Ep. 64: "Sunset University"
Merlin: Hello.
John: Hi, John.
John: Hi, Merlin.
John: How's it going?
John: Good.
John: I've got my settings all screwed up here.
John: I have to adjust my settings.
John: Should I play a little music?
John: Yeah.
Merlin: You have a preference?
John: Setting adjustment music.
John: I can do that.
John: I was at an architectural salvage yard the other day.
John: Of course you were.
John: And I was digging through some bins, and there was a whole bin of old...
John: old headphones like you would see you would see in a secretarial pool or a library you know like the headphones we used in in the library oh with the like plasticky cheap not very useful padding correct and i was i was digging through these headphones and i noticed that they had uh written on them in in black pen the name of my childhood elementary school
John: They said sunset on them, all of them.
John: I was looking through them.
John: I was like, sunset, sunset.
John: That couldn't be sunset elementary.
John: And I walked up to the gal at the counter and I was like, did you guys do a salvage from an old elementary school?
John: And she said, oh yeah, some elementary school up in Shoreline.
John: And I realized these were the headphones that
John: These were the actual headphones in the library of the elementary school I went to when I was a little kid and lived in Seattle.
John: Wow.
John: So I bought them all.
Merlin: And now I have all of these headphones.
Merlin: You might have watched The World at War with those on your head.
Merlin: Absolutely.
John: I watched microfiche.
John: I watched film strips.
John: I watched who knows what I probably took French lessons.
Yeah.
John: Anyway, so I bought these headphones because I was so excited to have the, you know, to have the real, a real artifact of that, of that school.
John: And of course they're terrible headphones.
John: It's no reason that, that, you know, the Chinese beat us to the moon.
John: We can't even...
John: We were listening to stuff on these terrible tinny headphones.
Merlin: Well, the Fidelity is not completely up to snuff.
Merlin: They're probably not what you call reference headphones, right?
John: No, in fact, they are barely, I mean, it's like, it feels like the sound has to go through a tiny, tiny pinhole to come out into your ear area.
John: So no, they're terrible.
John: But I love them.
John: I have a bunch of them too.
Merlin: How many did you pick up?
Merlin: Oh, I don't know.
Merlin: A bag.
Merlin: How much is in a bag?
Merlin: A bag is 5 to 22.
Merlin: Yeah, right.
Merlin: So between 5 and 22.
Merlin: Metric or imperial?
Merlin: I've got an imperial bag.
Merlin: It's an imperial bag.
Merlin: Well, I don't want to, you know, you know me, I hate to state the obvious, but it seems clear enough to me that you should start a school.
John: I have been wanting to start a school my whole adult life.
John: You got the headphones.
John: I feel like that's what we've done here, Merlin, with Roderick on the line.
John: We have started a school, a kind of, it's like, it's one of those internet colleges.
Merlin: Well, you know me, and I don't like to restate the stating of the obvious, but, oh, University of Phoenix, really?
John: I think this is, we should be just as accredited as the University of Phoenix.
Merlin: I got a diploma in some Bazooka Joe from Phoenix.
Merlin: I'm technically an electrical electrician now.
John: An electrical electrician?
Merlin: It's got a typo on it.
Merlin: They meant to say engineer.
Merlin: John, sorry, I don't want to be too on the nose, but for the love of Christ, you have to start a school and really in deference or in honor of your own sunset time.
Merlin: And just for what it's worth, I don't make it creepy, but the neighborhood I live in is called The Sunset.
Merlin: So you could have a satellite location here.
Merlin: I'll call it Sunset.
Merlin: Yeah, I mean it's a costly place to build anything.
Merlin: But I think once you've got the sunk cost of the headphones taken care of, the kids are just going to show up.
Merlin: John, people are – I say this with Rue because of the fact that we're going through this right now.
Merlin: But it's a real pain in the butt to get into a school.
Merlin: It's a huge pain in the butt to get into a good school.
Merlin: And it's an extreme rarity to get into a John Roderick school.
John: Well, I feel like if I named it Sunset University –
John: You know, it's already sort of, like, very inviting to an older demographic, right?
John: It's like, these are the sunset years of your education.
John: Come to Sunset University where the chairs are comfortable and the headphones are...
John: Like you had in elementary school.
Merlin: That's a little long.
Merlin: But, you know, you ever get a pizza and it says on the box, you've tried the rest, now try the best?
Merlin: Of course, every pizza box says that.
Merlin: It's not probably entirely true.
Merlin: But, I mean, again, I don't think you have to be the best pizza place in order to order those boxes.
Merlin: And by the same token, let's be honest, it's not, you know, it's not the 19th century.
Merlin: I think you can literally call yourself a university without any fear of...
Merlin: contradiction.
Merlin: Anybody could be a university.
Merlin: It's like being a doctor.
Merlin: You just say it.
John: Yeah, well, and it's like they say about when you and your friend meet a bear on the trail, you don't have to be faster than the bear.
John: You just have to be faster than your friend.
John: That's a great joke.
John: I love that joke.
John: It's true.
John: And that would be the motto of Sunset University.
John: We'd have to translate it into Latin.
Merlin: Okay.
Merlin: You don't have to be faster than the bear.
Merlin: You just have to be faster than the bear.
Merlin: But here's what I like, and this is why I bring up pizza, is because what you're really saying is you've tried the rest, not try literally the final school you go to.
Merlin: It's the sunset.
Merlin: It's the last school you need.
John: You've been to a lot of colleges, presumably.
John: If you're listening to this podcast, you have either been to a lot of colleges and none of them have met your needs.
John: Or you haven't been to any colleges.
John: You're very curious about them.
Merlin: Yeah, you have the kind of non-job where you could listen to an hour and a half of help from somebody you've never met.
John: I meet a lot of people who haven't been to college.
John: Good.
John: You know, they say that everybody's been to college now, but I meet people all the time that have never been to college.
John: It's very costly, John.
John: College is costly.
John: It's not worth anything.
John: I met some Australians the other day.
John: I'm sorry to interrupt.
John: No, please continue.
John: I met an Australian couple who were traveling in America, and they had two teenage daughters.
John: Well, one was a teenager, 13, and the other was nine.
John: Neither kid had ever been to a school.
John: They just were educated by their parents and traveled around together.
John: And they weren't even hippies.
John: They were a little bit punk.
John: Oh, I see.
John: They were all wearing, the entire family, mom, dad, and both daughters were wearing Doc Martens.
John: Hmm.
John: Which is – I don't know.
Merlin: That's a start.
Merlin: If I know what your special things are, that's a start.
Merlin: And this isn't – that wouldn't necessarily be one of those we keep them out of the schools because of the menace of creationism.
Merlin: They might actually be doing – it's not that hard to do a better job than a school right now, which is all the more reason for you to start one.
Merlin: It's an opportunity.
Merlin: Apple says, hey –
Merlin: you've never really loved your phone before.
Merlin: Let's give you something that you can really use.
Merlin: And in this case, maybe the reason that you've stayed out of school, as you say, it's never met your needs or your children's needs.
Merlin: You know what they need.
Merlin: You should be the one that's helping them matriculate.
John: I was having another time travel dream the other day, except in this case, I time traveled back to high school, but I looked like I was in high school.
John: I time traveled back into my high school body.
John: And I was trying to think if I would do a better job than I did or if I would fuck it up even worse.
Merlin: The jury's still out.
Merlin: I have lots of dreams.
Merlin: I only really dream about five things.
Merlin: And one of them is a kind of time travel.
Merlin: In dreams, I only ever go to shopping malls, high school, my college, church camp.
Merlin: And did I mention the mall?
Merlin: I go to the mall.
John: Wait, those are the five dreams or that is one kind of dream, time travel dream and you go to five different places?
Merlin: I don't remember them that well in the Ringling Museum in Sarasota.
Merlin: That's the only places I go in dreams.
Merlin: And it's usually like a dark ride at Disney World.
Merlin: Like it's a small world but with, you know, ribbon-esque women paintings.
Merlin: But time travel features heavily a dream I've had a lot.
Merlin: Yes, naked.
Merlin: Yes, flying.
Merlin: But also precisely the dream you described, which is going back to school but like being me now.
Merlin: And I'm just going to tell you for myself the ones I can remember.
Merlin: I do equally as poorly because I'm essentially the same person.
Merlin: It's just a little heavier with different pants.
John: Yeah, I think I'd probably get more tail than I did in high school because in all honesty, this may shock you, but I got zero tail in high school.
John: I find that so hard to believe.
John: Zero.
John: Even with Kelly.
John: You know, our... She's a doctor now, so we should probably steer around that.
John: Well, no, she's a doctor now, so she knows... Presumably now she knows about the human anatomy.
John: She's had two kids.
John: But, you know, at the time... At the time, I think I had the sense that good kids didn't...
John: Go too far.
John: I was very governed.
Merlin: You said on previous occasions, I think we've agreed that we both felt put off by the people who were getting tail, whether that was men, women, or otherwise.
Merlin: I felt sort of betrayed by people who were able to smoke pot and finger bang.
Merlin: I never had access to that.
Merlin: And now today I understand that people, let's be honest, want to be finger banged.
Merlin: There aren't that many people who don't want a little bit of finger banging.
Merlin: And I know that.
Merlin: I don't have to make it weird.
Merlin: But now I know that.
Merlin: Again, something we've discussed is that for me, going to college just made it worse.
Merlin: That feeling I just described, then it had some kind of like brassy patina of political correctness to it.
Merlin: And, you know, I would do finger banging, but I would feel bad about it sometimes.
John: You know, but when I first went to college, the only difference between college and high school is that
John: that girls were wearing a lot more perfume.
John: There was a thick layer of obsession in the air.
Merlin: You felt like there was more in college?
John: More perfume in college, for sure.
Merlin: My girlfriend, as you know, I'm a serial monogamist.
Merlin: My first girlfriend who became my first college girlfriend during the first week of school, big Calvin Klein obsession user.
Merlin: Obsession.
Merlin: When I smell that, and thank God people don't wear it so much anymore.
Merlin: I have a great sense memory of it, like listening to the cars and finger banging.
Merlin: But, you know, Candio, she had one of those really nice jam boxes that could play a cassette on repeat.
Merlin: And back then, you know, I didn't even need to drink a lot of water and rest then.
John: I went to a Catholic school for the first two years of college, as you know.
John: Mm-hmm.
John: And really, Catholic school, Catholic universities are a place where people really, really drink a lot and have a lot of reckless sex with one another.
John: Because it's like when Amish kids go get kicked out of their Amish town.
John: Rum springing.
John: That's what it's called.
Merlin: I think that's what it's called.
John: Yeah, it's the Catholic rum springing.
John: They go to college.
John: I think the expectation is by junior year, you will have found the person that you want to marry.
John: But that first two years, people are just throwing down gin and tonic and then hooking up.
John: It's basically like hooking up.
John: If you had a frog cannon, let's say you had two frog cannons.
Yeah.
John: Is that a sex thing?
John: And they were aimed at each other.
John: No, it's a cannon that shoots frogs.
John: Okay.
John: But it shoots, like, multiple frogs at once.
John: It's a semi-automatic weapon?
John: No, no, it's not like da-da-da-da-da.
John: It's like a blunderbuss of frogs.
Merlin: Oh, like a double-barreled frog cannon.
John: Well, except you're shooting, like, shotgun frogs.
John: Oh.
John: So let's say you can shoot 25 frogs out of this cannon and you have two of those pointing at each other.
John: They're kind of not pointing directly at each other pointed up in the air, but in opposite ways.
John: And you're shooting 25 frogs at a time in two different directions.
John: Some of those frogs are going to hit.
John: And that is what sex at a Catholic university is like.
Merlin: It's also a lot like the Cold War.
Merlin: Don't you think?
Merlin: I mean, don't you think in some ways?
John: You mean my frog analogy is like the Cold War?
Merlin: Well, I mean the elements of it, not the actual extant analogy.
Merlin: I don't want to derail you, but I mean that seems a lot like the Cold War.
Merlin: You point a frog cannon, we got a frog cannon, we get a bigger frog cannon.
Merlin: Yeah, bigger and bigger frog cannons.
Merlin: Here's the thing.
Merlin: You're the one who runs the school, but it seems to me that if you're one of those people – and don't you get a lot of old Catholics running the school?
Merlin: Don't you get a lot of guys in their 60s?
Merlin: Like it seems to me that if you've got that continuity of care over many, many years, they know that there's some frog cannons being shot over the –
John: Well, it was explained to me when I first arrived at Gonzaga University, where I spent my first two years of college, or my first year and a half before I was asked to depart.
John: It was explained to me that there are two types of Jesuits.
John: And the one type of Jesuit is the hyper-intellectual homosexual man.
John: who was either put into the priesthood by their terrified parents, or he had an older brother who was going to inherit the family business, and he ends up going into the priesthood.
John: It's very traditional societies.
John: The other half of the Jesuits, or the other percent, I don't know if it's a half.
John: It seemed like it was about half.
John: So half of my professors were incredibly smart, clearly gay priests who just lived this incredibly diverse intellectual life.
John: The other half of the Jesuits were former jocks.
John: like football players and like just jocks that came up in Catholic school, athletic programs, basketball, famous basketball players or whatever.
John: And when their athletic career was over, they just sort of were brought or kept in the church family, brought back in and given a life to,
John: in the Jesuitical order so for instance the president of the university while I was there everybody on campus recognized that he was from the jock side of the Jesuits and nobody had any respect for him as a as a thinker but he was a glad hander and a and a back slapper and a and a fundraiser
John: And so all the intellectual queer Jesuits were very contemptuous of that side of the order.
John: I never understood it because it seemed like to become a Jesuit, it took years and years and years of study and whatnot.
John: But then as time went on, I realized it does take years of study, but there's only one book.
John: The Bible?
John: Yeah.
John: So, I mean, you study that.
John: Even if you're like a dumb basketball kicker, you can, over the course of five years, you know.
Merlin: It's not like you're expected to understand Chaucer and James Joyce.
Merlin: You can spend a lot of time getting good at that one thing.
John: Yeah.
John: You just memorize the one book and you seem like, I mean, it's true of all religion.
John: You memorize one book.
John: And then when, when anybody says anything to you, you just say something out of the book and it seems like you're a genius.
John: A saint.
John: Anyway, we're going to have to figure out at Sunset University what our equivalent demographic split is or our equivalent sort of professorial.
John: I feel like any university needs tension between the X professors and the Y professors.
Merlin: You need McCartneys and Lennons.
Merlin: We need McCartneys and Lennons.
Merlin: On their own, they'll do stuff.
Merlin: But when you combine the jocks and the
Merlin: Scholars, let's say.
Merlin: It's a euphemism.
Merlin: When you get the jocks and the scholars working together, I mean, it's like, you know, you need two hands.
John: I feel like one side of Sunset University should be prissy Bay Area software people who are really uncomfortable when we start to, you know, when we go off book, but who are secretly titillated by it.
John: Mm-hmm.
John: Mm-hmm.
Merlin: And then... That's a great way to be.
Merlin: You'll pick up a lot of interesting stuff with that attitude.
Merlin: I think, in my experience, yeah.
John: And then the other half of the professor should be like...
Merlin: You're talking about the faculty.
John: I'm talking about the faculty.
Merlin: Oh, these would be actually like literally separate wings.
John: Separate wings.
John: The prissy Bay Area software designers who secretly get a chubby when the rules get broken, but they can't really admit it.
John: And then the other half are like wild man fisher types.
John: who probably have never been to college themselves, but for a while we're living in a tree outside of Jackson Hole, and then they hitchhiked down to Mexico, and they built a stone fortress out of broken seashells, and then they were a whitewater river rafting guide.
John: Guys like that.
John: I can lay my hands on some guys like that.
Merlin: And if I may say, they represent at least two of the many facets of your personality because you are a very learned McCartney in many ways.
Merlin: And on the other hand, I won't call you a jock, but you're certainly the kind of man that would travel in a fugue state.
Merlin: And having those together, would they be decorated differently, the two wings?
Merlin: Would they reflect the interests of the faculty and the sensibilities?
John: You have to put the two wings together and you have to pretend that everybody's the same.
Merlin: Same chairs, same chalkboard.
John: Exactly.
John: Because without that, if the wings were just divided, then they would be at war with one another or they would be openly hostile.
Merlin: Well, it's like the tyranny of public restrooms, right?
Merlin: You got an icon on the door.
Merlin: Do you have a weenus?
Merlin: Do you not have a weenus?
Merlin: Here's your restroom.
Merlin: And in this case, it's really like one large unisex bathroom where you're just going to have to go in there and wonder who was there before you.
Merlin: Right.
Merlin: That's pretty good.
John: Well, and I don't want to swing back to finger banging too fast, but girls have a weenus too.
John: It's just a much more.
John: Good point.
Merlin: It's an on-board.
Merlin: It's on-board weenus.
Merlin: Yeah.
John: Retractable weenus.
Merlin: Well, I mean, I think it's a terrific idea in ways that I'm sure you understand.
Merlin: I mean, obviously you have so much to share with people.
Merlin: And if anything, it's just that you really need...
Merlin: You need the platform for that.
Merlin: I'm not entirely sure what the sort of monetary model would be.
Merlin: You could probably get some of those friends of yours to write some grants or some maybe retired senators who would want to have their name on an arch or something.
Merlin: I mean, you've walked in the corridors of power.
Merlin: You know a lot of people.
Merlin: You know the mayor there.
Merlin: You know the Rock and Roll County Administrator.
Merlin: You know a lot of people that – Yeah, but none of those people have any money.
John: They can accredit us.
Merlin: Yes, but it's like Facebook, friend of a friend.
Merlin: They could go and talk to people in the deeper corridors of power who have access to those monies.
John: I've been going on this – I've been starting this whisper campaign for months suggesting that I be appointed to the boards of directors of some hot up-and-coming software companies.
John: Yeah.
John: And I've gotten a few nibbles.
John: Yeah.
John: I don't think that counts as a whisper.
John: But nobody's pulled the trigger yet.
John: I feel like these are my prime scimitar-wielding years.
Merlin: John, this is a huge part of the problem.
Merlin: It's like when I'm counseling my kids and they're wondering about how to make their job better, and they're all like, should I?
Merlin: I want better stuff.
Merlin: Should I ask for a raise?
Merlin: I'm like, no, you should go.
Merlin: You're counseling your kids?
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: You know, the youngsters, the listeners.
John: Oh, you're talking about Merlin's kids.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: I do a telethon every year.
Merlin: I yell at people.
Merlin: I'm like a Janice of help.
John: I didn't realize that you thought of your listeners as your kids.
John: That's really sweet.
John: Yeah.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: Well, you know, I don't want to be condescending, but I think of them as Merlin's kids in a lot of ways.
John: I like that.
Merlin: Like I'm out and make goofy faces and make kind of a fruity hand gesture where my hands all limp.
Merlin: And you pour some vinegar and some baking powder.
Merlin: But –
Merlin: I got a lot of cards here.
Merlin: But here's the thing.
Merlin: So here's the problem with these suckers.
Merlin: And this is true in schools.
Merlin: You know it's true in work.
Merlin: And for the love of Christ, you've taught us that this is the case in rock.
Merlin: Is that there are people out there who are waiting for their benediction.
Merlin: They're waiting for their Bazooka Joe that's going to tell them that they're an electrical electrician.
Merlin: And what they never think to do is go out and just get it.
Merlin: And I'm not even talking about like follow your dreams.
Merlin: I'm talking about you go out and do that thing.
Merlin: You're not going to get –
Merlin: You're not going to get the kind of position where you wield power by asking for it.
Merlin: And in this instance, this is why I think you showing up in a bathrobe and a scimitar literally at the meeting is going to be much more impactful than saying, may I have permission to bring a scimitar into your building?
John: You're absolutely right.
Merlin: I don't mean to give you a note here.
Merlin: I'm just saying that you understand as a man of power that you don't go in and ask to be empowered.
John: It's true.
John: It's true.
John: I was thinking about this the other day.
John: You know, Eddie Murphy recorded raw.
John: when he was 21 years old.
John: 20, even.
John: And...
John: We are still listening to and debating and arguing about music that the Beatles made when they were similar, same age.
John: And like I've said before, I encounter sometimes 20, 21-year-olds who are fully adult.
John: They are fully actualized.
John: They do not appear to be wrestling with how do I...
John: How do I keep from crying in public?
John: They do not seem to be wrestling with, like... It's because they got a Tumblr.
John: Put another Tumblr.
John: Like, it took me years to understand that any given meal that you eat out in a restaurant with a group of other people, you should always, A, put in more money than you owe...
John: And B, potentially you should just buy the dinner.
Merlin: Oh, John.
Merlin: You should just buy the dinner for everybody.
Merlin: This is core curriculum.
Merlin: I mean this should be in the freaking orientation.
Merlin: I've told you about this, but when we would go out to eat – I think I told you this.
Merlin: When I had my real job back in Florida and we'd go out to eat, go to some like sushi barbecue place or whatever –
Merlin: there was always like a couple guys who the bill would come and they'd be on me and they take out their, you know, Hewlett Packard calculator and want to like break it down.
Merlin: And like, you know what I mean?
Merlin: Who, who had a more edamame or whatever.
Merlin: And, and I would be like, look, this is back when I took work seriously.
Merlin: I would say, look guys, let's just either split it.
Merlin: N ways, or please, I cannot spend my 20s listening to you guys argue over a $6 tab.
Merlin: Hand me the bill.
Merlin: I will pay it.
Merlin: We will never discuss it again.
Merlin: And you move on.
Merlin: And the thing is, you go to a party, don't ask.
Merlin: Don't ask if you should bring ice.
Merlin: Always bring ice.
Merlin: Don't ask if you should take out the trash.
Merlin: Don't worry.
Merlin: Grab the trash.
Merlin: You can find the trash cans.
Merlin: They're either in the garage or, more likely, outside.
John: You still see 40-year-olds.
John: The bill comes, and they are looking at this bill on the table like it contains some hieroglyphic information that they're afraid...
John: They're afraid it's going to get translated by the wrong scientist.
John: Instead of animating the good God, we're going to animate the bad God.
Merlin: Oh, you grab the abnormal brain.
John: Exactly.
John: And this little piece of paper that is telling everybody that they owe somewhere between $21 and $27 each is vibrating on the table.
John: And some people are actually levitating it with their anxiety.
John: And it's like, you know, $27, around $30.
Merlin: I would put in $40.
John: Just throw the money down and go on with your life.
John: And that kind of anxiety about money was a thing that I walked into adulthood with.
John: I walked into being a 21-year-old with this feeling, this hyper-consciousness that I didn't want to get shortchanged.
John: And money seemed to be the language that human beings used to determine who was getting over on who.
John: And so I wasted so many years trying to make sure that I didn't get shortchanged 30 cents when all along the simple wisdom that you should paper the path in front of you with your gratuities.
John: You should put your money to work together.
John: I mean, the number one usefulness of money is to make your anxiety about money go away.
John: Like, here it is.
John: Here's $40.
John: Like you say, I never want to speak of this again.
John: And learning that was this turning point for me.
John: But it came too late to have that information when I was 20, 21 years old to just free up money.
John: my spirit so that i was not walking around all the time i mean i i would go i would i would show up in a town the rain would be pouring down i would be soaked to the skin it would be 11 o'clock at night i would be in spain and i would see this you know little little sign pension and i would walk up three flights of stairs i would knock on the door and the little spanish woman would open the door and
John: You know, do you have a Chambra?
John: El Casa de Chambra?
John: Por favor?
John: And she would say, you know, yes, it's 1,500 pesetas or something like that.
John: And I would have it in my mind.
John: that a room was, though the room should be 1,300 pesetas or 13,000 pesetas or whatever.
John: And I would try and haggle with her, but I was a bad haggler.
John: And she would say, no, sorry, that's the price.
John: It's 11 o'clock at night and you're standing in the hallway here dripping wet and it's this much money.
John: And I would say, well, no then.
John: And turn around and walk the five flights back down into the rainy night.
John: And sometimes walk around the town for another two hours.
John: But you won.
John: But I won.
John: And I'm looking for this magic room that was going to save me $2.
John: And sometimes the greatest nights of my life were when I ended up back at that woman's door two hours later.
John: Ringing the buzzer and she wouldn't answer.
John: And all because I was imagining that the $2 symbolized savvy.
John: The $2 symbolized that I was...
John: That I was a knowledgeable person who wasn't being rooked by this 70-year-old Spanish woman that was renting out a room in her house.
John: You know, that I was wise.
John: And in fact, I was a fool.
John: And when I meet somebody who never had that burden, who...
John: was just by virtue of how they were raised or by virtue of the grade of milk that their mother used in their Kraft macaroni and cheese, they came into the world with either more generosity of spirit or less confusion about what constituted wisdom.
John: This is the problem.
John: This is part of the problem with matriculating young students in Sunset University is that I'm afraid the older students would be distracted by their envy and resentment as the young people who were so much better at this just began their lives of graceful progress through time.
John: And all of us old grouches
Merlin: Yeah, but I mean also you should give yourself credit.
Merlin: It's also kind of a wax on wax off situation where we have to – we may need to teach you something that you can get your head around before we teach you what we just taught you.
Merlin: I think that happens a lot.
Merlin: I mean in the case of my kid when like a year or two ago, whenever she first started going to soccer, well, the real goal of soccer is to show up first of all.
Merlin: And then to, even if you go, you get your orange slices, you could, uh, but, but, you know, I mean, honestly, it's, this is one of the, one of the few things where I will seed the whole, like learning to sit still and understand that you're part of a team thing.
Merlin: You know, I, I think you can take that too far if you take it all the way to your senior year of college, but, but sometimes, sometimes that's what it takes and, and you will be a stronger character person out of that.
Merlin: And to your point about the money, uh,
Merlin: And this is in some ways very related to the Chinese ladies at Walgreens arguing over expired coupons.
Merlin: For some people, as you know, and I think sometimes this is true for you, it's not a question of the dollars and cents.
Merlin: It's a question of what we agreed to.
Merlin: So it seems to me that if you show up at that place, if you went today, you would be there like a gentleman and you'd say, well, I'm going to give you – you want 35,000 piastres for this.
Merlin: I don't know if the money is there.
Merlin: But you – and you could do this much and they say no and you walk away again like a gentleman.
Merlin: Now in the case of going to the Chicken Fingers place in Tallahassee in 1993, what troubled me was the ones who were the biggest dickholes about the tab were the PhDs, were the people that at the time were making three times as much money as I did.
Merlin: And I think what it comes down to in some ways is that –
Merlin: Yes, there's certainly a lot of personality flaws in play here.
Merlin: One of them is that money makes it easy to understand where you stand.
Merlin: And so if somebody is trying to get more of your money or really any of your money and you hold that dear, even if you've got the money –
Merlin: I can certainly understand that.
Merlin: You don't get rich by spending money.
Merlin: I understand that.
Merlin: But at the same time, like you're right, it's a certain generosity of spirit and it's a certain like getting outside of your own stupid head and understanding that I am not going to be able to get back and finishing summarizing this goddamn deposition if you sit here and argue over a $4 chicken finger bill.
Merlin: Do you know what I mean?
Merlin: To me, that's what the school could do is help people understand eventually once they're ready to accept it, there's a lot more to it.
John: I would even argue that you do get rich spending money.
Merlin: Well, that was a little reductive.
John: But you know what I mean?
John: Like that is precisely how you become a person that – I mean I –
John: Without getting too loosey-goosey woo-woo about how money is made, I know that the fashion now in America, I think maybe even the fashion worldwide, is to think in certain quarters that making money and being a success in business is a woo-woo proposition, that if your Buddhism is correct and you're...
John: your spirit is open and your chakras are aligned, that money is going to fall from the heavens.
John: And I feel like that is a kind of mind rape that I...
John: that I hate with every... It really makes you small.
Merlin: With every emotional scimitar I have.
Merlin: Every scimitar in your bathrobe, it makes you a very small person.
John: But I do believe that spending money freely, that being generous, rather,
John: tipping bellman and the guy that opens the door for your taxi, you know, handing him some money, even though it is clear to all parties involved that he has not performed very much of a service.
John: Opening the door for you is not a thing that doesn't
John: That does not cost a dollar, except it does cost a dollar, because that is what we have agreed.
John: He opened the door for you, you hand him a dollar.
John: That is part of the social contract.
John: And to preserve that dollar for yourself is to live in a world where you are not fully embracing the social contract and therefore not going to prosper by definition, right?
John: You know, learning that lesson, that money, that a lot of it, that money is fake.
John: Money is absolutely fake.
John: And to treat it like it's real and to preserve it like it matters is to miss the point of it entirely.
John: And that is not to say that you should be a...
John: like wanton with it you should count it and you should know what it represents but you it's also it is just a symbolic thing and at the last five years of my life i have i have been living in this weird relationship to money where all of a sudden i have a bunch of it and then i live off of it for a long time and then i have then all of a sudden i have more and every time i have a bunch of it i think i'm made in the shade
John: I'm going to keep having, I'm going to keep getting big bunches of money like this.
John: Money's going to keep arriving in bails and I'm just going to, I should go out and buy myself like a really useless watch or electric car.
John: And then I live off of this bale.
John: I'm the horse that comes into the barn and nibbles at the end of his bale for a couple of years.
John: And then the money's gone.
John: And if I succumb to the feeling of like, the money's gone.
John: I used it all up.
John: I blew it.
John: I blew my big nest egg.
John: You know, I can get into a real panic.
John: But then...
John: Then all of a sudden the door opens and another bail comes in.
John: And I just have realized, oh, money is totally fake.
John: And this business, I think when people work for a paycheck that comes very regularly and there's a real clear correlation between I worked 40 hours, 40 hours is worth X dollars, here come the dollars.
Right.
John: And so money and time become very real feeling.
John: And it seems like if I stop working for a moment, the money will dry up.
John: There will never be more.
John: Or I have to go find another place like this where I work 40 hours and get, you know, that money and time are so inextricably time.
John: And I have just realized that money is just this, it is absolutely impossible.
John: Just a handful of seashells.
John: And it is not the point.
John: It is not the thing to guard.
John: It is not the thing to treasure.
John: And so...
John: Yeah, that's why I never do anything anymore.
John: I just... You got your big bail on the bar.
Merlin: Well, I just... Neville on your bail.
John: I sit in the front window of my house with my elbows folded on the windowsill looking down the street for the truck that's going to back up with the money bail.
John: Every day it doesn't come.
Merlin: Well, it's easy to seem or sound careless by saying something like that.
Merlin: But I happen to agree, I think, with a lot of that.
Merlin: And one of the things is that when you've got – let's say you've gotten into a position where you get a job and you're grateful to have a job or any kind of ongoing work.
Merlin: It's a kind of conditioning where it's been made clear to you that this is the bar.
Merlin: And when you hit it, the pellet comes out.
Merlin: Right.
Merlin: And if you start doing that for long enough, regardless of what it is – I mean that could be beer too.
Merlin: But whatever it is, when you hit the bar, the pellet comes out.
Merlin: You start – and then you start looking forward to you've hit the bar a certain number of times and a certain number of pellets have come out.
Merlin: That's – it's going to cause a lot of anxiety for you to think about a world where you miss a couple pellets.
Merlin: Right.
Merlin: And I'm not trying to reduce that because everybody has what they need.
Merlin: She should get what they need.
Merlin: But you're right.
Merlin: You lose track of the fact that this is an abstraction and that this isn't the only way –
Merlin: It's not the only way you could get it.
Merlin: It's not like you can just sit around and wait for bales to show up.
Merlin: But the nature of what you do, you would have to be able to tolerate that feast and more feast and then occasionally pseudo-famine for a while because you've got the confidence to know that – let me put it this way.
Merlin: This might be too high level, but I think –
Merlin: The fact that you need money a lot or need money a little has very little to do with what's happening in the rest of the universe.
Merlin: And because of our own heuristics and hangups, it's really easy to think that the more I need this money, the more likely I will do anything to get it.
Merlin: But the funny thing is this sounds so slack or like some kind of a self-help thing.
Merlin: But like, well, the truth is like, you know, if it's going to be something where now you got to drive four hours round trip every day and do dry cleaning and have a job that you hate.
Merlin: Well, yeah, you got a bar and maybe you've got a pellet.
Merlin: But in some ways that makes you even more enslaved to that same concept instead of going, it's worth it for me to find something that has a bar that I like because I can get pellets anywhere.
John: We get into this bar and pellet.
John: And we forget that we are actually natively made to eat grass in the field.
John: Like, the pellet is not our natural reward.
John: You know, the pellet... And again, we don't want to... I don't want to be too woo-woo either, but...
John: It is very, very hard.
John: You get so conditioned to the bar and pellet that you will find yourself in a field of flowers and you will miss the bar.
John: It's not just that you'll miss the pellets.
John: You'll miss the bar, the connection, the clear connection you had between this mechanical action and what you considered your sustenance.
John: So my life has been...
John: a progress of learning to feel like
John: Money is not the thing.
John: And you would think when I was 16 years old, I was so consumed with the idea of money as an abstraction and as a real thing.
John: I collected coins.
John: I collected silver bars.
John: I would go to those gem and numismatic shows in Alaska where guys who were mining...
John: Raw ore would come and just sell buckets of dirt to each other.
John: And I remember buying raw copper that had been mined out of a vein of copper.
John: It's just like a crumpled up baseball of just pure copper.
John: And I would buy these things for... At the time, a little baseball of copper was only a buck or two.
John: I would buy this metal not because I ever thought it was going to be worth more money or because I was going to take this raw metal and trade it with my friends or anything or fashion it into jewelry.
John: The idea that we had collectively agreed that this metal was precious –
John: appealed to me.
John: I wanted to own it for myself.
John: And so you would think at 16, 17 years old, I would have made life choices that would have put me in like a closer or a more direct relationship with money that I would have become a stockbroker or somebody who, who sits and just plays with money and invents money, makes money out of nothing.
John: Um, but, um,
John: For whatever reason, I took that love of money in all its many forms and then chose to be a...
John: dancer basically you know i chose to i chose modern dance as as my expression of my inner life and itinerant entertainment monkey yeah like oh great i love money and i am you know and i and i worship money like you know you've seen on my wall here i have a sheet of uncut bill two dollar bills one of your favorite websites is uh what's your money's worth if you melt it down yeah what's your money worth i mean like what's the melt value i
John: I have – when I was carrying – when I had that chain wallet, I used to carry around a kind of born identity style safe deposit box.
Merlin: You said you had like what, like $600 worth of tiny folded up bills?
John: Yeah, tiny folded up $20 bills in all the different – of all the different nations of the world.
John: What is that?
John: It's a kind of relationship to money, a crazed –
John: And in a lot of ways, it was a simple love.
John: I just had a simple love of it.
Merlin: Well, it's kind of like a little miniature art museum near your ass in some ways, right?
Merlin: It's like a little display.
John: Yeah, a little display and a little game and a little thing I could sit and monkey with with my fingers.
John: But to have chosen a life in the arts where money is...
John: is 17 steps down on your Maslow hierarchy.
John: You know, like you are, you are so, you are so, it's so long after the show before the smoke clears enough that anybody's even thinking about money again.
John: Yeah.
John: And that tension has been in my whole life.
John: If I had gone into stock brokering and had just been interested in solving math problems to create money and then collecting money,
John: I may have been a more, that may have been my duck.
John: You know, I may have been in some ways a more realized person.
John: If not as broad a person, I would have been a more, my life would have had that sort of targeted self-knowledge that I see in people who, like my sister realized 15 years after the fact that
John: And I watched the realization hit her like a ton of bricks.
John: She realized that she had been put on the earth to have been an Olympic skier.
John: And she bailed out of skiing because she wanted to smoke pot and hang out with skaters.
Hmm.
John: And all her competitors and all the girls that could never catch her on the ski race mountain ended up being the U.S.
John: women's Olympic team for that era.
John: Like, her friends and nemeses went on to be the U.S.
John: ski team.
John: And none of them were medalists.
John: but they were the ski team and they did go to the Olympics.
John: And my sister was a better skier than they were.
John: And she realized it many years later, like, Oh shit, that was my thing.
John: I should have, if I had been an Olympic skier,
John: My whole life would have this order.
John: It would have a context that it's lacking now.
John: It's like I'm missing a limb.
John: And I often wonder whether that relationship to...
John: literally to coinage you know to like bags of coins right when i when i was a little kid and i would get a quarter because people give quarters to little kids i don't know if they still do that but they sure used to i would put it in a shoe box have i told you this story i had a shoe box i would change it for 25 pennies because it made me feel richer
John: I like that.
John: I like that very much.
John: But I would put whatever coin I got, any denomination, I would put it in the shoebox until I had a shoebox that I could barely lift.
John: I used to keep it on the top shelf of my closet and then I had to keep it under my bed because I couldn't lift it.
John: And I would pick the shoebox up and I would put it on the bed.
John: I'd close my door and lock my door and I'd go sit on my bed and I would take the money in big handfuls and I would pour it over my head.
Merlin: You'd have a little quarter shower.
John: Yeah.
John: Didn't it hurt?
John: I loved it.
John: You could really feel the money.
John: You could feel the money, and I was literally bathing in my wealth, which a shoebox full of quarters is, you know, I know exactly how much it is because eventually my mom convinced me to take it to the bank.
John: Handed in, and the woman behind the counter gave me a bank book where they had typed $117 in the bank book.
John: And then my box of quarters was gone, but in its place I had this bank book, which looked like a passport.
John: That had this amount of money in it.
John: And I could take the bank book out and stare at my $117 in this new form, which was a promise.
Merlin: Was that as satisfying?
Merlin: A different kind of thing.
John: It was a different kind of satisfying because my mom was initiating me into the culture of adults by taking me to the bank.
John: Now I had a bank book.
John: Now my money had joined the big stream and I was part of the big operation.
Yeah.
John: There were so many times in my young life where somebody initiated me into, like when I got my first checkbook, initiated me into this, the big operation, the world of adults who were trading money and stock.
John: And, you know, I was fascinated by all of that.
John: I wanted to be a part of it.
John: And yet there was nobody, nobody took me all the way.
John: You know, nobody explained everything.
John: Maybe...
John: the next step beyond having a bank account.
John: And I mean, I, and, and people bought me stock for Christmas when I was, because I was one of those kids.
John: I would have hated that.
Merlin: I would have hated that so much.
John: I got stock for Christmas and I was thrilled.
John: I would open up the newspaper and I would look for my little penny stocks and the stock, the stock that I had was trading in the 75 cents a share realm.
John: And I had a hundred shares and,
Merlin: And you got to watch that change.
John: I would watch it change and sometimes I'd be up and sometimes I'd be down.
Merlin: You're so good at that.
Merlin: You're so good at watching and waiting.
Merlin: You're really good at that.
John: Yeah.
John: I like to watch and wait.
John: But the problem is with the stocks and with a lot of things, I watched my stock go up to $1.50 a share and then I watched it plummet to $0.40 a share and then I watched it plummet off the bottom of the
John: of the stock exchange when it fell to two cents a share and then was delisted and that's why you're angry at politicians now the uh one of the companies i invested in in like 1980 made some kind of hose that was used on the space shuttle and i thought this is a growing industry now that's cool
John: And then it turned out you can't really... Your business isn't going to thrive just making one hose.
John: That's a pretty specific vertical market.
John: Yeah, you need to diversify.
John: But I've watched my fortunes go up.
John: I've watched them go down.
John: I am not...
John: I'm a hoarder.
John: That's what I was – yeah.
Merlin: I mean I don't know.
Merlin: I don't want to derail you.
Merlin: But like I think I personally – I mean I don't think you should – I'm not saying you feel bad.
Merlin: But like I think there's an important distinction to be made that at least I have at this point for now feel like I've learned.
Merlin: I'm not like a successful person by the longest stretch of the imagination, especially money-wise.
Merlin: But –
Merlin: But when you think about what you described, like somebody going to Wall Street or somebody who's going to be in numismatics or whatever, like I think it's important – did I pronounce that even anywhere near right?
Merlin: Yeah, it was good.
Merlin: Like think about this breakdown though.
Merlin: One that I think is interesting and one that's very personally important to me.
Merlin: One is like think about the aspects of being a –
Merlin: One of those people, like you're a banker or you're a mergers and acquisitions person or really you're a cashier, whatever it is.
Merlin: Like think – maybe this goes right back to the bar and the pellet.
Merlin: But think about like what aspect of that appeals to you because like – again, going back to the great Robert Evans, he realized never put his own money into a movie.
Merlin: He made a lot of money for himself and others, but he did that by realizing – it's sort of like I can be great at blackjack on the computer.
Merlin: I can make $500 a night playing blackjack on the computer because I'm really good at it, and I'm really – on the computer with fake money, I am really great at employing basic strategy.
Merlin: I know what cards to play when.
Merlin: You just basically become a robot who gets free Heinekens – well, virtual Heinekens.
Merlin: But in the casino, I'm a mess because it might be the dollar table and I'm still screwing up.
Merlin: So I guess what I'm saying is like if you're somebody – like I think a lot of people make the mistake of saying I like money a lot.
Merlin: So I'm going to go do this money thing and they kind of leave it at that.
Merlin: But that sets aside the part like my daughter collects bottle caps.
Merlin: I collect comics and I think in some ways that's the same kind of impulse –
Merlin: as somebody who wants to, for example, collect money.
Merlin: Like in your case, you really liked having those quarters in a box.
Merlin: But that gets me to the second point, which is how do you like to spend your day?
Merlin: I think people don't ask themselves that enough.
Merlin: And this is real fancy, but I really believe this.
Merlin: I've seen...
Merlin: We've seen people who go through like all the things we talked about, becoming a doctor, becoming a lawyer, becoming all of these things.
Merlin: And it never completely occurred to them that while they were studying – let's look at it this way.
Merlin: First, you aspire to be an attorney.
Merlin: And so you watch attorney TV shows or maybe if you're really smart, you read books.
Merlin: So then what do you do?
Merlin: You go to law school.
John: And yes, you study the law, but really you're –
John: begins by watching attorney TV shows.
Merlin: You're telling me you watch SWAT and didn't want to be on a SWAT team.
Merlin: Yeah, okay, you're right.
Merlin: Okay?
Merlin: And so then maybe you go to school for a pretty long time, but you know what you are?
Merlin: You're not a lawyer.
Merlin: You're not a law student.
Merlin: You're a student.
Merlin: You've gotten good at being a student.
Merlin: Student.
Merlin: And I'm referring here specifically to one friend in particular and a couple other people.
Merlin: Then you...
Merlin: I knew this woman who made it all the way into studying for the bar, which is not easy.
Merlin: It was not until she was in a study group studying for the bar that she realized how much she hated lawyers.
Merlin: And she did not like being around them.
Merlin: And so I guess this is long-winded.
Merlin: But all I'm trying to say is that I think one reason a lot of people are unhappy, maybe because of the bar, maybe because of the pellet, but because they don't really think about what they like to do all day.
Merlin: If you become a manager and you don't like going to pointless meetings, you have the wrong kind of job.
Merlin: If you love money but don't like being around bankers, if you like the idea of making movies but can't get along with the crew, you picked the wrong job because you forgot what you like to do and who you like to spend your time with.
John: I wanted a job at a stock brokerage or at a bank that involved me going into a big Scrooge McDuck room and
Merlin: behind a giant circular vault door and pouring money on my head did you ever see the taking of pelham one two three do you remember that the original one yeah yeah yeah well the reason when you said that i was immediately taken back to the scene that is totally if i remember this correctly i guess could be an oprah memory but it's such a clear recollection i would never want to spoil the end of the movie because it's a really good movie but it was on a lot
Merlin: When I was a kid.
Merlin: And I know it's had a huge influence on like Tarantino and stuff.
Merlin: But like I just saw it all the time when I was a kid.
Merlin: It was just another one o'clock movie for me.
Merlin: But there's a scene at the end when Martin Balsam has his cut.
Merlin: And if memory serves – and Martin Balsam, I mean he was a troglodyte.
Merlin: He's in his little tiny crappy room.
Merlin: He dumps his entire share of cash on the bed and starts rolling around in it.
Merlin: And I thought, you know –
Merlin: That's kind of appealing.
Merlin: And just because, even if you take that money away from me in a week, it would be kind of fun to get to roll around in it for a while.
John: It's super appealing.
John: And when we were kids growing up, the trope of the heist movie, the bank robbery movie, or especially any movie where they were going to knock over Fort Knox...
Merlin: It could also be stuff like the, you don't like that one Robert Shaw movie I like, but the Force 10 from Navarone, right?
Merlin: It's kind of a heist movie, right?
Merlin: You got to go out and you got to go get this thing.
John: Force 10 from Navarone is maybe, it's maybe in the top four.
Merlin: But you don't like the Dirty Dozen.
John: See, this is just not as good.
John: I'm sorry, heist movies.
John: Force 10 from Neverone is in the top, it's definitely in the top four movies that informed my entire... That's Harrison Ford?
John: Young Life.
John: Harrison Ford, it's the classic film where there's like a British guy who's an explosives expert.
John: Oh, I love that.
John: The black guy is a hand-to-hand combat guy, you know, and they go on a mission and they blow up a dam.
John: It's so wonderful.
John: I love movies like that.
John: it makes me so happy but any any movie that involved well and and and to that end any movie that involved a vault full of money and a british explosives a guy a guy pushing a cart that had gold bars on it or a room that was full a room that you were breaking into that was full of explosives or guns that you were stealing you don't read comics
John: totally totally appealing in any case those were my those those i i think i have spent my entire life trying to figure out how it is that i am going to be uh not just a bank robber but a bank robber who is robbing banks to defeat the nazis like that i think is was really my job a bank robber who's also fighting the nazis
John: And I, I, there's a, there's like, that's my missing limb.
Merlin: Hmm.
Merlin: Hmm.
Merlin: Hmm.
Merlin: That's your, that's by way of a duck.
Merlin: I just want to point out just cause I'm quickly searching to just make sure I get these facts right.
Merlin: Force 10 from Navarone.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: um the taking of pelham one two three yeah and i think yeah from russia with love all featuring mr robert shaw robert shaw robert shaw and the sting and the sting where he gets he's the on the other end of the heist yeah in the shot in the in from russia with love with blonde hair getting punched in the stomach by uh that lady from uh that uh with the german composer's wife
Merlin: Kurt Weill.
Merlin: That's Kurt Weill's wife.
Merlin: Oh, no kidding.
Merlin: She was in a lot of his productions.
John: You know, there was a movie starring Frank Sinatra where they steal a train.
John: Oh, Vine Ryan's Express.
John: On Ryan's Express.
John: And if you watch Von Ryan's Express, the German girl that they kidnap with the train, who was the mistress of the German baddie, and then she becomes like, obviously she falls in love with Von Ryan.
John: She turns the tables.
John: This German girl was not German.
John: She was Italian.
John: And it ends up that she was the girl that did the dancing in the prison colon ensinine Cusol video.
John: So put that in your pipe and smoke it.
John: Is that an exercise thing?
John: Prison colon ensinine Cusol?
Merlin: That has nothing to do with a new bouton?
Merlin: No.
John: I've never explained to you prison colon ensinine Cusol.
Merlin: I've got a card and a pencil and I don't even know what letters to make.
Merlin: Is it an industrial band?
John: No.
John: So there was an Italian actor.
John: And I'm going to find his name for you right now.
John: Prison Colin Ensign Cusol.
John: There's an Italian actor named Adriano Celentano.
John: And he...
John: had a, uh, like a, uh, he was one of those actors that was kind of the, he was the Marlon Brando of Italy or something like that.
John: He was the somebody of Italy, famous actor.
John: And he had a music career in the early seventies.
John: And he wrote this song, Prison, Colin, Ensign, and Cusel, which is him as an Italian guy who doesn't speak English, singing a song of nonsense lyrics, uh,
John: that sound like what he imagines English sounds like.
John: Oh!
John: So he has an entire song where he's just singing in made-up... The way that we would go... Yeah, the way we'd be like... He writes an entire song in that style, records it, and it's a hit in Italy.
John: Is that like a novelty hit?
John: Well, yeah, but here's the thing.
John: It's a killer song.
Merlin: It is killer.
Merlin: I'm sorry, I just spent three minutes.
Merlin: Can you give me a hand on the spelling?
Merlin: So, P-R-I-S-E-N, prison.
Merlin: Oh, prison, prison, colon, ensignacuzel.
Merlin: There it is.
John: Prison, colon, ensignacuzel.
John: So, watch this music video.
John: There are two videos, but the one that you want is the black and white one.
John: I see it.
John: They're both recorded off a TV.
John: They're terrible quality.
John: But this tune got stuck in my head a couple of years ago.
John: And I had to watch this thing once a day.
John: I watched it once a day for a year.
John: Because the backing track of the tune is kind of like a crazy loop.
John: It's got horns.
John: It's got kind of proto-fuzz distortion.
John: And and the way his vocals kind of it's like he in a way he invented rap because he kind of raps instead of sings.
John: And I don't know.
John: This track is amazing.
John: I listen to it still all the time.
John: But the woman in the video is the woman from Von Ryan's Express.
John: And I think those are the only two things she did that were that had any traction outside of Italy.
Merlin: And you're like a Jean Charlotte, a Jean Siskel.
Merlin: That's amazing.
Merlin: That's encyclopedic, John.
Merlin: Prison?
Merlin: So I know ein is one or a. It's probably nonsense.
Merlin: It's probably nonsense, right?
John: None of it means anything.
John: It's just, well, did I ever tell you—
John: When I first went to college, there was a Japanese kid that lived in the dorms, and he didn't speak English right.
John: And one day we were sitting around drinking and smoking pot, and my friend Bob had this kind of moment of insight, and he said to the exchange student, he was like, how do you imitate Americans in Japan?
Yeah.
John: And the kid didn't get it at first.
John: He was like, huh?
John: What do you mean?
John: And so Bob said, well, like when we pretend to be Japanese, we're like, oh, I saw karate.
John: Hi-ya.
Merlin: And you're looking for his hit.
Merlin: Let's ping pong for him.
John: Yeah.
John: And he was like, oh, I see.
John: I see.
John: And he stood up and he like kind of cocked his arms out at the side like he was going to.
John: Like he was on a he was dueling on a old Western town.
John: And he said, hamburger, hamburger, bang, bang.
Merlin: me i can have intercourse without hitting your own or panties look at me that's awesome chicago bang bang i love that kind of stuff i love to hear like onomatopoetics in different languages and we must sound so like you never ever notice like russian of course you've noticed russian and german people like they could be they could be flirting and it sounds like they're about to have a fight russian people sound really mad when they're speaking russian people are mad is that right they're just mad
Merlin: We used to be in the – when we used to go to the Y before we had a child and we could go places, we would go to the Y in the morning and I'd do a little bit of a workout and then I would go into the sauna where everyone spits.
Merlin: And there would always be these two – you know the way – especially a lot of Germans, right?
Merlin: You get this real round and shiny –
Merlin: and bulbous and these two russian guys would would talk like just short of yelling they were six inches away from each other everybody's spitting and they would they would yell at each other i knew had no idea what they were saying but they're clearly friends they kept coming back maybe they were it was a long negotiation i don't know they're still the russian people are mad they are still very mad that peter the great cut off their sleeves they are they're they're just they're mad about a lot of things i'm sorry why did he cut off their sleeves why did he cut off their is that a metaphor
John: No, he actually cut off their sleeves.
John: But before Peter the Great modernized Russia, the fashion for centuries there was to have, it sounds ridiculous to say, was to have really, really, really long sleeves on your garments.
John: And like really long.
John: And Peter the Great felt that this was not in keeping with the Russia that he wanted.
John: He wanted to emulate the court in France.
John: He wanted Russia to be like a European country instead of what he considered to be this kind of backward, like medieval country.
John: And so he mandated in a very contentious decree...
John: That everyone had to cut their sleeves off and have normal sleeves.
John: Under penalty of law.
John: Yeah.
John: Have normal sleeves that ended at where your hand was.
John: People hate stuff like that.
John: And he made them shave their long beards.
John: He cut their beards.
John: And he cut their sleeves.
Merlin: How is that not the beginning of a revolution?
John: Well, in fact, it was.
John: It sowed the seeds.
John: It sowed the seeds of the eventual revolution.
John: And also, I think, why Russians in bathhouses are yelling at each other to this day.
Merlin: It makes perfect sense.
John: They're still upset.
Merlin: That stuff sticks with you, right?
Merlin: I mean, the kind of thing that if your people have suffered an indignity in the past, I don't think that's the thing.
Merlin: That's not the kind of thing that people let go of lightly.
John: Yeah.
John: Well, it's any kind of forced modernization.
Merlin: Well, the Jews are still celebrating candles, lamps that stay lit.
Merlin: You know what I mean?
Merlin: That was a long time ago.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: I heard a crack somewhere.
Merlin: Somebody was saying that every Jewish holiday is about bad news.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: About, like, something going wrong.
Merlin: But this is a huge thing.
Merlin: I mean, you know what?
Merlin: We shouldn't get into politics.
Merlin: I love learning these things.
John: The Shiites and the Sunnis are still super-duper mad at each other.
John: Mad at each other to the point of wanting to kill each other.
John: Because somebody says that the real prophet is the cousin of the guy and the other people say, no, the prophet is the uncle of the guy.
Merlin: Well, you'd have to change a lot of icons.
Merlin: Literally, fetishes, like religious icons.
Merlin: You'd have to change a lot of the architecture of churches if that were the case.
Merlin: Well, you know, and I mean, the thing is, it's all a little bit bananas to begin with, with all due respect.
Merlin: And so, I mean, when you try and introduce even what feels to us like a fairly trivial change, right?
Merlin: I mean, it's your religion.
John: Right.
John: But I feel like the long sleeves thing, if Peter had just demonstrated that shorter sleeves...
Merlin: were more efficient by like prancing around in short sleeves for a while and i'm we're not talking about short sleeves we're talking about just less less long sleeves yeah what we now consider conventionally long kennedy did not set out to kill the hat industry exactly clark gable did not set out to kill the t-shirt industry but they said you know what let it begin with me let it begin with me that's right and
John: And so you get this problem in history where somebody has too much power and they're like, you know what?
John: I'm just I'm drawing a line.
John: No more sleeves.
John: And that's when the problems start.
John: That's when the problems begin.
John: Right.
John: If Kennedy had said, I hereby outlaw the hat, we would have every tea partier in the country would be wearing a hat right now.
John: We would be a nation of people in hats.
John: But no, Kennedy was just like, yeah, I don't need a hat.
John: I'm cool.
Merlin: You can have a hat when you pry it off my cold, dead head.
John: Have you seen?
John: There's a great shot of Kennedy and Johnson walking in a rainstorm across an airfield.
John: And Kennedy doesn't have an overcoat on.
John: He's just in his suit.
John: And Johnson showed up, like all the other guys, with an overcoat.
John: and he realized that he was going to look like a pussy if he had this overcoat on.
John: So he takes the overcoat off, and he's carrying it in his arms, and then they're walking across this airfield, and Johnson has this look on his face like, why aren't I wearing a coat?
John: This is crazy.
John: But he was savvy.
John: He was savvy enough to know, don't show up to a no-coat party wearing a coat.
Ha!
Merlin: You know, Kennedy didn't need a coat.
Merlin: I don't need a coat.
Merlin: He's a very wise man.
Merlin: I would never have thought of Johnson.
Merlin: I mean, I know he was extremely politically savvy and powerful.
Merlin: So for him, though, you think, guessing, that was not something about vanity and appearances in the sense of people thinking he's fashionable.
Merlin: It would be because he didn't want to look like some fruity dork who was afraid of rain.
John: Well, it's like that scene in the movie MacArthur.
John: where he's you know it's during the war and he's reading fan mail or his assistant is reading fan mail aloud to him from people back in the states and they're saying you know they're sending him this worshipful mail and then he reads a letter from a little kid who says
John: General MacArthur, why are you always walking around carrying a bamboo cane?
John: Do you have an infirmity?
John: Are you lame?
John: It was just an affectation.
John: It was just an affectation.
John: And everybody in the room, like the room gets quiet and everybody's looking at him because MacArthur had the cane.
John: He had the corncob pipe.
John: He had the glasses.
Merlin: Corrective lenses.
John: The gold braid on his hat.
John: Like the man had...
John: more affectations than Truman Capote.
John: He had a duffel bag full of props.
John: He was like a sartorial carrot top.
John: Yeah, right.
John: He was a prop comic, except he was the general of the army.
John: Of course I'm wearing this toilet seat around my head.
John: I'm the general, asshole.
John: And everybody gets quiet because, oh my god, this kid just...
John: Said the emperor has no clothes, basically.
John: And MacArthur walks really slowly across the room.
John: I mean, obviously, this is Gregory Peck as MacArthur.
John: I wasn't there to see the real MacArthur.
John: But I have it on good authority from this movie that he walks slowly across the room and he throws his bamboo cane in the garbage can and everybody laughs.
John: But it is true that there was a moment during the war when all of a sudden MacArthur no longer had his cane.
John: And you never saw it again.
John: And it was, yeah, to present the impression of vigor.
Merlin: How important do you think that stuff is?
Merlin: And again, now speaking of another general I learned about from movies, like with Patton, he seemed – like when I was in military school, the guys that you would really respect in the administration were clearly people who had been in the military.
Merlin: And particularly this Marine, not an ex-Marine, the Marine who ran our Naval Academy, he just looked like a million bucks.
Merlin: He had no reason to dress like that.
Merlin: But he looked wonderful.
Merlin: Great.
Merlin: I mean he did not – of course he didn't have a spot on him.
Merlin: His seams were impeccable.
Merlin: Do you think part of that is – I mean obviously there's a status part of it, but I wonder if part of it is also like I'm out here like in the shit and I still look awesome.
Merlin: Like I'm getting stuff done, but you've got to respect me because I look great.
Merlin: In this time of privation and violence, I still look awesome.
John: Isn't that part of it?
John: It absolutely is.
John: And I think a lot of the, you know, Brooks Brothers, if you get really inside the whole Brooks Brothers machine, you can find the place where Brooks Brothers still tailors uniforms for officers.
John: Like they have a whole section of their tailoring department that makes uniforms for naval officers and army officers.
John: who come from a certain background.
John: And if you are a scion of a prominent family and you join the Navy, you don't just get issued a uniform.
Merlin: Oh, you're not going to get a pre-de-porte.
Merlin: You're going to go in and get a bespoke artisanal uniform.
John: Exactly.
John: You're going to have a uniform tailored just as all of your clothes have been tailored.
John: And I think a lot of it is that, you know, I've told you that my dad refused to wear jeans because they were enlisted men clothes.
Yeah.
John: and he did he said i'm a goddamn officer i wear khakis i don't wear jeans but but until very recently it was true that the clothes made the man you you could tell by a person's tailoring where his station was in life and at a certain point
John: And this was because you could not afford clothes like that unless you were a member of this strata.
John: And sometime in the 60s, when people started to have disposable income, and you saw first that guys were spending a lot of money on flashy clothes.
John: I mean, I guess that started as far back as the 30s, but...
John: You know, guys were wearing flashy clothes.
John: But then Ralph Lauren was really the one that introduced the idea of clothes that looked like the clothes of people with money.
John: And you could just go and buy these clothes now.
John: You didn't actually have to go to J Press or you didn't have to inherit these clothes from your father.
John: You could go buy clothes that looked like you had money.
John: And now we live in a world where...
John: Like Seattle, there are no dress codes in any of the restaurants here because some of the richest people in the world live in Seattle and they dress like slobs.
John: Steve Ballmer, I can't imagine... He's just one of those guys where...
John: You could put him in a $10,000 suit and it would look like he'd been sleeping in it.
John: It still looks like he's in the SA.
John: There are people here who will show up to the nicest restaurant in town in a fleece jacket and some dockers.
John: And we are all expected to admire them for their commitment to comfort or their commitment to what they consider to be their street credibility.
John: They don't have to dress up because they're so rich.
John: But what it's done is it's undermined one of the easiest ways, and intentionally and in a cool, egalitarian American way,
John: The traditional ways that we told one another apart and could tell who you would doff your hat to are all gone.
John: And now, if you see a guy walking down the street in a really, really great suit, chances are he's a young guy who is spending his disposable income on clothes.
Merlin: Or it reads as an appearance in court.
Merlin: When you show up and you're like a tech entrepreneur, on the one hand, it makes you look like a person of the people because you're dressed down.
Merlin: But in a weird way, it also telegraphs a lot of power.
Merlin: Like if you could be the one at the meeting wearing your Stan Smiths up on the table, it is power.
Merlin: It is down to earth.
John: But it's a power that is trading on like I am powerful enough to disrespect people.
John: the right just so you know none of you guys should do this yeah right and and so so it is you know it is it is actually the wrong kind of power you know the power of being of being able to disrespect the rules is an adolescent expression that's why you're mad at politicians it's why i'm mad at everybody that's why i'm mad at the entire world
Merlin: This comes up a lot.
Merlin: It's really disorienting to not have a way that we can know these things.
Merlin: Certainly you and I, given our own sartorial decisions, probably benefit from the fact that we don't have to get dressed up.
Merlin: But one thing I think is kind of cool in New York, there aren't many things, but I think it's kind of cool that people still dress up.
Merlin: I'm glad I don't have to do it, but I think it's neat that people still get dressed up to go out to dinner and stuff.
John: Yeah.
John: How else are you going to know that you're in the pretenders if you're not walking –
John: against a tide of guys in bowler hats and umbrellas walking across the Thames.
John: I bet the guys in The Pretenders were all the time thinking to themselves, who am I again?
John: And then, oh, right.
John: I'm in The Pretenders because everybody else on this bridge is wearing a suit.
John: That's how the guys in Pink Floyd knew that they were in a band too.
John: And now the only place you can find that is in New York City or Vienna.
John: The guys in Vienna dress pretty good.
John: I believe that.
John: They're sharp dressers.
John: It's a real closed town.
Merlin: Everything I know about Vienna comes from one Falco song and the third man.
Merlin: I like that music in that movie.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: Falco song.
Merlin: Vienna calling.
Merlin: Oh, oh, oh.
Merlin: Vienna calling.
John: Every Falco song had oh, oh, oh as part of the...
Merlin: O-O-O-O.
Merlin: Chorus.
Merlin: Come around.
Merlin: Commissars in town.
Merlin: O-O-O Amadeus.
John: You know what?
John: I miss West Berlin.
Merlin: Are you going to bust a angels on me?
Merlin: Alexander Platz.
Merlin: Alexander Platz.
Merlin: The old man walks alone.
Merlin: And Columbo offers him coffees.
Merlin: What is that?
Merlin: Wings of Desire.
John: I don't know that.
Merlin: Oh, of course you do.
Merlin: It's that movie everybody saw with the angels in the library and the trapeze lady and Columbo.
Merlin: You remember that circa 1987?
Merlin: It's about the wall.
Merlin: It's big, big in German.
John: In 1987, I was already really going from half rack of Schmidt to half rack of Schmidt.
Merlin: You don't get so many movies that way.
Merlin: So you ever seen the Hitler Rage videos where Hitler's freaking out from that pretty good movie, Last Days in the Bunker, or whatever it's called?
John: Oh, yeah, yeah.
John: I have seen that.
Merlin: So that actor, Bruno Gans, plays an angel in it.
Merlin: It's really good, but not nearly as good as you remember, or I remember.
John: This is the problem with...
John: With me and culture, as soon as I left high school and became a dedicated drinking person, from 1987 to 1997, there are huge holes in what I know about popular culture.
John: Because I didn't have any money and I was subterranean.
John: I wasn't living above ground.
Merlin: And if you were in a bar, it wasn't to watch Friends.
John: No, or I would never be in a bar where they had TVs.
John: They didn't have TVs in the bars that I drank in.
John: I hate all the TVs.
Merlin: I feel that way about college, where there's so much stuff that is now so much part, like your buddy, the child actor.
Merlin: Star Trek New Generation started, and I...
Merlin: I've never been a Star Trek fan.
Merlin: I don't have anything against Star Trek.
Merlin: But, like, everybody I know that's just a little bit younger than me, that was a real touchstone for them.
Merlin: Maybe not quite as much as Star Wars was for me.
Merlin: But, you know, they know so much.
Merlin: You know, there's something you miss.
Merlin: Like, age-wise, I just miss Transformers.
Merlin: I was more of a Micronauts guy.
Merlin: Micronauts, of course.
Merlin: Obviously, yeah.
Merlin: You got that Baron – not Baron Zemo.
Merlin: That's from the Avengers.
Merlin: But this – the big – remember the big black armored guy?
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: I still have a little handful.
Merlin: Those were really well made.
Merlin: The metal ones were really well made.
Merlin: But no, you had these latent – I think everybody has these latent periods and I was really in a bubble in a way that I am very happy about in college.
Merlin: I'm glad that I was removed from even hearing stuff on the radio when I was in college.
Merlin: It was nice to have a break from that.
John: Yeah.
John: Yeah.
John: Because when you're in high school, you are just you're so hyper aware of everything, every new cultural thing.
John: And right about the right about when Peter Gabriel so came out.
John: I just went off the reservation.
Merlin: I so heavily associate that with starting college.
John: yeah yeah me too and i and i i just uh i came back i came back to the world sometime in 1997 you time traveled you came you came forward and you said peter gabriel he's a good looking guy and you go you know what dude he's bald and has a super beard now yeah and walks walks like with a limp and wears a an ankle length leather trench coat or am i confusing him with rob halford
Merlin: i would love to see peter gabriel riding on a stage on a motorcycle very awkwardly i would love to see a collaboration between rob halford and peter gabriel huh with with like moby does the music okay i was gonna say now i know peter gabriel plays flute and i know rob halford plays a kind of flute yeah but i i don't know oh
Merlin: The bells are just ringing in the town.
Merlin: Ah, fuck it.
Merlin: We're done here.