00:00:04 ◼ ► So, optimistically, you know those, I guess they're like, I don't know, IQ test questions
00:00:10 ◼ ► where they show you a pattern and then they're like, what's the next one in the pattern? It's A,
00:00:14 ◼ ► B, C, D, and you have to pick the shape. And it's like, oh, I get it. It was up and then down and
00:00:18 ◼ ► then east and then west and then up, so the next one will be down again, right? Or whatever.
00:00:28 ◼ ► Well, if we want to start just reaching for any signs of optimism and hope that we possibly can,
00:00:35 ◼ ► we can at least say that our pattern is that four years from today, we will be in a much better mood
00:00:48 ◼ ► Wow, talk about getting over your skis. Your feeling is, when we do this again in four years,
00:00:54 ◼ ► God willing, it'll be better than today, is your thought? Because I'm afraid it's my thought.
00:01:22 ◼ ► So obviously my little game that I'm playing that there's any sort of four-year pattern doesn't
00:01:35 ◼ ► Let me tell you a story. I'm going to try something here, and it's going to require you to listen.
00:01:54 ◼ ► the people listening to this might have read it on my website by now in a different form,
00:02:01 ◼ ► because it'll be written. But let me just tell you this, and it's going to—I'm going to—the
00:02:06 ◼ ► next sentence I say after I finish this one is going to sound like I'm making you sad, but I'm
00:02:12 ◼ ► not. My mom died this year in June. She was 78. And I want to say that this is not the point of
00:02:20 ◼ ► the story, and my mom's death is okay. She hadn't been that healthy for a while, and to be honest,
00:02:26 ◼ ► she was sort of losing her mental acuity in recent years. And the worst thing is in May,
00:02:33 ◼ ► she was hospitalized. This is a month before she died. She was hospitalized. She sort of collapsed
00:02:37 ◼ ► and was too weak to get up the stairs, and my dad called 911, and she went to the hospital,
00:02:44 ◼ ► if they keep you in the hospital for a couple days, something's up. And they didn't know.
00:02:49 ◼ ► And it turned out she had ovarian cancer, and it's pretty bad. It's about months to live,
00:02:55 ◼ ► and the effects of it had made her collapse. And we had this whole grim—everybody has got somebody
00:03:03 ◼ ► in their family, hopefully not so close, but for all too many of us, somebody very close.
00:03:09 ◼ ► And everybody knows how this goes. The months to live, and my parents had started talking to
00:03:18 ◼ ► That's what we were all as a family looking at. Months of a grim decline that ended inevitably.
00:03:28 ◼ ► But late June, she still felt pretty good overall and making plans, coming to grips with it
00:03:36 ◼ ► with amazing, amazing dignity and self-awareness about how she wanted to deal with it and do it.
00:03:43 ◼ ► The last Monday in June, she and my dad went out to eat at their favorite restaurant, or certainly
00:03:48 ◼ ► one of the favorite restaurants, and one that the whole family used to go to growing up. They had a
00:03:53 ◼ ► great meal. Her appetite was good. She felt good. That day, she'd scored a two on the wortle, had
00:03:58 ◼ ► won the family challenge. Tuesday morning, she played. She got a four, reported her score duly
00:04:06 ◼ ► to the family group. And then she sat down and had some kind of coronary incident and just
00:04:13 ◼ ► fell over dead. My dad found her, called 911. They got there in minutes. Minutes. Really,
00:04:19 ◼ ► remarkable time in the suburbs, but she was gone. No pain, no decline, the whole long, slow grind of—
00:04:31 ◼ ► Jared; In a twisted, in a very, as somebody who's had folks in my family going through cancer and
00:04:36 ◼ ► Alzheimer's and stuff like that, it's, you never want to say anything like, it becomes so cynical
00:04:41 ◼ ► and so lame to say stuff like taken too young and all that kind of stuff, but for as bad as that
00:04:50 ◼ ► Pete; It's so trite to say it was a blessing, but it was, given that she was in decline and had been
00:04:56 ◼ ► diagnosed with terminal ovarian cancer and was still, the night before, had just enjoyed a meal
00:05:02 ◼ ► at her favorite restaurant. Just fell over dead and that was it. It was as good as it could be.
00:05:09 ◼ ► And my dad, she was 78, my dad is 84 and he is sharp as a tack and he's in great health.
00:05:15 ◼ ► Until recently, he was still not just playing golf whenever weather permitted, but walking the golf
00:05:21 ◼ ► course, carrying his clubs. I learned in that month from when my mom was hospitalized, I live about an
00:05:28 ◼ ► hour away, so I see my dad regularly and saw my parents regularly and stay in touch. But I figured
00:05:36 ◼ ► out after mom was in the hospital and you sort of start putting clues together that, oh, she'd been
00:05:46 ◼ ► a little bit more in decline than they together had led on. And dad has been shouldering a lot more of
00:05:55 ◼ ► their just daily lives than he had led on to me and my sister. Not out of maliciousness or to hide
00:06:04 ◼ ► it, but because that's the way we are and it's the way I am. I would think the same way. I don't want
00:06:09 ◼ ► my kids, they didn't want me and my sister worried, he didn't want us worried about my mom, so he took
00:06:15 ◼ ► on more responsibilities. And I figured out that he'd stopped playing golf, not because he couldn't
00:06:22 ◼ ► play golf anymore at age 82 or 83, but because playing golf, even if you only play half around
00:06:27 ◼ ► nine holes, takes two hours and it's like the light bulb went off. He did not feel comfortable
00:06:33 ◼ ► leaving her for two or three hours. But he still walks full mile every day, he's in good shape,
00:06:41 ◼ ► they've been met, they were married 52 years. And so, the story of my mom's death is really more
00:06:47 ◼ ► the story of my dad and his grief. And I talk to him every day and he's doing good. And I think
00:06:53 ◼ ► everybody knows either firsthand or somebody close enough to the sort of scenario of a couple that's
00:07:02 ◼ ► been together for decades and grows old together and one of them dies and if the survivor is a man
00:07:20 ◼ ► grandmother died, he just suddenly, you know, and maybe it's just coincidence. Everybody always says,
00:07:27 ◼ ► "Hey, everybody knows when somebody gets elected president of the United States, they go in with
00:07:30 ◼ ► a head full of dark hair and then they come out with gray hair." Well, guess what? They often go
00:07:34 ◼ ► into the office in their mid-50s when hair starts going gray, right? You know what I mean? Like,
00:07:47 ◼ ► grayer than it is right now. And that might be what happens to 80-year-old men when their wives
00:07:53 ◼ ► die is they were about to go into decline anyway. We sort of saw that happen, speaking of 80-year-old
00:08:03 ◼ ► My dad's not doing that, I can say with certainty. He is an optimist and he is upbeat and he is very
00:08:10 ◼ ► sad and he is remarkably, for a man of his generation, in touch with and willing to express
00:08:16 ◼ ► that he gets sad and misses my mom every day. I talked to him, I told you, I talked to him every
00:08:22 ◼ ► day. And Tuesday morning, he called me around noon. He had voted already. And again, he's an
00:08:30 ◼ ► 84-year-old white man who lives in the suburbs of a red county in Pennsylvania. But my dad's
00:08:35 ◼ ► a lifelong Democrat. And I'm not saying that to brag or that there's anybody out there whose
00:08:40 ◼ ► 84-year-old dad is glued to Fox News 18 hours a day. It is how it is. I'm just saying this is my
00:08:47 ◼ ► dad. And my dad's always been a Democrat. But I was really, and I went, do you see the Harrison
00:08:53 ◼ ► Ford thing this week? Yeah. Man, the way he opened, I've been voting for 60, I can't do an
00:08:58 ◼ ► impression, but I've been voting for 64 years. - Given that it's Harrison Ford, and I'm a huge
00:09:04 ◼ ► fan of his work, but also like getting to see him on stuff like, this sounds random, but if you see
00:09:08 ◼ ► him on the Conan O'Brien podcast in particular, they have such a fun rapport and you get to see
00:09:14 ◼ ► how good Harrison Ford is at doing his bit. And we all know Harrison Ford's kind of grumpy old
00:09:20 ◼ ► bit coming from him in particular. He's got a lot of credibility with me as a serious person. And
00:09:31 ◼ ► I do too. But the part that reminded me of my dad was the very opening. I'd been voting for
00:09:36 ◼ ► 64 years. Never really wanted to talk about it very much. And my dad's blue voting, it was like
00:09:44 ◼ ► that. He's the type of man who saw it as a civic responsibility to vote every election day, even
00:09:51 ◼ ► in the odd years when it's the borough tax collector is the only thing on the ballot or
00:09:56 ◼ ► the school board. My dad just thought that's what you do as a citizen. You pay attention,
00:10:07 ◼ ► Not to put a sign out in the lawn guy. That's the never really wanted to talk about it much.
00:10:13 ◼ ► And isn't going to tell other people how to vote, that sort of thing. Although if his friends asked,
00:10:19 ◼ ► and I think as an 84-year-old, his peer group was decidedly Trumpy, but that's the way it is.
00:10:26 ◼ ► It's not like he sat there in silence. He'd give it to them, but in a friendly way. And in a way
00:10:32 ◼ ► that I think people think maybe doesn't happen anymore, but does. The coffee counter where he
00:10:38 ◼ ► goes to, there's people who voted one way and people who voted the other, and they do feel
00:10:43 ◼ ► strongly, but they can stop talking about that and go back to talking about the Eagles and the Dallas
00:10:49 ◼ ► Cowboys playing this weekend, the next minute. But anyway, he called me Tuesday morning, and
00:10:57 ◼ ► given that I know he cares about politics and we just talked the day before, I thought that's
00:11:02 ◼ ► certainly all that was on my mind. And figured it was all that was on his, but he said he had
00:11:07 ◼ ► something to tell me, and he's laughing. He's laughing. But I know him. Like I said, he's my
00:11:16 ◼ ► dad, and I talk to him every day, and he's laughing, but I could tell something's not right. And of
00:11:22 ◼ ► course, I'm thinking, you always think, is it something with his health? He's lost a lot of
00:11:26 ◼ ► weight in recent years. He's gone to the doctor and they weigh him, and they say he's lost,
00:11:32 ◼ ► I don't know, 40 pounds, maybe 50 pounds. His fingers are bonier. He's calling me right now,
00:11:39 ◼ ► as a matter of fact. That's true. No, I know. I just saw it. Yeah. He always, his voicemails,
00:11:45 ◼ ► it's, this is a true story, his voicemails to me, which he always leaves a voicemail if I don't
00:11:49 ◼ ► answer, always says, I don't know if you're on a podcast or something. I'll talk to you later.
00:11:55 ◼ ► This time it's true, and I will tell him that. But anyway, he's lost weight. His fingers have
00:12:01 ◼ ► gotten bony, and I could tell there's something wrong in his voice. And he told me he went out
00:12:06 ◼ ► to eat the night before by himself. In fact, to the same restaurant where the one where he and
00:12:11 ◼ ► my mom had eaten the night before she died. And he came home, and he, you know, he's old, and he's
00:12:17 ◼ ► always been very much a morning person. He was going to bed, probably like 6.37. Daylight savings
00:12:24 ◼ ► had just kicked in too. And he went to wash his hands before bed, and as he's washing his hands,
00:12:36 ◼ ► when we were talking about his weight, and I believe it was in the context of him just having
00:12:41 ◼ ► him just having gone to his doctor for a health checkup, that they said, "Hey, you've lost weight,
00:12:47 ◼ ► but you know, everything's good. Blood work's good. There's nothing, we're not really worried
00:12:52 ◼ ► about it. It's just you're 84." And he's like, "Yeah, my wedding ring's even loose. I have to
00:12:56 ◼ ► be careful when I do dishes and stuff now." And here he came home and was washing his hands,
00:13:01 ◼ ► and the ring wasn't there. And he looked everywhere he could at night, but it's, you know,
00:13:07 ◼ ► night he's 84. And he went to bed without it and woke up in the morning and in the light, searched
00:13:13 ◼ ► everywhere. Searched the drain, searched the tub, looked on the floor, looked under the couch,
00:13:18 ◼ ► went out to the car, looked in the car and the floor, looked between the cracks, couldn't find
00:13:23 ◼ ► it. And he thought to him, he said to me, and I just know I had it at the restaurant. And it's not
00:13:29 ◼ ► because he remembers looking at his wedding ring at the restaurant, it's that he knows that if he
00:13:35 ◼ ► had eaten a full meal and it wasn't on his finger, he would have noticed because I don't know if you
00:13:39 ◼ ► wear a ring, but I wear a wedding ring. And if I take it off, my finger feels incredibly weird now.
00:13:45 ◼ ► You notice the absence, you notice the absence of it, not that it's there. And he said, "I don't
00:13:51 ◼ ► remember looking at it at the restaurant, but I just know I would have noticed." But he called
00:13:54 ◼ ► the restaurant anyway, but they're only open starting at four or something like that. So,
00:13:59 ◼ ► there was nobody there. So, he left a message, left his name and number in case anybody finds it.
00:14:14 ◼ ► this time with a flashlight and searched and searched and you know how it is when you lose
00:14:19 ◼ ► something. You become manic. It's like there's a loop that you can't close until you have some
00:14:24 ◼ ► feeling that you've, even as your mind is telling you, this is a long shot, you're like, well,
00:14:29 ◼ ► this is a long shot, I've got to ride out because I don't know what I'd do if this happened. I know
00:14:35 ◼ ► that's such a desperate feeling. You look at this, and it's like when it really starts to make you
00:14:41 ◼ ► sick is when you're looking in the same spot. All the places it couldn't be. Again. And you're like,
00:14:46 ◼ ► I don't even remember how many times I've looked in the sink. I've lost count, but it's nowhere.
00:14:55 ◼ ► I told Amy and when I told her, she almost burst into tears. And she said, "Your mom just died."
00:15:03 ◼ ► And I don't believe, I'm not superstitious. I really am not. But my ear hears superstition.
00:15:13 ◼ ► The Yankees lost two games of the World Series and I hadn't worn my hat. So when I watched game three,
00:15:27 ◼ ► And I'll tell you this, Merlin, it is selfish and it is not. My heart breaks for my dad.
00:15:36 ◼ ► Because the ring, whatever it means to me, it means 100 times more to him. But when he dies,
00:16:14 ◼ ► And he usually calls me around 11 or so. And he'd woken up and he read the news because he'd gone
00:16:23 ◼ ► to bed long before the election was called and processed the election. He went to mass. He goes
00:16:30 ◼ ► to daily mass a lot, especially after my mom has died, which not because he's turned to religion
00:16:36 ◼ ► afterwards, but because I, again, I feel like he wasn't as comfortable leaving her alone.
00:16:41 ◼ ► And I think he really enjoys the relative solitude of daily Catholic mass compared to Sunday mass. He
00:16:49 ◼ ► goes on Saturdays too for the weekly stuff. And he drove home and he parked in front of the house
00:16:56 ◼ ► in the exact same spot, which just happened to be open. And my parents live across the street
00:17:00 ◼ ► from the elementary school I went to, so parking on weekdays is often difficult. But he got the
00:17:06 ◼ ► exact same spot. And they changed the street from when I grew up, it was two ways. And it's
00:17:15 ◼ ► blah, blah, blah, safety of the kids, the school bus. They changed it to a one-way street just a
00:17:22 ◼ ► handful of years ago, which is still really weird for me when I drive home. But because it's a
00:17:26 ◼ ► one-way street on my dad's house, my parents, I'll always call it my parents' house, my parents' house,
00:17:33 ◼ ► you park the wrong way now with the driver's door on the side of the curb. And he opened the door,
00:17:40 ◼ ► and it was the same spot where he parked before. And he looked, it's just thought wonder, and he
00:17:52 ◼ ► in a bunch of leaves, a bunch of dry leaves. My dad calls it the gutter. It's not a gutter like
00:18:00 ◼ ► a drain, but there would be. And he had told everybody this story, and he told his neighbors,
00:18:05 ◼ ► and his one neighbor, he saw him, and my dad said, "I picked that ring up and I kissed it, John."
00:18:10 ◼ ► And his neighbor said it, and said, "If it had even fricking rained, that ring would have just
00:18:21 ◼ ► well, it's just the obvious thing, if it had moved one car length away, that would have-
00:18:25 ◼ ► Pete: Yeah, or if that spot hadn't been open. If that spot hadn't been open, he might not have
00:18:30 ◼ ► looked down when he got out of the car. Jared; It's like something out of a fairy tale,
00:18:37 ◼ ► Pete; Well, but there it was on the street, two days later, just sitting there in a bunch of
00:18:42 ◼ ► leaves, which is probably why he didn't hear it when it hit the street, because it hit dry leaves.
00:18:48 ◼ ► And that doesn't help with anything that's coming with the election. But I needed that.
00:18:57 ◼ ► I don't know. You know, they used to, Obama had a lot of posters with just the word "hope."
00:19:17 ◼ ► And I mean, I'm glad he found it. But my God, what a, we think Joe Biden's last six months
00:19:24 ◼ ► have been crazy. That's, Jesus. What do you think? I'll say what I always say, it'll all be fine.
00:19:34 ◼ ► What do I think? I think that is, thank you for sharing that. That was amazing. I think so many
00:19:40 ◼ ► of us have stories like that because we're human beings and we're Americans. And even more than
00:19:46 ◼ ► regular human beings, I think Americans tend to impugn. You get to give us coincidences or magical
00:19:51 ◼ ► thinking, but I think most of us have a tendency to, it's the way our attention works. Our attention
00:19:56 ◼ ► is such a, such a frazzled, crazy thing. And I think one thing most of us know is that when we
00:20:01 ◼ ► are feeling especially emotionally elevated, think about when you're in a car crash and it feels
00:20:06 ◼ ► really slow and you feel like you remember and like, I'm not a neurologist. I don't know how
00:20:11 ◼ ► that works, but I do know that whether that's the causes of trauma or the causes of lifetime elation,
00:20:17 ◼ ► that there is a very, I'm not trying to scientific this, but there is a very elevated emotional state
00:20:23 ◼ ► that we go through that can make us very vulnerable and can make us very, again, I'm always
00:20:29 ◼ ► hung up on this idea of trauma and what causes us to process information differently after the
00:20:35 ◼ ► traumas of our life. And one of those is we start casting about for what the story is. It's something
00:20:39 ◼ ► everybody does. Everybody loves a good story. You just told a good story. You told a good story. You
00:20:43 ◼ ► could have stopped on November 4th or 5th and it would have still been a good story, but you've had
00:20:47 ◼ ► a nice thing to the end of that. We do that. We want to see a frame around things. We want to
00:20:52 ◼ ► understand things. One of the things I'm personally not going to get crazy into today personally is
00:20:58 ◼ ► all of the recriminations and the goblin hunting and all of the searching around for who did what
00:21:03 ◼ ► wrong. And like, I, I'm finding that very overwhelming and personally, I reject a lot of those
00:21:08 ◼ ► frames personally, but that's how it works. That's the way it works is with that attenuated, that
00:21:16 ◼ ► higher, that elevated attention in that state of emotionality, we tend to notice more things.
00:21:27 ◼ ► Pete I think both things can be true. I don't think that my dad lost his wedding ring on the eve
00:21:42 ◼ ► Pete; And found it the day after as a symbol of hope after a dark event. I don't think that
00:21:51 ◼ ► there's any cosmic aspect to it. But, as you said, human beings are natural pattern finders
00:22:11 ◼ ► Pete; And it's where the whole paranoid mindset and, and, and, or just conspiracy mindset.
00:22:18 ◼ ► Jared; Yeah, like, what would explain, what, again, not necessarily the election, but for
00:22:23 ◼ ► a lot of things, what would explain, give me a way to, a word I like a lot, I don't know if I'm using
00:22:28 ◼ ► this correctly, but how do I take this, what appears to be true information about the world,
00:22:32 ◼ ► and how do I integrate it into the way that I see the world? And how do I, how do I think,
00:22:36 ◼ ► how do I decide, how do I do as a result of that? It's, I don't think that's that exotic an idea.
00:22:47 ◼ ► made those events coincident, but the fact that they were coincident has tremendous meaning to me.
00:22:54 ◼ ► I would have noted if my dad had lost his wedding ring on December 4th and found it December 6th in
00:23:01 ◼ ► the exact same way, I would have been just as worried and heartsick about it for the 24 hours
00:23:07 ◼ ► that I thought it was lost, and I would have been just as jubilant for him the day that he found it,
00:23:40 ◼ ► to butcher Kierkegaard, like, that's the terrible thing in life. Life goes on whether we're into it
00:23:46 ◼ ► or not. We will keep going until we don't, and it benefits us in some ways, it benefits us in
00:23:54 ◼ ► some ways to obviously keep situational awareness, keep our head about us, to stay as emotionally
00:23:58 ◼ ► stable as we can. But also, I mean, there's sometimes some very poignant, meaningful things
00:24:04 ◼ ► that can happen to us that whether they reflect the unseen hand of the universe, I'll leave to
00:24:10 ◼ ► other people, I think probably not, but that doesn't mean it's not without value for you.
00:24:17 ◼ ► For good and bad, we can imprint on certain kinds of things, and I think there are worse things to
00:24:23 ◼ ► take away from the month of November than the idea that your dad kept going and maybe America can't
00:24:28 ◼ ► do. Pete; Exactly. I mean it. I really do. I'm going to take a break and thank our first sponsor.
00:24:36 ◼ ► I am. Jared; Hi. You gotta do it right now. Okay. Pete; Life goes on. You gotta hit the
00:24:40 ◼ ► money bell as our friend Bob, or what was his name? The money belt guy, the guy who's the
00:24:45 ◼ ► narrator of A Christmas Story? Jared; Gene, Gene Shepard. Pete; Gene Shepard, that's right. Gene
00:24:50 ◼ ► Shepard, the narrator and author of the original work. Jared; Scott Farkas. Scott Farkas, what a
00:24:54 ◼ ► lousy name. Pete; Of A Christmas Story used to be the host of Drive Time Radio and what he is.
00:24:59 ◼ ► Jared; I think he was like an Art Bell. Wasn't he like a late night radio guy? And he would just
00:25:02 ◼ ► sit on a mic and just tell a three-hour story. Pete; Yeah, yeah, I think he was late night. Hours
00:25:04 ◼ ► a day. Right, and part of his shtick was when he got to a commercial break, he'd say, "Gotta hit
00:25:09 ◼ ► the money bell." And I think he even had a little, yeah, there we go. Well, there's the money bell,
00:25:13 ◼ ► and it's our good friends at Squarespace. You guys. Jared; Squarespace. Pete; Squarespace. Look,
00:25:17 ◼ ► hey, hey, you got things you want to say because of the news, because of what's happened? You feel
00:25:22 ◼ ► like maybe social media isn't really healthy for you, but you still want to be on the internet? You
00:25:28 ◼ ► know what you could do? You could and probably should, and it's probably been in the back of your
00:25:32 ◼ ► head, maybe just have your own website. And you know what's a really, really good, easy way to
00:25:38 ◼ ► have your own website with your own domain that you control and just sort of has what you want
00:25:43 ◼ ► to say and none of the noise. You could build it at Squarespace, which is just an all-in-one,
00:25:53 ◼ ► to the way it looks to the style. All of it is built into Squarespace itself. You don't need apps,
00:25:58 ◼ ► you don't need any kind of web development skills. You don't need to know the difference between
00:26:04 ◼ ► HTML and CSS. You can just do it all in the browser, very visually, right there at Squarespace.
00:26:14 ◼ ► anybody, you get 30 days free trial. But if you go to squarespace.com/talkshow, which is actually
00:26:21 ◼ ► the URL specific to this show, you'll still get the 30 days free trial, but you'll also save 10%
00:26:28 ◼ ► off your first purchase of a website or domain. You could prepay for your website a whole year in
00:26:35 ◼ ► advance, save 10% with that code squarespace.com/talkshow. I don't know. I think, you know,
00:26:43 ◼ ► a lot of people take moments like this to reevaluate their lives and what they're doing.
00:26:48 ◼ ► And if one of them is making your own website, I sincerely, not just because they're a long time,
00:26:54 ◼ ► very regular sponsor of the show, I mean it in terms of actually getting off your ass and making
00:27:05 ◼ ► - Thanks Squarespace. You know what I do on my Squarespace site? One of the things I do?
00:27:10 ◼ ► This is not to polish your skirt, just a little bit. It's so nice to have me on every four years
00:27:15 ◼ ► on the worst day of the year. Thank you so much. But I use Markdown is what I do for my blocks.
00:27:20 ◼ ► I have bits that I do in Markdown and it's just easier to me and the way my mind works to keep
00:27:26 ◼ ► that as text. But with that said, can I make a pitch for Squarespace? Do you mind real quick?
00:27:33 ◼ ► Listen, you're a nerd. You're listening to this. You're probably doing the international symbol
00:27:37 ◼ ► for regular expressions. You're probably out there making your own pearl like Chairman Gruber does,
00:27:41 ◼ ► but it not only is it very fun to use, here's the thing. Even if it's not for you, it's probably
00:27:52 ◼ ► earning my living such as that was as a web guy, which is that for things like my kids' preschool,
00:27:59 ◼ ► for things like church groups, for things like whatever a little group is that needs to do stuff.
00:28:15 ◼ ► - Oh, yeah. Well, and when you have to get all the stuff in Microsoft, you have to save it out.
00:28:19 ◼ ► And oh gosh, I forgot, somebody made this actual HTML in Word. So now I've got to clean all this
00:28:24 ◼ ► up. I got to go into BB Edit. I got to run my scripts to take out all those little squares
00:28:28 ◼ ► with question marks in them. Like all that kind of stuff you've got to do. What's nice about this is
00:28:32 ◼ ► if you can get them, your beloved group or friend or whomever, just kind of set up with this,
00:28:38 ◼ ► they could set it up themselves and it'd be fun. But the neat thing is you don't have to be on the
00:28:43 ◼ ► payroll forever as the circa 1996 webmaster with this. You get it going and anybody can update it
00:28:50 ◼ ► that's on their team and it's fun to do. It's Squarespace. What are you doing, John? You're
00:28:54 ◼ ► looking at your phone. What are you doing? - We'll get to it. But giving into obsession
00:29:03 ◼ ► - There's something so gratifying sometimes. This is really more content from a different show that
00:29:10 ◼ ► I do, but I am somewhat famously not somebody who excels at what are normally thought of as vacations.
00:29:23 ◼ ► - Well, I would be happy to discuss that maybe in four years we can come back and talk about,
00:29:31 ◼ ► people think of as vacations. And frankly, I'm very counter revolutionary about people telling
00:29:36 ◼ ► me whether I'm having fun at things or not. I'm a little bit of a pill about that stuff.
00:29:40 ◼ ► But I think sometimes there is something very gratifying about willfully saying to yourself,
00:29:47 ◼ ► this is gonna sound nuts to a lot of people, a lot of the same people who think they can yell
00:29:51 ◼ ► themselves asleep at night, a lot of the same people who think that they can just do a New
00:29:55 ◼ ► Year's resolution to utterly change everything about them despite having no basis for making
00:30:00 ◼ ► that assumption about themselves. I think sometimes it is very gratifying to say I'm having a morning
00:30:04 ◼ ► off or whatever. But to say I am deliberately going to be undertaking something that maybe
00:30:12 ◼ ► another person might see as a distraction, but like the great David Allen said, pencils do need
00:30:18 ◼ ► to be sharpened. They maybe just oughtn't be sharpened while your house is on fire. We have
00:30:23 ◼ ► a built-in sense of where we need to be spending our time and attention, but there's some times
00:30:28 ◼ ► when, man, I'm gonna sharpen the fuck out of some pencils. And for me, we've talked about this a
00:30:34 ◼ ► little bit already, because this is not an easy episode for either of us, but I realized, oh my
00:30:39 ◼ ► gosh, I gotta get reconcilable differences up. I was so thrilled that our producer Jim said,
00:30:44 ◼ ► the episodes are ready, and I was like, oh my God, I get 15 minutes of struggling with Libsyn.
00:30:52 ◼ ► there's a reason doctors and other more competent people tell you to take a walk. Get out in the
00:30:58 ◼ ► greenery, get out and take a walk. I'm not trying to be helpful here, but just to say that there is
00:31:02 ◼ ► something that is difficult for a lot of Americans. There's a reason I'm talking about sleep,
00:31:07 ◼ ► because I think they're very related. Americans are very shameful about the whole idea of meeting
00:31:11 ◼ ► sleep, about taking time for sleep, about taking care of their sleep. And as an old man, I feel
00:31:16 ◼ ► qualified to say to you, hey, maybe don't be so tough on yourself about those things. Maybe that
00:31:20 ◼ ► is something, a part of your life that might need a fairly new frame or approach for you to do well.
00:31:25 ◼ ► And if you're having a hard time and you say, I'm gonna take two hours, maybe you're gonna go see the
00:31:29 ◼ ► wonderful Francis Ford Coppola movie Megalopolis, which I think might be four and a half hours.
00:31:33 ◼ ► But you go and you say, this is the thing I'm gonna do now without guilt or without means of
00:31:38 ◼ ► evasion. This is just the thing I'm gonna do. I think that maybe you can't do that forever,
00:31:44 ◼ ► like I try to do. But I think for a lot of us, that can be a good way to sort of get your head
00:31:50 ◼ ► together. And I'm gonna tell you the anti-pattern to me. The anti-pattern, and I have the scars to
00:31:56 ◼ ► show this, unless it works for you, maybe you don't need to submerge yourself in every conceivable
00:32:08 ◼ ► - I think we'll come back to this numerous times. I mean, let me just say this, let me interrupt and
00:32:15 ◼ ► just say that as we're recording this on Thursday the seventh, so it's day two of realizing what's
00:32:25 ◼ ► happened again. - You know what this is? This is Trump S2E1. We're currently in the first episode
00:32:32 ◼ ► of the second season. - In 2016, when you and I first had one of these post-election holiday
00:32:38 ◼ ► parties, I believe we recorded the day after. And I don't remember why, because I was trying
00:32:45 ◼ ► to remember. - I was trying to remember, and I can't be fucked to go back and listen to it, but.
00:32:49 ◼ ► - I don't remember why. Were we already scheduled, thinking again deja vu, so much deja vu?
00:32:57 ◼ ► - Why would we record a podcast to talk about Hillary's win? Like, why would we schedule that?
00:33:04 ◼ ► I mean, it's gonna... - Or did we even like, "Hey, oh yeah, we'll be coasting on the positive
00:33:07 ◼ ► vibes of our first woman president." - I see a very large multi-gigabyte file in my application
00:33:13 ◼ ► support library a lot. So I'm gonna see if maybe that text still exists, because I think it was as
00:33:20 ◼ ► basic as, "Well, I guess we need to record a podcast." - I don't know, maybe that's what we did.
00:33:26 ◼ ► Maybe we decided on the spot to do it, but I will say, and I told you yesterday, yesterday you and I
00:33:35 ◼ ► just spoke on the phone for 45, because we thought about doing it yesterday. - You can tell the story
00:33:39 ◼ ► if you want. I would be fine with you saying what happened. - So the story is, a week ago, people started hitting me up,
00:33:44 ◼ ► "Hey, you and Merlin are gonna do this again." Because you and I did, as I alluded to earlier, we did
00:33:49 ◼ ► do it again four years ago under much happier circumstances the day after Biden. And I guess
00:33:54 ◼ ► when we recorded four years ago, it wasn't official, but you, yeah, you know, and we'll get to
00:34:00 ◼ ► Kornacki. If you follow Kornacki, you knew, it's hard to explain, but... - I have so much to say about Kornacki.
00:34:06 ◼ ► Like, it wasn't official four years ago until Friday morning, but... - No, it was Friday, but Saturday was
00:34:11 ◼ ► like when it was officially, like, yeah, official, there's still one person that disagrees, but, you
00:34:16 ◼ ► know, 300 million others. - Yeah, some disagreements, but... - It's all just gonna happen in a democracy.
00:34:24 ◼ ► - We recorded the day after knowing that Biden was almost certainly the victor, and a week ago I reached
00:34:30 ◼ ► out. People had started hitting me up, "Hey, you and Merlin are gonna have a holiday party again," and
00:34:33 ◼ ► I had been thinking about it, but I hadn't really reached out, which you kind of have to do, and you
00:34:39 ◼ ► were like, "Yeah, I guess so." We had penciled in yesterday afternoon, and we didn't really, at the
00:34:46 ◼ ► time, you could go back, and it's not that long ago, you could go back and look at the exact text.
00:34:50 ◼ ► We didn't really talk about the if, the implicit if-then-else statement of how that might go,
00:35:02 ◼ ► and it wasn't a cocksuredness like we, I had it certainly in 2016, where I thought it was
00:35:08 ◼ ► just a stone-cold lock that Hillary Clinton was going to win, both because I thought she was,
00:35:15 ◼ ► had run a good campaign, was the best qualified candidate, still to this day, the best qualified
00:35:23 ◼ ► candidate in the history of the United, or of modern United States, to serve as president,
00:35:30 ◼ ► and the fact that the candidate that the other party had nominated was a seven-times-bankrupted
00:35:37 ◼ ► reality TV show blowhard clown from Queens, and sort of a joke, who obviously himself clearly
00:35:47 ◼ ► did not expect to win, and, right? And there's the whole thing, and people listened to it,
00:36:19 ◼ ► before calls had been made, and realized that he was going to win, and I went, I'm not an animal,
00:36:26 ◼ ► the vodka is stored in the freezer, so it was ice cold, but I had poured healthy pour of vodka
00:36:33 ◼ ► straight into a pint glass, which is ordinarily meant for something much lower in alcohol content
00:37:02 ◼ ► I don't—one thing, I do not listen to this show. I cannot, I do, I reread and self-edit my writing
00:37:15 ◼ ► but I also can't imagine, there's no way to do what I do without it, and I do it, but I find
00:37:20 ◼ ► myself unable to listen to myself on a podcast, and if it were up to me and I had to edit myself—
00:37:35 ◼ ► You don't go back and listen to our old, you don't listen to the banana window? That was a classic.
00:37:39 ◼ ► I sure it was, and I, some things, the things that I remember were good, but I do remember the
00:37:44 ◼ ► moment while we were, I'm gonna guess it was maybe 15 minutes in, 20 minutes in, and you, I remember,
00:37:52 ◼ ► what I remember is you saying to me, you, it dawning on you that I had maybe had a drink before
00:38:15 ◼ ► you said some of the funniest stuff that I still think about to this day, and I'm gonna quote you,
00:38:22 ◼ ► because I remember this, is that you said that you had, maybe you'd had some drinks while you're
00:38:27 ◼ ► recording with our friend Dan, and Dan kind of intimated that maybe there was something just
00:38:30 ◼ ► a little bit chemically different about you, and you said, "We're having a holiday party over here."
00:38:35 ◼ ► And Dan said, "Well, why didn't I get an invite?" And you said, "Because you used the word invite."
00:38:46 ◼ ► Yeah. It probably led me, I don't know if I did it on the spot then or not, but it reminds me of
00:38:56 ◼ ► probably the closest, or certainly the time that I should have been punched right in the mouth
00:39:14 ◼ ► you'd think it's sort of like in the building full of student clubs and stuff. And it was like
00:39:21 ◼ ► the beginning of a semester, and I was already an upperclassman, very comfortable and familiar,
00:39:30 ◼ ► and somebody was there paid to give out coupon books, little books, and please take it,
00:39:36 ◼ ► and then you local pizza establishments and get these—I don't know, take the book and then you can
00:39:41 ◼ ► go save five dollars on a sandwich at a local establishment. And me and a friend were doing
00:39:48 ◼ ► something, I forget what, but it required us to leave the building and come back with a couple
00:39:53 ◼ ► of things, take it up to the newspaper office, go back down, get some more, come back up,
00:39:58 ◼ ► several trips. And every time we came in, this kid who'd been hired to give out these coupon books,
00:40:02 ◼ ► he was just approaching everybody as they came by, and he had been, you know, just like this
00:40:08 ◼ ► third, fourth, fifth time he'd asked us, "Do we want a book?" And we, of course, declined every
00:40:14 ◼ ► time. And by the fifth time, instead of just saying no, no, and he recognized, "Oh yeah,
00:40:20 ◼ ► you guys," again, after he'd asked us, right? We come in, he's like, "Would you guys like a book?"
00:40:28 ◼ ► realized I just asked you guys seven minutes ago, sorry. And we go. And the fourth time, I stopped,
00:40:34 ◼ ► and I turned around and I said to him, "Well, I know you have been by before. Just let me ask you,
00:40:41 ◼ ► are these coupon books or coupon books?" And he said, "They're coupon books." And I said,
00:41:00 ◼ ► he was the one who was with me, and he said, "I can't believe he didn't punch you right in the
00:41:10 ◼ ► I'd like to think I've had a role in that. Maybe not recently, but at the point when you were
00:41:15 ◼ ► struggling—not struggling—but there was a point where you weren't quite as good at talking to
00:41:21 ◼ ► Pete: I've just, I've often tell people this, that I've learned from, now it's different
00:41:27 ◼ ► because people you would, if you're alluding to when, like, I, WWDC is really the only thing left
00:41:33 ◼ ► on the calendar. But I go to WWDC and I'm suddenly, for lack of a better word, I'm micro-famous.
00:41:38 ◼ ► Steven: Oh, Jesus, I'm nobody now. I, oh, I'm nobody everywhere. It's, it's bananas. I mean,
00:41:44 ◼ ► it doesn't, it's not that bad. It's not bad at all, but it is pretty wild compared, I was just
00:41:51 ◼ ► looking at photos of our baby shower from 2007 and we used to be so much more popular than we are now.
00:41:57 ◼ ► Pete; You don't ever get, but do you, I mean, we were just up in Boston where our kid is going to
00:42:03 ◼ ► college and just, we all, we had gone to see the three of us. My wife and I went to visit him
00:42:10 ◼ ► a couple weeks ago and we went to see the Beetlejuice Beetlejuice because the whole family
00:42:14 ◼ ► is fans of such movies and it was fine. It was a good movie. I recommend it and I don't go to
00:42:20 ◼ ► theaters much anymore and really enjoyed it and we came out of the theater and we were like, where
00:42:24 ◼ ► to go next? And I don't know, Matt Nace was four and there's some very kind person who might be,
00:42:30 ◼ ► again, might well be listening to us. I do forget his name, but gave me a look and said,
00:42:36 ◼ ► are you John Gruber? The are you John Gruber? I said, yes, who are you? And got his name.
00:42:42 ◼ ► Pete; Asked him where he's from, what he does, and that's all, that is what I learned from you,
00:42:48 ◼ ► my friend. You told me years ago, probably at a South by Southwest where I was incredibly awkward
00:42:53 ◼ ► to somebody who'd come up to us, you said, think about it, they know you, and I've probably already
00:42:59 ◼ ► been podcasting, they know your voice, but they know a lot about you because they're recognizing
00:43:04 ◼ ► you and they read your work and you don't know anything about them. So, the imbalance is 100%.
00:43:09 ◼ ► Whatever they know about me, and again, they don't know everything about me, they know what I share
00:43:15 ◼ ► publicly, not my private self, but I know nothing about them. So, ask them, find out, what's their
00:43:20 ◼ ► name? What do they do? Where are they from? Jared; It sounds like pretty cheesy day one
00:43:28 ◼ ► Pete; Now everybody listening when it happens and they recognize me or you and we do this,
00:43:52 ◼ ► Jared; But Jeb also knew an important thing, which is that if you want something in life,
00:43:59 ◼ ► could I have more applause, please? It's good. There was an article in the New York Times,
00:44:02 ◼ ► gosh, at this point, probably over a year ago that I came across and I'll ask you to just
00:44:06 ◼ ► bear with me for a minute, but this is an article that I have found very useful in my own life and
00:44:10 ◼ ► others may find useful and it sounds corny, but that's okay, which is that if you've ever had an
00:44:15 ◼ ► experience, let's say classically with your partner, your spouse, whatever, where you go in
00:44:20 ◼ ► and you're like having a terrible day and you say something and you're like, oh, I'm dealing with
00:44:24 ◼ ► this guy again and then usually the man goes, well, why don't you blah, blah, blah and you
00:44:28 ◼ ► should go do this and put up a post-it note and get a sash and like, blah, blah, blah, blah.
00:44:32 ◼ ► What this article said is just ask a simple thing, there's three H's. Do you want to be helped? Do
00:44:37 ◼ ► you want to be hugged or do you want to be heard? Now, I think this is a very powerful thought
00:44:42 ◼ ► technology because once you have made it okay to have that conversation, you can hit escape
00:44:47 ◼ ► and just like pop out of whatever's happening in that moment and you could say to your partner,
00:44:52 ◼ ► hey, not in a mean way, in a totally straight up way, do you want to be helped? Do you want to be
00:44:56 ◼ ► heard or do you want to be hugged? Because let me just say, as somebody who frequently just wants
00:44:59 ◼ ► to be heard, I sure as shit don't want to be helped. And like there are times when I just
00:45:05 ◼ ► mean, I just need a hug. You don't need a hug like we all do, but like it's, there's ways that you
00:45:10 ◼ ► can like, you don't have to be like an over the top in therapy person to find this useful.
00:45:16 ◼ ► It's just a nice way to say it. Hey, it sounds like you and eventually you'll learn, hey,
00:45:19 ◼ ► you know what? Maybe that person just doesn't want or need my help very much. So maybe that's
00:45:24 ◼ ► something I should stop making my default response. I think stuff like that's pretty powerful,
00:45:32 ◼ ► I am aware that I am learning and changing less in middle age than I was when I was younger,
00:45:52 ◼ ► most old guys aren't, we talked about this privately yesterday, but that's something I've
00:45:56 ◼ ► said, the single greatest affliction of the, I'm just going to give you the full array,
00:46:01 ◼ ► the single greatest challenge to the white American aging man is the belief that he is not
00:46:06 ◼ ► sufficiently appreciated. And I say that not as a way of announcing that I've gotten better about it,
00:46:11 ◼ ► but as a way of saying, oh no, that's every day. Like every day you're constantly going,
00:46:16 ◼ ► like, I feel like whether that's your ability to identify classic Les Paul guitars, whether that's
00:46:39 ◼ ► And then Palatino, just remember Palatino, it's got the foot going one way. One foot goes one way,
00:47:01 ◼ ► I'll tell you, something I've learned and I think I might have, I think long before I think I might
00:47:07 ◼ ► have been guilty, I think I might have been guilty more in 2016, maybe, but I certainly felt it
00:47:19 ◼ ► I do want to talk about it and I am, I don't know if you've noticed, I am posting about it
00:47:26 ◼ ► and writing about it, but I am not and I, not because I'm afraid to or I feel like it's out of
00:47:35 ◼ ► turn, I am not going to offer any suggestions as to what could have or should have been done
00:47:43 ◼ ► differently. I'm not, I don't think what anybody out there who is hurting because of this election
00:47:50 ◼ ► needs to hear that. I don't think they need, in your context, help, which would be the,
00:48:12 ◼ ► to what others, not maybe want to advise as having done differently, but how others are,
00:48:19 ◼ ► I'm sure you're the same, I'm sure everybody listening has had this experience, text messages,
00:48:24 ◼ ► maybe even phone calls, but you know, I've heard from a lot of friends and I've myself reached out
00:48:54 ◼ ► and this is not about who you voted for, it's just more like that's the way life works,
00:49:02 ◼ ► And if there's somebody you think about a lot and you miss a lot, there's a chance you might love
00:49:06 ◼ ► them. So it's probably a good idea to reconnect with them if they're on your mind a lot. I'm,
00:49:11 ◼ ► I'm very, I'm very grateful about that. But no, I, I don't, I'm, geez, I don't know. You should
00:49:17 ◼ ► do this episode. Well, I'll just say this, I'll just go back to where I was a few minutes ago and
00:49:21 ◼ ► just say, I don't know what, I don't know what we did or how we did it the day after the election in
00:49:25 ◼ ► 2016. And part of it was that I was hung over and had a couple more. I, again, I don't, I haven't
00:49:32 ◼ ► listened to, I've listened to it a little bit here and there, but I, I couldn't have been drunk again
00:49:38 ◼ ► because otherwise there's no way the show would have hit, but it hit for people. And people really
00:49:43 ◼ ► this post-hoc reconstruction of an audio recording in 2016, it was going to be bother. I do remember
00:49:49 ◼ ► at one point, what was our catchphrase that episode? You're not going to get all of them.
00:49:54 ◼ ► I think was the catchphrase. Oh, I don't know. Listen, we're going to, we're going to listen.
00:49:58 ◼ ► Well, maybe I should listen to that. We're almost inevitably going to say something here that
00:50:02 ◼ ► somebody's going to disagree with, but we're not going to get all of you. There's no way that as
00:50:08 ◼ ► big as we would like to make our tent too soon, as big as we try to make our tent, it's not going to
00:50:13 ◼ ► fit everybody who doesn't actually want to be in a tent and would rather set the tent on fire or
00:50:18 ◼ ► play golf on it. I have not really spent a lot of time on social media in the last 48 hours. And I
00:50:26 ◼ ► would recommend for anybody out there who's like, yeah, me too. I haven't by the time you listen to
00:50:30 ◼ ► this. Yeah, stay off. Nobody ever regrets staying off social media longer. If you're taking a break
00:50:35 ◼ ► and you're like, I wonder if I've taken enough of a break. Eh, if you're even asking yourself,
00:50:40 ◼ ► keep it going. But I checked in. I mostly agree, but I think also the important thing to remember
00:50:45 ◼ ► is whatever contest you've made for yourself about anything, it's your fucking contest. You can go
00:50:51 ◼ ► and choose to do whatever it is that you want to do. Maybe part of the problem is also that in
00:50:56 ◼ ► addition to this feeling that things like social media, like we're addicted in some ways perhaps,
00:51:02 ◼ ► or we are, I mean, my way I look at it not as being addicted, but as being like, it's difficult
00:51:07 ◼ ► not to be a character in that particular world participating in like, when I have times away from
00:51:14 ◼ ► social media, people think I'm like having a self-harm thing. It's like, no, I just, this is
00:51:19 ◼ ► not a, this is not a fruitful thing for me or you right now. And when I know that, that's a good
00:51:25 ◼ ► time to step out. Same way that like, if you don't like what's happening at the party, just leave.
00:51:29 ◼ ► Don't try to legislate a better party by yelling everybody down. Sometimes you just got to bounce.
00:51:35 ◼ ► Pete: And sometimes when you've got it in your head that, oh my God, this party's excruciating.
00:51:39 ◼ ► I can't wait for it to be over. And then it just pops into your head. Like I could just fucking
00:51:43 ◼ ► leave. And then you leave and you're like, this wasn't like a Rubik's cube. This wasn't a Mensa
00:52:00 ◼ ► it's something you have agency over. Pete I don't know, I don't know what magic we pulled off in
00:52:04 ◼ ► 2016, but I'm so glad that we did because I've heard over the years, even just random times,
00:52:10 ◼ ► people just, it's just, it's probably the best episode of this show that's ever happened and
00:52:16 ◼ ► probably, maybe ever. I don't know. People reference it and in the last 48 hours I was on
00:52:23 ◼ ► for a little, which I thought would be the sanest of the social media and just checking them.
00:52:36 ◼ ► Jared Surprising number of people who've requested that you and I would do what we're doing.
00:52:50 ◼ ► Pete You texted me yesterday, we were going to go at two, I'm going to use Eastern Time,
00:52:54 ◼ ► we were going to record at two and you texted me at 11.52. When we scheduled this recording,
00:53:01 ◼ ► it hadn't really occurred to me that Trump might win. And I have to say, I thought the same thing,
00:53:09 ◼ ► and that is not, that is not, and my analogy that I wrote on Daring Fireball yesterday in one of my
00:53:16 ◼ ► brief posts, and I like it a lot. I love analogies in general, but I really like this one is that
00:53:22 ◼ ► 2016 felt like a trapdoor that we didn't even know existed springing under our feet on election night.
00:53:32 ◼ ► And I just, this is literally unimaginable to me that the American people would nominate Trump.
00:53:41 ◼ ► I thought it was very unlikely that the republic, this is how naive I was, I thought in 2015 it was
00:53:47 ◼ ► pretty unlikely that the republicans would nominate him as their candidate. I knew that
00:53:53 ◼ ► Jared at that time, at that time, it did seem very, very crazy that what we thought of as the
00:53:59 ◼ ► like, Republican sort of mandarins was the word, the classic sort of rock river republicans.
00:54:24 ◼ ► Pete Yeah, but I think, I think that was the year Buchanan embarrassed George H. W. Bush by winning
00:54:28 ◼ ► New Hampshire. Maybe it was '88. I think it was '92, but George W., or George H. W. Bush, the old
00:54:35 ◼ ► George Bush was already president for four years, but the, what we would now call the MAGA types,
00:54:41 ◼ ► were very, very unhappy about his moderate overall views. And Pat Buchanan ran against him and won in
00:54:52 ◼ ► because what I remember from that election, I think, well, what I remember from one of those
00:54:58 ◼ ► elections, and I think it must have been '92, because at that point, H. W. was running against
00:55:03 ◼ ► Clinton, right? What I remember is in the final days, say what you will about the older George
00:55:09 ◼ ► Bush, I've got a lot to say about the older George Bush, but he was seen as like, as they say, one of
00:55:14 ◼ ► the adults in the room. And something happened in the last like, week or two, I guess he got on,
00:55:18 ◼ ► I remember him being on like some kind of like a whistle stop tour. And like, he decided to adopt
00:55:24 ◼ ► the rhetoric of people of like, of being an angry Republican in the same way that Buchanan was,
00:55:31 ◼ ► which I think, again, like in so many elections, put somebody in kind of an awkward position where
00:55:35 ◼ ► it's like, if you're not making the right sounds, as the person who seems ascendant right now,
00:55:39 ◼ ► you might as well be the people, the enemies on the other side. And I just remember it seeming so
00:55:43 ◼ ► undignified. Bob Dole at some point did a similar thing where it's like, of all the people to kind
00:55:48 ◼ ► of break down and become a fussy baby. It's weird that these World War II vets are the people,
00:56:03 ◼ ► Ted Delaney So in 1992, with George H.W. Bush as the sitting president running for reelection,
00:56:09 ◼ ► Buchanan, he lost New Hampshire to Bush, but it was 52-37 in the Republican primary, which...
00:56:16 ◼ ► Ted Delaney The closeness of that. And he did win in 1996 against Bob Dole in New Hampshire.
00:56:23 ◼ ► And Bob Dole, of course, famously went on to be the nominee. But I saw Trump as Buchanan with a bit
00:56:30 ◼ ► more telegenic. I don't know how else to describe it. Pat Buchanan was not going to get to host a
00:56:46 ◼ ► Ted Delaney Right. If you're old enough to remember Pat Buchanan, you'd understand Trump as a fan.
00:56:51 ◼ ► Ted Delaney Yeah, and he literally won the New Hampshire primary in 1996 and embarrassed George,
00:56:58 ◼ ► at least embarrassed old George Bush in '92 while he was sitting president. I knew that there was
00:57:02 ◼ ► this too big for my comfort, populist, right wing, very, very, very white, rock rib male sort of
00:57:12 ◼ ► mindset. And I just saw Trump as Pat Buchanan plus, right? And that he'd finished like that.
00:57:18 ◼ ► And guess what? He did get the—I don't know if you recall this—he did get the nomination in 2016.
00:57:28 ◼ ► that having happened, it's just unimaginable. It was to me. I just, I really could not,
00:57:34 ◼ ► I just couldn't. And when the unimaginable happens, it's no longer unimaginable. Right?
00:57:41 ◼ ► I was talking to, I think, I don't know, I hope I didn't talk when we talked on the phone yesterday,
00:57:47 ◼ ► Pete: I actually, I think it was when I was talking to our mutual friend, Mr. Scott Simpson,
00:57:52 ◼ ► but it reminds me of how I grew up thinking of the generation that went through World War II.
00:57:56 ◼ ► Like, when I was, you and I are, you know, roughly the same age. And when I was a little kid,
00:58:01 ◼ ► you could tell the old people, not the elderly, but just the old, they were the people who'd
00:58:07 ◼ ► lived through World War II. And they're different. They were, there was a hardness to them.
00:58:13 ◼ ► And that was very powerful. Steven: For my family, that was the Depression, where like,
00:58:17 ◼ ► my grandfather was far too young for World War I and a little too old for World War II,
00:58:22 ◼ ► but my mom was born in 34. My father was born in 29. So they, there's all kinds of stuff I'm still
00:58:30 ◼ ► processing about what that meant to my parents and grandparents in terms of, whether that's in terms
00:58:35 ◼ ► of a sort of privation attitude about life or just about how risky everything is, but how you become
00:58:42 ◼ ► like a little bit of a, maybe if not a hoarder, at least what we used to call a string saver,
00:59:06 ◼ ► Let's just say in 1942, 43, there was no certainty or sureness. It looked bad. No, it looked real bad.
00:59:14 ◼ ► And that was just for us. Like we entered, we entered in 30, we have 41. And we had two really
00:59:20 ◼ ► nice big oceans. That's exactly right. Like those oceans were going to keep us safe. And we were
00:59:25 ◼ ► still pretty burned about World War I and how that all went. Well, our friends in the, I mean,
00:59:49 ◼ ► Did you ever see a movie, that John Borman movie, Hope and Gloria, by any chance? It was a movie in
00:59:54 ◼ ► the early mid-80s. The guy who did, I know him from Excalibur, but Hope and Gloria, it's a
01:00:00 ◼ ► wonderful movie about, I think it's a wonderful movie about, in London during the Blitz, it's
01:00:04 ◼ ► about this family, and especially about this little boy who's sort of like a, somebody who's
01:00:09 ◼ ► sort of a stand-in for John Borman. But what life was like in the Blitz. And it's, I won't say it's
01:00:16 ◼ ► like an unvarnished view, but you see how like, you're a little kid just trying to stay alive.
01:00:24 ◼ ► Sammy, something, that blonde woman, she's his older sister. She wants to like meet guys.
01:00:29 ◼ ► And like, he wants to go out and play army with his friends. Well, those guys are getting,
01:00:34 ◼ ► are in the army. Those places where he goes to play with his friends are his other friends'
01:00:39 ◼ ► houses that have been leveled. Because the life does go on. And this is still the time when they
01:00:45 ◼ ► were like trying to keep the kids in London rather than sending them away to other places.
01:00:50 ◼ ► But it just gives you the sense of like, maybe not as much in America, but like in the case of
01:00:54 ◼ ► like my mother-in-law talking about 42, like up until Midway. I mean, like we really needed to
01:01:00 ◼ ► win at Midway. And by the way, is that ever a hell of a story what happened at that battle. But
01:01:04 ◼ ► there was no assurance at all. And then think about this, of all of that. So for us, that's
01:01:09 ◼ ► five years, right? About five, a little over five years of that. But think about this, you had the
01:01:18 ◼ ► Russians and Americans were moving into the camps and Hitler, he could have learned from Napoleon.
01:01:23 ◼ ► Do you really want to go invade? I mean, do you really want to invade Russia in the winter? Maybe
01:01:27 ◼ ► not such a great idea. But that really screwed him up. And then of course, Gering screwed him
01:01:31 ◼ ► over because he was lying about what the Wiffwaffe could do. Don't get me started on this. But
01:01:35 ◼ ► here's the thing, things were on their way. The swing was already moving up after summer of '44.
01:01:43 ◼ ► Things were moving more in our direction. Right. But here's, yes. So then you get into,
01:01:48 ◼ ► think about this, think about like, Anne Frank was alive. Like until like, I think a couple weeks
01:01:55 ◼ ► before the liberation of that camp. But it wasn't so, you know, then you get this very eventful
01:02:00 ◼ ► month of April when a lot happens and Roosevelt dies. We were still in that war. I mean, I'm sure
01:02:06 ◼ ► you all have seen Oppenheimer. But think about that. The eastern part of that was really winding
01:02:11 ◼ ► down. Hitler had, you know, done what he was going to do by April of '45. But we still had May,
01:02:17 ◼ ► June, July, August. Now we know, you and me, this is really important, you and I know that it ended
01:02:24 ◼ ► in August. And the way that it ended is just a horrible, horrible thing where decisions were made
01:02:30 ◼ ► that that was better than seeing our, and if you know what was going on in places like in those
01:02:34 ◼ ► islands in the Pacific, the incredible number of casualties that Americans were, the Marines in
01:02:39 ◼ ► particular Navy were getting as a result of trying to mop up on the different islands was just
01:02:44 ◼ ► brutal. We know now that that's August. In the month of July 1945, they did not know it went
01:02:50 ◼ ► into August. All I'm trying to say is, because this is, there's a couple things that I keep
01:02:56 ◼ ► wanting to pick up on that you said. One is that you don't know how things are going to turn out,
01:03:06 ◼ ► history feels like it was inevitable. It is, and that is why I think older people, you know,
01:03:14 ◼ ► like us get into watching World War II documentaries as we age. It's, you become more aware
01:03:21 ◼ ► of the error of your ways of youth when you think the way the dice rolled to get to the point where
01:03:30 ◼ ► you were born in the decade you were born was of course inevitable. Of course I was going to grow
01:03:38 ◼ ► up, I was going to be born in 1973 and grow up in the 70s and early 80s. And again, because humans,
01:03:42 ◼ ► and especially Americans, love a story. So, you can, in retrospect, it becomes like one of those
01:03:46 ◼ ► terrible biopics where you're like, oh, Paul McCartney sees a base in a window. Oh, that means
01:03:51 ◼ ► he's going to be a bass player. You try to put those moments together into something that makes
01:03:55 ◼ ► a cohesive story because that's what helps keep you alive, is saying this must have happened for
01:04:00 ◼ ► a reason. If—and one thing I've learned, and I'll come back to this with World War II, but one
01:04:05 ◼ ► thing I've learned from learning more about history, as opposed to when I grew up thinking
01:04:12 ◼ ► that history was just blah, blah, blah. For example, I have no—I love science, but I have
01:04:16 ◼ ► zero interest in chemistry and never did. It was—I just had to take chemistry, you figure it out.
01:04:20 ◼ ► History was like that. Well, they tell me to read this, they're going to give me a test on that,
01:04:24 ◼ ► and it goes in my ear and goes out the other. But now I'm kind of obsessed with it. And one
01:04:29 ◼ ► thing I've learned, and of course—and I'll say this, but I didn't learn this until like my 40s,
01:04:35 ◼ ► and it just never popped into my head. But now it seems incredibly obvious. If a military struggle
01:04:42 ◼ ► has an inevitable victor, it doesn't take more than a day or two. Like the first Iraq war in
01:04:51 ◼ ► 1992 or 91 when Bush was president. Well, no, Shaka Na was the opening of the W's. But Saddam Hussein
01:05:01 ◼ ► went into Kuwait and old George Bush was like, "Hey, no." And they'd sent the army in and decided
01:05:07 ◼ ► not to invade Iraq, just get them out of Kuwait, took like two days and it was over. That's one
01:05:13 ◼ ► where the history is—it was inevitable. And I've—since, if we're going to go on digressions,
01:05:18 ◼ ► one thing—I just saw this somewhere recently. It was like a CIA documentary I was watching where
01:05:24 ◼ ► they were talking about how intelligence is never, never certain. It's always, we think, 70% chance
01:05:31 ◼ ► of this, 30% chance of this. And if it was 100% chance or no, there's a 0% chance, this is false,
01:05:37 ◼ ► then the top intelligence agencies aren't on that issue because it's certain. They're only there to
01:05:42 ◼ ► deal with the ones they don't know. But the gist of it was Saddam Hussein figured that we would be
01:05:48 ◼ ► fine with him inviting Kuwait because he just figured—this is the way they said it—in the
01:05:54 ◼ ► Middle East, all of them, they just assumed that our CIA knows everything and listens to everything
01:06:00 ◼ ► and knew everything. And so, when they made some plans for Kuwait, they just assumed that our CIA
01:06:06 ◼ ► knew that they were going to invade Kuwait and we didn't do anything. And he was like, "Well,
01:06:10 ◼ ► they must be good with it." And so, they went ahead with it. And it turned out we weren't good
01:06:14 ◼ ► with it. And it turned out our CIA didn't really know that they were going to do it. They thought
01:06:18 ◼ ► it might be a pomp and circumstance. And when they captured Saddam Hussein, years later, you know,
01:06:25 ◼ ► Pete: Spider hole that he was hiding in, that was one of the questions that he said to them. He was
01:06:31 ◼ ► like, "Why didn't you tell us not to go in?" And they're like, "We didn't know you were going in."
01:06:36 ◼ ► And he said to them, "I can't believe that. I just assumed, we just assumed you knew everything."
01:06:42 ◼ ► Jared; Where you're like— Pete; I don't think Strangelove, that's another one. Strangelove
01:06:46 ◼ ► seemed so goofy and silly and ridiculous to me when I first saw it and I loved it. And it might
01:06:51 ◼ ► be, again, it changes and at this moment in history, this week, as I speak to you, I would
01:06:57 ◼ ► say it's my favorite Kubrick movie right now. Usually 2001 in normal times takes precedence,
01:07:09 ◼ ► Pete; Do you remember laughing? The whole premise of the movie is about a nut job with any kind of
01:07:16 ◼ ► authority in the government or military who's obsessed with fluoride in the drinking water,
01:07:27 ◼ ► communist indoctrination, and the international communist conspiracy to sap and purify all of our
01:07:37 ◼ ► Pete; I always knew there were kooks who had crazy ideas about the low levels of fluoride
01:07:41 ◼ ► in drinking water, which have had tremendous, tremendous increase in the strength of our enamel.
01:08:05 ◼ ► Jared; Here we are in the wake of an election where in the days, the very days leading up to
01:08:11 ◼ ► election day, one of the stories was that crackpot Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is going to be appointed to
01:08:17 ◼ ► be the head of Health and Human Services and one of his top agenda items is getting fluoride out
01:08:38 ◼ ► is quite literally would fit right in, right in, which is ridiculous. It's like when you go to the
01:08:46 ◼ ► Disney World and there's the guy who draws the caricatures and he's going to make my nose real
01:08:55 ◼ ► Jared; Yeah, yeah, and he's going to draw your glasses real thick, you know, because that's what
01:08:58 ◼ ► you do is a caricature and your head's the size of your torso because it's a caricature. It's like if
01:09:03 ◼ ► you walk down the street and met somebody who actually had those proportions, right? But that's
01:09:11 ◼ ► Jared; Yeah, but here we are, here we are. But like I was, my whole digression there about the
01:09:16 ◼ ► World War II generation was that I just figured as a kid that that's what happens to people in
01:09:24 ◼ ► Jared; Oh, I just assumed it was, I don't want to, I mean, the joke that I have made from time to
01:09:29 ◼ ► time that's not very kind is I just assumed that old people were old because of the equivalent of
01:09:33 ◼ ► sin. I had a practically medieval idea about how my fresh young pink body was because I was how I
01:09:40 ◼ ► am and everybody else got old because, oh god, why do you smell like that? Why are your toes like
01:09:44 ◼ ► that? Why is your entire deal like that? Can I mention one thing that I heard somebody talk about
01:09:51 ◼ ► the other day? It's one of those no-dah things that a learned person should think about, but
01:09:55 ◼ ► one reason I did have a lot of hope for this year, even notwithstanding the Seltzer poll,
01:09:59 ◼ ► even before that was, well, let me just, I'm sorry, let me take away the valence and just
01:10:03 ◼ ► talk about a fact that I think is an important thing to keep in mind. The old people of our youth
01:10:09 ◼ ► are not the old people of today. And we should realize that because we are amongst the aging
01:10:15 ◼ ► people of our day. Now, that sounds like a silly thing to say, but here's the thing, when we talk,
01:10:19 ◼ ► what are all these things we talk about? Things that have in the past been these old saws that
01:10:23 ◼ ► we could rely on in a popular idea of American politics. Early voting tends to benefit Democrats,
01:10:29 ◼ ► late voting, you know, all these kinds of things. Old people are the most elderly seniors,
01:10:43 ◼ ► but there's a reason that political, aspiring political people go after and try to please those
01:10:50 ◼ ► people because they're a really solid way to vote. Now, here's the thing that's interesting,
01:10:53 ◼ ► I'm going to put on my Professor Obtus hat for a minute here, but the people who were 70 years old
01:11:00 ◼ ► in 1975 are different from the people who were 75, 70 years old in 1980 are different from the
01:11:08 ◼ ► people who are 70 years old in 2024. Now, again, forgive me, sit with me for just a minute, but
01:11:13 ◼ ► you know what that means? That means people who are 60 now were 50 only 10 years ago. They're
01:11:19 ◼ ► different people. They're different. So, I feel like, at least in the way that I've come up,
01:11:25 ◼ ► I tend to look at old people, quote unquote, seniors as a monolith. I mean, there's all
01:11:29 ◼ ► the sort of cliches and all the going to dinner early and everything we've learned from Seinfeld
01:11:34 ◼ ► about people loving pens and all that kind of stuff, but here's the thing to think about.
01:11:58 ◼ ► Who famously wrote a song called Born in the 50s. Why am I saying this silly thing? Oh, Merlin,
01:12:06 ◼ ► somebody born in 1954, that's who's 70 now. I thought that A, so B, I thought that would
01:12:12 ◼ ► have a bigger impact this election, but A, that's something I needed to hear. It's not like the
01:12:18 ◼ ► canonical like Irene Ryan in Beverly Hillbillies. That's not who these people are. These are people
01:12:23 ◼ ► who might have been, I mean, you see the boomers or whatever, I despise these generational,
01:12:27 ◼ ► these useless generational names we give, but the point is, the nature of that is likely to change.
01:12:33 ◼ ► The nature of old people doesn't change. You tend to get weird, you get defensive, you imagine that
01:12:38 ◼ ► you're more powerful than you actually are, and you do all these speaking as an American man.
01:12:43 ◼ ► I'm all too familiar with the way that people age, believe me. But that's one of the things
01:12:47 ◼ ► that really hit me. And so, is there anything that we can do to extend that? Well, maybe,
01:12:52 ◼ ► just from a liberal arts point of view, realizing as a learned person that the people who are 70
01:12:59 ◼ ► now are not the people who are 70 in the 50s or 60s. I think that's really valuable, but it's also
01:13:05 ◼ ► a reminder that the people who are young now are not the people who were young in the 80s. A lot of
01:13:10 ◼ ► stuff is changing and we need to update all kinds of, this is going to get, I'm not going to get into
01:13:15 ◼ ► it, we talked about this yesterday, I'm not going to get into it. I have a couple big, as they say
01:13:18 ◼ ► at the New York Times, which I think I'm about to cancel, so close to canceling, is one of the
01:13:23 ◼ ► takeaways is that we might need a new way to think about, when I say division, I don't mean in the
01:13:29 ◼ ► neither arithmetically or in terms of dividing people, I mean in terms of binning people.
01:13:34 ◼ ► I said this to you, it pitches to you yesterday as like, imagine the rows of a spreadsheet,
01:13:41 ◼ ► and then you have many columns for a spreadsheet. I'm wondering if, I'm not saying we need a z-axis
01:13:47 ◼ ► necessarily to fix this, but a lot of the older, more conventional ways of thinking about how
01:13:54 ◼ ► Americans are binned up, whether that is by gender, class, country of origin, all these kinds of things
01:14:01 ◼ ► that tend to be those driver's license aspects of our life. They're starting to feel far less--
01:14:07 ◼ ► - Does race, I feel like I don't see race. I mean, I do see color, especially on the black.
01:14:19 ◼ ► "Well, of course they're not the same old people." Well, are you sure? Are you sure you've
01:14:23 ◼ ► integrated that and internalized the idea that that's all changing? And a lot of the people who
01:14:28 ◼ ► are now 20 are pretty different from people who used to be 20. Maybe that's obvious to you,
01:14:33 ◼ ► and if so, thank you for listening. What I'm saying is this is one of a lot of things that we,
01:14:43 ◼ ► - I think about this a lot, a lot, even outside the context of a week like this. But I think about
01:14:50 ◼ ► it a lot that as a species, as just the highest evolved of the many fascinating primates on the
01:15:00 ◼ ► planet, we did not evolve to live in a world that changes as fast as our world lives, where each
01:15:08 ◼ ► generation grows up in an entirely different context, right? I mean, our kids do not grow,
01:15:16 ◼ ► do not feel, their youth is not like our youth in the '70s, you know? Go back, you know, go back a
01:15:25 ◼ ► thousand years and it just didn't happen. A thousand years isn't that long ago, right? But then
01:15:31 ◼ ► a thousand years ago, nobody's life changed. And it's for most people in most places on the planet,
01:15:36 ◼ ► it didn't really change much until the last century, really. I mean, and there were pockets,
01:15:42 ◼ ► Europe and— - Well, a lot of it didn't change till even, I mean, like, there are a number of
01:15:45 ◼ ► ways in which, for better or for worse or whatever, American life was the way it was until the '50s.
01:15:56 ◼ ► there's things like mass media, the way that we more and more heard what other Americans sound
01:16:00 ◼ ► like. And, "Oh, you've had radio since the '20s." Well, not everybody even had a radio. But the idea
01:16:06 ◼ ► that I can watch a video from the English band ABC on MTV in 1982, that's a pretty exotic idea,
01:16:13 ◼ ► considering that in the generation or in the lifetime of people who were very much alive and
01:16:17 ◼ ► still driving themselves around, they didn't have a phone in their house. Maybe they didn't have a
01:16:21 ◼ ► toilet in their house even. It's just that we don't always, I don't know, I'm going into old man,
01:16:26 ◼ ► wise man, but I do feel like there's a way in which we sometimes, there's so much, I mean,
01:16:32 ◼ ► you said a word earlier that I learned in interests like chunking, the way that we, like,
01:16:36 ◼ ► get information. And you can think of this, whatever way works for you. Think of this chunking,
01:16:40 ◼ ► thinking of cognitive biases. Think of it as priors even, some people in journalism like to say.
01:16:45 ◼ ► But there's all kinds of ways that in order just to get by for a quiet life, as the comedian
01:16:49 ◼ ► Stuart Lee says, for a quiet life, there's all kinds of stuff we just kind of fly past. And I
01:16:54 ◼ ► know I personally have many things I continue to fly past. A lot of people would say perhaps maybe
01:16:59 ◼ ► that's the lives of people in Appalachia. I'm not thinking about as much as I should. Although,
01:17:03 ◼ ► as I revealed to you yesterday, that is my people. It's just that there's a lot of stuff-
01:17:12 ◼ ► grandfather before me, if I had white lung teeth, if I got to serve in the mines, if I-
01:17:26 ◼ ► I recommend it to you because I'm going to be basic enough to say that it had a big impact on
01:17:32 ◼ ► me. It was one of those spades you get sometimes. Look at this case, it was about the Sacklers and
01:17:38 ◼ ► Oxy. And it's my favorite one of all. It's got Caitlin Vever who rules. It's got Batman. What's
01:17:42 ◼ ► his name? Michael Keaton. Michael Keaton. He's terrific. But that gave me insight into, well,
01:17:48 ◼ ► first of all, the way that the Sacklers very deliberately chose to market those drugs in areas.
01:17:54 ◼ ► You probably know this. You have family that did this for a living. But you would market this stuff
01:17:58 ◼ ► in areas. Didn't you say, what was our bid a million years ago? Nobody ever got black lung
01:18:08 ◼ ► like some woke mind virus and now I understand people in West Virginia perfectly. But it did-
01:18:13 ◼ ► I was very- I'm being dead honest with y'all. It was very easy for me- not easy for me. It was
01:18:19 ◼ ► difficult for me not to go, "Oh my God, what are these people doing? They're working against their
01:18:22 ◼ ► own self-interest. They have this strong man that they're obsessed with and all this kind of stuff."
01:18:26 ◼ ► And I, for a long time, just really didn't understand on any level the appeal of the 45th
01:18:36 ◼ ► that it was so out of alignment with every value that I have, including being able to complete a
01:18:41 ◼ ► sentence, that it was very difficult for me and I did reject it. But learning how much you can mess
01:18:48 ◼ ► with people who are vulnerable. And again, just take this red placeholder here. "Include once,
01:18:56 ◼ ► the idea that, oh my God, actually, maybe it had to be a lesbian actress to bring it to me."
01:19:02 ◼ ► But to see Caitlyn Deaver working in a mine, getting a back injury, and then accidentally
01:19:08 ◼ ► becoming addicted to something that every doctor was told is not addictive gave me an insight into
01:19:13 ◼ ► how this country can screw over anybody. It's a little bit like watching Chernobyl. You don't
01:19:19 ◼ ► realize how many bodies we can throw into this meat grinder if it meets the story that we have
01:19:32 ◼ ► You know which show we did watch? Same story. It was called Painkiller. Matthew Broderick played
01:19:39 ◼ ► the head of the Sackler family. It's a Netflix show. And there's a similar plot line in that.
01:19:49 ◼ ► There's a guy who I think he owns. The one guy from a serious man played him. The guy from
01:19:59 ◼ ► I don't think this is even a spoiler. I mean, everybody knows how the OxyContin story basically
01:20:06 ◼ ► played. But it's very... You get to know the guy before it happens. But his family business is a
01:20:11 ◼ ► garage and cars leaking oil. Take it to this guy's place because they're good. They're actually,
01:20:17 ◼ ► you know, like a good... It was a good garage. Like the one where if you're new, your neighbor moves
01:20:21 ◼ ► into town and says, "Hey..." They say, "I gotta get my car looked down and the oil changed."
01:20:29 ◼ ► It's a guy who ran the good garage. But guess what? Running the good garage is actually
01:20:32 ◼ ► freaking hard work, right? Because it's like low margins and people care and it's like a lot of
01:20:37 ◼ ► work. And anyway, he hurts his fucking back in a little... Just an accident. He just wouldn't even...
01:20:43 ◼ ► Not like a major accident. He's not in a hospital, but his fucking back is all screwed up.
01:20:50 ◼ ► But he's gotta keep working. The whole place, he's not the only guy there, but the family garage
01:20:56 ◼ ► can't run without him. So he's gotta work. He can't take time off. And guess what? Little Oxycontin
01:21:01 ◼ ► and he was good to go. But you see how... Yeah, I'm with you. And it is. It is a conspiracy, right?
01:21:11 ◼ ► And the reason I'm mentioning it, I'm not trying to cover myself with glory for watching television.
01:21:15 ◼ ► I'm sending you the cast of dope sick. Look at that. Look at that. Look at that. Murderers row.
01:21:18 ◼ ► Is that I think the opportunity... Going back to Anne Frank, comma, boy, he's a great podcast.
01:21:27 ◼ ► Going back to Anne Frank, how do you tell a story of... There's a lot of numbers in World War II that
01:21:34 ◼ ► get overwhelming pretty fast. A lot of us have heard the six or six and a half million Jewish
01:21:38 ◼ ► people who died in the Holocaust. Again, as a new and young student of the role that Russia had in
01:21:46 ◼ ► World War II, 20 million dead. A lot of them, they killed themselves. A lot of people. It's a lot of
01:21:56 ◼ ► more than the vote that we got out of crucial Waukesha County, believe it or not. But you live
01:22:00 ◼ ► through that era. And how could you not be changed? Absolutely. Absolutely. Right? Because you know
01:22:07 ◼ ► what can happen. It's not... Like I said, the unimaginable is no longer unimaginable after
01:22:13 ◼ ► it's happened. And then it becomes, for those of us like me, born in the '70s, it becomes
01:22:19 ◼ ► unimaginable again. I grew up thinking, of course, there's not going to be another Holocaust. I didn't
01:22:29 ◼ ► on religion or race or any of these things and that it could happen. But certainly there's not
01:22:33 ◼ ► going to be a systematic rounding up. Systematic, yeah. Six million of people just because, say,
01:22:39 ◼ ► of their certain religion, and they're just going to march them into death camps or line them up on
01:22:44 ◼ ► a fence and shoot them in the head and throw them in the ditch. Yeah, ditch in Romania. Yeah. Right.
01:22:48 ◼ ► Not dispute. And I think I am not excusing Holocaust denialism at all. Thank you, John. I'm
01:22:55 ◼ ► really glad. Thank you for, you know, my belief that it actually happened. Thank you for my
01:22:59 ◼ ► service. But there is, I can see where it starts. And I think it can start with a kernel of—
01:23:09 ◼ ► Holocaust denying that it exists because it can seem to somebody, and I think that almost
01:23:15 ◼ ► everybody—and yeah, the real dirtbags, the Sacklers of Holocaust denialism are the people
01:23:21 ◼ ► who were old enough to have lived through it and knew that it happened. But I can see how younger
01:23:28 ◼ ► people could grow up thinking, "Well, how could something like that even happen?" It's not,
01:23:36 ◼ ► It gets to be unimaginable because you couldn't imagine that something, if you go back and watch,
01:23:41 ◼ ► read a book about Weimar Germany or maybe not Cabaret exactly, but if you go and look at what
01:23:46 ◼ ► was happening in Germany in Berlin, I have a really good book on basically the lives of queer
01:23:53 ◼ ► people in the Weimar Republic, which was, I mean, I guess some people would read it and go, "Oh my
01:23:58 ◼ ► gosh, no wonder that guy was so popular because who wants all of these weirdos running around?"
01:24:03 ◼ ► But to feel like these are, when you look at the photo or the films, and I'm not trying to be
01:24:08 ◼ ► histrionic, but you can see this even in Schindler's List. You see all these very successful
01:24:12 ◼ ► Polish people with furs and you're like, and you can feel it every step of the way, "Well,
01:24:18 ◼ ► this is as bad as it'll get, right? This is having to move into this area is the worst." No,
01:24:24 ◼ ► now we've got to move into a smaller place with more people, and now we're putting our jewelry
01:24:34 ◼ ► even at that time, especially at that time, I'm guessing, where your mind just rejects it and goes
01:24:41 ◼ ► like, and I think that's why I think for a long time the denialism came from, "Well, the numbers
01:24:45 ◼ ► don't really add up, the scale of this, people trying to use their model trains to figure out
01:24:50 ◼ ► how Warsaw works," or whatever led to that in the past. And I think part of it now may be like,
01:25:02 ◼ ► "God, this is depressing." Wait, you're going to do one more ad, right? So like, I want to have a
01:25:09 ◼ ► chance to say the one thing I wanted to say about this. And then we could talk about something else.
01:25:14 ◼ ► Yeah. All I've got to say about this is this. This is what I wrote. I sent you the entirety of my
01:25:19 ◼ ► notes for this entire project. I sent you a screen grab from drafts that you can see, and I decided
01:25:26 ◼ ► that on Tuesday night I would keep a log in preparation for my celebratory visit with Chairman
01:25:32 ◼ ► Gruber. And so, I have a timestamp here. It says "Election Night Log," and then it's got a timestamp,
01:25:36 ◼ ► and then it has three words, "Come on, Georgia," and then I didn't type anymore, which tells you
01:25:43 ◼ ► something. But here's the other thing. Oh, yeah. So, yesterday I was reading this not very good
01:25:50 ◼ ► that phrase, which is a little bit problematic, but here's what I wrote down when I was prepping
01:25:54 ◼ ► for this show yesterday. What I wrote down was, "The Harris campaign was perfect for me, and maybe
01:25:59 ◼ ► that was the problem." That's as far as I've gotten, and I'm okay with that right now. Like,
01:26:09 ◼ ► it would be difficult with the time that we have in this visit and the fact that this is nominally
01:26:15 ◼ ► a show about MacIntoshes or whatever to get into this. There's a lot to get into. But the part that
01:26:22 ◼ ► is a little herdy for me is that I liked the vision of America that that campaign was pulling
01:26:32 ◼ ► for, and I really hoped that other people would like and get with it too. And right now, just to
01:26:40 ◼ ► be dead honest and to be a little bit touchy, this is part of the reason why I'm not currently
01:26:45 ◼ ► trying to see whose frame I can just drag over how I feel. I'm just going to feel this emotion
01:26:52 ◼ ► for a minute, which is, I think the way that we feel about abstract strangers says a lot about us
01:27:01 ◼ ► as people. And sometimes we find ourselves able to think about specific strangers. And sometimes
01:27:09 ◼ ► that even becomes perverted into, "Here's things I imagine happening to specific people that I know."
01:27:14 ◼ ► There's all kinds of ranges of ways of thinking about that. But a lot of what I liked about just
01:27:21 ◼ ► this improbable campaign that was put together so well and so quickly and dealt with so many things
01:27:25 ◼ ► that matter to me, those are all just bullet points now to go, "Well, nobody really cares
01:27:31 ◼ ► that much about trans people," or "Nobody actually cares that much." There's just all these different
01:27:36 ◼ ► things now where it's like, "You guys talked too much about this thing, and that was bad."
01:27:40 ◼ ► I'm still not ready to begin rejecting, let alone mourning, the fact that all that shit really does
01:27:48 ◼ ► matter. The part that bums me out is that there were not more people that saw that and that
01:27:52 ◼ ► instead think there's some very large red button somewhere on Pennsylvania Avenue that you hit to
01:27:57 ◼ ► stop inflation and now gas prices go down. I understand, but it's such a non-sequitur to keep
01:28:03 ◼ ► talking over and over and over about the economy. It's a popular non-sequitur, but with a divided
01:28:10 ◼ ► Congress and whoever was in there, where I am at today, John Gruber, is I don't think anybody
01:28:16 ◼ ► could have beat him. And I didn't see that coming. I did not see the numbers the way they are. I'm
01:28:22 ◼ ► not ready to learn a lesson about love in any way. I care about all of that stuff, and I'm not ready
01:28:28 ◼ ► to say, "We got it wrong," or "Thought wrong. What we got, what we got?" "Are they better off
01:28:33 ◼ ► today than yesterday?" "Well, no, they're not. But there's just not enough babies to throw out
01:28:38 ◼ ► with all the bathwater at this point. There's people who are so ready to just abandon the entire
01:28:43 ◼ ► project because a bunch of chuds are sad that she didn't go on Joe Rogan." And she laughed funny.
01:28:50 ◼ ► And she had, they don't like her laugh. I can't, I couldn't agree more. And I really, and if we're
01:28:58 ◼ ► not just palling around me and you, which I think is helpful and I think people enjoy, hopefully,
01:29:04 ◼ ► and listening to, but if we're imparting any iota, sprinkle of wisdom or just suggestions
01:29:12 ◼ ► for everybody listening while this is fresh as to how to cope and what to do and maybe how to
01:29:20 ◼ ► direct your attention. I so, so strongly encourage you to stop thinking about what it could have
01:29:27 ◼ ► shooters or ifs or if it was somebody else or if Biden had dropped out earlier or just not run or
01:29:32 ◼ ► blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And just, yeah, no, we were going to lose. And I'm not saying that
01:29:37 ◼ ► there isn't a hypothetical roll of the dice, a million monkeys type in a million different 2024s
01:29:43 ◼ ► or a million different last four years. One of them doesn't involve, I mean, one of them involves
01:29:48 ◼ ► Trump choking on a hamburger and dying. I mean, there's a lot of ways this could have turned out,
01:29:52 ◼ ► but in terms of what, one of the things that made 2016 so hard to process is it was so close and it
01:30:00 ◼ ► really does seem like an objective, an objective, yes. That's the point I wanted to make about your
01:30:05 ◼ ► dad's story was like when I said clean as horrible, I'm so sorry to say, as your mother's death was,
01:30:11 ◼ ► it's kind of good that it didn't go on for six years. Don't apologize. It was. I'm glad this
01:30:17 ◼ ► was clean. I super am. And I mean, in addition to respecting the way that we did what we always do,
01:30:23 ◼ ► which is the right thing and like the institutional thing, I'm glad it was clean. It would suck if
01:30:28 ◼ ► this were still going on forever and ever and ever. I'm not even saying that to go far and you
01:30:32 ◼ ► guys asked for it, although I think that, but it was clean. It was clean. And then now we move on
01:30:36 ◼ ► to the next thing. And that part that we said was important is important. Keeping democracy together.
01:30:42 ◼ ► And 2016 wasn't clean. A truly objective, in fact, I've never read a counter argument that the Comey
01:30:51 ◼ ► letter issued days before the election was enough to spill public opinion in the states that were
01:30:59 ◼ ► close to swing the election. It really was. And the letters never should have happened. The whole
01:31:03 ◼ ► thing was friggin' nonsense. There was nothing to it. And it was against department policy to
01:31:08 ◼ ► issue such a letter up to the election. And the only reason he did it wasn't because he wanted
01:31:12 ◼ ► Trump. It was because he thought he was covering his own ass because her victory was certain and he
01:31:17 ◼ ► didn't want to seem like a Hillary Clinton. He was already doing that pretty optively thing we do,
01:31:21 ◼ ► which is more than we need to because we want to seem fair. I'm going to get ahead of this and look
01:31:26 ◼ ► so objective as the head of the FBI that I issued this letter against who's the woman who's certainly
01:31:31 ◼ ► going to become my boss in next week. And in fact, that's what turned the election. And there was a
01:31:36 ◼ ► bunch of those. And there are no, there's no Comey letter this year. There is no woulda, coulda,
01:31:40 ◼ ► shoulda. She ran a friggin' perfect campaign from where she started. And again, it's like with my
01:31:45 ◼ ► mom. Given that she was diagnosed with terrible, really bad, this you're not going to beat this,
01:31:53 ◼ ► Ovarian cancer to just drop dead on a Tuesday morning after a lovely meal the night before
01:32:05 ◼ ► he is in decline. What are we going to do? And it's Harris, go. She ran a perfect campaign. And
01:32:10 ◼ ► Tim Walz was a perfect choice. And I didn't know who the guy was. And I'd sort of thought—
01:32:29 ◼ ► 56 to 40 here in Pennsylvania. Like in terms of how weird this election and how it is, how it's
01:32:35 ◼ ► not just red and blue, Democrat and Republican, but it really, it's Trump. It is him personally.
01:32:42 ◼ ► I thought it should be him. But then it was Walz and our friend, he's been on the show,
01:32:53 ◼ ► Pete I didn't like badmouth Walz's pick. I was just like, I never heard of the guy and I just,
01:32:56 ◼ ► again, a group chat was like, I don't know, it doesn't make any sense to me. And I kind of
01:33:00 ◼ ► thought he was a Tim Kaine, who Hillary picked as her vice president, who is so forgettable. Did you
01:33:25 ◼ ► but it probably didn't help. But she thought it was helping to pick the most unobjectionable guy.
01:33:30 ◼ ► I thought maybe Walz was that sort of character. And no, it turns out this guy is a dynamic,
01:33:38 ◼ ► Jared And he's a dynamic presence. He was a great pick. And to key in on your message of I
01:33:45 ◼ ► love the message of this campaign is that Walz, based on just what he friggin' looks like,
01:33:50 ◼ ► but especially what he said and what he has accomplished in Minnesota, was inclusive of
01:34:06 ◼ ► not just comfortable, but some of my closest loved ones and family members, in fact, themselves are
01:34:11 ◼ ► trans. I mean, if you think you've never even met a trans person, just think you've, you probably have,
01:34:18 ◼ ► but you just don't know it. But I'm just saying if you think that that's an other, that campaign
01:34:24 ◼ ► was still inclusive of you. All the jokes about Tim Walz being the guy who when he knocks on your
01:34:30 ◼ ► door to ask for your vote will help you clean your gutters and stuff like that, that's the inclusive
01:34:36 ◼ ► part of the message, that it really was for everybody. And it was palpable. Absolutely palpable.
01:34:43 ◼ ► Jared Here's me being mean for a second. We have one candidate who says, I'm going to, quote,
01:34:46 ◼ ► protect women whether they like it or not. But then there's another guy who says, well,
01:34:51 ◼ ► we're going to help you take care of people you love, whether other people like it or not.
01:34:56 ◼ ► It doesn't, what did Thomas Jefferson say? God, Thomas Jefferson had that great quote that
01:35:01 ◼ ► Lawrence Lessig used to use about like, when I let somebody, he used the word taper, but I'll use
01:35:06 ◼ ► candle. When I let somebody light their candle from my candle, they get flame without diminishing
01:35:11 ◼ ► my light. And I mean, I'm for a variety of reasons, I don't want to get super into it right now.
01:35:17 ◼ ► But they found a way to make a version of trans stuff a big deal, which now I think is getting a
01:35:28 ◼ ► little bit of a rap as like, well, she did pay for two people's sex change. It's like, oh, no,
01:35:32 ◼ ► no, no, that's a coded way of saying, well, it's sort of like the way as an Apple enthusiast,
01:35:37 ◼ ► you'll know about the way that we're always saying to think of the children. And if we don't put a
01:35:41 ◼ ► backdoor in the security of every single thing out there, you're basically saying, I love child
01:35:46 ◼ ► predators. And it's, no, child predator is what we do to get the rights to do anything. But like,
01:35:52 ◼ ► in that same way, like pretty soon, all those traffic laws are mainly being used against black
01:35:56 ◼ ► men. Isn't that weird? And like, there's all these ways in which something, if we come up with
01:35:59 ◼ ► the most extreme example of something, and in that case, in the most cynical, bad faith way possible,
01:36:05 ◼ ► I mean, what up? Brilliant, I guess, from a sort of a terrible political standpoint is to say like,
01:36:11 ◼ ► what could be worse than an immigrant in our clogging up our jail? Well, what if it's the
01:36:16 ◼ ► guy from Silence of the Lambs and we paid for his necklace? I think that's kind of like how
01:36:20 ◼ ► that got through to people. But those folks aren't doing, the people who are out there, the queer
01:36:25 ◼ ► people out there are not doing anything to harm you. There's not, they're not, they're, it's,
01:36:30 ◼ ► it's so bizarre. Can I tie this together with one thing and then you could go to commercial?
01:36:35 ◼ ► Yeah, I am. You and I did a talk at South by Southwest a long time ago, and it only occurred
01:36:39 ◼ ► to me a second ago that it's kind of relevant to the thing I'd like to say to our friends
01:36:43 ◼ ► today, which is that as usual, as a typical ex-punk, punk rock guy, like I've mainly talked
01:36:49 ◼ ► about the things I'm not doing and the things I don't want to do. I want to talk about the one
01:36:52 ◼ ► thing I do want to do, which is this, which is I would invite anybody out there to join me
01:36:57 ◼ ► in not abandoning the things that you believe in. Well, I put it differently. Let me encourage you
01:37:05 ◼ ► to think about this on at least two tracks. There's the track of like, oh boy, lessons learned,
01:37:10 ◼ ► all of our learnings and leavings. What do we learn from this? And who should we be mean or
01:37:14 ◼ ► to, to be popular with chuds? There's all that stuff, all the things we're going to learn,
01:37:17 ◼ ► all the dissecting. If you're doing post-morems at this point, you are a goblin. It's a little
01:37:22 ◼ ► bit early to be cutting up the bodies, but fine, you do you. Here's what I'm going to say to our
01:37:28 ◼ ► friends. Regardless of what you decide to do, tactically, what you decide to do politically
01:37:33 ◼ ► over the next few years, don't burn down everything you believe in just to try and fit the frame of
01:37:39 ◼ ► somebody else. And I'll tell you why I think that's related to our, our little jokey talk we did when
01:37:44 ◼ ► blogs mattered. We just, is there a way that you could find a way to become successful at what you
01:37:50 ◼ ► do? Not because, not in spite of your unique take on things, but because of your unique take on
01:37:58 ◼ ► things. Is there a way that you could find the phrase, the joke, when there are the jokes we
01:38:02 ◼ ► made was, "Don't just have a blog about, don't just have a blog, don't just have a blog about
01:38:06 ◼ ► Star Wars, don't just have a blog about Jawa's," but try and like, is there a certain particular
01:38:10 ◼ ► Jawa? Like the more I watch the 77 movie, the more I appreciate, oh, that's a teenager. That's
01:38:16 ◼ ► obviously a child. That's the tall kid, right? Well, he was a tall Jawa who was a short kid,
01:38:25 ◼ ► and then there's the wonderful photos with Anthony Daniels. No, but I'm not trying to be cute about
01:38:31 ◼ ► this. It's just that in that same way that idiots like you and me will, and perhaps privileged
01:38:36 ◼ ► idiots like you and me, title, is that I want to continue to, I don't want you to love me for the
01:38:41 ◼ ► wrong reasons and I can't prevent you hating me for what you consider the right reasons.
01:38:47 ◼ ► And that oughtn't change the things that matter to me. I have my own very personal reasons for
01:38:51 ◼ ► believing in a lot of these things that nobody else needs to worry about, but I bet there's
01:38:55 ◼ ► something you care a lot about and that you worry about. I'm not saying don't change. I'm not saying
01:38:59 ◼ ► dig in and I'm not saying double down because that's a term from Blackjack and has nothing to
01:39:03 ◼ ► do with politics. Does it drive you crazy, Jon, when they say triple down because that's not a
01:39:07 ◼ ► thing? Anyway, my point is don't abandon. There's no such thing. It's like people saying insurance.
01:39:14 ◼ ► Using double down, using double down in a sense that does not really analogize to its use in
01:39:22 ◼ ► Blackjack, I'm still okay with because that's how language works. It's like the way young people
01:39:26 ◼ ► say out of pocket when they mean crazy instead of unavailable. Metaphorically, the way people
01:39:32 ◼ ► say double down does apply to the game, but it does because there is no triple down in the game.
01:39:39 ◼ ► What's closer to playing two cards in bingo, I think is closer to what it means. Here's my thing
01:39:43 ◼ ► I just want to say to you, my friends who are listening and thank you for putting up with this.
01:39:46 ◼ ► I don't have any advice about anything. I don't know how to change anything, but as I sit here
01:39:51 ◼ ► today, November 7th of 2024, I am nowhere near ready. I don't want to be unnecessarily dramatic
01:40:00 ◼ ► here, but let me just put it this way. Just because we legitimately straight up got our ass handed to
01:40:07 ◼ ► us. When I say us, I mean a lot of us as little people. Everybody's hurting. Well, and it was a
01:40:13 ◼ ► guy won. He won big and there's probably things to learn from that. But what I want to say is I
01:40:19 ◼ ► want to encourage you to think about what is still worth caring about. And I'm not saying go become
01:40:27 ◼ ► an activist, but what I'm saying is, do you remember something I said in that talk, Jon?
01:40:31 ◼ ► Don't cut muscle. Like the worst way to lose weight is to cut off your muscles. And if you
01:40:36 ◼ ► see people who give you in the world of blogging or social media or whatever it is, there's always
01:40:41 ◼ ► a constant temptation to become an idiot because you think it'll make a stranger love you. And I
01:40:48 ◼ ► personally have not had great luck with that. What I've discovered is I do not have a big impact on
01:40:53 ◼ ► what other people think about anything, including me. But you know what I have learned is that
01:40:58 ◼ ► nothing bums out the people who love you more than seeing you throw away the stuff that they
01:41:04 ◼ ► know matters to you in order to fit in. And that's what I'm saying. Give yourself some time to be
01:41:10 ◼ ► sad. Do not feel like you've got to throw away the things that are valuable to you in order to
01:41:26 ◼ ► I don't do that much to begin with though, Jon, but it doesn't change the fact that I care.
01:41:29 ◼ ► But that's, let's see, if you're really passionate about trans acceptance or you're really
01:41:36 ◼ ► Well, do you think, how about, how can we say the environment? One that really got lost in the
01:41:46 ◼ ► The climate. That's one that, like, it got kind of like, "Oh, yeah, that's cute." That's like
01:41:53 ◼ ► But the climate is a much better example because those of us on one side of the climate argument
01:41:59 ◼ ► have everything on our side. We've got all of the facts, all of the science, and all of the actual—
01:42:16 ◼ ► pieces of data you could look at. The hurricane that happened in the Gulf recently. You can,
01:42:27 ◼ ► causes cancer, causation, no, no, really. The heating Gulf is what made that bad. It's not
01:42:36 ◼ ► The whole thing that, I mean, you grew up in Florida, so you've probably looked at the maps
01:42:40 ◼ ► more often than I do, but you and I have 50 years of looking at hurricane maps in the United States,
01:43:05 ◼ ► banana town movie. Today, I live in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. I don't know how much you know about
01:43:10 ◼ ► the weather patterns in late October and early November. High temperature today, 76 degrees.
01:43:18 ◼ ► I wore, I'm wearing a short sleeve polo shirt. I'm in San Francisco and you can see my sweat
01:43:39 ◼ ► the whole global warming thing where it's, well, it's snowing in different areas and it's, no,
01:43:47 ◼ ► Even when it's a nice, lovely day, which the upside of it is that we get lovely days in
01:43:52 ◼ ► November, it is wrong. It is absolutely wrong. It's as wrong as what the ancient people must
01:44:07 ◼ ► Yeah, yeah, yeah. Halloween was a week ago and it was so warm that it was, again, it was like in the
01:44:14 ◼ ► 70s into the evening and, you know, is it too hot for your kid's Halloween costume? I grew up every
01:44:39 ◼ ► When it's cold, that you need to wear a coat or you would get sick. My mom would drive by the
01:44:44 ◼ ► playground because I would, you know, we'd go play touch football with the Nerf football on the
01:44:50 ◼ ► basketball court and I would take off my winter coat because I was running around playing football
01:45:07 ◼ ► I don't miss that. Oh my god. But the Halloween, every freaking year, Superman doesn't wear a coat.
01:45:46 ◼ ► And just because you didn't score well this week does not mean you've stopped caring about it.
01:46:21 ◼ ► what we're doing, but you do you, but if there's one person out there that needs to hear it,
01:46:27 ◼ ► please don't feel ashamed about how much you care about something that other people don't care about.
01:46:32 ◼ ► Because that's what makes you such an interesting human being, is that you care so much about
01:46:37 ◼ ► something that other people don't. Don't give that away. Don't sell that just to feel like
01:46:59 ◼ ► Matthew Panzareno actually works there, but they are sponsoring the show. They've sponsored before.
01:47:04 ◼ ► They're sponsoring it again this week. And Tip Top is a completely new way to pay that makes
01:47:10 ◼ ► everything you buy more affordable with trade-in at checkout. I do this with my iPhone. I do still
01:47:16 ◼ ► buy a new iPhone every year, but I've stopped my obsessive collection of them because they're up
01:47:21 ◼ ► to like, it's like iPhone 33 now. And a lot of them look the same and it doesn't really seem
01:47:26 ◼ ► like a point to keep them. So now I trade in my old iPhone and get a new one. You can do that at
01:47:32 ◼ ► Tip Top with like all sorts of stuff. It is incredibly easy. You go to checkout and you
01:47:41 ◼ ► Phone cases, John, because I feel like my kid could go to a UC with the number of phone cases
01:48:03 ◼ ► Let me just tell you, Tip Top, they do have a catalog of over 50,000 choices. So they'd have
01:48:18 ◼ ► And then at checkout, buying the new thing you want to buy, you agree to it, you get the thing,
01:48:24 ◼ ► and then Tip Top sends you a box and you put your thing in a box and then it goes off and it's,
01:48:29 ◼ ► you get the trade in price for the thing you no longer want. And somebody else gets a thing
01:48:34 ◼ ► that they were looking for. Like maybe like an obscure pair of sneakers or a poster or whatever
01:48:39 ◼ ► the hell it was that you were selling. If you're a merchant, you can easily, if you're selling stuff,
01:48:48 ◼ ► They've got Shopify checkout support built in, of course, because everybody uses Shopify and they
01:48:53 ◼ ► have great APIs for integration with any kind of custom store or backend or whatever you have on
01:48:59 ◼ ► your side. And you want to, we don't just use the Shopify built in thing that makes it super easy,
01:49:05 ◼ ► one click. And it's well, then if you rolled your own, they've got APIs that you can hook up to.
01:49:10 ◼ ► They are currently offering Tip Top promotional credit that you can use to help your customers
01:49:22 ◼ ► spell it just the way you think, TipTop.com, no special URL, just go to TipTop.com. Whether you
01:49:42 ◼ ► Let me just say this, because as we said yesterday, when we strategized over what to do,
01:49:49 ◼ ► we decided yesterday that counterintuitively, I would say that in 2016, with a far more shocking
01:49:56 ◼ ► result and a far more, I felt more concussed, for lack of a better word, we recorded the next day.
01:50:08 ◼ ► And here, while I think, I think this is going to be worse for the America, for the world,
01:50:14 ◼ ► for a lot of people within America, a Trump second, I do think it's going to be worse. And I
01:50:19 ◼ ► just don't want to talk around it. I feel better personally, because, and again, part of it,
01:50:28 ◼ ► and again, I don't like prefacing stuff with declaring my privileges, but I do. I have all
01:50:35 ◼ ► of them. I'm white, I am a man, I am financially successful, I'm healthy. You tick the boxes and
01:50:48 ◼ ► I got them. I get it. But I'm saying from a different perspective that the fact, like I said,
01:50:57 ◼ ► that this was not unimaginable, I was not ready for it. I really didn't think ahead, even
01:51:03 ◼ ► scheduling you to do the show, that what if he might win, but I knew he might, and I was braced
01:51:07 ◼ ► for it. That trap door that I didn't even know existed under my feet, well, I'm never going to
01:51:13 ◼ ► forget that it was there. I might have been surprised if Trump did not run and somebody else
01:51:22 ◼ ► who's worse or just as bad had done it, but certainly the same guy appealing to the same people
01:51:29 ◼ ► didn't come as a surprise to me. But let me, we said yesterday, well, we're not going to talk
01:51:35 ◼ ► about the election, we'll talk about other things to help people get their mind off it, and here we
01:51:38 ◼ ► are. And I think we've done that to some extent, as you and I tend to do on these episodes, but
01:51:43 ◼ ► here we are still talking about it. But on that context of people not beating themselves up over
01:51:50 ◼ ► the woulda, coulda, shoulda's, or the what ifs, or the whoa, which just isn't there, the cleanness
01:51:55 ◼ ► of the victory. Another one, not only was there no Comey letter, he won the popular vote too, right?
01:52:00 ◼ ► It hurts. There is, and for me as somebody who does have a primal, and as I described it on
01:52:06 ◼ ► Daring Fireball Yesterday, it's a quasi-religious, what the Catholic Church is to my dad, even though
01:52:13 ◼ ► he also believes in democracy. Democracy fills that role for me. It is a belief system that is
01:52:18 ◼ ► larger than me, and it, my belief in it is predicated in a significant amount, purely on
01:52:28 ◼ ► faith, that it is the right way to govern ourselves. It is faith, and that to me is what defines
01:52:37 ◼ ► a religious belief. And I totally get it, I'm a nerd. I've known how the Electoral College
01:52:44 ◼ ► worked since I was a teenager. I totally got it when it was, I don't know about you, when I was
01:52:48 ◼ ► in high school, and my wife and I, because it, I don't mention it a lot, but my wife and I went to,
01:52:55 ◼ ► all through school together. We both recall this, that our, we had a good history teacher,
01:53:02 ◼ ► a US history teacher in 10th grade, Mr. Dengler, and he, when he taught us about the Electoral
01:53:09 ◼ ► College, and he was an old school teacher and a little older at the time, but even he presented
01:53:15 ◼ ► it as sort of a, the whole thing was sort of an asterisk. Every four years, we hold a presidential
01:53:20 ◼ ► election, whoever gets the most vote wins, but we don't actually do the tabulation by just counting
01:53:25 ◼ ► the votes, and whoever gets the most votes from coast, from Florida to Alaska gets the thing.
01:53:29 ◼ ► We actually do it state by state, and you get state Electoral College votes, but it always turns
01:53:42 ◼ ► Pete: And then 2000 happened where Gore won the popular vote and Bush won the Electoral College,
01:53:51 ◼ ► and it was by its craziest, flukeiest one in a million are we living in a simulation that's
01:53:57 ◼ ► just meant to torment this margin of hanging 500 hanging chads in Florida. While, speaking of our
01:54:04 ◼ ► good friend Pat Buchanan, the idiot graphic designer in Broward County designed a ballot
01:54:10 ◼ ► that made it look like voting, if you wanted to vote for Gore, yeah, that if you wanted,
01:54:17 ◼ ► if you wanted to vote for Al Gore, you, there was a circle next to his name, and if you filled in
01:54:23 ◼ ► that circle next to Al Gore's name, you were casting a vote for Patrick Buchanan. And 5000
01:54:29 ◼ ► Jewish, elderly Jewish Democrats in Broward County wound up casting a vote for Pat Buchanan,
01:54:37 ◼ ► of all people. In an election where the state of Florida was determined by only 500 ballots,
01:54:44 ◼ ► and that Florida's electoral votes tipped the scale to the candidate who didn't win the popular
01:54:49 ◼ ► election. But it was so close, but it still sat wrong with me. And part of what made 2016 sit so
01:54:55 ◼ ► wrong with me in a fundamental way is I know that the game is for the Electoral College.
01:55:03 ◼ ► And I know it. And that's how the campaigns are geared. And if the game were for the national
01:55:08 ◼ ► popular vote, they'd run different campaigns. They'd have commercials in, what's that big
01:55:12 ◼ ► state out west where you live? Oh, Nevada? Nope, the other one. It's a little bigger. California.
01:55:18 ◼ ► Yeah. Yeah. Did you get TV commercials? Did you have TV commercials? Did you watch any TV? Did
01:55:23 ◼ ► you watch sports at all? Yeah, no, I watch, I watch enough, well, I watch a lot of people.
01:55:28 ◼ ► Did you have commercials over the last month? All we had, all we had for the last six weeks were
01:55:33 ◼ ► I mean, I just can only begin to guess how different they are. Like, we get a lot of stuff
01:55:38 ◼ ► here for some local politicians, but the real money to buy commercials is for ballot initiatives.
01:55:45 ◼ ► Yeah, that's it. So you do get election ads, but they're like the ballot. Yeah, but we don't get
01:55:49 ◼ ► as much Bobby Newport. Yeah, what about the Steve Garvey, Adam Schiff thing? You know how that
01:55:53 ◼ ► breaks. Was that big or was Garvey a clown? You know how that breaks my heart. I met him in 1979.
01:56:03 ◼ ► No, no, no. Oh, I met the '79 Dodgers in the Bob Trumpy from the Bengals. I never told you this
01:56:12 ◼ ► story. No, I don't think so. Is that really his name? Unfortunate name. Yeah, he was a center,
01:56:17 ◼ ► Jesus Christ, man. He was a, what, center tight end for the Bengals for years. It's a long story,
01:56:27 ◼ ► he had a radio show in Cincinnati. It's a long story, but yeah, no, shifted okay, shifted okay
01:56:32 ◼ ► there. But yeah, I mean, like it's, it's going to be different. They would play, all candidates
01:56:40 ◼ ► would play the game differently if it was just a national vote. But to quote the great Nathan,
01:56:44 ◼ ► Arizona, if a frog had wings, he wouldn't bump his ass at a hobbit. Right. In the same way that in,
01:56:50 ◼ ► in theory, I mean, if things were different, they'd be different. That's what makes them
01:56:54 ◼ ► different. Right. In theory, you could have a baseball World Series where one team wins
01:57:01 ◼ ► three games by a landslide, like 10 to 1, 13 to 3, 15 to 0, and then loses four games by one run each,
01:57:11 ◼ ► two to one, three to two, etc. And the team that won those four games by one run wins the World
01:57:17 ◼ ► Series. And the team- Sounds like a man who's lost money on baseball recently. Well, that didn't
01:57:24 ◼ ► happen. Thankfully, that did not happen. But that, it most famously happened to the Yankees
01:57:30 ◼ ► before I was born when the Pittsburgh Pirates beat them in 1960 on a home run by Bill Mazeroski in the
01:57:35 ◼ ► seventh inning. That's before I was born, but as a Yankees fan, you learn, you learn that history
01:57:39 ◼ ► before you learn. That was in the World Series? Yeah, it was a World Series and the Yankees were
01:57:43 ◼ ► by far a better team and won three games by a large margin and lost four games by one run,
01:57:48 ◼ ► including the last game by a game winning home run. Talk about privilege. But the Yankees knew
01:57:54 ◼ ► it. The Yankees knew that the way you win the World Series is to win four games out of a possible
01:57:59 ◼ ► seven. And it doesn't matter how big you win the other. Fair and square, the Pittsburgh Pirates won.
01:58:04 ◼ ► And fair and square, Donald Trump was the victor in 2016 because he won the Electoral College.
01:58:18 ◼ ► it, I, what's wrong about the Electoral College is not that it hurt my team in 2000 and 2016.
01:58:30 ◼ ► it actually came pretty close. Nate Silver, who, well, he's retired to this day, who's,
01:58:35 ◼ ► I'm not going to say it, but to this day, my entire impression of him is governed by an
01:58:57 ◼ ► Pete; Nate's, Nate Silver's simulations for this election, which turned out in hindsight
01:59:02 ◼ ► to be very, very accurate. The polls, hats off to the whole polling industry who kind of had it
01:59:06 ◼ ► right this time. But he, his simulation showed numerous outcomes where Trump could have, could
01:59:12 ◼ ► have gotten the, win the election by winning the Electoral College, but losing the popular vote
01:59:18 ◼ ► to her, which happened again. And it also showed outcomes that went the other way. There were
01:59:24 ◼ ► outcomes where Kamala Harris would have been the next president of the United States having won the
01:59:29 ◼ ► Electoral College, but Trump would have won the popular vote. It's so close. He won solidly,
01:59:36 ◼ ► but, you know, 2% here, 2% there, and that could have happened. And I really kind of wanted it to
01:59:42 ◼ ► happen in a, in a very small, I'm a very small person, bitter way, because I knew it would drive
01:59:51 ◼ ► the man insane. If he won the, did the reverse of what he himself benefited from eight years ago,
02:00:00 ◼ ► and lost the election, but won the popular vote, his, I think he would have died on the spot.
02:00:11 ◼ ► Greece is holding synapses together, it would have burst into flames if that had happened to him.
02:00:16 ◼ ► But then I, and I, I'm even hesitant to share this with you and our audience on this show,
02:00:28 ◼ ► and it's not as good as a clean win for Harris would have been, even though it would have been
02:00:34 ◼ ► a spiteful part of me would have enjoyed it. But it's not outlandish to think that Democrats could
02:00:40 ◼ ► one day, it could have happened this year, it could happen in four years, that if the rules of
02:00:43 ◼ ► the game are such, but it just, the reason to abolish it is it's wrong. One person, one vote,
02:00:55 ◼ ► whoever gets the most votes win. That's the way it should be because I believe in it. I do.
02:00:59 ◼ ► And the fact that it went the wrong way, and it is a clean victory for Trump where he won
02:01:06 ◼ ► the popular vote and the electoral college and none of the margins in any state is really within
02:01:12 ◼ ► disputable, nobody's worried about recounts or anything, is horrible, but it is so much better
02:01:18 ◼ ► than 2016 where you could say that this isn't even the will of the majority of the people who voted.
02:01:36 ◼ ► We should talk about computers sometime. I got a whole list of stuff I want to, I know I'm not
02:01:43 ◼ ► really at the level of a John Moltz that I would be on again in less than fewer than four years,
02:02:16 ◼ ► Pete Let me thank our friends at Memberful. Memberful helps independent content creators.
02:02:24 ◼ ► Either you are now or maybe again, if this whole thing is making you reevaluate your choices and
02:02:31 ◼ ► how you spend your time on what you do, maybe you want to become one. I don't know. Also, maybe you
02:02:36 ◼ ► are a developer and you aren't a content creator yourself, but you're the sort of person who helps
02:02:42 ◼ ► actual content creators make things, do things, sell things, build out the website for them.
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02:03:19 ◼ ► And that's part of the strength of Memberful's offering where they're not putting their brand
02:03:24 ◼ ► in front of the brands of your creators. They're in the background behind them and it's no more
02:03:29 ◼ ► interesting to you that they're using Memberful than which CMS they're using or what flavor of
02:03:35 ◼ ► Markdown they're writing their posts in. It is really great though if you are a creator or
02:03:40 ◼ ► a developer who's helping a creator integrate a membership system into their site. Don't build the
02:03:45 ◼ ► whole thing yourself. Use Memberful. They've got all of the stuff that you need and it's already
02:03:50 ◼ ► roles and it all just, if you're using WordPress, it's just like, "Goo, you install this, click that
02:03:55 ◼ ► and you're already up and running." And you've got stuff like members only posts or members only
02:04:00 ◼ ► podcast episodes or integration with Discord so that you can have a members only area on a
02:04:06 ◼ ► Discord board for people to get together and talk about whatever it is that your obsession is. It is
02:04:11 ◼ ► just great. I'm a member of so many Memberful sites and I love every one of them. Go to
02:04:17 ◼ ► memberful.com/talkshow. That's M-E-M-D-E-R-F-U-L memberful.com/talkshow and find out more and
02:04:26 ◼ ► they'll know you came from here. Yeah, lightning round. Let's just do a lightning round and I don't
02:04:31 ◼ ► know. I don't know if we helped. I don't know. I did. No, we did not. We absolutely did not.
02:04:36 ◼ ► Well, you were talking about our mutual friend John Siracusa and I told you I've just, you know,
02:04:42 ◼ ► I'm texting more friends this week than I do most weeks because I want to. I want to be the,
02:04:46 ◼ ► I don't know, I hope everybody else is too. And I do a stupid thing that I justify because it's my
02:04:53 ◼ ► job and I'm supposed to pay attention where I, instead of having the App Store on any of my
02:04:57 ◼ ► devices install updates automatically, I have it on manual mode. So every day, and I have a lot of
02:05:02 ◼ ► apps on all my devices. So every day. Can I just also say as a hot tip, that's also a good
02:05:06 ◼ ► opportunity when you're getting the update, I'm being serious, to swipe with your little thumb
02:05:11 ◼ ► from right to left and delete the app if you don't use it anymore. Yeah. Which you don't get when
02:05:16 ◼ ► it's automatic. And it's actually a lot easier to delete apps in there than it is to delete them
02:05:21 ◼ ► from the jiggle screen. No, it is a great way to, you know, maybe like, hey, every, you know,
02:05:27 ◼ ► I'm going to look at these things manually. I like to look at the release notes if they have something.
02:05:30 ◼ ► I have a rule of thumb, John, that I realize amongst the tech class, and that's what I call
02:05:35 ◼ ► you people, the tech class, I realize this is considered irresponsible, but I have a rule of
02:05:38 ◼ ► thumb, which is if I have absolutely no idea what the app is, what it does and why I have it,
02:05:45 ◼ ► I tend to have, I'm pretty sanguine about letting it go. I figure I can always get it back if I
02:05:49 ◼ ► learn what it is. If I don't remember what an app does, I either force myself right then and there,
02:05:55 ◼ ► after it updates, to hit the open button and open it and remind myself or swipe and delete. It is a
02:06:02 ◼ ► great time to delete. But anyway, I update all my apps manually because I want to see, oh, here,
02:06:07 ◼ ► I want that. I want to be able to see, is it something I don't use? Anyway, I was on my Mac
02:06:11 ◼ ► and I went to the Mac app store and there were six updates and two of them were apps from John
02:06:17 ◼ ► Siracusa. Bug fixes to his little utility front and center. And I know this. Switch glass.
02:06:25 ◼ ► Yeah, updates, bug fixes, and he had to... I got switch glass running down here right now,
02:06:30 ◼ ► over here to my lower right. I don't know if you know John Siracusa well, but guess what?
02:06:37 ◼ ► His release notes are not bug fixes and updates. They actually tell you what the bug fixes are.
02:06:45 ◼ ► Just so I'm clear, John, you're saying he does more than say, we're always improving the app?
02:06:57 ◼ ► This is one of the numerous reasons I love Greg Pierce. The man says how the app changed. Thank
02:07:16 ◼ ► John, I watched a one-hour video yesterday about how to create an entire notes infrastructure
02:07:34 ◼ ► and I lost all the preparation. There's still wheels spinning in a corner of your screen,
02:07:42 ◼ ► So I pasted a screenshot. Two of the six apps with updates from my Mac were his, and I wrote...
02:07:48 ◼ ► I texted a screenshot and wrote, "Nose down on busy work as a distraction," and he wrote, "Yep."
02:07:57 ◼ ► Me, it works. And he said, "We also recorded for over three hours last night." I'm assuming that...
02:08:04 ◼ ► I just presume that means ATP. I look forward to that. And I said, "I'm recording with Merlin this
02:08:09 ◼ ► afternoon." And he gave me the salutomer emoji. Because... As in, thank you for your service?
02:08:18 ◼ ► Only three hours? Three hours long? I wonder if there's anything in their discussions about
02:08:23 ◼ ► somebody who likes the wrong stuff the wrong way, like CERs or what have you. I don't know.
02:08:30 ◼ ► Because I'm the Casey here. I'm the Casey, I'm the Griffin Newman. I know what character I am
02:08:35 ◼ ► on shows. I was on You Look Nice Today, for God's sake. We made the episode called Who Voted,
02:08:43 ◼ ► it's like getting a sticker that says, "Who farted?" I voted. But anyways, I worry a lot
02:08:47 ◼ ► about Casey. Here's what Jon does. I don't like to throw Jon under the bus. I'd like to throw him
02:08:52 ◼ ► under some kind of municipal transit system in Long Island. Maybe the LIRR, maybe. But no,
02:08:58 ◼ ► what he does is he makes Casey read... So Jon puts all the stuff and decides what the show will be.
02:09:04 ◼ ► I'm also familiar with this. And then he makes Casey read it and say it. And if like Anish
02:09:10 ◼ ► Gupta or whomever writes it, Casey's the one who has to navigate the name. He goes, "I looked at
02:09:16 ◼ ► something on YouTube." You're killing Casey, Jon. He's such a good person. He's the best...
02:09:24 ◼ ► Who? Casey. Yeah. He's the best person. But part of what makes him the best person is a certain
02:09:33 ◼ ► ... Forgive me, Casey, but a certain naivete? Naivete possibly, but also he's not as committed
02:09:40 ◼ ► to his bit as a lot of us are. Well, I don't think it's a bit, which I think anybody who listens to
02:09:45 ◼ ► you will recall what you're saying is when Casey is reading those show notes that were obviously
02:09:51 ◼ ► written by Jon. And in his words... It's like what Ezra Klein has the producer in to interview him.
02:10:00 ◼ ► And Casey will say, and I don't think Casey can act, so I don't think it's a bit. Casey will say,
02:10:06 ◼ ► "I don't know which one of you put this in here, but..." And every single time! Because
02:10:10 ◼ ► Marcus is famous for always doing his homework. It's probably Marcus. Every time I have to pause
02:10:16 ◼ ► my AirPods and I have to laugh out loud. I have every single time. It is... I don't know which
02:10:24 ◼ ► one of you put this in here. And then, of course, then later on, Sir Cusan will say, "Somebody will
02:10:31 ◼ ► find that for notes." And I think, "Will someone find that? Is it somebody or is it that you
02:10:37 ◼ ► basically talking to Casey?" We have a small support group. I can't get super into it, but
02:10:41 ◼ ► there's another number of people who have to deal with people like Jon, Sir Cusan, and their life.
02:10:46 ◼ ► And we talk to each other quietly about it. We try not to get his attention because we'll find out
02:10:50 ◼ ► that what we're doing, we're doing wrong, even the way we're talking to each other. But we all need
02:10:54 ◼ ► to... It's like the election in a lot of ways. We got to stick together. We got to stick to our
02:10:58 ◼ ► values. What's the... Jon, what's the lightning round? Are we going to talk about scissors?
02:11:08 ◼ ► shame on me because it's... it's just a shame on me. It was actually two years ago. It was October
02:11:14 ◼ ► 2022. I can't believe it. I feel like you're on all the time, but it was two years ago. But at the
02:11:19 ◼ ► end... I think it was even at the end of the episode, we got to talking about nail clippers
02:11:45 ◼ ► Jon Moffitt And I... I needed a new pair and you said they were better. And I actually do
02:11:49 ◼ ► believe... and as soon as you said it, I... A, I was... they're nail clippers. I don't know how
02:11:53 ◼ ► much they cost. They're not... they're more expensive than the gas station nail clippers
02:12:03 ◼ ► Jon Moffitt Oh, the gas station sells nail clippers. I guarantee you, next time you buy gas...
02:12:08 ◼ ► Jon Moffitt Next time you buy gas, don't pay at the pump. Go inside, get yourself a beverage,
02:12:16 ◼ ► Jon Moffitt Ask the guy if they sell nail clippers. I guarantee you, 100% they sell nail clippers.
02:12:28 ◼ ► Jon Moffitt There is a 100% chance that they sell USB cables and chargers, 100% chance. And there
02:12:36 ◼ ► Jon Moffitt Ping pong balls. Now, that's something where you... that's an organic thing where you
02:12:40 ◼ ► learn your community, right? It's like, are you gonna have like Robert Mueller candles or...
02:12:54 ◼ ► Jon Moffitt I've discovered things that are for marijuana that I don't know about. Where like,
02:13:02 ◼ ► there's a similar kind of thing where you're like, there's got to be a little bit of... we've got a
02:13:09 ◼ ► Jon Moffitt Seiki, Seiki, Seiki. But anyway, I was predisposed... anyway, you could have told me to
02:13:14 ◼ ► buy them and if they could have been from North Korea, and I still would have bought them. But I
02:13:18 ◼ ► happen to think I'm a fan of Japanese design and the Japanese sentiment and approach to design. And
02:13:25 ◼ ► I think things like... our kitchen knives upstairs are Japanese. They're very nice and have wonderful
02:13:30 ◼ ► handles. I happen to think as soon as you said it, I thought, I'll bet the Japanese can make a
02:13:34 ◼ ► hell of a nail clipper. I bet they can. And the truth is, it is one of the best little things I've
02:13:40 ◼ ► ever bought. It is... they are the best nail clippers. I can't imagine how they could be
02:13:44 ◼ ► better. And I've had it in my head. I was like, I didn't even write it down. And I write everything
02:13:49 ◼ ► down because I forget stuff. There was 100% chance, no matter what, whether you came back
02:13:53 ◼ ► last year, no election, whether you came back today to talk about a holiday party, whatever,
02:14:00 ◼ ► I was not going to forget to thank you for this nail clipper recommendation. Because one thing
02:14:05 ◼ ► about a set of nail clippers is you need to use them... I think I'm like a once every 10 days
02:14:16 ◼ ► Well, it depends. Like, if I'm playing guitar, you've got to keep them kind of trimmed on my
02:14:20 ◼ ► left hand. But also it's one of those things kind of like a knife where it might seem like every
02:14:27 ◼ ► knife is pretty much the same. It's either sharp or it's not or whatever. But like you develop,
02:14:31 ◼ ► even if you're not a weirdo, like one of those weirdos with their case full of knives they got
02:14:35 ◼ ► at CIA, Top Chef weirdos, but you discover, oh, this kind of knife, I can depend on it being this
02:14:40 ◼ ► kind of way. Having the confidence with nail clippers will add a little bit of quality of life
02:14:46 ◼ ► to your life because they work. So you're not... the problem with a dull knife, there's a lot of
02:14:52 ◼ ► problems with the dull knife, including it's way easier to cut yourself, but it's also that you
02:14:59 ◼ ► But you develop, like if you're trying to cut up an orange slice, like for an old fashioned,
02:15:03 ◼ ► and you know that you like... I'm a big knife sharpener. I love sharpening knives. But like
02:15:12 ◼ ► like keep your knife sharpened was what I'm saying. Get these, it'll make a difference.
02:15:23 ◼ ► our friend Matthew Panzareno now writes, since leaving TechCrunch, and he's joined Tip Top as,
02:15:30 ◼ ► I don't even know what his title is, but you know, he's Matthew Panzareno there. It's just,
02:15:33 ◼ ► he's him. But on his side, he's running his own website, a blog, as it were, which is not dead,
02:15:40 ◼ ► and which I encourage anybody out there who's thought about starting one, and it's inspired
02:15:44 ◼ ► to change to do it. But he runs a great one called The Obsessor, which is such a great name for what
02:15:49 ◼ ► he does. And a couple, it was August 25th, he wrote a headline, "The Best Nail Clippers You'll
02:15:55 ◼ ► Ever Use." And he had a recommendation for a nail clipper. And I thought, oh, this is even greater,
02:16:02 ◼ ► because next time Merlin's on, I can pit my friend Matthew's choice against Merlin's choice. And I'm
02:16:08 ◼ ► going to buy the one that Matthew's recommending and see how they compare it to the one I've been
02:16:12 ◼ ► using for two years from my pal Merlin. And then I got to the picture he showed and I thought, whoa,
02:16:17 ◼ ► that looks a lot, looks a lot like the other one. I might have learned about it from Kevin—
02:16:32 ◼ ► I might have learned about these from Kevin Kelly's site. I'm not sure. Isn't that hilarious?
02:16:38 ◼ ► He picks a different model. He's got a bigger model, sort of a, maybe more of a toenail clipper,
02:16:43 ◼ ► to be honest. He's got a bigger model. And in fact, just, I don't know if you knew this,
02:16:51 ◼ ► But anyway, I'm going to put this link in the show notes. And anybody out there who's using a
02:16:56 ◼ ► pair of gas station nail clippers, get these. They're 16 bucks at Amazon. I'm sure you can find
02:17:01 ◼ ► them at another store if you're not in the mood to shop at Amazon anymore. But this is $16. For $16,
02:17:09 ◼ ► you could get yourself the best set of nail clippers in the world. I want to thank you.
02:17:22 ◼ ► You don't get to pick how people remember you in life. But as somebody who grew up as a child of
02:17:28 ◼ ► the Depression-era people, boy, fancy nail clippers is about the last thing in the world.
02:17:33 ◼ ► Every single time I cut my nails, and I'm telling you, I think I'm about once every 10 days.
02:17:36 ◼ ► Every time, it at least pops into my head, I thank my friend Merlin for recommending these to me,
02:17:42 ◼ ► these are clearly superior. They cut better, they last longer, the lever is smoother, the grip,
02:17:58 ◼ ► Yeah, I did. My grandfather died of black lung disease. He went to work in a coal mine in
02:18:03 ◼ ► outside Pottsville, Pennsylvania when he finished, I think he finished eighth grade or else it was
02:18:13 ◼ ► But you've got people in your family where, you know, what I'm curious, do you ever find
02:18:22 ◼ ► Ben Franklin could see how SMTP works or something. But then you go, oh my God, I'm so grateful that I
02:18:29 ◼ ► don't, my grandfather does not have to know about certain aspects of my life. And this one,
02:18:35 ◼ ► I thought about enough, I think about it all the time. I mean, this one I actually wrote down,
02:18:38 ◼ ► I never did anything with it, but I imagine this is a dialogue between me and my grandfather.
02:18:42 ◼ ► My grandfather says, how can a light bulb cost $20? And I say, Grandpa, you can use your phone
02:18:51 ◼ ► to turn it on and off. And my grandfather, in my imagination says, you call your $20 light bulb to
02:18:59 ◼ ► turn it on and off? And I would say, sort of, and he would say, well, I hope it's a local goal.
02:19:11 ◼ ► I have this one because it can make a less yellow, less blue light in the room and I can control it.
02:19:16 ◼ ► Oh, and by the way, it's all gotten so much worse in the last five years. Everything I own has
02:19:21 ◼ ► become ungovernable, nothing works anymore. My voice, my dictation on my phone finally broke.
02:19:26 ◼ ► Like everything is, as they might be trying to say, everything is catching on fire. It's all
02:19:34 ◼ ► I do, and I do think if you want to tie it back to the election, I think that little things...
02:19:52 ◼ ► The obvious truth is, and it's not a partisan thing, it is not a partisan thing. It affects
02:19:57 ◼ ► both, everybody, but there is a large swath of the electorate that is necessary to achieve a majority
02:20:11 ◼ ► here in the US this week by people who lived through Trump's four years in office and seemingly
02:20:19 ◼ ► don't remember any of it. Like just, you'd say, do you remember the time he blank? Which is the
02:20:24 ◼ ► thing that not only happened, but is on TV, on camera and was replayed many times because it was
02:20:31 ◼ ► so ridiculous. The putting bleach in your arms is one I think. Yeah, during the time when it...
02:20:36 ◼ ► what if something really bad, a true crisis happens and people are dying and we actually need
02:20:41 ◼ ► leadership in the White House and we had a guy up there who on the fly took over the daily press
02:20:47 ◼ ► conference from actual scientists and suggested... I think you're selling the guy short because...
02:21:00 ◼ ► Okay, listen, I've got to stop this right now because this is making me sick. I think you're
02:21:04 ◼ ► not giving this guy the credit that he's... He has been told by people who are some of the greatest
02:21:08 ◼ ► professors, not just in America, but in the world. At MIT? Like his uncle? Including at MIT,
02:21:14 ◼ ► he did go to college in Pennsylvania, which is no small matter. But he knows, for example,
02:21:19 ◼ ► he's been told by many, many prominent scholars. I don't know if it's scholars of sharks or batteries,
02:21:24 ◼ ► but they believe that his response to the famous shark versus battery conundrum might be the
02:21:29 ◼ ► smartest way they've ever heard to deal with the shark versus battery. Also, he has passed two
02:21:34 ◼ ► cognitive tests. He aced them, in his words. Person, woman, camera, TV. Man, person, woman,
02:21:42 ◼ ► man, camera, TV. He still remembers them and he's still very proud of them. Loaf of bread,
02:21:48 ◼ ► a stick of butter. You know what I mean? So many people have said it, but it's just so true. He
02:21:56 ◼ ► tested that he has now spent five fucking years bragging about acing is a test where if you get
02:22:02 ◼ ► one wrong, they call your family. They go to that sheet that says, "Who do we call if there's an
02:22:07 ◼ ► emergency?" And they call your family and say, "We're gonna have to have a hard conversation
02:22:12 ◼ ► about grandpa." And yeah. It would be kind of like going like, "I totally aced that eye exam."
02:22:18 ◼ ► I saw the "E" on the eye exam very strongly. We're not going to be able to let him drive
02:22:25 ◼ ► home. That's the test that he brags about. Anyway. Sorry, P-Paw, you're taking the train home.
02:22:33 ◼ ► But do let me, I will say, just let me say this. The point is I do want to make it before the
02:22:38 ◼ ► show's over. For people to honestly to feel a little better is it is global. We can look
02:22:43 ◼ ► outside the US and globally there has been in the last year, two years now that COVID is over,
02:22:52 ◼ ► there has been a—everybody's getting pushed out. Anti—it's not right wing in some countries,
02:22:58 ◼ ► it is—it's anti-incumbency though. That people saw the, "Okay, COVID's over and inflation is
02:23:05 ◼ ► inevitable." It's inevitable after the government, after everything shuts down and the government has
02:23:10 ◼ ► to pump money into the economy to keep, you know— And sorry, but just in passing and that,
02:23:15 ◼ ► nobody likes to see their dad cry. But once you've seen your dad cry, your dad can cry. To see
02:23:21 ◼ ► these governments that by and large, whether that's Trudeau or us or whomever, have mostly been pretty
02:23:26 ◼ ► reliable. You've seen your dad cry now. Like you've seen, "Oh, this can fail. Like this can go bad."
02:23:31 ◼ ► And I think that had a huge impact, whether you think about it in terms of competency or
02:23:36 ◼ ► continuity of care, whatever, however you think about it. I think that leaves a mark on people's
02:23:45 ◼ ► "Let's get rid of them and put incumbents out, new people in because I don't like it." And
02:23:50 ◼ ► inflation was like that. These prices are crazy high for whatever, and they were. They all did,
02:23:56 ◼ ► all sorts of prices went up and people immediately just looked, "Who's in office now?" Well, here it
02:24:03 ◼ ► was the Biden and there it was the Tories. But if you look at the other countries around the world
02:24:08 ◼ ► that have thrown out the incumbents by large margin, in the UK, which they—we have a special
02:24:17 ◼ ► relationship, as they say, with them. We share a language, some might debate how much, but
02:24:22 ◼ ► there was a 47-point swing in the election results that put Keir Stormer in and got rid of the
02:24:43 ◼ ► Pete; As the prime minister. But 47-point swing, 47-point swing, and you go country after country,
02:24:49 ◼ ► 15-point swing, 20-point swing, and it's not all to the right if there were the conservative party—
02:24:57 ◼ ► but this is what I was trying to say about we need different ways to slice up and understand
02:25:04 ◼ ► Pete; That there is an argument in the context of what's happened to the incumbent party
02:25:09 ◼ ► post-COVID around the world that the seven-point swing we saw this week in the United States is by
02:25:16 ◼ ► far the smallest swing of any of the Western countries we would consider our peers, and
02:25:20 ◼ ► therefore further proof that Kamala Harris ran the best or as close to the best campaign we could
02:25:44 ◼ ► These are scissors I learned about from Marco Arment and they're called, I think I put,
02:25:49 ◼ ► I can't tell, Search K-A-I. These are scissors, these are the big ones, I got big ones,
02:25:58 ◼ ► and I'm sorry, that's aggressive, but if you're like me and you grew up the child of people who
02:26:03 ◼ ► came up during the Depression, you have the notion of the good scissors. The good scissors,
02:26:11 ◼ ► It's only recently in my life, and I've covered this, please put a link to my document that I wish
02:26:15 ◼ ► people would talk about more in the wisdom.limo. You can go to this. If you got good scissors,
02:26:20 ◼ ► use good scissors. What are you saving it for? What are you saving that chicken breast that you
02:26:24 ◼ ► cook for? Are you going to eat it? It's not a museum. Do something with it. And my feeling is,
02:26:28 ◼ ► even as frustrated as I got with my young person about all the mini-disappearing scissors in our
02:26:39 ◼ ► Use them for whatever it seems like—what do you—I feel, I can feel like my grandparents'
02:26:45 ◼ ► sensibility ringing in my brain as I'm like, "Oh no, these are too nice to use." And you're like,
02:26:53 ◼ ► well they might get wrecked." "Okay, then you'll get different ones or not?" But the way that we
02:27:00 ◼ ► Americans try to keep their—like you people, you people with the plastic on your furniture.
02:27:05 ◼ ► It's crazy. Like, why don't you enjoy it like a couch instead of try to enjoy it like, I don't
02:27:09 ◼ ► know, like some kind of like an abattoir that needs to be easily cleaned up. These are called
02:27:14 ◼ ► KAI scissors. KAI, I learned about this from Marco and I'll tell you what Marco told me.
02:27:19 ◼ ► He said, "Merlin, you're going to get these scissors and you're going to cut yourself on
02:27:23 ◼ ► them." And I said, "Thank you, Marco. I probably will get the scissors, but I don't know if I'll
02:27:29 ◼ ► But really saliently, you will cut yourself on them. And I said, "Oh, Marco, I'm not in the
02:27:33 ◼ ► habit of cutting myself on scissors. I'm a big boy, strong like bull." Well, I'm here to tell
02:27:37 ◼ ► you, you will cut yourself on these, but holy God, I don't know if you can see what I'm doing here.
02:27:43 ◼ ► I can see it. Like how little. Maybe I should have a video show. But these are solid KAI.
02:28:02 ◼ ► You can go to Daddy's office and go to Daddy's desk and you can find a decent pair of scissors.
02:28:08 ◼ ► And it's a thing in this household because you know who the one person is who sometimes is
02:28:17 ◼ ► The one person who is sometimes sitting at my desk and looks over to the cup where there should
02:28:36 ◼ ► and including a person who now only lives in the house like over the summer and Christmas holiday.
02:29:02 ◼ ► But it has occurred to me that what I could do is just buy several pairs more scissors.
02:29:18 ◼ ► Why are we struggling? Go to my kid's room and come out with a basket of six pairs of scissors,
02:29:24 ◼ ► five or eight rolls of tape, like all the stuff that could be like in the service of being an
02:29:35 ◼ ► oh, that's where our six, I thought, geez, I thought I was buying enough scissors to keep up.
02:29:40 ◼ ► But then here's the thing, it's, there should be a name for this, like a Murphy's Law thing.
02:29:48 ◼ ► utility knives. I deploy these around the house. I have lots of different ones of these,
02:30:06 ◼ ► But do it, because life's too short. So what points do you get for keeping the scissors nice?
02:30:11 ◼ ► Right. You can stop yourself before you get to the getting a phone call from the people who run
02:30:17 ◼ ► the Hoarders TV show about the nail clippers. I don't want that call. Yeah, you don't want that
02:30:22 ◼ ► call. You can stop yourself before then, but you can buy a pair or two more nail clippers or
02:30:27 ◼ ► scissors than you need and never be short. So, Kai scissors, I'm going to try these. I'm going to buy
02:30:31 ◼ ► a pair. You will cut yourself. I checked, I knew you were going to suggest a pair of scissors.
02:30:37 ◼ ► And so I actually looked at my desk and I have one pair of scissors at my desk. And I, like I said,
02:30:42 ◼ ► I should always have two. I wish you could see my 3D, I'm not even going to send you a photo
02:30:46 ◼ ► because it just can't be anywhere that it could go anywhere. But I have so much of everything
02:30:51 ◼ ► everywhere. But what I've learned as a dad and as a goddamn American is you will benefit from
02:30:56 ◼ ► deploying important things around the house. Hey, did you ever know this? Did you know it's
02:31:00 ◼ ► okay to hide more than one key outside? Did you know that? Sounds crazy, right? But put it in two
02:31:06 ◼ ► non-obvious places instead of one. My advice would be to put it offsite, not onsite. Scissors,
02:31:11 ◼ ► it's okay. Now, if you're like my lady and you got those fancy poultry scissors that she used
02:31:15 ◼ ► to spatchcock a bird, pardon my French, we will try to sometimes move those aside because those
02:31:20 ◼ ► are special for spatchcock. There was a time where Jonas took a pair of kitchen scissors and
02:31:28 ◼ ► there was yelling about, "We use those for food," for whatever purpose he was using them. And all it
02:31:35 ◼ ► did was instill a belief that, yes, the way to go to take a pair of scissors is to go to the daddy's
02:31:41 ◼ ► office. Do you remember the old far side? Because there's no yelling. What we say versus what dogs
02:31:45 ◼ ► hear? Oh yeah, blah blah blah. I mean that's a lot of it. Blah blah, I'll buy more scissors.
02:31:51 ◼ ► You know that I love the fizzy waters. And I believe it broke during the pandemic. I don't
02:32:02 ◼ ► know when it did, but for years and years I had used the Soda Streams and made my own. Do you
02:32:07 ◼ ► still do that? Do you do a Soda Stream? No, and not for any reason other than I'm lazy.
02:32:17 ◼ ► Yeah, yeah. And it broke. And again, there's a very Marco and ATP heavy episode here, but
02:32:24 ◼ ► my friend Marco, while visiting him and his lovely family at the beach house several years ago,
02:32:30 ◼ ► I encountered this brand, Hals New York. You cannot get—I heard about it from Marco too.
02:32:36 ◼ ► You can't get it here. It's like trying to get your goddamn hoagies. You can get it. Go to
02:32:41 ◼ ► oasissnacks.com. Is this Full Belly? Where you can get like a $300 pizza delivered? Is that
02:32:49 ◼ ► kind of thing? No, it's not that well... Okay, tell me again what it's called. Where am I going?
02:32:55 ◼ ► OasisSnacks.com is a—I guarantee you you can order it. Sounds like a CIA front, but that's okay.
02:33:08 ◼ ► Well, because you and I—we talked about this—you and I have really—we've pushed the envelope on
02:33:15 ◼ ► My fizzy water, if I make it myself, it burns. Don't be fucking around with my fizzy water.
02:33:22 ◼ ► I am telling you that I buy it and I buy it in bulk, and I have it down here in the basement,
02:33:26 ◼ ► and I'm telling you that it's—there are—by the time it's time to reorder, I have like a 24-pack
02:33:33 ◼ ► of the plastic bottles that has been— This is YTROP1. This is YTROP1. SNR Oasis Snacks.
02:34:00 ◼ ► Do you get this kind that's a liter? No, I don't like a liter. I get the 20-ounce bottles.
02:34:21 ◼ ► No, don't be a sucker. You learned that in the '80s, recapping a two-liter. It's already—
02:34:30 ◼ ► bought a 24-pack of the cans and the shipment that I think literally arrived while we were
02:34:36 ◼ ► recording this. I got a notification that the shipment arrived. Well, humblebrag. Does that—
02:34:40 ◼ ► Well, you know what, though? That kind of puts me in Dutch, though, because it's sort of a—it's
02:35:11 ◼ ► Spindrift is like a competitor to—I'm drawing a blank on it because I hate them. What's the name
02:35:28 ◼ ► Oh, no. It's like somebody said a long time ago. It's like, you put a candle in a bathroom so that
02:35:32 ◼ ► when you take a shit, you can light the candle and it'll smell like a candle, plus somebody just
02:35:36 ◼ ► took a shit. That's how I feel when somebody has me a, quote, "flavored water," and I say,
02:35:55 ◼ ► forget the name of it, but they have a purple one. They have a grape or a lime that's nice.
02:35:59 ◼ ► It's just that in most cases, it tastes like—what is it my ex used to say? He used to say, "Zima
02:36:04 ◼ ► tastes like Diet Sprite with a cheese aftertaste." So many of them have this weird taste that's like
02:36:09 ◼ ► somebody took a shit in your bathroom and lit a candle. You know what I'm saying? I think that
02:36:12 ◼ ► should be the new benchmark. How many candles do you give this? Zima. There was always these fads
02:36:18 ◼ ► of these drinks. Crystal Pepsi. Yeah, that would—and Zima—but sometimes they're alcoholic,
02:36:24 ◼ ► and they last for two years. But the messaging of Zima was if you don't like the taste of
02:36:29 ◼ ► alcoholic beverages that are traditional, try Zima, which doesn't taste at all like them
02:36:40 ◼ ► It's like, "Why are you even flailing it? Don't put the flavor in it. That makes it worse." Oh,
02:36:44 ◼ ► you don't like beer or wine or mixed drinks? Try Zima. Oh, really? Wine coolers? Wine coolers are
02:36:48 ◼ ► too strong for you? Anyway, well, this is not alcoholic. And unlike 2016, I have not been
02:36:55 ◼ ► drinking in the aftermath of this election at all. But Spindrift is like a La Croix. I really like
02:37:01 ◼ ► this. I don't love every flavor, but I've never gotten a bad flavor. Well, put it on the list. I
02:37:04 ◼ ► got a waste of snacks, and now I'm writing down— Now, I think part of the secret is that Spindrift
02:37:09 ◼ ► is not a zero-calorie beverage, but it is not—and this is a personal preference. If you're out there
02:37:16 ◼ ► and you have a taste profile like mine, I have moved away from sweet sodas, which I used to
02:37:21 ◼ ► consume like a fiend in my— Gosh, I just drink them in such small—I drink like old man cans now,
02:37:25 ◼ ► and I can't finish. Oh, yeah, now I know why— Why the old people drink those little Budweisers
02:37:29 ◼ ► and stuff? Well, now I know why— It makes me feel like Andre the Giant when I've got this little
02:37:34 ◼ ► tiny Dr. Pepper. "Oh, I hope this doesn't keep me up!" But I—and I know many people looking to cut
02:37:40 ◼ ► down on the calories of sugar beverages, which to the zero ones, like Coke Zero, famously,
02:37:46 ◼ ► which are zero calories, but they substitute the sugar with the other sweetener. I like things that
02:37:52 ◼ ► have no added sweetener. I've gotten the need for sweetness out of my palate. Part of it getting
02:37:58 ◼ ► older, part of it is just by drinking it. So, they don't add any sweeteners, Spindrift, but they do
02:38:02 ◼ ► use real ingredients. So, here's the ingredients of their passion fruit orange guava island punch,
02:38:09 ◼ ► which is one of my favorites. That's too many words for how something tastes. Island punch,
02:38:13 ◼ ► I'm going to call it—I'm going to go back. Yes, please. Spindrift Island Punch. Edit that.
02:38:16 ◼ ► Island Punch. It tastes like Island Punch. It's a good name. Here's the ingredients. Carbonated
02:38:21 ◼ ► water, guava puree, passion fruit juice, orange juice, citric acid. That's not bad. That could
02:38:28 ◼ ► be a lot worse. Oh, and it is 13 calories. So, very close, very low calorie. I don't think anybody
02:38:34 ◼ ► is going to say, "I've gained weight, my pants don't fit because I've been drinking these 13
02:38:38 ◼ ► calorie Spindrifts." But it's not that chemically taste of like, uh, flavor. I know exactly what you
02:38:44 ◼ ► mean. Yeah, I really like this. I like this Island Punch. I'm not taking it under advisement. I've
02:38:49 ◼ ► written it down. Yeah. Yeah. Try a bunch of different—get a variety pack and see what you like.
02:38:53 ◼ ► Sure. Yeah. Anything else you want to recommend? No. Yeah, I got one more. What, me? No, people
02:39:02 ◼ ► aren't here for me, they're here for you. Everything I have is lame. Let me see what I've got.
02:39:06 ◼ ► Anything—let me just think. If there's anything that could change somebody's life, let me look.
02:39:09 ◼ ► Conversation with my grandfather, my election log. I'm in drafts. I can always recommend drafts.
02:39:15 ◼ ► One thing I was invited—hmm, you should have me back. Kai scissors, how do I fix my Apple dictation?
02:39:21 ◼ ► No, I think that's probably mostly it. You want to hear about the nano texture MacBook Pro display?
02:39:26 ◼ ► Just impossibly briefly. I don't know if you know this. Like, just—literally, that's plenty,
02:39:31 ◼ ► but keep going. I love it. Oh, good. Okay. I like iPads. I'm a fan. Yeah. No. You know what I like?
02:39:39 ◼ ► You should have me on the talk about computers sometime, because I have a lot to say about
02:39:41 ◼ ► computers. And I don't—I'm just going to say stuff like, do you want to bring up your phone
02:39:48 ◼ ► on your Mac? It's really nice. Oh, yeah, it's nice. I mean, you very quickly—it's one of the
02:39:52 ◼ ► things like writing in a Waymo, where the first few minutes you're like, this is uncanny. And then
02:39:56 ◼ ► after that you're like, this is the only way I ever want to do this. Let me tell you how I know
02:39:59 ◼ ► that that's an awesome feature. So I just upgraded late to the 15—Mac OS 15. Somebody who hates you
02:40:05 ◼ ► talking about technology likes it. But I upgraded late to Mac OS 15. And in hindsight, when I did,
02:40:11 ◼ ► I was like, you know what, this is no big deal. Somehow, with all this shit over the summer with
02:40:15 ◼ ► people talking like, ah, you got all these warnings and recording stuff, and it's annoying, and I
02:40:19 ◼ ► wrote about it. You got to go to preferences and take on the password thing. And I thought,
02:40:21 ◼ ► you know what, I'm going to wait. I'm going to wait a month to upgrade my Mac. Sure. Because my
02:40:24 ◼ ► Mac is too important, and I'm very precious about it. But in hindsight, I should have just upgraded
02:40:29 ◼ ► weeks ago. But anyway, I upgraded, and I got the iPhone mirroring, and I'm like, man, this is
02:40:34 ◼ ► great. Everybody says this is great, and I really like it, and this is a lot of great. And I got a
02:40:39 ◼ ► trackpad over there at my desk next to my computer. And then I spent the last week reviewing the—or
02:40:46 ◼ ► using a 16-inch MacBook Pro M4, the new one. Oh, wow. Which Apple sent me as a review unit,
02:40:53 ◼ ► which ostensibly I would have already reviewed today, but haven't because I don't know if you
02:40:58 ◼ ► know there was an election this week. I remember that. But they also sent me the new Magic trackpad
02:41:04 ◼ ► with USB-C. And there's obviously some kind of bug. It looks just like the Lightning one,
02:41:09 ◼ ► but there's some kind of bug, and I don't know what it is. I heard the keyboard doesn't work on
02:41:13 ◼ ► some current beta. Yes, there's a thing where if you're on an older version—Is that right?
02:41:18 ◼ ► Something like that, yeah. Yeah, something's going on with these new Magic peripherals.
02:41:22 ◼ ► I don't think they even work if you're on macOS. Well, because when you think about having like
02:41:24 ◼ ► Secure Enclave and all that stuff, there must be a lot of stuff going on that's—it's like,
02:41:33 ◼ ► It's just something about it. Well, why doesn't my dictation work, John? I really rely on it.
02:41:37 ◼ ► But anyway, the Magic trackpad with USB-C, even though I'm on the new machine that it's supposed
02:41:43 ◼ ► to be compatible with, when I use it with the iPhone mirroring app, scrolling works at 1,000th
02:41:51 ◼ ► the pace. It's almost—is it even working at all? Oh, no, it moved a pixel. There's something wrong.
02:41:55 ◼ ► And I went back to the Lightning trackpad with the same computer, and it just worked instantly. I
02:42:00 ◼ ► don't know. They'll fix it. It's a bug. But it was just proof that even after a week of using
02:42:05 ◼ ► the iPhone mirroring with a setup that was completely reliable, this is where I'm going.
02:42:09 ◼ ► That's actually perfect. When I couldn't scroll with this new computer with the new trackpad
02:42:14 ◼ ► on this one app that I thought, "Ah, that's cute. Sometimes I'll use my iPhone." I'm like,
02:42:19 ◼ ► "I need to finish up this review and go back to something that works so I can use my iPhone
02:42:23 ◼ ► in iPhone mirroring." I realize how much I've already— That's one reason I wanted to mention—so
02:42:29 ◼ ► we had a Do By Friday challenge a couple weeks, couple, three weeks ago to the extent possible,
02:42:33 ◼ ► just use voice to text on your Mac, which was easy for me because I use it a lot. And I've passed
02:42:39 ◼ ► the important thing, which is I now know which kinds of things are faster than others. And I'm
02:42:44 ◼ ► talking about hitting the thing in the lower right-hand corner, which you cannot make part
02:42:48 ◼ ► of a shortcut that's very frustrating to me because I want it everywhere. And boy, since,
02:42:52 ◼ ► for whatever reason, it stopped working, I've tried a bunch of things, I really wanted to bring
02:42:55 ◼ ► that to you because I didn't realize how addicted I was to dictation or voice to text until it wasn't
02:43:00 ◼ ► working. And it works with my AirPods. It's really weird, but it seems to be—and I'm not sure if it's
02:43:05 ◼ ► the keyboard—but anyway, the point being, that's how you know it's good. Here's my tip for you.
02:43:09 ◼ ► I'm going to say it again because I think I talked to over you. If you think you might like
02:43:13 ◼ ► the iPhone mirroring and you're okay with the risk, by all means hit Command, comma, and turn on
02:43:20 ◼ ► "Automatically." Lock me in and remember. Because if you don't have to enter—so if you've been doing
02:43:27 ◼ ► it and entering your password each time, that's a sucker game. But to have it be just another window
02:43:33 ◼ ► you bring up—and also, if you played with this in July and aren't up to date, Command+Shift++
02:43:38 ◼ ► Command+Shift-minus will change the size of the window on your Mac. So you can actually make it
02:43:42 ◼ ► a little smaller. Command+1, Command+2, Command+3 will take you through stuff. It's brilliant.
02:43:47 ◼ ► It's wonderful. You know what? They default to making it like a one-to-one real size thing.
02:43:52 ◼ ► Which seems kind of big on most laptops. Yeah, it's like, you could definitely—so change the size.
02:43:56 ◼ ► And I realize that. And I think this is one of those areas where Apple not explaining itself
02:44:01 ◼ ► is what's given me a career. So I can explain things that they don't explain themselves because
02:44:07 ◼ ► they just don't. But it's like, why is the default—and you know, Apple knows how important
02:44:14 ◼ ► the default settings are. And they have, in the recent era, I would say 15 to 20 years, gotten
02:44:22 ◼ ► religious about minimizing the number of options their own software offers, right? There was the
02:44:39 ◼ ► completely different areas of settings on my phone. So I need to double check the language
02:44:44 ◼ ► settings, for example, in keyboard. But then I also need to like clear out the cache in Siri,
02:44:49 ◼ ► dictation history. These are all kinds of things that I think Apple is really trying to get better
02:44:57 ◼ ► Right. And so you'd set up iPhone mirroring, which is very easy to enable on your phone and on your
02:45:02 ◼ ► Mac. And the default is you have to enter a password every time it starts up. And you think,
02:45:06 ◼ ► "Well, that's for a reason because Apple does things for a reason." And so you leave it on and
02:45:10 ◼ ► you're not going to use it as much. And you should definitely do what Merlin said. And I'm saying—
02:45:19 ◼ ► And it might—some people use their Macs in a family context where the kids just sit down in
02:45:33 ◼ ► like, it starts playing and then, like, you hear the dirty message somebody left on somebody's
02:45:39 ◼ ► It's kind of a shame that Apple doesn't advertise the fact that it is so easy to set up your own
02:45:55 ◼ ► Maybe folks aren't aware of that. And the thing is, that's a game changer. If you can tolerate
02:45:59 ◼ ► If you can trust that the only person using your Mac is someone who should have instant
02:46:14 ◼ ► But it's off by default so people, A, feel better and so that people in a context where their kids
02:46:20 ◼ ► or their spouse or whatever also use the same Mac as them, they can't just, like, quick peek at
02:46:25 ◼ ► their phone. But everybody like us and probably most people who are the only people who use their
02:46:31 ◼ ► Mac or at least their Mac user account and the only people who use their phone, turn that off
02:46:36 ◼ ► and just get easy access and it is a game changer. And you will go—if you've been like, "I don't
02:46:41 ◼ ► see why people are making a big fuss over this," you'll go to, "Oh, this is amazing. I can't
02:47:12 ◼ ► independent of seeking out memes, I've seen the picture of Seymour Skinner looking through the
02:47:17 ◼ ► broken window and asking if it's the children that are wrong or him. But I'm determined that
02:47:24 ◼ ► the people I care about still deserve to be cared about, even if it's unpopular with people I don't
02:47:29 ◼ ► My wife had an interesting observation and I—it's not original, but just—and I wish I'd written
02:47:36 ◼ ► it down because she put it very succinctly. But she said—and she feels—she really feels better
02:47:42 ◼ ► this time than 20—same way as me—feels better personally because she's braced for it, knowing
02:47:49 ◼ ► that this is going to be worse. And she said, "I'm going to do what they do, is I'm not going to pay
02:47:54 ◼ ► attention to what the fuck he does." And they don't do it. And they're proud of it. And I'm
02:48:04 ◼ ► not proud of it, but yeah, just don't pay attention to what he does, even after he takes
02:48:07 ◼ ► office. But especially, especially between now and then, there's no point to it. Just don't pay
02:48:13 ◼ ► attention to it. Just tune out—but don't tune out a life, just find something else you care about.
02:48:20 ◼ ► For me, that's New York Times games. I don't play Wirtle, but I play the other ones, and it's
02:48:26 ◼ ► Yeah, go nose down. Go nose down. And if you're a favorite social network, if you've been using
02:48:31 ◼ ► Mastodon or Threads or the Blue Sky or the old one, and you go there and it just, "Ah!"
02:48:36 ◼ ► Just, just frickin' close it. Delete the app from your phone. You don't have to delete your
02:48:40 ◼ ► account. Just delete the app. Just get rid of it. You can go download it again if you want to,
02:48:44 ◼ ► but delete it. You don't have to pay attention. Just find something else. There's so much more,
02:48:47 ◼ ► and I am already just one day in, just finding that the focus I can get by, "I don't want to
02:48:56 ◼ ► And it was always available to you, but now you have more reason than ever to reconnect with
02:49:01 ◼ ► And it doesn't have to be useful. It could be becoming a model train guy in your basement.
02:49:11 ◼ ► But I was trying to sell you on—I have so many things prepared for today that we're not going to
02:49:15 ◼ ► get to, including my list of things that I think cheers me up and I hope cheers other people up.
02:49:20 ◼ ► I have a really good YouTube list. But honestly, things like listening to Vivaldi and 3D printing
02:49:29 ◼ ► is having something I can really focus on. And I can always apply the same kinds of skills I've
02:49:35 ◼ ► always tried to apply, which is things like catching myself heading into an area I don't
02:49:48 ◼ ► Like, all those things can happen. But while—and I'm not trying to be a fancy lad saying that.
02:49:56 ◼ ► Go find something that—I'm not just saying even to be distracted—but you need something to do with
02:50:01 ◼ ► your hands and with your eyes, and that doesn't have to be jamming your gullet with more and more
02:50:06 ◼ ► bizarre information that somehow keys you up. Like, I understand. I have ADHD, which means that
02:50:12 ◼ ► my body has a problem doing healthy things about dopamine and with dopamine. I totally understand
02:50:18 ◼ ► that. But you do always have the choice to do something like Neil Perk. You always have the
02:50:22 ◼ ► ability to do the thing that you want to do with that information and with that ability.
02:50:31 ◼ ► We're not telling you anything you don't know. We're just reminding you what you already know.
02:50:37 ◼ ► Keep caring about the things that you care about. Don't cut muscle. We should probably have some
02:50:42 ◼ ► action points at the end and maybe a way to—maybe we could get a sponsor for that. Maybe it could be
02:50:47 ◼ ► brought to you by some kind of meal service company. But don't let go of all those things
02:50:52 ◼ ► just because you're losing your goddamn mind. This side benefit of any kind of a practice of
02:50:58 ◼ ► anything approaching meditation is developing the ability to not—to, as Pima Chodron says,
02:51:04 ◼ ► "Accept that you're the sky, not the weather." To not feel like everything, every feeling that
02:51:08 ◼ ► inhabits you has to define you. You always got the executive function to hit that escape key.
02:51:14 ◼ ► And by which I mean VI escape key, not as in like jump out of a plane. But like, just kind of pop
02:51:19 ◼ ► out of what you're doing, do a level set, think about what you're doing. And I'm not trying to be
02:51:25 ◼ ► corny about this, but find your version of 3D printing in Vivaldi. Not just because it's
02:51:31 ◼ ► distracting. Which might be 3D printing. But I'm going to make a lot of nice stuff for my family.
02:51:37 ◼ ► Because all the ones we received as children. No, but I'm just saying like, "Hey, go easy."
02:51:43 ◼ ► If there's ever any piece of advice I try to leave off, end up with just having to be a person who
02:51:49 ◼ ► grew up in America. Go easy on yourself that you think you deserve. And say I love you to everybody
02:51:55 ◼ ► who deserves it. And care about the stuff you care about. And if you want to turn that into a form of
02:52:00 ◼ ► whether that's activism or outreach or whatever it is you want to do, that's okay. But before we