Ep. 131: "Subsequious"
Merlin: This episode of Roderick on the Line is sponsored by NEED, a refined retailer and lifestyle magazine for men.
Merlin: Each month, NEED sources and curates a selection of exclusive products from brands around the world.
Merlin: To learn more about NEED's first anniversary, and to explore their new essentials collection, please visit neededition.com.
Merlin: That's neededition.com.
Merlin: Hey!
Merlin: Oh!
Merlin: Hey, you got your chocolate on my peanut butter!
Merlin: You got peanut butter on my chocolate!
Merlin: What?
What?
Merlin: Hello.
Merlin: Hi, John.
Merlin: Hi, Berlin.
Merlin: Oh, no.
Merlin: I'm a little sick.
Merlin: I was exaggerating how sick I was.
Merlin: You've never been a little sick.
Merlin: Don't you go pretty fast?
Merlin: I mean, you've got a hockey stick curve, my friend.
John: Yeah, well, the problem is that all colds, all sicknesses end in the same place, and it doesn't matter what I do.
John: If the moment I start feeling sick, I lay in bed for three days with a warm blankie, I'm still going to get just as sick as if I went running naked in the cold rain.
John: Like there's nothing I can do once I'm on the path.
Merlin: God, you're like Rutger Hauer with an upper respiratory infection.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: Tears and rain.
John: That's right.
John: And so, yeah, that's right.
John: Pick up, time to die.
John: This year, this time, when I started feeling sick, I was lying there in bed and I was like, ugh.
John: You know what I'm going to do this time?
John: I'm just going to power through it.
John: I'm going to go do all the stuff.
John: I'm going to be out in the cold.
John: I'm not going to wear a scarf.
John: I'm just going to go for it.
John: And here I am, three days in, and I'm just as sick as I would be if I were in a bath right now.
Merlin: Oh, God.
Merlin: I thought cutting out the glutens, it helps a little bit, but you're still going to get tagged sometimes.
John: It has helped immeasurably, I think, my overall health.
John: I was thinking about this last night.
John: I have not, since I stopped, because I'm not.
John: maintaining a perfect adherence.
Merlin: Your default is, I mean, I'm guessing here, but at least with me when I've been successful with that, it's never been that I, I mean, I very briefly was 100% Atkins back in the day, as you know, and you made fun of me, which is understandable.
Merlin: But for me, it's just generally like all of the things being equal, if I have the choice, I'm going to go for less rather than more of the junk that I'm trying to avoid, which I think is a very sane pattern.
John: Yeah, unfortunately, the problem with this cold is that it coincided perfectly with Halloween.
John: And so Halloween, I've given myself a buy on Reese's peanut butter cups.
Merlin: Oh, man.
John: And so the sugar makes me feel bad anyway.
John: Yeah.
John: I don't know.
John: It just sounds like our podcast is turning into old men talking about their colons.
Merlin: I have so much to discuss, including my colon.
Merlin: Here's the thing that I am finally having to accept.
Merlin: And you're right.
Merlin: Nothing could be more boring than somebody realizing they're getting old.
Merlin: It's something everybody's going to do and no one cares.
Merlin: I'm getting old.
Merlin: But here's the thing.
Merlin: When you're younger and more elastic, you can do things that make a difference in your life.
Merlin: You could say like, oh, I'll get a little more sleep.
Merlin: I'll drink a little bit less.
Merlin: I'll eat some carrots.
Merlin: And within a day or two, you notice a difference.
Merlin: And it's like I would remember hearing as a kid like, oh, grandma broke her hip.
Merlin: And it takes a really long time to heal when you're an old person with a broken hip.
Merlin: Yes.
Merlin: If not, I wouldn't say a death sentence, but an immobility sentence.
John: Oh, it's a killer.
John: The broken hip.
John: Yeah.
John: A lot of people don't come back.
Merlin: A lot of stuff goes downhill after that.
Merlin: That same grandmother, when she got old enough, she broke her femur.
Merlin: Can you imagine breaking your femur?
Merlin: I think it might be the biggest bone in your body.
John: She broke it like buttering some toast, right?
John: She leaned into the toast.
Merlin: No, so much worse.
Merlin: So pathetic.
Merlin: She's sitting on my stoner, God bless him, my cousin's bed, and he had this kind of like, it was kind of this slippery sort of bedspread, and she's sitting there, and she very, very, very slowly slid off the bed, landed on her knee, and broke her femur.
John: Well, I suppose that's better than spontaneous combustion.
John: I don't know.
John: Right?
Merlin: I mean, that's got a finality to it.
John: Did you ever go through a phase where you researched spontaneous combustion?
John: Duh.
John: Because I know I did.
John: Of course.
Of course.
Merlin: No, of the many kinds of, you know, Sasquatches and Yetis out there, that's one I've thought a lot about.
Merlin: I want to circle back to that, but I want to talk.
Merlin: Here's the other thing for me is like, so like, hmm, like you and the Reese's peanut butter cups, is that kind of like a one cigarette situation for you?
Merlin: Like, can you really walk away from that after a couple of days?
Merlin: Because you enjoy the candy, John.
John: I do.
John: It remains to be seen.
John: I enjoy a chocolate candy, particularly one where your chocolate has gotten in someone else's peanut butter.
John: Or, conversely, if your peanut butter gets in someone else's chocolate.
John: Those are situations that I relish.
John: Where you'll be walking along with a chocolate bar and you'll bump into a pretty girl and she'll have an open jar of peanut butter.
Merlin: And you'll be like, what the... Dear forum, I never thought this would happen to me.
John: But what's nice about the small size...
John: uh halloween candies now the children's portion is that i can get i can i can have a little mini buffet because you know about me also that i like a sample i like a sampler platter you like a flight
John: I went into a fancy pants restaurant here the other day where everybody had mustaches.
John: And I sat down and there was all this stuff about kale and eyelashes and all this bullshit.
John: And then there was, down at the bottom, it was like platter, right?
John: Platter.
John: You could get it for four, you could get it for six, you could get it for eight or something like that.
John: Platter for eight.
John: And I looked at everything on the menu and I was like, well, I don't want any of that.
John: I want this platter, but there's only going to be two of us.
John: The other person hadn't arrived yet.
John: And the waitress was like, well, it's a lot.
John: Platter for four is a lot of...
John: food.
John: And I was like, all right, I'll look at the menu again.
John: I looked one more time, and then she came back, and I was like, I want the platter.
John: Bring the platter.
John: I want the samples.
John: I want a little bit of everything.
Merlin: Yeah, I mean, that sounds like, back in the discriminatory days of real estate, that sounds like steering.
Merlin: That's very normative to tell you how much you should be eating.
John: I know.
John: Well, and the problem was, or what she meant, what she should have said was, it comes with a bucket of potatoes that you could possibly eat.
John: When the platter got there, the vegetables and the meat portions were all perfectly fine for two people.
John: It was just that it had a bucket of potatoes.
John: It's called platter.
John: But last night I sat down at the kitchen table after everybody had gone to bed, and I had one little Reese's peanut butter cup, and I had one little Butterfinger, and I had one little Crackle, and one little Mr. Good bar, and one little Hershey bar with almonds.
John: And that amount of candy was probably...
John: The equivalent of, I mean, it wouldn't even come close to the amount of garbage that's in a single small blizzard from Dairy Queen.
John: But I had a little bit of each candy.
John: And then I did.
John: I felt, I mean, honestly, I walked around the house the rest of the night in a state of total craving.
John: But at the same time, I had had one of every possible kind of little treat.
John: There was not a second one that was going to help me at that point.
John: So the little mini bars actually are good for me, although I'm opposed to them in principle.
Merlin: We did full-size bars this year.
John: See, God bless you.
Merlin: I figured it's time.
Merlin: It's time to start giving back to the community.
Merlin: Here's my problem.
Merlin: This is a slow, dawning, and painful realization that I just have to re-realize every few days is that this is not going to get better.
Merlin: I'm doing a Louis C.K.
Merlin: sweep down my entire body at this point.
Merlin: Nothing about this is going to get better.
John: Well, see, I keep thinking...
John: That maybe when our alien overlords finally arrive and make them, I'm sorry, when they finally make themselves known.
John: And when they make themselves known by virtue of coming to me first and saying, we need you to talk to the other humans on our behalf.
John: The first thing I'm going to say is put me in one of those TSA scanners.
John: and figure out everything that's wrong with me, all the torn ligaments and all the little, you know, scar tissue.
Merlin: You should really get those moles looked at, John.
John: The moles and the enlarged prostate and all the sickness and what is presumably like a thousand dormant viruses that are all just sort of
John: Sitting around the lunch table, taking turns, deciding which one is going to give me a cold for.
Merlin: All the stuff we don't even have a way of metering at this point.
Merlin: That's right.
Merlin: It's just sitting there, and they have the technology, maybe involving time travel, to let you know, like, based on this, here's a pie graph on how it's probably going to end for you.
John: Well, no, I think they're going to scan me, and then they're going to do, like, a top-to-bottom scan and just eradicate all problems.
John: Oh.
Bzzz.
John: And then everything, all the viruses are gone.
John: All the scar tissue is mitigated.
John: All the cells are little plump, fat, happy, little childlike cells.
John: And then, fuck, I'll be their spokesperson.
John: I'll do whatever they want.
Merlin: It's a nice, good faith gesture.
John: I feel like that would be, you know, like, I don't want, I don't want, I presumably don't want Bitcoin or whatever from them.
John: I don't even know what a universal space shit will buy.
John: Probably just shit at the company store.
John: But if they can make my cells fat and plump again.
Merlin: Yeah.
John: I mean, so I'm getting details magazine in the mail now because somebody signed me up for details.
John: I think as a prank, I don't know where it came from, but I'm getting details and it comes in and it's got like five perfume ads in it.
John: You can see the fumes coming out of the mailbox.
John: It just smells like ax.
John: It just smells like who smells like that?
John: Who are the people that buy this stuff?
John: But on the cover of details this month is a picture of Brad Pitt.
John: And I'm looking at Brad Pitt as I'm walking back from the mailbox to the house with my copy of details that I'm going to, before I even get in the house, I tear all the perfume ads out of it.
John: But I'm looking at him and I'm like, Brad Pitt is older than me.
John: He looks great.
Merlin: He still looks like the best looking guy at the hardware store.
John: He's a really good looking guy.
John: And I'm standing there with a friend, with a lady friend.
John: And I'm like, look at him.
John: He looks amazing.
John: And she's like, you know he dyes his beard, right?
Merlin: I was like, what?
Merlin: Brad Pitt doesn't dye his beard.
Merlin: That's really vain, John.
John: And she said, look at his beard.
John: It's all full of just for men.
John: And I looked at his beard, and it did look a little suspect.
John: It looked like James Lipton's beard.
Merlin: That is very... That beard is suspicious on so many levels.
John: Right?
John: And so then I... And then she was like, he dyes his hair, too.
John: And I was like, no, not Brad Pitt.
Oh, no.
John: And I looked at it.
John: He does.
John: He dyes his hair.
John: So...
John: I don't know what that tells me.
John: He still can climb a rope or whatever.
Merlin: You know, you don't throw out the baby with the bath.
Merlin: I'm sure there's still a lot of things you can learn from Details Magazine.
John: Well, there's a lot I can learn from Brad Pitt, I feel, still.
John: He and I really need to have a sit-down.
Merlin: I like that guy.
Merlin: He seems down to earth.
John: Yeah, who knows?
John: He's made a lot of questionable decisions.
John: That proves he's probably down to earth.
John: But I do feel like his handsomeness alone would get him an audience with me.
Merlin: We were watching the Captain America movie, and I don't know why I do this.
Merlin: Why do I say anything to my daughter ever?
Merlin: But I was like, yeah, that guy right there, a lot of people considered him, Robert Redford, to be the handsomest man in the world at one point.
Merlin: And even as the words were coming out of my mouth, I was like, this is not going to make any sense at all.
Merlin: Because even then, he was very rugged looking.
Merlin: Yes.
Merlin: He had a certain, let's just say, you know, there's certain kinds of stars that would not have come up in the HD era.
Merlin: You got your Robert Redford's, you got exactly, you got your Edward James Olmos's, you got your Cameron Diaz's, like where HD is not surpassingly kind to them.
John: You see some of those flaws.
Merlin: Yeah, it's very topographical.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: And so,
Merlin: Yeah, I like the idea of the pink plump cells, though.
Merlin: Now, when you pick up the details, do you start with the table of contents?
Merlin: Do you flip through?
Merlin: Obviously, you remove all the acts.
Merlin: Are you looking for recipes?
John: The thing is, I read every magazine from front to back, right?
John: When I was a little kid, my mom had a subscription to Time magazine, and she would give me the Time magazines.
John: And her instruction to me at first was, you don't have to read every article.
John: Just read the things that are interesting to you.
John: And so I was like, OK, all right.
John: And so I would flip through.
John: And, you know, back then it was just like page after page of pictures of Henry Kissinger talking to McGeorge Bundy.
John: But then there would be a picture of somebody on a motorcycle or there would be a picture of some black September terrorists leaning over a balcony in the Olympic Village.
Merlin: Or there would be some... A long feature on Howard Hughes' long toenails.
Merlin: Super interesting.
Merlin: I love Time magazine.
John: I wonder where you'd get a Time magazine like that.
John: Anyway, so I started reading Time... I started reading just the articles that interested me.
John: And then I remember feeling a real sense of accomplishment when I said to myself, when I began reading it from front to back, without regard for whether or not the article...
John: seemed interesting and that was when i really started learning about interest rates but so now when i get a copy of details i open it up and i do not presume i do not prejudice the feature article i do not presume that the that any of the stuff at the front of the book is not interesting to me i just read it all the way through uh details takes about 10 minutes to read the latest copy of wired
John: you may be surprised or not surprised to find, also has perfume ads in it.
John: What?
John: Which I felt like writing a letter to them like, of all the magazines in the world, yours has to be the most chemically sensitive audience.
Merlin: Is it like space perfume?
John: No, it's some kind of Axe body spray because Wired is trying to appeal to bros because bros are who make up San Francisco now.
Merlin: Yeah.
John: Fair enough.
John: There was a fantastic editorial in the latest Wired about how machines should be free of spyware or pre-programmed government nipples or whatever.
John: A lot of good stuff in Wired.
John: I get a lot of my...
John: That's how I even talk to Wil Wheaton.
John: I just read Wired, and then he and I have all this common ground.
Merlin: Yeah, and cats.
John: And cats.
Merlin: And is that where Elon Musk says we should have artificial intelligence?
John: We should or shouldn't.
Merlin: I thought I heard something.
Merlin: I don't like tech news.
Merlin: I don't like news.
Merlin: But I think I heard that Elon Musk, who I understand you follow periodically, he has concern that the AIs are going to take over.
John: Well, I think the concern is that in order to... Currently, every device has this built-in weakness, built-in flaw, which is that the copyright protectors don't want us to be able to listen to music, so they build in a way that they can keep us from...
John: listening to music.
John: And the cops don't want us to be able to make 3D guns with our 3D printers.
Merlin: You're talking about like the Apple thing.
Merlin: Like the Apple's not going to help break into your phone.
John: Right.
John: And so over time, as we cede more and more control to our machines...
John: If we continue to allow them to all be built with backdoor, you know, backdoor weaknesses or backdoor permissions, right?
John: Higher level permissions that are granted to someone else besides us, the owners.
John: Then you've got AI things running all around and you don't know who they're answering to.
John: And that is a dangerous condition.
John: And it was really food for thought.
John: I was like, that's right.
John: That's why there's no computers in my new Suburban.
John: oh see that's probably smart and you got an am radio so you can listen to frank sinatra you got an am radio and uh and i'm learning a lot about you know frank sinatra was a sex symbol like i can't every time i hear his voice come over the over the am radio over the single speaker in my truck which is all the time because he is the king of am radio
John: I think this guy was sexy.
John: People wanted to kiss the Skeletor of a, like this baby Skeletor is what he looks like to me.
John: i don't see it i don't see it and i don't hear it in his voice he doesn't he's not appealing even when he was really young he was super skinny when he was young and kind of freakish looking he had that weird curly hair back when he had hair see now i don't i'm not i'm not uh body normative no right so one thing i think we can all say about john roderick is he is not body normative not body normative but at the same time he is a rodentine creep
John: Dean Martin, sexy guy.
John: Yeah.
John: I mean, even Jerry Lewis would have a certain amount of enthusiasm in bed, presumably.
John: But, ugh.
John: He knows how to make a lady laugh.
John: Right?
Merlin: Oh, yeah.
John: But Frank Sinatra, like, with his, ugh, is like...
John: Little bony knuckles.
Merlin: My problem is I fall back on convenience food sometimes.
Merlin: Sometimes I think I'm going to treat myself.
Merlin: And that fucking KFC slash Taco Bell near our house is always there.
Merlin: It's always there.
John: How often do you choose the KFC and how often do you choose the Taco Bell?
Merlin: One does not choose a KFC.
Merlin: One ends up at a KFC.
John: Right, but I mean, once you're in the door... Oh, I roll KFC generally.
John: You don't go over to the Taco Bell side of the line?
Merlin: No, no.
Merlin: The menu there is so overwhelming.
Merlin: It's really, really weird.
Merlin: Given the footprint of this place, it's crazy how many different combinations of some kind of meat and sauce they have.
Merlin: It's really weird.
Merlin: But, you know, like yesterday, I did this thing that I... Here's the thing.
Merlin: I've never gone to KFC and not regretted it, and I know that.
Merlin: I know I'm going to regret it.
Merlin: And it's the thing is, like, I realize I'm short on time.
Merlin: My thought process is like, OK, I did it again.
Merlin: It's three o'clock and I haven't eaten.
Merlin: And if I go home not having eaten, I'll be cranky.
Merlin: Right.
Merlin: And so it's dumb.
Merlin: I should have eaten something halfway decent.
Merlin: I should have eaten some beef jerky two hours earlier.
Merlin: But I say, oh, I'll just go in and get this little thing.
Merlin: And the effect that that food has on me, setting aside anything it does to my gastrointestinal system, it just takes me out.
Merlin: I need like a two-hour nap after I eat that food.
John: Popcorn chicken?
John: Do you get popcorn chicken?
Merlin: Sometimes I'll get a kernel strip.
Merlin: I'll get some strips.
Merlin: I might get the 10-pack of the bites.
Merlin: I'll get something small that I can eat while I'm literally walking to my house.
Merlin: Something between a strip and a bite.
Merlin: But like yesterday, we went to see the movie.
Merlin: We went to see a movie, my daughter and I, and a good movie.
Merlin: And I did this thing I do periodically where you get this little platter that comes with curly fries and chicken strips.
Merlin: And I sat there in a movie theater and I ate the entire thing.
Merlin: i mean and and like every single bite i'm i'm just filled with self-loathing because i know what's gonna happen and then i came home and i i slept for an hour and a half in the middle in the middle of uh leaving daylight savings so it's practically dark and i'm still laying on the bed groaning i don't know i don't have a point it's just that it's just that my recovery uh recoveries are not what they used to be
John: Well, so I'm not depressed anymore because of the gluten.
John: You remember when I would talk about like I was just in a fog and I couldn't see to the end of my hand and I didn't know.
Merlin: Sounded like you would, I mean, not necessarily as a palliative or something, but like you would find yourself eating a very large bowl of something, perhaps even in the middle of the night.
John: Yeah, just to keep the barking down.
John: Demon dogs.
John: But now that it's been a long time since I've been in a deep depression, it has revealed my sort of latent, normal level of constant depression to be just my old friend, like I'm back with my old friend, walking hand in hand with my pal.
John: Normal depression.
John: And so last night I'm reading Wings of Gold, the magazine of naval aviators that I still get because my dad was a lifetime member of the Association of Naval Aviators.
John: And it's one of those groups that doesn't, when somebody dies, they don't take their name off their subscription list.
John: They just keep sending you the magazine of naval aviation.
John: So I'm reading about it.
John: I enjoy getting it because it tells me all about the latest technologies.
John: They're firing HAARP missiles from C-130s now.
John: It's very exciting.
Merlin: That's a cargo plane, isn't it?
John: Yeah, yeah.
Merlin: That seems pretty innovative.
John: I was like, why weren't they doing this before?
John: You could put a lot of missiles on that.
Merlin: You still have room for a KFC in it.
John: Yeah, they figured it out.
John: But anyway, one of my favorite things about this magazine is that all the old guys, the 80, 90-year-old guys, when they sit down to write their reminiscences...
John: They write about the time that they scored, that they downed five zeros in one day or whatever.
Merlin: Or maybe shot a zero out of the sky with a 45.
John: Shot a zero out of the sky with a 45 or strafed some locomotives outside of Inchon or whatever it was that they were doing.
John: Back in the old days, when they were flying mechanical airplanes, bristling with machine guns, and they had to actually see the thing they were shooting.
John: It wasn't just some dot over a horizon.
John: And some of these people lived these extraordinary lives in their youth, where they...
John: Imagine being in 50 dogfights before you're 30.
John: Think about some of these guys.
John: There's a guy, the world's oldest naval aviator is this guy who's 103 years old.
John: And he retired from the Navy as a Rear Admiral in 1958.
John: Wow.
John: And he's still alive.
Wow.
John: And yet, I'm reading this magazine and I'm like, this guy, wow.
John: Think about his life.
John: Think about retiring from the Navy as an admiral in 58.
John: And ever since 58, 10 years before I was born, he's been walking around.
John: People still call him admiral.
John: But he's been alive longer since retiring from the Navy than he was before.
John: than he was old when he retired from the Navy.
John: And yet, who gives a fuck?
John: Nobody's ever heard of this guy.
John: He's probably dead by now, since the time the magazine came out.
John: And wherever he lives, probably somewhere in San Diego, there's an obituary of him in the newspaper.
John: And then, whatever, his kids have a picture of him, and then his grandkids are like, I think that was my grandfather.
John: And then his great grandkids...
John: Never heard of them.
John: Who cares?
John: Who cares about anything?
John: I can feel my... What's that little bulb up your butt that the doctor touches?
Merlin: Oh, like your prostate.
John: Yeah, I can feel mine enlarging.
John: I don't even have to... It's not impacting me yet.
John: I can just feel it down there like, well, now's my time.
John: He's waking up, he takes his little stocking cap off, and he's like...
John: Better get going.
John: And who cares?
John: Who gives a shit?
John: Who cares about me?
John: I've got a lot of theories that I feel like there's a part of me that feels like, well, what if I got cancer tomorrow and they told me I had a month to live?
John: Would I hire somebody to sit and transcribe all my theories so that the world could benefit from them before I went?
John: And then I was like, who cares?
John: Who gives a shit?
John: Nobody's going to remember either way.
John: Nobody cares about what I think.
John: And also, who cares what happens to people?
John: Even if my theories are super good, who gives a shit?
John: I'm glad you improved your diet.
Merlin: Little friends back.
John: I got out of my car today in front of a cafe and an attractive young woman was walking past.
John: And she looked at me and I looked at her and for whatever reason, we didn't break eye contact.
John: You know, normally you look at somebody and you kind of give a half, like you give a Scott Simpson smile and then you look away real fast in case your eyes are hurting them.
John: But for whatever reason, we both kept looking at each other and then she said, nice hat.
John: And I was like, wow, thank you.
John: And I didn't have, I didn't get back to her with a like, I like your scarf or whatever.
John: It all happened so fast.
John: Nice hat, she said.
John: And all I could say was, thank you.
John: And then we were passed.
John: And I thought about filing a harassment suit, but more importantly...
John: Who cares?
John: She doesn't remember me even now.
Merlin: Yeah, that's another thing in the fascinating story of getting older is being a noncombatant in the sexual revolution.
Merlin: Nobody cares.
Merlin: Nobody cares.
John: I've got a gray beard, and I swear to you there are people who walk past me and probably think to themselves, he looked good for a 60-year-old.
Yeah.
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John: Like there are young people who cannot distinguish me from a 60-year-old.
John: And ultimately, they're right, right?
John: I mean, what's the difference between me and a 60-year-old?
John: Just a little, just 10% more vitality?
Merlin: Oh, yeah.
Merlin: I mean, well, and you see those guys, like, you know, you don't even have to be Jack LaLanne.
Merlin: You know, just those kind of guys who are real puckish.
Merlin: And they're hopping around and helping move chairs and stuff.
Merlin: Playing the violin.
Merlin: I'm just sitting on the floor groaning all the time.
Merlin: Take a photo of my daughter on stage, go back to sleep.
Merlin: No, I've definitely reached a point.
Merlin: It's really dispiriting.
Merlin: It's dispiriting.
Merlin: And the thing is, part of me thinks, oh, I should make a bunch of changes.
Merlin: I should have a personal, mental, and physical, and emotional, and maybe spiritual revolution.
Merlin: I should just hit reboot and start it all over.
Merlin: Yeah, reboot.
Merlin: But then now you're just a pathetic nut.
Merlin: Because you can't change it.
Merlin: I mean, I guess you could.
John: I mean, the only reboot that's going to work is if the aliens have TSA backscatter technology to fix all your cells and make them plump again.
Merlin: That's pretty appealing.
Merlin: Now, I think the way to make that an interesting story, so the way I know you're a comic fan, it's kind of like they're Galactus and you're Silver Surfer.
Merlin: And instead of actually eating the Earth and consuming all of its energy, they're going to do something, something.
Merlin: I'm thinking they throw you a bone.
Merlin: They make you aware of the backscatter scanner and say, you know,
Merlin: The usual season, you got maybe, let's say, 22 episodes in a classic TV season.
Merlin: They say there's 20 things about you that can and eventually will kill you.
Merlin: And the first one's free.
John: And the thing is, some of them are just annoying, right?
Merlin: Yeah, but I mean, like, each week, they could solve, they could fix one really fucked up mole that you weren't even worried about.
Merlin: Right.
Merlin: But I'm just saying they give you a little bit every week.
Merlin: I know you don't marry the cow if you can get the milk in the backscatter scanner.
John: See, I don't know what the aliens want from us is the thing.
John: They clearly don't want... They're not here to take all six billion of us with them.
Merlin: No.
John: Where would they put them?
John: And what would they do?
John: Yeah, right.
John: So if they're going to take any of us and put us through the plumper...
John: There's got to be some trade.
John: You're going to end up being a pet somewhere, right?
John: It's not going to end well for you.
Merlin: See, I don't mean to sound like I'm obsessing over this, but I think if you look at one thing that's super interesting to me about the last, say, 200 or 300 years of changes in actual technology, not dating apps, but actual technology, is that everything changes when you can measure something you didn't know was measurable and
Merlin: And when you get a name for something that you didn't know existed, I think that's, to me, that is super interesting.
Merlin: There's think about the special ed class when you were even in high school.
Merlin: And when I was in, I look back now and I think about the kids that were in the quote unquote special education class.
Merlin: And it seems fucking medieval.
Merlin: The mix of kids in there.
Merlin: There were probably kids that were dyslexic in there.
Merlin: There were kids who had profound developmental disabilities.
Merlin: There were kids in there that probably had a severe ADD.
Merlin: Right.
Merlin: And certainly a whole range of spectrum stuff going on.
Merlin: But they all just went in this one group, which is like you don't fit with the rest of the school because we didn't have a way to measure it.
Merlin: We didn't have a name for it.
Merlin: And I think a lot of power in technology, and maybe I'm getting too sci-fi here, is figuring out like maybe there's shit that the aliens can come and measure and have a name for that we don't even know about, including maybe let's just say our natural resources.
Merlin: There may be natural resources here that they can measure and have a name for that we aren't even aware of.
Merlin: That would serve them well in their GMC RVs in another galaxy.
Merlin: And you could be the person.
Merlin: You don't need to know where it is.
Merlin: You just need to liaise that fucking shit.
Merlin: You need to get in there and Silver Surfer that situation and help them get to the things that we don't have a name for.
John: But I end up feeling like – remember in Red Dawn, the mayor of the town?
John: Remember the mayor of the town?
John: I'll look him up.
John: I don't remember.
John: In the movie Red Dawn.
John: He's a minor character.
John: Yeah.
John: But the mayor of the town, it's some kind of Montana town.
John: And he's just trying to, on the one hand, he's trying to help, right?
John: The Russians are here.
John: They're the new boss or the Cubans.
John: They're the new boss of the Montana town.
Merlin: Oh, he's played by the great Lane Smith, of course.
John: Lane Smith.
John: He's a great character actor.
John: Love that guy.
John: He's just trying to keep the lid on everything.
John: He's still the mayor.
John: They're still dealing with him.
John: They didn't just take him out and shoot him.
John: They're still dealing with him contemptuously, but they're dealing with him as they go about their own project.
Merlin: So he's kind of like a Judenrott kind of situation?
John: Yeah.
John: Exactly.
John: He's a Judenrod.
John: He kind of comes and he's, like, he's subsequious, but ultimately, like, you sense that he has some altruistic goals in mind.
John: He wants to help the citizens of his town by liaising with his new masters, but he ends up being on the wrong side because he's, yeah, he's Vichy.
John: And the problem with being the liaison to our alien masters is you don't want to be Vichy.
John: And I don't understand their thought technologies enough to know...
John: whether they would recognize that trait in me and they would let me believe that I had complete autonomy in decision-making.
Merlin: I totally see what you're saying.
Merlin: You don't really have any real bargaining power.
Merlin: You don't have any ability to stop them.
Merlin: You don't even understand what they're trying to do, and they're just letting you have an extra crust of bread, which in this case might be removing a mole from your back.
John: So you get on television, you usurp all international television broadcasts, and you say, Hello, I have been empowered by our new alien masters to explain to you what is going on.
John: I am a human like you, and I am not under their thought control.
John: I am just here as a translator and an intermediary to speak human language to you.
John: But who knows if they've got a finger and they're tickling your prostate or whatever that you don't even know about.
John: Think about Jodie Foster in that Contact movie.
John: She's up in imaginary space, and she's talking to the ghost of her dad.
John: I mean, right?
Merlin: There's a lot of angles for sure.
John: A lot of angles.
John: So they're like, oh, yeah, we're going to remove this mole from your bag.
John: Seems so easy.
John: And you're like, oh, thank you.
Merlin: I could use that, sure.
John: Yeah, they're plumping your cells up.
John: Meanwhile, they're mining the molten gold at the core of the earth.
John: Yeah.
Merlin: Sean, we've talked about this before.
Merlin: Nobody offers you money for something unless they think they're going to get more value out of it than you're getting out of it.
Merlin: I think it's a good idea in your liaising to be a little bit suspicious, but maybe not let them know you're suspicious.
John: I'm just trying to figure out what their angle is.
Merlin: What do you think their angle would be?
John: I can't imagine that it's anything other than mining the molten gold at the core of the earth unless it is.
John: I mean, it just seems so unlikely that they want us for food.
John: It's like food is a simple problem to solve.
Merlin: Food seems like a uniquely earth problem.
John: Yeah, right.
John: Did I tell you when I was in Kansas City?
John: I went to Oklahoma Joe's barbecue and I had a tweet up with some very nice people in Kansas City.
John: And one of the people there was a young man in glasses and a baseball hat who works in tech.
John: Nice guy, intelligent guy.
John: And halfway through the meal, halfway through my brisket meal,
John: Well, I say to him, like, do you want some barbecue?
John: I'll buy you some barbecue or whatever.
John: And he's like, no, I mostly eat Soylent.
John: And I was like, we've been standing here talking for 20 minutes, and only now you tell me that you mostly eat Soylent?
John: Is that that stuff that's like a space shake?
John: Yeah, it's another San Francisco bro technology.
John: A bunch of bros down there, but hippie bros.
John: We're like, if you look at all the ingredients, all the nutrients.
Merlin: It's an open source nutritional drink.
John: It is, yes.
John: All the nutrients that you need, they just buy them raw from chemical companies and combine them in a gray Metamucil style shake.
John: And you can just seriously mostly just eat this paste, and it has all the nutrients that you need, and off you go.
Merlin: Rich life.
John: You've solved the food problem so you can spend more time coding dating apps.
Merlin: The creator says you can spend $154.62 a month to yield a diet of 11,000 kilojoules.
John: Kilojoules.
Merlin: Kilojoules per day.
John: That's 1,000 joules.
Merlin: Because food is heat.
Merlin: Medical food.
John: medical food so no brisket for him no and so no he didn't want any brisket and you know and he was lean and he was going to live forever you could tell you could see the look in his eye that he knew he was going to live forever and i have to say as much of an epicurean as i am as much of a person who lives who truly lives who sucks the marrow out of life it appeals to me to wake up every morning and drink a shake with all of my kilojoules in it
Merlin: Ah, you know, 10 years ago, I would have said maybe.
Merlin: Because there is something very appealing.
Merlin: I'll tell you, John, boy, this is a really depressing episode.
Merlin: I'm tired of thinking about food.
Merlin: Let me cough for a second.
Merlin: Yeah, go ahead.
Merlin: Tired of thinking about food.
Merlin: I'm tired of buying food.
Merlin: I'm tired of preparing food.
Merlin: I'm tired of cleaning up after I've made the food.
Merlin: And I'm tired of throwing the leftover food.
Merlin: I'm tired of food.
Merlin: I'm tired of thinking about it.
Merlin: And even when it's food that makes me happy, it doesn't make me that happy.
Merlin: I'm tired of thinking about food.
John: No.
John: Why do you have to keep clipping your fucking toenails?
John: They just keep growing.
Merlin: Yeah, and irregular shapes increasingly.
Merlin: You know, I've said this before, but I really miss the symmetry of my youth.
Merlin: My body was more symmetrical.
Merlin: I'm starting to feel more and more off-center.
Merlin: Did you have a symmetrical body?
Merlin: No, not 100%, but I mean, I think I could pass.
John: Yeah.
Merlin: Yeah, but yeah, okay.
Merlin: See, the thing is, I haven't researched this, but Soylent, and so this is something, this is a new technology that people are exploring, because why?
John: It's just solved all the problems that you just described.
Merlin: Yes.
John: You don't have to go... You can make more apps.
John: Yeah.
John: You don't have to eat kale.
John: You don't have to really even deal with taste.
Merlin: You certainly don't have to worry about costly dates.
John: You just chug your gray cornmeal paste, and then... You're going to get so much email.
Yeah.
Merlin: Then you're free, right?
Merlin: You know what it looks like?
Merlin: It looks like I did this.
Merlin: I've done a lot of kooky fad diets in the past.
Merlin: I remember at one point, probably maybe 92, 93, I'd gotten, you know, I'd been at a job for a couple of years.
Merlin: I, you know, I remember when I was in, so I'm five, nine.
Merlin: And when I was in college, I was 149 pounds.
Wow.
Merlin: And so I was pretty skinny, like not super skinny.
Merlin: But then by the time I'd had a job for a couple of years, coinciding with the fact that I was now in my 20s and officially going downhill, you know, I got up to like probably 165.
Merlin: And I went, well, I mean, I was still, I wasn't, you know, heavy, but, um, but yeah, one of the guys that, you know, you pick up on those, you haven't had a lot of these real jobs, but I don't know if they had this at the newsstand, but you start doing like kooky diets that other people try, you know, do the cabbage soup.
Merlin: I did the, not Nutrisystems, but what's the one where you get the shake, it's got cellulose in it, you add orange juice to the powder, and you shake it up, and you drink two of those a day instead of meals?
Merlin: Tang?
Merlin: Orange Julius?
Merlin: No, no, you get it in a can, and you put a scoop of this into this special built-to-purpose shaker, you top it off with orange juice, you shake it, and then you joylessly slug it down.
Merlin: And that's kind of what this stuff looks like.
Merlin: It's got a little bit of a foam head on it.
Merlin: Yeah, foamy head.
Merlin: Except in this case, it looks like... I'm guessing it's got everything that you need for your kilojoules.
John: I feel like this is a new evolution.
John: This is maybe one of the principal problems of modernity, right?
John: Back when we were at the dawn of the modern age, someone devised the theory...
John: that what we lacked was enough time.
John: We were wasting time doing all these labor-intensive things, and what we needed was to free up that time, and if we had that time free... Can you even imagine what we would do if we got that time back?
John: If we got that time, we would be reading poetry, we would be philosophizing on the mountaintop, we would be living in a...
John: culture that was flowering art and music and dance.
Merlin: We would become cocksmen on a level that our great-great-grandfathers could never have even dreamed.
John: I collapse on the divan with one hand shading my eyes just thinking about the elegance that we would be capable of if we just had that time.
John: And the whole project of the last 200 years has been to free up this crucial time that we somehow
John: That we somehow had lost as we moved into the machine age.
John: And with every new device, with every new thing that supposedly saves us time, we realize that we have all this time now and we have to fill it.
John: And in the past, we would have filled this time from dawn to dusk laboring.
John: And now we don't have anything to do, and we don't have the imaginations necessary to really, you know, to flower.
Merlin: But also, just in passing, during and before the times that we were laboring all day, we also had to worry about being destroyed by our environment.
Merlin: Right.
Merlin: So we had a legitimate reason to be anxious all the time.
Merlin: Oh, we were literally being chased by wolves.
John: Literally.
John: Not figurative wolves.
John: Not demon dogs, but actual wolves.
John: Not like an eWolf app.
John: So you take away food...
John: And when you're 24 years old, it seems like, well, I mean, all I'm eating is Taco Bell anyway.
John: I might as well just drink Soylent and I'm getting nutrition.
John: But for those of us who are in middle age, food, thinking about food, preparing food, eating food, and then worrying about food, that's 60% of how we fill our time.
John: Take that away.
John: And what do you fill it with?
John: More episodic television?
John: More Dan Harmon fan worship?
John: No.
John: Do not take my food, even though I hate it.
John: Even though I despise everything about food.
John: It is at least a game you have to play every day.
Merlin: No, you're right.
Merlin: I mean, I enjoy the food.
Merlin: I enjoy the idea of some food, but it's just, again, maybe I'm just old and tired, but it seems like so much effort goes into the food proposition to have my daughter then push around a little bit of noodles and ask for dessert.
John: It's ridiculous, but think about how much effort it would be if you had to make your own clothes.
Hmm.
Merlin: I can't imagine how much worse things would be if I had to make – because, I mean, I kind of wear the same thing every day as it is.
John: Right.
Merlin: By which I mean I wear the same thing literally every day.
John: Take a look at the clothes that you have on right now and imagine yourself in a situation where those were gone, those had worn out, and you needed to just make that.
John: You just needed to make those clothes that you have on.
John: It would take me like three years.
John: And, you know, but you'd feel good about it and you would wear those every day with pride instead of the shame.
Merlin: That's right.
Merlin: The craftsmanship that went into this particular Fantastic Four shirt.
John: Now imagine if you had to make clothes for your daughter and how frustrating it would be every six months when you had to make her new clothes because the little beast kept growing.
Merlin: Yeah.
John: I feel like, you know, I've told you, my mom, she used to detail her week back in Ohio in the 40s, whatever.
John: You know, there was an entire day that they devoted just to ironing.
John: Or arnen, as they said.
John: They would arn for an entire day.
John: Now, they were thinking...
John: boy, I wish that there was some kind of soylent, at least.
John: Soylent for clothes.
John: Yeah, that could allow us to be free of this labor.
John: Right.
John: But, you know...
Merlin: But that's kind of what life is.
Merlin: I mean, not to pull out the turns out thing, but people said for a long time, turns out once we get all these time-saving devices, once we have refrigerators so we don't have to go to the store twice a day, once we have washing machines so we don't have to spend our entire Monday washing, it is said that all that really happened was that the standards went up.
Merlin: Now people expected their clothes to be done more quickly.
Okay.
John: Well, right.
John: The standard of that went up, but what went down was clothes suck now.
John: Clothes are made by little brown hands in Malaysia.
John: The clothes are all garbage.
John: We throw them away.
John: We wear a shirt 15 times and it's like, oh, this shirt's old, gone.
John: Like standards have not, only the appearance of standards have gone up.
John: Actual standards have declined everywhere.
Yeah.
John: And I'm sitting here.
John: We're helping a lot of people.
John: I'm sitting here and I'm stinking up this whole house with farts because all I eat is Land Jaeger and Reese's Peanut Butter Cups.
John: That's no way to live.
John: It's certainly an option.
John: How can a man my age survive on Land Jaeger and Reese's Peanut Butter Cups?
John: I mean, my emissions are evidence there's something deeply wrong inside me.
John: That's why I'm sick.
John: You need an alien scanner.
John: I need to get on a new planet.
John: If an alien scanned me right now, they would find a ball the size of a calf.
John: They would find a ball the size of a newborn calf made up of peanut butter and land yeager inside me, and they would say, there's nothing we can do to save you.
John: We're going to go somewhere else.
John: We're going to hire another guy to be the spokesperson.
Merlin: Did you not know what you were doing?
Merlin: Did you not know that this is what you would get?
Merlin: You would get a ball out of this?
No.
Merlin: I had chicken fingers.
Merlin: Oh, chicken fingers.
Merlin: Chicken fingers and got some curly fries with it.
John: I stopped at a... I actually, on my drive across America, I stopped at a Taco Bell, I have to admit.
John: And I had not been to a Taco Bell in a dozen years.
John: And I was like, you know what?
John: I'm on a road trip and I am too busy to stop at a Perkins...
John: I do not want to go into a Bob Evans.
Merlin: They still got Perkins?
John: Yeah.
John: That's cool.
John: Last time I went into a Bob Evans, I ordered the pot roast, and it was watery.
John: And I was like, no more.
John: I'm not getting fooled.
John: I won't get fooled again.
John: So I went to a Taco Bell.
John: I went to a Taco Bell drive-thru, and I got the old standby that I used to get when I would go to Taco Bell all the time when I was a young person.
John: The old standby, which is five tacos.
Merlin: Yeah, they used to be like 89 cents.
John: Yeah.
John: And I sat in my truck with the engine running and I scarfed five tacos because that's the only word you could use to describe it.
John: You don't savor them.
John: No, I scarfed them.
John: And the whole time I was thinking this is like this is sub pump chili.
John: This is this is like meat that is just coming out of a basically out of a Coke machine.
John: Right.
John: It's just like they are.
John: They have to add texture to this to make it seem like ground beef.
John: And it was one of those Taco Bells in the middle of the country where you pull up and every single employee is like a high school girl.
John: You know what I mean?
John: Like as soon as you get out of the cities, you pull up and like fast food jobs are still jobs that like somebody on the Glee Club would get.
Yeah.
John: I get five tacos handed to me by a girl with a jaunty ponytail.
John: I scarf them in the parking lot, and I was like, this is it.
John: This is reality.
John: I'm experiencing reality now in a way that I protect myself from this reality.
John: Five of them, huh?
John: You smoke this shit sauce to escape from reality?
John: I don't need this shit.
John: I am reality.
Merlin: But then even just having normal food still feels like such a grind.
Merlin: I feel like a meat machine that just has to feed other meat into the meat machine.
Merlin: And then I create my rudimentary paste and take a nap.
Merlin: It's disgusting.
Merlin: Maybe I should look into Soylent.
Merlin: Maybe it's open source.
Merlin: I should commit some code, if you know what I mean.
John: So, you know, my daughter is a happy carnivore, but...
John: i'm i shudder i shudder to think about the conversations i mean we've already had the conversation about like well this is this is meat it comes from a cow and she was like it comes from a cow how and i was like well it is a cow this is part of a cow that we made into these to this meat and she was like hmm and then
John: we moved on to a different conversation.
John: But when she... I mean, really sitting and explaining to her that we...
John: Eat aminals.
John: We eat aminals.
John: We don't have to.
John: But we do it on purpose.
John: But we do it on purpose.
Merlin: There's a lot of planning and infrastructure involved in getting those five tacos into your lap.
John: Yeah, like the farm is a motif that we talk to kids about a lot.
John: Like the farm.
John: Chickens and cows and pigs and goats.
John: The farm.
John: And when we take kids to farms, we're like, the farm.
John: And kids get it.
John: But then it's like, you know what the farm is?
John: It's not just corn.
John: It's a fucking holocaust.
John: Every single farm.
John: Everybody here dies.
John: And everybody here dies in a way that they don't go curl up in their bed with the loving hen that they've spent their whole lives with.
John: Everybody here dies by getting lured into a room, lured into a stainless steel room where a German-looking woman in a smock is waiting.
John: And then it's all over.
John: It's curtains for you.
John: It's farm noir.
John: And that's, you know, that's not a conversation that I'm looking forward to having with her.
John: I can barely justify it to myself.
Merlin: Oh, I'm the hugest hypocrite in the world when it comes to that stuff.
Merlin: I do not have the stomach for that at all.
Merlin: And you think about the sluice and getting all the matter off the farm and back into the water supply.
John: Pink slime.
John: Pink slime.
John: I mean, the best thing the aliens could do for us is make Soylent taste like Reese's peanut butter cups.
John: And then you wouldn't have to, you know, the number one advantage of Soylent with all its disgustingness is just that you can just take a step back from the factory killing machine that our culture is.
John: And I say that as someone who has already eaten a sausage today.
Yeah.
John: Already eaten a sausage and chewed on the little nubbins that are in every sausage and gone like, hmm, what is this nubbin?
John: This was once a part of a thing.
Merlin: It's filled with cartilagy goodness.
John: This isn't like the soft part of whatever that guy was.
John: You know, and that guy was out in a field not very long ago.
John: Not thinking anything.
John: Just a dumb cow.
John: Not thinking.
John: I'm not sorry about his thoughts.
John: I'm not sorry for him.
John: Fuck him.
Merlin: So do you make your own Soylent at home?
Merlin: Do you buy it in a package?
Merlin: I'm starting to see the appeal.
John: I feel like I should try Soylent.
John: You go on Amazon and it shows up in one of those civil defense bins.
John: Remember when we were kids and there were still air raid shelters in city buildings?
Merlin: Yeah.
John: And you would go down in the basement of those buildings and there would be all those cardboard 50-gallon drums.
Merlin: Oh, sure.
John: With the civil defense triangle on them that was sort of a trilateral commission-looking Masonic symbol.
Merlin: I'm sure it's a coincidence.
John: And you would open those 50-gallon drums and they would be full of... Cream corn.
John: Yeah, freeze-dried food and canned stuff that was all just slowly moldering.
John: Somewhere in America, and I bet you it's in Kansas City, there's still a basement of a government office building where all that civil defense air raid stuff is sealed behind the door like Al Capone's vault.
Merlin: Oh, and if you get it now, it's vintage.
John: But, you know, like when I was a kid, I mean, maybe Alaska had a preponderance of this stuff, but everywhere you went, there were these civil defense cans down in the sub-basement where you were supposed to go when the Russians blew us all up.
Merlin: Of course, yeah.
John: And I think what happens is Soylent sends you a big cardboard 50-gallon drum full of sand.
John: And then you add water to the sand.
John: And maybe, like, what, a splash of cranberry juice or something for just honey.
Merlin: I bet there's a MacGuffin or a little trick here.
Merlin: I bet there's something where you put in, like, activated yeast.
Merlin: I bet you put in something that makes it, like, fresh.
Merlin: Right?
John: Makes it fresh?
Merlin: Well, you know, it makes it, you know, probiotic.
Merlin: There's probably something you put in there that introduces something that was not available in the air raid shelters of the 50s.
Merlin: Something that, you know, something that makes it, because see, the trick is, I bet it's got to be a little bit artisanal.
Merlin: Because this is not that different from typical, like, diet powder you buy at the, you know, GNC or whatever.
Merlin: There's got to be something, and I should just read the whole Wikipedia article.
Merlin: But I'm guessing there's something to this.
John: If you Google Soylent Hack...
John: I bet you people are hacking their soylent.
John: Uh-huh.
John: And filling it up with, you know, acacia berries.
John: Oh, jeez.
Merlin: Or... Yeah, like antioxidants.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: Oh, God, this is depressing.
John: Or make it taste like coffee.
John: Make it taste like peanut butter.
Merlin: Oh, this is really, really depressing.
Merlin: It looks like everything in it is gray or beige.
John: Yeah, because all... Because really...
John: We are made from the ashes and we go back to the ashes.
Merlin: Mazel tov.
Merlin: Oh man, sometimes I'm really hungry after we record and I am not hungry today.
John: Mazel tov.