Ep. 58: "Squirearchy of Monks"
Merlin: Hello.
Merlin: Hey, John.
Merlin: Merlin, man.
John: are you there yeah just thinking thinking i'm thinking john it will come back to you oh yeah that's nice you know for a while there i was trying to sing a song for jonathan colton when i talked to him on the phone and the the only thing i could come up with was jonathan colton helps your hamburger help you make a great meal and it didn't make any sense to either one of us perfect but uh there it is uh-huh
John: And then as time went on, it evolved to Jonathan Colton.
John: Helps you, Jonathan Colton.
Merlin: Jonathan Colton, not Michael Bolton.
Merlin: Nothing rhymes with Bolton.
Merlin: Nothing really rhymes with Colton.
John: I've been thinking... I've been thinking a lot about Benjamin Franklin since I talked to him.
Merlin: You know that always gets my attention.
John: I'm convinced now that Benjamin Franklin...
John: is more or less responsible for the French Revolution.
Merlin: Hmm.
Merlin: He was... I'm going to pause and just do a little tidying around the office.
Please continue.
Merlin: Really?
John: Huh?
John: Wow.
John: Okay.
Merlin: He was the American ambassador.
Merlin: I'm sorry.
Merlin: I just jumped in.
Merlin: I didn't know if we were still talking.
John: He was the American ambassador.
John: Benjamin Franklin.
Merlin: Single-handedly responsible.
John: Yeah.
John: To Louis XVI's Versailles.
John: Now picture, if you will, picture the scene.
Hmm.
John: Ben Franklin.
John: Cam Reddy.
John: He's waltzing around at Versailles in his intentionally shabby American clothes.
John: And he's screwing girls left and right.
John: And he's got a witticism, a bone mo for everything.
John: He's doing his Ben Franklin rag.
John: And all the aristocracy is like, this guy, this guy.
John: He's incredible.
John: This Ben Franklin.
John: And it's planting the seed.
John: We got to get rid of this king.
John: The Americans are on to something.
John: This Ben Franklin is such a character.
John: We want a little bit more of this action.
John: You know, they're pooping behind curtains and doing that whole French thing all dressed in pink silk.
Mm-hmm.
John: And Franklin's just, you know, he's wearing his tweeds or whatever.
John: His American, he's probably got sweatpants on.
John: And they're thinking, this is what freedom looks like.
Merlin: Is this still in the colonial days?
Merlin: Or is this post-war?
John: Well, you know, French Revolution was 1789.
John: American Revolution was 1776.
John: So there's this little interregnum there.
Merlin: He introduced la virality.
Merlin: He brought some viral politics.
John: Yeah, see, Louis XVI...
John: He hated the British so much that he thought that Franklin and the Americans were on his side.
John: He was focused on England, right?
John: So he thought that allying himself with Americans was going to work out for him because we were all fighting the British.
John: But what he didn't realize was that Franklin was shagging...
John: for all lines, and spreading sedition in his own backyard.
John: That's the 17th century version of a stress bump.
John: He was basically, Franklin was a giant bald stress bump in Louis XVI's underwear drawer.
John: And then when the French were fed up,
John: They have this role model.
John: They have this American idea.
John: And they're like, we can do this.
John: We're all going to be Franklins.
Merlin: Who would he talk to in order to spread that?
Merlin: He's talking to kind of like the monarchical middle managers?
Merlin: He's talking to people, gentry?
Merlin: He's talking to people who would benefit from shaking off the shackles?
John: The court.
John: You know, when you look at the aristocracy in Europe at that time, we always think of England.
John: England had like several hundred really rich, really powerful families.
John: But France, the way their aristocracy worked, there were like 50,000 families.
John: uh aristocratic families in france there were all these little little minor barons and you know so the the court of louis the 16th is this he has this big house and there's just there's aristocracy everywhere they're they're in the they're in the flower garden they're they're you know behind the cupboard in the kitchen there are people everywhere and they're all there's this rank and this hierarchy or this
John: The Squirearchy.
Merlin: How long have you been sitting on that one?
Merlin: That's a good one.
Merlin: I've been sitting on what one?
Merlin: Squirearchy, that's pretty good.
John: Yeah, Squirearchy.
John: Squirearchy.
John: All the little squires.
John: And Franklin is there, and America is very fashionable at this time, right?
John: Because, hey, we had a revolution.
John: We're like, we're the Justin Bieber of nations.
John: Brand new.
John: Swoopy hair.
Mm-hmm.
Mm-hmm.
John: And also, Lafayette was a hero of the American Revolution.
John: I was going to ask.
Merlin: They helped out big time.
Merlin: We couldn't have done it without them.
John: They were the Germans, right?
John: In fact, the Saxons fought on behalf of England against the Americans.
John: But the French poured money into the revolution.
John: So we were fast friends, big bros.
John: But Franklin, I'm telling you, he was over there
John: This was his posting, and I think a lot of the, I think the Americans, you know, I think the continental types sent Franklin to France just to get him out of their hair.
John: And he was there just a swinging dick.
John: Franklin, oh, all, all like slyness and, and he was kind of.
John: I think he was a goer, if you know what I mean.
John: He was a finger in the pooper.
John: That seems pretty French.
John: So anyway, then French Revolution, then Napoleon, and we know that that leads to World War I. So basically, Franklin, responsible for the Holocaust.
Merlin: I'm going to need to make a chart for that.
John: I woke up early this morning.
John: You did?
John: I was lying in bed and I was going, wait a minute.
John: So, hmm, interesting.
John: But I really believe that there's some meat to this.
John: Franklin started the French Revolution theory.
Merlin: I was reading – I don't want to click too much here, but I was reading a story the other day, one of the many things I didn't finish reading this week about Franklin and how – it's interesting.
Merlin: There's two people I've been thinking about this week, Glenn Gould and Benjamin Franklin.
Merlin: Two people who learned how to deliberately kind of work their eccentricities.
Merlin: Glenn Gould's too much.
Merlin: We've got to save him for another show.
Merlin: Very interesting guy.
Merlin: But Benjamin Franklin, I think, was entirely – he basically –
Merlin: For example, the classic example that most of us know and then unknow, it turns out, people have tried to replicate the whole kite and the key and a jar lightning thing.
Merlin: And it seems, based on what I can gather, that it either wouldn't work and or you would die.
Merlin: Mm-hmm.
Merlin: Right?
Merlin: Okay, right.
Merlin: that myth or to say dispel that you know story or i guess i don't i he may have said yeah it totally totally happened i was there i'm ben franklin i'm a big swinging dick right but but he he enjoyed his uh celebrity i mean i i have to imagine that it helped him uh get the tip into a lot of butts uh continentally or otherwise to have to have these things about him and yeah and like like the equally annoying oscar wilde he he was graded up on malt french french phrase also a vietnamese sandwich
Merlin: Is that right?
Merlin: The bon mot?
John: Yeah, the bon mot.
John: It's delicious.
Merlin: It's got the carrots and the sliced pork.
John: Yeah.
John: Well, if you want to call it pork, yeah.
Merlin: Vietnam, French colony.
Merlin: I'm just pulling it all together just for what it's worth.
John: Vietnam, French colony.
John: Ben Franklin, responsible for Vietnam.
Merlin: Bien sûr.
Merlin: Yeah, the French, the Vichy.
Merlin: If it were for the Vichy, you know, French.
Merlin: French, first country to send their Jews to the camps.
Merlin: First non-German country.
Merlin: Oh, God.
Merlin: Mm-hmm.
Yep.
Yep.
Merlin: I'm with you.
Merlin: So anyway, I just think it's interesting because there's all those – I think the original turns out things for me were dispelling a lot of these myths.
Merlin: In the days before Snopes, when you could just read something like The People's Almanac or The Book of Lists 1 through 3, I learned a lot of what I should be unlearning from those books.
John: Yeah, yeah.
Merlin: Right?
John: Yeah.
John: Well, far be it from you or I to ever subscribe to the great man theory of history –
John: We don't believe in great men.
Merlin: I think we have at least three episodes stating something to the contrary.
John: We believe in the small actions of many, many, many anonymous people over the centuries.
Merlin: Egalite.
John: Yeah.
John: There's no theory of great men in our podcast.
John: May no.
John: But in this one instance, I think we can say that Ben Franklin is the wheel upon whom history turned.
Merlin: Oh God, I don't even know where to fucking begin with this.
Merlin: So first of all, I think you and I have to look at Ben Franklin and be both odd and furious.
John: Well, yeah, Ben Franklin, if I was going to go back to the Continental Congress, I'm afraid for myself how much I would be the Ben Franklin.
Merlin: You know, you want to be the Jefferson.
Merlin: Do you have a sense of what time they started each day?
Merlin: I think they started early.
John: John, a lot of those guys are farmers.
John: They were used to getting up early.
John: I think they started early, but I think Franklin rolled in.
John: I think he rolled in a little bit later.
Merlin: You threw a lumber like Benny, and you're going to come in whenever it fucking suits you.
Merlin: That's right.
Merlin: Oh, I'm sorry.
Merlin: I was busy inventing something that'll change your life.
John: Yeah, exactly.
John: I was inventing eyeglasses.
Merlin: Oh, I'm sorry.
Merlin: I was saving your forebears from a wretched agrarian future.
John: You know, he's a lot older than most of those guys.
John: Yes.
John: And so I think he rolled in whenever the hell he wanted.
John: He was born in America, right?
Yeah.
John: That's important.
John: I think he was born in America.
Merlin: He's one of the original Americans.
John: He's an OG.
John: That's right.
Merlin: He's an OGA.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: Well, OK.
Merlin: So, you know, on the one hand, you know, early, better, early to rise, you know, poor Richard's almanac.
John: You know, he definitely don't want to be Adams in that situation, even though he was a great man and he wrote a lot of great stuff.
John: He just got a sense that he was a very tense guy.
Merlin: I think he was the Salieri to to Franklin's Mozart, because, I mean, John Adams did a lot of shit.
Merlin: But I think he's got to be sitting around, guys, over here, like I'm doing all the heavy lifting.
John: I think Jefferson was the Mozart in that analogy.
Merlin: Oh, yes.
Merlin: Okay.
Merlin: I'll accept that.
Merlin: And then who was F. Murray Abraham?
Merlin: Was he in The Omen?
Merlin: I think he might have been in The Omen.
Merlin: I'm trying to remember.
Merlin: I never saw The Omen.
Merlin: Man, I would hate to be seated next to F. Murray Abraham on a plane.
John: There are so many people on the list of people I would hate to be seated next to on a plane.
Merlin: Oh, God, where to begin?
Merlin: But all I'm saying is it's incredibly frustrating that this great man got so much accomplished.
Merlin: If he did half of the stuff that he appears to have done, it's incredibly frustrating.
John: Yeah, well, and, you know, particularly you get the sense that he was a tinkerer and a polymath, kind of a da Vinci.
Merlin: Well, that he was – not to interrupt you, but also that he was confident that he would say – the one thing I love about a tinkerer who actually ends up producing things in addition to the ability to synthesize information and so forth is that ability to go, hmm, this might be a thing.
Merlin: I'll spend half a day on this.
Merlin: Ha-ha!
Merlin: Bifocals.
Merlin: What?
Merlin: What is a bifocal?
Merlin: You'll see, literally.
Yeah.
Merlin: Don't you know, but you and I are sitting around, you know?
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: Yeah.
John: We're sitting around devoting ourselves, devoting our entire lives to turning lead into gold.
John: And at the end of our lives, we have 42 notebooks.
Merlin: Paracelsus.
Merlin: Paracelsus, my favorite alchemist.
Merlin: But then on the other hand, and this could be several episodes, but I just want your thought on this.
Merlin: I cannot help my family adequately understand how important it is for me to lay in bed awake but not completely awake in the morning.
Merlin: And I understand.
Merlin: I have to get up and participate in family life.
Merlin: I understand that.
Merlin: But I'm curious, based on the kind of dynamism that you're bringing with a discussion like Franklin to Holocaust and Five Easy Steps, I have to tell you that when I wake up in the morning, I don't remember my dreams like I used to, and I don't care because dreams are stupid.
Merlin: But I do wake up...
Merlin: And I can feel this process of thoughts arranging themselves.
Merlin: I can feel that there are – it's almost like if I were to imagine some kind of – like there's these little will-o'-the-wisps all just kind of wandering and slowly things are starting to make sense.
Merlin: And I feel like just about the moment I'm ready to figure everything out, my daughter comes in and wants to watch Mulan and she gets me out of bed.
Merlin: And I don't know, I'm curious if you have something like that.
Merlin: My sense is that given the opportunity, you might spend even more time in bed if you could.
Merlin: But that's daddy's special thinky time.
John: Yeah, just as you described, that process of waking up and gradually coming into the world is absolutely, it's the magic hour for me.
John: And if it's interrupted, I'm... Otherwise known as noon.
John: The magic hour between 11.45 and 12.45.
John: But I love it if I find myself kind of coming into awakeness.
John: And I roll over and start staring up at the ceiling, and all is still a dream, you know, or my thinking is still happening in dream language, but I'm awake.
Merlin: That's a good way to put it.
John: Yeah, and I sit and...
John: Process all kinds of things, and I try not to interrupt that, or I try not to let my worries about the day intrude.
John: That's a time when it's like, hmm, I wonder if Ben Franklin can be blamed for the Holocaust.
John: Let me see, how do I reverse engineer that?
Merlin: There's a wisp over here, one of these is further away, and suddenly there's this synaptic leap that you couldn't have if you weren't supine.
John: Yeah, and so I – but then I appreciate – and this is one of the things where I look at the way the world works.
John: I've had this experience a few times in the last month where I have perceived someone my age, a friend or an associate, I have perceived them and their family from –
John: From one remove, like kind of peering in their window on Christmas morning.
John: And the thing about Facebook and also knowing people sort of in a wide circle is that every once in a while you get this glimpse inside someone else's home where you really do have an intimate vantage point, but you're not...
John: but you don't get to see how it actually is you're just kind of looking in their window and i've had this experience of of seeing these these people that i know my age and feeling like oh my goodness they are adults they're they have an adult house their family their kids think of them as their parents you know like they are mom and dad the way that we thought about our parents and and
John: In the reflected glow of that, I look at my own life and I go, but I, you know, I'm, I mean, I'm not all grown up yet in that way.
John: I mean, my house is not an adult's house.
John: It is a house that is transitioning some, it's like a hunting lodge where a grandma bomb lives.
Merlin: I disagree.
Merlin: I think it could be a delirious 84-year-old man's house, easily.
John: Right.
John: Okay, sure.
John: Someone who worked in the Foreign Service for many years.
John: He might be a super adult.
John: That's right.
John: A retired adult is what I... But that perception, that glimpse of other people's worlds...
John: And then realizing that part of what makes their house adult is that no one has a half an hour in the morning to lay in bed and let their dreams manifest.
John: You know, all those people are waking up to a bell and they are...
John: They are kicking it into gear, and they are going, going, going, and breakfast is at 7.30, and let's get going.
Merlin: That's part of the adult problem, though.
Merlin: First of all, I totally agree with you.
Merlin: I think I feel exactly the same way.
Merlin: If anything, though, I feel like I represent a collage of different kinds and parts of adulthood.
Merlin: You're an adult quilt.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: Yeah, yeah.
Merlin: And the funny thing is I can't even say that like, oh, I live like a child, but I think like an adult or anything.
Merlin: I think like really – my thought processes are so compartmentalized and weird.
Merlin: You think like four adults.
Merlin: I think like four different adults, the four horsemen of the adulthood.
Merlin: Because I mean there's parts of me that I think are – I would like to think are –
Merlin: Unfortunately, not the very useful parts.
Merlin: But for example, I mean, while I'm not a Buddhist because I don't meditate and stuff, there's this part of me that acceptance is just a huge part of my life in a lot of ways.
Merlin: As may be evident, there aren't that many things that I pine for.
Merlin: I don't like to sit around and go, oh, if only I had this other thing.
Merlin: And it's a source of – I don't want to say pride, but a source of – the feeling of like if you've accomplished something that used to be a problem.
Merlin: And I like that part of myself that I honestly can roll my eyes about things other people obsess over and handle that.
Merlin: But at the same time –
Merlin: If I'm lucky, I wake up in a dream state.
Merlin: But other times I realize how many adult things I am fucking up every single day and I make my noise.
Merlin: I go, hmm.
Merlin: And whenever I wake up and go, hmm.
Merlin: And if I get two of those, two of those become, hmm.
Merlin: And I don't want to make that noise.
Merlin: Well, the thing is that your acceptance –
John: Your acceptance is a thing that you and I look at and say, well, that is very adult.
John: Like, that is an adult that I aspire to be, someone who has this kind of long view.
John: But in fact, relative to this looking in other people's windows on Christmas morning...
John: Adulthood, by their standards or by normal standards, is not at all about accepting the long view.
John: What keeps that engine running is the sort of...
John: acquisitive nature of we want a bigger house.
John: We want a nicer living room.
John: We want more stuff from restoration hardware.
John: We want more Williams-Sonoma kitchen appliances.
John: I mean, that is the stuff that you look in the window and envy.
John: Like, oh my god, they have a bread maker.
John: All their kitchen chairs match.
John: And so, you know, my kitchen chairs... They only have one kind of fork.
John: Wow.
John: My kitchen chairs match because I found them in my barn.
John: But...
John: And somebody else arranged the matching.
John: You didn't feel barn seating?
John: When I got to this house, I was like, huh, I wonder what's in the barn.
John: I went over there.
John: I was like, hmm, kitchen table and matching chairs.
Merlin: Check.
Merlin: I'll move those over into the house.
Merlin: Now, again, though, that clears your field of vision because now that's off your mental slide puzzle for having to go to the thrift store.
John: Right.
John: Well, my forks don't match.
John: And that's a source of personal promotion.
Merlin: The forks that I have that match, we've mostly lost.
Merlin: So we're very close to falling back into the non-matching fork problem.
Merlin: anyway sorry go ahead the thing i like about your kitchen is that stainless steel table that was one of the best things we ever did that changed it i mean given the constraints and we live in a very our house was built in 1928 and it feels like it it's really weird like a lot of san francisco houses i don't i can't i can't promise this because it might have been built as flats but yeah it was probably built as flats because you know in san francisco especially in the central neighborhoods most of those houses start as one giant house yeah yours feels like it was built as flats
Merlin: I think so.
Merlin: I think so.
Merlin: But I mean, I don't think it's flats for, you know, I don't know.
Merlin: I think maybe it's a flat for a divorced sergeant in 1946.
Merlin: Well, 1928.
Merlin: I guess it was somebody who's about to lose all their money.
Merlin: Anyway.
John: Somebody with a snap brim fedora and spats.
Merlin: Hey, see, Bob's your uncle.
Merlin: There's so many things about our kitchen in particular that are completely wrong.
Merlin: I talk to my friends who have all the mod cons, as my mother-in-law says, and, you know, modern conveniences.
Merlin: And so, like, we have a single sink.
John: If you don't know what all the mod cons are, Google it, damn it.
Merlin: Well, you can't always count on that.
Merlin: But we don't have, for example, a big one, big one.
Merlin: You know I cook and I make a lot of meat.
Merlin: I know you do.
Merlin: We do not have a hood.
Merlin: We do not have a vent.
John: Oh, interesting.
John: What do you do when the house fills the smoke?
Merlin: Precisely.
Merlin: We turn off the smoke alarm and open windows and basically a greasy fog hangs over my daughter's room for two hours.
John: Have you ever thought about just having a shop back in there and just leaving it on while you cook?
Merlin: I had not, but I'm writing it down.
Merlin: What?
Merlin: But see, I don't want to get too wound up in this, but I think it does get to an important point.
Merlin: When I cook, here's the other problem now.
Merlin: Now, should that matter?
Merlin: Well, if we just had a hot plate and we're like braising tuna fish, it wouldn't be a problem.
Merlin: But we also have a really shitty oven oven.
Merlin: Uh, range and oven.
Merlin: And so we got, we got like five BTUs.
Merlin: And so what I have to do, I have to heat a pan up for like four hours.
Merlin: I got to cook with coconut oil because it's the only way I can get a sear.
Merlin: So I make this incredibly hot pan.
Merlin: I throw it in and it's, I mean, it's like a, I don't know.
Merlin: It's like some kind of Cajun hut.
Merlin: The place just fills with smoke.
Merlin: And so that, you know, we don't, we don't have a dishwasher, you know, we've got all, cause there's no place to put a dishwasher.
John: Well, some of this though is the, is that you are renters.
John: Yeah.
John: And you don't feel like you can improve your kitchen with your own money because it's not your place.
Merlin: We also – we have a wonderful relationship of 13 years now with our landlords.
Merlin: But they are literally the cheapest people in the world.
Merlin: And you have to be cautious if you've got a cheap landlord.
Merlin: And no offense.
Merlin: They're great people.
Merlin: I don't think they listen to the show.
Merlin: But they're great people.
Merlin: But you have to be cautious about what you ask them to fix.
John: Oh, right.
Merlin: Because they bring in a little bit of what I secretly refer to as old-world Irish craftsmanship.
Oh.
Merlin: So, like, for example, when our furnace, our original 1928 furnace broke, I've told you this, and I told our landlord, who's a wonderful, sweet guy, he said, I haven't had heat in your house in 20 years.
Merlin: Even though he has, like, three children.
Merlin: This is a man in his 80s.
Merlin: And even though he's a multimillionaire because he bought all these houses when they were $20,000 to $60,000.
John: And he doesn't have heat in his house at all, he's saying.
Merlin: I don't know.
Merlin: He's got like broken windows.
Merlin: He's, he's it's old world.
Merlin: And so like, if you ask them to come over, we had, for example, some tiles were falling in the, in the battle area.
Merlin: And we did that thing where if you push the wall, the wall would give an eighth of an inch.
Merlin: And I thought, you know what?
Merlin: I can take care of this.
Merlin: I'm a guy.
Merlin: Of course.
Merlin: I took it down and basically this is the kind of thing that makes your kid weird.
Merlin: We had a hole in the wall made of mold that had basically – we had a hole.
Merlin: I tried to patch it and basically it didn't work.
Merlin: I called them up.
Merlin: I said, hey, the usual drill.
Merlin: I tried to fix this myself.
Merlin: I don't want to be a jerk.
Merlin: I know you don't like fixing your own house.
Merlin: But they came over and they essentially put tile over the hole.
John: Oh, yeah.
John: Well, that's how you do it.
Merlin: Well, they didn't fix the underlying wall.
Merlin: They literally put tile over a hole in the wall.
John: You know, that is a great description of Irish politics, too.
John: Is that right?
Merlin: Yeah.
John: They've just been tiling over the hole in Irish politics for 250 years.
Merlin: That's a starchy diet.
Merlin: But that acceptance thing, I think, can be very important.
Merlin: And I think a discussion I think will probably get clipped off of a recent episode we did.
Merlin: But I was talking about back when I used to be a web guy.
Merlin: And I'd have clients that I hadn't worked for in months who would call me up and complain that the internet wasn't working.
Merlin: Like their modem didn't work.
Merlin: And because I was the person they knew to call...
Merlin: And I would answer the phone because I'm a gentleman.
Merlin: I would end up having to listen to them complain.
Merlin: And the more I tried to explain to them in the nicest way possible that I wasn't responsible for that, the angrier they got.
Merlin: And there's two lessons there.
Merlin: There's a two-sided lesson.
Merlin: On the one hand, like if I'm that guy in a transaction –
Merlin: I kind of want to figure out who I'm yelling at and why and take a step back and ask myself whether this is something I need to accept.
Merlin: And if I'm not willing to accept it, is there something other than Google me that I can do to solve this?
Merlin: And then on the other end –
Merlin: I hope this doesn't sound like carelessness, but I have just become monumentally universally OK with the fact that I not only can't please everybody, but if I did try to please everybody, I would screw up pleasing the people that I like.
Merlin: And that has become like a huge value for me that I think a lot of fucking adults need to adopt.
John: Well, you know, we talked about this the other day in the sense that I think as people get further and further away from understanding what's going on.
John: their sense that perfection is still possible in that realm grows.
John: You know what I mean?
John: Like, if I don't understand what is wrong with my computer, there's nothing to keep me from thinking that my computer can still do everything I want.
John: Yes, exactly.
John: And when you're using a hammer...
John: Your awareness of what the hammer is capable of is pretty one-to-one, right?
John: You don't look at a hammer and think, this hammer can make stained glass windows.
John: You look at the hammer and you go, I get it.
John: It just pounds things, right?
John: I can either pound nails or I can pound holes in the wall.
John: That's the extent of what I can do with this.
John: But as you get more and more confused about what the capabilities of a thing are,
John: There's nothing to keep you from thinking that that thing is capable of perfection.
John: That's why we yell at politicians.
John: It's why we are so mad at the world.
John: We look around and we're confused about what the stakes are anymore.
John: We're confused about what banks even do.
John: And so in our minds, there's no reason why these things can't be made perfect.
John: And all we know to do is call somebody at a call center and scream at them.
Merlin: Essentially yelling because of the lack of perfection and their inability or lack of desire to fix it, sort of.
Merlin: Because we understand so little about the process.
John: The problem with my iPhone is not that things are imperfect and this little machine is struggling to keep up.
John: The problem with my iPhone is that somebody in Cupertino is being a dick and intentionally programming it to be stupid.
John: as a project, like as a giant, as like a research project, and they're filming me be frustrated.
John: They're filming me with a secret camera in my phone be frustrated that it won't work because they are sadists.
John: And I think a lot of people look at their consumer electronics.
John: I struggle with this.
John: Look at their consumer electronics as though the reason it's not working is that it's some kind of sadistic built-in obsolescence.
John: Rather than that we're at the dawn of this age and this stuff is just, it's just barely able to do what it is doing.
John: You know, it's just barely able to, it cannot keep up with our imaginations.
John: I think, I think,
Merlin: It does a better job not to defend Cupertino, but actually if you had the misfortune to use some non-Cupertino products, I think you, in fact, would appreciate that they're doing a better shit job than all the other shit jobs.
Merlin: Yeah, no, absolutely.
Merlin: You're not going to wake up one morning and find a virus on your phone.
John: In 1918, I wouldn't have wanted to fly in one of the off-brand airplanes.
Yeah.
Merlin: It's Wright Brothers with no W. Did you say White Brothers?
Merlin: The who?
Merlin: The Ite Brothers?
Merlin: The Ite Brothers.
Merlin: That's a great name for a gang.
John: The Ite Brothers.
John: Yeah.
John: Hello.
John: Well, that'll be the new Game Changers.
John: But I think this is one of the things that science fiction has done to all of us, particularly those of us who love science fiction.
John: Science fiction has leapt ahead and become real in our minds so that we all have what we think is a pretty good sense of what interstellar space travel looks like.
John: We have a good sense of what...
John: You know, fusion energy looks like we have a good sense of how these technologies work.
John: And in fact, none of those technologies exist at all.
John: And so we live in this world where we sit around kind of with a with a constant low level frustration.
John: Like, why are we not?
John: Why are we not on space battleships yet?
Merlin: Well, but our imaginations are – unless we are truly – the truly rare kind of very, very creative, innovative person, most of our imaginations are constrained by what's been possible in the past.
Merlin: And we tend – I think we tend to see if you look at any decades version of science fiction or in some cases I prefer to call speculative fiction, you'll see that it's based on iterating –
Merlin: Or making a super version of something, super dash version of something that already exists.
Merlin: So in the 50s, everything looked like televisions in science fiction.
Merlin: Everything looked like rockets in the 60s and so on.
John: Star Trek, the control panel was levers and lit up buttons.
Merlin: Yeah, but the thing that I – you've read a lot more science fiction and speculative fiction than I have, I'm sure.
Merlin: But the thing that I like about the good stuff that I've read is that it – yes, on the face of it, it is about a future where you have whatever, moving sidewalks and laser guns and things you can plug into your brain.
Merlin: But all the great ones, also the more important, the more salient part of it is these somewhat dystopian trade-offs that got us there.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: I'm not just talking about Soylent Green or whatever.
Merlin: Really, anything that is not too heavy-handed is going to have, based in it, some idea that the thing you thought was going to turn out great is not only not great, but really complicated in a way that we never could have expected.
John: Right.
John: Well, and that's why all the narratives in science fiction are all 500 years old.
John: I mean, Star Wars is just...
Merlin: Well, yeah.
Merlin: The unexpected consequences – when I'm in my somewhat former racket of trying to help people do work stuff, setting aside the fact that you don't have enough time to lay in bed and think about Hitler is that – I mean I think that's actually really important.
Merlin: I mean to have time every day that you just don't even have to think about how quickly you're going to get your minivan on the 580.
Merlin: It's crucial.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: It is crucial and that could be a whole show because I think that's really huge.
Merlin: But there's something else to this though that – I don't know.
Merlin: At the risk of sounding like a college sophomore first semester, there's this other thing that happens though and it shades into science fiction or –
Merlin: I don't know.
Merlin: Science fiction to me is like ray gun stuff.
Merlin: I want to think of speculative fiction.
Merlin: I don't know if that's correct.
Merlin: Our listener John Syracuse will be able to tell me if I'm anywhere – even though he's into fantasy.
Merlin: He's into like Gandalf sex vampire TV shows.
John: Yeah.
Merlin: Hello, Gandalf sex vampire.
Merlin: I just started reading a fantasy comic.
Merlin: that's pretty good called Saga.
Merlin: Does it show naked boobs?
Merlin: No, and it's not even made by marble.
Merlin: But here's the thing.
Merlin: You take your Williams-Sonomas.
Merlin: You take your bread makers.
Merlin: You take your Cupertinos.
Merlin: There is, for a lot of people, this vision of perfection that to anybody from the outside, you would look at and say, well, that's not really attainable.
Merlin: But it's not only not attainable.
Merlin: Once you get into a certain suburban treadmill, it seems both very,
Merlin: it seems just slightly out of reach all the time.
John: Right, right.
John: Your bread is just this shy of perfection.
Merlin: Yeah, yeah.
Merlin: The bread maker is a terrific idea.
Merlin: And to return to the Cupertino example, not to talk about computers, but, you know, I had an...
Merlin: I've had an Apple two for whatever, or excuse me, an iPad two for a couple of years.
Merlin: You have an Apple two, I have an Apple two, two E two.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: No, I've had two.
Merlin: That is like perfectly fine.
Merlin: It's really great.
Merlin: So, oh my gosh, there's rumors.
Merlin: There's going to be an iPad three.
Merlin: Oh,
Merlin: Oh my God.
Merlin: What size will it be?
Merlin: How many pixels will it be?
Merlin: Can I do this?
Merlin: What will the aspect ratio?
Merlin: I can't tell you how many of my friends are writing about aspect ratio.
Merlin: And of course I'm saying who fucking cares.
Merlin: So you know what comes out?
Merlin: The iPad three, the iPad three comes out.
Merlin: It is ridiculously faster.
Merlin: It has a better screen that is just on another level.
Merlin: Everybody's so excited.
Merlin: They run out and buy an iPad three.
Merlin: So finally perfection has been reached.
Merlin: And you know what happened like in the last month, iPad mini plus the iPad four.
Merlin: Oh, what?
Merlin: Yeah, so now there's an iPad that's something like twice as fast as the iPad 3.
John: Oh, you're kidding.
John: Does that make our iPad 2s no longer... It's obsoleted.
Merlin: It is obsolescent.
Merlin: It has made you into a punk-ass Cupertino bitch.
Merlin: Because you put your money on the electronic barrel head and now you got your dick in your hand and there's a better iPad.
Merlin: So suddenly something that I'm talking about, this was in, I don't know, like March or something.
Merlin: You have a perfectly fantastic device, but now you're mad because they made a better one.
Merlin: I'm so mad on behalf of all those people.
Merlin: Think about bread makers.
Merlin: You go to Williams-Sonoma and you buy the SPH 4516 and then a few months later they do the 4516A.
Merlin: And suddenly your perfection has been obsolescenced.
John: That's so annoying.
Merlin: Am I being a college sophomore, or is that something to avoid?
John: Well, you know, I try and avoid it at all costs, but... Because it's not just about computers.
John: Well, but the problem now is that I could not, just as science fiction cannot anticipate the future...
John: I could not, even a year ago, let alone four years ago, have anticipated that... And this is an admission that I hesitate to make.
John: I mean, I still am grappling with it.
John: But I really looked at it the other day and realized that I am now spending...
John: an average of three hours a day looking at twitter looking at my twitter stream i used to be worse i used to be even worse because i get my news from there i get my entertainment from there your provocations i get all i'm having all my fights with with idiots there like all of the fights with idiots that i used to have to farm out to the world you'd have to send them by courier
John: I used to have to go to Costco.
John: I used to have to go to a hipster bakery.
John: I used to have to drive all over town to get in fights with 10 idiots.
Merlin: Oh my God, that's so inconvenient.
Merlin: You would have to maintain all of those via automobile?
John: Yeah, and now I can sit in a comfortable chair.
John: And have fights with almost an unlimited stream of idiots.
Merlin: People you've never met.
John: People I've never met.
John: And I don't mean to call this guy an idiot because I think he's very smart.
John: But I have been having a political argument with what I think is a Dominican brother.
John: on twitter now why a dominican monk is on twitter a i don't know but they have different rules but he is also politically conservative which you can imagine because he is a devout catholic but he's also an incredibly thoughtful
Merlin: Is he worthy of the standoff?
John: He is.
John: He's actually based in San Francisco.
John: I don't know if he's Dominican.
John: He could be Corsican.
John: I don't know.
John: It's been a long time since I was at Jesuit school and I don't remember all the squirearchy of monks.
John: Thank you.
John: That'll do.
John: But I'm talking to this guy online and he's provoking me at first.
John: He's like, oh, you liberals think you're blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
John: And so I go look at his... He's a confrontational monk?
John: Yeah.
John: I go look at his thing and I'm like... I follow it to his blog where he's writing like economical...
John: pieces on how to interpret certain aspects of John 3.16 or whatever.
John: And I read his blog and I'm like...
John: This is a Catholic scholar, but he's not a Catholic scholar who is sitting at Notre Dame University trying to get himself appointed to the bench somewhere.
John: This is a guy who's all the way up in the rice pad.
John: He's in it to win it.
Merlin: He's not just there to climb the ecumenical ladder.
Merlin: He's there because this is something that means a lot to him.
John: Oh, yeah.
John: So I start writing it back and I'm like, well, I mean, we got this.
John: We got that.
John: We got to think about this.
John: We got to think about that.
John: And he's like, hmm, good points.
John: But what about this and that?
John: And all of a sudden I'm like arguing with this guy, not even arguing where we agree on most things.
John: And I pull back from my phone and I'm like, okay, point to Twitter.
John: What am I doing?
John: There's no science fiction book or film in the world that could make an action movie out of this, me sitting in a chair staring at this little black box.
John: But really, I'm falling into this world of interconnected communication with people all over the place.
John: And so now I find myself, even though I've spent my whole life trying not to ever be a person who needs to get an iPad 3, let alone an iPad 4, when his iPad 2 works just fine.
John: I did not buy a CD player ever.
John: I don't even own a TV.
John: When CD players came out in the late 80s, I was like, this will never last.
John: And I maintained that attitude all the way through the lifetime of CD players.
John: In 1999, I was still like, nah, CD players, I'm not going to get one of those.
John: Those are junk.
John: But here I am now finding myself socially dependent on my interface machine that gets me into this realm.
John: I'm embarrassed about the time I spend on Twitter because only embarrassed in so much as I feel like if anybody asks me to justify it,
Merlin: I still don't have a very clear... You've thought through that and you don't really have an answer you're proud of.
John: Right, because do I get more out of – because so much of my interactions on there are just like – it's just transitory.
John: It's just people going like, ha-ha, here's a picture of my fart.
John: And you go click on the picture, and it's a picture of empty air.
John: And you're like, ah!
John: Of course, you can't take a picture of a fart.
John: Next.
John: Retreat.
John: Yeah, and you're like, oh, wow.
John: Paul F. Tompkins took a picture of himself eating dinner.
John: Oh, there he is.
John: Hi, Paul.
John: Took a picture of John Hodgman taking a picture of him.
John: Hey, there he is.
John: Okay, next thing.
John: And then somebody's like, oh, there are a bunch of people storming our embassy in Syria.
John: And then I get really into some, you know, like intense kind of politics for an hour where it's like, oh, shit's happening in the world.
John: And then Sarah Silverman's like, oh, my boob hurts.
John: And I'm like, oh, should I comment?
John: And I go look and there's 42 people that have commented on Sarah Silverman's boob.
John: Let me roast for you.
Yeah.
John: And 43 of them are, I'll help you with that.
John: I'm not going to comment on that.
John: That's gross.
John: And it's just this constant falling down the stairs.
John: But every once in a while something happens as you're tumbling down the stairs.
John: It's like, oh, they're storming our embassy in Syria.
John: That's fascinating.
Merlin: We talked about like when – at least when I was a kid and we first got MTV and a phenomenon of like I just want to see – I want to wait and see what the next video is.
John: Yeah, right, right, right.
Merlin: It was totally addictive.
Merlin: But like imagine that the videos were talking back to you or you were waiting.
Merlin: You know what I mean?
Merlin: That's what you're experiencing is – you're right.
Merlin: It is like falling down stairs.
Merlin: But first of all –
John: But so I'm dependent on the machine now.
John: I have this iPhone and I'm like, okay, well, if there's a new one of these iPhones that's faster, that shows Sarah Silverman's boob tweet in higher resolution, you know, and it's just like, I don't want to be that.
John: I do not want to be that.
John: I bet she's really your type.
John: Sarah?
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: I mean, I could think of a couple, three things about her that are in your wheelhouse.
John: Yeah, she's pretty close, but not to be the John Roderick in this episode of Roderick on the Line, but I met her a couple of times.
John: Crazy girlfriend?
John: Is she crazy girlfriend material?
John: She actually used the bathroom in my trailer, and when she came out, she said, don't tell anyone I use the bathroom.
John: And I said, I mean, it's fine.
Merlin: It's an odd thing for her persona to say.
John: Yeah, and then she said, I don't use the bathroom.
John: Do you know what I mean?
John: And you don't keep secrets.
John: I wonder.
John: Yeah, I'm talking about it on a podcast now.
John: That was many years ago.
John: But she was very weird about people knowing that she ever goes to the bathroom.
Merlin: That's an odd thing to do in front of another minor celebrity.
John: And what it seemed like was it seemed like a window into her soul.
John: I don't know if you want, I mean, crazy girlfriend is one thing, and I will chase a crazy Jewish girl across five continents.
John: But not if she has, I don't go to the bathroom.
Merlin: No, that's not going to work.
Merlin: Well, first of all, of the billions, the literally billions of different transactions that occurred on the internet in the last month, your exchanges with the Dominican are probably in the top 0.001%.
Merlin: You know what I mean?
Merlin: Like all you have to do, go and search.
John: We have a plan to get drinks, by the way, me and the monk.
John: Oh, nice.
John: Yeah, the next time I'm in San Francisco.
Merlin: What do you suppose you'll both have?
John: We have tea?
John: We're going to argue in real time.
John: Yeah, we'll probably go to a tea house.
Merlin: A tea room?
Merlin: Is that what it's called?
John: Well, you're the one that lives in San Francisco.
John: You tell me.
Merlin: I'll tell you where the tea rooms are.
Merlin: That's a great code word.
Merlin: But, you know, here's a lot to say here.
John: I have three cookies for breakfast, so I'm feeling it.
Merlin: What kind?
Merlin: Chocolate chip?
John: Chocolate chip cookies, yeah.
John: You're a peanut butter cookie guy, aren't you?
Merlin: I'm not a cookie guy.
Merlin: I'll eat a quart of ice cream at night, but I'm not a big sweet eater.
Merlin: Okay.
Merlin: We have an interesting constraint, you and I. I can't say this without saying it, but we still have cause to provide information and artwork about our program from some people who are interested in helping to publicize it.
Merlin: Hmm.
Merlin: And right now, the single biggest constraint, which is on me, is to come up with presentable show art that they could use in a high-resolution environment.
Merlin: Now, why is this a problem?
Merlin: Because the show art for our program, which I happen to love because it doesn't look like the show art for a podcast, is a photograph of the two of us at the UCSF computer store in probably 2003 or 2004.
Merlin: And it was the day you bought your first Mac.
Merlin: It was a laptop, and we bought it with my wife's discount, if memory serves.
Merlin: But here's the problem.
Merlin: That photo of us, I shot a picture of the monitor that was taking our picture.
Merlin: It's at the largest resolution I have of it.
John: You took it on a flip phone, right?
John: I mean, you still had a flip phone at that point.
Merlin: Yeah, I did.
Merlin: It was probably like a little Samsung flip phone.
Merlin: But the truth is that podcast art for popular podcast distribution facilities is 300 by 300 pixels.
Merlin: I had to stretch it to fit into that.
Merlin: I had to basically increase the size of it in reducing the quality of it because that is what a camera on your phone was.
John: So you're telling me that if they want to put Roderick on the line up on one of those LED billboards in Times Square, you're saying that that picture— I'm going to have to apply one of those halftone screens I love so much.
Merlin: But anyway, and I don't want to get too far into the phone thing.
Merlin: Can you convert to paths?
Merlin: uh i can probably convert to paths i i might just go with a dither i might go with an old school macintosh dither good i like it that was actually right before the charleston caught on that was the last great dance craze of the 20s the dither well you gotta go with you gotta go hither you gotta put together what the macintosh dither everybody kick it
Merlin: I'm not sure where I'm going with this, but I have to come back to one part of the science fiction and then I want to get back to the suburban thing.
Merlin: Is that to me, yes, science fiction, the least interesting part of science fiction to me is the science-y, ooh, rocket car stuff.
Merlin: The part that appeals to me that we always can write about is that the human –
Merlin: Human nature never really changes.
Merlin: And the part that we never seem to get over is that that is the case.
Merlin: And why am I telling you this?
Merlin: Because I honestly – I think I've felt this and I think a lot of people feel this every day.
Merlin: All I need is the whatever, the 4516B.
Merlin: bread maker and I'll finally be where I need to be.
Merlin: Well, you're never going to be where you need to be because your essential nature is to be keening toward the acquisition of something not even nominally interesting that you've decided is something that you really need to have.
Merlin: And
Merlin: And I'm hesitant to say that this is a suburban thing, although I think in the suburbs it is worse.
Merlin: It's certainly – it could be you want that beard.
Merlin: It could be you want a curly, puby Portland beard.
Merlin: But the part about – and again, I haven't read more than a half dozen science fiction novels.
Merlin: I've always enjoyed them a lot more than I thought I would.
Merlin: But that's what I always love about it is this idea that the take-home message of all the good ones is that human beings are always going to be meddling, selfish.
Merlin: and really basically unuseful people who look out for themselves more than others.
Merlin: And in the case of things like comics, they will always try to turn it into a weapon.
Merlin: That seems to be a big science fiction thing.
Merlin: We will always – everything cool we get, like T'Challa, for example, the Black Panther, who's the king of this country in Africa and one of the most powerful of all –
Merlin: They have the cure for cancer, but they will not – yes.
Merlin: They weaponized it.
Merlin: No, here's the thing.
Merlin: They don't want to give it to – they won't give it – they will not give it to Cap or anybody else because they know that S.H.I.E.L.D.
Merlin: will turn it into a weapon.
Merlin: Oh, S.H.I.E.L.D.
John: terrible i think you know i think the technology that most people fantasize you around i'm gonna fucking turn you around on this i think there are stories here that would help you john i know but i just i just uh our good friend adam pranica just brought me the uh bought me the uh collected great uh all the fritz and the cat cartoons in one volume i read those the other day that taught me a lot
Merlin: That's cats having intercourse in sweaters?
Merlin: What is that?
John: Yeah, that's exactly right.
John: Cats in sweaters.
John: Fritz the cat is a pretty lean cat.
John: I used to love the cats in sweater twins.
John: And then cats in sweater twins.
John: That's not even funny.
Merlin: I thought it was funny.
John: But most of the female cats in Fritz the cat are chubby cats in sweaters.
Merlin: Like Arcrumb looking cats.
John: Yeah, with big boobs and big behinds.
John: And, boy, I'll tell you, that's... Talk about in my wheelhouse.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: Oh, is that right?
Merlin: You like R. Crumb?
Merlin: R. Crumb didn't do that.
Merlin: That's Ralph Bakshi?
Merlin: No, who did that?
Merlin: R. Crumb.
Merlin: R. Crumb did Fritz the Cat?
John: Yeah, I mean, and say what you will about R. Crumb.
John: Are you sure about that?
John: Yes, I'm sure.
John: I thought it was Ralph Bakshi did the movie, I guess.
John: Oh, you're talking about the movie?
John: Yeah, Ralph Bakshi did the movie.
Merlin: No, but you're saying R. Crumb did Fritz the Cat?
John: Yeah, R. Crumb did Fritz the Cat.
Merlin: I'm going to double-check that.
John: I don't think that's true.
John: That's an R. Crumb joint.
John: Okay, I stand corrected.
John: But, um...
John: But I think the technology that most people, when you really, really get down to it, the technology that they envy or that they covet is the technology of leisure time.
John: Like, everyone, when they really imagine what they would do, you know, what they really want, people maintain this.
John: Like, I want to move out to the country and...
John: You know, and turn off all my electronic devices and listen to the wind whistle through the trees.
John: I still think that that is a powerful fantasy for most people.
Merlin: And I feel that probably because it feels completely out of reach.
John: Because it feels completely out of reach, that's right.
John: And because it seems like the only way that you could achieve that is through earning money.
John: It's the old thing that you hear on so many college campuses on graduation day where people say...
John: I want to do good things for the world.
John: I want to devote myself to helping other people, but what I need to do right now is make a lot of money first, and then I can be a liberal, and then I can help people.
Merlin: Have a social war chest.
John: After I...
John: go for 10 years and work in banks.
Merlin: Well, just look at how many times it happens every day.
Merlin: There's so many people who make $620,000 a year on Wall Street and then give it up in their early 30s to become environmental activists.
John: Oh, absolutely.
John: Yeah, it's a very common experience.
John: But that whole dream of like – I mean I know a lot of people and I feel like the power of that dream may be waning because I hear about it less and less now.
John: People are talking about achieving that state.
John: I think people are conscious – and when I say people, I mean like –
John: Our world, our realm, people are more aware now that they have to continue to work in order to feel valid.
John: Nobody has this, like, let's go down to Florida and sit in a rocking chair for the last 40 years of our life dream that our grandparents had.
John: But this idea that you're going to have a ranch in Montana with five dogs, and you're going to get up every morning and walk through the fields with the top of your hand, just barely grazing the wheat, like Russell Crowe in his death scene in Gladiator, and Enya is playing in the background, and you're just walking with the dogs chasing behind you, just brushing the wheat.
John: I can enjoy that.
John: Well, it's great.
John: It's wonderful.
John: And the thing that I always say to people who talk about that fantasy to me is, Montana is really cheap to live.
John: You could go do that now.
Merlin: Yeah, you're absolutely right.
Merlin: Well, one thing with the students today, and this is just my own anecdotal guessing, but I bet one reason that's gotten harder, to be honest, is the cost of going to college and the subsequent student loans.
Merlin: I don't know if this is accurate.
Merlin: I listen to just enough public radio to be dangerous.
Merlin: But I'm pretty sure most people when they finish college today have a pretty big tab, definitely a bigger tab than the average graduate when you and I came out of school.
John: I think that's true.
John: And it begs the question.
John: I met a person the other day at the MaxFunCon event.
John: You may have heard of this.
Merlin: This is MaxFunCon East.
John: This is MaxFunCon East at Jesse Thorne Production.
John: I met a person there who is a young person who elected not to go to college in order to become a comedian.
John: And this person, smart person, smart young person...
John: And I'm listening to this story, and I'm thinking, what a radical idea.
John: Like, smart, middle-class young person just didn't even consider going to college because college was superfluous to their desires.
John: Like, they wanted to be an entertainer of some kind, a comedian or a writer.
John: And the idea, that idea would not have occurred to me
John: At 18 years old, I couldn't get into a college when I was 18 because of my, because my overall grades were F, F, F, D plus F, A, A in newspaper.
John: But the idea of going into adult life without first passing through the lens of college was inconceivable.
Merlin: It would certainly feel extremely risky.
John: Risky.
John: And just like you're basically walking out into the world with a giant red L for loser on your jacket.
John: And now, just as you're saying...
John: You come out of college with a degree in sociology and you are $120,000 in debt.
John: That was not a very smart move on your part to go to college and get a degree in sociology.
John: It just wasn't.
John: I think a lot more people who are at that point in their lives are going to start just saying, there's nothing...
John: There's nothing that I'm going to learn in college that I don't already have access to on the internet, and I'm going to just go find my way through life on my own.
John: I really do feel that colleges are...
John: colleges are pricing themselves out of you know like into irrelevance and we are going to look back at this era from 50 years in the future and say oh yeah that was the moment that colleges became a um the colleges completely lost it's got to be close their game it's really it's got to be close
John: Yeah.
Merlin: There's another thing, though.
Merlin: When I was thinking about my former racket as the self-help guy... You were great at that, by the way.
Merlin: Thank you very much.
Merlin: It took me a while to figure this out, and this does because I've had coffee and everything seems related.
Merlin: This does also shade into the speculative fiction stuff, which is that...
Merlin: things evolve at different rates and so for example today um the the rate at which technology becomes faster more ubiquitous less expensive and more widely adopted the pace of that change is not being matched by an evolution in uh
Merlin: a wide, broad, contiguous and agreed evolution in terms of how we use all that stuff.
Merlin: So, for example, a lot of those kids coming out of college right now think email is for old people.
Merlin: You know what I mean?
Merlin: They just don't send emails.
John: Oh, my God.
John: I said to somebody the other day, they were texting me or something, and I said, let's take this conversation to email.
John: And they said, oh, classic style.
John: And I didn't get the joke.
Yeah.
John: Oh, my God.
Merlin: Let's let's let's let's let's have a beer at the Masonic Temple.
John: You know, I think they were DMing me or something on Twitter.
John: And I was like, listen, I don't want to have this conversation over DM.
John: Well, here's my email address.
John: And they were like, oh, yeah, it's a classic style.
Merlin: I mean, I you know, this is part of this is that I'm a I'm a willful.
Merlin: loner about a lot of the things.
Merlin: I don't have a presence on Facebook.
John: You're an outlier.
Merlin: I don't, everything I ever get from, um, Evite goes into the spam filter.
Merlin: Mostly I, I get such frustrated, uh, things from people.
Merlin: I think this is a fairly common thing nowadays of like, you didn't, you didn't respond to my, my thing.
Merlin: And I was like, I'm sorry, I'm not very good at email.
Merlin: We're like, no, it wasn't on emails on Facebook or, or, you know what I mean?
Merlin: And the natural assumption is that a, I'm on Facebook B I'm following their Facebook and
Merlin: And C, I use that to determine how I'm going to spend my night.
Merlin: And I've said this before, but telling people I'm not on Facebook – and I don't go out of my way to say that.
Merlin: I'm not – like I don't have a TV guy.
Merlin: It's just it's not a part of my life.
Merlin: I might as well tell them I worship goats with the mountain people.
Merlin: It sounds to my family.
Merlin: It's so bananas.
Merlin: And then I get a thing for my kids school and like, Oh, we put up the photos from this event in this Google plus group.
Merlin: And like my, my heart sinks.
Merlin: And it's like, so, I mean, I guess what I'm saying is that, you know, with Instagram, no,
Merlin: You know what I like my photos to look like?
Merlin: Photos.
Merlin: Oh, look, it's a picture of clouds.
Merlin: That's handy.
Merlin: I have 40 more of those and I should be good.
John: I go onto Facebook about once a week just to see what's going on.
Merlin: It's part of your profession.
John: And I went over there the other day and someone had left a message in my inbox.
John: On your wall?
John: No, not on my wall.
John: Not on your Facebook wall?
John: Like a DM.
John: A DM.
Ugh.
John: That was incredibly time sensitive.
John: Like, you need to respond to this in the next 30 minutes type of thing.
John: And I was like, who do you take me for?
Merlin: I mean, I do not... What does that assumption say about another person?
John: I don't know.
John: What's strange is that the person that left this message has my phone number and my email address.
John: Right.
John: But that they sent this to me on Facebook.
Merlin: Yeah, but that's also a case of like they're using the medium that they did not think for one – with all due respect to your very good friend who I'm not sure who it is.
Merlin: But that person – You're talking about Jesse Eisenberg?
Merlin: They did not take half a second to stop and think about, A, is this really important?
Merlin: And if it is important –
Merlin: Well, then why don't I do a little bit of the heavy lifting to reach this person in the place where that will be most cogent for them to receive an urgent message?
Merlin: That could be fun.
Merlin: It could be whatever.
Merlin: But you know what?
Merlin: No, it's all about their convenience.
Merlin: And now back to the acceptance.
Merlin: But now it's your fault.
Merlin: You're the dick and they're mad.
John: Well, yeah, it may have even been like a psychological – this person was trying – what the message was was she has an 18-year-old daughter, this friend of mine.
John: For sale?
John: For sale.
John: And she wanted me to have first crack at it.
Merlin: You get first right of refusal?
Merlin: What's that called?
Merlin: Kristallnacht when you get to have sex first?
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: You know what I'm talking about?
Merlin: Like in that movie with the kilt, right?
John: Yeah, Kristallnacht.
John: Is that what I'm thinking of?
John: The little girl wanted to go to a rock show by a band called My Seventh Heaven or My Diminished Return.
John: I don't know.
John: know what the band was called some kind of floppy hair goffy uh emo band and her her mom wanted to take her to this show but it turned out the show was sold out and so she was writing me saying can you get me into this show
John: And this is a girl that I know, this is a woman I know well, and I knew her daughter when she was young, and now the daughter is 18, and this alone is a surprising fact.
John: And she wanted me to get them into this show, and it was like the show started in half an hour or something.
John: But I suspect she might have sent it to me on Facebook as a kind of like, her daughter was sitting there and this was her due diligence.
John: Like, hey, can you get us into this show?
John: Oh, he didn't reply.
John: Oh, I see.
John: And maybe she didn't actually want to go see.
Merlin: There's another layer to it.
Merlin: That's good.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: Earlier on when you were talking about Europe, I looked at my Tumblr page and I wasn't even aware that this existed until fairly recently.
Merlin: But apparently I have an inbox on Tumblr that I didn't know about.
Merlin: Yes.
Merlin: Apparently people can – this is not a bad thing in itself, but apparently people can send me –
Merlin: The equivalent of, I guess, like a DM, like an email.
Merlin: You can send things called fan mail.
Merlin: If you choose to do so and I do not, you can ask me anything.
Merlin: These kinds of things.
Merlin: I don't think you can poke.
Merlin: You can poke them if you talk about them offline at the Mason Hall.
Merlin: Poke them if you got them.
Merlin: But I'm sitting here now, and understand, I kind of got that this existed somewhere.
Merlin: But now, in the redesign, Tumblr has added on their beautiful blue page a bright red rectangle that says 20+.
John: You have 20 plus messages on Tumblr.
John: That's right.
Merlin: It says 20 plus.
Merlin: And so now I never asked to have that turned on.
Merlin: No disrespect to anybody who's kind enough to send me a message.
Merlin: But now every place that can at this point will create some kind of an area that you have to check to not be a dick.
Mm-hmm.
Merlin: And that's to me is not – that's not tenable.
Merlin: 20-plus messages waiting for you, Merlin.
Merlin: There will always be 20-plus.
Merlin: And the thing is if I click it – and this is a value for me, John Roderick.
Merlin: If I go in there and I go and answer every one of those, well, that's setting aside all the things that I haven't answered in all these other places.
Merlin: You know, an email that I get from – and I don't mean – I'm not complaining about you, people.
Merlin: I'm complaining about the number of affordances for trying to communicate with me that I never asked for.
Merlin: And I say this because when you – and I understand the reason that the Facebook request might have been tendered.
Merlin: But this is a little bit like saying there's an urgent note that I sent you.
Merlin: Why didn't you get it?
Merlin: And I say, where is it?
Merlin: You say, I put it in the left shoe of your white box.
Merlin: Right.
Merlin: Well, why aren't you checking your bucks?
John: You'll get it in the spring.
Merlin: But do you see what I'm saying?
Merlin: Like to me, and I know, again, I'm an old guy.
Merlin: I don't know these things.
Merlin: But I have no idea how or why anybody would want to keep up.
Merlin: Even if you have a lower volume of people interested in communicating with you, I can't understand why anytime you choose to have something on your attention radar screen, it should have to come with a thing you have to check.
Yeah.
John: Have you checked in as the mayor of the local dim sum place there?
Merlin: No, I haven't.
Merlin: Are you the mayor of the... I went in the other day and I was hypnotized by his fingernails.
Merlin: Because of the amount of century-old dirt under them?
John: Money and pork, yeah.
John: Have you recently watched Big Trouble in Little China?
Merlin: No, is that Kim Cattrall?
John: Yes.
Merlin: And Kurt Russell?
Merlin: Yes.
Merlin: Is this something you recommend?
Merlin: I've never seen it.
Merlin: You've never seen Big Trouble in Little China?
Merlin: I've never seen Buckaroo Banzai.
John: Well, I haven't either.
John: Okay.
John: I'm in so much trouble right now because I was part of some quiz show not very long ago, and one of the questions was buckaroo bonsai oriented, and I faked my way through it.
John: I was like, oh, yes, John Galt.
John: Oh, you were passing.
John: I did.
John: I tried to pass as a buckaroo bonsai.
John: Because here's the thing about buckaroo bonsai.
John: For someone my age...
John: Buckaroo Bonsai was advertised to me as something on the level of Fletch.
Merlin: Oh, I think it's some people's Monty Python Jr.
Merlin: It's a heavy source.
Merlin: It would be like my, not Princess Bride necessarily, like Spinal Tap maybe.
Merlin: I don't understand how you cannot understand my references to the Princess Bride and Spinal Tap, the two most quotable movies of all time, apart from The Godfather.
Merlin: Right.
John: But I started to watch Buckaroo Banzai sort of the first time it appeared out of the theater.
John: So it would have been either on VHS tape or it would have been... Laser disc?
John: The first time it appeared on cable or something like that.
John: I tried to watch it and I was like, nothing about this is interesting to me.
Merlin: Nothing appealed to me at all.
Merlin: I tried.
Merlin: And I bailed out of it in the first half.
Merlin: It was a little dry for me.
John: Yeah, it was dry.
John: That's exactly right.
John: But anyway, so I faked my way through this buckaroo bonsai thing in the quiz show, but now I've been outed.
John: I'm busted.
Merlin: Now, how do you respond to that now?
John: Are you going to...
John: first of all kim cattrall when she was hot yeah hot yeah but also i think she gets tied up in that movie she does many times but it's also uh it's also a san francisco movie i like to catch all of those it'll help you understand the guy at the dim someplace oh because of the little china
Merlin: Here's the other thing.
Merlin: You get the debt, and then the other problem is – I don't know if it's a problem, but here's what I'm saying.
Merlin: In 19 – let's say you're Benjamin Brodick.
Merlin: Let's say it's 1964, 56, 7, 8, 9.
Merlin: You get out of college, and it was –
Merlin: When you decided to join the Peace Corps or when you decided to move to Haight-Ashbury or when you decided to just disappear into helping this little village in Southeast Asia without any Facebook page, that was – you were making a statement.
John: You were in the CIA if you did that in 1967.
John: Is that right?
John: Nobody went to Southeast Asia to help a little village.
Merlin: Do you think they recruited a lot of hippies?
John: Oh, well, they recruited a lot of Ivy League hippies.
John: The CIA was never interested in people that didn't go to one of four colleges.
Merlin: But when you did that, you were doing more than trying to help somebody.
Merlin: You were certainly probably trying to burnish your reputation and get a little more tail, but you were making a statement about society.
Merlin: You were saying, I am opting out of this plastic society that we all know about now to go do this thing.
Merlin: Now today, I think you get to be just as high and mighty by buying CFL bulbs.
Merlin: So on the one hand, you've got the debt.
Merlin: You go buy the CFL bulbs.
Merlin: You're spending less money so you can pay down the debt.
Merlin: And on the other hand, you get to be a giant dick about how your bread machine is green or whatever.
Merlin: And I think that is a real thing.
Merlin: I think that is a big difference from even 20 years ago when I was 22 years ago.
Merlin: I graduated from college.
John: Well, I think that's right, and I think it is that the plastic society has become... The plastic society was always a thing that you could be outside, and I don't sense anymore that it is a thing you can be outside.
John: You know, it was only... In 1999...
John: I walked from Amsterdam to Istanbul.
John: And I had no camera.
John: I had certainly no phone.
Merlin: No maps.
Merlin: No decent maps.
John: But I was still communicating with home.
John: Even though it had transitioned to email, I still was only able to communicate with home
John: When I arrived in a town, I would check into a hotel or find a place to stay and then wander the town asking people I met on the street, do you know of a place that has internet?
John: And eventually I would talk to somebody and they would point and I would wander up an alley and there'd be a place that had computers.
John: And I would go in and spend 15 minutes, you know, bah, bah, bah, bah, bah, bah, bah, bah, bah, bah.
Merlin: Right, right, right.
Merlin: You're saying this is 1999.
John: 1999.
Merlin: The year I got my first mobile phone.
John: And I had no... Mobile phones were still three or four years in my future.
John: And I would sit then and I would tap out an email and send it.
John: And then...
John: log off because i knew i wasn't going to get a reply to that email until the following day and if i and then i would wake up in the morning at this hotel and i would go down to the same internet cafe where by that point i'd be on like fist bump level with the guys that were running it and i would log in same process you know and you're paying by the minute and uh and then maybe there'd be a reply waiting for me and this was 12 years ago or so
John: So, now, if I was walking from Amsterdam to Istanbul, I would be posting pictures and tweeting about it every hour, and there would be thousands of people following my progress, and that would not be incidental to the trip, you know what I mean?
Merlin: You might try to be mayor of some mountain in the Balkans.
John: Yeah, I'd be mayor of the Vulcan Mountains.
John: Yeah.
John: But, but, but that would, it would not.
John: Mayor of the Vulcan Mountains.
John: They're, they're actually.
John: Is that a Philip K. Dick novel?
John: It would, the thing is that it would not, it would not just be that I was, that I was doing the same trip and I would just be documenting it.
John: that that posting about it would become central to the trip absolutely it would become almost almost like a companion because you'd start looking for things to photograph you start looking for experiences to facebook and you might start looking for things that you could be the mayor of well and people would be communicating with me and saying oh my god you have to go to this castle that i went to on my on my year abroad it's only a two-day walk from where you are the burgemeister of this holocaust memorial
John: And so the trip and the social networking would be inextricable from one another, and the entire time I would be gone, but I would also feel like I was not gone.
John: And in 1999 when I did this, I was completely gone.
John: There were multiple, multiple days where if I had fallen into a hole...
Wow.
John: There would be no way anybody could ever have traced to where I had disappeared.
John: The last time anyone heard from him, he was in this town, and it was four days until I was in the next town, and in that four-day time, I could have just gone away forever.
John: And I was in places where that was absolutely possible.
Merlin: Did you think about that when you were walking across those long stretches?
Merlin: The day that I introduced you to Google Maps, you spent, I think, an entire night zooming in on tiny pieces of Romania, trying to find one specific spot that I think is – it's kind of an important thing in your book too, right?
Merlin: It's like this one spot where something really big happened, and you were combing over that ground.
Merlin: That ground, there was not a lot of places for you to do check-ins, right?
John: Oh.
John: No, that was a place where I would have been animal food.
John: And it's not that it was one place.
John: It was that I crossed a mountain range where I was just...
John: Completely.
John: I wasn't even on a goat trail.
John: I was just fighting my way through the forest.
John: And that whole kind of two-day period was a time where even a sprained ankle would have been...
John: Life-threatening.
Merlin: That didn't freak you out at the time?
Merlin: Oh, it fucking freaked me out.
Merlin: Oh, my God.
Merlin: Especially with that broken-ass backpack.
John: That's why when you showed me Google Maps, I was like, oh, my God.
Merlin: I guess Google Earth, right?
John: Yeah, this was a place where there were no maps.
John: Even the Romanian maps just had it as a big black area.
John: And they had no sewer lids.
John: There were no sewers, and when I met people there, they were just... This was the part of the country where I would meet people, and they would... And it would be inconceivable to them that I didn't speak Romanian, but that I did speak a language.
John: Like, they understood, I guess, that there were other languages, but that...
John: That not speaking Romanian meant that I was either stupid or illiterate, but I did seem to have words and I didn't seem stupid, so what's this about?
Merlin: They were that far off what we would consider the grid?
John: Just off the grid.
Merlin: Jesus.
John: But in any case...
John: The idea of doing a thing like that now, I don't think... I think it's a much... I mean, not that there was a huge group of people 12 years ago who were walking from Amsterdam to Istanbul, but the number of people who would do it now...
John: It's probably still the same number of people, but fully 70% of even that small cast of people would be thinking about how they would document it, how they would tweet it, how they would Instagram it.
John: The number of people who would do it with no technology on board has shrunk to statistical irrelevance.
John: And I'm not sure any more...
John: It isn't even a question of there being any unexplored places on the globe so much as it is that we no longer want to explore places in silence.
John: We no longer want to be...
Merlin: But don't you think that sense of documentation, that's always been around.
Merlin: I'm just guessing.
Merlin: If it was in the early 50s and you want a chance to go backstage at the Martin and Lewis TV show, you'd sure as shit bring a camera and get a photo, right?
Merlin: If you were a volunteer and a Dominican monk and you got the chance to work on Kennedy's campaign and got a chance to meet him, you'd get a photo and probably an autograph, right?
John: I don't know.
John: My friend Autumn DeWild, who is a rock and roll photographer, she tells this kind of famous story about the first time she photographed Elliot Smith.
John: And she went back years later after he died to find that first roll of film that she shot of Elliot the first time they met.
John: And this is a roll of 24 exposures or something.
Yeah.
John: And she said she had three or four pictures of Elliot and then a picture of her cat and a picture of a sunset.
John: And, you know, this was 24 exposures.
John: But when she took a few pictures of Elliot, she didn't want to waste the film.
John: Because a roll of film was valuable.
John: So she got, you know, she got three or four exposures.
Merlin: Right.
John: But then she needed to save that film because, you know, basically that 24 exposures represented that month of her life.
John: And it was pictures from all kind of all different places.
John: She went all aspects.
John: And she was looking at it and thinking to herself, was I crazy?
John: Why didn't I just take 24 whole pictures of Elliot Smith?
John: Like this was totally not how we used to think.
John: It was early on in his years and these pictures now, those early pictures of Elliot are like some of the things that she treasures the most.
John: And she's trying to get inside of her mind and think, why didn't I just blow a whole roll on this dude?
John: But she just took a couple of pictures and then had to save that film.
John: So, I mean, you know, when I think about my own life, there are no pictures of me, Merlin, between the ages of 17 and 22.
Merlin: Really?
Merlin: That aren't part of, like, King County Sheriff's Office?
John: Yeah, right.
John: Or, like, I mean, I think people at Gonzaga probably have them, pictures that were taken at parties and, like, I'm walking through the room or something like that.
John: But no...
Merlin: Like that picture of Lincoln at the Gettysburg address.
John: You got to really zoom in.
John: Got a blurry like in the distance and somebody's like, what do you say?
John: See that sad by curious guy.
John: But like no, no pictures of me ever hopping a freight train of, you know, no pictures of me on a train.
John: Like none of those things were documented because I mean, certainly there were people then who were taking, who were taking, I mean, you remember those girls in college that had 25 photo albums of parties and
Merlin: It was always photos of three girls smiling and holding a drink up to the camera.
Merlin: Like, you know, there's always that fraternity and sorority section of your college paper.
Merlin: It's just lots of pictures of white people at a party.
John: Yeah, with red eyeballs.
John: But there were a lot of us then who did not think of ourselves as photographers.
John: And my instinct was not to document.
John: My instinct was to do.
John: And that instinct, I preserved that instinct until not very long ago.
John: You know, I was thinking, there are so many people in my life where I had a profound experience with them on the side of the road somewhere.
John: Where, you know, I arrived, like I was a really picky eater my whole life, and my picky eating...
John: There was a pivotal moment where I stopped being a picky eater, and it was at a little restaurant in Innsbruck, Austria, and it was the middle of the night.
Merlin: Oh, is this the lady who had you in?
John: Yeah.
John: The lady who brought me in and served me asparagus for the first time.
John: And this woman and her little restaurant are, they are like a, they're a flag planted in my imagination.
John: And when my daughter is old enough to hear that story, she's going to hear it.
John: She's going to hear it a thousand times probably.
John: And when I am 85 years old and sitting in a rocking chair and somebody goes, would you like some asparagus?
Yeah.
John: I'm going to say, funny story, you know, I never used to have asparagus until it's one time.
John: Now, if I had documented that restaurant.
Merlin: Your asparagus with one bite out of it.
John: Nom, nom.
John: Nom, nom.
John: If I had checked into that restaurant or if I had blogged about it at the time and written it down and yelped it.
Merlin: Yeah.
John: Then that restaurant would not be a flag in my imagination in the same way.
John: It would be a place that I, you know, that I could, that I would have pictures of or that might still exist that I might have tried to go back to at some point when I, you know, but, but instead that experience happened immediately.
John: happened in my memory in a way where my memories are like fairy tales or nursery rhymes.
John: Like that version of Innsbruck, Austria exists in my mind as something out of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.
John: And I have no...
John: I have no scrapbook about it, and I don't want one.
Merlin: Yeah, and if you had that today and looked at it, in the same way you look at any old photo, you might notice funny things like, oh, look at that old Time magazine.
Merlin: Or one of my favorite photos of my mom and dad.
Merlin: The first thing, I love the fact that they're hugging it.
Merlin: It's this great moment.
Merlin: And I always notice how it's an old, very, very old can of Coke from 1972.
Merlin: That's the first thing I always notice is the Coke in it.
Merlin: I mean, I treasure that photo, but it, but like the, the photograph and the act of photographing, not to be all fucking, you know, Susan Sontag or whatever, but like somebody was a woman, but, but, but that, that's changes the whole experience.
John: It changes, but, but there's more, there's also, I look at a picture of this woman and she'd have white power tattoos on her knuckles that I didn't notice at the time.
Merlin: Vice, vice power.
Merlin: I need more fingers.
Merlin: Here's the other thing that's really funny though.
Merlin: Like I have a pastime, a hobby in San Francisco, which is finding – noticing tourists who are taking photos of themselves and their friends.
Merlin: And it's a thing I do.
Merlin: I don't know if you've ever seen this.
Merlin: I do this all the time.
Merlin: I walk up and I say, hey, would you like me to take a photo of you?
Merlin: I'd be happy to take the photo for you.
Merlin: And almost invariably they say, oh my god, yes, thank you.
John: You do do that.
John: That's very generous of you.
Merlin: And I'll tell you what I do.
Merlin: I'll tell you what I do.
Merlin: First of all, I say, well, right now, while they're looking at this camera, my shoe camera is getting there.
Merlin: No, no, I do several things because part of my job is to educate.
Merlin: I say, well, first of all, right now you're what's called backlit.
Merlin: You got the sun behind you.
Merlin: So why don't we do it this way?
Merlin: Let's get the solid background behind you.
Merlin: If you want one of you with the Golden Gate Bridge in the background, why don't we do it from this angle?
John: You art direct it.
Merlin: I do out-direct it because I know how many shitty pictures people ever take.
Merlin: But you know the important thing that I do?
Merlin: I never take fewer than three photographs of those people.
Merlin: Because when I was coming around to trying to become a better photographer a few years ago, before I got sick of carrying a five-pound camera with me everywhere, I learned that if you take...
Merlin: six photographs of the same thing there will first of all there will be at least two or three that are markedly different and there's very likely to be one that is an order of magnitude better than the others for no reason that an amateur like myself could identify so here's a couple funny things funny thing one it's amazing yeah you'll see people who take 50 photographs of the same blurry 20 year old man playing guitar on stage that's not useful to anybody you'll see they'll post these stupid fucking videos on youtube that are of no use to me try and find a good built to spill live video here's
Merlin: Here's what they all sound like.
Merlin: That's every live Built to Spill show.
Merlin: That's what Built to Spill sounds like in person.
Merlin: I think he's got better finger work than that.
Merlin: But two funny things.
Merlin: One is that, yes, people still, for an important event, will take this one photo and then jump straight into putting it on Facebook or whatever.
Merlin: But you know what the other thing is?
Merlin: And this is just an admission because I have a guilty conscience about having been somebody who would try to get myself photographed with famous people.
Merlin: I wish there were more photos of us five dudes hanging out when I was in Seattle.
Merlin: But I felt like I would feel like kind of a dick to go, let's do this.
Merlin: You know, the photo we got of the five of us sitting together was not us.
Merlin: It was Chad.
Merlin: Chad's the one that took a photo of the five of us in our tuxedos sitting around backstage.
Merlin: We should have had a whole bunch – we should have shot – we should have had somebody professional come in and take really cool pictures of us that we could use for stuff.
Merlin: You're right.
Merlin: But we didn't because on the one hand, like now I'm a little bit gun-shy –
Merlin: Think about the way I was in that booth where we got interviewed.
Merlin: I don't know if you noticed this, but short of being unprofessional, I did everything I could to stay out of the camera.
Merlin: I stayed right over the edge talking to your PR friend because I did not – I don't want to be part of the photograph everything culture.
Merlin: It's not privacy.
Merlin: It's not anything.
Merlin: But now it's funny that with the ubiquity of those devices, I'm a little gun shy now about just taking pictures of people for fun.
Merlin: Whereas we used to like – and as precious as those were, on the one hand, that lady has some wonderful photos of Elliot Smith and of her cat.
Merlin: But like why would you not take five rolls because it was expensive?
Merlin: Now today, nobody has the thought to take five photos of their bachelorette party together that are good.
Merlin: Look at them in the camera.
Merlin: Don't just chimp and take a photo in the midair.
Merlin: Like take a good photo like a gentleman.
Merlin: It's another one of these things where I think the culture has not caught up with the technology, and the parts of the culture that do catch up with the technology are sometimes a little bit paradoxical or contradictory.
John: Well, the Library of Congress is archiving all of our tweets.
John: Thank God.
John: And presumably, I mean, everybody assumes, and I don't think this is necessarily true, but everybody assumes that all of our Flickr photos and everything is archived forever.
John: But we are creating a tale of frozen experiences that no one will ever sift through.
John: How could you?
John: How could you possibly sift through that?
John: the billion photographs of three girls.
Merlin: I still haven't organized the photos of my kids first year.
Merlin: There's just too many in different places.
Merlin: I'm paranoid about losing them, but I have, you know, since then I take two photos a year, but I've got, but you know what I'm saying?
Merlin: Just from the first year, I've got thousands of photos.
John: Every photograph that exists of my grandmother's entire life, I own in a shoe box.
John: Right.
John: You know, every single one I can, I can, and I can tell you every one of them.
John: every single photo of my dad i have unless there are you know there are some in other people's photo albums floating around and those people's kids don't know who my dad is and when they're going through their parents old photo albums they're throwing those pictures away just as i throw away pictures of people in my dad's photos that i'm like who is this some some guy that worked on the pipeline that my dad took his picture in 1972 like don't need it
John: And there's something about that culling that is very important to me.
John: It's why every time I open up my iPhoto, as I'm looking through photos, I am just deleting.
John: Not deleting.
John: I mean, I'm just going through and like, I don't need that one anymore.
John: I don't need that.
John: I don't need that.
John: Just as a way of trying to order it with some kind of semblance of...
John: You know, if Autumn DeWild was taking that roll of photographs of Elliot Smith today, she would have 700 pictures.
John: And I'm not sure if the additional 695 pictures we need.
John: Or at least those five that she took are treasures, even the one that's a little out of focus.
John: And, I mean, I honestly can't say.
John: We are old, you and I.
Merlin: Wait, wait.
Merlin: Well, we, yes, we certainly.
Merlin: My eyes and my ears ring.
Merlin: My eyes ring.
Merlin: I just got a new, I just got a new brand of generic Adderall.
Merlin: And so I wanted to go to, uh, use this pill identifier site you can go to, to find out what any pill is.
Merlin: And it's really cool.
Merlin: You go in, you should try this with what you got.
Merlin: You go in there.
Merlin: I don't have any pills.
Merlin: Okay.
Merlin: Good for you.
Merlin: You should try this with your coffee beans and you go up there and, uh, and you just enter in whatever letters are on it.
Merlin: And it very magically shows you what you've got.
John: What did this tell you about your over-the-counter cheap Adderall?
Merlin: I should let you talk more.
Merlin: And that's what it said.
Merlin: It was right there.
Merlin: It's made by... Anyway, but I... John, it was so fucking funny.
Merlin: I'm sitting here in the admittedly somewhat dim and comfortable...
Merlin: golden light of my office that i that i keep a certain way and i i've never looked more like an old man in my life because i'm doing that thing where it used to be you hold it a certain place and you can see it so then i'm doing this frank benjamin franklin-esque or like liwan hook thing is liwan hook the micro the microscope guy i'm doing looking over the top of your glasses
Merlin: i'm pulling it to arm's length and then i'm pulling it up close okay it gets worse and now i'm putting it next to the dim ikea light and i'm like fuck fuck what does it say i go into my the bathroom where i have four 23 watt which is like you know which is hippie for 100 watt giant light bulbs in my bathroom because i like a well that bathroom i go in there and i have to turn the lights on and stand so that i can see the subtle shadow oh
Merlin: This is why I need glasses.
Merlin: Oh, it's awful.
Merlin: I can't see in the dark anymore either.
John: You need a magnifying glass.
John: You need a big Sherlock Holmes style magnifying glass.
Merlin: Like Grandpa doing the crossword?
John: Yeah.
John: What does that say?
John: Now, here's a question for you.
John: With all of your secret internet drug connections, can you get ketamine?
John: Is that for K-holing?
John: Ketamine is like an animal tranquilizer and kind of a PCP.
John: Sure, I can get you that.
John: But somebody sent me a thing online.
John: It was a link to an article in the Yale Medical Journal that said, small doses of ketamine have been found to be an instantaneous cure for depression.
John: Hmm.
John: You take this ketamine and within 45 minutes, like your brain has really rewired itself.
John: Now, it doesn't last.
John: It only lasts a few days or seven days or something like that.
John: But I would be very interested in trying this.
John: Ketamine is on the list.
Merlin: Schedule one.
Merlin: Actually, schedule three in the U.S.
Merlin: That's not too bad.
John: Ketamine is on the list of those drugs, you know, like monkey adrenal glands and stuff that I never got around to taking during the drug years.
John: Huh.
Merlin: I will say that there are things that one is not supposed to have that can be acquired.
Merlin: Mm-hmm.
Merlin: I have discovered in the past before I got – and someday I will tell you what I have to go through to get a prescription filled each month.
Merlin: It is fucking medieval what I have to go through.
Merlin: It's ridiculous because the thing is I – the stuff that I take for my stuff is speed.
Merlin: So I have to go and get a physical prescription.
Merlin: I have to – which means I've got to go drive across town, pay for parking, go in, pick up a piece of paper, go back, pay for my parking and leave, go somewhere and drop it off.
Merlin: I have to do that every 30 days.
John: You can't just do it online.
Merlin: We'll have to do it every 30 days on the dot.
Merlin: Otherwise, I run out.
Merlin: You get 30 days worth.
John: Oh, this guy I follow on Twitter, Daniel Shannon.
John: I know Daniel Shannon.
John: Yeah, he's been talking about the fact that he ran out of Adderall because the pharmacy was closed because of Hurricane Katrina.
John: And he's been sitting on a toadstool or whatever in his apartment.
John: for the last four days with none of his meds and just falling deeper and deeper into some kind of crazy hole.
John: And he's just waiting for this pharmacy to open on Monday morning or something.
John: He has to put on snowshoes to get over there.
Merlin: He lives in Chicago, right?
John: No, he's in New York.
Merlin: New York, okay.
Merlin: Well, I have to tell you.
John: There's not even snow on the ground.
John: He just has to put on snowshoes because that's what his brain is telling him.
John: That's why he needs the medication.
Merlin: Well, yeah, yeah.
Merlin: Homosexual men on toadstools, they like to have their snowshoes.
Merlin: He's a riot, by the way.
Merlin: But I'll tell you a funny one.
Merlin: Well, first of all, I take less than I am prescribed.
John: That's always a good idea.
Merlin: Yeah, because I mean it's – and I have gotten full – well, I shouldn't say this.
Merlin: But I've got – I want to say carte blanche.
Merlin: But within reason, I should take the amount that makes me feel good and doesn't give me side effects.
Merlin: And sometimes for me, that's less than I have to.
Merlin: So I'm fortunate that I've got a little bit of wiggle room.
Merlin: But I'll tell you.
Merlin: Tell me.
Merlin: I don't know.
Merlin: Have you ever known people that take – what's the sleep one that everybody takes?
John: Ambien?
John: Ambien, yeah.
Merlin: Have you ever known an Ambien person?
John: You mean one who gets up in the middle of the night and has, like, group sex and then doesn't remember it?
Merlin: No, I had one of those.
Merlin: Oh, let me tell you about that one sometime.
Merlin: I had the one that was on This American Life that makes people gamble and have intercourse.
Merlin: I had a prescription for that once.
John: Oh, really?
Merlin: Yeah, makes you shop on the internet and have intercourse and gamble.
Merlin: And then not remember it?
Merlin: I can't remember.
Wow.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: If you'd laughed, we would have had a bell.
Merlin: The, um...
Merlin: And I have to pee so bad.
John: It was better than I didn't laugh.
Merlin: Fuck you.
Merlin: I've known some Ambien people.
Merlin: I have an Ambien user in my family for whom...
Merlin: He or she – let me just say the idea.
Merlin: So, I mean, you've had intoxicants that you used on a regular basis in the past.
Merlin: Yes?
Merlin: Yes.
Merlin: Have you ever had the feeling of, oh my gosh, I need to get more of this?
John: Yes.
Merlin: Okay.
Merlin: Well, just the very prospect of his or her prescription running out –
Merlin: This is fucking ridiculous.
Merlin: When she's very close to running out, she loses it.
Merlin: If she thinks that – you know what I'm saying?
Merlin: Like she's visiting in a different state and there's a confusion with the prescription.
Merlin: She goes – normally like very sane person.
Merlin: She goes like off her nut at the prospect of it not – abstractly not being – she's still got some.
John: That's why drug people hoard.
John: I mean you got to always have a – like a stockpile somewhere.
Merlin: You mean like swords and military hats?
Yeah.
John: Yeah, like Sauron sitting, not Sauron, Smaug, like Smaug sitting on his... Bill Callahan, is that his name?
John: Not that Smaug.
John: Smaug the dragon sitting on his horde of dwarvish gold.
Merlin: I am Star Wars today.
Merlin: That's deep catalog.
Merlin: Yeah, but it's hard when you take the drugs.
Merlin: I'll tell you though, there's many other things that I've taken for various other things that I'd much rather be not out of than this stuff.
Merlin: But like, oh my gosh, you know with the – Like soda water.
John: When you run out of soda water, you go bananas.
John: Oh, it makes me so crazy.
Merlin: I do.
Merlin: And I stack up.
Merlin: But you know, I was on – because of my downstairs, my basement problem, I was on steroids for a while.
Merlin: I was on prednisone.
Merlin: And you've got to taper that off because if you run out of that, you are mega fucked.
Merlin: Why?
Merlin: What happens?
Merlin: Because your body – basically, as you know, I'm not a steroidal physician.
Merlin: But my understanding is that it heavily – it's a steroid.
Merlin: It gives you lots of extra steroid activity, but that also causes your body to produce much less naturally.
Merlin: I'm given to believe this is true for many different kinds of drugs.
Merlin: So if you don't taper the shit out of a steroid, you're going to be in a really bad way.
John: Oh.
John: Yeah.
John: I don't really even, I guess, know what steroids do.
Merlin: I don't either.
Merlin: I guess they make you bulky.
Merlin: They get you moon-faced.
Merlin: You can get all moon-faced.
Merlin: You ever seen pictures of Jerry Lewis when he was moon-faced?
John: Yeah, I have.
John: Well, you know, half the people in Wales are moon-faced.
Merlin: Is that a natural thing?
Merlin: Or the drinking or the poetry?
Merlin: What causes that?
John: I think it's, yeah, it's like a gummo thing.
Merlin: It's a drinking country, isn't it?
John: Wales?
John: Yeah.
Merlin: I think they drink there.
John: I'm pretty sure they do.
Merlin: They drink to forget or drink to remember?
John: They're Celts.
John: They drink just to get by.
John: They came to get down.
John: They came to get down.
Merlin: Oh, so you got to get up your seat and jump around?
John: Jump around, that's right.
Merlin: Pop quiz.
Merlin: The Matrix, Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure, and to a certain extent, Glenn Gary, Glenn Ross.
Merlin: What do they have in common?
John: Uh-oh.
Merlin: I'll read it again.
Merlin: The Matrix, Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure, and Glengarry Glen Ross.
Merlin: First of all, have you seen all three movies?
Merlin: Yes.
Merlin: Excellent, dude.
Merlin: Most excellent.
Merlin: All three rely very heavily on payphones.
Merlin: In The Matrix, they use a payphone to do that little travel dealie.
John: Right.
Merlin: Right.
Merlin: Right.
Merlin: Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure, they travel in a phone booth to go through time.
Merlin: Right.
Merlin: And Glengarry Glen Ross, some of the most poignant moments happen when Jack Lemmon's on a payphone.
Right.
Merlin: I'm setting aside Dial M for Murder.
Merlin: I'm setting aside all of the various 70s cop shows that depended – oh, fucking Dirty Harry.
Merlin: You couldn't have Dirty Harry.
Merlin: Dirty Harry?
Merlin: Magniforce?
Merlin: Dirty Harry.
Merlin: Dirty Harry.
Merlin: You couldn't have without payphones.
Right.
Merlin: There's so many stories that when you watch the movie now, if you showed these to a kid today, they'd be like, why don't they just, you know, it's like Roger Ebert, Roger Ebert, Gene Siskel's rule that like, you know, no movie, no movie should ever involve an easily overcome misunderstanding.
Merlin: Like that's a French play, not a good movie.
Merlin: I don't understand.
Merlin: You're not really having sex in here.
John: Why did I kill you?
John: What was that one?
John: Not very long ago with Colin Farrell, where he was trapped in a phone booth and there was a sniper.
Oh,
Merlin: oh i bet it was called the phone booth or the booth yeah that wasn't that long ago right no well the matrix i mean to me the matrix is part of the modern age matrix like it's like rushmore it's from that period when you know but they have to get to a phone booth yeah they got to get to this one phone within the phone rings that the uh the guy with the glasses and he anyway wow i should pee you got anything else you doing okay
John: I'm doing fine.
John: I'm a little tired.
John: I thought that was a really good episode, but we didn't find exactly that.
Merlin: No, no.
Merlin: I'll find a dinger.
Merlin: There's a dinger in there.
Merlin: It was in the middle of something, but I can cut it off.
Merlin: I got to pee really, really bad.
John: Yeah, I got to poo.
Merlin: Okay, good, good, good.
Merlin: Okay, well, I'll talk to you soon.
Merlin: Okay, you're the best, Merle.
Merlin: You too, buddy.