Ep. 71: "Everybody Has a Hamburger"
Merlin: Hello.
Merlin: Hi, John.
Merlin: Oh, hi, Merlin.
Merlin: Hi, how's it going?
John: Pretty good.
John: How are you going?
Merlin: I'm going good.
John: That's good.
John: It's really early.
John: I just thought I'd say that so that we would feel some nostalgia.
John: Taking us back to the old days.
John: The old days when it was early instead of like at night, which is what we're doing now.
John: I think we've adjusted well.
John: How do you feel it's different?
Merlin: Hmm.
Merlin: Well, you know, we've not that it matters, but, you know, we've received some plaudits from people who seem to enjoy the later recording time.
Merlin: I think it's pretty good.
John: We don't care about our fans, though.
John: We don't care about their praise.
John: Oh, that's the super train talking.
John: I care.
John: Yeah, I know you care.
John: You're gentle.
John: You're soft.
Merlin: I don't know about that.
Merlin: Yeah, you're right.
Merlin: Yeah.
John: Yeah.
John: Yeah.
John: I had kind of a heavy meal.
John: Oh, you did?
John: You know what I just did?
John: What?
John: I went to the Taco Bus, but I didn't have enough time to eat.
John: Sounds dirty.
John: It is dirty.
John: Or El Taco Bus, as I call it.
John: Because you're a polyglot.
John: I am, and I'm sort of an internationalist.
John: Los Taco Bus.
John: And I went there, but I didn't have enough time to eat.
John: So there's Taco Bus food downstairs.
John: And it's my prize.
John: It's my prize that's waiting for me.
Merlin: Well, that's terrible.
Merlin: Is it still hot?
John: It doesn't matter.
John: Oh, come on.
John: No, it doesn't matter because, Merlin, I like food that is room temperature.
Merlin: Huh.
Merlin: Is that like a Chinese energy thing?
Merlin: I mean, you know.
Merlin: Well, a little – well, no.
Merlin: Do you mean like is my chong?
Merlin: You're not supposed to drink like – I don't work ping pong, but I think you're not supposed to drink anything while you're eating, but especially you can't drink cold stuff when you're pregnant.
John: Because of feng shui?
Merlin: See, I got to look that up.
John: If your cheese are aligned with your other cheese.
Merlin: It's –
John: You know, they don't have a lot of cheese in Chinese food.
Merlin: Oh, God.
Merlin: Oh, God, I hate myself.
Merlin: You know what?
Merlin: That was pretty good.
Merlin: I'm going to leave it in.
John: I'm going to allow it.
John: Sorry.
John: I feel like I'm limping now.
Merlin: Here's my question, though.
Merlin: So you like room temperature food.
Merlin: Does that go both ways?
Merlin: Do you like yogurt to come to room temperature and you like your beef to get to a comfortable 70 degrees?
John: Yeah, kind of.
John: I mean, I'll put it this way.
John: I do not object to any food that has either cooled or warmed from its initial serving temperature to closer than room temperature.
John: And some people find it repulsive that I will eat it.
John: For instance, open a can of food and just eat it out of the can.
John: I've been affronted by that.
John: Yeah.
John: And a lot of people are.
John: They're like, that's disgusting.
John: And I'm like, what do you think Heat is doing to it?
Merlin: You guys always have a reason.
Merlin: What do you mean us guys?
Merlin: Who's us guys?
Merlin: I've had a couple... I've had a couple...
Merlin: bean eaters like you that i that i have uh i've been acquainted one of my one of my very good friends in high school first of all would eat pretty much anything and he would eat it in almost any state yeah and i think i don't know to me there's three parts to it there's there's the first part which is the eating it out of the original container that really says bachelor for life and
Merlin: And then, and then there's the, there's the guy.
John: All right.
John: No, no.
John: I mean, does that, does that, if you get takeout, you won't, you like to decant it.
Merlin: I am notorious in my household for liking piping hot food.
John: Right.
Merlin: I'm not a nut.
Merlin: I mean, my, my, my sister-in-law, you ever had Dunkin' Donuts coffee?
Merlin: Of course.
Merlin: It's pretty good coffee.
Merlin: And they're kind of famous for how scalding hot their coffee is.
Merlin: And it's really, you know, it's really, I mean, I'm not going to say anything because, you know, all my family in Rhode Island will, you know, pop a stitch if I say anything.
Merlin: But it's good.
Merlin: It's not like the best coffee I've ever had.
John: It's super hot, though, because you're supposed to, you know, you're going to be on like a four-hour stakeout.
John: Oh, yeah.
Merlin: Everybody in New England's a cop.
Merlin: But then she has the microwave it.
Merlin: To make it hotter?
Merlin: Yes.
Merlin: Can you imagine microwaving, donkey donuts, coffee?
John: Well, you know the old story about the exploding hot water heaters.
John: I don't think I know that old story.
John: The old story.
John: See, hot water heaters don't explode anymore because they have like 17 layers of fail safe valves and vents and stuff to keep this from happening.
John: Okay.
John: This is something I learned.
Merlin: It's like a big, it's like a big, slightly sophisticated tea kettle.
Merlin: It's a tea kettle.
John: It's a sealed tea kettle.
John: And if you don't have shut-off valves for the heating element and also steam vents for the steaming elements, what happens in a hot water heater, especially one that's like two-thirds full, the water gets hotter and hotter and hotter, but it can't boil because as it gets hotter, the pressure increases.
John: And the pressure increases and pressure increases, and the water gets hotter and hotter without boiling.
John: And then finally the pressure gets so great that the hot water heater explodes.
John: And the second that there's an opening, all like 80 gallons of water turns to steam instantly.
John: And a hot water heater can blow up your house.
Merlin: Oh, God.
John: With this flash explosion of instant steam and all that pressure.
John: It can flatten your home.
Merlin: Now, when did they, as an industry, fix that?
John: They fixed it, I think, after the Great Hot Water Heater explosion epidemic of the 1930s, where all those people were killed because they were sealing the fire exits.
Merlin: Oh, right, the Triangle Shirtwaist water heater incident.
John: That's right, the Triangle Shirtwaist water heater incident.
Merlin: That's a great Guide to My Voices EP.
Merlin: The second part is the room temperature part.
Merlin: Yeah, I love Doug Gillard's playing on that one.
Merlin: That guy's solid.
Merlin: You don't know who they are.
Merlin: You've never listened to them.
Merlin: You've never listened to an entire Guide to My Voices on in your life.
John: But I happen to be friends with Doug Gillard.
Merlin: Well, I knew his wife on LiveJournal.
John: Hmm.
John: LiveJournal.
Merlin: Tell me more.
John: Oh, you were huge on LiveJournal.
John: I remember being very mad at LiveJournal because you were on LiveJournal with a bunch of, like, a bunch of teenage girls who were talking about me.
John: And then I would say, well, what are they saying?
John: And nobody would tell me.
John: Oh, they would say things about you.
John: LiveJournal was a secret cult, and if you weren't on there, then you didn't get to know.
John: And I was like, they're talking about me.
John: I should know.
John: Nobody would say.
John: Nobody would say.
Merlin: It's like a series of private handjob booths, you know, and you know what happens in the booth.
Merlin: Hmm.
Merlin: The second part is the room temperature.
Merlin: So, like, here's the thing.
Merlin: If you were a hobo with just a little bit of fucking human dignity, you would stick a can over a fire like a gentleman.
Merlin: Okay.
Merlin: In a minute, I'm going to come to a very specific sense memory of this.
Merlin: And I think the third part is I think if you're the kind of person that eats out of a container and B, has it at room temperature, you're not above picking up something that might have been open and room temperature for a while.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: Maybe even of an unknown amount of time and picking it up.
Merlin: This could start as something as simple as the guy who eats the maguro that's been on the table for an hour.
Merlin: And it could go all the way up to my friend who would eat ravioli that was almost blue.
Merlin: And I don't mean Miles Davis.
John: I definitely, I definitely have like, uh, back in my college days would, would wake up in the morning.
John: And, uh, because of my, because of the position that I was, that I'd ended up sleeping in, which was kind of half on the floor.
John: I would have a view under my bed.
John: There's your autobiography right there.
Merlin: Half on the floor.
John: Half on the floor.
John: And then I'd be like, Oh, look, looking under my bed and I'd be like, Oh, there's two slices of pizza in there.
Merlin: No, pizza, okay.
Merlin: Pizza, I will give you a papal dispensation for pizza.
John: Yeah.
John: The thing is, hobos, when they were cooking those cans of food on the fire, it was because those were cans of raw ground pork.
John: Which was a very popular food during the Depression.
John: Did it have the glands in it, John?
John: Canned, raw, ground pork.
John: And you have to cook that stuff.
John: Yeah.
John: But modern food is all cooked.
John: It's cooked in the can.
Merlin: Yeah, it's flash fried or it's... Flash fried, yeah.
John: Yeah.
John: It's steamed or boiled.
John: And so if I open a can of, say, Chef Boyardee raviolios... That's the sense memory.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: I think, wait a minute.
Merlin: Oh, my God.
Merlin: Heating them up.
Merlin: John, if I told you the story, it was literally Chef Boyardee.
Merlin: It was Raviolios.
John: Raviolios, yeah.
Merlin: That's exactly what he ate when it was almost blue.
John: Heating them up just fills the house with the smell of a cat that died on top of a furnace.
John: No, it literally smells like barf.
John: It smells like a dead cat or barf.
John: Mm-hmm.
John: They're very similar in smell.
John: Would you eat a room temperature cat?
John: If you don't eat them up, they don't smell like that.
John: They just smell like tin.
John: That's a really good point.
John: Ditto Brussels sprouts.
Merlin: If you eat them like an apple, you're good to go.
Merlin: Voila!
Merlin: Voila!
Merlin: See?
Merlin: I had at some point... I don't remember... I blocked this out.
Merlin: But at some point, I had made some canned, probably store-brand ravioli in my dorm.
Merlin: And I don't know why I would have left any...
Merlin: As I remember, it was a very, very small bit that was left in there.
Merlin: And with a completely straight, non-ironic, non-jokey, non-frat boy, non-hey-look-at-this expression, my very good friend said, you know, the classic – I've got to get a name for what you guys are.
Merlin: The classic room temperatist, room temperaturist, are you going to eat that?
Merlin: And I said, no, my dear friend, I'm not going to eat that because that's trash.
Merlin: It's just that I am a freshman in college and I don't throw my trash out.
Merlin: And he picked up the utensil, which memory serves was like a tablespoon next to it.
Merlin: And I said to him that if he wanted to eat the garbage, he was free to do so.
John: Listen, all of that food is garbage.
Merlin: He was up for most likely to succeed in high school, John.
John: It's garbage from the beginning.
John: If we can rewind to the pump chili discussion.
John: That's a very subtle distinction.
John: Imagine that same pumped meat.
John: that does not even have the advantage of chili powder to to camouflage its like essential nature and it is being pumped at chef boyardee headquarters through a multitude of tubes like it's like bob hoskins in brazil except those tubes are full of of liquid meat and they're making little ravioli pods
John: Like, blorpking, blorpking.
John: Like, why would you cook it again?
Merlin: So this is really all about me and my ravioli hypocrisy.
Merlin: So I'm fancy about whether or not you should eat it like a fucking bum.
John: Mr. Fancy Pants with his stove and his microwave.
John: Just eat the thing as God intended.
Merlin: If you're going to defecate, why would you flush?
Merlin: You know?
Merlin: And I sat there like slack-jawed, as you do, and boy, he could eat anything, anytime.
Merlin: Yeah.
John: Yeah.
John: When I was not in college, but a little bit after college, early 20s, I had a three-bedroom apartment with a couple of guys, and our kitchen had so many flies in it, but somehow, so many flies in it that no one ever went in there again.
John: Yeah.
Merlin: We had a student lounge like that.
Merlin: It basically became a place with a TV that you run into for Star Trek and then dash back out.
John: But we would not even cross the threshold, but somehow the flies remained.
John: There was no door on the kitchen, but they remained in that area because that is where...
John: that was that is where they were born that is where they fell in love that is where they they died their whole culture was there they never came through the door into the rest of the house also because there was probably an impenetrable wall of pot smoke and so we had we had a kind of detente we lived in this room and they lived in the kitchen and we never went in when i never went in that kitchen again i lived there three years that was your munich
John: That's right.
Merlin: You said, look, we need to reach some kind of a, you know, have to have a separate piece.
John: Yeah.
John: You can have the Sudetenland, which is our kitchen.
John: We will have peace in our time.
Merlin: And you walked out holding up a piece of paper saying peace in our time.
Merlin: Peace in our time.
Merlin: And then, you know, did you read the umbrella story the other day?
Merlin: I don't think.
Merlin: No, I don't think I saw that.
Merlin: I read about Ann Curry.
Merlin: But I haven't read about the umbrella.
Merlin: Tell me.
John: The umbrella story.
John: So you know about the guy with the umbrella on the grassy knoll.
Merlin: Oh.
Merlin: This is the thing.
Merlin: I know about the grassy knoll.
Merlin: I don't think I know about the umbrella.
John: So right at the moment that Kennedy was assassinated, as he is driving past the grassy knoll in Dallas, visible on the Zapruder film and other shots.
John: Love Zapruder film.
Merlin: I could watch that all day.
John: There is a man standing right at the point of impact when the first bullet hits Kennedy, standing with an open umbrella.
John: And it has long been... I mean, it was one of the major sort of, like, what the fucks.
Merlin: It's a beautiful, sunny November day.
John: Sunny day.
John: And this guy is standing right at that exact spot.
John: standing under an open umbrella.
John: Not like a parasol.
John: No, no, no.
John: A full-on black umbrella.
John: And so this was a thing that kind of made the rounds last week.
John: All the conspiracy theorists, of course, said this bizarreness, not even conspiracy theorists, any normal thinking person would say this bizarreness must be connected.
John: The man with the umbrella has to somehow be significant
John: In this moment, this like historical moment.
John: And I am forgetting the names of both the man who investigated it and the man who made the documentary film about him.
John: So this is useless.
John: What is the Warren Commission?
John: No, no, no.
John: Who was the guy that made the film?
John: Okay, Errol Morris.
John: And who was the guy that made the film about McNamara?
Merlin: Errol Warren.
Merlin: Oh, no, wait a minute.
Merlin: McNamara is Errol Morris, and he has the camera that talks to you.
Merlin: Right.
Merlin: So he is making a film about this guy.
Merlin: Oh, Errol Morris is a very interesting guy.
John: Well, anyway.
Merlin: No, no, no, because he's very into this idea.
Merlin: I'm sorry to interrupt you, but he has a whole famous essay that we should come back to about one photograph of that road with cannonball dents in it and the authenticity of it.
Merlin: I think he's a person who's – obviously he's a guy who's always searching for like the unexpected truth behind the unexpected truth.
Merlin: So you're saying he's making a movie about the umbrella guy or about the whole – No, no, no.
John: So he's interviewing a guy who went to great lengths to find the umbrella guy.
John: Oh, nice.
John: And the umbrella guy actually came forward and testified before Congress at the end of the 70s.
John: And his story was, yes, I am the umbrella guy.
John: Yes, I stood there with my open umbrella.
John: And my open umbrella that day was a protest.
John: Against not John F. Kennedy, but it was a reference to Chamberlain's umbrella.
John: And it was a protest against Kennedy's dad, who was a Nazi sympathizer.
Hmm.
John: Or who this man, you know, was like... John, that is extremely subtle.
John: It was extremely subtle.
John: And the point of this little short film that I watched was that if you examine any historical moment in excruciating detail like we have done that moment in Dallas...
John: The number of things that are, like, too bizarre to describe that in any sort of historical, like, over-examined historical moment would blow your mind.
John: Like, if you could be... If you could take apart a photograph of any, like...
John: of any moment like that, you would find so many unexplainable kind of just unrelated weirdness.
Merlin: It's not just that there's question marks on this particular day, but that every single frame of anything that anybody shot that day, every single person was interviewed, there was such a huge amount of detail and you get a Rashomon thing where there's so many different versions plus the documentation.
Merlin: Anywhere you've got that, you're going to get different things and it's going to sound...
Merlin: Question marks.
Merlin: Lots of question marks.
John: Yeah, you see it in the Boston Marathon thing.
Merlin: Yeah, I wasn't going to bring that up, but that's relevant.
John: All the Redditors out there looking at all the photographs and they find 25 different guys with backpacks and you're like, how many suspicious looking guys with backpacks are there at the finish line of the Boston Marathon?
John: Turns out, a lot.
Yeah.
Merlin: Yeah, you know, for some reason, and that that Errol Morris thing, I'll send you a link to that because it's really interesting.
Merlin: But I don't know if you've ever seen this, but, you know, there'll be something if you see something like a really iconic photograph.
Merlin: I'm trying to.
Merlin: Oh, the classic one of the classic examples, you know, the very famous portrait of Winston Churchill, you know, looking taciturn and that famous photo of him standing at a Tommy gun.
John: That's my favorite picture of him.
Merlin: He's a good subject.
Merlin: But if you ever see a photographer who's made an iconic image, you'll notice that when there's an iconic image, you usually – unless it's Chet Baker, you don't usually see it alongside –
Merlin: The 17 rejects with white Xs on each of them.
John: Oh, sure.
Merlin: The negatives.
Merlin: The rejects.
Merlin: The ones that did not become iconic because that's not the one they picked.
Merlin: And what always strikes me about that is when you see – again, it becomes like the Mona Lisa where you've seen it so many times that you kind of go dead to the foreground, the background, the –
Merlin: Anyway, it's always amazing to me when you get to see a whole sequence of photos where that might be one of 17 photos that somebody shot really fast.
Merlin: And it's amazing how completely different a scene looks in like really literally a fraction of a second.
Merlin: And it changes the entire story.
Merlin: I mean, if you saw like the nurse slapping the sailor in one of those, you know, and was a VJ day.
Yeah.
Merlin: vj day that's funny but but you know what i mean like if you see you know if anything was anything if anything were different in that one shot it kind of starts to tell a different story or like you know the the the woman walking down the street was the guy the french guy that takes all the pictures or poiseau i think it's so the was
Merlin: Well, Sean.
Merlin: And the thing is, if he didn't capture that one moment where a bunch of... You're talking about the Italian woman where all the guys on Vespas are whistling at her?
Merlin: I think that's the one, yeah.
Merlin: And if everybody... If he hadn't captured it in that one moment, it would have been a completely different photograph.
Merlin: Anyway, I don't want to get into like... No, I was thinking about this just the other day.
Merlin: But that's kind of what we're talking about.
John: Well...
John: This came up for me because for many years, I would say 25 years, ever since I first saw that iconic picture of Mountain Girl sitting next to Jerry Garcia right before Jerry grew a beard.
Merlin: Mountain Girl, Jerry Garcia, okay.
John: Mountain Girl is a woman named Carolyn Garcia.
John: who was one of the original merry pranksters she had a baby with ken kesey and then she hooked up with jerry and had two babies with jerry garcia before they married sometime in the 80s or whatever but there's this iconic photograph of of mountain girl and jerry sitting next to one another in probably 67
John: And it's like, he's got big mutton chops and they kind of... He's got big mutton chops and she is a gal in her 20s.
John: And they're both kind of looking up.
John: She looks like she might be in Slater Kenny.
John: She looks like she might be in Slater Kenny.
John: Okay, got it.
John: I got the one.
Merlin: It's a nice photo, really nice photo.
John: So the first time I saw this picture, it was back in the 80s when, if you recall, seeing pictures of your favorite rock stars was not...
John: uh it was not just a simple matter right i mean you did not just go on the internet and google mountain girl and get every picture of her ever taken you would cut them out of circus magazine you would cut them out of magazines right and and so you would buy up and down with the rolling stones and you would pour over those two two pages of pictures in the
John: Because those were the only candid pictures of the Rolling Stones you had ever seen.
John: And I saw this picture of Mountain Girl with Jerry Garcia.
John: And on the one hand, it's a picture of Jerry before he had his beard.
John: So it is a picture of utter carnage and horror.
John: Because Jerry is a terrible looking person.
John: And he has a very sort of a weak chin that his beard later concealed.
Merlin: For folks who haven't seen it, it's got a real mid-70s, my dog speaks to me serial killer kind of vibe.
John: Yeah, he's super uncool without his beard, and it's crazy to think that he was the leader of this whole movement.
John: But then once he grows the beard, then you're like, it's Jerry Garcia.
John: It's like Santa Claus.
John: He's amazing looking, and he rightfully never shaved it again.
John: But Mountain Girl...
John: Was to me at 21 years old or whatever, where I first saw this picture.
John: She was so beautiful.
John: She was like the girl in the Obermeyer ski catalog.
John: And she actually looks a lot like the girl in the Obermeyer ski catalog.
John: Oh, the one in the puffy jacket?
John: The puffy jacket.
John: The ski pants.
John: And this picture of Mountain Girl kind of looking up, maybe slightly squinting her eyes, dark hair, so fresh and clean.
John: And it so embodied the 60s to me from my perspective in the mid to late 80s when 60s worship was at its highest.
John: And I was at 18 and 19 years old consumed by this
John: nostalgia for the 60s and this feeling of loss and regret that I hadn't lived through the 60s that in fact the 60s were lost forever and we were stuck in these miserable 80s
John: I wanted so much to be with Mountain Girl.
John: And this was not a, this wasn't, it didn't have anything to do with liking the Grateful Dead because I didn't particularly like the Grateful Dead.
Merlin: This is right before your Grateful Dead hangout period.
Merlin: Didn't you say you had a period where you hung out with deadheads?
John: yeah i did but i mean you know i've i've always had a period of uh i've my i have multiple periods simultaneously so i was hanging out like a nunnery i wasn't uh oh sorry oh where's my bell hang on here it is ready
John: so you were talking about your menses yeah i i you know i i had i had a lot of dead head friends i saw the dead three times wow but it but i know right but it wasn't about it wasn't about that it was about this idea i mean i don't know if you remember the movie 1969 starring uh starring raw what's his name uh iron man oh wow nice pull uh robert downing jr
John: Robert Downey Jr.
John: and Kiefer Sutherland and Winona Ryder in a movie called 1969 that came out in 1987 or 88.
John: And it was this, you know, it was this super, super stroke off kind of like the 60s, man.
John: The 60s are going to make the 90s are going to make the 60s look like the 80s, man, or whatever Dennis Hopper's famous quote.
John: But anyway, so I spent years thinking that Mountain Girl was kind of this beautiful girl or like my ideal hippie girl.
John: But I had only ever seen the one picture of her.
John: Literally, there were no other pictures of Mountain Girl.
John: And I thought, I guess at a certain point, many, many years ago, I just assumed that she had...
John: gone up into the mountains and never come down or that she had turned into an eagle or i don't know what happened i did i had no idea what happened to mountain girl and what happened to mountain girl was that she married jerry garcia had two kids and wrote a book about cooking with pot or something and she's still alive today and lives in santa rosa
John: And I, so the other day I was just, I don't know why I was thinking about her, but I Googled her and there are all these pictures of mountain girl and you look at her from a different angle and I mean, she's cute, you know, but she looks like a, an assistant manager at a health food store.
John: Yeah.
John: She's not so cute that, that she would burn herself into your, into a person's mind for years.
John: for 25 years but here I am like the mountain girl of my imagination trumps the real mountain girl and it's because I only ever saw this one great picture of her and there were probably 25 pictures on either side of it that no one's ever seen right so unfair considering how many terrible pictures of me are out there hmm
Merlin: You think so?
John: Yeah.
Merlin: You look really different from different angles.
John: I don't think I'm going to shave my beard again.
John: It's not because I have a weak chin.
John: It's because I have the chin of a thousand men.
John: I have too much chin.
Merlin: Your beard-shaped face.
John: I have too much face.
Merlin: Oh, yeah.
Merlin: You know what's interesting about you?
Merlin: It's hard to explain, but you have kind of big everything.
Merlin: yeah it's weird like there's some people uh who seem like kind of proportionate but it seems like you know like you could only really have one big thing on your body you know not you but one like you know it seems like you could have a real big melon head you know like hulk hands or something big wide shoulders we go wow that guy's but he meets people sometimes especially frenchmen who uh who uh like andre the giant everything on him looks big yeah it's gallic
John: Yeah.
John: Well, I guess I'm not Gaelic.
John: You're pretty French in a lot of ways.
John: Oh, that's interesting.
John: You think I'm kind of French?
Merlin: I'm not going to get involved in this again.
Merlin: All right.
Merlin: I just sent you a link to this.
Merlin: The guy who took this famous photo.
Merlin: I encourage you to look at the link because of the other picture that came out of that session.
Merlin: So it's a famous picture of Churchill with his head kind of slightly down.
Merlin: It's a beautiful photo.
Merlin: He's got a cane.
Merlin: He looks great.
Merlin: And so Karsh, the guy who shot this, had asked Churchill to remove the cigar in his mouth.
Merlin: Churchill refused.
Merlin: Karsh walked up to Churchill, supposedly to get a light level, and casually pulled the signature cigar from the lips of Churchill and walked back toward the camera.
Merlin: As he walked, he clicked his camera remote, capturing the quote-unquote determined look.
Merlin: Now, when you know that... Is that right?
Merlin: Is that true?
Merlin: Look at that link, essentially.
Merlin: Mostly now he just looks like a fat man who's pouting.
John: Yeah, but at the time, he looked like the guy who was going to defeat Hitler with his scowl.
Merlin: But here's the thing.
Merlin: If you go to that page and scroll down, you can see the one of him smiling broadly from the same set.
John: Oh, yeah.
John: Very different.
Merlin: Looks like Oliver Hardy.
John: Right, although still with the kind of like, yeah, like the left side of his face is fully four inches shorter than the right side of his face.
John: Yeah.
John: He's one of those guys, if you draw a line down the middle of that picture and you look at, just put your hand over it, you look at the one half.
Merlin: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
John: It's two completely different men.
Merlin: He looks like a courageous twice baked potato.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: It's a funny thing.
Merlin: I'll send you that Errol Morris thing, too, because it's a good read.
Merlin: I don't know.
Merlin: I like hot food.
Merlin: I like medium warm coffee.
Merlin: I don't like it too hot.
Merlin: My friends really look down on this, but I put a lot of like half and half in my coffee.
Merlin: You do.
Merlin: I think you're a half and half guy, right?
John: I like half and half, but you go through a gallon of half and half.
Merlin: I go through a lot of everything, but yeah, you're absolutely right.
Merlin: What I'll do is I'll make real strong coffee.
Merlin: I'll make it here in my office in my dingus, and then I will pour in, as you say in the business, an admixture of hot water and half and half until it's exactly the perfect temperature to drink immediately.
John: Yeah.
John: You know, Merlin, I will drink room temperature pop.
Merlin: I've done that.
Merlin: I've done that.
Merlin: But here's the thing.
Merlin: I don't want to get too much into your biography because I know you're uncomfortable talking about it.
Merlin: But do you think some of this – let me ask you this.
Merlin: Have you always been this way or has some of this come out of your – I recently – I guess I read those –
Merlin: The diaries where you had sent stuff from your walk back to that professor.
Merlin: I guess I read those pages a long time ago and hadn't looked at them again until recently.
Merlin: And they're fantastic.
Merlin: But you should write a book about that.
Merlin: I'll tell you what.
Merlin: I'll write a book about email if you write a book about your walk.
Merlin: Deal?
Merlin: Okay.
Merlin: High five.
Merlin: Preach bra.
Merlin: 420.
Merlin: But, I mean, it sounds like your diet was uneven at best.
Merlin: And you had – would you say your feet were singing?
Merlin: Was that it?
John: Ringing.
John: Ringing.
Merlin: Your feet were ringing.
Merlin: But, I mean, you must have – it sounds like you really did kind of eat roots and berries if you were lucky sometimes.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: Did that make you less picky?
Yeah.
John: I became less picky.
John: Didn't I ever tell you the story about how I became less picky?
Merlin: No, John.
Merlin: I would love to hear the story about how you became less picky.
Merlin: Are you sure?
Merlin: Was it in the Balkans?
John: No, no, it was a long time before.
John: I was extremely picky when I was a kid.
John: The pickiest of all picky eaters.
John: I only ate four menu items.
John: Macaroni and cheese, boil-in-a-bag Salisbury steaks.
John: Oh, like Stouffer's?
John: Stouffer's.
John: Oh, those were good.
John: Boil-in-a-bag Salisbury steaks.
John: I would eat pizza and I would eat spaghetti if you put the spaghetti sauce in the blender and blended all visible lumps out of it.
John: How often would your mother capitulate to these requests?
John: She was busy.
John: She had a career.
John: She was busy.
John: And so what she ended up doing was she would make spaghetti sauce with just like drizzle tomato sauce.
John: She wouldn't put anything in it.
John: And the problem was that I was extremely...
John: I was extremely stubborn.
John: Like it was no, it wasn't a question of, I would sit and did multiple times, sit at a table in front of a, of a cup of cold peas and sit there until it was time to go to bed.
John: And, you know, and they would sit me in front of the cup of cold peas for breakfast and I wouldn't eat.
John: And they would sit me at the cup of cold peas at lunch and at dinner and,
John: And I just wouldn't eat until continuing to not feed me would constitute child abuse.
Wow.
John: And they just, and it wasn't that I would, you know, I wasn't crying.
John: I wasn't, I was just sitting quietly staring over the top of the cup of cold peas.
John: Uncommunicated.
John: You're like the John McCain of convenience vegetables.
John: Until they just, you know, until everyone capitulated and I just ate the, you know, the five things that I would eat.
John: And when I was in high school and had a car,
John: At lunchtime, I would go to McDonald's because I was growing.
John: I was getting big.
John: I would go to McDonald's and I would get two cheeseburgers, a 20-piece chicken McNugget, a strawberry shake, a strawberry sundae, an apple turnover,
John: And one other thing.
John: I didn't eat French fries.
Merlin: That's insane.
John: I would get this meal that would feed like a soccer team.
John: But I wouldn't eat a green vegetable.
John: I wouldn't eat a... And I had a powerful gag reflex.
John: It's not just that I wouldn't eat it, but that I would sit and like... Like I couldn't even... If you put a piece of broccoli under my nose, I would be retching like I was...
John: Um, like I was in a outhouse and that persisted and it was a big reason that I didn't do foreign exchange.
John: When I was in high school, it was suggested that maybe what I should do is go on a foreign exchange program and maybe that would straighten me out or maybe that would show me the, show me something about the world that would, that was going to change my, my weird little provincial attitudes.
Um,
John: And I didn't want to go on foreign exchange because I was afraid that I was going to go some... I was afraid to even apply for fear that I would end up going someplace where they served me frog's legs and clams and made me eat lettuce.
John: And so I was like, no thanks.
John: I sheltered myself from experience all the way through high school largely based on am I going to be able to get...
John: to McDonald's or to Taco Bell.
John: And even at Taco Bell, I would order tacos with no lettuce.
Merlin: Wow.
John: They would specially make tacos for me with no lettuce.
John: And the cheeseburgers I got at McDonald's, plain.
John: Plain cheeseburgers, no ketchup, no mustard.
John: Oh, you would do a grill order.
John: Do a grill order.
John: Oof.
John: So this was true of me into college.
John: And fortunately, the food that you get in college is basically exactly that menu, pizza, macaroni and cheese, boil in a bag, Salisbury steaks.
John: So until I was, I guess, until I was 20.
John: I had an incredibly small palate and I lived in fear.
John: I lived in fear of the wider world strictly because if I ended up going home with somebody for dinner and their mom put a plate of food in front of me.
Merlin: Or they made lumpy spaghetti sauce.
Merlin: They made lumpy spaghetti sauce.
Merlin: You would be totally outed.
Merlin: Not only would you have to eat it, but you would have to explain that you're picky.
John: Yeah, it would.
John: And it happened many, many, many times.
John: I'm over to somebody's house and their mom is like, I made spaghetti.
John: And everybody's like, yay.
John: And I am dying inside.
John: Did you get panicky?
John: I did.
John: I was dying because I didn't know, am I going to sit down at the table and the spaghetti is going to come and it's fine?
John: Or is it going to have big green peppers in it and onions and all these things that I was just like, oh, no.
John: and believe me you cannot eat spaghetti at someone's house and pick out the green peppers and put them on the side of your plate that doesn't fly so all the way until i was 20 fire it was so i mean you know and i was i had i'd done it all i'd put the put the food in my pockets i'd wrapped it in a napkin and stole the napkin you know hey didn't we have six napkins i don't know i've got it tucked down the front of my pants
John: um but so anyway so i and i and i'd been like this hitchhiking all across the states it's just like everybody has a hamburger you know what i mean in america so if you have any choice of food you're fine because you just choose a hamburger and it's fine um but then i went to europe for the first time and
John: And for most of the time, I was just living on French bread and cheese.
John: And every once in a while, I would get a plate of something and I'd kind of pick at it.
John: But it...
John: I was pretty much covered.
John: Like ham sandwich in Europe is the same as hamburger over here.
John: You can find a piece of French bread with a thin slice of ham and some cheese everywhere you go.
John: But one day I was on a train...
John: And it deposited me in Innsbruck, Austria.
John: And it was at the end of the day.
John: And I got off the train.
John: And instead of heading left, I headed right.
John: And it's one of those things where if you're not... Is this the lady who made you food?
John: Yeah, I told you the story.
John: The lady who...
John: Who made me the asparagus with the hollandaise sauce.
Merlin: She laid out an entire meal for you.
Merlin: It was past closing time, and she spread out an entire banquet for you.
John: That's right.
Merlin: That's right.
Merlin: I have told you this story.
Merlin: It's a good story.
Merlin: I'm sorry.
Merlin: It's okay.
Merlin: I shouldn't have said anything.
Merlin: I shouldn't.
Merlin: I'm sorry.
Merlin: I shouldn't have said anything.
John: No, that's, but that's the story.
Merlin: So, so, you know, I never, but I never heard the part.
Merlin: I never heard the part before that.
Merlin: And I have to say, it's very, it's, it's surprising to me that you were, you were picky.
Merlin: It's not surprising to me that you had showdowns with your mom, because it seems like that would be a kind of inevitable battle of the wills.
John: Oh, but that's the problem.
John: It didn't start with my mom.
John: My dad was weird about food.
John: And I don't know whether it was from his dad or whatever, but when I was a little kid, after my folks got divorced, my dad would come stay with us.
John: And one time, and it's a moment that sticks in my head, even though I couldn't have been any older than about three and a half.
John: But my dad got up with me and my mom slept in and my dad made me eggs.
John: And my mom had always made my eggs sunny side up.
John: And I would pop the yolks and I would eat the yolks with toast.
John: And my dad scrambled the eggs or he made the eggs some way.
John: And I was a three-year-old, and up until that point, three-and-a-half-year-old, I had eaten everything.
John: It wasn't a problem.
John: But dad made the eggs wrong, and I was a little kid and didn't... And I was like, no, that's not how eggs are.
John: That's not what an egg is.
John: And my dad lost his mind and was screaming, and you're going to eat those eggs!
John: And...
John: it was this traumatic experience where i was like i'm not going to eat those eggs those are those i know what an egg looks like this is something hell this is some garbage food and it my dad and i had a showdown and it was the first time and he and i were had been you know we're always very close it was the first time there'd ever been any conflict between us wow really yeah and my mom came running into the kitchen leave him alone
John: And my dad was like, you're ruining him!
John: God!
John: And it was this whole... I mean, it sticks in my head, not just because it has been talked about since, but I mean, it made a big... It planted a big flag in the ground.
John: And from that point on...
John: food was the thing that food was the way that i could control my environment whoa really yeah and so i never from that point on i was just any time a plate landed in front of me if it was something i had never seen before i was like no way no way
John: And so my palate basically stayed at the, at the like chicken strips, uh, uh, grilled cheese sandwich level of a three and a half year old.
John: And, and with every passing year, I just reinforced it, reinforced it in my mind and in my, in everything I did until, you know, you're 16 years old, 17 years old.
John: And you're just like grilled cheese sandwich, please.
John: Uh,
John: Or whatever.
John: I grew up in Alaska.
John: I never ate fish of any kind.
John: Wow.
John: People would pull king salmons out of the Kenai River and gut them right there and throw them on an open fire.
John: And everybody else is digging into this.
John: I have since had it, of course.
John: But a king salmon straight out of the river...
John: There's no, it's like ambrosia and I'm so good.
John: I'm eating a hot dog.
John: And my, my teenage friends are like, what is the matter with you, man?
John: This is the world's greatest food.
John: And I'm just like, gross.
Merlin: But you would, but I mean, you were okay with saying like, that's just not a thing I'm going to do.
John: Oh yeah.
John: Okay.
John: I mean, I was like, you, you guys are eating a fish that just came out of a river and
John: Like, think about it.
John: And they're like, we are thinking about it as we eat this delicious fish that just came out of this river.
John: And I'm like, no, thanks.
John: I'm going to stick with this hot dog, this amazing, pure hot dog that wasn't just in a river.
John: I mean, I was like... It's so funny that you'd pick a hot dog.
Merlin: You know?
Merlin: Of all of the kinds of food.
Merlin: I mean, you know, I'm just saying, it wasn't like you were having organic parsnips.
Merlin: You were having glands and butts, basically.
Merlin: Far from it.
John: But it's familiar.
Merlin: Very familiar.
John: The one thing that holds over is that I still eat at Arby's periodically.
John: Not very often.
John: Me too.
John: But, you know, an Arby's sandwich is probably the worst...
John: thing that human beings have ever devised.
Merlin: I see some, I've seen some signs for stuff at our Taco Bell that I, I just, I can't believe, I mean, you know, it goes into food photography where I'm just, my, my, my, I'm, I just, I said to my daughter, doesn't that look like barf?
Merlin: She's, yeah, I mean, it really, it looks like barf.
Merlin: Looks like barf.
John: I mean, all those companies, you know how the food gets there.
John: It gets there in tanker trucks, you know, like,
John: everything at a Taco Bell arrives in a tanker and they just plug a huge fire hose into a slot in the wall and they just pump it in.
John: And that's true of our, it's true of Arby's too, but I just, it's the one holdover from those years.
John: So anyway, after that experience in Innsbruck,
John: Then it was like going from black and white to color.
Merlin: It's almost like it broke a fever or something.
John: That's exactly right.
John: Something popped.
John: And I think it's because asparagus was at the very top of my list of things I would never, ever eat.
John: Like it looked so wrong.
John: It smelled so wrong.
John: It was terrible.
John: And the idea that an asparagus, and I say this with the full knowledge that Europeans have no idea how to cook asparagus.
John: Like Europeans eat white canned asparagus, limp, gross, soggy asparagus.
John: Like nothing compared to the amazing olive oil drenched broiled asparagus.
John: That's so good.
John: But even this soggy Austrian asparagus was so delicious and so astonishing that that could have been there in the world the whole time that I was sitting on my cold log eating a hot dog and eating fresh salmon.
Merlin: I go through this with my daughter who is – she is really – she's a five-year-old in a lot of ways.
John: So she doesn't want to watch – She's a five-year-old in a lot of ways including actual chronological age.
Merlin: Yes.
Merlin: I guess that does factor into it.
Merlin: Yes.
Merlin: She's not where we'd like her to be.
Merlin: She's being five on a 12th grade level.
Merlin: But I have to say to her sometimes, she's like, we'll be like, just try a little of this food.
Merlin: And we're not going to make it weird because I don't want to get into eating disorders.
Merlin: That's the new Hitler.
Merlin: But I've had more than one woman tell me that their relationship with food, like yours, became really fucked up in a divorced family where food became a way to control something in an environment that they didn't have control in.
Merlin: Seriously, I've had a handful of women tell me that that's how they got a weird relationship with food.
Merlin: So I'm not really surprised with your saying that in some ways.
Merlin: But with my kid, you know,
Merlin: yeah, we're, we're, we're the typical, I mean, kind of like we, we consider ourselves good about this family, which is like, just try it, you know, just try it.
Merlin: And, and that's really all you have to do.
Merlin: Just try a bite.
Merlin: That's all we're asking you to do.
Merlin: You don't, there's nothing you're going to like, we're not going to make you go on a roller coaster, even though we don't like it.
Merlin: We're like, we're not going to make you eat shrimp with lobster sauce.
Merlin: Cause I'm the only one in the house who likes it anyway, but you know what I mean?
Merlin: Like, just, just give it a spin.
Merlin: That's really all that we're asking.
Merlin: And the thing I ended up saying to her though, is,
Merlin: I try to be careful because just in life, I try to be careful not to tell somebody who I think they are, but rather what I think they're doing.
Merlin: I'm not great at it, but in this case, I don't want to say to her, you're a picky eater or something like that.
Merlin: But what I will say is pretty much every food we have put in front of you, you didn't want to try, and that includes chocolate.
Merlin: And I can pretty much guarantee you that there was at least one Saturday morning years ago where you didn't want to watch Toy Story.
Merlin: Like you have a habit of, of not liking stuff until you try it because that's how it works.
John: Right.
Merlin: And, you know, I, I think that's actually weirdly appropriate, you know, to a lot of things in life, you know, where, you know, you get this really strong idea, but, uh,
Merlin: i've uh i it's weird i've met a lot of people with kind of sometimes like famous but often like shameful things like that it's kind of like being an adult bedwetter in some ways i had a friend who would only eat white food she would only eat white wait what huh i was a bedwetter until i was embarrassingly old is that right yeah you know my oh well at least until i was at least until i was in fourth grade probably
Merlin: No kidding.
Merlin: That sucks.
John: It did.
John: The thing about my parents' divorce was that I gave no outward sign of being affected.
John: Oh, God.
John: And so all of these things, all of these little broken gauges...
John: It just all came out in these other ways.
John: And they did everything to try and get me to stop bedwetting.
John: And in the mid-70s, there was the... Was there an appliance involved?
John: There was an appliance.
Merlin: No, really?
John: Yes, it took the form of a complete sheet of...
John: Like stainless steel, thin, very thin sheet.
Merlin: No, no, no, no, no, no, no.
John: That was under my sheet.
John: It was plugged in?
John: That was connected with two, you know, electrode clamps to a buzzer to a loud alarm.
John: And if I wet the bed in the middle of the night, the water or the liquid would hit this metal sheet.
John: And this... That shouldn't make a shame problem worse.
John: The way it was sold to us was it was supposed to wake the child up.
John: And that way they would learn to equate their full bladder or their recently empty bladder.
Merlin: Recently evacuated alarm-causing bladder.
John: Yeah, with the need to get up in the night and go to the bathroom.
John: And so, you know, this thing went off a couple of times.
John: And I was no dummy.
John: I pulled the sheet back and figured out how it worked and took the electrode off the metal sheet.
John: Just one, not both.
John: You're a life hacker.
John: Because I know how fucking electricity works.
John: And then I would wet the bed.
John: And then when I would wake up in the morning, I would go, oh, fuck.
John: And I would lean over and plug it back in, like clip the clip back to the metal.
John: And it would immediately start.
John: And my mom would come running in and she would say, you just wet the bed now.
John: You just, it's time to wake up.
John: You just, you made it all the way through the night and you just wet the bed now.
John: I don't understand.
John: I was like, oops.
John: And for the, for a long time, I, you know, I pulled this scam where I was convincing my mom that I would sleep all the way through the night and then just pee like two minutes before she was.
Merlin: That's super interesting.
Merlin: And that seemed better in your mind because it actually kind of seems worse.
Yeah.
John: Better than being woken up in the middle of the night by an alarm and gotten out of bed and, you know, put in the shower and clothes.
John: I mean, I would much rather sleep through the night.
John: Not now, of course.
John: Now I would, I do not want to sleep through the night in wet pajamas, but I much preferred to do it when I was, you know, six, seven years old.
John: Right.
John: Then, then the alternative, but, but also, you know,
John: Like, waking up the entire house at one o'clock in the morning, not a great feeling.
Merlin: Yeah, I would never say anything against your family.
Merlin: But that seems like, I mean, that's like masturbation mitts or something.
John: Yeah, it was the 70s.
John: I mean, you know, there were people sitting their kids down and, you know, giving them like quarter doses of LSD and flashing lights at them to see what they did.
Merlin: They could have had your aura cleanse.
Merlin: They could have, you know.
John: But that was another thing.
John: The bedwetting was a thing that kept me from going to slumber parties.
John: It kept me from going over to other kids' houses.
Mm-hmm.
John: So I think that the person that I am today is absolutely a product of the person I was at 10 or 12 years.
John: Which was a kid with a, you know, I had this sense of adventure that I have, but it was in this shell of timidity that was, you know, that was timidity brought on by fear of being exposed as a picky eating, bedwetting, thumb sucking kid that played with G.I.
John: Joes until he was 17.
John: Yeah.
John: Like I was a late bloomer, late, late, late, late.
Merlin: This is one of those things that it's just – it seems so obvious, which is why it must be said, which is that I think for most of us, there are very few people that are always looking forward.
Merlin: I mean if you think about anything that you do in a given day or a week, it is for most of us in some way –
Merlin: a conscious or more often maybe unconscious reaction to something that just happened.
Merlin: And I mean, in extreme cases, you can think of lots of, you know, examples of that.
Merlin: But pretty much everything that we're doing, you know, even if it's going out to get half and half because we forgot to get half and half, we're constantly reacting to something that just happened.
Merlin: This sounds like Scientology.
Merlin: But I mean, the thing is, that didn't just happen this week.
Merlin: That's happened every week of your fucking life.
Merlin: You're always reacting to something that just happened before.
Merlin: And if all of that is happening, and that goes back...
Merlin: 45 years, it's still the same thing.
Merlin: And I mean if you had – if one had these things that really help form your personality into a certain way, it sounds like – I don't know if it sounds Freudian or something, but I'm not surprised at all to know that.
Merlin: I mean to know that that has such a long-lived effect on who you think you are and then what you should be doing to react to what just happened.
Yeah.
John: Well, and I think because I felt a prisoner of shame, like kid shame, right?
John: Not really shame for anything I had done, but just kid shame of somebody.
John: And I wasn't even afraid of kids pointing at me and saying that bedwetter.
John: I was afraid of adults doing it.
John: Because, of course, in the 70s, it is not so far outside of the realm of possibility that some coach or teacher or friend's parent would go, what a little baby.
John: Um, so living, you know, living confined by, by kid shame, uh, was a big part of me at some point deciding that I would, that I would have no, no shame or I, it would be rather, it would be impossible to shame me.
John: You know what I mean?
John: That was the that was the key.
John: That was the that was the moment, the moment when I realized that the only reason you couldn't be gay in the CIA was because that that would give the Russians power over you.
John: Right.
John: You're already kind of compromised.
John: You're vulnerable.
John: You're vulnerable because you can be exposed.
John: And the idea that – and I saw that radiating out through the world that people were so afraid of being exposed that they were enslaved.
John: It's not hard to enslave another person.
John: You just find out what they're scared of other people knowing and then you hold it over their head.
Merlin: It starts with a person not being difficult for someone to enslave themselves.
Merlin: And that's this little – suddenly it's Oprah.
Merlin: But I mean that's where you end up having this prison of your own design, your own personal panopticon of shame in which you dwell.
Merlin: And I think that – I mean I think that has ramifications that go much further than most of us like to think.
Merlin: And I mean again, it sounds like a cliche, but you want to say to kids like, boy, that guy –
Merlin: Right.
Merlin: Right.
Merlin: You know what I mean?
Merlin: Or he's hitting his big brother who's getting hit by Uncle Joe.
Merlin: I've told you the story of Julius McRae.
Merlin: I don't know that.
Merlin: Yeah, sure.
Merlin: Shower down and get an A. Oh, shower down and get an A. I don't understand what makes you want to be a gym coach.
Merlin: I mean, does that seem like that seems like maybe a third level fallback?
John: You know, there are all those dads.
John: This is the thing that Merlin, we were not jocks.
John: So we don't understand the power of jock dumb.
Merlin: Yes.
Merlin: Like people who are engineers, you know, or people, you know, it's people who are engineers have trouble thinking.
Merlin: Understanding how people who are not engineers think because they understand the mechanics of how the universe operates at a physics level.
Merlin: And so they don't understand why people would not think the same way that they do.
John: Right.
John: They don't understand why nobody can read the instruction manual that they wrote because the instruction manual they wrote is –
John: Totally obvious to an engineer.
Merlin: Well, Dr. Strangelove is in there.
Merlin: You just haven't searched on enough services yet.
John: And this is the thing about jocks, and I'm convinced of this.
John: Jocks live fairly happy lives, I think.
John: Much happier than mine.
John: Because the life of a jock is just uncomplicated by all this why, why, why, wondering, wondering, fretting, fretting, fretting about stuff that can't be fixed.
John: And, you know, a jock throws a ball, catches a ball.
John: There's a feeling of accomplishment there.
John: It maybe is just as real as the accomplishment of writing a novel, maybe just as real as the accomplishment of writing a great novel.
John: If you catch a great touchdown pass and it saves the day for the team and the town, like what could be better than that?
John: And a lot of these guys who didn't have the didn't have the glory of
John: For themselves or their, you know, their glory days are behind them and they get to work with kids and and bask in the reflected glory of young people having those experiences.
John: I mean, that whole world where where there is somebody out there right now who has reached his career pinnacle and it is.
John: it is being like secondary teams coach for a small Midwestern college.
John: And, you know, and he's out there.
John: It,
John: for 50 years on the sidelines, season after season.
John: I mean, those seem like valid and poetic, beautiful lives, I guess.
John: And it's never a thing I can relate to at all.
John: All I can picture myself, if it was Freaky Friday and he and I switch positions and I'm standing there in those polyester pants with the wind blowing over my windbreaker, watching these kids, not even the A-team,
John: But like the, you know, the secondary defense squad and they're running drills.
John: And I, you know, I just see myself standing there and watching them for like a minute and a half and then looking around and wondering where the bus station is.
John: And but people devote their whole lives to it.
John: And I might, you know, my dad, I think, would have been a happier guy.
John: If he had just followed sports, if he had just followed the sports thread of his young life and had found a way to stay in sports.
John: Without all the pressure of trying to make a difference.
John: And trying to settle disputes with labor unions.
John: If he had just, you know, been in that clear cut world of like the dispute is that your team is against our team and the dispute is instead of being in law and politics, which is never resolved.
Merlin: Right.
Merlin: And like you have a victory on that Tuesday night.
Merlin: Right.
Merlin: And then the real work begins and you start over or in law, I mean, it's just all shades and subtlety.
Merlin: Yeah, I couldn't do that.
Merlin: But, you know, here's one thing you think about.
Merlin: Think about like we talk about jocks.
Merlin: And I mean, I think one thing from at least in my mind, like the jock thing goes way beyond who's on the field playing sports because, you know, football teams are big.
Merlin: If you, you know, it's there's whatever, 11 people on each side on the field at a time.
Merlin: How do you know that?
Merlin: I'm speaking phonetically.
Merlin: Is it 11 people?
Merlin: I think so, yeah.
Merlin: You've got 11 offense, 11 defense, and they face off.
Merlin: Is that right?
Merlin: 11?
Merlin: What a weird number.
Merlin: Why 11?
Merlin: All sports are done mostly in prime numbers.
John: Interesting.
John: How many people on a basketball team?
Merlin: On a team or on the court at a time?
Merlin: There are five people from the basketball team on the court at a time.
John: But you can have as many people on the team as you want.
Merlin: I think so.
Merlin: You can have what they call a deep bench.
John: How many people are on a soccer team?
John: All of them.
John: Is it a prime number?
Five.
Merlin: You know, I'm not going to look, but I'm going to say what you got.
Merlin: You got your forwards.
Merlin: You got your senator.
Merlin: You got your backs.
John: Five, six, seven.
Merlin: The thing is, even if you let's take it as read that there's 40 to 60 people on the football team in high school, which I think is probably still a little high.
Merlin: There's a ton more people than that.
Merlin: that see themselves as jocks and act like jocks.
Merlin: And you could be, I'm just gonna say with all due respect to lard asses, there are so many lard ass men in this area walking around in era, like official giants or, you know, or what's the other sports team?
Merlin: 49ers jerseys.
Merlin: They're walking around and they are fat.
Merlin: They're fat like fuck in a giant official jersey.
Merlin: And they are there.
Merlin: They know everybody on a first name basis.
Merlin: They talk about all of them.
Merlin: So, I mean, I think part of not to eat off Hodgman's plate here, but I think this jock thing goes way beyond victory on the field.
Merlin: And I wonder if a lot of those people who want you to shower down to get an A were not like the quarterback.
John: I feel like you're I feel like you're feeling that jocks shouldn't be fat is the same as my feeling that Christians shouldn't smoke pot.
John: Oh.
John: Hmm.
John: Let me think about that.
John: There are a lot of fat jocks.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: But I'm not talking about I'm not like I'm not talking about coming by it honestly, but I'm talking about like the association.
Merlin: You know, it's kind of like kind of like girls who like want to dress up like people they've seen in us magazine and then talk like people on TV.
Merlin: You know, there's nothing like inherently wrong with that, I guess.
Merlin: But it's no different really than like the management, the bad management of a company hiring more people who are like them.
Merlin: Like it's this self-replicating pattern of willful dumb fuckery that makes me lose my mind.
Merlin: Anyway, I don't understand coaches.
Merlin: And those shorts, ugh.
Merlin: They had to find jobs at our high school.
Merlin: I think we might have mentioned this once, but at my high school –
Merlin: We probably talked about this on the Mr. Finnell episode.
Merlin: But I remember at my high school, they had to come up with phony baloney jobs for all the coaches.
John: Oh, sure.
John: They're all history teachers or social studies teachers.
Merlin: Well, I mean, in some cases, yes.
Merlin: The driver's ed teacher...
John: No one respects history as a pursuit.
Merlin: Yeah, give him a coach.
John: Because the coach is always the history teacher, and he's always like, I don't know, French Revolution.
Merlin: The soccer coach taught in-school suspension.
Merlin: That was a class?
Merlin: He was officially a faculty member because he sat in a silent room for six hours a day watching people who'd gotten in a fight.
John: He must have been a real – well, he was a soccer coach.
John: I was going to say what a Buddhist.
Merlin: He looked a lot like somebody who would listen to Peter Frampton and follow a lady to her car.
Merlin: Not a good way.
John: You're getting a little close to home there, buddy.
Merlin: Which part?
Merlin: I know you're a big Frampton fan.
John: I'm not.
John: I know.
John: I know.
John: I know.
John: You know, the first time I ever heard Frampton comes alive.
John: Frampton turns a trick.
John: Frampton turns alive was also the first time I ever saw somebody light a fart.
Yeah.
John: It's true.
John: I was over at this kid's house, and he had big brothers, and they were playing Thumbs Alive, and they were like, want to see something cool?
John: I was like, I do want to see something cool.
John: And he lit his fart.
Merlin: That's living.
Merlin: That's where I learned the A major seventh chord.
John: I'm not sure I still know it.
Merlin: It's like an A, but you drop the middle one.
Merlin: Oh, right.
Merlin: Oh, yeah, yeah, sure.
Merlin: Great chord.
Merlin: It's a great chord.
Merlin: It's the official chord of the 1970s.
Merlin: If you play pretty much anything as a major seventh, it invokes the 70s.
John: Right.
John: All right.
John: Well, I'm going to give that a try as soon as I lose you today.
Merlin: Yeah, my guitar's just out of reach.
Merlin: Lucky you.
John: That should be the name of my autobiography, My Guitar's Just Out of Reach.
John: My autobiography for the last seven years.
Merlin: Your unfinished autobiography.
John: I saw my good friend Will Johnson of the band Centromatic last night, and he has, I have no doubt, has put out 12 albums since the last Longwinters record.
Merlin: Oh, it's got to be so fucking annoying.
Merlin: And then you have to talk to him.
John: well like he's your friend and you like him but isn't there some part of you that wants him to be wetting the bed well the the problem is that he and dave bazon and i are standing around in a circle and dave bazon you know plays 200 road shows a year and uh will probably you know does close to that or or will's in 10 bands and puts out four records a year and uh we're all talking shop and
John: But there was a time 10 years ago when we would be standing around talking shop and we all had, we all had very duplicatable experiences.
John: You know, we were doing the same thing and now we're standing around and they're like, yeah, so anyway, you know that, you know, you know, Jimmy's chicken shack down in Oscar Lolo, Florida.
John: Oh yeah.
John: I hate that place or whatever.
John: And I'm standing there like, yeah,
John: Hey, I've given some keynote speeches that I didn't get paid for.
John: How about you guys?
John: What about those keynotes, right?
John: Am I right?
John: Hey, I got a new keyboard.
Merlin: Yeah, and they're like, huh, anyway.
Merlin: No, John, you're just perceiving that.
Merlin: I know you're doing that for comedic effect here, I'm sure, but you're just perceiving that.
Merlin: Even if you are being honest, I think you're kidding, right?
Yeah.
John: Well, a little bit.
John: I mean, but there is that thing of like, why haven't, you know, we look at each other and it's like, oh, man, we used to play so many shows together.
John: Why haven't we played any shows lately?
John: And then there's a silence.
John: You know about chemtrails?
John: And then it's like, oh, right.
John: It's me.
John: I'm the reason we haven't played any shows together.
Merlin: God damn it.
Merlin: God damn it, John.
Merlin: Fucking Roderick.
Merlin: You've evolved.
John: Yeah.
Merlin: You're sitting around like, why am I not throwing my monkey bone in the air and having it turn into a spaceship?
Merlin: And I'm telling you, you are the spaceship.
Merlin: You have become your how.
John: I gave my first PowerPoint presentation yesterday.
John: Oh, shit.
John: Really?
John: Yeah, I didn't do it.
John: Were you pitching VCs?
John: No, I was at EMP, the Experience Music Project.
Merlin: Did you have a deck on Mudhoney's van?
John: It was called... It's the pop conference where intellectuals and journalists get together to talk about pop music as though it is a serious academic discipline.
John: Which kind are you?
John: Neither.
John: Okay.
John: But I was there to talk about weathering the storm, the fallout of my punk rock article.
Okay.
John: And so they wanted me to have a PowerPoint presentation to go along with my speech.
John: And I was like, I don't know anything about that.
John: And they were like, oh, it's easy.
John: And they sent me a bunch of templates and emails that I didn't open.
John: You sent them to Josh.
John: The day before I was giving the talk, I was like, oh, right.
John: PowerPoint thing.
Yeah.
John: So there's a gal that works over at the Grammy Awards where I'm also on the board.
John: And so I sent her an email and I was like, well, you know about PowerPoints?
John: And she was like, yeah.
John: And I said, will you make me a PowerPoint?
John: And she said, for what?
John: And I said, I'm giving this speech.
John: She said, I know, but I mean, what do you want me to, like, we should get together and talk about this PowerPoint thing.
John: And I said, no, I don't need to see it.
Merlin: For some of us, that would be like being called and saying, can you make me a song?
John: Yeah, basically.
John: And I was like, just make me a PowerPoint demonstration that's X number of minutes long that has pictures of punk rockers and punk rock.
John: And she was like, well, yeah, I mean, I didn't even really like your article very much.
John: And I was like, perfect.
John: So I got up and I gave this speech with a PowerPoint demonstration going behind me where the slides were programmed to change every 15 seconds.
John: And I had never seen it before, and I still haven't seen it.
John: You're kidding.
John: Because I wasn't looking at it while I was talking.
John: That's my bedwetting right there.
John: That is a terrifying idea to me.
John: And the only advice I gave her was I would like the last slide, the one that hangs up there, because inevitably I will go over my allotted time.
John: And so the last slide is just going to sit there all afternoon while I keep talking.
John: I want it to say, fuck you.
Yeah.
Merlin: And she did it.
Merlin: She took time out of her day to do that for you.
John: Yeah.
John: So I gave this PowerPoint demonstration where all these pictures of Sid and Nancy or whatever were flashing behind me on the screen.
John: That sounds like a horrible PowerPoint.
John: It was terrible.
John: And then at the end... Oh, no.
John: I mean, it was great because it was terrible.
John: Because I was talking about...
John: I wasn't defending.
John: I didn't defend my punk rock.
Merlin: Couldn't you just have somebody with sync stoppers in their ears like slowly flip through an NME or like a maximum R&R while you're up there?
Merlin: That's basically what it was.
Merlin: Just get a barista and an overhead projector.
John: Yeah, that's essentially what it was.
John: But then the last slide said, fuck you.
John: And then for the last 15 minutes, I just talked over a slide that said, fuck you.
Merlin: Had you practiced it?
Merlin: Had you rehearsed it with time and everything?
John: No, no, no.
John: I improvised it because, as I say, I gave no thought to it until I arrived.
Merlin: Well, you understand my questions.
Merlin: That's... Wow.
Merlin: How was the reception?
John: Oh, it was... You know, I like to give impromptu speeches.
John: And generally, the response is good because people...
Merlin: Well, you are good and you're very entertaining and I haven't done a lot of public speaking, but I will just say that I think slides – John, I heard this a long time ago and I kind of don't want to say it to you because I don't want to lose this awesome analogy that I have to imagine is not correct.
Merlin: But I've heard it said that the only people who really need poles when they ski are beginners and experts.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: The typical moderate level skier doesn't really need the poles to ski.
John: Is that true?
John: Yeah, I don't think you need poles to ski.
John: I mean, even an expert doesn't, and a beginner really doesn't either, but...
Merlin: Okay, let's stop right there.
Merlin: I don't want to ruin it.
Merlin: Okay.
Merlin: No, just because it's so good.
Merlin: But anyway, you take the analogy writ large, right?
Merlin: To me, that's slides.
Merlin: When you are up there and you're nervous, you don't know what you're saying.
Merlin: I don't mean to talk about my actual job that I have.
Merlin: But when people do that, when they get up there, they're making the classic mistakes.
Merlin: They've got a bunch of bullshit slides with tiny, tiny letters on it.
Merlin: And they're doing the rookie mistake of reading off the slides.
Merlin: Right, right.
Merlin: And then to me, like when you get really good, you come up with a super polished – to me, I knew my slides got better when they didn't make any sense on their own.
Merlin: Sure.
Merlin: And like it used to really frustrate me when people would first of all demand slides and I would wish I had your last slide to send them because I would be like, you know, it's – well, yeah, okay, send me your deck.
Merlin: I'm like, why do you want my deck?
Merlin: Right.
Merlin: Well, we want to put it in the binder.
Merlin: We want to print it out and put it in the binder.
Merlin: Is that what people – that's what people call PowerPoint slides?
Merlin: Oh, yeah.
Merlin: Yeah, they call it a deck.
Merlin: Yeah, but I mean that's what they do with these things.
Merlin: You go, oh, and you just don't want to get me started.
John: So somebody could sit and just open the binder before the thing even starts, read through all the slides.
John: Yes.
John: And then they're done and then a person gets up and reads the slides aloud?
John: Yeah.
Merlin: Could be, but let's say you've got the greatest talk in the world.
Merlin: Think about this.
Merlin: How about this?
Merlin: How about you're about to go – I don't know of an example where you would go somewhere prestigious to do like say a three-song set.
Merlin: But imagine that you went up to do your three best songs and right before you went out, they handed out the lyrics to all of the songs to the audience stapled together along with maybe a biography.
Merlin: Now, if you're the typical person in that audience, what are you going to be doing while somebody that you've never heard is performing a song?
Merlin: Following along?
Merlin: Yeah, at best, you'll be reading the lyrics, but you'll be flipping through, looking at all of this, and it's like handing somebody the fucking script for The Godfather 2 right before the movie rolls.
Merlin: It's like, before you go into this building, let me give you the blueprint.
Merlin: Well, that's not the thing.
Merlin: I hate to sound like a diva about this.
Merlin: No, I get you.
Merlin: And that's why, to me, it's so funny.
Merlin: I would send people and I'd say, oh, fine, here you go.
Merlin: Here's my slides.
Merlin: Have fun.
Merlin: And it would be like a – They made no sense at all.
Merlin: They're just like – There's one that's a picture of a cardboard box.
Merlin: There's another one that's a douchebag making two devil's horns while he bites his lower lip.
Merlin: And I'd say, have fun.
Merlin: Here's 20 slides for you.
Merlin: Okay.
Merlin: How's that work out?
Merlin: Love it.
Merlin: Mm-hmm.
Merlin: I did a talk a year or two ago where – when I try hard, my slides are pretty good.
Merlin: But I was at a place where I was expected to first of all hand them a PDF because they couldn't handle having like a keynote file with all the builds and stuff.
Merlin: So I was going to give them a PDF and then I hit a remote to change the slide except that remote actually sent a signal to someone to turn on a light to let this guy in another room know to advance the slide.
Merlin: Whoa.
Merlin: So imagine that you had cards that you would hold up to let someone know which chords to fret.
Merlin: Wow.
Merlin: That's how I felt.
Merlin: And so I said, you know what?
Merlin: I did what I end up doing about 80% of the time, which is I went, you know what?
Merlin: No slides.
Merlin: Either do it right or don't do it.
Merlin: This is really boring.
Merlin: But it does get to something that drives me crazy, which is like the shittiness of a culture becomes – you have these ruts, like truly a rut.
Merlin: Like if you imagine wagons going down a road, pretty much if you get 50 wagons going down a road, there's going to be some pretty deep –
Merlin: ruts that those wheels create.
Merlin: And it's going to be really hard to not have your wagon go into those.
Merlin: And that's exactly what it is.
John: It's interesting that you use a wagon as a rut producer because we were talking about skiing earlier and it seems like skiing would be the way that you got to the rut description.
Merlin: I had to explain ruts to my daughter two days ago.
Merlin: We scoot together.
Merlin: We both scoot.
Merlin: And I was telling her about ruts.
John: Yeah, ruts are a major feature in a skier.
Merlin: Ruts are a teachable moment.
Merlin: I could talk for five minutes about ruts, but they don't really become clear until you experience them.
John: You sure?
John: Especially if you're going over ruts the wrong way.
Merlin: Oh, yeah.
Merlin: You're like a lady in high heels.
Merlin: Yeah.
John: Well, this is a thing.
John: On a wagon rut, it's not like you want to take a different line on your way to Oregon.
John: Right?
John: You got your wagon ruts, you're going to get in the ruts you're going to go.
John: But in skiing, ruts get dug in, and then you want to go a different way, but there are these ruts in the way.
John: It's very – I mean I could go on and on.
Merlin: We should avoid the Holocaust.
Merlin: I saw a documentary on Hollywood's treatment of primarily the Holocaust but also a little bit of pre-war stuff.
Merlin: And they talked about this one scene in Sophie's Choice where Meryl Streep is doing this really – she's walking across the camp.
Merlin: She's at Auschwitz, right?
Merlin: I never saw Sophie's Choice.
John: Is it a Holocaust movie?
John: I always thought it was about horses.
John: It totally sounds like a horse movie.
John: Sophie's Choice isn't about horses?
John: Jesus Christ.
John: I always thought it was like National Velvet.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: Actually, it turns out My Friend Flicka was about the Sudetenland.
Merlin: What?
Merlin: I didn't see that movie either.
Merlin: Anyway, but she's got this really peculiar gait.
Merlin: She's walking very, very strange.
John: So basically in the making of this film – Meryl Streep or – Meryl Streep.
John: Not a horse.
Merlin: I shouldn't have said gait.
Merlin: Sorry, my bad.
Merlin: But her character is – of course she's very ill and she's walking across the ground being kind of led along by this – one of those mean Auschwitz ladies and she has this very odd –
Merlin: And it's very memorable when you see it, but this very strange like kind of swaying, like almost like she's about to fall over kind of drunken master sort of way of walking.
Merlin: And they'd hired – brought people in consultants because they really wanted to get every detail they could, right?
Merlin: And she wasn't doing that simply because she was malnourished.
Merlin: She was doing that because there was like several inches of mud.
Merlin: In the camp.
Merlin: And you would make every attempt that you could to follow the footsteps of other people in the mud so that you wouldn't get bogged down or fall down in the mud.
John: Right.
John: It's like snow.
Merlin: I also watched three movies about anti-Semitic propaganda the other night.
John: That were not also about the Holocaust?
No.
Merlin: I guess given that one was made by – was it Himmler?
Merlin: No, who was the – Who's the – Himmler.
Merlin: Himmler.
Merlin: Himmler was the propaganda guy, right?
Merlin: Jimmler.
Merlin: Jimmler.
Merlin: Mr. Hilter.
Merlin: Welcome to Argentina.
Merlin: The Internet and Monty Python are off limits.
Merlin: But anyway, so that's why people walk that way at Auschwitz.
Merlin: Right.
Merlin: Oh, but brother, there's actually two documents.
Merlin: You know what?
Merlin: Never mind.
John: Yeah.
John: You know, I was feeling the other day that, you know, when we talk about Semites, it's all the people of...
John: Arabia and the Levant, all of the Arabs are also Semitic people.
John: But anti-Semite only refers to Jews.
Merlin: Okay, while I take a minute to look up a Twitter tweet you had yesterday, tell me what that means by Semite.
Merlin: I am not familiar.
Merlin: I thought Semitic meant Jewish.
Right.
John: No, a Semitic is a description of a language group.
John: The Semitic languages are Arabic and Aramaic.
Merlin: I am a total piker.
Merlin: I don't mean to work ping pong, but I am a piker as a Holocaust scholar.
Merlin: I did not know that.
John: Yeah, and Hebrew.
John: All these are a language group.
John: That are one of the Indo... Oh, Sem.
Merlin: S-E-M.
Merlin: Right?
Merlin: I mean, from the Latin?
John: Yeah, you're digging in.
John: Oh, fuck.
John: So, all of those people are called Semites because they all share a common language...
John: group and then I think anti-Semite only became more of a targeted reference to Jews in the 19th century during that whole period sort of
John: mid-1800s when the Germans were really, really wrestling with how to integrate the Jews into their culture.
John: They decided not to.
John: Spoiler alert.
John: But, so Arabs are Semitic people also, and all of this anti-Arab talk in America that we've been soaking in for the last... I'm sorry, not to be that Arab or Muslim?
Merlin: Well, Arab – Because this gets me back to your toot.
Merlin: Well, what did I say in my toot?
Merlin: I'm sorry.
Merlin: I'm double interrupting you.
Merlin: But you remember all this that happened after 9-11 was like Sikhs were being beat up.
John: Right.
Merlin: I mean there was this entire Venn diagram of confusion about who we were supposed to be mad at.
John: Sure.
John: Anybody with a turban.
John: But, of course, Sikhs couldn't be further –
Merlin: But weren't Indian and Pakistani guys getting hassled too?
Merlin: I mean, it got pretty bananas for a while, right?
John: Well, Pakistani guys might have had it coming, but Indian guys, not so much.
John: Huh.
John: It's a kind of bullying clairvoyance.
John: Even though Indians and Pakistanis are very similar racially, they have very different religions.
Merlin: Could you eyeball a Pakistani versus an Indian?
John: Well, but there are like 700 different racial groups in India.
John: You should be in the fucking cabinet, John.
Merlin: Nine hours ago, John Roddick, remember that a Chechen is not a Czech.
Merlin: I actually read your Twitter sometimes.
Merlin: Remember that a Chechen is not a Czech, nor a Chetnik, nor a Moravian, a Moldavian slash Moldovan, or a Monrovian, nor a Roman, Roma, or Romanian.
Merlin: Right.
Merlin: And as with me, if I may say, I can't believe you fit that many fucking letters into a toot.
Merlin: But you typify, I think you're not typifying, you're exemplifying like an unbelievable error that we all make, including me.
Merlin: Right.
Merlin: You know?
John: Well, yeah, so there's, you know, Chechnya.
John: I don't have to tell you.
Merlin: I should tell you, John, there is one way in which I am so...
Merlin: This is really hard, going to be hard to believe.
Merlin: There's one way in which I am, I don't even own a TV guy, which is about the news.
John: Right.
Merlin: And I am that guy, first of all, in the way that I actually don't follow the news, but I'm also that guy constantly letting you know that I don't follow the news.
Merlin: So I literally go out of my way.
Merlin: If you could see my filter file on TweetBot actually slows my computer down.
Merlin: You can't prove a negative, and there's no way you could begin to visualize how many things I never see anywhere.
Yeah.
Merlin: So Chechnya is part of the actual capital R Russia.
John: Well, so that area.
John: So we hear about these countries in the news all the time.
John: Armenia, Azerbaijan, Georgia.
John: Those are areas where the Russians have been fighting wars for a long time because they are these untamed areas between the Black Sea and the Caspian Sea at the very south end of what
John: we think of as Russia, but it isn't Russia really at all.
John: They are the, they are the people there.
John: A lot of them are Muslims there.
John: They are, they're related to like Persians and Turks and,
John: And they were conquered by the Russians back in the day, multiple different times and ways.
John: But they live up in the mountains.
John: They are Caucasian people because those are literally the Caucasus.
John: But they are not ethnically Russian.
John: They are very much like descendants of Genghis Khan.
John: And...
John: And they are mad.
John: And Chechnya is this weird little landlocked mountain redoubt up there that doesn't want to be in Russia anymore.
John: It's not really a self-sustaining place.
John: It's surrounded by...
John: Russians and mountains.
John: And it's ruled by an autocratic dictator who thinks that he is God.
John: Like a lot of those places.
John: You're talking about Turkmenistan?
John: Well, Turkmenistan has it bad too.
John: That guy's awesome.
Merlin: That guy is amazing.
John: Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, and Kazakhstan, and Tajikistan are all on the other side of the Caspian Sea, and they are much more like steppes.
John: They're much more like horse people.
John: Those are the horse-riding people.
John: The long people.
Merlin: Didn't he also name all the months after himself?
John: Yeah, he's built a couple of Brazilians, like big towns out in the middle of nowhere that are full of pyramids and globes, giant gold globes.
John: So that area is very interesting.
John: Now, Moravia is...
John: is uh half of the czech republic so the czech republic is made up of bohemia and moravia which are two regions that we don't think they're not separate countries they never were but they are two kingdoms i guess and the bohemians and the moravians feel differently about each other they're united in a kind of contempt for the slovakians now moldova
John: used to be part of Romania and they speak Romanian, but it was absorbed into the Ukraine.
John: And so my God, John, it's like, they're trying to fuck with us.
John: They changed the alphabet of the Romanian language into Cyrillic.
John: So the Moldovans, which that country also, before it was called Moldova, it was called Moldovia.
John: But that region is now a separate country where they speak Romanian, but they spell it with Russian letters.
John: And so all of these places are probably going to erupt in war and everyone will be sent to camps.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: You want to hear more about those anti-Semitic, sorry, anti-Jew movies?
Merlin: No.
Merlin: But I mean like the one you still see today that's pretty funny.
Merlin: So Georgia, I mean setting aside the White Album.
Merlin: My daughter loves that song.
Merlin: How cool is that?
Merlin: She likes to hear it on repeat.
Merlin: your daughter is cool um that's a good song do you know about the importance of happiness is a warm gun are you aware of how important that song is to you personally or to the world to the beatles it was the last song they had fun making
Merlin: Really?
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: You know, like, we've talked before about that, those outtakes from Anya Burke and Singh.
Merlin: We can hear how high they were, and, like, they're laughing.
Merlin: I mean, they're super... You've been high, right?
John: They're super... I don't want to say I'm on public broadcast.
Merlin: Sure, the CIA might still have you, and it's fine.
Merlin: That's getting up and come on.
Merlin: This podcast has a bullet.
John: When I go to the doctor, and they put the piece of paper in front of me, I've never done any drugs or smoked cigarettes, and I'm like...
John: No way.
John: I'm not telling you, buddy.
John: If you find an undifferentiated mass in my lung, we're both going to wonder where it came from.
Merlin: It's asparagus.
Merlin: Okay, forget about the civilian.
Merlin: My friend – I have a good friend who had – he had a really, really bad traumatic injury to his hand.
Merlin: Many of our listeners will be able to figure out who this is.
Merlin: And he went to the doctor because I mean basically he like – I guess severed a nerve and he had to go through all this.
Merlin: Like it was a big deal.
Merlin: And when they went to the doctor, of course like they do –
Merlin: They ask you, do you take ibuprofen?
Merlin: Do you smoke?
Merlin: Not anymore.
Merlin: And they ask you, do you drink?
Merlin: And of course, like me, I think he paused.
Merlin: He paused.
John: Conspicuously.
Merlin: If you're like a, I don't say a nurse, but if you are the information taker at that facility, you, I mean, you know what?
Merlin: You can get good at something in a day if you do it often enough.
Merlin: If you do that 10 times in one day, I bet within a week you are going to be like fucking Kreskin at knowing whether somebody drinks a lot or whether someone lies a lot for that matter.
John: Right, right.
John: Absolutely.
John: But they never let on.
Merlin: I mean, so here's some possible answers to that.
Merlin: Oh, so here's the thing.
Merlin: And this is such a great hack.
Merlin: They don't ask you, do you drink?
Merlin: They ask you, how many drinks do you have a week?
Merlin: And so first of all, you got to do math if you're trying to be honest.
Merlin: But you could say, I don't drink anymore, which is a good lie.
Merlin: Or it could be...
Merlin: Four times a week.
Merlin: Or you say, you don't want to see him drink on weekends because he's not like a binge drinker.
Merlin: Right.
Merlin: And so my friend said the real rookie thing, which is that he has a couple drinks a day.
John: Oh, sure.
John: That's like he's talking to a cop.
Merlin: Which is exactly what I would say, which really means I have about three or four times that much.
John: Right.
Right.
Merlin: Couple of drinks.
Merlin: And his wife is awesome.
Merlin: It was all she could do not to knock him onto the floor.
Merlin: She said, listen, when you go in and you talk to anyone, whether it's a doctor or anyone, and they ask you how much you drink, you know what you tell them?
Merlin: I only drink socially.
Merlin: Which is such a great answer because it doesn't really answer the question.
John: Oh, but that's such a archaic answer.
John: That's a madman answer.
John: I only drink socially.
John: Do you think that sounds like denial?
John: It sounds like something that you heard your father say many times.
John: Or it sounds like something you heard your mother say to your father.
Merlin: Okay, how about this?
Merlin: The nurse, Tron, says, how many drinks do you have a week?
Merlin: And you say, do you think you're better than me?
Merlin: That's pretty good.
Merlin: Oh, that's actually a good one.
Merlin: We're, God, fucking hour and a half.
Merlin: Long.