Ep. 310: “Quiet Moments”
Hello.
Hi, John.
Hi, Merlin.
How's it going?
Ooh, John, things are gonna get Monday morning.
Oh, I love it.
That's a really good song.
Oh, I love it.
Such a good song.
Yeah, it's really a good song.
I'm here, baby.
I powered through this weekend.
What happened?
What happened?
Oh, Jiminy.
We got so much going on right now.
Yeah, you doing a big remodel?
Well, you know, one way things get done in my house is my wife decides that we got a project.
So we painted the bedroom.
She mainly painted the bedroom.
But you got to move a lot of stuff to paint the bedroom.
So the bedroom is painted.
What color?
It's called Quiet Moments.
Now, what color do you think that is?
Quiet Moments.
Quiet Moments.
Let's see.
Is it...
Is it tea colored?
Well, a Cretan like me would describe it as light blue.
Oh, oh, quiet moments like light blue.
Quiet moments.
Yeah, yeah, it's nice.
It's real nice.
It was kind of a wackadoo color before, but now it's nice and it's soothing.
Is it sunshiny?
It lights up real good.
When you open the blinds and stuff, you get lots of light.
It's nice.
Yeah, so no complaints.
Okay, that's nice.
But one doesn't like to say about one's maladies, you know?
Sure.
Sure, you don't want to talk about your maladies.
Well, I get a malady of a kind once or twice a year.
Yeah, oh yeah.
Where I get, this is such an old man thing, but I get this like a nerve thing.
I think it's piriformis and it leads to sciatica and I get this big pain in my buttle area and legal area.
Oh no.
And it's been, it's been bad.
It's been, you know, like you get a, you get a malady and it gets distracting.
Yes.
And then like you try to sleep and it's hard to sleep and stuff.
So it really threw me off.
I was really off my game all weekend, uh, powered through it.
We had the walkathon on Sunday.
There's lots of stuff to do.
Got a flu shot, did all the things.
And I said, you know what?
I'm going to power through this.
Uh,
And, you know, go with God.
God is my co-pilot.
And Zenyatta Mandata.
I said Zenyatta Mandata.
And for whatever reason, it's not gone, but it's way less bad today.
And you, as a man who was recently a little under the weather, you know the feeling.
Oh, no, I'm getting sick.
It's getting worse.
It's getting worse.
It's getting worse.
Now I'm sick.
And then one day, in my parlance, I would say, it feels less bad.
Okay, so you're feeling less bad.
I mean, to be honest, shit dog, I feel tons better.
Because that's the way, it's a nerve thing.
It's a nerve thing.
So the pain is in your butthole area.
Yeah, there's a muscle called the piriformis in your upper butthole area.
What does it do normally?
I don't know.
I think your butt's your biggest muscle.
I don't know a ton about it, but my wife, the athlete, has had it before.
She's never had it with the sciatica.
I thought your skin was your biggest muscle.
Your skin's your biggest organ.
Oh, your skin's your biggest organ.
Biggest organ.
It takes out all the toxins.
So your butt's not an organ?
I don't want to make this about me and my butt.
I just wanted to say I powered through the weekend.
I woke up today.
I felt less bad.
And for a man of my age, there are a few things that feel better than waking up and feeling less bad.
You know, don't you just wish for that every day?
Right?
Yeah.
Just let today be less bad.
For me, it's always when you wake up in the morning, no matter how bad you feel, good or bad, it's the first voice you hear in the morning.
Oh, interesting.
What does the voice that first speaks to you from inside the house... Oh, God.
What does it say?
I wish I could pre-program that.
So the first thing you hear when you wake up is, you're a loser.
Oh, this is the day.
They're finally going to get you.
Or, yeah, right.
This is it.
This is it.
You're not going to make it.
Are you ready for undoing day?
Because welcome to Monday.
Or, you know, oh, there's so much to do today.
So much to get done today.
I'm never going to get it all done.
Yeah.
I'm a big fan of breaks.
I like to have a break.
I like some unbroken time in which to not have to do stuff.
And if it's a day where I know there's not many breaks and it's going to be a lot of all day long, the voice is there to remind me of that.
No breaks today.
No breaks today.
Yeah.
I feel like I was saying to my sister the other day that the number one reason that I would like a personal assistant or a butler is
is that the first thing I want to hear in the morning is someone come in, open the blinds, and say, good morning, Master Roderick.
And then what do you, I mean, what problems could you have the rest of the day?
That'd be so nice.
That'd be so nice.
We're like the opposite of memento mori.
You know, there's the guy who used to whisper to the king, you're mortal, you're mortal, right?
I wish there was somebody who was like, you're good.
You're good.
You're good.
You're fine.
Yeah, you're fine.
You're going to be fine all day.
You're going to be fun.
Oh, wouldn't that be nice to know?
Wouldn't it be nice if there was like a little like not insurance policy, but something where you're like, you know what?
You're all day.
Today's going to be fine.
You're going to be fine today.
Guess what?
You know, tomorrow's another day, but today you're fine.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So, yeah.
What happened today?
Oh, today.
The first thing that I heard today was at about 3 30 a.m.,
Uh, this was the, both the first thing I heard today and the last thing I heard yesterday was it's 3 30 AM and you have to get up at 7 30.
So when I got up at 7 30, the first voice I heard said, see, you went to bed at 3 30 and now how do you feel?
The first voice was already lecturing me.
About the day.
Yeah.
You went to bed at three 30.
How do you feel now?
When are you going to learn?
Yeah.
And then I rolled out of bed.
I got, you know, I tumbled to the kitchen and I poured myself a cup of ambition.
I yawned and I stretched.
I tried to come to life.
I did.
I tried to come to life.
Mm hmm.
jumped in the cab like a stuntman the blood starts pumping out on the street the traffic starts jumping no i jumped in a cab like a stuntman dummy a little did i know i was still doing 20 and i nearly broke my neck but i thought that it was funny because i made it uptown and i didn't spend any money ah nothing but trouble wait which one is that parents have gone on a week's vacation wait which one what is that was that a will smith rap uh that was not a will smith wild wild west
Was that from the lesser canon?
I woke up in the morning and the voice was in my head and said, how do you feel now?
3.30, are you dead?
The first voice you hear will cause all the fear.
It's not going to be good.
Oh man, that would be so bad.
Like depressing Will Smith rap in your head.
Can you imagine?
That would suck.
It would be so catchy.
It would be so catchy.
You'd be so fucked.
i've had running on empty in my song i've had running on empty in my head for a few days and that's pretty good if you're gonna have a song in your head that's a good song to have in your head 65 i was 17 and but i would not want will smith rap and sadness in my head i was at a store where was i i was at a place was it a store was it a restaurant oh i was at a restaurant okay and they had some kind of playlist on
That in the course of a single meal, I heard four Eagles songs.
Whoa.
And I was like, what kind of Spotify could you put on?
Yeah.
So a normal meal would have four Eagles songs.
I don't think there is one.
I bet it's called Easy Sounds of the 70s.
But I mean, four Eagles songs?
It's not like I was there for four hours.
Well, if you're somebody like me who likes to make playlists, you know that that's a little bit like wearing your own t-shirt.
Like, you don't put too many songs from the same artist on.
Definitely not in the same city.
Especially if you're like Smooth Sounds of the 70s, you've got like 700 songs to choose from.
Oh, yeah.
You don't need to hear like, Desperado.
Why don't you come to your senses?
You've been out riding fences so long now.
There's something.
There's something.
There's something.
All right, now we're getting into copyright territory.
Oh, right.
Sorry.
That's too much.
That's too much.
Now, I like the Eagles.
I know it's not popular to like the Eagles.
I like the Eagles, but that's too much Eagles.
That's too much Eagles for a pseudo-random situation.
Well, especially since a lot of it was that Eagles stuff.
That Eagles stuff where it would come on and you're like,
Wait a minute.
Is this flying... Yeah, right.
Sure, sure.
Oh, no.
It's the Eagles.
And then the next one comes on and you're like, is this Foreigner?
Like knowable Eagles songs.
Like trademark... You think of it as classic Eagles tunes.
Were there any deep cuts?
Well, no.
I mean, and the thing about the Eagles is, are there any deep cuts?
I mean, there are.
But there were so many singles that...
I mean, Deep Cuts, it's like, how deep do you go?
Lion Eyes.
I mean, Lion Eyes, big hit, right?
Oh, that's such a good song.
Best of My Love.
These are all, you know, these are big songs.
I can't tell you why.
What happens if you put in Eagles Deep Cuts?
Let's see what comes up.
Let me look on Spotify.
so this is a hot-headed man train leaves here this morning she was terminally pretty out of control the last resort good day in hell journey of the sorcerer whoa
The Disco Strangler.
Hmm.
Hmm.
That sounds like a long run.
That sounds like a long run.
The Disco Strangler is on which record here?
Oh, that sounds like a long run.
Before.
Oh, wait.
No.
Oh, yeah.
Oh, yeah.
Yeah.
You're right.
It's long run.
You're right.
It's a slick mishmash of funk, glam pop, and club-tailored robo-rock.
Robo-rock.
Says us.napster.com.
Napster.com.
Crank it up and rip off the dial.
It's a solid rock block of 45 Eagle songs.
Everyone's a hit.
Fuck you.
We talked about that.
We talked about that where the DJ radio voice is the same voice as somebody that's really angry at you.
Oh, no.
Oh, no.
John, John, John.
Worst case scenario.
That's the voice in your head.
Oh, no.
News and traffic on the fives.
You have a very, very full day.
Get up and get some breakfast.
Your daughter likes you less every day.
There is not a single break waiting for you today.
You sure are disappointing.
Oh, no.
No one's grateful, grateful, grateful.
Yeah, news and traffic on the sevens.
No attaboys coming this week.
No attaboys.
I love that... Shouldn't you have a job, job, job?
I love that your voice sounds like the... Who was the professional wrestler that was in the movie Predator?
I mean, the whole movie was professional wrestler.
Was it kind of like a Roddy Piper?
No, no, no.
You're Jesse Ventura.
Yeah, it's Jesse Ventura.
Your radio voice is your Jesse Ventura voice.
He has a little bit more.
He got a little bit more kind of Minnesota to it.
your lifestyle is your death style your lifestyle becomes your death style yeah yeah that's that so far so good now i'm glad i put that thought in my head i wonder if i'll have drive time dj in my head tomorrow i uh my mom and i painted the back porch and she just came in a minute ago with and with her finger held out like she was offering me some cookie dough you know like here i've got my finger with something on it yeah
I looked at it and it was covered with white paint.
And I was like, what's with the white paint?
And she said, we painted the back porch like five days ago and the paint's still not dry.
Something's wrong.
I said, something's wrong.
Something's wrong with the paint.
And she said, I hope not.
The whole house is painted with that paint.
And I said, it's got to be something else.
It's got to be, there's another problem that we're not thinking of.
And she said, I painted it on a sunny day.
Like that was a sunny day.
There's no reason that the paint shouldn't have dried enough that it's not like milk, like milky.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
listen sister you're you're singing you're preaching to the choir here so now and so you know the last thing she said was maybe we should put some carpet over it i said i don't think we should put carpet over wet paint but i don't want to spend the whole winter or to achieve a groovy van look i really don't know i really don't know i was it's a thing is i was like look i have to talk to merlin now we're gonna check that that sounds like ambient talk
Carpeted porch.
She's on another level.
On the porch.
Let's put a carpet down.
You painted wrong.
It seems so simple.
We did two coats.
Two coats of quiet moments.
Yeah.
Quiet moments.
Tell me who picked the color.
Oh, I'm not involved in any of those decisions.
I didn't even know we were going to paint.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I got a text.
I got a text after work.
We did it over two weekends.
She texted, said, ah, I have a wish for this weekend.
And I'll go, oh my God, here we go.
Because here comes the projects.
And she's like, I like to paint the bedroom.
I was like, okay.
So yeah, she did most of the work.
I did some of the moving.
Again, you have to remember, I've been afflicted for a couple of weeks.
So I'm not on top of my game for moving things and rolling carpets and whatnot.
She did a hell of a job.
Looks great.
She did the tape and everything.
It looks fantastic.
You know, one time back when I was back in my my I'm not going to say my drug years, but somewhere, you know, somewhere during that time, a friend of mine and I were down at my dad's apartment down at the ski resort.
And I don't know, maybe we were doing drugs.
I don't remember.
It's hard to remember all the times.
But but I hit upon a great idea, which was because it was it was one of those apartments kind of like a railroad style shotgun style apartment where there was one wall that went the entire length of the apartment from the front door all the way to the back door.
one wall.
And then every, all the rooms were kind of off this one hall, but it was a continuous uninterrupted wall, not a door.
And I was like, you know what?
Why don't we paint that wall yellow?
And my friend was like, Whoa.
And I was like, right.
So we moved everything.
We taped it.
And I, it's hard for me to remember, like it's, it's hard for me to remember doing it, let alone
how I managed to be so meticulous.
You know, I'm a meticulous person about things.
You get your snout into a project and you want it done right.
Yes.
So somehow over the course of this weekend, we taped and painted this wall like sunshine yellow.
Hmm.
And then let it dry, didn't like rush it, and then pulled all the tape off.
And it was like a professional job.
The only difference being that it was sunshine yellow and no professional painter would have done it.
Unless it was like the mid-80s.
I think that sounds pleasant.
And so then, you know, then like at the end of the weekend, we kind of woke up or shook off our fog.
And we were like, whoa.
And when we put all the paintings back up on the wall, it looked amazing.
And my dad...
came home, you know, from wherever, whatever trip he was on, walked into his house and it was like, oh, now there's a sunshine yellow wall that's like 150 feet long or whatever.
That's like the main wall of the, of the house.
Yeah.
And he lived with it for five or six years.
And I was really proud of it.
I, every time I walked in, I was like, oh, my wall.
That's a real big boy job.
Yeah.
And he didn't, you know, he was never like,
He never, I'm not even sure he remarked upon it, but he definitely never like was mad about it.
But then one day I showed up and the wall was painted back to normal white, eggshell white or whatever people paint their walls.
And again, like no, no remark was, I didn't say like, what happened to the, it was just like one day it was, and it was years later, years later.
Um,
And so that was just one of those transactions that happened between me and my dad, you know, between the years 1987.
1992 and never came back up it was just like oh that that was you know that was a five-year period there where we were where we were living in the the sunshine every house is a battleground the tiny tiny battles are fought in houses all over the world all the time and and many of the many of the skirmishes are never acknowledged yep that's right you know this goes here not there love is a battlefield hey can i ask you a favor sure this is anomalous can you give me 10 minutes sure bro
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Crisis averted.
Yes.
Good news.
Real time.
Podcast.
Movement.
Yes.
I thought it was a delivery attempt, but it wasn't a delivery attempt.
How do you monitor those?
I have various means.
I'm not entirely sure the abundance of information we receive in our life is always wholesome.
Oh, I see what you're saying.
You know what I'm saying?
Yes, I do.
I mean, this is certainly true with lots of Internet things.
But then there's the Internet of Things things where I'm not so sure all the information we receive is always useful.
It's a bad signal to noise ratio.
I was daydreaming, as sometimes happens, about the Internet of Things.
Really?
Today, this morning, as I was driving.
Because, you know, I'm thinking about...
I'm still thinking about this new house that I'm thinking about.
And when I think about my new house, partly what I'm thinking about is maybe...
Having the Internet of Things.
This intrigues me, as you can imagine.
So when I think about the Internet of Things, there's a fantasy that I have where I have perfect knowledge.
I have locks on the doors that all respond to my phone that I can lock and unlock remotely and also like from deep inside my underground bunker.
You can do it from anywhere.
Nobody would even know if you're home.
Yeah, that's right.
That's right.
I could, you know, like there could be like a squirrel on my back porch and I could lock and unlock the back door frantically with my phone to scare the squirrel away.
Okay.
Oh, you make a lot of noise.
Like shaking a can of beans or something.
Yeah.
Squirrel's like, fuck this or whatever.
Get me out of here.
I imagine that there would be cameras that I could see all around the property and
outdoor cameras could see all around the property i imagine that i would have a split screen kind of scenario where there were between six and nine different views you have an array of cameras like a bond super villain right and that they would be maybe able to see infrared as well for nighttime viewing
I imagine that there would be some outdoor lights that I could trigger remotely.
So let's say someone was in the bushes.
Someone was sneaking in the bushes.
I would like to be able to turn a light on that was concealed in the bushes.
Or maybe have speakers around the yard.
So if someone was in the bushes, I could speak to them quietly in a quiet voice in a speaker that was in the bushes.
Like it was high enough quality that it sounded like a Moses type situation.
Yeah, or I would just be like, hey man, what's up?
Like three o'clock in the morning, somebody's sneaking in the bushes and I'd just be like, hey, what are you doing?
Like real quiet like that.
Hey, what do you think you're doing?
Like that would be some fucking spooky shit.
Mm-hmm.
I also just do that to people that are like they're at a garden party or whatever.
I imagine I'm not really that worried about being able to change the temperature in my house remotely from my phone.
I feel like thermostats are not a thing I need connected to my Internet of Things.
Yeah.
I don't want my refrigerator to have a TV in it.
I don't want to be able to talk to my toaster.
Yeah.
I am getting good at talking to Siri.
Yeah.
Not good.
Well, I've avoided, um, I don't know.
I've avoided bringing it up, but maybe we should put a fork in that.
I'd love to hear how the whole watch adventure is going.
All right.
I'll tell you all about it.
But anyway, so I'm, so I have this fantasy and I'm like, you know what I would like, I would like to be able to have the, uh, the split screen, like nine screen view of all the remotes in my house.
I would like it.
I would like to be able to access that from a computer obviously, or a phone, but also I would like a, uh,
like a master control computer somewhere in the house where it would actually be connected to a switch box that would have nine buttons on it, 10 buttons.
And I could just push button number two and it would bring up screen number two or camera.
Oh, man.
And then the 10th button would be... You'd get your own like a personal panopticon.
Yeah, right, where I was just like... Or I could even say to Siri, Siri, bring up camera number five.
And it would just like be there.
Right.
I don't want to talk to Alexa, though, because I said I'm not sure I trust Alexa.
But anyway, so I'm like Internet of Things, you know, like, OK, all right.
I'm picturing being able to really, truly because the problem is I couldn't do that kind of compound shit here at this house because it was aesthetically inappropriate.
Like this is this is a this is a farm.
It's like a reverse anachronism.
Right.
Like in the sense that your, your house is, is vintage and all this gear would be unvintage.
Right.
Exactly.
And I don't want to, you know, this is the type of house that you protect with a sword and tiger traps.
It is not the type of house that you have like, but the new house I want to buy, I think it would be more consistent to have these kind of like bond villain upgrades.
Right.
Because I'm thinking about buying a house that's like straight out of Bonneville and Central.
Okay.
You know, if I can find one.
Anyway, but then I started... As I'm driving, I'm having this daydream.
I'm like, Siri, bring it up.
Or like, you know, I wouldn't call it Siri, though.
I'd have my own proprietary thing that was like, Bernadette.
Brenda.
Brenda, bring up camera four.
Brenda, bring up camera four.
Well, the problem with Brenda bring is like, you know, it's too much alliteration.
So it would have to be like...
Suzanne?
Suzanne.
Debbie?
Rhoda.
Rhoda.
I don't know.
Rhoda.
I built a fort inside of a giant rhododendron that's in my daughter's mother's backyard.
I went inside the rhododendron and I hollowed out all the dead branches inside the rhododendron.
So from the outside, it looks like a giant rhododendron, but when you're inside, it's a cathedral.
Oh, that's so cool.
And then my daughter started calling it Fort Rhodey.
Oh, that's sweet.
Yeah, Fort Rhodey.
Because I actually carved out another...
I carved out another fort underneath a really, really big Japanese maple, and she calls that Fort Maple.
These are good names.
Fort Maple, Fort Rhodey, but I don't want to have my Siri be called Rhoda because that could get confusing.
You get namespace pollution.
That's going to get confusing.
Exactly.
Anyway, but then I realized I needed to talk to you about it.
I needed to talk about it here because I don't know.
I feel like a lot of the time what I want technology to do, I'm always like three years ahead of what it really can do.
Oh, yeah.
And like right now, every day with my watch, I'm like, really, that's the best you can, that's the best you can do watch.
Like, I know what you can do.
You know what you can do.
But right now, when I go on the app store, it's like, do you want to track the number of times you spit in a day?
No.
How many glasses of water did you have today, John?
That's not a valuable thing.
What I want is the watch to do other things, valuable things, useful things.
And it's like, would you like to look at your stocks?
No one, no one has ever used the look at your stocks app on any of your devices.
Stop it.
Give us useful things.
Why is there not a camera in this watch?
Yeah, that would make it pretty thick.
I think that's an optics problem.
Don't we have small cameras now?
Yeah, but you know Apple's pretty hinky about wanting their photos to look good.
But I see your point.
There is a camera button you can push that takes a picture with your phone.
I know.
That's handy.
So you've explored this thing a little bit.
Well, a little bit.
I mean, I've explored it enough to know that there are, even without asking, there are seven things on here that track...
The number of times I pee in a day, none of that do I want.
I don't want any of that.
The other day, the watch decided that I was on a walk, and I was driving in the car, and I was going like 40 miles an hour, and the watch was like, you are really scoring a lot of walk points.
You just walked 12, you just ran 12 miles.
And I was like, I ran 12 miles at 45 miles an hour.
Yeah, that's... You're Steve Austin.
I know.
Okay, so anyway, but what about my plan to, like, make all my door locks?
I want to be able to lay in bed.
You want a full-on Matt Howey situation.
Yeah, where I'm like, I'm in bed at night, and I'm like, did I lock the back door?
Yeah, was my garage open?
And just go, chick, chick, and everything goes.
I can hear all across the house, chick, chick.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
All the things locked.
Now, is that possible?
Hmm.
Is this a thing you want to talk about?
Well, yeah.
Okay.
I mean, unless you don't want to talk about it.
Oh, no, no, no.
I'm so much deeper in this stuff than would make anyone happy.
This short version is that it reminds me a little bit of the first person I ever knew who had a home computer.
And it was probably a kit computer, but it was in the 70s.
And he's this real dorky son of some friends of ours.
Goes without saying.
And it used, I want to say probably basic.
He'd written a program that would let you go and it would insult you.
Like he'd made this jokey, insulting basic program.
And I mean, you know, you'd like to talk about how, you know, we are currently with technology where airplanes were when they were made out of bicycles and paper.
It's not quite that bad, but to have your Panopticon work...
in a way that would be satisfying to you.
We're not quite there yet.
Dad!
Well, the stuff that is there, that is for sure pretty much working well, will not feel like much of a development.
If you ever had a timer on your front living room light in the 70s, we're at the point where you can do that with computers pretty well.
If you want something that does stuff at a certain time, there's all kinds of stuff that does that well.
there's a couple things that are well the single largest thing that is not there yet this is very boring but it's important is that and all this stuff
almost really across the board is not very well integrated so there's still lots of players in this game making lots of different things that do or don't or kind of work with each other there are things like apple's home kit that kind of work with some things but it is not plug and play it's not like you know 110 electricity or anything like that it's not there's no standard for all this stuff working together and the part that's really frustrating the second part of that is that
the interaction part that you're describing here, like, you know, talking to Delilah or whatever.
Delilah, that's a great name.
Delilah, bring up camera three.
Delilah, bring up camera three.
That sounds so good.
You know, it works often enough to frustrate you with how often it doesn't work, as you've certainly encountered.
You know, where a classic example for me with my various Siri interactions is how many times every week I say, remind me to take out pasta in eight minutes.
Or nine minutes.
It depends on what kind of pasta it is.
But how often I say that and how often it comes up with some like hilarious like Mad Libs thing.
This morning, my wife showed me like this.
God, I wish I could remember it exactly.
She's writing a letter to a colleague.
You know, this is an MD that, you know, a big university.
And she meant what does she mean to type something was sent at the moment.
And it came across as something like your momentary snatch.
Right.
No, I'm so glad I didn't send that.
I don't want to talk about this person snatch like that's so weird.
And that's kind of thing you run into where even you know how it is where even if it works like your key pretty much always works in your lock as expected.
Right.
It's dependable in that sense.
And with this stuff.
um for any variety of reasons we can get into it's not as strictly dependable it's it's not as dependable as a switch it's not as dependable as when you plug this 110 plug into the wall electricity comes through it regardless of what you're using that electricity for that stuff's not there yet and i think you really feel that pain at the nexus of um
That was probably kind of long, but it's not there yet.
It's for hobbyists right now, I think.
What about the Russians?
I don't know.
I mean, it depends on who you ask.
I mean, a lot of people say, like, you know, obviously, if you're a target, everything is hackable.
But I don't know.
I mean, honestly, I don't know.
I'm not sure.
I don't want to say anything about this.
If you and I and Marco Arment decided that we were going to make it 110 degrees inside of Matt Howey's living room, could we?
I imagine that there are probably various exploits that could be caused to do that.
I don't know.
If we had some exploits.
What's this the plot of?
Oh, this happened to Mr. Robot.
They made it real hot somewhere.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
I don't know.
Mr. Robot.
What a fun movie.
It's a TV show.
You know, he's in Queen now.
Everybody says the same thing.
They say he's amazing, the movie's eh.
Oh, he's amazing, but the movie's eh.
Yeah, that's what the people say.
I'm glad to hear he's great, though.
They just put out a couple new tracks.
They did Don't Stop Me Now Revisited with new Brian May guitar tracks on it, and it's pretty good.
Pretty damn good.
Anyhow, I don't know.
I mean, yeah, I guess you could.
I think the biggest viable concern, the viable concerns are, yeah, like unpatched exploits in the wild that even the companies don't know about.
But, I mean, ultimately, it also comes down to, like, how much, I guess, you trust the company that's doing this stuff.
Well, I don't trust any companies.
Yeah.
yeah yeah yeah no i i know i understand no i i yeah no yeah um one nice thing if you were going to go in on this you could save yourself a lot of trouble if you chose by doing things like uh this company for example this is so boring i'm sorry a company's products i have utilized call i think it's called lutron and they make they make a pretty good like system where you could have um smart switches rather than smart light bulbs
That's kind of a cool thing.
So if you don't want to deal with the Phillips Hue family of costly computer lights, you can control all your stuff at the light switch and electric socket level.
What was the movie?
Was it Weird Science?
What was the movie where the character woke up in the morning and he had a Rube Goldberg machine that was making his toast and stuff?
Was that Pee-Wee's?
Pee-Wee definitely had that.
And it gave food to Spot as well.
Right, right, right.
Okay, so Pee Wee had that.
Was there another one?
I've never seen, believe it or not, I've never seen Weird Science.
I've never seen Real Genius.
I've never seen either of those movies.
But that sounds like it could be in a movie like that.
Yeah, it seems like Real Science or Real Genius.
Well, I mean, this goes back to the 70s for me where I had some kind of a bespoke stick of my own design that would let me turn the channels on the TV from a distance.
Oh, yeah, we've talked about this.
Yeah, sure, sure.
You had that with your TV.
Yeah, right.
You rigged up your room with like a series of pulleys, right?
Yeah, and I was trying to get it to make me iced tea in the morning back when I drank like 14 glasses of iced tea a day because I thought it was like the most amazing Lipton instant iced tea.
Yeah.
And I had it all figured out, but I just couldn't get the right combination of strings and pulleys to actually...
to actually pour the water into it.
You were really on the forefront of that stuff.
Yeah, it was strings and pulleys, though.
There was no architecture of switches or whatever.
It's funny, though, what becomes on a podcast some of our friends do, Syracuse and Marco and Casey, they do a show where they were recently talking about, do you remember when intercoms
Were the thing where your fancy friends had intercoms in the wall in the 70s and 80s.
We had an intercom in our house in the 80s.
Did you have like a master control panel like in the kitchen?
With an AM FM radio.
With an AM FM radio.
And that seemed pretty swanky for the time.
You could go to it and you'd just be like, Mom, can you come down here?
And you could turn the radio on and stuff.
But then, you know, quickly you realize you just go, Mom!
I know.
I know.
You can't stop children yelling.
Yeah.
No.
So why would you go over to the intercom?
But that was a thing for a while, right?
Then there's another thing they mentioned.
Do you remember like when it became a thing like in the 90s?
I didn't see this too much because I didn't know that many people in new housing.
But where you could get that, like we had like vacuums in the wall.
You had that hole where you could stick a thing on and vacuum around your house.
My mom had that installed in her house.
No kidding.
Did she use it?
I had all these things.
She loved it.
Huh.
she loved it vacuumed you know all she had to do was carry the hose around put it in the little slot the it all vacuumed down to the basement and then not too long after that you started getting houses wired with ethernet which was kind of a big deal in the late 90s especially like late 90s early 2000s that was another thing
When we rebuilt my mom's house, we wired it.
No, she's so cool.
And also wired it for like hi-fi.
What?
We put hi-fi wires in the wire.
So you could put a hi-fi stereo system somewhere and then run it.
to different rooms for with speakers major twice cut once when you're planning ahead like that you know uh greenfield development you get the chance to do something really cool that's that's awesome yeah it was pretty hot that's pretty hot so now today along the lines of those things and i have the same wonders and concerns about it given how young the market is now if you are sort of starting with a blank canvas there's more stuff you can do a lot of stuff up till now has been kind of hacky
where you're trying to make this stuff happen with legacy equipment.
And so you started out with stuff like, you know, internet of things, um, slugs.
So this again, not, not entirely dissimilar to like a timer for your light.
Uh, now you've got stuff that could like turn a fan on and off.
So you don't have fan desk.
Oh, fan death.
Did you say fan death?
Do you know about fan death?
What's fan death?
Look up fan death.
Look up Google Korea fan death.
Korea fan death.
Korea fan death.
That sounds like the worst metal band ever.
That should be a Drag City band.
All right, here we go.
Korea.
Fan death.
Everybody likes it when you're Googling something that you say it out loud.
I'm clicking.
I'm clicking.
And there's an internet science page for it.
Okay.
Fan death, it says here.
The Korea Consumer Production Board.
Oh, a well-known superstition where it is thought that running an electric fan in a closed room with unopened or no windows will prove fatal.
Fatal!
whoa yes that's exciting so fan death in korea they will not leave a fan running in a in a room with no window open because it will cause death death korean death fan death so do you have to also be in the room with it or will it cause death remotely is it like uh spooky action spooky action in a distance
Yeah, where you've got a fan running in a place and then your grandma... That would be even cooler.
That would be even cooler if you left it running near your bed and you were retroactively killed by a fan.
This says that it dates to the 1920s.
See?
Nausea, asphyxiation, facial paralysis from fans.
Oh, hello.
You know what?
I'm sorry to do this.
I have never done this once.
What?
And I am putting this in the omnibus.
Ha ha ha!
Ha ha ha!
I finally made it.
I thought Potemkin Village was going to make it, but now FanDeath.
Alright.
Korean FanDeath.
Make sure to tell people to like and subscribe our show.
Be sure to rate us on Amazon.
Hit that bell, fam.
Get all the updates.
We release new content every day.
You know what we never say, Merlin?
Please rate us.
Please don't do that.
Just listen to the show.
Just listen to the show quietly.
Please go...
It really helps people discover the show.
It really helps us out.
If you're worried about fan death, for example, now you are.
Now you're going to wake up tomorrow.
Welcome to a world of fan death.
uh the dj in your head um but uh if you're worried about fan death you could have an internet of things dingus right that would make sure it turned it off so you don't get fan death and off turn the fans off i would love to find many more things like this i really want i want internet of things to be oh you're talking about oh is aren't there hot links uh i want none of the hot links i'm looking at culture bound syndrome
Yeah, yeah.
It's a hot link.
Oh, wow.
Oh, wow.
Oh, wow.
Okay.
I mean, culture-bound syndrome.
Internet science page for culture-bound syndrome.
In medicine and medical anthropology, I don't want to take you off your topic.
I want to hear more about your things.
A culture-bound syndrome, culture-specific syndrome, or folk illness, is a combination of psychiatric and somatic symptoms that are considered to be a recognizable disease only within a specific society or culture.
Oh, come on.
And then they have examples.
So we've got running amok.
Running amok.
Ataque de nervios.
No, that's Philippines.
Bad accent.
Have you ever heard of the Paris syndrome?
These also sound like urban dictionary things.
Well, oh, wait a minute.
Down here at the bottom.
Fear of Wendigo.
Oh, Wendigo.
Buffet delirante.
Brain fag syndrome.
Brain fag syndrome.
Brain fag syndrome.
Ghost sickness.
Evil eye, of course.
You see that a lot there in Turkey and stuff.
What about a St.
Vitus dance?
You think that's a form of running amok?
I think St.
Vitus dance is not running amok.
It's a different thing.
Running amok.
Sometimes referred to as simply amok or gone amok.
Episode of sudden mass assault against people and or objects usually by a single individual following a period of brooding.
Running amok.
that was traditionally been regarded as occurring specifically especially in southeast asia's austronesian cultures running amok yes so watch out you watch is there a brooder in your life watch the brooder that's me the brooder film i am less like it's not funny
That's not funny.
It's not funny.
Well, it's not funny, but that's why I gave it the dead bell.
Ghost sickness?
I like ghost sickness.
Okay.
I like zuhuarumo.
Which is the Qigong psychotic reaction.
Czar?
What's czar?
I don't know, but I really want to know what root work is.
That sounds like a podcast you do.
Root work?
Oh, it's hoodoo.
Uh-oh.
What's that hoodoo you do?
You do it so well, do.
Czar, a demon or spirit assumed to possess individuals, mostly women, to cause discomfort or illness.
Hmm.
You can exorcise them.
Exorcism has become popular.
It's in Kairos.
It's an Egyptian czar.
It's in the cultures of the Horn of Africa.
All right, I'm sorry I took us off this.
This is a very good page.
I'm going to go back to czar later.
But yeah, definitely work that fan death.
So what I want is an Internet of Things.
I see this watch.
I just looked down.
So Adam Pranica...
Asked me if I would walkie talkie with him.
I just looked down at my watch.
What a blight.
This was a couple of weeks ago.
He asked him.
I was like, sure.
I didn't know what it was.
I looked down at my watch and I didn't do anything.
I did not touch this thing.
But all of a sudden, Adam Pranica's little page is up here.
It says walkie talkie on the top.
And then there's a plus symbol.
Now, what I don't know is, is Adam Pranica trying to walkie-talkie me?
Or did my phone watch just think that some combination of movements of my wrist indicated that I wanted to navigate to walkie-talkie page, and now the plus symbol is asking me if I want to walkie-talkie him?
There's no button to hit to ask the question.
How even did this happen?
How am I here?
And the problem is I'm not sure if I push that plus button, whether it's going to send an invitation to my LinkedIn page.
Oh, you know what I mean?
I see.
I see.
LinkedIn is like somebody wants you to reply to you.
And I'm like, OK, sure.
They can be my friend.
And then LinkedIn's like a friend request sent to them.
And I was like, I don't didn't want to request anything.
Why did you put that in my thing?
I just I was just minding my own business.
I don't even want to be here.
Yeah.
So now what should I do?
Here, I'm going to... Whoa, whoa, whoa.
Walkie-talkie just buzzed.
Oh, Merlin, man, wants to talk with you over walkie-talkie.
Yeah, I actually don't, but I thought we should just do it for the sake of the program.
Always allow.
Whoa!
Hang on.
Oh, boy.
Press and hold to talk.
Press what?
Oh, boy, it's making all kinds of noises in here.
Merlin, are you there?
Did it happen?
Let's see.
Merlin, hello, hello?
John, I am here.
Hello?
Yeah, I think it's working.
This is amazing.
Oh, wait, I didn't turn my volume up.
Okay.
Yeah.
Bertha?
Uh-huh.
No.
Beatrice.
What was her name?
Delilah, deploy the cameras.
Right.
It's not coming over my thing here.
I think you're coming over mine.
Now you're talking.
Oh, this is great.
This is Amazing Radio.
Over.
you know connecting to merlin it says now yeah it was working a second it was working a second ago all right let's close that i could not connect to merlin oh you know it might be because i have do not disturb on but this is part of the problem i know that we're old men but sometimes it's difficult to know why things are happening and not happening yeah why was that happening oh wait i invited my mom apparently to walkie talkie according to this
And she hasn't replied.
She ghosted you.
She did.
But I'm available, it says.
But please don't walkie-talkie me.
What a terrible idea.
Can you imagine you're just going about your life and people just start talking to you?
You've been in airports, right, where people were talking with that thing where they're like...
Their phone goes before everything.
Yeah, there used to be.
Yes, there used to be beat a leap phones, especially in the 90s.
I feel like in the early 2000s, there was a particular I don't remember which.
Nextel, maybe there was a particular brand of phone that came with walkie talkie.
And, you know, John, what happened?
When did we stop learning how to hold a phone to our ear to talk?
When did we when did we start doing speakerphone for everything?
When did that happen?
I for me, zero times, except now I have this stupid watch, which won't let me which won't allow me to do things without talking to it.
Well, but that's, I feel like that's a little different.
I would not hold a very long conversation that way personally, but like everybody, I think it's from watching reality TV and everybody walks around talking into their phone like it's a piece of pizza.
It's so strange.
Yeah.
That's awful.
I took you off your internet of things.
Well, no, my, my internet of things problem is like, so let's say I'm talking to you and I'm on my watch.
Um, and I want to say, uh,
Siri, tell Merlin he's a ding-a-ling.
Okay.
Send.
Send.
Hang on, let's try that.
Siri.
Hey, Siri.
I'll turn off my, do not disturb.
Hey, Siri.
Hey, Siri.
Hey, Siri.
Hey, Siri.
Tell John Roderick he's a ding-a-ling.
Hey, Siri.
All right, I have to push the button.
Which shall I use for John Roderick?
Siri.
Siri.
Okay, I'll send this.
Hey, Siri.
He's a ding-a-ling.
I'm listening.
Tell Merlin he's a ding-a-ling.
Tell John Roderick you're a ding-a-ling.
Okay, I'll send this.
Hey, Siri.
Tell Merlin Mann he's a ding-a-ling.
Which one should I use for Merlin Mann?
Tell John Roderick that's kind of hurtful.
I'll send this.
Okay, I'll send this.
This is so stupid.
It says he's a ding-a-ling.
He's a ding-a-ling.
No, I didn't mean that.
I meant Merlin's a ding-a-ling, not he's a ding-a-ling.
Delilah, deploy the insults.
Did it send it to you?
Did you receive he's a ding-a-ling?
That's kind of hurtful.
I got a clicking.
I'm going to open messages.
I don't have any messages.
Oh, there it is.
He's a ding-a-ling.
There it is.
I got it.
I'll pay you some money.
What am I doing?
Oh, I sent you my heartbeat.
He's a ding-a-ling.
I sent to you, but I don't have a... Oh, wait.
That's kind of hurtful.
He's a ding-a-ling.
You are a ding-a-ling.
I got all those from you.
Amazing.
That's really amazing.
We've really come so far.
There you go.
I like the little thing where you can draw letters on it.
I just sent you something.
I sent you a dick.
A dick pic?
Well, a dick drawing.
It's kind of rudimentary.
You can send drawings?
Wait a minute.
You can send drawings?
Oh, wait.
There's something there.
Yeah.
Oh, how do you do that?
It's kind of air sats.
You click on the heartbeat button.
No way.
Is that right?
You click on the heartbeat button and then you draw.
Heart beeps.
So this is what you can expect when you're talking to your house.
I don't know.
I mean, it's getting better.
How much time do we have?
Can you give us a sense of how things are going with the watch?
I haven't talked about this.
I haven't wanted to bug you about it.
But I'm curious.
You started, what, almost a month ago.
You decided that you didn't want to have the internet.
You're so tired of having the internet in your pocket.
Big time.
And so you elected to try the wireless lifestyle by having an LTE Apple Watch that would let you leave the house without...
Your phone.
Right.
Which I think at the time, I didn't say too much, but I was saying that's pretty ambitious.
Yes, it has proved to be ambitious.
Because you had not been much of a Siri user before.
Zero amount of Siri user.
The initial challenge was that I wear my watch on my inside left wrist.
And I learned that from my dad.
That's a military thing.
Yeah.
Inside left wrist.
It doesn't get broken when you're getting hit with a rifle butt.
Well, and also, if you're a pilot like he was, you can have both hands on your yoke and still look down at your watch.
Oh, that's smart.
Yeah, that makes sense.
And pilots, I guess, need to look at their watch all the time.
And apparently in old airplanes, they didn't just have a clock in the
in the, uh, the dash, which seems weird.
I think they probably did.
But anyway, this was my dad.
You got a picture of your best gal.
Yeah, that's right.
Yeah.
Pinned to the, to the dash there.
You've got a, you've got a map of, uh, of, uh, Iwo Jima and you've got your watch on your inside wrist.
And you got your 45 that you can take anytime you need to shoot a zero out of the sky.
And so I never have worn a watch anywhere but on my inside left wrist.
And so I put my Apple watch on my inside left wrist to start with, and the watch could not figure it out.
No kidding.
Every time I turned my wrist and lifted it up, the watch turned itself off.
And I was like, it's the same story, right?
The watch is still facing the sky just as, just as when you turn your, if you're wearing on your outside wrist, you turn it, the watch is facing the sky.
Um, if you turn it the other way with it on the inside wrist, it would, it would turn off every time.
And so I looked into it and I read some message boards, which you know I love to do.
And it said, um,
Oh, well, you know, if you are wearing your watch, because most people, I guess, wear their watch on their right wrist on the outside.
Whatever it was, they had the Apple engineers had thought about the fact that people would want it on different wrists.
Right.
And so they had two.
configurations you could put left wrist right wrist yeah with software you tell it and it's got the little the crown then can be on one side or the other right so then i said all right well let's put it on the right wrist and maybe that will fool it so that i when i'm on inside left wrist
it will be something.
It'll do something.
It'll function.
This is interesting.
I did not know this.
You can't do it.
It didn't work.
It doesn't work.
It says right here.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
So then it said, well, Apple has configured the little radars that are in it, the little hyper, the hot links that are in the back of it.
The hot links that get all your sensor points.
Yeah, that sap your precious bodily fluids.
Those are calibrated for outside wrist.
And I was like, well, wait a minute.
Inside wrist is where all your veins are.
Doesn't it seem like that would be more intuitive, like easier?
Way more.
But it said, all the message boards said, well, if it's on the inside wrist, it can't figure it out.
It can't calibrate it.
It's going to tell you that your heart is beating 700 beats a minute or something.
I'll be horn-swaddled.
So I was like, this seems just like a thing where the Apple engineers have a prejudice because it's just like if you're looking for a cure for Charcot-Marie-Tooth syndrome, there are just not enough people that have it for the medicine people to invest the money.
It's not a big enough market.
So who wears their watch on their inside wrist?
Not enough people that the Apple engineers feel like this is... They're not supporting the troops.
No, they don't have to worry about...
Yeah, what about us C-47 pilots that are flying over Iwo Jima?
We don't want to have to turn our, you know, take our hand off the yoke.
Jeez Louise.
Anyway, so that made me mad.
So then all of a sudden I had to wear the watch on the outside of my wrist, which I have never done.
And it makes me feel like going outside without my glasses on.
Because everywhere I go, I'm like, well, my watch is just facing out into the world.
Everybody can see it.
It's going to get scraped.
What if I go over a fence?
It's going to get scraped.
Yes.
So that was the first thing that I had to accept, right?
This was not a thing I could fight, which normally is what I would do.
Because for about a week and a half, I continued to wear it on my inside wrist, thinking that I was going to stick it to the man.
And it just was like, no, what you did was you bought an expensive thing that you cannot wear the way you want.
Okay, that's telling.
So I put it on the outside where...
Where the snorks wear it.
Where the snorks wear it, where the man makes me wear it.
But what had happened was when I told the watch that it was on my right wrist instead of my left wrist, I didn't flip that back around when I put it on the outside left wrist, which meant that my little dongle button...
was on the bottom left corner of the watch.
You got to do a reach across.
Because it's flipped around.
Well, no, it's not.
Because now I can control the button dongle with my thumb.
Ooh.
So the buttons are now on the left-hand side, and I can work them with my thumb, which is the...
The digit that I prefer to use wheels and buttons with, right?
You grab it and you are like clicking, moving with your thumb instead of trying to do it with your forefinger.
Cool.
So then I went online and I was like, is this a thing?
And there was a whole subreddit or whatever, a whole sub community of people who were like, this is the hack, the flip around thumb button hack.
Yeah.
So I was like, well, at least I feel like I'm in some subculture here that's like not snork culture.
Yeah.
And I've definitely had a couple of people say like, what's wrong?
Why is your button on the wrong side?
And I've just been like.
Shut up.
Snork.
Yeah, right.
Why don't you go to your regular jobs?
Anyway.
So then one of the things that I use my watch or I'm sorry, one of the things I use my phone for, of course, is maps.
I like maps.
I like to see what's going on.
I like to map the traffic.
I like to map things.
Well, so what I do on my phone, what I like is maps.
What I don't like is directions.
Oh, boy, you get the reverse situation with the watch.
Big time.
It's great at the directions, not so great at the maps.
So what I do with maps, like Google Maps or Apple Maps, I will put in the destination.
I will look at the map and
And then I will close it out because I don't want the phone telling me where to go.
And I don't want the Goog knowing where I, knowing where I went.
So like, if you go onto the Goog, it has an option of telling you where you've been all the last year.
Correct.
And I, when I first heard about it, I was like, oh, that seems cool.
So I went there.
And according to Google, I haven't been anywhere in the last year.
I've been, like, at my house and at a couple of different locations in Seattle.
But I never let it follow me.
Right.
So it doesn't know where I'm going.
And I was kind of disappointed because...
that I didn't have a map of every single trip I've ever taken, but at the same time I felt like, oh maybe, well that's just another hack that I accidentally had.
The different Google products suck up that information in different ways.
My gut is that if you're using the Google app, Google Assistant, it almost always gets it, but otherwise I think it's guessing from your browser, like when you're using your browser to look at something, which you're mostly doing at home probably.
Right, exactly.
And mostly I'm looking on eBay at like some of the heroism medals from the Austro-Hungarian Empire.
It knows.
It knows from medals.
It doesn't know how to market to me exactly yet.
But so I go on the watch and I'm like, I want to see the map of where I'm going.
And the watch is so bad.
And the watch is, if I put in a destination, which it will allow me to do, then the watch just wants to take over.
And it's like, turn left at place.
And I'm like, no, fuck you.
And then I can't get it to turn off.
I can't get back to the map.
I've done it a couple of times where I've navigated to a map and I can look at the map, but I don't know how to do it.
i i can't do it reliably well if you do it with the apple product uh it will give you taps to let you know when to turn left or right yeah but i don't want that i don't want it telling i don't want to that's the opposite of what you want i just want to look down at a map and and move and pinch it and and move it and you know like spread it and pinch it and move it and slap it and give it a little swat and then
I want it to sit on my lap and tell me that it's been a good girl.
That sounded weird.
No, not at all.
It's a bonding relationship.
It was not meant to sound weird.
No.
It's a watch.
Oh, wait, wait, wait.
Siri's asking me a question now.
Hmm.
But, but, oh, wait, wait, wait.
Siri, Siri is asking me a question now.
But, but, oh, wait, wait, wait.
Oh, no.
You've locked your keys in the voice component.
This is pretty good.
This is recursive now.
Oh, no.
It's also recursive.
Hang on.
Let me turn that.
Oh, no.
Okay.
Right.
You're in too deep.
I don't know why.
When I turn my watch over and say, hey, Siri, it never does it.
But sometimes if it's just sitting there.
It will suddenly Siri will suddenly appear.
That's fine.
So so I have been using the watch.
It has freed me somewhat from the phone during the day.
it still feels a little bit unsafe right i am i can communicate with people i am tethered to the world but it still feels like maybe in an emergency situation it would fail yeah well i mean let's the cars on the table it's not like having an iphone is that that dependable i've had plenty of times where the three times a year i want to make a phone call and like one of those three times like it just doesn't want to work
So you've got that to begin with.
It's not like having a wired connection.
But yeah, very much on top of that, you're going to go through spots where you're not going to have reception.
And if you don't have reception, there's no Siri, right?
And then you don't know.
Part of it is there's so many aspects to what is making your voice get into the cloud to make things happen.
There's like at least three or four different ways that that can go wrong.
starting with it didn't hear you, continuing to, like, it can't get the signal up, all the way down to it didn't understand what you said, to it's not able to do that, you have to go to your desktop computer to do that.
There's all kinds of ways that that becomes frustrating.
Yeah.
I'm sure you've run into that.
I am.
I am running into it all the time, and it's just, it's like, I so much am ready...
For it to do things now.
Like, I crossed the membrane.
I'm on the other side now.
I'm one of the people that has one of these.
And I just want it to now do the things that I want.
which seems like not that much.
I don't want that much.
I don't want it to turn Matt Howey's thermostat up.
No, we're friends with Matt.
We don't want that to happen.
Absolutely.
I don't want it to shut off the ignition of my car.
I don't want it to cause Korean fan death.
I just want it to show me maps, send texts reliably,
I guess sometimes make phone calls.
Not really, though, but sometimes.
Yeah.
I mean, there's all kinds of ironies to this.
An irony of the phone call part is like the phone or the watch has come a very long way in the quality of the microphone and the speaker.
You have a nice loud speaker on that thing now.
They're not used to.
No, no, it's gotten way better.
But now having the mic and the speaker on different sides allows the speaker to be a lot louder.
If you chose, I've done it maybe three times ever just as a novelty.
I don't make a lot of phone calls anyway.
But so even while it does sound better, it's still like, yeah, you're still like using your watch as a phone.
And that's kind of weird.
But you're running into something that I think is a common hang up for any normal person wanting to use this stuff, which is it's not so different from having to learn the command line or DOS where you have to learn how it wants to be talked to.
and interacted with.
And you learn what it is mostly pretty good at and mostly not that great at, as I think I mentioned a few weeks ago.
It does take a while to learn, don't even waste your time, especially when you're driving around in the country.
Don't even waste your time trying to do this one thing, because there's three different ways that's going to disappoint you.
But then there's other kinds of things where it's pretty wild.
I can say, for example,
Add, take out the trash to my chores list in OmniFocus.
And that will create a task in my task creation thing that'll work on the phone.
It doesn't work on the watch.
So that even if I get the incantation right and the connection works and all that kind of stuff, it'll say, whatever, to continue this, like do this on your phone.
Are you getting a lot of that, I'll tap you when I'm ready?
Do you like that?
Oh, yeah, yeah.
You like that, John?
You like when your watch says, I'll tap you when I'm ready?
No, I don't like that.
I always say, I'll tap you when I'm ready.
Here's, oh, that's right.
You want to get tapped?
I'll fucking tap you.
I'll tap you are.
Here's another problem.
When I go to my calendar, like, okay, so here's my calendar.
October.
It says, it's 22nd of October.
Story checks out.
Now, I want to go to the 26th to see what's going on.
Okay.
So I touch on the calendar, I touch the number 26 and it brings up today.
So I go back.
I go, I don't want to look at today.
I want to look at the 26.
I touched 26.
It brings up today.
So when you look at the calendar on the watch, the only thing it can do is take you to today.
Oh, I see what you're saying.
Yeah.
If you swipe right to left.
Yeah.
Oh, wait, you swipe right to left.
But you're absolutely right.
It's deceptive because it looks like that's a target for a click.
But when you click on it, it always takes you to today.
But then click from the right side to the left.
Like from the right side to the left?
Once you're in a day view.
Oh, now you can go from day to day.
But your point's well taken.
But I mean, what if you want to go like two months from now?
Right left, right left, right left, right left.
I can't do that.
Right, the Siri incantation.
This is good.
Well, that's the thing.
So I said to, so the other day I was trying to get to like the 26th and I said, I looked at it, I tried it 15 times.
Finally, I said, Siri, put this on my calendar on the 26th.
And she did, and it worked perfectly.
But it was a thing where... What did you say to get that?
What did you say to get that?
Well, I just went to Siri, and I was like, Siri, put a dentist appointment on my calendar, 2 o'clock on the 26th of October.
Right.
And she was like, I will do that for you.
And then did.
And it was like, all right.
That's how that worked.
But I didn't, I wasn't able to look at the 26th of October and tell whether there was anything else there until she did it.
And then once she put it on there, she showed me that day and everything that was happening, it turned out it was fine.
Anyway, so that felt a little bit like, come on, you guys, you've got 42 different ways to take my
take my fucking underarm temperature.
Yeah.
But what I really want is just to be able to use the calendar app and, and there's no notes app.
Uh, it's there.
I use notes all the time.
Um, note that I spent $5.
There you go.
Yep.
Oh, but it goes to the iPhone.
Yeah, not super helpful.
It's not on the watch.
No, it's not.
Reminders work.
Yeah.
Oh, that's real frustrating.
Yeah.
So, suffice to say, it's a long way from being able to look at the nine security cameras I have in the backyard of my new house that I haven't bought yet.
And that's what I really want.
I want to be able to say, like...
Esmeralda.
What was her name?
Oh, Delilah.
Delilah.
That's a pretty name.
Delilah.
Bring up camera five.
And just be like, because there's, you know, you've got the resolution here.
You could be looking at a camera.
Camera five indicates a squirrel.
Would you like to frighten the squirrel with noises?
Would you like to speak to the squirrel?
Delilah, eliminate the squirrel with laser cannon.
I'll tap you when I'm a squirrel.
No, no, Delilah, not you be a squirrel.
Okay, tapping squirrel.
No, Delilah, no.
Purchasing squirrels.
You have purchased 13 squirrels.
Do you still have Amazon lady in your office?
Oh, shit dog so much.
Do you talk to her a lot?
Yeah, all the time.
Alexa, who's the mother of dragons?
Mother of dragons in the title of Daenerys Targaryen, a character
Alexa, stop.
It used to be much funnier than that.
Thank you.
Oh, what did it say?
What did it used to say?
Oh, it used to read Daenerys' entire title.
Oh, that would have been better.
You can have it tell you jokes.
There's all kinds of stuff.
Alexa's way better at... Sorry.
Sorry, Alexa, stop!
The lady in a tube is way better at understanding what you said and giving you what you want.
Well, what do you want from her?
Friendship?
Alexa, play car parts from Spotify.
Alexa, stop!
Alexa, stop!
Alexa, play Car Parts by the Long Winners from Spotify.
Alexa, stop.
I just made you almost two cents.
Baby wasn't down with the hype.
Are you going to keep sticking with this for a while?
The watch?
I mean, it's on cost fallacy, right?
You already paid for it.
You might as well use it.
Well, no, but I believe... I believe that as I... So what I'm trying to do...
I took Twitter off my phone again last night.
Good man.
Wow.
All the way off.
Because I was just like, come on.
Somehow.
You know what Twitter says?
Twitter says, meh.
Meh.
Meh.
You sank back into it.
And now every time you turn on Twitter, you're like, because for a while I was just like, this is a broadcast only medium.
I'm going on there.
I'll say some funny things.
Not very often.
I'll set them off.
If people want to contact me, it's an easy way for people to tweet things at me.
and you know and my my favorite thing is like a comment about either a tweet or something else that happened like nine months ago but without any preface so just like that you know that doesn't make any sense send and it's like what doesn't make any sense and then you go look and it's like some and they're trying to be funny yeah like it was it it was a it was a tweet that you sent like a like a month and a half ago
Anyway, so I did that for a while.
I was just reading those things having a good time on the internet and then I started to read Twitter again And it just turned into a freaking head nightmare And so anyway, I was like forget it.
I'm taking it off I'll go on the computer at the end of the day if I want to read anybody's messages to me, but I do not ever want to sit For five minutes while I'm waiting in a parking lot for somebody and look at Twitter.
It doesn't help.
It does not help it makes things worse not better and
So I took it off, and then I realized, and I don't have Facebook on my phone, so Instagram is the only thing I have.
But I've been thinking lately, wait a minute, this is Facebook.
Instagram is Facebook, right?
Am I right?
Am I right?
You're right.
You're right.
When I'm right, I'm right.
It's like when Blogger turned into Apple.
Google.
Oh, when Blogger turned into Google.
Google Blogger.
It's when Flickr turned into Yahoo.
Oh, Yahoo.
It's when Flickr turned into Yahoo.
Do you remember when you went to Flickr and they were like, oh, you have to log in with your Yahoo name?
Oh, people are mad.
People were steamed.
I was mad.
I didn't want to have a Yahoo thing.
Yeah, that's where good products go to die.
Anyway, so Instagram is Facebook.
And then I started to think, like, what does Instagram bring me?
I mean, I like to look at what's going on in busy Phillips's life.
Sure.
Sure.
She lives a very dynamic life.
I'm very happy for her.
Good for her.
It's great.
She's having a wonderful time.
She's living her best life.
I love her kids Cricket and Birdie.
What else do I get out of Instagram?
But you're concerned because it's a Facebook thing.
Well, it's Facebook.
And what I'm concerned about is like, am I really having fun over there or does it just feel like fun because I've lost a good sense of what actual fun is?
Yeah.
So I didn't take Instagram off.
And the thing is, I cannot interact with Instagram on my watch or on my computer at home because Instagram is specifically... It's a web page.
It's a pretty lame web page.
But it's a mobile app.
You can't post photos to it from your desktop.
You can only do mobile.
So they're pot committed to me having it on my phone.
Anyway, what I'm thinking is the watch...
and the Internet of Things are a transition for me from Web 2.0.
Do you remember when you first introduced me to Web 2.0?
I feel like I kind of remember.
You're kind to credit me with these various Sherpa duties.
I don't want to over-credit myself, but the only reason I feel like I can take any credit or blame for your interest in a lot of computer things is you were...
I was really actively not interested in a lot of it.
It wasn't even just that you didn't have a scratch for curiosity.
I think you... A lot of your early objection, part of your early objection was you didn't want to be sort of overexposed as a rock guy.
But another one, you were just like, I just don't know why I would do this.
Like, why would I go and, like, just type these little things in here?
Like, that just seems...
so weird it was definitely that i didn't want to be on some internet where people could say like things to me just anybody just anybody just people were like oh i want to talk to you on the internet it's like no send me a letter if you want to talk to me but also to my label i didn't send my send a letter to my label they'll send you some stickers and that's the extent of the interaction i want to have did christopher ever answer your email that would have been kind of fun
No.
Well, I mean, I still have an email that I composed to Christopher that was like 15 pages long.
I think it was the end of our friendship.
But I definitely said to you a few times, like, yeah, I get what is happening on the Internet.
I get it.
But why would I want to be there?
I don't want to be there.
I don't want anything to do with it.
And you were like, you saw almost all downside to it.
I feel I did.
but then you i remember you stood in front of a of one of those easels that had a big notepad of paper on it sounds like me and you put a new you flipped the old page over the top you stood on the new one and then you drew two little triangles with the word the letters br in the middle oh yeah that's funny and you were like yeah that's funny that was like that was an html joke it was like webs 1.0 yes that's back when i was merlin mann
Yeah.
That's when you were Merlin Mann.
I was like, I don't know what that even is.
And you were like, you were like, it's super funny if you know what it is.
And I was like, okay, well, okay.
Um, and, um, and then you were like web 2.0 and you had some other funny jokes about it.
Yeah, well, it was stuff, you know, Flickr's a real good example of that.
Flickr, for a variety of design and technical decisions, they had made it really fun to put photos on the internet, and they made it easy to do, and they made it easy to share, and they encouraged a certain amount of, like, editorial thinking, and they had a great community.
I had a lot of really good pals on Flickr, and, you know, it's...
I don't know.
I don't want to get dragged into the whole, like, my problem with Instagram thing.
But Flickr felt more, it was before there was a vocabulary, taxonomy, and culture around how we try to make other people envious about our life.
Where there was more, there was, certainly there's always been that thing.
Anything you put on the internet, you want to be the best version of you it can be.
That's totally normal.
Well, except my brand is, I'm the worst version of myself.
No, no, it's me, here's me in a hat.
As you say, here's me in a hat.
Here's me in a hat.
Here's me in another hat.
Here's the thing that I saw that is basically me in a hat.
I felt something in my house.
Here it is.
Look at this.
Have you ever seen one of these?
I bet you haven't seen one of these in a while.
Professor Roderick, I can clearly see in the background that from the way that the sun is gleaming off of your piano candelabras, it's very simple to trifectorate into the position in which you're sending from, just helping, la-da-da...
It's very clear from here.
Your daughter's name is visible on some of the mail that I zoomed in on.
I took a video of... Oh, I wanted to say that I sold my GMCRB.
I saw it on Instagram.
Well, your accidental dick pic accidentally also gave your social security number, which was tattooed on there.
i took a video of it driving away i know it's sad and one of the comments melancholy not sad melancholy it was melon yeah it was melancholy um uh as it was driving away and so there was a comment on the instagram page where somebody said or maybe it was on twitter somebody said whoa that's your neighborhood where you walk around gently
fucking people god fucking damn it they said i thought that there the houses would be a lot further apart and there would be a lot more trees and i was like oh my god your nails are so gross i wish that i lived in that neighborhood that you thought i lived in i live in this other neighborhood where there are houses around and oh my gosh it's so nice that you could make this creepy and insulting oh you really overstepped the bound you piece of shit i think that they were trying to be i think they were just like they're just having fun just having fun fat man on the internet
They had in their imagination a world that I inhabited that had a seven-sided lighthouse made of dreams.
And I lived way up on a hill.
I was still in Seattle, but I had 14 acres and so did my neighbors.
And we would go out sometimes and shoot guns at each other.
But we were so far away that the bullets wouldn't reach all that way.
And then we would laugh and laugh because we would point our guns and be like, check this out.
Hey, please.
And the other person would just stand there with their arms wide apart like, bet you can't.
Oh, your bullets fell short.
But that's not the world I live in.
I live in a world where my neighbor's fucking dogs drive me crazy.
Although they got rid of the dog.
The dog in the little cage?
The two giant pit bulls in the tiny little cage.
There's one over across the corner from you, don't be creepy, that was barking a lot and getting provoked.
So I went out one night, I was out there, because I used to go out and stand on the other side of the fence, and the dog would bark like crazy, and I would say, shh, hey, hey.
Harf, harf, harf, harf.
Tranquilo, tranquilo.
I know that you speak Spanish, and I know that you understand me when I say tranquilo.
Tranquilo.
So I was standing out there.
I was talking to the dog and then a guy came out from behind the fence and he was like, can I help you?
And I said, well, you can help me by having your dog not bark all night.
And he was like, well, are you the one that wrote the letter to my dad?
And I was like, I am the one that wrote the letter to your dad.
And he said, well, you know, this is what dogs do.
So he comes over.
He's like, this is what dogs do.
There's a lot of things that dogs do.
But as somebody who takes care of a dog, you help them with that.
And I said, you know, it's funny that you mentioned that because what people do sometimes is kill dogs.
Oh, John Roderick, you did not.
I didn't actually say that.
Okay, good.
I said, yeah, dogs do bark all night, but not in cities and not like at three o'clock in the morning.
It's just not how neighbors behave to one another.
And I did write a letter to your dad.
And he said, well, I'm moving and I'm taking the dogs with me.
And I was like, oh, well, when is that happening?
And he said, I just made an offer on a house.
So, and it was somewhere over.
Oh, his new neighbors are going to love that.
I was like, how exciting for your new neighbors.
And so we had this like civil, but very strained conversation.
Yeah.
And the dogs continued to bark for maybe eight more days and then they were gone.
And I was like,
Viacondios, dogs.
I hope that wherever you live, you have more grass than where you're living now.
But the final chapter was that the RV went into the hands of some new people.
It drove off under its own power.
It now has begun a new life with its new family.
And I'm just one step closer to having that house that is...
My house is going to end up in Wired Magazine, Merlin.
Oh, you think so?
It's a cautionary tale?
No, because you and all the internet people that are all the influencers that listen to this show.
And that's a big part of the popularity of this show is all the influencers that listen to it.
Oh, the secret listeners.
Oh, just have quiet moments.
Quiet moments with John and Merlin.
Shh.
The thing is that you and I, like this show never became one of those big shows like My Brother, My Brother and Me where they can sell out 10,000 seats every night and people like sit and shoot money at them with a t-shirt cannon.
Yeah.
I've got this shit with a money cannon.
With a money cannon.
But you and I, we have a lot of influencers.
And what's going to happen is I'm going to detail my construction of my house made of internet of things.
And then all the influencers are going to be like, finally.
Finally, like, here, like, we never thought it would be Roderick that did this.
We always thought it would be somebody else.
We thought it would be Matt Howie, but no, it was Roderick that finally... It was Roderick all along.
25th anniversary, Home of the Future, featuring John Morgan Roderick.
Home of the Future.
Morgan, Home of the Future.
Home of the Future.
Home of the Future.
Morgan rides free.
Morgan does ride free.
Morgan will ride free again when the new house and the thing is... This is a stupid episode.
You will.
You will.
Question my internet of things, you won't.
Move your dog.
A problem to the homeowners association, you are.
I'm going to pee.
Hey.