Ep. 54: "This Is Not YOUR Kennel"
Merlin: Hello.
Merlin: Hi, John.
Merlin: Hi, Merlin.
Merlin: How are you?
John: I'm good.
John: Yeah.
John: How are you?
Merlin: I'm good.
Merlin: This is a little bit early.
Merlin: Do I sound boomy?
John: You sound far away.
John: I sound far away.
Merlin: You are far away.
John: You're in California.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: Well, you know, I don't want to break the fourth wall, as they say.
John: Yeah.
John: What happened?
John: Did you get a new microphone?
Merlin: No, no, no.
Merlin: Same microphone.
Merlin: I think for one thing, my hearing, I'm getting into that Pete Townsend, Bob Mould thing.
Merlin: Oh, you got a little tinnitus.
Merlin: No, no.
Merlin: Thank God.
Merlin: Knock on wood, I don't.
Merlin: But I've got – the range of what I can hear is – does not include the human voice anymore.
John: Oh, I see.
Merlin: I think it was Pete Townsend.
Merlin: It might have been Pete Townsend that talked about that, that that's the thing is when you stand in front of a high watt.
Merlin: Well, many high watts for that many years.
Merlin: It's ironic that the range – well, as you know, I'm not an audiologist.
Merlin: But the range – well, thank you.
Merlin: I do what I can.
Merlin: The range that gets knocked out is very close to the range of a human voice.
John: Yeah, I find even more specifically the range that gets knocked out for me is the range of the female human voice.
Merlin: Yeah, it's hard to hear women.
Merlin: I didn't want to say anything, but especially when you're alone with them.
John: Yeah, right, or they have some things they want to talk about.
Merlin: Yeah, and the madder they get, the harder it is to hear them.
John: Yeah.
John: I have a couple of things that I'd like to talk to you about.
Merlin: It's like, what?
Merlin: Huh?
Merlin: Ah?
Merlin: Eh?
Merlin: I feel like I've asked you this.
John: Do you have tinnitus?
John: You know, after years and years of standing in front of not a high watt, but other very loud amps,
John: I went to a bachelor party a couple of years ago.
John: Did I tell you this story?
Merlin: That's right.
Merlin: Of course you do.
Merlin: You shot the gun.
Merlin: The guy shot the gun with your thing off.
John: Yeah, the guy shot the gun, and I had my headphones off, and it was like I've had a ringing in my ear ever since.
Merlin: Oh, I forgot.
Merlin: Now, again, that's an irony inside the irony.
Merlin: Now, the kind of hearing loss you get from a gun, how does that relate to women?
Merlin: Has it changed anything about how you understand women?
Merlin: The, uh, the, whatever, the better gender, whatever they're called.
John: It definitely, uh, it definitely inhibits my ability to hear them complain about gun violence, you know, like, cause as I'm sitting around, as I'm sitting around cleaning my own guns and they're like, you shouldn't have guns in the house.
John: You have a small child.
John: I'm like, I don't know.
John: I can't hear you.
John: Uh, mumbling.
John: My dad, my dad, uh, had bad hearing because of all those years he claimed.
John: uh flying airplanes making the world safe for democracy just him and his 45 just him and his 45 and so he didn't have he had bad hearing he had he had uh ear uh earphone what are those things called um hearing aids but he also he couldn't hear my sister he couldn't hear my mom um he heard me fine
John: But then I have a voice like a French horn.
John: You got to put your fist in it?
John: Yeah, that's one of the hardest instruments to play.
John: Did you know that?
John: French horn?
John: You know, in my opinion, the French horn is the secret weapon of pop music.
John: If you put a French horn on a song...
Merlin: Oh, yeah.
Merlin: I think it was John Entwistle, if memory serves, was one of the first.
Merlin: Probably John Entwistle and you have to guess George Martin had a lot to do with that.
Merlin: John Entwistle could actually just bust out a French horn and play it.
Merlin: Are you reading a Who book right now or something?
Merlin: Oh, I'm sorry.
Merlin: You know, Roger Daltrey was a short man.
Merlin: He was.
Merlin: I've met Roger Daltrey.
Merlin: I think we finally reached the point where we're repeating our stories.
Merlin: So you came back from Europe, and you had trouble with the zipper on your bag.
Merlin: And your father – so you know what?
Merlin: It's a joke, but it is funny.
Merlin: I think I do – I'm imagining like a graph of the various hertzes or whatever.
Merlin: And I do think it is the higher end of the human voice that I have the most trouble with.
Merlin: I'm not saying that's just ladies.
Merlin: It could be whiny people.
Merlin: I sound like a broken clarinet.
John: I'm a woodwind.
John: I've actually seen a graph of my hearing.
John: I went to an audiologist, and they did a long hearing test on me, and in my right ear, there is a dramatic little spike, a downward spike, right about at where a female voice is pitch-wise.
John: And you say there's no God.
John: But at the same time, I also happen to have to deal with...
John: a little you know a little cadre of uh women in my own personal life who are mumblers oh no who are mumblers and uh not just mumblers but also like um like uh like sentence pullers you know they kind of they like they like kill the end of their sentences in order to draw you into their draw you into appearing to be more interested in
Merlin: John, what an inhuman thing to do to you in at least two ways.
Merlin: First of all, you're having trouble hearing whatever they're saying to begin with.
John: Thank you, exactly.
Merlin: But then as a thinker, as a thinker and somebody who demands satisfaction as well as completion, you're going to want to know, what was that?
Merlin: What was that?
Merlin: I almost heard something.
Merlin: What was that?
Merlin: I don't like mumbling and trailing.
John: Yeah, trailing.
John: I think of it as like a boardroom technique.
John: It's like a...
John: It's the guy that speaks incredibly quietly in order to dominate people.
Merlin: Oh, yeah.
Merlin: They say that if you want to make people listen, you should speak quietly.
John: Oh, it's the word.
John: I mean, to a point, I agree, but taken to the extreme where you're like...
Merlin: That's like one of those – Oh, you're killing me now.
Merlin: That's like one of those discount Dale Carnegie techniques.
Merlin: Some douchebag hears that, and I've met a lot of extremely uninteresting people who speak quietly because they think it makes them interesting.
Merlin: Now, as somebody who speaks fairly – I'm learning I speak very loudly.
Merlin: I'm not saying that makes me interesting, but I've been around – You're not interesting though.
Merlin: A lot of people I've met who consider themselves futurists speak very quietly.
John: Oh, right, because they're presuming that other people are going to go into the future, develop some technology to come back into the past to be able to hear what they're saying.
Merlin: You know, it could be.
Merlin: Time travel is a very complicated issue.
John: Let's not talk about time travel.
John: Does that trouble you, time travel?
John: No, but ever since I saw Looper, now I realize that when anybody starts talking about time travel,
John: The answer is, let's not talk about time travel.
Merlin: Oh, I heard about that.
Merlin: That's a funny way to treat it.
Merlin: Well, I just read about 600 pages of a comic that was a long comic arc that was about time travel.
Merlin: And my daughter and I have been reading a comic book that involves time travel, and it always makes my head hurt.
Merlin: Paradoxes upon paradoxes.
Merlin: Yeah.
John: Upon paradoxes.
Merlin: And then, of course, the worst part is then there's somebody who can explain it.
Merlin: And I just don't want them to explain it.
John: There never is because it's just the infinite universes problem.
John: That's a big problem at Marvel right now.
Merlin: There's just too many universes.
Merlin: Too many universes.
John: There really are too many universes at Marvel or whatever.
Merlin: I've got my bell here.
Merlin: I'm touching it, but I'm not dinging it.
Merlin: Marble, that's good.
John: That's pretty good.
Merlin: I'm going to let my sentences trail off now.
Merlin: It's early.
Merlin: It is early.
Merlin: I have a little dingus on my phone that I use to tell me how well I slept.
Merlin: How does this sound?
Merlin: It's long story short.
Merlin: You put it on your bed and it kind of observes how often you moved while you slept, which tracks to how deeply you're sleeping.
Merlin: And it calculates based on how long you slept and how often you were deeply or not deeply asleep.
Merlin: It tells you how high quality your sleep was.
Merlin: Does it give you a single number?
Merlin: Well, yeah, it's got like an index number.
John: It gives you a clout score of how well you slept.
Merlin: I got a clout of 96 last night.
Merlin: I'm usually in the 60s, so I killed it last night.
Merlin: High five.
Merlin: Thank you.
Merlin: I went to bed early, and my wife let me sleep in a little bit.
Merlin: Oh, you know what happened?
Merlin: I came back from our show, and I got a stress bump.
Merlin: Oh, I'm sorry.
Merlin: Where is it?
Merlin: Oh, you know, it's actually one of my least favorites.
Merlin: It's the upper right.
Merlin: Upper right lip.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: And this morning, I thought I might have one on my nose, but then I realized those don't really exist.
John: I don't agree.
John: I think that stress bumps on the nose are a major, major... We've probably covered that enough.
John: That's where stress bumps want to be is on the nose.
Merlin: But here's the human side of stress bumps.
Merlin: We're not just talking about getting kissed by Uncle Licky and Bad Girls, but it really does when you... Again, this is the irony show.
Merlin: It is very ironic that...
Merlin: When you don't get enough sleep and you're stressed out and you're pushing too hard, if I do that for more than a couple days, mainly the sleep part, but also maybe the drinking and staying out, but really it's the sleep.
Merlin: If I do that for more than a couple days, there's a pretty good chance I'm going to get a stress bump.
Merlin: Especially when I travel because I think my immune system is exposed.
John: Has it ever occurred to you to grow a beard?
Merlin: Yes.
John: Why don't you do it?
Merlin: Well, it's like having it occur to me to be nine feet tall.
Merlin: Like, I'm just not sure it's in my wheelhouse.
John: You know my theory on beards, that God gives men the beards that those men deserve.
John: Oh, brother, does that ever make sense?
John: I hate to admit it, but it does.
John: Yeah, you wear the beard that you have, not the beard that you want.
Merlin: That was Donald Rumsfeld.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: That's a really good point.
Merlin: And so those guys – like I remember there were guys in college who really wanted to grow a beard.
Merlin: And let's be honest.
Merlin: The reason a lot of guys grow a goatee is because that's the only place that the hairs will go.
Merlin: It's kind of cheating.
Merlin: You know what I mean?
Merlin: It's like if you really tried to grow an actual beard – but I'm remembering – this is true for me, but it's really true for the guys who stuck with it and were willing to look stupid for a year.
Merlin: If you wait long enough, you can almost get a beard.
Merlin: I think it's true for ladies too.
Merlin: If you wait long enough, you'll eventually get a beard.
John: Well, when I was in college, my problem is that I had one of those spin doctors, Lane Staley beards.
Merlin: That's the guy with the hat?
John: the well lane staley was the singer of um of uh that band that i'm now spin doctors no lane staley was the seattle grunge rock uh allison chains thank you allison chains hey that was a guess good job good job and uh and the spin doctors were that other guy and they both had i was just worried that you might know the name of the singer from the spin doctors it's not a big deal
John: But they both had that beard, which was they had a lot of hair on the underside of their chin.
John: They had a big face beard, but really no mustache.
John: They couldn't grow a mustache.
John: And this was my problem in college.
John: I went a year without shaving, and I had an enormous beard.
John: But my mustache was like the wispy down on a child's bottom.
John: And it was infuriating to me because I wanted, you know, I wanted a Zorba the Greek beard.
John: Right.
John: And I had this beard that I just, I would sit and stare in the mirror and I would ask myself like, if you put...
John: mascara in your mustache.
John: Do you think people would notice?
John: If you bought one of those boxes at the drugstore of dark hair coloring and put it in your mustache.
Merlin: But the texture's not right either, right?
John: Everything about it was wrong.
John: There was no... I could have handed it.
John: I could have drawn it on.
John: I could have drawn a mustache in with pen.
John: Nothing was going to look right.
John: And it taunted me
John: my own beard, it taunted me until I was at least 30 years old when I finally felt like, okay, you know, my mustache has finally caught up to the rest of what's going on.
John: But I realized in looking back that that is a kind of beard.
John: That is what I like to call the young warrior beard.
John: Which is to say that in all those old sort of Greek like bas-relief carvings
John: of uh warriors lined up like a phoenician yeah sort of against sparta right or a phoenician you know the young warriors all have a lot of a lot of neck beard for lack of a better term and not a ton of mustache the mustache is how you that's because maybe because the soldiers are young they are young precisely and the first part of your beard that grows is around your jaw but in any case
John: My conclusion was that, because as I talk to people, I go around the world, as you know, and people come up to me and they want to talk about beards because I have one.
Merlin: And beards are a source of... It's kind of like having a Harley or a Great Dane.
John: Yeah, exactly.
Merlin: You shouldn't have it unless you want to talk about it.
John: Yeah.
Merlin: A utility kilt.
Merlin: A great Dane of a beard.
Merlin: People who have Utila kilts happen.
Merlin: The Venn diagram is very heavily.
Merlin: There's people with Utila kilts and people who like to talk about Utila kilts.
Merlin: And the Venn diagram is a perfect circle.
John: Nobody wants to talk about a Utila kilt that doesn't wear one.
John: That isn't exciting to tell you all about it.
John: But also, excited to tell you about it with a certain amount of smugness.
John: You think so?
Merlin: I get a brony vibe from a lot of them.
Merlin: They want to tell me about the benefits, the Fs and Bs.
John: Well, the benefits, but there's a little bit of a haughty aspect to someone with a Utila kilt where it's like, either you know what this is,
John: And you're asking me about it because you're teasing me.
John: Oh, right.
John: Or you don't know what this is, in which case you're clearly not a member of the... It's like having a tattoo on your arm in runes.
Merlin: Where you'd go, oh, yes, I see you've recognized that these are runes, but you probably don't know what it says.
Merlin: Right.
Merlin: It says Zoso.
John: Where's the beef?
John: But I've realized that almost every guy...
John: When you really give him a safe place to talk, he's going to express a list of reservations about his own beard.
John: He's going to say, it's patchy over here.
Merlin: He may not have ever mentally made that list, but when pressed... It isn't even pressed.
John: It's just like you give them a safe place.
John: You're like, oh...
John: You're trying to grow a beard.
John: Oh, I like your beard.
Merlin: Oh, it's like telling the Scoutmaster story.
Merlin: You go somewhere, it's okay to have that conversation here.
John: Yeah.
John: And then they're like, wow.
Merlin: It all comes out.
Merlin: It all comes pouring out.
John: You see here where the mustache doesn't connect to the beard.
John: Oh my God, that's mine.
John: That's where I get touched.
John: That's mine.
John: There's a patch over here that doesn't fill in or this or that.
John: And everybody has these really small things about their beard that to them they have amplified to be these disgusting, ludicrous holes in their beard that basically preclude them being able to wear one.
Merlin: It's kind of like a hirsute anorexia.
John: Yeah, it is a body dysmorphia.
Merlin: Dysmorphia.
Merlin: I used that word yesterday to talk about George Lucas.
John: That's a great word.
John: Of hair.
John: George Lucas has this sense that he has a slim neck.
Merlin: Oh, God.
Merlin: This slim, graceful neck.
Merlin: He has a bad beard toupee because I think he honestly thinks that helps his dewlap.
John: Well, it's the Andrew Dice Clay problem, where Andrew Dice Clay just kept making his sideburns sharper and sharper to accentuate a jawline that was coated in an enveloping parka of fat.
LAUGHTER
Merlin: i always assumed the pointy sideburns were some kind of like i want to come back to this whole idea because i think there might be something nearly phrenology like about what we learn from somebody's beard that they can or can't grow but i thought date rape caused pointy sideburns
John: Oh, no, I think pointy sideburns, certainly in anybody that's over, like, 35, is just like the George Lucas thing.
John: He is trying to architect some shape.
Merlin: Oh, like a forced perspective, almost.
John: It's like, oh, no, no, no, no, this is where my face ends and my neck begins.
John: I think people...
Merlin: Right here where the beard is.
Merlin: People get this so backward.
Merlin: And I remember, for example, a lot of times in high school, when girls are learning how to use makeup, they use it backwards.
Merlin: They think it's all about building up rather than contrasting.
Merlin: And so when we were in high school, it was really popular.
Merlin: There's this blue eye makeup.
Merlin: It's called Coal.
Merlin: Like K-O-H-L.
Merlin: And a lot of girls go, oh, it brings out my blue eyes.
Merlin: And it's like, well, no.
Merlin: It makes you look like a day after Hooker.
Merlin: Like it just makes you look super weird.
Merlin: You're not contrasting that, right?
Merlin: It's like people – you know what I mean?
Merlin: Like people – like George Lucas, I think he doesn't realize that what he's really doing is saying, hey, look, I got a dewlap down here.
Merlin: It's not – now in some men – He's pointing at it rather than – He's creating a you are here sign for his dewlap.
John: Yeah, I feel like if George Lucas just let his beard grow down over his bullfrog neck.
Merlin: But he has no chin.
Merlin: That's the other problem is he has no chin, right?
John: But that is one of the top four reasons guys grow a beard.
John: To look like they have a chin.
John: Yeah, did you ever see a picture of Jerry Garcia without his beard?
John: No.
John: No, his face goes from his nose to his Adam's apple.
John: There's nothing in between.
John: That's a goddamn shame.
John: Well, it isn't because he discovered that if you grow a big beard, you look like Jerry Garcia, one of the most iconic rock faces of all time.
John: If you say so.
John: So I've known a lot of guys that had no chin that grew a beard and they were handsome guys.
Merlin: Yes, you're absolutely right.
Merlin: You know what?
Merlin: You're absolutely right.
Merlin: I have a good friend that lacks a chin and has a very retreating hairline.
Merlin: And he does well with both.
Merlin: He's not doing that truly farcical kind of comb forward.
Merlin: Like it's pretty believable.
Merlin: Oh, he's got a little hairdo, you're saying.
Merlin: Well, you remember when George Clooney made the Caesar thing kind of like okay?
Merlin: Well, thank God – we said this on five shows, but thank God you can shave your head today.
Merlin: I think that is the greatest – that is like the gay rights of hair.
Merlin: It is so great that it's okay now to say, you know what?
Merlin: I shaved my head.
Merlin: Maybe I'm bald.
Merlin: Maybe I'm not, but I'm probably bald.
Merlin: But I look really cool now.
John: I saw a guy the other day, not in person, but I saw it on the internet, where he was bald, and he shaved his head, and then had stubble tattooed on his head in the shape of where a full head of hair would be growing.
John: And he really was pulling it off.
John: How did it look, John?
John: He was pulling it off.
John: He looked pretty tough.
John: Huh.
John: Yeah, he did.
John: So you're saying your friend with the comb forward.
John: Yeah.
Merlin: He also has what you could unkindly call a weak chin.
Merlin: But he looks great.
Merlin: You don't think he's a hideous freak or anything like that.
Merlin: But you're on to something extremely interesting here.
Merlin: And we talked about phrenology before.
Merlin: There's some other things we've talked about where – oh, shoot.
Merlin: What was the other one?
Merlin: But where you can tell a lot about a person by – By the things they say and do.
Merlin: I don't want to go nuts.
Merlin: But, you know, what was it?
Merlin: Was it your teeth?
Merlin: I forget what it was.
Merlin: But it was one of you were getting very close.
Merlin: Your clothes, your job.
Merlin: Your job, your lack of security, understanding, saving for the future.
John: But my feeling about a beard is that one of the things as a student of beards for many years, if you open up a fashion magazine,
John: men's fashion magazine all the models now have beards and a lot of those beards are very patchy
John: Like, that's kind of a look, if not the look.
Merlin: You mean the kind of like young guy, puby, patchy?
John: Yeah.
John: Young guy, puby, patchy model beard is a thing.
Merlin: They call it the PDX.
Merlin: Isn't that kind of a Portland thing before you get the giant beard?
Merlin: You know, because really, if you're 25 and you're playing acoustic guitar and being earnest, you got to have a beard, right?
John: That's the thing.
John: Yeah.
John: Patchy puby beard.
John: So you've got the sideburns, the mustache, the chin, the sole patch, and the cheeks, and none of them actually really connect to each other.
John: It's like little archipelagos.
John: And this is, in some ways, an incredibly fashionable way to wear your beard, and also...
John: It is like blue eyeshadow, which blue eyeshadow is meant to mimic the closeness of the blood vessels to the skin that a young girl has.
John: So young people, their skin is still translucent, and you see the blue of their oxygen-deprived blood right under their skin, and that conveys to us unconsciously youth and vitality.
John: I did not know that.
John: So a little blue eyeshadow is what older people use to mimic this youthfulness, and the same is true with a patchy beard.
John: So my contention is that older gentlemen, or rather, I'm not calling you old, but rather to say men who have attained their agency, if you are lucky enough to have a youthful, patchy beard...
John: Ha ha ha.
John: I don't have the option.
John: I would have to go in with two pairs of scissors and some toenail clippers and a bottle of bleach to make my beard look patchy.
John: I see.
John: I think I understand.
John: It looks like a beaver pelt, my beard.
John: Ladies.
John: I love these gentle bells.
John: You're just reaching out.
John: You're just touching.
John: You're just like...
Merlin: Well, it's like I was appreciating at our show how good your microphone skills are.
Merlin: And I think that's important.
Merlin: You ever watch that Feist when that Feist sings?
Merlin: That lady's got mic skills.
John: She can sing loud or quiet.
John: She uses a couple of different mics, too.
Merlin: She's amazing.
Merlin: But, I mean, I want to get that way with the bell.
Merlin: I don't care if I can't sing.
Merlin: It doesn't matter.
Merlin: I just like the idea of this bell being something where I have a little bit of subtlety.
Sure.
John: I like that.
John: We perfected at our show the other day the clammed bell.
Merlin: conch i like the idea though of in this i don't know why this is so interesting to me but you know in our post age of reason age uh you know we would never look at something like phrenology and go i guess phrenology was still around until the early early 20th century but the idea that there's these things about you you know what it was we're talking about stress bumps we were talking about that like this says something about you like morally in this like medieval sense and uh because you know there's no place you can go where a stress bump is going to be accepted
John: No.
John: If you go down to the local firehouse... Yeah, wine tastings.
John: They're going to shun you.
John: Kissing booze.
John: Even if you go under the Embarcadero, where people are burning trash in a garbage pail, and you're like, hello, my friends!
Merlin: They won't share their hooch.
Merlin: They're like, ugh.
Merlin: You know, the idea that – it's funny because I have a face.
Merlin: I have a – when I shave and get a haircut, I have a pretty classic guy face.
Merlin: I got a big chin.
Merlin: I got a jaw.
Merlin: I do have beady eyes, which I'm not crazy about.
John: You're a handsome guy.
John: This is the thing about you.
Merlin: Thank you.
John: Yeah, you have a handsomeness.
Merlin: Well, I don't know about that.
Merlin: But it's funny how there's all kinds of things that have happened for years and years and years.
Merlin: You show people pictures of people and say, do you trust them?
Merlin: Would you trust this person?
Merlin: And so forth.
Merlin: And I like the idea, though, of the beard you deserve.
Merlin: Because the beard you deserve, if you think about it, is going on the face you got.
Merlin: Which is, in some sense, the face that you deserve.
Merlin: That's right.
John: Exactly right.
Merlin: So you smoke those cigarettes and you start getting a little wrinkly.
Merlin: Right?
Merlin: You, I don't know, get a German lady to choke you and you get petechial hemorrhaging in your eyes.
Merlin: You know, everything that you've done is going to have some kind of an impact on how your face looks.
John: Well, and I think this goes to the dysmorphia that we all have, I think, from... We spend a lot more time looking at other people's faces than we do our own.
John: And so we develop this...
John: You and I know a guy, I've mentioned this before, who is a man with very distinctive looks, but who I've always contended in his mind's eye pictures himself looking like a young Johnny Depp.
John: Or Morrissey, because these were faces that he fixated on.
John: And then what that caused in him was every time he caught a glimpse of himself in the reflection of a storefront, he would be newly horrified, horrified for the first time.
John: uh, each time like that brutal, brutal cognitive dissonance.
John: Yeah.
John: That he realized as he's walking down the street, he's like, I am looking like Johnny Depp.
John: And then he looks at himself and he goes, ah, and, and it, and it was a, it reinforced.
John: It was a constant like reinforcing trauma.
Um,
John: That gave him this kind of schism in his mind about what he looked like.
John: He thought he was more hideous than he was, in other words.
Merlin: And none of the solutions to that are easy or happy.
Merlin: Because what do you do?
Merlin: I mean, there's the John Roderick approach of, well, I'm just going to keep staring in this goddamn mirror until I don't care what I look like.
Merlin: I'm guessing, or you could say, maybe, I mean, on the other end, you could be a little sophisticated and say, well, maybe I have to just accept that I don't look like Johnny Depp, or you could just quit catching yourself in mirrors.
John: Well, but the problem is we all want to, I think we all want to imagine that we are good looking enough, you know, for, for, for whatever our circumstances are.
John: And it's the rare person that,
John: It's the rare person that doesn't think they are almost good looking enough.
John: You know what I mean?
John: Oh, yeah.
John: It's very rare that people think, like, I am truly hideous from top to bottom.
John: But we always find ourselves wanting just that extra little push over the hump where we would be good looking enough to pass.
John: Yeah.
John: And the reality is, we're all good.
John: I mean, this is the classic thing that you hear from people all the time when they get to be in their 30s and 40s, and they look back at their youth, and they say, I thought I was so disgusting when I was 18, and now I look at every 18-year-old, and they're all beautiful.
John: Like, it's just, being 18 is just, you're intrinsically beautiful.
Merlin: You had a really good – you had a good toot about that a few weeks ago that I liked a lot.
Merlin: I don't know if it was about how you look or weight or something like that, but it's absolutely true.
Merlin: It's one reason teenagers are so insufferable.
Merlin: It's like the age – youth being wasted on the young kind of thing.
Merlin: But you're absolutely right because – and we're obsessing over a different thing at that point.
John: Right.
Merlin: All we're seeing is our deficits, which are in retrospect should be fairly minor when you don't see that you have things like energy.
Right.
Merlin: And you haven't been broken yet.
John: Right.
John: Well, and I feel like the same is true of being 40 years old.
John: I mean, at 40 years old, you can, as you say, study the way a person has lived by seeing their cigarette lines and the way that their evil has manifested itself on their face.
Right.
John: Their gnarled knuckles.
John: And in my case, the fact that... Their Jewy wallet.
John: All the teeth that they got knocked out when they were a young person fighting in bars.
John: All that starts to come home to roost.
John: But in fact, being 40, I mean, that is the...
John: dare I say it, the prime of life.
John: And when you look at a picture, when you read an obituary of somebody or you're reading their autobiography, the picture of them at 40 years old is the picture of them.
John: There are the pictures of them when they were young and the pictures of them when they were old, but the picture of them, how they are, who they were,
John: It was always when they were 40 or 50.
Merlin: I think you're right.
Merlin: I was reading – my knowledge of Leonard Cohen is really spotty.
Merlin: So I was learning a little bit about Leonard Cohen last night.
Merlin: And I was looking – the pictures of him when he's young are really weird looking.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: It seems so different from the pictures of like what I – and now he looks old now.
Merlin: Like he's an old guy now.
Merlin: But you're right.
Merlin: The pictures of him like in the mid to late 70s or whatever are like that's what he looks like.
Merlin: Yeah, that's him.
Merlin: Paul Simon, you know?
Merlin: Well, actually, Paul Simon's always looked weird.
Merlin: There's never been a time Paul Simon didn't look a little weird.
John: Paul Simon is a little strange, isn't he?
Merlin: Yeah, he's... Yeah, I mean, I kind of most admire the bridge over troubled water, let's just let this hair go crazy part.
Merlin: But isn't it always weird when somebody's... I'm not going to make it all about baldness.
Merlin: It always seems weird to me when somebody's bald for a while, then they stop being bald.
Merlin: You know what I mean?
Merlin: There's that time where you're like, okay, I'm a guy who's going bald, and I'm going to try a couple tricks, and then suddenly you got hair.
Merlin: But there's lots of pictures of Paul Simon on Saturday Night Live where he had no hair.
Merlin: No hair, right.
Merlin: And then suddenly he's got hair.
Merlin: He's doing a pretty profound comb forward in a lot of those, I think.
John: You look at Elton John.
John: I was thinking about this the other day.
John: I saw a picture of Elton John in a magazine.
John: And Elton John is at an age now where his face is really starting to go.
John: And I was looking at this picture of him and I was like, oh, he is starting to look like Queen Elizabeth.
John: You know, there's a certain sort of man that as he gets older, he just starts to look like a matron.
John: You know, he's starting to look like the queen mother even.
John: Except that he has this hair.
John: He has a little furry friend up there.
John: He has this hair that's like sort of the wispy, like red hair that a young Irish lad would have.
John: And so I'm looking at this picture and I'm erasing the hair in my mind.
John: And realizing what Elton John actually looks like.
John: Looks like Judi Dench.
John: He does look like Judi Dench.
John: He looks like a bald Judi Dench.
John: And he would be a remarkably different looking person if he had just let himself go bald.
John: And I think maybe less of a pop star, you know?
John: We have all accepted his hair, for the most part, and it's camouflaging a multitude of sins.
John: Do you know the poker player Daniel Negrano?
John: I think you might have mentioned him.
John: Yeah, he's a Canadian poker player.
John: For a long time, before I eliminated cable TV from my life, I used to watch hours and hours of televised poker.
Yeah.
John: I don't know why.
John: I honestly don't know why.
John: But I would watch it for hours.
John: And most poker players, I have to say...
John: when you watch them on TV for very long, you realize, like, these are terrible people.
John: These are people who would be, if they were not millionaires from this game, they would be sleeping on a twin-size mattress with no sheets, and they would be just pulling a blanket of dander over them to keep the winter chill off.
John: But now they're millionaires, and they haven't done anything different.
John: I'm sure that a lot of these poker guys, they have one or two changes of underwear.
John: Like, they're just reprehensible.
John: But Daniel Negrano is this guy from Canada who is kind of... He wears his hair... He's a balding guy, but he wears his hair pushed forward like a...
John: In this Greek style.
John: Oh, dear.
John: And over the years, as he's gotten more famous and has made more money, I've watched him go from... Originally, he would just comb his hair straight forward and then cut it off at his eyebrows.
John: But he has developed a style because he's obviously paying people to style his hair now.
John: But anyway, he's my favorite.
Merlin: This is one of those things that like a beautiful pastry that was probably very complicated given what the results look like.
Merlin: This looks like a lot of work.
Merlin: If I'm looking at what you're talking about, he's obviously a bald man who's doing things with his hair.
Merlin: Let's start there.
Merlin: And he's got – it's kind of wispy, but it's kind of like a fun, youthful, tousled look.
Merlin: Exactly.
Merlin: Fun and youthful.
John: It's kind of skater.
Merlin: My wife calls this the hipster come forward.
Merlin: We have a mutual friend that has one of these.
Merlin: And it's a look.
John: It's a look, yeah.
John: And I get the sense also that he spends a lot of time in Montreal, if you know what I'm saying.
John: So you're going to get a lot of... Your hair is going to... Montreal is a place like... Well, let's just start with France.
John: There are a lot of things you can do in France that you can't do anywhere else in the world.
John: Listen to jazz.
John: Well, yeah, and be a 40-year-old guy who dresses like a, what am I trying to say, like a butt plug.
John: And if you take that and you translate it to Canada and you put it through the Canadian filter where everybody in Canada looks like they are an extra from an early episode of 21 Jump Street.
John: Montreal is the place, I think, in North America.
John: I heard Montreal is more French than France.
Merlin: They're like hyper-French, aren't they?
Merlin: They're so... They're perma-angry.
Merlin: They're mad at everybody, including themselves.
John: Montreal is mad.
John: There are places in Quebec and even northern Ontario where they speak French where they're much madder than in Montreal.
John: They're mad at Montreal for not being...
John: true enough.
John: In the Francophone world, I think there is a sense of, as you move away from Paris, people get madder and madder about how untrue you are.
John: And Quebec City is mad at Montreal.
John: Quebec City feels like Montreal abandoned them.
John: But there are places in Northern Ontario which is not...
John: So they're outside of Quebec, but they are French-speaking towns.
John: And they're just so mad.
John: They're mad at everybody.
Merlin: Because they've, what's the word I'm looking for?
Merlin: They've watered down the language and culture by allowing anything in that's not super French.
John: No, I think it's more that they feel that they were... In Canada, the French feel that they were abandoned by France to the uncertain fate of first England and then Canada.
John: And so, you know, the motto of Quebec is...
John: I will not forget.
John: I will remember, I guess.
Merlin: I think it translates roughly as, oh, I'll remember.
John: Yeah, right.
John: And really, I feel like it translates as, we will never forget how you fucked us.
John: And it just moves, you know, they're mad at Canada because they don't feel part of Canada.
John: They're super mad at America because we are just the worst.
John: But they're also mad at France because France abandoned them.
John: And they're mad at the people down the block who have English signs out in front of their stories.
Merlin: Let alone the entire world that's causing them all this problem.
John: Oh, please, the world.
John: Sacra blue.
Yeah.
John: So anyway, but part of that, I think the two places in North America where you're going to find the worst men's fashion, or not worst, but opportunities for men to dress in ways, like for instance with hyper-distressed jeans that are then also bedazzled.
Mm-hmm.
John: You're going to find that in Mexico City?
Merlin: Yeah, you once stipulated that Canada is like the pilot for 21 Jump Street, basically.
John: Yeah.
John: Where the fashions are what a Hollywood set designer in the 80s imagined gangbangers.
Yeah.
John: war.
John: People are like, oh yeah, this is edgy and cool and groovy and hip.
John: A lot of gangbangers are going to be wearing mohawks.
John: Am I right?
John: That's what gangbangers do.
John: They wear mohawks, right?
John: Like in the Terminator kind of idea.
John: But a lot of these actors, they have another gig later on in the day, so we can't give them a mohawk, so we're going to give them a fauxhawk with gel.
John: So then they can comb it out and go do one life to live on a neighboring soundstage.
John: So it's all this kind of like punky, edgy, but mostly crafted with gel and bleach.
Yeah.
John: It's very funny.
John: I don't dislike it.
John: I don't despise it.
John: I'm glad it's there.
Merlin: It's like Pirates of the Caribbean.
Merlin: Did you know Daniel Negreanu is Canadian?
John: Yes.
Merlin: And I'm doing everything I can to learn everything that I can about him just from a Google image search.
John: He doesn't have much of a chin, honestly.
John: No.
Merlin: He wears headphones, and it looks like he's getting a massage maybe while he's playing.
Merlin: He keeps wearing the same baseball hat that's advertising something.
Merlin: Are these guys like NASCAR?
Merlin: It looks like they wear a lot of things with little ads and logos on them.
John: Yeah, they figured out pretty fast that they were on TV, and they could make extra cash by putting PokerStars.net on their hat.
John: Just go to the internet and find out.
John: People play poker on the internet for real money.
John: I had a friend who decided that this was his job.
John: He was going to be an internet poker player.
John: And he'd be playing 25 hands at a time.
John: And it becomes... It's like day traders.
John: It's like those guys who just suddenly decide they're going to... It seems like easy money.
John: Yeah.
John: And ultimately, I think when you're playing 20 hands of poker at a time, you're not invested in any one of them.
John: And it becomes kind of like playing solitaire.
John: You're just... You taught yourself kind of the odds of all the different hands.
John: And you're just playing the odds.
Yeah.
John: And over the course of a whole day of doing that, you're up by 15% or something.
John: So how did he do?
Merlin: Did he make some dough off it?
John: I don't think he's still doing it, frankly, because I think a lot of them are like 25-cent games.
Merlin: I don't think gambling would still be around if it was that easy to win.
John: Interesting theory.
Merlin: Well, blackjack is the only game.
Merlin: Poker is an outlier because it has a human factor unlike any other game.
Merlin: But I guess, I don't know, Baccarat, I don't know.
Merlin: But I mean, blackjack is the only game where you have even a, as I understand it, have even the slightest chance of winning against the house.
John: My sense is Baccarat is the one where the odds are best in your favor.
John: Is that right?
John: Yeah.
John: Because there's... I have stood around many Baccarat tables and, you know, elbowed the person next to me and gone, what?
John: what is that?
John: What the hell is happening now?
Merlin: It's baffling.
Merlin: It's baffling to me.
John: And they go, well, see, this line over here, you can bet against the earlier bet and that line over there, you push the bet to the next bet and then that's how you beat the odds because then you have 51% chance of earning something.
John: I've had it explained to me a dozen times.
John: I've stood next to a Baccarat dealer and asked her as she's
John: As she's doing it, as she's rolling the dice or whatever, tell me what you're doing.
John: Explain what's happening.
John: And she's like, here's how it goes.
John: It's really simple.
John: And then she explains some 15 paragraphs of space math.
John: And I walk away going...
John: I don't know what that was.
John: I am not going to throw my money down on a table where I don't understand.
Merlin: That's probably a pretty good rule in gambling.
Merlin: If you don't understand how money is made and lost, you're better off not to bet.
John: Here's me at a casino.
John: I walk into, and this is why I hate Las Vegas.
John: I walk into a casino.
Merlin: It's all happening all around me.
John: I'm like, okay, I don't want to sit over there.
John: Those people don't look interesting.
John: That guy is disgusting.
John: And I end up over at the slot machines, the one-armed bandits.
John: And I go, well, I'm here.
John: I might as well, you know, and I put $5 in.
John: And it goes, and it gives me some, a number of credits and I pull the arm until those are gone.
John: And then I'm like done.
John: That's it.
John: I spent $5 and I feel even that I didn't get my money's worth.
John: And then I just sit and watch people smoke, you know?
John: And in fact, I have a pretty good time in casinos because I have a pretty good time until I see that little old lady with the oxygen tank and the popcorn bucket full of quarters plugging them into one of those things.
John: And then my heart sinks down into my stomach and I'm like, I have to go now.
Merlin: I did a gig in Reno a couple years ago and I got there.
Merlin: It was, you know, Reno's...
Merlin: you've been to reno yeah it's not it's not it's not las vegas it's not yeah well i got there early and i checked got you know finally got actually i'm sorry i take it back i had to wait to check into my room because some fucking military event was there in motorcycle races and it's those assholes no well like you know they hadn't planned well for it so there was a lot of mookie people in line waiting for their room was this at circus circus
Merlin: No, no.
Merlin: This was at Anus Anus, I think was the name of the place.
Merlin: Oh, yeah.
Merlin: It's off strip.
Merlin: The odds are a little better there.
John: Anus Anus.
Merlin: Just got to get in the hole.
Merlin: And so I had some time to kill.
Merlin: So I went, oh, I can go over here.
Merlin: I can go to this bar area.
Merlin: I'll play a little bit of blackjack.
Merlin: And I can smoke here.
Merlin: So I'll go and I will smoke while I'm waiting for my room and I will have a drink.
Merlin: And this will be fun.
Merlin: And, you know, I said, okay, this is good.
Merlin: You know how it is when you travel and, you know, when you kind of arrive, once you're through all the main part of the travel, it's kind of nice to just relax and be where you are.
Merlin: And I was like, okay, this is great.
Merlin: I'm going to get into this.
Merlin: I'm not going to be me.
Merlin: I'm not going to be all stand back and look at it from a removed guy.
Merlin: I'm going to just be here and talk to people and hang out.
Merlin: And it wasn't long before I saw – this is, you know –
Merlin: I think probably late morning.
Merlin: And I saw a woman there, um, doing slots while she, uh, rocked a baby seat with her right foot.
Merlin: So her baby, her baby was there.
Merlin: She was on like one of those stools and she's with her right foot.
Merlin: She's, she's pulling thing in with the right foot.
Merlin: She's like, uh, rocking a baby in the little car seat.
John: Oh dear.
Yeah.
Merlin: The thing is, these guys, these gambling guys, they look like terrible, terrible people.
Merlin: This guy's got headphones on.
Merlin: Are you allowed to wear headphones while you're playing poker?
John: I think so.
John: I think you can do whatever you want because it's the Wild West.
John: But what I like about Daniel Negrano is that he has developed his...
John: He has developed his talent to the point that he can, this is one of his tricks, he'll go around the table and he'll tell everybody what their hand is.
John: And he's remarkable.
Merlin: Oh, it's a whole other level of bluffing.
John: Yeah, it's remarkable how close he can get because he knows the cards that have been dealt, and he looks at your face, he knows how you're acting, and he, what they call, puts you on a certain hand.
John: And imagine playing cards against this guy.
John: There's nothing illegal about it.
John: There's nothing illegal about him saying, I bet you got a king-queen, don't you?
John: And you're sitting there holding a king-queen.
John: Imagine trying to play poker against that.
Merlin: That's why I say it's like two levels of bluffing.
Merlin: Because on the one hand, it isn't like you're being provoked.
Merlin: Because you can sit there with your stupid douchey sunglasses on and stare.
Merlin: But when somebody says that to you, it's going to be hard not to have some kind of a reaction.
John: Right.
John: And so Daniel Negrano can have a 2-4 offsuit.
John: And say, I bet you've got a king-queen, don't you?
John: All in.
John: And then you're like, he knows what cards I have, and he's going all in.
John: He must have two aces or whatever.
John: And then it turns out he did know what you had, and he was bluffing.
John: And you're just like... And he does it with a kind of a merry... I think he's a small man.
John: I can't tell for sure.
John: But he strikes me as a smaller guy.
John: And he just... I don't know.
Merlin: He looks like amongst these guys, he looks like a nice fella.
Yeah.
John: He's a little bit of a leprechaun.
John: I follow him on Twitter, and I don't know.
John: It's one of those funny things where there aren't many celebrities that I care about or try to attract their attention.
John: But I have replied to Daniel Negreanu tweets...
John: on several occasions hoping that he will reply.
John: Interesting.
John: And I don't know why.
John: I don't know why I care about this guy.
John: I've seen him on TV.
John: I've watched him play poker.
John: I feel like his mind is working a certain way that is not akin to mine.
John: He's not a guy I would maybe even naturally be friends with.
Merlin: Isn't that funny?
John: Isn't that funny how that can happen?
John: But I'm flirting with him on the internet.
John: It's so silly, the internet.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: I'm sorry.
Merlin: I have to admit I'm a little bit off my game because now I'm consumed in these pictures of poker players.
Merlin: I've been like at somebody's house.
Merlin: You know how it is you go to somebody's house and they got the TV on.
John: Mm-hmm.
Merlin: I don't know what this is.
John: They have plastic on their couches.
Merlin: They ought to.
Merlin: Back in Ohio, everybody did that.
Merlin: But when I was a kid, you just wouldn't have the TV on when somebody came over.
Merlin: If it's the babysitter or something, and you've got that as established TV time, that's actually kind of a good transitional thing.
Merlin: But you go to somebody's house, they get the TV on.
Merlin: You can't really say...
Merlin: can we not have the TV on?
Merlin: The TV is going to be on.
Merlin: So now the TV is the, is the, is the evening.
Merlin: And sometimes people, you know what I'm talking about?
Merlin: And, uh, and it'll be, sometimes it'll be poker.
Merlin: And I just, I watch people watching poker and I'm like, the joke used to be like watch English people watching darts.
Merlin: And I think I'd rather watch darts.
Merlin: I don't, I want all of these people to die in a fire.
Merlin: I don't want any of them to win.
Merlin: They just look like awful people.
John: Darts are at least a sport.
Merlin: It's absolutely a sport.
John: Yeah.
It's
John: Well, I'm the guy that if I walk into a restaurant, let's say in an airport or anywhere where there's a TV on and there's no one in the bar, I just walk around and turn them off.
Merlin: Our flight back the other day, we were right under the TV and it was like CNN just blaring, of course.
John: Yeah, yeah.
John: I mean, if I can turn them off, there are some airports now where the TVs are not in the bar, but they're just throughout the airport.
Merlin: Oh, absolutely.
Merlin: Every gate.
John: Yeah.
John: Yeah.
John: And the TV just blaring CNN, like you're saying.
John: And, oh, my God, I can't think of a worse thing.
Merlin: People are so scared.
Merlin: Men are so scared to be alone.
Merlin: They're so scared to feel alone.
Merlin: Demon dogs.
Merlin: Demon dogs.
Merlin: Now, here's the other thing.
Merlin: Baccarat.
Merlin: Like, I was a point when I was looking at James Bond movies and I thought I should learn more about Baccarat.
Merlin: I tried to read the Wikipedia page and I thought this has got to be the most confusing thing I've ever heard in my life.
Merlin: Now, I know you're not at this stage quite yet, but I want to plant a seed.
Merlin: I want to hear how it goes when your little daughters start doing stuff.
Merlin: I want to hear how it goes when you try to explain baseball.
Merlin: Oh.
Merlin: Because we have a baseball field right by our house.
Merlin: And we went out to watch baseball.
Merlin: And I don't like to be like explaining, Dad.
Merlin: That big truck is carrying dirt for making the road.
Merlin: Like, who cares?
Merlin: But we're sitting there.
Merlin: We're watching it.
Merlin: You just described me.
Merlin: Yeah.
John: The airplane is in the sky.
John: That big truck is carrying tar for the roads.
John: Now, tar is made out of a petroleum distillate.
Merlin: Look over there.
Merlin: Do you see that man?
Merlin: He's my pole.
John: You know how trees grow?
John: Well, let me show you.
John: Doesn't it seem a little bit warmer?
John: Are you wearing a trench coat?
Merlin: But you were explaining to her – Well, we're sitting there and there's like a baseball game going on, a really terrible baseball game.
Merlin: I think only terrible teams play at our park.
Merlin: But we're sitting there watching them and they're whacking around.
Merlin: And I don't want to explain things stupidly to my daughter.
Merlin: I don't want to dumb things down.
Merlin: But I tried to explain baseball and for everything that I could explain, it required either more explanation and or something that contravened what I just said.
John: Right, right.
Merlin: That's why it's America's game.
Merlin: It's America's pastime.
Merlin: There's nine people out there, and that guy's going to come up with the bat, and so that pitcher's going to throw the ball, and he's going to try to hit it.
Merlin: Easy enough.
Merlin: Okay, well, if he hits it, he has to go around all the bases.
John: Right.
John: I don't think most baseball fans would describe that as an obligation, although I guess it is.
John: He doesn't have to.
John: He gets to.
Merlin: Wait a minute.
John: You're saying he has the opportunity to run around the bases.
John: You don't have to do anything.
Merlin: If he doesn't want to, he doesn't have to.
Merlin: Could you choose to play different positions if you wanted to in baseball?
Merlin: Baseball seems like it's got a lot of rules.
Merlin: Well, for example, they've got all the different positions.
Merlin: You've got first, outfield, left, right field, right field.
John: They have different talents.
John: A first baseman and a third baseman have different skills.
Merlin: This I know.
Merlin: I think you kind of have to stand in a certain place and stuff.
Merlin: But I'm trying to explain it.
Merlin: And so they throw the ball.
Merlin: But I mean, how do you explain a foul ball with a full count?
John: Hmm.
Merlin: It was a strike, but it wasn't a strike.
John: Right.
Merlin: Okay.
Merlin: So that was a strike.
Merlin: Well, wait, you didn't swing at it.
Merlin: Well, the rules.
Merlin: Wait, wait, wait.
Merlin: So it's, wait, hang on a minute.
Merlin: So there's three balls and I'm speaking for my daughter who at this point would not be able to understand any of this.
John: So there's, this is why I didn't fully understand baseball until I was 32.
Merlin: It's incredibly complicated if you really think about it.
John: But I had the advantage for several years there of going to baseball games with our good friends, Jason Finn, and then other times with Ben Gibbard.
John: And both of these guys are super baseball fans.
John: Yeah, so Jason is too.
John: Jason used to score the games.
John: He would do that thing that old men do.
John: He would take a piece of paper and a pencil and he'd score these fucking games.
John: And he would explain everything that was happening as it was happening.
John: And it was like me sitting at a baccarat table where I'm like...
John: Well, now, what's a bulk?
John: And he's like, well, here's the thing about a bulk.
John: It hardly ever happens, but... And he would explain what a bulk was.
John: And I had to see, like, 13 bulks before I kind of got it, you know?
John: Like, infield fly rule and all these things.
John: Yes.
John: All this esoterica.
John: But also...
John: What these guys communicated to me through their love of baseball, Ben's and Jason's, and they love baseball in different ways.
John: But they communicated the kind of Greek drama that baseball is and made me understand that you really don't understand the game.
John: You can't appreciate the game unless you're also...
John: really following the players stories you know these guys would come up to bat and i'm thinking well he's gonna get some baseballs thrown at him and then one of them he's gonna either hit or not and jason's like no no no this guy got called up from the minors after 15 years of playing triple a ball and for the new zealand uh you know uh ocelots and uh and this is a real cinderella story and i'm like cinderella story right i hear that a lot
John: What does that mean?
John: And he's like, oh, yeah, yeah, this is amazing.
John: This guy here, boy, he had some injuries last season.
John: And so all that extra material that they're bringing into every game where they know the narrative of each one of these players, and they're bringing those narratives into it, and all of a sudden you feel like, oh, it's the freaking Iliad to these people.
John: It's like...
Merlin: Here comes this guy who's from— He's a guy who used to play for the opposing team, and he's coming up, and he's back home for the first time.
John: For sure.
Merlin: Or here's a guy that got drafted right out of high school, and I see their eyes— The coach is getting old, and this might be his last season, stuff like that.
John: Right, or this, you know, this pitcher, this is a pitching duel, and you realize, like, oh, they are seeing this as a clash of titans, like the Etruscans against the Phoenicians.
John: Like, it isn't just a bunch of dumb, overpaid, fat kids out there running around a field.
John: It's like, it's all full, it's all laced with metaphor, right?
Merlin: for a true fan uh and and i'm not interested in it i wish i wish i could i totally intellectually understand that i feel that way with comics but um you know and and things like tv shows i've gotten into but it's i can't get past the fat rich guys thing not nothing it's not the fat or the rich it's just it's just it's so i just i just cannot get into it and you know i don't i don't begrudge people liking it but i begrudge how much it is forced down my throat all the time it drives me crazy
John: It made me realize that in my private moments walking around a city, the things that I am enjoying about my little private narratives are also kind of laced with metaphor and full of...
John: full of metadata that other people don't have access to.
John: And, you know, I'm walking around.
John: I'm like, Oh, this is like the other day I was in an airport and I, it was just, I'm just navigating an airport, which I've done a million times.
John: And it's late at night.
John: I'm the only person there.
John: And I wasn't trying to make it fun for myself.
John: I just started to,
John: I just started having a spy adventure in the airport by myself because I don't know why, because there it is, you know, like I'm in the airport and a couple of, I walked through a couple of pneumatic doors and all of a sudden I'm, all of a sudden I'm trying to lose a tail and all of a sudden I am, you know, trying to get some microfiche.
Merlin: But something trips off your spidey sense, and even if it's a jokey spidey sense, you go, uh-oh, here we go, and it's on.
John: And then I'm having fun, and I'm seeing all the – in all the airport hieroglyphics, I'm seeing all this other information, and I'm remembering the great –
John: The great espionage stories that kind of make up a part of my imagination.
John: And I'm passing the time, I guess.
Merlin: It's consuming, though, because aren't you also – you're looking for means of aggress.
Merlin: You're looking for who you can count on.
Merlin: You always say this.
Merlin: When you're at the terminal, you're figuring out who you're going to have to take out and who you might be able to get on your side.
John: Well, I'm thinking like, okay, there's the security door, watching the janitor come and slide his little card and the door opens.
John: And I realize that is the way I'm going to have to get out of here.
John: And so I'm going to have to take that janitor down and can I?
Merlin: Cut his hand off.
Merlin: There might be one of those, you know, cybernetic things.
John: And that is essentially, I guess, what people are doing when they watch baseball.
John: It's just their imagination is engaged.
Yeah.
John: In a different way.
John: They have a different set of – a different group of material is going into the function machine, and it's coming out the other side as a different shape sausage links.
John: But really, they're just using their mind to pass –
Merlin: So there's the game that's happening on the field, but there's another kind of game that's happening in somebody's head.
Merlin: It's like when I watch two pigeons fighting over some bread and I pick a side.
Merlin: Like, I want that guy to win.
John: Right, right.
John: And I turned on the World Series the other day.
John: And I don't care about Detroit or San Francisco, frankly, as far as sports teams go.
John: I love them both as cities.
Merlin: No argument here.
John: We're all good.
John: But I'm watching it and I'm like, okay, I'm rooting for Detroit because I feel like Detroit is the perennial underdog in everything.
John: And then the San Francisco guys have a story.
John: There was a guy on the San Francisco team that literally had spent his entire baseball career in the minors.
John: and had just gotten called up last year as an old guy, and now he's pitching in the World Series one year later.
John: Tell a hell of a story.
John: He's like, it's an incredible Cinderella story.
John: And so I'm watching this thing, and every time somebody comes up to bat, I'm like, well, I hope this guy wins.
John: And I'm the worst sports fan in the world.
John: I'm like somebody's girlfriend.
John: I hope this guy wins.
John: I like his hair.
Merlin: I like their hats.
Merlin: But it's definitely like that with the Olympics.
Merlin: You know, they're always trying to insert all of this, like, oh, you know, drove her at 5 a.m.
Merlin: to swim practice every morning.
John: Yeah, and a lot of those Olympic montages, what I come away from it with is like, oh, what terrible parents.
John: I can't imagine.
John: Did they really do that?
John: Like the girl that won the combined gymnastics thing, it's like, well, we wanted her to succeed at this.
John: So we sent her away.
John: I haven't seen my daughter in two years because she's been at the gymnastics school in Iowa and I can't afford to go there.
John: So I'm here working to make the money to pay for her to be at this gymnastics place where I don't get to see her and she's only 13 or something.
John: And I was like, I didn't feel like they were terrible parents, but I just felt like, wow, weird.
John: Like weird priorities.
Merlin: Yeah, because things like running fast by themselves are not that interesting.
John: But this girl won all these Olympic medals and the rest of her life she'll be the one that won all those Olympic medals.
Merlin: Yeah, and you meet her at a party, you'll be a little envious.
John: You know, it's like having an Emmy.
Merlin: She's an EGOT.
John: It's an EGOT.
John: She's basically the Olympic EGOT.
Merlin: I think I do something similar to this.
Merlin: And I had never thought about it in this way until now.
Merlin: And our friend Scott Simpson has pointed this out to me that I'm kind of like suspicious guy.
Merlin: Like I'm always trying to notice like what's not quite right here.
Merlin: Why did they decide to do it that way?
Merlin: And I do this constantly and I don't even really think about it.
Merlin: And I definitely don't think about how weird it is until I find myself saying it to somebody else.
Merlin: Mm-hmm.
Merlin: It could be something like – it's kind of weird.
Merlin: They bust all the tables in this place twice, but they haven't bust that table yet.
Merlin: I wonder why that is.
Merlin: And then I start thinking about, well, maybe the busboy is mad at that waiter.
Merlin: Maybe they're expecting that person to come back.
Merlin: And then now suddenly I'm the spy.
Merlin: So I'm always noticing things.
Merlin: In my room in Seattle, hmm, it's interesting.
Merlin: It used to be you always had minibars in rooms, and now you don't see minibars very much anymore.
Merlin: They have a refrigerator in here but not a minibar.
Merlin: I wonder why they did that.
Merlin: Is it because it was just people were asking for reversals on charges?
Merlin: It was too costly to restock?
Merlin: Were there liability problems?
Merlin: And all of a sudden, like an hour later, I wake up in a cold sweat, and I've been thinking about this thing for an hour.
Merlin: Right.
Merlin: So for me, I'm very sympathetic.
Merlin: Walking around an airport, I see, especially in an airport, because you get nothing better to do.
Merlin: Yeah, yeah, you're just trapped there.
Merlin: It's like Gitmo.
Merlin: You're going to find little games for yourself.
John: Well, and the thing about airports is there is that underclass of people who are in the airport all the time.
John: They work there.
John: I wouldn't even say underclass, but they are a subclass to the, like the airport fills up with people that empties out.
John: Well, most of them are from Middle Earth.
Yeah.
John: But here are these people who are always here and you don't notice them.
John: It's like at the public market.
John: I remember I was down at the public market here in Seattle with somebody who was visiting.
John: And there was a Native American guy who was panhandling kind of right in the middle of the market.
John: And this person said, oh, my God, look at that.
John: It's a real Indian.
John: And I said, you're surrounded by Indians here in Seattle.
John: There are Native Americans all over the city.
John: And they were like, what, really?
John: And I said, yeah, you're not seeing them.
John: And we stood there in the market and looked around, and I was like, look over there.
John: See right there?
John: And all of a sudden, they became aware that there were Native Americans all around us.
John: And they just had never... They had never...
John: They had grown used to because of wherever they grew up or however it is that this happens, that they just didn't see Native Americans because they had a sense that anytime they saw a Native American, that person was going to be either panhandling them or judging them.
John: Wearing a headdress.
John: There was some thing about Indians in America that made them uncomfortable, and so they just stopped seeing them.
John: And, you know, you can't spend five minutes in Seattle downtown without realizing that this is kind of a place where Native American culture is existing simultaneous with Seattle culture, but in a way, like, separate.
John: And people just don't, they just change the focus of their eyes a little bit, and they don't see them.
John: And it's the same in airports.
John: There are people in airports that are there all the time, and you don't see them.
John: You're looking for your gate.
John: You're looking around.
John: You don't realize that there's this other culture happening that's always there.
John: And when you do realize it, you're like, oh, hello.
Merlin: And you always think about it, of course, from your own point of view.
Merlin: So the things that I first noticed a lot when I first visited San Francisco in 1997 versus what I notice now are really different.
Merlin: And this is really Psych 101 stuff, but I think it's incredibly interesting.
Merlin: You don't even see the vomit.
Merlin: You kidding me?
Merlin: The thing is, I don't even notice the poop.
Merlin: I walk around the poop without even seeing it now.
Merlin: I know it's there, but, you know, again, like my spidey sense.
Merlin: But I mean this is one way to start feeling a little bit more alive in life is to realize how much stuff you've chunked.
Merlin: Chunking and heuristics and algorithms account for so much of our existence that if we were to really stop and think about it, it would blow your mind how many things you've chunked.
Merlin: A great example, when my daughter and I go and wait for a streetcar, there's a multi, multi, multi-ton vehicle.
Merlin: Like you go to wait for a BART train, there's something flying by you at like 40 miles an hour.
Merlin: And you're like four feet away from that.
Merlin: Like what kind of frontier guy would feel good like standing next to a giant piece of metal flying by at 40 miles an hour?
Merlin: You've habituated yourself to that because it hasn't jumped off the track and killed you yet.
Merlin: Right.
Merlin: Right.
Merlin: That's one.
Merlin: I mean, there's a whole bunch of these where think about the way you drive to work.
Merlin: Now, in your case, you don't have a job and you always drive a different route.
Merlin: So that's true.
Merlin: Just in and of itself makes you more alive.
Merlin: But I mean, I think that's what happens with me.
Merlin: And this is my own probably mental illness.
Merlin: And it's why I'm very sympathetic to crazy people is I sometimes wonder what's the pattern here that I haven't seen yet.
Merlin: That's I'm really, I'm almost obsessed by that.
Merlin: Like, why did you choose the, like a marketing message?
Merlin: Why did you choose to put that ad in this place with that wording?
Merlin: Now, of course, a lot of this probably means next to nothing because it's just a bunch of idiots probably.
Merlin: But
Merlin: But I don't know.
Merlin: My life gets better if I let myself strip away some of the chunking and re-experience that.
Merlin: And sometimes that's what travel is, once you get beyond the airport even.
Merlin: But you go somewhere and you try and see something anew, including yourself.
Merlin: And that means instead of saying, well, here's all the things here that are weird, and here's all the things that I can't get here, right?
Merlin: Here's all the things I can get but don't want, and here's all the things that I want but can't get.
John: Pimms.
John: Pimms biscuits.
Merlin: That's a tea room?
Merlin: What do they call that?
Merlin: A tea trinket?
Merlin: Yeah.
John: Yeah, it's a tea trinket.
John: I don't know why this is, because this isn't true of anybody else in my family.
John: I don't know why I'm like this.
John: But I do everything I can to break my own patterns every day.
John: Like, when I put a cup of coffee in the microwave, I never heat it for the same amount of time.
Merlin: No way.
Merlin: Yeah, because... You manually choose?
John: Yeah, a lot of times.
John: Whoa.
John: One minute, two seconds.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: When I make my daughter's milk in the morning, I've got it down to a science because I realize we have a quick minute button.
Merlin: Right.
John: Quick minute button.
John: I get a coffee cup.
John: I feel like the quick minute button is the enemy.
John: Holy shit.
Merlin: I'm Vichy.
Merlin: Of consciousness.
Merlin: You know what?
Merlin: I'm complicit because what I do is I know.
Merlin: Here's the thing.
Merlin: It used to be that I would go get it set for like 52 seconds or whatever.
Merlin: I said, wait a minute.
Merlin: If I had a little bit more milk.
Merlin: to this cup, I can go, I can hit clear, quick minute, on.
Merlin: I hit tip, tip, tip, right in a row, three buttons, and I'm making milk.
Merlin: There you go.
Merlin: But I'm a little less alive, aren't I?
John: Well, this is why I take a different route into town every day.
John: Partly.
Merlin: You also want to lose a tail, right?
John: We've said too much.
John: But I also, in the process of taking a different route to town every day, I've been down every street in the city.
John: And, you know, there are, you're accruing accidental benefit all the time from breaking your own pattern.
John: And, you know, the pediatrician, when my daughter was born, said, you know, children really like patterns.
John: They like regimented sort of, they like the dependable day.
John: As though this was like, you know, this was pediatric 101, right?
John: And I said to her, I was like, well, that's just not going to happen.
John: So we're going to have to, if this is true, if kids like this kind of certainty, then we're going to have to find a different way to impress upon her that things are certain in life.
John: But I'm not going to make her breakfast at the same hour every day.
John: It's just never going to happen.
John: And that little bit of pushback, the pediatrician was like, oh, well, I'm sure that's fine, too.
John: And I was like, oh, it's another example of people saying shit where they don't mean it.
Merlin: There's no real basis for that.
John: Or even if there is.
John: I mean, she read 450 papers written.
John: That represent 450 different studies that people have done that have come to this conclusion.
John: Turns out.
John: But turns out they're just a bunch of studies that people did on some group of kids in a room.
John: It doesn't mean anything.
John: Every person is individual.
John: You might have 400 kids that all like their Elmo doll given to them at the same minute of the day, because their Elmo doll's always been given to them at the same minute of every day.
John: My daughter is almost two, and she has so far exhibited no adverse effects to living a life that is...
John: Almost 100% spontaneous.
Merlin: Have you tried to push the envelope?
Merlin: I mean, is it a different size Delmo, different color, eye missing, and then back?
John: I mean, have you... I am not yet experimenting on her in that way, although it will surely come.
John: It will surely come.
John: But, you know, when she's ready to go to bed, it's obvious.
John: And when she's ready to wake up, we all wake up.
John: Like, I remember we went to buy a car from a gal who had just had a...
John: This was back when I was buying a lot of cars.
John: She had just had a baby.
John: And she had a couple of older kids.
John: And we were buying her car.
John: And her new son was like, what, a week old or something like that.
John: And we were like, wow, that must really change things for you.
John: I mean, you've got a couple of boys, you know, one's five and one's three.
John: And now you've got this little one.
John: It must really have...
John: You know, must be like crazy times right now.
John: And she said about the infant.
John: Yeah, well, he's got a couple of more weeks where he's kind of can do his own thing, but then he's got to get on our schedule.
John: And I was like, whoa, yeah, a couple of weeks to just be a two-week-old, and then he's going to have to get on their schedule.
John: And I think there are a lot of people who live that way.
John: You got to get on my schedule.
Merlin: But on the other hand, I feel like I'm hearing two things here.
Merlin: Are you saying that you're not going to create and hue to a baby-centric schedule, correct?
Correct.
John: Oh, no, no, no.
John: I went the other way.
John: I think we all went the other way, which was I don't have a schedule, so it's the baby's schedule.
John: The baby's schedule 100% for the first year of her life.
John: And now her schedule is when she's with me, it is whatever happens.
John: And when she's with her nana...
John: Of course, Nana is on a schedule.
John: Nana is a lady who is on a... She's got a dog that needs walks.
Merlin: She has a beautiful garden to keep up.
John: Yeah, and she's on much more of a schedule than that.
John: Nana is on a schedule where she is rotating condiments.
John: And stuff where it's like, oh, it's March 16th.
John: Well, that's the day.
Merlin: Time for some new zesty Italian.
John: That's the day when the tartar sauce moves from the top shelf of the door of the refrigerator to the middle shelf.
John: Because you got to keep everything on and everything's gone.
Merlin: I have such a funny – it's easy to become a smug parent because that's – it's right there in the name parent.
Merlin: You become smug.
Merlin: But when you hear people who are – you know you can like schedule a C-section and stuff like that.
Merlin: Not for medical reasons but just because it fits your schedule.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: I mean whatever.
Merlin: Teach his own.
Merlin: But it is funny to me when somebody has that kind of attitude of like, well, we're just going to get this – as though it's a puppy who will eventually learn about the paper.
Yeah.
John: Well, you can't have parent without errant.
Merlin: Whoa.
John: Right?
Merlin: Man, I sometimes forget how much you're here to help.
Merlin: Pair.
Merlin: Right.
Merlin: Hmm.
Merlin: Hmm.
Merlin: But, you know, it's like, you know, we want to have everything planned out.
Merlin: You want to have everything all squared away.
Merlin: And it's like they're just, you know, especially when the baby's little.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: You know, I think a lot about the demon dogs, to be honest with you.
Merlin: They're just howling with their red eyes.
Merlin: They're just nipping at your heels.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: You know, I slept pretty well last night, but I still feel a little bit out of it today.
Merlin: I did some stuff this morning, so I'm a little confused.
John: Well, sometimes getting a good night's sleep can actually make you a real fuzzball.
Merlin: Oh, well, if you're curious, we're going through a sleep thing right now.
Merlin: And I came back from our trip.
Merlin: We should at some point talk about our thing, probably.
Merlin: Should.
Merlin: Because I think it went really well.
Merlin: I think it did, too.
John: I thought you were amazing.
Merlin: See...
Merlin: You really were.
Merlin: You're a truth teller.
Merlin: You wouldn't say that to shine me on, would you?
John: I would not bullshit you.
John: You would avoid it.
John: Your game changing that you did, the game changing that you accomplished, I mean, you changed a lot of games that night.
John: And I was proud to be on stage with you.
John: I was proud to share a stage with you.
Merlin: Well, you called me – I remember I said the same thing in an email to you, and I believe you called me a fag.
Merlin: No, I said gay.
Merlin: Gay.
Merlin: You called me gay.
John: Yeah.
Merlin: I feel the same way.
Merlin: Fag is like – That's ableist.
Merlin: That's an ableist word.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: I feel the same way.
Merlin: God, we should talk about it.
Merlin: It's normative.
Merlin: We should just about that a little bit later.
Merlin: But all I wanted to say was I came back.
Merlin: I was tired.
Merlin: I could tell I was getting a stress bump.
Merlin: So the night before last, sometimes – I'm usually super dad, 100% attention.
Merlin: Don't look at the phone.
Merlin: Don't do anything.
Merlin: And I think in some ways that's been a not great thing in some ways because that means whenever dad's around, you play with dad, whether that's at the playground or wherever.
Merlin: You know what I mean?
Merlin: But it was like 5 o'clock two days ago, and I was like, you know what?
Merlin: We're going to read a little bit and then we're going to lay down.
Merlin: I'm going to sleep.
Merlin: You may either go to sleep with me or you can go in another room and be extremely quiet.
Merlin: And she ended up falling asleep and she slept till like 830.
Merlin: So, of course, now she goes to bed at 10.
Merlin: As you probably know from how this stuff goes, now that throws everything off.
Merlin: You can't bank up sleep with a kid.
Merlin: It throws off – when you try and tell your single – not single, but your childless friends about something called sleep hygiene, they roll their eyes and think you're being all Northern California.
Merlin: But if your kid's not sleeping, everybody's fucked.
John: Right.
Merlin: Right.
Merlin: It really – I mean somebody is going to bear the brunt of that.
Merlin: There's going to be some caregiver that has to deal with when there's not sleep in place.
Merlin: And so that's why I think it's funny when people are like – have these ideas, they read a book or something, and they're like, oh, yeah, we're going to get them on – get them onto this schedule of this and that, and especially when they're little.
Merlin: It's just that's – it's really weird.
Merlin: It's like trying to train a brick.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: It's like you really think that's going to work?
Merlin: I mean you're just going to frustrate both of you and you're not necessarily going to make it better.
Merlin: I think you provide favorable conditions.
Merlin: I'm not sure if he said this or quoted this, but this is from my friend Jeff Veen once in the way he has approached the design is to make it easy to do the right thing.
Merlin: Right.
Merlin: And I believe in this.
Merlin: So I think if you create, instead of telling your child to be honest, instead, create conditions in which it's hard to be anything but, to want to be anything but honest.
Merlin: Right?
Merlin: If you want to create, if you want the kid to sleep, create a condition where it's easy to sleep in the way that you want, which sounds subtle, but I think that's really, really different from go get in bed now.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: Creating stress, because now daddy's schedule says it's time for you, it's 725, so it's time for you to go be in bed.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: And if it's 726, now we're both mad.
John: Yeah, there's one bone of contention in my family right now, which is that sometimes I feel like baby has to sit on daddy's lap.
John: And sometimes baby doesn't want to sit on daddy's lap.
John: She wants to get down.
John: And I say, and there are a lot of people in my family who feel like baby should be allowed to do whatever she wants.
Merlin: They had their chance.
John: I say, this is true.
John: Baby has some times in the day when she is allowed to do whatever she wants.
John: But there are times, and this is one of them, when baby needs to just sit on daddy's lap.
John: Because, and this is what I always come back to, what if we are in a hidden train compartment and the Gestapo is checking documents?
Merlin: does baby get to get down and run around so like what like you're in like uh like hiding in the floor type situation exactly you have limited space i hate to say this john i hate to keep bringing this up but the last episode of mesh it just keeps bringing me back to the last episode of mesh they're sitting there in the bus they're about to be discovered by the north koreans is that right and uh and and they're in the back in this bus full of civilians and hawkeyes there and this baby remember the baby yeah the baby
Merlin: the baby the baby's crying and crying and crying and that's revealing their position yeah now that that that is uh with with much respect to to a simple village woman she'd never rehearsed that no she she had not she had raised a baby that thought it was okay to just go do what baby wants that's right is that right am i on the right track here this is you're preparing for something much larger than having a healthy child well and this is what happened in that uh terrible quentin tarantino movie the uh the one where they shoot hitler in the face 400 times
Merlin: Oh, the Angry Jews movie.
John: Yeah, the baby under the house makes a sound.
John: So here's the thing.
John: If you have a baby, you need to prepare her.
Merlin: Oh, that opening sequence.
John: That was great.
John: It was a great opening sequence.
John: The rest of the movie was horse shit.
John: But the beginning opening sequence could have been a whole film.
John: That was very well done.
John: But so my contention is, and I have to hold the women in my clan back with a saber.
John: While I'm holding baby on my lap because they, because baby's crying and they want to make it better.
John: And so I keep them at bay with a saber in one hand.
John: And with the other hand, I just say, baby, hold your daughter fast.
John: I say, baby, let's say you're too young to understand this, but let's say there's Gestapo searching this farmhouse.
John: This is not the time to play.
John: This is the few minutes where you just sit quietly on Daddy's lap.
John: And she fights and screams and yells.
John: And I'm like, fight and scream and yell all you like.
John: But when that moment comes, we will be ready.
John: We will be trained.
Merlin: So it's just, you know, think about this.
Merlin: Think about how you train a police dog.
Merlin: And first of all, I got to say, John, I'm going to start doing this today.
Merlin: And more often than not, it'll probably be that you need to go in another room and be extremely quiet because the Gestapo might be coming.
Merlin: That's right.
Merlin: But, you know, if you...
Merlin: Train a police dog.
Merlin: You don't just take the dog into a drug house and have it smell for drugs in the house, right?
Merlin: You do all kinds of things.
Merlin: You have all this training.
Merlin: First of all, you've got to train the dog to be a police dog in general.
Merlin: It's got to follow orders.
Merlin: And then don't you do lots of stuff with having it sniff things in a field and it has to detect stuff and you're introducing things and getting it more subtle and subtle and subtle?
John: Yeah, it has to be on voice command because you can't have a police dog that's just...
Merlin: You don't just throw a bag of weed at it and take it to the airport.
Merlin: It takes some training.
John: Yes, it does.
Merlin: And that's what you're doing.
Merlin: It seems to me that what you're doing is you're doing a kind of, I don't know, allied power parenting.
John: Yeah, that's right.
Merlin: If anybody gives away that train, it's not going to be your daughter.
John: And she is understanding that in her whole life, there is only one person...
John: that ultimately draws a big line, the fat line.
John: With a saber.
John: The fat line with a saber in the sand, which is, there is nothing now that you can say or do, nothing that anyone can say or do, that will divert me from this project of you sitting quietly on my lap.
John: You could set yourself on fire, and I would hold you in my lap until you burned to a cinder.
Okay.
John: I will kill your mother and my own mother with this saber rather than let you get off my lap.
John: Does everyone understand?
John: Good.
Merlin: You're sending a very clear message about how this is going to work.
John: That's right.
John: Now let's all sit quietly and let the Gestapo pass.
John: And it is very hard for everyone to swallow this bitter pill.
John: which is why I carry a saber.
Merlin: Every father should.
John: Every father should.
Merlin: I think I told you about the guy I went to school with who sold Snickers bars and bought a Marshall amp.
Merlin: Stop me if I've told you this other part, but his dad was the head of the canine
Merlin: unit at our sheriff's department.
Merlin: Have I told you this?
John: Right.
Merlin: Okay.
Merlin: So Phil's dad, who is a really, really cool, interesting guy.
Merlin: I don't know.
Merlin: I feel like I learned a lot from this guy.
Merlin: He was a really cool, really smart guy.
Merlin: And so he's in charge of all of the guys who have dogs and do dog police stuff.
Merlin: Mm-hmm.
Merlin: And apparently, I mean, he said – he told me all kinds of interesting things.
Merlin: But the one that really stuck with me was, you know, first of all, these dogs go and live with the police officer.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: Like it's not their pet, but I mean they have to have a very strong bond.
Merlin: Oh, they're bonded.
Merlin: Right, right.
Merlin: But there's a lot of – and so then after – it's a weird thing though because they're not just watching the dog.
Merlin: They're also watching the dude because these are fucking Rottweilers.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: Rottweilers – and what Phil's dad would say to me is that –
Merlin: I am getting old, and I think I'm repeating myself.
Merlin: But he said a Rottweiler, it's like a Marine.
Merlin: A Rottweiler will follow every order to the letter from the chain of command, but it also knows what to do when there's no order in place.
Merlin: It's like a commando dog.
Merlin: Which is great.
Merlin: But here's the problem.
Merlin: If you're not smarter than your dog and you're not more resolute than your dog, that Rottweiler will run your fucking house.
Merlin: You will never have a life again because a Rottweiler is bigger than you.
Merlin: It's stronger than you.
Merlin: And in some sense, it is stronger.
Merlin: It is also smarter than you.
Merlin: And he says that's the thing is we go and we monitor these guys.
Merlin: We train them.
Merlin: We test out both the dog and the handler.
Merlin: And the thing is he says you can learn so much about the character as with a beard.
Merlin: You learn so much about the character of the police officer.
John: Watching them try and interact with this dog.
Merlin: Yeah, and just seeing how their dog is.
Merlin: You know, you got one of these little nervous people with three chihuahuas running around.
Merlin: There's a pretty good chance that's going to be a pretty nervous person at the other end of the cord.
John: Yeah.
John: Well, because the human being has introduced all these variables, all these concepts, all these irrelevant concepts, like...
John: That they want to be nice.
John: Does the dog like me?
John: All these things that never occurred.
Merlin: The dog just wants to know what the rule is.
John: Yeah.
John: The dog wants to be.
Merlin: The dog wants to please you.
Merlin: It wants to please the pack.
Merlin: It wants that dog wants to know its place in a pack.
Merlin: In the pack.
Merlin: Yes.
Merlin: Precisely.
Merlin: A dog.
Merlin: It's this is what this is.
Merlin: John.
Merlin: God damn it.
Merlin: This is another thing people need to learn.
Merlin: Yes.
Merlin: Dogs want to please us.
Merlin: That is their nature.
Merlin: But they want to please us because they think we're the boss.
Yeah.
Merlin: Not because we're nice.
John: Oh, they have no interest in pleasing us to earn our friendship.
Merlin: No.
Merlin: No.
Merlin: No, no.
Merlin: And a dog is not happy when they think they might be in power or maybe not.
Merlin: They're happy when they know who's running the show.
John: Well, this is the interesting thing about our show the other day.
John: we did a show in Seattle with five guys, all of whom are alpha type people.
John: Some are more alpha than others.
John: Are you talking about the show or the panel?
John: Well, both.
John: I mean, it's the same group of people.
John: And Jonathan Colton at one point said, listen,
John: you know, I don't want to get in the middle and start tangling with you silverbacks.
John: And I was like, all right, that's fair.
John: But he was making a point that there was in that show, there are all these, and this was part of my desire to get five really talented people together and collaborate.
John: There are all these questions of ape dynamics that nobody wants to address.
Merlin: I think I was pretty good at being a beta dog.
John: You were awesome.
John: Scott Simpson was awesome.
Merlin: I think given my history... I think given my history...
Merlin: And my pack problems as a human being.
Merlin: My performance aside, I think I didn't complain unduly about the tuxedos after it was a done deal.
John: No, you acquiesced to the tuxedos is what you did.
Merlin: I did.
Merlin: I got down.
Merlin: I laid on my back, and I said, please don't hurt me.
John: You rolled over, you put all four legs in the air.
Merlin: You get a dog, you get a dog and it starts acting up.
Merlin: You know what you do?
Merlin: If you're strong enough, this is what you just want.
Merlin: It's a puppy.
Merlin: You grab that fucking dog.
Merlin: You put it on its back and you hold it down with it on its back.
Merlin: That is the way that you show a dog.
Merlin: Who's in charge?
John: Yeah, like my mom climbing into her fucking dog's kennel.
John: What?
John: My mom periodically.
Merlin: What?
John: Periodically makes Gibson get out of his dog bed.
Merlin: She breaks up his toys.
John: She makes him get out of his dog bed and she climbs in and she lays down on his bed.
John: And she stares at him and she goes, my bed.
John: no i okay i've accepted all of this up until now there's no way that your mom does that 100 and she says i let you sleep in this kennel holy this is not your kennel and gibson goes
John: And she's like, all right, glad we had this talk.
John: And she climbs out, and then he goes back in.
John: I mean, he understands.
Merlin: And order is established.
Merlin: And you know what's funny, though?
Merlin: She was a computer programmer.
Merlin: It's weird how many computer programming jobs go off the rails because people don't act like the code base is a shared resource.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: They act like it's – no, you know what I mean?
Merlin: Again, back to the bases ball.
Merlin: Like if you started going out there and thinking it was all about you just trying to look cool while you were swinging the bat or while it was about you trying to make eyes with somebody in the stadium.
Merlin: It all sounds silly, but you get your ass kicked because that's not your job.
Merlin: Your job is to go out there and hit the fucking ball, right?
Merlin: Do you know what I mean?
Merlin: The order must be restored.
Merlin: And – oh my god.
Merlin: Is it a covered kennel?
John: Oh, it's a full-on... She has to climb in... It's one of those igloos.
John: It's a fucking igloo.
John: She climbs in the goddamn igloo.
John: You serve it my pleasure.
John: She's 78 years old.
John: You should see her.
John: You know, she'll...
John: I have watched her walk down the street late at night ahead of me.
John: You know, I'm trying to catch up to her like, Mom, you shouldn't be out walking.
John: She walks right into the center of like the what what in some cases could be construed as the most intimidating scenario, which is to say a group of four teenage.
John: So I'm saying I'm saying between 15 and 17 year old gangster.
John: like street corner hangout scene desperate with people that's desperate people who have no idea what they even have to lose they're teenagers they have no they have no sense that they are mortal and they are all wearing gang colors and they are standing on a street corner in the middle of the night in the middle of the hood and my mom will walk right into the middle of them
John: And say, I think that it's reprehensible that you just threw your candy wrapper on the ground or something like that.
John: And I'm, you know, I'm a block and a half behind going, mom, no.
John: And they, they straighten up.
John: I mean, I've watched it happen.
John: They're like, yes, ma'am.
John: And pick their candy bar wrapper up off the ground.
John: She's one of those.
John: It's like a Jedi thing.
Merlin: It's a Frank Kufel thing.
Merlin: There are some people who just have a certain way of carrying themselves and have that principle feeling.
Merlin: And if I did that, you might be able to do that with some authority, but you're also big and intimidating.
Merlin: Your mom's not a giant person.
John: Yeah, but those kids wouldn't be intimidated by me.
John: You're a threat.
John: My size would just encourage them to go on the defensive attack.
John: But my mom just... I think what it is is that we all have in the back of our head this switch where you do what your grandmother tells you.
John: And I feel like that is why...
John: Yeah, I think that was such a good Secretary of State.
Merlin: Who?
Merlin: Madeleine Albright?
Merlin: You say Madeleine Albright?
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: She's an attractive lady.
Merlin: She had a beautiful voice.
John: She, it turns out, was a Jewish lady.
Merlin: You know what?
Merlin: She found out late in life that she was a Jewish.
John: She found out late in life that she had this whole cultural background she had no idea about her whole life.
John: Isn't that amazing?
Merlin: So, so, so you're, but here's the thing now, but you and, uh, without naming names, you and certain members of your family are, are somewhat at loggerheads on the saber and baby holding issue.
Merlin: It is believed by these women who are not you, that the child should be allowed to go to stop it from crying.
Merlin: It should be allowed to go wander around.
John: Well, this is the thing.
John: I don't believe that they are, I don't believe that they are approaching these matters with, uh, with the long view and they are responding rather to a crying baby.
John: Their instinct is to take a crying baby and through petting and goldfish crackers and whatever other things, whatever other sort of sorcery that people apply to children, they want the crying baby to stop.
John: They want crying baby to go away and happy baby to come back.
John: And what they fail to appreciate is that crying baby has no effect on me.
John: Really?
John: It is the power I have in this situation, which is the difference between crying baby and happy baby is a math problem to me, not an emotional one.
John: So I can sit with crying baby on my lap for an hour, and I think it's important that it happen periodically.
John: Does it energize you?
John: No, no.
John: I mean, it's exhausting.
John: You're not like a vampire.
John: It's exhausting, but crying baby is sitting on my lap and she is saying, she is saying crying baby is what I do.
John: Crying baby is who I become when I want the situation to change.
John: And I say, I know that's what crying baby is.
John: And she goes, so I am being crying baby and the situation is not changing.
John: And I go, that's right.
John: And then we look at each other and she keeps crying.
John: So her strategy is to cry more.
John: Her strategy is to cry more.
John: And I swear to you, you know, the women in my house are tearing their hair out.
John: Sometimes they have to leave the house because this sound is not being... Because this sound is a sound that needs to be addressed and I am not addressing it, although I am addressing it.
John: I'm addressing it by saying...
John: Here's the thing.
John: You are going to sit on my lap.
John: And you can do it crying or not.
John: This can go a thousand different ways.
John: But the thing that isn't going to change is that you're not going to get down.
John: And it's not a wrestling match.
John: It's just the crying is not going to produce the results that you're expecting in this instance.
John: You're making a stronger person.
John: Crying may work for you in a lot of other avenues, but I know you don't have a wet diaper.
John: I know you are not uncomfortable.
John: I know you're not hurt.
John: I know you're not hungry.
John: I know you're not scared.
John: You are just dissatisfied.
John: And dissatisfaction is a thing that we are going to learn to sit and appreciate.
John: You can even store it up for a while.
John: Dissatisfaction is a thing that we are going to learn to endure.
Merlin: You should savor it like a wound.
John: Because all around me there are people who have never learned to endure dissatisfaction and I do not admire them.
Merlin: That's the beauty part with you.
Merlin: You do demand satisfaction, but you deny yourself, it seems to me, the immediate payoff of going, I'm going to write a letter or something like that.
Merlin: You let that sit and grow and strengthen.
Merlin: Right?
Merlin: You're in training.
Merlin: You're in training for the demanding of satisfaction.
John: What made walking into that North Face so exciting to me was that I had had two and a half months of discomfort.
John: That, you know, I could have thrown that backpack away the second I got to a town and bought a new backpack in a store.
John: But I did not.
Yeah.
John: I carried that broken-ass backpack for two months.
John: I carried that watch in my ass.
John: You knew it was going to get worse.
John: Oh, it was going to get worse, and I knew I was going to have to fix it with thread and bailing wire.
John: And I knew I was going to carry that thing for two months, and I was going to carry it all the way back to Seattle, and I was going to carry it downtown, and I was going to throw it on the floor of that store.
John: I knew that was going to happen.
John: And so every time it dug into my back, every time that backpack, every time I had to take it all apart and sew it back together, it was just like, mm-hmm, mm-hmm.
John: And then you made everyone in the store sit on your lap.
John: And I made everybody so sad.
John: I got my satisfaction.
John: I get mail from people all the time saying, I am trying to get satisfaction.
John: Will you help me?
John: Well, I can help you, but not in the way you expect.
John: That's right.
John: My feeling is I'm not going to help you get satisfaction.
John: Right.
John: But I can help you by saying I 100% support your desire to get satisfaction.
John: Yeah, there was a... Somebody tried to social network me the other day.
John: I want you to... Will you retweet my dissatisfaction?
Merlin: Oh, they want you to be the social media fixer.
John: Yeah, I'm not going to be your megaphone.
John: You know, if part of your dissatisfaction is that you are not able to socially mediate your problem with these people...
John: Let that be another log on your fire.
Merlin: You could really become – I mean I know you don't have the time for something like this nowadays, but you could become a kind of coach.
Merlin: You could become somebody – no, I'm just saying.
Merlin: I got to know – it's just something to think about.
Merlin: I'm not saying you would have to hold them on your lap.
Merlin: Maybe that could be just the first week or so.
Merlin: You come in for an hour and maybe, you know, how about this?
Merlin: You go to their house.
Merlin: You shake them out of bed.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: Private, get out of my bed.
Merlin: You lay in their bed.
Merlin: You make them watch you while you sleep in their bed.
Merlin: And they're tired and confused.
Merlin: Stand at attention at the foot of this bed and watch me sleep.
Merlin: My bed.
Merlin: I let you sleep here.
John: Watch me curl up with your, watch me turn your pillows to owls.
Merlin: It's a terrific idea because what you're saying in some ways is – it's funny.
Merlin: There's a – again, the irony.
Merlin: The irony of holding her in your lap – and I'm not saying I approve of that.
Merlin: I think it's an interesting idea.
Merlin: But the idea is you're teaching her that this is not a situation that will change.
Merlin: It's not about her being sad.
Merlin: It's about acceptance.
John: Yeah.
John: Right?
John: Well, it's about acceptance and it's about understanding that in this world, in the world that she lives in, there are people who are going to make decisions where she isn't going to be consulted necessarily.
John: Right.
John: And that is a thing that the argument against is that it disempowers her.
Right.
John: But I want to be perfectly clear, at least in my clan, that total empowerment is not what I'm after in the case of a two-year-old.
John: Like, empowerment is a thing that you earn over time as you overcome obstacles, learn, and accomplish things.
John: You become empowered.
John: Empowerment is not a thing that you are born with and that the parent's job is to get out of the way of.
John: Empowerment is a thing that you earn, and some of that is that you become empowered by knowing that you were disempowered or that there were tremendous limits on what you were able to do as a young person.
John: So, I mean, some of the shrieking that's happening, some of the shrieking that necessitates that I carry a saber while I do this stuff…
John: is around this idea that somehow by holding her on my lap, I am either being a bully or I'm teaching her that she doesn't have autonomy or all these other questions.
John: And I'm like...
John: First of all, the thing in my family that I'm not worried about is that she grows up with a sense of autonomy.
John: You know what I mean?
John: I am not particularly worried that she will be the first Roderick Rochester in the history of time that isn't a total...
John: like basically a human monster.
John: We are, we are, we are a threat to, to human culture.
John: Not, you know, not a, not a cog in it.
Merlin: That's not something you get or don't get in an afternoon on daddy's lap.
Merlin: Yeah.
John: She's not, you know, she is not going to be, I think she won't have blonde hair or something.
John: So, but all the, but all these ideas that, you know, that a two year old is learning these unconscious, um,
John: This idea that she's not going to be... That she's not going to feel capable.
John: Right.
Merlin: Because her father periodically... Made her prepare for a Gestapo search.
John: Institutes a regime in which she will be... In which she will survive a holocaust.
John: I do not accept this logic.
John: If anybody in this family... Because I had a dream the other night.
John: After this terrible hurricane in New York, I had a dream the other night that I was in a car that went off a bridge into a river.
John: And the car filled up with water.
John: And the baby was in the car with me.
John: And I had to...
John: I had to wait for the car to sink in order to open the door and then swim around, get the baby out of her car seat underwater and then get to the surface of what then became a raging torrent.
John: I was then in a raging river and I had to have the baby hold on to me as I swam.
John: in what became a boundaryless sea.
John: Then there was no shore, and I'm swimming in this torrent, and there's no shore, and there's nothing to hold on to.
John: And I'm, in my dream, trying to navigate, and I'm not a super great swimmer either, trying to figure out a way that I can make us buoyant enough to float where she can ride on my chest as I'm floating on my back.
John: And we're being carried in this raging flood water.
John: And this was not a good dream.
John: This was a terrifying dream.
John: But it reinforced to me that there are times when baby needs to hold on to daddy and shut the fuck up.
John: And I can see my daughter in this situation as we're floating down this deluge.
John: And she is on my chest and I am trying to keep my head above water.
John: Then she starts saying, down, down.
Merlin: daddy down and it must make you redouble your your uh your saber and i rattling and in this in the in the case of being in the deluge i would have to say no honey you're just gonna sit on daddy's chest right now and and you know what if she grows up with that which i'm certain that she will when she becomes a strong swimmer you know what i think we run into the uh harry chapin scenario i think she says to you no
Merlin: I'm a strong swimmer.
Merlin: You will hold on to me.
Merlin: And then you will be happily, lovingly, the beta dog for that situation.
Merlin: Unless you can learn to swim better.
John: That will be the moment.
Merlin: And they'll know you've succeeded.
John: In every child's life, there is the moment where they say, no, Dad, I am no longer sitting on your lap.
John: And that is the moment when it is incumbent upon me to say...
John: You're right.
John: And now I am old.
Merlin: And the cat's in the cradle and the silver spoon.
Merlin: We have to fight each other?