Ep. 385: "Home Corn"
Merlin: Hello?
Merlin: Hi, John.
Merlin: Hi, Merlin.
Merlin: How's it going?
Merlin: I feel great.
Merlin: Rabbit, rabbit.
Merlin: No, see, don't laugh.
Merlin: Don't, don't.
Merlin: Okay, now we got to reference it.
Merlin: Listen, in the first, if I am elected, when I am elected, in the first 100 days of my administration, I will personally smite.
Merlin: I will smite Comcast.
Merlin: I will smite Skype.
Merlin: Many things will be dealt with.
Merlin: Let's put it that way.
Merlin: Let me ask you this.
John: This is not – yes, you there.
John: How – just talking about purely architecturally, how well has the internet –
John: achieved what you hoped it would do.
John: Ooh.
John: I wasn't prepared for this.
John: Let me take you to Merlin, 2010.
John: Hey, Merlin.
Merlin: Hello.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: We know each other already.
Merlin: Hello.
Merlin: I'm an English android, I am.
Merlin: Let's go.
Merlin: We'll be destroyed for sure.
Merlin: Sent to the spice mines of Kessa, we will.
John: Let's take it all the way back, although I don't know if all the way back, back to when you designed the Long Winters website.
John: Let's take it just as far back as when the decade turned the corner.
John: And I said, what do you think it's going to be like in 2020?
John: And now here we are.
John: Yeah.
John: What's your take?
John: Yeah.
Merlin: Well, I mean, if you break it into little pieces, there's some parts of it.
Merlin: And again, this is the color of my crystal.
Merlin: It's based on stuff like the access that I get, the things that I know, what I know to run.
Merlin: I do know that there are many different internets for different people around the world and very much in the United States.
Merlin: So the provider that you have, the speed of your connection...
Merlin: How much spam you get, whether you're on a platform that can be more easily or less easily compromised.
Merlin: The tech part of it, for myself, I'm pretty happy with.
Merlin: Well, I mean, I mentioned to you in one of our four previous calls this morning.
Merlin: Right.
Merlin: That I've gotten faster upload speeds in Yosemite on an LTE connection than I get in my house with the premium Comcast Cable Town connection.
Merlin: So there are still weird anomalies like that.
Merlin: The actual content and stuff.
Merlin: Well, so...
Merlin: But not content-wise, but I'm talking about just... Oh, good.
John: You're going easy on me.
John: Okay, good.
John: Yeah.
John: Did you think, for instance, that in 2010, that in 2020 there would still be
John: 500 different internets depending on where you were who you were right there would be like better distributed from yeah or that that for instance like for instance like this morning my router dropped out one two three four times four internet drops we fired our guns and the british kept it coming
Merlin: Uh-huh.
Merlin: And the clear blue skies over Germany.
Uh-huh.
Merlin: 80 men tried, 80 men died.
Merlin: Now they're buried together in the countryside.
Merlin: Which is how it feels sometimes.
Merlin: I mean, I only know what I read in the newspapers.
Merlin: I guess I thought – on the one hand, it is really astonishing to me how big and fast everything has gotten.
Merlin: And I am very much enough of an old person that the –
Merlin: And improvements in quality in various kinds of things have historically improved in leaps and bounds.
Merlin: So it's pretty nuts to me that my first computer that I owned with my own money did not even have a hard drive and used 800K floppy disks with no hard drive.
Merlin: And now today, like one of our abortive Skype calls, like one of our, it failed in the first minute, that file size is way bigger than the first hard drive I ever had.
Merlin: Just the rounding error, the shavings, the clippings of that connection.
Merlin: So on the one hand, like it's great.
Merlin: And I love stuff like, I mean, my family doesn't care about 4K ultra high def, but I do.
Merlin: Even with my terrible eyes, I look at the TV and I go...
Merlin: God, that looks so good.
Merlin: I watched something in like 720.
Merlin: We go back and watch Veronica Mars from just a few years ago and still a really good show, but it just doesn't look as good.
Merlin: So on the one hand, I'm amazed that stuff has improved the way it has.
Merlin: And on the other hand, it does seem troubling that it's not better distributed in the population.
Merlin: Well, when the blimps, when the blimps come, the internet blimps.
Merlin: It's weird that when you travel, I mean, like, well, when we used to travel, when you go to places and it is wild how, I mean, it makes sense that they, that they being the like cell phone providers and the, you know, LTE providers or whatever, it makes sense that they concentrate their efforts where it'll do the most good and they level their resources and all that kind of stuff.
Merlin: But it is pretty wild how the difference when you're traveling somewhere and you'll suddenly have no internet for like 45 minutes and then suddenly wicked powerful internet and you don't know what changed.
Merlin: All you know is to like keep looking at your phone to see if you got the internet again and can get maps or whatever.
Merlin: Well, in my case, not your case.
John: Right, no, I don't need maps, but I sometimes do need to upload live video from Coachella, and I don't understand why I and 80,000 of my closest friends can't do it.
Merlin: So, I mean, from a tech standpoint, you know, it's just, I do look at, and then I want to throw to you in here what you have to say, I do look at the time in, around the time we did your site, and what would that be, 2004 or 2005?
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: When was Pretend to Fall?
Merlin: What year was that?
John: Pretend to Fall was...
John: 2003.
John: What?
John: Yeah, sorry.
John: I'm afraid so.
Merlin: Wait, so we made that website in 2003?
Merlin: I thought I met you in 2003.
John: No, you met me in early 2002.
John: Ooh, okay.
Merlin: I know, right?
Merlin: Oh, we're coming up on 20 years, Merlin.
Merlin: Nope, nope, nope, nope, nope, nope, nope.
Merlin: But, you know, the thing is I look at that time as a very exciting time for me personally.
Merlin: It was like the beginnings of the – there's a lot of stuff going on that had not become a thing yet.
Merlin: The economy, the dot-com stuff had crashed.
Merlin: There were a lot of extremely talented people out there, practitioners.
Merlin: Apple stock.
Merlin: well but like i want to be clear here i'm not talking about the zucks of the world i'm talking about the practitioners the people who had the skills that led to what came to be called web 2.0 where suddenly everything got a lot cleaner it got a lot more standards compliant it got more accessible it got cooler and more fun people came up with ajax and all these different ways of doing stuff in your browser and i do and then of course i had a website that did pretty well that i was excited to have a chance to build and
Merlin: Anyhow, I do feel like the excitement of that time, that just feels like it's turned to ashes.
Merlin: The sites, I look at stuff like Flickr or Vimeo or any of that stuff, and it's just not the same as it used to be.
Merlin: I've still not found anything that I enjoy in quite the same way that I enjoyed using Flickr back in the day.
Merlin: You were great at Flickr.
Merlin: But it was also community.
Merlin: It was really neat.
Merlin: They had picked up some really neat ideas about how to keep things not totally private exactly, but how to be more discreet.
Merlin: And you could share baby pictures in a bathtub with your friends.
Merlin: And now today, in some ways, it's great.
Merlin: There's elements that it's great.
Merlin: If you can afford to have it be great, it can be great.
Merlin: But...
Merlin: It is very strange to be in a position where if – I think I've mentioned before I had a time where every Sunday I would try not to use my phone – I would not use basically interact with technology until noon was the original idea.
Merlin: And that quickly became, well, there's no way not to interact.
Merlin: That's silly.
Merlin: How am I going to like turn on my internet-controlled lights?
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: But even just like going to find out we don't use a yellow book, yellow pages anymore.
Merlin: You know, we don't use an atlas the same way anymore.
Merlin: And you start to realize like how much of your shit is technology.
Merlin: Like when we say don't look at screens, don't use the computer.
Merlin: Well, that's how are you going to do practically anything?
Merlin: Right.
Merlin: I mean, I buy books, you know, for Kindle.
Merlin: It's like, you know, and bad on me, but like it is weird to be in this kind of dystopia of our own design.
Merlin: What's your thought?
John: Well, the Flickr one is a good example because there are a lot of things from that era that didn't make it to now and for good reason, right?
John: Like message board communities like existed then and
John: just couldn't really exist now in the same way because who's going to go to the message board of 50 different bands that they like or, you know, everything that they do, there's a separate.
Merlin: So that becomes something more like Reddit where like there's a large scale community of what we used to call like bulletin boards or, you know, forums.
John: Yeah, right.
John: You couldn't go on the Longwinners forum and post a picture for a long time.
John: I mean, I guess you could post links.
John: But something like Flickr
John: Is there any reason that Flickr – I cannot think of a reason why Flickr isn't still a viable community.
John: Right?
John: Like there's nothing about what it was doing then that wouldn't translate to now.
Merlin: Well, the network effect cuts both ways.
Merlin: And so the network effect, as we all know, is the thing that says like the more people use something, the more people will use it.
Merlin: Like if your friends are there and your rappers are there, like you're going to go check it out, whether that's MySpace or Flickr or whatever it is.
Merlin: But then that sometimes slow, sometimes quicker attrition of people not going there, you don't notice it as much because all their stuff is still there probably.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: But, you know, it's.
Merlin: So is that what kills Flickr is that it falls out of popularity?
Merlin: I mean, I don't know the details of this.
Merlin: I do know that Yahoo is a company that's kind of not where they used to be.
Merlin: And I think they have to make a lot of resource decisions just based on the garbage fire that is Tumblr these days.
Merlin: I think there's some pretty odd decisions.
Merlin: But I mean, again, look at this.
Merlin: Look at the way MySpace, oopsie-dipsie, we've lost everybody's music.
Merlin: One day, all those people who had put all their music on MySpace, it was just gone.
Merlin: Today, I got an email today that said that the Amazon look is being discontinued.
Merlin: So your first question might be, what is an Amazon look?
John: Do you know?
John: That was my first question, no.
John: Was it like, what were those Microsoft tablets or phones or MP3 players?
John: Oh, like a Zune.
Merlin: Zunes.
Merlin: Zunes.
Merlin: But like, you know, it's Google, Sunset's products all the time.
Merlin: Amazon does it a little.
John: What was that thing that you were talking about?
John: What is an Amazon?
Merlin: Well, so just to say like, okay, so the big splash comes out.
Merlin: Hey, check it out, everybody.
Merlin: We have this new thing and it's a camera and you can put it in your bedroom or your closet and the camera can help give you advice about your clothing choices, I think was the pitch.
Merlin: Oh.
Merlin: And now that's just not, I mean, I don't have a dog in this fight, but just to say for relevance sake, as recently as today, I see the announcement that that is just not going to work anymore.
Merlin: There's a lot of stuff where, as you know, you get it, it works fine for a while or it doesn't work fine for a while.
Merlin: And then it's just not supported any longer.
John: Flip phone, flip phone, roly poly, flip phone.
John: Eat them up young.
John: Yeah.
John: What I still feel I still feel like the the fact that that Vine went away was like it was like some was some culture war stuff.
John: Like where the where the fuck is Vine?
John: Weren't they acquired by Twitter?
John: And then shut down.
John: Yeah.
Merlin: Right?
Merlin: And I didn't even discover why it was so good or how it was so good until it was already gone.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: I don't know.
Merlin: It's so difficult.
Merlin: Everybody's holding a different part of the camel in some ways.
Merlin: It's difficult to know.
John: Can I pick what part of the camel I hold?
John: No.
John: You're a blind man.
John: This is an elephant.
John: Work it out.
John: I don't want to get stuck with the wrong part of the camel.
John: Camel dick?
Camel dick?
John: Yeah.
Merlin: I'm always stuck with a camel dick.
John: You know what?
John: A camel is like a python.
John: You don't want to be the one that says that.
Merlin: No.
Merlin: You instantly lose all respect with the ladies.
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John: For me, I keep thinking because I'm an idiot, right?
John: And I'm not inside the mail.
John: I'm not inside the Internet culture.
John: Every time I go to San Francisco, I wander around.
John: like a blind man wondering what part of the internet I'm holding.
John: It never feels like a Python.
John: I'm like, the internet is a wrinkly board.
John: The internet is a, it's the size of a barn.
Merlin: Uh, Rabbi, you're touching a barn.
John: And you know, and everybody down there, when you're, when you're, when you get into conversations with somebody, you know, there's a lot of, it's weirdly prickly about, um, um,
John: First of all, you never know who the person you're talking to, whether or not they're the one that invented RSS or whatever.
John: So, you know, so you can't just like me just shoot from the hip like, you know, it sucks.
John: Yeah.
John: Twitter.
John: And they're like, oh, yeah, that's my name's Jack Twitter.
John: But as a, as like a, just a user, a consumer, I've always wanted from 1982 on, I've wanted computers to be as dumb as me, or I've wanted them to be effortless, right?
John: For you not to have to
John: For the user to not have to climb the mountain to the computer, but rather that the computer would come down to the valley where the users live.
John: And over the course of my life now, from the time I got my first personal computer, which was almost 40 years ago, I still feel like every day I'm greeted with a string of unintelligible numbers that
John: Somebody says, oh, to restart your Xfinity Comcast Blorg, you need to go on to the Bleag Blorg and do the Blorgity and here's your troubleshooting and Blorg, Blorg, Blorg.
John: And so the computer and the phone, they're extremely limited devices for me because I have to climb the mountain each time to figure out how to
John: do the next thing right like if i wanted to do a video blog if i wanted to um if i wanted to publish something to the internet i still would there would be such a huge and you know and i if i if i care you know if i really wanted to i could call you i could call john
John: I could spend a week trying to figure it out.
John: I could buy a bunch of hardware and probably get up to the level of a 90-year-old grandpa relative to what a 15-year-old can do.
John: But none of it works is what's so weird to me.
John: In 2010, I absolutely would have believed that by 2020, I would walk in
John: And like what's amazing is you've opened your laptop now and it comes on.
John: It doesn't spend five minutes turning on.
John: Yeah, and apps launch pretty fast now.
John: That's all extraordinary, right?
John: But it's still a question of – and a lot of it is idiot.
John: Like I click on the mail and there's the mail.
John: I click on the thing and there's the thing.
John: But in terms of like the overall experience and the sense –
John: The sense that I always had that, well, that computers would be integrated into our lives.
John: I thought what that meant was the computers were going to meet us.
John: And what it means is that kids now are raised in computers and so they meet computers.
John: they live on top of the mountain already or something.
Merlin: Yeah, I mean, computers writ large.
Merlin: I mean, I think the computer, quad computer that we grew up with or, you know, in our adult life got to use, I don't think it's the classic desktop computer or even a laptop in a lot of cases, but there's just the, like an iPad or an iPhone is just so, it's so part of life for them now in a way that would be very perplexing for young us to understand.
Yeah.
John: Yeah.
John: Yeah.
John: And I don't, you know, I don't let, so one of the problems with the, with the quarantine has been that we, we sent our kid to Montessori and when I first went to the Montessori school to tour it, it was conspicuous that there were no computers.
John: There was like a computer and they were so proud of it.
John: Like, oh, we don't, you know, we don't do any screen time.
John: We just play with colored blocks and
John: When it's time to do math, we get out a big bag of corn kernels, and the kids sit and do higher math by using matrix telekinesis to juggle corn kernels in the air.
John: And I'm like, wow, totally.
John: That's just how I do math.
John: And we were coming from a public school where they were absolutely trying to – you could see that the teacher didn't know how to use the technology, but she was being pressured by the district.
John: To, like, take it all online.
John: You know, the standardized testing on the computer.
Merlin: And again, just to be clear, this is in the pre-COVID days.
Merlin: Pre-COVID.
John: And... Oh, my goodness.
John: Thank you, Alexis.
John: She just told me there was no coming calls.
Merlin: But then... Oh, God.
John: But then... They're coming for us, John.
John: But then the COVID.
John: And...
John: the Montessori school trying to figure out what to do, uh, just started throwing Hail Marys.
John: And all of a sudden it's like, Oh, well you got to log on to seesaw and get the, and then download the, the stuff from the Google drive and then get, be there ready for the zoom call with your,
John: You know, pie pieces cut out of a piece of paper.
John: Oh, and you need to buy a bag of corn kernels.
John: Eat some home corn.
John: But it's going to be – but we're going to do it all online and this online and that online.
Merlin: So we're going to continue this ethos of –
Merlin: whatever phrase, I don't know the phrase, I don't want to say anything offensive, but this sort of deliberately primitive approach or non-electronic approach, we're going to continue to do that.
Merlin: It's just we're going to use electronics to do it.
Merlin: Right.
John: Okay.
John: And none of us here at the Montessori School know how to use electronics.
John: So every time you log on, it's going to
John: somebody's going to have the wrong password.
John: Somebody's going to have put the wrong time into the thing.
John: Half the kids are going to be there.
John: Half of them didn't know where to find the material.
John: Uh, so half of them are sitting there with a pair of scissors and it's like, no, this is corn kernel time.
John: And, and that's all forgivable because COVID just threw everybody into insanity.
John: But what, what's crazy is that, uh, that there's not,
John: Even now, I don't know.
John: Computers aren't integrated.
John: They still aren't.
Merlin: And it's strange to me that the— You mean like just user-friendly, to use an old phrase, sort of?
Merlin: Right.
John: Yeah, user-friendly, but also like they don't—where they belong in our lives isn't clear, right?
Merlin: Oh, so it might be embedded in your washer or your dryer, but maybe you would prefer that that technology be deployed in a more useful way for you personally.
Oh.
John: Well, or just like if they're in your washer dryer, you would also expect, for instance, that you would be able to either print out a piece of paper and not have it cost $7 in toner or living in a paperless world where everyone else is also living in a paperless world.
John: So, for instance, when I still get asked to print out a document, sign it, and fax it back, and I'm living in a world where that person maybe has internet in their washer and dryer, I'm wondering how it is, like, where...
John: Because there are other people that don't want you to.
John: What they want you to do is go into a virtual program on your phone and put a pretend signature on the phone.
Merlin: Or they've wrapped a web page in some kind of basic Chrome and now here's your secure website.
Merlin: Thank you for your mortgage.
John: Right.
John: Exactly.
John: And then there's me who cannot imagine any reason why my washer and dryer would be on the Internet.
John: But it doesn't just feel like, oh, we're in a transition period.
Right.
John: Unless what you mean by transition period is an entire lifespan of a human being to transition between this and that.
John: Because when we transitioned from horses to cars, it took a few decades to go from a world where a car was like— The system wasn't set up for that.
John: The system wasn't set up.
John: We had to build roads across America.
John: And gas stations, and we had to decide what traffic signals.
Merlin: And now you need a way to get the gas to the gas station as well, which now is just more road need.
John: Got to get the gas to the gas station.
Merlin: The tires, all those windshield wipers, and the aerial for your car, yeah.
John: Got to get the aerials to the aerials.
John: Got to get the windshield wipers to the windshield wipers.
John: But that all kind of went down between –
John: 19, what?
John: 15 and 1930?
Merlin: Mid to late 30s.
Merlin: Yeah.
John: So you got 15, 20 years there and then all of a sudden you can get in your car and
John: And get in your car in Pine Barrens, New Jersey, and drive to San Francisco.
John: And when you get there, there's a Golden Gate Bridge.
John: Yeah, if you plan to motor west, you know.
John: Yeah, if you plan to motor west, that's right.
John: You know, hop on Route 66.
John: And the idea that you could build an entire road network and all of the infrastructure to support an entire, the whole concept of automobiles in 15 years, but
John: 15 years ago, I was still unplugging and restarting my router and I'm doing it exactly the same way now for the same reason.
John: Seems like, uh, seems weird to me.
John: And I know that the, you know, I know like computer apologists are going to say, well, it's harder than it seems or whatever.
John: But, but, but it is strange given that in 1960, Kennedy said, we're going to go to the moon.
John: And in 1960,
John: uh, nine, depending on who you believe we were on the moon.
John: I know that's a, that's a specious comparison because everybody makes it, but, uh,
John: It's also not.
John: Those guys built those rockets with that.
Merlin: No, no.
Merlin: And by the reports that I've heard were that they were, yes, there was a NASA program underway.
Merlin: And yes, they certainly thought about stuff like, I wonder if we could go to the moon.
Merlin: But I don't think, you tell me, but I don't think he consulted with a lot of inside baseball space people before he made that rather grand announcement.
John: No, he just threw it out there.
John: I think he thought of it that morning.
Merlin: There's a bunch of guys in short sleeve shirts and black ties going, we're going, what now?
No.
Merlin: Yeah, right.
Merlin: And bring him safely home?
Merlin: Okay, all right.
Merlin: Where do we stand on that, Marv?
John: Sure, we can get him there, probably, but what's his safely home business?
John: Right.
John: It's like that woman on...
John: on tiktok or whatever who does the videos where where donald trump is talking but she's i love her and uh and and she always cuts to herself with a different haircut going what me testing we have the best testing it's those guys yeah i went there you know there's a there's a there's a display at the museum of flight here where they walk you through the whole space program
John: They've got like an old Goddard rocket and they go all the way through, uh, the whole, you know, the whole program.
John: And they've got a huge Apollo room full.
Merlin: There's a moon buggy and there's lots of, is it like a, is it like a, uh, uh, what's the word I'm looking for?
Merlin: A tableau?
Merlin: Like, does it look like it's the moon?
Merlin: A little, they have a little bit of that.
John: There's not, they didn't do like it.
John: They didn't do a diorama where it's got like a, like a, like a,
John: A baboon and a man with a spear.
Merlin: If you look really closely, you can see Stanley Kubrick in the background.
John: Yeah, a little black obelisk.
John: But it's astonishing.
John: And you've seen a Saturn V, right?
John: It's a big-ass rocket.
John: I've been lucky enough to go.
John: And then you go up close to it and you're like, fuck, it's just like pipe fitters.
John: Like guys built this.
John: The same guys that build refrigerators built this thing.
John: Yeah, yeah.
John: It's really astonishing.
John: And you watch the film because that Kennedy speech is on a loop.
John: And you can just see the pocket protector guys fall back in their chairs.
Merlin: We've watched it so many times and talked about it so many times that I'm going to give you an eight-second anecdote that perfectly encapsulates my relationship with my daughter, which is we watch that and I say, you know what I would have said if I were him?
Merlin: She goes, yes, you would have said difficult instead of hard.
Merlin: I know.
Merlin: I was like, yeah, he would have made his point more clearly.
Merlin: I think difficult would be a better word choice there.
Merlin: We do these things not because they are easy, but because they are difficult.
Merlin: Difficult.
Merlin: Thank you.
Merlin: I'm going to tie this all together or break it all apart.
Merlin: I'm not sure which.
Merlin: To your point about the...
Merlin: trying to do a remote Montessori, which is kind of a mind-boggling concept.
Merlin: Yes.
Merlin: I mean, you know, okay, so it would be easy for somebody like me to look at Montessori or Waldorf and go, oh, you people, you're so silly.
Merlin: You're such hypocrisy or whatever.
Merlin: But, like, I admire and respect the desire to say I am living intentionally in a way where I make choices about how I'm going to conduct myself in the world.
Merlin: I have a respect for that with a lot of people, you know, that you would say, like, I think it's cool to say, like, well, like, of course, nothing happens now unless we talk about it and unless we post about it.
Merlin: But there are a lot of people who do little things like...
Merlin: Hey, you know, I'm not going to use my phone at these certain times of day just because that makes me feel healthy.
Merlin: And shit, man, I was the same way when my kid was born.
Merlin: I had a bunch of completely arbitrary made up rules about how to be a less terrible father working in a house with a baby.
Merlin: So like classics I've talked about, like, you know, people have said to me, thank you for this tip.
Merlin: Here's a tip.
Merlin: As soon as you can see your house, you have to take off your headphones.
Merlin: You have to at least, if you're going to listen to music or a podcast on the way home, as soon as you can see where you live, take off your headphones and in an intentional way, begin a transitional period that says, I'm going from what I was doing into what I'm going to do next.
Merlin: I like that.
Merlin: It's like a docking procedure.
Merlin: Precisely.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: Or like another one.
Merlin: It's all very easy.
Merlin: But one that I thought was very, I had to do was I don't open my laptop until my kid's gone to sleep for the night.
Merlin: Not every day, not all the time, but like until something better comes along, that's a really good rule.
Merlin: And I, I, I think that was smart for me to do.
Merlin: And I think it's advisable for everybody to make those decisions.
Merlin: So just, I just want to stipulate step zero.
Merlin: I'm not trying to bag on anybody with this stuff to your point though, about like, why, why isn't this, why can't this be more the way I want?
Merlin: Maybe it's because the computer people are going to tell me it's because it's difficult.
Merlin: Um,
Merlin: I think a big problem we all – almost all of us, probably all of us, let's be honest, suffer from is when we get anywhere, even in our own field, but especially with other people's fields, we have a very incomplete idea about what makes something difficult or easy, right?
Merlin: So like there are certain kinds of things where you go, you know –
Merlin: You know, it's like when I was a designer a million years ago, you know, people would always say the same thing.
Merlin: They'd say, can you make the logo bigger?
Merlin: Can you jazz it up a little bit?
Merlin: Can you make it pop?
Merlin: And I'm like, you know, my computer, I have a really nice Mac, but I do not have a pop button.
Merlin: There's no button to hit to make it pop.
Merlin: And so you do all these dumb psychological tricks of, like, always show them three and have the third one be the one you want them to pick.
Merlin: You know, stuff like that.
Merlin: But in this case, I'm not going to say this is universally true, but in my own observation and from hearing my friends who are educators...
Merlin: distance learning online learning um any kind of learning is different from other kinds of learning there's no pop button you don't you don't say okay hey right here we go uh everything you've done your your job where you like you your job where you make sixty thousand dollars a year and have two roommates uh by the way all that work you've done like that now only needs to go online so put that online
Merlin: And I'm not saying, I just feel like there has been a certain exaggerated level of expectation about what educators in particular, not just what they know about technology, but let's put it this way.
Merlin: Let's say you showed up for a gig and you're John Roderick from the Longwinners and you brought your guitar and you're ready to go out there and do your set.
Merlin: And they go, what are you doing there?
Merlin: What is that?
Merlin: You go, well, this is my guitar.
Merlin: I'm going to, you know, I had it sound check, you know, play the piano, play a little guitar.
Merlin: They go, oh, no, no, no, no, no, no, no.
Merlin: I'm going to give you this Dell laptop and I want you to go out and improvise trap music.
Merlin: Which might be fun.
John: But here's... That's not where I thought you were going with that, but that's very good.
Merlin: Well, I mean, for example, I don't know how to use a fucking PC, let alone how to make Vaporwave or whatever.
Merlin: I have no idea how to do any of that.
Merlin: I could...
Merlin: I could tap my way around.
Merlin: I could probably, if I had the right two-factor, I could check my email.
Merlin: I don't fucking know how to make that kind of music, let alone use that particular.
Merlin: Well, it's just a performance.
Merlin: You're a performer, right?
Merlin: Go out and do your performance.
Merlin: And so how do you explain to that?
Merlin: And I realize this is a straw man.
Merlin: But that is not dissimilar from saying to a teacher,
Merlin: Take all that stuff you do and put it online.
Merlin: You're like, well, we mostly just, you know, we have quiet time and look at colored blocks.
Merlin: All right, cool.
Merlin: Put the colored blocks online.
Merlin: And you're like, with what?
Merlin: Like every Mac laptop and desktop has the shittiest conceivable camera.
Merlin: Everybody looks like their screen is covered with Vaseline.
Merlin: All these things we're discovering because we never had to be forced to do it that way.
Merlin: Certain kinds of people, absolutely.
Merlin: They walk right into it.
Merlin: I just think that in talking about this, there's something, it's an Anna Karenina thing, where we're each fucked up in our own different way because of what's being expected of us, what tools are available, and then what our recourse is if we don't understand why something is not working.
Merlin: In the case of your modem this morning.
Merlin: Right.
Merlin: It's not only that I'm not sure if this thing is broken, but if it is broken, I don't know how to tell that it's broken.
Merlin: If I can tell that it's broken, I have absolutely no idea how to fix it apart from turning it off and on.
Merlin: And that's a frustrating way to conduct your life is that everything mostly works fine until it doesn't.
Merlin: And now your career is like you've got to go jam this, you know, square peg into the round hole.
Merlin: That was a lot.
John: Yeah.
John: No, no.
John: But but it's but I think what you were saying is absolutely absolutely true.
John: And like a like a very good like high level view of the problem.
John: You know, for me, I'm always frustrated because what I want is just put.
John: Just send me some stuff I can print out so that she and I – because I'm thinking of it from the perspective of here's my kid.
John: I need to teach her now.
John: So what's the natural way to do that?
John: Well, we sit down together at a table and we have a piece of paper that tells us here are some word problems.
John: Here are some math problems.
John: Here are some geometry problems.
John: Here's a text to read.
John: Like I go immediately back to what I know, which is, well, so there's a textbook, presumably.
John: Send us the textbook and we'll work through the assignments.
John: And Montessori, you're absolutely right.
John: You know, a lot of the time what they're doing is they're not shooting from the hip.
John: They're working from a philosophy, but their philosophy is,
John: throw a bunch of corn on the floor, and then the little chickens are going to find the corn.
John: About $100.
John: You know?
Merlin: And when they say like, well... John, there's so much going on right now.
Merlin: I had no idea that corn had such a large role in our lives.
Merlin: It's everywhere, right?
Merlin: You can make it into gasoline.
Yeah.
John: Sure, it's Posoda Pop.
Merlin: It's Posoda Pop.
Merlin: You get all the various syrups of corn that you could make.
John: Yep, yep.
John: You can make a corn pie.
John: You can make a corn hat.
John: You can make a corn snake.
John: It gets up as high as the elephant's eye.
John: Right, right.
John: The elephant, which is, as far as we know, either a python or a barn.
Merlin: It could be a python or a camel.
Merlin: It could have a strap-on camel.
John: My sense is that... So my frustration...
John: is what the fuck just send me a thing because what my kid wants and what i want is to be able to sit down and say here's what we're doing today and because montessori is based on the idea that 18 kids are going to be all work all pecking at the corn and one of them's going to go i don't know how to do this and the other one's going to go let me show you my my good friend my my fellow kid
John: Let me show you.
John: And that's – and kids are going to educate themselves.
John: It's Lord of the Flies.
John: And we just keep them from eating each other.
Merlin: So we sit down and, you know, and the thing I printed off – This is all – you know, the thing is what people don't realize is John is just reading verbatim from Maria Montessori's Wikipedia entry right now.
Merlin: You get the kids in the room.
Merlin: You got the corn kid over here and the other one's – what is this?
Merlin: I got no blocks.
Merlin: He's got like no soup.
John: Not me, not me.
John: So like the first, the first thing that's crazy is I print this thing off and we have a black and white printer.
John: Because the idea that I was ever going to print out any pie charts did not seem like worth the... Oh, that's such a good example of nobody could see this coming.
John: Right.
John: So I got a black and white printer because all I ever do is print out contracts, sign them and fax them.
John: And so I get this thing and it's in color.
John: And I print it off and it's like, okay, well, here's your pie chart.
John: You know, pick the one that is a different shade of pink from the other one.
John: And I'm like, oh, fuck.
John: Or like the keywords were highlighted with a background, with a color.
John: But as it prints out in black, it's just like redacted.
John: So I'm like, okay, well.
John: It looks like something the Daily Beast would put up.
John: Yeah.
John: Yeah.
John: It's like Eddie Van Halen's Rider.
John: Mm-hmm.
John: And so that just seems like a simple problem number one.
John: Why is this in color?
John: Why do you assume that we have a color printer?
John: You can't possibly make that assumption.
John: Well, in a lot of cases, that's not the assumption they're making.
John: The assumption they're making is you don't need to print this out.
John: Just look at it on your iPad.
John: Yeah.
John: And it's like, oh, fuck.
John: We don't have one of those either.
John: And we don't use computers anymore.
John: that way, right?
John: We've never once sat our daughter in front of a computer.
John: And what that's produced is a nine-year-old that's not interested.
John: If I were to say like, Hey, sit down in front of the computer and figure out this thing, or let me walk you through the website.
John: She just, her eye doesn't, her eye wanders.
John: The computer isn't a place that's fascinating to her.
John: And I've yet to, and part of this is her mother is a, is although, although her mother is an internet security
John: She's also a hippie Luddite.
John: And there's a tremendous, like, tension between the fact that she spends all day on a computer working with computer people about computers for computers about computers.
John: And yet, in the case... I'm sorry, Alexa, I didn't mean to wake you up.
John: Oh, no, not again, John.
John: Sorry, Alexis, please...
John: Leave me alone.
John: Have you disappointed her?
John: Please leave me alone.
John: Recalculating.
John: I'll never say computer again.
John: And oh, and she has this right in her house.
John: She likes to be able to say, Alexis, play the Beastie Boys.
John: Check your head.
John: And Alexis goes, check your head.
John: Playings, check your head on Spotify.
John: Like that.
John: She probably the first one to have computer light bulbs, although we don't have those.
Hmm.
John: But at the same time, when I say I want to teach our little girl how to use Wikipedia, she gets a look in her eye and she's like, no, I don't want her on computers.
John: And I don't think she's worried about our nine-year-old like taking bikini selfies and putting them online as much as she's worried about her bikini.
John: becoming... Getting sucked into the machine.
John: I guess so.
John: Watching unboxing videos or ASMR videos.
John: I don't know why.
Merlin: I don't know what it... You've surely heard this factoid that for some years now, there's been a sometimes private, sometimes very public sentiment in Silicon Valley that the people who make a lot of this stuff...
Merlin: are very conservative about letting their kids use computers.
Merlin: Is that right?
Merlin: The hot take is, oh, you're such a hypocrite.
Merlin: But the other take on that is, which is maybe true, I don't have a dog in that fight.
Merlin: I can tell you that my daughter's best friend from birth, her parents are tech people, and she goes to Waldorf.
Merlin: It's not – there's something I think maybe to this.
Merlin: The extreme example from things recently is like I think people who – I've heard interviews with a guy at Google who did a lot on the algorithm for recommending videos and he doesn't think it's such a positive force in the world.
Merlin: I've heard people from Facebook say similar kinds of things.
Merlin: These things are all designed –
Merlin: To draw you in, to increase your view time, all that kind of stuff.
Merlin: I guess what I'm saying to you is I think it's not dishonest to say the people who are keeping their kids away from screens have their reasons a lot of the time.
Merlin: It's not that they're Luddites.
Merlin: It's not that they're, in this case, what do you want to call it, a hypocrite?
Merlin: Well, I mean, just because you own a bar doesn't mean your kid's allowed to drink from birth.
Yeah.
Merlin: I think it's so weird how like there was this transformation.
Merlin: We've talked about this probably half a dozen times.
Merlin: I grew up in the period where the TV was the idiot box.
Merlin: TV equals screen.
Merlin: Screens equals bad.
Merlin: And then pretty soon you're going to be killing yourself at a Judas Priest concert.
Merlin: And it's all because of TV.
Merlin: And then, you know, how many years ago, what was it, 10 years ago, nine years ago, we first started talking about Jonathan versus John in terms of at their other Jonathan, right?
Merlin: In the one household, the kids can go just pick up an iPad whenever they want.
Merlin: In the other house, that's all very heavily regulated.
Merlin: And now we get to where Merlin is on any given Sunday, which is, well, how do I not use a screen to do stuff now?
Merlin: Like, what am I going to do?
Merlin: I'm going to be like that David Cross character with the Victrola.
Merlin: You know, you're being a little bit too cute if you're not making sensible decisions about when it's appropriate to use technology and not.
Merlin: And that's up to everybody to get to make the decision you hope.
Merlin: unless you're a gig economy worker.
Merlin: And guess what?
Merlin: You hand your phone to your gig economy employer, and they install a profile on there that will let them do stuff like track what you're doing if you're working for somebody else.
Merlin: There's all that kind of stuff where you're like, technology is way more than washers, dryers, and online block classes.
Merlin: It's embedded so deeply in culture where a privileged few get to utilize it at high speeds in ways that they want, and a lot of other people are really stuck with a very shitty...
Merlin: uh, panopticon experience.
John: Right.
John: Right.
John: And I don't mind the fact right now that at least, at least at this moment in my daughter's life, I honestly am like, um,
John: I'm basically a character on a Tootsie Pop rapper.
John: Like, let's go out and, like, roll hoops.
John: You live in a bazooka show.
John: I do.
John: Like, let's go, you know, do archery practice.
Merlin: Hey, let's the three of us get in a trench coat and go to an R-rated movie.
John: Exactly.
John: Right?
John: What an adult place.
John: As far as my daughter is concerned, in some ways, it's still 1970.
John: because of the things that she has access to, right?
John: I mean, it's not like all of our toys for her are made by the Amish, but she plays with dolls, reads books.
John: And rides her bike and plays in the yard.
Merlin: Oh, we forgot to say.
Merlin: Sorry, John.
Merlin: Real quick before I forget.
Merlin: You can also make a doll out of corn.
Merlin: You can make a doll out of corn.
John: Absolutely.
John: My mom is always bringing over her old corn dolls.
Merlin: Look what I found.
Merlin: Oh, not like this.
Merlin: Oh, no, no, no.
Merlin: Look what I found.
Merlin: Please, mom.
Merlin: Please keep the corn dolls in your place.
Merlin: It's one of my old corn dolls.
Merlin: This is little Nancy.
Merlin: She's had a troubled past.
Merlin: My family couldn't afford food.
John: Uh, but on the other hand, and I kept expecting a lot more from her, a lot more protest.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: Push back that she can't like watch, you know, YouTube videos or something.
John: Not that, that her mom and I spent so much fucking time looking at our phones.
John: Oh, sure.
John: I expected that by the time my daughter was nine, she would either be standing there accusing us of hypocrisy or
John: Or she would be like some Latter-day Saints television commercial sitting over in the corner with a single tear dripping down her face.
John: For just 60 cents a month, you can buy me a corn doll.
John: Right, as her mom and I sit there.
John: I will remember you.
John: And her mom is on some Slack channel talking about, you know, the marketing budget.
John: And I'm on there going, God damn it.
John: I'm going to tell this person on Twitter exactly where they can put it.
John: And yet she kind of, I mean, she definitely bounces in and says like, all right, phone's down.
John: But, but she takes it in stride.
John: And so it hasn't become an attractive nuisance.
John: She's not like, let me look at your phone.
John: She forgets that she forgets that she could and yet she accepts somewhat at least right now that I look at a computer or a phone a lot And I don't know how to square those things because I'm telling her there's nothing on the internet and I agree but I'm on there all the time and
John: And it affects me.
John: It affects my emotions.
John: It affects my presence.
Merlin: Yeah, long after you put the device down, you're kind of still on the internet.
John: Yeah, sure.
John: I mean, you turn your podcast off as soon as you hear your house, and that's beautiful.
John: But for me, like...
John: It's one of the great things about working in my ravine, which is what I'm primarily doing now with any spare time.
John: Did you say ravine?
John: I have a ravine.
John: Oh, okay.
John: And the problem is that I know for a fact that state law and county law and city law in my region all have very strong feelings about
John: Because as you know, the law is just feelings.
Merlin: Feelings are real.
Merlin: Therefore, ergo, laws are real.
John: They all have laws about whether or not I'm allowed to just go down into the creek in the bottom of my ravine and start fucking around building dams.
John: they're very clear about this.
Merlin: Okay.
John: That you need to do an environmental impact statement.
Merlin: Oh, it's like when the film company or the electric company says, call candy before you dig.
John: Call candy before you dig, yeah.
John: Except in this case, you're supposed to get
John: probably 15 layers of permits you need, and you need hydrological engineers.
John: What about the beavers?
John: What about the beaves?
John: Right.
John: Uh, and they're every, every institution, uh, in Washington and in King County and in the town where I live, they all have some clause about wetlands.
John: And yet my Creek is not visible from the road.
John: And is so fucked up by the past, by people fucking it up.
John: I mean, there's like a transmission in it, you know?
John: Um,
John: That I just said, well, sure.
John: I mean, I'm not going to do anything that's bad.
John: I'm only going to do, I'm going to, you know what I am?
John: I'm a human beaver.
John: Oh, I'm the big beef.
John: That's so nice.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: And so I'm like lifestyle thing.
Merlin: You're a full-time beaver.
John: I'm a full-time beaver.
John: I'm down in the Creek beaving away.
John: When Mike, when my kid comes with me, I'm like, look, you're either a
John: You're either a beaver or you're not a beaver.
John: Either on the dam or off the dam.
John: Right.
John: That's right.
John: You're either the beaver or you're the dam.
Merlin: Sometimes the beaver builds the dam and sometimes the dam beavers you.
John: Right?
John: Sometimes it's the dam we met along the way.
Merlin: Oh, I see.
Merlin: The unknown, unknown dam beavers.
John: So she comes, I go down there.
John: I'm building little structures.
John: I'm taking like metal parts out and I'm putting wood parts in.
John: And, you know, and I'm doing it all in the hopes that one day I will cut the ribbon and unveil my
John: My masterwork.
John: And the beavers will flock and the people, the mayor with a top hat and a sash will come in and give me a cool medal.
Merlin: We had you wrong all along, John Roderick.
Merlin: You're the greatest beaver of all.
Merlin: You've done a thing for us, sir.
Merlin: With his giant fucking scissors.
Merlin: We owe you an apology.
John: But I'm down there and my mind is absolutely insane.
John: Evacuated of any concern other than a nine-year-old boy's desire to put things in a stream and change and make the stream go here And then I have these and I love them I treasure them the thing you get to disappear into I'm completely disappearing.
John: Yes.
John: Yes, and it is It's so incredible that I'll come out of six hours in the ravine and I'm completely covered in mud and it soaking wet because it's been raining and I'm working in a creek and
John: And I come up and I have a moment where I'm like, hey, wait a minute.
John: Isn't there something?
John: Was I doing something?
John: And then I remember my phone, the internet, the world, all the people I know.
John: Like it all comes kind of rushing back in.
John: And I pull my phone out and I look at it and it's like, Oh, I haven't looked at my phone in six hours.
Merlin: And, and it's, and at first it's always, it's always difficult.
Merlin: You almost want a website that's like, you know, there's like Twitter moments.
Merlin: I want something that's like Twitter moments for Twitter moments where you can explain what the fuck this means.
Merlin: Like, why is every, what is everybody mad about right now?
Merlin: I can't tell.
Merlin: I've only been here for a minute.
John: Yeah.
John: I've only been here for a minute.
John: What happened?
John: Was there a school shooting?
John: Did what happened?
John: Yeah.
John: And, um,
John: And you wonder, like, well, I mean, I honestly do believe that I could log on once a week.
John: Is that crazy?
John: Oh, I think twice a week would do you.
John: Twice a week?
John: Twice a week?
John: And that my daughter could...
John: What I want her to – all my encyclopedias are in storage.
John: And what I want – I know.
John: I know.
John: What I – What you want.
John: Want is my encyclopedias because I want to sit with her and say, oh, you know, the Andromeda Galaxy?
John: Well, let's look that up.
John: Oh, you know, Aristotle.
Merlin: Are these like world books from back in the day?
John: Yeah.
John: When I was born in 1968, my parents bought the Britannica.
John: Whoa, that's the nice one.
John: And they bought it for me because it was like in 1968, the idea, at least as far as the world was then, was you buy a kid the Britannica at their birth and it will be with them the rest of their life as though...
John: Like it's the it's the greatest savings bond you can buy.
Merlin: Yeah, and then the craziest way that Britannica What a what a terrible year to buy a set of in 1968 it's like by 1969
Merlin: I mean, one, what do they call the updates?
Merlin: The annual update, like some world book.
John: The world book or the yearbook.
Merlin: Yeah, something like that.
Merlin: But yeah, there'll always be like an addendum.
Merlin: That'll be a pretty thick addendum.
John: I mean, it's crazy because, I mean, when you think about it, like...
John: Plate tectonics, right?
John: Like extinction events, like all those things in 1968 were like, well, we think what killed the dinosaurs was sadness.
John: Or, you know, like... It wasn't drinking enough milk.
John: But in terms of the fact that when I... I mean, in high school, when I sat down to write a research project, I got my Britannica out.
John: And that worked for me...
John: I mean, I was still looking stuff up in to my 30s before.
John: Well, shit.
John: I mean, honestly, before Wikipedia, I still pulled the Britannica out.
Merlin: And if you want to learn about Zachary Taylor, there's probably not been that many bombshells even in the last 40 years about Zachary Taylor.
John: Yeah.
John: If you want to if you just want to sketch out the life of a cell, like, oh, the life of a cell.
John: Right.
John: Like we haven't.
John: She doesn't need to know so much about mitochondrial DNA, right?
John: It's just – we're talking about the life of the cell.
John: That's the engine of the cell.
John: That's the engine of the cell.
John: But if we're living here in a world where we're stacking corn and I'm trying to do math with her –
John: Where I'm like, well, here it's we're we're multiplying fractions.
John: And she's like, I don't get it.
John: And I'm like, oh, right.
John: You're a Montessori kid.
John: And I go, how many petals are on a flower?
John: And she's like, oh, are we talking about flower petals now?
John: It's like, fuck.
John: All right.
John: Let's get the let's get the encyclopedia out.
John: Oh, fuck.
John: We can't because they're in storage.
John: And so I I need to have her understand Wikipedia because I want to talk about stuff.
John: I want her to start doing that thing that we did, which is when nobody's around, go pull the encyclopedia down.
John: When it's a rainy day, you go sit and stare at the encyclopedia.
John: And that's what's missing in not having the internet because she can't go do what I do, which is when she comes in and I'm looking at my phone, how much of that time is Wikipedia?
John: It's got to be 30% of my day.
Merlin: No, it's incredible.
Merlin: I used to look at so many different websites.
Merlin: Oh, so there was a scene on Veronica Mars, a scene that takes place in probably 2005 or 2006.
Merlin: And Veronica is looking at somebody's web history.
Merlin: And all three of us were like, that's not what a web history looks like.
Merlin: Because it's basically, imagine they go to history and it's just, it's like 60 different websites.
Merlin: single page views of a website.
Merlin: So it'll be like, you know, whatever, like CNN, one view of CNN.
Merlin: It's like, no, no, more like, you know, I don't know the way that, well, I'm not going to say, but the way most modern people use a website is no, I use four websites and I use it all the time.
Merlin: IMDB, Wikipedia,
Merlin: Google News, Twitter, like the number of websites I use in my ecosystem has gotten so much smaller, and it really has become more of an appliance than a playground for me.
John: My favorite thing in the world is that you call it Wikipedia.
John: Did I say wiki?
John: Wikipedia.
John: We should interrogate that.
John: We should interrogate it.
John: Hmm.
John: Ha, ha, ha, ha.