This is the second part of a two-part conversation with Merlin Mann.
Join Jeff Severns Gunzel and Merlin Mann on a whimsical journey through AI antics, creative teamwork, and nostalgic rabbit holes. Get insights on ChatGPT’s quirks, AI integration in daily tasks, and practical wisdom from the Wisdom Project. Expect pop culture musings, heartfelt chats on personal growth, and humorous tales—from DIY hacks. Dive in for tech talk, life lessons, and a pinch of philosophical reflection.
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Transcript
Beauty of the Lonely Boys (Merlin Mann Part 2)
[00:00:00] Jeff: Hey everybody. This is Jeff Severns Gunzel. This is the Over Tired podcast. This is the second part of a two part conversation with Merlin Mann. Welcome back Merlin.
[00:00:11] Merlin: Thank you for having me, Jeff
[00:00:12] Jeff: so the Overtired, anybody who listens has noticed there are large gaps between episodes.
[00:00:17] Jeff: And in those off weeks, I was thinking I wanted to pick up on a conversation I’d had with Merlin we had started to have when you were on the on the podcast earlier this year about ChatGPT and it was to me a very interesting conversation as opposed to a very stale conversation and I think you and I are sort of kindred spirits and how we use this thing and so originally the idea was hey you guys mind if I just do like a one on one with Merlin about this so we did it. We did a first try at that. And it ended up being such a delightful, um, uh, opportunity to talk about a million things that weren’t ChatGPT that here we
[00:00:53] Merlin: Jeff, we got to talk about music and I was very, I was so, well, first of all, I was pleased because I don’t know where anybody sees anything [00:01:00] anymore, but, um, and you know, I was really hoping people would listen to it, but I didn’t want to be like too like meh, go listen to me talk, ramble for a long time.
[00:01:08] Merlin: But the people who did discover it and listen to it, uh, a few of them have contacted me and you to say that they enjoyed it. And I just wanted to say to our friends, uh, who especially enjoyed the music, thank you for enjoying that and for saying so. The music, the music talk, because we talked a fair amount about music.
[00:01:23] Jeff: Yeah, it was lovely to hear people kind of being excited about that. It was
[00:01:27] Merlin: This is my version of World War II, with all respect. Like, I don’t have anybody to talk to about what it’s like, you know, to be in the trenches. Well, you know, the trenches of 1994
[00:01:37] Jeff: Yeah, exactly. That’s all you got. 1994.
[00:01:40] Merlin: didn’t watch my friends die face down in the mud so that you could say shit about polvo.
[00:01:45] Jeff: There was a great, there’s a great Minneapolis band called More Ram. And this was in the 90s. And it was the singer of this band Hammerhead is a great band on Amphetamine Reptile local band here. But he had a song called She’s My Vietnam.[00:02:00]
[00:02:01] Merlin: Um, Trump told Howard Stern one time that venereal disease was his Vietnam.
[00:02:05] Jeff: Oh, shucks. Yeah, no. Yeah.
[00:02:08] Merlin: guess the Bonespurs didn’t bother him enough for but
[00:02:13] Merlin: Hey everybody, you’re listening to Overtired. It’s an alternate week episode where Jeff talks to Merlin Mann, which is a thing we’re gonna do from now on.
[00:02:18] Jeff: sounds great. Sounds great. Um,
[00:02:20] Merlin: neck of the woods? Good afternoon. Hello. Woo!
[00:02:24] A Collaborator, Not a Crutch
[00:02:24] Jeff: Um, I will tell you, I have, I have kind of an idea for how to get into this conversation so that we’re, we’re not just talking about ChatGPT, but I really, really want Um, and so, you know, I think it’s really important to have that conversation because I think that the, kind of the overarching themes of like curiosity of, of like, do we love this because, because of how we are?
[00:02:44] Jeff: Is it, what’s the difference between collaborating with this thing and just leaning into it or leaning on it? Jesus, I didn’t mean to go all Cheryl, you know, Sarah on you.
[00:02:51] Merlin: Oh, I know what you mean. These are these are great. These are great. Are these things just out of curiosity? You’re Um, wonderfully dogged about wanting to discuss this, which is great for me, but [00:03:00] these are things that, it sounds like these are things that you’re, you’re thinking about a lot. Is that true?
[00:03:03] Jeff: I think about it all the time, in part because, um, you know, I, so I’m, in my, in my work, I’m, I’m part of a member owned research and evaluation cooperative, and there are seven of us, and I do work a lot differently than, and everyone would agree, than everybody else that does this work, um, in our, in our organization.
[00:03:23] Jeff: And part of it is that a lot of what I do is, is building and is, is kind of creative in nature. So it’s the kind of stuff where it’s like, when you’re planning it, it’s the hardest shit to project plan, because it’s kind of like, I was going to build a deck this summer, I didn’t. But when I was going to build it, somebody said, you know how to build a deck?
[00:03:41] Jeff: And I said, I will when I’m done.
[00:03:44] Merlin: Right. Can I, can I ask, can I ask an early, early question just for my, um, so you guys, your group, your team of people works together. If you can say within, you know, privacy reasons, like what, um, what is the deliverable or what is the [00:04:00] product that people come to you to get? What is the thing that you, Produced for your clients.
[00:04:05] Jeff: Yeah. Okay. So we do something that’s called developmental evaluation. And the idea is like, rather than really dull, stupid, uh, done by Rand and other defense contractors, uh, program evaluation, um, we do this kind of evaluation where it’s like, you’re an organization, you’re often a small organization, but we’ve worked with some really large ones.
[00:04:25] Jeff: You’re trying to do a thing. And instead of So instead of being evaluators that are off at a distance, sort of looking at what you’re doing and then feeding back some report at the very end of the, of the
[00:04:33] Merlin: Like the classic Arthur, whatever it used to be, Arthur Anderson, DeLay, Touche, those kinds of, McKinsey.
[00:04:38] Jeff: Yeah. So we are like, we are kind of a critical friend working alongside these people, but we’re really focused on the stuff that they think they are, are doing well, or that the stuff that they have promised a funder they will do.
[00:04:52] Jeff: And we try to work between them and the funder. I’ll get to the deliverable in a second.
[00:04:56] Merlin: No, no, this is fast, because my wife works with, um, does a lot of [00:05:00] stuff with, uh, grants, where she has to like, you know, there’s all kinds of, um, Uh, not World Health Organization, what’s the big one that gives grants? I’m sorry I’m spacing out, but she has to like, yeah, there’s a lot of that putting stuff together where there’ll be like some kind of a mandate that’s stated or implied and you’ve got to show progress on these kinds of things and then there’s metrics and
[00:05:20] Merlin: evaluations of the, of the scholars,
[00:05:22] Jeff: this stuff, right? And so like, what we’re always trying to do is if we can get between the funder and the organization and say to the funder and the organization, all right, you’ve promised these things, like, this is what you’ve told them you’re going to do to release the money.
[00:05:35] Jeff: But in reality, there are going to be moments where you’re like, fuck, why did we tell them we were going to do this? Because now that we’re in it, what really is working is this thing over here. We’re there to kind of like
[00:05:45] Merlin: where you commit, commit too early to
[00:05:47] Jeff: Yeah, you commit too early in part because you’re just trying to get that money, right?
[00:05:51] Jeff: Like, and, and so we’re there to kind of help between the funder and them to go to the funder and be like, hey, just so you know, we’ve interviewed like all these people that are kind of like the people these folks are trying [00:06:00] to like, help or the systems they’re trying to impact. We’re actually seeing that while they thought they were they were heading here, they’re heading over here.
[00:06:06] Jeff: And we actually think that’s like something you should really be supportive of.
[00:06:09] Merlin: And maybe you couldn’t even be in contact with those people until that first part happened. It’s like, it takes the doing of that thing to discover that what they need is food vouchers. Not, uh, tote bags or whatever.
[00:06:20] Jeff: Yeah, exactly. And honestly, like, if I’m being really, really frank, like, for me, the what, what I like to do in supporting people who are doing the work is to like, be a firewall from the people who like, let’s face it, most funders, most people giving grant money, they’re only at the table, because they have money.
[00:06:37] Jeff: They are at the table, because they have money. And you are the one doing all the work to Uh, suffering through all of this stuff, experiencing the pain of failure or of having kind of like aimed wrong, um,
[00:06:49] Merlin: some of it also could be in various ways managing expectations with different stakeholders.
[00:06:53] Jeff: Yes. Now, on the most, like, if we’re just looking at my work, and so I should say [00:07:00] deliverables are not like there’s a final deliverable. It’s like all along the way we’re doing, we’re like facilitating meaning making sessions with the, whether it’s with the funder or with the organization to kind of be like, this is what we’re learning as we observe your work and talk to the people that are, you know, your work is meant to help.
[00:07:14] Jeff: And, and, but let’s, but we’re not experts. So let’s like make some meaning together, figure out kind of like how to do this, the, The way that like,
[00:07:22] Merlin: Wow. For the, for the right kind of groups, that must be great. Like I have this cascade I think about in my life a lot, which is, you know, when I tend to think about new information or things in my life, and this is admittedly very oversimplified, but I tend to think about this cascade or this array of like, When new information comes into my life, like, how will this, how can this help me to think differently?
[00:07:43] Merlin: How can this help me to decide differently? How can this help me to do differently? And then, of course, like you’re implying here, on this meta level, and then is my ladder against the right wall? Like, how do, what are the checks that are in place for all those things? And, I’ve found that kind of stuff very challenging with, in this case, as you [00:08:00] said, the middle people between these organizations, and it’s sometimes tough to be the person who breaks the news about.
[00:08:07] Merlin: I’m going to speak a little bit in douche speech because it might be useful to our listeners. What if you just, how do you, how will you discover? that you’re not aligned on something you just assumed everybody was aligned on.
[00:08:20] Merlin: And boy, it’s tough to be the one, especially if there’s representatives from both sides, like North and South Korea on either side of the blue line, where you’ve got to like break it to both of them that, you know, the bad news is that neither of you have your eye on the right ball right now.
[00:08:33] Merlin: And that, that’s, that’s, that’s gotta be tough. So it’s more like you’re integrated into the process of what they’re doing. It’s not like you just give them some brick of a report and come back five years later.
[00:08:41] Jeff: Right. Exactly. And, and there’s a, there is sort of a accepted premise at the start, which is not always something that the client remembers, that we are, we are focused with them on the emergent. And so we aren’t ever going to just stay in the gray zone, but we are going to definitely recognize that things emerge and those things should have a chance [00:09:00] to guide the work you’re doing.
[00:09:01] Merlin: God willing.
[00:09:02] Jeff: Yeah, God willing. So and
[00:09:04] Merlin: not so obvious when you say it, but in
[00:09:06] Jeff: I know, I know.
[00:09:07] Merlin: it’s, people are so resistant to that for all, all understandable reasons.
[00:09:11] Jeff: Yeah, so resistant. And then like, so if I’m being super concrete, oh my god, Merlin. Is my computer about to go again? Hold on, hold on, hold on, hold on, hold on. Hold on. I’m back. Jesus.
[00:09:22] Merlin: Hey everybody, just so you know, Jeff won’t say it because he’s a gentleman, but earlier on, uh, we’d recorded a bit, and then Jeff said, Computer. I think the technical term is it shot the bed. And so we started over. So
[00:09:33] Jeff: it. Yeah,
[00:09:34] Merlin: you didn’t miss much
[00:09:35] Jeff: That’s right. Um, okay, so here’s like, I’ll just give you the most concrete thing,
[00:09:39] Merlin: because it could crash at any time. We should wrap this up.
[00:09:41] Jeff’s Jobby Job
[00:09:41] Jeff: This is, yeah, exactly. This is a little outside of what I just described. So, one of my projects right now is there’s an amazing organization here that is called, it’s called Foster Advocates, and it is in Minnesota, and they are made up of mostly ex Fosters, and they have done amazing work at getting legislation passed, all this stuff.
[00:09:59] Jeff: They went [00:10:00] around to all 87 counties in Minnesota and the tribal nations and held sessions where they talked and recorded conversations with fosters about like what rights they expect they should have, what rights they know they have and, and where they wonder what the hell rights do we have at all?
[00:10:16] Jeff: And they, they hired us and I’m sitting with 85 hours of audio and I go through with qualitative analysis
[00:10:25] Jeff: for patterns. I look for the things that are the nuances that might be missing. We do the meaning making
[00:10:30] Merlin: Is it some, some of that, I’m guessing some of that is, um, probably Sort of concretely quantifiable and others are not like I just read this recent report about how Richard Stallman’s not a very good guy And they use this entire process of like this is the number of times that he said this particular objectionable thing Like you were like, but it’s also you also there’s right you’ve got to quantify Nobody nobody likes the tote bags or like 90 percent of people but like but That’s complicated because it also depends, what questions did you ask?
[00:10:59] Merlin: Did [00:11:00] you always ask in the same way? And then there’s the fuzzier, like, as young people would say, the vibe kind of thing, like, that you probably got to report on too, which is like, this part of the company, everybody’s happy that this thing works, they don’t even notice it runs so regular, but then there’s these other things.
[00:11:13] Merlin: There’s this kind of deep, there’s a shared disc, inchoate disquiet about the future of leadership here that we only discovered after we’d done this for a month.
[00:11:23] Jeff: Totally. And then inside of the issues, like the, the organization, which is like preparing this kind of bill of rights package for the state of Minnesota, the organization would be like, okay, so we know that one, one, one theme is like, when you age out of foster care, your credit, how are you going to have credit?
[00:11:37] Jeff: Because everything you need to do to succeed, you need to get an apartment, maybe you want, you know, whatever you want to do. And so we already know that Credit is an issue, but like, what comes up in the conversations is how many people’s like, parents, their biological parents kept using their name and social security number throughout the years that that child was in foster care.
[00:11:54] Jeff: So their credit is shot because of that. So
[00:11:56] Merlin: Oh dear. Oh dear.
[00:11:57] Jeff: that like,
[00:11:58] Merlin: They treated it like a burner phone.
[00:11:59] Jeff: [00:12:00] up. Yeah, and it can kind of rise up into this. So you can add that nuance to the issues. Anyway, that’s, that’s one version
[00:12:06] Merlin: And so, and so, I think it sounded like you were about to talk about how this works with your work, in ways others don’t do it?
[00:12:13] Jeff: Well, yeah, so I mean, I would just, I guess that the theme for me, and this is if we’re getting back to ChatGPT, is that like, I use it for a lot of things, and most people in my field just assume that it’s dangerous, that you would be leaning on it
[00:12:28] Merlin: Dangerous and unreliable.
[00:12:30] Jeff: unreliable, when in reality, like anything, it has everything to do with what, how you approach it, right?
[00:12:36] Jeff: But I will say, it also has a lot to do with your inherent sense of curiosity. And that is something that I think you’ve brought up. I remember listening, there was a reconciled Global Differences some time ago when John kind of interrogated you on your understanding of, of ChatGPT and AI. That was a delightful episode.
[00:12:54] Merlin: like, like so many of those conversations, it’s, it’s the implication that I’m not even allowed to ride on a bus unless I [00:13:00] understand diesel engines.
[00:13:01] Jeff: Exactly. Exactly.
[00:13:03] Merlin: Why don’t, why don’t you, why I would, I would simply learn everything about everything.
[00:13:07] Jeff: Yeah, exactly. Exactly.
[00:13:09] Merlin: but no, no, really, really seriously, though, all I really want is like a chunk of code that will let me use CSS to hide this author on this one page.
[00:13:16] Merlin: And so, so John, John, I, John, of course, if you ask John, whom I love. He would never even give you a straight answer. But what I could gather from that would be, well, just simply start at the beginning and learn everything
[00:13:29] Jeff: Right, right, right.
[00:13:31] Merlin: Because if I know about it, and this is the thing, John’s a type, and he doesn’t want to admit this, he doesn’t know this, I’ve met John’s type before, and again, I want to stipulate that I love him.
[00:13:38] Merlin: He is a type where he is not aware a certain cataract that he has. This is true for almost all of this, but you notice it with John because he’s so lucid. John only talks about the things that he wants to talk about. And John only gets excited about the things he wants to get excited about. And he has this tick that even a lot of, or especially a lot of nerds have, which is my [00:14:00] deep and complete knowledge about something is what it is.
[00:14:04] Merlin: And your falling short of that is a problem. And the, but conversely, or inconversely, if that’s a word, your deep interest, I remember I heard a, I heard a friend of mine who I really respect a lot, white guy from Oakland, Podcast host who, um, who really loves hip hop, especially like Bay Area hip hop. He knows everything about all of those things, but if you start talking about comic books, he goes into like a mode.
[00:14:33] Merlin: he like, he goes like, oh yeah, you and your funny stories, or whatever, and it’s like, well, I don’t expect you to love comic books, but I do expect you to have the presence of mind and the class to realize that everybody’s different about that stuff. And it’s a bummer that you’re gonna miss the opportunity to learn about something.
[00:14:51] Merlin: Why does everybody else like this thing that I hate? Well, that’s an opportunity you’ve now lost, because you’ve been an asshole. But also, be careful because, like, [00:15:00] you are very close to becoming, uh, all I have is a hammer guy.
[00:15:04] Merlin: And so, like, if you are in curious about those things, or you wanna change it to the conversations, like you studied for the wrong blue book essay, and now you you wanna say, well, yeah, but I do know a lot about I didn’t read The Ambassadors, but I know everything about Moby Dick.
[00:15:17] Merlin: Can I take a different test? Well, that’s lame. Like, that’s, so it’s not a Siracusa thing, but you, it’s very related to this problem. I’m probably cutting you off, but like, that’s the problem here is, I don’t, I mean, yes, it would be nice to know how everything works, it would be nice to know everything. It is peculiar to me how under the microscope, even the most anodyne benign use of this stuff is, because it, it, it’s sort of like saying, well, like, yeah, I’m, I’m, I’m looking at weird, you know.
[00:15:49] Merlin: Uh, porn from Thailand, but like, it’s for my work, and you’re like, ooh, you shouldn’t even look at that at all. It’s like, well no, like, there isn’t, I’m sorry I’m going on, but [00:16:00] like, and I don’t mean to get emotional about it, but it is a little frustrating sometimes when people who do all kinds of insane shit every fucking day with all sorts of tools, including computers, things that are unreliable, things that are stupid, but those are all normalized and they’re used to that.
[00:16:14] Merlin: They’re used to, we’re used to going to West Portal near our house, and the cellular is just not available for this one, two block area. I don’t get mad every time, like I’m used to that. Do you ever get frustrated with Google results? Sure, but you keep using Google. Well, then, can, is there any analogy to be found there?
[00:16:32] Merlin: Is there any analogy to be found, and I’m going to go check on this even if somebody else told me it’s right? Or is it possible there are some things where it really doesn’t matter that much whether it’s right, and you go into it knowing that?
[00:16:45] Merlin: That is a very frustrating prospect to people who think they know a lot about things.
[00:16:49] Jeff: There’s also the, the sort of thing about going, you know, to the very root, learning everything from, from sort of the bottom up, um, is, is a huge trap [00:17:00] for me because it’s a
[00:17:00] Merlin: It’s also deeply privileged. It’s a hugely privileged thing, and people don’t realize how privileged
[00:17:04] Jeff: Yeah, sure. Yeah. And, and for me, it’s a temptation that can become an obsession that will never see itself through. And so I have that temptation and have to stop myself off. When John, when John Siracusa talks about how to learn Unix, I
[00:17:21] Merlin: do! That’s the other thing is he won’t tell you! I’ll say to John, well, how do you pronounce your name? And he refuses to do it. He says, I did it in episode 35. Okay. Why are we talking about this? Or, or, but no, it’s not just him, but that is, like, a pretty common thing. It’s, it’s almost like there’s a library of code, and we’ve already covered that, so, like, why would we program around that?
[00:17:41] Jeff: right, right, right, right, right. Yeah. I mean, so as much as I would love to learn Unix in that way, in the end of the day, what I really started needing to do was just figure out which command did this thing. And, and it’s super cool for me to go thumb through the what is the Unix
[00:17:56] Merlin: CD, CD, LS, PWD, like,
[00:17:59] Merlin: [00:18:00] I don’t get started.
[00:18:01] Jeff: Exactly. Exactly. Um, okay. So I, here’s, that was all kind of a riff on, on curiosity. And the reason I, I even started using that word was like, one of the reasons I actually don’t try to talk about ChatGPT with too many people is because what I find right away, and this may be unfair, but, and I may be too quick to judge this, what I find right away is there is not, there is not the base curiosity needed.
[00:18:25] Jeff: Um, So that we can actually have an interesting conversation. We’re just going to be talking. We’re just going to be rehashing the shit that I can, I can listen to on, on NPR. I can, you know, like whatever, like whatever the most sort of base,
[00:18:36] Merlin: What it, and like, and just, I mean, there is sort of a little bit of a step zero to this, which is like, it certainly doesn’t seem very cool. Like, it, it, it isn’t like, I don’t know, like, Pickleball. I, I don’t know that much about Pickleball, but everybody talks about Pickleball. People, people really like it, and like, eventually they, people might see the attraction of that.
[00:18:55] Merlin: Or whatever. It’s just that the way, whether or not you like, I, people like me kind of don’t [00:19:00] always love the way this, these questions are posed, but there’s that step zero of like, ugh. You know, I mean, again, it’s like asking people, like, nobody, nobody smokes their first cigarette thinking they’re going to die of emphysema, you know, but so, but there’s this part of you that’s like, well, why would he
[00:19:16] Jeff: that’d be a super dark turn. Why, why do you want to try it? Well, here’s the thing.
[00:19:20] Merlin: Well, you’ll die, but like, that’s not how life works. That’s not how human habits work. And that’s why I love the, I think, It’s easy enough for somebody to just turn this off at this point and go, God, curiosity about how math works. Well, no, but like, Jeff, I think you’re talking about at least a couple kinds of curiosity.
[00:19:38] Merlin: The kind that may be obvious and is worth being obvious is that, hey, I’m kind of curious, there’s this new thing, and like, what does it do? There’s the other kind of curiosity, which is like, I may not understand I may not be so close to the metal that I understand how, like, transistors or fabs or whatever.
[00:19:56] Merlin: I may not understand how the metal makes computer go, but I [00:20:00] am deeply curious about how it arrived at this particular way of looking at the question that I asked. And there is almost inevitably something for me to learn from that. And that’s it for today. I, if you, if anybody out there wants to go like, well, yeah, I mean, that’s the same thing as like looking at tea leaves or, you know, uh, slaughtering a chicken to see what the future’s going to be.
[00:20:18] Merlin: You can put value and purpose into anything, but I do believe that I am, I’m learning a lot about something. And a lot of times I’m not sure what it is that I’m learning about, but I’m definitely learning something. And the results continue to be extremely interesting. And that just makes me more curious.
[00:20:37] Merlin: And to your previous point, it’s, I really honestly don’t mean this. So, you know, it’s, in the critical way that it often sounds, but like, it’s not for everybody.
[00:20:47] Jeff: Right. Like that’s part of the curiosity problem. It’s like, you should, part of being curious is to assume immediately,
[00:20:52] Merlin: like imagine somebody’s like, Oh my gosh, my phone’s out of power and I can’t charge it and I got to go on this long flight. And you’re like, well, here’s a copy of the Power Broker and you’re like, [00:21:00] Oh, thanks. So there’s like a 1200 page book, like really, uh, but really I just want to charge my phone.
[00:21:05] Merlin: And you’re like, yeah, but this is a really good book and you should read it. And like, and, but you know, it’s a silly analogy, but you know what I’m saying? Like it’s, I actually. Ended up accidentally saying a lot of things I liked about this on the latest Dubai Friday, so forgive me if I repeat a little bit of this, but like, the way I look at it in some ways is that people, even people who are like using or are aware of LLMs, or in particular for me, ChatGPT, it’s, I think they treat it a little bit like a vending machine, where it’s like, Or, like, imagine a vending machine at an airport where you can buy a tooth, or like at a hotel where you can buy a toothbrush.
[00:21:43] Merlin: Like, or, or, there’s another vending machine where you can go and buy chips. Well, like, I don’t need to buy anything right now, so I don’t need any vending machines. Well, of course, there will be the day you realize you forgot your toothbrush, and you’ll pay 7 for a vending machine toothbrush, because you really want to brush your teeth.
[00:21:56] Merlin: That’s how life works. I don’t think it’s wholesome, [00:22:00] and this might be a straw man, if so, forgive me. I don’t think it’s wholesome to look at this as a vending machine. In, in, in one way it’s, I’ll explain in a minute, it’s useful to look at it as a vending machine. But if you think you’re going to walk up to this thing, hit a button and get a Coke.
[00:22:13] Merlin: You’re going to be disappointed, because that’s not really what this is for. In some versions of this, it’s not even very good at arithmetic. Oh my god, look how dumb this thing is, it’s a computer and it can’t do arithmetic. Well yeah, but we know enough to know that that’s not, I mean, okay, alright, alright, I’m fine.
[00:22:27] Merlin: But then on the other hand, that vending machine analogy works because there are people who act as though they’re asking a Coke machine whether they should get divorced.
[00:22:36] Merlin: we know Coke machines are good at is giving you a Coke. So if you want a Coke, that’s a good time to use a Coke machine. If you don’t drink Coke Or don’t have a credit card or a change, as we used to say, then you’re probably not going to interact with the machine.
[00:22:49] Merlin: But when you do, if you think about it, it’d be pretty weird to go to the machine, start hitting buttons, and ask it if I can get divorced. If I should get divorced and what I would say is, [00:23:00] well, okay, first of all, you didn’t even put any money in the machine, so you can’t even get a Coke. But is that really a good use of a Coke machine? And I think it’s cynical to do the equivalent of saying, I asked this thing if I could get, if I should get divorced and all it did was give me a Coke or it gave me like a Fanta when I’d ask for a divorce. And it’s like, that’s how it feels to me sometimes when, when people try to impugn this entire sector.
[00:23:28] Merlin: And I’m going to be the director of this huge growing piece of our future technology with this whole like, well, I didn’t have a use for it today and I’m pretty sure I don’t trust it and everything that comes out of it is bad and it stole everybody’s art. And like, it’s, then we’re getting into something that I call the phenomenon of everything is everything.
[00:23:45] Merlin: Well, can we just talk about like one part of that? Maybe let’s start with the part of, I need to disabuse you of the idea that this is a Coke machine. And if it is a Coke machine, don’t ask it for relationship advice. And I feel like that’s, [00:24:00] to me, that’s a good way to understand it. What if you understood this more as like, talking to a friend who doesn’t know everything?
[00:24:06] Merlin: Do you not talk to people if they’re sometimes incorrect? Do you not talk to people?
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[00:27:00] Thank you, Pika, for sponsoring Overtired. Very grateful. It’s a great service. And now back to my conversation with Merlin Mann.
[00:27:09] Because of How We Are
[00:27:09] Jeff: You said something. This was also I mean that I revisited that Reconcilable Differences, because it was such an interesting, it was kind of where I initially thought I really want to have Merlin on Overtired, which was the first time earlier this year. Um, but you said something there, and you said, I can immediately see the usefulness of this thing because of how I am.
[00:27:27] Jeff: And, and I’m wondering if you can kind of give me an example of, of something that is just a perfect example of what the usefulness is for you, and I know there’s lots of different ways, but and and how it is useful because
[00:27:40] Merlin: because of how I am.
[00:27:42] Jeff: does that mean?
[00:27:43] Merlin: Um, I think, is it cool to talk about this?
[00:27:48] Jeff: Yeah, please.
[00:27:49] Merlin: I can give you one. I mean, I’ll avoid all the prologue stuff, but like, I’ve been at ChatGPT for, I don’t know, I think over a year now. I’ve done some image generation stuff, but [00:28:00] ChatGPT is the one I’ve sort of imprinted on in the Conrad Lorenz sense, like this is my daddy.
[00:28:04] Merlin: Like this is the one I feel like I mostly understand. It just doesn’t make sense to me to run around and try 60 of these. You know, learning one, let me learn this one hammer before I buy more hammers or even try more hammers. Here’s one of the first ways is. A term I might be abusing or misusing, but is that I, for whatever reason, there’s a thing you can learn.
[00:28:28] Merlin: A consultant can come out and you’re gonna teach all the executives about lateral thinking. Or what some people, I think, erroneously call thinking outside the box. But, you know, There are, there’s, there, if you think of the world as, as these, these series of different kinds of grids or, uh, graphs or spreadsheets, you know, with two different kinds of things on it, like, I, without even being able to help myself have a kind of emotional synesthesia, where I very easily, easily slip into at least thinking about things that are related to the thing in a way that others don’t.[00:29:00]
[00:29:00] Merlin: Which on the one hand is what occasionally makes me funny. Honestly, part of being funny is being able to relate to unrelated things. Okay, so, like, I go into this thinking, like, I hear somebody speak in a certain cadence, and it makes me think of a line from The Simpsons. Or something a little bit more Like, really closer to the liberal arts in terms of like, well, that process that you just described sounds a lot like one of Hegel’s tripartite charts.
[00:29:27] Merlin: And like, not, not necessarily, not, not to brag or like say like, oh, listen to me, I read a book, but more a way of saying like, when you become widely read and learned at least about a handful of topics, you kind of can’t help but keep relating them to each other. So I just want to stipulate that that’s one thing that’s weird about me in a way that I think is unusual.
[00:29:45] Merlin: I’m a mess. Talking to me is a nightmare. But like, I can’t help but think laterally because that’s just how I think. I think maybe if you wanted to put that more negatively, one of my challenges, apart [00:30:00] from problems with authority in life, is that I am, I’m not good at thinking laterally. Unilaterally.
[00:30:07] Merlin: And that doesn’t mean I can’t stay on topic because I sure can, but I find it, I feel like it really just grinds it into the ground to when you’re sitting around with people and you go like, okay, well we’ve done, we’ve done one, and we’ve done two, and we’ve done three.
[00:30:18] Merlin: What do we think comes next? Everybody goes, well, I think that’s gonna be four. All right. And then after four, and you’re, I’m like. Oh my God, you guys are killing me. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, that could be the Dave Brubeck song, 5, that could, like, there’s all these different things where I’m like, my brain is going in a million directions about what 5 means, Jackson 5, my list of 5, like, I can’t stop doing that.
[00:30:38] Merlin: So here’s an example. One of the early things Well, honestly, was realizing that this is a good fit for people who think that way. I don’t, I’m not going to say that it’s a bad fit for people who don’t think that way. I watch so much TV in general, but I also, I’m always thinking, for example, oh, it’s that [00:31:00] guy from the thing.
[00:31:01] Merlin: Except from that thing, not the thing, that would be Wilford Brimley. But like, uh, but, but like, for example, last night, I, I gotta make my wife watch the worst shit. We were watching, I was watching the 25th anniversary, uh, performance of, uh, Les Mis. And they do this wonderful thing where all of the, like, you know, available original cast comes out there, you know? And like the guy who plays the, what’s it called, like the innkeeper, the Sacha Baron Cohen character in the movie. La la la la, master of the house, da ba da ba da ba da ba da la there’s a free for all. He’s played by this actor in 1985. He’s played by this actor who I love from lots of British TV shows.
[00:31:43] Merlin: Uh, uh, especially Shakespearean stuff. He’s in the Hall of Crown. Uh, the Henry the Fourth, uh, and Fifth, uh, thing. And I was just saying to my wife, like, that guy, I love that guy. He’s one of those guys. He’s one of those guys like Jared Harris or like the guy who plays Filch in Harry Potter. That guy’s [00:32:00] in everything.
[00:32:00] Merlin: So what do I do? I let go and I let God. I’m accepting the fact that I’m weird and I think like this and I go in one of my early things that continues to be something I do a lot. And I’m not going to read this. I’ll just. because I’ve done this so many times, uh, make me a markdown table of everybody who’s been in at least one episode of Doctor Who, at least one episode of Game of Thrones, um, Uh, Doctor Who, Game of Thrones, um, what was the other one?
[00:32:30] Merlin: Uh, oh, oh, oh, and then like Hot Fuzz, I threw in a few, or Shakespeare, blah, blah. I’ve done this a million different ways. But even if you do that with three things, if you do that with Harry Potter and, um, and Game of Thrones, you’re gonna say, oh, it’s the guy who played Filch, it’s the guy who’s Walder Frey.
[00:32:47] Merlin: He’s been in all those things. It gives you a table of here’s like seven people. And then I say, Oh, that’s a pretty good table. It’s got, you know, you can, if you’re a nerd, you know, all this stuff there’s as everybody knows, there’s only 11 actors on the entire [00:33:00] island. But, but, but you know what I’m saying?
[00:33:01] Merlin: And then, but then I say, that’s really cool. Okay. Now new columns for name of role. And it just knows to do that. One time I asked it this kind of question where I said, actors who’ve been inductor, actors who’ve been inductor, who Hot fuzz and some Shakespeare production, Henry the V or whatever. And then I did this thing where I said in the columns, I said, roll in a Harry Potter movie.
[00:33:29] Merlin: I didn’t have to tell it. In the, quote, question or prompt, it just knew what to do, and it just added that column.
[00:33:37] Merlin: Now, why is that great? Well, great, that’s great because that’s the way my mind works, and I think it’s kind of cool to see that, um, God, what is that guy’s name? David Bradley. David Bradley, he’s in, God, he’s in everything.
[00:33:47] Merlin: And he’s the guy who mumbles in Hot Fuzz, the guy who has the guns.
[00:33:51] Jeff: No, yeah, yeah, yeah.
[00:33:52] Merlin: Have you seen season four of Game of Thrones?
[00:33:56] Merlin: So you know Wal you know Wal you know Walder
[00:33:58] Jeff: Yes, of course, yeah.
[00:33:59] Merlin: Okay.[00:34:00]
[00:34:00] Jeff: Amazing. That’s
[00:34:02] Merlin: know his granddaughter’s name.
[00:34:06] Merlin: Waldeen,
[00:34:09] Jeff: Oh my god. It’s been a long time.
[00:34:12] Merlin: but, uh, so on the one hand, okay. Would I ever do that on my own?
[00:34:17] Merlin: Would I ever really like sit down and go to IMDB? And remember, everything has to be perfect. So I have to find this exactly right. So by hand, I’m going to go in, I’m going to go make a spreadsheet, right? If I did this by myself, you can see where this is going. It would be kind of silly for me to do that.
[00:34:33] Merlin: Number one way that this is good for the way that I am, this is already how I think. And And I run into challenges with how I could take what I think or what I’m curious about and turn it into something without a grave amount of extra work. Okay. So first, I know it can do that. And second of all, it will do that.
[00:34:51] Merlin: And what it comes up with may not be perfect. Sometimes it’s not even right. But that’s one way, that’s a starter, okay, [00:35:00] is like, you may be a person who does not think this way. You may not be a person who makes a lot of spreadsheets. I have spreadsheets about every flashlight I’ve ever owned. I have spreadsheets about every Uh, two factor authentication, Dingus I own, with pictures and serial numbers and links to documentation.
[00:35:19] Merlin: I have a PDF of the manual for every item I own on iCloud. These are, that’s all weird, and that’s okay. But if one asks the question, who is this nonsense for? Oh brother, is this nonsense ever for me? Or I can just say, make a block, I need a block. Uh, that’s, uh, 50mm wide with a circle through the middle that tapers on the end and has a chamfer of this fillet on the, on the edges, and it’ll create me a 3MJ, like a 3D object like that.
[00:35:46] Merlin: Yeah, that’s how my mind works. I would rather do that for a simple device than have to learn CAD. Yeah, but do you really understand FDM printing if you haven’t learned CAD? I’ll never find out! Like, I’m willing to learn CAD when I need to, but if [00:36:00] there’s this thing that can do that thing for me, and it’s the same thing that’ll tell me what David Bradley’s in, and plus then, I’m getting way ahead now, with the addition of memory, which is not working so great on the current model, but like all those different kinds of things, uploading images, all those things like that, and that’s what leads me to just a slight sadness that it’s not something somebody else could find as interesting as I have, but if we keep doing The bar seems to keep coming back to these two things, which is like, is there anything bad or nefarious in any conceivable way with what this thing is?
[00:36:31] Merlin: Wow. Sounds like pretty much every technology, doesn’t it? Is there something bad or nefarious and like, could this actually be something useful but limited even if it’s not always quote right? And the answer to both of those questions is a no brainer for me. Like, go show me the thing that’s always exactly right.
[00:36:46] Merlin: That’s always exactly right and up to date. That’s always exactly right and up to date and contextual. You know what that takes? It takes your fucking brain going in and deciding what you think about whether that’s the correct answer.
[00:36:58] Merlin: And it’s just that in the case of this, [00:37:00] because it’s not thinking in a conventional sense, it’s not computing in a conventional sense, you’re going to get some really weird stuff.
[00:37:07] Merlin: And then when you say to it, well, did you forget that David Bradley was this and that, it’ll go, I’m sorry, I’ve made a mistake, blah, blah, blah. I asked it recently, last week, I can tell you specifically, I asked it what year the building that my mother lives in was built. For hurricane reasons. And it very confidently gave me a year, I asked for the citation for that.
[00:37:28] Merlin: Asking ChatGPT for a citation is funny, because in some ways it really can’t know what the citation is. Like, it’ll make up a citation, because the same way that the human mind will come up with a reason why it does everything. But it doesn’t. I, and I just kept pushing it and pursuing it and said, no, that was incorrect.
[00:37:44] Merlin: I shouldn’t have told you that. It was like a French, it was like a waiter that had dropped a roll and felt really bad about it and just didn’t want to talk about it. And I kept pushing it and pushing it. And I was like, no, no, no. I want to like figure out, it’s not, I’m not mad. LLM. I’m just curious how you arrived at that.
[00:37:57] Merlin: And it told me how it thinks, [00:38:00] this is the thing. It told me how it thinks. Thinks it made a mistake about something where it has no way of knowing that it made a mistake. So it came up with a reason why it thought it was 1998 or 1973. It came up with a reason why it got that wrong. You don’t saying like all the way through.
[00:38:16] Merlin: I find all of that endlessly fascinating and it doesn’t make me trust it less. It makes me. As aware as ever that this is not where to go for facts a lot of the time. And if it is where to go for facts, I mean, if it makes me that table dude, like, can’t I just go in and fix the stuff that I know isn’t right?
[00:38:37] Merlin: Or where it came up with a synonym for something? It still saved me, like, it saves me three hours of work on every task, every day.
[00:38:46] Jeff: if you’re the type of person, which you and I both are, who is going to take the time to make that incredibly tedious
[00:38:52] Merlin: fact check all my tweets,
[00:38:54] Jeff: yes, this thing is going to get you. I mean, I just, the other day, I, you know, I’ve been sitting on a pile of my [00:39:00] tickets from First Avenue shows, uh, from the nineties, I was sitting on that pile forever.
[00:39:04] Jeff: I love to look at it. And I’ve always wanted. A spreadsheet of everything. And so I was like, ah, I’ll try this. I took pictures of five at a time and I put them in the chat GPT. And I said, I want, I want a spreadsheet. I want a CSV and I want you to put everything. I want the door time, the, the show time. I want the price.
[00:39:21] Jeff: I want, I want the opening band, all the opening, whatever, everything. Right. Like everything I want
[00:39:25] Merlin: And I think also importantly, maybe not First Avenue, because you’re all at the same place in the same city. For me, it’s also the venue. Where I’m like, I can’t remember if this was at the Cuban Club in Ybor City, or, you know what I mean?
[00:39:35] Jeff: Yeah. And if it’s the early show, say it’s the early show. If it’s the late show, say it’s the late show. And it created this, this CSV that I will say when I looked at it, um, I, I have, for whatever reason, I have a deep compulsion to be able to hold a lot of things at once in a way that I can look at them all.
[00:39:54] Jeff: And that makes me feel very calm. And, and when I looked at what was [00:40:00] essentially a timeline of a really important decade of my life, And this thing gave that to me. Um, it was, it’s exactly why I use this tool. There’s a million other reasons. I use it for really
[00:40:11] Merlin: Yeah, yeah. It’s, it’s difficult, but isn’t, I mean, we’re both, I think, struggling a little bit to describe what the thing of that is. I can answer the question of why I think it’s good for me, because of how I. How I am, if you like, or how I think, but, but like what you’re describing there, like, just creating a table that I would fill in later.
[00:40:29] Merlin: Well, thank God for Brett’s table flip, which is a great app. But you know what I mean? Like, even just
[00:40:33] Jeff: That’s not Brett. Christian Tietz, the guy who created the archive.
[00:40:37] Merlin: oh, oh, wait a minute. Oh, wait, is he the Zytel,
[00:40:42] Jeff: Yeah, Zettelkasten guy, which, Zettelkasten, not unrelated to this conversation, but very unrelated in a lot of
[00:40:48] Merlin: put a pin
[00:40:48] Jeff: We’re not, we’re not gonna, it’s,
[00:40:50] Merlin: Sorry, sorry, I regret the error. But like, even just the mechanics of I mean, it sounds easy, but you go to IMDB and look up David Bradley, you can see everything he’s in. Well, that’s one, [00:41:00] that’s one angle of that. That’s one row or column of that. But how would I even know what I don’t know about?
[00:41:08] Merlin: And that’s where, and if it fills in a table, if it creates the basis of a table with 25 lines in it, I can always change all of that later. I can also ask it to do better. And it often does. But, you know, and then it’s frustrating because sometimes I might, one of my original use cases was making playlists for YouTube and Spotify back, back in the day when the store first started and you can have different, you know, um, I seem to have kind of gotten away from that a little bit.
[00:41:33] Merlin: I don’t exactly understand why, but like, it’s even just creating the, you know, the And the frame for what it is that I’m exploring helps me think about it better.
[00:41:44] Merlin: And singing, and here’s another example. When I said, God damn it, oh, you know what it is? Here’s a recent one. As of a week or two ago, a kid and I went to see Megalopolis and I said, I want to see,
[00:41:55] Jeff: my boys to see that this weekend.
[00:41:57] Merlin: my God, [00:42:00] get back to the club.
[00:42:03] Jeff: Okay, anyway.
[00:42:04] Merlin: you know, you can stop time.
[00:42:05] Jeff: Ha! Yeah! No, yeah, right. Woo!
[00:42:11] Merlin: A lot of ideas. A lot of ideas in that. Um, but, uh, but. I find, and again this, I’m trying to be big hearted and open and honest and kind to everyone in the way that I say this, but I, I don’t mean this in a mean way, but maybe this is not interesting to other people.
[00:42:26] Merlin: Maybe people want a Coke machine that produces just the Coke that they want, this is exactly the temperature that they want, and the more, but the more time I spend with this, the more I realize that it is a collaboration, that there’s ways that, you know, we I could be better at asking for, asking what I want, like I, cause we’re all in the same way that we have these occasionally somewhat long term dysfunctional relationships cause we don’t know how to ask for what we want or to ask people what they want, we don’t know how to talk to people about stuff and so we satisfy through life with all this like sort of getting by.
[00:42:57] Merlin: Well, with this, I get a much more. [00:43:00] Active in a direct way, however this thing is made, whatever computer it’s running on, there are things to learn from this.
[00:43:06] Merlin: And the thing is, if I tell it, hey, you know, you did a bad job at that, do this instead, this is what I wanted. Not to be mean, but just, again, collaboration, which is like, I see how, now I think I see how you got there, but what I really want is more of this.
[00:43:20] Merlin: And then with this latest model, as I was saying to Alex, it’s more and more I’m getting away from this XY problem of going in and asking for something deeply technical instead of just saying, go make this for me. And it does. And I don’t know. I don’t know how you don’t find that exciting. I’m somebody who first started multitrack recording with two cassettes.
[00:43:41] Merlin: and a pause button. I used to try and make mixes that way. Like, I, I had a four track, uh, our college had one, and then I have, like, I’m forever using, like, spit and bailing wire and rubber, rubber bands and Maxell tapes to try and produce a world that makes sense. And [00:44:00] anything that helps these parts It’s like, it’s part, can we, is there no way to look at this as another tool in the box?
[00:44:22] Merlin: The title of the episode comes from this, The Greatest Screwdriver in the World, is the idea that like, no matter how good your screwdriver is, you can’t use it for everything. Even if you have a, uh, like a, uh, a Vera, like really good screwdriver with, that’s, it’s still not, it’s not even good for every screw, dude.
[00:44:37] Merlin: It’s, if it’s a flathead and you’ve got a Phillips head, well, that’s not what that’s for. And that doesn’t mean the screw failed you.
[00:44:45] Jeff: you, you said something a little bit ago, or you kind of got towards something that I, that has been really meaningful to me. And if I were to use it, if I were in a classroom and I was using ChatGPT to teach something, what I would teach is essentially the experience for [00:45:00] me of Being forced to slow down and be specific.
[00:45:05] Jeff: And like you said about what you want, right? And in human relationships, the funny thing is, it’s bad at, it’s bad at interpreting what you say you don’t want. It’s, it’s really only good at interpreting what you say you do want, which I think is a very funny, very human dynamic. But like,
[00:45:18] Merlin: And that’s something, that’s something we tolerate or sometimes enjoy, I guess, that kind of chunking and heuristics and all the sorts of things are the kinds of things that make, make our day to day human life with each other. Like. Like bearable in the same way that like you say to somebody how you doing and they go into a 14 minute speech about their how their mudroom is getting relined and it’s taking forever and you’re like, well, I just said that to be polite.
[00:45:41] Merlin: I didn’t really want to know about your mudroom, but we tolerate that. We have such a low tolerance for how wrong this, these things are all the time. And it’s like, I don’t know if that’s the best way to look at it. I mean, is a, I mean, a Xerox machine is wrong in some ways because all it’s doing is making in the back in the day, and we have black and white image.
[00:45:58] Merlin: It’s not the book that’s just a black [00:46:00] and white image of the book. I don’t mean to get all semiotic, but like it’s not actually that complicated. We interact with stuff all day long, every day our entire life. That is far less reliable at ChatGPT, it’s just that they’re less reliable at things we’ve learned how to tolerate and not be scared of.
[00:46:15] Jeff: yes, yes. I’m wondering, you, I don’t know if you want to talk about this or not, but I know
[00:46:21] Merlin: I want to talk about your repo, all this stuff you’ve got in here. My
[00:46:24] Jeff: you see that? I took, yeah, okay, so I’ll explain. I
[00:46:27] Merlin: But, you know, I just, I don’t want to
[00:46:29] Jeff: Yeah, we’ll get to
[00:46:30] Merlin: a way that we don’t get to talk about all your very good stuff you’ve put in here.
[00:46:33] Jeff: Um, I, oh man, what was I saying? What was I
[00:46:37] Merlin: Um, ChatGPTs and the right tool for the job or tolerance, tolerance for people and tolerance for incorrectness. Yeah.
[00:46:46] Jeff: I’ll tell you what, I will, I will actually, this will come back to me, I’m sure, but like, this thing about slowing down and being, So I’m going to talk a little bit about what I have found, I mean, I’ve found this literally, it’s almost like we talked about practices last [00:47:00] time. It can be almost like a practice because my nature is to want to gather up so much, so fast, because I want to see the connections in the world.
[00:47:09] Jeff: I want to see through some other window. I mean, I think there’s a lot of reasons that this connects to how I grew up and my kind of interior life as I was
[00:47:18] Jeff: sort of, sort of
[00:47:19] Merlin: Expansive, and Expansive, this is the beauty of the Lonely Boys title, is that expansive inner world, that like, we always wanna like impose upon our children, of like, you should be bored more, it’s like, no, god, what a piece of shit you are to say stuff like that, but like the expansive interior world of like, this is the book I’ve got, and I’m gonna read it and read it and read it, and like, I’m, you know, just like the funny drawings that you make, and all those little things that are just part of, An expansive interior world where you haven’t learned to be ashamed of, of how little you know in life and what excites you in life.
[00:47:53] Merlin: And everybody’s supposed to become so ashamed about all those things and so confident about all these other things and like [00:48:00] put on this big show and it’s like, well, no, I’m always going to be, I’m always going to be a Lasky Child at heart.
[00:48:04] Jeff: Yeah. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. Wondering, wondering, wondering, right? Like, imagining what these connections might
[00:48:11] Merlin: Too much time, not enough money. No, it’s too much time, not enough money, a life in Florida. There’s a
[00:48:21] Jeff: Oh, that’s good. I like that. I like that a lot. Um, yeah. Anyway, I found that really, and initially I experienced that in trying to do code stuff, but then when I just wanted information, when I wanted to make those goofy tables, I, I eventually got kind of quick at it, but like, I actually loved having to stop because this is the thing.
[00:48:38] Jeff: It’s almost a manic energy to me wanting to
[00:48:40] Merlin: I know, I know, it’s weird that I feel like I know exactly what you mean, which is like, think about the scene when Luke is doing the trench run,
[00:48:49] Merlin: right when, right when Obi Wan tells him to like, use the force, and right, you know, it’s before he turns off the, the targeting thing, but there’s that moment where he has this like, little, you know, Human caesura, where [00:49:00] he’s kind of like, okay, this is the way I’m going to do this.
[00:49:05] Merlin: And, you know, the way, and I’m not saying like, oh, I got to talk myself off. No, but that’s, sometimes we find a moment of grace like that where you go, oh, wait a minute. I can totally do this. And I just need I need to, my head in the game, I need to focus on this, I need to do the thing, but being weird about it is not helping.
[00:49:23] Merlin: You know, a two meter target, that’s a very small target. Isn’t that kind of what you’re describing? Then when I sit down, I’m like, I’m so used to this, like, ah, you’re a coke machine.
[00:49:31] Jeff: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
[00:49:32] Merlin: the factorial of blah is, and like, you’re stupid. And instead just go like, oh, I see. But if I ask for it this way, and with different models, you learn different things.
[00:49:43] Merlin: But you’re right though, you, it’s a slower, more deliberative, purpose, on purpose kind of thinking.
[00:49:50] Jeff: Which is not something I think it takes. This is getting back to the, like, does somebody have the curiosity to have the conversation? That is the thing that is miles away when you [00:50:00] start most conversations about ChatGPT. And it’s the first thing I’m thinking about. It’s the thing I’m trying. I’m waiting for the point where in this conversation, I can say this part.
[00:50:09] Jeff: So we get past all of your incuriosity. And I can say, think about this part, right, that they’re actually, you know, there was a point at which I fed it. Talks I had given about storytelling or story gathering, I fed it old bios I had written, I fed it interviews with me on podcasts, and I said, tell me about this guy.
[00:50:27] Jeff: And, and what it gave, what it gave me back was all the stuff that I am. I am too something to tell myself I am. It was right. I was like, that is me. Goddammit. I would never say it out loud, but you have just described me to me in a way that actually amazingly gives me a little permission to sort of like hold that and be proud
[00:50:47] Merlin: I mean, was it doing it? If you can say, like, how was it trying? Was it trying to describe the person who said all that? It was
[00:50:54] Jeff: Yes. So it was a
[00:50:55] Merlin: qualities or like tendencies or
[00:50:57] Jeff: me qualities about this person. Tell me what [00:51:00] this person’s priorities are. Tell me what kind of, you know, life is important to this person. Um, and, and there was, everything was like right on. I’m like, yes, no, that is how I would describe myself, but have always been a little too something to do it.
[00:51:13] Jeff: Like, that voice is in you going, oh, shut the fuck up. Um, yeah. And, and so here was this thing, and this would sound so absurd to so many people here, was this thing that in reflecting back to me, myself at my fucking request, by the way, uh, , like I actually,
[00:51:30] Merlin: for this. I said I wanted this.
[00:51:32] Jeff: I felt things, I was able to actually like unlock a sort of relationship with myself that wasn’t there.
[00:51:37] Jeff: I don’t wanna over blow this, but like, but it was, this is the kinda shit that like if you get, if you get past the, in curiosity and.
[00:51:45] Merlin: But I mean, think about Eliza, which is a story everybody knows, which,
[00:51:51] Merlin: but the, um, but the, the, the, the thing where the guy at Berkeley, I think, came up with the program, it’s the famous, God, I’m sorry, I’m telling the story like Siracusa, but like
[00:51:59] Jeff: know it.[00:52:00]
[00:52:00] Merlin: oh, E L I Z A, Google it, um, and this guy had come up with a program that appears to be, it’s very basic, like, you know, Command line program where he says, Hey, hi, I’m Eliza.
[00:52:09] Merlin: Like, how are you? And you talk to it and it’s a very elementary program. So a lot of what it does is mirroring and asking questions. And it says, well, how do you feel about that? And the story, and this is, I don’t know, this could be one of those twice told tales was like the guy showed it to his admin and like, she was like, could you please leave the room?
[00:52:29] Merlin: I just want to do this for two hours. People would get so involved in Eliza. And at no point did somebody think that was a real person, quote
[00:52:37] Jeff: yeah, yeah,
[00:52:38] Merlin: doesn’t change the fact, like, why do, why are people so resistant to realize how much of themselves they bring to their work and what they do?
[00:52:46] Merlin: Because if you did that, you would go, well, of course this is interesting. And I know this is a machine. Like, I was a child, I could throw a ball against a wall for two hours and be pretty happy. I mean, I didn’t think the wall was a person, but I was more amused than I would have been doing nothing. And [00:53:00] in that instance, because you are talking about yourself, but you’re realizing things.
[00:53:03] Merlin: It’s. It’s a continuum of an exchange, even if it’s with a computer. Do you know what I mean? And it’s like, it’s like, we’ve known about that for 40, 50 years, that that’s a thing. And like, if you set somebody down in front of Eliza today, the exact same thing would happen.
[00:53:19] Jeff: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Oh, for sure. Yeah. Yeah, it’s a yes. That’s a
[00:53:24] Merlin: I see what you mean though. It does, it makes you, you’re getting at something emotional here. Like, it may just be a computer, but like, maybe you’re realizing something about yourself as you’re doing it. And I don’t. I think that’s unwholesome.
[00:53:37] Jeff: No, yeah, exactly. It’s not unwholesome. I like that. I mean, and even to you, I mean, you had mentioned this repo. So I, I created a repo for the last episode where I wanted to just take the transcript and fuck around in ChatGPT and put what’s in there. It’s what came out of it in there. So the show notes are there too.
[00:53:50] Jeff: That was human made, but like with the help of ChatGPT. But one of the things I did, and it took a lot of collaboration. It wasn’t just an easy thing was to, I wanted [00:54:00] a glossary of terms, uh, because what struck me about that conversation, which is the kind of conversation I love to have. And if I kind of tick off my, the closest people in my life, they’re almost all people with whom I can bounce around in that way.
[00:54:14] Jeff: And, and that is a feeling of joy and wonder for me that I don’t always find with humans, right? Like, and, and so when I made that glossary of God knows
[00:54:22] Merlin: I have so many things I can’t say about what you’re saying right now. I, there’s, it would be very difficult for me to agree with you more. To, to borrow, to borrow, again, to borrow a phrase from my brother, my brother and me. It’s just so, so difficult sometimes to find someone who’ll play with you in the space.
[00:54:38] Merlin: You know?
[00:54:39] Jeff: Yeah. Yeah. And you know, instantly if the person is not, or is that person, right? Like, it’s like, Oh, I got to figure out how to
[00:54:46] Merlin: You’ll know pretty darn quickly.
[00:54:48] Jeff: Yeah. Yeah. I said Bon Jovi way too soon in this conversation.
[00:54:52] Merlin: Or like, I tend to think of it in terms of layers or levels, where it’s like, and my frustration, as I’ve said, is that I do feel like I sometimes, I’m [00:55:00] not trying to build myself up or puff myself up or anybody else down,
[00:55:04] Jeff: ChatGPT do that for you.
[00:55:05] Merlin: I’ll let Jeff GPT do that for me.
[00:55:07] Merlin: There’s a lot of people out there who are very resistant to going any more than two levels into anything. It’s, and I’m not even talking about like weird like, you know, um, inception type stuff. I’m talking more like, well, here’s my, here’s my raw, hot take on this, here’s a yeah, but turns out about that.
[00:55:23] Merlin: And it’s like, the thing is like, we haven’t even gotten to the third or fourth layer where we figured out this is actually not what this thing is about at
[00:55:31] Merlin: there’s so little interest in pursuing that, and because people like that fast thinking. And at this point we should probably mention Daniel Kahneman, but I mean, I think that is related.
[00:55:41] Merlin: The, the thinking fast and slow idea of like, there are these in behavioral economics, there are these things where like if, if I ask you, if you were a person like me and you, uh, and I ask you what 2N2 is, you can’t help but think four. You can’t, it’s like don’t think of an elephant type stuff. Whereas if I ask you to do longer [00:56:00] division with numbers that ends in, you know, sevens and nines, it gets harder, and you have to do a different kind of slower thinking.
[00:56:06] Jeff: So I’m curious with you.
[00:56:07] Jeff: Okay, so when I think of when I looked at that glossary when it was done, and if you look at the glossary, if anybody looks at this, I’ll put a link in the show notes. The descriptions are not something I have fully edited,
[00:56:17] Merlin: Oh my gosh. Oh my God. Okay, so, sorry, sorry, sorry. So, so just to be clear, ’cause I’m stupid, you got from DS script or Mac Whisperer or something. You got a transcript of the show, it knows who’s who, what kind of prompt. So what I’m looking at here is a, uh, at least 260 line, uh uh, sorry, row. Markdown table with term category and definition.
[00:56:42] Merlin: Can I ask, am I jumping ahead to ask roughly what you asked to get this?
[00:56:45] Jeff: Yeah, sure. I mean, I’ll try to retrace my steps. I sort of played between models, the new, like, whatever, oh, one
[00:56:51] Merlin: Like, how, how did you let it know? Like what should, how would you like Glossary would include? So it’s just anything novel.
[00:56:57] Jeff: so actually, I started in kind of a [00:57:00] funny way, which was to sort of test it, and that was something I’ve been doing with some interview transcripts in my work, was I fed the new model, our transcript, and said, I want to see a markdown checklist of all the things you think might have been mistranscribed, right?
[00:57:16] Merlin: I love this. I
[00:57:17] Jeff: And that, that became that was the beginning of the glossary because and they were coming up with stuff like Karras is not with a C, it’s with a K. And it comes from Kurt Vonnegut and like all that,
[00:57:27] Merlin: I, I I, I’ve done that thing where like, this is a big thing people talked about for a while. Ask it to be this or ask it to be that. Ask it to do this. I, I’ve asked it to be the, the most knowledgeable person in the world about home, home technologies, like smart home technology and, um, show me the, the show in the thing that I just wrote is the thing that I just made.
[00:57:46] Merlin: Um, show me the things that are the biggest problem. Show me the things that are most likely to be untrue. Fact check my work, act like you’re the smartest person in the world. Find the, here’s another way to put it, find the weakest part of my argument.
[00:57:58] Merlin: And it’s pretty good at [00:58:00] that.
[00:58:00] Merlin: When you ask it to be somebody smart,
[00:58:02] Jeff: Well, and what blew my mind, I intentionally did, so initially when I tried to do this, I gave it like my bio and yours and like, here are the two guys that are talking, now go through this and whatever, right? And it actually wasn’t that effective. It got kind of confused. When I said nothing, it pulled that new model, pulled sort of context so well, and caught things that it should never have caught.
[00:58:22] Jeff: Like, it shouldn’t have known how to spell Sebedo, like necessarily, because
[00:58:26] Merlin: you must’ve, you must’ve really put it, you must’ve put a hurting on some tokens here. Likes. Seriously. Like
[00:58:34] Jeff: Yeah, yeah.
[00:58:35] Merlin: I mean, there’s so many I’m see, I see so many tokens in what it came up with here.
[00:58:40] Jeff: so here’s so okay, so if I’m if I’m walking through the process, that was the beginning of the process. And actually, in the repo, there’s a there’s one file that’s just amusing corrections that it that it felt like it was seeing it. So that’s, that’s where I started like, okay, well, that’s really interesting.
[00:58:56] Jeff: So actually, actually, I mean,
[00:58:58] Merlin: I like to cut up your [00:59:00] jib.
[00:59:00] Jeff: I’d like to cut up your chip. It’s
[00:59:02] Merlin: Um, so, so actually Vampire title is an album, not an ep. Um,
[00:59:06] Jeff: That’s the other one. It’s like such a, such a dude half the time.
[00:59:10] Merlin: oh, I know. It’s, it’s a character from U Nice. Today I call Carl Van Hoot. So actually, um,
[00:59:18] Jeff: So okay, so actually here was the me here was the me It was the manual step. I, I like, I never ask it to fix things in a transcript and feed me the transcript back. I say, give me a markdown checklist, and then I go through. So I actually manually changed based on that checklist. Then I fed it in again.
[00:59:34] Jeff: What do you see that might be wrong? And then I felt like I was ready to say, I want a glossary of terms. And it took a little bit of like, no, no, when I say terms. I don’t want these things. I want these types of things. And then it was like, but then it was pretty easy. It was like, I want a column that’s sort of a description.
[00:59:51] Jeff: I want you to group it. I want to give a little category so you can group it. And the kinds of shit that it was filling in was really unbelievable to me. [01:00:00] Um, and so, yeah, that was the back and forth really. There was a lot of just massaging, like, yeah, you basically got it. And then I edited three or four of the entries.
[01:00:08] Jeff: And it’s not that there’s not more that should be, but those are the ones that
[01:00:11] Merlin: Huey Lewis sports
[01:00:14] Merlin: Huey Lewis and the News sports.
[01:00:16] Jeff: actually, uh, I think it also corrected, you had said,
[01:00:21] Merlin: Tripanning. Didn’t like my tripanning.
[01:00:23] Jeff: oh yeah, that’s drilling into the head, uh, there was a point at which you, you, um, were talking about David Bowie introducing Adrienne Ballou, and you
[01:00:32] Merlin: Actually, he’s from
[01:00:33] Jeff: from, and it was like, actually, Adrienne Ballou was from, it’s just amazing,
[01:00:38] Merlin: that’s so great. How much did it cost you to hire everyone on Mastodon?
[01:00:43] Jeff: Yeah, exactly.
[01:00:44] Merlin: I can only have one of two opinions about everything. Either I don’t care about what you’re saying, or I think it’s wrong.
[01:00:51] Jeff: But Merlin, here’s the crazy thing. Like, when I was done with that and I looked at it, it was similar when I looked at the list of like, I don’t know, 36 [01:01:00] songs or something. I think there might be a few more, but the ones that I identified through ChatGPT were 36. Um, I, I looked at that and I said, that’s all in me.
[01:01:10] Jeff: Like that, that was a, that was the transcript of just the 90
[01:01:14] Merlin: By the way, it would be one thing to see, like, your EKG or something expressed as a line and go, Well, that’s my heart. And in this you’re like, Oh my gosh, this has all been in me the whole time, it’s just now I’m seeing it in a table.
[01:01:25] Jeff: Yes. And that’s
[01:01:26] Merlin: I know what all these things mean. Isn’t that weird?
[01:01:28] Jeff: Yes. And that and the fact that you and I were bouncing on that. It’s like there is another person and there are there’s other people that for some fucking reason, some of it you can you can guess certain movies, we’re all going to talk about Big Lebowski, right? Like, that’s not a surprise.
[01:01:41] Jeff: But like, the sort of the sort of like, multiverse kind of multiverse
[01:01:47] Merlin: not wrong, Walter, you’re just an asshole.
[01:01:49] Jeff: Exactly. Exactly. So anyway, I, when I say, um, that it feels almost warm to see my
[01:01:57] Merlin: the fact, okay, but like here’s the thing about what you’re saying right [01:02:00] here. So let me find the one I was looking at a minute ago in your, this, this playlist, the glossary. Okay, so it did a pretty good job of finding 266 That’s individual monads of thing that we talked about in this show. Turned it into a table, said what kind of category it was, and it even defined it.
[01:02:18] Merlin: Let me go look down here. Oh, geez. Boy, well, that’s a shame. Look at line 43.
[01:02:24] Jeff: Wait, I’m not in it. What’s
[01:02:25] Merlin: Oh, it’s okay. It’s just a bummer. It says, Buy Thomas Harris, instead of
[01:02:32] Merlin: Thomas Harris is the, I mean, I know this. Like, I, like, unlike ChatGPT, I know this. Thomas Harris, you know, wrote the Hannibal Lecter novels. But, what a shame.
[01:02:42] Merlin: And it’s even in the wrong order. It’s between Buzz Osborne and Carl Hyasson. What a shame.
[01:02:50] Jeff: it was good to leave some of that. I should say, I made it add
[01:02:54] Merlin: But it knows what Columbia House is! This is fucking insane that it can do this!
[01:02:59] Jeff: Oh, it’s completely [01:03:00] insane. Yeah. And that’s, so that’s it. Like, and I look at that and if somebody said, would you like to listen to 90 minute conversation in which all these things are mentioned? I’m like, you know what, maybe
[01:03:09] Merlin: Well, when you put it that way, it sounds bad.
[01:03:13] Jeff: Amazing. So, yeah, that’s a, that’s just a way of, I like that a lot.
[01:03:18] Jeff: I mean, I’m whole, so okay, do you remember the Beastie Boys magazine Grand Royal?
[01:03:22] Merlin: Mm hmm. I, I posted, I just, I just found a copy in,
[01:03:28] Jeff: you posted about Grand Royal.
[01:03:29] Merlin: yeah, it’s the one with, um, Scratch Perry on the cover. It looks like a Wheaties box.
[01:03:35] Merlin: it’s the, it’s the one where, um, Rad Rock goes to the Guitar Tech, Institute of Technology with the Mullet Wick.
[01:03:42] Jeff: So okay, so that’s a great example. I have the I have three of the episode. I think the first three
[01:03:47] Merlin: Mine’s still got the decal for a shirt in it, and I’m thinking about making a
[01:03:51] Jeff: doesn’t. Mine doesn’t. One of them has a record in it. Um,
[01:03:54] Merlin: it came with the FlexiDisc in one of them, I
[01:03:57] Merlin: Sorry, go ahead. Yeah, Grand Royal, great. Spike Jonze, Spike Jonze [01:04:00] and Beastie Boys, Manor Magazine.
[01:04:01] Jeff: this was a magazine that it’s no surprise you and I both hold dear, because it is exactly the kind of collection of the world that is all over the map, is so dense, and somehow Despite all that, it might really, really overwhelm a lot of people.
[01:04:19] Jeff: But when I hold these, I’m holding all three now, I grabbed them last night, actually. When I hold all three of these, I feel like I’m holding a whole world. And if I wanted to just go into somebody’s world, it’s, it’s like a novel, practically, right? But it’s also a doorways to a thousand other worlds. And as much as I am always on the watch, in me, for my gathering instinct.
[01:04:44] Jeff: Um, my gathering instinct is also a core piece of who I am, and my whole life has been figuring out how to harness it in a way that it doesn’t, it doesn’t sort
[01:04:54] Merlin: I like that you’re saying gathering, the word we probably want to use is learning, but that would [01:05:00] put people off. So I like the way that you say gathering, but it’s like, I can’t learn enough new things. It’s just, I will never get sick of learning a new thing.
[01:05:09] Jeff: Yes, and this, and this thing gives you an opportunity, just all by yourself, unless you choose to post about it, which I love to do, um, to just explore your world in the most fucked up ways. And sometimes, look, people say, well, but it’s wrong. Sometimes it’s wrong in really delightful ways that
[01:05:25] Merlin: and sometimes, I
[01:05:26] Merlin: is a This would actually be a useful podcast episode if we ever made one of those, but I think it could be argued that the errors are some of the most interesting things, or at least some of the most instructive things. At the very least, how do you not see an error and go like, wow, I wonder if that’s an error I could have helped with?
[01:05:44] Jeff: Yeah, definitely. Or, or it’s the kind of thing, I had a friend, there was this amazing, he’s still around, Hiro Tanaka. He was a, he’s a Japanese guy who came to Minneapolis in the, in the early 90s, went to a Babes in Toyland show, met Lori, the drummer, she fell in love with him and had him stay, [01:06:00] fell in love, like, what a great human.
[01:06:02] Jeff: And he went on tour with them. And for the next 10 years of his life, he was almost always on tour with an American indie rock band. And, and he went on tour with My band, he would just get in a van with people and he was always learning English with a notebook in his hand. And fun fact, my brother owns a bar in Brooklyn and the bathroom walls are papered with the pages of his book.
[01:06:23] Merlin: That’s so cool.
[01:06:24] Jeff: and, and you now imagine Merlin, he’s learning
[01:06:27] Merlin: Boy, that must feel like a really insane place to urinate.
[01:06:30] Jeff: he’s learning in English
[01:06:32] Jeff: band vans in band vans So one day he comes to visit me. I remember he was on tour with with the Selby
[01:06:40] Merlin: in the bottle.
[01:06:40] Jeff: Yeah, he was on he was on tour with the Selby Tigers It’s a great band from Minneapolis and I was living in Chicago and they were staying overnight and I was in this kind of shitty neighborhood in Chicago and he and I were sitting outside in front of my house talking and in the like brown, weedy grass stuff, a mushroom was coming up and he looks at it and he goes, Oh, [01:07:00] ghetto mushroom.
[01:07:04] Jeff: And that is exactly the kind of shit that can happen in ChatGPT where it’s like, that is a delightful mistake.
[01:07:10] Merlin: Oh, I totally agree. An example, uh, I, I used before, there was one where, okay, and this, this goes back to, I’ll make this quick, but, um, okay, so you know what, actually, this is also, if I may say, a good example of your, one of your original questions, which is what is it that makes this so well suited for you, or you so well suited for it?
[01:07:28] Merlin: And I had mentioned lateral thinking. So how did this start? It started off, this is just how my stupid fucking brain works. I think it started off as I wanted, I’ve got these, it starts out so boring, but it gets so good. I’ve got, um, what are called Nanoleaf lights. Most people, if you’ve ever seen those hexagons in douchey YouTube videos, but they do all kinds of lights.
[01:07:46] Merlin: And, but the connectors for these things are garbage. Like so many of those kinds of like where you get the little belt with the connectors and you can cut them to fit and like light strips. And my light strips would always pull out. of the dingus that connects them to the electric. Long story [01:08:00] short, I basically just gone in and said like, what are some of my options for dealing with this?
[01:08:04] Merlin: And I’m like, well, you could do this or blah, blah, blah. And I said, Hmm, I said, act like you’re somebody who’s very knowledgeable about HomeKit things, about home automation, and You’re somebody who does DIY stuff and isn’t allowed to avoid the warranty a little bit, something like that. Boom! It drops all this great stuff, all this crazy stuff, which is not dangerous, but one of the things was you can just hot glue it.
[01:08:29] Merlin: And I’m like, fuck, of course, I can just hot glue it, that’s really easy. But then I said, okay, well now, give me a Caravaggio painting. And in the style of, of this, give me a Caravaggio painting of, of people. I said, no, first I said, now, now give it, now explain what you just said to me, but do it in a hundred words and in the voice of a 1930s hobo who refers to himself in the third person as Cletus.
[01:08:52] Merlin: And it’s, and it actually did that. And it goes, Oh, Cletus got a hot tip for you. Got to be real here. You got to get that glue nice and hot. But old Cletus knows that. And I [01:09:00] was like, now make a Caravaggio painting of people. Cletus, Demonstrating this to other hobos, who are, and one of the hobos, at least one of the other hobos is eating beans out of a can.
[01:09:08] Merlin: You’re with me so far. Who the fuck
[01:09:09] Merlin: this way? Raises his hand, and you, but you know, it was hilarious, it was fucking great, it did like a pretty passable fake Caravaggio, but what’s great is there was a big pile of beans on the floor, and a can next to it that said Nanoleaf. And, like, if that doesn’t make you happy, I guess that’s okay, but I was like, I mean, like, the dumbest part that I could say from all this, well, that just teaches me a little more about, like, how to ask for things.
[01:09:34] Merlin: Cause I asked for beans, and it gave me beans, and it gave me a can, the can said Nanoleaf on it, because that’s what Cletus was showing people how to do with a hot glue gun. I’ll send you
[01:09:42] Jeff: Yes, yes. Oh, that’s
[01:09:44] Merlin: like that, okay, now that’s a pretty good example of almost all of those things. And, and, and like so many of my examples, it’ll be useless because people will go, that’s silly, I’m a normal person, why would I ever do bullshit like that?
[01:09:54] Merlin: Why do you, why did you play with anything when you were a kid? Why did you ever imagine that you’re somebody whom [01:10:00] you’re not? Why did you ever imagine a world that doesn’t currently exist? I mean, I mean, I’m gonna get all bummed out. Fucking Bobby Kennedy on your ass, but Jesus Christ, like, is there nothing that you can see in that beyond the dangers that other people have told you about?
[01:10:13] Jeff: right, right. Exactly. Yeah. What about, so that’s a great example of a practical use. The other day I, I, I,
[01:10:20] Merlin: know if it’s practical
[01:10:22] Jeff: That’s it. No, it is. It’s
[01:10:23] Merlin: definitely lateral.
[01:10:24] Jeff: practical. And then becomes Cletus, which
[01:10:26] Merlin: I get to show off the fact that I enjoy Caravaggio.
[01:10:30] Jeff: I, um, so I restore old tools, uh, large and, and
[01:10:35] Merlin: You’re an old tool.
[01:10:37] Jeff: I’m an old tool. Um, and,
[01:10:39] Merlin: You know, like one of those YouTubers?
[01:10:41] Jeff: yeah, like one of those
[01:10:42] Merlin: Like you’ll turn a cheese board into like a modern thing or make a pinball
[01:10:46] Jeff: No, no, it’s, it’s more like, it’s the
[01:10:48] Merlin: Restoring like an old hammer or
[01:10:50] Jeff: see a picture of a terribly rusty power tool, uh, from the forties,
[01:10:54] Merlin: love it.
[01:10:55] Jeff: You know, and then you, so I, over the summer, I experimented, we talked just a little bit about this.
[01:10:59] Jeff: I [01:11:00] experimented with rust removal, just all these different ways of rust removal. And I realized
[01:11:04] Merlin: Now you’re speaking my love
[01:11:06] Jeff: was holding all this shit in my head. And so I went to ChatGPT and I, and I said, help me create a decision tree for rust removal strategies because I realized I was, I was coming, sometimes I was, I was kind of jumping a little too
[01:11:20] Merlin: But notice what you did. I’m sorry to interrupt, but you didn’t, you didn’t say, How do I use this remover? Or like, Find the ba ba ba ba Coke machine. Right?
[01:11:31] Merlin: I want to show me the work.
[01:11:32] Jeff: yeah, exactly. Exactly. And and that’s interesting, too, because it is weird to jump like yesterday I was working I have this like one ton hundred year old lathe metal machining lathe that I’m rebuilding.
[01:11:43] Merlin: So you can do woodturning?
[01:11:45] Jeff: This is metal turning, which is even more insane.
[01:11:49] Merlin: I’m gonna make one of those vases out of colored pencils.
[01:11:51] Jeff: Oh, yeah. Oh, I saw you posted that. I love
[01:11:53] Merlin: such an upsetting
[01:11:55] Jeff: love them. I love them so much.
[01:11:57] Merlin: put a root on this thing and now it’s turning. [01:12:00] Anyways, you’ve
[01:12:00] Jeff: So I’m in there. I when I’m in that world in my workshop, like I, I’m not particularly drawn to my phone or my computers, because I’ve got like grease from the Coolidge administration on my hands, right? But like, actually,
[01:12:14] Merlin: It’s like it’s just a way to disappear from the world.
[01:12:16] Jeff: It’s a way to disappear from the world, but actually I’ve started more and more going to it to say, okay, I’ve got gear oil.
[01:12:22] Jeff: Uh, what, what should not have gear oil on it? Right? Like, it’s just like shit like that, where if I was going to the forums, I would have to go through a bunch of like, why the fuck are you even looking at gear oil? Right? Like, do you even have gloves?
[01:12:33] Merlin: would be an automated post that says, have you checked the FAQs? But no, absolutely, because if you treat, again, if you treat it like a Coke machine, you might be, and this is a concept I learned from John Siracusa, please put it in notes, the XY problem, where what you really, you really want Y.
[01:12:48] Merlin: But you ask people for X. So like, you ask for some really complicated technical explanation for how to do something because you’re smarter than the average bear, when the real answer is just unplug it and plug it back in. Like, what is it that you [01:13:00] really want? I mean, there’s that famous story about like, you know, why do you buy a drill?
[01:13:06] Merlin: You buy a drill because it puts a screw in the wall. Why do you want a screw in the wall? So I can hang up a painting. Why do you want to hang up a painting? Because looking at a painting makes me happy. So in some ways you bought a drill because you want to be happy, you just don’t know it yet.
[01:13:19] Merlin: like, if you, if you think that that is an overly circuitous and not useful way to think about life, you’re probably fairly unhappy a lot of the time.
[01:13:27] Jeff: Yeah. Yeah.
[01:13:28] Merlin: Right and that’s that’s isn’t that kind of what you’re doing here though? It’s like hey You know I got this Leatherman that can do all these different things and sometimes I can even use the Leatherman for the wrong thing and sometimes That’s kind of cool.
[01:13:39] Jeff: Yep. Sometimes it’s kinda cool. Exactly. Yeah. Exactly. Um.
[01:13:45] Merlin: How are we on time?
[01:13:47] Jeff: We’re good. Well, we’re at 113 for this round. I
[01:13:50] Merlin: Oh, we should we should probably bounce pretty soon, right?
[01:13:52] Jeff: an hour 13. Yeah, we should bounce. I have a final topic for you. Which, which sort of comes sort of [01:14:00] related to what I was saying about feeding all of my kind of life information and asking it
[01:14:03] Merlin: Oh, I would love to talk about this.
[01:14:06] Merlin: my god Well, the the memory stuff is so great, but I filled my people, people, can we assume people know what we’re talking about?
[01:14:13] Jeff: well, I don’t know. Oh, the Wisdom Project. This is where
[01:14:16] Merlin: So, no, no, no, sorry, sorry, sorry, I’d love to talk about that too, always, but, no, but like, there was an introduction to something a few months ago that’s been really a game changer for me, that could be more of a game changer, with fewer constraints, but there’s a thing called memory, where you go in and say something as simple as, my name is Merlin, I live in San Francisco, and what that means is, from now on, in future threads, it’ll remember what you told it about yourself.
[01:14:39] Merlin: You know, you can probably imagine all the ways this is useful. A second one might be, I really prefer Markdown. So when you give me stuff, give it to me as Markdown. Et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. But like, I I, I put in all the information about my family, where they were born, all that kind of stuff. And then, and it was working great.
[01:14:57] Merlin: And again, remember this works across threads.
[01:14:59] Jeff: [01:15:00] Yeah.
[01:15:00] Merlin: So this is really powerful. But then, you know what I started doing, entering all kinds of, I started taking photos of things like, you know, the information panel on my Synology or my AeroGarden. Upload that. Remember this is an AeroGarden called BigGarden. This is an AeroGarden called OldGarden.
[01:15:14] Merlin: Now remember that on this day I changed the water and added plant food. Remember, remember, remember all this stuff. And I was. It was fucking incredible. I would put my entire life into this thing if I could, but after a week or so, it said meh, your memory’s full. So I had to start deleting stuff. But what you’re describing, once you start dipping a toe into that, you think shit’s integrated now, just you wait until it actually knows what your life is like.
[01:15:39] Jeff: Yeah, it’s funny. I have not ever used that memory function. I mean, I
[01:15:43] Merlin: Have you ever seen updating memory, where it goes, like, you say something, maybe, for example, with your tickets, I would bet you Dimes the Donuts that it says updating memory because it’s remembering that you were at that replacement show or whatever.
[01:15:55] Jeff: So it’s, so you’re saying this memory function, which somehow I don’t, I’m not even aware of is something that[01:16:00]
[01:16:00] Merlin: Do you have it open right now?
[01:16:01] Jeff: Yeah, I have ChatGPT
[01:16:02] Merlin: Okay, uh, you have the app on your Mac?
[01:16:04] Jeff: Ah, yes, I
[01:16:05] Merlin: Okay, command, comma, and go down to personalization.
[01:16:10] Jeff: Mm hmm. Is this like what you did for Joe Walsh? Oh, that was in the, that was in the part of the recording that got, but we’re just
[01:16:17] Merlin: the last year of Rocky Mountain away. Um, if you look under manage memory, you’ll see all the things that it remembers about you.
[01:16:23] Jeff: Oh shit.
[01:16:25] Merlin: So my first one is, uh,
[01:16:28] Jeff: It’s using Hover as their domain registrar. Okay. You can let that
[01:16:31] Merlin: about my mom. Merlin is feeling kind of tired today. And remember, Merlin prefers shorter responses. Here’s where Madeline was born. Merlin’s son, Billy, is a little reluctant and doesn’t like technology. That’s because I stuck the phone in Billy’s face with advanced voice mode on. And I said, Oh, don’t worry about Billy.
[01:16:48] Merlin: He’s just a little reluctant. It doesn’t like technology. Well, it remembered that. imagine this filled with, Oh, here’s my two synologies. Here’s what the serial number is. Imagine that, you know, that, that, that, that folder I’ve got on [01:17:00] iCloud with hundreds or dozens of manuals. How far away are we from me just dropping that or not even needing to drop that in?
[01:17:08] Merlin: Like, you know what I’m saying? Like, but this, having it remember all of these different things is ridiculously, I haven’t remembered my. Again, think about my garden, or think about my 3D printer, or you could think about your automobile. If you’re an automobile person. When did I buy this automobile, how many miles are on it, when’s the last time I was checking it?
[01:17:25] Merlin: Like, this is the dream. It’s like, in the same way that I have this dream for this bike log idea for Apple products, I also have this dream over here of like, I just want to like, start talking and have it remember and integrate things, have it be my outboard brain, and if all that information about your, not even your quote, your life, but like, have you ever wanted to make a timeline?
[01:17:45] Merlin: I’ve always wanted to make a Full Timeline of my life in Excel. Where I lived, for how long, who my housemates were, like, when did that person leave and get replaced by this one? Like, I don’t know why, that’s just something I’ve
[01:17:56] Jeff: I have, I have a spreadsheet. I’ve lived in 38 places[01:18:00]
[01:18:00] Merlin: when I was in college, I would move four times a year in
[01:18:02] Jeff: Every, every single place I lived, who I lived with, if it was my mom, she had a friend
[01:18:06] Merlin: And don’t you want to kind of see that? Now,
[01:18:08] Merlin: system where that all just gets remembered, and it says, oh, this is kind of like that thing Richard said one time. And you’re like,
[01:18:13] Jeff: Oh, you were in Chicago at this point,
[01:18:15] Merlin: Right, but that, that memory part, and it sounds like you were not expressly aware of it. And by the way, this will don’t, so use this in 4.
[01:18:22] Merlin: 0. Not in the new one. The new one does not do well with
[01:18:26] Jeff: add things myself,
[01:18:28] Merlin: hell yeah. Here, try this. Just open a new 4. 0, right? Like an old one. Um, and just say, remember that my favorite fruit is apples, or whatever. You can also add them manually in those lines, but that’s the easiest way. It’s just as you’re going.
[01:18:44] Merlin: Or like, remember I changed the water in this thing today.
[01:18:47] Jeff: Okay. Okay. Got it. Yeah.
[01:18:50] Merlin: And now, now, now, why is that useful? Well, that. That’s it. So I, when I was doing that dumb demos of the worst, and I say, I go up to Madeline and I’m like, uh, can I introduce you to my wife, Madeline? And she [01:19:00] goes, oh, hi Madeline. Nice to meet you. And she’s like, what are you doing? Can you go? And I said, I said, uh, where was Madeline born? And she goes, Madeline was born in Providence, Rhode Island. And it’s like, she’s like, get that away from, get
[01:19:10] Merlin: from me.
[01:19:12] Jeff: Okay. Hold on. Let me just, there’s, there’s three bits in my memory that are cracking me up and I want to, I want to bring them out. So I had at one point asked it to make me a playlist based on whoever was the centerfold of Circus Magazine, uh, between a certain date and a certain date,
[01:19:27] Merlin: Oh my, that’s already
[01:19:29] Jeff: So. So this says, it is interested in creating playlists based on specific themes in historical context, such as magazine centerfolds for a
[01:19:37] Merlin: Oh no,
[01:19:38] Jeff: Almost, almost, almost.
[01:19:40] Merlin: tweet.
[01:19:41] Jeff: And then I’ve got is using vinegar and salt to derust tools and then soaking them in baking soda and water, drying, wire brushing and applying WD 40.
[01:19:48] Jeff: And then I’ve got has traveled to Iraq on multiple occasions,
[01:19:51] Merlin: Oh, that is so funny. This is all memory stuff. Oh my god. Let me look at mine. Merlin has an X1C printer. Merlin’s [01:20:00] tomatoes in his AeroGarden are a few inches tall. What it doesn’t say right here is that it remembers when you said that. Merlin has a special edition, The Hardest Job in the World pencil, which is a collaboration between Palomino Blackwing and CBS’s John Dickerson. Thanks, buddy! Merlin uses the app Drafts for macOS and iOS. Merlin is interested in trying different It’s so When you read it this way, it does sound kind of insane.
[01:20:27] Jeff: It does. I mean, and there’s also
[01:20:28] Merlin: It remembers which Milwaukee drill I have.
[01:20:31] Jeff: it’s great. That’s great. Then there’s kind of stuff that seemed that’s very sort of passing, like is customizing their zprofile to include specific manpager setting that uses BAT
[01:20:41] Merlin: Merlin is researching Ray Davies wife.
[01:20:44] Jeff: What if the entire podcast was just just taking turns reading this
[01:20:47] Merlin: It would be called a show with John Siracusa.
[01:20:51] Merlin: Anyway, let me tell you the joke in four bullets.
[01:20:57] Jeff: okay, let me before we are done.
[01:20:59] Merlin: Merlin set up the [01:21:00] birdhouse yesterday. I wanted to see
[01:21:04] Jeff: is yesterday?
[01:21:06] Merlin: well, it knows, but I wanted to find out, like, I, I have another, see, these are all such disparate little scraps of paper. I have a calendar called journal. A calendar called journal where I just write down when something happened. So I changed my medication on this day, I installed the new X on this day, and if it’s stuff where like, you know, sometimes it’s stuff where it goes either under journal or environment are my two calendars.
[01:21:26] Merlin: And one is like, hey, it’s been six months, change the filters in the um, in the air dingus. But why do I need that in 60 different places? And do I really want Apple to be the arbiter of all that? Couldn’t there be some kind of standardized XML style, JSON style thing where like, all my stuff just goes into a thing and then it just all learns from me?
[01:21:44] Merlin: It doesn’t seem like that much to ask. They have a universal
[01:21:46] Jeff: system? Do you have a oh, system, system. Do you have a system for archiving your chats, or even just like a
[01:21:53] Merlin: No, it’s a huge, it’s a huge amount of my memory.
[01:21:56] Jeff: thing for
[01:21:57] Merlin: I get a periodic, like, when I’m downloading. And [01:22:00] some open source materials. And it’ll say like, and Downey will say like, you have 116 gigs left. I’m like,
[01:22:07] Merlin: So I go and I go to Daisy disk or I sort by, you know, whatever. And I go and I go, and it’s always my directory, my tilde slash application support slash, Wait, sorry, slash library, slash application, slash, like, MESSAGES.
[01:22:21] Merlin: Whoa. Cause I keep the attachments too! I need
[01:22:24] Jeff: Yeah. Oh, yeah, of course. You need it for
[01:22:25] Merlin: No, I should, I should do that. If I lost it, it would be fine. But it’s just a weird PAC GRAD compulsion I have.
[01:22:32] Jeff: I’ve started doing this thing where if it’s something I want to remember, actually, the last thing I ask in the thread is summarize succinctly in a bulleted list, what I have asked of you in this thing. And I have a notes file where it’s just like the, the link to that chat. And then that
[01:22:47] Merlin: You’re kidding me! I, I sometimes will also do it to, sometimes I, occasionally I’ve done this to cheat, but more often just cause it’s, it’s like we’ll go through a whole long thing and I’ll be like, uh, give me a 100 word prompt for how I would ask [01:23:00] for this. Again, or something. Like, like when it’s being a dick about like, I can’t make you a Caravaggio painting, or like, I can’t make a David Hockney painting, or whatever, and you’re like, describe the work of David Hockney.
[01:23:10] Merlin: There’s David Hockney, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And so I just copy and paste that, take out the first part of the sentence, and drop it in, and it’ll give me what I want.
[01:23:16] Jeff: yes, yes. Right, right.
[01:23:19] Merlin: by obscurity, or lessons by sessions, or something. I don’t know. Who needs a name? Sorry.
[01:23:26] Merlin: you know, though! Now you know about memory!
[01:23:28] Merlin: But like I say, I don’t know if you understood what I said, but I don’t think it’s working with oh one preview. So try it with 4.0 4.0 and all the other ones and you’ll be fine.
[01:23:37] Jeff: Okay, sounds good.
[01:23:38] Merlin: ’cause like you can’t, you also can’t upload images to oh
[01:23:40] Jeff: No, it’s just driving me
[01:23:42] Merlin: it won’t make you 3D prints. It’s got a weird knowledge
[01:23:45] Jeff: I, I promise, this is the last thing I’ll say, and then I want to ask you about the Wisdom Project, very specific question, I want to, um, but I am, so I’m going to the UN archives in November, I’m spending like a week there, because
[01:23:58] Merlin: As in the United Nations.
[01:23:59] Jeff: I [01:24:00] have this project I’ve been doing for 10 years on and off where I’m,
[01:24:03] Merlin: You should read the power broker on the plane. He had a big role in,
[01:24:06] Jeff: give it a shot
[01:24:07] Merlin: wouldn’t really even have West Side story if it, if it wasn’t for Robert Moses.
[01:24:10] Jeff: oh my God, I just, sorry, this is
[01:24:12] Merlin: Talk about, no, that’s lateral. That’s lateral. Realizing the West Side Story is a movie about Robert
[01:24:17] Jeff: And, and I’m going to continue this, uh, and you’ll see why in a second. So I went, hold on, now you got, so you fucking got me trapped in a net. Uh, I grabbed, I grabbed a, uh, issue of Punk Planet, uh, that we did, um, in 2005 about podcasting called The End of Radio and, um, and I opened it up.
[01:24:35] Jeff: This is, I’m going from the power broker
[01:24:36] Merlin: yeah, yeah.
[01:24:37] Jeff: Uh, I wrote sort of the main feature line, then we had a bunch of interviews. Who does the interview with something called Neighborhood Public Radio? Fucking Roman Mars. Just like 2005 in a, in a feature package about what the fuck is this new thing that we
[01:24:51] Merlin: Was he living in, oh, was he in Oakland at the time? I didn’t, I don’t think of him as a punk rock guy.
[01:24:56] Jeff: he was in Chicago and he wrote with, he wrote for Punk Planet here and
[01:24:59] Merlin: [01:25:00] You’re kidding me.
[01:25:00] Jeff: Yeah. Yeah. And, but
[01:25:02] Merlin: you listened to that podcast yet?
[01:25:03] Jeff: Oh my God. I can’t. You know what my problem is Merlin? Is that I’ve been wanting to read The Power Broker forever and I cannot
[01:25:09] Merlin: There’s only one chapter in the book where you should stop and read the chapter, and it’s a late episode. Well, there are people that I know who would disagree.
[01:25:17] Merlin: But there’s, there’s one called R. M. late in the book where it’s worth, because it’s the most, they, they both say, and other people agree, it’s the pivotal chapter in the book.
[01:25:25] Merlin: It’s like in the 30s. It’s a very late chapter. That’s so cool! I have a photo of me with Roman Mars.
[01:25:31] Merlin: I met him at, I was a, oh my god, I’m not even gonna say it because people will look it up. I was a guest on Political Gab Fest once and it went
[01:25:39] Jeff: I know you were. I
[01:25:40] Merlin: I did some, but I wasn’t, it’s not my, it’s not
[01:25:41] Jeff: was the, it was the, was it, it wasn’t a conundrum show.
[01:25:44] Merlin: No, it was a live show
[01:25:46] Jeff: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
[01:25:47] Merlin: friend asked me to be on and I met them and I didn’t do very well. Here’s a picture of me and Roman Mars, I’ll send you that.
[01:25:54] Jeff: Sounds good. Um,
[01:25:55] Merlin: We both, it’s so funny, my kid has identified a type. This really, really came to the [01:26:00] fore when my kid and I went to see The Flophouse a few months ago live.
[01:26:03] Merlin: And there’s a line for question askers to, like, come up and, you know, ask a question. And Billy’s, like, just, because we, we got really good tickets. We got in the front row and, um, we were, like, right by Dan. It was exciting. And, um, in the shadow of Dan. But Billy looks at the line of people waiting to ask a question to the Flophouse podcast people and he goes, every one of those people looks like one of your friends. And I said, I said, that’s what they all look like. I said, Billy, I bet every one of those people has a podcast. Hey. Because we, we are, we are a type.
[01:26:36] Jeff: Oh yeah, completely.
[01:26:37] Merlin: I just send you my stuff, text me, so I can talk to you like a person. Anyways, um, before we get to the wisdom document, you’re going to the UN.
[01:26:46] Jeff: I’m going, thank you. I have been working on a project on and off, uh, which is basically telling the story of a single day in Gaza in 1956 after the Israelis had invaded and occupied it in order to clear out [01:27:00] the fedayeen that were living among the, it’s a very familiar, Story. Um, but for reasons I won’t get into here at this point, uh, I am focused on this specific day.
[01:27:09] Jeff: I’m looking for a specific list of the dead, and I have identified sort of a chain of possession, um, and have identified kind of the 25 boxes that might have this at the UN Archives, right? Um, but I also
[01:27:23] Merlin: this is exciting.
[01:27:24] Jeff: But I also had found, um, reference to these documents that are like verbatim minutes that are really relevant to what I was trying to do among the Secretary General and a few other people in 1956.
[01:27:35] Jeff: And so when the archives sent them to me, I opened them up, and the words, the words
[01:27:40] Merlin: Who’s the Secretary General in 56? Is that Dag Hammershulge?
[01:27:45] Merlin: was the guy forever, right?
[01:27:46] Jeff: oh, yeah, Forever, good guy, uh, I mean, I, you know, I never met him. Uh, but, so, okay, so, the, the, this very important, like, previously strictly confidential verbatim meeting notes from 1956 I think are very important to what I’m [01:28:00] doing, but the, the text is so fuzzy that I can’t read it.
[01:28:03] Jeff: I write back, I’m like, is there any chance you have some better, no, that’s all we have, and I couldn’t do it. But I put it in, I tried to OCR
[01:28:09] Merlin: this like that Dell commercial with the
[01:28:12] Jeff: So I took, I don’t know what that is, but I took a
[01:28:14] Merlin: Was it able to figure it out for you?
[01:28:16] Jeff: took a screenshot, I put it into ChatGPT, I said transcribe this for me, and it was perfect because I could then go back and kind of
[01:28:23] Merlin: Isn’t that awesome and upsetting at the same time?
[01:28:26] Jeff: And so now this invisible
[01:28:28] Merlin: It’s better than you, Jeff. It’s better than
[01:28:30] Jeff: Or better than me, it’s way better than me. I mean, that’s
[01:28:32] Merlin: Yeah, yeah, yeah. It’s just something you live with, yeah.
[01:28:34] Jeff: to me all the
[01:28:35] Merlin: Yeah, yeah, I know, I know.
[01:28:36] The Wisdom Project
[01:28:36] Jeff: All right, Wisdom Project. So give me the, just for the listeners, describe the Wisdom Project as briefly as you want.
[01:28:45] Merlin: Well, with some projects, uh, um, the way I remember it, and this may not be right, I’m so glad the train’s back, it started out as a challenge on Dubai Friday, which was to use, um, what’s that app? Alex’s Gay Bones for Obsidian. It might have started with that, to use the Obsidian app, and it’s a text based app, [01:29:00] and it’s really cool.
[01:29:00] Merlin: But anyway, I, and, and, and. I don’t know. And I’m going, I’m going something with Alex and me. Um, I really, I’m very into the buildings and Alex is obsessed with the scaffolding. Sometimes I’m not sure what Alex makes with all of their tools, but I’m very into the what you can make with it stuff. That’s my, I really love, I mean I like the stuff too, but I was like, Oh actually this kind of dovetails with an idea I’ve had for a while, which is like, to start writing down, The point is, the Wisdom Project is to write down, uh, stuff it took me too long to learn in life that I would consider good advice that is just hard one and the part that gets missed in this is it’s not me necessarily haranguing strangers about how to act, it’s more of like, here’s stuff it took me too long to realize, sometimes very painfully, um, and it’s, uh, you know, just a bunch of those, like 500 some bullets, um, And then, you know, part of the reason it continues to be successful for me is that I’ve never tried to do anything with it.
[01:29:57] Merlin: I, I’ve only ever just added a new bullet [01:30:00] and the occasional horizontal rule for visual interest. But, uh, you know, I’ll sometimes tweak previous things. I’ll add more bullets to the beginning. I’ll work on, but like I deliberately have avoided turning it into anything because I love that it’s, it’s just a, now it’s a repo.
[01:30:15] Merlin: For the longest time, the problem is with a repo you can turn off comments, you can’t turn off comments on a, on a gist, so I had to make it a repo. Actually, you may not be aware, the bowling balls were actually invented in Shut up, shut
[01:30:26] Jeff: Oh, no. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
[01:30:27] Merlin: So anyway, and that’s what I do, and so, um, yeah, I mean, it’s, it’s done as it is, the whole idea was just to like, have that be a thing, and, um, that’s the wisdom, I’m very proud of it.
[01:30:35] Merlin: Um, because I can like, you know, it’s like St. Crispin’s Day, which is around this time of year. I can strip my sleeve and show my scars and say that I was there that fought upon St. Crispin’s Day. These are all the things that were, these are a lot of the things that were difficult for me. It’s a fun writing exercise.
[01:30:49] Merlin: I love to write. I love to write in this style and um, I like wordplay and so it’s one of those things where you could, it could be just a bathroom book. It could be, it’s pretty deep in a lot of [01:31:00] ways if you actually read it though.
[01:31:01] Jeff: Well, and that’s, okay. So that gets me to my question about it. So I’ve, I’ve listened to you on your podcast for a very, very long time. And, and I know that this kind of warmth and, and, and wisdom and thoughtfulness is something that arises in all of those podcasts. I have observed, maybe with the exception of Back to Work, that, and I hope it’s okay for me to say this.
[01:31:22] Jeff: I have observed that there, there are times in some of those other podcasts, less so with Alex I would say, where when you get into the mode that is represented by the Wisdom Project, you can kind of ricochet off of it quickly. Um, no one is interested in this, I don’t, you know, that kind of thing, right?
[01:31:37] Jeff: Which is all fine,
[01:31:38] Merlin: It’s a it’s a lot to ask of
[01:31:39] Jeff: you’re in these,
[01:31:40] Merlin: It really is It’s a lot to ask people to even like even consider like looking at it And also it’s just like this is this is such a thing where a guy gets old and then has a vanity press book A memoir or something and it’s like but the thing is I I don’t know.
[01:31:55] Merlin: I I yeah, I do bounce off it pretty fast I’m not embarrassed of it. I’m deeply proud of [01:32:00] it It’s just I can’t find people who are as into that stuff as I
[01:32:02] Jeff: no, I think you’re
[01:32:03] Merlin: but it won’t stop me
[01:32:04] Jeff: the sense it’s context. So here’s, here’s what I, I loved so much when this came out was that this is a part of you I love when you go into this in any podcast, I’m always that
[01:32:15] Merlin: You mean like when I’m when I’m when I’m nice and I’m sincere and I’m
[01:32:18] Jeff: no, I love it all,
[01:32:19] Merlin: how I actually am in life?
[01:32:21] Jeff: No, I love it all.
[01:32:22] Jeff: Um, but the point
[01:32:23] Merlin: sound, fart sound.
[01:32:24] Jeff: Not knowing you, I, when I read that, I thought, this is interesting. Something, something worked for Merlin that Merlin felt like he could not only do this thing, but call it the Wisdom Project and, and, and live with it and live around it, talk about it, reference it all the time, which I think is really amazing.
[01:32:43] Jeff: And I’m curious, and I hope I’m not being presumptuous, but when I use the example of having ChatGPT say back to me things that I kind of wasn’t allowing myself to do. to like acknowledge out loud. I’m wondering if there was something in you that had to [01:33:00] change or that at some moment where you’re like, I can do this.
[01:33:02] Jeff: And here it is. And I’m going to say it. I’m going to say Wisdom Project all the time, right? Like or the document, which is how you refer to it sometimes. But was there something? Was there some
[01:33:11] Merlin: a really good question. Yeah. I think it’s a I think it’s a It’s a great question for at least for me. It’s a great question that I could talk about quite a lot because There’s a, hmm, this is too big to talk about, but I think this might actually be a line in the document. Start acting like your life matters.
[01:33:32] Merlin: Do you notice how I like, I really like snuck it in, like in the middle of something else? If I made that first, nobody would keep reading.
[01:33:38] Jeff: right, right, right.
[01:33:39] Merlin: The first, the first one is, uh, sometimes an email is just a way to say I love you. Because you can read that in several ways and most people will not fully understand because they, Have no time to think about these things.
[01:33:50] Merlin: Sometimes an email is just a way to say I love you. Okay, cool. Thanks. What’s the next one? Okay, but like, did you ever really think about that? Like when you get annoyed in an email? Did you ever really think that maybe that’s somebody saying I love you, [01:34:00] just in a way you hadn’t expected? Oh, okay, whatever.
[01:34:03] Merlin: Yeah, but like, did you really think about it? Because did you ever, did you ever think about how sometimes you write emails to people because you love them? And maybe there’s a different way you could choose. There’s so many ways you can look at, and to me anyway, the reason I found all these things so absorbing, it’s not my wisdom, it’s what the world had to fucking show me.
[01:34:18] Merlin: I just made it into words that are readable for people who can fucking read. It’s, in some ways, it’s kind of like the culmination of anything like A Life’s Work that I’ve ever had, um, in, in a weird way, and it’s, it’s so close to who I would like to be that it gets difficult sometimes.
[01:34:38] Merlin: because it is very vulnerable, and it’s not, it’s not all just fart jokes.
[01:34:41] Merlin: I mean, there’s some jokes in there. For people who can actually fucking read, you’ll see a couple references to I Think You Should Leave that most people wouldn’t notice. There’s several little things like that. You can use too small a
[01:34:51] Jeff: No, I can’t drive!
[01:34:53] Merlin: can’t drive!
[01:34:55] Jeff: Not everybody can do everything! Sorry, sorry,
[01:34:57] Merlin: you’ve got the mud pie, and then you use too small a slice.[01:35:00]
[01:35:00] Jeff: sorry, go ahead.
[01:35:01] Merlin: But, just, don’t, don’t touch the receipt! Um, no, but like, um, it takes, This is, boy, this is, Jeff, this is the most important moment in the entire history of podcasting for me, because it all comes together in this one thing. This is the chicken problem. This is the wisdom document. This is so many of these different fucking things where It can be very, the things, the things that make you who you think you are, the things that you treasure, all these different things, very difficult to talk about with people.
[01:35:34] Merlin: It’s the ultimate kind of vulnerability in some ways. And but it also takes a lot of, um, you have to believe that your life is worth living on some level. I’m not, I don’t mean that as a pep talk or as a, like, cheerleading or anything. But like, you also, but like, and then the ultimate temerity is to say that the things that I think are worth writing down and the things I write down are worth editing.
[01:35:56] Merlin: The things that I think are worth editing are worth collecting. [01:36:00] The things that I think are worth collecting are worth going back to and improving. The things that are worth improving are worth sharing. There’s this cascade of apparent self involvement that is instead the thing that I would wish upon every person, which is that you care very intensely about the things that matter a lot to you.
[01:36:16] Merlin: And then you spend less time feeling distracted. By the things that you really know in your heart are not the good things in life and this, this, that could be that essay better that I read. That could be, there’s all kinds of different ways you can look at this, at least from my POV and the way that it’s received is something I’m touchy about because it’s a lot to say to somebody to like, oh yeah, that guy who just couldn’t be bothered to update his blog anymore is writing self-help again.
[01:36:42] Merlin: It’s like, well, don’t. But I don’t mean it that way. The first bullet in the list is the true one that mustn’t be missed. I hope you read it as a fun, breezy thing that makes me sound like a confident person who’s read a lot of Kurt Vonnegut. I hope you enjoy that. I really super do. And there are some things in there where like, but like, the, what it took me to put those words [01:37:00] together in that order took so much more work.
[01:37:03] Merlin: Personal effort, and it wasn’t personal effort this month, it wasn’t even that much personal effort last year, it was personal effort when I was 11 and couldn’t figure out why girls weren’t nicer to me. Like, I could place almost every single one of these things, from the most trivial, like, kind of like put your keys in a bowl shit, life hack stuff.
[01:37:29] Merlin: All the way down to my favorite one, which is about what it means when you have a kid and the kid changes. That’s my favorite one on the list, which I will look for right now. But it’s um, I feel very vulnerable about it. I don’t, touchy’s the wrong word for it, but I, I do love it a lot. What I don’t apologize for is that the project exists and I love doing it, and that it will never be done.
[01:37:50] Merlin: The whole point of this is that this be an ongoing thing. I mean if I only ever, if I never add another one, I mean, God, go, go get it. You can go make it in EPUB. It’s easy enough. Um, But, it [01:38:00] means a lot to me and I don’t really have a way to talk about that stuff because it’s not on brand for my usual stuff.
[01:38:06] Jeff: Yeah, yeah. Oh, it’s beautiful. I love it. And I,
[01:38:09] Merlin: Do you? Well, what, what, what are the other ones you like?
[01:38:13] Jeff: Oh my god, what are the ones I like? I’d have to pull it up. I’ve read them aloud to my wife at
[01:38:17] Merlin: I think, I think it’s useful and there’s a thing I’ve always done when I’m editing. Or I don’t know, is there a better word than that when I’m rewriting, another way to put it, if you don’t like the word editing? Um, which is like I, I,
[01:38:27] Jeff: word for me.
[01:38:28] Merlin: Well, like when I record songs, I always listen all the way through, from the beginning to the end.
[01:38:31] Merlin: Sometimes I’ll stop and go back, but I always end up going back to the beginning. Like, if, and this is why it really helps to like the things that you write. If you don’t like the things you write, you’re probably not going to become a very good writer, but you’ll get to walk around and go like, oh, of course, I never look at my own stuff.
[01:38:44] Merlin: Well, wow, it must suck. I laugh at my own jokes all the time, that’s how I know they’re good. Can I read you my favorite one?
[01:38:50] Merlin: Your kids are not little versions of you. They’re little versions of themselves. So don’t be sad or alarmed whenever they are becoming something different from you. Because they will become [01:39:00] lots of things that are different from you, and that’s arguably the whole point.
[01:39:04] Merlin: It is inarguably a thing that you need to cheerfully celebrate and support.
[01:39:08] Jeff: Oh, it’s
[01:39:09] Merlin: Now, why did I say that? Because I grew up, everybody grew up, I think, implicitly believing that a little, every kid is a little version of their parents. Oh, that’s, that’s real deep, man. Yeah, but did you really fucking think about it?
[01:39:22] Merlin: Did you ever think about how much shit you’ve had to carry around your entire life? Maybe not because of your parents, certainly because of your parents, but maybe just because of other people who had these expectations that you’re a little version of your parents. You have the same values with them.
[01:39:33] Merlin: You have the same concerns, the same anxieties, the same aspirations. You’re a little version of your parents and you’re doing it wrong. What if you accepted from the beginning that a baby’s just a cute pre adult and it’s your job to get the fuck out of the way and help them become the person that they are?
[01:39:51] Merlin: That they are, or the person that they need to become, or sometimes, admittedly, the person they need to not be anymore, and you need to help when you can, but you need to stay out of [01:40:00] the way, and one way of staying out of the way is to stop looking at them as little versions of you. Because do you want, are you a little version of your dad?
[01:40:07] Merlin: Are you a little version of your mom? How do you feel about that?
[01:40:10] Merlin: It’s very inhumane, and like, I love that one though, because that’s one of the ones where like, there’s so many levels to that for me. Cause, no matter what the situation, kids are full of surprises. Some kids are full of more surprises than others.
[01:40:23] Merlin: And that’s the greatest thing in the world to me, I wouldn’t trade a single piece of it. And getting to the point where I could type that, rewrite it, and get it to where it’s my favorite one in here, represents a lot of progression from where I was in Cincinnati in say 1975.
[01:40:37] Merlin: It means a lot to me, Jeff. It honestly does.
[01:40:39] Merlin: I have nowhere to discuss it, but it means a lot to me.
[01:40:41] Jeff: Yeah, I know. That’s great. I love it. I’m scanning through it now and it’s just like, yeah, it’s, and I did wonder, I mean, how much time or how much it took to order it,
[01:40:50] Merlin: That’s the beauty. Well, I very, sometimes I’ll change them because you can’t have two that are too close together. There’s some business, as we say in programming, some business logic to how I would want to turn this into something more [01:41:00] automatable. But if there’s anything that’s made this successful, it’s the fact that I have not been distracted by saying, I wonder if I should put this in Describener or,
[01:41:08] Jeff: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
[01:41:10] Merlin: or, or SQLite or whatever.
[01:41:12] Merlin: It’s like, if somebody else wants to build something that’ll turn this into like an EPUB, I mean, I’ve done, You can go look at the source code. If you go into the repo, you can find where I’ve had automation stuff inside of VS Code to generate EPUBs. But my near term goal is to have this generate an EPUB every time there’s an update so people could always get, but I don’t know how to do that and I don’t want to learn how to do that.
[01:41:34] Merlin: I could learn to do that, but maybe this needs to go in the document, Jeff, is like the document exists because I stopped trying to do other shit with it. Which gets to you another point of wisdom, which is like,
[01:41:44] Jeff: God, that’s its own. Yeah.
[01:41:46] Merlin: do better. People tend to screw up their next thing because they’re not paying careful attention to their current thing.
[01:41:52] Merlin: Yeah. Ask me how I know that, like how I’ve learned that 60 different ways and I still follow [01:42:00] shiny objects when I get to the difficult part of a project, unless I catch myself and I go, remember you wrote that thing down? You know how to do this once your party’s been seated. Always order a large pepperoni pizza for the table.
[01:42:11] Jeff: John Roderick.
[01:42:12] Merlin: Roderick. Sometimes
[01:42:15] Jeff: piece of wisdom. Very practical.
[01:42:17] Merlin: have a good run. I like this one. Throw out all shitty scissors. Bring
[01:42:21] Jeff: Oh, I was just going to read that one to you.
[01:42:23] Merlin: Well, what do you do? Well, right here, you might have heard this during this. This is a Japanese company called Kai, K A I. And they make, I learned about this from Marco, they’re the deadliest, sharpest scissors in the world, and you will, you will personally mangle every, you will destroy, with extreme prejudice, every other pair of scissors you’ve got.
[01:42:41] Merlin: You only need one good pair. Um, let’s see, bring in your neighbor’s trash cans. Talk to your pets and remind them that they’re not so bad, considering. Close the door behind you. Except, always hold the door. Say, I thank you, and mean it. Try to fix more things than you break, and calm your mind. Everybody’s doing, people hate this one, everybody’s [01:43:00] doing the best they can each day, even though what they can do is rarely enough.
[01:43:03] Jeff: Oh, that’s good. That’s good. Well, it’s a great project,
[01:43:07] Merlin: Thank you, man, and thank you, thank you for having me on your program.
[01:43:09] Jeff: Thank you for doing this, Merlin. It’s been really fantastic. Goodbye, everybody. Get some sleep.
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[01:46:04] Thank you, Pika, for sponsoring Overtired. Very grateful. It’s a great service. And now back to my conversation with Merlin Mann.
