Ep. 566: "My Talking Chair"
Hello.
Hi, John.
Hi, Merlin.
Hello.
Get up.
It's seven.
All right.
I want to know.
How many of you people like to get high?
Now, I think it's important for our listeners to know that you've never liked to kiss.
Oh, well.
And that caused problems.
At a point, that caused problems for you.
Actually.
Actually.
Is Kiss bullshit, John?
In 1977.
Yeah.
In 1977.
Bring me my talking chair.
I knew a man.
There was a fellow once.
What was his name?
You know, that was that one fellow.
He used to all you know.
He was with that gal, dang it.
Let's see, what the hell.
No, it wasn't 77.
It was 76.
I, you know, a kiss.
I remember because Carter hadn't been sworn in yet.
We were looking forward to Mondale Mania.
Kiss was, you know, they were very important.
You know what?
I'm sorry.
I was filling the air.
You are not in any way required to talk about Kiss.
No, no, no.
It's fine.
It's fine.
It's fine.
I liked Kiss.
I liked Kiss just fine until I heard Queen.
Oh, yeah.
Yeah, and there's a time where there's only really so much room.
There was a thing where it was like, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
They can't all be your favorite.
And so I was like, nope.
And I remember very distinctly in fourth grade, I guess third grade, there being a pretty clear division in my elementary school between people that, and by people, I mean like the four boys that actually are part of this story.
The lonesome children with radios.
Yeah.
I was the fourth boy that liked Kiss, and then I became the one boy that liked Queen.
And, you know, that was just the beginning.
I set a course for adventure, my mind on a new romance.
Can I just also mention in passing that the name is not helping?
You know what I'm saying?
The name is not helping.
Oh, I see.
Between kiss and queen, sure, sure.
Well, kiss you could get away with because everybody knew factually that that meant knights in Satan's service, whereas queen just meant they were all gay.
Yeah.
But, you know, I was fine with that.
Which they weren't, by the way, but that's okay.
I'm just saying that's what everyone said.
Yeah, but he was super gay.
Extreme.
Although at the time, you know, none of us even knew what gay was.
It was just... Yeah, had to have five gallons of semen pumped out of your stomach.
No, that was Rod Stewart.
I know.
As we all know.
How are you?
You know, you're down there in California.
It's a great state.
It's a big, big state.
It's fine.
It is very long.
It's longer than people realize.
It is.
It's long.
I just realized that China and the United States are about the same size.
Isn't that something that you would think people would say every day?
Well, John, I'm basic, so I like those kinds of comparisons.
Even if you're comparing two abstract things, if one of those abstract things is something I have an idea about, I find that very useful.
I know it can also be misleading.
No, it's nice.
China is actually a little bit... Sorry, I think your internet sucks.
China is a little bit... Oh, it does.
I hate it.
I hate my internet.
Here, do you want me to reboot?
No.
I'll try not to interrupt you, but that's part of how our show works.
It relies on low latency to be able to...
Is latency currently an issue?
Unless you're trying to make a point about how I should never interrupt you, we're definitely talking over each other, which I would understand.
I feel like China is 2% larger than the United States.
Okay.
Doesn't that seem like something we would talk about all the time?
Like, oh, we talk about how big Texas is relative to Alaska.
Well, that's why John John's thesis was the feelings of geography and the geography of feelings.
We used to write papers like that in the 80s.
Weren't the 80s a marvelous time.
They were like the California.
They are very long.
They're longer than people think.
My friend Dave wrote a paper one time called something like, I think it was like Spinoza's argument for the existence of God or how I stopped worrying and learned to love the Lord.
Learned to love the what?
The Lord.
Oh, the Lord.
He used the colon and everything.
I wonder if, you know, I wonder if, boy, I wonder if it was all worth it.
Oh, really?
You know, there's times I wonder.
I do feel like I have, oh, it's really interesting you should say that because I didn't realize I had a strong feeling about that until right now.
Let me hear it.
dangerously sharp tools for certain kinds of analysis, and then almost nothing else.
I don't have a classic snap-on tool, like one of those giant red things you have in your garage full of tools.
I don't have unlimited numbers of tools for analysis.
I have a basic, well, a sub-basic liberal arts education.
But also the other problem this week, this has been a tough week,
For a lot of people, obviously, it's been really hard for people who dislike jargon.
Oh, is that right?
Has there been a wave of jargon in the last week?
I've learned or relearned so much jargon this week.
What is some of the jargon pertaining to?
Well, a lot of it is that, and listen, jargon has its place.
We know this.
Oh, sure.
I mean, jargon functions as a shibboleth, but more importantly, jargon functions as shorthand.
And shorthand in a very effective way in a lot of places.
But it's just, it's funny to hear bureaucrats just, I don't know, just talking about stuff like that you could explain a little more easily, but like, I understand, nevermind.
I'm not going to sit because I'm going to get in trouble.
It's going to sound like I'm not, it sounds like I'm against the first responders and I'm not.
But, you know, if you call it a wind event.
No, I know you're not.
I know you support our troops.
And what about air assets?
I wrote some other ones down.
I haven't been paying attention to that.
Oh, okay, good.
No, no, no.
I mean, I've been paying very close attention to Los Angeles.
It's affected me way more than I expected.
I've just been kind of devastated.
I've been thinking about it over and over on numerous levels, and I can't stop.
Can't stop.
But I have not been listening to experts.
I haven't been listening to people talking about it.
I've just been watching.
Yeah.
I guess.
Watching the sound off is what I've been doing.
Yeah.
I wish I could have.
And then, of course, texting people and talking to people and saying, are you okay?
Are you okay?
I mean, you can only ask any person, are you okay?
Once.
Yeah.
Because now you're creating work.
You're creating work for them.
Yeah, exactly.
There's going to be... Oh, boy.
Okay, let's do this.
Hey, everybody.
Do we have latency?
Do we have a lot of latency?
We have a little bit of latent latency.
Yeah.
You want to stick with it or do you want to try a redo?
No, no, no, not a start over, but a reconnect.
Let's reconnect.
Let's reboot.
Circle back.
I'm going to reboot, because you know what?
I probably haven't rebooted my computer since October or September.
Good for you.
So I'm going to reboot it, and that might clear out the cache.
Okay, I'm going to play some sound, and I'll see you on the other side.
Okay.
Over the course of our friendship, you have introduced me.
Well, there was a time when you loved entrepreneur jargon and tech entrepreneur jargon.
You loved it because you hated it.
And so you turned it into a song.
You made it into music, Merlin.
Your mockery of tech.
I always admired how easily people could just say such empty, so many very empty things with such confidence.
But you taught me so much.
And then later, it was only later that I realized that you were mocking people who were entirely serious.
And I heard a lot of those terms in real life.
uttered by real people with straight faces and i was like i know what that means yeah not only do i know what that means but i know that it's ridiculous that you just said that oh my god yeah no it's it's it's but you know i would have been lost before we took a break to listen to some sound uh for the other side uh it like i say it has its purposes you know whatever it's too much head up my ass you listen this is the thing you watch things with the sound up
And my greatest life hack is watch things with the sound down.
Can I tell you the biggest problem with streaming TV for me is I've got a really nice TV, a really nice sound bar.
I mean, really nice in the sense of, like, I could afford it.
It makes everything sound and look better.
Bum, bum, bum.
Oh, boy.
I've got that in 7.1, baby.
And I'm not exaggerating.
But it's, and so I acknowledge the value of, especially within a team, having very specific, like when you say something, a certain kind of jargon on your team means something extremely specific that might sound silly to other people, but it means a lot to your team, right?
But then there's also the kind of jargon that's like how everybody, whenever something's announced,
On a flight, they always use two adjectives or two adverbs.
Give me an example.
Well, could you please put your tray back into its full upright position?
Oh, full upright position.
Yeah, and don't develop your seatbelt until we've reached a full and complete stop.
Full and complete stop.
Mm-hmm.
That's just a couple off the dome.
I see.
But the problem is, then, the house is boring.
But it, like, it's just, I don't know.
When we just start saying stuff, it, like, it loses a lot.
Like, Open the Kimono was one, I think, you know, from a long time ago.
I do.
I love it.
Friendier.
Boil the Ocean was a big one in my time.
Mm-hmm.
And Syracusa, you know, who had a regular job until just a few years ago, like he was always saying, yeah, those are like from a few years ago.
And he would occasionally bring me a new one that I hadn't heard.
Was that all like skibbity toilet?
Nobody actually says it anymore.
Skibbity Ohio.
Yeah, I don't know.
The Skibity's the toilet man, right, with his head in the toilet?
I never know.
Yeah, someone forced me to learn once recently.
It's so easy to lose.
But, you know, never mind.
You know what?
Never mind.
New year, new Merlin, and I'm going to not be publicly such a pill about language.
Oh, stop being a pill?
Really?
Okay, all right.
Well, because, you know,
I don't mind per se.
I don't mind sounding like a crotchety old man.
What I want to avoid is actually being a crotchety old man.
And like, it's okay.
I like, I, I can't, I don't have, she keeps her Moet and Shondon in a pretty cabinet.
Let them eat cake.
She said, just like Marie Antoinette.
Um, you can do the clicks at the beginning.
Oh God, that's such a good song.
I watch the videos so many times every year.
Um,
No, I agree.
There are so many people whose brand now is be a pill on the internet.
Why do you... You don't need to be in that space.
Well, and I'll tell you, you wouldn't know it to look at me because nobody sees anything I do anymore.
But whenever... I try to bring, if not strictly like a positive thing, I try to say something assertive about a thing, usually a positive thing.
Like I'll say, you know, this song is really good and I hadn't heard it in a long time.
You know, that kind of thing.
I don't think...
And even when I'm constantly corrected about things that aren't wrong, somebody will make a correction and then I'll just say, yeah, yeah, that is a really good song.
Right now people are arguing about the continent of Australia.
Oh, they are.
I think so.
I think so.
And I spent 10 minutes trying to figure out the best way to say continent of Australia.
And here's why.
Because I didn't mean the country of Australia alone.
I was talking about music I like from Australia.
Oh, I see what you're saying.
Jumping off with Hoodoo Gurus, I want you back.
And saying that there's just a whole bunch of music from this continent that means a lot to me.
Now, in another time, the thread that I made out of that would have delighted a handful of people.
You know, now today...
Somebody is arguing with you about something.
So I'm talking about the saints.
And I'm talking about split ends.
I'm talking about, you know, midnight oil and all this stuff.
And, like, here's the thing.
Here's the problem.
I thought about it when I was taking a shower this morning.
Like, there's no way to get around this problem.
I know that there are more modern and...
inclusive names for that continent and well like i think oceania is one that's that i've heard there's another one that's like the official like you know pangea name but the thing is it is to most people it is the continent of australia i did not say the country of australia why am i saying this i don't know
I mean, I'm just in front of the firing squad now, like trying to explain how there's been a mix-up.
But then other people come in and say, well, you know, New Zealand's in Australia, too.
New Zealand's in Australia.
Yeah, that's why I'm actually a split ends guy.
Because here's the thing.
If you don't know who split ends are, and you don't know they're from New Zealand, or maybe you can intensely.
Clink clank disagrees with opinion, clink clank.
But, you know, but there's not, is there a better way to say continent of Australia, the people who half know what I'm talking about could grok, right?
Because then, no, do you understand what I'm saying?
And I'll tell you another example, straight out of the Reconcilable Differences handbook.
which is neither John nor I have any particular affection for the phrase PIN number.
PIN number.
Oh, it's a number.
It's a PIN number.
Yeah, it's a PIN number, which is unnecessary because PIN already has the N in it.
It's an ATM machine.
There you go.
But here's the problem.
Shrimp scampi.
Shrimp scampi, military intelligence.
Okay, what's the problem?
There's no I. No, no, no, I like this better.
There's no I in military intelligence.
ATM machine, automatic ATM.
Well, it's just that as much as PIN is, to a lot of people, correct, PIN number.
will get the point across to somebody a lot more efficiently, even though it's not as correct.
You know, there's times where we do that because it actually provides clarity to the lay person.
And if you're trying to address a non...
Like if you're not trying to address everybody in your business development group at the company, or for that matter, everybody inside your IT department at the company or the programming, you know, whatever it is, like, I don't know.
It's a tough balance to know.
But if you're going to try and communicate effectively with people, it really does help to use things that will not distract from the point you're trying to make.
The point I'm trying to make is not about what countries are technically in Australia, the continent.
My point is I want to talk about music I like.
Yeah.
Well, this makes you really want to bring something up.
What you want to do is you want to give a little love and then it all comes back to you.
We could have been anything that we wanted to be.
is that what that is did i get it i got pretty obsessed with paul williams for a while he's one of the great americans just go listen to that uh that uh that carpenter song where he it was a bank commercial that he wrote bank commercial bank commercial they didn't he didn't even have the second part he wrote the second part i think he wrote the didn't write the bridge that wonderful bridge in particular he wrote for the carpenters so beautiful sharing horizons that are new to us what's in the signs along the way oh
Talking it over, just the two of us.
Just the two of us.
He wrote the Rainbow Connection?
Nothing wrong with that?
Listen, he wrote them all.
He wrote them all.
If you go back and you look at the songs of the 1970s, Paul Williams has got his DNA in all of them.
Oh, dear.
Not in a creepy way.
No, not at all.
But he's also in that Phantom of the Paradise.
It's a pretty good movie.
Who's that director I like?
That weird director.
Brian De Palma movie.
Yeah, see, now you've lost me.
Okay.
Oh, Jesus Christ.
Listen, I'm really upset about California.
I know that we want to keep it light, but I really think that this is going to affect the entire United States for years to come.
Oh, John.
Years to come.
Have you been a fly on the wall for the last week because...
I have – like you thought you were sad about the election and whatnot before.
Well, get ready because I have – I've already laid down markers on some very ugly things that I think will happen this year.
Yeah.
Oh, no.
You've got some predictions for 2025 that are bad and sad and scary?
Yeah, I got some hot picks.
Oh, man.
The one I'm not going to say publicly is, oh, boy, can you imagine how insufferable the Oscars are going to be this year?
Oh, no.
And I think the color— That's another one I watched with the sound down.
Oh, yeah.
Oh, shit.
Sound.
I want to talk about listening to Yes while watching TV with my cousins in 1980.
But you can already see how—
I wish I had gotten awake a little bit earlier today.
I've been saying for quite some time.
It's early.
With my group of people that, especially since Ron DeSantis became governor of Florida, I've been saying something.
We're going to go back to the Simpsons joke about how, ha ha, you know, Florida's America's wang.
Well, it's always been, it's been my belief for a number of years now that there is a non-zero chance that decisions made in Florida are going to bring down the whole country.
Wow.
Wow.
Well, think about all of the catastrophic stuff that's going to be happening in Florida, even outside of politics, that people just refuse to pay any attention to.
But, you know, now it's going to be California that people point at about that.
America's other wang.
Yeah.
California is America's wang when America's wang is inside.
What could it be that it's America's wang when it accidentally superglued it to its thigh?
San Diego, you're the balls.
I hate when that happens.
You ever do that?
You ever start just horsing?
You know what?
Horsing around is what happens.
Horsing around is what happens.
You're horsing around with super glue.
Maybe it starts that you're trying to, like, fix some heirloom china.
You're fixing some china.
And then other stuff happens, and then what?
How do you end up?
You end up in California.
You're dick to your leg.
Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha.
But I seek no particular credit if this turns out to be the case because it's horrible.
But the incoming administration has already expressed a lot of animosity toward our governor and the state in general.
And you might remember that in previous years, the incoming president-elect has numerous times said, we have all these wildfires because we're using the water.
We have so much water we don't use.
We just throw all the water away.
One of my favorites was, it's because they don't sweep the leaves off the floor.
It's a phrase he used several times.
You don't clean up the forests.
Yeah.
But the thing is, it's going to turn out to be that people are going to go, see, he figured it out.
They didn't clean the leaves off the floor in Topanga Canyon, and that's why everything's on fire now.
Well, what's interesting is one thing I know a lot about California is that you guys just throw water away.
There's so much water.
To quote the president-elect, it's called rain.
It comes from heaven.
Yeah, it comes from heaven.
You throw the water right away.
Because the delta smelt.
Because we've got to save that delta smelt, so we throw all the water away.
The delta smelt is why you throw the water away.
Delta smelt to delta.
The water goes down to Oceana, where they use it to build a paradise that never has any fires or bugs or any problems.
No, no.
They've got no spiders, no snakes.
Nope.
Nope.
Nope.
There are wonderful people down there, too.
You know, every time when I have this other podcast that I do with Ken Jennings, America's Sweetheart.
Oh, I've seen that guy.
I've seen that guy on the TV.
You know, and I hate to call him America's Smartest Boy, because really, we know that that was John Hodgman for a long time.
But you know, the thing is, you know, where he's better than either or in both of us, if he's like, you're pretty smart, I'm pretty quick.
He's really smart and really quick.
He's smart and quick.
And they're not at the expense of one another.
No, they're not.
But you know, a lot of his humor is at the expense of Canada, Germany, and the nation of Oceania, the continent of Oceania.
Does he make a lot of spider and snake jokes?
Well, he just, you know, like a lot of people our age who came up developing a sense of humor that just involved roasting everybody all the time.
Yes, you've talked about this.
And then over time, you know, we've learned over the course of the years, like, well, you can't roast everybody all the time.
And then increasingly it's like, well, there's a lot of things that you think are like, yeah, you drew the line on roasting things, but actually the line's way further back up here.
And you've got to be careful because you're not sure if somebody who's not in on the bid is going to understand how good-natured it's intended to be.
Yes, that's exactly right.
There's so much love that we give a little love in the form of roasting everybody all the time, and then it all comes back to you in the form of just general merriment.
But where we've arrived, of course, is that it's really hard to know who you can roast, but what Ken has decided is that you can roast the Germans, the Canadians, and the residents of Oceana.
Okay.
And so he does those three things because he has all this roasting energy in him all the time, like we all do.
Despite being a very, very kind and even keeled human being.
Oh, he's a, you know, he's marvelous, but you know, he's, you're marvelous.
I'm marvelous.
My interactions with him have been especially nice.
I might be talking to his assistant.
I don't know.
No, that's not always true because there are other friends of mine.
Was he talking about me?
No, no, no.
There are other friends of mine who have not gotten along with Ken over the years because there's been pissing matches in Turf Wars that Ken, this is the marvelous thing about Ken, he doesn't engage in any of it.
So the pissing matches are all one-sided.
He does a kind of like intelligent person Aikido where he's able...
Yeah.
I mean, like it's, we're, and that's something I've tried, like I said, a few minutes ago, something I've tried to get better at is like, I don't, I don't want to always pursue the same kind of argument or disagreement or really anything framing that just because somebody else, like, you're not allowed to like change the subject and turn it into something that you want to be a dick about.
I've never met a person our age in our profession that is so completely immune to other people framing who he is than can.
You just cannot frame him.
You cannot put baby in a corner.
He just, and it just, he waxes on, he waxes off.
It's, he doesn't ever, I don't know.
He's, I, I, you know, obviously I admire him and I, and I've learned a lot from him.
But what I also have learned is if you disparage the people of the great nation of Oceania for long,
They will clap back, as the kids say.
The Canadians will take it.
And the Germans, I think, love it.
Yeah, but the Oceanics have really good put-downs.
They do.
They're extremely, they roast quite well.
It's like why you never go after Scotland.
You know what I mean?
Oh, no.
Never go up against the Sicilian when death is on the line or go into something involving expletives with a Scottish person.
No, I would never insult the great nation of Scotland, which of course is its own nation.
The kingdom, yeah.
It's not England.
Boy, I've heard a lot of wonderful Scots people explaining to me in great detail.
Okay.
Don't make problems for yourself.
But here's the thing.
When Ken makes a joke at the expense of Oceana,
They don't know how to get those letters to him, kind of like you.
Really hard to get a letter directly to you.
And so I end up being a kind of clearinghouse for people's thoughts and feelings.
People send me stuff all the time.
How dare Ken say that about the roux, which is short for kangaroo.
Oh, I thought you meant a flower-based sauce.
Oh, God.
How could anyone talk poorly about a roux?
Right.
But I think they regard them more pest-like there, right?
Yeah, they do.
They're bad.
Because they get into their seed corn and stuff, right?
Yeah, and they're boxing all the time.
They probably poop a lot.
I tried to make a flour-based roux on Christmas for the family.
And my sister, who is a vegematarian...
Um, was like, I want to make a sauce for my own stuff.
And I was like, Oh, it's real easy.
And so all of a sudden she pulls a pot out.
A residential kitchen only has room for one room.
That's a lot of pots, right?
Pulls the pot out, stands next to me.
Oh, come on.
That is so rude.
And it's like, okay, now what do you do?
And I was like, well, all right.
So then you, you know, what you're going to use is butter because you don't, you're not using, um, gravy and,
And she puts it in and I'm like, okay, now it's flour and now you cook it.
And, and I'm trying to do mine, which is already.
Does she use like a seed oil?
Yeah, some kind of... She's got her whole little magic corner of the refrigerator that's full of all kinds of... Food that isn't food?
Yeah, potions and food and stuff that's just like, oh, okay, whatever.
But so she's next to me, and they say that making a roux is real easy.
Well, maybe it's easiest if you've done it 10,000 times, but I'm still really concentrating on mine.
And then I'm also now concentrating on hers because she's like, am I doing it right?
Am I doing it right?
And those are time-sensitive, stir-sensitive things where you're both going to need access to pretty much the same area at the same time eventually.
And what happened is I basically sacrificed my roux to her roux.
oh man but i kept trying to salvage it this is the thing with the root when you when you go sideways with it you're constantly trying to salvage it like no no no i can do this i can do this did you break your sauce i'm just gonna whisk it more and then i come over to the table like all hang dog like with this sauce where i'm like here's the sauce and everybody's like it's great it tastes amazing if you chase if you chase two rabbits you lose them both
You lose them both, Merlin.
See, that's the kind of business talk that I miss.
Oh, I should probably try and catch up a little bit.
If you chase two rabbits, you're going to lose them both.
Yeah, a rabbit in the hand is worth two in the rabbit bush.
Yep, I totally agree.
Although rabbit bush, it's redundant.
It's just like automatic tea machine.
Another person with whom I am very lightly acquainted that is constitutionally very similar is John Dickerson, who's a CBS news guy.
Oh, you know John Dickerson?
And he's a wonderful guy.
And there's a phrase, and I'm going to paraphrase this because I don't know if he's always even said it exactly the same way more than once, but I'm going to paraphrase what he said.
And this is a big theme in things that he talks about in sort of the discourse, which is like, I think he's the most complete quote I remember him saying of this insight was something along the lines of, with so much wonderful food on the table, why would you take the bait?
Or why would you sort of eat the bait?
And I don't know if that's exactly what he said, but you'll just see John frequently saying, you know, don't feel like you always have to take the bait.
And in that image, I'm imagining this wonderful, you know, table, long table laid out with all this wonderful food.
But like...
Almost like a, you know, like a condiment all along the table is like, you know, minnows and night crawlers.
Live bait on the table.
And you're like, and somebody goes, you're such a queer bait, I bet you wouldn't eat a minnow.
And you're like, I totally eat a minnow.
It's like, oh, no, no, you couldn't have had stuffing.
Well, that's the thing.
People that are yelling at you about Oceana... It's not that bad.
It's not that bad.
Well, but the thing about it is if you are looking for accuracy...
But, but if you're looking for efficiency, you've already wasted so much more time than the X, the additional M or, you know, the additional machine or whatever.
But, but, but I think what we have now is because we've eliminated the idea of expertise in so many spheres of American life, like we've said expertise, we basically equated expertise with elitism.
In a lot of places.
Elitism, but also being sort of hidebound.
That's right.
Hidebound, like connected to old systems.
Not open to new or sort of not open to new ideas, but especially not interested in new kinds of thought technologies nor data that would help you presumably.
Like if you disagree with me, you obviously need new information or new methods.
Okay.
And this was, I think, part of the, we've talked about it before, part of the analysis gift that you were given in college, the ability to dissect and analyze everything, an incredible skill, or I'm sorry, an incredible tool
in a toolbox from 1968 or even from 1992.
Yeah.
But it's a tool that eventually all you can do is turn it on itself.
Like you can't build a system just by analyzing it.
You can't build a new system just by analyzing.
Well, let's go to the Latin root.
I mean, analysis versus synthesis, not to sound like a pointy-headed liberal.
Let's go.
you could think of sometimes as analogous with troubleshooting.
And we need to analyze this.
And when we say analyze, what we really mean is take a seemingly, you know, knotty ball of yarn and try to like break it.
Knotty with an N, not knotty with a N. No, not knotty by nature.
No, no, no.
Not bad meaning bad, but bad meaning good.
And you break that into pieces where synthesize, I think, has the connotation of creativity of where you're trying to add things together.
Yes, yes.
But can I... You can't just dissect it.
But I think all this weird, fake, useless specificity...
is coming from people who are desperately trying to prove they know a thing.
Yeah, and establish themselves as authorities in a world where all of the old ways of establishing yourself as an authority, like doing good work or being there for a long time or knowing things,
A lot of that has been sort of eviscerated.
So now it's like, well, who can be more of a dick about things?
That's not a good way.
I'm going to ask you for a fairly rare papal dispensation here.
Can I hijack the show with something?
Oh, man.
Yes, absolutely.
I just was gonna say that John Dickerson is the same age as me He's like two months older than you see some photos of him in front of my office.
He's really okay Two months older than me and look at him.
He's got all he went he did all these things backgrounds, you know about his mom His mom Janice Dickerson who you wrote a book whom he wrote a book about was the first national Anchor who was a woman on network TV.
Mm-hmm
Well, anyway, go ahead and hijack the show.
I had something... I struggled with something last year in terms of like... Basically, I was mad at the internet, okay?
But let's just... Just give me a break for a minute here.
Thing I'm struggling with where I feel like I...
I don't know.
A lot of this comes out of not having Twitter anymore because Twitter was a really big deal for me.
I think I was pretty good at it.
I got it.
And the people for whom I was making things on Twitter got it, mostly, I think.
Or at least there was a critical mass enough so that, like, you know, it's sort of like if you go to a big college or a big university, it sucks.
But you're likely to find at least a handful of people who like the same obscure band that you do.
I don't want to say this in a way to embarrass you, but I think you are one of the group of people that made Twitter an interesting place.
Thank you.
Enough that it became then interesting to more people and then got out of control.
It was Stone Soup where we all brought whatever we had and adapted.
Some of us were able to go like, oh, the constraints of this are actually kind of cool.
Yeah, the language you developed, the culture that you developed there...
You can see why I'd miss it, though, where I could talk about not even an obscure thing, but I could find common cause in a similar way to the times in my life in the 80s or the 90s in particular where I could just talk to people who DJed at our radio station.
And at our very highly esteemed college radio station in Tallahassee.
And, you know, you know who the posies are.
They know who the posies are.
I mean, I could talk about why I liked this Slater Kinney record, but I didn't like this Heavens to Betsy record.
Like I could like have fairly subtle things that just didn't just turn into like a big argument about the one index card that somebody has on a fax.
You told me about the first day of college at the dorms when you walked into the room with the four guys and you said, that's no ordinary habit.
And then they were like, oh, you know.
I wore a Husker Du shirt my first day of college.
A Husker Du show?
Shirt.
Oh, shirt.
Right, right.
Talk about shibboleth.
Anyway, yes, I hear what you're saying.
I know it.
Shibboleth.
Shibboleth.
All right, all right.
Okay, this is...
I was struggling with this and I couldn't quite put my finger on it.
And at various times I found myself saying, well, you know, gosh, it's really frustrating.
Like I can't seem to find my tribe anymore.
Well, yeah, you were missing your friends, right?
It was a feeling of loneliness.
But when I say the tribes, I don't mean just the tribes of people who like are fucking idiots on the internet.
I mean, like I'd lost a lot of lost touch with like friends in Tallahassee with great domain knowledge of all of our one another's bands and
But also not just our bands, but like I can count at least four people who were at that particular show where MBV opened for Dinosaur and was the loudest thing we'd ever heard.
Like that may not sound like a big deal, but those people are still out there.
But I can't.
make i can't take an angle publicly on something that those people would understand and other people wouldn't the same way that there's certain kinds of extremely off color like inside family jokes you never say publicly because it comes off wrong when you don't know like how it's just i'd really miss that and at various times i got really frustrated about it through a lot of the year and anyway i won't you you do enough kind of get where i'm going with this so far
Oh, for sure.
Yeah, absolutely.
You've used all the shibboleths that I recognize.
Well, I'm bringing you something that I arrived at through a different podcast I do, Dubai Friday, where we talk about stuff having to do with LLMs and AI stuff a lot.
And I just started to feel like
No matter what it is that I have to say about something, this could be a classic Merlin, like, really?
Duh, you just figured this out.
But I would want to talk about how exciting it was to me that I could do something like, say, show me all the actors where there's overlap between these three or five different media properties.
Yeah, this is your spreadsheet project.
Yeah, very much.
Very much like that.
But where I was – it wasn't – I wasn't trying to get it to go in and tell me how to make an IED.
I wasn't trying to get it to go in and do my homework for me.
I wasn't trying to do all the basic guy stuff that people think –
LLMs were either great or terrible at.
What's an LLM?
Oh, a large language model, so like ChatGPT, which is my main one.
I thought you were going to say it meant learning machine, and I was like, oh, are we calling them learning machines?
No, it's an LLM model.
I see.
I see.
LLM model.
Oh, the M is the model.
I see.
See what I did there?
Yeah, you know, we did away with thinking machines after they tried to kill us.
Yeah.
See, I was about to make a joke, but I could not assume that you're watching the new Dune Prophecy series.
Are you watching that?
And then I made a Dune Prophecy reference, and then you were like, OMG, you said.
OMG, God.
That little boy who looks like Justin McElroy.
He's got a toy that's a thinking machine.
Yeah, I don't even remember what the McElroys look like.
They just look like skull and crossbone faces to me now.
Right.
But you know that little boy that was married to the pretty girl?
The little boy that's married to the pretty girl.
Oh, well.
Doom Prophecy is pretty good, by the way.
But he's gone a long time ago.
Yeah, I know.
Spoiler alert.
Yeah.
He dialed 911 a long time ago.
Yeah, well, the heat is on.
But the...
I'm struggling because I feel this so strongly and I want to try and articulate this in a way that's sensible.
So here was the breakthrough.
And it's not specific to LLM stuff, but here's an example of something I realized that feels instrumental now.
I got frustrated because I started to feel like no matter what it is I wanted to talk about,
whether that was a feeling or a personal experience or a frustration or whatever it was, especially on one of the social media platforms where I spend most of my time, no matter what it is I said, somebody and often many people would want to find a way to turn it into a tech headline in particular.
A tech headline.
So I wanted to talk about how I, like, fix my oven with... Using ChapGPT?
Yeah.
Or I wanted to talk about, like, I don't have any particularly good examples off the dome, but, like, I use it a lot, a lot, for a lot of different things, and I'm always experimenting.
Yeah, Chaddy G, which name I have now appropriated from your sister.
But I want to say it again.
Yeah.
It frustrates me that, at least to me, in my estimation of this, and I'm going somewhere with this, that anytime I wanted to talk about something that felt like a big deal to me personally, there were people who would always want to turn it into a tech headline.
By that they mean that you're establishing a thesis about tech instead of just saying, oh, I've fixed my oven.
They're like, oh, so Merlin thinks that ChatGPT has a killer app is fixing ovens?
Is that what you're saying?
Yeah, maybe kind of.
Let me try and I'll wrap around to try and may not need to even put this in a term that'll make more sense to other people.
But let me just say, if I said something like, hey, this thing did this really great thing and it made me happy,
There's a non-zero chance that, well, first of all, this is understandable, and I'm not complaining, but I am just saying that the response from a lot of people would be, what app is that screenshot from?
Okay, not a problem.
But the thing is, I don't want to talk about my apps.
And the problem is, if you make this... And what I'm saying is, here's the results of this thing.
Or like, is that Safari?
Why does it look like that?
Okay, fine.
That is incredibly anodyne, low-stakes stuff.
I don't want to have to explain that.
Over and over, but that's okay.
I understand.
I'm the same way, and I'm usually more than happy to say, oh, that's drafts, or I'm using Safari with high contrast mode on, or whatever it is, but that never goes away because there's no context for anything.
What people see is an image they don't recognize, and so they ask a question.
Totally normal.
That's annoying.
It's not what drives me crazy, though.
So what drives me crazy is, and this is where I will pivot to the much larger point I hope you'll appreciate, is I just really wanted to talk about
what a thing means to me personally.
And in any variety of ways, other potentially good faith, well-meaning people will turn it into the thing that they want to talk about.
Now, that could be something like, well, did you know that that producer is canceled?
Even that movie, that movie that you like from the thirties, like that's not the best example, but you, I would say, well, yeah, yeah, that really sucks.
But yeah, I liked that movie.
But more often it would be something like, do you, let's turn this into an argument about the environmental impact of LLMs.
Let's talk this, let's, let's move this into a conversation about more saliently here, how unreliable LLMs are.
And I'd never use them for anything.
Yeah.
And I don't know if this is making sense.
I have not tried to articulate this very clearly, but I want to present you with a potential new thought technology, which is to be on the lookout for when you're trying to, one, we, is trying to turn someone else's
into something that's the thing that you wanted to talk about.
You studied for a different test.
You have a different interest.
You have a, what's that old phrase?
You have a hobby horse about a certain kind of topic.
So like if you're the issue guy who likes arguing about whether these things are good or bad or otherwise, that might be the angle that you have on it.
Now, whilst I remain not in love with every aspect of these things and what they mean for our future, my God, speaking of taking the bait, how are you not using this for low-stakes shit that can change your life today is what I'm trying to say.
But here's what I don't want to do is I'm not interested in this instance.
I'm not interested in...
In discussing, let alone debating the tech angle of this, because I cannot relitigate that every time I want to just share something that is special and literally today unique to me.
Right.
So the act of what I feel like, I feel really put upon sometimes by people wanting to take something.
I know I don't control the words once they're out in the world.
And I've been aware of that for some time now.
But I can still say that it really frustrates me when people who should know better don't think for half a second about what it is that I'm trying to say where they could play with me in the space.
And we could have fun with it.
And we could talk about it.
And we could riff.
And then somebody else comes in and is like, oh, I'm the guy who knows one thing about LLMs, and this is what I want to talk about.
So I mentioned that the specificity here is it's frustrating to me when my feelings and experiences are – I feel like there are always people who are trying to turn it into a tech headline.
The much broader point is I've become very aware of myself and of others trying to take what somebody presented in a certain way –
And maybe even with good faith, it's like, here's the joke that I could make about that.
Here's the fact that I have about that.
And like, maybe as an example, I just want to talk about how I like bands from the 80s that happen to be from Wellington or Auckland.
I don't really, I don't really super want to argue about the geography of Earth.
And when you do that, I understand why you do that, because you've got a file card on that, and maybe you care intensely about that, and that's okay.
But the only saving grace I have is that almost nobody sees anything anybody does anymore.
And if people did see it, you know what?
That would just become like a desire path.
It would just attract more people who want to argue about geography rather than talk about the go-betweens and their 1988 hit, Was There Anything I Should Do?
Well, let me ask you a serious question because I felt as Twitter evolved that you went into broadcast only mode because I feel like at a certain point you didn't want to be argued with on Twitter anymore.
You had too many followers.
There were too many.
There's just too much side chatter.
And what you always wanted to do was make jokes with Scott Simpson and me and 25 other people where you were making jokes that I didn't even understand because they were about C++ or whatever.
Yeah, I know what you mean.
But...
But is it that because you've, because you left Twitter behind and you went onto platforms that were smaller and felt initially more manageable and more, uh, intimate that you went back into conversation mode.
I always think of you as having more filters on what's coming in then, then I even know how to do just filtering out.
bots and trolls and all that stuff like and and when i think about filtering stuff i mean it's not a problem for me anymore because i listened to everything with the sound off but but you um but do you think it's because you let people back in in a way that even five years ago you
you had just eliminated the two-way radio aspect of it?
I think that's a pretty good question.
There's all kinds of issues of scale and size and stuff like that that would be too much to get into, but your basic question stands, and it's a good one, which is like,
You know, at first on Twitter, it really was just a bunch of knuckleheads, you know, having fun.
Then it got big.
And I feel like I should always say very affirmatively that I have never, ever, ever suffered anywhere near the slings and arrows that a lot of my friends have, present company included.
And I haven't more saliently.
Again, I didn't go through Gamergate.
I didn't have to deal with what a lot of my friends had to deal with over the past 10 years.
But...
Your point is good.
Because here's the thing.
And I've taken a little bit of criticism, frustration for this.
But I think it's always bugged me that I understand the idea of a parasocial relationship.
I have many of them with many para people.
But I think we oughtn't assume a level of familiarity with strangers that doesn't actually exist.
And in the same way that like think about somebody where you go and you buy a cup of coffee, you get off the train and buy a cup of coffee every morning.
Like you have a pretty well-defined relationship with that person that neither of you, I mean, I don't know if you both love it, but I've had hundreds of those sorts of relationships to this day where I have like a relationship with the garbage man.
or I've got a relationship with the guy two doors up who I've never spoken a word to, but we always greet each other with a wave.
Well, if I suddenly ran up to him and started wanting to talk about venture capital, that would be a weird, it would be one thing to talk about, hey, is your power off?
Because that all works in that context, right?
But the thing is, all of these things are publishing platforms and they always have been.
I think there are people who would say, well, yeah, what if you're on a private Slack or in a private text channel?
And I would say, well, yeah, that's not public in the usual sense, but it's still, I don't know if it's got a level of performance, but it's definitely got a level of publishing to it.
And if it's not, what are you doing wrong?
Like I spell check everything.
To the extent I quickly can, I try to at least do basic fact checking on when I say things.
Your grammar is good.
I try.
And like, what is the name of this area that encompasses?
Australia, New Zealand, Tasmania, I assume.
Tasmania, yeah.
But, you know, it's... The problem is, though, the beauty is in the responses and the beauty is in the threads.
And both the responses and the threads have gotten very...
not as easy to grok as they used to be, and I've done several episodes of Rectiffs with Syracuse talking about this, how people don't see that something's part of a thread.
Twitter was uniquely great at showing you stuff in line.
You can see where this started, what it comes from, because I'm not going to explain something six times.
If you missed the first act of the movie, don't expect me to stop and rewind so you can catch up, you know?
But anyhow, but the truth is I really do like, I like the social part of it I like.
I like the back and forth of it a lot.
And if I could say, I've held for some time now that a lot of my best stuff is in the replies.
You don't see it.
And often it's replies to other people.
or it's to other people that I don't particularly know, like the guitar player from Fountains of Wayne, who happens to share with me a frustration sometimes with the words that the New York Times spelling bee will not accept.
Oh, I know.
That's a fun game.
I don't know if he has, I don't think he has the slightest idea sort of who I am, but if I go into his thing about that,
I'll post sometimes one of mine under one of his, and I'll say the kind of thing I say, which is whoever these people are decadent and depraved.
Why did you not accept polychloro, polychloro, polychloro poly, or whatever?
And like, I don't know if you found that funny, but I found it funny, and a couple other people found it funny, but I went into his little world, and I played along with what his bit was.
And like to this day, few things make me happier than when somebody comes into my little world and plays along with what my bid is.
Rather than having it come in and try to turn it into, for example, and I don't want to overstate this, but rather than coming in and wanting to turn it into the argument that they feel like having this afternoon.
Yeah.
And that frustrates me because that makes me really feel like there's a certain awareness of tonality that people either have lost or have never really had.
And it's like, dude, as loud and obnoxious and as interrupting as I am, it might shock you to know that I...
and this is in my document that is out there, you know, always read the room.
When you walk in to a room, try to understand what happened before you arrived and what it felt like, which might sound crazy because I think a lot of people don't think that way.
I think a lot of people think in terms of the internet, they feel like they should come in there like Zukav in Death of Stalin, like whipping off your giant coat, you know, in slow motion and like
With all your medals on there.
With all your medals.
General Zhukov has arrived, bitches.
And I'm here to punch Rupert Friend again.
I love this scene where he's about to punch Rupert Friend, you know, Stalin's son.
And right before he punches him, he goes, medic.
You've seen this movie many times, right?
Oh, such a great film.
Oh, it's such a good movie.
But anyway, I'm mostly just bitching.
But the thought technology I wanted to bring to you, hijack the show to bring to you, is just this idea that what started for me as, please don't turn everything in my life into a tech headline.
The larger pattern, the larger sort of thought technology is, on the one hand, like...
So I'm going to try and do this in a way that covers me with glory rather than making me look like a complaining idiot, which is that, like, I got to be aware of that, too.
I need to take care that I don't overwhelm... You watch a little kid playing with blocks.
Like, do you run in and start telling them what that thing is that they're building?
Do you run in and start explaining...
the role that Robert Moses had in New York City in the 1930s.
Like, read the room and go in and then play in their space rather than trying to make it into the thing that you want it to be.
And I think that happens, I can just say to other people, it happens more...
than i would like and i think it's frustrating and when it starts to happen at a certain scale now having said all of that i feel better than i did a few months ago about this because i've re-tempered or regulated my expectations about these things i still sorely dearly miss having a ready set of people i could go to to talk about something very specific i miss that so much i can't even tell you
But I'm also hopefully now going to become a little bit more sensitive to like when I do that, but also maybe the reasons why people do that, because sometimes it's just a way to say I love you.
Your thoughts?
Well, you know, I...
It's not in me to go onto anyone else's post and argue with them.
Or even for a second, even if someone says something outrageous, I don't have any...
need.
It's not a desire.
It's not, it's just like, I don't need to engage with any of it.
And I don't, I, and I think if you looked back at every single post I've ever done on the internet, the number of times that I said actually, or well, I disagree or you're wrong.
I mean, I never thought of Twitter as a place to disagree with anybody.
And what I learned in being comedy adjacent for so many years, like I love playing along with somebody else's joke.
Absolutely.
You are.
And you're really you're really fine at it.
And you even you even stick to a role, which is unusual for most people.
Yeah, that's right.
I mean, I've always just, you know, I mean, not to blow smoke up your skirt, but I've always noticed that and admired it.
But the thing is, you're like that on the proscenium, in the proscenium and onstage, but you're also like that offstage, which is you're a pretty friendly go along, get along, I'll just go with whatever your bid is.
And I'm the same way and I love it.
I love it.
And that's the way to be, I think.
Yeah.
And I do, I would posit myself in a role like I'm the guy, suddenly in the context of your joke, I'm the guy that believes in chemtrails or I'm the guy that believes that the Nazis are
If you remember, John, that's why you never went on Atkins.
It's because you didn't want to crack your head open like happened to Dr. Atkins.
Exactly right.
And so I never understood that.
I've been in the room at least twice when you said to somebody, I'm not going to go on that diet.
That guy cracked his head open on the sidewalk.
Well, that's because he slid on ice.
Well, he was on Atkins.
Those were fun times.
But listening to comedians sit behind the scenes and bitch about the whole, and I know you remember this, when they were like, stop explaining my joke to me.
Where they would make a joke and then someone would come in, not in the spirit of playing along, but in the spirit of recapitulating the joke as if they thought of it.
As soon as they grokked the joke, they felt like they needed to explain the joke back to the comedian.
Oh, yeah.
That's what it's like to be a woman.
Right, right, right.
But also in my case, that just means, well, you know, perhaps because of tech and perhaps because of inattention, you didn't see the first post.
So, yeah, that was, to quote Rainier Wolfcastle, that's the joke.
But, you know, the reason I ended up getting permanently banned from Twitter, where I can't even log in,
is I can't even log in and I appealed it to whatever bunch of young people were sitting around one computer terminal trying to make these decisions.
I appealed it three times.
Like, listen, I don't think you understand that you're banning me for some keyword, but you didn't get how it was used.
It came as a result of a joke that Megan Amram made, who is a comedian that, you know, and she's one of these people that I had a parasocial relationship with.
I started following her when I was really early.
She's really funny.
She had that funny photo and she did.
Today's the day Donald Trump became president.
And she also wrote for a bunch of good Mike Scher shows.
Yeah, and she was, you know, she was the one that said, her Twitter bio was, my mom said that this is some kind of comedy, anti-comedy that's real popular now.
I mean, I just remember her from early days.
I followed her all those years.
I played along with all of her jokes so much that, you know, I'm used to dealing with parasocial relationships where people say, oh, I've been following you for years and you don't know who I am.
But you and her and probably the people reading it by and large knew the context.
Yeah.
Knew the context.
Well, but the thing was, I was coming back onto Twitter after Bean Dad, and real slowly, like I was watching Ukraine for a long time without commenting, and then a few of the people that, because I think that she had defended me at Bean Dad in some small way where she was like, I don't know this guy, but he's always been great.
Just acknowledging the social media relationship we had.
But she made some comment.
She loves the WNBA and she made some comment about referees in the WNBA and how badly they were doing a thing.
And it was a serious thing that she didn't like, but she also made it as a joke because that's the world that we lived in.
And I replied.
Something to the effect of, yeah, the WNBA refs should be all murdered or something.
But it wasn't a dumb, it wasn't as dumb as it sounds.
It was, I was echoing her voice.
Because sometimes you're doing, one is doing, this is a problem.
This is why I try to never make a joke unintentionally that too many frat boys would like.
I don't want to have that as my audience.
In that instance, right, like in the context of that, that totally makes sense.
And sometimes we send up a certain kind of pomposity or stupidity by emulating it in a way other people understand.
This is something that I believe it was Jonathan Swift called satire.
Exactly.
And that's the thing.
I was a character in her little joke, and I came in as a character.
Yeah.
And this was why Dave Hill got it.
No, but did people report you or something?
No, no, I don't.
Well, I don't think so.
I think at the time it was just that they were running some script that said, or not script, script.
Script is what you pay for, is how we're all going to pay for our groceries soon.
And that's why you're going to be, John's going to have so much money because he saved all that Confederate money.
Because he loves the Confederacy, everybody.
John loves the Confederacy.
I do.
I have all this Chinese medicine.
Yeah.
Um, no, but I, uh, but Dave Hill got thrown off of Twitter for some similar things, some, you know, saying murder.
And I think the machine just caught the word murder or somebody.
And this was, you know, at a time when they were being very performative about, oh, well, we're going to, we're going to make sure that this is a platform that doesn't encourage white supremacy or whatever.
Yeah.
I think it was, it was post Elon.
where they were playing some game.
And I think maybe even the game was, we're going to cancel just as many liberals as we do Nazis because both sides.
But anyway, I was at the next day I was, I was gone.
I was vaporized from Twitter and no, no attempt to get back.
And the thing was the pair of sociality of it.
made me realize, oh, Megan Amram is not going to defend me here because she's got 5,000 other, it probably never even went on her radar, but even if it did,
It falls into that category of like, well, you're playing games and those are your... It's not fuck around, find out.
That phrase I'm always using, I always try to avoid things that are turning into a whole thing.
Right?
Oh, geez, now this is turning into a whole thing.
And you cannot run to every whole thing that comes along as much as she might have enjoyed your interactions.
If she says something now, then that turns into a whole thing.
Yeah, exactly.
Do you know what I mean?
Like I can understand being resistant to like, you know, running to put out every spot fire.
But I saw it during Bean Dad a lot because there were a couple of people who I'd been in a parasocial relationship for 10, 15 years, however long we were all on social media, who were in now big scare quotes, comedians or side comedians.
who then went back through all of the jokes that I'd made with them over the years and screen capped all the ones where I was like, well, you know, the FBI is coming in through the window to get all the Jews.
And they put it all into screenshots and they were like, look at this guy.
Because they wanted to be part of the fun or they wanted to get into the game.
But those were jokes that I'd made with them, I thought, all those years ago.
That's the headline that they wanted to turn it into.
Yeah.
So, I mean, I know exactly what you mean.
And I think, I think I followed you years ago when I, when I saw you go into broadcast only mode where it was like, Oh, wait a minute.
This is no longer like writing jokes.
It's writing jokes.
Right.
And so I was like, Oh, I'm just a broadcaster.
And, and that's kind of, I mean, even on my own little podcast that I do on my Patreon,
There was somebody in the last few weeks that kind of just wanted to argue with me.
And I took the bait.
I sat at this big table and I ate the minnows for two weeks.
And then I was so mad that I took like four days off from the internet where I was like, and then I had that moment sitting on my couch where I'm like, I'm literally mad at someone who's paying to communicate with me
because they have something they want to talk about yeah and i keep going back to talk about it with them but i actually don't want to talk about that with them and i just stopped i just stopped and the next day i my heart lifted a little bit because i wasn't arguing anymore about a thing that i had no dog in the race really don't you're not you don't have that minnow hangover
Yeah, I don't have the middle hangover.
I went back to the table.
I realized it was set with all these giant hams and turkeys.
And I turned to everybody else at the table and I was like, oh, I'm sorry.
I was arguing with this person for the last 20 minutes, but this is a wonderful party.
This is where I want to be.
Pass the ham.