Ep. 85: "Steamin' John"
Merlin: Hello.
Merlin: Hi, John.
John: Hi, Merlin.
Merlin: Oh, no.
John: Yeah.
Merlin: No.
John: Yeah.
John: I'm sick.
Merlin: You sound like so sick you're like make-believe sick.
John: Yeah, I might be playing it up a little bit.
Merlin: Oh, God, that's awful.
John: But these are the first words I've spoken all day.
Merlin: Oh, John, I'm sorry.
Merlin: Are you up to this?
Merlin: Now you're feeling better.
John: Oh, I feel much better.
John: John, I think you're susceptible.
John: I am susceptible.
John: I feel like the Northwest has a lot of spores.
John: And I'm vulnerable to spores.
Merlin: I think anywhere there's vergency, there shall be spores.
John: It's like somebody set off a Gaia bob.
John: It's like Spock set off a Gaia Bob, except it's of spores all around me.
Merlin: I'm sorry.
Merlin: You sound like, I don't know, like Mason Reese in a commercial for Robitussin.
John: My Belody has a first name.
John: It's O-S-C-A-R.
John: I wonder what he's doing.
John: He's probably a junkie.
Merlin: He's probably a junkie.
Merlin: He's probably... I want to help you, John.
Merlin: I want to cradle your giant head.
Merlin: He probably lives in a pumpkin patch.
Merlin: This is adorable.
Merlin: I know.
Merlin: Why is there not a John Roderick babies on Saturday mornings?
John: There should be.
John: There should be.
John: I'm a huge baby when I'm sick, too.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: Who else would be in the nursery with you, do you think?
Merlin: uh you remember my muppet babies i feel like really kind of kicked that off yeah i didn't like them but i think that i think that mel brooks and marlo thomas should be in the in the in the little babies what do i know i'm just born i'm a baby i'm a definitely a girl um just that boys keep theirs and girls don't
John: So I opened two cans of Progresso chicken noodle soup today.
John: And I ate the soup and I left the noodles in the bowl because I'm not eating carbohydrates.
Merlin: You are born again hard.
John: Yeah.
John: But I tell you, it's... We shouldn't do this, John.
Merlin: This is going to be too much of a strain on you.
John: No, no.
John: It's good.
John: I need the socialization.
Merlin: When did you realize you were getting sick?
John: Well, so the band has been rehearsing, and it's been a long time since we used our practice space, and it has become damp.
John: And so the first day we were there, I was like, ugh.
Merlin: Does it have that mildew smell?
John: Yeah, I got to get the dehumidifier, but it's hard to find dehumidifiers.
Yeah.
Merlin: I have looked.
Merlin: When I was a kid, air conditioning, you couldn't always count on.
Merlin: You had to have a dehumidifier and that little thing was filled with water.
Merlin: It was very reassuring.
John: You dump it out.
Merlin: Dump it out.
John: Dump out the sticky water that's in the air.
Merlin: You should go to S&H Green Stamps.
Merlin: They probably got them there.
John: For every 50 humidifiers, there is one dehumidifier.
John: I think I found one the other day.
John: I think I found one.
John: It's operating now.
John: It's a humidifier dehumidifier, which I'm suspicious of.
Merlin: I'm extremely suspicious of that.
Merlin: You know, pick one.
John: Yeah, exactly.
John: And then when it's time to humidify, you just put the same stinky spore water back in the air.
Merlin: You pick up an oven slash refrigerator?
John: No.
John: No.
John: So anyway, I'm dehumidifying, but it was too late for me.
John: And I was hoping, I honestly was hoping that now that I am not eating carbohydrates, that I would have suddenly developed super immunity to disease.
John: That all of my health problems and all of my mental health problems were all just a product of eating sugar.
John: But in fact, it's probably the sugar was even a bulwark.
Merlin: No, no, no.
Merlin: Here's the thing.
Merlin: You don't know.
Merlin: It might be that you should have gotten way sicker way sooner.
Merlin: You do all the right things.
Merlin: I want to talk to you about hydrogen peroxide a little at some point.
Merlin: You bathe a lot.
Merlin: You use a lot of hydrogen peroxide.
Merlin: You're doing everything right.
Merlin: You've cut out the noodles.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: Oh, man.
John: No more noodles.
Merlin: So you're rehearsing.
John: Yeah.
John: Well, you know, back in the old days, in the punk rock days, when the junkies that I knew couldn't find heroin and they couldn't get methadone on the street from junkies that were getting methadone and then selling it, their third line of defense was Theraflu.
Yeah.
John: And all the heroin addicts that up here in Seattle, at least, that I knew would get Theraflu to help them with their sickness.
Merlin: They snort it?
John: When they couldn't get drugs.
John: No, they would take it as prescribed.
John: But they would drink the hot mugs of Theraflu, and they were like, it's just like heroin.
John: I mean, it's not quite as good as heroin, but it'll do in a pinch.
John: Which is why I never used to take Theraflu, but now I feel like it's end times.
Merlin: I have really mixed feelings about it because when I was a kid, I was a try and medicine kid.
Merlin: I don't even remember what was in that.
Merlin: It was grape flavored, right?
Merlin: I had those yucky tasting big yellow pills and I'd have half a grown up one or whatever.
Merlin: But the thing is like Theraflu, all it's really doing is forestalling the pain.
Merlin: It's stopping you up.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: Do you think there's any benefit to just sitting with your pain and suffering through it?
Merlin: There are some people, I think, what I'm getting at is I think there are some people who believe that taking something like a Theraflu, it may not make it worse, but you're not getting the poison out.
John: Yeah, I believe that.
John: And I've spent the last 20 years not taking medicine of any kind, not even aspirin.
John: But lately, I've grown soft.
John: Uh, particularly when I am looking forward to doing a podcast with you and I'm like, I'm going to take some Theraflu.
John: I can't believe you're here.
Merlin: This is you.
Merlin: You're a Viking.
John: Well, you know, you gotta, you gotta get up and get your, get your stuff taken care of.
Merlin: It's easy for me.
Merlin: It was either this or keep getting my ass kicked at Uno.
Merlin: I was like, I gotta go.
Merlin: How do you lose at Uno?
Merlin: My daughter's good.
Merlin: Well, she's good at Uno and I play hard.
John: Yeah, well, Uno is a game for French trains.
John: Like, it's best played on the train in France.
John: That's my contention.
John: If you're playing it in an apartment in San Francisco, it's only half the story.
Merlin: We could make believe it's a train.
Merlin: Now, what about Mealborns?
Merlin: Mealborns is one of those games I feel like, and we talked about this before, were you a game kid in general?
John: No, but we definitely played Milborns because in junior high school, my French teacher, Mrs. Elsie, did not speak French.
John: Had been to France on her honeymoon or something.
Merlin: She already sounds insufferable.
Merlin: Did she demand that she call her Madame?
John: Oui.
John: Oui.
John: Madame LZ.
John: And no, she didn't speak French as far as I can tell.
John: And it was seventh and eighth grade French.
John: And we never spoke French in class.
John: But we did do things like play Milbourne and watch the red balloon, which only has one word in it.
Merlin: What the hell kind of school were you going to?
John: Ballon.
John: Ballon.
John: Um, I was going to Anchorage public schools and I took French instead of shop because my parents were adhering to a 1940s idea of what was important in life.
John: And if I took French, then I would go to Yale and I would be the ambassador to Yugoslavia and
John: And if I took shop, then I would wear a pack of cigarettes rolled up in the sleeve of my white T-shirt and have a duck's ass haircut and drive around town in a jalopy getting in fights with the cops.
John: And so now, having taken... I took, in my whole life, I think I probably took six years of French.
John: And I...
John: I regret every minute of it.
Merlin: Why?
Merlin: It's not as useful as making a lamp?
John: Yeah, that's six years of small engine repair that I forewent.
John: You know what I mean?
John: If I had started taking lawnmower repair,
John: when I was in seventh grade, I'd be, uh, I'd be Elon Musk right now building a space space crafter.
John: I'd be able to build super train on my own without any help from anybody.
John: But instead I'm sitting here, you know, and play uno on it.
John: I have forgotten how to conjugate all, but like the basic five verbs, uh,
John: And I know just enough French to solve the New York Times Sunday crossword puzzle.
Merlin: I bet you – I'm just guessing if we dropped you somewhere French, you could pick it right back up.
John: Well, that's true.
John: But if you drop me in Saudi Arabia, I would probably pick up Arabic pretty fast too without the six years of Arabic I didn't take.
John: I don't know.
John: You know my feeling about foreign language.
John: Learning foreign language is mostly unnecessary.
Merlin: That's just for English-speaking people, I assume.
John: Yeah, exactly.
John: It would be good for them to learn our language.
John: If you jump to America, you fucking speak English.
John: But no, if you want to be a world traveler, you go out there
John: You figure it out.
John: You just speak the language.
Merlin: I think you just learn to talk a little bit louder and wave your arms around.
Merlin: That helps a lot, right?
Merlin: Which way is the train station?
John: Talk softer and get in close.
John: Get right up on them and just let your eyes do the talking.
Merlin: I felt old a few weeks ago because my daughter is in regular school now.
Merlin: And then once you go into regular school, you're deluged with all these offers of other things that you can do.
Merlin: Like she's taking an engineering course right now.
Merlin: She's getting offered all these things that she's been doing soccer.
Merlin: Pretty soon she's going to be one of those annoying overscheduled kids.
Merlin: One of the things was she could take Mandarin at the age of five.
Mm-hmm.
Merlin: And I was of two minds because now I'm of that age where everybody said, look, learn Spanish because you learn Spanish.
Merlin: You can learn Spanish in an afternoon, basically.
Merlin: Most of what you need to learn from Spanish, you can learn over a weekend.
Merlin: And the letters always sound the same.
Merlin: If you get your pronunciation correct on day uno, you will be fine reading anything pretty much in Spanish.
Merlin: And they always said, you know, this is the growing, you know, language vertical.
John: Pretty mucho.
Merlin: Pretty mucho.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: Frito bandito.
John: Yeah.
John: Yeah.
John: That's all I ever, that's all Spanish I ever needed.
Merlin: I was of two minds.
Merlin: I was taken aback a little bit.
Merlin: And then I remembered that that's a growing economy.
Merlin: Now, if you were going to learn a Chinese, would you learn Mandarin?
John: If you believe, uh, in the movie, um, looper,
John: If you believe in the future world created in the movie looper.
Merlin: I believe in the movie looper.
John: Everybody's living in China in future times.
John: Interesting.
John: My feeling about it is if I... Is he going to Hong Kong?
Merlin: Is that where he goes?
John: No, I think he's in Shanghai, right?
John: Isn't Shanghai the city of the future?
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: In Pacific Rim, all the Eggers go to Hong Kong.
Merlin: So I guess what I'm saying is based on movies, it seems like we should learn something Chinese.
John: Well, so my feeling about my own daughter, I don't know if you knew this, but when I was a little kid, until I was two years old or three years old, I had a Japanese nanny.
John: And she and her husband both lived with us.
John: This was back in the...
John: late 60s, before Japan was an industrial powerhouse, when Japanese people would still come to America and act as nannies instead of as industrial production designers.
Merlin: Our corporate masters.
John: Yeah, coaches and tutors.
John: Yeah, they were my nanny, and I was learning Japanese as a little kid, and then they got deported because they were here on student visas.
John: And we didn't have the, my parents didn't have the power to keep them in the country because that, you know, their fortunes had fallen by that point politically.
John: So I lost my opportunity to have grown up speaking Japanese.
Merlin: I would love to speak Japanese.
John: I know.
John: And I, and, and, and I'm still angry about it.
John: I'm angry at the nation of Japan and I'm angry at the, at American government.
John: I'm going to crush them both when I become a supervillain.
Merlin: I don't blame you.
Merlin: They didn't pull in Uncle Jack or anything?
Merlin: There's nobody who could have stepped in?
John: No, it was, you know, it's like that whole student visa, working on a student visa, overstaying your student visa, that's just one of those, like, everybody gets busted for that, right?
John: How many politicians have gotten busted because their nannies were working under the table?
John: It's like the back door to bust white people for their unearned privilege, their unreflected privilege.
Yeah.
John: But in any case, my feeling about my own little girl is that I am going to sign her up for karate lessons at a young age for the following reasons.
John: Karate is no longer even a fashionable martial art.
John: Right.
John: And martial arts are an extremely nerdy thing for a person to pursue in high school or junior high or grade school.
John: I mean, in grade school, I guess it's probably pretty cool.
John: But there's a certain moment where if you are studying martial arts, you are just automatically relegated to the Dungeons and Dragons room off of the band room in your high school at lunchtime.
John: You don't walk around in those toe shoes for long before you get branded an outlier.
John: So I'm trying to shepherd my daughter through these difficult teenage years by casting her in iron as a nerd early on, by forcing her to take martial arts.
Merlin: Not forcing, but introducing... It's like a boy named Tsukiyaki.
Merlin: You get in there early, you give her something she's going to have to fight about, and she'll be good to go.
John: So I get her into martial arts when it seems like it's just a fun exercise game.
John: And then when she's 14 years old and develops a bosom, she's just wearing those kendo garments.
John: And the cheerleaders don't want her at the party or whatever.
John: And then later on, when she's 24, all that suffering through high school...
John: of being like a nerdy martial arts outcast.
John: And then at 24, she'll be like, she'll be a total, she'll be like Scarlett Johansson in that, um, Avengers movie.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: Well, I mean, it's, it's, it's a brilliant plan because it has built in consequences.
Merlin: As you say, you will make her a nerd.
Merlin: You will make her an outcast.
Merlin: You will have her, uh, but, but she's also going to get self-confidence.
Merlin: She's not going to care that she's an outcast.
Merlin: And isn't that the perfect way to enter?
John: She's going to be chopping boards in half and,
John: And I'm going to try and find her a karate teacher who will only speak to her in Japanese.
John: So we'll double threat it.
John: Well, it's triple threat.
John: Nerddom protects you in high school.
John: This is counter to what we always think of nerddom, that nerddom is an albatross in high school.
John: But in fact, it protects you.
Merlin: That's a kind of inoculation.
Merlin: You're giving her a little bit of the cowpox so that she won't get big cowpox later.
John: Exactly.
John: You inoculate them with nerdy mind pursuits.
Merlin: It's interesting because you're not saying like, oh, you're going to teach her to be into Magic the Gathering or something.
John: I don't want to be retarded.
Merlin: Remind our listeners that John is sick.
Merlin: He's not in his right mind right now.
Merlin: It's John that said that.
John: No, it's a wonderful kind of like – there's nothing intrinsically nerdy about martial arts.
John: They are like globally – It is hard work.
John: It's hard and it's fantastic and it comes with all the attendant like Buddhism that I barely understand.
Merlin: You get disciplined.
Merlin: Like the thing is kindergarten, my daughter goes to school for however many hours a day to learn how to follow orders.
Merlin: That's what kindergarten is, learning to sit still, learning to –
Merlin: Yeah, and to not hit people and stuff like that.
Merlin: But I mean she took a few weeks of – we won martial arts.
Merlin: We won – I don't know.
Merlin: It was a pretty generic version of J Random Karate she took.
Merlin: But it was – she did it for a few weeks and it was pretty impressive.
Merlin: I mean you got to schedule.
Merlin: You got to be respectful.
Merlin: It's got all of this stuff to it that I could never give her.
John: Right.
Merlin: So really I am more than happy.
Merlin: Uh, timing.
Merlin: It was a terrible time of day.
Merlin: I don't know how you schedule anything for a child at three 30 PM.
Merlin: I'm tired.
Merlin: She's tired.
Merlin: No one wants to make karate at three 30.
Merlin: So it was my problem.
Merlin: I broke down.
Merlin: I didn't want to sit there and watch her do it, but, but no, but you know, I want to teach her.
Merlin: I wanted to go and learn some kind of really cool, you know, mostly hand and foot like Kung Fu.
Merlin: That's what I would like that.
Merlin: Cause it's cool too.
Merlin: It looks cool.
Yeah.
Merlin: Taekwondo, you can literally break everybody's bones, but it doesn't look nearly as cool as Kung Fu.
Merlin: I want it to look cool.
Merlin: Even if it's nerdy, eventually when she's wearing her dojo to the singles bar and somebody comes up and remarks on her big boobies, she can break exactly a specific bone in somebody's hand and still not drop her drink.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: You know what?
Merlin: I really, that's what, that's the thing, you know, it's like you're hitting two inches behind the board to be able to do that.
Merlin: And she's got, she's got to have a whole lifetime behind it.
Merlin: That will pay her back forever.
John: Well, this is what I'm saying.
John: What if she's ever buried alive in a coffin?
Merlin: Okay.
John: I'm listening.
John: Does she sit there and scream and claw the coffin lid until she runs out of breath?
John: Or does she put her hand against the lid of the coffin and gradually make a fist and punch in a very small amount of space until she has punched through the lid of the coffin and dug herself out?
Merlin: I think this is a very interesting scenario.
Merlin: I must tell you, because first of all, okay, there's some levels to this.
Merlin: Level number one, if you're buried alive, are you okay to talk about this?
John: I really don't like talking about being buried alive, but I think for the sake of this podcast, we can do it.
Merlin: What about locked in a closet?
Merlin: Can we do that?
John: Is it on the ground floor?
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: And there might be people coming by by the end of the day.
John: Yeah.
John: All right.
John: We can talk about that.
John: If it's a basement closet, I don't want to talk about it.
Merlin: I find it very implausible when people don't initially panic in a movie.
Merlin: I think everyone, pretty much everyone should initially panic in a situation like that.
Merlin: And when they don't, I'm a little bit suspicious unless they're Matt Damon.
John: Yeah, right.
John: Sure, he doesn't panic.
John: Cold as ice.
Merlin: Okay, but then here's the thing.
Merlin: I'm also, I find it equally implausible if people have not explored every square centimeter of the space to try and find a trap, trap door, some kind of a lever, a painting that they could move, possibly a bust.
Merlin: I think you should be looking for, and when people don't do that, I'm a little surprised.
Merlin: The thing is, what your daughter is going to have, and I wish to God my daughter would have, if God forbid she's ever buried alive, is that understanding that you just might be able to get out of this, right?
John: If you remember your training,
Merlin: yeah you really keep your keep your head about you and then get a lot of energy because now here's the next level though what if she hits it i don't freak you out here what if she hits it and then six feet of dirt uh cover her up and she doesn't even have the cushion of the coffin anymore well then speed the collapse you know what i mean like if you're going to die of being buried alive
John: Let's get it over with and not have the four hours of ripping your fingernails off trying to claw your way out of a coffin.
John: Let's just have dirt in the mouth.
Merlin: I think with the right amount of training, you could do it for six to eight hours.
Merlin: Probably.
Merlin: But here's the other thing.
Merlin: I think based on what I know about villains is that most of them have a built-in hubris.
Merlin: They do something stupid.
Merlin: They get a little bit showy.
Merlin: There's a walkie-talkie or a camera involved, and they find some way to game it.
Merlin: So I think also you might want to show her – well, obviously when she's ready, you show her enough movies so that she knows how she might be able to take it and turn it and flip the villain to their side, maybe end up with them in the coffin instead.
John: Well, see, what I'm counting on is that part of her backstory is that her father at some point turns to the dark side.
Merlin: This is your daughter?
John: This is my daughter, yeah.
John: Her father becomes a supervillain.
John: A supervillain who believes that he is acting in the cause of justice and right, but he becomes a madman.
John: And then that's informing her character arc because she has all these powers, but she just wants to live as a normal person.
John: She doesn't want anybody to know that her last name is Roderick because that's a name that lives in infamy in her world.
Merlin: Oh, it would be like her name being Magneto or something.
John: Exactly.
John: So she just wants to go to a regular college.
John: Magnetowicz.
John: And not use her special powers.
John: She puts on glasses and puts her hair up in a bun because she's just a regular nerd.
Merlin: She's just another quote-unquote library science student at UW.
John: That's right.
John: Just starting her freshman year until her father's...
John: her father's minions and sworn enemies start another battle for the future of earth blah blah blah etc etc but I want her to be ready
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: You know, one problem is if you become too successful, you know, you look at all of these stories, you know, where the parent is extremely successful.
Merlin: I mean, ask Frank Sinatra Jr.
Merlin: Was he a happy guy?
Merlin: Well, no, because his dad was a dick and really successful.
Merlin: Ask Bing Crosby's kids how they felt.
Merlin: Well, their dad was a dick and he was really successful.
Merlin: I think if you were to really focus on becoming a tragic character, you could do a lot for your daughter.
Merlin: You give her something to fight for.
Merlin: She's not going to fight for you if you're winning Grammys and stuff.
John: Yeah, and this is the thing.
John: I don't want my kid to be Bing Crosby's kid.
John: You want your kid to be Bing Crosby.
John: And what mistakes did Bing Crosby's father make?
John: Those are the mistakes that I'm trying to emulate.
Merlin: Oh, I see.
Merlin: You want to be Bing Crosby Sr.
John: Yeah, exactly.
John: I don't want my daughter to end up being Nancy Sinatra.
John: That's no way to go.
Merlin: Yeah, Bing was not nice to his kids.
John: Yeah, you know, he and I lived in the same dorm.
Merlin: Huh, non-contiguously?
John: Yeah, right, separated by 50 years.
John: Is it Gonzaga?
John: Gonzaga, yeah.
John: He's a Gonzaga alum and famously got kicked out of Gonzaga.
John: uh for being a discipline problem and now they have a statue of him in front of the library so i was also kicked out of gonzaga where's your statue where's my fucking statue you should hit your kid with a belt i mean no offense but you know maybe that's maybe maybe they were looking for a turnaround maybe they're looking for a little more decisiveness yeah i feel like they i feel like i need to make another christmas album i think that's what really put being over the top
John: You need to make a Christmas album that's not so irreverent.
Merlin: Oh, man.
Merlin: Parenting is complicated.
Merlin: You think you'll do that again when you do another holiday album?
Merlin: That was a lot.
John: It was not a lot of work.
John: It was a lot of work, but it was a lot of work packed into a short amount of time, which is the kind of work that we like to do.
John: But, you know, my feeling about the holidays is like, well, I share it with Jonathan Colton.
John: This is feeling of total ambivalence to the holidays.
Yeah.
John: I was hoping to go... So I got offered a Spanish tour around Christmas this year.
John: Right.
John: And I went and I looked at all the details and I emailed back and forth with my Spanish people.
John: And it was one of those Spanish tours that had been designed by science to sound amazing.
John: And when you put all the numbers into the function machine...
John: And you stand on the other side of the function machine, and the function machine, of course, just has one red light on it.
John: Like Captain Pike?
John: No buttons, no switches.
John: And you sit on the other side of the function machine, and you're waiting for the readout to come out the other side.
John: Like, how's this going to... Is this all going to pencil out?
John: And it just puts a big poop.
John: It just poops.
John: You put all the numbers, all the money in one side and it just poops on the other side.
Merlin: So timing, money, travel, dates, hassle, people.
Merlin: The function machine just spat out a big red poop.
John: Yeah, and all of those things line up.
John: It's just that the people who represent pop music in Spain have got it down to a science where they know exactly how much...
John: to offer you so that it feels like a Sophie's choice.
John: Like they, they, they, they, they find the amount of money that is just enough that you feel like turning it down is crazy.
John: But if you accept it,
John: you are actually, if you accept it, you actually lose, you know, like in the end, it costs you money to go play for people.
Merlin: And there's, I mean, like the way I would think of it, there's not enough of an inconvenience cushion that like, if this as inevitably happens does not go as well as it seems like it will, will I be sitting there in a hotel room in Madrid cutting myself that I ever did this?
John: Yeah, that's exactly right.
John: What it ends up being, and I've done enough European tours to have had this experience multiple times.
John: You are sitting in the airport on the way home, and you are looking in your money bag, which at one point on the tour, three weeks in, that money bag was full of money.
John: And there was a time, you know, one week prior when you were sitting in a hotel room somewhere in Zagora,
John: And your money bag was so full of money that you were like, I'm never going to work again.
John: I'm rich.
John: And then that last week is all people showing up and saying, hello, my friend.
John: I am the person who supplied the wire that ran the electricity from the building to the amps.
John: And I need 1,000 euros.
John: And you just pay 1,000 euros to so many people on your way out.
John: And then you're at the airport and there's just a line of people.
Merlin: That sounds like a fix.
John: It's like a line of people like when you're leaving Downton Abbey and all of the staff has lined up.
John: But you have to give every one of them 1,000 euros.
John: And then you're sitting in the airport and you're waiting for your plane and you're looking at your money bag and it just has moths in it.
Merlin: Gracias, senor.
John: And you're thinking, I have people to pay when I get back home.
John: There were people that like... I hate that feeling.
John: There was the t-shirt guy.
John: I still got to pay him.
John: And there was the... There's all the shit I put on my credit card.
John: And it's just like...
John: So in the famous words of Eugene Merman, there used to be a time when a hotel room felt like pay.
John: Like getting a free hotel room felt like
John: you were getting pain.
John: Right.
John: And then as time goes on, that's, that's no longer the feeling.
Merlin: Oh, I'm really suspicious of anything where they take care of things for you.
John: Oh, see that's it.
John: And it's exactly how they do business over there.
Merlin: It's like, we got it all covered.
Merlin: All you got to do is turn key, right?
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: El turno, El turno.
Merlin: You show up and, and you just walk right in, you plug in and bamonos.
John: It's all ready.
John: And here's all the money that you're going to get.
John: It's just that all of those things are taken care of.
John: By my brother-in-law and his brother-in-law and his brother-in-law.
John: It's like the Medici's or whatever.
John: It's, you know, like all those popes, all those popes that became popes, even though they were pederasts.
John: It's just this – it's a long circle of brother-in-laws that keeps – and that's why Italy has had 45 governments in the last 30 years and it's why I'm not doing this Spanish tour.
Merlin: So it's – well, I don't talk out of school here but it sounds like you – like in the period of like what?
Merlin: Like 10 days.
Merlin: Didn't you get like a ridiculous deluge of like offers –
Merlin: Like, ah, when I pretend it falls 10 years old, let's come do shows here and there.
Merlin: And it seemed like you had this, you just turned your, turn your umbrella upside down and all of these gigs would just fall into your umbrella lab.
John: Yeah.
John: But then you, I mean, and it ends up that the, the, the, so the offers that seem like completely legitimate are exactly as reliable as the offers that you get on Twitter from people saying, come to Iowa city.
John: Yeah.
John: You can stay at my house.
John: It's basically like, come to Spain.
John: This tweet is not legally binding.
John: But it's funny.
John: A couple of years ago, I got off.
John: The government of Iceland put together a Reykjavik-Seattle friendship committee.
John: And they were like, we want Reykjavik and Seattle to think of each other as sister cities in the world.
John: And they brought a bunch of Icelandic musicians to Seattle.
John: And we put on a big show where we played with our Icelandic counterparts.
John: And Eric Corson and I played some songs with this guy Mugason from Iceland, who was a great guy.
John: And we had a wonderful time together.
John: And then the Icelandic government said, we want to fly you to Iceland.
John: And we're going to do the same thing in Reykjavik.
John: Put on a big show and it'll be a bunch of Icelandic musicians and Seattle musicians.
John: And we want you to be like the centerpiece of it.
John: And I said, amazing, of course.
John: I can't wait.
John: And then as the weeks went by...
John: you know, the first thing they said was, uh, Moogason can't do it because he's going to be in Scotland mixing his record with the Arab strap.
John: But we got another guy.
John: We got the younger cousin of the bass player of the side project of the piano player from Sigur Rós.
John: And he's going to be the Moogason for your show.
John: And I was like, oh, that's all right, okay.
John: The Einar-in-law.
John: Yeah, exactly.
John: And then they're like, you need to send us, you need to, you need to send us a credit card for the hotel room.
John: We're going to pay for it, but we need to, you need to send the credit card number because that's how we do it in Iceland.
John: And I was like, the show isn't for six months.
John: And they were like, we have to have it by tomorrow or the whole thing is canceled.
John: Oh my Christ.
John: Because you, because you know, it's Iceland and this is how we do business.
John: And I was like, well, slow down a little bit here.
John: Like everything's going to be fine.
John: Um,
John: And then I'm talking to them a little bit more, and they're like, well, so you and your show are, you know, you're absolutely in the prime spot of this Reykjavik Summerfest.
John: You go on at 3.30 in the afternoon on the Gnome Hat stage, and you're right before the puppet show.
John: And I was like, right before the puppet show, really?
John: You realize that is like... That's a canonical rock and roll joke.
John: Yeah, that is an American rock joke.
John: Puppet show and long winters.
John: Right, right before the puppet show.
John: And they were like, they were extremely offended.
John: They were like, puppet shows are a very important part of Icelandic culture, sir.
John: I was like, this deal is changing all the time.
John: And then the guy from the hotel was really mad and he's like, you're staying two extra days and the festival's not paying for it and you have to pay for it.
John: And this is the height of Icelandic tourist season, so it's 1,000 kroner a night.
John: And the kroner is worth, the kroner on the international market is worth 40 pounds of mushrooms.
John: And 40 pounds of mushrooms is 600 American dollars.
Merlin: This sounds like a total jam up, John.
John: It was like, and the more emails I got from Iceland, the more confused I was.
John: And I was like, all I wanted to do was go play in Iceland with Mugusson.
John: And now I'm playing before a puppet show with the, with the second cousin of the third bass player of Sigur Rós in the middle of the day.
John: And I've seen some documentaries about Iceland.
John: I know that the best I can hope for is polite applause, but,
John: There's a bigger chance that they will just openly scoff at me.
John: And gnomes running all over the place.
John: And you know how I feel about gnomes.
John: And I don't like any currency that I have to translate an amount into mushrooms on its way to dollars.
Merlin: Are they on the mushroom standard?
John: It's like this weird thing where it's not tied to the euro.
John: It's tied to the mushroom market.
Yeah.
Merlin: I honestly can't tell if you're kidding.
Merlin: See, I would believe that.
Merlin: Everything I've heard, when I first got into the sugar cubes, I tried to learn just enough, and I was so disoriented so quickly that I ran the other way.
Merlin: It sounded like deliberately confusing as a culture.
Merlin: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Merlin: Delightful, they take care of their people, but it sounds completely baffling as a culture.
John: They harvest geothermal steam and turn it into magic tricks.
John: I don't know how Iceland... I don't believe... I'm not even sure that Iceland is real.
Merlin: There was a guy named Daryl.
Merlin: It sounds like something you would build in the window of Macy's.
John: Yes, exactly right.
John: It's a train set.
Merlin: As done by Danny Elfman and Charles Bukowski.
Merlin: It just doesn't make sense.
John: There was a guy in my ninth grade English class named Daryl who had formerly lived in Iceland because his father was in the Air Force.
John: And Daryl said at one point that people in Iceland drive at night to save gas.
John: what he said that everybody in iceland if they have errands they wait until it's night they drive at night to save gas and i was like i don't i i don't think any i think this is all fake i think that's either made up and it's super annoying or it's true and it's super annoying
John: I think it's a reverse Area 51 where the Air Force has been telling us that there's this place called Iceland in order to distract us from the portal where the alien motherships enter the center of the Earth.
Merlin: So we spend the afternoon Googling about Iceland.
Merlin: We're reading Wikipedia things and all these apparently real quote-unquote articles about quote-unquote Iceland.
Merlin: Meanwhile, over here, the portal is opening and closing like Sauron's great eye.
John: That's right.
John: That's right.
John: And we're not even noticing it because we are like on a whale watch or whatever.
John: Mushrooms, gnomes.
John: But in any case, that was the first time I had ever just looked a bunch of money because it was a bunch of money on the surface of it.
John: Like a five figures money.
John: It was just, yeah, here's a ton of money.
John: It's Iceland money.
John: But if it is to be believed, it can be transferred into American money.
John: Via mushrooms.
John: But you have to pay for these hotels, and there's going to be a shame surcharge as everyone tisks at you.
Merlin: You have to tip the mushroom EA when they turn it into dollars.
John: And I pictured myself at the airport in Reykjavik buying like 14 Icelandic sweaters.
John: I knew I was going to do it, so I had to factor that into the cost.
John: And so I knew it was a trip that if I took it, I was going to come back.
John: I was going to come back with a chapped ass.
John: I was going to come back with no money and mad.
John: And so I turned it down and I still never been to Iceland.
John: So much have I not been to Iceland that I don't even believe it's a real country.
John: But I look back at that decision and I can't fault it.
John: Because the initial deal started going sideways right away.
John: And from all signs, my communications with these Icelandic people... I was talking to the consulate and the ambassador's office and stuff.
John: And they were talking to me this way as though it were normal.
John: I was like, listen, I am not a Scandinavian.
John: I do not...
John: I do not like being barked at about a credit card.
John: Don't bark at me, you little fairy people.
Merlin: Boy, you're touching a nerve, Icelandic nerve for me.
Merlin: It's become so difficult for me to do business with anyone because my...
Merlin: Icelandar has gotten so heavily tuned to what could go wrong with something because it does.
Merlin: It sounds ridiculous to say, but – and the problem is the more of that dealing with strangers about business that I have to do – and the thing is when you're doing stuff like we do in our own ways, you have people that you work with and God willing, you work with them again.
Merlin: And even then, this may not be the same conditions.
Merlin: But more often than not, at least for me, I'm working with people I've never met before.
Merlin: I'm talking about money I've never gotten paid before.
Merlin: I'm talking about doing work in a place I've never been before.
Merlin: And it's all extremely speculative and requires a tremendous amount of at least communication and hopefully trust.
Merlin: And the trust really comes mostly from me because they're asking me to do a thing.
Merlin: And I wouldn't say this except I think this is true for more people than they may realize.
Merlin: There's all kinds of ways that this can happen.
Merlin: I mean it's the basis of every scam really is like I'm going to give you this thing that seems either like –
Merlin: Spanishly accurate or Icelandically wonderful.
Merlin: And the thing is, as long as you don't think about it too much, it's going to seem like a good gig.
John: Right.
John: Because they hand you a business card.
Merlin: and and and your trust they are counting on you to trust them because they have a business card that says something even though they've never in in the many years that you in the 40 whatever four years you've been on earth you've never gotten money from them for anything ever which is not a bad thing but we must remember that until john has gotten money from them john has never gotten money from them this is this is what happened when i worked uh when i when i played some shows for microsoft
Merlin: oh net 90 net 90 i bet they're net 90 they pay 30 they pay three months after you do it yeah well and not only that but i had to go through the entire process of becoming a microsoft contractor oh john you don't want to oh and i went like you're like you're fucking boeing it was it was right like you're like you're gonna be like a contractor yeah providing like uh like ivy equipment to the united states marines
John: Yeah, I had to I had to walk through some it was like it was like walking through the Starship Enterprise every door like into Maxwell Smart's cave.
John: It's just like you walk through a door and then there's a door that goes and you walk through the door and you're just like deeper and deeper.
John: Welcome to Antichamber one.
John: Yeah, it's like you guys promised me this money.
John: Oh, it makes me so goddamn angry.
Merlin: I already did the goddamn thing.
Merlin: What am I doing?
Merlin: And for me, what that comes down to, what they really hire me for in most cases is to come in and do a one-hour talk.
Merlin: And I could parse that a bunch of ways.
Merlin: Well, no, actually, I charge like it's one day because it is one day for me.
Merlin: But yeah, sure.
Merlin: Essentially, you want me to come in and talk for 50 minutes about something that you think is important.
Merlin: But to do that, it's excruciating what you have to go through just to do this.
Merlin: Don't you have petty cash around?
Merlin: This is what you pay for one day of light bulbs in your company.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: Meet me at the stage door with an envelope full of money.
Merlin: It doesn't have to be complicated.
Merlin: Okay, so I'm going to say – I'm going to try and get this out because I think this is important to me.
Merlin: When it comes down – well, I guess what I would say, there's these, I think, in threes.
Merlin: One of the things is I think there has to be – what people come at you with something involving some combination of time, money, and respect or courtesy.
Merlin: Right.
Merlin: And in the best situations, they have lots of time to work it out.
Merlin: They have a reasonable to excellent amount of money to give you and a huge amount of respect and courtesy for your time and for the relationship.
Merlin: And ideally, you'll respond in kind.
Merlin: But in the worst cases, you get none of those, which is somebody calls you at the last minute and then they're all pissed off because you won't do it for free.
Merlin: That's the bottom rung.
Merlin: But if you can work all those things out – and the courtesy thing matters because you can tell if they don't understand that you are a free agent on your own and that you're basically – you're a net 30 guy.
Merlin: Like you've got to get paid because you have – the people that work for you want to get paid.
Merlin: Like you've got to pay for things.
Merlin: They're expenses.
Merlin: I don't want to go buy this plane ticket just because you think this might be a good idea.
Merlin: But here's my thing is like I like people –
Merlin: I like people who give me money.
Merlin: I like people who give me a lot of money and I like people who give me a lot of money more than once.
John: Yeah.
John: Yeah.
John: Those are the best people.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: But you know, giving me money, giving to, giving it to me quickly and giving to me more than once.
Merlin: That's great.
Merlin: So the thing is that you got to have at least two of those.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: You know what I mean?
Merlin: In other words, I'm not putting this well already, but like to me, give it to me quickly.
John: Well, give it to me, give it to me more than once.
Merlin: And again, in the worst case, you've got somebody who you'll never work with again that wants to give you next to no money and it'll take a long time.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: Okay.
Merlin: So here's the thing.
Merlin: Like if we work together a lot and it's a medium amount of money,
Merlin: Take all the time you want.
Merlin: I can wait.
Merlin: I can wait a little bit on that.
Merlin: But the thing is, if there's hardly any time involved, like if you want this, like if you're really hot to like get this thing signed that you want done like next week, and especially if it's not a lot of money, like when I hang up this phone, that's when it's due.
Merlin: And all the time that that's not paid, we're not working together, and it frustrates me that people don't get that, that their urgency about that stuff – I don't mean to piss and moan like white wine about this, but I think it's something – when people work on their own, they put up with a lot of bullshit from people who are bullies.
Merlin: And they make their entire, they, they spend their entire life doing nothing, but dealing with people like you and me and then being bullies.
Merlin: They paint you this picture of what it's going to be like to go to Spain.
Merlin: And then if you actually sit there and look at the details of the painting, it's not actually that attractive, but now it's your thing.
Merlin: Cause you agreed to do it.
John: Yeah.
John: And no, nobody respects the freelancer and nobody respects the, you know, it's, uh, everybody takes their cut, but they're all sitting behind a desk and they're just, you know, they're making their living, taking 5% of everything.
John: But,
John: But they don't wait for their invoices to get filled.
John: You know what I mean?
John: Like the money comes through.
John: They are where the money sits and waits.
Merlin: Yeah, and if you're a guy at Microsoft who's empowered to spend $5,800 on this event, well, then that's not his money, that dude.
Merlin: That dude is going to go fill out some forms, and then you're going to be the one who has to show up and run on the treadmill for two hours in order to get the basic form that gets you the form that gets you the form.
John: How did you know that that was the gig I did?
Merlin: I've done some work with Microsoft.
Merlin: I've been on the treadmill.
John: I showed up and I ran on a treadmill for two hours and then they applauded and they took three months to give me the check.
Merlin: Ah, man.
Merlin: I have a very, very quick story about the worst gig I never should have almost taken.
Merlin: And it was like when... Did you take it?
John: I didn't understand that syntax.
Merlin: Exactly.
Merlin: I'm still not sure.
Merlin: It might still be going through accounts receivable.
Merlin: No, but it was right around the time a really important like...
Merlin: Back when my book still had a chance of getting made, I had a draft that was due and I got this impossibly great offer from a major pharma company in the Bay Area.
Merlin: So like basically, oh, it's really going to be great.
Merlin: All you're going to have to do is come out and do this talk and blah, blah, blah.
Merlin: It's all the typical like Merlin's greatest hits of pain because it sounded like the greatest thing in the world.
Merlin: I was going to come down there.
Merlin: And I just – I knew I could feel it in my gut.
Merlin: Don't even keep talking to this person.
Merlin: Just don't do it.
Merlin: Don't do it.
Merlin: Don't do it.
Merlin: Of the million things that went wrong about this, that made it a terrible decision for me to even keep talking to that person.
Merlin: Because the worst part is the waiting.
Merlin: The waiting is, as Tom Petty says, the hardest part.
Merlin: Dealing with people who say they're going to give the shit this week or give it to you today.
Merlin: Oh, by the end of the day, you'll have it.
Merlin: OK, but then it's Friday.
Merlin: Friday goes by and now it's Tuesday and Tyler was sick and you still haven't gotten it.
Merlin: But now I'm turning other stuff away.
Merlin: For this make-believe work, the best part of this thing though, the best part and the part that we got so hung up on, they sent me, OK, attached, .docx, please sign this and send it back.
Merlin: And it was literally for a contractor.
Merlin: They sent me – I had to have a million dollars in insurance in order to do a one-hour talk.
Merlin: I showed it to my lawyer and he said basically this is like the contract they would give to Boeing.
Merlin: You have to do all this – so they wanted me to sign a thing that said I had a million dollars in liability insurance, that they owned all the IP on like every word of what I said.
Merlin: You ever get that?
Merlin: You ever get that in a contract?
Merlin: No, because music is like – But if you get the person who doesn't know, they just go grab a contract from Sally and throw it at you.
Merlin: They may not even look – they're thinking of somebody who would come in and say like, oh, get the education contract.
Merlin: Well, that might be the education contract for somebody who comes in and devises a two-year plan with workbooks and CD-ROMs that you would want to keep proprietary.
Merlin: Right.
Merlin: But some dipshit with a podcast comes in and talks about your email for an hour.
Merlin: I'm not going to sign that over.
Merlin: No.
Merlin: I'm sorry, John.
Merlin: This is boring.
Merlin: It's just frustrating.
Merlin: Yeah, I understand.
Merlin: I mean I – I hate dealing with people in bad faith.
Merlin: And again, I feel like a putz.
Merlin: It's like going to Flingers and I'm the only one who doesn't want to acknowledge the fact that the waitress and me aren't really friends and I'm the dick.
Merlin: Well –
Merlin: Poor kid, I want to help you.
John: If John Flansburg still listens to this podcast, he's so mad right now that we don't have a cough button.
Merlin: I don't think he listens anymore.
John: Can you be sure of that?
John: Man, you're racist, friend.
John: You know, my old New York City rock and roll lawyer that was eventually...
John: that was eventually indicted for fraud.
John: Those guys, you know, they were really good about spending a year and a half going through a contract like that with a red pencil and nothing ever happens.
John: The whole business of businesses...
Merlin: Oh, when you're playing at my level, though, I have a much simpler unit test or, you know, kind of a little software test, which is go through and find the first thing that's probably that is going to either be a pain in the ass or show that they're kind of dicks who haven't thought about this.
Merlin: It only takes one of those and then we're done because I'm usually in the first sentence, right?
Merlin: It's on the first page usually, yeah, about who the parties are.
Merlin: And like I'm going to spend $300 an hour to like – oh, by the way, and in the case of that gig I never took, what I spent in having my attorney look at that contract already covered half of the gig that I never got just dealing with the contract for the Boeing-style contract.
John: Right.
Merlin: Okay.
Merlin: Changing topics.
Merlin: If you want to talk about this, I got hydrogen peroxide.
Merlin: That's too boring.
Merlin: I was going to ask you about touring in Europe because it sounds like a real mess in general.
Merlin: It's probably boring to talk about.
John: Oh, no, it's not boring.
John: I mean, it's wonderful to tour in Europe.
John: I should save it.
Merlin: It sounds like you deal with so many different people.
Merlin: It isn't even like dealing with different guys you call on Tuesday morning in different places in America.
Merlin: It sounds like every system is a completely different fiefdom.
John: Well, and I can only hope that that has changed.
John: But in 2003 and 2004, let's say 10 years ago, I don't see how you could live in Europe.
John: Because every single country had a separate cell phone empire that as soon as you crossed from the Netherlands to Belgium, you were paying a dollar a minute or you were paying a euro a second to use your cell phone.
John: And, you know...
John: That's the equivalent of going from Seattle to Portland, or it's even further from Seattle to Portland.
John: I mean, in the distance from Seattle to Portland, you would have crossed four national borders and paid, you know, and paid like...
John: out of country roaming charges to four different countries.
John: Wow.
John: And, you know, there are as many people in Europe that think of the continent of Europe as sort of one big playground as there are people in America who feel that way.
John: And if you were somebody who was, you know, who had friends in...
John: in cities all over, it was maddening.
John: And that is even Europe after they took down the national borders.
John: The first time I went there in 1989...
John: You still had to go through passport control to get from one country to another.
John: Looking back at it now, it makes sense if it takes you five days on a horse to get from Brussels to Berlin.
John: But as soon as the car was invented, it's incredible to me that those countries maintained their chauvinistic sovereignty through all of the 20th century and all of those wars.
John: I mean, it's just insane.
John: And it's crazy to think that that was...
John: that my firsthand experience of it was just that my fucking cell phone stopped working an hour after I bought it.
John: You know, the, the first time I bought a cell phone in Europe, I went into a, into a Vodafone store on the dam in Amsterdam and I bought a cell phone and I like made five calls and then I was in Germany and the thing was useless or, or, or close to useless.
Yeah.
John: And there were people that used to buy little SIM cards for every country and keep them in little plastic bags and switch them out every time.
Merlin: I mean, it was like currency or something, where you just know, oh, I'm crossing over, I've got to switch to this other chip.
John: Totally bananas.
John: And I don't know if that's changed.
John: It's got to have changed, but maybe it hasn't.
John: Who knows?
John: I haven't been... I have not tried... The last four times I've been to Europe, I have treated it like it was...
John: I was out to sea.
John: I landed, I turned my phone onto airport mode, and I used it as a Wi-Fi device, but I never ever tried to use my phone as a phone, and I didn't ask anybody about it.
John: I was just like, forget it.
John: Fuck you forever.
John: I'm not going to use my phone over here.
John: And...
John: uh and so touring is like touring over there is is wonderful and it's and there's a part of me that's very brokenhearted about it because i made lifelong friends over there that i haven't seen in a long time because i don't have a new record and the whole the whole basis of my life
John: that I established 10 years ago was, it was premised on this, put out a new record every year and a half, and keep this going as long as it can, and all these friends you have made around the world will continue to be your friends, because you'll see them every few months.
John: And as soon as you stop doing that, as soon as I stopped making records, I stopped being...
John: part of a part of the economy of places and I went back to like if you want to come to Germany by all means come as a tourist and we're busy so you come as a tourist and and you know maybe we'll meet you for coffee or whatever but like I'm not playing and that's true in the United States too I mean I have friends I haven't seen in years because I stopped doing the thing that that gave me a reason to be there
John: And now I don't have a reason to be there.
John: And that's part of my ennui, my ongoing ennui all the time.
John: I think it qualifies as angst.
John: I think he moved on to angst.
John: I have angst.
John: And it is the angst of what is my reason?
John: What is my reason for being here?
John: I don't have one.
Merlin: Well, I feel that way about – in retrospect, I feel that way about college where at the time I – it was – whenever good things – I'm sure this is some kind of a cognitive bias.
Merlin: But good things that happen to us, we deserve.
Merlin: You know, we had it coming.
Merlin: Right.
Merlin: And things that aren't as good that happened to us or like, you know, a problem or somebody's fault.
Merlin: So going from being like a fairly kind of lonely kid living in the, in the provinces to going to college and being surrounded by smart people and like going to this tiny school where I knew everybody was just, I was like, ah, I mean, it wasn't great.
Merlin: It wasn't all beer and Skittles, but there's a lot of beer, but like I, I suddenly was surrounded by people and you would just, what I'm trying to say is like, you would just, I would bump into a hundred people a day without trying.
John: Yeah.
Merlin: I sometimes didn't want to see those 100 people, but I would just see these people all day long.
Merlin: It was really jarring to me to leave that environment.
Merlin: And then suddenly – I mean I still have my friends.
Merlin: I still have a lot of friends.
Merlin: But you had to be much more intentional about seeing people.
Merlin: And I think that's what you're describing is not so different from me checking my mail in Hamilton Center where I'm going to see 20 people I know along the way and catch up in this impossibly casual, easy way.
Merlin: And I think that really – that goes away.
Merlin: And in your case, it was that you wouldn't have to – like right now, what would you do?
Merlin: Would you sit and make a list of all those people?
Merlin: You probably couldn't even remember them all.
Merlin: But that would lead you past taking that tour, would take you past at least half of those people that you'd like to see without you even trying.
John: Well, yeah.
Merlin: It would be easy.
John: The fifth time that we played in Munich, there were people there that had been to all five shows and that I had talked to five times in the last three years.
John: And that we had spent, we'd gone out for drinks afterwards and had spent some merry, merry times.
John: And those people, after the first few times, you're like, I am looking forward to seeing that person again.
John: They are kin in a way.
John: And in high school, I had that.
John: I had that group of friends in high school.
John: My high school friends were very tight.
John: And we were very competitive with each other.
John: If I look back at my high school, my 10 friends in high school, like they were in a lot of ways...
John: In a lot of ways, my relationships with them were like my relationship with Colin Malloy, that it was a friendly and very competitive and often like the competition turned to thinly veiled hostility.
John: But these were my closest pals, you know, where we were always kind of trying to shoot the other one down, both in class and socially and
John: Like, it was not considered... We weren't loyal to one another in that way.
John: You know, if you could shoot your friend down while he was trying to chat up a girl at a party, if you could walk by and make some cutting remark and, like, blow up his game, that was considered fair play in high school.
John: And there wasn't a sense of, like, we're all in this together, you know.
John: And when I went away to college, my experience at Gonzaga was maybe much closer to what most people think of as how normal friends treat each other.
John: All the people I knew in college, they sort of liked each other and they were friends with each other.
John: And I didn't understand those relationships.
John: I was like...
John: At what point are we going to start playing mean pranks on each other?
John: And my college friends had all come from whatever their high school experiences had been, mostly that you don't have that many friends, but the friends you do have are warm and supportive.
John: And then all through the grunge years, that was a deeply competitive and fraught era for me.
John: It wasn't until the indie rock years that I really felt like I had a network of people that I liked, that liked me, and that we weren't out to get each other.
John: And I have remnants of that, certainly, but I've really isolated myself from it.
John: And it's a weird thing to come into in your 30s.
John: Like, hey, look at this.
John: I know people and they're not all trying to cut me off at the knees.
Merlin: It depends on the context in the environment.
Merlin: Based on my viewings of many movies about the U.S.
Merlin: military and special ops, there's a certain kind of constant jostling that you do one to another.
Merlin: And that's understood that that's part of the thing.
Merlin: In high school, I mean, God, in my group, there would be kinds of jostling.
Merlin: But we all knew...
Merlin: what a fucking homemade mess each of us was and how close we were to like kind of falling apart at the seams.
Merlin: So I think, you know, not, not pushing too far on somebody's bed wedding was just considered, you know, decorous.
John: Right.
John: And that was, that was the decorum that was absolutely missing.
John: Yeah.
John: in my group of friends.
John: When you were in high school.
John: In high school.
John: If you were outed as a bedwetter, oh my God, your best friends were the ones that were going to shout it from the rooftops.
John: And we were always looking for the... Because it was a fairly impressive group of kids, we were always looking for the Achilles heel to knock the other ones down a peg.
John: And it might have inculcated in me this idea of friendship as being combative.
John: This is an interesting question for me because my whole adult life, combative friendship is my model of
John: The famous conversation I had with Sean Nelson, famous between me and Sean Nelson, where he said, you don't like any of the things I like.
John: Why are you friends with me?
John: Friends are people who like the same stuff.
John: And I said, what?
John: That's crazy.
John: Friends don't like the same stuff.
John: That's what makes them friends.
John: They like hate the other person's taste.
Merlin: That's how you know your friends.
Merlin: But just to be clear also, it was consensual with your other friends who jostled thusly so.
Merlin: Oh, they were evil.
Merlin: I mean, they were terrible.
John: Yeah, but they... Let me wear your bed for you.
John: It was totally consensual, but it was like... I mean, one time, a couple of guys came by my house to get me for something, and I was in the bathtub and...
John: upstairs and they rang the doorbell and I stuck my head out the window.
John: It was like, Hey, what's up you guys.
John: And they kind of stepped back from the front door and looked up and they were like, Oh, we thought you'd be ready.
John: And I was like, I'll be ready in a minute.
John: Just a second.
John: I'm, uh, you know, I'm in the shower.
John: I'll be right down.
John: And I said, I was in the shower because taking a bath is uncool.
John: You don't want to say I'm taking a bath.
John: You want to say I'm taking a shower.
Um,
John: But it was in the middle of winter and I'm standing in the window and apparently there's steam coming off of me because I'm leaning out.
John: I jumped out of the bathtub and I'm leaning out the window in the cold.
John: But my hair is dry, they note.
John: Uh-oh, clocked.
John: So for a week or two after that...
John: They really tried to get the nickname Steamin' John going.
John: They really wanted that to have traction.
John: Yeah.
John: With a drop G. Steaming John.
John: Steaming John.
John: And this is like the 1984 version of Nice Dockers, dude.
John: They thought they had all the pieces there.
John: I said I was in the shower, but my hair was dry.
John: I was standing in the window, and there was steam pouring off of me.
John: Something's not right here.
John: There's a vulnerability here that they can try and exploit.
John: And Steam and John was what they were pushing.
John: And at that age, you know, I had already learned like how not to let a nickname like that catch on.
John: And, you know, and part of it is like you.
Merlin: Do you have mind bullets for dealing with that with a nickname you don't want?
John: Yeah, you kind of go into the blow a little bit.
John: Like you're like steaming John.
John: That's right.
John: Here I am steaming it up.
John: I'm going to steam you, pal.
John: Finger gun.
John: Yeah.
John: And you just make it dumber.
John: You just put the dumb on it.
Merlin: Doesn't that mean they can tell that it's bugging you?
Merlin: I don't know.
Merlin: See, I don't know how to do this.
Merlin: I need to learn.
John: Yeah, the vulnerability... You don't sit there and get red-faced and say, knock it off, guys.
John: You have to go into it a little bit and be like, yeah, that's right.
John: Call me, Stephen John.
John: I'm eating it up.
John: Give it to me.
John: And they realize that, at least in those terms...
John: Your audience is the third person, right?
John: Your audience is the person who is watching from the sidelines, who's trying to decide for themselves whether Stephen John is something they can get away with under the protective umbrella of the kids that are trying to turn it into a meme.
John: And so that what you're doing is you're looking around the room and you're looking at all the vulnerable.
John: You're looking at the weak minds and you're giving them the, the Obi-Wan Kenobi.
John: And you're like, that's right.
John: Give it a try.
John: Why don't you try calling me Steven Steven and John?
John: Why don't you see how that works for you?
John: I'd really like you to try it.
John: And you just like you just soften the gum in their pockets.
Merlin: You think that really works?
John: It really does.
John: You know, people because people want to jump on people want to jump on a bully train if they feel really safe.
John: You know, they want to they want to start calling the mob mentality.
John: Yeah.
John: They want to call the fat kid a fat kid if they know that, you know, but they don't want to they don't want everybody else in the room to go away.
John: And suddenly it's just them and the kid, especially if he knows Wing Chun.
John: Or if he can break dance, there's a lot of reasons you don't want to get caught on the wrong side of that.
John: So, but that's what I mean.
John: Like they were, they were always looking for, and I was just as bad on the other side, looking for openings to get some kind of like steam and John meme.
John: Because if you get one of those and it lights up, you know, Oh, you've got, you've got the person by the sack.
Yeah.
Merlin: stories.
Merlin: Stories will be told, handed down.
Merlin: Years from now, when you're at the wedding and those people are really incredibly unhappy and insecure, you will be able to take credit for having Steaming John, that person.
Merlin: That's right.
Merlin: That's a good name.
John: Steaming John.
Merlin: But now you're happy about baths.
Merlin: You're immune.
Merlin: You're like rust.
Merlin: You are impenetrable.
John: Well, here's the problem with baths.
John: You have to really man up
John: and own your baths.
John: There are still plenty of adult men I know that would never admit to taking a bath.
Merlin: That's just sad.
John: It happens all the time.
John: I went to this guy's house, $5 million house on the shores of Lake Sammamish not very long ago.
John: Went to his house, and he's showing me around the place, and it's one of these, like, he's a millionaire software designer, and he's got a 20-room house, and all he has on the walls are, like,
John: Lamborghini posters with a bikini girl you know they're just tacked up with that blue poster gum and we get upstairs
John: And he showed me through the master suite and we get into his bathroom and he's got a, he's got a massive jacuzzi indoor sex bath.
John: That's like built for five people built for you, the soft, you, the overweight software guy and four Russian escorts.
John: And I'm looking at this thing just covetously, but he's got laundry hanging all over it.
John: And I'm looking around the bathroom and it shows all the signs of never having been used as anything other than like a place to put laundry.
John: And I was like, when was the last time you used the bathtub?
John: And he said, oh, I've never used it.
Yeah.
John: And I said, you had this house built.
John: This is a custom house.
John: He's like, oh, yeah, I mean, you've got to put it in a bathtub like that in case you ever want to sell it.
John: But, I mean, I'm not going to take a bath.
John: What am I?
John: What am I, some girl?
John: I was just like, man.
Merlin: Now, my version of that would be like if he came to my fancy house and I didn't have a way to get into the garage or something.
Merlin: And he says, well, how do you get into your car?
Merlin: I'm like, I've never used the garage.
Merlin: I've never opened it.
Merlin: Right?
Merlin: Because, I mean, for him, like for me, the idea of having a house with an incredibly luxurious bathtub, I would take four baths a day.
Merlin: I would cancel things to take fucking baths.
John: Have you ever been in a bathroom where there was a television mounted to the wall?
Merlin: I don't think so.
Merlin: I don't know if I'd like that.
John: I had this experience not very long ago down in California.
John: I was sat over at somebody's house and they were like, oh, you want to take a bath?
John: I know you like baths.
John: And I was like, if there's one thing...
John: that I want to be my ambassador in the world, it is that people know that I like baths.
John: I want that, I want, you know, I want that envelope to get handed.
Merlin: That's your sentinel, like that precedes you.
Merlin: Just ahead, let everybody know, that should be like in John's existential rider.
John: Right, listen, Roderick's coming over, just word to the wise, he really likes baths, okay?
John: Good, good, are we good?
John: And the guy in the black suit splits.
John: And then I show up.
John: Hey!
John: They're like, I know you like baths.
John: We got a really nice bathtub.
John: Do you want to take a bath later?
John: And I was like, yes, I do.
John: And it's a bath with a waterfall.
John: I mean, a completely wasteful, just terrible, disgusting thing.
John: Wonderful in every respect.
John: And there was a TV mounted on the wall.
John: And I turned it on.
John: And I had never had this experience before where I was in the bathtub and I was watching a movie.
John: And I was like, whoa, I didn't think I would like this, but I really like it.
John: I never want to see a movie when I'm not in the bath.
Merlin: Were you a little uneasy at first?
Merlin: Because I feel like I would be a little bit uneasy.
Merlin: It just seems a little on the nose to be watching the TV.
John: Yeah, it was really uneasy.
John: I was super uneasy and I was like, what if I turn the TV on and all that's on it is porn?
Merlin: Oof.
John: I checked into a hotel in Miami not very long ago, and it was a hotel.
John: This was the last time I ever used Yelp.
John: I Yelped a hotel close to the Miami airport, and this place had all these great Yelp reviews.
John: It's really hilarious.
John: It's like an old-style motel.
John: It's great.
John: It's really cute.
Merlin: Like an ironic vintage hipster motel?
John: It's an ironic vintage hipster motel with neon pink flamingos close to the airport.
John: You're going to love it.
John: It's called the Paradise Inn or something like that.
John: I was like, okay, great.
John: That's perfect.
John: It's cheap and it's by the airport.
John: And I show up and the first sign was that the desk clerk was behind Bulletproof Glass.
Yeah.
Merlin: Vintage bulletproof glass.
John: Vintage bulletproof glass.
John: The key he gives me is an actual key on one of those... Like a Holiday Inn key?
John: Yeah, like on an oblong plastic key ring.
John: That says, that says paradise, you know, paradise in room number four.
Merlin: Mail this if you find it.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: Mail it if you find it.
Merlin: Right.
John: Postage paid.
John: And then I, I opened the door to my room and the carpet is so worn that it's like you can, it's like it has the traffic has worn a path from the door to the bathroom.
John: I'm like, this isn't,
John: ironic this is a real old hooker hotel and i sit down on the bed and the mattress is wrapped in plastic and so it crinkles like i'm sitting on a christmas present and i'm like okay this is not funny anymore i've stayed in plenty of these this isn't cute this is not who who wrote these yelp reviews are there people that really think that this is like
John: hilarious because this is fucking terrible this is giving me bad memories and i reach over and i'm just i'm trying to think of what to do i only had a few hours i needed some sleep i turn on the tv and it's looping porn you just turn it on and it's there it's just right there looping porn on every channel and it's not like a porn movie it's just loops the
John: Like a demo reel?
John: Yeah, two-minute loops of the quote-unquote good part.
John: And then it switches to the next loop.
John: It's basically a high-traffic masturbation room.
John: Or, no, I mean, this is a full-on hooker hotel.
Merlin: This is, as they used to say, no-tell motel.
John: Yeah, this is rooms by the hour.
Merlin: Oh, God.
John: And I'm here by the airport and I look at the pillow and I just imagine what this poor pillow has been through in its short life.
John: The pillow is probably, let's say, five years old.
John: And it has been scrunched and used as a bolster and used in so many horrible ways.
Merlin: It's been so many aging actresses and horses.
Merlin: It's been so many things.
John: I don't want to touch anything.
John: I don't want to lay down.
John: They wouldn't put that plastic down unless it was convenient for them.
John: Absolutely.
John: The plastic is to preserve...
Merlin: If you're flipping a hotel 23 times a day, I'm guessing that pillow does not get changed that often.
John: And I'm in this situation where I've been in many, many, many, many situations where this room would have been a godsend.
John: I would have thanked my lucky stars that I had a door I could close and I would have gotten as much sleep as I could.
John: But I'm...
John: I'm in the, I mean, it's again, one of these moments where it's like, I only have five hours to sleep.
John: I need desperately need those five hours of sleep, but I am too wound up right now to just grab that pillow and snuggle up, snuggle up to 100,000 butts.
John: And try and get that five hours.
John: And so... I left.
John: I kept the key... As a memento and reminder...
John: And I stuck it to the wall of my room when I got home.
John: Paradise Motel, Miami, Florida, room four, whatever.
John: Thumbtacked it to the wall and I was just like, remember.
John: Remember.
John: First of all, never use Yelp.
John: And second of all, just remember.
John: Like, there but for the grace of God.
John: And I went out and I slept in my rental car.
Merlin: Are you kidding?
John: No, I slept in the rental car.
John: Because I was just like...
John: There are indignities and there are indignities, but that, I mean, in a really, really nice hotel, I will throw the sex pillow on the floor because we all know where it's been.
John: But this room had no surface that was not a sex pillow.
Merlin: Why are you doing this?
Merlin: Don't just not do this to me.
Merlin: There was blood on the walls.
Oh, God.
Merlin: Oh my God.
Merlin: See, I'm fine as long as I don't think about it.
Merlin: And then as soon as I think about it, it's game over.
Merlin: I would be the same way.
Merlin: I would be scurrying out to the porn free car.
John: Yeah.
John: I went out and I slept, I put the seat back in the, in the rental Camaro and I was like, you know, I bet you slept better, John.
John: Worst places to sleep than that.
John: Right.
John: Parked right under the airport.
Merlin: Nobody's a fewer.
Merlin: Let's just say fewer people have come in the rental.
John: Well, it was a new... You know, those rental cars are... They circulate them.
John: I mean, it only had a few thousand miles on it.
John: How many people could have fucked in that rental car?
John: A handful.
John: 50 tops.
John: There were a handful of people that had had sex in that hotel room.
Merlin: But there was nobody who had not ejaculated in that room ever.
John: Yeah.
John: Yeah.
John: The things you learn, the things you learn, you can handle.
Merlin: I don't know if I can ever go anywhere.
Merlin: I know.
John: Oh, you have to bring your own pillow.
John: Have you started bringing your own pillow?
Merlin: I hate being the bring your own pillow guy.
Merlin: Because I see that person, I'm like, you know what?
Merlin: If you are a 19-year-old girl wearing Ugg boots in your jammies when you go on the plane, that's fine.
Merlin: Have fun.
Merlin: But when you see a grown man carrying a pillow around, I mean, now that's seriously, now that's a Stephen John type situation.
John: It's terrible.
John: So this is a thing.
John: Right here, this is another economic opportunity for us.
John: And speaking of which...
John: I was being forced to watch the Star Trek reboot the other day because my lady friend wanted to watch the new Star Trek.
Merlin: Oh, so you saw the first one?
John: She was like, you can't see the new Star Trek until you've seen the first one.
John: Did you cry at the beginning?
John: I don't want to.
John: She's like, no, you got to watch it.
John: So she rented it from Redbox, put it in my DVD player, my Yamaha DVD player that...
John: is like, you know, built with Soviet technology.
Merlin: Sweet.
Merlin: Is that digital?
John: It's, it's, it's a half digital.
John: It's pretty digital.
John: And I'm watching it and the star Trek enterprise comes up on the screen.
John: And for the first time, my entire life, the USS enterprise, I mean, I remember when my dad and I took a skiff around the USS enterprise docked at Pearl Harbor.
John: And we were headed out to the USS Arizona and,
John: And the Enterprise was there.
John: We went around the Enterprise, which at the time was the largest aircraft carrier in the world.
John: And the impact that that carrier made on me.
John: And we're going out to the Arizona.
John: My dad is throwing flowers on the memorial or whatever.
Yeah.
John: And my whole life, the USS Enterprise, Enterprise, Enterprise, the Star Trek Enterprise, the Carrier Enterprise, the World War II Enterprise, it only just, watching this movie, dawned on me what a curious name that is for a U.S.
John: warship.
Merlin: It's like calling it the business.
John: Yeah.
John: It's like calling it the capitalism, the USS capitalism.
Merlin: Never occurred to me until now.
John: Yeah.
John: that it's a name that rings out in my imagination.
John: And it's just like, it's called the enterprise.
Merlin: The flight deck is 1100 feet long.
John: It's a big air pressure.
John: It's not the biggest anymore though.
Merlin: It just got decommissioned in 2012.
John: That's right.
Merlin: Whoa, John, that is a sweet... What are they doing with it?
Merlin: Are they going to get a museum or something?
John: No, it's up here at Bremerton.
John: It's in Mothballs.
Merlin: You should make an offer.
John: If you go up to Bremerton, there's like seven aircraft carriers lined up just like cars in a Walmart parking lot.
John: It's pretty extraordinary.
Merlin: I would love to see that.
Yeah.
Merlin: Feeling a little better?
Merlin: Oh, it feels amazing.
John: I really need a cough button.
Merlin: $451 million.
Merlin: Is that in 1957?
Merlin: No, wait.
Merlin: Sorry, 1960 dollars?
John: So it was the first nuclear-powered aircraft carrier.
John: Is that right?
John: Isn't it?
John: Wasn't it the Enterprise?
John: There's a lot of Enterprise there.
Yeah.
John: Oh, but so what I'm saying is here is a business opportunity for us to make a pillow, a genuine pillow that doesn't feel like it's full of beans, doesn't feel like some neck pillow you buy at the airport, but a pillow that you would...
John: that you could call your own, but that is collapsible and fits inside your carry-on bag so that you don't look like a ding-a-ling walking around with his whoopee.
John: Like, how do you create the pillow experience, the full...
John: Pillow experience.
Merlin: The simple way to do this would be to buy one of those things from the infomercials that's a bag and use a vacuum to suck the air out.
Merlin: The problem is that only works going one way.
Merlin: That's not going to help you coming home.
John: Right.
John: You don't want to carry the vacuum the whole way.
Merlin: No, you'd have to put that in a vacuum bag too and it vacuums all the way down.
Merlin: That's right.
Merlin: Um...
John: Yeah, what is that tactile experience of a great pillow?
Merlin: Just add X. And I guess X is air.
Merlin: So you need a way to compress all the stuff out of it.
Merlin: Maybe, I don't know.
Merlin: Because I like a firm pillow.
Merlin: Yeah, yeah, right.
Merlin: Me too.
Merlin: But see now, a firm pillow is not like an inflatable thing.
Merlin: Like it shouldn't be hard.
Merlin: It should be firm.
Merlin: There's a difference.
John: But if you suck all the air out of a foam pillow, suck it all down until it's a capsule size.
Merlin: I got an easier way.
Merlin: The easier way would be to standardize something I've craved for a long time is to standardize through some kind of a two or perhaps three axis grid standardized pillows and then have them in sizes because it's, you know, the thing is I, I, it's very difficult for me.
Merlin: I don't know what pillow to get.
Merlin: And so I'm about one for three on pillows.
Merlin: I go to the store, we buy a pillow.
Merlin: I'm not happy with what I brought back.
Merlin: I don't even know what to ask for.
John: I mean, this is the thread count problem where it's like 500 thread count means nothing because it's,
Merlin: Oh, no, no.
Merlin: That's just – people are just scoundrels and liars about those things now.
Merlin: But I mean there should be a way to describe like when you say firm, like what the fuck does that mean?
Merlin: Like do you want it – how much do you want it to give?
Merlin: How much do you want it to stay down when you've been on it for a minute?
Merlin: Like do you like it spongy?
Merlin: Right.
Merlin: Do you like it feathery where – that kind of firm where like it's not going to yield after a certain point?
Merlin: See, I think what we do though is with all these ages of 3D printers and Elon Musk, there should be a way to send your order to the hotel and a built-to-purpose pillow could be brought into your room in a sanitary bag for you.
John: What about right downstairs, under the stairs, a vending machine, you put your money in, you choose the parameters, and it spits out, it 3D prints you a pillow just to your specifications.
Merlin: Could you get it with a vagina on it?
Merlin: I don't see why not.
Merlin: Why would we leave money on the table?
Merlin: It could be shaped like an owl, or it could be something you could have a little bit of gentlemanly enterprise intercourse with.
Merlin: But then you throw it away, John.
Merlin: It's like a newspaper.
John: I like it.
Merlin: I went too far, didn't I?
John: You know, in my whole life, I have never fucked a pillow.
Merlin: No.
Merlin: I think I've tried.
Merlin: I've tried to fuck pretty much everything.
John: I don't look at a pillow and think like...
Merlin: Hey, that's not much of a bar, John.
Merlin: There's so many things today that I've already forgotten how many things I've tried to fuck in the past.
John: Yeah.
John: I mean, maybe it's that I see pillows as like kind of watchers.
Merlin: Oh, yeah.
Merlin: You have to respect.
John: Rather than like lovers.
Merlin: I'm never traveling again, John.
John: I am.
John: I am traveling.
John: I am a traveler, Merlin.
Merlin: I don't know where to stop.
John: I gotta pee.
John: Just stop there.
John: It'll be the first time that there's not a laugh.
John: In all the years.
Merlin: Stop right there.
Merlin: That's perfect.
Merlin: Long dramatic pause.
Merlin: Perfect.
Merlin: And then I'll make it good.
Merlin: I'll add in some coughing and stuff.
Yeah.
Merlin: Ah, so disgusting.
Merlin: So disgusting.
Merlin: Once I start thinking about it, it's so gross.
Merlin: It's so gross to think about you're getting into a bed that hundreds of people have slept in who did not know each other.
Merlin: Hundreds of people who did not shower before they got into that bed.
Merlin: They got in there and they rolled their cock around in that bed for like until they fell asleep.
Merlin: And then they woke up and they probably did it again.
John: And a hotel like that, it's all disgusting people.
Merlin: People who read Yelp.
Merlin: Gotcha.
Merlin: And there it is.
Merlin: Perfect.