Ep. 306: "Corgis I've Already Seen"
Hello.
Hi, John.
Hi, Merlin.
How's it going?
Pretty good.
Happy Monday.
Oh, thanks, Bez.
Don't call me Bez.
Is that the dancing boy?
Yeah.
I don't know, Bez.
You think I'm a dancing boy?
Oh, man.
I don't even like that band.
You're more like the dancing guy in Hazel.
No, I'm like the dancing guy in Pavement.
I could be Bob.
Yeah, you're the dancing guy in pavement, right?
I'm dancing Bob.
He hit something every once in a while, wasn't he the drummer?
He was somewhere between the second drummer in Adam Ants and Davy Jones, and he loved horse racing.
Yeah, the second drummer.
In fact, I have a...
uh racing form t-shirt that i found in a thrift store many years ago and when i found it i was like oh like bob like bob i don't think i know of any other people who are in rock bands that are enthusiasts of horse racing that play the ponies maybe not so publicly yeah have you ever gone to the horse track
I don't think I've been to the horse track.
I've been to the dog track.
Oh, yeah.
Did you bet on the dogs?
I think I bet on the doggies.
You bet on the doggies?
I think I did.
We had one right near our school in Sarasota.
Doggos?
Yeah, the Doggos.
Yeah, and yeah, I think I went there.
It's not really my jam.
No, me either.
You and I don't like strip clubs or dog tracks.
Oh, God.
Oh, we could do a very special episode.
Oh, my goodness.
Oh, God.
I don't want to be a prude, John.
We could tell some stories.
I don't.
I can honestly say I think I don't like it on any level.
I like that people are employed.
It's nice to see the economy thrive.
It's good for tourists.
It's weird to see ladies dancing on your friends.
I don't like it.
Could I have another Coke, please?
I'm just going to look at the floor.
And they go back in the little booth.
I know.
Remember that?
Remember our friend went back in the booth?
We were so lonely.
Oh, my God.
I didn't even know what to stare at.
We both, so just to fill in.
No, well, I'm not sure.
Let's not locate it too specifically in space or time.
What happens at Georgetown Prep stays at Georgetown Prep.
We were standing out in front of the strip club and there was a desk there and the man wanted $20.
And you and I both were like, we don't want to pay $20 for this.
$20 for what?
And our friends were already in.
They paid the money and were through the dark door and in the place.
John, they seem very...
comfortable with the transaction they're very familiar it felt like this is a thing they knew how to do they're like oh money on the table and then in the door and then money out money everywhere and you and i were like could we just go to the maybe we could go to the movies and then and then i don't i think i love the movies i think it was you who said we have to go with our friends
Well, you know not to go.
You don't want to go to a second location.
You got to be careful.
You got to stay with your friends.
Stay with your friends.
You don't want to break it up.
You know, one of those friends is always going to leave anyway.
You know, but you ever go to Ikea, and when you go to Ikea, at a big Ikea, they have an area for kids to play in.
Yes, they do.
You know?
And it's kind of cool.
Like, it's pretty boss.
You're not supposed to leave them there, even though everybody leaves them there.
get a ball pit you get some kind of like a flergen and like i wish if they're gonna if you're gonna have a strip club why don't you have a ball pit okay i don't know if that would be clean i don't know what's happened in that but no ball pit is clean but all right but for the nominally heterosexual men who don't want to see ladies dance on their friends there should be something like an adult ball i see what you're saying maybe someplace for you to go play
It could be like an emergency room, like waiting room, like where they've just got cooking shows on or something.
Let me rewind a little bit.
Are you saying that you're not supposed to leave your kid at the Ikea drop-off?
That's the whole point of that thing.
I think they have signage to that effect, John.
That says don't leave?
We're supposed to just stand around?
This is not the 1970s.
Oh, come on.
It's the first thing you do is drop the kid off.
Remember all the places you'd get left when you were a kid?
They're just a normal thing.
Yeah.
I got left in bars.
Yeah.
I've told you that.
I've told you that, my dad.
I would wander around in bars.
My dad would roll up to the bartender and say, like, we watched my kid for 45 minutes, and then he'd be gone for three hours.
Yeah, he'd just go play with the cigarette machine for an hour.
Chit-chunk, chit-chunk, chit-chunk, chit-chunk.
Do you know how many matchbooks I still have?
You get free matches.
You get free matches.
You get a pack of cools and you get free matches.
Every time somebody would buy a pack of cigarettes, you're entitled to a pack of free matches if you push the button.
But most people didn't do it.
So I would just haunt the cigarette machine as it sounds like you do.
Yes.
And then everybody that bought a pack of cigarettes, if they didn't get their matches, I would go over and get them.
Oh, my pockets were full of matches for all the pyromania later.
Well, I in general like to collect all kinds of free bric-a-brac.
I'm not changing the topic from strip clubs, although that would be fine.
I always collected the bric-a-brac.
I would always take the free things, whether that was mints or toothpicks, or whether that was matchbooks or business cards, or brochures.
I would always raid the brochures at a motel.
Yep, yep.
A trade show, like I'd go with my dad to like a convention center trade show, and I'd get everything.
And they'd give you a bag to put it in.
So what matches are otherwise?
Now, then you discover you can do stuff with matches.
Now, as we've said before on here, it's not the form of expression as acceptable as it was in the 1970s to be a firebug.
Let me remind you of a thing that you may have forgotten in our young years, which is swizzle sticks.
Oh, give me a break.
We had so many swizzle sticks.
Swizzle sticks.
Swizzle sticks.
You don't see a swizzle stick as much anymore.
No, especially not an exciting swizzle stick that does something or has a joke on it.
A branded swizzle stick?
You get a swizzle stick with a Playboy logo on it or something?
That's a big deal.
A swizzle stick that says, like, Hotel California.
I mean, you know, they were big things, too.
They weren't these little flimsy ones you get at Starbucks.
They were solid.
You could whack people with them.
Oh, no, you absolutely could.
And the coffee stores at McDonald's were amazing.
They weren't just for cocaine.
You could use those golden arches.
You strap those golden arches into a rubber band between your thumb and forefinger.
You shoot that at somebody, you take an eye out.
Wow, those were so wonderful.
There was a different level of tolerance.
My wife and I will sometimes trade stories.
Now we are very fretful about our child because that's the era that we're in.
And we're very fretful about where she goes, knowing where she is, strapping a GPS device to her neck.
But back then, I mean, we have dueling stories about what our totally competent, normal parents would do in the 1970s.
yes she has a story i think of being left in a shopping cart at the front of a grocery store while her mother shopped and maybe loaded up the car and she just left in a shopping cart the whole time i was i was just encouraged to wander you just go wander go go look at the darts don't play with the darts but look at the darts just wander through the bar look at the restrooms look at the cigarette machines you were encouraged
I've told you a story, haven't I, about my mom was at, we were at the department store downtown, the big department store, the like seven story tall department store where you can buy lawnmowers and beds and, you know, gliders and stuff.
And, and I like,
was doing that thing where you're wandering underneath all the clothing racks and gotten separated from my mom.
And I got over by the escalator and found the on-off button for the escalator.
You're kidding.
And, of course, turned the escalator off.
And it was the middle of a busy shopping, you know, Christmas time or whatever.
And so all of a sudden, you know, bedlam, right?
Because the escalator is full of people and they all have their bags and it stops.
Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa.
And so, you know, so I would, you know, I kind of like...
secreted myself somewhere and then finally the manager came over and came around and turned the escalator back on and I waited an appropriate amount of time and then scuttled back over there and turned it off again.
And I played this game with the management of the department store until they were on the overhead speakers like...
you know, calling out around the world about, well, you know, security dial for whatever.
Hellions in the streets.
They finally like nabbed me.
Oh no.
You got pinched.
I got pinched.
I didn't sing, but my, they, so they ended up, then they were on the overheads.
Mom slips a hundred dollar bill into your pocket.
Yeah.
They were like, we have a little boy in security.
And my mom looked around.
He looks like a scallop.
Wait, I have a little boy.
Anyone here own a scallop?
Oh, I didn't look like a scallop then.
God, I was a beautiful little kid.
Were you beautiful?
You're angelic.
Oh, that was so disappointing about puberty.
Like, I became so grotesque after having been...
such a little angel oh i had i had flax and white hair as a child i was gorgeous oh i know you and i both yeah you know there are a lot of hideous kids let's just be honest come on you can't say that and some of them grow up to be perfectly normal looking grown-ups i think there might be a like a inverse relationship i feel like that's very it was very true in junior high in high school the people who peaked early yeah and got penis they grew a penis and everything and got the hair and then boy they lost a lot of that hair by the time graduation came around
Tell you what, but I feel like I peaked at like eight years old.
Yeah, that's a good time.
Well, yeah, but I mean... You know a lot of stuff, but you're not really on the hook.
Huh?
Well, it's no good then if you're like... Oh, no, no, it's useless.
Well, that entire time is useless.
That's, that's, it's, it's the worst.
I used to like, so one thing I would like to talk about is what you considered boring things you had to do with your family, because I struggle with this with my child.
But I didn't ever have I never had the option of like, do you feel like going to the grocery store with me?
It was never an option.
You always go to the grocery store.
You go to the hardware store.
You go to the butcher shop.
You go to the ladies' clothing store.
And that's where I was a Viking because I was so bored.
There was nothing to do.
It's like going to a craft store.
It's excruciating when you're a kid.
There's nothing fun.
There's nothing branded.
It's all just like shawls and needles and shit.
But I used to like to get into the racks where the ladies' clothes were and then jump out and scare people.
I thought that was pretty funny.
So fun.
Well, you know, you and I both had,
You and I both had this single parent thing.
Single parent lifestyle, yeah.
I never had any option about going to the store or the pharmacist.
It would be like asking if you wanted to go on vacation, right?
Yeah, right.
You know what I mean?
What are you going to Kevin McAllister this shit?
No, you're going to get in the fucking car.
I'm going to pick the radio station and you're going to sit quietly with your hands in your lap.
I, I, there are so many, like, uh, there's so many hours and hours and hours of my life spent sitting, listening to my dad talk about jazz music with a, with a city council person.
I get, you know, like the idea that my daughter would ever get bored.
I don't allow her to get bored.
Did he hand you an iPhone, John?
I'm guessing he did not.
I'm guessing maybe you got half a crayon and a matchbook.
Not even that.
If I could go steal a brochure from somewhere, I could sit and read it quietly in the lobby.
Everything had to be performed quietly.
You know what?
Bring a book and you can read quietly.
Because my dad was in government and everything was government.
Everything he did was government.
All his friends were government.
All those buildings, and I still, there's such a huge part of my sensory, like my eyes, ears, nose, and throat that were formed during that era when, so like 1975, a lot of those buildings that were built in 1910 that had been kind of refurbished in 1938, and by 1968 had fallen as far as they could fall.
And then it was 1975, fully seven years later, after they had fallen as far as they could fall, right?
So they all smelled, they had marble floors.
They would bear the best and worst of each era in which something had changed.
Right.
Right.
Like there's buildings downtown that still have like fucking marble urinals.
Like you just see this crazy shit the entire bathroom, all the dividers, everything's made of fucking marble.
But the building is just fucking falling apart and the walls are paneled.
It's like you just get this weird detritus of all these different ages and there's always a nice little touch of brutalism.
Yeah, well, and those urinals that are six and a half feet tall, but probably weigh like fully more than a Prius.
And they're as big as a Prius.
There used to be somebody whose job it was to sell those to places.
Can you even imagine that?
Do you want the giant man tub urinal?
How would you mine one of those?
I mean, just thinking about like the marble sculptors that are sculpting those giant urinals.
And every door in those buildings had like a hand-painted...
You know, it didn't just say purser's office.
It said, you know, it had the person's name on the door.
Yes.
The frosted glass.
And then you would open it.
Heavy doors.
Heavy doors.
And so I spent so much time in those buildings.
And, you know, and I can just smell everything about them.
I can hear the this.
This is also when most people who were doing work downtown had leather sold shoes.
So everywhere you went, it was like slap, slap, slap.
You know, people like echoey hallways.
Yeah, and grownups walking had a sound.
They had a snappy sound.
It always sounded like you were in trouble.
Yeah, right.
Somebody's coming down the hall.
Yeah.
And there's going to be hell to pay.
And all the file folders and all the file cabinets and the smell of paper that had been in file folders.
Like mildew, old paper, coffee.
There's definitely... Cigarettes.
Oh, the cigarettes.
I was at an ATM yesterday.
Yeah.
an automated teller machine.
Yes.
And I did not even have to look in the little mirror.
I knew the man behind me at a polite distance was a smoker, not a vapor.
I knew that he was a smoker.
I smelled a smoker.
You remember that?
Both my parents smoked.
They smoked in the goddamn car with the windows up.
Yeah.
Everybody smoked.
Your mom didn't smoke, right?
My people didn't smoke, dad or mom.
Wow, that's unusual.
It's very unusual.
But people smoked all well because they were older and they'd both smoked in the 50s.
It would be like asking someone not to use pronouns.
It would be so strange to say to someone that you can't smoke in here.
It would be so odd.
Well, yeah.
My dad used to pick up hitchhikers, and he'd pick up a hitchhiker, and the hitchhiker would be smoking.
Get in the car, smoking.
Did they ask first?
No!
No!
You know, or light up in the car, and dad never said anything, because I guess it was just like, yeah, you just smoke.
Smoke them when you got them.
Yep, yep, yep.
I cannot get...
back to those places because they don't they don't exist anymore except in rare occasions when you go into a place and you're like oh it's not just
It's not just that this building is still here, but somehow they kept the smell of it.
You remember every stairwell had a fallout shelter sign in it?
Oh, sure.
I'll let you know which floor to go to.
Yeah, absolutely.
There'd be 50-gallon drums full of like mealy meal.
Mealy meal.
It's the preferred future food in fallout shelters.
I remember, and this was a thing about cities.
Do you remember when people wore neckties?
Do you remember?
Why doesn't anyone wear neckties?
But there was a thing in cities before they quieted down the horns.
Do you remember when they quieted the horns?
You mean the car horns?
The car horns.
Oh, yeah.
People used to horn all the time.
Noise pollution was a thing, and they made the horns quieter.
Yeah.
He used to get a real bad, it was like a one and a two, like an F sharp and a G. But at some point in the early 80s, noise pollution was what everybody was talking about.
It was the killer bees of the moment.
Africanized torrents.
Yeah, so Detroit decided that they were going to cut the...
the db of car horns by some significant amount and that was when all of a sudden all the horns were like or like especially on the imports especially on like a japanese car you get a mink mink mink mink and uh before that because my dad used to come and stay at the washington athletic club when he would come from alaska down to seattle and we would go spend three days with him at the washington athletic club and and you know we'd be up on the 14th floor and i'd be hanging out in the
And but the sound in the city was like horns.
Cars were honking.
And it was just like it felt so urban.
And it's crazy to me to think that Seattle felt more like a downtown, a classic like downtown than it does now.
Now it just kind of feels I don't know.
It's like a comic book.
All the cars are made of plastic.
Yeah.
I don't know.
What are you going to do?
What can you do?
What are you going to do?
What the hell?
The future gets more future.
I was just talking to you and Matt Howie yesterday about getting an iPhone.
I wasn't going to bring it up.
It's on my list, but I didn't.
Here's what's on my list.
How's the new schedule?
Do I have a head cold or an allergy?
I tried to fix my ice machine and Apple Watch.
That's what's on my list.
Did you know that I write things down before we talk?
I had no idea.
Do you consult that list ever?
I don't know, maybe.
I don't need it most of the time.
You've got a bee in your bonnet sometimes, and I just want to let that bee just buzz around a little bit.
You mean the ice machine in your freezer?
Or you have a separate ice machine?
That was low on the list for a reason.
It's not very interesting.
But I'm trying really hard to fix my ice machine.
You like ice.
I love ice, and I'm struggling.
I think it might be some missing gear teeth.
But you don't want to have to make ice in the old-fashioned way.
You have a small-capacity refrigerator, and the amount of ice that I require would take up a surpassing amount of room that could be filled with frozen chickens.
Right.
Or whatnot.
You know?
If you want to talk about... Okay, so... You boys!
Okay, I want to put a fork in single-parent lifestyle because I have some more examples of that.
You could not perhaps have surprised me more.
Mm-hmm.
uh we talk but you know we don't text each other that that often unless it's to send something about steely dan we'll interact about steely dan and videos and things sometimes but you know you and i both have friends that text out of the blue pictures of their kids doing things yes we do what am i to make of this one says to oneself this is a picture of a man and a child what am i to make of this people that are just keeping in touch just checking in with each other just touching base
You and I text each other when there is something to text about.
We have a visit every Monday morning, Pacific time, where we get to catch up with each other.
We probably don't talk as much as we should, but we talk way more than we did during the time when you were busy with music and I was making the web.
So we have our visits.
I think our relationship, if I could say I don't want to be presumptuous, I think our relationship is a point where we don't need to assure each other too much.
It's nice to share a little bit, but we both got shit to do.
Well, yeah, that's right.
I mean, if I need your consultation on something or you need mine.
Well, this is where we arrive on Sunday evening.
Sunday evening, I find myself a member of a group text chain that I thought was very interesting.
It was only two people.
Two people, but the only other person in the entire Roderickosphere who I would imagine being on that thread.
that's right that's right our good friend matt howey who even at the time even as he spoke was locked up he's probably sitting in a cold bathtub right now because his nest is broken and it won't let him out siri hot siri hot
So do you want to talk about this?
Because I don't know if it's good radio, but it was certainly very interesting to me.
I got a text from...
John Roderick at 816 Pacific time.
If I get, let's see.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Sorry, sorry.
A little earlier.
It was a little earlier.
Yeah, yeah.
Go to 642.
642 PM.
Is that right?
Yeah.
I'm not sure.
I'm looking at Disneyland tweets.
Okay.
Let's roll tweets.
If you're going to get a new Apple watch, if you're going to get a new Apple watch, do you get the stainless one or not?
And I was like, you've got to ease me into this.
I need some context for this.
How about what person you are?
Yeah, well, so I wound up in that question because I did not know this was even a consideration.
You do not like computer devices.
And I couldn't decide if you were doing it for a friend.
It sounded like it was for you.
And I was very intrigued.
Well, so anyway, I wait a minute.
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I am so excited.
tired of carrying the internet around with me i don't want the internet every every passing day merlin i get more and more less and less oh sing it sister with the internet yeah it wasn't working on my ice i fucked up my whole weekend looking at brett kavanaugh i ruined my whole weekend just clicker clicker clicker what the fuck is wrong with me
What am I doing?
I got an ice machine to fix.
I have a child to shepherd.
You got ice machines.
You got children's.
I got fires to stop.
I got shit to do, and I'm sitting there, flukka, flukka, flukka.
Like, what am I doing?
No, no more flukka, flukka.
What is this in service of?
It is in service of zilch.
Ah, bupkis.
Oh, you're so fucking woke, John Roderick.
You want a way to have things that you need, but not too much of the things you don't want.
That's right.
So, for instance, I did not need to see the video of the two... The shirtless dad and his shirtless son...
with guns confronting the guy in the orange shirt in their driveway about a mattress.
Oh, no.
I haven't seen the mattress video.
I won't watch it.
You don't need that.
I didn't need it.
And especially, I didn't need it in the middle of the day.
If I wanted at 1 o'clock in the morning to go down and pad down into my lair with my bathrobe on and watch the video of the guy with the orange shirt...
And the two guys with the guns.
I could do it in the middle of the night if that's what I want.
But I do not need that during the day, right?
As time goes on, I look at my phone and I'm like, what are you providing to me other than...
uh, what, what do I need?
What is, what are my basic needs here?
I cannot be without texting.
It becomes your, like your digital everyday carry.
It's your everyday carry.
You know what I'm saying?
In the sense of like, you don't want all the knives.
You want one good knife.
You want maybe a pen, maybe get a space pen.
You got your keys, your wallet, right?
Your sword, all the things you actually need to get around during the day.
But when you got that fucking little pocket computer, you see the thing and you go, Oh, it's a guy about a mattress.
And then you see it three more times.
And like, now you got to go look at it.
You're not doing your life anymore.
What's your sword sitting there with your dick in your hand?
No, I don't want to spend any more time on Kavanaugh.
I know, I know, I know.
I know.
And so, but, but I tried to go without the phone and I cannot live without it because I, because I have a child and people are trying to communicate with me all the time.
People, friends of mine are sending me pictures of their children.
I need to be able at least to be on top of business.
And I thought for a while I was going to get a flip phone and I was going to be like a guy who rolls up the cuffs of his Levi's and has a mustache that he waxes and also carries a flip phone and wears a Stetson.
I could be that guy.
I'm not that far away from that guy.
It would be a very interesting turn.
But I am not quite ready to be that guy.
And so all of a sudden I'm thinking, well, wait a minute.
These are new watches.
So, so my mom, you've seen your mom.
I'm sorry, go ahead.
You've seen your mom interacting with this.
She went ahead.
She went, did she go ahead and pop and get the, the series three last month?
She got the, she got the, the last day, the last days of the lab of the series three.
And she seems happy with it.
She interacts with it.
I don't know if she a hundred percent is, is using it to its full full capacity.
Um,
using all its capabilities.
But she went and got the LTE one so she could make and take a phone call if she needs to.
So that's the one I'm going to get.
And I feel like the goal is leave the phone and
at home and just be out living in the world with the watch.
And if I have to say like, Siri, text Merlin that I would love to see a picture of him with his daughter.
Uh, at some point today, I have to have nothing.
Or if I wanted to look down and say, what is the fastest route to the nearest Arby's?
Or have texts read to me, or if the phone rings and it's something, you know.
Siri, who has the meats?
Siri, where are the meats?
Where are the meats?
Yeah, yeah.
Where's the beef?
Pond.
Pond.
and so even i do i do have an english voice on mine you do oh it says merlin you want to hear it yeah let's hear it okay hang on what time is it what time is it it's 10 31 oh she's so posh yeah she's pretty can you have her read my text
Uh, let's see.
I could try.
Let me see.
Oh, my, let me see if my latest text was kind of insulting.
I don't know how to, I've never done this.
Let me try it.
The one to me, read my messages.
I said something untoward about a reporter.
Oh, you can read things on your iPhone.
Oh, look at that.
There you go.
What does that mean?
It only wants to do it on the iPhone, but you can still look at them on here.
You could say open messages.
Hang on.
I'll tap you when I'm ready.
To whom should I send your message?
Oh, geez, it got confused.
John Roderick.
Which shall I use for John Roderick?
Mobile.
What do you want to say?
May I mambo dog face to the banana patch?
Question mark.
Okay, I'll send this.
All right.
Let's see.
May I mambo dog patch to the banana patch?
May I mambo dog face to the banana patch?
Yeah.
Wow, it got the whole thing.
Pretty good.
Let me see here.
Well, it's got to arrive here for this experiment to be completed.
Yeah.
Mambo dog patch to the... What did you say?
May I mambo dog face to the banana patch?
Oh, yeah.
Hope it went through.
Waiting, waiting, anticipating.
Well, I set this thing on do not disturb, but that shouldn't affect it.
I'll cut all this out.
It's imperfect, but it's doable for periods of time, and it could restore some life to your life.
So the only thing I'm sad about is no camera, right?
There's no camera.
You love your camera.
I do.
I like to put a camera.
Oh, may I mambo dog face to the banana patch?
It came across perfectly.
Yeah.
Oh, that's wonderful.
Is that an early text garble that you decided to make into a catchphrase?
It's worse.
It's way worse.
It's a Steve Martin bit.
Oh, it's a Steve Martin bit.
Remember how to screw up your kid whenever you're around him?
Talk wrong.
First day of school, the kid raised his hand.
We're doing Steve Martin bits.
Cut that out.
I got really small.
You have done a very good problem statement.
You have identified that it is frustrating to you that your phone is a, what do they call it in legal terms?
It's an attractive nuisance.
Fair to say?
Yeah, I would say.
I do not want it, Sam, I am.
I do not want green phone and ham.
I do not want it in my crotch.
I would like it on my watch.
Yes, precisely.
I always feel bad for the train driver.
I always feel so bad for him.
He drives off the bridge and then he looks stunned.
Yeah, he should be stunned.
Yeah.
I kind of fuck with that guy pretty bad.
I wonder if he's Union.
So... The thing is that the laws of gravity are suspended in Seussiana.
Well, not for that guy.
He's in the fucking drink now.
What if he was leasing that train?
He only looked perplexed, though.
There's never horror.
No one ever expresses horror in Dr. Seuss.
They just... They fall...
They fall, they end up ass over tea kettle.
Generally, there's a cake balanced on their feet.
They make a lot of poor decisions.
People in Dr. Seuss do, yeah.
So I'm not going to have a camera, but you know what?
Instagram has stopped being 100% fun anymore either, and it's just making me realize I think that this is a thing.
This is just – it's exactly like the vintage guitar market or the sound of indie rock, which is to say that when you're in it, when you're in the middle of it, you can never foresee a time when it would no longer be –
be when it would just fully no longer be right.
I mean, there is still a vintage guitar market, but it's nothing like it was when I was learning it, learning that trade.
There will always be an internet, but I don't think it's going to be as important to us as it is now.
And I don't think it's going to be as important as we imagine it's going to be.
I don't think it's, I don't think we are just in the beginning of a thing where the internet is going to
subsume us all i think we always imagined that was what was going to happen but really the internet is such a useless piece of shit 98 of the time that that sensible people are going to abandon it in droves and it's difficult i think with part of what you're implying it's difficult it's difficult to realize what it is while you're doing it you kind of have to step away a little bit to have any kind of
perspective you know what i mean yeah isn't that kind of what you're saying well for so for instance uh uh podcasts are via the internet but podcasts aren't the internet they're not on the internet they're just via the internet and a lot of the things that we like like the map program and the you know and communicating with our friends and whatnot those are not
Those are not – the internet is just a series of tubes, Merlin.
I don't want to get too technical.
Oh, is that what Uncle Ted said?
Mm-hmm.
Mm-hmm.
But what's happened is we've – like this place, this place, this social media place –
We've come to think of it as like a like a I don't know, like a universe that we're just wandering around all these rooms and and we can't leave.
But we totally can leave and we can have all the best parts.
You can still have podcasts without being on the Internet.
You can still share photos even really without, you know, like, I don't know.
Social I don't even want to say the words.
I just feel like there's not These problems that we that we're feeling now this like access to constant news and the reason I think this is this whole What's it?
I don't know exactly the term but but where you can where the video technology is such that you can superimpose Someone's face on a video and all the deepfake things deepfakes right as soon as that becomes as soon as there's the first scandal of
Where a deep fake gets accepted as reality for six hours or something and creates a hullabaloo because it was done to, it was done for political reasons or it was done in order to, you know, as soon as somebody is caught doing something terrible, everybody jumps on it and it's big six hours of screaming and then it's revealed that it's a deep fake.
Yeah.
From that moment on, none of us will be able to trust anything we see or hear.
It's not so far from, I don't want to talk about the news, but it's something we've been going through this morning, which was wasted by me on looking at the news, where there's an official in the...
government who nobody knew whether he was fired or not fired or resigning or not resigning and all of the news for this entire morning has been this uh schrodinger's cat speculation about what's happening with him and and can i also just give one thing just to clarify slash reframe what you're saying i feel like one thing you're saying that's interesting to me is um
So we came into the internet stuff at a time where there was a lot of walking to get to a destination.
And then you get to that destination, and then you go walk to someplace else.
But there was a lot of walking in between.
There were a lot of hallways between the rooms.
I think so.
But, I mean, there were times when you would go check your email.
I mean, something in another career I've talked about was the difference...
how different it is today versus 1994 when I had to be at a computer with a modem and the ability to log in through the internet to go in and get that email.
And the expectations over time have changed as that availability has gotten wider.
So, I mean, you tell me if I'm way off track or not, but like the internet of so many years ago,
Felt like a series of destinations that you would kind of walk to at your leisure, whereas now it feels more like, what, a casino?
It feels more like a casino combined with the world's least satisfying food court, where it feels like you're being barraged.
from so many things between the things you choose to go to, the notifications you get, your own compulsions you've developed over time, there's not a place that you go to anymore.
The place is where you are, and that place is everything.
It's everywhere.
And there's increasingly less sense of finality
or just existential canon.
There's not that much stuff that feels like the real version, the final place, I'm done looking at the photos, I'm done doing the thing, and then I get back to my life, because that is your life now.
Right, there's no exit door.
You can sit and scroll through
your Instagram feed all the way back to the beginning of Instagram, if you want.
Right.
And there's, I mean, Instagram has started doing an unusual thing, which is putting a, putting a little notification in there.
Like you're all caught up.
You're finished.
And it's like how interesting that they would do that.
It's both helpful and also quizzical because why are they stopping you?
Why, why would they intrude on your consumption of their app space time and,
If you wanted to just sit and blah, blah, blah.
That's a form of benevolent gaslighting because if they actually wanted to do the normal and correct thing, they would give you a chronological, reverse chronological timeline where once you saw, like when I go and look at cute animals on Twitter, I know when I start seeing corgis I've already seen, I know that I've seen all the corgis.
But because they're presenting this to you in this algorithmic, weird, fucked up order, you don't know when you're done.
Right.
Right?
I mean, that wasn't their accommodation.
That's their accommodation to say, well, now you'll know if you're done with the funhouse for now, but make sure you come back.
Yeah, I guess.
But it is like a casino.
It's like the nightmare casino that you can never leave.
There's no exit door.
Every time you go through a hallway, you're just in another room of the casino.
It all smells like smoke and the carpet is damp.
And I don't think that...
I mean, I certainly don't want to stay there anymore.
And I recognize that I have become compulsive about certain things.
I routinely put my phone down only to pick it up immediately and go right back to doing what I just decided to stop doing.
I all the time will be on my computer, log off my computer and pick up my phone and go back to immediately back to the same places I was just at on my computer.
And none of those places are giving me anything.
I mean, the news is not news.
The commentary is not commentary.
My mind is not being broadened or stroked in any way other than just constant, constant negative reinforcement.
And I can't live like it.
And I don't think it is –
It's civilization eroding.
It isn't civilization building.
It's like this constant buffet of lukewarm macaroni salad that you get one teaspoon at a time.
And if you had actually taken a huge bite, you'd go, fuck this.
But no, this is what you do now.
But the mayonnaise has gone.
It's sour, right?
It's unhealthy even.
It's going to make us have bad poops later.
And so...
So I still have faith in people that we cannot be – we can't be this Ponzi schemed for this long.
Like we're all contributing and have – early on it felt like you would contribute your funny jokes and your smart ideas and I would contribute mine and we were putting them into a pile that other people could use and it was –
It was we were rewarded because it was fun and because we got things out of it.
And the people like Zuckerberg or Jack or Jack or whatever, like these these guys were profiting from our free content and our attention.
But we didn't we objected a little, but we didn't mind exactly because we were getting stuff out of it.
But now we're too smart as a as a race of people.
As human beings, human beings, we're too clever to let this go on for long now that we see it, right?
Now that we feel it every day, like we are, we're intrinsically like a, there's a spirituality to being a human being that we all tease with.
Some people are really in bed with their spirituality.
Some people are running from it all the time, but it's there.
And this, this, what we're doing is,
It's like a disease of the spirit.
And so we cannot but reject it eventually.
And I'm finding it as somebody that like thinks about this a lot.
I'm finding it super, super hard not to just go into this polluted space and punish myself.
And, but, but punish myself just with the, like, just, it's just exactly like drinking in a shitty bar.
And so it sounds crazy that I am going to go to a,
expensive Apple watch in order to try and find a way away from the internet.
But, but I'm not, I don't want to reject technology.
I don't want to lose what's good about the future.
I do believe in the future and I believe that technological... The appliance itself is extremely useful.
There's no question about the, I mean, like you say, just even the fact of just having a camera, having your calendar there without having to be at the office.
Having your stuff all backed up.
That's all really good stuff.
I want to be augmented by all the things that we've developed.
I just don't buy in anymore to the fact that my online avatar is... I mean... The challenge I still have is that there are... What am I doing?
I always feel like I'm laying the groundwork for some...
Like I almost wrote an email to Ted Leo last night and said, and in the email, I'm going to say, I am going to write this email.
Look, you did a, you did a Kickstarter for your record last year.
It was successful, successful enough that people were commenting on it as an example of a successful Kickstarter.
I bought it.
Will you break it down for me?
Because I've had John Van Der Slice break down his Kickstarters for me, and in the end, it felt like it cost him more to do than he made, just in terms of blood, sweat, and tears.
We've talked about things related to this offline, and it's doable, but it's...
Well, and so it's not as easy as it first looks, but it is doable.
Ted and I have talked about his Kickstarter and he has indicated the same thing that it was a big successful thing.
But in the end, he you know, he had to fulfill all the promises he made.
He had to pay for all the things that he he committed to.
And in the end, it was, you know, not like a huge windfall.
But I want him to really break it down for me, like note by note.
Because a lot of what I do, a lot of why I'm still on Twitter, even though I keep trying to get away from it, a lot of the reason that I – the ways that I justify it to myself in being there is that I need to be there because I'm an entertainer and I need to maintain –
that venue to reach people.
That's, that's something that a lot of my, a lot of my friends say that people who actively, many of whom are actively very unhappy with, let's say in particular Twitter is like, well, that's, that's where the people are.
This is how, this is my largest audience for communicating with people who consume what I do.
So it's not really an option for me.
We're not, you're not alone in that.
I have said that to myself a million times, but I'm thinking, well, I,
is it, how much of that is actually true?
Like, is it, is it true?
If I were not on Twitter, if I put out a thing and said, and didn't say anything about it on Twitter, would it really, I mean, I guess there's, there isn't a similar place, right?
It still is the, it still is the sidewalk of main street USA, right?
I mean, because if I didn't tweet about it, I would,
Kind of count on you and Andy Richter to tweet about it, right?
I mean, if it weren't being tweeted about, it wouldn't exist.
I know.
Or Facebooked?
Yeah.
I mean, when is my last tweet?
How do we get... My last tweet was July 26th.
Really?
Yep.
Nice.
That's got to feel good.
But you're on there every day looking, right?
Are you lurking?
I don't want to go into too much because it's super boring.
I talked about other places.
But yeah, I made a very conscious decision to say I'm done here for a while.
And now I'm back and looking.
But so far, nothing has tempted me enough to want to contribute anything to the garbage fire.
I am merely a consumer of the garbage fire.
I'm vaping the outgassing of Twitter.
This morning, a person who lives in Vancouver, Washington, presumably in Vancouver, Washington, wrote to Ken Jennings and me and said, you guys need to get your facts straight.
You said that this, that Washington third district, which we didn't name, but we just said like, we basically referring to the Washington third congressional district.
You said the Washington third congressional district was, was like red state and rural, but you're wrong.
Hmm.
we're like a swing.
We're not red.
We're magenta or something.
Purple.
And so I went.
Thank you for your message.
I should not have replied, but I went and I looked.
And the Washington Congressional 3rd District.
I want you to get one of those watches that gives you an electric shock every time you want to respond to someone.
That's what you need.
Because Ken replied to her and said, well, what we said was that
Every single congressional district that touches the Pacific Ocean is a blue district except for one, which is the Washington Third Congressional, which touches the Pacific Ocean in a tiny little corner.
But it will probably be a Republican congressperson still, even though it's magenta or purple.
That's what we said.
But so I went and saw that in every election since the first Bush election,
Except for the initial 2008 Obama sweep of the country.
The third Washington congressional district has voted pretty strongly for the Republican candidate.
49% for Trump over 42% for Hillary.
They voted for Mitt Romney the second time.
I mean, let's not kid around that it's like a blue area.
And so this person writes back indignant.
You said that it was a rural area, but it's not a rural area.
We have Washington's fourth biggest town.
And so again, I went back and I said, the third congressional district is made up of like seven counties, five of which have a population density of less than 18 people per square mile, including one of the counties which is the second least populous county in Washington.
And Ken then texts me and says, WTF?
Like, what the fuck are you doing?
Why are you doing this to yourself?
You're arguing with, you're using facts.
on twitter to do what to convince this person with you know this like egg with 15 followers that uh that they're wrong about the population density of the washington third congressional district like go take go stick your head in a bucket of water and i'm like it's like you're screaming at a mcdonald's that's just the food pyramid you guys you guys milk is right on just you need more fruits
Anyway, I'm going to get a watch.
And I'm going to say, Siri, text Merlin, bugbear, banana pants, Frankenstein, frankincense.
And Siri will get to know me.
I'll have Siri speak in a German accent.
You know what else?
The Scottish one's good, too.
I'm going to risk making this extremely fucking excruciatingly boring.
by saying that I know this is not your solution, but FWIW, in iOS 12, there's a new thing called Screen Time.
I don't know if you've upgraded to iOS 12 yet.
I have, and I've heard of this.
Screen Time...
If you don't do anything else with screen time other than turn it on, it's still really useful.
Because what it will show you... Screen time!
Screen time!
You don't have to go to Twitter, but fuck you.
You go to screen time and it will show you some interesting things.
It will show you how much time you spent on your phone that day, over the last seven days, whatever you want to look at.
And you can have work across all your devices.
So it can show you like a cumulative for all of this.
But, you know, if you want to dig deep in this, it gets really interesting to go in and say, well, how much time did I spend with this type of thing?
Like, show me how much time I spend on social media stuff.
You can get specific.
Where do I find screen time?
Go to settings.
And then somewhere down near the bottom of the first or second screen, you'll see.
Screen time.
I see it.
Okay.
I'm there.
I'm in.
I'm in.
Crack the encryption.
Okay.
Oh, look at this.
One hour and 37 minutes, it says.
I don't know how much time that represents that I was on there for one hour and 37 minutes.
Oh, already today?
Yeah.
Here's the good one.
So click on the last seven days tab.
Well, so this says, I've been social networking for 34 minutes.
That's not so bad.
I've been gaming for 28 minutes.
I've been in entertainment.
You've been gaming?
Are you a hardcore gamer, John?
I'm mad gamer.
Mad, mad gamer.
Scroll down for the interesting stuff, though.
So you see stuff like how much you use Twitter, Safari, Wikipedia in my case.
But scroll down, look under pickups.
That's pretty interesting.
Where do you see this?
Oh, you have to go to a different screen?
No, no.
Just scroll down below the most used section.
Pickups.
One per hour.
Okay.
What's that mean?
That's how often you pick up your phone.
Oh, okay.
It says 20 total pickups, most pickups between 9 and 10 a.m.,
I had nine of them between 9 and 10 a.m.
But I started the show at 10 a.m.
I'm just saying, watch that one over time.
That will be surprisingly, interestingly useful for you.
And then down further, one that I thought was interesting is how many notifications you get.
I don't know if you get a lot.
I get a lot.
I've got 98 messages, 30 from my task app, 16 from my delivery app, et cetera, et cetera.
This is all I'm trying to say is number one.
Well, there's like several points to this.
One point is no, this is there and go look at it because it's kind of interesting.
It's cool.
You could choose to look at that.
And then what also is interesting.
So then click on the little left arrow, go back to screen time, top level.
And you'll notice now under your time thing, you'll see areas for downtime, app limits, always allowed, etc.
Now, I'm not saying this is for you.
This feels very un-John Roderick.
But if you chose to, you could go in and add limits for different apps or times you don't want to be on the screen.
I know this is not your solution.
It's not how you roll.
But before you buy a watch to have less internet...
But FYI, there's an area where you could go in and just as an exercise, you could say, I don't want to spend more than 45 minutes a day on social media.
You can always override it.
But at that point, you would know.
You would get your own little governor.
I know that's not how you roll, but I just wanted to say, and I'm not trying to discourage you from getting a watch because it's really fucking cool and I love mine.
But that is a vector of attack that you could use for destroying the Internet in your life.
Okay, look at this.
Now, on seven days...
It says that I have spent four hours and 50 minutes per day.
That's five hours per day.
Now, when I worked at Steve's Broadway News, my shifts were five-hour shifts.
So you have an internal sense of five hours.
So five hours per day, I'm looking at my phone.
Fourteen hours and six minutes of the last week, I've spent social networking.
Mm-hmm.
Um, six, uh, like seven hours of which was looking at Instagram.
Wow.
Uh, eight hours and 30 minutes I've spent playing games.
Is that right?
Yeah.
Okay.
That one surprises me a little.
Um, and, uh,
And so, you know, obviously that makes me feel... It makes me feel like I have some data now.
What's your immediate hot take on how do you feel about that?
Is it different than what you would have guessed in a blind taste test?
Let's see.
If you had told me five hours a day I'm looking at my phone, would I have been surprised?
Maybe not.
Maybe not.
If you'd said 14 hours a week looking at Instagram, interacting with Instagram, it's one of those things like I used to say about cigarette smoking.
Like if you just took all the cigarettes you were going to smoke this month and just set them on the floor in your living room and just said, get started.
That's perspective.
But like we used to say at the bank, Fifth Third Bank when I was a kid, they used to say every dollar is made of dimes.
Every dollar is made of dimes.
Every dollar is made of dimes.
Every dime is made of pennies.
Yep.
Every penny is made of fractions of bitcoins.
Every penny is made of copper and different kinds of valois that cost like two cents to make, which is stupid.
But the point being, before you start thinking that pennies and dimes are dumb, remember that's how dollars get made.
And that's how time works too.
My daughter wanted a candy the other day and I said...
you know, you've got a nickel, buy it yourself.
And she said, I don't have a nickel, I have five cents.
And I said, a five cents is called a nickel.
And she said, why does it have two names?
And I said, well, it's called, and we're doing this in front of the cash register lady who has, you know, who has a beehive hair.
Sorry.
No, she has a beehive haircut, a beehive hairdo.
She's 75 years old.
She has blue hair.
And I'm like, a nickel is called a nickel because it used to be made of the metal nickel.
And already my, you know, you can just see my daughter's eyes starting to go back in her head.
Why are you still talking?
And I'm like, it's not made of nickel anymore because nickel became more expensive than five cents worth to make a coin that was that heavy.
You're so fascinated.
Tell me more about when the Smiths had a second guitarist.
It's so fucking interesting to add.
Now a nickel is made out of an alloy, but it wouldn't make sense to call it an alloy because all American coins are made of alloys now.
Actually, nickel is a known carcinogen.
And that's how time works.
Now that I know that's there, I think I will actually, Merlin, experiment with setting limits.
Is that okay?
You understand why I'm pushing back on my own idea.
I know you're a man who likes to have a pack of cigarettes in the house just to know that he won't smoke it.
Yep.
You might have a bump just sitting on a mirror somewhere just going to leave it because that's how you roll.
I just turned the switch for downtime on and Apple has conveniently...
pre-programmed it to go off at 10 p.m.
and on at 7 a.m.
Oh, that's going to be an interesting test around 347 the night.
Right.
Am I right?
Right?
That is their stock thing.
That's when you're going to watch some mattress shooting videos, which you know are very good for you.
Well, so now my question is, or when I look at that, I think,
That is perfectly reasonable.
Who wouldn't do that?
Who needs to have their phone doing stuff at that time, right?
You're treating yourself like a 13-year-old boy, which, I mean, you have the suspiciousness of that 13-year-old boy to say, eh, eh, eh, let's go ahead and just shut that off.
Let's just shut it off.
Shut it off.
And let's just shut it off.
And so then when I reach for it and the phone goes, eh, eh, eh, eh, then each time you have to make a
You have to decide in your soul...
Is this where I go now?
Is this the zig that I'm going to make?
There's a Tumblr I follow called Confirm Shaming, and it's just screenshots of pop-up menus that are asking you, hey, do you want to save lots of money on your auto insurance?
Or no, I'd rather get used by the system.
That's what you're doing here.
You're saying, John, do you agree to the terms and conditions that you're actually a big fucking loser and can't follow your own rules?
Enter the code!
But in fact, I cannot, I cannot independently, this is, this is the thing about, so, so I've been considering going on a keto diet.
Oh, no shit.
Not because I believe.
Do you know how extreme, you know, that's, you know, that's a very serious, that's more than Atkins.
You know this, right?
Well, like, how is it more than Atkins?
It's just the same, right?
Be careful of Atkins.
You know, that guy fell and hit his head.
The Atkins guy, yeah.
But the keto guy didn't.
The keto one is... So what is it?
You can't do anything.
You just have to eat meat and cheese and full... My sense is that the keto... You know what?
I'm sorry.
I keep interrupting you.
I want to hear where you're going with this.
You're going to... I'm sorry.
Shame on me.
Confirm shame on you.
This is a phone version of the keto diet.
Okay.
Is that right?
Well, so no, I'm thinking of actually going on the keto diet as well.
And as you know, I've had a lot of success in life by just being like, eh, leave it.
You've had a lot of success in life by simply suddenly not doing something.
You have a distinguished record of suddenly not doing something that other people would think needs a graded off-ramp.
Right.
I am not going to put the patch on.
I am not going to gradually stop smoking cigarettes.
I'm going to go from a pack and a half a day to zero cigarettes.
And whatever the consequences are, however much it feels like I am getting beat up by a kangaroo with boxing gloves, I'm going to take that punishment.
Ow, ow, ow.
Because that punishment, because I've earned that punishment, first of all.
And second of all, it feels like, why stretch out the punishment?
You did the crime, now you do the time.
That's right.
And it's the same, I don't drink anymore for the same reason.
I said, you know, I don't buy vintage RVs anymore for the same reason.
Like, there are a lot of things where I'm just like...
Done.
Done.
Yep.
Yep.
Yep.
You are done.
Don't do it anymore.
Don't do it anymore.
So I'm trying to do that with the phone, right?
You're done.
It's just, you're done.
But I can't because it has so many tendrils, so many little fucking tendrils in me.
And to be done completely is to be, is to have this problem of like, well, what if I did come out with something that I wanted to share with the world and I was done?
What would I do?
Like, I wouldn't even, would I just like send emails to myself?
Just keep it to myself?
Ugh.
Ugh.
uh so i was almost clever for a second i need to share this but these things these things like oh okay well maybe i'm just maybe i'm just done from 10 to 7 boy that seems hard to do too like what my only friend is is the game of threes at one o'clock in the morning otherwise i would have to lay there and sit and think of my thoughts oh oh i never had played threes with the sound on
you're kidding you missed you missed all the little voices yeah i never do anything with the sound on sound is turned off for everything and one day i was sitting there and i was like oh i'm so bored of threes it's so inside my head please go away please if i never see threes again i'll be i'll be happy it's not a game for vulnerable people and then i was like well you know or the other thing i could do is turn sound on see what that's like oh it's so cute
And I turned it on and I was like, this is pretty fun.
And then there's that point near the end of the loop where it starts to swell.
And I always feel like I need to do something really heroic because the music's getting so good right now.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
I've got an EP3 of it.
I love it.
I love that music.
I played it with the music for a while and then I had to stop because it was like, no, no, no, no, no, no, don't, don't, don't, don't, don't.
You should play Pocket Run Pool.
It's really fun.
What am I doing?
Leave it.
This is really interesting.
The fact that Apple is putting this into their phone is funny because Apple is, in a way, setting itself up as the enemy of apps.
Apps never want you to stop using them.
There's a lot of buzz amongst the people who observe these things.
We've heard a lot of not-so-great stories about some of the major players in the last couple, three years.
And there is a thought going around that especially with things like Facebook and I guess to an extent Google, there's a lot of thought that, look, hey, if we don't take care of this, somebody else will.
There's going to be a mobile phone 9-11, and then it's going to go straight to Congress, and there's going to be all kinds of craziness.
And the thought is, amongst different people in their own way, well, we need to show that we can help take care of our users before...
some regulatory body does it on our behalf.
Do you know what I mean?
Right.
I don't know if they're all actively stating that, but people who observe these worlds believe that that's a lot of what's going on is we need to show that we can encourage responsible use and consumption, whether that's in vetting articles on Facebook or whether that's in giving you the opportunity to see how much your kid's playing threes, that they want to get in front of that.
Which makes good sense, and it's kind of what we're talking about, too.
They do still very much want you to buy the phones and get the apps.
That is correct.
Yeah, they want you to get the iWatch.
They want to give it additional functionality.
Every single person I've mentioned the iWatch to has said, oh, yeah, if you fall down, it'll alert the cops.
I'm like, what the fuck are you talking about if I fall down?
Why, because you won't fall down?
Well, no, because that's like one of the five things that they can claim it does.
Like the thing doesn't do anything, right?
I mean, it's... Here's a very short version of this is with the Series 3 that I was happy to recommend to your mother as a guest, one of our first guests on the program, is that the Series 3 is when the thing became a more capable standalone device or just device in general.
Before that, it was very easy to say to people, the same way that I would say about Mac stuff, really, until the 2000s is like...
what i would say about the watch is it is a fun it's a fun accessory for your iphone that is utterly unnecessary it is still no longer necessary but it's become much more capable that's for sure i don't agree that things like fall detection are the only good part of this i mean it's but but i do take your point it's just in the last two years it really has gotten a lot better and it will continue to get better there's one reason i say not to buy the steel one because you might want another one in a year or two
Because I don't want it to be an accessory to my phone.
That's what it's been.
You couldn't use it without your fucking phone.
You could use it.
So basically, up until the Series 3, I know this is really boring.
Shut up.
Up until the Series 3, here's what you could do.
It didn't even used to originally have GPS on it.
But the notion is, before it got LTE in the Series 3, basically, you could use it when you were either A...
in proximity of your iPhone, which is pretty goddamn close, or B, were on a Wi-Fi network that had previously been seen by your iPhone.
So, for example, there are great stories beginning with the Series 2 watch.
There are amazing stories of people who were on, like, worked at a university where the same Wi-Fi network sprawled over miles and they could use, oh my God, they could magically use their watch all over campus because they were always on the same Wi-Fi network.
But it didn't become it's mostly its own thing until Series 3.
And now with Series 4, they've taken that even further.
Right.
And you also now, the other thing is, I don't mean to say that this is the answer to the problem that you have posed, but FWIW.
You can do stuff like change the kinds of notifications you get on this device or that device.
Most people like me say mirror notifications from my phone to my watch.
So whatever notifications I get on my phone, I want to also get on my watch.
You can do that per app.
So you could go in and say, listen, I want to know when I get a message, but I don't want notifications from Twitter on my watch.
And further to that in iOS 12, I know I'm getting deep in the stack in iOS 12, you have a lot more ability.
Next time you get a notification on your phone, swipe right to left and hit manage, and you'll see you now have lots of options for how you will see notifications from that thing in the future.
So if shit's getting up in your grill and you're sick of looking at it, you can say, just don't show me this anymore.
Ah.
I don't let most things give me notifications.
Smart.
They sure want to, don't they?
Oh, they want to so bad.
No, there's some new jewels in the Jewel Hop game.
Turn notifications on?
And I say no, no, no, no, no.
Access your contacts?
I don't think so.
No, no, no, no.
So I don't get a ton of notifications.
But what I...
What I don't want is access to Twitter at all.
Can I make it so that my watch, even if I wanted to go on Twitter, wouldn't let me?
Yeah, you could basically not have Twitter installed on your watch.
Oh, see, wouldn't that be... Oh, but the thing is, you can install it on your watch, though.
Yes.
Can you say, Siri, let me send a tweet?
Can you send a tweet?
I don't do any of that from the watch, but based on the stuff I do do from the watch, do-do-do-do-do-do, shibby-dooby-doo,
do say what yeah as with as is that kept it sensible no no no that's uh that's from uh repo man that's um that's not the dead milk ordinary fucking people it's uh
Who was the band in Repo Man?
Come on.
Oh, Harry Dean Stan.
No, the band.
No, the band.
Oh, the band is not Circle Jerks.
It was Circle Jerks.
Was it Circle Jerks?
Circle Jerks.
Yeah, Wild in the Streets, they said.
You know, where they're in the bar and they're like, Yeah, they're doing the little jazz thing.
Oh, they're being funny.
Ever since then, I just say it.
I say it like it's one of those things.
I say it like three times a day.
You can't turn it off.
So as with notifications, you can choose to mirror the notifications from your iPhone to your iWatch.
Mirror.
You can also choose to say whatever apps, if there is an Apple Watch that's associated with an app on my phone, automatically put it on my watch.
I would say do not do that.
I would be very, as with me, I would be very deliberate about going into your new Apple Watch app that you would have on your iPhone and say, yes, install this, yes, install that, don't install it.
And the rest of it would just leave uninstalled.
And you could just choose to not have Twitter on there.
I think you might still get, if you have notifications on your phone for Twitter, I think it would still be mirrored to your watch.
But as I say, you could just, I don't understand anybody who has notifications on for Twitter.
But if you're the kind of person who does that, you would just not have that on your watch.
You could shut off notifications on your phone.
You wouldn't see it anymore.
Yeah.
I think people that have notifications on for Twitter have like 30 people.
Yeah, I know.
But you should make this your bug out kit.
This is your small bag that you pack.
If you do choose to get this watch, I think you should be very parsimonious about adding things to it.
Yes, that is my plan.
I want to be able to use maps.
I want to get phone calls and send texts.
Texts are nice because now on this new watch, if you choose to get the Series 4, it also now you can get images.
You can get webpages.
You can get images, really.
Yeah, it gives you webpages and images, yeah.
So what else should I have on it?
Well, I'll tell you this.
I would start out with just basically the stock stuff.
Learn how to use the watch such as it is.
I think that there are things, this is so fucking boring.
In the evolution of the Apple Watch, Apple has learned a couple of very important things.
Go on.
One they have learned is, the second important one, is that mostly people really use this as an excellent fitness device.
And so, boy, please put lots more focus on using this for fitness tracking.
The other one is they thought apps were going to be the central thing, perhaps almost as important as apps are on the phone.
And that's not the case at all.
Do you use it as a fitness tracker?
Yes.
Absolutely.
I use it for sleep tracking.
I use it for fitness tracking.
Is it useful as a fitness?
Do you have more fitness?
Yeah, yeah, yeah, absolutely.
I have goals for what I want to meet.
Like you saw last night when I sent you that photo, you could see that two of my three rings are filled.
The third ring never gets filled.
But I get my stand goal and my movement goal every day.
You do?
Mm-hmm.
Because it's very modest.
But that's what I want.
I want a goal that I can reach every day.
Sleep tracking is awesome.
I use a different app for that, which we could talk about.
But...
But listen, listen, if you're going to do this as your friend and occasional tech conciliary, I think you should go into this very parsimoniously and be very mindful about anything you put on there.
And there's a tip I used to give to my kids on the old website, which was, I still say this today, if you've got drawers full of shit in your house, like in your kitchen, take all the shit out of the drawer and then only put stuff back in the drawer as you need it.
I think you should consider that with your iWatch.
Which is, unless you're really hurting to have this functionality on there, don't put it on there until you really need it.
Like, run as stock and as clear and clean as you can before you junk it up with the shit that made your phone such a nightmare.
How many apps do you have on your phone that you have not looked at in the last six months?
Oh, most of them.
That's actually the challenge this week on another podcast I do, is to clear out my electronic life, which I have to do tomorrow.
Is this a do-by-Friday challenge?
Yeah, that's right.
It's a challenge program.
We challenge each other, we challenge ourselves.
So most of what I've got on here is only the stuff that I really need or can't delete.
But you will find other things that are really handy.
For example, there's an app called Just Press Record.
You could put a big red button right on the face of your watch.
And when you click it, it starts recording your voice.
It transcribes the audio to a text file and then puts it where you want it to go.
So if you had some great idea for a song and you went la, la, la, la, la, you could just like, if you're writing a Smith song, you can just hit that little red button and it would record it for you.
Stuff like that.
So it's not just a, it's not a feedback you strap onto your fucking face.
It's also just a way of like minimizing the friction needed for
to go from cognition to completion like whatever it is that's in your dumb fucking mind you could get it into the watch and it puts it someplace it's your concierge it serves you could you send me the things that you think i would want on my watch uh to me in a in a text that also has some pictures of you with your kid