Ep. 577: "Cigarettes and Pancakes"
Merlin: Hello?
John: Hi, John.
John: Hi, Merlin.
John: How's it going?
John: Well, my computer just told me that Google Drive no longer supports...
John: This operating system or something, and it said after 11 days, it's going to be deprecated.
John: Oh, you just got that this morning?
John: I had never seen that word used in that context before.
John: Well, I don't know.
John: They're going to deprecate it.
John: The whole thing.
John: Well, I don't even know.
John: Do you know what that involves?
John: I'm not sure how you can deprecate a Google Drive.
John: I mean, I could right now.
John: I could deprecate them by saying, what a bunch of bullshit.
John: What a garbage fire.
John: Boy, that's a hell of a way to start your week, huh?
John: How are they going to deprecate it?
John: remotely i don't know i don't know what do you think that'll involve john do you think it'll touch any other parts of your life i think it will i think it reverberates across everything it's all connected or at least related it's all related and you know and they all have come at me lately saying i've used up my 200 free gigabytes and now i have to buy a terabyte for
Merlin: Now, could that be something that's a feather in your cap because you're utilizing the technology more?
Merlin: Is that something you could turn that frown upside down?
Merlin: Where you could say, yay for me, I'm making more gigs.
John: No, I feel like they promised us flying cars.
John: You knew.
John: space, you know, and NASA and stuff.
John: And they were like, oh, hey, we're just going to give you all this free storage.
John: And then they're like, oh, but we're also going to increase the resolution of everything.
John: And we're not going to really make it easy to throw anything away.
John: And why would you anyway?
Merlin: They did all of that.
John: They did.
Merlin: You think that they had a hand in that?
Merlin: See, now, I remember as a younger person using a Macintosh that there would be updates sometimes.
Merlin: And it used to be time was you run a Microsoft Word on your Mac in 19, say, 90, 91.
Merlin: And, man, it was great.
Merlin: It was fast.
Merlin: And it did everything good.
Merlin: at least I could ever conceive of that I would need.
Merlin: And then they started adding all this stuff to it.
Merlin: Yeah, and it deprecated it.
Merlin: I think it probably deprecated it because the power was there.
Merlin: The power kept going up, but then they also kept adding more business to it.
John: Could be it could be deprecated I guess and then pretty soon you're like whose computer is this you know I'm saying do you remember when the early iPhones were just like miracles and then They were like, oh everybody's using up too much bandwidth and then they I don't know they choked them off from from headquarters what they did that oh
John: Sure they did.
John: Don't you remember?
John: And all of a sudden your iPhone was like... I'm trying to remember when they choked it off.
Merlin: That was in the early... Oh, and then they made it... Oh, okay.
Merlin: So then they made your phone slow?
John: Everything was slow and everything was like, oh, now you're waiting and now there's like, oh, it doesn't... It's just like slow.
John: And I don't think they ever sped it up again.
John: I think it's been... I think it's been ever since.
John: Deliberately.
John: now that's just your life and then you wake up you get ready to a podcast eventually with your friend merlin and they and then they say we're deprecating you they're throwing this shit at me all the time you know what it is somebody said this it might have been you or it might have been scott since then or it might have been some other scott but somebody that works in tech said to me
John: some friend yeah no sure sure it was a friendly trust a trusted advisor inside uh inside of uh mick and techs yeah yeah they said here's the thing nobody in silicon valley has anything less than the most the most storage the most speed
John: As part of their job, they all have the most.
Merlin: Oh, in terms of the people who, who make use test and deploy these things.
Merlin: Right.
John: Yeah.
John: And so the people who are, who are throwing these things at you.
John: They never get those things thrown at them because they automatically have the most.
John: So they don't know what it's like to get to 200 gigabytes of photos and have your computer tell you every single day, we're about to deprecate your service.
John: because they have one billion trillion terabytes of storage yeah and they look at somebody like me average joe was 200 gigabytes and they say what is this you know this like shirker here this guy this like this like guy that's sucking on the last teat
John: of america like he should oh sucking on the oh america's final titty yeah this guy should just drop off and and wither and die or kick you know pony up because that's because they're all sitting on their tuffets yep yep yep yep yep with probably 25 billion terabytes worth of stolen organic court curds in a way yeah yeah stealing from artists yeah they're on the first teeth they probably got two teats
Merlin: I bet their teats, and I don't want to make this entirely about today's, but I bet their teats are unmetered.
Merlin: No, unmetered.
Merlin: Exactly.
John: You know what I mean?
Merlin: It's the equivalent of free parking.
Merlin: I know this is a bit, but it's not a bit.
Merlin: I said this to a friend of mine on another program this week.
Merlin: Was it Stop Simpson?
Merlin: What is your thing with Scott?
Merlin: Do you miss him, or are you talking to him a lot?
Merlin: What's his name?
Merlin: Scop?
Merlin: What's brought Scott back on your radar?
Merlin: Is he just your default, like, slender guy who used to work at Apple?
John: You know, no, I feel like, no, I got a message from Matt Howey the other day, or a couple messages from Matt Howey, but every once in a while, the thing about Stop Skimpson is that he swings in out of nowhere on a vine.
Merlin: Not as often as I would like.
Merlin: I try to provoke him into conversation, but I think he must be busy with a job or something.
Merlin: Or he dislikes me, which is fine.
John: It's never as much as I would like either.
John: But then he comes in and it's like, oh, it's apparent to me from what he says that he's been listening the whole time or that he's completely up on everything.
John: I don't know about that.
John: He's just he's just sitting somewhere in his in his.
John: I.
Merlin: Contact two or three times a year with something I either regard as funny or that reminds me of him, you know Or for example, what did I just learned?
Merlin: Oh, I just learned something interesting I just recently learned that Jeff Koons the controversial summer controversial artist is from his balloon dogs Yeah, it's from his hometown in Pennsylvania, which is also where live is from and live bought the bank
John: Live bought the bank.
Merlin: I thought they were just shirtless.
John: No, when Live was big, they went back to their hometown, which apparently is also the hometown of Jeff Koons, who I could have sworn was from Munich, and Scott Stock Simpson.
Merlin: Stock Simpson.
Merlin: I think it's York, Pennsylvania, which he once described in an episode of You Look Nice Today as having no elitants with either, what did he say, Philadelphia in the east, nor Pittsburgh in the west, I think is what he said.
Merlin: When you think of Pittsburgh as being the West, I don't know.
Merlin: I could be saying it wrong.
Merlin: I mean, I'm from Ohio.
John: We don't really have maps, but but but live the band went back to York, Pennsylvania, and they bought the main bank in the center of town and they turned it into their practice.
John: Your jokes better than mine.
John: They put carpets down.
John: They were like, and there was, it was a bank with like a balcony and, and, and obviously a vault and stuff.
John: The acoustics would be weird.
John: Really bad.
John: Right.
John: And also vibe bad.
John: But this was, you know, live never struck me as guys that really had it figured out.
John: I don't know.
Merlin: I don't have anything against live.
Merlin: I didn't care for their music, but I think they did a good job at what they were trying to do.
John: But I think it's one of those things where the lead singer is the only original member of the band now or something like that.
Merlin: There's no reason for them to be around now, and they should all put a shirt on.
Merlin: It's my feeling.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: They're always looking so mad, and there's that video with the light bulb swinging around.
Merlin: I'm more of a wean man.
Merlin: I'm more of a New Hope fan.
John: Did he at any point say, yeah, no, or was that, am I mixing them up with Creed?
Merlin: Anyways, this is fast, but the real talk part of this.
John: I miss Scott Simpson.
John: I do.
John: I miss him.
John: I miss those days.
Merlin: I miss those days.
Merlin: I miss that Scott.
Merlin: Yeah, I want him in my life.
John: Do you ever talk to Sandwich?
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: Sometimes the three of us will end up in, you know, say, well, that doesn't matter.
Merlin: It's private.
An elevator.
Merlin: No, we're on the internet, and we'll be like, yeah, we should do the thing again.
Merlin: But the same to a pal of mine, because it just keeps coming up, is, I don't know, I try to evolve, and I try not to sound, you know, like all the other ding-a-lings who just speculate about the world, but... You've evolved a lot.
John: Huh?
John: You evolved a lot.
John: You evolved a lot.
Merlin: You have no idea how hard I try.
Merlin: But I...
Merlin: There's an impression that I get sometimes, and I really, I don't want to sound like a jerk about this, but I have this feeling so strongly sometimes.
Merlin: I don't think my mom's doctor has probably ever had to negotiate the same system of bureaucracy in the same way that my mom does.
Merlin: Maybe he or she has people for that, but like, I don't know how you live with a system.
Merlin: I don't know how you live...
Merlin: I don't know if I'm putting this well, but I think the people who use those systems for their job don't experience them in anywhere near the same way as the people who use them for their life or for their work.
Merlin: So just random examples, because it's something my mom's dealing with right now, health stuff.
Merlin: It's just these systems are so difficult to get through.
Merlin: And this all started with talking to Syracuse about his kid getting into college and having to deal with this app where you can't log in and the app's broken and there's nobody to talk to about it.
Merlin: And on the one hand, you go, they're all out there to get me.
Merlin: The other hand, it's just like there's a version of this that's much simpler, which is, you know why you guys don't get mad at Apple TV as much as me?
Merlin: Because you don't use it as much as me.
Merlin: And I'll bet you that on a curve, excluding the amount of time they spend at work in an optimal environment, I wonder how many people use Apple TV enough to run into the stuff that I run into.
Merlin: Because if you use something enough and love something enough, you learn to discover what's not optimal about it.
Merlin: And when those non-optimal things remain for years and years without any kind of improvement or effective big amelioration,
Merlin: We were flipping around probably during a sports game.
Merlin: But anyways, my kid really likes the ABC reporter David Muir.
Merlin: He's pretty hot.
John: Why are you not being paid as a beta tester for Apple TV?
John: Oh.
John: You should be a tester.
Merlin: I don't even want to be paid for any of that.
Merlin: I just would love to have the opportunity to go like, hey, here's what seems like pretty low-hanging fruit, or here's a showstopper that may not be a showstopper because you just, anyways.
Merlin: I want you to be paid for it.
John: I know you don't care.
John: I want you to get $250,000 a year to send them messages once a week and say, here's a thing that would be cool for your program.
John: Here's a thing that would be cool.
Merlin: See, it sounds like you're trying to put me on a board, it sounds like.
John: I want you to be on a board.
John: I want you to be part of the conversation in these boardrooms.
John: The thing is, these people, they're swimming in water and they don't know their fish, you know?
John: Whoa.
Merlin: yeah they're too close to it yeah they're too close anyway i said enough i probably probably said my piece but it's just it's it can be frustrating like in the case of that like you know we've got all these mystery meat channels through streaming services that we have through things like hula hulu and fubo and we get all these weird ass those are made up fubo's made up i know it is and it's fubo.tv which makes it even worse at least it's you know
Merlin: Yeah, they go right up to the edge of cute.
Merlin: But the frustrating part of that one is like, there's so many things in streaming where you have to see ads now, even though at every opportunity where I can pay to not have ads, I do.
Merlin: They really want you to have ads.
Merlin: It's just they don't really have that much to show for it.
Merlin: And the thing is, if you flip on this one ding-a-ling station, which I think is technically more like
Merlin: ABC News streaming.
Merlin: And we just flipped it on because it had David Muir's face.
Merlin: And it was about 30 seconds at a time of what someone might consider content, followed by usually like two or three minutes of ads.
Merlin: But...
Merlin: Here's the part that's critical, and if y'all don't know this, well, then you don't use it as much as I do.
Merlin: Most of the ads on a lot of these platforms are what we call house ads.
Merlin: They're not ads that somebody paid to place there.
Merlin: They're not ads for Ford.
Merlin: They're not ads for Coca-Cola.
Merlin: They're ads for other ABC, Disney.
Merlin: et cetera, ESPN properties.
Merlin: And, but you know what I'm saying?
Merlin: So like you look, stop now.
Merlin: An unskippable ad has come up and now you spend two or three minutes.
Merlin: If you're watching survivor and the ad comes up like a whole bunch of that, it's just gonna be ads for CBS shows, which I'll bet you if they had more, uh,
Merlin: If they'd sold more ads, there wouldn't be that many house ads.
Merlin: But it's so galling to have to sit there and just watch house ads, or NPSAs, because that means they don't have any real ads.
Merlin: And the very deliberate...
Merlin: forcing of ads into my face is providing fairly little value for everybody.
Merlin: And I just, I wonder if people use that.
Merlin: I wonder who to put it another way when I'm feeling really saucy, who loves this?
John: Who's proud of this?
John: Well, I bet you there's somebody in the building that's doing this and somebody else across the building that's never met that person.
John: is is accepting it and it's like inside the building everybody feels like they're doing their job and all they're doing is in shitifying the world but from from their standpoint right from their standpoint each one of them is doing a great job we all and all of us only we only only each of us touch like one part of the camel or the elephant depending on your analogy i hope i get a good part of it
Merlin: But, you know, I understand that part.
Merlin: But, like, it's become somewhat inescapable at a certain point, especially with companies that you imagine should know better.
Merlin: That, like, if this is the way you want to make money as a business, then you're going to do what Syracuse calls putting wood behind the arrow.
Merlin: You're going to, like, really try to make this thing good and put resources into it.
Merlin: It just becomes a little frustrating sometimes.
John: Wood behind the arrow.
John: Oh, my God.
John: That's...
John: Syracuse, come on.
Merlin: Whenever Apple every year or five talks about how much they love video games, well, they like video games because they sell a lot of them on the store.
Merlin: But they have not put a lot of time, money, and effort into making that something different for people who actually really do like games.
Merlin: That's not my bailiwick.
Merlin: But anyways, that's all.
Merlin: It's frustrating.
Merlin: I would like to find out who they are is a big part of this for me, tracking it down.
Merlin: I'm not saying we could change anything, but I'd like to at least know who they are.
Merlin: I'll tell you who they are.
John: Who is it?
John: They're about to deprecate my Google Drive.
John: Oh, John.
Merlin: And you just found out this morning.
John: Well, yeah.
John: And I also, the thing is, Google just made me last month after months and months and months.
John: Made you.
John: Made me, forced me.
John: They said for months, your Google drive is almost full.
John: Okay.
John: And then I would go into my Google drive and I would delete stuff.
John: I would go, well, I don't want it to be full.
John: No, I wasn't, I wasn't trying to game it.
John: I was trying to like, oh, oh shit.
John: My Google drive is full.
John: Oh, you know, I was like, I was, I was dealing with it like a, like somebody that had a box that was full and I was like, oh, well I got, I need to put more stuff in this box.
John: I got to get some of this, you know, these old candy wrappers or whatever out of here.
John: And I went and I deleted everything that seemed like, oh, I should have deleted that a long time ago.
John: And then I was like perking along burp, burp, burp, burp.
John: And then it said your Google drive is almost full.
John: And when it does, we're going to in shitify it.
John: I was like, oh shit.
John: I just, I took all that stuff out and I went in again and I was like, okay, well, I guess all these videos of like.
Merlin: Hydra foils and the blue angels and all these videos that I took of some kid You know wrecking on a skateboard or whatever like I don't I don't need those, you know And I would watch them one last don't you feel like you're sort of swatting sort of blindly I've done that where on only a handful of occasions that said oh your Gmail's got too much stuff in it And so I've like like a lot of us I've got my ways where I'll go in and like find attachments and you can sort by this size and all those kinds of things and you're like
Merlin: But it's that feeling of, like, especially in the early days of getting those pop-up nasty grams, you go, like, I don't want to break my computer.
Merlin: I'll go delete a bunch of stuff.
Merlin: And that's not, hmm.
Merlin: The implicit promise is that you can kind of have all of your stuff.
Merlin: But I'm not saying who that implicit promise is from.
Merlin: I don't know if the implicit promise is.
Merlin: It was made by they.
Merlin: It was made by they.
Merlin: I see.
Merlin: Hmm.
Merlin: Okay.
Merlin: Do you feel like, okay, so, okay.
Merlin: Okay.
Merlin: And are they necessarily sort of cloaked figures?
Merlin: Are they necessarily sort of in the shadows?
Merlin: Are they fighter thieves?
Merlin: Are they chaotic neutral?
Merlin: What are we dealing with here?
John: No, you know, honestly, I picture stock simpskins, except not as funny and not as nice.
John: Just guys doing their job in these buildings where one of them is...
John: making ads for ABC shows.
John: And one of them is trying to fill up ad space that another one of them carved out and somebody else, you know, and they're just like, they're kicking this, this hockey puck around.
John: That's a really inefficient way to move a hockey puck.
John: It's terrible, right?
John: What are you guys doing?
John: Get a stick, Norman.
John: And the thing is, they all have little laminates that beep them into different corridors.
John: Of course, of course.
John: And when they drive Audis or whatever...
John: and you know not one of them thinks they're part of the problem not one of them thinks they're doing a bad job they've got all the storage that they have could ever want so they never get a pop-up
John: Nobody, none of them are still running their MacBook from 2014.
Merlin: But the other part of that that's real, and this is the other giant part of this thing with my mom, is like, well, and if for any reason, I can't say whether or not everybody who works at these companies has the Rain Man suite for everything that I pay for.
Merlin: But what I can say is I'll bet if they ever run into anything, they have a pretty good idea.
Merlin: of either sort of how to fix it, where to find out if it's a problem, or if necessary, to escalate something to get it taken care of.
Merlin: Exactly.
Merlin: And that expertise ends up, forgive my saying, ends up being a kind of privilege, where if you're not aware that...
Merlin: Actually, our friend of the show, Matt Howey, and I used to talk about this a lot back 20 years ago, 25 years ago, about the people who use Firefox versus the people who use Internet Explorer have such a different experience of the world.
Merlin: I've had relatives who just got in the habit of carrying their PC to the curb every three years because it was so full of garbage that they just had to start over.
Merlin: You know?
Merlin: And you know what I'm saying?
Merlin: Like, there was so much zombification of their machine or whatever, you know?
Merlin: But, I don't know.
John: It's frustrating to me, and it's... Well, I think you and I are good examples of bookends somewhat of this problem.
John: On the one hand, you...
John: are watching 800 hours of video on Apple TV per week.
John: That's about right.
John: Plus or minus 20%.
John: And I am running a 2014 laptop still, and I look at it every day, and I run all of my podcasts through it, and I do all of my everything.
John: And I bought a new laptop because of all these messages that were like, we're going to stop using your laptop.
John: And then I couldn't get the new laptop.
John: I just couldn't get into it.
John: I opened it.
John: It was like, oh, you don't have any storage on this laptop.
John: Your old laptop's got however many, you know, gigaflops.
John: And you have a lot less of those because you got a MacBook Air because you thought you were somebody slick.
John: So I have a laptop.
John: Well, yeah, I got it in the I got it an Amazon shopping days.
John: No, no, I only asked because my my my lady got one too.
John: Yeah, so I got one, but I never started using it.
John: It's sitting right here on the table.
John: It's slick.
John: It's black and I open up my old I bet it's got a pretty small hard drive.
John: It's got a really small hard drive.
Merlin: I try to counsel my kids about this.
Merlin: You got to be careful
John: This one here, how many hards does this one have?
John: This has... 256 gigs.
John: So what I've got here is I've got 8 gigabytes of DDR3 mega plops and a 3 gigahertz dual core Intel Core i7 processor.
John: Oh, Intel.
John: That's a good company.
John: And it's got 500 gigs hard drive on this thing.
John: But under a sharp stick in the eye.
John: It's pretty good.
John: It's pretty good.
John: And right now it tells me that I got 26 gigs available because I went in and deleted all of the hydrofoil videos.
John: Because of the deprecation issue.
John: Yeah.
John: And so here we are, bookends of this, right?
John: And I, all the tech apologists that are like, well, what do you expect?
John: Free storage forever?
John: These companies got to make a dollar.
John: Yeah.
John: Which I do.
John: I get a lot of that kind of like helpful feedback from people.
John: You should stop talking to those people.
John: What the fuck is this thing broken?
Merlin: I wouldn't pursue conversations with those people personally.
John: But here's my question.
Merlin: Yes, you there.
John: And I know how you feel about this, I think a little bit.
John: Am I doing it wrong?
John: By running this this 11 year old computer.
John: Am I doing it wrong?
John: Am I doing it wrong?
John: Am I am I a bad person?
John: Am I not helping America?
John: Am I am I?
John: Is there something wrong with how I'm asking this like you want my honest opinion of this?
John: Well, yeah here I have a podcast with America's smartest boy Ken Jennings.
John: I recorded into GarageBand on my 2014 computer.
John: Am I doing it wrong?
John: Should I be punished for this?
John: Am I, should I have to pay like $90 a month for them to tell me that they're gonna shut it off anyway?
John: You know, like, tell me, Merlin, am I the baddie?
Merlin: I don't think so.
Merlin: But it is complicated because there are ways out there.
Merlin: If you developed a slightly different sort of curiosity about this, there are ways to fix things.
Merlin: But it's not always simple and it's not always obvious.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: And when you talk about stuff like a note about deprecating an app or a service or any of that kind of stuff, this, again, I think applies to people inside of those companies.
Merlin: I mean, maybe I just happen to be your friend with the worst anxiety, but I don't like getting pop-ups and nasty grams about stuff I'm supposed to do, especially when if I pursue what it is it's popping up about, it's not always clear what
Merlin: what I'm supposed to do differently, how it will improve it.
Merlin: There's not a clear, to use an old phrase, a clear value proposition about even spending time on this.
Merlin: So the classic, and I don't know if this is related to the one, but it's something that's been frustrating to us lately.
Merlin: Apple enthusiasts for a while is the very small amount of disk space that you are able to buy on some devices.
Merlin: That's gotten better, but it's still not great.
Merlin: So, I mean, there was a time I feel like I've known at least half a dozen people who at one point or another could not update their phone because they didn't have enough room.
Merlin: On the phone to do the update.
Merlin: Now, anybody who's listening to this, who's a computer enthusiast, which is almost all of you, knows how to do stuff like go into settings.
Merlin: And I mean, could you without looking describe that to someone right now?
Merlin: I think what I would say is go to Apple settings about.
Merlin: Uh storage something like that and go in there and and but okay So wait, so wait if I delete this movie I downloaded to watch on a plane.
Merlin: Is it gone forever?
Merlin: No, but you're just deleting it from but like not everybody knows that hey I paid 30 bucks for that.
Merlin: I don't want to delete that It sounds silly to a lot of like just sort of normal people what you need to understand This is true in creating art.
Merlin: This is true in life It doesn't take that much resistance for us to just give up for a little while
Merlin: And then that thing pops up again, and it says, you're out of free iCloud space, or you're blah, blah, blah, blah for this.
Merlin: And it's like, so then you go, okay, well, what do you want me to do?
Merlin: You feel like fucking George Harrison at this point.
Merlin: I'll play whatever you want me to play.
Merlin: If you don't want me to play, do you even want me to be here?
Merlin: So you click through and you go, okay, now this is Apple One.
Merlin: You're like, okay, what the fuck is Apple One?
Merlin: Okay, well, it's ways that you can choose to subscribe to different levels of service for their different things.
Merlin: So with this one, you get this much iCloud space.
Merlin: And with this one, this family account, you can share this between them.
Merlin: And it's like...
Merlin: But at the moment when you're just getting frustrated and maybe a little anxious about all of this stuff and you go to look it up, you go like, okay, fuck it.
Merlin: I just got to get back to it.
Merlin: Hit cancel.
Merlin: And then it pops up again and the music goes round.
Merlin: And you know what happens?
Merlin: I don't want to sound like I'm catastrophizing this, but then you know what happens?
Merlin: You get a situation like you had with your phone.
Merlin: with your phone that got went into the drink.
Merlin: Bogged.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: And so I think there are probably people out there who would think, well, there's nothing I can do about this.
Merlin: There may be other people out there who think I'm sure there's an exact up to the second backup somewhere.
Merlin: Everybody's understanding of that is very different.
Merlin: But regardless of what their understanding of that, how that works is,
Merlin: Is my stuff safe somewhere?
Merlin: You ever go to the Apple store?
Merlin: Every time I go to the Apple store, I have to hear at least one civilian come in and be told by the Apple people, we have no way to get you your password for iCloud.
Merlin: That's why it's a password.
Merlin: And they're like, okay, well, so what, all my photos of my grandkids are gone?
Merlin: You're like, I don't know, but whatever was in there, like, if you can't, that stuff's all really, really complicated and frustrating.
Merlin: And what I'm trying to say is, like, if you create an environment where people are just constantly dismissing things because it's a giant...
Merlin: you know, annoying frustration.
Merlin: Well, like we talked about this when it happened, right?
Merlin: My thing I was trying to say to you was, I think you and I are similar in the sense of like, I don't like being bugged constantly by new eels.
Merlin: And in fact, I sometimes take it as a kind of self-defense to think like, well, yeah, you're not going to tell me to go buy more stuff.
Merlin: Well, one of those messages could have been the thing that saved your ass by making sure you do have at least up to the day backup of your stuff.
Merlin: But does getting bugged about that stuff put you in the mood to spend money?
Merlin: No.
Merlin: For the 50th time, you're like, oh, this will be the time that I spend $30 a month on this, which I do.
Merlin: And I get a lot of value out of that $30 a month for the Apple stuff that we get.
Merlin: But I utilize it.
Merlin: I don't know how much.
Merlin: I can't get my family to completely understand.
Merlin: There's a whole bunch of these apps that I have paid for that you can use for free.
Merlin: And it's all in there.
Merlin: Anyways, this is probably not particularly interesting to people, but that's the part I find frustrating is like, you know, between the theys at the companies and between the theys of the voices in our head yelling at us about being dumb about technology, I sometimes think the reason we have those voices in our head is because people can be sometimes peculiarly tone deaf to the needs of other people.
Merlin: And I think it walks right up to being an accessibility issue in a lot of ways.
Yeah.
John: It's it 100% is and you know the confusing thing for me Is often like you say I get bugged then they send me to a place that I can't navigate They're not offering me any help to navigate it, right?
John: And they keep throwing up only 999 a month and I'm like, yeah I'm just trying to clear out the things that you're telling me I have too many of and they're like 999 a month like it always reverts back to what they're trying to get me to do which is pay money and
John: And that's when, you know, that thing where it says your disk drive is full and it has a color bar and it shows you all these things that you have no transparency on.
Merlin: For people of my vintage, that's a very big deal.
Merlin: Things have changed a lot since the 90s, 80s and 90s.
Merlin: But time was, if you got a warning, like Norton Disc Doctor or whatever said, hey, you're getting close to filling up your drive.
Merlin: really chaotic shit would happen if your drive got too full.
Merlin: So, I mean, is it the same way now?
Merlin: What should I take away from that?
Merlin: How do I buy a new, can I even buy a new larger hard drive for this thing?
Merlin: Maybe, maybe not.
Merlin: That's easier said than done.
Merlin: With a lot of Apple products over the last little while, you're generally kind of stuck with a lot of the hardware options you purchased.
Yeah.
Merlin: so i mean i have a refrigerator box full of hard drives as i'm sure you do or maybe when you empty out a hard drive you put it on a newer hard drive and then you put it into a slingshot and you send it into the ocean you know i've got a really nice milwaukee drill and uh hammer drill and a uh what's what's the little one that does all the heavy lifting the the the really the uh the you know the driver i've got a driver too
Merlin: And I keep wanting to do a Mr. Robot on my drives.
Merlin: So I'm thinking I might go on Amazon, because I don't have a drill press currently, but I would really like to be able to do a Rami Malek on my hard drives.
John: You've got room in the basement for a drill press.
John: No, not anymore I don't.
John: There's a lot of old books down there.
John: Because it's full of Volkswagens?
Merlin: Mostly silverfish now.
Merlin: The silverfish live here now.
John: What I realized the other day is that redundancy, which is at one level, I think a, like I think of it as a virtue.
John: Oh, you've got two of them because sometimes hard drives just fucking brick.
John: And so you had it on that hard drive, but you also have it on this one.
John: Redundance.
John: In terms of like backups or.
John: Just everything.
John: Yeah.
John: Oh, okay.
John: But the thing is that.
John: I have my photos on Google Drive and on Apple Drive.
John: Yep.
John: And they're both full of this.
Merlin: I think both of those companies would tell you you should buy more cloud storage is what both of those companies would tell you.
Merlin: That's right.
Merlin: Then you'll stop getting that message and you won't notice that it's happening anymore.
John: Yeah, and like you said, I should pay whatever, $80 a week on yields.
Merlin: You're saying you should.
Merlin: I'm trying to keep this value neutral to just say the short answer is they, to me, it seems pretty clearly they want.
Merlin: Now, then the question becomes, well, how related is the filling up of your hard drive to Google Drive versus this versus that?
Merlin: Do you know, for example, that there's ways if it's a laptop that's not your primary computer, you can go in and say, like, don't download all the originals to this iPhoto library.
Merlin: Only download originals to that other photo library.
John: Exactly.
Merlin: And I know that there's just one little tick box and one line of text that people may or may not see that could change their entire world for better or for worse.
John: The other day, Justin Viega, who's helping me with my, uh, with some aspects of my social media computers, uh,
John: He came in because I was complaining about it.
Merlin: I imagine using computers in the sense of the movie Hidden Figures, where it's black ladies that solve NASA problems.
John: That's right.
Merlin: And they aren't allowed to use the bathroom.
Merlin: No, no, no, no.
Merlin: And then he tears down that sign, remember?
Merlin: I love that movie.
Merlin: Yeah, but those would be social media computers.
John: Yeah.
John: Well, he, every once in a while, and I know that he does this for a living somewhere because he came in the other day and he was like, okay, you have to connect your Instagram account to this other thing.
John: And I was like, okay.
John: And he said, here's a step-by-step way of instructions.
John: So I followed his instructions and I connected the Instagram account to the other thing.
John: And then he wrote me and he said, okay, I'm not seeing the Instagram account.
John: And this was the best thing he could have done.
John: He said, and it's not your fault.
John: It's a problem of the thing.
John: So now here's what I need you to do.
John: And he's, and here's what he sent me on the left.
John: Scroll down to the not linked section, click Instagram feed, hover over the content, which is a photo of a mountain and click on the edit button next to page content.
John: Click that mountain photo again.
John: Then the pencil icon that appears in the top left that should open a box or hopefully he says open a box where you can choose your connected Instagram account.
John: like the screenshot that i have included in this email or reconnect it there if not then hit the apply button then scroll down and hit the save button now he justin he has this in his mind or he just navigated it for me using his millennial powers of pull down i imagine he went through it himself and wrote down steps so you could replicate it you know
John: I could not have found that.
John: Oh, I see what you're saying.
John: Especially not because I had already the day before followed his instructions on my phone and clicked a thing that said link Instagram account.
John: And I had clicked it.
John: I'd found it, clicked it.
John: And then it said, your Instagram account is clicked or linked.
John: Now why it wasn't, I'll never know.
John: And Justin knows better than to try and explain.
John: He said, it's not, but it's not your fault.
John: i'm sure he says i'm sure you did it right but something something something something so now it now it works right now the functionality is there now you can see my instagram account at john roderick.com if you don't want to be on instagram
John: Which was what I was trying to do, because people write me all the time, and they're like, I hate Instagram, but I want to see what you post there.
Merlin: Oh, so you're embedding it on a website?
John: Yeah, it's embedded on johnroderick.com, so you can look at my Instagram posts.
Merlin: Is that a Squarespace site?
Merlin: Remind me.
John: Well, I don't want to out them, because they're very nice people, and they have supported our shows.
Merlin: Okay, but it has functionality for adding something like embedded stuff.
Merlin: Yes, it is Squarespace.
John: And so I but I never would have been able to figure that out on my own because like you say I would have pulled down menus and it would have said Go to the photo of the mountain click the edit button and then hover over the the pencil icon Imagine my dad if he were still alive He's not even gonna know what any of these things are But imagine him just just like your mom going through something where it's just like okay now hover over the pencil icon It's like who is design the people that are designing it are designing it for themselves and
John: And for geniuses like Justin.
John: Yeah.
John: And they're not thinking, okay, this guy, John Roderick's not ready to go out on an iceberg.
John: But now people can see your photos.
John: That's nice.
John: It's nice.
John: I said this to my mom and my daughter were sitting here.
John: And my mom was like, if they ever try to hook me up to a machine, I want you to shoot me and then shoot them.
John: And my daughter looked at me and I said, Mom, we all know that you're going to go out on your iceberg when it's time.
John: She's coming home on her shield.
John: No one's going to put you on a machine.
John: Don't worry.
John: And she was like, you better not.
John: I'll haunt you from beyond the grave.
John: And I said, mom, we know you're just going to walk into the ocean.
John: You know, don't, don't stress about it.
John: And my daughter said, looked at me and I said, and you know, the, my worry is that, that the little one here is going to put me on an iceberg before I'm ready.
John: And everybody laughs.
John: But now, whenever I do anything... Like, trick you?
John: Well, no, she's just like... Because my daughter is... How about she get you on the iceberg?
John: She's just going to be like, oh, hey, you know, look, there's M&Ms on the other side of this iceberg.
John: And I'll be like, M&Ms?
John: And then... So now, every time I do a switch and it doesn't work and I turn it the other way and it doesn't work, she says, okay, Dad, time to go out on your iceberg and...
John: And she's just already, she's just like shepherding me.
John: Oh, it's just, it's a big joke now, huh?
John: Yeah.
John: She's just like, here you go, dad.
John: Here's the iceberg.
John: It's waiting, you know, like there's your iceberg.
John: And I'm like, I'm 56.
John: I'm not ready for the iceberg.
John: I'm still trying to get my Instagram account to port over to my Squarespace account.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: You still have a bright future, but you probably got a few more months.
Merlin: Thank you.
John: Yeah.
John: Thank you.
Merlin: Don't put me on the iceberg yet.
Yeah.
John: But, but the promise they, the promise Merlin with a, okay.
John: So for this is like, what about when basic, what about when basic became a language that you could talk to?
John: Remember what was it?
John: It was not visual basic.
John: What was the one where you could just type normal writing in?
John: Like line 10, that kind of stuff.
John: Print.
John: Yeah.
John: Instead of like burp, burp, burp.
John: It was like, no, it was like the new programming language that everybody was supposed to be.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: Basic and like in the early to mid eighties.
Yeah.
John: No, no, no.
John: But this is later in the 90s when it was a new computer programming language that you didn't have to memorize all these commands.
John: You were just going to be like, I want... That might be blood magic.
John: It was some kind of magic.
John: But the premise was that this stuff was going to get easier, not harder.
John: Right?
John: The idea was that this was going to become accessible to normals.
John: And in the process of democratizing the internet and making...
John: computers a part of our daily life and having our refrigerator talk to our thermostat the idea has always been at least presented to us that this is more and more user-friendly every day easier for regulars to use it's not going to be you know a walled garden that only
John: Certain neckbeards can figure out how to work.
John: And yet I think it's one of those things.
John: When I gave my first speech at a Democratic Party meeting when I was running for city council, I got up there and I said, we need to sweep out all the bad things.
John: You know, dust and all these entrenched people that are just been in these jobs forever and we need new blood and I'm an artist and I'm here to, I'm here to be the new voice.
John: And I got down off the stage and these two bless them, bless them.
John: These two young Democrats, both in their early twenties.
John: walked over because the room was like, nobody wanted to talk to me.
John: And they came over and they were like, hey, heads up, this is a room full of all of the people that you just said need to get swept out of government.
John: And I was like, oh.
Merlin: David Hogg's running into that a little bit now.
John: Yeah, that message doesn't resonate
John: With this room now if you go to like a union hall
John: Or a bunch of, you know, people, a bunch of activists.
John: Maybe, you know, that's your story.
John: But here, you're trying to be one of these people.
John: And I was like, whoa, thanks for the heads up.
John: And they were like, no problem.
John: Yeah, that's a pretty sophisticated insight.
John: Yeah, we love what you're doing.
John: Well, these are the young Democrats who are 21 years old who are like, they're going to be senators one day, right?
John: They're already smarter than me.
Merlin: But I mean, that is, that's, I mean, I guess I'm looking at it slightly differently with that regard to, I just think about how I was at any point you could call my early twenties.
Merlin: I was not that emotionally intelligent.
John: No, no, no, no.
John: I was not either.
John: Right.
John: If I had been, I would have been a young Democrat.
John: But my feeling is that at every level that this should be getting easier, the world should be getting easier.
John: The people that are designing it are the people in the room.
John: And they not only aren't interested in it being easier, like their jobs depend on it not being easier.
John: They're, you know, the Silicon Valley continues to run and continues to recruit 24 year olds at $250,000 a year because it isn't easy, which I think they could have 15 years ago set on a different path where the path was
John: This is, we're going to actually make this so that a dummy can use it because what it's actually doing as you're fond of saying, isn't that much.
John: It's saving our photos.
John: It's, it's still a typewriter in a lot of ways.
John: It's a, it's a radio.
John: You know, like what the box itself or the boxes are doing is basically replicating television, radio, typewriters, photo albums.
Merlin: That's one way to look at it, yeah.
Merlin: And Playboy magazine.
Merlin: I don't know if that's a particularly forward-looking way to look at it, but I take your point.
Merlin: No, it's fulfilling those traditional roles.
Merlin: But, you know, as I think a lot of people, including me, are fond of saying, there's a reason they called it...
Merlin: iphone which is even though it was a pocket computer they were moving into a a space that was ripe for disruption by a quote-unquote phone that was a computer but if you'd sold it as pocket computer it wouldn't have had nearly the same update right well if you look at if you look at all the computer in a in a brand new electric car what it's replicating is thomas guide radio
John: uh and uh and like two knobs and two sliders for your uh for your climate control and and then a bunch of things that light up when your tire pressure is too low which
John: Is, you know, in the, even my car, it doesn't even have all the screens and my car is just frustrating.
John: It's like, oh, you're now your tire pressure has changed by one PSI.
John: It's like, this is not information that I need or want, but it's, but what you need somebody in that, in that company is like, well, we need four more screens on this to make it look like it's worth the money.
John: and people are like oh well what could we do we could you know we could tell them that the headlights have seven settings now or you know whatever like yeah yeah yeah but all any of this stuff is doing it's not teleporting it's not hovercrafts it's not making i still have to put every last vegetable into the into the mix master myself if i want a smoothie
John: i don't just walk over and throw my banana peels in the back of my car and it suddenly is a time machine it's just a typewriter we were promised that it's a typewriter it's a photo album it's a phone it's in in in every way really what it is is 1905 technology that has just been shined up
John: Made faster and then in shitified Okay, I mean, you know when I think about what what I spent money on in a typical week when I was 24 It was cigarettes
John: And pancakes.
Merlin: Uh-huh.
Merlin: Now, those have been around since at least 1905.
John: Yeah, right.
John: But now, you know, this is part of the millennial problem of feeling like the world is unfair.
John: Because at a basic level, they don't even think about the fact that they are paying for...
John: They're paying massive amounts of money for all this shit that that to them just is like basic level.
John: Like, well, how did generation X, all those guys were just, you know, they're like stealing all the, and it's like, we didn't have anything, you know, like I, when I wanted to read the newspaper paper, I went into a cafe and I found the newspaper that was laying on the table.
Merlin: The library and get on one of those big bamboo sticks.
John: Get him on a bamboo stick.
John: Oh, my God.
John: So here's a talk about insurance.
John: There's dignity in that.
John: You know, I subscribe to the New York Times because I got tired of people sending me links that I couldn't read.
John: And I was like, okay, you know what?
John: New York Times, fine.
John: You beat me down.
Merlin: Did you get the home delivery version?
Merlin: Well, so no, I didn't because it was like $1,000 a week.
Merlin: Yeah, we let that go a long time ago.
Merlin: That was pretty costly.
Merlin: Even just for Sundays, it was really expensive.
Merlin: I've had a digital subscription since, oddly enough, 2016.
Merlin: Here's the crazy thing, right?
John: And because I still can't read Washington Post articles.
Merlin: I canceled that shit.
John: I just got all mad and canceled that.
John: And there's always something from Vanity Fair that somebody wants me to read, and I'm like, I can't buy a thousand of these anymore.
John: Yeah, yeah.
John: But so New York Times did the thing where they gave me a year at something, right?
John: At $15 a month or something.
John: And then I looked at my bank and I was like, how the hell am I spending 35 bucks a month on the New York Times?
John: This is outrageous.
Merlin: Because the offer changed, huh?
Merlin: The offer changed.
John: But as I was sitting there, this is the rare occasion when somebody had not made the salient information secret enough to
John: I realized that if I switched to getting the Sunday New York Times delivered I Would still get all my digital access I would get a Sunday hard copy of the paper and I would get a deal that now it was $20 a month instead of 35 and I looked at it seven different ways like this can't be real I can't be Gaming this seem like you feel like you were getting away with something.
I
Merlin: Well for sure if I could get away with it, but no no, but by which I mean they set up the rules of the game presented it to you and you said okay These are all the rules well because it looks like I could just go left right left and get this for cheaper than that Is that an oversight right do you do you feel like you were kind of getting away with it?
John: 100% yeah, and so loophole I looked at it.
John: I looked at it and I was like loophole
John: And I did it.
John: I canceled my old subscription that was $35 a month.
John: I got a new subscription that was $20 a month.
John: And I get a Sunday paper.
John: So for the last three weeks, the Sunday New York motherfucking Times has showed up on my front.
John: Well, the first week it showed up on my front porch.
John: The last two weeks it has showed up.
John: Showed up on your roof.
John: End of my driveway, right?
John: That damn kid.
John: The guy doesn't even throw it.
John: He just like drops it.
John: He wants his $2.
John: And so I'm like, I'm the guy in his bathrobe and slippers trudging down to the end of the driveway.
John: But so yesterday I'm sitting here reading the New York times and my kid comes in and she's like, blah, blah, blah.
John: I'm not satisfied with life.
John: I want things.
John: And I said, yeah, she's like, man, there aren't enough Skittles in my life.
John: I'm like, you know what?
John: And I said, sit down and read the newspaper.
John: with me because this was what from the time i was six years old until the last time i got a newspaper my mom and i would sit and read the newspaper together and when i lived with her we'd do it every morning yeah sit and read the newspaper and you know and she's the one that's across the room and she's like says here that there's the city's building a new coffer dam
John: And I would say, Mom, you know I'm going to read that section of the paper when I'm done with this one, and then I'll have read the same article.
John: It's hard for me to talk about it now because A, I haven't read it, and B, I'm reading a different article.
Merlin: Did you read that long piece about the DC air collision?
Merlin: I did.
Merlin: It's so fucking good.
John: It's a very long piece.
John: They did a lot of investigating.
John: They did a really good job on that.
John: All the way down to like, and at that point, this was at 300 feet, and that one was at 285 feet.
John: Oh my God.
Merlin: Well, the mist thing, because...
Merlin: It's something I never think about because I don't have to use a walkie-talkie or a radio, but the thing of where when you're... Click on the button.
Merlin: And you can't hear what they're saying.
Merlin: And that miscommunication about 300 and 400, I thought that was very well done.
John: They're talking over each other, I know.
John: But so the kid sits down and she's like, ugh.
John: And I realize...
John: Give her the tea section.
John: Give her the big style.
John: That's fun to read.
John: I realized she had never and we had never sat in a room where we were both reading the same newspaper.
John: She's too young to have had funnies be a big part of her life, probably.
John: Although my mom, because she's 90, still gets the Seattle Times and I still use the funny papers to wrap Christmas and birthday presents.
John: So what I do is always collect the funny papers.
John: Do you save them up over the year?
John: I save them up over the year until I have a big stack of funny papers.
John: Where do you put them?
John: How are they organized?
John: My mom folds them very flat, and then I have them in a box, and it's a stack of funny papers.
John: So my daughter knows that this exists, and so she has read the funny papers all the way through, and she knows exactly what is happening with Pogo and Mary Worth.
John: Because she's been through it all.
John: But we have never... I never understood Mark Trail.
John: I didn't either.
John: I never understood.
Merlin: I tried.
John: I tried.
John: I liked The Phantom.
John: I read The Phantom while it was still a thing.
Merlin: Yeah, yeah.
Merlin: She's never been alive at a time when there was a new Bloom County every day.
John: No, and never sat with her father, 14 years old.
John: By that point in time, this was part of my... So deep in my life, so deep in my relationship with my mom.
Merlin: I'm not doing the thing.
Merlin: I don't mean to do the thing.
Merlin: But it is fair to say that in a previous time, perhaps when we were younger, when one wanted – you've talked about how your mom didn't want to be into the Beatles.
Merlin: She wanted to be a grown-up.
Merlin: My mom wanted to smoke and listen to Nat King Cole.
Merlin: She did not want to be part of youth culture.
Merlin: If you wanted to be part of my parents' age culture, you had to find a way to fit in and not be a pain in the ass.
Merlin: So if you wanted to be in the room and hang out with them, you were going to have to do something really boring, like watch a Sunday morning news show and read the paper.
John: Yeah.
John: In companionable silence.
John: But then you're the nine-year-old that's out there going, well, it seems like Anwar Sadat's really got a, you know, and people are like, what?
John: But that was, that's how you, that's how you become a nerd, you know?
Merlin: Yeah, this Bibi Rabozo seems to have a lot on the ball.
Merlin: So I don't have a joke here.
Merlin: I just like saying Bibi Rabozo.
John: She dives into the newspaper, and suddenly she's sitting here, and she did.
John: She started with the style section.
Merlin: Quick question in passing, and it's okay if you don't ask this.
Merlin: Generally speaking, does she like to read?
Merlin: She's a reader.
Merlin: Okay, good.
John: But, like, the particular delivery system of a newspaper is...
John: You know, and me sitting and trying to read it, it's hard for me now not to pick up my phone and Google the things that I'm reading in the newspaper.
John: Yeah.
John: And I have to keep saying to myself, you know what, dude, two paragraphs from now, they're going to answer that question for you because this is a newspaper article.
John: It's not all available at once.
John: And I'm like, okay, okay, okay.
John: Right, right, right.
John: And I dig back down and she's starting to read all this stuff.
John: And it turns out she's exactly like my mom.
John: She's like, what?
John: This is outrageous.
John: It says here that the city's building a new cofferdam.
John: And I'm like, oh, my God.
John: Oh, my God.
John: Is that kind of spoilers?
John: It's all timey spoilers.
John: It's something in the genes.
John: Like, I never read halfway through an article and go, it says here.
John: You know, I'm like a quiet reader, quiet and slow.
John: And she's a fast and apparently talkative reader.
John: And then at one point I said to her, look at your hands.
John: Newsprint.
John: And both of our hands are all covered with newsprint.
John: Yeah.
John: And I was like, this is one of the greatest things.
John: And she's smelling the newspaper.
John: She's like, it smells great.
John: I'm like, it does smell great.
John: And there aren't any hyperlinks and it isn't any, the information that we're getting is not any worse than if we had read this online.
John: right and reading it online didn't get you know getting it an hour earlier online isn't an improvement being able to click through and google all the terms isn't really an improvement it's like a it's like we think of the newspaper being in our phone as being one of the killer apps one of the reasons we have it it's like whoa i got the whole new york times in here yeah
John: And I'm realizing reading the new, the Sunday times once a week is basically all any intelligent person needs to know about the world.
John: And then she was like, eh, this crossword puzzles too hard.
John: and was like where are the skittles i'm like you know i didn't want to be like sit down and do the new york times crossword puzzle 14 year old i mean you know she gave it a she gave it a swing she did she did because but then she's you know again she's like my mom she's like what's a five letter word for in shitification and i'm like poopy
John: i don't know what does it start with you know it's just like that it's now p-o-o-p-y
John: As we're sitting here, I'm sure I'm using up memory.
Merlin: Oh, we're all using up memory, John.
Merlin: Oh, my God.
Merlin: No, sorry.
Merlin: That's pretty real.
Merlin: Oh, no.
Merlin: I'm the one that did it.
Merlin: I'm the one that finally took him down.
Merlin: That's it.
Merlin: Yeah, that's it.
John: You know why Scott Simpson came into my mind?
John: Oh, no.
John: Tell me why.
John: Another friend a mutual friend of all three of ours said in an email Listen, I have a fail-safe situation if I die You
John: On you're one of the people that's going to be activated to know All my stuff.
John: Oh dear.
John: Oh, you should have to contact somebody about approving that but The content the approval the person that's going to be administering it is Scott Simpson.
John: Okay
John: Does he know?
John: Does he know?
John: I don't know.
John: I have no way of knowing.
John: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
John: It goes to Scott, and then I'm going to get an email, I guess, from him, unless he's living on a boat at this point.
John: And I have all these responsibilities I didn't know I had.
John: Yeah, that's not cool.
John: I don't think you're supposed to do that.
John: No, I think it's cool because it's the type of thing that I love.
John: It feels like espionage.
Merlin: Oh, no, no, no, it does, it does.
Merlin: You know, I love me, all that stuff.
Merlin: But you could become responsible for somebody's stuff after their death and not know it until they're dead?
John: I don't know.
John: That shouldn't be legal.
John: The problem is if I die, then my daughter's going to be at the Apple store going, how do I get into the computer?
John: And they're going to say, look, man, we don't have tools for that.
John: That's not our problem.
John: And what I don't, what I should do is just put it all into a thing.
John: And then it's like an auto serve to Scott Simpson.
John: Yeah.
John: Like a dead man switch.
John: Yeah.
John: We should make Scott Simpson, the dead man switch for all of our lives.
John: Could he be our friend group executor?
John: Yeah.
John: And he won't even know.
John: He won't even know.
John: Yeah.
John: I think that's marvelous.
John: Although, you know, that's assuming that Scott outlives us all.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: If anybody is out there and in contact with Scott and can get him to text back, I would just do that thing, that annoying thing.
Merlin: We'd go, ooh, Scott, you really need to hear this week's broader.
Merlin: Yeah, they were talking about it.
Merlin: And then he'll say, whatever, whatever he says.
Merlin: And then you go like, no, I think you're going to.
Merlin: We're like, uh-oh, you're in trouble.
John: Uh-oh, they're talking about you again.
John: And then it's like, oh, shit, what are they saying?
John: We called him out, perhaps.
John: Yeah.
John: It turns out what we're saying is you're the executor of all of our digital estates.
Merlin: I don't like to fall back on such a simple construction here, but what if he'd done that to you and you just don't know it yet?
Merlin: Are you cool with that?
John: I'm totally cool with it.
John: Can you imagine what's in Scott Simpson's secret lockbox?
John: Oh, my goodness.
Merlin: It's just going to be an evidence dungeon.
John: It's going to be so many unsolved crimes.
John: I mean, I don't have to ask you if you remember, but you remember.
John: You remember when you remember.
John: I do.
John: And all of a sudden, we knew things about it.
John: Scott would just disappear sometimes.
John: Well, that, yeah, but also when Sandwich and Scott and you and I went out on a night on the town.
John: Yes, okay.
John: So, yeah, that's a good point.
Merlin: Yeah, that is a good point.
Merlin: I'll have a Coke and stare at my shoes.
Merlin: Do I really have to pay $20 to stare at my shoes?
Merlin: $20 to come in and have a Coke.
Merlin: Where are you guys going with that room?
Merlin: Maybe they're getting a tour.
Merlin: No.
John: So then think about their hard drive.
Merlin: Okay.
Merlin: Oh, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no.
Merlin: Well, well, do you think that's all uploaded to the code?
Merlin: Would you have to go to their residence and take out the plates of the drive like Rami Malek?
Merlin: You tell me.
Merlin: I don't know.
John: Is the cloud safe?
John: You know, 4chan got taken down by some soy jacks.
John: Some soy jacks, Merlin.
John: Oh, come on.
John: John, what are we doing here, bud?
John: Soy jacks took down 4chan.
Merlin: Okay, fun's fun, but what was all of that?
John: And then they doxed.
John: They doxed all the janitors and the... You're kidding me.
Merlin: They did that.
Merlin: No, they doxed them.
Merlin: They doxxed them completely.
Merlin: But they couldn't put it on 4chan because 4chan was already DDoSed.
Merlin: It was already DDoSed.
Merlin: They got a DDoSed prompt.
Merlin: What do you think the over... A DDoS.
Merlin: All day I dream about sex.
John: What's the overlap of the Venn diagram of the soyjacks at soyjack.com that took down 4chan and the people that are in shitifying my Google Drive?
John: I bet you there's some people that are in both camps.
Merlin: Maybe Baby Gronk rizzed it up.
Merlin: As long as we're just saying words.