Grumpy 37

**Merlin Mann** (0:08)
Hi, hello, do I sound OK?

**John Siracusa** (0:10)
I'm fine.

**Merlin Mann** (0:11)
OK. Well, I'm not asking you to be weird, I'm asking you for a reason.
I feel like I sound like that.

**John Siracusa** (0:16)
You're not asking me to be weird, I do that all on my own.

**Merlin Mann** (0:20)
You have a T-shirt that says that being weird on request.

**John Siracusa** (0:23)
It's a lot for a T-shirt.

**Merlin Mann** (0:24)
It's just one of being weird on request, it's just one of our services. Is that the line? What's the line? Sarcasm, dot, dot, dot.

**John Siracusa** (0:31)
I don't think I've seen that.

**Merlin Mann** (0:32)
I'll put it in bullets for you. Hi, John. B-b-b-bonus.

**John Siracusa** (0:39)
Yeah, bonus.

**Merlin Mann** (0:41)
Am I in trouble?

**John Siracusa** (0:43)
No, well, probably not.

**Merlin Mann** (0:46)
What? What are you going to yell at me about something?

**John Siracusa** (0:48)
I don't think so. I mean, I can't if you want.

**Merlin Mann** (0:50)
Oh, no, you were just, you're being quiet. Are you waiting for something?

**John Siracusa** (0:56)
No, no, I'm ready. I'm ready to go.

**Merlin Mann** (0:59)
Are you trying to psych me out?

**John Siracusa** (1:00)
I'm not.

**Merlin Mann** (1:01)
Because I think you might have psyched me out. I'm not loving it.

**John Siracusa** (1:04)
You're fine. You're the right amount of psyched. You're not psyched in or out or up or down. You're just exactly in the middle.

**Merlin Mann** (1:10)
I never know how much to prepare for these things. This is a bonus episode. We begin with follow up from Jim, who I'm pretty sure is married to someone I like from Twitter, and I can't remember.

**John Siracusa** (1:23)
That's where I know from as well. Although, like many of the people who I know online, I've never had to say their name out loud, so I put in my guess at the pronunciation of his last name.

**Merlin Mann** (1:31)
Who's his wife? Who is that?

**John Siracusa** (1:32)
Do you remember?

**Merlin Mann** (1:33)
It's not Sadie. Sadie's with Jim Ray.

**John Siracusa** (1:36)
Yeah, no. It's somebody really funny.

**Merlin Mann** (1:38)
It's somebody really funny from Twitter.

**John Siracusa** (1:39)
Yeah, someone who was funny on Twitter.

**Merlin Mann** (1:41)
Who was more famous than him. I really like his. I don't know if you want to correct this without saying anything. There's two slight typos in this.
Just so you know, I didn't change it because I don't.

**John Siracusa** (1:52)
Well, you know, we got to do the last name first. What's your guess? I put in my guess in the document. What do you think?

**Merlin Mann** (1:57)
Would you say Kubaček? Yeah, I think that's right.

**John Siracusa** (2:00)
That's your guess?

**Merlin Mann** (2:01)
I mean, yeah, I mean, that's how you pronounce it.

**John Siracusa** (2:04)
All right. I mean, I don't know. You never know how people pronounce their last names. And again, with online stuff, you'd never even have to say it out loud, let alone every year someone else says it.

**Merlin Mann** (2:12)
I mean, it's funny how, I'll tell you where that happened. I mean, far and away, the thing that happened the most with, I think, in terms of like, I have no idea, is like how to pronounce someone's name. Like, that's the one where I could read somebody's name honestly back in the blog days.
Like, Neil Dash, I could figure out. But you know, I mean, like Jim Kubitschek, like who knows? Or is Jamie Zawinski or whatever.

**John Siracusa** (2:37)
Are you aware of the, I'm tempted to say SEO, but it may predate the term SEO. But the basically, the sub industry of people who are doing web searches for how to pronounce words. Have you ever done this?

**Merlin Mann** (2:54)
You, I don't think I know what you mean. I do know that you often send me things like, you'll send me a YouTube video of a pronunciation and then say you're not sure if it's right.
Yeah, so is it one of those things where like it's like a dictionary attack. It's a dictionary business plan where you just have something pronounced every word, and then eventually it's a long tail.

**John Siracusa** (3:14)
Yeah, I guess this is probably in the SEO age.

**Merlin Mann** (3:17)
I can't believe that kind of stuff still flies.

**John Siracusa** (3:20)
Well, so someone figured out that people Google for how do you pronounce and then insert proper noun, and people Google for that a lot. So someone's like, this is a potential goldmine. What we need to do is basically figure out the top 8,000 things that people say, how do you pronounce, whatever, and make sure that our search results come up as the number one. Oh, I see. I'm sorry.