Ep. 127: "Fermi in a Van"
Merlin: Hello.
Merlin: Hey, John.
Merlin: Hi, Merlin.
Merlin: How's it going?
John: pretty good what's the matter oh no things are good things are good you know it's one of those it's just one of those like um how good can things be you know what i mean yeah how good can they be really
John: Yeah.
John: There's a comet coming.
John: There's a meteor, giant meteor, going to wipe us out.
Merlin: Wow, I didn't know about this.
Merlin: Yeah, how good can we feel?
Merlin: Is that a BuzzFeed thing?
Merlin: Should I catch up on that?
Merlin: I'll tell you what.
Merlin: If you were on Reddit, you would know.
Merlin: You've got to get off the Reddit, John.
John: I've never been on Reddit.
Merlin: Oh.
Merlin: Can you believe that?
Merlin: I follow a Tumblr site that puts up pictures of cute animals from that site, but that's about it.
John: Yeah, every once in a while someone says I should do an AMA from Reddit.
John: I thought you were going to do one.
John: I thought I saw you scheduled for one of those.
John: I don't think I ever was, but in any case, I don't understand the interface.
John: I look at Reddit and it looks like an organizational chart or like an outline for a term paper.
John: Yeah, it's got a tree format.
John: A tree format, right.
John: And you know what?
John: When I first got on the internet, 1990-07.
John: Hmm.
John: And I would go on the news groups, or rather I would go to the internet.
John: I would go to a place where people were on the internet, and I would look over their shoulder while they were on the news groups.
John: And I would say, why are you doing this?
John: What is this about?
John: And they were like, oh, see, you go over here, and there's a guy that tells you how to build a ham radio.
John: I'm like, I mean, yeah, but it never appealed to me, partly because I didn't like the...
John: I didn't like the way that it looked, like the way it was shaped.
John: And Reddit's like that for me.
Merlin: Yeah, I mean, I think in some ways, this is really reductive, but I think I sometimes feel like you can break it down into these two general levels of interest.
Merlin: And you think about a site like Metafilter, which is similar in some ways.
Merlin: Oh, yeah.
Merlin: Metafilter, like some percentage of the time, I'm most interested in what people have to say about the link, but a lot of times I'm really most interested in the link.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: And I think the thing that makes the internet hard for me to understand sometimes is that there are a lot of people who are way more interested in the comments than the link.
Merlin: That's not a judgment, but that it is a real difference in some ways.
Merlin: They see the link as the jumping off point for providing opinion and having witty repartee.
Merlin: And I think I tend to be more interested in ruminating on the link.
Yeah.
Merlin: Yes.
Merlin: Personally, by myself, in solitude.
John: Agreed and agreed.
John: I was thinking as I loaded up my briefcase today to come down here, my briefcase.
John: You got a briefcase?
John: As I was loading up my briefcase, I was thinking that in my dad's time, my dad put nothing electrical in his briefcase.
John: With the exception, perhaps, of a micro cassette recorder to dictate.
John: Right.
John: But there was no cabling of any kind in my dad's briefcase.
Merlin: He didn't have to plug anything in when he got to work or got home.
John: Nothing ever got plugged in.
John: When my dad was at an airport, he never plugged a single thing in in his life.
John: And as I am loading up my briefcase just to come down here to talk to you and I'm like, oh, I got to get that other cable.
John: And I go over and I get a cable and I stick it in and it's like, oh, right.
John: And I need that cable.
John: for that other thing, and I go get that cable, and pretty soon, you know, your briefcase is just like, it's just a spaghetti of different wires.
Merlin: If you X-rated, it would look like a bomb.
John: Yeah, right.
John: And it caused me to think that up until probably about, I would say, into the 90s, if your work entailed that you were using electrical gizmos,
John: It was a 99% chance that you were a technician, that you were a blue-collar person, and you had a briefcase full of gizmos because your job involved you doing some monitoring of some HVAC equipment.
John: Right.
John: And now it has completely flipped and everybody is carrying around electronic equipment all the time.
John: You are measured, in fact, your status is measured by how much gizmology you have in your bag, not how little.
John: My dad never had a single, and no one he knew had a single gizmo.
Merlin: Right.
Right.
Merlin: Yeah, I get what you're saying.
Merlin: And it's funny because as much as you get a new laptop bag or a new briefcase in your case, we still haven't fully adapted to that.
Merlin: Because when you're describing somebody who dealt with gizmos for a living, I'm not thinking about a phone repair person.
John: Yeah, right.
John: He had a hard shell case.
Merlin: Oh, he had a goddamn van.
John: He had a van.
Merlin: I'm starting to think I don't need a backpack, I need a van.
Merlin: He had a van with a ladder on the top.
John: Right.
John: Yeah.
John: And, you know, the culture could have gone a lot of different ways.
John: It's like that famous R. Crumb drawing of progress.
John: Right.
John: And first it's a horse-drawn carriage, and then it's a locomotive, and then it's phone wires and El Camino's.
Merlin: And more and more of the landscape is filled up with phone wires and encroaching technology.
John: And then the sort of little or lesser known coda to that drawing were his three possible versions of the future.
John: And one of them was like hover cars and sort of Jetsons houses.
John: And one of them was a completely blown out landscape of just like dystopia.
John: And then obviously the one that he... It's hard for me to reconcile this with what I know about R. Crumb.
John: But the third...
John: of his three options was a kind of ecotopia of yurts and tall forest and people, you know, a community of people living in a natural hippie style.
John: It's an option.
John: It's an option, but it seemed to me that, it seemed like R. Crumb would have, he would have desired that the future looked like everyone wearing spats and straw boaters and playing the banjo.
John: Actually, how the future turned out.
John: We are living in an R. Crumb dream future that even he didn't envision.
Merlin: People carry their Victrolas around with them.
Yeah.
John: So, yeah, but I wonder, I mean, we went this way.
John: Do you remember the Osborne computer?
John: I know of it.
John: My best friend in high school, his father was an early adopter and he owned an Osborne, which was the first briefcase computer that was the size of what it was.
John: It was bigger than a than a tower computer.
John: Right.
John: Bigger than what we would call a desk or a what would you call that?
Merlin: Yeah, I know what you mean.
Merlin: It's bigger than a desktop computer.
Merlin: It's not at all portable, but much smaller than the mainframe or mini computers that we thought of as being a computer at the time.
John: Yeah, and the entire screen was about the size of an iPhone.
John: Two disk drives.
John: And he actually brought, my friend brought that down to our, brought it over to my house sometimes.
John: And, you know, we played games on the Osborne.
John: And to think that that is in a museum now.
Merlin: Oh, that's it?
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Merlin: We could not do it without them.
John: No, there were a lot of ways I could go with that, but I got tired of hearing myself talk.
Merlin: You know what I notice is everybody, not everybody I know, but for probably all kinds of obvious reasons, most of the people I know have a smartphone of some kind.
Merlin: You got an iPhone, you got an Android phone, you got a whatever phone.
Merlin: But like in my neighborhood, which is mostly people from Asia, a lot of Chinese people, so many people still have like a clamshell, like a flip phone, a feature phone.
Merlin: Interesting.
Merlin: I mean, the interesting thing about that is, though, I mean, see, now I'm going to get all in my bomb bag again.
Merlin: But, like, the funny thing is, like, I get these – I get a new phone every, what, two years, three years, something like that.
Merlin: You know, and as you've noted, you've got to get the right charging cables and you've got to get all synced up.
Merlin: It's a weird thing, though, that, like, these folks have the same –
Merlin: Roughly the same phone that I had before I got an iPhone.
Merlin: So they've got a mid-2000s level phone.
Merlin: It looks like it's been at the bottom of a fish tank for six years.
Merlin: A Razr.
Merlin: Well, in a lot of cases, those Samsung phones...
Merlin: It's a thing.
Merlin: But, you know, I don't really feel like – this is just as insightful as your Osborne anecdote, I guess.
Merlin: I remember – that was a tie.
Merlin: But I – why do we need more than three TV channels?
Merlin: What's the deal?
Merlin: You got three VHF channels.
Merlin: You got two UHF channels.
Merlin: What market people do?
Merlin: You can only watch one at a time.
Merlin: What's the matter?
Merlin: But the one thing I will say, though, is that I think that this might come out of – certainly this comes out of the rapid pace of technology.
Merlin: And it comes out of my still – even though I'm getting to be older and I'm not as interested in new nerdy stuff by a long shot as I was even five years ago.
Merlin: Even now, still, I find myself like –
Merlin: I don't feel like things have gotten that much easier because by the time that all the bugs have been worked out of whatever iOS or S10 or whatever, by the time I'm getting the hang of that, there's a new one.
Merlin: And then I sit on that for a while.
Merlin: Are my backups still working?
Merlin: Is this thing still – oh, no.
Merlin: Like my wife.
Merlin: My wife for the last three years has had 14 copies of every contact.
Merlin: My wife.
Merlin: My wife.
Merlin: My wife.
Merlin: Here's the thing with my wife.
Merlin: She's got – but I've gone in there and I have like once a year I go in and I definitively decide I actually have a built-a-purpose program that will help me locate and delete.
Merlin: But like her contacts now are so screwed up that she has – like she mostly has 14 copies of the same contacts.
Merlin: So she has something like 5,000 contacts.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: Or in some cases, I guess maybe this app got it wrong.
Merlin: And now in some cases, she'll have a contact that has 35 email addresses from different people associated with it.
Merlin: And so now I'm just to the point where I open that up and I look at it and I go, you know what, we should just burn it down.
John: Yeah, right.
John: Burn the whole thing down.
Merlin: I want you to take this piece of paper, write down the phone numbers and email addresses of five people that you really need, and let's start over.
John: Oh, no, you know, the thing to do is to, of course, to send a bulk email out to everyone in your contact list.
John: Oh, you send out a blast?
John: Saying, reply to this with your contact information because I dropped my phone or whatever.
John: Right?
John: And then only the people that reply.
John: Those are your only true friends.
Merlin: I like those notes I get from people that I haven't even – not that I haven't talked to them in 15 years.
Merlin: I haven't thought of them in 15 years.
Merlin: I maybe had one interaction with them like during the Clinton administration and I still every year or two get an email from them with their updated contact deets.
John: Yeah, yeah.
John: Here's my new email address.
John: Yeah.
John: Like your new email address?
John: Who changes email addresses?
John: Yeah.
John: I don't know.
John: That's the march of time, John.
John: Time marches on.
John: I feel like I've touched on this over the years in talking to you, but I want to say it again, which is... There was a time.
John: Which is that...
John: Sort of elaborating on what I was saying a minute ago, that we use the word tech and we talk about tech now like it's kind of a new realm, right?
John: Like the tech economy.
John: We think of tech as a thing that's only been around for 15 years.
Yeah.
Merlin: And it can mean virtually anything.
Merlin: It can mean television set-top boxes.
Merlin: It could mean an app on your iPhone.
Merlin: It could be all these different things, and it's like we suddenly invented a way to use technology that we never had before.
John: Yeah, yeah, and like technology somehow didn't exist before.
John: Right.
John: But in fact, like, over the course of, I mean, just since the Industrial Revolution, there have been innumerable periods where the culture at the time was fascinated by the new technology.
John: Right?
John: Everybody, you know, the cotton gin or the machine rolled cigarette or the automobile, for Christ's sake.
John: Right?
John: And the technology of the moment is super fascinating to people and seems like it's revolutionized the way people conduct their lives.
John: And then kind of the dust settles and that technology becomes commonplace and people stop talking about it, right?
John: They go back to the more important or more interesting business of talking about...
John: ideas or of talking about, I mean, politics even.
John: And we're living in this kind of extended period where we're talking about tech and interacting with tech as though that is in itself culture.
Merlin: Oh, I get it.
John: You know what I mean?
Merlin: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Merlin: It's like in the late 70s, early 80s, I think newspapers started realizing that people were dying.
Merlin: And so they started having a section in the paper called health.
Merlin: And suddenly, for the first time, you started seeing stuff about whatever peach pits of curing cancer or whatever.
Merlin: And that became like a hot thing.
Merlin: And now today, it's not unusual to see a section anywhere of something called tech because people are using tech to look at tech.
Merlin: And tech is its own thing.
John: Tech is its own thing.
John: And in a way, certainly in the little ghetto that we live in, like tech is the topic.
John: And when I was younger, or I mean, when we used to prognosticate about tech, it was always that tech was going to facilitate...
John: The conversation tech was going to, you know, and that is part of the conversation we're having now that tech is facilitating a conversation about tech.
John: Yeah, right.
John: And I couldn't be less interested over time.
John: This is an unpopular point of view, John.
John: I'm glad we have a podcast to talk about this.
John: I'm not putting this out.
John: But you know what I'm saying.
John: I do.
John: I do.
John: It's exhausting.
John: I keep waiting for tech to stop being the topic because I do feel like ultimately it lowers the quality.
John: of the dialogue.
John: I feel like I am down... That's maybe a disparaging way to put it, but I feel like I am talking to a bunch of people with the cables in their vans all the time, but that those people are...
John: are presenting themselves and imagine themselves to be part of the, like, the real, like, thinking level of people.
John: Yeah, they're Fermi in a van.
John: Yeah.
John: Fermi in a van with a ladder on the top.
John: Chicks in, ducks in, keeps better scary.
Merlin: And I'm in my Fermi van with a ladder on top.
John: What I was terrified of, I had this terrible realization the other day that...
John: You know, you and I both have prepared our long lives to be prognosticators and thinkers and hosts and toasters and, you know, like we imagined when we were young.
John: that there was a very important job in the world, which was hard to get and really a prize when you got it, which was that you were a person with some thoughts about things that people wanted to hear.
John: And you were the voice.
John: You were the thinker, the public person, the citizen artist.
Yeah.
John: And I had this sort of terrible moment when I was reflecting back on the 80s when, as you do.
John: I remember the spotted owl controversy here in the Northwest.
John: And trying to tease out all the different sides of it when it was really embroiled here.
John: And realizing that the answer was that it wasn't possible to save all the lumberjack jobs.
John: And the lumberjacks were protesting on the streets of Packwood or wherever the hell they lived.
John: And they were saying, like, we're losing our jobs.
John: To this bird and what it really was was that we were shipping all of their work, all their jobs over to Asia.
John: We were putting the raw logs on boats and sending them to Asia rather than milling them here.
John: But the owl was a scapegoat.
John: But they were marching and saying, like, we are losing our jobs.
John: And...
John: And they presented it as this kind of like, I mean, we can't lose our jobs, so you have to find another solution other than that we stop cutting down trees.
John: And I remember having the insight that like, oh...
John: These jobs are gone.
John: There won't be these lumberjack jobs.
Merlin: No amount of protesting will change the reality of that.
John: Yeah.
John: The sad truth and the truth that no politician kind of has the guts to stand up and say is like, no, it's already happened.
John: And it was the same with the auto workers in Detroit right about the same time.
John: Like, hey, we're losing our jobs.
John: And these are good union jobs that we're paying $150,000 a year for us to lean on a broom and smoke cigarettes.
John: And we can't lose these jobs.
John: And it was like, well, yeah, in fact, they're already gone.
John: And you made a bad choice by leaning on a broom and smoking a cigarette.
John: And it worked for a while, but now it's over.
John: And watching those groups of workers have the slow, dreadful realization that it wasn't just a matter of going over and getting another job across the street.
John: It was that the whole thing was done.
John: and the ones that could adapt did, and the ones that couldn't are on Social Security right now and yelling about Obama.
John: But this realization that you and I maybe have prepared our whole lives...
John: Imagining that what we do and what we can do was some kind of rare talent that the world desperately craved.
John: And now we have arrived at precisely the moment when it is hardest, which is to say middle age.
John: And I just am realizing like maybe our jobs are starting to be outsourced.
John: In the sense that every teenager has an opinion and values it equally with ours.
Merlin: And they're better at engaging with the people who are primarily there to make comments who are going to do a lot of the heavy lifting for them.
Merlin: Right.
Merlin: Back to that previous thing.
Merlin: There's another thing in one of the many lost episodes that people won't hear.
Merlin: We talked about college.
Merlin: I don't remember when it was.
Merlin: But we talked some time ago, you and I offline, about college.
Merlin: And it's in particular in the context of college being something that –
Merlin: That was – will you tell me if I'm putting this right?
Merlin: But for both of us and maybe for our generation I guess or for similar middle-class white kids, college was something that was just – you were going to go to college.
Merlin: And every decision that you made on the way to going to college was primarily an opportunity to screw up your chance to go to college.
Yeah.
Merlin: It wasn't something – and again, I'm sorry.
Merlin: There's bits of that that were really good.
Merlin: But no, seriously though, there was – I think we both shared that sense that like every known or unknown thing that was on the path for us was, well, for one thing, on one path.
Merlin: And here's that path.
Merlin: That path is you're going to fucking go to college.
John: Right, an inexorable march.
Merlin: So you going out and drinking that beer, it's not just about you breaking a rule about drinking a beer when you're underage.
Merlin: It's about the fact that that could really screw up your one opportunity to be something nowadays.
Merlin: And so the thing that – in thinking about – I'm going to go a little bit John Roderick here.
Merlin: I wonder if one thing we lose or are losing or have lost in some ways, I mean, are there that many people that are really excited to go to college for the sake of going to college?
Merlin: It's become so rote and so costly and so, I don't know.
Merlin: I mean, there was a part of me that once I was in college, I was really into it because here's the thing.
Merlin: Yes, on some level, I thought of myself as a future Dick Cavett, but I also was really open to the idea that there was so much stuff that I knew the name of
Merlin: But I didn't know anything about it.
Merlin: And I was really open to the idea of someone saying, okay, well, you've talked out of your butt a little bit about Shakespeare here.
Merlin: Well, how about you go read some of those?
Merlin: You've talked about these novels and these great works and these classics.
Merlin: Well, now you're going to read those.
Merlin: You're going to go see all these paintings that have been name-checked and we're going to talk about them in context.
Merlin: So there was at least some part of me that was really open to being a vessel for a while.
Merlin: I'm not saying it had any great impact or I did particularly well with it.
Merlin: But I wonder if that state of mind is different or maybe if I was unique at that time.
Merlin: I don't think I was.
Merlin: I think people like me were pretty hungry to go somewhere, not to be wrong, but to definitely be open to the idea that there was shit tons of stuff that I didn't even know I needed to know.
Merlin: And then once I had that, I would be in a better position to conduct myself as an adult.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: And I wonder if that isn't unique.
Merlin: I wonder if that's still as pressing a feeling as it is today.
Merlin: And I'm not trying to be dismissive.
Merlin: I'm not trying to be an old man.
Merlin: But I do get the sense that there's less, especially as the idea of a canon has kind of withered on the vine for better or for worse, sometimes for better.
Merlin: Do you think people still have that same feeling of going like, wow, I'm going to go out today and learn what I might be wrong about.
Merlin: I'm going to go out today and like figure out all these ways that somebody could set me straight a little bit.
John: No, I don't.
John: I don't think that that is the feeling because I don't think that there is a sense that you can be wrong about a thing in the same way.
John: I think that the idea that we had that you could be wrong or rather that you could be right, you could be more right.
John: was predicated on an understanding that there was a limited amount of knowledge, right?
John: There was a canon.
John: You went to college and there were still more books than you could possibly read in a lifetime, but you could read 10% of the books.
John: And from that 10% get a pretty good picture of what the common understanding of truth was.
John: And I think that's completely blown out of the water now.
John: Everybody's got their own micro-truth.
John: And in that sense, I think college is over.
John: There's no reason.
John: Increasingly, I feel like college is another one of these, like, it's a timber business.
Merlin: It's already kind of over.
John: It's already over.
John: And people are still going because of inertia.
Merlin: I heard a thing on Planet Money where they're talking about the kinds of jobs that have the highest and lowest average incomes.
Merlin: So for example, if you know what a petroleum engineer can make –
Merlin: You can go to college and say, well, I'm going to go become a petroleum engineer because there's a pretty good chance that for at least the next five to ten years, that's still going to be a pretty good gig.
Merlin: And I know I'm going to start in the six figures the day I step out of that program.
Merlin: But see, what's funny about that, as difficult as that work is, as smart as you have to be to do it.
Merlin: As hard as you're going to have to work to get through that, that is oddly similar to the same kind of vocational training that I was completely not interested in when I was a kid.
Merlin: I did not want to fix air conditioners.
Merlin: I did not want to fix cash registers.
Merlin: That was not work of the mind.
John: Well, yeah, exactly.
John: And a petroleum engineer spends a lot of time looking at graphs, looking at printouts of, you know, they're setting off charges or sending sound waves into the earth and watching it bounce off of stuff, you know, different layers of schist or feldspar.
John: And then they're interpreting charts, basically, in the same way that a radio repairman is.
John: They've just been taught how to do it.
John: It's more complicated than... I mean, I'm not even sure if it's more complicated than tuning a crystal set.
John: But it doesn't feel like upper campus, right?
John: All that stuff... At the University of Washington, there are...
John: The lower campus is where all the new buildings are.
John: It's where all the excitement's happening.
John: It's where, you know, you walk into these buildings that have been... Old buildings that have been rehabilitated.
John: And every wall has a little cluster of...
John: AV adapters and little hookups and USB ports and they're all purpose-built for what people imagined or what people in 2009 imagined the modern classroom was going to be.
John: Because we were all going to be PowerPointing one another and it was, you know, books were gone and science, science, science, science.
John: And then the upper campus is...
John: It's getting smaller and smaller, and it's this area up there where people are still studying poetry.
John: I mean, can you think of a more irrelevant thing than studying poetry?
Merlin: I mean, the classic is art history, right?
John: Right, but when I was entering college, those were precisely the things that interested me.
John: Mm-hmm.
John: Art history was one of... It's my all-time favorite class I had in college, was 20th century painting.
John: Yeah, one of four possible majors for me, right?
John: There were only four conceivable ones.
John: English, philosophy, history, art.
John: And...
John: And I am one of a, I mean, I think entering freshmen at the University of Washington now, I mean, even in 1985, I don't think that many of them measured in the humanities, but certainly a lot, a larger percentage than are doing it now.
Merlin: Oh, that's, you know, dude, right there.
Merlin: That's the real automotive industry.
Merlin: Because think about that perfect storm.
Merlin: On the one hand, I mean, I, you know, I don't want to overstate this, but I can already see that, like, when I was a kid, we had a music class.
Merlin: There was a gymnasium that you go to to do gym things.
Merlin: There were all of these things that were not strictly the academic stuff.
Merlin: But, I mean, you had a music class.
Merlin: You learned a little bit, play a little bit of an instrument and learn about rhythm and learn about George Gershwin and all that kind of stuff.
Merlin: I'm guessing that Copland is not in the Common Core.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: in the way that it was when we were kids.
Merlin: So on the one hand, you have fewer and fewer people who are getting that every day.
Merlin: And let's be honest, we're not just talking about middle class kids.
Merlin: There are a lot of kids that would not learn about that stuff at home.
Merlin: They're not going to be listening to their parents, you know, eight tracks of the planets or something like that.
Merlin: And then, you know, but then on the other hand, think about where the money comes from at a university, not just the tuition, but think about the grants.
Merlin: Think about where that money goes.
Merlin: That's not going to be coming from, you know, the National Endowment for the Humanities, probably.
Merlin: It's going to be coming from Exxon.
John: Well, and increasingly, universities get a lot of money from the patents that they develop.
John: Oh, God.
John: And I don't want to give too much away, but I just had a very interesting meeting of this arts commission that I'm on.
John: The music commission and the arts commission had a joint meeting, and we were talking about the kind of... We were pie-in-the-skying.
John: Because those commissions are doing a really good job in Seattle now, and people are excited about them, and companies are coming around.
John: And the proposal was kind of like, all right, if we were going to envision a forward-looking arts curriculum for Seattle public schools, and we felt like we could present it to the world and take money from people and actually build it, like not just build...
John: But build an academy of the arts.
Merlin: Not just outline it, but implement it.
John: Yeah.
John: And really build a physical structure that has drinking fountains and classrooms and is a place that people go.
John: And what would it look like?
John: And we went around the table.
John: And these are – the people at the commission are like all –
John: It's a super altruistic mindset.
John: Nobody's there to personally profit.
John: It's a lot of work to be on one of those commissions, and we're trying to make the city better.
John: But every single idea was like, well, you know what we need?
John: We need a classroom on video game design, and we need a classroom on...
John: graphic art design all this sort of design and and electronic music implementation classes where it's like we got to teach them how to use the tools the pro tools and the this tools and the art tools so that they can go out and like make
John: It's without anybody saying it.
Merlin: It's kind of driven by the idea of a market.
John: Right.
John: The commerce word never got used.
John: It was just that as we – because the thing is nobody wants to say, well, the kids should be all – every single kid should be forced to learn the clarinet.
John: Oh, God forbid.
John: Right?
John: I mean, everybody on the thing wants to be contemporary.
John: They want to give stuff.
John: They want to have a curriculum that kids are interested in.
John: They want to be ahead of the game, ahead of their parents, and not force the clarinet on a bunch of kids that are using their iPhones to make music.
John: But in doing that...
John: The whole curriculum was, as initially envisioned, was dependent on companies interacting with the schools and sort of like predicated on the idea that we were giving them real skills.
John: And not a bunch of like nothing.
Merlin: So in order to attract that kind of interest, by which we mean corporate money, it has to appear very modern and very practical.
John: Right.
John: And that way Microsoft maybe will come in and give us 5,000 Zunes or something.
Right.
John: It's not about bringing in somebody with a bassoon every once in a while.
John: Well, and so it kind of came around the table to me, and I was like, listen, we have the opportunity to develop an arts curriculum with a capital A, arts curriculum.
John: And I don't think that that is technology dependent.
John: I mean, I think it's important that we do have a room somewhere where we can learn how to use Pro Tools.
John: And it's important to have a room somewhere where we can learn how to use Photoshop or whatever.
John: Like tech rooms are important for sure.
John: But talking about art is already a mysterious thing.
John: project.
John: It's already complicated and difficult.
Merlin: It's hard to even agree on what that means.
Merlin: I mean, I guess you could argue that's always been the case in the 20th century, but I think more than ever, it's very difficult to come up with some version of art that doesn't either feel like dusty or full of charlatans.
John: Yeah, exactly.
John: Oh, thank you.
John: Exactly.
John: And yet, without it,
John: Like we can't cede that ground to dusty history, right?
John: We can't say like provocative art is just a thing that has been colonized by Russian mobsters and it's all just Damien Hirst garbage now.
Yeah.
John: Like, we have to continue to have a language of art, and we have to continue to provide the opportunity for people to challenge us through art.
John: I mean, you know, and I reflect back on the Jesse Helms, like, anti-NEA hearings of the 1980s again.
John: Fucking 1980s.
John: God damn them.
John: It was the worst, John.
John: It was the worst.
John: So bad.
John: But, like, this whole business of, like, what is art and...
John: And watching and actually being in a position, sitting at a table where I might have some small voice in determining some aspect of an arts curriculum in Seattle and realizing that I'm swimming against the tide even to suggest that the arts are in some way anything but a trade, right?
John: That the arts are something that transcend training and become a kind of theory and practice that requires knowledge.
John: that in some ways requires difficulty and requires that people be trusted and really turn them loose, right?
John: If all they had were clarinets, they would make something amazing with clarinets.
John: And it doesn't matter that the tools be...
Merlin: It seems like it's at the very least a three-legged stool.
Merlin: Because if you had – think about when you've had music classes in the past or something like that.
Merlin: I mean you could hand somebody – I'm not going to say clarinet because that's not the best one to start with.
Merlin: But even if it's one of those God-offer recorders.
Merlin: If you handed somebody a recorder and just showed them how to play scales and modes and maybe showed them things about rhythm time signatures and that kind of stuff, now that's a pretty fucking dusty class because all you're going to do is play scales.
Merlin: You're not going to actually make any music.
Merlin: The second leg of the stool has to be, well, now that we know enough, not even everything, now that we know enough, we can actually play hot cross buns.
Merlin: Or Three Blind Mice, whatever your regional version of that is.
Merlin: And it's not going to sound great, but now you're making a little tune.
Merlin: Now, wouldn't it be great for the third leg of that stool to learn a little bit more about music and how people take those technical skills, apply the craft of this song that somebody has put together,
Merlin: And then what does that mean in context?
Merlin: And goddammit, that can mean so many different things.
Merlin: And I look at my kid, and right now she is pretty obsessed with making stuff all the time.
Merlin: Our house is upside down.
Merlin: There's glue everywhere.
Merlin: There's glitter glue.
Merlin: There's origami paper on fucking everything.
Merlin: She's constantly cutting things up.
Merlin: Oh, this is a thought technology.
Merlin: Glitter glue.
Merlin: It's glue with glitter.
John: Oh, no.
Merlin: And boy, does it get everywhere.
Merlin: Because if you thought you had trouble getting glitter out of things, ask yourself about glitter glue.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: It's like spray poo.
John: I don't want it.
Merlin: I don't want it.
Merlin: And then she illuminates them with stamps and things that she's cut out of magazines.
Merlin: I'm not saying it's great art, but she walks around with a legal pad and a pen now.
Merlin: We walk around the park and she – not very well, but draws stuff all the time.
Merlin: And like how long is she going to have that?
Merlin: How long is she going to have that urge to just move your hand and make stuff appear on a page?
Merlin: And the thing is, I mean, I'm torn on the technology issue because I do think of it as a class thing in a lot of ways.
Merlin: The thing is, if you have an iPad in the house, if you have a Mac in the house, like there are plenty of resources, even crappy open source apps, but you could learn to use Logic at the age of 10, maybe not Pro Tools.
Merlin: Sure.
Merlin: But you can learn to do GarageBand on an iPad.
Merlin: That's all there.
Merlin: I don't think you need a track for that necessarily.
Merlin: But there are a lot of kids that don't have that.
Merlin: And you don't want to just put them on some 20-year-old PC with some busted-ass program that crashes all the time.
Merlin: But I do think all those things do work together.
Merlin: And it's like so many problems, at least in my estimation.
Merlin: We fall short when we get too reductive about trying to focus on one aspect of it.
Merlin: Jesse Helms did that by looking at bullips in a man's ass and saying, ergo, we should not fund art.
Merlin: You're throwing out all these other things that are really valuable.
Merlin: But even when we teach things, you have to understand that it starts with every little kid has a natural urge to make cool, stupid stuff.
Merlin: Sometimes it's about race cars.
Merlin: Sometimes it's about aliens.
Merlin: Sometimes it's about Disney princesses.
Merlin: But they have almost a compulsion to make that stuff.
John: Well, this is why I'm terrified of Minecraft.
John: Yeah.
John: I don't understand it.
Merlin: I'm a little scared of Minecraft, too.
Merlin: I'm not going to go booga booga, but I have kept her away from it because just on the basis – I'm saying just on the basis of the elementary school and what T-shirts kids wear, it seems to become like an entire lifestyle to every – a lot of girls, but especially every little boy around six seems to be getting absorbed into Minecraft.
John: Yeah, and the language that adults are using, the articles that I read about it in Wired and the articles that I read about it everywhere –
John: are all really at pains to talk about how creative it is.
John: And collaborative.
John: Collaborative and how it requires... I mean, I read an article not very long ago, I'm sure everybody that listens to this podcast also read, that said that Minecraft...
John: actually increases literacy because kids are going on Minecraft hack blogs and reading above their reading level because they are interested in figuring out... They're passionate about it.
John: They're passionate about it, and their passion is causing them to teach themselves to read on blogs.
John: And I read this thing and I was just like, seriously, really?
John: Is this where we are?
John: Is this the point in the conversation where... I mean, I feel like raising my hand and saying...
John: Maybe the fact that Johnny can't read is the thing to address, not to clap and praise Minecraft for teaching, for giving kids a reason to learn to read.
Merlin: I'm keeping my powder dry on this one, and I'm trying to help you keep your powder dry.
John: Okay, thank you.
Merlin: Because it's a new thing.
Merlin: It's a new thing, but I guess it always seems like whenever something is new and we're not familiar with it, like you and I are not that familiar with it, we see the worst aspects of it.
Merlin: Which is the same thing that happened when people wanted to make computer games.
Merlin: Like why don't you go do your math homework?
Merlin: Why are you doing all these computer games?
Merlin: Well, in a way, that kind of is kind of math homework.
Merlin: What I'll say is – and I don't have the numbers to say whether that observation about reading blogs is true.
Merlin: What I will say is my daughter is much more interested in reading something if she likes what she's going to read.
Merlin: Oh, for sure.
Merlin: you know has great art and you can tell the story it's sequential art and you can really suss out a basic story and then when you learn a little bit more about reading you can figure out some of the words and then if you don't know the word you can like try to figure out the rest of it in context but like think about it like you know anything where you really wanted something like you'll apply all of your devilish childish wits to trying to figure out how to get that thing so i don't know i mean i
John: The argument is the same as often gets used with musical instruments, right?
John: I sat down with a piano teacher from 1977 to 1981, and in the course of that four years of weekly piano lessons, I learned nothing.
John: Because every week I was supposed to go... Like you eventually will play the Moonlight Sonata poorly.
John: Yeah, and I had no interest in any of it.
John: And the argument that somebody should have sat down with me and gone like, here's how to basically play this Elton John song.
John: Ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, and give me a song and just start there.
John: It's very convincing to me that that would have been a better method because it's not what happened.
Merlin: It's easy enough to assume it would have worked.
John: Yeah, right.
John: I didn't like playing the piano, and I didn't learn how to play the piano, despite throwing tons of artillery at the problem.
John: I never took the beach.
John: But if my teacher had been a long hair, who had been like, here's how to play Elton John, man, get with the times, I can picture myself going like, yeah!
John: Yeah!
John: But in fact, the way I learned to play the piano was... Well, actually, the way I learned was that I got hired in Harvey Danger, and that's not going to work for everybody.
John: That's a great story.
John: Eventually, I came back to the piano on my own, and I sat down at it, and I started picking away at it because I needed to.
John: And now I do play the piano, but I have no...
John: Depth or breadth at the thing, right?
John: Now, my mom, by contrast, can sit down and sight read and play...
John: She picked that up as a kid?
John: Well, yeah, because she was taught piano in the 1930s.
Merlin: Like back in the sticks in Ohio?
John: Yeah, where the teacher sat on a tall stool and hit you with a rod.
John: On your broken foot.
John: Kicked your broken foot until you learned to play the piano.
John: But my mom characterizes herself as having no gift.
John: and she can sit down and play Tchaikovsky, and I look at it, and I'm just like, Mom, that's incredible.
John: That's amazing.
John: And she just dismisses it with a wave of her hand, like, well, I'm a poor musician, and I just was forced to learn this
John: I was forced to acquire this habit or this technology.
Merlin: It's probably like learning long division.
Merlin: It's not anything where you go, wow, I really want to be able to work out some of this division I've heard on the radio.
Merlin: It sounds like work.
John: Yeah, super.
John: And I think she approached it that way.
John: And when she sits down, she does play that music for pleasure.
John: She likes to hear it and she likes to feel her fingers kind of figure out the patterns again.
John: But her take on it is almost completely absent of art.
John: She just learned a thing by rote, and now she can do it.
John: She sees the black dots on a piece of paper, and she knows that that means push down this key.
John: To my ear, it sounds beautiful.
John: I mean, I wouldn't say that it was like...
John: uh like artful but i mean it's it's like she's playing this beautiful music from the page and if she and i were both invited into a hotel lobby and someone said would someone like to sit at the piano and entertain us like what my mom can do is a thousand times more useful in that situation than what i can do you can play the commander thinks aloud twice yeah i would sit down and be like
John: Okay, I got three more.
John: Stick around, everybody.
John: And so, I mean, honestly, the idea that honey attracts more flies than vinegar, is that the folk saying?
John: Is that the Bill Clinton saying?
Merlin: You catch more flies with honey than vinegar, I think is the folk saying.
John: Right.
John: And so this idea that the way to teach people, the best way or the only way to teach people is by appealing to their interests –
John: It always I mean, what it suggests to me is that that the earlier step of like establishing their interests was super duper important.
John: And a lot of times that just comes that that window is closed now.
John: Well, yeah, at least it's harder to pry open.
John: The way that that window got established was that mom and dad were like, just go play with the fucking iPad while mommy and daddy talk or whatever.
John: The initial establishment of the interests was not... I mean, most people don't take the care that you took to say like, I want you to get into this.
John: I want to show you this.
John: I mean, most adults that I meet that talk about their kids talk about the iPad and...
John: as you know sort of they're a little guilty about it like uh we yeah we give them the ipad for sure um usually just to give us some space or some time to think or so we can speak a paragraph this week to each other yeah and so and that is that is like that is omaha beach in this kid's mind um
John: Here it is.
John: Four years from now, we're going to talk about, well, the only way we can get Johnny to learn to read is by putting him on Minecraft blogs because that's his interest.
John: That's where his interests are.
John: And it's like, huh, I wonder why that's true.
John: And it all seems very passive, right?
John: It all just seems like we're just reacting, and all Johnny wants to do is strum his guitar, so we're trying to teach him English by having him learn songs in English.
John: He's reading fake books.
John: He's reading fake books.
Merlin: I think there's a thread through this that has probably been – That has been, I'm sure, much better articulated by people for centuries.
Merlin: But there does seem to be a basic problem, which is – and this sounds like the plot of some kind of a kid's movie or something.
Merlin: Yes, yes, yes.
Merlin: Plot of a kid's movie.
Merlin: But, you know, the thing is when you're when you're a grown up and you got a little kid and you got all these ideas and like some of the some popular kinds of ideas are like you need to go take karate or you need to go go to soccer because there's character things and you'll get exercise and there's all these different things.
Merlin: But, you know, whatever.
Merlin: There's a hundred different reasons why you would do something like send your kid to soccer or importantly, in this case, why you say, I want you to take piano lessons.
Merlin: Now, the thing is you as a parent see this in such a vastly different way.
Merlin: You see it as like, hey, maybe this could be the next Glenn Gould.
Merlin: Or you see this as I wish I'd learned how to play piano or any of the dozens of other reasons why it seems like a great idea to kind of kind of force a kid into learning a musical instrument.
Merlin: Or learning, you know, any kind of crafty thing, going and taking drawing lessons.
Merlin: And the thing is, like, I apologize for how obvious this is, but I think about it a lot.
Merlin: The way I describe what my daughter does.
Merlin: Like, my daughter's not sitting around thinking about making great sequential art.
Merlin: She just likes the way it feels to draw on the page, I think.
Merlin: I think she likes smooshing her hands around in the glue.
Merlin: I think she likes the way that feels.
Merlin: And I think it's important to...
Merlin: I don't know how to do this, but I feel like it's important to give opportunities for people to play like that.
Merlin: And I think about – you see me on your piano.
Merlin: I call it the Wolverine chord, right?
Merlin: Where I hold my pinky with my thumb and I play triads with my three middle fingers.
Merlin: You've seen me do this.
Merlin: Well, that snicked.
Merlin: God damn it.
Merlin: Sorry.
Merlin: But that's how I learned.
Merlin: I learned because I wanted to be able to – I just thought that was fun.
Merlin: I'd sit around at downtime at church events.
Merlin: We'd hang out and try to figure out how to play songs on the piano just because it was fun.
Merlin: It felt good.
Merlin: It sounded good.
Merlin: You could play loud.
Merlin: You could bang on it.
Merlin: It was play much more than it was learning.
Merlin: I'm not saying I'm any prodigy piano, but I see this in my daughter.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: So I brought my acoustic guitar home.
Merlin: It's been at the office forever.
Merlin: I finally brought it home so we could – it's fun to just play around.
Merlin: I thought – a long time ago I thought, oh, we'll play songs and sing together.
Merlin: But what she really likes is – I'll send you a photo of this.
Merlin: She likes walking up to it and kind of banging on the strings, standing over it on the stand almost like it's a cello.
Merlin: And I've shown her how to do two chords that she can mostly replicate.
Merlin: The one she's best at is an A5.
Merlin: That was the easiest chord I could think of in terms of, you know, the strings aren't too hard to press down.
Merlin: You know, the two middle strings at the second fret.
Merlin: And then I showed her after that, showed her an E minor.
Merlin: And she's not great at it, but she will stand in front of the guitar, facing the guitar, and with the totally wrong fingers, pushed down, mostly the right places, right on the fret, which drives me crazy because it buzzes.
Merlin: But she sits there, and she plays these little chords, really shitty, and then she goes into this crazy D. Boone thing, where she just keeps going up and down, and you know what it's like to be a little kid playing with a guitar.
Merlin: And I put it out of my mind, like, this guitar, the strings are going to break, the guitar might break, but she has so much fun just banging around on that.
Merlin: And I don't know if that'll, if anything's ever...
Merlin: I was thinking more like Stanley Clark.
Merlin: Stanley Jordan?
Merlin: Who am I thinking of?
John: Stanley Clark Jordan.
John: Stanley Clark Jordan.
John: Yeah, it's his married name.
John: Yeah, just start teaching her songs.
John: Such a strong persuader.
John: Well, I think what you're getting at is this crucial thing.
Merlin: I'm trying to make it not about me.
Merlin: I'm trying to remember how fun it is to just fuck around and have nobody sitting there correcting you.
Merlin: And if she wants to bang around on that guitar, go ahead.
Merlin: Go nuts.
Merlin: And sometimes I will say, hey, you want to see this other chord?
Merlin: Do you want to see this other thing?
Merlin: Maybe I'll get her a guitar for her birthday.
Merlin: I don't know.
Merlin: She didn't love the piano we got her.
Merlin: But she's going to play, and it'll be fun.
Merlin: And there's not going to be any pressure for her to become Segovia by the time she's eight.
John: I think it's probably more fun for her to play on daddy's guitar than to have one of her own.
John: But a big part of... This kind of dovetails with this idea that there's nothing new under the sun.
John: But that so much of making art is reinventing the wheel.
John: And you can sit there and shape their little hands and teach, teach, teach, teach, teach, like art is a thing that can be known.
John: And I think that that is, in a way, really an important part of the process.
John: But then there's that other thing, which is at a certain point...
John: And I think the jury's out where that point is, but you have to reinvent it somehow.
John: You have to act as though it's like beyond Thunderdome and you are a tribe of kids living...
John: In a little valley that's separated by a great desert.
John: And it is the dying time.
John: And you are inventing your culture with just the faintest memory.
John: of what came before you.
Merlin: It has to feel like your own, even if it's your own cover of The Kinks.
Merlin: There has to be something about it.
Merlin: I don't know if that's exactly what you're saying, but I think part of it is that it really feels like some kind of transplanted culture when you try to pop this culture into a kid, like an Atari cartridge, and then expect them to go, oh, ah, Bach, or something like that.
John: Yeah, you can see the kids in rock and roll, the kids in their 20s now, whose parents...
John: put them in Nirvana T-shirts when they were three years old 18 years ago.
John: Right?
John: I mean, you can kind of see them.
John: You see them even, I'm sure, like, there are a couple of kids in my daughter's preschool who have mullets,
John: if you will you know like their parents are trying to push them toward being cool from a very young age in the hopes i think that being that if they are cool that that they won't have heartbreak or they won't have problems growing up like the solution the solution to so many problems is to just be one of the cool ones and
Merlin: I mean, and that is... That's painful and true.
John: Well, yeah.
John: It's really well put.
John: It's so different from my approach, which is to say, you are going to be a nerd.
John: I'm going to force you to be one.
John: It's going to suck.
John: And through those many, many hard years, you're going to grow up to really appreciate...
John: um, how, how fun it is to be an adult.
Merlin: It's like a boy named Sue, but with pain.
John: Not have your dad, not have your dad forcing you to take Taekwondo lessons.
Merlin: You're helping her understand that she will be an outsider.
John: Yeah.
John: Right.
John: And because, you know, being an outsider, well, I mean, ultimately like she's going to decide, right.
John: And, and she's already decided that what she's going to be as a princess, but, and that's wonderful because, uh, my understanding is they make a lot of money.
Merlin: That's good doing being a princess.
John: Facebook came through my feed the other day.
John: I somehow got on Facebook again.
John: You found the key under your mat.
John: I'm really trying to curate my feed.
John: I'm not reading the news on Twitter anymore.
John: I signed on to the internet the other day.
John: And I was like, you know what?
Merlin: I'm going to go... You signed on to the internet.
Merlin: Signed on to the internet.
John: And I said, I'm going to go over... You went down to the cold room, opened the cage, went in, put in your key.
John: I'm going to go over to Twitter and see... And you know what I'm going to do?
John: I'm going to go over to Twitter.
John: I'm going to read the news.
John: I haven't done it in a couple of weeks.
John: I'm just going to read my news feed and see what I come up with.
John: And I got over there and I started reading and I...
John: I read a couple of things about the Ukraine that were interesting, and I saw a couple of things about this and that that I thought were, yeah, that's pretty interesting.
John: And then I clicked on a retweet of somebody's, and I read somebody's blog post, and I was like, well, okay.
John: And that blog post was in response to another blog post, so I went and read that.
John: Dave Chappelle.
John: chappelle about the dave chappelle i read that last night that was a good link you retweeted and that i thought that that person's writing was really great i thought both pieces were were were very nuanced yeah it was it was a fascinating conversation and gutsy gutsy and it but it got into a little bit you know where my stomach was starting to get butterflies because i was like well i don't know i just i don't
Merlin: i don't have a comment here i'm just i'm just just reading the news just reading because in your head you can just imagine the thousand different kind of like intellectual bum fights that are going on about that and you're like you just don't watch two drunk guys hit each other that's exactly right you don't mean by bum fight like i just like it's just people representing the absolute worst point of view on either side of this are just going to be hitting each other with sticks
John: I very studiously did not read the comments on either blog.
John: You know, I didn't want to go down.
John: I just read the blog.
Merlin: You didn't see any reaction gifs?
John: Just didn't get, you know, just staying away from it, staying away from it.
John: And then I'm back up to the surface of Twitter, and I'm reading along.
John: And then there's... And Hodgman has a little link to his Tumblr, and I click on it, and it is a graph of...
John: All the Johns that have influenced each other and all the Johns that make a very interesting little cluster of Johns.
John: I hope that was a first draft.
John: And it said Flansburg, Linnell, Stewart.
John: Hodgman, Colton.
John: Hodgman, Colton.
John: And I'm just innocently looking at the fucking news for two seconds, and I click on a friend's link, which was a link that just somebody made, and he was retweeting it.
John: I'm sure he didn't do that.
John: And now I've only been on the news side of this thing for honestly two minutes and I feel bad.
John: I've seen a thing that made me feel bad.
John: Right.
John: And I just closed it all down and was just like, why did I go and read the news on Twitter?
John: I am trying to...
John: I'm trying to not have those feelings, and the internet provides so many opportunities.
Merlin: But you handled it well.
Merlin: You did exactly what you should do.
John: It sounds like you came into it thinking maybe it'll be different.
John: I've had some time away.
John: This will be a fun thing.
John: Yep, I'm going to go over there.
John: I'm going to read some stuff.
John: I'm going to learn about the news.
John: I'm going to see people making things.
John: But anyway, as I closed down Twitter...
John: i went over to facebook i had not had enough i had not had enough merlin i went to facebook and i and for whatever reason the facebook like alchemy of just like oh what would you like to see today i mean like the room temperature dessert of your online meals
John: They are just like, would you like some flan?
John: That's the one kind of dessert we have.
John: No, no, no, that's not true.
John: We have flan and we have noose.
John: Here's the one surprising thing.
John: The one surprising thing you need to know today about flan.
John: And I get over there and the person's website that I go to, or the person's Facebook page that I go to see is a guy I haven't thought of in years, some guy I went to high school with, who, he was a bro when we were in high school.
John: And I am deposited on his Facebook page, and he is a bro now.
John: He's an Alaska bro.
John: He's a 45-year-old man with a goatee.
John: Not a mustache either, like just a chin goatee.
John: And his Facebook page is just picture after picture of him wakeboarding and of him...
John: doing some more wakeboarding and other kind of you know and him holding a giant salmon and him you know with his arm around his like embarrassingly much younger wife and then him with his two adorable little like kindergarten age kids both of whom have super cool dude haircuts
John: And his dad had a permanent sneer on all through high school and college, you know, like the kind of smug sneer of somebody that had been born with money.
Merlin: Sounds like a little bit of a pan man.
John: He's sort of a pan man, but like in Alaska, that version, he's grown into being a pan man.
John: He was a skinny kid.
John: Now he looks much more like a pan guy.
John: But whatever his job is, I don't know.
John: It's probably something in the financial sector or maybe he sells bulldozers or something.
John: He's doing well.
John: He's a successful guy.
John: And every aspect of his life looks amazing if you are...
John: Judging your adult life on the strength of the aesthetics of a Bones Brigade VHS tape from 1984.
John: Right?
John: Like he's a grown-up skater.
John: Alaska style.
John: And I'm looking at his Facebook page and it's just like my head is just spinning.
John: I've just come off of this two minutes on the internet where I got confused and delighted and then ultimately like sad and
John: And now I'm over here, I'm looking at this alternate history of my life where it's like, I know this guy.
John: Like, I haven't seen him in 15 years, but I know this guy.
John: We grew up together.
John: And I'm looking at his life as presented on Facebook.
John: And it's causing my stomach to churn.
John: And I feel lightheaded.
John: I'm wondering if I would have been happier if I had just gotten really into wakeboarding.
Yeah.
Merlin: Because it seemed too good to be true or you're somehow slightly envious of his bro lifestyle?
Merlin: Just the fact that it all fits together so well?
John: Not that it seemed too good to be true because I know that it is exactly as it seems.
John: You can't lie on Facebook.
John: You can't exaggerate there.
John: Well, except that I know this guy and his adult life looks like his...
John: teenage life it looks like his it looks like his this is the life that his father provided for him right there were all kinds of guys at my high school that like had brand new chevy step side pickups when they were 16 years old and did i ever tell you about there was a kid at my high school who drove a 57 corvette
John: To school.
John: What?
John: And the license plate was a personalized license plate that said THX.
John: Thanks.
John: Thanks, dad.
John: Right.
John: So dad bought him the Corvette.
John: And then got him the plate.
John: Got him the plates.
John: Had to have.
John: Like the ultimate, just like, here's my son and I'm going to make him simultaneously the coolest kid on campus and also the world's biggest fucking chode.
Merlin: It's like giving your kid an iPhone and the wallpaper is you giving him a thumbs up or something.
John: Yeah, right.
John: It's the original...
John: it's the original just like, you are always going to be under my thumb, kid, so never forget it, right?
John: Thanks, Dad.
John: Thanks, Dad.
John: And it's a thing I think rich dads do to make their sons, I don't know, maybe it is an Agamemnon thing where you just keep your son down because you're afraid he's going to kill you and have sex with your wife.
John: But in any case, like,
John: This was the problem when I was growing up.
John: All the kids that were successful in Alaska were kids whose lives, like their ambitions seemed incredibly simple, right?
John: There's no neuroticism.
John: Yeah.
John: Yeah.
John: Yeah.
John: But he's not, yeah, he doesn't wonder or you presume that Laird Hamilton does not wonder about his purpose or whether he's doing a good job.
John: And that neuroticism is the thing I want to exercise from my own life.
John: It's the thing that I am the least interested in anymore.
Right.
John: And so I go on this guy's website and I'm like, not website, Facebook thing, and nothing about his actual existence intrigues me except what I perceive to be the simple...
John: like, like mono culture of it.
Merlin: Just like, it seems like he's got several successful doctorates in being 18.
Merlin: Like he's, he's a very accomplished.
Merlin: He's reached the highest level.
Merlin: He's like a 33rd level monk of, of being a teenager.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: He's made it work.
John: And then from there, I mean, I, as I was driving down here today, I passed by the bus stop, uh, that's down at the corner of my block and Skeeter was sitting out there rolling a cigarette.
Yeah.
John: And Skeeter wears one of those Peruvian hats with ear flaps.
Yeah.
John: And so he's unmistakable because, you know, like how many guys are rocking that look right now.
John: So I'm driving by the bus stop and I'm seeing Skeeter and it's 830 in the morning and he's rolling a cigarette.
John: And I had that consciousness, having formerly been a smoker and a drug addict, that like, oh, right on.
John: Skeeter's having his first smoke of the day or maybe it's his second.
John: But like he's marking his day.
John: He's marking his passage through the day.
John: One cigarette at a time until he can get his first drink or his first hit of dope, which might have happened already.
John: And, you know, it's like you're marking the day.
John: Cigarette, cigarette, toke, cigarette, cigarette, cigarette, beer, toke, cigarette, cigarette, toke, toke, beer, beer, beer, beer, beer, beer, beer, cigarette, beer, cigarette, beer.
John: And then the day is over.
John: And there's something very comforting about that and reassuring.
John: As you're stubbing out the last cigarette, you have the next cigarette on the horizon.
John: And you just are kind of leapfrogging lily pad to lily pad throughout the day.
John: And you never are just at sea wondering, like, how am I going to make it?
John: How am I going to make it to dusk?
John: And this guy whose Facebook page I was looking at is doing a version of that with his life.
John: It's just like jet ski, jet ski, toke, toke, TV show, TV show.
John: Kid haircut, kid haircut.
John: Kid haircut, haircut.
John: And then now he's got kids.
John: So then it's hockey practice, hockey practice.
John: And his goal is to make his kids really good hockey players and really cool kids in high school.
John: So that's his new project.
John: And there's no neuroticism.
John: He never second guesses it.
John: He never wonders if he's doing the right thing.
John: His kid comes home and he's like, yeah, dad, there was this kid on the playground and he's a real fag and I told him to fuck off.
John: And his dad's like, yeah.
John: Like there's no...
John: he's never ever going to say like, well, son, maybe you should walk a mile in that kid's shoes.
John: I mean, it's just... Or he's not even sure how to approach the topic.
Merlin: Not only do I want to give you this really kind of like mushy advice that's hard to understand, but I'm not even sure how to talk about this.
Merlin: He didn't do that.
John: It doesn't even pop into his head.
John: It's just like, oh, some kid was a fag and you told him to fuck off?
John: That's right.
John: and that bruskies that bruskies that simplicity uh you know it's so it's so ugly it's so um it's so like dark to me but it's but my own darkness is such a drag
Merlin: I haven't seen this page.
Merlin: I haven't been in this particular corridor.
Merlin: But I'm going to cheer you up by making this dark.
Merlin: I said something a long time ago, which is something along the lines of if you want to learn what somebody fears losing, watch what they photograph.
Merlin: which I think is really, it's kind of true.
Merlin: And you go, oh, I'm worried about losing my lunch.
Merlin: But no, seriously, if you look at that.
Merlin: And so my only addendum to that today is, and I don't think this is just about Facebook, but maybe this is just that I become a darker person.
Merlin: But I think also sometimes when you watch what people photograph or put differently here, when you watch what people put on social media, it might be the thing they most fear losing.
Merlin: But I think sometimes it's the thing they fear may not love them as much as they love it.
Merlin: Or maybe the thing that they have equivocal feelings about or complex feelings about.
Merlin: And one nice thing about a photograph that you put on a page or one nice thing about a succession of photographs of your absolutely perfect vacation is that it cements in your mind the idea that this went a certain way.
Merlin: and meets a certain story.
Merlin: And I'm honestly, I'm not trying to bag on this guy because I do this.
Merlin: Everybody does this.
Merlin: When I take a picture of my kid and put it somewhere, it's because this feels like emblematic of what I think things are, how this thing is happening.
Merlin: Whether it really is happening that way or not.
Merlin: But increasingly, the way we...
Merlin: take photos or tell stories or put things in social media are a way of like telling ourselves a story that helps make our life make more sense and you can call that branding you can call this other stuff you can go whatever you want but i think sometimes when you put that stuff up it may be that that he has more complex feelings about those things or worries that those things have complex feelings about him setting aside his uh what's called a starboard what's it called his boogie his boogie night what's it called
Merlin: uh wave wave border wave wave raker wave runner but i think sometimes that becomes a way i mean nobody there aren't that many people who primarily put up photos of their kid being unhappy or sullen because that's not the story that you want on the books the story that you want on the one on the books is that we had a birthday party and it went okay at least in this one photo and
Merlin: How many photos?
Merlin: I mean like my daughter's fourth birthday party.
Merlin: We had a blowout birthday party for her at the park and there was stuff and like – and she was like crying and running away from the group the entire time.
Merlin: And that's honestly how the birthday went.
Merlin: I got a funny picture of her dressed as Spider-Man because it was a cool costume she got.
Merlin: But but, you know, it's all that shit in life is so much more complicated than you can put into a Facebook post.
Merlin: It's going to get a lot of thumbs.
Merlin: And that's not a criticism because it but is a new way of telling a story about ourselves, whereas it used to be a really big deal.
Merlin: I have my picture in the paper when I was about six.
Merlin: And that seemed like about the biggest thing in the world.
Merlin: I was photographed at a library and I thought it was the coolest thing in the world.
Merlin: And that became really like this thing we showed people.
Merlin: Look, look, I'm important.
Merlin: I'm in the paper.
Merlin: Here's me like reading a microfiche or whatever.
Merlin: And I don't know.
Merlin: I guess I feel like it's not anything against that guy.
Merlin: It's not just to chuck you on the shoulder.
Merlin: I think everybody struggles with this stuff.
Merlin: I think everybody looks at other people's stuff, not purely in the sense of –
Merlin: Envy, in the sense of, oh, I wish I had what they had.
Merlin: Or jealousy, I wish I had it and they didn't.
Merlin: Or, boy, that guy's a tool.
Merlin: How's his life so together?
Merlin: That's what you put up.
Merlin: That's the version that you print.
Merlin: Because it kind of expresses hope about how the world can be.
Merlin: And so I think you have to take all that stuff with a tremendous grain of salt.
Merlin: Because people tend to be super-duper positive about lots of stuff in public.
Merlin: Until they get really scared.
Merlin: And when they get scared, I think when people tend – when people get scared in life is the time they tend to be most honest about or most forthcoming about what they really worry about.
Merlin: But most of the time, you'll do anything you can to not have to talk about that.
Merlin: And that's what those pictures are.
Merlin: That's what those boogie boards and haircuts are.
Merlin: It's an opportunity to say, like, this is the world as I hope it is.
John: Yeah, I –
John: I went down a rabbit hole of talking about this guy where I tried to make it one of my core competencies that I have empathy for bros.
John: I am profoundly aware that they are human beings and that they're not monsters.
Merlin: Their pleasures are simple.
John: Yeah, and this guy is, you know, in a way, like a guy I know well, and even somebody... He was never a friend, but was a guy that if I was back in Anchorage and I ran into him at a bar, I'd be glad to see him.
John: It was... And so the way I was describing my experience of watching him was...
John: And I got a little shitty about it.
John: And really, my experience was 100% internal and had nothing to do with him.
John: Who knows what his life is like?
John: I don't even know what his life was like when he was 16 years old.
John: But my experience of sitting and studying...
John: Not the Facebook page of somebody that I know well, not the Facebook page even of somebody that I'm interested in how they're doing.
John: But I landed on the Facebook page of somebody that I'm not transacting anything with them, nor will I ever again.
Merlin: And you're not even thinking about them too much.
John: Yeah, and wandering through, as you say, their idealized presentation of their life and seeing, even in their idealization of their life, nothing to interest me, only things to critique and judge and feel, and ultimately critique and judge myself against.
John: Because I didn't come away from that feeling that... In a way, yeah, I've always preferred my worldview or methodology to those guys, those old friends of mine from Alaska.
John: It's why I left Alaska.
John: It's why I never felt like I truly belonged...
John: to that culture.
John: But I was critiquing myself against that incredulously in that it feels like that is a way of living and a valid one.
John: And when he gets to the end and looks back at his life, he's not going to probably burden his kids on his deathbed with a lot of talk about all the things he wishes he'd done.
John: You know, I think as I get to be a middle-aged person, my great, great fear, the worst thing I could do to my kid is to start now saying things like, well, I could have...
John: We could have lived in Hawaii, but it didn't work out that way.
John: Or I wished I'd, you know, I wanted, there was a time I thought maybe I would do it, make a television show, but it didn't.
Merlin: You know, kids love boring and irrelevant stories that are ultimately really sad.
John: Right.
John: And the thing is, you know, this was, as my dad got older, we had a lot of these conversations where he was like, well, I should have been a senator.
John: Right.
John: And I would say, like, Dad, stop it.
John: Shut up.
John: What are you talking about?
John: Like, you lived an amazing life.
John: And, you know, there's, like, these sort of niggling regrets.
John: And that's what I don't want.
John: That's what I don't want for myself.
John: And I guess, ultimately, like, the passionate feeling I had about this guy's Facebook page that caused me to, like...
John: Finally, turn off the internet and stay away from it.
John: was that I was contrasting my self-doubt against his.
John: And perceiving, at least, that he had none.
John: And I don't think you could even go on my Facebook page and perceive that I had no self-doubt.
John: But that self-doubt, what good is it?
John: What is the evolutionary advantage of it?
John: I don't know.
Merlin: It seems like all the – I would like to think in the Facebook of my mind that the self-doubt that I am utterly riddled with has, in practical terms, had most of its usefulness wrung out of it already.
Merlin: All the times that I could have used that self-doubt, I feel like that's pretty exhausted.
Merlin: And now I need some of the other stuff now.
Merlin: Yeah, thank you.
John: That's it.
Merlin: Just for a month.
Merlin: Give me a month.
Merlin: Give me a month with the opposite of self-doubt.
John: I'm grateful that I had it because it made me into the person that I am.
John: And that is, I think, in the long run, a good thing.
John: The self-doubt that I had contributed to me being thoughtful.
John: But I'm fucking done with it now.
John: Please.
John: Like, I would like to just act and eat and poop and live and not brood.
John: Because the rate of return is like at zilch now on brooding.
John: And so maybe I need to just start banging a tambourine.
John: It really is a fantastic time for technology.
Merlin: Thank God we've got it.
Merlin: It brings the world right to your doorstep.
Merlin: Isn't it amazing?
Merlin: All the bills for phone stuff that we pay, all the internet is so that we can go and find new ways to be completely riddled with self-doubt.
John: Yeah.
John: And seriously, stopping watching the Twitter feed has made me happier.
John: Absolutely.
John: Absolutely.
John: And taking Facebook off my phone has made me happier.
John: There's no question about it.
John: And so I keep coming maybe back to it's like stopping eating sugar.
John: Then Friday night you have an ice cream because you feel like you've deserved it.
John: And then you're kind of back on the sugar train and, and the, and the, the feeds, the various feeds out there that are trying to pitch lives to me are just, they're the, they're mind sugar things.
John: And that is so antithetical to the story that we're being told by tech, that these things are just making it.
Merlin: They're connecting us.
Merlin: The implicit lie of all this stuff is that it's making us closer to other people.
Merlin: A lot of times it's just making us further from ourselves.
John: Yeah, exactly.
John: And what's terrifying is that there's a part of me that's like, well, for instance, I just got a Sonos system.
Merlin: Oh, right.
Merlin: The Sonos, the home speaker thing.
John: Yeah, I got a Sonos home speaker thing, and I spent a whole day setting it up in my house.
John: And I'm not somebody that listens to a lot of music around the house, but all of a sudden I got this really interactive stereo system.
John: And we had a really nice weekend at the house because there was music playing in every room all of a sudden where that had never been possible.
John: That's so cool.
John: And I was like, you know, this is very interesting.
John: Like, this is kind of a new take on this.
John: And I'm...
John: and unfortunately like i only have four albums on my ipad so i'm just listening to these four albums over and over two phil collins albums and then the two other ones well yeah and then there's that then there was that one it was i got the i got the u2 did you get the u2 record i got the box set of the early duran duran records and personally what that meant is there's like seven different versions of hungry like the wolf because there's like the berlin mix and there's like planet earth and aramaic
John: And somehow I couldn't figure out how to arrange the cue so that it wasn't playing things in alphabetical order.
John: So it just played Hungry Like the Wolf like seven times.
John: In every room.
John: In every room.
John: In every room.
John: But it was really exciting.
John: And right away I start to think like, maybe I should download one of those apps that allows me to raise and lower my garage door opener from my phone.
John: And then I was like, I don't have a garage?
John: First of all, and second of all, like, no.
John: Stop.
John: Stop it.
John: Leave it.
John: Leave it.
John: Do not hook up your security system and your house lights to the internet.
John: Like, don't.
John: That technology is still in beta, and you are not an early adopter of that shit.
Merlin: Leave it.
Merlin: I am not German and your skin is so tight.
Merlin: Is that what he says?
Merlin: I don't know.
Merlin: What is the line?