Ep. 46 Special: Origin of Roderick on the Line
Merlin: Whenever I say your name, when you're not around, I do it to the tune of Nasty Boys by Janet Jackson.
John: I don't know why.
Merlin: I don't care why.
Merlin: I just love it.
Merlin: I'm just glad you think of me.
Merlin: For you, I always do Mercedes boy.
John: How does that go?
Merlin: Let's see.
Merlin: Do you want to ride on my John Roderick?
Merlin: Oh, right.
Merlin: I never realized how dirty your name sounds.
Merlin: You're like Peter O'Toole.
Merlin: I'm stealing that from Groucho Marx.
John: There are so many ways I'm like Peter O'Toole, and a few crucial ways I'm not.
Merlin: You're tall, you're slender, you're English.
Merlin: You were in that Pixar movie I like.
Merlin: Drunk.
Merlin: I enjoy him.
Merlin: I really enjoy him.
Merlin: There's another one on NPR.
Merlin: There's a show that's sponsored by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.
Merlin: I laugh out loud every time I hear that.
Merlin: I want Robert to be a dick name, too, just because if he can get the triple threat.
John: Dick Wood Johnson.
Merlin: His lesser-known brother, Richard.
Merlin: They couldn't name the foundation after him.
Merlin: They found the grants were just disappearing.
Merlin: As you know, I'm not a physicist.
Merlin: Well, you sell yourself short.
Merlin: You're sweet.
Merlin: My question is, do you think there might be some chance that you have some kind of a slight electrical charge that causes any electronic devices in your vicinity to fail?
John: Well, it's interesting.
John: I don't believe in curses, and I'm much more inclined to attribute the fact that all my equipment, my computer equipment in particular, fails.
John: I attribute that to the fact that computers are – computers, although we use them every day and we think that they're great, they are at the level of development –
John: that the airplane was when it was powered by bicycle motors and had had to have seven guys on each wing to get them aloft like we are still at the dawn of this era and these machines my apple here in front of me which i which i love it's very beautiful i'm caressing it now but it is a it is a it is utter horseshit it doesn't do any of the things that it
John: claims to do it doesn't do any of them it doesn't do any of the things that it even manages to eke out it doesn't do those things well and it just sits here on my tabletop as a as like a like a talisman of all of all the the potential I mean I can imagine what it would do I can imagine that my children will will love their computers and watch movies on them live streaming and there will be no glitches
John: But for me, it's just – it's all potential.
John: There's no kinetic energy to these things.
Merlin: I find that baffling.
Merlin: You seem like you – just for what it's worth, I don't know if there's a clinic or something you can go to, but you should check the charge thing because I think you live hard and you play hard.
Merlin: I think you're hard on things.
John: What you're thinking of is sexual chemistry, and that doesn't affect computers.
John: I do have it.
John: It is powerful, but as far as I know, it shouldn't affect the computers.
John: You know what?
John: I would run a connectivity diagnostic to see, but it would only tell me that the computer was having problems and couldn't connect.
John: The word diagnostic means diagnose.
Merlin: You can't tell me what the UW, that's good.
John: The root of diagnostic, diagnose.
Merlin: Diagnose, okay.
John: From the Greek gnos, which means to know what is the problem.
Merlin: And diet, meaning across.
John: Diet, across or to lose weight.
John: And the diagnostic program does nothing.
John: It just tells me that it can't connect.
John: And then there's something else that can't connect.
John: And then pretty soon I'm walking around reading a book out loud to myself and happier, frankly.
Merlin: See, you strike me as somebody who is not a—the term Luddite is overused.
Merlin: You're not a willful Luddite, but you seem to revel in the physical objects of life more than the virtual things.
Merlin: And when you use these tools, you seem to use them for a purpose.
Merlin: I don't see you just kind of sitting around—
Merlin: Well, I don't see you noodling, but then I know you're an MP3 tagger, so you noodle a little.
John: You know, I would dick around on the computer happily, but it just fails to live up to my expectations.
Merlin: I'll see you have big hands.
John: I do have big hands.
Merlin: You might be hitting two keys at once or something.
John: You know what?
John: This whole idea that maybe it's the sexual chemistry thing, I'm going to look into that because it's possible.
John: That has caused me problems in other walks of life.
John: Sure.
John: I mean, it gets me out of traffic tickets when the cop is a woman.
John: Sure.
Merlin: Local Cinemax police department.
Merlin: But here's the thing.
Merlin: The problem is you're going to go to UW.
Merlin: You're going to go to the highly lauded, I believe, sexual chemistry clinic.
Merlin: And there's going to be some lady who's working on a graduate degree.
Merlin: She's probably got her hair in a bun.
Merlin: She's got big, big, big glasses.
Merlin: You're going to walk in there and you're going to say, please, find out what my problem is.
Merlin: Help me.
Merlin: Right.
Merlin: But right there, that's the root of the problem.
Merlin: Before she even gets the clipboard out, the hair is down, the glasses are off.
John: That's right.
John: And she's up on the desk.
John: And then Alex Van Halen plays a drum solo.
John: And then this happens to me on a weekly basis.
John: I don't even know how Alex knows where I am.
John: He seems to always know where I'm going to be.
Merlin: He's good with those.
Merlin: He plays the, in that song, he's talking about the Hopford teacher, he plays like the double kick drum thing.
Merlin: He does that, right?
John: He does, but it isn't a double kick drum.
John: As far as I know... It's a pedal.
Merlin: Double pedal.
Merlin: Double pedal.
John: It's not a double pedal.
John: As far as I know, he is playing that with a single kick drum pedal.
Merlin: He must have outstanding ankles.
John: I bet that's true.
Merlin: He's eventually going to get to an age where he's going to have to get one of those Def Leppard deals.
Merlin: He's going to have to get everything triggered.
John: What, a fake arm?
Merlin: I thought he was just rolling mono.
Merlin: Third arm.
Merlin: You were a big Def Leppard fan back in the day, right?
Merlin: The pre-Pyromania era Def Leppard was big for you.
John: Yeah, Pyromania was the bridge that I had a hard time crossing.
John: Everything before Pyromania I thought was solid gold because it is solid gold.
John: Pyromania now, I look back, I realize it's a great record.
John: At the time, very hard for me to swallow some of those keyboards and all that.
Merlin: Yeah, but the thing is, back in the day, their guitar player was like 15.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: It was amazing.
Merlin: Now, this is all before Shania Twain.
Merlin: Right?
Merlin: This is Mutt Lang.
John: Shania Twain, what are you talking about?
Merlin: My God, I'm going to wash my ears out.
Merlin: Is that record not produced by Robert Mutt Lang, who also did Highway to Hell, I believe?
John: Yeah, but Shania Twain was like 15 years later, I think.
Merlin: Okay, I'm just saying, but you go back, you go back, you listen, even to Bring It On Heartbreak.
Merlin: And there is a certain polished, glitzy shininess to that that you would not hear in Venom.
Merlin: Or your beloved Slayer.
John: You're not going to hear it in Venom, for sure.
John: Yeah, but that polish, you know, ACDC, you can polish ACDC all day long.
John: It's still going to be...
Merlin: I think that's why that record stands up so well, though, is that the songs were tighter.
Merlin: I'm sure he had an influence on that.
Merlin: I mean, I love, you know me, we go back.
Merlin: We go back with the ACDC.
Merlin: But I'm telling you, I think for a post-Bond Scott record, I think that one stands up pretty well.
Merlin: And it's partly because it's very listenable.
John: It's super listenable.
John: And I think what Mutt Lang did then is what producers should do.
John: which is they listen to the band and they say, yeah, that's good.
John: Did you think about trying a little harder next time?
John: Did you think about trying a little harder on the next take?
John: Like, sing it like you mean it and play it like you mean it.
John: Okay, go.
John: And I think in the last 10 years, last 20 years,
John: I mean, every kid with a Macintosh computer and GarageBand now calls himself a producer.
John: Yeah, I know.
John: Present company accepted.
John: Merlin, you are a brilliant producer.
John: But there are a lot of people out there who are actually selling themselves to bands as producers.
John: And the bands come in, they play their song, and the guy turns some reverb on and he goes, sounds great.
John: And it doesn't sound great.
John: But the guy that's recording them doesn't know enough to say one thing or the other.
John: To say, hey, kill that second snare hit or whatever.
John: The little details that good producers add to make good records great.
Merlin: That's what Mike was doing in the old days.
Merlin: And no matter how much I spend, like, I don't know how to describe this, but, like, and I have never done anything I've ever done and recorded since, whatever, 1986, has never been anything as meticulous as what you do because you really do...
Merlin: like you have the ears to hear these little things.
Merlin: And I know you've got that, but I mean like today with the, I love garage band just cause I think of it almost like, I guess it's like the difference between etch a sketch and having a big box of paint.
Merlin: Like I know, I think I know the limitations of this and I just love it cause it's so fast for me and I've gotten really comfortable using it.
Merlin: But you know what's weird is I go back and I'm mostly listening to, oh, this band, what are they called?
Merlin: Cheer Accident I was listening to.
Merlin: And it's like, it's just the latest thing I bought.
Merlin: And, um,
Merlin: It's just, you go back and you listen to any of those, you listen, obviously Pink Floyd's a big sound.
Merlin: Well, you go back and listen to, like, pretty much any record by somebody good, Colton's record.
Merlin: And, like, there's, like, I said in this interview with Colton the other day, like, there's so much, like, personality to every song.
Merlin: They all sound different.
Merlin: It doesn't just sound like somebody selected Stadium in the output setting, you know?
Merlin: And it doesn't, you know, every track's, it's great.
Merlin: It's great for prototyping, but...
Merlin: That's one thing I like about, one of the many things I like about your music, like about your records, is that there is a lot of personality.
Merlin: And I don't know.
Merlin: So on the one hand, we talked about this.
Merlin: We did some interviews a while back, and we talked about how the process works for you at every level.
Merlin: And it seems like there's a contrast between...
Merlin: It seems like you record with relative, I don't know what the word is, but it's not that you're sloppy or something.
Merlin: But like you said, you're not going to do 42 takes of a song.
Merlin: But then it seems like you're very careful in the editing and listening and definitely in the track order process.
Merlin: I mean, you almost seem to function more like an editor in some ways.
John: Well, in terms of how many passes I'm willing to do on a vocal track, you're absolutely right.
John: I won't sit and work on a vocal track as the performer all day.
John: But I will be super meticulous about adding little surprise moments, little teeny tinkles and twinkles.
John: And I think that some of that is that I came of age in the recording process
John: when all that stuff became more and more possible.
John: It's the John Vanderslice-ization of indie rock where you have the time, you have the resources, and you have the inclination to put a keyboard part on a song that will never reappear, that sound doesn't appear anywhere else on the record.
John: It's just a two-second thing that...
John: that you feel like is 100% necessary on this tune.
John: And if you think back to when they recorded The House of the Rising Sun, they got four guys in a room and they said, roll it!
John: And they ran the song and then they started drinking.
John: They didn't spend months and months putting little shit on there.
John: I mean, what they did was they spent months and months rehearsing.
Merlin: um and that's something i guess in indie rock we don't do as much or at least we don't do as much it was also a time though it strikes me that that was a time when yeah it was certainly um more primitive recording conditions but it's something you think this is wrong but i think that's also rock music was not taken as seriously it was not seen as an arty thing like in whatever 1964 65. i mean the beatles were starting that but i mean it wasn't really until 67 68 the people
Merlin: took the time and the, and the polish.
Merlin: And I wonder if in some ways it was just seen as more of a commodity, you know, where Columbia records have this giant roster of people and they must've, and certainly things like Phil Spector.
Merlin: I mean, they must've just said, okay, let's bring a bunch of pros in monkeys, whoever you bring in a bunch of pros and you just plow through this as fast as you can.
John: It's absolutely right.
John: They did not think that 50 years from now, those tunes would still be not just relevant, but like the underpinning foundation of what remains an entire industry of selling music and culture from 50 years ago.
John: I mean, they made House of the Rising Sun, which they didn't write.
John: It was a cover.
John: They did it in one take, and they thought that it would go up the charts.
John: Yeah.
John: and then it would go down the charts, and then that would be the end of it.
John: You'd never hear it again.
John: Or if you did, it would be some Bobby Soxers playing it on their little collapsible record player.
John: No one ever thought that House of the Rising Sun would still be played 10 times a day on every classic rock radio station across the country and across the world, 50 years later, 40 years later.
John: So you're right.
John: They just, they jammed it out and they were like, next.
John: And I think when we make music now in the aftermath of that, we're conscious, I think to our detriment, conscious of the fact that potentially we're making it for history.
John: Potentially one day at the library of Congress, a man will sit down and listen to all the long winter's records and he will identify the keyboard patches and
John: And it will be a matter of some import.
John: Like, you think about it that way unconsciously because of the way we've all minutely dissected the Beatles records and all of those records that we love, the Pink Floyd records.
John: Like, those of us who love recording, God, we know every single microphone they used on every single part and how many takes they did and da-da-da-da-da.
John: And so when you're making music yourself...
John: In light of that, I mean, you almost can't help yourself.
Merlin: That's a pretty high bar, though, if you're sitting around trying to hypothetically, if you're just hypothetically trying to, I don't know, finish a record.
Merlin: That's got to be – I mean, just you must have friends that have struggled with that at one point or another.
John: Oh, we all do.
John: And I think what's – the great bands –
John: and I'm talking about the great bands of now, not the great bands of history, but the great indie rock bands of now, there's always at least one guy in the band that says, or one guy on their team that says, this thing's got to get done by Monday the 11th.
John: And the other guys, if they want to take all the time in the world to screw with the tambourine part, Monday the 11th is a pretty hard – it's a hard date.
John: So that's something that I have lacked being a free – being a sole proprietor and a free agent.
John: no one has the authority to tell me that it's due on Monday the 11th.
John: Some have tried.
John: Many, many have tried.
John: In fact, I've even sent people letters and said, like when you call your wife at work and say, tonight, let's pretend that you are a nurse coming home
John: No, no, no.
John: You're a nurse coming for a house call to help a man who has a problem.
John: Very much like that.
John: I have called some of my friends and said, let's pretend that you have some authority over me and you are going to come...
John: Write me an angry letter or grab me by the shirt collar and tell me that my record has to get done by X day.
John: And my friends have all been good sports about it.
John: And they've showed up at my house in a nurse's costume.
John: And I've said, no, no, I made the what did I send that email to you?
Merlin: Oh, you're looking for some kind of constraint.
John: Yeah, that's right.
John: I'm not looking for... I mean, that's the problem.
John: You can't empower somebody to have power over you.
John: If you are empowering them, then the power is still yours.
John: You can't give them the power and then have it have any effect on you unless you're really into role-playing.
Right.
John: So, yeah, I've tried to get somebody to set a deadline.
John: And up until now, none of it has worked.
John: But just recently, I got an email from my dear friend, John Hodgman.
John: And he said, get your record done by Labor Day.
John: Sincerely, John Hodgman.
John: And for some reason, the succinctness of that and reading it aloud in his voice.
John: which brooks no argument.
John: His voice just naturally brooks no argument.
Merlin: Now you put it that way.
Merlin: It's almost like a headmaster quality.
John: That's right.
John: If John Hodgman tells you something in a definitive voice, you don't.
John: You're not going to like... If you do try and argue with him, you're just going to sound like you're whining.
John: He's going to say, no, your record should be done by Labor Day.
John: Sincerely.
John: That is all.
John: Sincerely, John Hodgman.
John: And it's actually – that has actually had an effect on me.
John: I've been working.
John: I've been writing.
John: Just – I think it's because I hold him in high esteem.
John: And so it's a different – it's not that I tasked him with the job of telling me to do it.
John: He did it sort of independently as a favor.
John: And as a writer who has struggled to complete his own work, he knows –
Merlin: that you just you do you need an artificial wall you know what else it is because he's i've talked about him and i don't know like we're like we're the best friends in the world and we're not he's just a guy who's really nice to me not as tight as you and him but he um he's he he and people like him can have i think can have a tremendous effect not just because of being an expert and former professional literary agent but also it's just it's
Merlin: we've talked about this at length, that you're so surrounded by people, everybody is these days, especially with social media, especially in your rock biz, but you're so surrounded by people who are not precisely sycophantic, but who never really say true things or would never say anything to you that was too far at odds with what they perceive to be
Merlin: your thing.
Merlin: I only say that because to have somebody who you really admire give you a note that shows they care about what you do and are interested in your output, I find that to be a weird smack on the head.
Merlin: And sometimes it makes you want to finish things.
Merlin: Other times it makes you wonder why I'm having trouble finishing it because maybe I don't think it's up to par for somebody like John...
Merlin: You know what I'm saying?
Merlin: Like, to me, that's really complicated.
Merlin: But don't you think, I mean, you've talked at length about this, like so many things.
Merlin: Well, it is.
Merlin: You know, you're surrounded.
Merlin: You've talked about, you know, you got everybody's trying to screw you and, you know, and steal your copper pipe and stuff.
Merlin: And what a great line.
Merlin: We'll put that in show notes.
Merlin: People can go and watch our extremely long interview where you yell at the hippies and drink seltzer.
Merlin: But do you find that to be the case?
Merlin: I mean, you're surrounded by people.
Merlin: Hey, man, that's great.
Merlin: Like, that's so awesome.
Merlin: I really like that thing you do with the thing.
John: Well, yeah, it's just the sycophantic nature of our culture now is based on this false idea that nobody can handle the bad news.
John: Nobody wants anyone to yell at them.
John: And so they're, so they work very hard to never say anything controversial, to never say anything that, that might possibly inspire someone to yell at them back, you know?
John: And so people are talking to each other in this, in this, this, uh, language of like completely veiled meaning all the time in a friendly talk, happy, friendly talk all the time.
John: And I'm talking about specifically in the arts in the West, uh,
John: And artists have a tendency to do it because they, to varying degrees, they all end up feeling screwed at one time or another by an interviewer.
John: This has happened to you, I know.
Merlin: Yeah, you reveal something that you would consider, you're trying to be honest, and this isn't just me, it's everybody, but you say something...
Merlin: And, you know, obviously, some of the interviews, you assume that they're interested in something.
Merlin: You want to say something that you haven't said before.
Merlin: And by exposing yourself, I'm sure this has happened to you a million times, by exposing yourself, you get some kind of silly reaction.
John: Yeah, they take the thing where you say, oh, that guy's a dick, and they make it the headline.
Merlin: of their article and you go no I don't think that guy's a dick especially if somebody came in going like the story the the I feel like my assignment for this story is to get to basically hang out and wait and go mm-hmm until this person gives me the quote that I'm looking for yeah best evidenced by things like I had an interview once that just I just stopped it after like
Merlin: Because the person was like, would you say that you have really kind of invented the productivity space online with a blog that has been as jaw-droppingly successful as yours has been?
Merlin: And I said to this personally, not only would I not say that, but I just can't even articulate to you how important it is that you not even pretend that I said that.
Right.
Merlin: And this is why I, as usual with interviews, I won't name names because there's a lot of names that can be named when talking with you.
Merlin: But I know on at least a couple occasions you have basically said, okay, this interview is over.
Merlin: I'm going to write it and send it to you.
Merlin: That will be the interview you publish.
Merlin: I have done that.
Merlin: There's one I really liked.
Merlin: It was a little short interview in a well-known indie periodical.
Merlin: And I read it and I was like, man, that was a great interview.
Merlin: You don't always, you know, people don't always get you.
Merlin: And you're like, yeah, well, I wrote it for him.
John: Yeah.
John: I said, you know what?
John: I'm going to make this easy on us both.
John: I'm just going to write your questions and my answers, and it'll work out great.
John: Don't worry.
John: I'll write your questions in your voice.
John: Don't worry.
Merlin: I'll do this.
Merlin: Sometimes when somebody asks me for an interview, I'll start by mailing them back written pull quotes.
Merlin: I mean, the whole industry is an artifice.
Merlin: It's not like we're sitting around talking about folk dancing or something.
Merlin: This is people who call you at the last conceivable moment for their deadline,
Merlin: And are looking for something that they can jam into 200 words or whatever.
Merlin: In most cases, right, if you're in like an actual magazine or something, it's not going to be some long – setting aside like that wonderful stranger interview years ago, you're not going to get like a 5,000-word.
John: Oh, well, but even if you do – I mean the interview that comes to mind for me, I did a long feature.
John: in a national magazine at one point about, uh, about some other musicians that I had just been touring with in Spain.
John: And they were, you know, they were sort of legendary characters.
John: And this interviewer was, he was a super nice guy and a smart guy.
John: And we sat and just talked all day.
John: And it was, it had, it would, it had been a very candid conversation.
John: tour you know we were on tour together and i was there kind of in a junior capacity just like just sort of feeling lucky to be there and everybody on the tour was really great they they embraced me please don't please don't eat off matthew's craft services wasn't like that at all you know and uh and by the end of the tour we were just like you know we we were speaking to each other
John: uh, as you do old friends.
John: So I'm giving this interview a long feature interview and this, and the, um, the interviewer knows all about this tour.
John: And so he's, he's asking me all these questions like, so what was it like?
John: And I, I, I'd only been back a week or so from this thing.
John: So I'm still in this mindset, like I'm incredibly close friends with these guys.
John: My God, these guys, there's just a bunch of nuts and they're drunks and they're
John: well, these guys are just a bunch of... And this guy's writing it down note for note.
John: And this massive article about me comes out, like heralding the release of my new record.
John: And all the pull quotes are like, so anyway, these guys are total drunks.
John: And I get some angry phone calls from these people.
John: saying like what the you know we let you into our our little scene and uh and this is you know the this huge national article and you're talking about us all through the thing and i was like but but no i i was i thought we were i was doing it all like haha like we're friends
John: And they were like, boo.
John: And there are a couple of guys from that scene that still, I mean, the guys from that whole world that I was genuinely close to understood.
John: And it probably wouldn't have happened to them because they wouldn't have been, they would never have let their guard down that way in an interview.
John: And it did happen to me.
John: And it sort of cauterized me a little bit.
John: Particularly about talking about other people.
John: I'll still let my guard down that way talking about myself.
John: But if somebody says, so what do you think of Merlin Mann?
John: I'm not going to say.
Merlin: He looks bony in his underwear.
John: He's a four-flusher and a double dealer.
John: And he is... His bacon sucks.
John: He's a shitty bacon cook and I think worst dad in the world.
John: What about that?
John: Yeah.
John: Worst dad in the world.
John: You can quote me on that.
John: I'm not going to do that anymore, you know, because you don't have any power over how that gets received.
John: But there are these guys, guys who I respected and guys who I still respect and guys who I enjoyed their company,
John: who if i meet them at some big rock thing like i did i ran into one of them in the lobby of a hotel in barcelona one time and he kind of was like oh hey and i and on you there's only so many times you can like fall let me guess in a slightly indeterminate european accent oh hey oh hey
John: You know, you can't every time you see the guy grab him again and say, look, I'm still really sorry I called you a drunk in that magazine, even though you are a drunk.
John: But I know that's just between you, me, and everybody that's ever met you.
John: But come on.
Merlin: See, here's the thing, John.
Merlin: This is an occupational hazard for you that I think you should turn into an occupational benefit.
Merlin: Because you are... It's an opportunity stakes.
Merlin: It's an opportunity stakes.
Merlin: No, that's funny.
Merlin: Good.
Merlin: That's a good one.
Merlin: I know.
Merlin: I did my Bob Odenkirk impression the other day, and I was really embarrassed.
Merlin: But to foodie break, here's the thing.
Merlin: You can play sly about this, but I know how much you enjoy being the bull in the china closet.
Merlin: And the part that makes that complicated is not the bull, but the china closet.
Merlin: I mean, sometimes maybe I think you're in the wrong store.
Merlin: And I told you a long time ago, I think you're coming around to this now that you are a pundit.
Merlin: But I've said a long time ago, like I told you, I consider you our generation's Charles Nelson Reilly.
Merlin: Like I think you should, I think if there is a venue, you know what I mean?
Merlin: You're the kind of person that would have been on Mike Douglas and whatever, Jack.
Merlin: I would have enjoyed that.
Merlin: You know what I'm saying, though?
Merlin: See, I consider you, and pundit's the wrong word, a bon vivant or a raconteur or some other kind of slightly gay word.
Merlin: That's nice.
Merlin: I think of you, no, in a good way.
Merlin: The thing is, this is the thing about you, and this has been my counsel to you for 16 years now or however long it's been, is that you, it seems to me that creating excellent rock music is a facet of what you do.
Merlin: And I just want to say, I think there was a time when you pooh-poohed that because you regarded yourself and clearly that was your employment.
Merlin: You've been putting out these great records for one way or another since the late 90s.
Merlin: And I just wonder, has that changed?
Merlin: I see you being a funny guy on Twitter now.
Merlin: I see you going and doing a report from Bonnaroo.
Merlin: You had a column in, was it The Believer?
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: But you're doing more stuff where by virtue of the fact that you are a bull in a china closet, that attracts people to want you to go and put that voice somewhere that's not just around a lot of, as you've called it, don't yell at me music.
John: Yeah.
John: Well, I think that's inevitable because I do like to talk.
John: I like to hear the sound of my own voice.
John: Yes.
John: And I like to open up a newspaper and read the smart thing that I said to someone, accurately transcribed with the correct punctuation.
John: But also, I think the world...
John: The world has a lot of people who have arrived on the scene and said, I am a maker of opinions.
John: And that is only appealing so far because it begs the question every time, why do I give a fuck about your opinion?
John: I have an opinion too.
John: Everybody's got one.
John: And what the world doesn't have a lot of is people who have made enough stuff that you can have a sense of where they're coming from, that they are a maker of things.
John: So when they venture an opinion about something else, you have some context to judge whether or not you consider that person an authority.
John: You know, for the Internet...
John: the people whose opinions I value about pretty much any topic are people who have done any work of any kind in their own venue.
John: So I used to write film reviews for The Stranger, which is the alternative newspaper up here in Seattle, before I got my column for The Weekly, which is the other alternative newspaper in Seattle.
John: But The Stranger would send me to review documentary films
John: And they did it because I knew nothing about documentary films.
John: but they liked that I had a voice that stemmed from being an artist.
John: So I would watch these documentary films, and I wouldn't have the language of a film critic.
John: I wouldn't sit there and say, ah, this film is just a copy of this other French film that happened 25 years ago and negates the need for this film.
John: I had none of that.
John: I would watch the film, and I would judge it on my own...
John: and on the merits of what I saw.
John: And so when I look out at the internet, you know, when I see you comment on something or when I see Amy Mann comment on something or when I see Paul F. Tompkins comment on something or Hodgman or any of the people that we know who started creating, who started making art at some point or another in their lives and had success in
John: Had success either early or late based on the merits of the thing that they were like compelled to make.
John: All of a sudden, their opinion is like gold to me on any topic.
John: You know, I would listen to Amy Mann talk about the climate change.
John: Well...
John: Maybe not climate change, but I would listen to Amy Mann talk about a whole... Talk about things that are real, John.
John: That's right.
John: I don't want to hear her talk about a hoax like climate change, but I want to hear her talk about kind of what's ever on her mind.
Merlin: She's been interesting and independent for a really long time.
Merlin: So she's someone, and I think I know the kind of folks you're talking about, the kind of folks you and I will follow on Twitter or have conversations with.
Merlin: And it's – you're right.
Merlin: I mean it's people – I totally agree with you.
Merlin: And this is a theme that I notice a lot of my friends seem to share or at least say they share, which is that personally – A lot of your friends are liars, you mean.
Merlin: Yes.
Merlin: Yes.
Merlin: I mean I wouldn't have it any other way.
Merlin: Otherwise, I don't think I could tolerate it.
Merlin: But the – I think a lot of people I know and admire would say –
Merlin: That it's not even that I – I don't even have to like what you do.
Merlin: On some level, I may not even need to totally understand what you do.
Merlin: But I love – this is kind of a rehash of what you said.
Merlin: But I'm very interested in talking to anybody about what they do, especially if they're really good at it.
Merlin: And to hear them speak in some specificity about –
Merlin: things like contrast distinctions quality difference and and these are the kinds of things that that you know this is extremely reductive thing to say but there's a lot of stuff on the internet that really is about a thumbs up they may not even give you a thumbs down there's not really there's not a huge amount of nuance you run into this all the time on twitter with some very funny holocaust related material and i think i think the i think
Merlin: Not necessarily a Holocaust.
Merlin: I'm like the Warsaw Ghetto.
Merlin: But the point being, like, do you know what I'm saying?
Merlin: Somebody like you, like, part of what makes you so amusing to the people who think you're amusing is that there really is something very, very wry about it that is not going to travel well in a retweet to somebody for whom English is not a first language.
Merlin: So that might get passed around more like that.
Merlin: I don't know.
Merlin: I wonder what you think about that because you strike me as somebody with a lot of curiosity about, gosh, just so many things that people do that are not indie rock and Twitter.
Merlin: And do you think there's a thread there?
Merlin: I mean it seems to me that these are people who are interested in real things and saying real things more than simply miming what seems to be something other people would expect from them.
John: Well, it's hard on the listener if, I mean, a lot of the things that I say, this podcast, for instance, I'm sure, burns a lot of people's ears because they're not used to hearing people talk in a tone of voice even that is contentious without it devolving into a fight.
John: You know, and you and I can sit and talk for six hours and to somebody sitting at the table next to us, it would sound like we were having an argument the entire time.
John: It's the Larry David problem.
John: Everything out of both of our mouths sounds like it's some kind of, you know, we're making some contention.
John: And the other person, you do this to me all the time.
John: You're like, no, no, no, no, no.
John: And then you agree with me.
John: I don't know.
Merlin: But you know what it is?
Merlin: I think it's perceived, and this is not peculiar to you and me, but I think loudmouths like us, I think when, in a certain context, it can come out as, yes, a judgment, but a judgment that really demands a response.
Merlin: And I want to make a slight bridge to a bigger and broader point here, which is that I – getting to your stuff you've done, your record you're working on, some changes you've had in your life.
Merlin: But I wonder if in some ways it's this expectation of a certain kind of familiarity where it could be vanilla or it could be French vanilla or it could be vanilla with strawberries.
Merlin: But like it still needs to be that one flavor.
Merlin: And if you're expecting – it's almost like you hand somebody – they think they're getting an iced tea, but you hand them a Dr. Pepper.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: And their palate is not really ready for that.
Merlin: And I don't think there's anything wrong with them.
Merlin: It's not anything wrong with us.
Merlin: It's just that that's not the way that a lot of people talk to each other.
Merlin: And the thread I'm trying to find through a lot of this is it seems like today it feels like there's a lot of advantage to fostering familiarity.
Merlin: And that goes right back to putting out animals' records because we know that'll sell.
John: But it's also the balkanizing of...
John: the balkanizing and, and repackaging and fetishizing of really small cultures that, uh, and sort of the, the, the, um, the, the constant pandering that entertainment does to us now, you know, there, there's very little, there's very little in the way of music or, um, or film that, um,
John: And in a lot of ways, or novel writing, that is genuinely challenging.
John: We're all pretty self-aware now, and we're all pretty cynical.
John: And so what we want is to talk about Star Wars.
John: And what we want is somebody to write the feel-good movie of the summer.
John: And nobody wants, I mean, there is no modern Oscar Wilde because, you know, who was a polymath and a social critic and a, you know, like you say, a contrarian, but also a contrarian in realms that were truly dangerous, you know, that he ultimately was put on trial for.
John: And convicted and imprisoned.
John: And none of those those stakes don't really exist in the same way.
John: So somebody can be a social critic and a polymath and a bon vivant and either you like him or you don't change the channel.
John: I'm going to go listen to the polymath that I think is funny.
John: And so with that, you lose the frision of kind of being captivated by somebody that you don't like or captivated by somebody whose opinion gets under your skin.
John: And that has an effect on the creators, right?
John: So a lot of the people on Twitter that I respect, God, they work so hard for a thumbs up.
John: Everybody on the internet is just trying to get a thumbs up.
John: And frankly, I don't give a about a thumbs up.
John: And what happens then is that you risk not having 250,000 Twitter followers because a lot of people are like, I give that a thumbs down.
John: Goodbye.
John: And it's over.
John: Your relationship with them is over.
John: They're never going to come back.
John: They read one thing you wrote about some inconsequential thing.
John: They misinterpreted it in the first place.
John: Because they don't know you, they don't know your context.
John: And all of a sudden you're just, well, you're off their list.
John: And so there is no room for, sir, I take umbrage at what you've said.
John: But I admire the language you used.
John: So continue on.
Merlin: It's almost like if The Clash started today, they wouldn't be successful unless Joe Strummer followed you back.
Merlin: Because now, I mean, what I'm –
Merlin: Gathering from what you're saying in part is that – gosh, even five years ago this was different.
Merlin: But it's funny how today, partly from market forces, partly from social media, partly from all of this – the sort of sub-markets you discuss, the –
Merlin: Whether it's a consumer of toots or a consumer of downloads or a consumer of anything, in some ways, don't you think that the consumer sets the expectation in a way that's really fundamentally different than the producers have historically been used to?
John: Oh, absolutely.
Merlin: I'm not saying that's good or bad or like you want to respond by pandering to that.
Merlin: No, but you know what I'm saying?
Merlin: I mean there was a time when part of what made punk rock so bracing for people, setting aside the economic conditions in England and stuff like that, part of it was the confrontational part of that.
Merlin: Part of what made – continues to make – like Marcel Duchamp is still mind-boggling to me.
Merlin: Like I forget about Marcel Duchamp.
Merlin: Then I'll go look at his stuff and especially I'll read about his stuff.
Merlin: and I mean, gosh, maybe even more than Picasso.
Merlin: He was doing stuff, and I'm not just talking about the urinal.
Merlin: I'm just talking about everything he did was just a thing that he did, and he wasn't worried about whether you got it.
Merlin: He was really, but I think it would be hard not to have seen almost everything in the Dada's and all that.
Merlin: It was really hard not to see everything they did as being somewhat confrontational by design, and I think that kind of, talk about new wave movies, whatever.
Merlin: These are things that were meant to challenge
Merlin: Your expectations of the medium and to make you rethink at a pretty deep level how you see and process this stuff.
Merlin: You know, there's one last thing.
Merlin: Wild, gosh, Wild is such a great character.
Merlin: There is –
Merlin: An essay he wrote a long time ago called The Soul of Man Under Socialism.
Merlin: Or was it that or The Artist's Critic?
Merlin: But there's one where he wrote about how after the Impressionists, you never see water the same way again.
Merlin: And I happen to think that's true.
Merlin: Once you've really seen a giant S. Monet at...
Merlin: you know, at MoMA or something, you don't, water looks like an impressionist painting now.
Merlin: I mean, part of the role, sorry to babble, but the part of the role of art has always been to help you reshape the way that you see things.
Merlin: And you're not going to fundamentally have an impact with people if you're mainly trying to iterate on something that won't be too jarring to people.
John: That's true, except that you'll never see water the same way again after you've seen the Impressionists.
John: But there was only one time in history where one minute there were no Impressionists and then there were.
John: And Oscar Wilde was there for that.
John: Now, we're taken to see Impressionist paintings in museums when we're five years old on kindergarten tours.
John: And so for us personally...
John: in a lot of ways, there never was a time that we saw water without also knowing about the Impressionists.
John: And the Impressionistic paintings of water ultimately are, now we see them as kind of a close-up, used as a backdrop for a Coca-Cola ad or whatever, and the impact of those things and the amazement of
John: That's absolutely still possible, but it requires more work.
John: You don't just get introduced to it and sit there and have your mind blown anymore.
John: You have to stare at it and go back to a place where your mind is capable of being blown in order to have it be blown again.
John: Because your eye can see this stuff just as wallpaper.
John: Speaking of Duchamp, I went with a good friend of mine, the musician John Wesley Harding,
John: who is also the novelist Wesley Stace.
John: He took me to the Philadelphia Museum of Art collection of Duchamp stuff earlier this year.
John: And I spent, it took me a half an hour just being in the presence of the work to reset my brain so that I could even look at it without thinking.
John: without just seeing it as all the things that were derived from it without seeing it as as just a bunch of construction paper or just somebody like trying out some ideas i mean i had to sit with it and this is true i think of any art frankly yeah it's definitely true of of paintings and i think it's really true of poetry um
Merlin: And my 20th century painting teacher, best class I took in college, really got this through me when she put these slides up and she'd say, okay, this Helen Frankenthaler color field thing you're looking at is – it's going to look really faded on this old slide.
Merlin: But when you see one of these – like when you see your first Van Gogh and you see the impasto and you see there's like almost half an inch of paint at some points, you get, oh my gosh, this guy really – this guy was really –
Merlin: He had a lot going on.
Merlin: This is more than just a blue and yellow thing of a field.
Merlin: You can really see this guy's soul in these little pointy bits of paint.
Merlin: And with poetry, hearing Richard Hugo read Degrees of Grey in Phillipsburg is really different than scanning it on a Tumblr page.
Merlin: It's very, very different.
John: So now extend that to some indie rock music that took three years to write and record.
John: And, you know, and imagine how many people are going to rip it into their iTunes and give it even one thousandth that much attention, you know, clear their mind, put it on, not be listening to it while they're surfing the Internet, not be listening to it while they're doing dishes.
Merlin: I have to jump in here.
Merlin: I was at your house.
Merlin: We're at your mom's house.
Merlin: I remember sitting in the dining room.
Merlin: And you were like, okay, like I've done before, I'm going to let you listen to this.
Merlin: I'm going to let you listen to this.
Merlin: When was Departure and Teaspoon?
Merlin: What era was it?
Merlin: I know Teaspoon.
John: That would have been early 2006.
Merlin: Okay, so we sit down, you've got like a CD or something, and we sit down.
Merlin: And every single time, you've been very generous with letting me, you sent me stuff that's not out that I love, and like, you would get so pissed that I would not, like you, just sit and literally just listen to the music.
John: Yeah.
John: Eyes closed, head down.
Merlin: Yes, yes, absolutely.
Merlin: And I've done that with you.
Merlin: I've been like, you gotta listen to this.
Merlin: And you're like, well, turn off the TV, don't do anything.
Merlin: And all I can hear is a little bit of,
Merlin: from the, you know, bleed from the headphones and you breathing very, very loudly, which I don't know if you know you do that, very, very loudly.
Merlin: And you sit there and 100% of your attention goes to that.
Merlin: And I'm just thinking when you're committing something like the commander thinks aloud to tape, to hard drive, like you must, you really are thinking, I have to guess about some version of you sitting there with the headphones on, breathing heavily and really focusing 100%.
Merlin: And that's what you make, though.
Merlin: You're not making stuff for somebody to listen to once on a jog and a shuffle.
Merlin: You're trying to create some... I'm projecting here.
Merlin: But it strikes me that that's a big part of what you do.
John: When I'm sitting in the studio, I'm absolutely making the music for the person that is either sitting in a dark room with their headphones on, listening to it with their eyes closed, or driving in a car...
John: with the stereo on super loud, driving through some vineyards in Northern California.
John: No wonder it takes you so long to put out a record.
John: That's who I'm making it for.
John: The vineyard people.
John: That's right, my people.
John: But as a writer, the feedback I get from people is, oh my god,
John: I, for the last three weeks, every time I get on the Stairmaster, my iTunes brings up one of your tunes.
John: And so I started thinking of you guys as like my Stairmaster band.
John: And that is so awesome.
John: Now I love you guys.
John: That's such a giant compliment though, John.
John: It's a massive compliment.
John: I don't take it the wrong way at all.
John: But it's so not how I consume things that I love or media of any kind that I have to just let that be.
John: Because I cannot find an entry point for myself into that.
John: Like, you're Stairmaster Band.
John: Cool.
Merlin: Mine was always Interpol.
John: Was your Stairmaster band?
Merlin: Well, when they first put out that Bright Lights record, and I was exercising for a very short window of time, it was always Interpol.
John: You know, I opened for those guys once, and they were dicks.
Merlin: Yeah.
John: That's really not that surprising to me.
John: It was a long time ago.
John: They were young.
John: They might be really nice guys now, but they were total dicks.
John: They seriously were like, had their manager come and say...
John: That bowl of corn chips is Interpol's bowl of corn chips.
John: So can you guys stop eating those corn chips?
Merlin: Well, they changed a lot.
Merlin: I used to like them a lot better when they were called Joy Division.
Merlin: They did a thing with Peter Hook.
Merlin: I know it's played out.
Merlin: I'm trying to find the thread and the opportunity to jump.
Merlin: Can I jump around a little bit?
Merlin: Do you mind?
John: Let's just jump.
John: Don't find a thread.
Merlin: Just leap into the void.
Merlin: i'm trying john i know you find me scattered i know other people find me scattered and and uh i i don't always get this opportunity with you we've talked before about how we need to what is that what is that does that say it's my little bell that i keep on my desk so that when i need to reset i go and then is that right yeah and then i have this one if i really need to reset
Merlin: You're in a totally different head space.
Merlin: I have no context for wrapping my head around any of your bell-related activity.
Merlin: This sounds completely at odds.
Merlin: That sounded like, could you please check me into this small motel bell.
Merlin: That's right.
Merlin: That's right.
Merlin: How many bells do you have on your desk, John Roderick?
John: On my desk right now, I just have those two bells, but around the house, I have probably 40 bells.
Merlin: Nope.
Merlin: No, no.
Merlin: That's a pen on a glass.
Merlin: It's a pencil on an Incredible Hulk glass.
Merlin: Good job.
Merlin: Next question.
Merlin: Let's go to the lightning round.
Merlin: Gosh, there's so much I want to talk to you about.
Merlin: We talked a lot.
Merlin: We've got to start this.
Merlin: Don't talk.
Merlin: Don't talk.
Merlin: My idea for a podcast, we've still got to do this.
Merlin: Roderick on the line.
Merlin: It's just you and me talking on the phone.
Merlin: Once a week we put it out.
Merlin: We've got to do this.
John: Are we doing that right now?
Merlin: Well, you're on a podcast that I do right now.
Merlin: And so this is not precisely that.
John: We're going to do a different podcast where we do the same thing.
Merlin: Yeah, eventually everyone will have several podcasts.
Merlin: I think eventually.
John: I'm excited about it.
John: I did a podcast the other day.
Merlin: Really?
Merlin: Did you make a pod?
Merlin: Did you make an RSS?
Merlin: It was somebody else's pod.
Merlin: I did make an RSS.
Merlin: Can I ask whose pod you were on?
John: I did an online podcast.
Merlin: I had a pretty good online this morning.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: Had a lot of peeves last night.
John: I like doing onlines.
John: It was a podcast called Air Raid.
John: A young guy, indie rock guy up here in Seattle, asked me to come do his podcast and talk for a long time.
John: He had it set up in such a way, though, that every time you moved your chair...
John: the microphone would vibrate for like 30 seconds.
Merlin: I got a shock mount.
Merlin: I got a shock mount on this thing.
John: Well, he had a shock mount on it and then he amount he, so the mic is on a shock mount and then he mounted the shock mount to the table that we were both sitting at.
John: So if you, if you, if you, if you hit the table with your hand, it, it just, it vibrated through the whole system.
John: I was like, did you think about mounting that to something else?
Yeah.
Merlin: I'm going to send you a picture of my setup.
Merlin: I've got that Rode Podcaster and a shock mount.
Merlin: It's on one of those little crappy ones you would use to make a kick drum with a really heavy bass with a little short boom.
John: Hit your table right now with your hand.
Merlin: Okay.
Merlin: Okay, so you can hear the table, but I think you probably didn't... It didn't come through the mic at all.
Merlin: Okay, but the thing is, here's the real trick.
Merlin: Hang on.
Merlin: Okay, so this is, as I've posted before, this is sitting on top... I'm trying to get a page count here.
Merlin: It's sitting on top of the giant-sized X-Men...
Merlin: book.
Merlin: It's on a two and a half inch book from the classic period of the X-Men.
John: And I think that helps... You're pandering to your audience right now.
John: No, I'm not.
Merlin: I haven't read the whole thing, but it offsets, I think, a lot of the vibrations.
Merlin: Um...
John: Yeah, I have my speakers, my monitor speakers in my studio sitting on top of, both of them are on top of stacks of Beatles books.
John: Books about the Beatles, that is.
Merlin: I can't get enough of those.
Merlin: You know, one of those, gosh, no, never mind, never mind, I'm going to be on topic.
Merlin: Did you know that I'm on topic guy now?
Merlin: Did you know that?
John: That's awesome.
John: Mm-hmm.
John: Do you have a, let me guess, there's a post-it note above your desk that has written on, in Sharpie, on topic, exclamation, exclamation point.
Merlin: I have incredibly chaotic drawings by my daughter that suck over my desk, and I just keep – I stare at them and hope she'll get better someday.
Merlin: I want her to be better.
John: That whole business about kids being natural artists and the artistic impulse is beat out of them by our patriarchal society, that's shit.
John: Kids are terrible artists.
John: Yes.
John: And –
John: making artists hard work and and if you're listening to this and you have a kid um i would just i would discourage them not in an obvious way not a mean way but in a very subtle way yeah i would just go don't discourage them because you want better for them than the life of an artist no discourage them so that they get out of the way of actual artists who are working hard you're saying it's a signal signal noise problem
John: I think it is.
Merlin: There's a noise I make a lot when my daughter does things.
Merlin: I go, eww.
Merlin: You know what's funny?
Merlin: Our kid goes to a pretty cool, that's a very cool preschool, a little co-op we do.
Merlin: Is it run by Jewish people?
Merlin: No, it's not.
Merlin: And it's also not run by hippies, and it's not run by cultists, which is different from almost every preschool I've been to.
Merlin: Most of the other preschools, they want you to read a book.
Merlin: Well, this is very interesting.
Merlin: You know, when the children want to be on the same swing, we let them talk about it and then we write their names on a list and they, oh, shut up.
Merlin: This place is very sensible, but you know, it's funny.
Merlin: One day I was in there on my work day and I saw this thing on the wall and like so many great things in my life.
Merlin: First, I was angry and then I thought it was awesome.
Merlin: And it was this big thing.
Merlin: and admittedly a little hippie and it's like something like how to talk to your kid about their thing they're drawing their art or whatever uh and at first i was like all like because it was so antithetical to how i've been doing because i'm i'm totally that oh my god that's awesome that's great oh my gosh is that that looks just is that a face it looks like is that mommy or whatever i used to do that and it never no no we're still she'd go yeah
Merlin: Oh, right.
Merlin: And so here's the thing.
Merlin: And I don't know if you will find this useful with your youngster, but I what it said was instead, don't take a minute.
Merlin: First of all, take a minute and look at it and do not jump right into making a remark about what it quote unquote is, let alone making a value judgment.
Merlin: But you just say to them, wow, that's really cool.
Merlin: You made a bunch of red lines there and da-da-da and encourage them to talk about it.
Merlin: Now, first, I thought that was really hippie and dumb, but I've decided that that's actually a good idea because sometimes kids are just scribbling.
John: Right.
John: No, I think it's an incredible idea.
John: I mean, I actually try really hard, and this is a weird thing to say, but I try really hard not to say, good, good.
John: I'm terrible at that.
John: I do that all the time.
John: Because, you know, why the fuck does she name it, you know?
John: I mean, I understand there's a thousand people right now composing angry emails to you saying you need to say good to your kid.
Merlin: I think actually, John, the conventional wisdom is increasingly to not do that.
Merlin: But you can go too far.
Merlin: I read something.
Merlin: You're always supposed to say, encourage the effort.
Merlin: Oh, you're supposed to encourage the effort.
John: There are so many ways that my kid knows that I approve of her.
John: that, you know, it feels like it's just a reflexive action, like, good, good, good!
Merlin: You know what I worry about?
Merlin: I worry about raising a kid that just worries about trying to please me.
Merlin: As much as I am incredibly self-involved, I worry that when I do that, it's not even so much I'm going to crush her artistic ambitions, like she's going to do whatever she does, but I do worry about her thinking the only yardstick for that is whether other people thought it was good.
John: Right, right.
John: Well, yeah, exactly.
John: I think one of the things that I appreciate most about my parents and particularly my mother was that when I was working on something like art, something artistically, you know, she would back out of the room and close the door.
John: There wasn't... She didn't sit there and say, what are you doing now?
John: Well, what is that?
John: Is that a tree?
John: I mean, she didn't do any of that.
John: And when I was done, she put it up on the refrigerator, but there wasn't a...
John: She recognized that that was not necessarily another opportunity for parent-child interaction.
Merlin: That was your thing.
John: That was what I was doing, and I was fine.
John: Let it ride.
Merlin: This is a new segment I call Bizarra Marcia Roderick Theater.
Merlin: Are you ready?
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: John, John, is that about a space shuttle crash?
Merlin: Is that about the Challenger or the, I get it mixed up.
Merlin: Is it the Challenger, right?
John: The what?
Merlin: The Commander Thinks Aloud.
Merlin: It's more, I actually had to Google this because I wasn't even sure which is which, but you're a little younger than me.
Merlin: Was that about the Columbia or the Challenger, would you say?
Merlin: If you can say, if you're comfortable talking about it.
Merlin: I'm talking about, just so you know, first of all, you're listening to John Roderick, who I will never admit is my favorite songwriter and artist today because he's a dick.
John: Yeah, you don't want to tell me that.
John: No.
John: He's going to be like, can I come stay with you in San Francisco for free for several weeks, Merlin?
Merlin: Oh my God, I miss that so much.
Merlin: I would love it if your mom would take care of our stupid daughter and you would just come and hang out with me again.
Merlin: I miss it so much.
John: That's what we should do.
John: We should put both of our daughters in a little box and put it in my mom's living room.
Merlin: Not a mean box.
Merlin: A nice box.
John: My mom has nice boxes.
Merlin: Your mom is so practical.
Merlin: I love your mom.
Merlin: She's so straight.
Merlin: Even when she talks about how much she loves your kids, she's very...
Merlin: We had a little visit when I accidentally called her number instead of yours, and she seemed really happy, but she's also really like, yep, she's still her.
Merlin: She's still very practical.
John: She has a room in the basement where she keeps the good boxes for friends' kids.
Merlin: I get in trouble with my wife for keeping what I call quote-unquote good boxes.
Merlin: You can't throw that out.
Merlin: That's a good box.
John: That's a perfectly good box.
Merlin: Would we be going too personal to talk a little bit about these things?
John: The song was about the space shuttle Columbia, which is one of two space shuttles that crashed.
John: The other one being the Challenger, but the Columbia is the one that disintegrated on re-entry, whereas the Challenger is the one that disintegrated shortly after launch.
John: And so...
John: Yeah, I've had a very interesting relationship to this song just recently.
John: It was one of those songs, you get lucky sometimes that you write a song that has the capacity to make you cry multiple times as you're performing it.
John: And I know that all songwriters, there's one or two songs in their repertoire that if they really dig into it while they're performing it, it can make them very emotional like it does the crowd.
Merlin: For people who have not been with you since the very beginning, people I encounter, it's a lot of people's favorite Long Winter song.
John: Yeah, and I understand that.
John: It's somewhat atypical of a Long Winter song in that it doesn't have any guitars on it.
Merlin: Does it have literally three chords?
Merlin: It's a 1-5-4, the whole song.
John: Yeah, for six minutes long.
John: And it's atypical of a Long Winter song in that it's about a real event that was on the news.
Merlin: It was about a specific real-world thing.
Merlin: It just seems like that's not your wheelhouse.
John: Not normally.
John: But this was a song... Normally what I do is I use metaphor...
John: to take a, take small personal events and turn them into bigger things that we can use to talk about, talk about real feelings, you know?
John: And, and that's what metaphor is so good at.
John: You can, you can say, well, that, that, that girl stepped on my toe.
John: And if I wrote a song that was like, that girl stepped on my toe, it would, it would be a, a Jack Black song, first of all, but it would be not a very interesting song for the long haul.
Um,
John: But so you utilize metaphor and you turn the girl into the Hungarians and you turn your toe into the great, you know, the banat and the great steps of Central Europe.
John: And all of a sudden you're writing a song that sounds very big.
John: and it's coming from a place that's very small.
John: The Columbia was an event that was actual and big, and you couldn't metaphorize it.
John: There was nothing you could... You couldn't use a metaphor because any metaphor you would use would be smaller than the actual thing.
John: And as I was writing the song, I realized that the Columbia was an actual event that you could...
John: you could both talk about it in really small, discrete little scenes.
John: And it also, it functioned as a kind of reverse version
John: Like what happened to them on that spaceship and how that spaceship crash affected us all, in little ways was like a relationship breaking up or like one person's life kind of seen from beginning to end.
John: So it was sort of a reverse of what normal songwriting would look like.
Merlin: Yeah, absolutely.
Merlin: And that chorus is so memorable, whatever those five or six words of the chorus.
Merlin: But what else is there?
Merlin: There's that one line, something like – There's no words in the chorus.
John: It just goes, yeah.
Merlin: What do you call the – oh, so what do you call it?
Merlin: Do you call it the coda?
Merlin: Yeah, the coda, right.
Merlin: All right, sorry.
Merlin: Interesting.
Merlin: music guy like you like you know anything about like you know anything about music um but the part the part that always gets me is the something like uh can you feel it we're almost home something like that which is like it's just so like there's whatever i'm being all chris farley but if it works on a lot of levels uh and also just that whole idea of um this time when when america was so full of hope because of that impossibility of actually going from a john kennedy speech to being on the moon
Merlin: in such an unbelievably small amount of time, and all the weird things on this timeline that they were able to hit to make that happen and then bring people back alive from space.
Merlin: I don't know.
Merlin: I don't want to overanalyze, but it works on so many levels as a tragedy about so many things, not least of which is like, gosh, you can go and do this most amazing thing in the world, but you can be so close, and then it just blows apart.
Merlin: Yeah.
John: Well, and I think it's rooted in the argument that people use to justify space travel, which is that human beings are natural explorers, and if we aren't exploring and reaching out into whatever the next realm is, then we're not fulfilling our destiny.
John: And the reverse of that is that it is encoded in us all to...
John: to recognize and empathize with somebody who has left the village and is, and has been out, you know, to the Oregon coast or has been, has walked, uh, to across Africa or, or, you know, have found Stanley in the jungle or whatever we can, we can relate to that person.
John: And the idea that that person would be stepping off the train in their hometown and
John: and fall and get run over by the train while their wife and kids were standing there after having been gone, after having traveled with Lewis and Clark, is a kind of tragedy that certainly has happened a million times in human history.
John: And it's something we all feel very personally about.
John: So you would think that writing a song about astronauts would be hard for people to identify with.
John: But in fact, what they were doing was incredibly human and in a small-scale way applies to each of us every time we leave the house and go to work and make it home.
Merlin: That's what art is.
Merlin: It's metaphorical.
Merlin: what's the word my teacher used to use?
Merlin: It's metaphysical distance.
Merlin: Like if somebody wrote a song that was like, I'm so sad that the shuttle crashed, like that would not only have so much longevity, but the fact that you abstract that a little bit, but it's funny because like there's so many of your songs, uh,
Merlin: I don't think you've had to educate me on what they're about.
Merlin: And I've listened to them a lot, sometimes just listening to them a couple of times.
Merlin: But it's always really interesting to me because you're and I think one of the reasons you come across is so interesting to a lot of people is that you you do fake it pretty well as a polymath.
Merlin: But you are like somebody who is sexual chemistry.
Merlin: See, God, we got to get that looked at.
Merlin: You also are clearly a, not just a student of history, but it seems like you're always kind of, you're very knowledgeable about history.
Merlin: That wasn't your major.
Merlin: That was like your, no, your English?
John: My major was comparative history of ideas.
Merlin: Oh, that's right.
Merlin: This is a fruity program at UW, right?
John: Yeah.
John: So it has the word history in it, but history is just a component of it.
John: Yeah.
John: But I'm an amateur historian, sure.
Yeah.
Merlin: Yeah.
John: And I enjoy it.
John: And I feel like history is... Isn't it a shame?
Merlin: Isn't it a shame, though, how... It's such a shame.
Merlin: I feel really gypped about how I learned history.
Merlin: and I guess this is kind of a cliche or whatever, but there's a couple topics now that I'm really super interested in that I'm embarrassed how poorly I absorbed it, and I have to at least partly blame it on the way that it was taught.
Merlin: And two examples that jump to mind are mathematics and history, which I think, at least in the way that I learned it, I mean, I'm not the sharpest knife in the drawer, but in both cases, it's amazing to me that you could take something as interesting as European history and turn it into things like...
Merlin: memorizing what date the Treaty of Versailles was without understanding, like, what that really meant.
Merlin: Truly, you know, what the Treaty of Versailles meant, looking backwards and especially looking forward, there's not many more interesting topics.
Merlin: Right, right.
Merlin: That's absolutely true.
Merlin: In retrospect, I just remember, like, well, I think they, what, they signed on a train or something?
Merlin: Like, I don't remember.
Merlin: No, no, I'm thinking of the...
Merlin: Maybe the Civil War.
John: When Hitler had... Oh, no.
John: Actually, they did sign it on a train car.
John: And then Hitler used that same train car when France capitulated to him.
John: Oh, God.
Merlin: That guy's good.
John: He really was.
John: Talk about a master of metaphor.
John: Oh, yeah.
John: But now we're talking about Hitler and I'm going to get angry letters from Israel.
John: It happens every time.
John: I think that...
John: I think that that's true of everybody.
John: You know, I didn't learn history in high school, and high school actually deprived me of what had up to then been a lifetime love of mathematics.
John: You know, I started ninth grade thinking and having been kind of reinforced in the belief that I was a math whiz.
John: And by the end of 10th grade, I wanted absolutely nothing to do with math.
John: And history and civics and, I mean, really, what's more interesting than physics?
John: Physics taught by a great teacher is the whole reason for school.
John: And physics taught by a terrible teacher is like being waterboarded.
John: So, I mean, you know, we could talk all for the rest of our lives about
Merlin: educational education and how we were wronged by the by the 50s textbooks that were still being used in the 70s when we were going to elementary school and i don't think it's any better now i honestly don't i kind of doubt it i mean testing and stuff but you know i i don't know if this is true but i've heard heard it said that the only reason anybody really really dies is because of a lack of oxygen like every way that you whether you got stabbed about waterboarding now
Merlin: No, it could be.
Merlin: But every way that you – that is the cause of your death, it's the real reason that you eventually die is because of a lack of oxygen.
Merlin: That's ultimately the thing that really eventually kills you supposedly.
Merlin: That that's the actual cause of death.
Merlin: I don't know if that's true.
Merlin: But – and in the same way, I've heard that really –
Merlin: I've heard some people say that everything is physics, that when you really get down to it, almost everything that goes on is some kind of an abstraction of physics, which I think is a really interesting idea.
Merlin: And obviously physics itself combines, you know, different disciplines.
Merlin: But I see now me now I'm like the armchair engineer.
Merlin: I don't know a thing about physics.
Merlin: I never had physics.
Merlin: I had geometry when I was a senior.
Merlin: I mean, you couldn't meet a more lamentable math idiot than me.
Merlin: But now, like, whatever, it's stuff like fractals and, you know, set theory and all this stuff is I have no idea what any of it means.
Merlin: But I can tell if I had just the basic, basic ish skills that like I would get a lot out of that.
Merlin: And that bums me out.
John: I think you can take classes online if you like onlining.
Merlin: Oh, like a Phoenix University type situation.
John: Well, actually, I think there are classes by eminent Yale professors that have been uploaded to the interweb, and you can just watch them.
Merlin: You know that iTunes University is actually pretty great.
Merlin: There's a bunch of good stuff in there, free stuff, lots of great stuff from Stanford and things like that.
Merlin: Yeah.
John: I took a physics class in college that was taught by one of the physicists from Hanford, which is the big nuclear reservation where they made the atom bomb here in Washington State.
John: Wow.
John: And this guy, you know, he was a real Feynman type of character, you know, this just brilliant...
John: physicist who had who had been boots on the ground hands you know up to his elbows in practical physics for his whole career and now was teaching at the university just because he loved it and he would run around that class and climb up on tables and and uh
John: It was one of the best classes I ever took, and it instilled in me a lifelong love of physics, which in high school I got an F in physics because my high school physics teacher was some ding-dong that didn't know any physics herself.
John: She would, I think, read the book on her way to school in the morning.
John: Like she needed the teacher's edition?
John: Yeah.
John: Yeah.
John: Well, she was teaching out of it, you know, and doing these kind of dumb, like, okay, here's a slinky.
John: Now we're going to hit one end of the slinky and you're going to see the wave.
John: And it's like, yeah, I get it.
John: I've used a slinky.
John: Let's get on with it.
John: But I took a college physics class and it was the greatest thing I ever did.
John: I was terrified going in.
John: I was like, this is going to be awful.
Yeah.
John: And this guy walks in, and from the first second he picked up a piece of chalk, I was like, oh, it matters who your teacher is.
John: Right.
John: So that brings us to the topic of homeschooling, which I have to assume you're a major proponent of, and I am too, and I suggest we start a charter school, Merlin.
Merlin: I would love to be taught at a charter school.
Merlin: I'm ready.
Merlin: I'm ready to learn.
John: Would you teach at a charter school?
Merlin: I don't know what I would teach at a charter school.
Merlin: I mean, except, you know, misquoting, misquoting literature.
John: What about productivity?
Merlin: That would be a hell of a charter.
Merlin: You know, two somewhat related things.
Merlin: First of all, did I ever tell you that my – which one was it?
Merlin: Now I'm getting confused.
Merlin: My chemistry teacher in high school, did I ever tell you she was a finalist for the Challenger?
John: Oh, really?
Merlin: Yeah, yeah.
Merlin: I mean, she was on the news that night because this is a year after I graduated.
Merlin: I was living at my mom's house just half a mile away.
Merlin: And, like, she was out on the lawn at the school with everybody else watching this because, you know, she was a big deal.
Merlin: This was a big deal.
Merlin: She was a finalist for this.
Merlin: And, you know, very, very taciturn woman, very, you know, quiet, kept to herself sort of person.
Merlin: And she, yeah, she was there and just watched it.
Merlin: can you imagine that can you imagine like talk about the ultimate like that that could have been me kind of thing wow other one i might have told you this before but this i don't know this seems to say something about something when i was in college you know i went to a screw liberal arts school and did mostly like you know literature short story poems novels whatever all that kind of
Merlin: But on a whim, I took what they used to call physics for poets.
Merlin: It's called nature of modern physics.
Merlin: It was taught by a physics teacher.
Merlin: But basically, you read Adolf Baker.
Merlin: You read Einstein.
Merlin: I read Gary Zukav from the dancing Wooly Masters and all that nonsense.
Merlin: But the thing that's interesting about this is I've said this in other places before, but there's something to this, I think.
Merlin: The teacher was from, I think, Hungary.
Merlin: He really seemed like a weird guy to me.
Merlin: He's a good teacher.
Merlin: But you know what's funny?
Merlin: This is my second or third, probably my third.
Merlin: Maybe my second year, my second year.
Merlin: And you know, like a lot of people, I really thought I was a great writer.
Merlin: You know, I was the features editor in high school, so obviously I must be excellent.
Merlin: You don't get a position like that without being an outstanding writer.
John: You were top shelf.
Merlin: You know, it's funny, though.
Merlin: I turned in my first paper, and it was the most—well, I've got to say, I had one Vonnegut paper my first year where Mac Miller said—I'll never forget.
Merlin: He said, isn't this part curiously like whipping a dead mule with misplaced rhetoric?
Yeah.
Merlin: She'll always stick with me.
Merlin: But this physics teacher, he tore it apart.
Merlin: He tore my paper apart.
John: Wait a minute.
John: Isn't that a scene from Back to School starring Rodney Dangerfield?
Merlin: He hires Kurt Vonnegut.
Merlin: Yes, exactly.
Merlin: I have told you that story.
Merlin: I told you my Vonnegut story.
Merlin: But Peter Kasach, I think his name was, he tore it apart.
Merlin: He tore it apart.
Merlin: And he said, you know, there's all kinds of problems with this.
Merlin: There's, you know, grammatical problems.
Merlin: There's the structure.
Merlin: Mostly, though, things like the structure and the actual, you know, building a case.
Merlin: The writing.
Merlin: The writing.
Merlin: He said it wasn't good.
Merlin: And he suggested that.
Merlin: Of all things, he suggested I go to this staff member who was the writing instructor.
Merlin: Like she wasn't even – it was so ridiculous that she wasn't treated more seriously.
Merlin: But she's like, you've got to go see Jan Wheeler.
Merlin: You've got to go see her and you should go and get some help with your writing.
Merlin: And I was speechless.
Merlin: I was like, don't you know who I am?
Merlin: But you know what's funny?
Merlin: It's only in the service of saying, I went in, and yeah, I ended up taking that as a class.
Merlin: I got a credit for taking that as a class.
Merlin: And she just really whipped me into shape.
Merlin: Didn't make me a great writer, but made me a less crappy writer.
Merlin: But it's so interesting to me that, I don't know if it was...
Merlin: I think that was probably the severest lashing I ever got for my writing in college, and it came from a physics teacher.
Merlin: Maybe the other ones were just being too nice or something, but it wasn't my stuff about Raymond Carver.
Merlin: It wasn't my stuff about Robert Lowell.
Merlin: It was my stuff about quantum theory.
Merlin: I don't know.
Merlin: That seems really instructive.
Merlin: I think there was actually a great quote.
Merlin: Vonnegut somewhere had said that if you want to find the best writers at Cornell University, don't go to the English department.
Merlin: you know, go to the science department.
Merlin: That's funny though.
Merlin: I mean, like, and then that helped me so much.
Merlin: And I, you know, I still, she made me read, uh, Strunk and White, which I hadn't read since high school.
Merlin: But then she also made me read this great book called William Zinsser's, uh, William Zinsser book called On Writing Well.
John: Yeah, I have it right here.
Merlin: About, you know, economy and, uh,
Merlin: It was just so interesting because of all the educational stuff, like all the stuff I thought I was going to learn in college, the classes I took.
Merlin: It was weird how all this stuff snuck in in places that I never expected.
Merlin: I took a 20th century painting on a lark and it ended up being my favorite thing.
Merlin: One of the things that's most memorable to me.
Merlin: I don't know how much I remember of Moby Dick.
Merlin: I didn't think it was that interesting.
Merlin: But every single class in 20th century painting, I was just rapt attention the whole time.
John: Well, I don't understand why our entire education from kindergarten to graduate school isn't treated that same way because that's absolutely true of everything I learned that I carry with me to this day.
John: None of it was on somebody's syllabus or was on the college prep class.
John: coursework or whatever all of it was was found by accident and all of it was i mean during those classes where i was secretly reading a book propped in within the pages of the textbook that i was holding up so the teacher thought i was studying when you're actually looking at mad magazine the mad magazine i was reading within the within my english book is the stuff that that made me who i am it's it's the it's the education i ended up getting and uh
John: You know, my mom, again, to go back to my mom, I was telling this story last night to somebody.
John: When I was in 1976, I was eight years old, and I had a lot of questions.
John: It was...
John: The Vietnam War had just ended, and I was aware of that.
John: And Nixon had been impeached within a couple of years before, and I was aware of that.
John: People, you know, in 1976, God, people still talked about Nixon.
John: Ford was the president, but Carter was running for president.
John: I mean, I was aware of all these things, and I had a lot of questions about them.
John: And my mom got me a subscription to Time magazine.
John: When it was good.
Yeah.
John: Back when Time Magazine was a great weekly news magazine.
John: I mean, it was a middle-brow magazine always, but it was super well-written and super well-researched.
Merlin: But an 8- or 10-year-old could get a lot out of it.
John: Perfect for an 8-year-old, right.
John: And when my mom got me the subscription to this magazine, what she said was, you don't have to read every article.
John: If you start to read an article and it doesn't interest you, don't read it.
John: Move on to the next article.
John: Just read the articles that are interesting to you.
John: And so there was a lot, you know, that first year I got Time Magazine, I didn't read most of the stuff.
John: I just, I would flip through it and look at the pictures and read the captions.
John: And there was nobody there reading it over my shoulder.
John: There was nobody there trying to read it to me.
John: There was nobody there trying to explain it to me.
John: I just sat and looked at the pictures and read the captions.
John: And then pretty soon I started reading the feature articles that interested me.
John: And if there were cool pictures, I would start reading the article to put them together.
John: By the time I was in sixth grade, I was reading Time Magazine every week.
John: And...
John: And that gave me more of an education, and it was almost entirely a process of self-selection that probably from the outside looked like I was being given no guidance.
John: And frankly, in the 70s, there were things in Time Magazine that were too sophisticated for me.
John: There were things that I read that shocked me.
John: Because I was being introduced to ideas that were above my pay grade.
Merlin: My mom had a subscription and there was one, I want to say 76, 77, 78, had an excerpt from that Howard Hughes biography, the tell-all biography.
Merlin: Oh, uh-huh.
Merlin: And that's where I learned that he saved his urine.
Merlin: And it's still one of the most enduring images in my mind.
Mm-hmm.
Merlin: But you could graze, right?
Merlin: That was the point.
Merlin: There was nobody in there going, go write a report on Zimbabwe or something, and you could pull out the World Book Encyclopedia and start writing your five-paragraph essay.
Merlin: That grazing, I mean, it's funny.
Merlin: As much as we surf, we surf the web all day, but how much do we then decide to go settle on this one thing for a while?
Merlin: Do you know what I mean?
Yeah.
John: Well, and again, Time Magazine did not allow me to pursue threads that interested me.
John: They presented a dozen threads, and I chose the ones that interested me, but I also had to wade through all these ones that didn't.
John: Surfing the web is a very different process.
John: I'll do, as I'm sure you do, waste four hours on Wikipedia just clicking through, clicking through, clicking through, but always pursuing the thread that is the closest to the bullseye of my own interests.
John: I'm never...
John: Or very seldom do I find myself on a page where I'm like, oh, that thing you get with magazines when you're in a dentist's office where you're like, there is nothing else here to read, so I'm going to read this thing that I don't want to read.
John: And you read it and you're into something.
John: Now you know something you wouldn't have known otherwise.
John: On the internet, I find it's mostly like, and then I found out where he went to college, and then I looked at the college, and then I looked at the dorms in the college, and then I looked at the admission process.
John: It's like, why am I looking at the admission process for Yale right now?
John: Like I'm following my own interests, but my interests have led me up a smaller and smaller tributary and I'm learning stuff now or I'm following my own interest to something that's not producing any food for me.
Merlin: So like broad but shallow?
Yeah.
John: Broad but shallow, particularly when you're talking about the education of someone from the age of 5 to 15, broad but shallow is what they need.
John: And that's why those history classes you talk about are so useless.
John: Learning the dates of the French Revolution...
John: I mean, I've studied the French Revolution up and down, and I can't tell you any of the goddamn dates.
John: 1789, that's the only date you need to know.
John: And when I studied the French Revolution in high school and in college, I probably had to memorize 10 dates around those events, which is a degree of specificity that a master's student in the French Revolution probably wouldn't have at ready hand.
Merlin: But what you lose in all that, though, is the story.
John: You lose the story.
John: Where did the French Revolution come from?
John: Where did it go to is the story.
John: And that's the only story that matters.
John: And certainly until you have embarked on a PhD program, it's the only story anybody should ever try and tell.
John: Where did the American Revolution come from and where did it lead to?
John: You know, where did what where did the nation of Germany come from and where is it now?
John: You know, these are like topics that if you are a history teacher, if you are a history student, this should be what you do.
John: You should be sitting Indian style on the floor and talking about this stuff like it's storytelling.
John: And I think the six to eight hours that kids spend in school a day is four to six hours of keeping them off the streets.
Merlin: Oh, I mean, it's such a cliche, but it's true.
Merlin: They're learning how to stand in line.
Merlin: It's really more like a socialization institute in a lot of ways.
John: And if I had a charter school, that's what it would be, too.
John: But you'd be getting socialized in a way different way.
Merlin: Yeah, with ACDC.
Merlin: Yeah.
John: you'd be getting socialized to respect and fear John Roderick first and foremost.
Merlin: Sure.
John: And I think more people need to learn that at a young age.
Merlin: Well, they're going to learn it eventually, and they could save themselves a lot of frustration.
John: Save a lot of hurt going up against the big man.
John: Let's be honest.
Merlin: For some 51% of the audience, knowing about the sexual chemistry, even at a very young age, is going to help guide their decision-making on a lot of levels.
Merlin: That's right.
Merlin: You know, I get a lot of flack.
Merlin: I get a lot of flack for being a dick about the morass.
Merlin: You wouldn't believe it, John Roderick.
Merlin: I mean, like, I get really frustrated with the whole, like, I've got to follow the headlines.
Merlin: I've got to follow the news.
Merlin: I've got to go just suck up all this ephemeral information that's been packaged in these little morsels.
Merlin: But, you know, what's funny is, like...
Merlin: When I have this argument with people, I eventually end up falling back on – it's not a strategy I follow every week because I don't have a subscription.
Merlin: But I think you could learn more from picking up The Economist and reading their whatever two to five – I forget how many pages.
Merlin: I'm usually like three, four, five pages.
John: Like the week in review in international – That is one of the best things in all periodicals, that first five pages of The Economist.
Merlin: I think it's a nice... It's reductive, but it's kind of a middle ground in what we're talking about here, which is that you are... I mean, let's be honest.
Merlin: You pick up a paper, any paper.
Merlin: You pick up the New York Times.
Merlin: You try to look at the New York Times after the 20th of the month, whatever.
Merlin: You look at that, and there's just so much stuff that's been chewed up
Merlin: for the news pipe, right?
Merlin: And, but if you pick up that, that economist thing, it's going to give you the high level on there in a lot of ways, but it's, it's going to be about countries you don't know about.
Merlin: It's going to be about topics you don't understand.
Merlin: And I don't mean to sound like, you know, eat your beats or anything like that.
Merlin: But if you, if you really, if it is that important to you,
Merlin: to keep up to date.
Merlin: And your version of that is watching the crawl on CNN.
Merlin: Well, you can for damn sure take 20 minutes and read that every week.
Merlin: And now you're going to be like a grownup.
Merlin: You're going to be legitimately up to date on what's happening in the world.
Merlin: Frankly, I don't, I don't want to say I don't care about it, but like I don't, it doesn't have an impact on me in an actionable way.
Merlin: Like it does.
Merlin: A lot of people pretend it does, you know, just following like, you know, celebrity deaths and who's mad about politics this week.
Merlin: If that really does matter to you, then why wouldn't you just take the time to do that in a high-quality way?
Merlin: Instead of just looking at Google News or something, which is just a morass.
John: You have to add an extra 15 minutes to it.
John: I think that's what Wikipedia is for.
John: You open up The Economist, you read the first five pages of it, in front of your computer, and every word you don't understand and every idea that comes across your bow that you're even slightly curious about, just Wikipedia...
John: The term and spend another two minutes reading a little bit deeper on the idea.
John: I mean, I mean, people, I mean, it's the most common thing in the world right now.
John: Everybody's got an opinion about Palestine, the Palestinians and the Israelis.
John: And no one has even a penny turned on its side worth of depth of understanding of the history of the situation.
John: And I'm not saying that understanding the history of the situation helps you know what the solution to the problem is.
John: But I think understanding the history of the situation effectively tamps down at least my willingness to wade into an argument with every...
John: in a bar about the Palestinian situation because people are just like, and I'm like, right, you don't know anything.
John: And it's not hard.
John: That's the problem.
John: In America now, knowing stuff
John: Being educated is so equated in the popular culture with a kind of elitism, and elitism is just completely equated with liberalism and a kind of activist liberalism that wants you to eat your beets and wants to teach sex education to your five-year-old kids and wants to force those kids to become gay.
Merlin: Have the school nurses do abortions.
John: have the school nurses do abortions.
John: So, so there's this cascading hatred for being informed that, that in, in, in one way, emotionally, I absolutely understand the, the, the vast majority of people in America, or I'm sorry, not the majority, but 50% of the people in America have felt for a long time that there was some smug, uh,
John: There's a university administrator at their local high school telling them that they couldn't spank their kids anymore, and they resent it, and they don't have the emotional elasticity to wade into it and deal with the gray area.
John: They just reject the whole concept that somebody from the local university should ever come to them and tell them how to do anything.
Right.
John: And so you get a world of people who resent the idea that there is information that they could have that would help them clarify their thoughts on topics that matter to them.
John: And it's just, it's endlessly frustrating.
John: I encounter this all the time on Twitter.
John: I'll send something out like, hey, everybody.
John: Why don't you try reading a book?
John: Love, John.
John: And I'll get 15 angry tweets back from people like, why don't you stop telling me how to live?
Merlin: Right.
John: It's like, I'm just saying, I'm not telling you how to live, man.
John: Seriously.
John: Just suggesting that you might like a book to read sometimes.
Merlin: no you're not doing that you're trying to take my kids from me and this also i think gets back to some stuff we were saying more toward the beginning but there's also just this i hate to make this sound like something i'm saying oh the media pushes this on whoever the media is but there is there is first of all a focus there's a focus on conflict always because that's a story should be about conflict according to a lot of people and
Merlin: But it's also about just this constant dualistic approach to everything where there's conservatives and liberals or there's this and that.
Merlin: And, yeah, maybe I'm a contrarian.
Merlin: But I think that that is limiting in ways that most of us have never really even completely thought about.
Merlin: If we really think about how limiting that is, I mean, here's the thing.
Merlin: Things happen in the world.
John: And probably relatively—
Merlin: Well, I'm just saying like maybe – I mean there are some things where you couldn't really trace the provenance of an action and say, well, that's because a liberal wanted to do this thing or that's because – well, that's really – I feel like that's such an incredibly narrow way to see the world instead of having enough of a critical eye to go, well, no, that's just a thing that happened.
Merlin: And I'm going to have to look at it in context with other things instead of constantly trying to square this double-entry accounting of trying to figure out which one of these tribes this fits into.
Merlin: And, yeah, there are tribes.
Merlin: But maybe there's – it's like you say in Israel where you don't have two opposing sides.
Merlin: You might have 19.
Merlin: You're going to have these coalitions.
Merlin: And I just think in the U.S.
Merlin: there's just always this – this could be, again, the narcissism of minor differences.
Merlin: We're always looking for who we align ourselves with.
Merlin: And I think that's fine if that makes you happy.
Merlin: Like you can pick what pro wrestler you're really into or whatever.
Merlin: But I think it's extremely limiting in trying to see the world clearly to instead of seeing facts and events in and of themselves and then really square them against the context for what else is happening.
Merlin: Like that to me is like the beauty.
Merlin: Like a liberal arts education teaches you how to wander around a library and then wonder how something might be not what it seems to be, I think.
Merlin: I think that's a big part of it.
Merlin: And I guess I just wish that there wasn't always this constant feeling of like, ooh, that Ann Coulter.
Merlin: Ann Coulter's a pro wrestler.
Merlin: When you're getting mad at her, you might as well be getting mad at the Iron Sheik.
Merlin: She's making an entire career out of making you angry.
Merlin: And why would you keep feeding into that?
Merlin: Michelle Bachman, okay, I get it.
Merlin: You don't like Michelle Bachman.
Merlin: How are you going to dissuade people from the Michelle Bachman project by yelling on Twitter?
Merlin: This is all boring rehash of stuff, but I'm just glad we're so much better than other people.
John: Well, it's true.
Merlin: John Roderick, this is long.
Merlin: I've got this giant list of things I want to talk to you about that we'll probably have to save for our imminent future podcast.
John: Yeah, we'll save it for the Merlin Talks to John podcast.
Merlin: Get Roderick on the Line, I think it should be called.
John: Roderick on the Line.
John: And we should start making that very soon because otherwise I would have to go back to work doing my own thing.
John: And that's...
Merlin: Well, we'll talk about that, but let's avoid that for now.
Merlin: Like all of our conversations, this one must end because I have to urinate and I have to imagine that you probably do too.
John: That is how a lot of our conversations end, isn't it?
Merlin: Where you've got to catch a flight or somebody has to go to the bathroom.
Merlin: That's pretty much it.
John: That's right.
John: That's right.
John: It's usually you have to go to the bathroom and I have to catch a flight.
Merlin: Yeah, I can ruin a bathroom.
John: I could ruin a flight.
Merlin: I've been in that van.
Merlin: You've ruined that van.
Merlin: I don't know what's going on in your basement, John.
Merlin: It's a gift.
John: There's some suggestion that I eat too much sausage.
Merlin: I don't even know how to process that sentence.
Merlin: I don't know how to process that sausage.
Merlin: That's like you robble-robble too much.
Merlin: I don't even hear the words in that sentence.
Merlin: All right.
Merlin: John Roderick, of the long winters, inspiration and bon vivant raconteur, s'il vous plaît.
John: Yeah, durian.
Merlin: Until the next musical contribution to your oeuvre is ready to drop, as we say in the rap business, where would you like people to visit with what you do?
Merlin: They should follow you on the Twitter or not, at John Roderick.
John: No, they should absolutely follow me on the Twitter.
John: If they don't, they're being irresponsible.
John: I think they're just hurting themselves.
John: But also, I mean, if you're interested in any of the topics that we've covered today, I have a... Visit your local library.
John: I have a visit your local library or my online store where all of these quotes can be purchased on a t-shirt.
Merlin: Well, is Twitter the best place to find out what you're up to?
Merlin: You will link to things also.
Merlin: Is that the best conduit?
John: The longwinters.com is my website, but because The Long Winters haven't produced a record in several years, that website has, it's not dormant exactly, but I think there's still a message board community.
Merlin: I think I'm hosting it.
Merlin: I should look at that.
Merlin: You know, Ben's busy.
Merlin: Ben's busy now.
Merlin: He can't update those sites like he used to.
Merlin: He's gotten very, very busy.
John: Yeah, yeah.
John: He is a busy man.
John: But, no, I think Twitter is a good first place to look.
John: But I often don't tweet about things until after they happen sometimes.
John: I mean, basically, if you want to find me, good luck.
John: I'm not one of those people that's like, I'm on the Internet.
John: Come look at me all the time.
John: Sure you are.
Merlin: You didn't used to be.
Merlin: You make a big game, but you're like strep.
Merlin: You're like a strep virus.
Merlin: You're just kind of around.
Merlin: Sometimes you're on doorknobs.
Merlin: Yeah, you can catch me on a toilet seat.
Merlin: Hey, catch me at the toilet seat.
Merlin: After that, I'll be at the Laugh Shack.
Merlin: AJ Giggleheimers.
Merlin: People are stupid.
Merlin: John Roderick from The Long Winters, thank you very much for your time.
Merlin: Is there anything you'd like to part with to say?
Merlin: Parting words to the Back to Work audience?
John: Well, I feel like you guys ought to get back to work, and I hope this has been enjoyable.
John: And here, I'm going to reset you.
Merlin: I think we're done here.
Merlin: I love you.
John: Love you too, Merlin.
Merlin: Bye-bye.
guitar solo
Thank you.