failed to protect you from that wave.
But,
It's also good to remember, the sea cannot be trusted.
Do not ever put your faith in the sea.
You learned two valuable lessons about trust today.
Don't trust daddy and don't trust the sea.
Listen, don't trust anything.
But you can trust me now that I'm going to get you home and into the bath.
Well, six months later, I'm going through my photos and I realize...
that I was filming her when she was hit by that wave.
And then I immediately threw my phone in the big pocket of my parka, but it was still running.
Wow.
And so there is a film of, you know, my baby walking down the beach, me talking to her, we're talking about crabs, and then, oh, shit!
uh rogue wave baby gets hit with rogue wave and phone immediately goes dark as it goes into my pocket but then there's an hour and a half of audio of me saying it's all right don't trust the sea and don't trust daddy but you have to trust daddy this is the paradox of life and really we depend on the sea
I know you're not going to understand this for a while.
But you must have had adrenaline pumping the whole time yourself.
Well, but partly I am calming my adrenaline by explaining to my daughter that the world is full of rogue waves.
And, you know, and you hear the kind of corduroy of my wet pants as I'm walking through the dunes.
Blork, blork, blork, blork, blork.
Carrying this like, and you can hear her screaming and then you hear her calm down and you hear her listening to the story of the sea and what just happened and so forth.
And so I have all this, I have this movie that's an hour and a half long.
which iTunes refuses to import into my computer because it's too long.
And so I go to the editing function, like the trim function on the photo app, and I say, well, I can trim off the last...
I can trim off the last hour of this or whatever because it's just audio sitting in a wet coat hanging on a peg while basically the women folks sit in the kitchen and talk about what a bad father I am.
And the trim function says it requires too much memory to trim this movie.
So you cannot trim it.
I'm like, all right, you won't import it, but you won't let me edit it.
And the key bit, you know, the key first 10 minutes of this is something I would like to keep, quite frankly.
I would like to keep this video of her getting hit by the wave because this story is going to come up again.
But I cannot.
I cannot import.
I can't get it off my phone.
And I can't edit it to get it off my phone.
And I honestly don't know what to do.
It's just sitting there.
It's not gone.
This is the thing.
It's not gone yet.
But my presumption is one day something will go and then it'll just be like lost forever.
It's like an astronaut on the moon where we're pretty sure they're still alive, but we don't have a way to get to them.
That's right.
That's right.
You're just waiting for the oxygen to run out.
Oh, my God.
And, you know, what are my options?
I'm sure that Syracusa is going to write me an angry letter saying that's not how you pronounce my name.