Ep. 242: "Mr. Jingle-Jangle"
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Hello.
Hi, John.
Hi, Merlin.
How's it going?
Oh, super duper.
Mmm.
I have to tell you something at the outset.
Oh, yeah, let's hear it.
I have an important public service announcement for you.
This never happens.
Yeah.
So if I edited this show, I would cut this out.
But five or so days ago, my Mac started suddenly dying.
Like as in it was the equivalent of like basically if you just pulled out the plug, it would just die.
Oh, wow.
Yeah.
Which is, as we say in the woke Twitter community, it's problematic.
Is that a bug or a feature?
Yeah, sure.
Well, here's the thing.
Long story short, I'm pretty sure it's probably the power supply for a variety of reasons, including that it takes about five days to get an appointment to drop your Mac off to be looked at.
I've been doing lots of crazy monkey stuff trying to figure if I can troubleshoot it myself.
I think I've...
This is real medieval stuff.
Basically, I've tried unplugging everything.
I've reset everything.
I've done many, many things.
And it appears so far that... You're a computer guy.
Well, I used to be, sure.
It appears that as long as I don't use a certain keyboard, it stays up for at least 36 hours.
Okay.
Here's the thing.
I love our relationship.
I think it's a strong relationship.
But if for some reason I suddenly stop talking and go away...
It might be because the iMac wanted to have a little nap.
I understand.
We get sleepy, you get sleepy, you know.
Yeah, it does.
I've had it for over a year.
It's a pretty tired machine.
I have a couple of questions.
Yes, you there.
Is this a technical question?
Well, a couple.
I mean, for question number one,
When I first met you, you had a lot of computers.
Yeah, yeah.
You had a computer over here.
You had a computer over there.
You had a computer over here.
You had one under the desk.
You had the Fakak to Arab.
Right.
How many computers are you like... When you say my computer, are you down to a computer?
That's a very, very good question.
Yeah, you met me at a time when I had, I believe...
When we first started hanging out, when we had our important last weekend where you, me, and Sean made the Long Winners website, it was I had my desktop Mac, which I think at that point was still my big blue and white G3 Yosemite.
I had a Windows PC on a Plank that I was using to do cold fusion development.
And I probably was, yes, I was definitely still using my PowerBook from the late 90s.
Wasn't there a computer running in the background doing SETI research?
Mm-hmm.
Oh, yeah, it's still looking.
Yeah.
I think the thing is when you and I first met... Mm-hmm.
When we first... When we first... You know, you can cut this out.
No.
But I think...
your main computer was a pc and you had just recently purchased an apple that you were experimenting with that is an impression that is very understandable um uh no actually i've been using a mac since 1987 it's how i learned how to use a computer and my first job b job and i you know i eventually got a mac
in college, one of the lower-end Mac SE with floppy drives.
Did you learn on an Apple IIe?
No.
No, I hated computers.
Hated computers.
I somewhat famously, in the mythology, dropped music theory when I was a senior and moved into a stage band to play guitar.
I hated it.
I didn't understand BASIC.
I thought it was stupid.
But no, the thing was, I had my total amount of time until about 2008,
One, my total amount of time ever on a PC would probably be less than two hours ever.
Oh, wow.
But this long story is a boring story, but basically there's this development environment that was much easier to do on a PC.
So my boss gave me a janky-ass five-year-old PC to do this on.
Oh, I see, I see.
But, you know, here's the thing that's really changed is you used to really have to have a computer because that's where your stuff lived.
And, you know, it was where everything you think of, like obviously your files and your applications.
You know, if you wanted to have another copy of Word on another computer, you bought another copy of Word and you moved around with a floppy disk or eventually network drives.
Sure.
No, I mean, we make jokes about the cloud, but honestly, it's amazing how much stuff I can do on any device.
And that's actually, I think, we kid, but I think that stuff actually has gotten, on Apple's end, has gotten a lot better.
The dying iMac, it's probably my fault.
I'm probably using it wrong.
I'm probably holding it wrong.
Okay, now here's another question.
Yes.
About your hygiene, computer hygiene.
Do you just leave it on all the time or do you turn it off?
I do.
There was a time when it was believed.
There's so many things that are just based on... You ever heard... This is an old story I heard from John Syracuse.
You ever heard the old story about cutting the ends off the roast?
Um...
The story goes that someone in the house is preparing a roast, and they cut the ends off the roast.
I like this story already.
No, don't cut the ends off the roast.
Well, you cut the ends off the roast.
And then the other person, the younger person, perhaps the child, says, you know, hey, why do you cut the ends off the roast?
And they say, I cut the ends off the roast because my mom cut the ends off the roast.
And you go, it's ends of the roast all the way down.
And so you eventually discover...
The original roast cutter did it because they only had a small pan and would make it fit in there.
Oh, see.
Isn't that a good story?
See, that's a good story.
It's a good story.
There's all kinds of cutting the ends off the roast things that computer users have done for years that don't even really make that sense.
I mean, how many times have you been somewhere and you see people in line, if they're not playing a Facebook game or something, they're quitting apps?
You don't need to quit apps on your phone.
But people think that's a thing you should do.
You don't have to do that.
You don't have to do that.
You got a pan big enough to hold the roast.
Yes, the pan has gotten bigger.
And so one of the pieces of conventional wisdom back in my day was you should turn off the computer at night.
It saves energy.
It increases the lifetime of the computer.
And then, of course, you get, as we call it in the business, it turns out, where people say, no, actually, it takes more energy and wear on the computer to restart.
And I don't know if any of it was true, but they're so energy efficient today, and they do so much in the background that I think it just pays to leave them on.
Yeah, well, I mean, you know, what did they say?
That it...
It ends up using more energy to wash your hands than it does just to cure meningitis.
Oh, my goodness.
Is that recent scholarship, John?
Yeah, I think it is.
I had no idea.
Meningitis is a big problem.
It really is, and it comes from not washing your hands.
Oh, my goodness.
I've gone through a whole renaissance of washing my hands again.
I'm back on the hand washing.
Oh, good, good, good.
No, I never left it.
Really?
Okay.
See, I feel like this is something where you peg people as OCD, but like once you've had a kid, and like in our case, we were so freaked out.
We had several, I don't know if you remember, we had several hand sanitizers stationed around the house for when people would arrive.
But, you know, I feel like, this is anecdotal, this might be cutting the ends off the roast, but my kid went to a preschool where washing hands was part of everything.
They always were washing hands.
And she got a lot fewer colds.
Now today, you go on a field trip, the kids have been touching trees and railings like monsters, and they just shove a sandwich in their gaping maw.
Ugh, God, you know, you get that Dutch elm disease from that.
Is that what happens?
Yeah.
Which is worse?
Is that or meningitis is worse?
You touch a tree, you cram a sandwich into your mouth with your tree gummy hands, you get Dutch elm disease right away.
I think that's way worse than meningitis.
It sounds terrible, or like that zombie ant thing.
You get a tree beetle infestation.
Are there instances that you can think of in your own life that you have cut the ends off the roast?
Oh, yeah.
Yeah.
A lot?
Yeah, yeah.
There's tons of stuff in technology.
And there's just tons of stuff like, you know, I guess the word would be superstition.
That's too strong a word.
But it's something where, like, there's this thing we do.
Okay, how about this?
Do you, well, you probably do this with your truck, but warming the car up.
It used to be.
Oh, I sure do it.
Yeah.
it is the bane of everyone in my family because we get out of the truck started up and then we sit there for 18 minutes and everyone's like let's go right well and you hear it you hear it in our language today like you say well i take the car in for a tune-up well you probably don't need to take your car you do but like you don't need to take most cars in for a tune-up because there's nothing to tune up in the conventional sense right
That's right.
How often do you say, like, so, like, you're going to watch a show, do you still say, like, I'm going to tape that show?
Uh, no.
Because you don't tape things.
I don't tape things.
But, or like, you know, you might say you're going to tape something when you're shooting a video on your phone.
Some people will still say that.
Oh, well, I just say I'm working on a record.
Yeah, how many grams of vinyl?
I loved your new record.
You know, I heard like one track on an email.
In music all the time, I mean, I catch myself...
Uh, doing things, patterns that I learned in the very earliest days of picking up the guitar, the, the little boxes and shapes that I learned that I should have unlearned a thousand years ago.
I sent a, I sent an email the other day.
I'm sorry, a text.
I started a text thread and
That included Ted Leo, Amy Mann, Jonathan Colton, a couple other guitar playing ding-a-lings.
And I said, Jim Boja, a couple of these people.
And I said, how do you fret a G chord?
How do you make a G chord?
Mm-hmm.
Open G. Just an open G chord.
In some senses the simplest chord.
Open G. My favorite chord.
And of the seven people on the thread, I got back seven answers.
What?
All different.
And it started a huge argument between...
Between all these accomplished guitar players who have been playing guitar for 30 years in most cases, and they're all like, you play a G chord like that?
You know me and the D chord, where I play it backwards.
G chord seems like a non-controversial chord, where the main thing is, do you include the extra B, C, D?
Do you include the extra D?
on the b string that that was one of the things one of the the major bones of contention uh i think you do you do don't you i do as a as a diddle but i don't i don't as a twang yeah like i think ted plays the d in the g every time oh interesting i would have guessed he does i would see him doing more like a power chord
Well, yeah, except he's, you know... The G and the D on the E and A string.
He's Mr. Jingle Jangle.
Yeah, that's true.
Yeah, I guess.
But, like, I always play the low G. I always fret the E string on the G in my C chords.
Oh, I know.
I learned that from you, and I never look back.
Yeah, I've never played a C without... Changes everything.
But, so, G chord.
And the reason I asked it, the reason I sent it out there was I was playing my G...
as I do.
And I, and I became self-conscious about it because it's like the, I fretted the ultimate sort of cowboy, uh,
day one of your guitar lessons way, just the basicest kind of G chord.
And it felt unsophisticated to me all of a sudden.
Oh, but it's so pure.
It was just like... On an acoustic guitar, so many open strings, it's a perfect chord.
Yeah, but it just felt like herpaderp.
So I asked all my friends, I was like, what do you guys do?
And, you know, like, Jonathan Colton has this whole
This whole philosophy of a G chord that the way he frets it, it involves like muting strings with the fat part of his fingers.
And he keeps himself like, he keeps the chord wide open so he can do all these little Jackson Brown twingity twangities with his other fingers.
He likes to Fogelberg it up.
Yeah, he's fretting it basically with his pinky on the top and his thumb on the bottom.
I don't remember how he did it.
Oh, sure, you could do the reach around.
Yeah, it was very controversial.
And everybody was like, pshaw, but he had that smug, you know, Yale music degree.
Can I just say, John, typical.
Typical.
Yeah, right?
Yeah.
So, anyway, all by way of saying, when I sit down at the piano or when I sit at the guitar...
which you don't actually sit at a guitar.
You can.
Yeah, you can get one of those fruity little stools and put your foot up in the air.
Who was the blind guy about our age that played guitar, like, flipped up?
Huh.
Or, like, how did he play it?
He was, like, in the 80s, kind of like a bluesy rock guy.
Blind Guitar Jefferson?
Blind Guitar.
It wasn't Blind Guitar Jefferson.
It might have been Blind Willie Stupat.
Oh.
Oh, right, right, right.
Or it might have been Blind Jimmy Bindlepac.
Yeah, Bindlepac.
He's from the long line of Bindlepac.
Were they the Facebook investors, the twins?
The Bindlepac twins?
They're still millionaires.
I don't feel sorry for them.
They're all about the Bitcoin now.
Is that right?
Wait a minute.
Do you own a Bitcoin?
I don't know.
One doesn't talk about these things.
Oh, I see, I see, I see.
It's a cryptocurrency.
Isn't it one of those things like my dad used to get paid in, like, illusion art?
I prefer Confederate script.
It's like the barter.
Instead of giving you a chicken, people pay you in Bitcoin.
People laugh at Confederate script, but I'm telling you, buddy, it's looking like it might make a comeback.
Jefferson Davis.
And so it seems so simple.
I'm doing these things that were like some guy wrote out on a piece of notebook paper.
Like, here's the blues scale.
And I went home and I was like, blues scale.
And I still fucking play it every single day.
I never learned anything else.
I think everybody's got a funny compulsive thing that they do.
You know my compulsive thing with the little hammer on seat, you know, the little walk up.
That's so good.
Yeah, I know.
I love the little walk up.
That's when I'm playing my little guitar ukulele, which is the main guitar that I play when I'm just sitting around thinking.
I'll do that or I'll do the basic box where you slide from.
I'll do an A.
pentatonic where you do like a slide from ga and i'll do that and do a little bend on the fifth little compulsive thing you know yeah i think everybody's got this they've got those little like uh yeah compulsive things i just recently started arranging my dishwasher in a new configuration than this is huge this is a big deal it's a big deal i don't i don't like it but hang on though did it come out of a reason or you just felt like you needed a change
Yeah, I just, you know, I didn't want to be one of those guys that arranges his dishwasher the same way for the rest of his life.
Good for you, John.
Yeah, so I started doing it a different way, and it's a radically different way.
It's going across the grain.
And there's a part of me that feels like, this couldn't work.
This can't work.
But I still...
I mean, there's no wasted space in the dishwasher, and I still manage to get all the typical... It's not like I have a bunch of leftover dishes.
So it's working, but I'm still... But does it feel wrong?
I'm just on pins and needles about it.
It's like changing the way you wipe.
It's one of those things where even if you feel like there's an improvement to the system, it still feels wrong.
It feels like you're at cross-purposes with everything you know.
Well, you know, apparently...
Many, many, many years ago, I encountered some little skirmish in the toilet paper roll wars where it was presented to me as a choice that you can either put the toilet paper roll on top feeding or bottom feeding.
And it was given to me that the majority used the top feeding method.
And so in order, I mean, my native response to that was to be, to take the road less traveled by.
And that has made all the difference.
And so I put it on bottom rolling.
Two rolls diverted in a wood.
That's right.
Not because I preferred it.
Not because I cared one way or the other.
Because nothing could be more insignificant.
Yeah.
But I just did it that way.
And then I posted a picture the other day of my toilet paper rolls somehow.
On the on the Internet.
And I got all this blowback, all this like, you know, you're doing it wrong.
Yeah.
All the you're doing it wrong.
The voice is echoing out of the well, actually.
And I never heard a single person say, thank goodness a man standing up for justice.
Mm hmm.
And so now I feel I'm in a posture like the last time I changed the toilet paper rolls.
I put them on top over, not because I succumbed to peer pressure, but because I was wondering if there was some technological reason, if there was some massive improvement in the way that this toilet paper was going to perform.
And so now I've been dealing with this sort of over-the-top stuff.
And I'm trying to figure out, like, am I doing this better?
Am I more refreshed when I leave the water closet?
Do I go about my day with more of a spring in my step?
It's really hard to discern in such a short amount of time.
But it doesn't feel right.
It feels weird.
Yeah.
I mean, I used to have feelings about this.
You know, there's just been so many minor differences that the world and the Internet in particular chooses to have an obsession about.
I mean, you get the whole pineapple on pizza.
There's all these different things that have zero impact, and that seems to make them all the more important.
Yeah, I don't know.
You put pineapple on one kind of pizza.
Let's agree.
Well, we can all agree on pineapple.
It's a Hawaiian-style pizza.
If you order that, you get pineapple on it.
There it is.
It's the end.
Oh, interesting.
Right.
Yeah.
That was culturally insensitive of me.
I was thinking about this the other day.
Yes.
The degree...
This was very confusing to me at first, but then I thought that I found a way out of the jungle, which was that I was reflecting on Noam Chomsky.
And I was reflecting on the fact that, you know, I liked, not liked, you can't say that you like Noam Chomsky, but I did a deep dive on Noam Chomsky during the time that we all did back in our 20s.
Um, and, and, um, and my experience of Noam Chomsky was that there was nothing he said that, that you could point a finger at and say, I did, you know, that's wrong, right?
I mean, everything he said conformed to my own beliefs and, and supported my own suspicions and, you know, confirmed kind of my vision of the world.
And I didn't, I, I, I agreed with Noam Chomsky and
all the way down.
But still, it seemed that Noam Chomsky was wrong.
Like he was, you couldn't point at anything.
Like all of his proofs were correct.
And yet still in the aggregate from a mile high, he was just wrong.
Like anarcho-syndicalism or whatever is not the solution.
And I was, you know, kind of chewing on this because it seems like it would be – I was trying to figure out how that was some insight into now.
And I realized that – or I didn't realize, but then I started thinking about how in math and in science –
People will pursue these elegant solutions to problems, and the solution will be this beautiful thing that is right, absolutely right, all the way through it.
And then at the very end, it is not correct, right?
It doesn't solve for X. And the mathematician goes back to the drawing board, and a lot of times they waste years on
Because the thing they're working on is so beautiful and so true that they can't abandon it.
And it started to just sort of spin in my head that in the sciences, we're able at least at the end to examine the thing that is beautiful and beautiful.
It doesn't work.
We have to throw it away even even in spite of its beauty or we keep certain parts of it But but we have to we have to acknowledge that it it isn't true and in the social sciences and in politics We can pursue these ideas these like these towering sort of formations of ideas and they feel true and they seem true and they all sort of logically follow but at the end we don't have that and
And I think it's not that there isn't a true answer.
It's just that we don't have the technology right now, the intelligence or the technology to discern what the true answer is in the social sciences or in politics, right?
We just can't.
See it.
And, you know, a thousand years from now or even 200 years from now, it may be possible to see the the true answers there.
But now they're just still sort of like, oh, it's it's Taurus is all the way down or, you know, the the the stars in the sky are pinpricks in the fabric.
And so we follow these elegant solutions and we see these beautiful sort of, you know, elaborate thought storms.
And we say, this must be true.
And when we when we apply them to the world and they don't work and they, you know, they like they they utterly fail in a lot of cases to actually describe reality or to be useful.
we can't abandon them because we, because that isn't, there's no control group large enough or there's, you know, there isn't that, that arrival at like, does this solve the problem?
Absolutely not.
No, it's always a question of does this solve the problem?
Well, we haven't applied it enough times or we haven't, we don't have enough funding or, you know, it only works in a vacuum or whatever.
And, and so I was really like chewing on that as a kind of,
I don't know, like a hopefulness that where we are now, which is this world of total subjectivity in politics and culture, where everything is just like your opinion, man, isn't the end.
Or even it could be something where there's near universal ascent for now,
about the scientific rigor and validity of a given theory, which doesn't mean what everybody thinks it means, but, you know, whether that's gravity or something, or, you know, how the shape of the Earth, there are still going to be people who have the reasons why they choose to believe that it isn't true or can't be true.
That Earth is sitting in a gravity bag.
Yeah, or like a great tweet I saw not long ago.
There are flat Earth society people all over the globe.
I do think about this as somebody who's just an observer of all of these things and, you know, an enthusiast sometimes about some of these topics.
But I think there's a lot.
I have these sort of rough mental models, none of which is very complete.
Well, here's one example.
One example is my computer right now.
Why does my computer work?
I don't know why or how my computer works.
I can tell when it stops working, and then I can choose to identify what it is that made it work again.
I don't know if it was actually unplugging the keyboard that quote-unquote fixed this.
I don't think that's it.
I think that was probably a symptom of a deeper problem.
So I can, for the moment, be recording this program with you, believing that the problem is solved.
But I don't even know what the problem is.
I'm not sure if it's solved.
And I don't know if it will or won't come back again, because who knows?
That's one kind of model for it, is that, you know, again, that's a lot like cutting the ends off the roast.
But with the science stuff, or any kind of scholarship in particular...
And this is an incomplete mental model, but I do think of it a little bit like a puzzle.
Like I think about when I was a kid, my family, my mom mainly was putting together this very difficult, I think it was over 500 pieces, but it was a very, very large puzzle of a coin.
It was a liberty dollar.
I bet it's more than 500 pieces because I see 1500 piece puzzles all the time.
I know, I know.
And I never saw the appeal personally.
But you know, the thing is, think about that.
Think about making a 1000 piece puzzle of a coin.
It's like a recipe for madness.
It would be like doing a puzzle of an above-ground shot of a pool.
I mean, every piece looks pretty much exactly the same.
So, I mean, first you have to figure out what the puzzle is that you're trying to solve.
You wonder if you have all of the pieces.
And then as you go along, you start fitting them, again, incomplete.
But that's the way I think about it a little bit.
And these two pieces seem to fit together, but you may find that they actually fit together with this other piece.
And that takes time, and it never really even takes into account whether you should be solving a puzzle at all.
But that's the thing.
Some scientific stuff for some scholarship comes too early.
Sometimes maybe it comes too late.
Sometimes it comes at the, you know, maybe, and again, maybe like with my computer, there's something valid in what they're discussing, but it isn't 100% correct, accurate for all times in ways that may not be apparent for years.
But that doesn't mean it's not useful.
I mean, that's how you discover penicillin.
Yeah, well, I mean, right.
But what we don't remember is the is the
like thousands of people that were injected with human feces and died in the search for penicillin.
Right, and ideally, as I understand the process, which is a process I don't actually understand, but part of it is documenting the times that it didn't work.
This is where you get into the file drawer effect, where you only publish the results that turned out the way you want it.
You know, it seems like you really have to, it has to be replicable, and you have to talk about ways that it might not be replicable, and
That desire to find not the truth with a capital T, but what I can prove for now and document it, that's the real science.
The real science is not having some article that shows up on public radio.
It's about that search for what I can prove, how I think I can prove it, and then how that maybe fits into something else.
But that's a much more humble kind of science.
Yeah.
Well, and I think that's exactly what I'm getting at because in the social sciences and politics, there is really, really, really a strong trend and very little incentive to admit when a thing doesn't work.
That's not going to get you headlines in the science page of the local paper.
This is the problem, right?
A theory feels so gratifying when you feel like it explains everything.
And to abandon it, to abandon aspects of it or it entirely...
is really destabilizing and it makes you feel awful and you realize that everything isn't explained by a sort of book or a paragraph in a book.
And there's no incentive to do it because, you know, when we started calling them the social sciences, we were trying to give them the imprimatur of science because we thought we could use the scientific method to investigate...
these sort of soft ideas or hard to prove things that are only provable in mass aggregate over hundreds of years or something.
But we've sort of abandoned the science side of it.
And it's now just, it's become a thing where your conviction versus my conviction and any
any feeling of doubt within yourself or any feeling of doubt within your community where you're like, did this work?
Is this working?
Does this, is this accurate?
Is really shouted down because it's, because it's understood to undermine counter revolutionary.
That's right.
Counter revolutionary under undermine our, our, our great struggle.
And that's the, that's the thing, the feeling of like, Oh, this isn't,
This actually isn't it's not that any one particular idea or any or any group of ideas is is plaguing me.
It's more that this isn't a method.
This isn't a future method.
This isn't what we'll be doing forever.
We will again remember that we have to test things.
And when they don't work, we have to have the courage to say they don't work.
Right.
Rather than trying to shore up whatever flimsy proof you have that it does work.
Yeah, or to make those excuses that it doesn't work because of all these external factors that we can't control and we need to.
If we just keep applying our program that doesn't work long enough...
It will be shown to work after we have changed every other condition.
That's getting some pretty good traction in a certain light-colored house in D.C.
right now.
Well, and in the left, even more or equally as much.
Basically, we have nicer chicken bones.
We're doing the same voodoo, but we think our chicken bones have a graduate degree.
Yeah, our stone soup has more stone.
Now with 20% more stone.
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I'm just looking for some relief.
I'm just looking for something to put my imagination.
I can't put it in these stone soups.
It just keeps swimming to the top and saying, will you please pluck me back out and choose me something else.
We had a kind of school-related Easter activity this weekend.
My wife and another parent put together this egg hunt for the kids.
It was really fun.
I ended up talking to this buddy of mine who I've worked with a lot in the past.
And, you know, we are aligned on many, many things.
Oh, you know who it is?
Remember when I interviewed you in my yard and my friend with the glasses was there and he brought his friend who kept talking and you yelled at him?
This is my friend with the glasses.
Yeah, your friend with the glasses.
He was a very good help to me.
He's a good man.
He's a good man and thorough.
Very professional.
Our daughters go to school together now.
But we were talking, and, you know, of course, as with any Easter occasion in 2017, eventually you turned to talking about, ugh, just everything.
and uh boy he's so much more on top of the ball like he's like scheduled time to go like make calls and do stuff i'm like i'm so i'm so covered with shame about how much i'm still just sitting there going i don't understand anything i just want to understand things again
You gave me the opportunity to pull out two wonderful quotes that are widely known.
I want to cite these quotes here with credit.
Credited to Helmuth von Moltke, no battle plan survives contact with the enemy.
That's right.
That's a wonderful quote.
That's right.
It's a great quote, and I say it all the time.
And it's been adapted to many different, as of course, you know, the computer people.
They're always clocking other people's things, as you know.
But, you know, no documentation survives contact with the user, any of those kinds of things.
And then the other one from the great classical philosopher Mike Tyson, everybody has a plan until they get punched in the mouth.
Everybody's got a plan until they get punched in the mouth.
You know, it's funny because it's true, you know?
Yeah, yep.
I've been...
I've been chewing on some ideas.
I realized yesterday as I was cleaning my house yesterday.
I've let it go uncleaned.
I let the yard go untrimmed for a couple of seasons.
And everything had gone to chaos.
There were...
There were receipts from 7-Eleven where I never go from like 2013, sort of laying around.
Yeah, you might need those.
Well, and just like, how did this end up?
Why would I put this down on a table?
And how is it still here?
That says bad things.
And like, it's not disputable.
There's nothing where you get, you don't get an appeal on this.
There is, as we used to say in military school, no excuse, sir.
There's no excuse because the piles speak for themselves.
They are in chronological order, except for the time you must it up a bit trying to find something actually useful amidst all of your kipple.
Yeah, there it is.
But so I spent an entire day.
Let's call it two days.
I've been working on the I've been working on the yard for several weeks.
But I and I did some things that I'd been planning to do for years.
Like I chopped the top out of my ugly apple tree and let it do what it's going to do.
Let it fare its own.
You know what I mean?
Like if this apple tree can't hang, then it's out of here.
My mom is very unsentimental about trees.
Yeah.
Unlike other things.
And I could take a lesson from her.
But this tree, I was just like, you know what?
I've hated the top of you for a long time and you're gone.
But that's been over the past couple of weeks.
But the last two days, I decided I was going to clean the house.
I was going to do a deep, deep dive.
And I realized that I could work on a project in the house for a sustained hour before I needed money.
20 minute vacation and I'd never because I'd never like I'd never seen it in action this way because I have these stupid stupid stupid little games on my phone that are just so stupid and I they're still getting to you and some monkey part of my brain is just like well
Got 20 minutes to kill.
Yeah.
Might as well go.
So I worked all I worked from 8 a.m.
to 8 p.m.
yesterday, cleaning the house, and I took six 20-minute breaks to go boop, boop, boop, boop, boop, boop, boop, boop, boop, boop.
But I worked diligently the rest of the time.
That's still better than most people on a given day, I would postulate.
And way better than I normally do.
Yeah.
But what was interesting was that
Uh, I didn't, I didn't chastise myself for the 20 minute breaks because the hour I'd gotten a lot done.
And so I was like, I'm going to take a little break and I would play the thing until I would hit that point where my brain had turned to mush.
There wasn't anything else here to find.
And then I went back and I, it really was a, a kind of workflow that
And I wonder if there isn't something there for me to mine.
You're saying there's no reason you can't extend that to your indoor pseudo-digital life.
Well, and to everything, to writing songs, like work on it for an hour and then go take 20 minutes where you do this, like where you play Minesweeper and then back at it instead of... And recognize that the Minesweeper playing is also part of the workday.
It's part of the...
It's an integral part of the hour.
Can I share something with you?
Yeah, I'm dying.
In the days when I was considered by someone to be a productivity guru, I wrote about this, and I called it the procrastination dash, which is just the idea.
I've since heard this called things like the Pomodoro Technique.
Sure, whatever.
But the basic idea was, my idea was, if there's something you've been putting off...
Remember, there's light at the end of the tunnel.
And this could go for anything.
It doesn't have to be something you're procrastinating.
But the idea is you spend N minutes working on the thing, and then no matter what, you stop at the end of those arbitrary N minutes.
I would say 20 minutes.
At the end of that 20 minutes, you take a five-minute break or an X-minute break.
You decide what the N and the X is.
But the idea is you build in that, like, I know I'm only going to have to do this thing for so long, and then I'm going to go do this other thing.
Maybe it's a thing I like, or maybe it's a thing that's different.
But, like, you know, if you try to organize, instead of saying, I'm going to spend three hours on this, if instead you say, I'm going to spend this number of these 20-minute cycles on this, I think that's a good way to kind of bang on your brain a little bit and to make it totally doable.
bang on the brain because it at least helps you get bang on the brain with a baseball brain you at least you know the the the thing is the trick inside the trick the double turns out is that it gets you to work on something you've been procrastinating about putting off for whatever reason because you at least get started the hardest part of anything is getting started and that's all your brain needs to know i'm not going to die if i get started on this
The hardest part of breaking up is Folgers in Your Cup, right?
The worst part of breaking up is Folgers in Your Cup.
We've replaced John's Folgers Crystals with a Minecraft-like game.
I got a new word game I like.
I shouldn't tell you about it.
Well, no.
See, a word game would be a massive improvement over these, like, basically... Little bleep creep games?
Well, as Chris Caniglia once put it, putting away the dishes.
He's like, all these games that you play are just putting away the dishes.
Like, I hate putting away the dishes.
Why would I play one of these games that's just putting away the dishes?
Oh, God.
And I'm just like putting away the dishes, putting them away, putting those dishes.
So a word game at least would be using like some other part of the part of my brain that recognizes letters.
Yeah.
Yeah.
What is it?
You really want to know?
Well, yes.
It's called type shift.
Type shift.
One word.
And type shift, you get this little, imagine like a little clicky combination lock on a suitcase where you got the little turny things.
So basically these letters drop down and there's several letters in each of however many vertical rows and you move them around to create words and you try and create as many words as you can.
in a short period of time.
I'm not really selling it very well, but there's several different versions of it inside of the game, and it's really fun.
It's not horribly addictive.
It's not like that terrible threes game, but it is really enjoyable.
All right.
Well, I'll give it a try.
I usually... Those games that are like...
racing with somebody else to come up with as many words as you can with four letters.
It's like people say to me all the time, you should come join our trivia game, our trivia team, our pub trivia team.
Pub trivia team.
And I'm like, no, thank you.
That just, I mean.
It's not stressful.
It does to sit there and be like, oh, what was the name of the second Bananarama LP?
And then somebody else has it and you're just like, fuck.
Yeah.
I don't want that.
I don't want that in my life.
No, no, no, no.
You don't want that.
No, no, no, no, no, no.
I just found... I'm sitting here on the table.
I...
I was cleaning.
I was cleaning up.
I've been moving a lot of stuff to my office, moving stuff that I realized doesn't belong in my house.
Got to go to the office.
That causes an unusual mode of thinking.
It really does.
Seriously, it's a novel way of having to think about your life and how it gets segmented.
Well, I mean, not just you, but anybody else who happens to be involved in your house, like how it affects them.
Like, does this really need to be here?
I like these six boxes of comic books to be at the house, but nobody else really needs that.
Even I don't really need that.
No, no.
My dad went through a long, long phase throughout the late 70s.
No, no, no.
I'm sorry.
From about 73, if my research indicates correctly, from about 73 to probably 83, my dad...
Fell victim to the disease the mental disorder of thinking that slides were better than prints all right Have we talked about this before he might have but I'll inherit again Well, I'd slides you get out you get a really high-quality image You get a high-quality image that you can only see projected against the wall of your living room Or in one of those cool little dingus is we stick it in the little viewer
Yeah, but who wants to look at pictures that way?
Nobody anymore.
Nobody anymore.
Well, and who wants to look at them at all?
Right.
And so my dad took 20,000 pictures on slides.
And then at some point along the way, he felt like he needed to have those slides ready to view.
And so he started buying slide reels, the circular sort of carousels.
That's right.
Like you're like it's a machine gun.
And he bought, I don't know, 25 carousels and loaded them.
with slides and then put them back in the box and i'm sure never looked at them again yeah yeah and so now i inherited 25 full carousels we have the same box in our we have a giant giant box of my father-in-law slides in carousels oh yeah yeah
It was like a weird, it was like going to Est.
It was a collective.
Yeah, what do they call that?
Collective delusion or something.
Yeah, hysteria or something, yeah.
And so I have all these slides and I have them here at the house, right?
Because pictures belong at the house.
And then I realized these pictures do not belong at the house.
These pictures belong at the office.
And one day, and the thing about them is so many of them were like,
Well, they're constructing the pipeline and my dad got hired by a pipeline service company to provide the framework for like high school equivalency degrees for the guys who were welding the pipe.
And so my dad goes up.
He had this kind of thing going on all the time.
My dad started a university at one point.
And so he went up to the pipeline as it was being built, like early 70s.
And in the style that he had, he had his Canon AE-1.
And he seemingly just pointed the camera randomly without looking through the eye hole.
That's back when you had to tweak a lot of stuff to get a good photo.
Yeah.
And you wouldn't know if it was a good photo until you got it developed.
That's right.
And so there are all these pictures of like, well, there's a dirt parking lot full of pipe.
And there's the back end of a truck and the door of a mobile home.
Oh, boy.
And there's the coffee maker inside the mobile home.
It's very dark.
It's very dark in there because he didn't adjust the F stops.
So there's the copy maker.
I think I can make it out.
And then there are like three guys standing around in sunglasses that he didn't know, let alone me.
Did he get an AI that did a better job of this?
But my disease, his disease was that.
My disease is the disease of, here is an envelope of pictures of people you never knew.
That's your legacy.
You're the steward of that.
But one day...
There aren't that many pictures of the pipeline being built, even poorly taken.
I mean, I guess there are probably millions of pictures of the pipeline being built, but there aren't pictures of the pipeline being built that are so inartfully done.
And maybe there's someone out there that's like, that's the only extant picture of that particular brand of coffee maker.
No one ever thought to take that picture.
My dad died a week after that.
And that's the only photo of him we have from that time.
Yeah, that's right.
Isn't that part of the thinking?
What if this is precious in a way that is not clear from the seemingly useless, low-quality nature of it as I understand it?
What if this is somebody's favorite thing and I just don't know it?
In the background of one of these photos, there's a mound.
And it turns out, 50 years from now, someone discovers that that mound is actually an Alaskan pyramid.
Oh!
And everybody's like, what?
And suddenly pictures of that Alaskan pyramid accidentally taken in the background of the Alaska Pipeline Construction Company.
They're like, they're crucial evidence.
I don't know.
It's not likely.
And you come whipping into court with your carousels, clickety-clack.
Wait, wait, your honor.
This whole court's out of order.
Yeah.
You can't handle the truth.
Who are you, sir?
What I need to do is set this set a slide projector up and sit in my darkened office and watch these slides and take the few out that mean anything.
But then you have four slides with no context that at some point in your life you thought meant something.
And you took them out of their context.
And then forever after, they are rootless, meaningless, floating nothings.
You're the memory thief.
Yeah, right.
And then the rest of the slides are what?
What are they?
They're just like campfire starters.
Or you send them to Goodwill and some artiste buys them.
I keep imagining that there are artists out there.
And I don't even know if there are.
But there used to be artists out there that would go to thrift stores and buy old photographs until there was such a glut of old photographs that whoever those artists were, they did all their art.
There's nobody out there making art of old people's prom photos.
And all those websites that are like bad hair.
If only I had more photos of a mobile home door.
I have a whole concept of this art that I'm making from the Alias Pipeline.
I call it portals.
And so what are they?
Yeah, right, collective memory, but they're not useful.
We have every, like Peggy Sue Got Married is all we need to know about the 50s.
Why do I need what is essentially a 500-person haircut, like, repository?
That's all it is.
It's just like, well, here's some haircuts, right?
This guy had a different haircut than that guy.
Like, here they are.
Hang on.
In the five-person, what is it?
Five-person, 500-person haircut?
Repository.
Repository.
So are you saving the photos of the haircuts or you're saving the clipped hair?
No, I don't have access to their hair, but one day people will be like, I know how the Fonz wore his hair, but how does a regular guy wear his hair?
Right.
But if you wanted to do that, you'd go to the library or the thrift store and buy all the yearbooks, and you'd have them all there in a book.
These are all basically yearbook photos of the Van Wert High School class of 1950, and
Why do you need those?
There's a year for those.
Anyway, the only reason to keep them is that you're an artist or that you know an artist or that you believe there are artists still who do collage work.
Collage artists.
Sure.
Multimedia.
You're putting them out of business.
When you sort those slides, who knows what you're doing to the collage industry.
That's right.
That's right.
It's hard.
When I've tried to do cleanups in the past, I've found a lot of resistance to getting started.
I found it very painful at first, but the feeling I almost inevitably get to is, oh my God, I really probably could have just thrown almost all of this away sight unseen.
But I didn't, you know, it got sorted.
It got, you know, triaged.
But like, you know, when you're done, you have a lot less stuff than you started with.
And sometimes I feel a quickening where I'm like, oh, God, give me more.
Now I want to, especially if I got to call a hauler, you know, dump guy or something like that.
I'm like, I really want this to be worth the money and the time.
I want to fill that man's white truck with Kipple.
Well, and that happened to me yesterday.
I got a big box and I was like, all this stuff's going to the office.
And I started throwing shoe boxes full of wall warts and quarter inch cables and old guitar picks and weird like, and I'm throwing it all in this box.
And if it had been a dumpster, I would have been fine.
Like if it had been a dumpster, I never would have thought of these things again.
But as it is, I'm going to take it to my office and I'm going to go through, I'm going to put all the quarter inch cables in this and I'm going to put all the broken picks in that.
And
And it could have been a hole in the earth.
And I should remember that.
I should remember that as soon as you start hucking it into that guy's white truck, just fill that truck up.
The best gift you can give yourself if you've got the space to have it there for a few days is rent yourself a three-yard dumpster.
Well, I've been involved without saying too much.
I've been involved in things that involved having to go through a lot of things very quickly and in a difficult way.
And I will just say that my one bulwark against madness was the ability to whip something through the air toward a very, very large target and know that I wouldn't look at it again.
And you don't have to think about it.
You don't have to be precious.
You don't have to disassemble anything.
You just throw it into the three yard dumpster and it goes away.
But it's there for a few days in case.
Well, a nice three-yard dumpster.
I'm looking at some here.
These are nice.
You can actually buy one of these.
You got the flip-up top.
You probably got a dual flip-up top, and sometimes you get a little door.
You can go in through the little door if you want to go in there and have lunch or something.
But I think that's a big difference.
I mean, I don't mean to be accidentally reverting to my former retired career, but I think there's a big difference.
If you go into a situation where you need to clean stuff out,
And you brought like a single Chinese food takeout bag.
The results are going to be very different than if you had brought a 13 gallon hefty bag will be very different than if you had brought a giant contractor bag will be very different.
Here's a big one.
Contractor bag in a big hefty like cleanup after a party.
size because you don't have to you your goal is just fill I want to see as many black contractor bags at the end of the day as possible you know I mean setting aside being green and stuff whatever that's fine but like if you've really got to do that you don't want to feel constrained by like which one should I put this in is this the USB cables I save versus the USB cables that I donate somehow in here and I thought it might have come from you
There was a brand new, mostly unused, or I guess that's the definition of brand new.
That was a redundancy.
No.
One of those plug your computer in direct to the modem with a cable.
What is that called?
It's a cable.
Hot cable?
You're talking about a hot cable.
Pancake table.
Yeah, if you're hot cabling, you wouldn't use a table cable.
Yeah, right.
So it was a hot cable.
But you don't want to throw that out.
That's brand new and unused.
That feels wasteful.
200 feet long.
What?
Oh, it's an Ethernet cable.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Because at one time, you needed to run Ethernet way, way, way up to the second floor, right?
But this was 200 feet.
This could go over to my neighbor's house.
Sure.
Gary could make a little house out of it.
Yeah.
And I was like, what the how would I ever like this is something that, you know, that sometimes, you know, one of the great things about you, Merlin, is that sometimes you're just like, oh, that's a good idea.
And you push it.
You push the button on Amazon and it shows up at my house.
Yeah.
And I'm like, wow, this thing, you know, it's like cabled like a like an anchor chain on a ship.
And I was like, what am I going to do with this?
It's like heavy to pick up.
And but it was unused and it seemed imminently useful.
What if I want a hot cable into something?
And then I realized it needs to go to the it needs to go to Goodwill.
Somebody is going to want to run Internet to their friend's house.
And this is the thing.
They're going to string it up through the trees like Christmas lights.
And it's going to bring Internet to the world.
There could be a collage artist who's recently decided to go digital.
And they need a way to get it up to their treehouse where they like to put their collages together.
You're affording that.
The one thing I was worried about is if I had used it, was my IP address in there still somewhere?
A lot of your data is probably still in that pipe.
Yeah, should I have deleted it?
Yeah, you want to reset the firmware on it and reflash it.
And then you want to squeeze it real hard to get the last little bits out.
Because a lot of the special characters at that point will be out.
But a lot of the lowercase letters and numbers will still be in there.
You don't want that.
I know we're all very worried about hackers and hacking, hacker, hacker Stan.
And, um, and, uh, I, the hackers from hacker Stan are like some of them.
Oh, they're the worst.
They create all those bots.
They call it.
And so I was just worried like about all this stuff, all these USB cables and wall works and stuff, whether there's like, Oh yeah, I know at this point, there's so much stuff I need to throw out.
I feel like I need to go like full on Mr. Robot and like drill through old hard drives and throw it into a crematorium or something.
Mm hmm.
That's so Mr. Robot.
Oh, my God.
I have too many.
Well, here's the other thing I bought at your recommendation many years ago now.
I like how much this comes back to me.
Well, this is since we're since we're on the opportunity to bring it up.
No, since we're on a run where you're revisiting your career as a former executive salesperson.
Hello.
Who talked into his shoe phone.
That's back when I was Merlin Mann.
You remember that?
I figured we'd go all the way back to when I bought...
one of those tiny little video cameras that was called a Flip.
It's a great camera.
I love my Flip camera.
I had three of them.
I loved them.
Yeah, right.
And so I bought one because I was like, Flip!
Woohoo!
I'm joining the Flip revolution.
Most of the best video we have of my daughter was with the Flip phone because there was zero resistance.
You would just whip it out and hit the button.
That's all there was.
It's even easier than with an iPhone.
Certainly not as good video, but
like one night we this is really lame but one night it occurred to me that my daughter will not always be washed in a bucket for the rest of her life and when she was an infant we shot the entire bath all the way up to getting her ready for bedtime and i'm so glad i've got it oh yeah yeah no but that but i would have done that if i had to go well let me go get the handy cam and make sure it doesn't have days of our lives on it but then something happened just as i was getting into my flip
I got something in the mail, some registered letter that was like, we're no longer supporting the Flip platform.
And then it all... You got a registered letter about that.
Yeah, and then it all went poof in a day.
Like, it couldn't... There wasn't... What was it?
The hot plug didn't work?
anymore no i think they did stop pancaking under uh relevant environmental uh resources so you'd plug it in and it would just say error error error that's that's a goddamn shame mine are still sitting there in the closet i had one i had one and then i got the upgraded one one of them broke about another so i've got a total of three and i i i think you can still pop it in and get your stuff off it i think really
Yeah, you've still got a computer that has a USB port on it, so you'll be good to go.
Yes, I do.
Boy, you're going to love the next time you need to get a Mac.
Are you post-USB?
I have a laptop that has a headphone jack and exactly one port on it.
And it's not a port that I've ever used in my life.
So it's an entire new world of dongles for me.
And what kind of port is it?
It's called a USB-C.
And it's approximately, just if you eyeballed it, it would look pretty much like the, what's it called, lightning cable for your phone.
It's about that size, but it's not that size.
And so when you say dongles, how do you get stuff on a dongle?
Well, that means that if you're like most of the planet and you've got lots of stuff that's the kind of classic USB little boxy shape, you need the most basic one.
I've got one where I... This is really boring.
But you plug in the dingus.
I've got a thing that's a little hub.
So you put a USB hub.
The mail guy goes into your Mac.
And then you use a cord cable to power that device.
And that gives you three...
Like USB 3.
I'm picturing this, and it's making me so hot.
Yeah, but no, but if you want to have Ethernet, who has Ethernet anymore?
Why would anybody need that?
You don't need it.
USB thumb drives, what?
Yeah, you need something like that.
I don't know.
You don't need that stuff.
So how long will we be able to traffic in vintage computers until they no longer work?
You know, there's always going to be people who are interested in old computers, but unless it's in really good condition, it's sort of like comic books.
Like, nobody wants a busted-ass comic book.
But, I mean, if I went on the Internet right now and I bought a very good quality, high-quality computer from just the most recent future where it still had ports... Mm-hmm.
Would that be useful to me?
How long would it be useful?
Yeah, yeah.
How long?
I mean, I'm considering getting a desktop, but I don't want to go all the way into this thing where the desktop is just like a cue ball thing.
That pulses at me.
No, I understand.
You don't want that.
You don't want, like, a Logan's Run computer.
Well, I would be remiss.
I will be reprimanded via text message by John Siracusa if I don't advise you that, yes, I can help you with this.
This is not the perfect time to do that, but it will be time soon.
But it sounds like you're talking about a desktop.
With a laptop, in some ways, the thing that's inevitably going to go is the battery because the battery can only do so many charges.
Yeah.
And the capacity goes down and down, much like the human mind.
What would still be useful?
If you buy a typical Mac laptop today, you will pretty definitely, it's like buying a Toyota.
Like it's not fancy, but it'll be fine.
A Toyota runs for 300,000 miles.
Well, yeah, honestly, my last laptop, which I finally retired, I bought in 2010, which is like a million years ago in laptop years.
But if you bought a laptop today, and it's not the greatest time to buy a laptop, it's not a good time to buy anything but an iPad right now.
So if you did do that, and the one I got, my laptop was very inexpensive as laptops go.
What do you know?
But you don't want that.
It's only got one port.
No, I don't want that.
But if you wanted a laptop, you could get like a refurbished MacBook Pro that's still got a lot of miles on the tires, and it's not as costly.
What I want is a computer with a quarter-inch cable in.
Yep.
Quarter-inch cable.
If you're going to hot-pancake it, you want to be able to have, if you want to flapjack your bandwidth, you want to have a quarter-inch cable.
I want a three-quarter, three-and-a-quarter-inch floppy drive.
Oh, sure.
You might need that for your work.
I still have a lot of floppies that have stuff on them.
Oh, me too.
I'm not sure what is on the floppies and it might be like,
I had this terrible thing.
When my dad was moving out of his final apartment, my siblings were all there, all my useless siblings.
And my very useful sister was not there.
It was just me and the useless ones.
And we were going through his house, and we were like, oh, this is garbage.
And he had some—it wasn't even a Dell.
It was like a, I don't know, a Compaq or some—
gateway it was some kind of pc that he used to sit and you know hunt and peck uh emails to me that were like john i hope you're fine you know um fuck you love dad
And so here was this computer.
His voice used to be a lot stronger when he was younger.
Here was this computer, and I was like, get that out of here.
Nobody's ever going to use that.
And then like six years later, I sat up in bed in the middle of the night in a cold sweat, and I was like, what if he was secretly writing his memoirs?
Oh, Jesus.
You don't need that in your head.
what if that whole time he had been secretly tapping away and then in 72 i bought the pair of plaid pants that i would wear to court every time for the next 14 years that's a lot that's a lot of theoretical responsibility john yep yep so i so i had to say like well
If he had been doing that, it would have been very hard.
It would have been unreadable because he didn't know how to type.
Good.
All right.
Good.
Off your plate.
Viacondias.
Into the three-yard dumpster.
I have a lot of things I wrote and things that I drew.
This is before they invented Internet pornography.
Before they invented the Internet, really.
So you were drawing naked pictures?
Yeah, sitting there in Mac Paint making dicks.
I actually thought about that the other day.
There was a time in, I don't know, eighth grade maybe where I sat.
And drew dirty pictures?
Sure.
I made some very anatomically incorrect vaginas in my day.
Because what I imagined it looked like.
It looked like somebody dropped a mango.
I had these dirty pictures that I drew of people having sex as I imagined it.
Sure.
And I used to hide them.
I would roll the dirty pictures up that I had drawn into a lamp.
I hid them inside a lamp.
That's good spy craft.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Who's going to look inside the lamp?
No one.
And the lamps of that family of lamp have stayed with me until the present day.
And I was walking through the house and I looked at one of these lamps and I was like, wait a minute.
No.
That's the lamp that I hid the dirty pictures in.
No.
But I didn't open it.
I looked at it and I was like.
I wonder if there are long lost dirty pictures in that lamp and then I just walked.
Yeah, I just walked.
Do you feel like you should at least document?
It's sort of like that Nicolas Cage movie where they find the Declaration of Independence has a treasure map on it.
Shouldn't you leave a clue?
Say, here's the places to look for my hand-drawn pornography.
I mean, this is part of your legacy.
Make it easy for others.
I'm wondering.
I mean, if I pulled it out, I would probably want to take pictures of it and put it on Instagram, and then those would get flagged and I'd get banned.
No, band hammer.
Yeah, yeah.
And they're drawn in pencil, too, so I don't know.
Oh, no, they're degrading every day.
I guess.
I guess.
They're on notebook paper in pencil.
Oh, God.
I cannot remember.
One of the first things that ever happened when I turned on my IBM 64K PC with dual disk drives.
Hmm.
And booted up WordStar and started to learn how to use WordStar, learn all the hotkey commands.
What were they?
They weren't hotkey.
They were the commands you did in BASIC, right?
Yeah, for sure.
That would give you italics or...
your what capital letters even um but so i'm sitting there in base and the thing is my mom got me this computer she worked in computers and she was like this will help you with your homework because back then they were selling these 64k computers like manage your finances with our new financial man which is still how they're selling computers let's be honest yeah true
Nobody does it.
Nobody manages their finances.
Let's just say full stop.
Nobody manages their finances at all.
It's like cutting the ends off the roast.
It's something people talk about.
Nobody does it.
Nobody does it.
Balance your checkbook.
Give me a break.
Come on.
Who did that?
Balance your checkbook.
What are you, a Boeing engineer?
Yeah.
Come on.
You got this guy over here.
I haven't balanced the checkbook since Nevermind was out.
I got a message on Facebook the other day.
from a gal that I had not thought of in a long, long time who was married to a friend of mine.
And it was not a private message.
It was just a post on my page.
Was it on your wall, John?
On my wall.
Do they still have walls on Facebook?
I'm not sure.
I go there once a week.
But there was a post on my wall, and it said, Hey, John, I found these old tapes.
Some guy was clearing out his basement.
so he didn't say some guy he said chris was cleaning out his basement and he found these tapes because he's moving to uzbekistan and he brought them by my house and i have them and i and i i still have an adat machine that i dug up out of the basement and i listened to the tapes and i think you would like them um i don't know how to use email all right and what did he say i don't know i
So he was writing from his wife's account.
And he said, call me.
And he just put his phone number out there on my page for God and everybody to see.
And this guy is a fellow, like maybe a senior fellow or some kind of fellow, an associate fellow at Boeing.
He sits at Boeing all day and designs hyperspace airplanes and stuff.
And he doesn't know how to communicate with me any way other than by using his wife's Facebook account to post on my wall and put his phone number there.
What?
He's like, I don't know how to text.
I don't know how to...
Private message, I don't know how to do any of these things.
Like, he works deeply embedded in technology as an engineer.
And his wife is his, like, tech rabbi?
Mm-hmm.
Whoa.
That's super interesting.
Because he's siloed over here.
In this crazy AutoCAD world, and he never, ever, ever did the, like, internet thing.
But, I mean, on the—this is a little flimsy, but it feels like a veteran auto mechanic who doesn't know how to drive.
Mm-hmm.
Do you know?
Well, you know, he lives across the street from the planet.
He never needed to learn how to drive.
That's a good point.
I mean, we think of the Internet as being computers and science.
But you remember that moment in 1994.
I mean, I remember when my friend Phil Ellis was like, I'm on the Internet.
We were like, what's that?
And he said, well, what?
I'm going to send this message to a guy in Georgia.
Yeah.
And when we come back here in six hours, there'll be a reply from him.
And we were like, no, get out of here.
And we all stood around and watched these two guys have this super boring conversation that, you know, over the course of weeks that was like, that's amazing.
But my friend Ian did not find it that amazing and so didn't pursue it.
And I think probably within Boeing, you're even disincentivized to log on to the outside world from inside your secret airplane.
Ain't that interesting?
Yeah.
It's like you're in the skiff, right?
Yeah, you're in the skiff.
You're in there with your building blocks and you're building super space aircraft.
But if you need to, I mean, I bet you those guys still wheel a cart down to the library.
Like the Boeing library and they pull big dusty tomes off the wall.
Oh boy, I hope they do.
I hope they do.
That's a nice image.
There are people there that have worked at Boeing for 50 years.
From a time when they were building airplanes out of balsa wood.
Hmm.
Hmm.
Well, all by way of saying, when I first sat... Are you going to get the tapes before he goes to Uzbekistan?
Well, so this is the other thing.
This guy, Chris, that he's talking about.
Oh, Chris found these tapes and he brought them over.
I'm like, Chris, who are you talking about?
Ian, I haven't talked to you in 20 years.
I don't know who Chris is.
And then I sat and thought and I was like, ADAT tapes, ADAT tapes, Chris, Chris.
Oh,
Chris is the guy with the Rooster and the El Camino.
You're kidding.
Chris was Rooster El Camino, dude.
Who has the ADAT tapes.
Right.
In his basement for all this time.
It's all coming together.
Ever since Rooster El Camino days.
Yeah.
And Ian...
talks about him like he's somebody that he and i were just chatting about i feel like i'm the only person who doesn't remember yet let alone talk to everyone they ever knew because my friend's like oh yeah you know chris i'm like what what chris when who like i i feel like yes you and i have met but who who and you still talk and like what do you get wings it's like i feel so out of the loop
Well, yeah, and Ian doesn't even know how to use computers or his own phone.
How is he still in touch with Chris?
Like Chris El Camino.
El Camino Rooster.
Yeah.
How are they?
How is how did Chris get in touch with him?
Like if Chris was thinking, oh, somebody from the Bunn family players needs to come get these tapes.
Like he would presumably be able to find me pretty easily.
Yeah.
But no, it's Ian.
Ian is his point of contact.
And it makes it all the more amazing that the connection happened.
Well, so I am going to figure out a way to listen to these eight app multi-tracks of the Bundt family players playing, you know, proto versions of our, like, weird tunes, weird tracks.
Mm-hmm.
But just another big pile of media for John.
Yeah, there it is.
That's what I need is a bunch of boxes of ADAT tapes and the ADAT machines that Ian's like, well, while you're here, why don't you just take all this stuff?
Put them over by the carousels.
Boop, boop, boop, boop.
Somewhere out there, I think in my office now, is a box that has, I swear to you, my 64K IBM PC.
What?
And somewhere...
There is a box of floppy disks.
And what got me off on this was after I did a couple of reports for school on this and printed them out on my little dot matrix printer.
I was sitting in the basement one night working on something, and I closed it, and I opened a new file, and I started typing a sex story.
I was like, she came into the room, and he was there, and there was a red Corvette parked in the driveway, and they lowered the lights, and he took off his elaborate hat, and
please find this she showed her boob and he was very very very interested in her boob and looked at it very closely and she let him and she didn't seem to mind and i was so i was so turned on by my own writing as i was putting it down like oh my god this is so hot teenager's brain is the biggest sex organ
Yeah, and I couldn't, like now I can't even put myself into it.
I mean, I don't know.
I haven't sat at my computer for a long time and been like, her boobs were, you could see them.
And she didn't even care.
They were both there.
And you could see them.
And she said, look at those.
And I was like, I am.
And she didn't even look mad.
And I took my big hat off and I said, I'm going to just do that then.
May I hang up your cape?
She said, girlishly.
And then her dragon, her pet dragon, went purr.
I know, Lothrako.
Okay, D&D.
She said, go casually.
She was dressed like the girl on the cover of Heavy Metal, the movie.
And then she had a boob out, and then the other boob.
Yeah, the two of them.
That's hot.
That's hot.
And the reason I think I still have that 64K IBM PC with dual disk drives is that at some point, because I used it all the way through college, other kids had computers that had color screens.
And if not mice, then... Yeah, some kind of motion gesturing device.
Yeah.
You get the little laptop with a little red nipple on it.
A lot of people had those.
Yeah, and I still had this computer, 64 entire K. And we were way ahead of the curve in 1980 or 81 because we got the orange-colored screen instead of the green screen.
Oh, nice.
Yeah.
I still have this stuff.
And I think at some point in 95, my mom said, well, that's probably going to be worth money someday.
And I said, I don't think so, mom.
It's covered with Rainier beer stickers.
It's not pristine.
She was like, oh, you know, that's what we said about the 56 Chrysler 300.
Yeah.
I was like, hmm.
But anyway, I still have it.
If anybody's interested, contact me.
Please email John.
Info at thelongwinners.com.
Yep, yeah, that's the policy.
Two in, one out.
Boobs.
All right.