Ep. 353: "Reverse Khrushchev" - Roderick on the Line

00:04:35 John: this this is telling me that i'm um i'm spending almost all of my time social networking oh okay with almost no other oh and gaming gaming social networking and gaming and almost no phone that's what people do well i know but i'm i'm i hate i i really am i'm over the line i'm over the line with both

00:04:59 John: I just feel like I've looked at, according to this, according to my machine, I look at my phone.

00:05:05 John: Are you prepared to reveal this amount of information about yourself?

00:05:09 John: It depends.

00:05:10 John: Last seven days.

00:05:11 John: I'm up 10% from last week.

00:05:15 John: Five hours and 49 minutes per day looking at my phone.

00:05:19 John: Yeah, that's not so bad.

00:05:20 John: Well, okay, but are you prepared to say what your number is?

00:05:23 Merlin: Oh, a daily average on my phone, and this is new phone, who dis?

00:05:28 Merlin: Five hours, nine minutes.

00:05:30 John: Okay, so you're doing better than me.

00:05:32 Merlin: Well, but see, this is a whole thing.

00:05:35 Merlin: Okay, so when you click on screen time, do you see the little graph that says all devices or daily average?

00:05:41 Merlin: Do you see that?

00:05:42 John: Yeah, I guess.

00:05:44 Merlin: So you get downtime, app limits, you see all that stuff?

00:05:48 John: No, I think you have a better version of this.

00:05:51 Merlin: Seal activity is fascinating, though, because you can go in and it'll give you screen time by app, and then it'll give you, one of my favorite stats is number of pickups per day.

00:06:00 Merlin: How many times did you pick up your phone?

00:06:03 John: Number of pickups.

00:06:04 John: I'm not sure that I see that.

00:06:09 John: I don't see that as a thing on my screen time here.

00:06:12 John: Oh, this is so interesting.

00:06:14 John: Downtime is off.

00:06:17 Merlin: App limits are off.

00:06:20 Merlin: Yeah, it's fascinating, though.

00:06:22 Merlin: Especially with the notifications, I don't know if this is interesting, but it is a little bit sobering to realize how many you've gotten.

00:06:30 Merlin: Now, in the more recent iOS releases, what's cool is when you get a notification, you go like this.

00:06:36 Merlin: Ugh.

00:06:36 Merlin: Right?

00:06:37 Merlin: Sometimes you're like, well, if you slide from right to left on that, you'll see an option where you can go in and manage that particular kind of notification.

00:06:45 Merlin: So you could say, I don't want to get this anymore.

00:06:47 Merlin: Or you can say, deliver quietly.

00:06:49 Merlin: Like, don't bug me about this.

00:06:51 Merlin: Right.

00:06:53 Merlin: Hey, deliver quietly.

00:06:56 Merlin: Oh, God, if only.

00:06:58 Merlin: You know, if I could just say that when I get in a lift.

00:07:00 John: Hi, Merlin Mann.

00:07:03 John: Deliver quietly.

00:07:05 John: My setting for this, as for everything, deliver quietly.

00:07:13 John: No, so are you going to get an iPhone 11 team?

00:07:16 John: I did.

00:07:17 John: And so that's what it is.

00:07:19 John: It has all this fancy stuff in it.

00:07:21 Merlin: It has a four-camera camera.

00:07:23 Merlin: Yes.

00:07:23 Merlin: Well, no, you should be able to see all that screen time stuff on a not new phone with iOS 12.

00:07:32 Merlin: You still get screen time stuff.

00:07:34 Merlin: But, you know, I got to be in my bonnet about this, and I try not to be too, you know, that way.

00:07:40 Merlin: But, I don't know.

00:07:42 Merlin: Do you have a birdhouse in your soul?

00:07:43 Merlin: Yes.

00:07:44 Merlin: I'm the only bee in your bonnet.

00:07:46 Mm-hmm.

00:07:46 Merlin: This episode of Roderick on the Line is brought to you in part by DoorDash.

00:07:51 Merlin: You can download the DoorDash app today and use the promo code supertrain for $5 off your first order.

00:07:57 Merlin: Have you had a long day at work?

00:07:58 Merlin: Maybe a tough day at school?

00:08:00 Merlin: Maybe you're still stuck at the office.

00:08:02 Merlin: Well, treat yourself to the meal that you deserve and have your favorite restaurants come to you with DoorDash.

00:08:08 Merlin: because DoorDash connects you to your favorite restaurants in your city.

00:08:12 Merlin: Ordering is easy.

00:08:13 Merlin: You just open that DoorDash app, choose what you want to eat, and your food will be delivered to you wherever you are.

00:08:20 Merlin: Not only is your favorite pizza joint already on DoorDash, but there are over 340,000 restaurants in 3,300 cities, so you might find a new favorite, too.

00:08:29 Merlin: with door-to-door delivery in all 50 states and Canada.

00:08:32 Merlin: You can order your local go-to's or choose from your favorite national restaurants like Chipotle, Wendy's, Chick-fil-A, and the Cheesecake Factory.

00:08:41 Merlin: Don't worry about dinner.

00:08:41 Merlin: Let dinner come to you with DoorDash.

00:08:44 Merlin: So right now, listeners to Roderick on the Line are going to get $5 off of their first order of $15 or more.

00:08:50 Merlin: When you download the DoorDash app and enter the promo code SUPERTRAIN, $5 off your first order.

00:08:57 Merlin: When you download the DoorDash app from the App Store, remember, use that promo code SUPERTRAIN.

00:09:02 Merlin: Say it thrice and it's almost like praying.

00:09:04 Merlin: It's promo code SUPERTRAIN.

00:09:05 Merlin: $5 off your first order from DoorDash.

00:09:09 Merlin: Thanks to DoorDash for supporting Roderick Online and all the great shows.

00:09:13 Merlin: All right.

00:09:14 Merlin: Thanks, too.

00:09:15 Merlin: Okay.

00:09:17 Merlin: You know, I have over time become more and more like the way that you have at least described Jonathan Colton.

00:09:25 John: Yeah.

00:09:26 John: Like incredibly sexy or do you mean like a perfect medium?

00:09:30 Merlin: Yeah, I got those smoky glasses.

00:09:32 Merlin: No, you one time drew a distinction between how two Johns in your life dealt with kids and devices.

00:09:39 Merlin: This is not kid-specific.

00:09:40 Merlin: This is more me-specific, although it certainly affects kid stuff, but...

00:09:45 Merlin: I've tried to push back against the impulse.

00:09:51 Merlin: Well, like you, I try to be a modern man.

00:09:54 Merlin: Yeah.

00:09:54 Merlin: A contemporary man, right?

00:09:57 Merlin: How, how, how, how?

00:09:58 Merlin: How, how, how?

00:10:00 Merlin: Is that a ZZ Topper question?

00:10:03 Merlin: Yeah.

00:10:04 John: You're a modern guy.

00:10:05 Merlin: I live in a shack outside LaGrange.

00:10:08 Merlin: I play my guitar with a peso.

00:10:11 Merlin: I've talked about this a lot in other places, not so much here, but I'm trying to... I don't have sex appeal and I don't have relevance, but that shouldn't stop me from trying to catch myself becoming too much of an old man about new ideas.

00:10:29 Merlin: Yeah, stay up on your skateboard.

00:10:32 Yeah.

00:10:33 Merlin: Got my baseball cap on backwards.

00:10:36 Merlin: Where are my JNCOs?

00:10:37 Merlin: Hey, fellow kids.

00:10:38 Merlin: Hello, teens.

00:10:40 Merlin: So in that instance, I am trying to stay smart about... Okay, let's put it this way.

00:10:49 Merlin: There's always going to be a market...

00:10:51 Merlin: for trying to freak out parents.

00:10:52 Merlin: Let's start there.

00:10:54 Merlin: There has always been and always will be a market for trying to stoke our fears and insecurities about what we are capable of and good at as humans who have a kid that they deal with.

00:11:10 John: So you're not talking about ads that say, do you have hair coming out of your ears?

00:11:16 John: How do you mean?

00:11:16 John: You're talking about – well, I mean – Oh, that.

00:11:19 Merlin: No, no.

00:11:19 Merlin: I got a lot of hair coming out of my ears.

00:11:20 John: Just like if you have hair coming out of your ears, then you – Yeah, I got to deal with one problem at a time.

00:11:24 Merlin: You know what I'm saying?

00:11:25 John: So you're not worried about that.

00:11:26 John: You're worried about somebody who's like, oh, the kids today are wearing their pants backwards.

00:11:32 Merlin: well it's a little bit you know what it is in some ways it's um since before the kids stuff was a thing um as i think you are aware i've always had an attraction sensitivity suspiciousness about turns out stuff turns out journalism um and just that way of trying to like hey you're a pretty smart person who went to college uh here's a thing that you can mention at a cocktail party

00:11:57 Merlin: Turns out.

00:11:58 Merlin: Yeah, it turns out.

00:11:59 Merlin: Like, let's run down that real literature and, like, see what actually is behind that.

00:12:04 John: You and I used to, oh, we would have so much fun turns outing each other.

00:12:07 John: Yeah, yeah.

00:12:09 John: Back in the day, and we hardly turns out anymore.

00:12:11 Merlin: Well, I think, I mean, I read a couple things this week about Malcolm Gladwell and his latest book.

00:12:18 Merlin: And just sort of the evolution of his reception has not gone great.

00:12:26 Merlin: Oh, interesting.

00:12:27 Merlin: Yeah.

00:12:27 Merlin: Well, I mean, he was a hero for a long time.

00:12:30 Merlin: Well, I think like a lot of people, I was looking for more credulousness.

00:12:38 Merlin: And with each book of his, I had more situations where I would go, huh.

00:12:43 Merlin: is that how it turns out i only mention this because turns out is an addiction turns out is something that one can become do not become addicted to turns out is that how it turns out is that is that out is how it turns is that really really is that why people buy hush puppies are you sure you just look at the statue that real quick and is that how that works um but uh you know and and there's still a lot of stuff in that genre that i enjoy a lot i like um

00:13:08 Merlin: I like the Freakonomics radio show and podcast.

00:13:11 Merlin: I think they do a real nice job with that.

00:13:12 Merlin: You love watching TED Talks on the interwebs.

00:13:15 Merlin: Not so, so much.

00:13:18 Merlin: What about if a drone flies around and doesn't?

00:13:20 Merlin: Don't like a drone.

00:13:21 Merlin: I am not pro-drone.

00:13:23 Merlin: Okay.

00:13:24 Merlin: That's one way in which I am at all.

00:13:25 Merlin: All I'm trying to say is this.

00:13:26 Merlin: I think it is advisable for everyone, but particularly the elderly, like you and me, to keep an eye out for an idea...

00:13:35 Merlin: That feels, it feels turns out-y.

00:13:40 Merlin: But it's, and the thing about a turns out thing, you go, oh, you know what?

00:13:43 Merlin: That actually does make sense.

00:13:44 Merlin: That is why people buy hush puppies.

00:13:46 Merlin: And you never do any of your own due diligence to find out why the fuck that, if that's actually true.

00:13:51 Merlin: And there's a lot of stuff.

00:13:53 Merlin: right now, understandably, where we want to tweak parents, tweak adults, get everybody freaked out about how all these devices and dinguses are making your kids stupid and they're making you stupid.

00:14:06 Merlin: Screen time.

00:14:07 Merlin: Screen time.

00:14:08 Merlin: And no, no, the screen time, it can be very good.

00:14:10 Merlin: It's just that I see this in the school, things happening in the schools.

00:14:14 Merlin: I see this happening in...

00:14:16 Merlin: Let's just look at it this way.

00:14:17 Merlin: I mean, you've been through the process of seeing a child come into the world.

00:14:22 Merlin: You've been probably less so than your baby mama, but you're on the receiving end of so much unsolicited advice about what you must and must not do.

00:14:30 Merlin: And so much of it comes from this utter terror of getting it wrong and ruining the child.

00:14:37 Merlin: But also, we're always being encouraged to, like...

00:14:42 Merlin: whatever the situation to always do the thing that made sense to us when we were a kid.

00:14:47 Merlin: So if our parents yelled at us about watching TV, well, therefore screens are bad.

00:14:51 Merlin: So we should be, we should be yelling at our kids about that too.

00:14:54 Merlin: Maybe that's true.

00:14:55 Merlin: Maybe it's not.

00:14:56 Merlin: I, it's not, I'm not, I don't have a position on what everybody should believe, except that I think everybody should believe that most people are giving you advice for a reason of their own.

00:15:07 Merlin: And it, it pays to, it,

00:15:10 Merlin: It pays to decide how that actually fits into your own life.

00:15:13 Merlin: So why do I say this with your phone?

00:15:15 Merlin: Because a phone's not a phone anymore.

00:15:17 Merlin: A phone's a baby computer and it's how we do stuff.

00:15:19 Merlin: It's a baby.

00:15:21 Merlin: Yeah, well, I take time away, especially from social media.

00:15:24 Merlin: Like there's like a lot of times during the day, I just will hardly look at it.

00:15:27 Merlin: Sometimes I do, sometimes I do.

00:15:28 Merlin: But there's stuff I got to do on there.

00:15:30 Merlin: Like that's how I do my work.

00:15:32 Merlin: Absolutely.

00:15:33 Merlin: And I think it's really frustrating to me personally, professionally, when people try to paint with this very broad brush about anything that's a device with a screen and how that's – you're a grown-ass person, people.

00:15:50 Merlin: You can decide how you want to use that.

00:15:52 Merlin: You don't have to be, I don't, I'm sorry, I'm carrying on.

00:15:57 Merlin: But anyway, it just, it frustrates me because people, it sounds so smart and it sounds so safe and it sounds so like mature to go like, oh, no, people are always looking at their phones.

00:16:10 Merlin: Why don't they ever just do, do, do, do.

00:16:11 Merlin: Well, it's baby boomers looking at their phone that brought us 2016.

00:16:17 Merlin: Don't yell at my kid.

00:16:18 Merlin: Don't make my kid put her phone into a bag when she goes to school.

00:16:24 Merlin: What if you just like yelling at kids?

00:16:27 John: Well, I think it's a pretty popular thing to do for sure.

00:16:30 John: I just like yelling at them.

00:16:32 John: You know, they're standing there all stupid and put their whole lives ahead of them.

00:16:36 Merlin: Let me throw it to you.

00:16:37 Merlin: Do you feel right now, I want to phrase this appropriately.

00:16:41 Merlin: Do you feel like you use your phone more than you would like?

00:16:45 Merlin: Yes.

00:16:47 Merlin: So one of your goals with an Apple Watch, if memory serves, was you wanted to be untethered from the phone.

00:16:54 Merlin: You wanted to be away from the temptation of the phone, but still be plugged in if anything blows up, right?

00:16:59 Merlin: Right.

00:17:00 Merlin: Correct.

00:17:00 Merlin: Because that's how people get to you.

00:17:02 Merlin: They get to you through the devices.

00:17:04 John: They get to you, but also, as you say, it's a mini computer.

00:17:07 John: And so, you know, what it's done, one of the things that the phone has done is it has replaced magazines for me.

00:17:15 John: And I used to read magazines.

00:17:17 John: Yeah.

00:17:18 John: And I enjoyed magazines.

00:17:19 John: I felt, especially after I worked at the magazines.

00:17:23 Merlin: Others adopted it, but you were born in it.

00:17:25 Merlin: You were there for a very exciting time in magazines.

00:17:30 John: But also when I was little, when I was a kid, like the first thing my mom did that granted me some

00:17:37 John: sort of entree to the adult world was she got me my own subscription to Time Magazine in 1970-whatever-6.

00:17:49 Merlin: We were getting it at the same time.

00:17:51 Merlin: I really looked forward to that every week.

00:17:54 Merlin: Absolutely.

00:17:54 Merlin: Especially the Howard Hughes issue.

00:17:56 John: Well, all of them.

00:17:58 John: I remember reading about Evel Knievel jumping the Snake Canyon in 1974.

00:18:05 John: I guess that would have been my mom's copy of Time because I didn't have my own yet.

00:18:11 Merlin: I don't talk about him anymore.

00:18:12 Merlin: He was huge.

00:18:14 John: He was a big, big deal.

00:18:15 Merlin: He was a big rock star.

00:18:16 Merlin: He was so large in our young lives.

00:18:18 John: But I remember Time published a photo.

00:18:20 John: There was some Led Zeppelin concert or something.

00:18:22 John: No, I think it was Kiss, actually.

00:18:25 John: And Time published a photograph of a girl sitting on her boyfriend's shoulders with her top off at a Kiss concert.

00:18:34 John: And...

00:18:35 John: It was like, why are they able to put this nudie picture in time?

00:18:40 John: And my mom and I took it to her and I was like, I beg your pardon.

00:18:44 John: And she said, oh, well, I would like to speak with your manager.

00:18:49 John: She said, well, it's a news photo.

00:18:51 John: And so it's a so they're showing it.

00:18:55 John: But it isn't purient.

00:18:57 John: It's there because they find it newsworthy.

00:19:00 John: And I was like, aha.

00:19:04 John: I remember stewing on that for a while.

00:19:06 John: Like, I see.

00:19:07 John: So it's not there to make you... It's not like the magazines that focus on nakedness.

00:19:14 John: It's newsworthy nakedness.

00:19:16 John: I'm still chewing on it 50 years later.

00:19:20 John: But anyway, so I use my phone as a magazine...

00:19:25 John: And, um, and in that sense, I'm grateful to it, but I, but I see my daughters, I see in her eyes, she walks into a room and if I'm looking at my phone, she doesn't know whether I'm reading a fascinating article in the Atlantic or whether I'm just scrolling Instagram or whether I'm playing threes.

00:19:50 John: And to her, it all just looks like I'm absorbed in

00:19:55 John: in this you know this portal to something else and it really I really do feel like when I get into that when I get into

00:20:03 John: a, um, boundaryless mode with my phone that even when I'm not looking at it, I'm part of my mind is on it.

00:20:12 John: You know, I totally understand occupied by it.

00:20:15 John: So she's trying to talk to me and I'm like, yeah, I absolutely, sweetie.

00:20:20 John: I, I, I'm totally listening, but I'm thinking your attention is a little bit split.

00:20:25 John: And to the point that I'm like, maybe if I just went and sat in the bathroom for a while, I could kind of look at my phone uninterrupted.

00:20:33 John: And it's in the aggregate when I think about the five hours I spent looking at my phone today, what did I get in the end out of that?

00:20:43 John: You know, that was a big part of my free time.

00:20:48 John: Maybe all of my free time.

00:20:50 John: Yeah.

00:20:50 John: And I got a couple of cool magazine articles.

00:20:53 Merlin: Like when there's a spare moment, one fills it with that screen.

00:20:57 John: And so I know that Andy Levy right now, he has a beard and he's trying to figure it out, whether he likes it or not.

00:21:05 John: And Josh Gondelman won an Emmy, but Game of Thrones kind of got snarfed.

00:21:11 John: And, you know, Matt Howey has some issue with his garage door opener.

00:21:18 John: Like, I know all this stuff.

00:21:20 John: That's like, as it goes by, it's fun.

00:21:23 John: I feel like they just changed the game algorithm in Threes, so it's much harder to play.

00:21:31 John: Just in the last 10 days.

00:21:32 John: Shame on them.

00:21:33 John: Threes has become harder to play.

00:21:36 John: Asher is out to get you.

00:21:39 John: Well, because now it's sending like seven number twos at you in a row.

00:21:47 John: And it's just like, look, dudes, I can't I can't handle seven reds.

00:21:52 John: You got to either throw in a three or a blue.

00:21:55 Merlin: Are you doing are you doing the moving left, moving right to change the side it comes up on?

00:21:59 Merlin: You know, why am I asking you this?

00:22:01 Merlin: I have the lowest threes scores of anybody that I know.

00:22:06 Merlin: I'm in no position to give a break.

00:22:07 Merlin: You're just like, do you know how to play threes?

00:22:09 Merlin: It's so embarrassing.

00:22:10 Merlin: I have friends who are like, oh yeah, 64,000.

00:22:12 Merlin: I'm like, what?

00:22:13 Merlin: Like if I break like 3000, I feel like I'm having a really good day.

00:22:17 John: Let me just go here and see what my high score is on threes.

00:22:22 John: I'm going to go to the menu option here.

00:22:25 John: 87,849.

00:22:27 Merlin: Jesus tap dancing.

00:22:30 Merlin: Christ, John.

00:22:31 Merlin: I am super impressed.

00:22:33 John: I get a 1,500 tile.

00:22:35 John: I get a 700 tile.

00:22:36 Merlin: What noise does it make?

00:22:38 Merlin: Does it make a cute noise?

00:22:39 John: Oh, it's all little songs.

00:22:42 Nice.

00:22:42 Merlin: I love the little voices.

00:22:53 John: Anyway, you know, I'm not, I don't... And at the end of the day, you feel like you have not gotten...

00:23:01 John: an enduring level of quality stuff as a result of that amount of time I mean I'm not out teaching my daughter how to start a fire with Flint I wouldn't be even if I didn't have a phone and so I can't say like look at all the time you wasted you could have been out you know you could have been out teaching her how to you know working on her everyday because you know that you know that's a genre you know that's a genre no it is and and so I don't want to chastise myself based on a thing that I wouldn't be doing otherwise because

00:23:30 John: But what would I be doing otherwise?

00:23:32 John: I mean, frankly, I would be sitting there reading a magazine.

00:23:35 John: But at least to her eye, there would be a greater distinction.

00:23:41 John: Like now he's reading a magazine.

00:23:43 John: Now he appears to be reading a hardcover book.

00:23:46 John: Now he's staring at the wall.

00:23:48 John: Those used to be the three things that I did.

00:23:50 John: Read a hardcover book, read a magazine, stare at the wall.

00:23:53 John: And now all three of those things are different.

00:23:56 John: And maybe the thing that I'm missing the most is stare at the wall, which used to occupy three hours of my day.

00:24:06 John: Stare at the wall.

00:24:06 John: Into adulthood.

00:24:09 John: Oh, until I got a, until I got a smartphone.

00:24:12 John: Okay.

00:24:12 John: Well, I still stare at the wall for an hour and a half a day, but you know, you stare at the wall and that's right.

00:24:22 John: Sometimes the wall stares you.

00:24:25 John: Um, I, because, because I, I went to, I, so I, I went to the gym two times last week and

00:24:32 John: on purpose yes both times well one time was half on purpose and the second time was full-on on purpose and both times i did the thing where i got on the treadmill and walked for an hour and i think i've described it to you before but um because now i've done it three whole times but i was always just like treadmill geez why not just you know why not just uh put me in front of a

00:24:57 John: a sink and have me do dishes for an hour.

00:25:00 John: Um, but on the treadmill, if you, if your settings are such that you're getting, it's actually a little bit of work and you're not just like do, do, do, do, do, but you're like walking uphill a little bit.

00:25:14 John: It does quiet your brain.

00:25:16 John: Oh, totally.

00:25:17 John: I totally agree.

00:25:18 John: And I'm sitting there just like thinking all the thoughts and like, what if I did this?

00:25:22 John: And how many guns would it take to take over Tajikistan?

00:25:28 John: And then after a while, you're like, I'm just working here and I'm just not thinking.

00:25:35 John: And by the end of the hour, who knows?

00:25:37 John: I just went away, you know?

00:25:39 John: Wonderful.

00:25:40 John: How wonderful is that?

00:25:41 John: Enough that I feel like I might go to the gym a third time.

00:25:46 Merlin: Just FYI, I'm passing.

00:25:47 Merlin: There's a setting, it's pretty buried, but there's a setting for your watch where if you started a workout, you can have do not disturb on your watch while you're doing a workout.

00:25:59 John: Well, I wouldn't be disturbed by my watch for a workout because I would...

00:26:05 John: Because I really do put everything down.

00:26:07 John: You know, I put the I put I don't I'm not watching TV while I'm working out because I'm I'm absolutely trying to get into that state of like so hard.

00:26:16 John: That's the screen I want to avoid the TV.

00:26:19 John: Oh, my God.

00:26:19 John: It's just.

00:26:20 John: But you have so much TV to consume.

00:26:22 Merlin: Well, but like I went to pick up my Chinese food yesterday and.

00:26:27 Merlin: And I was actually telling Madeline about this.

00:26:30 Merlin: It's like the worst of all worlds because it's, you know, it's a pretty common thing, at least around here, where like every goddamn restaurant, every takeout place, they've all got big TVs, big TVs, big Samsung TVs running.

00:26:42 Merlin: And for some, I guess because they're cheaping out, it's all like, you can tell it's a...

00:26:47 Merlin: HDR TV, but they're getting an over-the-air signal, right?

00:26:51 Merlin: They haven't even, like, bought cable.

00:26:52 Merlin: And it's basically just, like, a local news show just going in and out or a judge show.

00:26:58 Merlin: And then, like, it pixelates and gets all, like, and it's like, oh, my God, this is hell for me.

00:27:03 Merlin: It's like, you know, the worst for me in some ways is, like, when you're traveling and, like, it's like sports and CNN, like, or Fox or whatever, everywhere you go.

00:27:11 Merlin: It's like, that's the screen I want out.

00:27:13 Merlin: The screen that is telling me...

00:27:15 Merlin: Like this, this needs to be, don't stare at the wall, you know, cause men are terrified of being alone.

00:27:20 Merlin: Let's be honest.

00:27:22 John: Boy, I want to be alone.

00:27:25 Merlin: Yes, but men also like control.

00:27:27 Merlin: But I think that's why, that's why they do it in the airports.

00:27:31 Merlin: Cause, cause people would lose their goddamn mind if they didn't have something to stare at.

00:27:34 John: Oh, those people.

00:27:36 Merlin: No, no, see now I'm, now I'm being that guy that I don't want to be.

00:27:38 John: Well, you know, what can you do?

00:27:41 John: You don't want to stare at a thing.

00:27:43 John: I don't like being forced to stare at things.

00:27:45 John: And back in the 90s, when I had a little cadre, let's call it a cell.

00:27:53 John: I had a little cell.

00:27:54 John: Do you remember the magazine Ad Busters?

00:27:57 John: Yeah.

00:27:57 John: Oh, Ad Busters was so exciting.

00:27:58 Merlin: It was fun.

00:27:59 Merlin: Yeah, culture jamming.

00:28:00 John: Yeah, it really felt like we were mounting a resistance.

00:28:03 Yeah.

00:28:04 John: And my little cadre, you and I have talked about it before.

00:28:06 John: We used to climb up on billboards in the middle of the night and change their messages.

00:28:11 John: We would go so far as to print out big, huge rolls of paper that had some, you know, in the same font.

00:28:20 John: that changed the message from Chevy like a rock to Chevy like a cock.

00:28:27 John: You know, that kind of like hilarious culture jamming.

00:28:31 John: And even, you know, we took on some big players.

00:28:34 John: We took on the whole like your baby has a heartbeat after 11 days and then a picture of like a really strange little zygote.

00:28:44 John: a worm child that has a bow in her hair and it's then the billboards meant to make you feel really bad about uh having the option of having an abortion right and we would get up and change the messages of those so that it you know it just made them it was sarcastic yes but it was really fun we would dress put our you know uh watch caps on and and uh we'd run around like john belushi and in um

00:29:09 John: in animal house in a sweatshirt that says college bump bump bump bump bump and we had walkie talkies and stuff and we'd have people stationed at different corners and and um see it like basically like a grown-up nighttime ninja raid it was super fun and then the next day the billboard would be there on a busy busy street and uh everybody until the billboard company got up there and tore it down everybody would have a good chuckle

00:29:36 John: as they drove past this billboard that we had culture jammed, and the newspapers picked up on it.

00:29:41 John: It was fun.

00:29:42 John: It was good times.

00:29:43 John: And it felt illegal, too, because we were destroying private property.

00:29:47 Merlin: Yeah, but I mean, the emerging thought at that time, you don't have to be a strict situationist, but the thought at the time was, we are being overwhelmed with all of these images of consumption.

00:29:59 John: You know what I mean?

00:30:00 John: It was just...

00:30:01 John: But it was – and I did an interview at one point with somebody and I was like, look, these are – you are – this is involuntary, right?

00:30:12 John: You're just walking out the door and you're trying to make it from one place to another and you're being bombarded by messages and you're not able to sign off on them.

00:30:24 John: You're not able to approve the whole notion of receiving the message, right?

00:30:29 John: You cannot block them out.

00:30:32 John: And that is a form of, you know, it's a form of assault.

00:30:36 John: It's a form of, um, it's a, you know, it's a, it's indoctrination and that's what we're opposed to or whatever.

00:30:44 John: And, you know, there was some logic to it.

00:30:45 John: It's the same logic that graffiti artists employ when they say, look, this, this concrete is negative space and we are not defacing it.

00:30:56 John: We are, it's already a defacement.

00:30:59 John: to live in a world where you're surrounded by concrete everywhere.

00:31:03 John: You're all, we're already living in a dead zone.

00:31:07 John: And so we're decorating it as an act of resistance against being, uh, living in a Logan's run.

00:31:15 John: And, you know, I was always like, huh?

00:31:17 John: Yeah, totally.

00:31:19 John: I mean, I'm, yes, you're not well, but what about that fence that you made look worse?

00:31:26 Um,

00:31:27 John: Does that count too?

00:31:28 John: I mean, you know, you always have to argue it out for yourself.

00:31:33 John: Yeah.

00:31:33 John: But nowadays, the number of things I don't consent to that are just shoved, not down my throat, just shoved right up my bottom, Merlin.

00:31:44 John: Yeah.

00:31:44 John: Every time I pick up my phone, it's just one thing after another that I'm sure somewhere a thing popped up that I consented to.

00:31:52 John: Yeah.

00:31:53 John: Have you noticed now every website you go to throws up a thing that's like, this site uses cookies, consent!

00:32:00 Merlin: Yeah, that one actually has a reason behind it, which is the European GDRP.

00:32:06 John: Right.

00:32:07 Merlin: But no, but what about just the newsletter thing?

00:32:10 Merlin: Like, no, I don't want your newsletter.

00:32:10 Merlin: I just want to look at your stupid site and leave.

00:32:13 John: Or just the general sort of amount of any time you go now to a magazine, basically an online magazine,

00:32:20 John: They're trying to throw ads at you every way they can.

00:32:23 John: And the most popular way now is like, let us block the thing you're reading for a second with an ad where we've made it unclear how to turn it, you know, how to click it away.

00:32:32 John: And you're just fucked, you know, like.

00:32:35 Yep.

00:32:36 John: And here you are, like, you're stuck.

00:32:39 John: We all agreed now that everything's on the cloud, and now your cloud is full.

00:32:43 Merlin: The only ads that I can fully support are for independent podcasts.

00:32:48 Merlin: This episode of Roderick on the Line is brought to you in part by Mack Weldon.

00:32:52 Merlin: You can learn more about Mack Weldon right now by visiting MackWeldon.com.

00:32:57 Merlin: Mack Weldon believes in smart design, premium fabrics, and simple shopping.

00:33:00 Merlin: Their website is so easy to use.

00:33:02 Merlin: You're in and out in no time.

00:33:04 Merlin: and your new clothes are on the way.

00:33:05 Merlin: Mack Weldon will be the most comfortable underwear, socks, shirts, undershirts, hoodies, and sweatpants, and more that you'll ever wear.

00:33:12 Merlin: They have a line of silver underwear and shirts that are naturally antimicrobial, which means that they eliminate odor, and they want you to be comfortable.

00:33:19 Merlin: So if you don't like your first pair, you can keep it, and they will still refund you

00:33:22 Merlin: with no questions asked.

00:33:25 Merlin: Not only does Mack Weldon's underwear, socks and shirts look good, they perform well too.

00:33:29 Merlin: They're good for working out, going to work, going on dates, or just everyday life.

00:33:33 Merlin: I'm a huge fan of Mack Weldon.

00:33:34 Merlin: I am wearing Mack Weldon right now.

00:33:36 Merlin: This top layer of mine, you can see this long sleeve shirt I'm wearing.

00:33:39 Merlin: It's just the best.

00:33:40 Merlin: Really highly recommended.

00:33:42 Merlin: So you go, you check out MackWeldon.com and you get 20% off your first order using the promo code ROTL, just like it sounds, R-O-T-L.

00:33:51 Merlin: MackWeldon.com, 20% off with promo code R-O-T-L.

00:33:55 Merlin: Our thanks to Mack Weldon for supporting Roderick on the Line and all the great shows.

00:34:00 John: I pounced on the table so hard that my daughter's shoe, which is for some reason on the table.

00:34:07 John: Okay.

00:34:08 John: And that has a reverse crew chef.

00:34:11 Merlin: It has.

00:34:11 Merlin: I did.

00:34:12 John: The shoe is all the way at the other end of the table, but it has those lights in it for when the child is running and the lights go off.

00:34:17 John: And I pounded the table in affirmation so hard that the shoe went off across the room.

00:34:23 John: Yeah.

00:34:24 John: Yeah.

00:34:24 John: That's how cruise ship I feel.

00:34:25 Merlin: You know, the other one, I feel like there was a point when, so like, you know, you go somewhere, you do a thing, you buy a thing, you have an interaction, you have an engagement with a company, and they would send you, they would automatically put you on some email list.

00:34:41 Merlin: There was backlash to that.

00:34:42 Merlin: You started getting an opt-in where you had the option of saying, hey, I want to be on your list.

00:34:47 Merlin: I don't know what happened to that, because I have not, in modern times,

00:34:53 Merlin: deliberately signed up for marketing messages that I'm ever aware of.

00:34:58 Merlin: And yet I get, you know, not a butt ton, but a fair amount of marketing messages.

00:35:04 Merlin: And then what's funny is when I go to hit unsubscribe and I go, I land on a page where I discover that I'm actually signed up for like six lists of marketing things.

00:35:16 Merlin: Yeah.

00:35:17 Merlin: And it's like, it's like, are we just not doing that anymore?

00:35:19 Merlin: Can we go back to the thing where I, where I opt in?

00:35:21 Merlin: I don't know.

00:35:22 Merlin: Yeah, I agree with you.

00:35:24 Merlin: I agree with you.

00:35:25 Merlin: Like you say, then we do it to ourselves.

00:35:26 Merlin: We jam a threes in our own face, but I don't know.

00:35:30 John: I'm threes jamming.

00:35:33 Merlin: So I want to get this exact quote.

00:35:35 Merlin: I don't want to interrupt the podcast to find this exact quote, but I've been citing this so much that I want to – I think I've tracked this down to the Plato dialogue, Phaedrus,

00:35:47 Merlin: But, you know, there's so many examples of this whole like, well, this new technology will be the end of us.

00:35:55 Merlin: And there's one of the people, and I'm just scanning this real quickly because I haven't read this since college.

00:36:00 Merlin: I'm just Googling it.

00:36:01 Merlin: But no, there are people who believe that writing was a terrible idea.

00:36:05 Merlin: Because writing was going to damage our memory.

00:36:08 Merlin: If we weren't forced to memorize epic poems as a way to tell each other the news, you know what I'm saying?

00:36:16 Merlin: I don't want to put too fine a point on it.

00:36:19 Merlin: Is there a bee in your bonnet?

00:36:22 Merlin: There's a bee in my bonnet.

00:36:23 Merlin: Both times.

00:36:24 Merlin: I'm not your only friend, but I'm your little glowing friend.

00:36:27 Merlin: But no, the problem is this has always been the case.

00:36:32 Merlin: Ever thus to dead beats, Lebowski.

00:36:34 Merlin: It's always been this way, that when a new technology or a different technology comes along, our natural impulse is to look at all the ways that it's going to be dangerous for us.

00:36:45 Merlin: So I'm with you.

00:36:47 Merlin: I do a lot of stuff more than I prefer, but I am also skeptical or cautious about

00:36:57 Merlin: About turns outs.

00:36:58 Merlin: About turns outs.

00:36:59 Merlin: Yeah, for sure.

00:37:00 Merlin: Or for like unintentionally adopting some kind of a very strident view about something that I don't really understand yet.

00:37:07 Merlin: I'm really trying to avoid doing that.

00:37:10 Merlin: If you could put that on a t-shirt and send it out into the world...

00:37:14 Merlin: I'll have to roll back because I think that's going to be a pretty long.

00:37:18 Merlin: Cotton Bureau might need to print that on two shirts you buy or maybe front and back.

00:37:21 John: Yeah, and one of them ends with, I'm with stupid and it points over to your friend and they're wearing the other one.

00:37:27 John: Todd is stupid and I am with him.

00:37:29 John: I've been saying for a long time that somewhere along the way, not for a long time, not for like 50 years or 15 even, but lately, I've felt like

00:37:39 John: We crossed something – some line in the sand where the idea of theory, the idea of coming up with a theory about something, it stopped –

00:37:51 John: It stopped being a theory anymore, and all that was required was that you come up with a theory for it to be considered true.

00:38:02 John: Like, I came up with a theory about why this is that, and now I'm going to act like it's true.

00:38:07 Merlin: Not a theory as in gravity or thermodynamics, but more like really a reckon.

00:38:11 John: Well, or just sort of like just the type of thing where you say, if you let a kid look at their phone, that kid will end up being a violent offender.

00:38:21 John: And that's my theory.

00:38:23 John: And I'm basing that on a magazine article I vaguely remember reading and also just my good sense and intuition about how things work.

00:38:31 John: And now anytime I see a kid looking at a phone, I'm going to speak about my theory as though I read a

00:38:38 John: a double-blind series of scientific tests that were run by a reputable agency over the course of a decade that produced this data.

00:38:50 John: And the thing we've forgotten is that even when that is true, even when the University of Pennsylvania runs a 10-year study that involves 2,500 people,

00:39:00 John: It's just 2,500 people and the study was designed by some 20-year-olds.

00:39:06 John: And what does it really prove?

00:39:09 Merlin: And also just importantly, not even getting into the replication crisis, which is huge.

00:39:15 Merlin: This whole problem of like, well, you know what?

00:39:18 Merlin: Turns out when people go back and try to reproduce all of this fascinating social science from the last 20 years, practically none of them can be reproduced.

00:39:27 Merlin: Or 50 years, right?

00:39:28 Merlin: Since the dawn of social science.

00:39:30 Merlin: But especially in this period where the interesting scholarship and the – well, the funding is not going to come to people who say, yeah, yeah, this Isaac Newton thing checks out.

00:39:39 Merlin: The money is going to come from the kind of thing that you can put into your newsletter or whatever.

00:39:44 John: And I think even more than that – and I've gone on record on this program being very critical of computer maths.

00:39:52 John: And I do that a lot.

00:39:53 Merlin: It's a vocation.

00:39:54 John: It is, and I do that a lot just because I know there are a lot of computer maths listening to the program, and there's nothing funnier to me than an antagonized computer maths, unless it is an antagonized electrical engineer.

00:40:08 John: But the thing that I really want to interrogate is that the social sciences have, for the last 60 years, been, I think, motivated primarily...

00:40:20 John: by a desire to elevate their science to the level of a science.

00:40:26 John: And the day that we decided that sociology and that psychology were sciences and belonged and lived in the part of a college campus that was also shared by biology –

00:40:39 John: And and we called them sciences rather than arts or rather than a new category of thing, which is a land of theory, a land of things where people are going to throw a frog at a wall.

00:40:52 John: And if the frog sticks, then they're going to say she's a witch.

00:40:56 John: That in making those things a science, we then encouraged or in some ways necessitated that the people practicing those disciplines –

00:41:10 John: Are now using what appears to be the scientific method, but really is in a way the mistake of social Darwinism, which is taking the theory that does not apply to what you're doing, but mistakenly applying it and then calling it science.

00:41:28 John: Hmm.

00:41:28 John: And so if you take a thousand cells and irritate them with nucleotides, and those nucleotides produce a result in a thousand cells.

00:41:41 John: You're talking about nucleotide irritation.

00:41:42 John: Yeah, nucleotide irritation.

00:41:44 John: Okay, all right.

00:41:45 John: After you do that to a thousand cells, if every one of them mutates a certain way, you can start to, as a scientist, you can say, well, I've seen this result.

00:41:54 John: And let's extrapolate it and assume that in 10,000 of these, we get the same result.

00:42:00 John: Now we're looking at some science.

00:42:02 John: But if you take 1,000 random yahoos,

00:42:06 John: across the United States and you show them all a television program and then afterwards interview them about how they feel about tacos and you get some bell curve of answers and try and conclude anything from it.

00:42:26 John: It's just sorcery.

00:42:27 John: You're just reading tea leaves.

00:42:29 John: It's just tarot.

00:42:30 John: And how many Americans you would have to survey and how carefully you would have to word those questions and how smart everyone involved would have to be to produce any reliable conclusion about how people are and what they think and do and how they feel.

00:42:50 John: It's bonkers how impossible it is to really do that.

00:42:56 John: And yet, I think now it's 35% of our culture.

00:43:00 John: 35% of our culture is people saying, I talked to 11 people.

00:43:05 John: They confirmed my bias that I brought into this study.

00:43:09 John: And now I'm talking about this theory as though it's true.

00:43:13 John: Enough people feel in their emotions that what I said...

00:43:17 John: makes them feel good or confirms their own bias going in.

00:43:22 John: And now they're all shouting about it.

00:43:25 John: And pretty soon every person I talked to in the world says, well, you know,

00:43:31 John: And then lays out some shit that they couldn't prove.

00:43:34 John: And now it's viral.

00:43:35 Merlin: Now it's viral.

00:43:36 Merlin: Now you are passing that along to other people as a fact.

00:43:41 John: And I walk out into the world and I'm just like, oh, I'm greeted today by everyone agreeing that 17-year-olds are the ones who are going to save the planet because 17-year-olds have been demonstrated to care more than 55-year-olds.

00:43:58 John: And it's like, huh, interesting theory.

00:44:01 John: How could you possibly be saying anything other than just that what you that you had a feeling this morning and enough other people had a feeling and they all yelled at each other?

00:44:12 John: You know, like there's no we're not even trying anymore.

00:44:16 John: We're not even it's not even at the level of saying chicken, the other other white meat, you know, it's like, oh, we don't eat saturated fats anymore because they're saturated.

00:44:27 John: Oh, turns out saturated fats.

00:44:29 John: The saturation is what makes them so.

00:44:31 John: And it's like that that was all hokum.

00:44:35 John: And that at least had some actual chemistry behind it, briefly.

00:44:41 John: I mean, but it really was just like, huh, I have heart disease.

00:44:45 John: My dad had heart disease.

00:44:47 John: We liked hamburgers.

00:44:49 John: Maybe it's hamburgers.

00:44:51 John: And now it's just like, my dad liked Three's Company.

00:44:55 John: I liked Three's Company.

00:44:57 John: Yeah, but your dad did die.

00:45:00 John: Yeah, turns out he died.

00:45:01 John: Turns out, yeah.

00:45:02 John: Turns out maybe I'm going to die.

00:45:03 John: Three's Company is the killer.

00:45:05 John: Yeah.

00:45:06 John: It's just, it's so infuriating and it's not, it isn't generational.

00:45:09 John: You know, a lot of people are like the millenniums, but it really isn't.

00:45:13 Merlin: You nailed it.

00:45:14 Merlin: I mean, it's, um, it's, uh, and I, let me just clarify before I even say this, John Syracuse.

00:45:21 Merlin: I'm not saying I'm good at this or I'm winning this, but I do find that, uh,

00:45:27 Merlin: it's a constant battle against confirmation bias.

00:45:30 Merlin: That's the one.

00:45:31 John: I would like to just say, I would like to jump in and say that John Theracusa, if he, if he has some, uh, something he'd like to add or any complaint that he'd like to lodge that he can email you at yourself at gmail.com.

00:45:45 Merlin: Okay.

00:45:45 Merlin: Yeah.

00:45:46 Merlin: He'll, he'll text about it.

00:45:47 Merlin: Um, for sure.

00:45:48 Merlin: Um, but the, why does he text you and not me?

00:45:51 Merlin: He only texts me.

00:45:52 Merlin: That's a really good, that's a really super good question, John.

00:45:55 Merlin: One,

00:45:55 Merlin: That's a really, really good question.

00:45:57 Merlin: Why don't you help him with his Mac more?

00:45:58 Merlin: Why don't you help him with his Mac?

00:45:59 Merlin: Why would you begin by telling him the desktop command?

00:46:03 Merlin: When he talked about me in this week's episode, why'd you say I said that?

00:46:07 Merlin: You misquoted me when I told you that you hit the wrong key.

00:46:11 Merlin: I don't know.

00:46:11 Merlin: That's a very, very good question.

00:46:13 Merlin: Confirmation bias is a dick.

00:46:15 Merlin: And you can quote me on that because I fight it all the time because it's, you know, it's Foster Wallace.

00:46:22 Merlin: This is water, right?

00:46:23 Merlin: I mean, in the sense that, like, confirmation bias is air.

00:46:27 Merlin: It's like we're always looking...

00:46:31 Merlin: whether we know it or not, we are always scanning the horizon for something that tells us that we're believing the right thing, doing the right thing, even if it's something we don't know we think or do or believe.

00:46:43 Merlin: I'm not an expert on this, but I do know it's very difficult to identify information

00:46:47 Merlin: And combat.

00:46:48 Merlin: And this is, but the reason I mentioned that, the reason I interrupt you with this here is that it goes straight to so many of the things we're talking about, whether that is parenting advice or whether that is how we deal with the evolving, quickly evolving technology and culture.

00:47:03 Merlin: We're always going to default to this idea that feels resonant with our past, maybe especially with our youth.

00:47:11 Mm-hmm.

00:47:11 Merlin: Right.

00:47:11 Merlin: And so I just I think you nailed it.

00:47:14 Merlin: I think that if we and this is there's so many other biases.

00:47:18 Merlin: There's so many of these things that we should be fighting for in ourselves all the time.

00:47:22 Merlin: But like we're constantly being fed all of these messages that tell us, yeah, that thing you thought it's really true.

00:47:29 Merlin: You really you really there really shouldn't be a woman president, you know, because look at what's up with her email server or whatever it is, you get fed all the stuff.

00:47:37 Merlin: Yeah, well, that makes sense.

00:47:38 John: That, but also, and this is I think a post-war phenomenon, right?

00:47:42 John: Up until World War II,

00:47:46 John: I think there were lots and lots and lots of people, maybe a majority of people, who wanted to make the world better.

00:47:52 John: They imagined that the world could be made better and they wanted to make it better.

00:47:56 John: And the way they thought about that was largely in practical terms.

00:48:01 John: I mean – and it wasn't just in terms of clean water, but it was in terms of the franchise, the right to vote, the right to –

00:48:09 John: the right to pursue liberty.

00:48:11 John: If you look at the Declaration of Independence, it's just a list of ways that the people at the time thought they could make the world better.

00:48:17 John: And it's not a complete list.

00:48:21 John: It's not... Obviously, I think in a lot of ways, unintentionally excluded a lot of ideas because they hadn't had them yet.

00:48:29 John: It was thought technologies that had not arrived.

00:48:32 John: But it was a list of practical things that they thought they could do to make the world better.

00:48:37 John: Since the war...

00:48:40 John: the energy that people have devoted to, uh, trying to make the world better.

00:48:45 John: A lot of it is psychological, right?

00:48:47 John: It's not, if we put this together, then, then, uh, it would improve the lot for people, you know, like the civil rights movement.

00:48:55 John: It was very practical.

00:48:56 John: It was like, we needed this, we needed housing, we needed job opportunities.

00:49:00 John: We needed, uh, you know, we needed to end segregation in schools.

00:49:05 John: But, but at a certain point,

00:49:07 John: It started to be psychological, like we needed to improve the mentality of people.

00:49:14 John: And the way to do that was to get into their homes, to get into the values of their families and of the schools and of their churches.

00:49:23 John: And at that point, we're making – there's a lot of confirmation bias about what we can say to people that's going to change their feelings about things.

00:49:33 John: And once we change their feelings, that is –

00:49:36 John: necessarily going to change the world for the better and all of that is based in this this world of sociology and psychology where we say in some ways like the like we need a woman president because female energy is different than male the female mind works differently and if a woman was president of

00:50:01 John: That would change the world for the better because she would bring – this was the logic 25 years ago, right?

00:50:06 John: Was that women in business were going to change the nature of business.

00:50:11 John: And it was – and because we believed that women would get into business and be able to use their powers because men are contemptible.

00:50:22 John: I mean that's the one thing we all agree on.

00:50:24 John: And then as time went on and we saw, oh, there are a lot of women getting into business and the ones that succeed are the ones that act like men.

00:50:30 John: That's not changing anything.

00:50:32 John: That's just making – that isn't what we anticipated.

00:50:37 John: That wasn't the plan.

00:50:39 John: So we've got to adjust the plan now.

00:50:40 John: And now we're furious that women have to act like men.

00:50:45 John: And rightfully so.

00:50:47 John: It would be wonderful because I'm still working on the theory from 1990 that women going into business are going to bring –

00:50:54 Merlin: female acumen to it which is a different thing which now we're not we're not sure if it is a different thing of course it is sometimes but not others right it's it's i mean like for somebody like me um i'm trying to keep my opinion out of this but like i think the idea of women being more involved in lots of parts of life is something that's an empirical good um for a lot of reasons but is it fair to say that the reasoning for why that's a good idea has sort of changed over time

00:51:22 John: Oh, the reasoning has absolutely changed over time.

00:51:24 Merlin: It went from... It seems like no less of a good idea.

00:51:27 Merlin: It's just that the reasoning changes.

00:51:29 John: Well, but who knows, right?

00:51:30 John: I mean, it was considered a really bad idea up until 40 years ago, at which point...

00:51:38 John: It changed when you talk about your dick and stuff.

00:51:41 John: It changed to being a good idea for this reason.

00:51:44 John: But then it turned out that that reason either didn't work or wasn't true.

00:51:49 John: Like, but not just women in business.

00:51:50 John: This is true of every single aspect of our of our social world.

00:51:56 John: We haven't we we have a absolutely innate and I think noble desire to make the world a better place.

00:52:07 John: And to open up the rights to engage in every aspect of the world to everyone.

00:52:14 John: And that is a, I think it's a, it is the liberal project and it is, I think, natural to a lot of us.

00:52:22 John: Right.

00:52:23 John: The problem is that we have progressed past the level of providing clean water and sanitation to everyone.

00:52:31 John: Well, mostly.

00:52:34 John: We have progressed now past the point where everyone has the vote.

00:52:39 John: We've progressed past, mostly, we've progressed past the point.

00:52:43 Merlin: So many big asterisks that didn't used to feel like they were quite so prominent.

00:52:47 John: Well, there are a lot of asterisks, but we're talking a lot of times about a fraction of a percentage, you know?

00:52:53 John: And so at a certain point, you've used science.

00:52:55 John: It's like, well, there are people being denied the vote.

00:52:59 Merlin: The trend line on disenfranchisement is not great right now.

00:53:06 John: Well, you're getting a lot of – it's a lot of confirmation bias, right?

00:53:12 John: If you really look at the numbers, it's – In Georgia?

00:53:16 Yeah.

00:53:17 Merlin: even the numbers of georgia voters versus the number that have been well i mean i'm talking specifically about i don't want to get down a rat hole but it's just just to push back a tiny bit there's a variety of things happening in our great southern states where there is a deliberate effort whether it's florida georgia carolinas there's a lot of deliberate effort to get people off the voting rolls and it affects some groups a lot more heavily than others

00:53:41 John: Yeah, it does.

00:53:42 John: But we're talking about Georgia.

00:53:44 John: The population of Georgia is 10.52 million.

00:53:51 John: And the number of voters we're talking about is...

00:53:57 John: What, 10,000 less?

00:53:59 John: And a lot of that is people being taken off the voting rolls that, I mean, what percentage of the Georgia population voted in the last election?

00:54:08 John: The ones that were allowed to vote?

00:54:09 Merlin: Like fewer and fewer are the black people because they're just showing up and they're off the rolls and they don't know why.

00:54:14 John: Yeah, but it's a rattle.

00:54:17 Merlin: I just thought you're going to you're going to hear from people about that.

00:54:19 John: I want to give you the opportunity to clarify.

00:54:22 John: Well, I mean, the thing is that I'm going to hear from a lot of people who have a who have a feeling that they know what it is already.

00:54:30 John: But there were four million voters out of 10.5 Georgians who voted in the last election.

00:54:37 John: So that's four out of 10 now.

00:54:43 John: That isn't insignificant.

00:54:45 John: Right.

00:54:45 John: And there are a lot of voters who are being taken off those roles that wouldn't have voted.

00:54:50 John: Right.

00:54:50 John: So we're talking about five thousand.

00:54:52 John: We're talking about, well, let's say ten thousand voters have been excluded.

00:54:55 John: So four thousand votes that would have been counted.

00:54:58 Merlin: You know what I'm saying?

00:54:59 Merlin: Yeah, I kind of do.

00:55:01 Merlin: But like that, when you suppress voting enough, people stop going to the polls.

00:55:05 Merlin: That's the problem.

00:55:07 Merlin: That's what the thing is.

00:55:10 John: But what you're saying is a theory.

00:55:12 John: It's not a theory.

00:55:13 Merlin: It's not a theory.

00:55:14 Merlin: There's so much firsthand reporting on the ground about what's happening at these places.

00:55:19 Merlin: It's wild.

00:55:20 John: Sure, I understand.

00:55:21 John: I mean, I have read the same magazine articles, but the idea that voters don't go to the polls because they feel like they're being suppressed...

00:55:34 John: And then there's another magazine article that says voters don't go to the polls if the election is held during a full moon.

00:55:42 John: Voters don't go to the polls if there's a football game that weekend.

00:55:45 John: You know, there's every different magazine article has another explanation for why voters didn't go to the polls.

00:55:53 John: And a lot of those are based on a feeling that the last election didn't go the way that the people who are running the polls wanted it to.

00:56:01 Merlin: You think that's true in Georgia?

00:56:03 Merlin: Well, the secretary of state who's running for office is the one who also makes the laws about who's enfranchised.

00:56:10 John: The thing is, I think that Georgia is, I think that it is a racist place.

00:56:15 John: And I think that racism plays a role in how the elections are run.

00:56:20 John: I think gerrymandering is a much bigger issue.

00:56:24 John: I think that there are 50 different things in the United States that are, uh,

00:56:31 John: that are at least as important as disenfranchisement in Georgia for people in San Francisco to worry about.

00:56:38 John: What?

00:56:41 Merlin: I mean, I am equally affected by Stacey Abrams not being able to get into office because they took a ton of people.

00:56:46 Merlin: That affects everybody.

00:56:47 Merlin: The local races are part of what animates people to get involved or to be squelched in their feeling about getting involved in their community.

00:56:56 Merlin: We can all look at the national stuff and see some of the problems with that, but anybody who's on the ground doing the political work will tell you that it's

00:57:06 Merlin: It's the local game.

00:57:07 Merlin: It's the down-ballot stuff that brings people in a lot of the time.

00:57:11 John: Well, I know, but that is the local people in Georgia who are doing the groundwork of a political game who are actually active.

00:57:16 John: It's not people on Twitter in San Francisco wringing their hands about it and talking about it.

00:57:22 Merlin: Wow, okay.

00:57:24 Merlin: I don't think that's fair.

00:57:26 Merlin: I think that's – why would you say that, man?

00:57:31 Yeah.

00:57:31 Merlin: I care that everybody has the chance to vote.

00:57:34 Merlin: It's not a political agenda.

00:57:35 Merlin: If anybody has their stuff thrown out because it's beneficial to the people who are running the election, that's not a partisan issue.

00:57:43 Merlin: That's a civic issue, isn't it?

00:57:47 Merlin: It absolutely is.

00:57:48 John: I'm not arguing for a second that it isn't an issue and that it isn't a – I'm not even arguing – I'm not arguing for a second that it isn't true and that it isn't an accurate critique, but only that it is a cause that is in fashion –

00:58:10 John: Like the detention of immigrants coming over the border existed throughout the Obama administration.

00:58:18 John: Nobody said a peep about it.

00:58:20 John: All of those same things that are happening under the Trump administration happened throughout the Obama administration.

00:58:26 John: Nobody said a peep about it because it wasn't the thing that we were on about at the time.

00:58:31 John: And it wouldn't have been convenient for us to be mad about it then because we had an investment in the Obama administration being righteous.

00:58:40 John: Now we have a tremendous investment in it being one of the major critiques we have about the Trump administration.

00:58:48 John: And the Trump administration is shitty, so they're fighting it.

00:58:53 John: They're fighting back that it's valid, whereas the Obama administration would have just papered over it with some happy talk.

00:59:01 John: And so the nature of these situations isn't...

00:59:06 John: Isn't changing.

00:59:07 John: There's nothing.

00:59:08 John: The voter disenfranchisement has been something that has happened from reconstruction forward.

00:59:15 John: It's not it's nothing new.

00:59:17 John: In fact, at the present time, there's less of it than there's ever been before.

00:59:22 John: Like we're making massive improvements across the whole scope.

00:59:25 John: But because of because right now voter disenfranchisement in Georgia got up to the level where the average person is conscious of it, it seems like an emergency.

00:59:37 John: And it seems like there's we've never been it's never been worse.

00:59:41 John: But in fact, more people have the vote in Georgia than ever before.

00:59:44 John: And and more blacks, more of the poor.

00:59:48 John: And, you know, and the bad guys are pushing back.

00:59:51 John: But that sense, what it is, that sense of constant panic, the sense that things are coming off the rails, like if you read the stats, I guess, for lack of a better thing, for lack of a better whatever thing to look at, we've never been better.

01:00:13 John: And so for me, like this idea that it is, that it's a...

01:00:20 John: That it's a set of people advancing a theory that has a very emotional component that there isn't a lot of people aren't doing independent fact checking on it.

01:00:32 John: Just as you said earlier, people aren't saying, now, wait a minute, what's the truth here?

01:00:36 John: Oh, man.

01:00:38 Merlin: And then it becomes this episode out, but you're so fucking wrong.

01:00:42 Merlin: You're desperately wrong.

01:00:43 Yeah.

01:00:43 Merlin: There is... If one is following the on-the-ground stuff from nonpartisan groups, I don't think it's accurate that more people are voting rather than less.

01:00:54 Merlin: I'm pretty sure that's not correct.

01:00:57 Merlin: In certain communities...

01:00:59 John: Here's an article that was the first thing that pulled up, and the opening paragraph is, in a historic election, Secretary of State Brian Kemp announced early Wednesday morning that Georgia set an all-time record in number of votes cast.

01:01:13 John: With over 4 million votes counted, Georgia surpassed the 2008 record of 3.9 million votes.

01:01:20 John: Now, this is him pushing back the governor.

01:01:24 John: That's the Secretary of State?

01:01:25 John: The Secretary of State of Georgia, yeah.

01:01:30 John: Um, I'm not, I'm not saying that he is right or that, that I'm not, I'm not making, I'm not vouchsafing anything about that article.

01:01:41 John: Um, but it's the, you know, it's other, it's another take than the one that's on Buzzfeed or whatever.

01:01:50 John: Um,

01:01:52 John: So – but again, I'm not like arguing any – I'm not arguing specifically about Georgia elections.

01:01:58 John: Like that's just an example that we're playing with.

01:02:03 John: There are a lot – there are a thousand examples of a thing that is – that's –

01:02:11 John: A conversation we're having where we go into it with a presupposition that if we read an article that confirms our bias about Georgia, about racism, that we're going to take it at face value.

01:02:25 John: We're not going to believe an article that says the opposite.

01:02:30 John: We're not going to question the source of the article we read that confirms what we want to think.

01:02:37 John: And we're going to doubt the veracity of the article we read that throws shade on it.

01:02:43 John: And we're going to proceed.

01:02:45 John: We're going to go down the road to the next article.

01:02:48 John: With all this that we know, that we, in quotes, know.

01:02:55 John: And we have now constructed a worldview that's based on surveys.

01:03:01 John: That's based on anecdotal evidence.

01:03:06 John: Often, that's based on interpretation of a very limited number of a small sample set.

01:03:20 John: And the Secretary of State of Georgia is not ever going to say, I intentionally disenfranchised 10,000 noble voters who were lined up out front of the polling station with their ballots in hand.

01:03:33 John: He's going to say a lot of these people don't exist anymore.

01:03:35 John: A lot of them are whatever died or whatever his justification is.

01:03:42 John: We're not going to believe it.

01:03:43 John: We're going to think it's disgusting, but he's an elected official.

01:03:47 John: He's a member of the same world that we're a member of and feels justified in his actions, whether or not we, with our limited set of articles about it,

01:04:03 John: Um, I mean, I am disinclined to believe him.

01:04:07 John: Right.

01:04:07 John: But that's based on my bias.

01:04:12 Merlin: And I mean, that, that definitely, there's an element of that I do agree with.

01:04:17 Merlin: Um, for sure.

01:04:18 Merlin: We, it's confirmation bias.

01:04:20 Merlin: It's, I mean, in the sense that like that is so difficult for me to even like know what it is, um,

01:04:28 Merlin: I mean, like, it's one thing to go like, so if we all have this sort of like pivoting here to like the kind of Daniel Kahneman idea of this like second order thinking, if we all have this slow thinking where we stop and we have a rational bracketed moment about any given fact, you know, most of us can look at something, step outside of our life for a minute, our day to day, right?

01:04:47 Merlin: And there's like, there's all kinds of stuff that we can see very rationally.

01:04:53 Merlin: you know, is a certain way, but that's not how we live our life.

01:04:57 Merlin: You know, that's, that's the challenge for me is just the day to day I'm wandering around, not even realizing how much I'm internalizing of stuff that I don't know where it came from.

01:05:07 John: You know what I mean?

01:05:07 Merlin: Yeah.

01:05:08 Merlin: Well, yeah, right.

01:05:09 John: Well, and a lot of it came from, in my case, at least my parents wanting to make the world a better place using the technology and the thought technology that they had available to them at the time.

01:05:23 John: And they raised me with values that were different from values that they were raised with.

01:05:32 John: Different values than maybe had ever been tried before.

01:05:38 John: And in a lot of ways, the way that my mom raised me, for instance, was experimental.

01:05:45 John: You know, she said, I'm going to... Were you a project?

01:05:50 John: Well, yeah, for sure I was.

01:05:51 John: You know, my mom said...

01:05:53 John: the world is dominated by a certain kind of man.

01:05:57 John: I have a male child.

01:06:01 John: I'm going to raise him not just to not be that kind of man, but to be the antidote to that kind of man.

01:06:08 John: And I'm going to do that based on

01:06:10 John: And it's an idea that hasn't really been tried because we didn't have all this information before.

01:06:18 John: So I'm going to make it up as I go.

01:06:20 John: And I'm going to make it up as I go, partly on the strength of magazine articles.

01:06:25 John: And I'm going to raise my kid a way that I've never seen a man raised.

01:06:30 John: And I believe that raising him this way, I'm going to be part of creating a better world.

01:06:36 John: And my man, my young child is going to go out into the world as a man and be a force for good based on this work that I'm doing as a parent.

01:06:46 John: And in a way, what it did was create in me at least someone that where it never ever in a million years would have occurred to me to try and kiss somebody that doesn't want to be kissed.

01:06:58 John: You know, like, um, and in that, in that sense, she, like her work, um,

01:07:06 John: Who knows whether I would have ever been the type of person that wanted to kiss somebody that didn't want to be kissed.

01:07:11 John: I doubt it.

01:07:12 John: I think that's in my emotional nature that I would never say like, come on, kiss me.

01:07:18 John: I can't think of a worse thing to say.

01:07:24 John: But she certainly reinforced it.

01:07:27 John: And in that sense, I have she did make the world a better place.

01:07:30 John: I'm one less guy that's out there trying to kiss people that don't want to be kissed or think the think that think that that would be part of like just being a normal dude.

01:07:39 Merlin: Right.

01:07:40 Merlin: And but it's also the case where the I don't know if this is the same thing you're saying or a corollary, but there's also the case of, you know, you hear a high profile case of a high profile person who's doing things that are upsetting or offensive to people.

01:07:59 Merlin: Let's say in the workplace or the campaign trail.

01:08:02 Merlin: And there are times when that person is sort of taking a task for that.

01:08:08 Merlin: This is not to defend it in any way, but just to say, I think this is a bigger, broader problem, which is...

01:08:16 Merlin: When we try to update our thinking to a new thought technology or a new way of being or a new way of looking at what's acceptable at a given time, there are a lot of people out there who don't feel like they're doing anything wrong.

01:08:33 Merlin: who don't feel who aren't even, or who are like, well, on the one hand, you've got the one end of the spectrum, you've got the whole, like, like you're not allowed to be mad at me about this, but really even at a softer end of that spectrum, there's the whole, like, I had no idea that that was a problem, that, that, that thing that I was doing.

01:08:49 Merlin: And that's, that is, that is, it's worth trying to unlearn, but it's difficult to even, it's difficult to change if you don't know that you need to change.

01:08:59 Merlin: It's true.

01:09:01 John: And, and,

01:09:02 John: I guess the whole, the hardest thing for me is to, and the thing is like, there are a lot of people listening who are to this program, I think more than most of ours who are going to have a hot take on it and are going to want to correct me in particular, um, by laying out their hot take and what,

01:09:29 John: What is hard for me and what I would suggest to everybody is if you've got a hot take, sit with it, you know, because how much interrogation have you done about where you got that hot take?

01:09:43 John: How much that hot take is personal to you before you lay it out to me as though I've never read any magazines or I didn't read the same magazines that you did.

01:09:54 John: And the hardest part about this world shaping that we've been doing based on

01:10:00 John: theories that we feel are correct is honestly we don't know what the result is and we feel very strongly that we're that our values are right and that the world we're trying to make is going to be a better world but everybody feels that way

01:10:21 John: And we're at odds with one another about what that looks like and why.

01:10:26 John: And we can all point to studies.

01:10:29 John: We can all point to theories.

01:10:32 John: And we cannot, I don't think, universally point to theories that we can say are proved correct.

01:10:40 John: And a lot of the theories that have driven post-war liberalism about housing, about zoning, about housing,

01:10:51 John: about gerrymandering, about a lot, a lot of the stuff we abandoned along the way, like the housing projects that were thought to be an incredible advance in terms of sanitation, in terms of safety, in terms of economic mobility.

01:11:12 John: I mean, we remade our cities based on a theory of how we were going to make lives better.

01:11:20 John: And honestly,

01:11:21 John: Those projects largely made things worse.

01:11:26 John: And when we abandoned those theories and moved on to the next thing, we didn't really mea culpa about it.

01:11:32 John: We didn't adjust any of the underlying theories that drove us to tear down whole neighborhoods and replace them with brutalist high-rises.

01:11:45 John: We didn't go back and really reevaluate what was motivating us.

01:11:49 John: We just said, you know, these projects didn't work because we didn't have enough lighting or because of mismanagement or something.

01:11:57 John: We tore them all down and now we're on to something else.

01:12:00 John: But there's not a tendency to look back and go, wait a minute, the methodology that brought us to that conclusion is something we need to ask more questions about.

01:12:13 John: Before we leap to the next big overarching project that's going to make people's lives better.

01:12:22 John: And, and before we make it, before we make the false equivalence, that it's just as simple to do it as it is to bring clean water to a town, you know, that it's just as one, two, three, a series of sort of reproducible steps as something that's concrete.

01:12:43 John: Because what we're trying to do is create a community.

01:12:47 John: We're trying to make communities, which is a thing that's just like, I mean, who's got the power to know that?

01:12:57 John: What committee understands what makes a community so well that they can go in and make one?

01:13:08 John: Not just out of nothing, but take an existing one

01:13:12 John: and change its values so that it becomes a different one, first of all, and a different one that's going to produce results that we want, or we think we want, that's going to make the world a better place.

01:13:32 John: And I say this as a guy that believes all of this.

01:13:35 John: I'm a world maker.

01:13:36 John: I'm an activist.

01:13:38 John: I'm a progressive.

01:13:41 John: And have been my whole life, and I do believe that you can make the world a better place by actions big and small.

01:13:50 John: But I look at what we've been through and what we've done and what we've made and what the results are, and it's a hit or miss proposition.

01:14:01 John: And we don't take that into account when we sit somewhere and shout about what we think the next thing should be.

01:14:10 Merlin: Bing.