Podcast 1 Transcript

A transcript for Episode 1: The First One (2007-02-16).

Pronoiac passed the podcast to otter.ai.

Summary Keywords

people, post, song, cortex, guess, kids, life, recordings, story, problem, cats, trapdoor, crazy, pop ups, page, insane, awesome, favorite, music, job

Transcript

mathowie 0:01 via repin pages from the pole which you admire God boy pointless lives we love welcome the metal filter podcast I'm Matt and this is Jessamyn. Hi, are awesome. So we just heard good news for the insane Writer's Block Party, which I actually liked. Because it's like a real rock song. And a lot of people I'm not to take anything away from it, but there's a lot of folk music, but when people go for rock, it's always fun. I guess this first show, we'll just be talking about the show bit too much. But uh, I guess I'll try and pick one of us will try and pick a good song each week to open with. Or we can throw a stupid Theme Song Contest, I'm sure cortex would do it. Guy or record anything. So we're just gonna talk about like three or four, handful of favorites from the week. And we'll try and do this every Friday morning and try and post it by Friday afternoon. I don't want to get too hung up on editing and stuff. So I think I can get this online pretty quick. So the most popular thing for the past week, it's been pegged as the smart kids post. I was kind of surprised about that. Because I've heard Malcolm Gladwell pushing this wheel for about a year about precociousness. And kids doesn't really have anything to do with how successful they are later in life and that people are getting really hung up on weird things that kids do well, and they brag about it. I've noticed this myself with other parents. I guess the just the article is about kids being so afraid of failure, being super smart, but so afraid of failure because they've been told they're smart their whole lives that they don't do anything and they're actually crippled by this fear

Jessamyn 2:16 of you ever take any risks? And yeah,

mathowie 2:18 I never saw that as a kid. I guess I saw my parents failing all the time. And I just thought that was part of life.

Jessamyn 2:23 Yeah. Nobody paid that much attention to what I was up to. I guess so it didn't seem to be it didn't seem to be that much of a problem. I mean, I remember reading about this in the New Yorker like a while ago. I think it was the New Yorker. Yeah. It was like read about. Yeah, all the kids with the straight Sats are like the most boring of all the kids. Yeah, you know, they peg the intelligence thing, and then they don't know how to do anything else.

mathowie 2:47 Yeah. And I think the gist of it is is like the ones that are actually CEOs and stuff and super powerful. They had something else about them. That wasn't they were smart enough, but there was something else about them. Musk's? Yeah. When he followed all the super smart kids, they all turned out to be accountants and dentists now lead boring lives. They're supposed to be groomed to be tomorrow's leaders.

Jessamyn 3:12 And it's not the same as leadership. Yeah, I thought that was really interesting. But yeah, I was also surprised at like, how in love with how in love with that post people were

mathowie 3:21 Yeah, 100 120 people. I was wondering if it was a spillover from the crazy comment. If people don't Robocop is bleeding. Yeah, his story that the dreaded wheel which is hilarious.

Jessamyn 3:34 Yeah, and is great and is now LinkedIn metadata, so nobody will have any trouble finding it.

mathowie 3:39 Yeah, I only found it on the popular Favorites page. I didn't even see it and love the story until the end. I thought it got a little too far fetched. But it's awesome, crazy, crazy story. I guess we should probably be describing these things more just in case people haven't even seen the posts. It's hard to do without

Jessamyn 3:58 we would have been able to read their post number out loud until you crazy. These crazy 5854 driving a pickup truck

mathowie 4:08 here. We're good. Yeah, we're gonna drop the URLs in the audio that's fun. colon slash slash I have a new front of me. I guess we'll have to tell everyone to go that popular Favorites page is a jumping off point.

Jessamyn 4:22 Or wherever you upload them. You can have a references list like cortex is crazy post.

mathowie 4:27 Oh, that's true. Yeah,

Jessamyn 4:28 what am I talking about? Here's

mathowie 4:29 Oh, that's good. Yeah, so you have to read the post first and then I guess there'll be I'll just try and like embed little audio player so that you can play it and read the comments below. Oh, the other cool thing was the the apartment for that was awesome for Yeah.

Jessamyn 4:48 Sweet. How do I build a sweet fort and asked Metafilter which which got everybody's attention. It was an awesome post by you know a young woman I believe in a Early first apartment. She wanted to figure out how to build a cool Fortner room. She already had the like tin can string intercom setup with a roommate and she wanted to figure out how to really trick out or pimp out her forte. Great suggestions

mathowie 5:18 yeah the loft beds a good start it's already fort shaped and everything so hilarious hilarious post.

Jessamyn 5:24 I used to have a loft bed and that was definitely Oh, this needs a trapdoor. And I had these like pulleys with string to like turn the lights on and off so I didn't have to get out of bed and

mathowie 5:34 I thought the suggestions are awesome except for trap doors like I mean when you think about the mechanics of a trap door it's insane. Like you seen trap doors 1000s of times and cartoons and movies and stuff trapdoor and like yard shed, but you know the use you see it in movies and cartoons could you imagine like people had bashed their noses falling, you know, against the frames and like, you can't get a Florida completely disappear. So it's not perfectly smooth. Like it's can't imagine that in real life being anything. It's not just a terrible idea.

Jessamyn 6:07 Chapters aren't that hard to build the real problem with a trapdoor and your suite for is that it's under your mattress.

mathowie 6:13 Yeah. Oh, yeah. It'd be a bad time for it to go.

Jessamyn 6:17 Just totally, totally impractical.

mathowie 6:20 Yeah, everyone loves sports. I think it's probably a child empowerment thing. Like, no, that was the one time as a kid, you know, you got to control your environment, and nobody told you to stop. And then we had a

Jessamyn 6:34 few people have bad fort stories, like people have lots of like, stories that seem like they're going to be great. And then like something really bad happened. But parents tend to like forts. Also. I mean, it's like that poor in the woods story, right? Like everyone has a wistful, like, Oh, I remember pouring in the woods.

mathowie 6:51 It's pouring in for it. So I think that was my my story was a tree fort at like a park nearby was loaded with porn. And I think that post walked the line between being clever and funny. And you know, it's really hard to, to recreate that kind of thing. Hopefully, there's no like silly copycats from that.

Jessamyn 7:15 Right. Well, and it's fun, right? Because it's a legitimate like, no, I really am working on this.

mathowie 7:19 Yeah. I don't know the Tin Can the string seemed a little kooky. Like that was

Jessamyn 7:27 sweet for it.

mathowie 7:30 That was a perfect description. People still love the post about your dad.

Jessamyn 7:35 Yeah, no. It's toning down a little bit. But I send it out to people. Now

mathowie 7:40 you sent it to you. You said your dad

Jessamyn 7:42 and I did not send it to Mike. Come on. Find it. He'll find it on Google anyhow. Are you kidding? Dude, if what Felix says is true, then it means he's gonna read like every post I've ever made. That just can't end. Well. Do

mathowie 7:56 you want to copy and paste it into like an email and just say, hey,

Jessamyn 7:59 yeah, I can. I can probably do that. And then my stepmom will Google it, and then she'll find it. And then I mean, you know, they know I work on metal filter, but they don't you know, they don't follow me around it yet. And I think that's probably just as well.

mathowie 8:12 Oh, that's a good thing. But I mean, it's like a once in a lifetime. I mean, they've never Your dad has never to come up ever on the site. Never will probably ever again. So

Jessamyn 8:21 that's that's, that's my hope. Yeah. I mean, I told them like, oh, you know, Felix Gallo used to work with him. And he did this thing and my dad. And that's like, where I'm like, Metafilter

mathowie 8:35 just tell him I met him online and a chat room or something. So you can't trace it. You know, was he young at the time? Was he like this? Some kid at college? This this Felix guy?

Jessamyn 8:47 I assume he's got to be about my age, maybe even younger? I don't know. I mean, it was like whatever.

mathowie 8:52 Oh, 95

Jessamyn 8:53 or something? Yeah, yeah, yeah.

mathowie 8:57 That post remind me of like, all the crazy things I was doing the late 90s at UCLA, we just had like, unlimited budget and like, we had wireless and 98 or 99. Before 802 11 B came out, it was only two megabit and we had these three pound laptops with wireless and the wireless points were like $2,000 Each and like, like all this amazing technology and we had like real audio real video had the smile standard was just coming out and they had these crazy videos where like, we could be talking like this and referencing things online and showing screenshots and showing the URLs that are clickable and like you can just barely do that today. Yeah 10 years later, you can like bear I mean, I could do this with the podcast if I I can't do it as an mp3 at afternoon is like I think you know apples extensions to podcasts would let me like reference new images, like in iTunes, if I did is like the AAC files but just remind me like why didn't that teddy bear come out in 10 years? It still hasn't come you haven't like sucking up Project Gutenberg texts and stuff and except he had a better he had a completely better system with ratings and stuff and subjects. And

Jessamyn 10:09 well, and it was just before its time is my feeling really. I mean, that was back remember when everybody was really into push technology and they really wanted to like, push your whether to your desktop and push you this, that or the other. But

mathowie 10:22 why haven't people like revisited these things are super simple, the technology is super cheap now. And like these things are like solid state will never break down. And you can make that teddy bear, you know, just join a wireless network and start working.

Jessamyn 10:37 Well, and the problem you're trying to solve though is I don't want to tell bedtime stories to my kid. That's this was always my argument with my father, where it didn't seem to solve a problem. It was an awesome technological solution. But to something that wasn't currently a problem. Like if you had it tell you NPR if it was like democracy now if my bear told me Democracy Now stories that would be great.

mathowie 11:03 I want my huggy. Terry Gross. Share, Bear. Exactly, exactly. I don't I mean, there's dumb kids toys, the talk. It'd be cool if it actually told story. I mean, it's just Teddy Ruxpin. Like, for today. For this? Yeah. I

Jessamyn 11:18 had a Teddy Ruxpin actually, like I had a boyfriend in college who got me one of those. So there was always one sitting around the house.

mathowie 11:25 That's like colored by cassettes, or they like cartridges or something.

Jessamyn 11:30 Had this cartridges. I never took mine apart. Actually. I know.

mathowie 11:36 It's not yours unless you crack it open.

Jessamyn 11:39 Well, now I know that.

mathowie 11:42 The other big thing was the I guess this is a good jumping off from a previous popular posts from a week or two ago, the the guy who went live in his band, which is awesome. But the why have a career well then was pretty close to that.

Jessamyn 11:59 Oh, yeah. The I don't need to have a job. So why should I have a job? Question? Yeah.

mathowie 12:04 Or career, they're really hung up on career where they didn't want to be defined by what they were doing. So they just didn't do anything. They didn't have to do anything. But they didn't know how to relate to people, I guess.

Jessamyn 12:15 Right? Well, no, it was it was a it was a woman who I think had a lot of people who are like when you're going to when you're going to settle down and do one thing, and she was kind of like, Why do I have to?

mathowie 12:26 Yeah, people are shocked when you give them that attitude?

Jessamyn 12:31 Well, I think part of it, I mean, as she described it, part of it is people would say like, so what do you do or whatever. And her response was, was really flip and she'd say not much. You know, it's like funny with your friends. And yet, you can see that it might not fly it like whatever social event you happen to be going to or what have you.

mathowie 12:48 Yeah, I often accidentally mentioned other people to people, but I was telling like, I can help out Tuesday at one o'clock because I don't have a real job. It's okay. And I'm everyone bust up laughing and like, what exactly do you again? Yeah, I think it's an American thing, right? I've heard. But Americans ask you what you do when they want to meet you. And what Europeans asked you. What do you do for fun? Because they want to know exactly.

Jessamyn 13:12 And the American question when you say what you do is actually what do you do for money? Yeah, sort of like, it's almost like they don't even want to know. Yeah, yeah. How do you make your money? Right, right, right.

mathowie 13:26 I see a lot of questions like this coming up lately. I don't know if it's a mid early 30s. Sort of

Jessamyn 13:33 everyone's What am I going to do with my life? Or it's

mathowie 13:35 probably people have empowered through their 20s. Like, they did the college degree they think got their career and they moved to Brooklyn. Yeah, they're doing everything they're supposed to be doing. Yeah, yeah. It's like, yeah, why? It's a rat race to know where it's like. Yeah, where? Where are we headed? Exactly. Am I just gonna do this all the time?

Jessamyn 13:59 Well, I feel like people have started talking. I mean, people have a lot more job instability, just generally, but people now use the phrase quarter life crisis. When when I was at my quarter life or wherever, whenever that was a million years ago, like, we never called it that like, it was like you're in your 20s. Your problem is you're in your 20s.

mathowie 14:18 Yeah, I guess I didn't think about like, there's no such thing as job loyalty anymore. So people are finally wising up to that. They're like, nobody's gonna have a job for more than five years at a time the same job. I mean, it's rare, it seems among my friends.

Jessamyn 14:31 Yeah. I mean, unless you're like, you know, government workers. Librarians sure do though. That's,

mathowie 14:36 that's true. But if you're if you're jumping from job to job every three or four years after like, three or four times doing it, you're like, Hmm, you know, why do I keep doing this? Or, you know, I could stop for a few years and go back. It's not that hard.

Jessamyn 14:51 Right. Right. Right. Right. I don't have to the holes in the resume thing is a non-problem anymore.

mathowie 14:56 Yeah, exactly. Plus, which is kind of great.

Jessamyn 14:59 I think Yeah,

mathowie 15:01 anything else you want to cover?

Jessamyn 15:04 Well, I really liked the 1500 cat pictures post only because it introduced the cat shit insane tag.

mathowie 15:14 Catch it and say, How's that different than batshit? Insane?

Jessamyn 15:18 Well, it's cats. But it's just this ridiculous page that's got all of those like lol internet horrible cats. You know, it was snowing a lot here on Valentine's Day and I was like hanging out in my house like making soup. And I was like, I could really use a little pick me up. What I really need is 1500 Internet cats, including like all the painted cats, you know, the recent painted cats hoax that kind of came down the pipes again. My only other favorite posts was the laughing policeman post.

mathowie 15:47 Oh, yeah. Fair to mention that one. That was awesome. The song is so bizarre. Like describe it. Like for everyone that didn't catch it.

Jessamyn 15:58 Well, I can play it out loud. But it's basically a song about like walking around during the Blitz, and the policeman does this kind of thing. And it's supposed to kind of, you know, Jolly good show, chap, UK kind of thing. And lots of people sort of new stories about this. And lots of people had looked up different versions of it. It was a song written in 1922. And apparently there's a whole bunch of other laughing songs. Oh, yeah. That was me who posted it?

mathowie 16:38 Yeah, that was great. Math was Chris Weatherall actually does Google Reader and stuff. He found the original wax recordings rip to an mp3 at UC Santa Barbara's site. Then from

Jessamyn 16:52 what like music from the Library of Congress. I'm looking Yeah,

mathowie 16:55 that was like late 1800s Slow 20 years before that song there was there laughing songs. That was like insane it that people have transferred the wax cylinders.

Jessamyn 17:08 Great finding a wax cylinders, my favorite like old recordings, you can find recordings of Walt Whitman reading his poetry occasionally. And like Harry Houdini introducing his wacky tricks. Wow. Those were like my favorite. You know,

mathowie 17:24 I think people have posted the like Edison sort of museum type. Late 1880s recordings online. I think a lot.

Jessamyn 17:33 Yeah. And a lot of the Edison, like video recordings from turn of the century are up on YouTube. Oh, no way. Yeah, they're totally cool. And they're weird. Like, it's like people from other countries, and they're totally played out is like, Whoa, look at these crazy, you know, whatever. Like, there's Chinese acrobats, and there's contortionists and people in grassroots and it's really kind of funky.

mathowie 18:00 If you're Edison, and it's 1880. And you have one of the first video cameras or you know, whatever, closer to this turn of the century. Like, what are you going to tape? People just go into work? Like figure out, go to New York and find the weirdos.

Jessamyn 18:15 Right? Which was not hard then it's probably not hard now.

mathowie 18:19 Yeah. That's probably about it.

Jessamyn 18:23 Do you think I was gonna mentioned Cortex A song?

mathowie 18:26 Oh, yeah. The ad song. Yeah, I guess I already picked the song for the week. Before this, and then. But cortex stuff like that crazy. Idiot line song, which is so inside baseball. It's crazy.

Jessamyn 18:44 Well, and I think people enjoy the sort of inside baseball stuff because I, you know, everybody gets to talk about it. And they're like, Oh, hey, that's me. And it's funny, and everybody knows the original song or a lot of people do. Yeah, he's roughly the same age. So yeah.

mathowie 19:03 I can't believe pronounces it Nephi do you pronounce it that way? No. People keep coming up to me at meetups and saying that phi is great. Like, what are Mefi that's the worst I've heard.

Jessamyn 19:18 Right. Mi five mi phi. Thank God we have a podcast to clear this.

mathowie 19:22 Yeah, like 25% of the people come to you will say Mefi because it's like a filter. And I'm like what like what do you call ask? Like someone said we call asked me. You can't ask.

Jessamyn 19:36 Maybe we should it's

mathowie 19:37 a fi sound so much better. Me

Jessamyn 19:41 fight? Well, yeah, exactly. A whole bunch of like words differently than I think about them in my head like Dell boy. I call him Dell boy.

mathowie 19:49 What is his name? Actually, that's

Jessamyn 19:50 an icon. Del more del moi. Yeah,

mathowie 19:54 he Yeah, he puts it weird. I guess it was del moi. I don't even look up people or spell if it's I don't have rows. So I have to like, look at his name names spell it right. I felt always calm. Stavos

Jessamyn 20:06 Yeah, you know, I

mathowie 20:07 have to actually, because it's just easier to store in my head

Jessamyn 20:13 well and has been kind of a love fest in meta taco this week. That's unusual that people were like, I love cortex. I love language hat. I love you know, I rarely see that. Yeah, I love this story. I love this song. I love all you guys.

mathowie 20:31 Yeah, it was hardly any. Can we change the AskMe edit filter posting limits? Only count once or twice?

Jessamyn 20:43 Early in the week. And then people just I don't know what it was. I think the snowstorm made everybody happy. Everybody got the day off work. And they recharge their batteries or something.

mathowie 20:51 It looks like there's an uptick in metal filter music, which is fun to see.

Jessamyn 20:55 I've noticed that too. I mean, I go through and I listened to all this stuff pretty much every couple days. And there's been I mean, there was the bass fight this week. That was kind of interesting. Yeah, there was a couple bass fight uploads. I was looking at Yeah, a lot more music

mathowie 21:08 last week, there'd be one or two songs a day. And then suddenly, you know, it's sort of exploded. Oh, could this be the people doing the song The album in a month contest? Oh, I forgot about that. Maybe this is their output

Jessamyn 21:20 that they're getting into. And people who are home because of the weather. And it's true. Yeah. People who want to upload other other great. Other great stuff. Cortex always sets the bar really high. It's good

mathowie 21:34 to think of a way to incorporate the recent uploads or something in the rest of the site, like let people run. Geo streaming, last week's Music randomly and a pop up or something so they can keep surfing the site.

Jessamyn 21:48 Oh, that's a good idea. Because right now when you switch to another page, it turns it off.

mathowie 21:52 Yeah. So I was Yeah, I was figuring hey, here's an actual legitimate use of pop ups that actually be useful to just sort of have this window you have over on the side.

Jessamyn 22:01 You can just give instructions to all of our Firefox users.

mathowie 22:06 Oh, you can Yeah, it's not auto pop ups. But yeah, you can do the pop ups work. Okay, so I guess we'll have to wrap it up.

Jessamyn 22:15 Good. I'm gonna get to the pole you're gonna remix this Yeah, I guess where are you gonna put it

mathowie 22:21 I think I'm gonna put it on odio and eventually iTunes and I guess I'll just drop into meta talk maybe we'll have guests on if we can get other people on Skype and stuff.

Jessamyn 22:32 I think yes, it's a great idea yeah, we've

mathowie 22:34 got to like talk to cortex because you know that guy must be stopped I guess that's about it for the first one and I guess I'll close it with that music I opened with and so we'll do this try and do this next week and every Friday after this

Unknown Speaker 22:50 sounds great. Fire by five seasons and the girls will swim and they always do Escape Rooms try to train and I think what comes down time we will come to grabbing the attraction of things bigger than other letters on the pages other pixels on your screen speak is pretentious pathetic shows listen try while no regrets drink too much now comes around go round again nice life fire repin pages from the poets you oh my god round pointless lives we love