Hello. I wonder if I would have recognized your avatar as Yakov Smirnoff if you had not written that name in the notes. Maybe. Maybe I would have. That's a pretty tight crop. Let me get a closer look here. Yeah, and I think it's a pretty old photo. Is he still alive? Oh, hell yeah. He's got a nightclub down in Branson, I think. Yeah, go off.
That name seemed really funny when I was a teenager. It's pretty funny. Yeah. I'm not saying it's the most elevated humor, but it's kind of funny. You go to yakov.com. Oh, that's good. Got a good domain. Yeah, that's a great domain. Should be Yakov.ru, am I right? Now, he's from the former Soviet Union. What actual, do we know which country inside he's from? I certainly don't. Wow.
He, uh, hmm. We gotta remember the 80s was a long time ago. Yeah. He's from Odessa in Ukraine, I believe. Somehow, it just seems like a bigger... I don't know, a bigger lift to dye the beard too. Like, you know, dyeing your hair seems like one thing, but then to say, I'm not going to keep my beard and I want to dye that too. That seems like the next level. Yeah, I can get with the beard.
The hairline is, as you say, problematic. And he's got that little kind of hair yarmulke thing that guys do. You know? Yeah, he looks like a nice guy. I bet he's a nice guy. I bet if you ran into Yakov... Like, I can't believe this is yogurt. I bet he'd be a really nice guy. Sure, yeah. He seems self-possessed. Happily ever laughter to her. Let's see what he's charging.
Oh, look, he's all over the place. He's going to Florida, Florida. Oh, a lot of Florida. I wonder if he's going to be in my neck of the woods. We don't have to talk about that. John, you've been... You visited the show notes. We've got many, many topics. And I think it looks like you might have promoted and added a new maxi topic. I don't think I did.
Who put the Fincher video in? That's me, isn't it? Yeah. You don't remember? Maybe that was Tyler Merlin who did that one. Spoilers, sweetie. A lot of people don't understand that movie is the problem. It is. Were you the one who retweeted that recent article about it? Yeah. See, that's showing that there is more than one person on the planet who got the same thing from the movie as I did.
Yeah, I, you know, when I retweet something, it's usually because I agree with it or I feel like I learned something from it. But it's often that I really like the way someone phrased something.
I like that. That was that was not the point of the article is an article about something else. But this person's go to example was it's like in Fight Club when and then I was like, yes, yes, that's that's what I get from Fight Club. And you did, too, so much so that you think other people got the same thing and you're going to.
Use it as an example, assuming everyone's going to be nodding along, when in reality, maybe only half the people will be. I don't credit you for follow-up, but I credit you with almost everything else in my life. Heavily credited. 55. It's an odd episode. What do you mean? You're the one who started. You started. I started nothing. You did that. You're the one who starts things. You started.
Yeah, I guess I did put that in. I thought that was such a, well, geez, Louise, we got, oh, you've added two new things. Jimmy, what is going on here? You sent me a text earlier today. You're like, wow, you've already done the whatever's. I haven't done the whatever's. I've been busy. You haven't been responding to my text. I don't know what's going on. Was I overwhelming you? Did I make you mad? What text did I not respond to? I don't know.
I sent you a picture of Alex and you said it was good. I said, no, what I said was what a wonderful photo exclamation point. Cause if you leave it off, people think they're, I didn't want people to know how you text. I was protecting you there. Hmm. You seem mad a lot. You use a lot of periods. Do I? Let me actually see if I do.
I do too. I do too. No, I don't. I'm scrolling up. That's not a period. I got an exclamation point. Nothing, nothing. My latest accommodation that I will allow here is I punctuate most things correctly. I try to work in at least one exclamation point so they don't...
I don't think I'm mad at them. And I frequently leave off the last period. And I'm not going to do a dot, dot, dot, because I understand that causes millennium young people to have a lot of anxiety, agita, as you say. So I don't want to give anybody, I don't give them the bubbles. I don't want to give them the agita. You pronounce that like a grandmother. Agita? Agita. From the Latin, right? Yeah. I don't know. I don't know what the bar is for text. It's like...
can you read this in that person's voice? Sometimes I can, sometimes I can't. Anyway, I thought that was a cute photo. I was trying to think. That's like a caption contest photo. Totally. Well, you took a wonderful photo. I forget who she's talking to. It was not my photo. This was like photos from the relay meetup at WWDC that you didn't come to because you don't like to come and see people.
Yeah, that's me. It's a wonderful photo of Alex. Anyway, she was there. She gets her hair cut at a Supercuts. Can you believe that? Wouldn't you kill for a haircut like that? Look how thick her hair is. Yeah, well. I wish I had thick hair.
I have very thin hair. I have a lot of hair. I have dense hair. This is hard to explain to people. I have a lot of hair, densely packed, but each hair is pretty fine. Youth is wasted on the young. Hair is wasted on the hairy. Is that how it goes? Something like that. That's right. Shakespeare.
Well, we got a lot of stuff in here. We have at least two, I think, super interesting topics. We have one piece of follow-up that only occurred to me right this second, and we've got many mini topics. It's hard to say. All right. So we can do our follow-up, and then I want to, at the very least, do the top mini topic.
Oh, I would love to. I would love to. Last week, I walked straight into a trap that John had warned me about, and we talked about housework and house duties. What? What's funny? But your wife doesn't listen to the show, so you're fine, right? I played her bits of it. She listened to, like, the first half.
Why would you do that? Well, if I selectively choose the parts where I'm really generous. Yeah, I could have cut, you know, could have five wide that and gone, I need to be loved. Is that the answer? Is that always the answer? No, I want to be happy.
That's the five whys. Five whys always ends with I want to be happy. Does it? All right, go ahead. You go to the Home Depot and say you want to drill. Why do you want to drill? I want to drill to put a hole in the wall. Why do you want to put a hole in the wall?
I want to put a hole in the wall so I can get a mounting for a painting. Why do you want a mounting for a painting? So I can hang up this painting. Why do you want to have a painting? Because it makes me happy. I was going to say, because I want to believe I'm the kind of person who has a painting in this house. Why do you want to believe you're the kind of person who has a painting in this house? Because I need to be loved. You're not happy until it's a grind. I just want to be loved.
No, you know, you're right. You're right. Anyway, so you played selected snippets, the parts where you thought you would come off good. Like, look at me, look at how... How, I don't know, you explain it. How did you select the parts that you played? I was being humorous in my way. I think what I actually did was I played her the part where she could hear me typing to her. And I think she thought that was kind of funny. And I think I played her the part.
where uh the the i think kind of funny part where i realized that it probably was a trap but you know she doesn't listen to my shows she gets the back to work newsletter so she she knows for example That's not going to the spam bin at all. Well, no, it might go to archive. But she goes, we're laying in bed looking at our iPads this afternoon and unwinding a little bit before Chinese food. And she goes, hey.
rx bars i eat these and i go what are you a witch woman what that's a new sponsor and she says oh no no i get the newsletter i was like i did not know that she also reads my at responses which is weird i don't do that Does she have her own Twitter account or does she just read yours? No. Oh, no. No, no. She has her own. She had one and then she decided to get rid of it, I think, for professional reasons. And now she has. It was protected, but I think it's not. You should follow her.
I should have. Did she ever actually tweet anything? You know, politics. Oh, really? Well, maybe I'll follow her and then unfollow her. Can she handle that? You tell me. Gun stuff. She didn't like guns. Some people can't handle the follow and the unfollow. She probably won't care. What's her thingy? I'm not telling her on here. You can text it. It's a secret? Yeah. I have concerns about your privacy. Yeah.
I'll send it to you. I think I know what it is. Is that clown? I couldn't find that clown emoji. Is that only on iOS? They don't have it in Slack. They don't have Gary, the privacy concern clown. You can't get a clown in Slack title. Is that a... it's not on the mac right it's only on ios like ios 10 2 and 10 3 as i was on my mac trying to type the clown emoji for some reason and i couldn't find it oh i have to tell you i don't know what happened because of course i have a
a text expander for it. So, and it was all working great. It works fine. Of course, I do everything in drafts on iOS, which is friendly to everything. But I was making a joke and I was going to post a screenshot of my text expander for it. And the clown wasn't showing up on the Sierra. How weird is that?
So try in the Skype window, send me your wife's Twitter handle. Okay, here I go. And a clown. Okay, Twitter handle and a clown. Okay, number one, I'm going to send you the fully qualified uniform resource identifier. Okay, and then I type hi, Gary. Look at that. Sickening. See that? I see a square with a question mark. Yep. As I expected. That's what daddy gets too.
But here's the question. I was going to send the square with the question mark because I had like pulled it off a web page or whatever, hoping that I had the actual character and just couldn't display it. Yeah. But if you send that to someone on iOS, does it show up as a clown for them? I think so.
See, there's no clown. See, I'm on Sierra and I searched for clown in the emoji picker and I don't see anything. Ditto Slack. You type colon clown. Hmm. Colon clown and nothing shows up. I have some privacy concerns about your Twitter account. Do you have some privacy concerns about your Twitter account? You can't talk about this on the show. What are you doing? Are you in the photograph?
See, you've already said too much. I just said ahead for some privacy concerns, which could have been construed as a joke, but now you're leaking information. Oh my God, I'm Gary. Oh my God, the call's coming from inside the clown. Close the window. Burn your computer down. It's over. Abort, abort.
delete all photos of ron swanson all right i followed her we'll see how it goes all right should i give her a heads up no um this could become a regular feature of the program like where i would i text my wife So you played Portions and... Don't make this about me. You were offering the story. I don't know how to end it. Well, I'll tell you one goddamn thing about it. I'll tell you this, that after I had played her a couple two-minute segments...
I for damn sure I'm taking out the compost a lot more. I am no longer worried about the quarter for the bag. I am taking me out a lot of compost. And I'm not staging Amazon by the door. I'm doing the full carry all the way down. Is that like when you tell a bunch of your friends that you have a goal to lose weight in the new year or something, and you tell them all so they can hold you to it? Because if it's just a secret goal yourself, you can abandon it without any social...
Shame. You named it shame. You've got to add, you have to have current shame, you have to have the admission of guilt, and then you have to have the prospect of future shame hanging over you. That's the only way to keep an American honest. Yeah. So my wife listens to the show. And she listened to it. Did she listen to last week's? Yeah, she's all caught up. Oh, boy. It went all right. Okay. It's none of my business, and it's certainly none of our listeners' business.
But certain points, I'm just playing it back in my head a little bit here. Drawing down the stock, how did she feel about your remarks on the blocks of paper? I'm guessing this is something she already knows that you two have a differing view on. Oh, yeah, this is not new information to her.
She knows that, I don't want to put words in your mouth, but you feel like maybe you have too many paper products. Too much milk. I got too much of a lot of stuff. Yeah, that's why, yeah, I think I put that in the topics list. I don't know if we'll get to it this week.
Things that need to leave our house. Oh, is that what that is? Oh, I love that. That is a category of things. We'll get to it someday. Oh, man. I hope you keep doing the show. What else am I going to do? Yeah. You got to stay busy. Right. Keep your mind second. Yep. See, now I'm going to close that tab. I don't want to see my wife's Twitter. So, okay. So, so no problem on the blocks. What about when she heard your candid?
virtue signaling about how little you did around the house. Was that, did that ring true with her? Was she frustrated with that? Did she say you were right on the money? How does she feel about your assessment of your contributions? What virtue was I signaling exactly? oh, she does 70% and she'd probably say 75 and beep, boop, boop, boop. You humbled yourself. My numbers were less than hers.
but i was saying i have this ratio and i my recollection is i said that she would say it was and and again this is not new information for both of us you know so it's no there was no there are no revelations there The only thing she had a vague disagreement about was the cooking percentage. And in that case, she was saying that I was lowballing my cooking number. But then I reminded her that there is more to cooking than just dinner. Because I think I gave out 50-50. Yeah.
I'm way over 50-50 for dinners, but there's also lunches and breakfasts. Oh, you didn't. I see, I see, I see. So I feel like my 50-50 number was correct. And then she left for a business trip, so, you know. Are you solo dadding? Oh, that's why you don't return my text. You've been taking care of your children.
What text did I not return? It's okay. Go look at the scroll back. Who added Fincher and CGI? Was that me? I didn't get time to get to that until 9 o'clock when I sent you the picture of Alex and saw those last...
three things. It's asynchronous. It takes time to make a sandwich. I'm not shunning you. No, you're not shunning me. Here I am. We're talking together right now. I appreciate that. I appreciate you being here. You did another show just last night. I listened to you do a program last night.
Yeah, I'm busy. As soon as my wife goes out of town, all the podcasts happen. That's how it works. Aloha. And all the kids' events, and yeah. I want to tell you so much about the camp that my daughter is at, but I don't want... Triangulation. That's right, yeah. We've got to worry about the clown. Okay, I'm going to type the theme of her camp into this. Please be skydiving. Please be skydiving.
They're studying stained glass. They're studying stained glass. They're making a trebuchet. Like, they're making a catapult. Mm-hmm. Yeah. I was trying to kind of pick a brain a little bit about how you do that kind of camp without having a lot of religion, because it's my sense that that era in history is very religious. Or corsets or diseases. Corsets, torture, diseases. That names itself. There you go. That's right. Yeah. Yeah.
Throwing human waste in the streets, is that... Hello, Gov. Yeah. No, absolutely. You get your chamber, Potts? Of course. That's Mrs. Potts' late husband, Chamber. So, I guess, okay, so then, okay, well, you are famous for making everything into a grind. Everyone says so. A grind, huh? You make everything into a grind. You're not happy until it's a grind. You were at sixes and sevens about how you're...
lady friend was going to accept this episode of our podcast. As you've come out on the other end, as you say, how do you feel now? Do you feel like you survived this pretty well? Yeah, I think it went about as well as can be expected. I feel like I was disciplined in my messaging. That's smart. Stay on message. Manage to avoid too many own goals. Manage to deflect a lot of the ridiculousness onto you where it is dissipated in the ridiculousness sink that is your...
ever patient wife. Was she, uh, was your wife particularly say complimentary about me? Was she, was she maybe a little bit impressed? A little bit envious? I'll be honest. It's all right. She didn't mention you. Sorry. Really? Not specifically. I didn't come up. I like her. We met and I liked her a lot. Yeah. No, she didn't. She was not concerned about what you're doing around your house. You're the only member of your family that likes me. And it's not even that much. It's not true.
Yeah. Didn't I send you a bunch of nice things my mother said about you? Mainly you sent me when she corrects your grammar. That was different. But I did send you, I think early on. Yes, you sent a very nice, long, sweet message. That's so nice. Everybody loves you, Merlin. You're safe and protected here. Really? That's really ultimately what I say I want to drill, but what I really want is to be loved by your mother.
Tori said hi. Well, anyway, I'm glad that all worked out well. You just hit on something, though, that I guess is obvious, but it's... On the one hand, the obvious thing is you don't want to say something that's obviously patently false that's going to get you in trouble because you're fronting. You're throwing the shape of being more helpful than you are. But you also are getting at something else, which is like, now I think I understand a little bit why you were...
So unproductively obsessing about the pie graph because it's our fear of estimating poorly. It's like the second big fear. The big fear is like, you know, you're a fraud and an idiot. Stop talking. But the other one is like, you don't even really know how to estimate how little you're helping, do you? Like, you don't paradigmatically understand enough about how this runs.
You know what I mean? It's like somebody who gets on the bus thinking that they own the bus line. Isn't that part of the concern? You don't want to be shown out as how little you understand about what is actually happening. Well, this is the classic Meta Merlin concern, which is actually nailing down in concrete terms what you're thinking about something instead of just vague generalities and dancing around it.
Doing the pie graph makes you have to pick. And like you said, when you have to pick, you're like, well, wait a second. How do I pick that? And then you start questioning, do I even know how big the pie is? Which one am I in that? How's that metameraling? Is that because every time you talk about anything, you want to hint at what you think about anything, but you never actually want to.
say it directly like figure out what you really think or feel about something and it's hard because if you haven't thought about it before you haven't formulated like I don't have a one sentence elevator pitch like let me here's what I think about it it's more complicated than that and working through it and getting that sort of the pie chart thing requires you to think about all that other stuff. I just, I, I just don't know.
Anyway, I mean, it seems like it went pretty well for both of us, right? Yeah, yeah, no, I mean, it's good, and it made me a slightly better, slightly less bad person, probably. I'm a little bit more cognizant. I try to make the bed more. I'll lay on it after it's made, but I'll maybe even take my shoes off. That's a problem. There's a lot of problems. Let's see. Okay, so we've got other things. Wait a second. Before we move on, the shoes thing.
You're not a shoes-off house? Yeah, we are. But then your shoes make it all the way up to the bedroom somehow? It's controversial. I like shoes. I like wearing shoes. I like having shoes on. But there's all kinds of reasons not to. One is that we are officially a no-shoes house.
Everybody else takes their shoes off and puts them in a giant pile that's a total fire trap down by the door. If we ever have to get out of here, the fire marshal is going to go all the way down the list. He's going to break his ankles on the shoes. No, he's going to go down when he says what happened here. It started out simply enough.
because of death shoes. Check. That's one thing. That's one of those unsolved, you know, it always comes down to shoes with these kids. But, you know, I like to wear shoes. I put on shoes in the morning. I'm a shoe person. But also, you know, we have neighbors downstairs and... However loud you think something is on your floor, it's 100 times louder downstairs. It's incalculably louder. So that's also just a consideration on our part. So you're trying to pat around like cats.
in your stocking feed? I don't want to say too much, but we did live downstairs for many years. We moved upstairs a few years ago. So we were down there. When the only people I've legitimately ever personally hated in my entire life lived above us. And they were very heavy footed and they had a toddler.
and they were very, very loud, and it was all entirely unintentional, and I feel terrible about it, because now I realize how loud that is. So, you know, I try to do that, but, like, I don't want to contribute to the fire hazard. And I just like it. I'm from Florida. You wear shoes, you know? Well, so how do you make it into the house? Like everyone else is there. They're taking off their shoes. They're putting them in the giant, the smelly pile of shoes. Fire pile, yeah.
You just breeze right by and nobody stops you. There's only three people in this house, right? Most of the time. And a cat, yeah. Yeah, two of them.
Or taking off their shoes every time they come in. Clockwork. Clockwork. Every time they walk in, first thing they do is shoes off. Put them in the firepower. But you're not. So you're like, this is a shoes-off household. It seems like it's not a shoes-off household. I'm not modeling. I'm not modeling good behavior. No. It seems like it's a shoes-off. There's a shoes-off coalition.
Yeah, it's a coalition of the willing. And do you feel like, just based on what you know, certainly a man wearing shoes against the rule of law and yes, sometimes putting them on the bed, which I know is a no-no. You think maybe you're better off for me? What, can I wear a croc? Could I wear like a croc around the house? house i don't know i mean i'm i'm not a shoes off house i'm i also like wearing shoes um
I'll wear all of my house. It's my house. I can wear my shoes wherever I want. I never encountered this till I moved to San Francisco. I don't remember ever encountering no-shoe households, and it's kind of a big thing here. I know it's also a big thing in Japan, and for understandable reasons, you know, it's...
I don't know. It's one of those cultural things that makes a lot of sense. But like here, it's like, oh, I didn't know this was going to be a no-shoe house. I would have done something different with my footwear. Was this ever discussed? like before you got married to say like let's discuss what do you want to have kids and how do you feel about choosing the house we should have done pre-canna um no no it was mostly when we moved and we you know had put again to kind of
bring the noise level down a little bit. We added lots of rugs, stuff like that. You know what? This is going to be my homework. This is my homework. I will get better about the shoes. I'm not convinced that you have to. Maybe you just need to make the case that Shoes Off is not the way for the Mann family to be. No, no. I'm the one. I'm the outlier here. I mean, it would be a little bit like if I was telling my...
daughter demanding my daughter go brush her teeth three times a day and she just never saw me brush my teeth it's the same kind of situation but there's the the question of the uh what you're what you're accepting as a premise is the inherent virtue of shoes off in the house
Like tooth brushing, I'm with you. I also accept the inherent virtue of like fluoride and brushing your teeth. Like it's good, right? But I'm not entirely there with the shoes. Obviously, if you have big muddy shoes, you shouldn't bring them in the house.
just as a matter of course, like that you can't, I don't know. I mean, in practice, I do usually take off my shoes because I don't want to, you know, at the end of the day, you don't want to take shoes off my feet. Yeah, come on, you like those slippers when you come home. That's right. I do. I have my slippers, and in the summertime when it's hot, I just take everything off my feet because they need to, you know, radiate heat. Let them breathe a little bit. Mm-hmm.
Yeah. You know what? I'm going to pray on this because I feel like there's several levels of problem here. I do think it is fundamentally not a bad idea at all to be a no-shoe house. It's just that I would like to be absolved from that. We're going to hear from the German people. I understand. It's fine.
Because you've got the world on your feet when you come in. Exactly. Right. Do you know where your feet have been? I don't. I wasn't looking down there. Go to public restrooms or even just the restrooms at work. It's just, yeah, I understand. I worry more about my hands. I worry about my hands and touching things. Like when I go, when I'm going down steps, I usually make a fist and kind of guide myself on the handrail. Are you, can I interest you in the hover?
The hover? The hover. Oh, and that's just in case I'm right there? That's good. So you trip on your way down the stairs, and your hand is right there. you know, less than an inch from the handrail. So you can very quickly and easily grab it just instinctively. Right. But you never actually touch it. I should do the hover. Cause you know, you just, when you think about, I think about going on Muni and like going downtown, going on the subway.
And it's, it can be pretty gross, not just because there's a lot of people living down there and it smells like body stuff, which it really does. But also like, is there, if you were over 30, three to eight years old, would you ever walk in a public area rubbing your hand across the surface of anything? Oh, yeah. All little kids do. In general, the only time I get a little bit...
I'm not going to say paranoid about germs, but more conscious of germs is during the winter when people get cold and stuff. When I don't want to be sick during the winter, I do a little more hand-washing at work. be a little bit more aware of banisters and door handles and stuff like that. But that's it. I feel like that's a means to an end. Most of the rest of the time, I'm in the camp of, you know, bring on all the germs is going to make my immune system stronger. I don't want to, you know.
I don't use hand sanitizer. I don't obsess about washing my hands. And like, surely my, everything I own is filled with filth and it's making me strong. You don't want to, you don't want your antibodies, uh, staying home and watching prices. Right. Put them to work. Yeah, yeah. I feel like I've, you know, this is probably all in my head, but for the past several kid illnesses that have gone through one or both kids and sometimes also my wife.
I have not gotten them. And I'm like, yes, good job. I am not going to remark on that because I am at risk for the same jinx. I don't know how I've gotten so lucky. Yeah. I mean, just my son had strep recently. And how did I dodge that? I did. We're all using the same bathroom cup. No strep. I had strep a hundred times when I was a kid. I feel like maybe my body has figured out strep. I don't know. Solve strep. Yeah.
All right, well, I'm going to work on this. I'm going to think philosophically about my place in the world as a no-shoe household, but I'm also going to try and respect the rule of law. You can also continue to work hard on your ability to levitate. So as not to bother the neighbors downstairs. I don't want to bother anybody. I just want to be loved, John. I know. What about that drill?
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and all of RelayFM Squarespace. Make your next move. Make your next website. Why don't you jump in on your mini topic? I want to know what you have to say about this. This isn't many one. It's front of mind as I try to prepare the house for my podcasting. How hot is it there right now? As we record this, it is June 20th. Yeah, it's only 75 out. It's cooling down. It was like mid to high 80s. We're very high humidity today. But no central AC in my house. And I've got window units. And so last...
Night's podcast recording, my wife was still here and she was upstairs. Actually, she went to the airport and came back. Her flight was canceled. So good old typical business travel. She made it out early this morning. Anyway, she was upstairs asleep. with the window unit in our bedroom on. And our bedroom is above the room I'm recording in now. And you can hear the window unit. The sound that radiates outside comes back in through the windows of this room and the floor below.
And, you know, Marco's got to use his little denoising thing to get rid of that. But it's kind of annoying and the compressor goes on and off and I can hear it. And it's like your streetcar, but it never goes away. Right. But that's not my main.
issue here so she's off somewhere else now so now the air conditioner is not on in my room but we have window units in all the bedrooms our bedroom and then the bedroom for my daughter and my son uh nothing downstairs we just use fans and lots of open windows and stuff like that
and hope that it gets cool at some point. So, so far, so good. But upstairs, we got the window units. And I've tried a lot of things with these window units. I bought them just randomly, like, oh, we're in Sears and we need a window unit because we're dying.
Like when we first got the house, you always, you always end up in that position, even though you think you're not going to, you're just like, you're dying. You go to the mall so as not to die. And in the mall, they're selling air conditioners. You're like, yes, please. And you buy one and you know, whatever.
i've also done research into them uh i have the most recent one we bought was a wire cutter or a sweet home whatever recommendation and most people care about their air conditions they care about like how big a room can it cool like all the different you know if your room is this number of square feet get this size air conditioner stuff like that i care kind of how heavy they are because i have to lug them down from the attic and put them into windows and that's oh my gosh a fun thing to do
What are they? Were you talking about like a hundred pounds? No, they're not that heavy. I mean, they can, they certainly can go up there, but the ones that we have are not like that. They're, I don't know.
50 70 pounds uh i mean they're more unwieldy than heavy because they have sharp edges and the whole back thing has those little fins of metal that you can't touch because it'll bend them over and mess them all up and they're sharp and you know and they're ungainly i have to go up and downstairs with them right
But the thing that has become, like it's climbing the charts of the things that I'm concerned about air conditioning, I still think I'm concerned about whether they're cool, but at a certain point, and I'm rapidly approaching that point, I don't even care whether they make the room cool. All I care about is that when they are running, do they vibrate in such a way that the crappy plastic case around them buzzes?
And this is the only thing I want to read in air conditioner reviews from now on. I don't want to read how loud they think it is when the compressor is turned on, how loud the fans are, how much it cools. All I want to hear is when it's on. Does it sound like... Like, does it sound like plastic that is vibrating? Because the compressor inside them... Is that about what the pitch of it is?
I can't do it. I can't make the noise. Like, imagine something that's vibrating like an air conditioning compressor. It's a high-speed rattle. Right. Exactly. Surrounded by plastic and... The fans make noise and the compressor makes noise. The fans are pretty quiet. Your house is the drum. It's the amplifier.
Right, and the compressor makes noise, and that's, you can't, you know, every time you look at the ones like, oh, this is great for bedrooms, it's quiet. They're saying the fans in the compressor are quiet. It doesn't matter how quiet the fans in the compressor are if the entire stupid plastic case that's around the thing shakes like crazy and buzzes.
with this incredible buzzing noise. You should see what I've done to the air conditioner in my room. I want to hear about every single inch of this. Just for me and for our listeners. Is this imagining that what you're talking about here is you open your window, you put the unit in, and then there's, is it like an accordion kind of thing where it fills the area and then mostly makes a seal?
With the window, theoretically. Yeah, the seal is BS, but who cares? That's not the part that's vibrating. Okay, I'm just getting there. But is the accordion part, is it rattling against the window frame? That's rarely the part that's making the noise. That can happen. Because remember, you put it in your window and...
You slide down the window and then you sort of lean the air conditioner back against it so it doesn't fall out of your window because there's like a little flange that's catching the window sash that's, you know, down on top of it, right? and in theory you can get some kind of vibration there but that vibration is nothing compared to the vibration of the entire the the metal box that is the air conditioner with the compressor running inside it is encased in plastic
And that plastic is poorly affixed to the metal box. Oh, no. Especially since there's like... Oh, so you're going to have to really hack on this. You're going to have to do baffles and muffling. You're going to have to do something really aftermarket to make this suit your needs.
Well, so I take it you don't have window units? Is that why you're not familiar with these as a technology? Yeah, I'm familiar with what they are, but we don't have air conditioning here now. All right. It doesn't get hot enough often enough for most homes to have air conditioning. So they also have usually like a filter because, you know, for the intake air in the front. And there's usually like a plastic door of some kind.
that you can open up or otherwise disengage and slide out the filter that you clean each year because it collects all the dust and everything. You don't want the dust going over all the little fins, the cool things, because it'll clog them up and everything. And so that little plastic door...
That cheap little plastic door that like clicks closed and has the little filter inside it. That little door vibrates. The entire frame the door is in vibrates. And the little filter thing inside it vibrates. And it's... It's an incredible buzzing noise. Now, for the units that's in our room, this was the Sweet Home recommendation. Nowhere in the Sweet Home said, by the way, this thing is going to buzz. The only thing I can think of that people might be familiar with is like...
You know when somebody puts speakers that are way too big in their crappy plastic car and the thumping bass? sound you know they're playing a song and when the bass thumps like
every plastic piece of their car vibrates. Like, sympathetically. It sounds like a second percussion instrument, because every bit of poorly fitting plastic on your car is rattling at the same time. Right. Now, but that is percussive. It's like, with the boom comes... the buzz imagine it was continuous imagine if that buzz just continued at you know at max volume uh sometimes for multiple sources that's what these things are like so i've attacked it with
last year I put it in the window and it was making this noise and I was like did I not get it mounted in that ride and I tried to like you know you can go up to it this is if you want to absorb vibration you can basically take something like meaty and fleshy like if you shove your butt up against it or put your forearm against it or lean against it you can make the vibration stop because now your body is absorbing I was gonna say Funtac I was gonna say like mounting
uh putty that you'd use to put up a poster when you're a kid maybe stick some of that in the door would that hold it fast right well see it's not just the door though it's the entire plastic frame that goes on the thing and you can see like this might you know it's i don't even know how it's attached there's no visible screws on the outside so it's probably screwed in from the inside you'd have to
disassemble the entire thing to get to it i've considered taking off the entire plastic front because it's like purely decorative and just remove the entire thing and have it be like a you know a car with no sheet metal you're gene hackman you're gene hackman in the conversation i'm not looking for bugs i'm just to stop the buzzing um but last year i was i was all about wedging like cardboard and stuff in there because i could see all these gaps like there was all these panel gaps essentially
and you can feel the vibration i could say if i just shove my hands here it stops and i take my hands off and it buzzes and it stops so if i just lean something against it that's like my hand it will stop it or if i can like wedge it with again lots of
pieces of cardboard or paper in the, in the things to try to sound. But you're onto something with the meatiness because you need something that will both, if you get something that's too rigid, it's going to just be another thing to vibrate, but you want it to be something where the meatiness is what is the dampener.
Right? That's the idea. What we're looking for is damping here because what I feel like is this is a big heavy metal box with a compressor in it that is well installed in the opening.
It has a lot of weight and pressure on all the surrounding things. There's only one place for the operation to go, and that is to shake the one thing that is in this entire system that can move. My window sash isn't moving because I have a nice fancy new windows, right? The house isn't moving. The air conditioner metal box isn't moving.
all that vibration goes to where, you know, it has to find an outlet and it ends up shaking the plastic parts. And so if you could put something against that as a big damper, but I was never able to do that last year. I was also, this is by the way, this one doesn't have a door. It has the filter kind of like.
pops outward and slides out you know like an oil dipstick type thing where you slide it in and so i was like oh yeah that's the way it works on our dehumidifier yeah it just kind of slides yeah so i've tried popping it out a little bit or putting it in sometimes it was like oh if you pop it out it doesn't vibrate but then it starts vibrating again so if you push it in it stops it's it's very strange it's not it's like uh
I don't know, like harmonic frequencies or whatever. It's not just like a one-time thing where it will vibrate and then it will like... get out of vibration and out of cycle then it'll come back into a different cycle because of i don't know it's a very complicated physical system so this year before i installed it first i had a different strategy about installing it i was trying to like give it more freedom have it have it only touch
the base of the window at or you know at a few points instead of like entirely being seated there to try to you know like ever see speakers that are like up on pointy little feet so they don't transfer aeration into the floor like i was trying that theory and also I duct taped the hell out of this thing before I put it in. Every part that I could imagine would move, and I pressed it down into its most stressed position, so it's pressed together, and then I duct taped it.
everywhere and i i duct tape you know the the air conditioner to itself all the seams all the stuff uh the place where the filter goes in I didn't think there was anything I could do about that. I installed it. It seemed like it was better, but then the buzzing started, and I was messing with the filter, so now I have socks shoved in the filter cavity. I should take a picture of this thing. I'm so sorry. This is your nightmare. And guess what?
Still vibrates. Oh, God. Still vibrates. So now the only thing I want to know from anybody on the internet when they review any air conditioner is does it buzz? because as far as i can tell they all do my kids ones do too i don't want to get into their head about i don't even mention it like they haven't asked me daddy why are their socks and tape all over your air conditioner i don't want to like if they're fine with the buzzing like that's their rooms i don't want to spare them
Yeah, like if it's not a problem for them, they're fine, right? Because there's buzz like crazy. And my wife doesn't bother her either. But now this is like my private battle. So like, seriously, I think next year... I may just entirely disassemble the plastic part of this. Because that's not functional, right? I guess I need something to hold the filter on. But aside from that, I want all that plastic to go away. I want these things to shut up.
I saw a diagram of your city recently. Did you see that tweet with the San Francisco microclimates? Yeah, I mean, that's Mr. Chili, and it's not always correct. There was no way was it 100 degrees in my neighborhood. That's crazy. Yeah. Yeah. I have some concerns about your... I just wanted to make you aware. It would be easy enough for me to triangulate neighborhoods who were trying to have a higher high than was actually high by using Mr. Chili. I have concerns about your privacy.
Well, anyway, you're lucky to live in a climate. Well, actually, no, I think your climate is crap. But anyway, you're lucky to not have to deal with window units because they're heavy. You and I have so much in common, John Sarkees. We have so much in common, but climate and beaches.
around to beaches a little bit. But I like it cold. I don't mind it foggy. And right now it's unseasonably warm and sunny, which it seems to be getting more unseasonably warm and sunny. I don't want to detect the trend here. But this is the time of year usually when it's just starting to really clamp down into just awful fog every day. I like wearing a couple of long sleeve shirts and having it be like 55. That makes me happy.
I think you are. I don't want to disparage you. I think you get colder than I do. I do, but I like all my seasons. I like winter to be cold, and I like summer to be ridiculously hot. I just wish I had slightly better tools to manage the... Both of them, actually. I mean, at the risk of saying something somewhat obvious to John Syracuse's super fans, this seems like an ongoing issue for you, whether it's the fans in a TV or, for example, the fans in a video game.
Or just to cite another example, the fans in a desktop computer, the fans in an air conditioning unit that cause lots of vibration. It's not the fans, it's the compressor. It's the compressor. It's not the heat. The best fan analogy is like when the fan on my TiVo, I've had a couple of fans on my TiVo start to go. You ever have a computer fan that starts to go like the little, not the bearing or the bushings or whatever in there deteriorate?
And they start making just an awful sort of dentist drill noise. Like before they were just going whoosh and like they sounded like air was moving. Then all of a sudden it's dentist drill time. You don't realize how fast those things go until they go wrong. And that's that type of sound where you're like, there was a thing that was spinning and doing its thing and it makes some inherent noise and it is what it is. Now it has gone wrong. And now it is like...
You know, you can tell that like eventually this will fail entirely. But in the meantime, it's making a terrible noise. And yeah, so I don't in general, I don't like things with fans and making fan noise at all. But certainly nothing that's like. This sounds like it's on the verge of failure. Like it's like shoddily made that the entire thing is vibrating and buzzing. There's nothing, nothing quality in life vibrates and buzzes.
in a way that is not part of the functionality of it. It's like, this is not the read on a saxophone. It's supposed to be an air conditioner. Nice save. Yeah, that's true. Unless it's built a purpose to vibrate. That's a good point.
It's a shame, though. Those people, you know, they always make such a, and I am given to believe, like hearing from Snell having written some of these, they kind of do put it through the ringer. It just sounds like they wouldn't think to have had that on the list, which does seem kind of strange. I always think, do I just have a lemon?
Do I, are all of mine lemons or do people not care about the buzzing or when they place them in their windows, are they putting them in their windows in a different way or are their windows better damped or like, I don't know, but I've had a lot of window units and all of them buzz and I hate them all.
Well, she was running the air conditioning upstairs last night. Did you have the windows open in the room where you're recording? No, I'm completely sealed in here in this airless room. Door closed, windows sealed. No, no nothing. Check your Skype settings, double check your USB pre, make sure everything's running. No USB pre here. Tough night in Virginia. I do have the Mac Pro that is basically a space heater.
Oh, people miss out not listening to the live show. There's so much to glean and enjoy from the live show. You like Skype? You like Skype problems, do you? When Marco goes into his thing about how you have this setup with all these weird sounds and this famously difficult microphone and somehow you're...
Audio is always fine, which is true. The secret is my microphone is plugged in through a USB cable and there's no other boxes or no other audio gear. There's nothing in this arrangement that, well, there's very little in this arrangement that I know nothing about. I know a lot about the computer. Do you have an XLR or a USB, Mike? USB.
That's what I'm saying. I don't know anything about audio boxes or XLR or knobs. Oh, no, there's a reason. There's a reason I'm still on Sierra. I don't want to break my cherry pie, and I don't want to take even the slightest chance that the audio is not going to work because the audio almost always doesn't work for some reason, and it's impossible.
to find out why. It's incredibly frustrating. But also, you know, it's funny because there's another podcast I do with some friends of mine. And it seems like every week, not only are they late, but there's always some problem with their multi $10,000 setup.
And they always say, did you change anything? And I always say, I text them because they can't hear me. And I say, I didn't change anything. I've never changed anything. It'll always be exactly the same setup. I don't even change the monitor. I don't change anything.
Like the thing is, even if this is broken, it's broken within normal parameters and people like Jim will always be able to fix it. It's fine. I never touch anything. It's the only way to fly. Yeah, I mean, I'll be sad. Well, I'll be happy sad. when i finally uh get a new computer because surely that's when all my audio will just go to crap because i've been podcasting to the same setup for a long time now and everything's fine and i can't upgrade my computer anymore so it's still on lcap so
Yeah, it'll all fall to pieces once I get a new computer, but it'll be exciting. I don't want to crush the bunny. Do you think you'll make it to 10 years? I'm going to try, I think. I think I'm going to try. I think it's worth it. But you know, man, that iMac Pro.
Yeah, but I think I'm really going to want the Mac Pro, and I don't think I can swing iMac Pro followed by Mac Pro. I think that's just too much money, especially since the Mac Pro is going to cost a whole jillion dollars. Let's avoid that. You've got plenty of other places to talk about computers. this episode of reconcilable differences is brought to you by sane box you can learn more about sane box right now by visiting sanebox.com
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for supporting Reconcilable Differences and all of Relay FM. I heard there's been a recent addition to your household. There has been. Mm-hmm. This has been a long time coming. There's been a concerted campaign within the household over the past several years. How many years? I'm going to say, I don't know. Six years, maybe? Maybe a six-year-long campaign? Maybe longer, depending. Mostly waged by my daughter, who has been asking me since she was able to form the words, can we get a dog?
My son would join in. It was a thing that they do. Can we get a dog? Can we get a dog? Can we get a dog? And, you know, long since past the point where I just don't acknowledge the question anymore because we had the discussion a hundred times. No, we're not getting a dog. We've got you now instead, I would tell the children. You're the dog. You're a handful. Exactly. You're a handful to take care of. We can give all attention to you, dog, sir.
a lot of work and we don't want that we want to have you um so my daughter would tell me uh you know her friend has uh you know two siblings and also a dog
So how are their parents able to handle one more child than also a dog? And you can only handle two children. Like, well, that's them and this is us. Interesting. What do you say about that, smart guy? I say, well, you know, this is a typical parent answer. Like, you know, every family is different. This is how our family works. Blah, blah, blah. My wife wanted to get a dog. We had a dog for many years before our kids were born. That's a very sweet dog. Very sweet dog.
Yes, my beloved dog passed away, I think, just before my daughter was born. So she never really got to experience my old dog. But anyway, that was our first child, sort of our training child. And he was very nearly perfect. And he was my dog. I worked from home. I telecommuted to Boston with him for several years. So we really bonded. And then.
He followed us back up to Massachusetts and followed us into our house, and he was great. And we have pictures of him on our wall and on our mantle along with the rest of our family. So he's a very important part of our life. And then we had kids, and they're, you know, they're a handful.
We had two of them. That's a lot of work. But my wife was always saying, when can we get a dog in? When will you be ready to get a dog again? And I was like, well, when the kids go to college, we'll be alone. And then we'll need something to parent, right? Empty nest syndrome. So when both the kids are gone, we'll get a dog.
And she would say, I don't want to wait that long. And that would be the end of the conversation. Repeat that conversation over the past many, many years, including both kids saying, can we get a dog? Can we get a dog? Can we get a dog? Like they would do it as a funny thing.
But they're also kind of serious. Really got rolling maybe about a year ago where my daughter was distraught. It went from just her, you know... cheekily asking can we get a dog her being distraught about the fact that we can't get a dog uh because she grew uh grew despondent yeah her friends would get pets like oh my friend is getting a cat right or my friend is getting a dog why can't we get one like
To the point where he was, like, nightly crying about why can't we get a dog, right? Which no one wants to see that. Like, I'm not made of stone, right? You don't want it to be, like, an issue, right? And I wasn't mean about it. There was nothing new that came to pass other than her getting older and her friends getting pets and her having difficulty dealing with it. It was to the point where she was...
you know, being difficult at school because she was upset about not getting a dog. Oh my goodness. Talk to her teacher about this, right? So she's, she's very, my daughter's very industrious. And she's always looking... I mean, she's been taking books out of the library about dogs for years, right? Reading about them. She would copy passages out of, like, dog...
how to raise a dog, how to train a dog type thing. She would copy them into her little notebooks and highlight them. Oh, man. She's very, very industrious. At a certain point, she, after several conversations with me about the dog stuff... She shifted strategies because my friends was getting a cat. And she's like, look, cats are less work than dogs. Right. So she made she made a presentation over the course of a couple of weeks.
and then she she gathered uh my wife and i into the living room and presented she had like you'll call them slides but they were on like you know big pads of paper right you know each one making a specific point about cats and about
where they go to the bathroom and how much work they are and how much she would do to help and how much we would love the cat how much the cat would love us and look how happy we are and this picture was very very uh she wouldn't let me film the presentation because she was old enough that she was self-conscious about that i did
steal a couple of clips of video and a couple of pictures with my phone. I tried to get as much as I could. And I told her at the end of her presentation, well, we're not going to give you an answer now.
And we're not going to say the answer is going to be no or yes, so you have to prepare yourself for a no. I tried to be mature about it and discussed it with her. By the way, there's no way in hell we're ever getting a cat. We are not cat people. That was never going to happen. I didn't want to tell her that, but that was never going to happen.
But we are dog people, and I was just waiting. It's just a question of timelines, right? And since I am the lone holdout, like, the entire family was against me. It's like you with the no-shoe house, right? What do you mean with the cat? Yeah, well, yeah. Remember how that went. I've got three on one, you've got two on one. But yeah, there's only so much I can take. So I discussed it with my wife and I said, look, if we want to do this during the summer.
I'll have some time off to hopefully get whatever dog we get settled in. and we'll all have more vacation time. It actually complicates our vacation. We understand how difficult it is to travel with a dog, or what do you do with a dog when you travel. We had a dog that didn't kennel well. We tried to kennel our old dog.
uh once i think and it was just incredibly traumatic so you have to like find friends who can watch the dog where that's a lot to ask and it just complicates everything right yeah Which is why I wanted to wait until the kids are gone and we're close to retirement age and we would welcome...
Like, just something to pay attention to and to parent and to keep us company as, you know, our children abandon us to start their own lives. Yeah. But we couldn't make it that far. So this summer, you know, so I told my daughter that, you know, we're not getting a cat. But we will get a dog. And she was very happy. And I said, but we're only getting it in the summer.
This was, you know, many months ago. So we still had to do the thing like, you know, you got the thing you wanted, but you have to wait for it. And so, but what were the, what were the parameters or ground rules? We can only have this size of dog. It has to be like, I have a lot of, I had a lot of parameters.
I mean, size-wise, we were going for like 20 to 30 pounds, maybe 35 pounds max, maybe, you know, like that size dog. Like Cocker Spaniel size. Like a medium-large dog. Yeah, I mean, I didn't... I have very specific criteria, and this sounds terrible. It sounds like doggy racism, but everyone has dogs that they prefer, right? My thing is I want a dog-shaped dog. Yeah.
A classic dog shape. Right. Yeah, like I showed my daughter the dog cow the other day. You know, there's something like you identify that as the, this is the shape of a dog. Well, like, so by way of, I'll explain it by a contradiction. Name some non-dog-shaped dogs. Oh, non-dog-shaped dogs. A greyhound. Yep. Is that one? Yeah. I'm going to say, I mean, maybe like a chihuahua? Mm-hmm. Not dog-shaped. Okay. Now, as far as a dog-shaped dog, I'm thinking like a hound or a terrier.
Terriers, terriers, legs are too short. Let me go through some common ones. I would say a beagle is a very dog-shaped dog. Yeah, beagle is absolutely dog-shaped, non-dog-shaped. Basset hounds, legs are too short. Corgis, legs are too short. Pugs face too squished in. Greyhounds, you know, nose too skinny. Like lots of breeds of dogs are not dog shaped. Short legs is a big problem, right? Especially and pushed in faces.
It's a big problem. Can I push you on that a little bit? What is it about the short legs you don't like? Is it aesthetic? Is it practical? I feel like the dogs that have been bred, first of all, I think they're ugly, right? So there's that. That's funny. I mean, aesthetics, I mean, you know, but really, like, I think it is cruel to have bred dogs.
to such such misshapen mongrels like I was at the park the other day with the dog and there was a pug there you can hear him just wheezing like Darth Vader because his face is all squished in it's just a terrible
Terrible thing we've done to these dogs. His back legs... were like stiff like they couldn't bend like he had two back peg legs and he like would fall over and his owner would have to pick him back up because he couldn't like he couldn't ride himself with his little peg he was old but still like Dogs that can't breathe well or they grow mold in the flaps in their skin. Check and check. Like, have terrible genetics.
Terrible genetic problems. Got them both. We just got the doll-shaped cat. We have eight pounds of wheezing and brown face drips. Polly shouldn't be. She makes a noise at night like a drunk man trying to open a door with a new key. It's a very distinct... I woke up the other night and I thought there's somebody's not trying to break into our house. There's someone very drunk downstairs who's trying to use the wrong brand new key on our door.
it's just a sweet precious angel trying to breathe yeah that's the thing most cats are cat shaped but you manage to find like there are there is the squish face cats like that is a kind of cat and you got one of the squish face ones and it's a terrible monster was not my idea
And so it's a dog shape was my important thing, which rules out most very small dogs because there are very few, very small dog shaped dogs. Also, small dogs tend to be mean or meaner. Any feeling on pure versus mixed or anything like that? Well, we'll get to that in a second. And I didn't want a big dog, like a lab is too big because it just, it's, you know, I'm...
Not that I want a lap dog, but I don't want a dog that can never possibly be on my lap. I don't want a dog that can reach the counters without jumping. It's too big. I can't handle... no dog that like outweighs me or any of the kids. So lab was too big. That's what I'm saying. 20, 30, 35 pounds. And the other criteria, but just purely aesthetic is no curly fur. Cause I don't, you know, what am I going to mostly do with the dog?
I'm going to tell it it's a good dog and I'm going to pet it. And I don't like to pet curly fur. Like, you know, all the doodles, all the poodle mixes. Anything that ends with an oodle. You don't want any oodles in the house. Yeah, I don't like those curly dogs. And you have the combination of non-dog-shaped curly dog. Oh, you get like a Bichon Frise. Yeah, exactly. That's the, you know, complete package of what I don't want, which is not dog shape, curly fur, small dog. Yeah. Yeah.
So, I mean, so yeah, I have specific, kids don't care. They just, they just want a dog. They don't know anything about a dog. My wife has some concerns. And now breeds, I went through all, you know, I had plenty of time leading up to this.
because it was going to be summer ahead i went through all the american kennel club or whatever breeds and looked at every single one of the breeds and all of them had something about them because i was like look maybe i'll you know if i find a breed i like we have enough time we can find a breeder we can get a puppy and you know pick out the dog we want and like do it up the right way right um
But I didn't like any of the breeds. They all had something about them that bothered me. They were weird or they had genetic problems because of overbreeding. Fan noise. Yeah. Like, for example, the Cavalier King Charles, which my wife thinks is very cute, I think is not dog shaped because the muzzle is too shoved in. But they have this thing where they've been bred so their skull is small in the back or some crap and it like pinches their brain.
oh yeah i see yeah and they like scratch like the symptom is like they're scratching the back of their head it's because their like brain is being pinched in their skull like that's not a well like i don't i don't want dogs and i have no interest in like
breeds or anything. I don't, I don't, you know, I don't care. You just want something you can pet that's dog shaped. Right. So I was like, all right, purebreds are out because they just have all sorts of health problems and I don't care about the breeds. Sometimes they have personality problems and you got to get a mutt. Too much unbreeding. You got to get a mutt.
right so so was it so adoption it was so let's see we're gonna do rescue our first dog was a rescue as well so Then I'm going on like petfinder.com and entering a bunch of criteria and there you can enter the size of dog you're interested in and you enter like a radius of how far you want to look and if it's good with children or how many people in your house or do you care.
uh how old it is or weight size and you know stuff like that and i was pretty open with my search because i was like look you know i'll take anything i'll take a four-year-old dog i'll i'll take a puppy i'll take whatever as the the time started approaching i started getting nervous about
um getting an adult dog adopted because a lot of these dogs have had harsh lives yeah and also a lot of them are coming from like out of state and like you can't meet the dog before you accept the adoption because they're going to ship the dog from like tennessee or something And I don't want to get a three-year-old dog sight unseen that has had a difficult life, because that seems like a formula, like a bad, you know, you know what I mean?
I absolutely do. I'm sorry. I'm just looking at pictures of your dog. This dog is so cute. Um, yes, I totally agree. It's like almost like, uh, you know, go do a Carfax. Has anybody rolled this dog?
Uh, has anybody ridden this into like Ted Kennedy style, like ridden this into a river and you don't know where that dog has been and it might've had a hard life. It could have been like my beagle was really badly abused. The beagle that we got before, well, when I was a kid, we had had a terrible life. And, you know, he was tough.
Yeah, and there are people who are prepared for that, like who, you know, this is what they do. Like they adopt dogs and rehabilitate them and they know what it takes to do that and they know what they're in for. Yeah, you take a Brett Terpster. Like he's always adopted all kinds of stuff.
like like your pit bull can live with me until it has somewhere else to go that's just like a whole things yeah that's like a whole point of view on the world it's amazing yeah and also probably don't have uh you know young children in the house potentially dangerous number anyway
I started getting antsy about that. And you know what? The reason I was looking at breeders is like, I want a puppy because I got my first dog when he was like two-ish or whatever, you know, an adult dog, right? And I'd never had a puppy. And who doesn't want a puppy, right?
Everybody, if you're going to have a dog, you want a puppy. Right. Well, people, you know, so I started to lean more towards puppies. Not that I was ruling out anything else. I was always, you know, and I was leaning more towards like.
dogs that had like beagle mixes because they tend to be beagle is about pretty much the smallest dog shaped dog breed right so if you had beagle mixed in with something else you end especially if you get one of the females you'll end up with like a small you know beagle lab mix or like uh you know beagle sheltie mix or whatever like just all sorts of
strange, especially on these adoption sites, they don't know what breed the dogs are. That's the bottom line. They don't know. If you're lucky, they know the mother. They never know the father. And they look at the puppies and they're like, well, they look kind of like it's... He goes out for a pack of doggy cigarettes and never comes back. Yeah, yeah.
So all you can do is look at the paw size and look at what the mother looks like. Paw size will tell you a lot. If a dog with big paws is a puppy, it's going to be a big dog, in my experience. Yeah. So...
So, yeah, we didn't have much to go on. So eventually, you know, the time was approaching. It's always it was always about the timing. Like, when do we get the dog and how do we time it with vacations and stuff like this? And what are we even going to do? And, you know, so eventually found a litter.
Puppies that have been born, they were all dog-shaped to a mother that looked kind of like a Brittany Beagle something mix. All the puppies... It's got a kind of Beagle-y... nose and body, but the ears and the eyes and the head shape are a little bit more... Different kind of sporty. Spaniel-y or like... Wait, what are spaniels? I know terriers or diggers. Spaniels are... Are those bird dogs usually? Yeah, I think so.
Maybe collies in there. Anyway, since my radius was 100 miles, this place was in Connecticut two hours away. So... my wife was the only one who was able to go at the appointed time to see the puppies. And we were like fifth in line. They're like, well, if everyone before you picks a puppy, there should be like one left for you. So you'll get like the last pick or whatever. Oh my God. So she drove two hours down there.
Got to see all the siblings. Like the mother had already been adopted. By this point, these puppies are three months old. So they've all, you know, they've grown up with the mother and been fostered. And, you know, so we're hoping we're getting like.
puppies that have not had a traumatic life that they, you know, the mother and the puppies were found and fostered and they've got, they've got some socializing. Yeah. The mother has been adopted and she was, you know, through the magic of the internet, just sending me like, uh,
you know uh facetime video with the bandwidth was crappy so she just recorded videos and then messaged it to me right it just puts you in a room with all the puppies like so it's a bunch of adults sitting in a room with the puppies just all running and flopping all over each other
Some of the puppies, some of the siblings looked very much like beagles. Like they had beagle, like a black, white, brown coloring, right? Some of the puppies had like... red sort of uh you know burgundy brown and white some were like liver like dark brown and white and some were black and white and we looked at all of them and she's like i don't know they're all sweet puppies like i don't just tell me which ones you want like she was not able to
I told her like all these things like, oh, take the puppy and put it on its back. And if it doesn't struggle, it's too submissive. But eventually it should stop struggling. You know, you just want the right amount of feistiness. So all these things that I read on the Internet, I have no freaking idea whether, you know, she's like, how am I supposed to pick out a puppy like?
Say like the two submissive ones are bad because they'll bite you out of fear or something. And the ones that are too aggressive will never stop struggling if you put them on their back. she said she just whatever they were all the same they were all sweet puppies who were just nice and happy and licking everybody and now you know like tumbling all over each other so this is basically like pick the one that you like the best
And she liked one of the ones that was fuzzy. One of them looked almost like a golden, like with the fluffy golden retriever puppy. With that fluffy fur. The only one of the siblings that was like that. You could see the family resemblance, but wide variety.
uh one of them had almost an entirely white body with like a you know reddish brown face thing or whatever um a couple of them were adopted before we got to have our pick but we actually ended up being third in line so we had a pick of a bunch of them
I started focusing on the black and white ones because I thought they were cute, and there was a boy one and a girl one. And I asked my daughter which one she liked better, the boy and the girl ones, and she said she liked the girl one better. The reason I focused on them is because they have, like, freckles. And our first dog had freckles too, and I love freckles on dogs. What a face. Its coloring is so symmetrical. Its head is very pleasing.
I think we ended up with the best one. I'm just saying. I can tell from here, just looking from these photos, it's a sweet, precious angel. There's no question. Look at that little tail and those feet. Oh, my God. It's a black and white dog with a freckled muzzle and freckled paws. And she's got freckles all on her skin. And she's like black and white spotted like a cow. And her nose is, her little muzzle is mostly white.
And her eyes and her ears are black and the end of her tail is white. She's incredibly... And she's got a little like a Cruella de Vil kind of widow's peak thing going on. Yeah, she's got a little bit of white in there. Her male sibling, who had the same coloring, actually had a connecting line, like the muzzle connected up with a solid white thing, which it wasn't... Like a horse. Yeah.
um called the blaze i think yeah so we brought this puppy home like the day before i left for wwc which is of course perfect timing yep but you don't get to pick these things right it was like yay we've got a puppy all right now i'm going to california for a week good luck so i did that um i mean but you know gotta do what you gotta do like given your druthers you probably would have liked to be there
for the initial, like, let's get used to how our body works, period. It's not going to be one week. All right. Well, I mean, how had this animal, and there's probably a reason you're not telling me its name, but the, it's... Daisy. Daisy. I know that. It's a very sweet name. I just didn't know if it was okay. I have concerns about my doggy privacy. I can cross-reference the dog ownership.
You can't because we rename the dog like they come with names, but I reject those. Your dog's a false flag operation. That's good. That's right. So we all as a family, we can't again with the names. My daughter went up and presumably Googled girl dog names and wrote down.
like three pages worth of names and then narrowed it down to a shortlist. And from the shortlist, we ended up with Daisy. That is a terrific name. You got some Gatsby in there. You got the duck. There's other, you got Daisy from the 2001 song. Isn't there another famous dog, Daisy? What am I spacing on? Daisy is a very popular, it's just like with kid names, a very popular dog. I registered.
I registered my dog at my work's dog Slack because, of course, my work has a dog Slack channel, right? And the dog that was registered just before me was also named Daisy. Wow. Daisy's a very popular dog name. It's like the... I don't know. It's like the Tyler or that's probably dated. It's like the Aiden of dog names. Aiden of dogs. What a face. And look, your daughter, I mean, I realize she knows she's being photographed by her dad, but she looks pretty happy here.
Yeah, I caught basically what I think is the moment of ultimate puppy ecstasy like this. Not the second picture, but the first one. The first one where she's like... stunned by happiness. This is probably the happiest she'll ever be in her life, which as I said, I don't want to tell her that, but...
You know, literally the happiest she'll ever be in her life because it's like... You shield your children from so many of the harsh realities. Everything's a grind, honey. Enjoy it while you can. I've wanted a dog for my entire life that I can remember.
And I've constantly asked for one. And by the way, her behavior in school improved tremendously once she knew she was getting a dog. That was it. We were wondering, is there something wrong with her? Is something bothering her that we don't know about? We're in the parent-teacher conference talking about it. It's like, nope, it was just the dog.
Because as soon as we told her she was getting the dog, everything was fine at school. She took it upon herself to behave better in order to not scotch the deal. No, she was just, like, depressed, I guess. Like, you're just upset about it. Oh, that's what you're saying, that she's... Okay, that she was, uh... She was, like, acting out because she was just in a foul mood about not having a dog and just, you know... Jeez.
Yeah, anyway, so here, so the puppy comes home and it goes right in her lap and it's a snuggly little soft puppy, you know, and there, that's, I've captured that moment of happiness. It's a nice film. Yeah. So, it's been a couple weeks. How's it going? So, as I said before, you know, we adopted an adult dog before. I've never had a puppy before.
I knew I was expecting going in. I was using like my parenting of human children thing. I was like, well, we could be in for a lot of long nights because. According to everything I had read, like the puppies can't hold their, you know, their bladder for very long. Like the rule was like, take the puppies age in months and add one. And that's how many hours they can hold in their pee. Are you supposed to like preemptively take them out?
So they like learn. Yeah. Yeah. So, you know, I got a three month old puppy that's four hours. So best case scenario, I'm waking up at least once a night to take the dog out. When I was gone at WWC, I don't know what happened in this house. Like, I came back and everyone was like, I did buy all the dog stuff before I left, right? So we were well equipped with dog stuff, right?
But when I came back, everybody, including the dog, was still alive. So I'm like, all right, well, whatever happened then, everything seems fine. But this dog that used to be the... cute little snuggly puppy and i wonder if the adoption agencies do this like that they you know come and come and see our dogs when they're still cute and snuggly she's now starting to get into
Doggy adolescence? Is she getting mischievous? Three and a half, four months? Shoes and stuff? First of all, what I thought was going to be the problem is howling in the crate because we've got crates for the dog, right? The howling in the crate and howling all night long and the letting the dog out every couple of hours.
I felt like I was prepared for that. Even the one night when she had the little doggy poops, right? She had some intestinal problems, right? I had to take her out every hour, and of course, it was pouring rain, right? like whatever i you know i had two kids like i'm i'm battle hardened for carrying a poopy being somewhere and being uncomfortable and like doing it every hour and like you know yeah and even for the nights before that i was like
setting my alarm every three hours and getting up and taking the dog out. You hate waking up early, but it's not your first day. You've been through this before. You know how to deal with these issues. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And so... And actually, at this point, she's basically sleeping from midnight until like 630 in the morning just fine. Oh, she's a good sleeper. Yeah. Yeah. So that part is fine. It's everything else that is mostly a disaster.
She, you know, taking her out like clockwork to do her business outside, doing all the things that they do, bring her to the same spot, you know, give her treats and praise when she does it. Do you tell her she's a good girl?
yeah yeah you know and she does it she go we take her out she does her business she does her thing like but still a lot of accidents in the house but even that it would be like well whatever like you know as long as i'm doing the right thing and i'm consistent you know clean up deodorize like I feel like we could get a handle on that. The problem is she basically can't be loose in our house. Oh, no. Are you going to have one of those permacennel kind of dogs? Does she get into stuff?
She's a nippy puppy. She bites our rugs, bites our furniture, bites our ankles. She pulls the towels down in the kitchen. She eats our shoes. So basically needs to be supervised. Every single second in a way that even toddlers don't need to be because toddlers are slow and stupid and she is fast and smart. Until they get big, most toddlers can't eat a shoe. No.
No, and they're slow. They're slow. They're so slow and dumb. You can catch them. They got a diaper you can grab. And then, and so, oh no. So, so now what is your reading? I'm sorry, I'm interrupting you. Does your reading indicate to you, like, some of this is standard puppy behavior. I know some of this is classic, I'm mad that you left me alone stuff. Some of it... I'm not leaving her alone.
I don't think she has separation anxiety. Now, in my research, what I've been able to determine is that this is, you know, there's a range of how your puppy's going to be. Some of them are just going to be sort of docile puppies that just sit there and do nothing. Yeah. And they're not going to have this. But in general, this phase, this adolescent phase of dog... is a thing.
Puppy nipping is obviously a thing. Working on bite inhibition. I think of that as a slightly younger puppy thing, but I guess maybe she's getting a late start on being a puppy. Well, I mean, she's already got the bite inhibition and that she won't actually like, she hasn't drawn blood. Like she's not, you know, she has bite inhibition.
her siblings you know like where they get it right but she is nippy and apparently dogs with uh herding breeds mixed in have that thing where they want to like nip at your ankles She wants to put her teeth on everything. I was going to say, when you said collie, it threw me off a little bit because I was thinking of Lassie, but her head, it does remind me of some border collies I've known who are famously hilarious about hurting everything.
Yeah, but she is all about the nipping. My beagle was pretty nippy, too. Yeah, and she wants to put her teeth. And the more excited she gets, the more she is going to use those teeth. She's got an attitude and she is, you know, very smart and very stubborn and she can be very good. But also, like, I mean, we were taking her puppy play time to socialize her with other puppies. She wants to be the boss of the other puppies. She.
will dominate them if she can't she's been in you know she's been one puppy playtime so far with the big dog and a dog her size and she dominated them both so she totally wants to just you know be on top of them and play fight with them and win we go to the dog part where the big dogs are she wants to swat the biggest dog in the face which of course doesn't end well for her because then she gets smushed by the big dog
And then she hides between my legs, right? And I'm trying to moderate that to say you don't want your puppy to get traumatized by a big dog. You don't want your puppy to actually get bitten, right? So you have to find, unleash, find the dog that...
is going to be okay with puppies talk to the owner like is your dog actually gonna bite my dog or is it you know whatever uh but you know so she's learning hey if you whack the big dog in the face with your paw uh bad things are gonna happen so maybe don't do that right
but basically what she's got is she just gets super excited and wants to run around and chew everything and bite everything and she's super sneaky about pulling the towels down in the kitchen which is kind of adorable but also means she just can't be loose in the house and
I don't want to keep her crated up all the time. Like today, I actually had her out for the longest stretch after one of her walks. I had her out and loosen the house for like 45 minutes. I was like, look, so you can just chill. You can just sit on your... Now, when she's loosening the house for 45 minutes...
100% of my mental energy is on this dog. Yeah. Like, in a way that it wasn't even when I had an infant. Like, the management, it's like a time bomb loose in your house. Because at any second this dog can pee or poo.
right because you know you never know like even though you just took it out and it did all its business you never know what they're holding back so it is literally a pee and poo bomb waiting to go off so you are you are there you need to be in arm's reach if you see that little squat happening you just scoop that dog up and take it outside right um and at any second
is going to bite something that it's not supposed to whether it's your rug or your furniture or a towel or a shoe or you know a wire or anything you don't want this dog biting you need to be there to redirect and uh you know like And so it's a tremendous amount of mental health. But I mean, it's one of those kinds of things. It is in some ways like having a little kid where like, you know, the kid might be sleeping for right now, but you don't know when they're going to wake up.
And in this case, like you just need to always be ready to spring into some kind of action. You just don't know what the action will be or how soon it will come along. Yeah. And I'm doing positive reinforcement only, which is very difficult. Especially when you're mad.
but that's not even it but because taking taking no off the table as a as a tool which i can tell you doesn't really work with this dog that much anyway but like taking fear and intimidation off the table as a training tool which seems to be the consensus about what you should do and i'm you know i'm all on board with that you know like i don't know well i'll get more advice when we're signed up for puppy classes and all sorts of other things right so
She is very smart and very able to be trained to do things. The only thing she's not able to be trained to do is to chill. Calm your doggy body down and just relax. And there are plenty of YouTube videos about how to teach your dog to relax. You're probably not familiar with the work of the great dog psychologist Cesar Millan. I don't really like him.
No one likes him. And according to Brett Terpster, most of what he says is BS. One thing I think is very interesting is, as you may know, in Los Angeles, he has a dog psychology center, which is a fenced-in parking lot. And what he says is, you bring him a dog, let that dog run with the big dogs that stay calm, and eventually that dog calms down and gets back into its desire to be part of the pack.
Now, I don't know if you have a dog psychology center near you or it's analog, but maybe there's somewhere you could take it around large, kind dogs that'll beat it up just a little bit to get its mind right. Not beat up. You know what I'm saying? Like a puppy beat up.
Or you do that. Like the whole thing is like, oh, if your dog is chewing and everything, like maybe it needs more exercise. And like, you know, we're just, I'm, I'm, I'm trying to preempt all the advice I'm going to get, because believe me, you're going to get so much advice, John. Seeing, seeing and read it all, but like. We tried a lot of different things. I've exercised this dog incredibly, like just...
Running with the big dogs, chasing things, going, you know, just like long walks, bringing big water bottles around to keep her hydrated. You wear it out. You try to really wear it out, right? Yeah. And to see. Does that change things? Like as far as I've been able to tell, and this was mentioned in a lot of training videos, the dogs have their witching hour. She has her witching hour. Her witching hour is essentially around four or five o'clock.
Yeah, it's like with an infant. You get the unhappy hour. It's like a time when just your child unaccountably starts crying every day. She's not unhappy. She's super aroused, right? Oh, I see. Okay, she's not a hunchback. Yeah, so it's like...
First of all, around five, she knows that's when she's going to get dinner, and she wants it so bad. Like, you would think we starve this dog to death. Oh, no, so on that, she's trained. We're not starving this dog to death. I guarantee you we are not starving this dog to death, right?
But you would think we are with the fuss that she puts up around five o'clock. And also when she runs with the big dogs and gets all excited, she is just wired after that. She's like, I can't believe it. I ran with the dogs. I got it. And she just.
She would just whip herself up into a frenzy, and before you know it, she's biting your ankles. All it does is get her more keyed up. Barking and biting, yeah. Just to bring her down. This morning, we had... chill out time where it was like you had your morning walk and stuff and now maybe just maybe just chill and she chose on her own to lay down on her little bed and just relax like see
See, you don't have to be eating furniture or peeing or pooping every second of the day. You don't have to spend your entire life thinking, is there food in my bowl? Can I eat your shoe? Can I eat this furniture? Can I do this? Can I pee on this thing? And you ask yourself, isn't this nice? This seems nice. We're laying down now. We're relaxing. This seems nice. And I've tried various techniques to get her to, you know, because the problem is she like...
She can be trained to do anything. Go to your mat. I trained her to do that in five minutes. I can tell her to go to a mat. She goes to her mat. She lays down. She waits for her treat reward for doing it, right? But she's just keyed up. She's like, I went to my mat. Here I am. I'm on my mat. It's like, right now, just chill. She's like, what do you mean chill? Like, I don't, there's no command for that. And it's like, pet your dog. Chill command not found.
Yeah, like pet your dog and say, settle, and just teach it to settle on Tom. And it's like they show these videos like, look, this dog is going to sleep. That's a big oaf of a dog that was going to fall asleep whether you were there or not. Come and make my dog settle. My dog's not settling. My dog's like, tell me my next command to do. You know, like, what do you want me to do? I'll do something. Give me the food. The one good thing that's come out of her insanity is.
you know before she came i bought all the dog things i've had a dog before so i know dog things i bought all the puppy things i could think of like the crates and stuff and i think i got all the right stuff there so that's all going well um but i also bought a bunch of dog treats right because you know you're gonna figure out which one they like
Right. And when she came into the house, she would not eat a single one of these treats, would not put it in her mouth. None of them. Milk bone style treats, squishy little treats, treats that the people in the store said dogs go crazy for this one. fishy treats, livery treats, like you name it. She would not put them in her mouth. You know what she liked? Daisy's a little bit of a diva. You know what she liked? Her dog food. She's down to earth. Her dog food.
So that's what we've been giving her for treats. I have a little treat pouch. And you know what's in it? Just her dog food. Just dry kibble. One piece of dry kibble at a time. That's her treat. And I feel like some days I've fed her most of her meals.
one piece of kibble at a time we've gone through like these long extended training sessions uh and she she needs that kibble she will do almost anything for it but as soon as you are not giving her a command and giving her a thing she's like all right well now i'm gonna eat your furniture
There's a part of me, in a second, I'd like to circle back to how you would like to receive the advice that you're going to get, or really the admonishments. But I wonder if there's a chance that she might be gifted. not like in an X-Men way, but I wonder if she's, if you need to, I don't know, put her in a better school. Is there a chance that she might be like super smart, have super intelligence?
Is there some kind of special insight you might be, maybe she is an X-Man, an X-Dog. I don't know, but could it be that there's something about her where you haven't found how to tap into making her special power work around the house? Maybe she's smarter than you. Maybe she's super smart. She's got a lot of energy and, you know, exercising her, like, at the very least makes the nights, you know, makes her conk out in the nighttime, but there's no avoiding her witching hour.
which is, you know, no matter what you do, no matter how much you run her, she's going to have her witching hour. And when I run her in the morning, she doesn't have her witching hour, then she actually chills, right? But she's not, you can tell she's still a dog.
Because when you try to train a dog to do something, like dogs don't generalize well. Like I was working on leave it with her where you put a little piece of food in your hand and you say leave it and she's not supposed to take the food out of your hand and you do it at varying distances and you get closer and closer, right? Right.
And we're getting doing pretty good with that. Right. And then I said, let me move my hand four inches to the right and do leave it that she just did successfully 10 times. Four inches to the right. She's like, I have no idea what you're talking about with this leave it crap and just, you know, went for the food immediately. It's like, we just did this 10 times, right? So she is a dog. She's not.
super duper gifted because dogs do not generalize they don't understand the concept of leave it means whatever thing that's in front of you that you want don't take it well they're a little aren't they just little pattern matching machines and it's just a question of how long it takes until that
pattern gets the kind of behavior that you want you need to it's it's like training an image recognition engine you need to have like what about when the food's over here what about when it's in your other hand what about when it's on the floor what about when it's on the table like there is no generalization of like i'm teaching you the concept of leave it mean
do not take the thing you want. She thinks leave it means when a treat appears in this position on this hand, if I lay back and don't take it, I will receive a reward.
right and then so you move it two inches to the right and she's i've never seen this scenario before so i'm just eating that food like i don't know i don't know what this leave it crap means but i see food and i'm eating it and then you have to retrain in the new position and yeah uh she doesn't and that's the other thing she doesn't do stay like she
She just stayed for like three seconds. We're working on stays. That's difficult with a three and a half month old puppy. But yeah, what I'm trying to work towards is I don't want this dog to be in her crate. She likes her crate. I taught her go in your crate. She does that crate. She goes right in her crate.
But then you leave the room and she's in a crate and she whines. I know you could probably brute force this, but I feel like I've known, this is not 100% successful for a variety of reasons, but I've known several people. I don't think they call it obedience classes anymore, but like there's a kind of doggy class you can go to where you learn how to communicate with your dog and get it to do stuff that you want.
I'm signed up for one of those classes. Are you? When does it start? Yeah, I'm signed up for a puppy class. Have you started it yet? No, I haven't done it to the first class yet. It starts like next week or something. I bet it's going to be fine. You know, it's like a little kid. Here's the thing. She's a handful is what I'm getting at. She's an angel. And I'm expending a tremendous amount of mental energy on this dog. Between that and that goddamn air conditioner?
It helps distract from the ignition. I think I'm spending more mental energy on this dog than I did on my children when they were out of their... their nightmare baby no only my son had a nightmare baby face like but like in their toddlerhood uh my kids were easier as toddlers than this dog is i can tell you that um because like i said it's like i don't i don't want to keep her in the crate like very often we spend time
with her in her crate, and me on the couch, sitting across from each other, right? Just staring each other down? No, I'm not looking at her. She's not looking at me. She's just sleeping. I'm just on the couch. Are you teaching her kennel as a command? I don't know. What would that command mean? That means get in your... Go in your crate. She knows that. Go in your crate. Try kennel.
Or maybe German. You never know what it is that she speaks. I mean, the problem with all these commands is like, all right, I'll go in my crate. And I did the command. Now what's next?
and if what's next is okay now lay down i don't want i want her to have to have free reign of the house and obviously you can't give a puppy free reign of the house you're gonna start them small here's your area and you keep expanding their territory so they understand that this whole house is yours and it's not like oh here's where i live and over there errors where i pee right so you know i understand that the system here but there is literally no place in this house where
the dog can be loose that is safe the closest we have in the kitchen because you got like linoleum in the kitchen right and if you just you know she she pulls down all the towels and i can redirect her from that but try cooking in the kitchen
If you're constantly trying to redirect her from the towels and I can't generalize, leave it on the towels very well. I can say, leave it. And she drops the towels. But then if you hang the towels back up, she's pulled back to her. I got a video of her today. Like. I like poke the iPhone into the room. So I wasn't in the room. You get a video of her fighting her, like not supposed to take the towels.
But towels are delicious. And she slowly turns towards the towels. You can see the inner struggle. And she pulls it down. And then I come in the room and tell her to leave it. And then she looks up real guilty.
But yeah, if you keep her in the kitchen, she goes nuts because you're cooking food and she can't handle the cooking food and she's biting your ankles again. Right. Or she just starts trying to like bite the cabinets. Daisy sounds sharp. It may not be apparent yet, but I'm going to guess that Daisy turns out to be kind of sharp.
I think, I think she's going to be like a, uh, who's the Star Trek guy. It's going to be like a Captain Kirk type situation. She might steal your car or something, but like, I got a feeling she's going to turn out what she gets to, to, to air flight Academy. She's going to do really well. I got a feeling she's a sharp little customer.
And you're just, I think you're going through a rough patch. I bet it's going to be fine. Yeah, I just, well, my two main goals and I'm going to engage the services of local doggy psychiatrists eventually if these puppy classes don't help us get, you know. I got to have like stop biting people because she totally does. She is totally nippy. And I understand puppy nipping is a thing. Yep. But she is way too nippy. Way, way too nippy. And so we're working on that. And.
be able to be loose in the house because we'll all be happier if she can be loose in some territory in the house. Something that we were told, well, let's be honest, things I read a lot on the internet.
in preparing to get a cat because I'm like you, I'm a, I'm an O'Reilly book guy. Like I got to go read everything about this. Hopefully I'll digest some of it, but you know, I feel like I have to take in lots of resources. One thing I saw over and over was when you first bring your cat, not talking about dog here. When you first bring a new cat into your house and there's no other animals in the house, consider putting the cat in, say, a bathroom with the door closed.
for some period of time, because it turns out the cat will actually like that. That's an area that the cat can explore and get used to. It won't feel overwhelmed. And then you kind of move out from, I didn't read any more past that. But the basic idea is that you, what you're saying, you want to give it an area that it's own. I know a lot of dogs that love their kennel. They're never happier than when they're in their kennel.
Yeah, no, she likes her crate for, you know, for snoozing and stuff like that. But she, you know, I don't want to keep her trapped in there. Because the problem is when she's in there and we go into another room, she doesn't like it. She wants, you know, to see us. And I want her to be able to follow us around the house. But you do have to, puppies, you have to start off in a confined area, too. Obviously, they're...
their crate is the smallest area, but you slowly expand outwards. Like the puppy should never be loose in your house. Like loose loose. It should be on the leash. So you have control over them. You keep track of them. And like, you want them to slowly.
expand their territory recognizing each new increment as an additional part of the house and you have to puppy proof them and make sure there's things they can't get it like we're going through that process um they also recommend like if you have some room that you can like we have baby gates all over the place now if you know that you can sort of fence off to control the dog but we really don't have a place other than the kitchen
That is sufficiently puppy proof and gated and doored off. And the kitchen she can't handle because if we're all in the kitchen, guess what? We're probably making food and she can't handle that. Food and towels.
yeah i mean the towels we can put up but but the fact that we're cooking food and it's not i don't want her to be in the kitchen underfoot while we're cooking food is dangerous and i just don't want her to you know or whatever but that is the only room that's like that doesn't have a rug that she can pee or poo on or anything like that so We're trying to like play with her in controlled environments.
like now we're going to play on this rug so you'll stop peeing on it because you'll see that hey this is part of the house too we're working on it but uh every day every day there's biting and there's peeing and like yesterday we didn't have any accidents in the house today we had one because i let my son watch the dog
for literally two minutes and 30 seconds. And like I go, I just, I needed to go in the other room and look at something, keep an eye on the dog. Plenty of time. Plenty of time for everything to go wrong. Dad, the dog is peeing. Yep. Like that's all it takes. Thank you. Thanks, buddy. Literally a time bomb. Maybe two minutes is 30. Maybe it was like 45 seconds. Ugh, literally. Seemed like not...
Not that many seconds. I don't want to belabor this. I want to get to the point where we find out how people can help you because they're going to want to help you. Just quick questions. So the little bites and the ankle nips. That's because she's excited. It's not because she's angry.
She's just excited, and that's how she expresses it, his little nips. Yeah, I mean, I was trying to look up things to see if I could determine that. I'm pretty sure it's arousal, like she's excited about things. Sometimes she is, I don't know, angry, but like, if...
If she feels like she deserved a treat for doing a thing and she's not getting it, I feel like she's taking her revenge on me for that. No, you got to go with Daisy's razor. I think it's going to be a lot simpler than that. The other thing is, is she a jumper? Does she jump? No, she's not a jumper.
Okay, that's really good. Yeah. I don't want to be, you've already expressed so much doggy racism in this that we're going to have to probably cut out. But I'll tell you, I don't like a jumpy dog. I don't like a dog where the dog jumps on you and then the person goes, you know. Petunia no jumps jumping is one of the easier things to deal with and that you just never give a treat unless all four paws are on the ground
Right? Yeah, I'm talking about just that utter lack of control. So I'm going to get in trouble if I say anything. But I've been around people who are fooling themselves.
much like the way I fool myself about how I've raised my daughter. I've been around people who really fool themselves about their dog. And I'll give you an example that is completely, completely abstracted and not with regard to any actual person that I know. We never... ever give the dog people food we've never given the dog people food and you're like hmm that dog sure spends an awful lot of time
in the kitchen while you're cooking and under the table while you're eating. That dog shoves its face into my dingus while I'm eating. Something tells me this dog has gotten people food before. And then, of course, when you're cleaning up, they put the plates on the floor, they put the scraps in the thing, and then they're curious about why the dog has jumped on the table and is doing bumpus dogs on the Thanksgiving turkey.
You know what I'm saying? I think sometimes people fool themselves into this. I know. And that's another reason I didn't want the dog in the kitchen because I don't want the dog in the room when we're eating because I can't be spending my entire meal trying to redirect it. Never mind. We have a tablecloth.
And the tablecloth hangs down at the corners. She gets her little needle teeth into the corner of the tablecloth. That's the first thing she goes for. Ooh, hanging fabric. I'm going to bite that. There goes your frazzled onions. That's no better way to cook. She's all over that stuff. What a mess. The towels in the kitchen. She put holes in my jeans. holes in your jeans. I'm the one with holes in my jeans. I do that. Those little needle teeth.
Yeah. She's such an angel. I'm trying to get some videos of her when she gets going and she's like growling and barking and jumping at me and biting my ankles. It shouldn't go without saying. Like, please send me all of these. It's hard to catch her in the act. I got some good footage of her running. I just sent you a couple of my cat, but I'd love to be in the loop for this. I think, first of all, I just want to say, I know this won't help, but I think it's going to be fine. The big question...
John, you're going to get a lot of feedback from people on this. On the one hand, you're going to get a lot of feedback from people who want to tell you why you shouldn't have gotten a dog that your reasons were wrong. You're going to get a lot of feedback on...
Let's say you even got over that hurdle. You're doing a lot wrong right now. Then you're going to get a lot of turns out about what you should be doing differently that you didn't realize. What's the best place for people to reach you to correct your dog behavior?
Yeah, I mean, people can send me emails or tweets or whatever they want. How about at Rectives? I mean, that's fine, too. Like, whatever. People can find me on the internet. Here's the thing with the doggy advice. Pound sign doggy racism.
chances are very good that whatever people are going to tell me that I have read. Because I've done a lot of reading. I've watched a lot of videos. That'll probably prevent a lot of people from contacting me. Doesn't mean that I'm doing all the things in them. No. But like... I feel like I have been well exposed over the past several months and the crash course over the past several weeks on this topic, right? Now, there are schools of thought about dog training.
and there i can tell you now if anyone's thinking of sending feedback there is an entire section of dog the dog training world that i have cordoned off um so if you're thinking of telling me that I need to get a choker chain or hit my dog or do anything. Oh, no, no, no, no, no. My daughter went to SPCA camp and she walked away with- Just give a correction. Just yank on the leash. Nope. I understand that's a school.
There are tons, tons of literature about that. Even some of the things the vet gave surprisingly had some negative reinforcements like, no, that's not going to work. I'm not interested in that school. I'm not going to tell you. There's all kinds of things you could do. You can go, you go eat out of his bowl. Like you make him watch you when you go to the bathroom. You say, look, I go to the bathroom first. You watch me.
Right. Maybe you wash his paws. You flip him on his back. You give him a tattoo or a nose ring. If your dog nips. I saw the things that are on YouTube. One of them was like. If your dog's biting you, take the soft like skin that like their little flappy jowls, push it inside their mouth and up against their teeth until they whimper and stop. I'm no dog scientist, but that does not sound wholesome to me. That sounds like Angry Dad.
There are tons and tons of people who say, look, I've had 100 dogs. You don't know what the hell you're talking about. I had 100 dogs. Look how well trained they are. Look how they do anything I ask. The instant I asked them to do it, they're beautiful, loving pets.
that are you know just perfect in every way and i taught them by hitting them with a baseball bat so if you're not doing that you're a dummy those people don't need to write me uh because i'm pretty sure that no matter what happens i am not going to intimidate or harm.
my dog in any way as any part of the dog raising process. Well, yeah. Also, I mean, let's be honest. Based on the little bit that I know about people who want to publicly share the idea of hitting a dog with a baseball bat, I'm pretty sure you're admonishing them right there will prevent them.
from contacting you oh you know and so here's the thing like you said okay well that's fine you if you want to you know because people think uh gonna raise a couple a lot of things about pets yeah people think they have to uh you have to dominate the dog you have to show it who's the alpha you have all these sorts of school schools have thought about it
Um, the other schools thought of whatever they call it, positivity training and stuff like that. Uh, the bad news for the choker shot collar, just give a little correction, uh, type of thing. People is that. the positive reinforcement people, their dogs do like ballets on command. Like they're, they also have dogs that are beautiful, perfect pets. They do everything they ask. The instant they ask it to do that can like, you know, balance a checkbook for you on command.
But those people are consistency engines. If you can be a consistency engine, you can make that work. Here's all you need to know is like ignore the bad behavior, reward the good behavior. Now just do that all the time and it'll be fine. But that's hard. It's really hard. I mean, you also have to get, you know.
It's difficult because that's the philosophy. If you want to distill the philosophy that I'm basically subscribed to after watching tons of different videos and reading tons of different things about how to raise... you know, out of trained dogs is like behaviors that are reinforced are repeated and reinforcement can take many forms. Obviously reinforcement is like praise or food that you give them, but some activities are inherently reinforcing for dogs.
For example, if they run after you and you run away, you are reinforcing that behavior. You're like, I'm not reinforcing, I'm running it away. But dogs find you running away from it, reinforcing if they're interested in pursuing. It's like if the following things happen. in mostly the same order most of the time, that's always going to win.
and it's not even it's not even the behavior it's like it's understanding what your dog's finds reinforcing because whatever the behavior is that's reinforced that will be repeated and so you have to be aware of what activities are inherently reinforcing and you know the the only tool you have in your thing is like
okay, well, if you want something different to happen, make that different thing happen and reinforce it. Well, and also, that means aside, like it's also a kind of animal that sees time and shame in very different ways than humans do. Like, I'm going to sit around and worry if I did something bad all day, but a dog's moving on to the next thing. Yeah, like, that's the thing you can do. Punishing a cat for something he did five minutes ago is just cruel.
Yeah, so I'm all inside my head about whether I'm being already being gamed by the dog for this. But for example, leave it, which we've worked on a lot. This point now, every once in a while, like dog gets a towel, you say leave it, dog immediately drops a towel and looks up at you, which is like.
Great. That's my leave it training at work. You know, and so I say leave it the, you know, even if it goes for the towel and I say leave it and it turns back from the towels. Aha, leave it. Leave it means. don't go after the thing that i'm getting at turn back give my give my owner eye contact right and i reward that with a with a quote-unquote treat which is a single hand-fed piece of her kibble which she's insane for
And it's done. And, you know, good job, right? Start your counter. 15 seconds later, her little head's turning back towards the towel. She pulls it down again or goes to pull it down again. I say, leave it. She leaves it. She looks up at me, gives me eye contact, give her a piece of kibble. And I'm like, wait a second. But she's a scientist, John. She's trying to make sure that it's replicable. If you want some kibble, pull the towel down, leave it, look up at the person.
and get your piece of kibble um so i i don't know how inside you know how well she's training me because like you're right that they do forget like a lot a lot of the behaviors are like redirect your dog if your dog is biting your furniture have it come over to you have it sit give it a piece of kibble to say you know what i want you to do is sit
Or be calm or come over here or look at me. And that behavior is reinforced. Forget about biting the couch, which is self-reinforcing because you love biting the couch. Come over to me and do that. But now you're just thinking, like, is she making the connection?
Bite the couch, get called over, sit, get a treat. Bite the couch, get called over, sit, get a treat. And then she just ends up back in her crate because it's like, look, you can't be eating our furniture. I don't think that's nearly as torturous as it sounds because, I mean, I made a crack a long time ago on Twitter that...
Nobody, people rarely remember who wins an argument on the internet. They mainly remember that you're a person who argues on the internet. And I think that's true with animals too, is that you, you have an idea. Because you have this mental model for how the world works and how cause and effect works and all the world of nature. You've got all your reckons about all of these things.
Well, who is to say whether your dog or cat sees anywhere near those same connections? Is there a chance that what they mostly remember is there's this neurotic person who keeps talking to me all the time when all I want to do is eat? Like put yourself in the dog's position.
Like you probably seem pretty weird to that dog. Yeah. I mean, she's obviously teething. She's obviously, you know, entering adolescence. She's got a lot of energy. Like these are all like natural behaviors. She's discovering, you know, things about her body. She's got to wear doggy deodorant. I mean, you're going to have to have the talk.
with her soon yeah it was kind of early for adolescence but looking up adolescence is like that your dog starts you know getting attitudinal and you know although they say it's related to hormones and she's already fixed so
i'm not entirely sure but anyway she's certainly got a lot of energy and like the thing is she can't help herself like when when i pick her up and she's excited uh and she's super excited normally when i pick her up like but she can't she has trouble with our stairs so i'm still carrying her up and down the stairs oh that is so sweet
She can make it up sometimes, but she's scared about the stairs, and if you try to encourage her to go down with a piece of kibble at a time, she has a tendency to freak out about it. So I don't. I always carry her. Our next door neighbors have a very, very cute, very tiny, very old, very incontinent, curly oodle dog. The dog's name is Bubbles.
And, uh, I'll be looking out the window in the morning as I do. And I'll just see one of the four members of their household dashing out of there with bubbles, bubble bubbles. Who's like the size of a big. Poop, basically. It's like a six-pound dog. Bichon Frazese, kind of like non-dog, but just dashing across the street into the park with bubbles because they know time is a factor. And it's just adorable. You're doing that with steps. How cute is that?
Yeah, and when I pick her up, she's so sweet. She looks soft. She looks like she has a soft face. She's very soft, and she wants to lick my face. But the more excited she gets, the more she kind of bites my chin, too. You know, and so, by the way, one of the one of the bite inhibition things that you do is you make.
There's various schools of thought on this, but one of them is you make... I heard there's the one where you put your hand in their mouth so they can't like... There's a lot of that. I think it's mostly for younger things. I mean, she's already got an okay bite into it. She just gets excited, right? It's the kind of thing like advice that old men would share at a VF.
w meeting that they were kind of guessing about it doesn't seem like it really would come from any kind of like consistent there's like it's a kind of a merlin man logic problem where like i tried this thing and it didn't break so i'm pretty sure it worked yeah yeah there's a lot of that kind of advice out there
One of the things, and this is the type of advice you get, but you can tell that it is probably good advice because it sounds like parenting advice. Yeah. They're like, okay, so if you make like a yiping sound when your dog puts its teeth on your skin. Just like a puppy would. That's how it learns that, oh, I'm hurting you. That's good. Maybe one of you should dress as a dog all the time. You've got a little time off this summer. You should dress as a dog all the time.
It's like the panda handlers. What you're basically trying to train them is humans are basically so incredibly fragile that if I touch my teeth to them, they freak out, right? But then that same advice says, but some dogs are aroused by this and find it reinforcing. So don't do it in that case. It's like all that parenting advice is like, well, you could try this or it could have the exact opposite effect. Every kid is different. Good luck.
Like, it's like, but how do I tell whether it's different? Is my dog being reinforced by his yiping or is it not? I feel fairly certain that if you consistently do this, your dog will either be a sociopath, perfect, or possibly.
something else right and so yeah just be consistent i think most for the most part she uh she understands the action because again when i pick her up to bring her out and she gets super excited that she's you know going down the stairs to go out in the middle of the night she really needs to go And she, like, you know, nips at my arm. And I make my little ouch sound. Then she licks my face 20 times. You call it ouching? Yeah.
Just say ouch. You want to say it loud. You don't want to startle the dog. I'm pretty sure she is not reinforced by it, but she doesn't she doesn't keep biting when I do it. She she, you know, sees that I've been, you know, like she's she's.
trying to be sweet but she does get super excited and like i've heard from many people talking to other people the dog park and stuff with these herding breeds do like to nip at your ankles and do like swinging fabric and other you know types of things like that and So anyway, she's a handful. And this is the only thing my brain is doing from, I guess, the next year of my life. So I'm sorry if I had to do anything else with any of my mental capacity. It is 100% occupied.
i'll just hopefully my brain stem will keep my blood circulating my heart pumping and my lungs my diaphragm going up and down like hopefully my motor functions will continue to work but pretty much 100 of my mental energy that is not or not already concentrated on keeping my children alive which is what i used to be spending all my mental energy on yeah and keeping my wife happy uh now every every every sort of like uh
every free amount let's put it that way every non-committed amount of mental energy is on this ticking time bomb that is a pee poop nipping machine in my house And every day we do training and every day I watch new videos and every day we try to make progress and we have good days and we have bad days. What a mitzvah. It is a hell of a thing. Kids were still more work. Don't get me wrong. My son is the undisputed champion of, you know, just...
Very, very difficult infant. And my daughter was only good by comparison. That's nice. I hope your wife will share that with them. That was sweet. Oh, we're talking about it all the time. He was such a difficult baby. And now I feel like we have a difficult puppy. He knows he did that, right? Yeah, he's fine. But they're both great now. But this is a difficult puppy.
It's not the world's most difficult puppy, but it's a difficult puppy. And like, I feel if we had gotten a beginner puppy, like we would have lucked out because we're like, I can handle, who can handle a beginner puppy? Oh, they're just sweet little things. They're just nice and follow you around. All you have to worry about is being consistent about training and maybe, you know.
uh every dog's probably going to get into something but like one thing but no this this dog wants everything in our house and requires uh you know a lot of exercise and a lot of energy and just gets amped up and i don't know so like like with kids they're like oh don't worry they'll grow out of this like in a year or something so again as i see one-year-old puppies going nuts at the park i'm like great so
I'm telling you, John, it's like bar cords. One day you're going to wake up and everything's going to make sense. Yeah, I mean, I look at my kids and I'm like, look, well. Yeah, look at them. They turned out fine. They came out of it. They do not poop in their pants at all anymore. Like, they never do it. So, like, I feel like it could happen with this dog. Eventually. Godspeed.