Ep. 120: "The Frog Leg King"
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Merlin: Hello.
Merlin: Hey, John.
Merlin: Hi, Merlin.
John: How's it going?
John: Pretty good.
John: Everything's different.
John: Ugh.
Merlin: Always change.
John: Ugh.
John: I don't... Ugh.
John: So different right now.
John: Everything's different.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: You know, it's like Heraclitus says, you can never dip your foot into the same Skype.
John: Hmm.
John: Hmm.
John: If you sit on the bridge and watch the Skype go by, it will always be a new Skype.
John: Whoa.
John: And yet, it's always the same Skype.
Merlin: By the time I see a cloud that looks like something and I call my daughter over, it doesn't look like that anymore.
Ugh.
John: You know, it's been so long since I looked up at a cloud and saw a dog or a taco or whatever it is.
John: Like, I don't, I have not had that experience in a long time.
John: And I think it might be that the clouds in Seattle, first of all, the skies are always blue in Seattle.
Merlin: Well, the bluest skies you've ever seen, if memory serves, are in Seattle.
John: Yeah, that's right.
John: That's right.
Merlin: But, yeah, when there are clouds.
Merlin: Has Brady Como ever actually been to Seattle?
John: Who?
Merlin: Perry Como?
Merlin: Yeah.
John: I'm sure Perry Como had been to everywhere.
John: He traveled a lot.
John: You know, those guys, that generation of guys, they were banging showgirls two at a time.
John: What time and what do I wear?
John: But when there are clouds here, they don't look like anything.
John: They just look like film on a soup.
Yeah.
Merlin: Yeah, this is the time of year, the really depressing time of year in San Francisco where we just have one contiguous cloud that's called the weather.
John: And as far as you know, it goes to Japan.
Merlin: Yeah.
John: As far as you know, it starts at your house and it goes to Japan.
Merlin: Yeah, it's super duper weird.
Merlin: We haven't talked, again, it's been a while, we had a little bye period.
Merlin: You've been traveling a lot.
Mm-hmm, mm-hmm.
Merlin: And I've got some things on a card here I wanted to ask you about.
Merlin: I've got four things on a card.
Merlin: I'm just going to toss these out.
Merlin: I know this is a little bit old school.
Merlin: I've got fever.
Merlin: I've got your office.
Merlin: I want to know about your fever, your office, your assistance, if you want to talk about it, and all the President's men.
John: Okay.
Merlin: In that order?
Merlin: You know, you can answer the last one first if you want.
Merlin: You were down.
John: So I had a very strange fever.
John: So, you know, a fever that I could not account for.
John: And...
John: Now, in retrospect, I do feel like I had an unusual illness, but it coincided with four very hot days.
John: Oh.
John: So I was tossing around feverish and, you know, just like that thing you'd get in the night where you wake up and your whole bed is just a puddle.
John: And you're like, there's no way I could get comfortable, but I don't want to go anywhere else because I'm just going to ruin whatever that is.
John: But then, of course, it's also like 85 degrees at night.
John: And so that explains some of it.
John: But what the problem is, is that since I stopped eating gluten...
John: all of my normal measurements of illness have to change.
John: Because I used to get these terrible sinus infections, and since I stopped eating gluten, I have not had a single sinus infection.
John: Wow.
John: And so I have this flu, basically, is probably what it was.
John: Some kind of, you know, some mild bird flu.
John: Mm-hmm.
John: Small bird.
John: A small bird flu.
John: Yeah, just like a chickadee or a love bird.
John: Yeah.
John: A goldfinch.
John: You know goldfinches are the Washington State bird?
John: Goldfinch.
John: I'm writing that down.
John: I did not know that goldfinch.
John: But so I have this sickness and I'm waiting for it to develop secondary symptoms.
John: I'm waiting to sit with my head all clogged and coughing up big oysters and just like terrible cold.
John: And it never metastasizes into my normal cold.
John: You know from colds.
John: I know a lot of colds.
John: And so I sit there and I'm like, what kind of illness is this?
John: This is in one sense terrible.
John: It hurts.
John: But in another sense, it's not producing any of the next level stuff where I'm really uncomfortable.
John: And so anyway, it's gone now.
John: And I bid it via con Dios onto the next person.
Merlin: So you've had to recalibrate.
Merlin: It's a different bar now.
Merlin: You had just gotten used to this long slog of colds.
Merlin: You used to get a fair amount of colds, right?
John: I did.
John: I had a lot of colds.
Merlin: You know, you drive yourself pretty hard.
John: It's true, but so normally what would happen is I would have a five-day fever like that, and then, no matter what I did, if I spent five days curled up in a rag dosed in antibiotics...
John: At the end of five days, no matter what else, I could spend 15 days sick, and then at the end of that period, then I would get a sinus infection and a lung infection.
John: Oh, God.
John: And then I would have to spend another eight to ten days clearing that out.
John: It just happened like clockwork, so that it almost felt like when I got a cold, I should just go run in the rain and
John: Because no matter what I did, I was going to get this next level of illness.
Merlin: Because you get older, you get used to that rhythm.
Merlin: It's like when you realize you're getting a stress bump and you're like, bring it on.
Merlin: I don't want to wait.
Merlin: I'm going to pop this.
Merlin: I'm not going to wait six days for this thing to be malingering on my mouth.
John: Yeah, cover my face with sores.
John: Cover it.
John: Let's do this thing.
John: Let's do it.
John: Let's go.
John: But so now...
John: You sound good.
John: You sound very healthy and hale.
John: You know, I'm a vital young guy in his early middle age.
John: I mean, sometimes I have to get up five times at night to pee.
John: And I was complaining about that the other day to my mom.
John: I was like, I don't know.
John: I think I need to see a doctor.
John: I haven't been to a doctor in a couple of years.
John: I think I should go.
John: And she's like, why?
John: What do you need to see a doctor for?
John: That's exactly the kind of encouragement I like.
John: And I said, you know what, mom?
John: I'm a middle-aged guy.
John: Middle-aged guys have to go to the doctor sometimes because things happen to them.
John: And she was like, ah, doctors are all bad quacks.
John: And I said, seriously, you know, I have to get up a lot of times in the night to pee.
John: And she said, welcome to middle age.
John: And I was like, oh, God.
Merlin: The problem is, once you start talking about health with people, it's sort of like talking about birth or bad relationships.
Merlin: Everybody's got their horror story about the person.
Merlin: You know, if I hadn't been blowing my boyfriend and found his funny ball, he never would have discovered he had cancer when he was 27.
Merlin: And first of all, I do not want to feel my balls.
Merlin: I've had two friends that totally got testicular cancer in their 20s.
Merlin: Really?
Merlin: Oh, yeah.
John: Big time.
John: Did they have their balls taken away?
No.
Merlin: Well, I think that's part of the process.
John: I know a guy with only one ball.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: Is that Himmler?
John: I've never... I don't know for sure.
Merlin: Hitler had one ball.
John: He and I don't go to the locker rooms or anything.
Merlin: I've got to sing the song now.
Merlin: Hitler had only one big ball.
Merlin: Himmler had two, but they were small.
Merlin: No, Himmler had something similar.
Merlin: I need to go back to school.
Merlin: But I don't even want to think about that.
Merlin: I need more people like your mom around me to say, listen...
Merlin: Leave it.
Merlin: You do not need to go to those people.
John: Well, because, you know, I'm also prone to, I mean, I don't want this show to turn into just some kind of show for the ladies.
John: But I am prone to moles.
John: I get moles.
John: Oh, you know, people tell you to worry about moles.
Merlin: I got a little mole over here.
Merlin: I got a little mole over there.
Merlin: You watch your moles.
Merlin: You get a chart.
Merlin: You can measure them.
Merlin: See if they have an uneven surface.
Merlin: Moles are a thing we're supposed to worry about.
John: I've been getting moles my whole life.
John: And every new girlfriend I would have would be like, you didn't used to have this mole.
Right.
John: And I would say, pretty sure there was something there.
John: Pretty sure it was some kind of mole by the before.
John: And she was like, yeah, but it never looked like this before.
John: And I'd be like, I'm pretty sure it looked like something like that before.
John: And she's like, exactly.
John: That's the problem.
John: They're not supposed to change.
John: And so they would hustle me off to some doctor.
John: And I'd go sit in his office with my shirt off.
John: And he would look at the moles.
John: And he'd go, yeah, that's not a problem.
John: That's not a bad mole.
John: And I would say, why don't you tell me what the bad moles look like so that I can reassure people?
John: And he would say, well, you know, it's kind of like Supreme Court definition of porn.
John: You know it when you see it.
John: Right.
John: And I'm like, that's no, no, no, no.
John: You know it when you see it.
John: So tell me what it is.
John: This isn't some Masonic ritual that you have to keep concealed from people.
John: He's going to get the business either way.
John: Yeah, give me the five points that I should be looking for.
Merlin: You need a listicle on seven surprising moles.
Merlin: You're not going to believe what metastasize next.
John: And he says, well, you know, if they change.
John: And I'm like, well, they all change.
John: This one changed and you didn't have a problem with it.
John: And he's like, well, they're uneven.
John: And I'm like, they're all uneven.
John: They're moles.
John: Fucking cop out.
John: They're not fucking pie plates.
John: They're moles.
John: Moles change.
John: They change.
John: They change.
John: He's like, well, if they're black, you know, these aren't dark enough.
John: And I was like, oh, I see.
John: It's a pigment scale.
John: And then you know what I did?
John: Then I just stopped giving a shit about it.
John: And if one of my moles takes over...
John: then that will be my superpower.
Merlin: Yes.
John: I'll be the mole.
Merlin: You'll be the... Mag is already a mole, man.
Merlin: But you could... Here's the thing with doctors.
Merlin: You know, I feel like you're describing this perfectly because I feel like whatever sentence comes out of a doctor's mouth tacitly always ends with, comma, dummy.
Merlin: Well, that's not a mole.
Merlin: Dummy.
Merlin: You gotta get your moles checked, dummy.
Merlin: In bed.
Merlin: In bed.
Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha.
Merlin: I feel this way about doctors and lawyers.
Merlin: You've got to call and make an appointment.
Merlin: You've got to find parking.
Merlin: You go in there.
Merlin: John, there's always forms to fill out.
Merlin: They have so many forms.
John: Half of the time, they send you to a different doctor.
John: It's like, you know the story.
John: Tell me the story.
John: And he's like, well, you should go see this eye, ear, nose, and throat guy.
John: Like, oh, now I've got to make another appointment.
Merlin: It's like going to Best Buy, and you think, oh, fuck, I've got to buy a USB cord.
Merlin: And you go in there, and they're like, hmm, yeah, it could be a USB cord, but you should probably go to the Apple store, and they've got to send you to the specialist, and that's a whole thing.
John: And this may be part of the problem of who we are and our unchecked white privilege.
John: But I have never heard a thing come out of a doctor or a lawyer's mouth that I didn't feel like, well, I knew that already.
John: And also, I could have figured that out in about 20 minutes if I hadn't come in here thinking that you were a magic sorcerer.
John: You know what I mean?
John: Like, what's the answer to this problem?
John: Oh, hmm.
John: It's pretty much what I thought.
John: And we imbue these people with magic powers because of their, what, three years in school?
John: I have fucking sandwiches in my refrigerator that are older than three years old.
John: And three years in school, as I get older, and I know you know this already, I do not think that three years in school is that big of a deal.
Merlin: They're also very young, a lot of them.
Merlin: So young.
Merlin: I think of a doctor as being an old-ass man.
Merlin: No privilege involved.
Merlin: But I'm just saying, when you meet people who are really young and they still end their sentences with a question, it might be a myocardial infarction.
John: I had a doctor like that.
John: A doctor who looked at me like, well, here's the first thing.
John: I had a doctor who looked at me like he was afraid of me.
Merlin: That's just setting a tone.
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John: I do not want my doctor to be afraid of me.
John: And this guy was, he was young, he was small, he had, you know, he had been to, I think he went to medical school in Guyana.
John: Like, I didn't, there was nothing about it.
Merlin: He went down there for a couple weeks and decided to just get an MD while he was there?
John: I'm sure he got, I'm sure his MD is from a reputable school like the University of Pennsylvania.
John: But whatever it was, they did not teach him in medical school not to, like, be visibly afraid of your patients.
John: They're probably smaller there, the people.
John: You know what?
John: They are not smaller in Pennsylvania.
Merlin: Oh, but like down in Guyana, if you were seeing the Guyanese, they're probably smaller.
Merlin: They probably have more interesting constellations of moles.
Merlin: They're not used to a bear of a man like you.
John: That's right.
John: They're not used to... And honestly, I did have a Bowie knife sticking out on my side when I walked in, so that maybe intimidated him at first.
Merlin: You mean like a Steve Martin arrow?
John: Yeah, yeah.
John: I got into a little disagreement, little fisticuffs with a guy down in front of the Toyota dealership.
John: You should have seen the other guy.
John: I'm not going to pay to have my oil changed here.
John: So it's not like I would get my oil changed at a Toyota dealership.
John: That's another example of something.
John: You know, you'd never take your car to the dealership.
Merlin: You've got to get it changed here, dummy.
Merlin: My wife needs the oil changed on our car, and she's supposed to take it to the dealership.
John: Right, because they have the tension boards.
Merlin: Oh, they have the 10W 30.5 or whatever.
Merlin: And if you don't get it done, then it... It's your warranty if you don't fix the viscosity.
John: Did you know that Volkswagens have a special...
John: quote, unquote, anti-theft nut on their wheels.
John: So, you know, you've got your five or six bolts that hold your wheel on.
John: One of them, you know, five of them are a normal bolt that you can remove with a tire iron.
John: And one of them is a special star bolt that
John: And in order to remove it, you have to have a special star adapter.
Merlin: What?
John: Yeah.
John: And so I borrowed a Volkswagen, actually a long time ago, and you get a flat tire on one of these things, nobody can change it.
John: Even AAA can't help you.
Wow.
John: If you don't have the Starbolt, which, of course, is the first thing that every Volkswagen owner loses, right?
John: I mean, how are you going to keep a hold of this little thing?
Merlin: Oh, gosh, and how?
Merlin: It must be very, very difficult to find a Starbolt wrench.
Merlin: Well, you can put a normal wrench into the Starbolt.
Merlin: I'm just saying, if you're somebody who's really into stealing tires off of Volkswagens, that seems like something you would want to get for your kit.
John: Well, ho, ho, ho, ho, ho, ho.
John: Here's the deal.
John: This is why it's not so simple.
John: They make multiple different kinds of Starbolts.
John: That's how they get you.
John: Exactly.
John: So if you go to the Volkswagen dealership and say, I need a Starbolt wrench, they're like, what kind of Starbolt you got?
John: And there's no way to know that.
John: You have to bring it into the place and show them, and then they can go into their enormous parts bin of Starbolts.
Merlin: Who the fuck thinks that is a good idea?
Merlin: Is that really that much of a problem that you would introduce that much deliberate inconvenience to the consumer experience?
Merlin: Because can I just say, John, can I blow your mind?
Merlin: Our car is a Volkswagen.
Merlin: And it's a recent Volkswagen, so we probably have a Starbolt.
John: I bet you have a Starbolt.
John: Or maybe Starbolts were only a thing that they used from 92 to 99 or something.
John: I sure hope so.
John: But Starbolts...
John: That's exactly the question.
John: I was like, are we the Griswolds off the road somewhere in Baltimore?
John: Who steals tires?
John: Who anymore steals a wheel off a car?
John: When was the last time you saw a car up on blocks?
John: You used to see them all the time.
Merlin: Well, you know, I'm not a physician, John, and I don't have the demographic data in front of me, but I would have to say I would rather have the prospect of some diligent person potentially stealing a wheel than knowing that if we're on the side of a freezing road, we can't change our goddamn tire.
John: Can't change our goddamn tires, right?
John: You know, that was one of the major plot points.
John: No, I guess not a major plot point, but it was a minor plot point of Smokey and the Bandit, right?
John: Oh, yeah.
John: I was just reading about Smokey and the Bandit the other day.
John: Yeah, those kids pull over, and they're taking the wheels off of the car that got left behind after what happened?
John: Something happened, and they're stealing the wheels, and then Sheriff Buford T. Justice pulls up and...
John: Gives them a good talking to.
John: It was a real satisfying moment.
Merlin: Some bitch.
Merlin: You ever seen that movie dubbed for TV?
Merlin: Oh, where they take the swears out?
Merlin: It's one of those ones like The Big Lebowski or Glengarry Glen Ross that really is a joy to see on TBS.
Merlin: Because it really, Big Lebowski, I think they deliberately put in, you know, they change stuff like, you know, this is what happens, you know, when you fuck someone in the ass into, this is what happens when you fuck a stranger in the Alps.
Merlin: And I think that's the Cone Brothers having a little fun with us.
Yeah.
John: I was, you know, our good friend David Reese has a television show now.
Merlin: Oh, my God.
Merlin: My daughter and I now argue over who has a bigger crush on him.
John: Yeah, I know.
Merlin: That show, I don't like to talk about media on media, but I'm just telling you, that is a goddamn gift from heaven, that show.
John: It's an amazing show.
Merlin: I want to meet him.
Merlin: He seems like a perfect delight.
John: He's the best, and he appears on the show exactly as he is.
John: That is how he is in normal times.
John: It's clear from watching him that he's not putting on a thing.
John: That's who he is.
Merlin: He really wants a better shoelace.
John: Yes, he does.
John: Like a lot.
John: But I spent last night looking at the internet at all of the people complaining that David said, God damn.
John: oh that's nothing man you i can't even believe if you've ever read get your war on i can't even believe how that guy's holding back on that show oh absolutely he is a he is he is a profane motherfucker he's like the father from christmas story i mean he he paints in rich tapestries of cursing but as the um as the as he was doing the paper airplane episode and he was like god damn or he said something like that yeah and i and i swear to you there are dozens and dozens of people who are like
John: I will never watch this program again.
John: I will never, you know, my kids, I had to take my kids down into the basement and spray them with a fire hose for a half an hour to wash goddamn out of their ears.
Merlin: I'm kind of surprised because that's one of those weird corner cases.
Merlin: That's one that really gets some people who could stand even some poopy vagina talk do not like to hear that one.
Merlin: That one really grinds some people's gears.
John: Yeah, it's a tough one.
John: They're lying in the sand, right?
John: I mean, you can say shit all day.
John: Yeah.
John: But you take the Lord's name in vain, and that is one of the things that it says in the book not to do.
Merlin: It's in the book not to do.
Merlin: Oh, the musical, when he does the musical.
Merlin: Did you see the party hole?
John: Did you see the party hole episode?
John: You know, I missed the party hole episode.
John: I was a little bit, you know, whenever somebody has a party hole and I'm not in it, I feel a little bit like, okie dokie.
John: I'll watch your show right up to the party hole part.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: No, he designed it himself.
Merlin: It's quite amazing.
Merlin: Now, have you met him before?
Merlin: I feel like I move in his circle somewhat, but I don't think I've ever met him.
Merlin: You see, he's like, via our friend Mr. Hodgman, you must have met him at some point.
John: Well, not only have I met him, but he is... So, on the first Jonathan Colton cruise...
John: David and I had already met.
John: The first time we met was upstate Massachusetts somewhere in an undisclosed location.
John: But on the first Jonathan Colton cruise, David and I were both on the boat solo.
John: I didn't bring anybody.
John: I was pregnant and couldn't go on the boat.
John: Oh, my God.
John: I just said her name.
Merlin: Yeah, I'll fix that.
John: We've done 200 episodes.
John: Yeah.
John: Anyway, so David and I get on the boat and he comes over and he's like, well, I guess we're cruise wives.
John: And I was like, cruise wives?
John: And he's like, yeah, you've got to have a cruise wife.
Merlin: You're even aware at the time how much smarter it was to not bring anybody.
Merlin: Because I understand, I'm talking to numerous people, that it's hard to know how much it's a good idea to not bring anybody else.
John: Yeah, yeah.
John: No, we were thrilled.
John: And the first cruise was a magical time for us.
John: Because we went to Jamaica together.
John: We were like, we're not going on the normal tour.
John: And we went off into the town.
John: And we decided that we were going to find a restaurant that served...
John: like a barbecued goat and we found some goat and we had it and we, you know, we like, we, we had a big adventure, but, and then we went snorkeling, both of us kind of for the first time in a long time and we're out snorkeling on, and we went not in the area that we're supposed to, but in the off limits area.
John: And then I look over at one point and David has taken off his swimsuit because he wanted to snorkel,
John: like a, like his natural, like fish self.
John: And so he's naked snorkeling around.
John: And I was like, well, I guess that's what we're doing.
John: So then I was naked snorkeling and we're just like, this is the best.
John: How could, how can we ever go back to the real world?
John: So, so the first Joko cruise was a, was, we were very close.
John: And then on subsequent Joko cruises, I started bringing my family and David started doing a thing, which amazes me to this day.
John: Each cruise, he's brought one old friend from high school.
John: And each cruise has been a different guy.
John: And every one of those guys has been an amazing, weird, southern gothic, just sort of like nutcase.
John: But they're all amazing, smart, incredible, sort of David Reese-ian type of people.
John: i've never met a guy who knew as many nutty people as david reese does although i guess that makes sense wow yeah you'd have to really think ahead plan ahead to do that see i'd i would still be like flustered over like trying to get the right tickets and the right luggage and stuff but he's thinking ahead he's bringing people along he's bringing people from his path and the thing is i for me to bring five people that i knew from high school could you get five people to answer the phone
John: Well, and the thing, what it implies is that he's still in close contact with all five of those guys, and they're all still like tight bros.
John: That either seems dishonest or sickening.
John: Whatever it is, it's unique in my experience.
John: That whole scene, you know, it's a little bit of a North Carolina thing, maybe.
John: Okay, yeah.
John: You know what I mean?
John: Like a little bit of a mint julep type of NASCAR thing?
Merlin: Sure, I can see you guys having a real crazy 80s montage thing, because you both like your curious guys who like trying out new stuff.
John: So on the last cruise, we went again to Jamaica, and we decided we were going to scour the island until we found a record store that had super old, weird reggae LPs.
John: And we spent a very hot, long, weird, exhausting day.
John: And we did find a guy who had some cardboard boxes of old reggae albums, which David probably overpaid for.
John: but we did buy a bunch of lps some of them had to be washed off because they were covered with dirt and resin but they uh but he's you know that's part of that's part of his record collection now oh man many props i like that guy i like that guy he's a good guy i'll make sure that you meet each other yeah yeah he retumbled something in my made me feel really good
John: You know, one of these shows not very long ago, we talked about some famous people, and then there was a little bit of like, oh, now Roderick on the line is just dropping names.
John: What?
Merlin: Who said that?
John: Some kid on the internet.
John: Now we're dropping names.
John: Huh.
John: Oh, he's probably, yeah, talking about Pete Rose.
John: Yeah, after all this time, we can still surprise people.
Merlin: John, I don't even like to address these kinds of things, but you move in the corridors of power at many, many levels, in many, many corridors, and I can't believe the restraint that you show.
Merlin: If you had not told us about that dinner you went to with your dad, where they were doing the can-can, that takes some name-dropping, but boy, that's real memorable to me.
Merlin: Yeah, you wouldn't know that such a thing existed until... You also talk a lot about people that nobody knows, so I think you balance it out.
John: Yeah.
John: Well, the thing is, we could have done a show two months ago.
John: I could have talked about David Reese.
John: Nobody would have known who the fuck we were talking about.
John: Why are you talking about this guy I don't know about?
John: Now he's a famous guy.
John: And he's a justifiably famous guy.
John: Because he's one of the people.
John: This is a rare example of somebody who got famous who should have been famous all along.
Merlin: Fucking people.
Merlin: You know, I mean... I do know.
John: I know exactly what you're saying.
Merlin: It's exhausting, John.
John: Fucking people.
Merlin: I try to keep an open mind.
Merlin: Also, your fever is doing better.
Merlin: David Reese, you should watch the Party Hole.
Merlin: The Party Hole one is interesting because... I mean, obviously, it's edited and stuff out of sequence, but... Why am I talking about this?
Merlin: Who cares?
Merlin: But I think it's the first one where something genuinely went tits up with the operation, and it makes it even funnier.
Merlin: And it has a cameo from...
Merlin: Jonathan Colton, who's someone that we know.
Merlin: Our good friend Joko that we talk about quite a bit.
Merlin: I think he had prop children.
Merlin: There's some children he has with him, but I think they may be loners.
Merlin: Oh, is that right?
Merlin: You think they came from the supply closet?
Merlin: Jonathan likes to protect his kids from the harsh eye of the public.
John: He does, and yet, as we all know, whatever that little piece of gauze is between our private lives and our public lives, that gauze is on fire, Merlin.
John: Oh, what happened?
John: Well, the gauze is on fire is all that's happening.
John: We are not going to be able to separate our public and private lives for very much longer.
John: yeah yeah uh it's all just an amazon algorithm for for how for what we want to buy my kid is going to be just another it's just gonna be another face that pops up on my computer sometimes saying hey your kid would like some food today it's like fuck you computer have you fed have you fed this darling child today we think you may like z bars try z bars
Merlin: Would you like to friend Z-Bars?
Merlin: Hello.
Merlin: Would you like to increase your level of engagement with Z-Bars?
Merlin: That's so weird to me when I go to look at – I think this is a thing you do, I think.
Merlin: I don't know.
Merlin: Sometimes if somebody says something really – oh, there's something I've got to talk to you about.
Merlin: Sometimes somebody will say something really bananas to me on Twitter.
Merlin: It doesn't happen that much, but I'll go.
Merlin: And so what do I do?
Merlin: I don't get mad.
Merlin: I go and I – sometimes I just – I always assume I don't get the reference is my first thing.
John: So you search the person.
John: You're like –
Merlin: Because the people that I engage with on Twitter are actually pretty nice people.
Merlin: But occasionally I'll get one from real out of left field.
Merlin: And then I'll go and I'll look at their thing.
Merlin: And I'll see if there's a URL.
Merlin: I'll see if there's a picture that's not something from the OC or something.
Merlin: And then I realized that they do things like follow airlines.
Wow.
Merlin: They follow, like, celebrities.
Merlin: Like, people who obviously, like, have somebody there on their behalf tooting for them.
Merlin: I shouldn't say this.
Merlin: You know what?
Merlin: I really shouldn't say this.
Merlin: Can I tell you this?
Merlin: I got a weird at response.
Merlin: to a toot that's probably two or three years old.
Merlin: Uh-huh.
Merlin: So they were going back.
Merlin: That's usually a good sign.
Merlin: That's a good sign.
Merlin: They were going back in the archives.
Merlin: And I think the only reason, I don't even know if this person knows that they kind of know me, but it was in response to something that your friend Sean said.
Merlin: Okay.
Merlin: And it's a certain super fan from the SeaTac area that you may remember from the Long Winter's Board days.
John: Uh-huh.
John: Okay.
John: All right.
John: I'm with you.
Merlin: And I read her entire timeline from the last two years.
Merlin: Wow.
Merlin: Because each one, I woke up, I saw that, I followed through.
Merlin: Do you ever do that?
Merlin: Do you ever go back and just read like two years of bananas?
John: I have done that, I have to say.
John: You know, because I love people the same way that you do.
John: You're a kind of gentle anthropologist.
John: And I want to see what is making people tick.
John: I want to see, you know, sometimes you learn a lot about the center by looking at the wings.
Merlin: Absolutely.
Merlin: It's like Heraclitus said, you can never dip your toe into the same crazy person twice.
John: That's exactly right.
John: And the thing is, you know, it's not a coincidence.
John: I was just recently reading Heraclitus.
John: Is that right?
John: Yeah, but not to digress.
John: I love to go back into, and a lot of times before I follow somebody, I'll just go read their last year just to make sure.
Merlin: I wish I started doing that a very long time ago.
John: Yeah, yeah.
Merlin: Just a real good idea to do that.
John: Hey, you had a couple of funny tweets there, and then you go back and you're like,
John: Oh, you tweet about Doritos all the time.
John: No way.
John: It's all like broken hard drives and Fox News, and you're like, what?
John: Yeah.
John: So anyway, so you did a deep dive on a ding-a-ling.
Merlin: i'll tell you more i should tell you more about it later but it really brought back some memories of the old days and and the thing is if you go back and you reread somebody's monkey balls timeline you get a sense of how they spend their time yeah and pretty much this person goes to the mall every day and takes a picture of him or herself yes that is that you know what and and when they are 60 and we are 60 they're going to have those pictures of themselves and we're not
Merlin: It's so true.
Merlin: I used to take 150 photos of my daughter a day, and now I get like one a quarter.
Merlin: And she won't look at the camera, so it's her in motion turning away on a swing set or something.
John: Well, but this is the thing.
John: In our culture...
John: The people who do the same thing every day for a long time sometimes are plucked out by the culture and identified as like the true geniuses of our time.
John: You know, the people that are like, I've been cooking frog legs every day for 25 years.
John: And, you know, and then around their head, this graphic appears, the frog leg king.
John: Bye.
John: And, you know, and all of a sudden he's the frog leg king and people are flying in from around the world to taste his amazing frog legs.
John: And it's like, well, really, we should be concerned about this guy.
John: He's been doing nothing but cooking frog legs for 25 years.
John: Like, that seems like a failure of the imagination.
John: but no he's the fucking frog leg king he's got a blog spot account yeah he almost got on jimmy kimmel yeah so you know so you go to the mall every day you take a picture of yourself in the in the in your reflection in the front window of a hot topic 25 years from now it seems like you are i mean you're the terry richardson of your time or whatever you're some genius like art photographer that had a weird piccadillo
Merlin: It used to seem so much weirder, and now it's something people do all the time.
Merlin: I'm thinking of – I think I read this in Harper's and then heard it on This American Life, but it was probably 10 years ago.
Merlin: Do you remember the story about the guy who documented everything that happened?
Merlin: It was an old guy, and he documented everything.
Merlin: He weighed the paper, the newspaper every day.
Merlin: He kept all the stickers from the meat that he bought at the store.
Merlin: Does this ring a bell?
Merlin: Yes, it does.
Merlin: It was a fascinating story, and now basically that's what everybody does.
Merlin: That's Pinterest.
Yeah.
Merlin: That's like, you know, I had a great BM.
Merlin: Here it is.
Merlin: I went to Hot Topic.
Merlin: They were out of Doctor Who shirts.
Merlin: I got an Orange Julius.
Merlin: Here's a photo of me having an Orange Julius.
John: Well, you know, and I pre-visioned this, Merlin, all the way back in the early 90s when I saw the storm clouds on the horizon.
John: And a little Mexican boy came and took a thoughtful photograph, a Polaroid of me, and handed it to me.
John: And that is how my son, the leader of the revolution, is able to identify me when he comes back in time.
Merlin: Oh, that's so smart.
Merlin: I know.
John: But, leaving that aside, I remember thinking that there was going to be some...
John: That in effect, the sum total of human knowledge was only going to be valuable insofar as we were able to collect it and sort it.
John: And so I had this sense in the 1980s or in the early 90s that there was this, it was kind of a comparative religion notion that, like, well, if we put all the religious texts throughout history next to each other and we're able to look at them in three dimensions and we just pick out all the similarities and we figure out what the differences are and how they relate to one another, then there should be some, like, some...
John: er body of knowledge there would be patterns that clearly emerge like hey here's a here's being nice to each other that tends to work out right and so and maybe we would have maybe we then we would have another dimension of insight into religion or what it's that how where it comes from why it's there what it means maybe there's a maybe there's a a tenth religion out there that is actually the the combined tenants of all religions and
John: And that comparative religion impulse extends to the idea that, well, we have a tremendous body of knowledge, all the libraries of the world, all of the oral accounts, all the novels, and this sum total of human knowledge and experience, if there was a way to collect it and sort it,
John: What would we know?
John: What would we know better?
John: And what would we do with that information?
John: And I remember in the early 90s thinking that this was, in some ways, the future.
John: We just needed to develop the technology to...
John: bind and sort this kind of dimensionless cloud of information.
John: And we're doing it now, and what it turns out is it's digital scrapbooks of how much the newspaper weighs and every collected meat sticker from every package of hamburger you buy.
John: And it turns out that the collected sum of all human knowledge is just...
John: Like a busy signal.
John: It's just... Oh, man, that's dark.
John: Because all the meat stickers, there are a lot more people collecting meat stickers than there are comparing Heraclitus to Augustine.
John: And the very few people who are comparing Heraclitus to Augustine are so drowned out by the meat stickers that ultimately there is no... I feel like maybe the high knowledge and the low knowledge do actually cancel each other out.
John: There is no...
John: I do not prefer anymore the high knowledge because I just am... The meat sticker scrapbooks are just rising up in the room.
John: I feel like I'm in the trash compactor in Star Wars.
John: And it's just meat stickers, meat stickers.
Merlin: Self-replicating meat sticker logs.
John: And then here floats by this little bottle cap.
John: And inside the bottle cap is like, oh, have you ever noticed that Augustine, Aristotle, and Heraclitus all said this?
John: And I'm like, huh, what?
John: Huh?
John: And then it just floats by.
John: It's eaten by a compactor monster.
Merlin: Yeah, that's good.
Merlin: Because it seems like there's so much stuff.
Merlin: Not to harp on the medical stuff, but it seems like at this point you should be able to walk into a box, kind of almost like an MRI or a TSA scanner.
Merlin: It seems like we should be at the point now where you walk into a little box with your clothes on even, and in like three seconds it tells you probably what's wrong with you and a couple things that it might be, and then you do a couple tests and you'd know.
Merlin: Why the fuck is that not the case?
Merlin: It really feels like that would be how it works.
Merlin: So you're talking here about religion, but you think about anything over the past however many centuries or millennia.
Merlin: Like if you had enough data over time in context with trend lines, it seems like there's so much interesting stuff that you could figure out about.
Merlin: And sometimes that surfaces as like an infographic on somebody's blog or something.
Merlin: But you're absolutely right.
Merlin: It reminds me directly of like the days after 9-11.
Merlin: When they were saying, look, you know, the problem is not collecting this intelligence.
Merlin: We've got a lot of intelligence.
Merlin: We just don't have any way to analyze.
Merlin: Right.
Merlin: The huge – there's so much noise in all of this that it's easy to miss any of the little stuff that comes along.
Merlin: So what do we do?
Merlin: We've got more and more information now.
John: But this is why – this is why – do you remember –
John: In the movie Russia House starring Sean Connery.
John: No.
John: I don't know that one.
John: Have you seen the movie Russia House starring Sean Connery?
John: No.
John: The movie Russia House.
John: With Sean Connery.
John: With Sean Connery.
John: And Michelle Pfeiffer.
John: Ding.
John: And Roy Scheider.
John: is one of those, what would it be, early 90s meditations on the end of the Soviet Union.
John: It's a Cold War thriller.
John: It's a Cold War thriller.
John: That's exactly right.
John: Circa Hunt for Red October.
John: in which Sean Connery plays a reluctant alcoholic book editor.
Merlin: I consider myself a reluctant alcoholic.
John: Yeah, well, and he's a reluctant alcoholic.
John: He's an enthusiastic alcoholic, a reluctant spy.
John: Let's call him a reluctant spy.
John: Anyway, not to give too much of the point away, but there is a scene in the film, or several scenes, I guess, where Roy Scheider, as a sort of CIA high mucky muck, is running an operation from a clean room within some CIA operational headquarters.
John: And they are monitoring the situation.
John: And there's a guy that's kind of a Cold War trope.
John: who is a sort of wild-haired, gray-haired, older, clearly homosexual, but everybody's pretending that he's not because he's such a genius.
John: A kind of Betchley Park CIA flamboyant genius, you know what I mean?
John: This is one of these ideas that you have about the CIA, that somewhere...
Merlin: somewhere deep in there there are these guys who are kind of uh who are so far off the reservation but so genius right you got your like uh john nash uh glenn gould misfits of science mutant types exactly who are super super interesting they keep them in the basement though you know for pr reasons
John: Yeah, keep them in the basement, and they're allowed to walk around the CIA in a kimono with an Indian headdress on.
Merlin: Looking like the boyfriend, like Chris Sarandon in Dog Day Afternoon.
John: Yes, because when it's time to process the reams and reams of information, they have what amounts to an artistic insight that cuts through the noise, right?
John: Mm-hmm.
John: And the problem that I see with the American intelligence community and the problem that we have in all of these massive data dump scenarios is that we have simultaneously culturally eliminated the Hiawathas from the process.
John: The CIA no longer hires people.
John: presumably people who are hiawathas they are only looking for the kind of like middle brow best and brightest the people that can get into yale the people that that score off the chart people with good grades good credit who aren't gonna be compromised right and so
John: So they're like, we had all this information, we just didn't have the people to process it.
John: And what they're missing and what all of data-driven culture is missing are the key people who are able to see artistically.
John: They're able to look at data artistically and say, you know what, you have all this data, but we can eliminate 85% of it right now because it doesn't apply.
John: And everybody goes, well, wait a minute, wait a minute, wait a minute.
John: We got to filter it.
John: We got to... And it's just like, nope, you know what?
John: I can see this.
Merlin: I can just see... But they can just see patterns.
John: They can just see patterns.
John: They see through the clouds.
John: And they're like, 85% of it doesn't matter because, you know, it's the Hannibal Lecter thing.
John: It's like, is this guy...
John: Who's your killer?
John: Is he going to be somebody that works a straight job or whatever?
John: Just sees the pattern and eliminates 85% of the data because they know it's irrelevant.
John: I love that character.
John: And what we are not doing somehow in our culture and in business and in these, like, we have salt mines full of information and we're trying to grind it, you know?
John: We're trying to process it through this, like, this increasing granularity and, oh, my God, the only place that patterns are going to exist is in the most granular, at the most granular level.
John: And we're not hiring people.
John: hiawathas we're not hiring people that are just like flying over the top in a kimono who are like they you know they swoosh in and they say you know what here's the answer it was right here in front of you the whole time like I don't think that 9-11 was that hard to figure out if you just had I mean and even through retrospect it's not you can imagine one person sitting at their desk and saying you know what
John: I think I see a pattern emerging.
John: And yet that person was just like just shunted off into some storeroom somewhere because he didn't have the he didn't have the clearance to talk to the guy who had the other other half of the information.
Merlin: Right.
Merlin: Oh, that's good.
Merlin: You want to keep it, you know, compartmentalized.
Merlin: And I do not want to keep it compartmentalized.
Merlin: You want to be in a kimono floating over that.
John: I do.
John: And I think the secret ghost squad of all of this is... And this is the problem again with generalism.
John: How do you train generalists?
John: In a way you don't.
John: But how do you recognize them and raise them up?
Merlin: Right.
John: Right.
John: If your if your culture is designed to to celebrate the frog leg king and it's like, well, this guy's got seven PhDs in frog legs.
John: How are you going to say that this guy over here who never even graduated from college has got more insight in the situation than the frog leg king?
John: And it's like, well, you know what?
John: The Frog Leg King is a fucking retard.
John: And the fact that he has seven PhDs is ludicrous.
John: And you should recognize that that is a sign of his mental illness, not a sign of his greatness.
Merlin: But on the other hand, think about – I feel like I heard something not too long ago on the radio about how people on the autism spectrum are not having an easier time getting jobs.
Merlin: So people are realizing that there are certain very special skills of people on the spectrum that are not as common in those generalists with the ties.
Merlin: And that with a little bit of care and individual attention, you can actually find jobs that these folks are great at.
Merlin: When I worked at McDonald's, everybody who worked breakfast in the morning at McDonald's was an old lady.
Merlin: It was not an old man.
Merlin: It was not a young lady.
Merlin: They were all old ladies, and they had all been there for like 10 years.
Merlin: And you know what?
Merlin: They showed up on time.
Merlin: They did their shit.
Merlin: Their shit was tight.
Merlin: And every morning breakfast ran like a top at McDonald's because there was this culture of all old ladies working at McDonald's.
Merlin: And they all interacted well.
Merlin: That sounds like a really insipid example, but you need the right person for the right job.
Merlin: You don't want somebody who's going to be all low-y in there.
Merlin: And sometimes maybe you need somebody, maybe not quite a John Nash, but you need people who are able to come in and see patterns or have a drive for them.
Merlin: toward a certain kind of curiosity that's a little bit outside the spectrum.
Merlin: I mean, it's a whole, you know, Einstein misquote about trying to solve the same problem by doing the same thing.
Merlin: You don't think they have some folks like that somewhere, like maybe in Virginia?
John: I feel like the bureaucratic, the cult of bureaucracy and the misidentification of our culture now as a meritocracy is,
John: has in a way smoked all those people out, right?
John: Because what we're trying to do now is...
John: Everywhere in America, there's an admissions process, right?
John: Everywhere, there are more applications for any job than there are – I'm sorry.
John: Yeah, there are way more potential applicants for any job than there are positions.
Merlin: And so – And plenty of very generic –
John: blunt instrument metrics that allow you to put people through this rock tumbler so that only pebbles larger than this and smaller than that will fit through the screen right so for instance i have a good friend who just went through who just did 25 interviews for a job and the job was one of your computer math jobs right webmaster uh chief uh web marketing uh
John: poobah of some kind of web maths.
John: And I know the job, you know the job.
John: It's a job.
John: It's an actual job that has things that need to get done.
John: A certain amount of imagination needs to be employed to do the job well.
John: But that imagination is... This isn't a job...
John: where you're at Betchley Park and you're trying to crack the Enigma code.
John: This is a job where it's like, here's what's going to happen.
John: Pretty much we know this is the type of thing that's going to come in.
John: These are the types of ways that we're going to solve this problem.
John: We're not going to invent a medical scanner at this business because all we're trying to do is sell phone trees to banks and hospitals.
John: But
John: But in the 25 interviews that my friend went to,
John: She described innumerable examples of people coming in and sitting down and saying, let's say you're in a sinking ship and all you have is one American nickel and an uncooked bag of pasta.
John: And a drinking straw.
John: Yeah.
John: How do you get out of this situation?
John: And then lean forward, big eyes, like...
John: This whole Google-influenced version of interviewing people.
Merlin: Yeah, it's kind of like an intellectual ropes course or something.
John: Right, where the question is meant to, more than anything, convey to the interviewee that the interviewer is a really smart, hotshot person.
John: Right.
John: over and over and over again she's she's trying to field these interview questions and at a certain point i had you know she's talking to me and i i advised her like the way to answer that question is to lean equally forward and say this question is irrelevant to the performance of this job and in fact what the person that you want in this position is somebody who is going to consider all the evidence
John: in any given situation, weigh it over time and make the best reasoned choice.
John: You do not want someone who is going to, off the cuff, shoot you some kind of answer that ties together the nickel and the bag of pasta.
John: By asking this question, you are interviewing for a different job.
John: And in fact, for a job that does not exist at your company.
John: You think you are in a different world than you're in.
John: And, you know, and I advised her probably that is maybe the wrong thing to say to somebody who's interviewing you for a job.
John: But it's something that I felt very, very passionately.
John: That in business culture now, that's an example of people not recognizing where they are and thinking that they are...
John: somewhere very else and asking you know asking basically like stupid sat questions because what they wish they were doing is working for google or they wish that you know they they hope that by asking by trying to find a hiawatha everywhere all the time and yet only choosing uh
John: Then ending up only choosing the people that went to Princeton anyway because nobody can even, that person couldn't pick a good answer to that question if they tried.
John: You know what I mean?
John: Like they ask the question and they don't even have the mental resources to know what a good answer to it is.
John: So, no, I don't feel like there are those geniuses anymore.
John: I feel like we all want those geniuses.
John: I mean, we're interviewing people as though you need to be that genius just to work at AttachMate.
John: And you don't need to be that genius to work at AttachMate.
John: If that genius is working at AttachMate, it's a net loss for everybody.
Merlin: I got a very simple, probably oversimple theory.
Merlin: Back to your favorite TV show.
Merlin: I think it's Kobayashi Maru.
Merlin: I think you know the Kobayashi Maru scenario.
John: I have learned it from my several visits to Comic-Con.
Merlin: But you know the basic idea.
Merlin: Yeah, Kurt... It's a big spoiler, but basically, I don't quite understand how this works, because it seems like they would tell other people about this, but you go into a simulator to be the captain of the ship, and you have a situation where you get a distress call from the ship called the Kobayashi Maru, and you have to go through, forgive me, nerds, not Klingons, but...
Merlin: But you got basically in order to get to that stranded ship, you're going to have to go through like a DMZ that you're pretty sure will provoke the baddies.
Merlin: And so the question is, you know, what do you decide to do?
Merlin: And the spoiler of course is that no matter what you do, the Kobayashi Maru will be destroyed.
Merlin: Your ship will be destroyed.
Merlin: Everybody, no matter what you choose to do, the Kobayashi Maru scenario dies, ends with you dying and your ship being destroyed.
Merlin: And, and, uh,
Merlin: So first of all, what you learn is that the Kobayashi Maru is a test of your character.
Merlin: It seems like it's a test of your decision making, but it's really a test of your character to see how you react in an impossible situation.
Merlin: And then, of course, as you know, he eats the apple.
Merlin: We know that Kirk is the only one who's ever passed it because he cheated.
Merlin: Right.
Merlin: He rewrites the encryption somehow.
Merlin: That's right.
Merlin: That's the way you beat Kobayashi Maru is by cheating.
Merlin: And then, of course, you know, he has to go to a space trial and stuff like that.
Merlin: Right, because it revealed his character.
Merlin: Right.
Merlin: Well, I don't doubt that there are answers that that person has on a piece of paper, but I think part of it is just seeing how you react to stuff like that.
Merlin: Don't you think?
Merlin: Don't you think part of it would be like, well, here's this real wackadoodle situation, show me your creativity and cool?
John: Yeah, but this is the problem.
John: How many of these jobs are creativity and cool needed?
John: I would say maybe 0.01%.
John: You flatter yourselves, interviewers, to think that creativity and cool is a thing that you're looking for when, in fact, you're looking for someone who is thoughtful, confident.
John: But this is another thing.
John: There are so many people out there.
John: who need a few minutes to think about it before they're going to come up with the solution, right?
John: And we have eliminated a lot of those people from contention because for whatever reason, we prize somebody's cool under fire in an interview.
Merlin: Right, or maybe they just don't present well, you know?
John: Right, but if they went home and spent the evening thinking about it, they'd come back with an elegant solution that required, you know, in a way, neither creativity nor cool, right?
John: but like intelligence and a little work intelligence and work exactly like work and processing that does not fall into this magical like this is a this is this problem of like everybody's a fucking artist now because everybody's mom told them that they were an artist all the way through grade school and so we think that creativity is this thing that like that we need even in the business class and the reality is
John: Of a thousand people working at a company, you need two of them to be creative.
John: And the rest of them need to be diligent.
Merlin: They need to be able to get along with other people, which is very hard to gauge.
John: Right.
John: That's such an overlook skill.
John: We're populating places with people who pass these dumb creativity tests.
John: And the reality is that most of them aren't creative.
John: So the dumb creativity test gets slightly...
John: It gets mutated until enough people pass it, right?
John: The test mutates to fulfill the curve.
John: And so now all of a sudden we have a different definition of creativity.
John: Because, well, we didn't want 40% of the people working here to be creative.
John: Well, guess what?
John: 40% of the people in the world aren't creative.
John: And you're probably not going to get... You're not going to skim the top 40% off to come work at your...
John: at your software company that deals with... Phone trees.
John: Phone trees, right.
John: So if you think that 40% of the people working there are creative, you have gamed your own test to think that you're getting creative answers out of people when people are just giving you whatever fucking... You are not actually measuring what you think you're measuring.
John: And this is the problem, I think, nationwide.
John: There is no, in a country that values creativity as highly as we do, as we claim to do, there actually is very, there's maybe even less room for creative people now because creativity has been co-opted and systematized.
John: What we call creativity.
Merlin: This is, yeah, and so here I'm going to toss out a word.
Merlin: I'm going to use this word, I think, correctly for the first time.
Merlin: It's normative.
Merlin: Because if you think about, I remember when I very, I feel like I have snapshots of this from my life as feeling like somebody who was a somewhat creative person who needed a chance and a little time to explain, who didn't do well in those kinds of things.
Merlin: But I remember hearing, you know, you remember all the stuff about, you know,
Merlin: The PSAT, the SAT, the ACT, like it was just even in 1980, I graduated in 85, like it was so drilled into your head how critical those are.
Merlin: And it wasn't until a few years later that at least this is the version I've heard is that the reason those tests are really important is that they look at those tests.
Merlin: they look at your grades, and yeah, they're going to look at stuff like your essay and things like that, but there's a single reason that those test scores amount so much, which is incredibly sensible, but also incredibly depressing, which is that there is, of all the measurements that are out there, there is one correlation that matters.
Merlin: The correlation between people who do well
Merlin: on standardized college admission tests, and people who finish college in less than four years, that correlation is extremely high.
Merlin: It sounds so obvious, but think about that for just a second.
Merlin: Like, talk about fucking normative.
Merlin: What that means is that, like, wow, you know what?
Merlin: We just don't have the time, the inclination, or the resources to really find out who would blow the doors off of this place.
Merlin: And what we've got here is we need to find people who aren't going to fail spectacularly.
Merlin: In some ways, that's what it means.
Merlin: So like in my nutty ball school, like I had good ACT scores.
Merlin: I had a good essay, but mostly they were like, you know what?
Merlin: You're a five percenter.
Merlin: You're like one of those people who we're pretty sure is going to bomb out before the end of the first semester.
Merlin: But what the hell?
Merlin: We have a certain amount in our budget to let in crazy people who might not work out.
Merlin: And in the end, it did work out.
Merlin: But I should not have gotten into the college that I got into, because that's what is there.
Merlin: I got it again, just quickly.
Merlin: I got it again, I think it was when I first went on unemployment in Florida, in like 95, after I got fired from a job.
Merlin: And I remember filling out that form, or I did a similar thing in California later, but going through and filling out those forms is so depressing, because it's so digital.
Merlin: It really is like one to five stars, write down your skill,
Merlin: Your skill does not match one of the things.
Merlin: Did you mean Microsoft Word?
Merlin: Okay, Microsoft Word.
Merlin: How many years have you done this?
Merlin: How good are you as that?
Merlin: And you don't get to explain anything about how you learn things fast.
Merlin: You don't get to explain anything about how you are sometimes good at figuring out a problem before it is a problem.
Merlin: I know that's out there somewhere.
Merlin: Maybe that's what those Kobayashi Maruas are for.
Merlin: But it's so frustrating to me that the data that we're talking about ends up getting used to get a more and more normative bell curve.
Merlin: of people who are unlikely to flame out spectacularly, but may not even be the greatest at what they're doing.
John: And if you believed in a world where the world was being run by people who knew what they were going for, you could say, like, oh, okay, this is one of a hundred potential ways that you could run the world.
John: And it's...
John: I guess one that is equally valid.
John: Like, let's just make a bell curve.
John: Let's admit people into the most prestigious colleges based on whether or not they're going to finish rather than whether or not they're really smart.
John: And then let's weight everything that happens in the culture according to this same sort of methodology.
John: So, like, if you go to Princeton, then doors are going to open for you the rest of your life.
John: And you're going to keep getting things done.
John: So we're going to prize people who get things done.
John: Yeah.
John: And et cetera, et cetera.
John: Like, if we believed that there were people up on top of the space needle of our culture looking down and saying, like, here's how it's designed.
John: And we know that we're losing people out of both ends of this machine.
John: But you have to pick a way.
John: And so this is the way that we pick.
Merlin: Maybe even thinking this is the least destructive method we know of for coming up with something not even efficient but something that's sustainable and doable.
John: Yeah, because ultimately people who get things done are more valuable than people who don't get things done.
John: So let's just say that.
John: But in fact, there really aren't people sitting up on top –
John: managing the system from the top down who know what they're doing like every one of these systems has kind of evolved just haphazardly and it is an accidental kind of hive that has built where this is the byproduct of it and a lot of that is I think because prior to now we didn't have the technology to do
John: it a different way really or i mean you know this is the technology has evolved at the same time that these systems have evolved and so it's all you know it's it's like a big ant hill that just keeps getting built and falling down and built and falling down but but we have now the ability to at least recognize that
John: And draw a correlation between the fact that, okay, on the one hand, we are increasingly producing a world of senior frogs and a world of... Frog-legged kings!
John: Well, not only frog-legged kings, but like...
John: Everywhere you go now in America, there's a senior frogs.
John: Is that how you envisioned America evolving?
John: Like, in 1950, when you were thinking of flying cars, did you really think that there would also be a senior frogs in every beach town?
John: Like, was that the plan?
John: Is this a plan?
John: Like, we are getting... Our culture is getting dumber.
John: We are getting less interesting at an exponential rate.
John: We are privileging...
John: We are privileging dummies.
John: We are just sucking from the fire hose of idiocracy.
John: And it's because we have not adjusted or recalibrated our systems.
John: And this anthill is... Like, our anthill is...
John: is starting to fall.
John: And part of that has to be the responsibility of the people that we've been sending to Princeton for the last 20, 30, 40 years.
John: Oh, totally.
John: You know what I mean?
John: Like, we have been choosing who goes to the next level, and those people have been producing an increasingly garbage culture.
John: It isn't just that we've...
John: emptied the asylums.
John: It is that the people who have the opportunity to make good choices are making bad choices because they are cogs or because what we're calling imagination is not imagination.
John: And we need to, I think, recalibrate and start saying like, you know what, maybe...
John: Maybe the universities, and this is the thing, I don't think we can reform the universities.
John: I think we who are outside of this culture need to start saying the universities are not where we need to look.
John: If you want an education, you can now get one.
John: on your own.
John: We can start building educational models that are outside of this whole cattle shoot that we have spent the last hundred years designing to find the smartest people.
John: And outside of that cattle chute, we can teach ourselves and we can start to prize and value other qualities and characteristics.
John: Because when I was 19 years old, maybe there was a chance that I could have...
John: kick down the door into that world still just by sheer force of will and like good essay and interpretive dance or whatever but those days are gone there's no way a person like me could make it
John: To could make it through that system now.
Merlin: It's so stunning to think that, you know, it just with all the high stakes testing that goes on throughout a public school education now and having to like more and more refine yourself through this funnel of getting more and more to be the kind of person that a college would be interested in.
Merlin: or for that matter, a preschooler that a private elementary school would want.
Merlin: And that makes you somebody – then you've got to be in a feeder elementary school to get to a good middle school and so on and so forth until eventually your edges have been sanded off to where you'll fit into – I don't want to over-say it, but it's kind of crazy to me.
Merlin: That really feels kind of real.
Merlin: You've got to have this number of extracurricular activities.
Merlin: You've got to have this many things going on.
Merlin: And that is for the privilege of paying $40,000 a year to go to college.
Merlin: That's to me where it gets a little bit crazy.
John: Well, and just look at, like, look who our heroes are.
John: If you want to look at, I mean, Bill Gates or Mark Zuckerberg and say, like, well, you know, these guys, they went to Harvard, they dropped out, they started these billion-dollar companies.
John: Like, these are our heroes.
John: And
John: If you look at Mark Zuckerberg and Bill Gates, these guys are not my hero.
John: They are not our heroes.
John: They are not heroes at all.
John: These are not... Maybe Bill Gates has become a likable guy.
John: Maybe he, through a combination of PR, devoted millions and millions of dollars of people working on him to make him appear in public as a pleasant...
John: person who has a good heart who is giving his money away for clean water like bill gates has has become a honorable character in the world but bill gates is a fucking frog leg king and then so is zuckerberg
John: Neither one of these guys are heroic humans.
John: They aren't even full humans.
John: They're just guys who had one idea and did it to the exclusion of all other human activity.
Merlin: Well, but through some combination of, I don't want to put it negatively, but like psychosis or grit was able to stick with it so long that they pushed it through to become what they wanted and then it evolved.
John: Yeah, they pushed it through.
John: And what is it exactly?
John: Well, in Bill Gates' case, it was some word processing programs that ran on a fucking little game box.
John: that everybody decided we all needed to have at home because the typewriter wasn't good enough or whatever.
John: I mean, it took 15 years of personal computers being pretty much boat anchors before they were really better than a typewriter and a mimeograph machine.
John: You know, it wasn't that long ago that we were... I mean, I'm still being asked to fax shit to people.
John: Like, the training wheels are still on.
John: And Zuckerberg did what?
John: He built a thing that does what?
John: That we all go and waste our time on sending baby pictures back and forth?
John: Like, okay, pioneers, sure.
John: Okay, they've made a thing.
John: Fine.
John: This is where we are now.
John: We're in a post-Facebook world.
John: But are we happy about it?
John: Was that really good?
John: Was that really the best we could have come up with?
John: Facebook was the next thing that human beings devised?
Merlin: We're proud of that?
John: Even that it set the mark.
John: Yeah, like, it is now.
John: There's no denying it.
John: It did happen.
John: It is a thing, and it is an enormous thing.
John: And it has adjusted our course for the future.
John: We will always now live in a world that is post-Facebook.
John: But I do not see it as heroic or even good.
John: And Zuckerberg is not a... He is no fucking Lancelot.
John: He's just a... He's a guy who got where he is because we decided...
John: A certain type of person was going to succeed in schools, and he got to a place, and now he produced a thing that is the direct result of how we decide who goes to college.
John: And we're living in a world where all the restaurants that used to have hand-carved turkey sandwiches have been torn down and turned into senior frogs.
John: And I don't fucking like it.
Merlin: I think it's a bad world.
Merlin: Certainly it's bad on a cultural, social level, but it seems like a lot of it is affecting the kind of food that you have available.
John: The kind of food and the kind of brain food.
John: Yes.
John: You know, I realized the other day, this is a crazy thing, but you know, Merlin, I was never bored in my life.
John: When I was a kid, I was never bored.
John: When I was a teenager, I was never bored.
John: You know, you never, ever, ever would have heard from me, I'm bored.
John: Because if I was left alone and I had anything, if I was left alone and I had two pebbles, I would devise a little thing with two pebbles that would keep me interested.
John: Not just occupied, but interested.
John: I wasn't bored anymore.
John: When I was a drunk, I wasn't bored at any, you know, really at any job I had.
John: Because once I got how to do the job, then I could let my mind roam.
John: And it was just like, do a rote job and let your mind be free.
John: But lately, I have discovered, I have found myself being bored.
John: And why?
John: Because I look at my phone all the fucking time and
John: And I'm looking at my phone all the time, and it's exciting, and I like the internet, and I'm on the Twitter, and I'm floating around, and I'm looking at stuff, and I'm looking stuff up.
John: But all of a sudden, in the afternoon sometimes, I'll be like, oh, God, I'm just so fucking bored.
John: And I realize it's because I'm looking at my phone all the time, and it has the collected world knowledge on it, and yet the interface with it and how I'm using it, what I'm seeking out there, and I don't think I'm any different from anybody else.
John: It's producing...
John: this novel sensation in me, which is like the boredom of access to everything and the boredom of, you know, of navigating a world that was created in a, in a way with no imagination.
John: The architecture of this, this phone based internet world has a decided lack of imagination, like built into the fabric of it.
John: It's just, you know, it's what people who were told they had imagination built.
John: And everybody congratulated them.
John: And they were like, thanks a lot.
John: You know, did you notice that the back button takes you back and the forward button takes you forward?
John: And did you notice also you can scroll over here and you can look at that and you click on the ad and it goes to the next thing?
John: And it's just like, you know what?
John: Yeah, I did notice that.
John: And fuck you, guy.
John: It's not that great.
Yeah.
Merlin: Want to talk about all the president's men?
Merlin: Okay.
Merlin: Yeah, guy.
Merlin: I saw it.
Merlin: It's not that great.