Ep. 178: "Action Movie Doctor"
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Hello.
Hi, John.
Hi, Merlin.
How's it going?
Good.
It's good to hear your voice.
It's good to hear your voice.
It sounds really clear and crisp and present.
I'm always trying to up my game.
What have you done?
Well, you know, I brushed my teeth, had two or three coffees.
I've had some Altoids.
Oh, I can smell them from here.
Hmm.
No, you know, I try.
You know, not that hard.
It's podcasting.
Yeah, right, exactly.
You know, doesn't it seem like drop bits?
Like, do you really need to try that hard?
You know, do you remember when the Pearl Jam first arrived on the scene?
And do you remember that music video for the one about the kid that kills everybody in his class?
Lemon Yellow Sun.
Because they don't... Hey, hit me with a surprise lift.
Hey, I'm in there.
Yeah.
Of course I do.
That was a great video.
Yeah, great video.
Very evocative, very current.
I think it was about issues.
It definitely was about issues.
But I remember most distinctly, see, I didn't have a TV then as now.
But I did see that video a lot because it was on a lot.
Just for my records, you don't have a TV at all right now?
Well, it's not that I don't have a TV.
I have a TV that I... I have one of those giant cathode ray tube...
tvs that was given to me by my next door neighbor okay all right that i haven't you know that's not plugged in but i can't get rid of because nobody wants okay so i mean i open i own one it's just not connected to anything i don't make you sensitive about it okay continue so so then as now you didn't own a tv right or rather than i didn't own a tv now i own a tv i'm a tv owner but i bet you didn't have cable especially
Well, I don't have cable now, and I didn't have cable then.
Your cord cutter.
Clipped it.
Clipped it.
However, I did see that video a lot because MTV was still in its waning days of ubiquity.
And I remember thinking, what is he doing?
What is Eddie Vedder, Mr. Vedder, what is he doing with his teeth?
Why is he baring his teeth?
Why is he showing them to me?
Yeah, with the big... And those big saucer eyes.
Yeah, but it was all the teeth that freaked me out and scared me.
All the big, big, big teeth mouth.
And it was a style...
singing that he was broadcasting that i had that i prior to that didn't know you know i knew the like open your mouth big and i knew the but like he his mouth isn't open it like it's not open wide it's just that his lips are open wide he's like teething you so then i was in the recording studio many years later
And I was singing a song and I was like, singing the song.
But I was just singing it, you know, normal, like, sort of in my mouth, in my brain.
But it just doesn't sound articulate enough.
It didn't have the clarity that I wanted.
It just sounded like I was bored.
And so for whatever reason, I started to sing with Eddie Vedder.
Like, can you hear the difference?
I'm talking right now, and then I'm talking like this.
And it brightened it up.
You just peel your lips back off of your teeth.
You sound relevant, like you've had enough.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
All of a sudden, it's just like I've got all this energy and this stuff to say because, ah.
my, my lips aren't in the way of what, of what my teeth are trying to tell you.
And so, and I just, and then I just had all this sort of aggressive energy in the song.
And I realized that, uh, that you can convey so much by just how like tight your lips are and how like much you, ah, get them off your teeth, man.
Get them off.
Hmm.
So anyway, that's what you sounded like early.
When I first picked up the phone, I was like, whoa, Merlin's really baring his teeth today.
Oh, you think I'm being intense?
No, no, not intense, but like good, like the present.
I'm interested in face shapes.
My mom was in sales and she said something she did when she was doing her real estate was whenever she would speak to someone on the phone, she would smile.
And that when you smile while you're speaking to someone, it's telegraphed to the phone.
You sound a little like a crazy clown.
But if you try smiling when you're talking and you sound happier.
When you smile, the whole world's happy.
Oh my God, listen to you.
You sound so happy.
Right?
I mean, it's just right there in your face.
You're relevant now in a different way.
Super smiley, like ready to sell some real estate.
Yes.
Yeah.
Right.
I mean, I don't do that enough.
And there are lots of people that smile all the time.
They're just their faces are just they just learn to smile all the time.
Well, this week on Ping Pong Corner, I'm going to tell you that when I moved to San Francisco, I had noted to a friend of mine that in my largely predominantly Chinese neighborhood and mostly older Chinese people, I was really struck by – this is just – again, this is the kind of thing you say when you live in a city.
I'm just telling it like it is.
But like the Chinese people, especially the older Chinese people in my neighborhood, do not engage.
They sometimes engage with one another, but you don't see it a lot in public.
And they very rarely make eye contact with or talk to people.
And I was a little thrown off, right?
Because I'm from, at that point, North Florida.
I'm used to – and even in the rest of San Francisco.
I mean, shit, man.
People are joining each other's conversations on street corners in San Francisco all the time.
It's a very social town.
Yeah.
So I was kind of struck by that.
And I said this to a friend of mine, did you, have you ever, have you ever noticed this as well?
And they're like, yeah, I actually, I have.
And they said, and I don't know if this is true.
And forgive me if this is ping pong, but that supposedly that the whole like smiling all the time for no reason is not a thing for Chinese people that it's considered, I guess, maybe like insincere or maybe like reveal some kind of weakness.
Like you're on your back on your heels a little bit.
I don't know if that's true, but some people smile a lot more than others, even when they're not happy.
In North Florida, everybody smiles all the time.
Well, right.
And nobody's happy.
Nobody's happy.
They're in North Florida.
In my experience in Europe, which is the majority of my overseas experience, people over there consider Americans to be fairly insincere.
Not just because we smile artificially and for no reason, but also that we congratulate each other all the time and that we say things that are good ideas when they aren't.
Right.
And we just generally blow smoke up one another's asses as a form of politeness.
Right.
And particularly in Northern Europe, that is considered a very American behavior and very untrue.
I bet it makes you seem a little bit like a huckster.
Yeah, that's exactly right.
This sense of like an American is trying to sell you something.
He's trying to put one over on you.
And particularly like the Germans and the Dutch do not feel like they need to be complimented.
they want to be told the straight story and the, and the Danes seem to be similar.
So, I mean, and down in the, down in like the Mediterranean countries, it's not, it's not so true.
They have different culture, but for sure,
The different culture of like compliment and smile.
But like in the North, boy, I mean, I am not a particularly complimenty, effusive person.
But the first couple of times I got off stage and came down and sat at the merch table and like it was a line of people and each one of them was like, that was not so bad.
Right.
I read this book in the 90s suggested by a friend's father, a guy who did a lot of international travel.
I think I learned about this book from him or at least my interest came out of this.
So he traveled a lot to Japan, a lot throughout Asia and, yes, also Europe.
and was just talking about the cultural differences that you really forget these things at your peril.
And one of them that really struck me was... So anyway, this led me to read this book called Kiss, Bow, or Shake Hands.
And it's basically a book for ding-a-ling Americans about things that might surprise you when you go to another country.
And there's the things you've heard about, like don't show people the sole of your shoe in Saudi Arabia.
There's things like that.
Don't shake a left hand in Turkey.
Don't spit on the ground in Morocco.
I can tell you...
For sure, don't do that.
Because I had a knife pointed at me.
You're kidding.
No.
That's the equivalent of taking a poop on the sidewalk?
Well, no.
It happened at a very inopportune time.
When I was young, I don't know if you ever experienced this, but I went through a phase where I...
I was spitting all the time.
Oh, I've had phases for sure.
Yeah, where it was just like, I'm just... I think every teenage boy, it's almost like a rite of passage.
Boy, I'm talking in broad terms today.
A lot of teenage boys or preteen boys definitely go through a spitting thing.
I see it in my neighborhood.
There's a huge spitting culture in my neighborhood.
Yeah, and I find it disgusting.
I can't even identify with where I was coming from at the time.
But I just spit a lot.
And I was in Morocco where that is already like not a good deal.
And I was in a public market in Marrakesh.
And I was – this is what made it awful.
I was actually negotiating with a guy.
Oh, dear.
That's got layers.
Yeah.
So I'm sitting there and it's – and I'm not in the market.
I'm like out in front of the market kind of in an area where people have their wares out on blankets.
And I'm negotiating with the guy over a belt, like a hold your pants up belt.
Yeah.
And I just at some point in the conversation, I just spit on the ground.
And he reacted violently.
And it became a big fracas.
And I was like, hey, no, I didn't, you know, I meant no offense.
I was just, you know, I'm 20 years old and I don't know my ass from a hole in the ground.
And, you know, and he's like, 30 seconds before, he was like,
you know, that's, it'll be 30.
And I was like, ah, well, you take 20.
And he was like, well, let's, let's say 27.
And I was like, why don't we do 24?
And whoa.
So, so that was not just like bad hygiene, bad public hate behavior.
It was kind of a fuck you to him.
Oh, it was some kind of, and the thing was, I wasn't,
he didn't make an offer and I spit on the ground.
Like it was, it was just bad timing, bad timing, but boy, he really took it that way.
And, uh, and I think that that, well, I'd like to say that that was the last time I ever spit in front of somebody, but then I moved to Seattle and,
A couple of years later, and I started drinking lattes.
Oh, that creates a lot of mucus.
Yeah, I'd never had a coffee before I came here.
I was 22.
I'd never had a coffee.
And then somebody handed me like this pint glass full of half and half that had one shot of espresso in it.
And I was like, this is the greatest drink of all time.
What have I been missing?
Are you sure this is coffee?
I should have been drinking that Sanka this whole time.
This stuff tastes amazing.
And for like nine months, I drank four pints of half and half a day.
And I was just hawking loogies everywhere until I realized that's not coffee.
That's something else.
That's a gateway drug.
Oh, buddy, you would love it in our neighborhood.
You'll just be walking down the street, 65-year-old Chinese lady comes and just does a giant snot rocket out of nowhere.
Old farmer's hanky.
Like my kid and I will be walking over and hear this, ka-cha!
And just giant, runny, like nine-inch long booger, like just hanging out there, heading toward the sidewalk.
Oh, no boogers.
No boogers.
I'm so against boogers now.
No, here's the thing.
I used to think this was just a bit or just a joke, but people from – I don't want to say the UK.
I want to say from England in particular.
I mean, you know, there is a very sophisticated level of code switching going on.
I don't know if this is exactly the right word.
But the thing is, you know, you've been to England.
I've been to England.
And you've obviously dealt with English people.
You've had them in your car.
Oh, boy.
And the thing about English people, by and large, especially people from London, I'm going to say that I have met, is that there is a very – it is almost like North Florida in the sense that there is a lot that's encoded.
in what people say and don't say.
Oh, yes.
Where there's a high level of apparent civility masking a lot of aggression.
Mm-hmm.
Maybe not aggression, but, like, there's like a million ways to say, hmm, you didn't do that particularly well, did you?
Mm-hmm.
You would never just say that was shit or something like that.
But in fact, there's that whole Twitter account and book called – what's it called?
It's called something like Weirdly British Problems.
And it's all about the need to be ridiculously civil at all times regardless of how you feel.
So you go into a retail store and the people who are working in there are incredibly civil but not very nice and not very helpful.
You know what I mean?
But that's what you get used to.
So I would also stipulate that like I'm the fish out of water here.
Like I'm the weirdo.
So I'm not trying to say that the way I do things is the right way.
It's just that it is jarring when you go somewhere where it's not how you expect it.
Oh, another one from that father, the business guy, was that he said when you go to Japan for business, you usually go there for several days and it's considered very rude to talk about business during the first day.
Oh, yeah.
You can tell me if you think that's true, but there's a lot of sitting in a hot bath together, talking about family and stuff, or you would just have a day of golf where if you started bringing up the deal on the golf course on the first day, you would just look like a total rube.
Oh, yeah.
Well, I feel like that should be the way that we do business here.
You know, the way to do business is not talk about business.
First rule of business.
Yeah, don't talk about business.
That's pretty good.
The first rule of business.
And it's all tied up in class, too.
I mean, if you're from London, but you were born within earshot of a certain set of church bells,
you have a very different take on this than if you went to the London School of Economics.
So all of that sort of like insincerity, what appears to us to be insincerity, but is really deeply encoded class behavior.
I mean, I can't make sense of it at all.
And I have close enough friends in the UK that I have brought this up
in you know sitting around the dinner table at night like hey something curious when you say this it appears to mean the opposite
And they kind of look at each other and go, what do you mean?
Right.
They say something like – you say like, hey, do you want to go sleep in a cabin for a week?
And they say like, oh, that would be lovely.
Yeah, right.
Which means no fucking way do I want to go sleep in a cabin.
Yeah, and all that stuff.
And they're kind of – they're hearing it for the first time.
It's really like a hamburger, hamburger, bang, bang.
Yeah.
where it had never occurred to them that the actual words they were using and in some ways the tone didn't line up with the meaning.
So it's like so deeply ingrained.
And I'm sure in the U.S.,
there are equivalent like uh incongruities but but because of our you know because of our wild west heritage because of andrew jackson we really tell it like it is in this country as long as what it is is a big fucking snow job that's trying to get you that's trying to get your wallet as long as as long as that's what it is then we tell it like that
I was talking to somebody about this the other day that especially it feels like in the South, maybe in the Midwest, I always feel like there's a thing, not always, but I frequently feel like that can be difficult to do without seeming rude.
That there is a certain kind of accepted... We should ask about each other's families.
Maybe you might even ask... It's pretty common in lots of places to ask, how's your health?
There's all these kinds of things you ask that...
kind of create the environment for having a more intimate conversation where you first talk about these things.
And that is part of the standard opening gambit in a lot of conversations is, you know, let's talk about these kind of general things before we talk about these specific things.
Well, did you read that?
There was an editorial in one of the newspapers.
I'm not going to say it was the New York Times.
It was probably, I don't know, one of those.
There's only three newspapers anymore.
You got the New York Times, the Atlantic, and the other one.
Yeah.
The New York Times, the Washington Times, great newspaper.
That sounds like one of those made up papers, which is really just a blog.
The Washington Times was for many years owned by Sung Young Moon.
Oh, right, right, right, right, right.
Who bought a newspaper and tried to establish it as a serious journalistic enterprise that just happened to also be a mouthpiece.
The Church of Unification?
Yeah.
Yeah.
Church of – yeah.
Unification Church, I guess.
But this editorial was a review, somewhat a review, of George Herbert Walker Bush's new autobiography.
Yes.
Not great timing for Junior.
Not great timing for Junior where the potter –
I'm sorry, I shouldn't say Junior.
I should say, what would he betray?
What would he call Jeb?
Was Jeb like his... Jeb is, yeah.
Anyway.
John.
John Walker Bush.
Jeb.
But Bush Sr.
like rips Bush, like George Walker Bush, G-Dub, rips him a new one.
Says what we've all been thinking.
Like, why did you cede so much power to Cheney?
He's a madman.
Rumsfeld is... How could you be in the room with Donald Rumsfeld and be comfortable with that?
Yeah, right.
Well, and the thing is, I mean, Rumsfeld and George Herbert Walker Bush had decades of history together.
They ran against each other for the Republican...
presidential primary in what 80 76 rumsfeld ran for president well he was considered a real comer like he'd been part of the nixon white house he was he rumsfeld rumsfeld believes i think this is part of rumsfeld's problem and part of the reason that he belongs in the bottom of a salt mine is that he believes that he should have been president
He thinks of himself that way.
And there's enough history.
He has enough.
He has actually a claim to believe that that was plausible and possible.
Like he was the young upstart.
And he went after George Herbert Walker Bush in the 70s, really denigrating him.
And so those two guys – That's when he was in the CIA?
Well, when – I think he went after him even before he got appointed to the CIA.
But like there was a lot of rivalry in it.
They were shitty to each – I'm sorry.
Shitty to each other.
Most of that shit coming from Rumsfeld who was the –
He's very Trump-like, Rumsfeld.
He is, but he also – I remember I would watch him speak, and I would always think even in his famous known and unknown, one of the most obfuscating paragraphs in English language history.
But you really appreciate it on the one hand.
The guy is super articulate and on message, whether or not you agree with him.
He's great at staying on message, and he really has that vibe.
He looks like a composite guy.
drawing of like a bunch of successful powerful people he looks like like if if uh if like teddy roosevelt and woodrow wilson had a love baby and he just has that like dad or grandpa vibe where like even if you think what he's saying is bullshit he seems really he seems really committed and smart yeah which is a dangerous thing for a
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And they were held together with bands of titanium.
And maybe that annoyed him a little bit.
That was in his mouth all the time.
Soft wood back there.
So Bush Sr.
is saying all this stuff in his autobiography.
And somebody goes to Bush Jr.
for a comment.
And Bush Jr.
is like, well, he never said any of that.
in the eight years that I was president or the two years I was running for president beforehand, never mentioned it before.
And I disagree with him.
I was the president.
I was the decider.
I didn't, Cheney didn't get to do just what he wanted.
I was the boss.
Mm-hmm.
Meanwhile, Chaney has got a seven-sided lighthouse made of dreams that's surrounded by machine gun nests.
You could not write a creepier supervillain than Chaney.
Oh, my God.
Remember when he had the Naval Observatory taken off Google Maps?
Yeah, blurred out.
Yeah.
Because God forbid that we would see his hedges or something.
Yeah.
He didn't understand how it worked, right?
His man-sized safe?
Google Earth takes a picture every six months and puts it up there.
And he thinks that they're going to catch him in the garden or something.
Wearing flip-flops or something.
And I think this article that I read was written by Maureen O'Dowd, who's obviously been a great media critic for many years.
But she was like...
This WASP family didn't talk about this stuff at Christmas?
Like, your father was president, your son is president now, and you're not going to bring up the fact that
That you think that these people are a bad choice?
Like both the father and the son went to war with the same Middle Eastern dictator and they never discussed it?
Right.
And that is like such a distinctively wasp thing.
methodology, right?
Christmas can be stressful.
You're absolutely right.
Sometimes you just want to play Uno or watch The Price is Right because there are things, there are so many elephants in the room that you really need a card game to keep it all straight.
It's true.
It's just that it really, really drove home, really put an exclamation point on the fact that the Bush family...
Should never have been in power in America.
They are bad people.
And it was a bad time.
It was a bad decision that we made repeatedly for reasons I cannot and I don't think history will ever be able to fully explain.
But like unsuited to rule.
by any measure except that they are aristocratic.
And George Herbert, George Herbert Walker Bush at least was like patriarchal in the old mode.
So he had a sense of, this is 41.
Yeah.
He had a sense of honor and duty and wasn't going to say a bad thing about a woman and wasn't going to, you know, wouldn't, wouldn't,
do a stock deal where the SEC didn't sign off on it at least, you know, but then his son was just a, like a brat and a, and a shit, just a shit.
There's no other way you can describe George Walker Bush, GW Bush than that.
He is a shit.
He's just a shit.
And he was president for eight years.
And it's insane.
It still is insane.
I am talking with my teeth bared right now.
I can hear it.
You sound committed.
I am so mad that he was ever president.
And this is a nonpartisan issue.
It is not that he is a conservative Republican because I don't even think he is one.
Well, it's one thing to say I didn't enjoy the roast beef tonight.
And it's another thing to say like I'm pretty sure they deliberately tried to poison us.
And like there's this conversation like from the time Obama came in, there's been this feeling of like let's not rock the boat.
But it is kind of strange that there has not been quite the public explosion of outrage over what a shit show that whole thing was.
Oh my god.
I want these people held accountable.
I want them to go into a shipping container in the desert that I have constructed.
Yeah.
And I want to feed them.
That's right.
You had a whole idea for Chaney, didn't you?
I want to feed them psychedelic drugs in an environment where I can control.
You had a saw type situation, a long term, long con, long mind fuck in mind for, I forgot about this.
You did.
That was your whole idea for the former vice president.
Oh, I still dream of it.
And the thing is, I want to extend the franchise all the way to Lawrence Eagleburger.
I want them all.
I want them all.
I want every neocon.
And I will just – the thing is it is a long con.
I will take them over the course of months and years.
For the gas lighting to really work, it's going to have to be a very, very, very long con.
It's not something where you're going to fool a lady by turning the lights off sometimes.
We're talking about – you're talking about like maybe you get them a little healthy.
You get them on a diet.
You get them using a treadmill.
But like you're just – it's a little bit of mindfuck at a time over like two to 35 years.
The problem is the challenge for me.
I feel like Lawrence Eagleburger will be easy to grab.
You just say... You are going to get a knock on the door, my friend.
The University of New Hampshire is offering you $15,000 to talk about...
Riyadh like the current politics in Riyadh will you come and Lawrence Eagleburger being like absolutely and then he just shows up and he opens the door to the conference room and there's nobody there and then somebody puts a bag over his head and all of a sudden he's in a shipping container in the desert truly truly extraordinary rendition
But Cheney has already thought of that, right?
Cheney has already.
He's already prepared.
He knows.
No one's ever going to put a bag over Cheney's head because he's the fucking penguin, right?
He's thought of that already.
And Rumsfeld, too, right?
They both, they check their six.
They've got a man stationed at their six, right?
So how the fuck do you get these guys?
And the thing is, there's the Fight Club thing where they go to the bathroom.
They're at a Rotary Club meeting or whatever, and they go to the bathroom, and then all of a sudden Brad Pitt is there.
and they threaten to cut off his balls.
But that's not gonna work for these guys either.
The bathroom is secured before they go in there.
So what do you do?
What do you do?
With Cheney, I feel like he's out.
What are you doing?
He's fly fishing, right?
He's fly fishing.
He's got the Tony Stark heart.
Keeping him alive at this point.
He and Scalia are wearing hip waders, and they're in some Montana stream.
The hills are full.
Shooting immigrants for skeet.
The hills are full of snipers, right?
Because Scalia and Chaney aren't going to go just take a truck out and find a river, right?
It's going to be completely perimeterized.
But I've been waiting in the river for weeks.
You're black ops.
Every summer I just pick a different river.
I just get my snorkel gear on and I'm in the river.
You look like a reed with a lily pad.
That's exactly right.
Until that year when they picked the wrong river.
Please stop.
I might be misremembering this, but I feel like in the last days of the – what would that be?
1992 campaign.
It got really, really ugly because I think – I feel like I remember it started to really look like Clinton had a lock on it.
And do you remember –
George H.W.
Bush, do you remember how he got?
Because he had always been, say what you will about the guy, I get the feeling he's probably a gentleman.
You would meet George H.W.
Bush, and I bet he's super smarter than he seems.
I bet he's not as, like a lot of people who are president, they're really good people people.
But like didn't he do like a whistle stop train thing where he was he was just a public dick for like three weeks before the campaign, before the election.
But and the thing is, it was like you could watch him.
And it was it was almost like in face off where Nicolas Cage is supposed to be John Travolta.
And you can see him going like, I've got to kill people and act like a dick.
This is really hard to do.
You can see like he's like he went to Yale.
He's a gentleman like he does not want to be.
behaving this way, but I'm sure all of his handlers were saying, look, man, you got to take off the gloves or you're going to have to move out.
And it was hard to watch.
I felt bad for the guy even as I was disgusted by it.
It felt off-brand.
It felt very off-brand.
My uncle went to college with Poppy Bush.
They were in college at the same time and they knew one another.
This is Yale.
Yeah.
And, you know, my uncle was tapped for skull and bones and said no.
Oh, boy.
And not to out Uncle Jack, but he did not like Poppy Bush.
For all the reasons that we don't like him now.
He was a snob.
He was a prick.
And was exactly the preppy, like class conscious person.
Rich kid that you would imagine, except this was 1948.
Well, so wait.
Now, wasn't he – he was in World War II.
So he went to – oh, it was the GI Bill.
He went after.
Yeah, right.
They all did.
Okay.
That particular generation.
He probably didn't need the GI Bill, though.
Didn't need the GI Bill.
He was going to Yale anyway.
But when I think back to that particular time –
46, 48, you know, that class of 50, let's say.
There were some people in that class who had just turned 18 and were going to college and the war was over.
And then there were other people in that class who were 24 years old, had become a – like a first lieutenant in the Navy and had won the Distinguished Flying Cross and been shot down over to Regidor.
Corregidor.
Sorry.
Torregidor.
That's a kind of spice that you put in your nutmeg.
Rookie mistake.
Corregidor.
And so you're sitting in class and that guy's a freshman too.
He's wearing, you know, the French government gave him the Legion of Honor, but he's like taking the same freshman philosophy class as you who just graduated from high school.
That had to be a crazy time.
That had to be a weird time to pledge a fraternity.
Right?
Like, well, let's see.
We could take you or we could take this guy that has the metal bar.
He's the president of Delta Kappa Epsilon, graduated as a member of Phi Beta Kappa, 1948, with a BA in economics.
Phi Beta Kappa.
So he got good grades.
He was on an accelerator program to graduate in two and a half years rather than four.
But as you know...
The rich people can pay for anything.
They can get you on Phi Beta Kappa.
We're making a lot of friends this week.
You know what I mean?
The professor's not going to give you a bad grade if you're padding their nest.
Everybody's on the take at Yale.
Give me a fucking break.
You think so?
Oh, yeah.
That's not a meritocracy.
It's a corrupt organization.
By their very nature, the Ivy League's
They let in that certain 15% of just legacy kids, and folks just buy them in.
The thing is that that's true, I think, of most colleges.
You think Hodgman bought his way in?
No, no, no.
I try and imagine Hodgman and Colton at their respective high schools.
No, they were both nerds.
They got good grades.
Colton...
is a legacy.
His father went to Yale and his grandfather.
Oh, I didn't know that.
But he also grew up in a really weird, small, small Connecticut town where, with a high school graduating class of like 40 or something.
And so in a situation like that, like I was talking to Hodgman about this the other day.
He's like, the problem is if your kids want to go to an Ivy league school and they live in New York, you can pretty much say, forget it unless you're rich.
Because, uh,
those schools fill the, fill those slots based on a kind of, you know, we need one, uh, we need one Athabaskan and we need somebody from
New Mexico, and we have 17,000 applications from Park Slope, Brooklyn.
And so it's the Brooklyn people that aren't going to have a chance at it.
If you are from a small town somewhere, if you're the only person in your high school class, you have a much better chance because you'll fulfill their demographic spread.
So I think both those guys earned that.
But how do you know, really?
When I wanted to go to Yale, which I desperately did, desperately did.
Was that the school you most wanted to go to?
It was the only college that I wanted to go to.
And when I graduated from high school, I had not applied to any colleges.
Because the only college I wanted to go to was Yale, and I knew I couldn't get in.
So what was I going to do?
Go to the University of Pennsylvania?
Forget about it.
Safety school.
Fuck no.
I wasn't going to go to Middlebury.
Brown, really?
Sit up there somewhere and just fucking play lacrosse.
Fucking Brown.
I'm not a safety school guy.
I'm not going to go to Rutgers.
Seriously?
You're headed for great things.
Why settle for second best?
Everybody knew you were going places, John.
Not everybody.
Not to say that you did graduate literally last in your class in high school, but you might be one of those three to five percent.
Let's just give the kid a chance.
We'll bring him into Yale.
This is the thing.
I thought if you really want a demographic spread, you every once in a while ought to pick a guy that not only graduated last in his class, but also didn't apply.
Yeah.
Oh, that's good.
It didn't apply to your school, right?
They come to give you the tap.
They say, come on over this way.
That's your demographic spread.
I mean, it's like when I got involved here in local politics recently.
You might have heard of it.
How'd that go?
You know, it was a learning experience.
It was a learning experience.
And one of the things that I learned was people from a great wide swath of – like the great demographic swath, if they're all lawyers –
they all think like a lawyer first.
Like if you go to law school and become a lawyer and are a successful lawyer, you think like a lawyer before you think like anything else.
And so you can fill a room full of lawyers from around the world, but you're just really going to have one type of person, which is lawyer.
And so when you're looking at a spread of ideas or like true sort of interesting ideas,
bell curve of people, you should be looking out at the fringes in three dimensions.
But Yale didn't
Yale just wasn't wise enough.
Maybe they didn't have the resources to scour every high school.
Maybe it was a rebuilding year.
Maybe, you know what?
Maybe they just were not on their game and, you know, bad on them.
Yeah, they let me slip to the cracks.
To not know that you were out there and should be there whether you knew it or they knew it or not.
Well, and you know what?
Here, I blame my Uncle Jack because he's the fucking Yale legacy.
His daughters went to Yale, both my cousins.
Shh.
they all were looking out for themselves looking out for each other it's kind of typical but when it was time for uncle jack to call up the local yale representative whom i knew it was sheffer ely's dad bob ely was the yale guy who interviewed the kids in anchorage who were going to yale bob fucking ely
Bob Ely, who incidentally got in trouble with the SEC himself later, but that's a different story.
That's a different story, yeah.
Bob Ely, but the thing is they were all contemptuous of me, even my own people.
None of them understood me.
Bob Ely especially wouldn't have.
Sheffer, Sheffer went to the fucking international school in Switzerland because he couldn't even get into a fucking American college.
But then he went to the University of Vermont later, another safety school.
Yeah.
So I feel like everybody let me down.
My whole clan let me down.
What a disappointment, John.
Have you found it in your heart to forgive everyone for this?
Obviously not.
I'm talking with my teeth barely.
You're so committed.
I'm sure Uncle Jack and Bobby Lee sat around and they were like, are there any kids in Anchorage that just should go to Yale?
And they looked at each other and they knew.
Oh, it didn't even need to be said.
Yeah.
And then they checked the box, no.
Now, what about your dad?
What was his feeling on this?
Because he always knew you were destined for great things, right?
Yeah.
Well, so my dad was of two minds, like his son, right?
Always of two minds.
And one of them was, there's nothing he hated worse than a preppy snob son of a bitch.
Your dad was always a man of the people.
He was in the trenches with the unions.
He was always pulling for the little guy.
That's right.
And he didn't like a preppy snob son of a bitch.
He always told the story.
He was down in Palm Springs at a party and George Weyerhaeuser was there and the, you know, the Boeings were there and the, it was all the old guard and he's standing around cocktail party.
Somebody walks over and he goes, Hey David, nice to see you.
How's the communist party?
Hmm.
Have I told that story before?
I think so.
I'd hear it again.
Yeah, it's a great story.
How's the Communist Party, David?
Oh, man, he was mad.
He was mad because, you know... It's a little reductive.
It's a little bit of a slur.
So dad didn't like a preppy son of a bitch, but the best way to deal with them is to get into their club and then...
Not be one of them.
To get tapped for skull and bones and not do it.
And say no.
Say no because you're not a star.
You want to affect that kind of change.
You're going to have to get inside to get to the server and crack the encryption.
That's right.
So, you know, so dad obviously wanted me to, but this is the thing.
They all wanted me to get in there on merit.
That seems a little on the nose.
Well, and they just have such a narrow definition of merit.
grades yeah tests great behavior you know and and not looking at the bigger picture which is like light in the eyes which is fucking rainbow double triple rainbow triple rainbow eyes and and again this gets us back to the problem it's like the game we're back to the problem with you being a retired general or the retired director of the cia and
It's like they don't need another foot soldier.
They need somebody to reform the organization from the inside out and the top down and really in every conceivable direction.
You have the vision for that.
They don't need another person sitting there like spying on somebody in East Germany.
They need somebody setting everybody straight.
So this is something I realized last night because I went to this new James Bond movie.
Oh, dear.
And the nadir of James Bond movies was Skyfall.
What the fuck are you saying?
Worst James Bond movie by far.
I think we have a bad connection.
Even the worst Roger Moore.
Let the sky fall.
Even the George Lazenby.
You're so fucking high.
Skyfall's great.
No, it's awful.
It's truly terrible.
The whole thing?
It's an abortion.
What about when he takes his teeth out?
It's very freaky.
Doesn't belong in a James Bond movie.
All right.
In any case, so I go to the new one and I'm like, all right, Skyfall was the bottom.
And now this can't be worse.
So it has to either be like on a plane with it or an improvement.
But I'm going to go into this assuming this is going to be terrible.
And then the movie unfolds and it is better than Skyfall.
But still like...
Just dull.
I mean, I'm in a James Bond movie and I'm looking at my watch.
Oh, that's no good.
You don't want that.
No, because it's just like, really, you guys?
And then I realized one of my callings.
Are you ready for this?
Yeah.
This was like a fucking bell going off in my head.
You had a lot of time to think about your future.
Well, because I'm sitting in a movie and I'm like, what am I going to think about?
Clearly not the plot of this movie.
And then I realized I...
And I was put on this planet to be a script doctor for action movies.
Oh.
See, I don't want a script doctor a comedy.
Mm-mm.
Because when a good comedy movie – like I can sit in a movie that's a bad comedy and go, oh, my God, this was fucking terrible.
It's hard to fix a comedy if it doesn't have good bones.
Yeah, exactly.
And the difference is when a good comedy is happening –
You don't even know you're watching a movie.
You don't even notice.
And I'm just swept up just like anybody.
I can't believe it's happening either.
I don't see where the seams are.
I go, oh my God, this is fucking fantastic.
Did you see that movie Spy?
Yeah, I watched the first half of it.
I've heard it gets better as you're watching it.
It does.
I love that lady.
I wish she made better choices.
I think Melissa McCarthy is one of the comic geniuses of our time.
Melissa McCarthy just steals that movie.
She's hilarious throughout the thing.
And I walked into that with my nose already crinkled up like I was in an outhouse.
This is not entirely accurate, but it's a little bit like Will Ferrell or Eric Wareheim where there are certain people who are just fucking funny.
Like Eric Wareheim in that Aziz Ansari show, just when he's on screen, just when they show his face, I start laughing.
Will Ferrell, I just start laughing.
Melissa McCarthy, I just start laughing because they're just basically funny.
They have an energy.
Certain people have an energy that they can make even the shittiest thing super funny just by standing there.
And that's not to diminish her talents, which are many, but she is just basically funny.
So I hope she chooses things that are worthy of her funniness.
Yeah.
Well, you know, that's the problem with funny.
Like John Belushi...
He made a lot of terrible movies.
1941.
Did you see that, the wedding movie with Kristen Wiig?
Did you see her in that?
What's it called?
Bridesmaids.
Yeah, yeah, I did see that.
I was utterly, utterly unprepared for how funny that movie was.
Very funny movie.
It's got, it's got, it's funny all through, but it's got, and she keeps that thing running, but there are four or five legitimately over-the-top set pieces that I think are pretty classic.
Yeah, right.
So Spy.
Spy.
But I don't – It's got that pretty boy in it, right?
It's got that – is it Jude Law?
The thing is every time that there's a dude on screen in that movie, the air goes out of the room.
Yeah.
They put a bunch of dudes in there to like – Oh, is Rose Byrne in that too?
No.
I don't know the names of actors.
Oh, the pretty fancy lady from, you know, she's the one who's getting married in the one with Dark Harrow.
Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.
She is, yeah.
She's Moira McTaggart in the X-Men movies.
Is that right?
No, it doesn't help.
And also, you know, I realized a long time ago I don't know the names of actors because I don't care about their lives.
Okay.
So Spy.
Oh, so anyway, not Spy because Spy was a good movie.
And the thing is, what was good about it, I understood and appreciated, but I could not have done it.
I couldn't have gone in – there were parts of Spy where the script – where it felt like the script was being written by a committee and one of the people on the committee was hilarious.
You can really sniff out the doctoring sometimes because there will be hilarious little jokes amidst a not very funny plot and not very funny execution.
And you can feel like, oh, this scene got doctored by Patton Oswalt probably helped with this or something, right?
Well, and like third, the thing is 30%, 35% of the movie spy is hilarious.
It's just that then 65% of the time the joke gets set up and then doesn't land.
And it's not that the actors aren't landing it.
It is that it is a badly executed, badly written joke.
And you go, if you can do 35% of them so well, why didn't you just let that person write the whole fucking movie?
But that is not my calling.
So there's something different about the action movie genre where an action movie doctor could come in.
And are you assuming Good Bones?
Well, so every James Bond movie has – at its premise, right?
I mean the basic foundation of James Bond is – are good bones.
Here's the spy and he's – then there's a bad guy.
It's just sort of – it's like you can start at a James Bond script and read it through and there's always going to be –
Good stuff in it.
There's always an opening action sequence that in the old days kind of wasn't even related to the film.
It's like the opening sequence was just to remind you that James Bond is an incredibly is an incredibly gifted badass.
Yeah, right.
He can just ski off of stuff or he can – there's lots of underwater.
There's a lot of shooting sharks and stuff, right?
And it was always the – I mean at least the classic James Bond movies of my childhood, the opening of the film, the cold open, was the end of his last mission before he begins the new mission.
Right.
And so it can be a great little three and a half minute long adventure movie kind of like that wonderful scene at the beginning of Inglourious Bastards.
what's that open with uh that's the one where they're hiding under the floor oh my god i love that movie right oh my god that scene i've seen that movie probably four times and i still i i still find that scene incredibly riveting it's it's it's horrible it's it's
so christophe waltz is so he's and the other guy the french guy so perfect so perfect because they don't overdo the whole like okay now let's show the people scared under the under the floor they just ignore them we know they're there the whole time and you're just like when is he gonna when's he gonna discover this or when's he gonna let you know that he knows it and the rest of the movie doesn't live up to it right no it's definitely got moments though
It does.
It does for sure.
And that final, there's something about the horrificness of that final frame that I, despite myself, I'm like, yes!
It's so awful.
I cannot.
I was rolling my eyes so hard at that point that you could hear my eyes rolling in the back of the theater.
It sounded like bowling balls.
My eyes were rolling so hard.
Anyway, yeah, you're right.
But you're talking about like, yeah, the setup, it's, yeah, this is a classic trope.
And I think Bond made this a thing.
But now you start off your action movie with something that immediately grabs you.
It might be a non sequitur.
uh batman you take the dark knight starts out with the heist uh at the beginning although i mean that's an example of like the nonce the great non sequitur but it also relates to the rest of the movie right it's the you're establishing this new character absolutely um
So there are all these things that you can do in the James Bond movie where it's like there's that and then there's – he's got to go to Rome and he's got to go to somewhere.
He's got to get his gadgets.
It's like Harry Potter.
It's kind of the same each time.
You got to get ready for school.
In this case, you got to go.
He's got to meet with M. He's got to have a visit with Q with some fun stuff in the background.
There's got to be a gadget in a car.
Somebody's got to say, James, you can't do this.
You are – James –
You're on suspension.
Yeah.
And then he goes... And then he's like somehow has access to unlimited funds.
Oh, and also a woman has to die.
A woman has to die.
Yeah.
And there's got to be, you know, there's got to be sexy times.
So, yeah, the bones are always there.
The question is how do you flesh that out?
And what's great about Casino Royale...
is that it's all fleshed out exactly the way you want it, right?
And it's gritty.
They successfully made the transition to a gritty James Bond.
Isn't that supposed to be the start?
That's when he starts.
That's when he's getting his double O, right?
Yeah, that's the reboot.
It's the reboot.
It's the one where Spock is young and cute and Kurt jumps off the road.
Oh, right.
He's eating the apple wall during Kobayashi Maru.
Right.
Got it.
There you go.
So I'm watching this film and I'm just sitting in there.
I'm just ticking off like, you know what?
All you needed to do to make that scene work was this.
And you didn't do this.
I cannot even fathom how you didn't.
It's staring you in the face.
And to choose anything else but to do this is to miss the entire scene.
like to is to not is to fundamentally not understand how james bond movies work and who are there were 800 people involved in the production of this film and no one in a position of authority could stand up and say hey um what if we just did the most obvious thing right now which would improve the movie and like
And it's not expensive.
It's like a lot.
You're talking about like a plot point.
Just a tiny little... There are some plot points where you go, we got all the way here.
We've spent $80 million or $100 million making this movie.
$245 million.
We spent $245 million making this movie, and the entire film hinges on...
a moment where James, with his pistol, shoots at 200 yards an inexplicable valve that is connected to an oil refinery or something?
He hits most of a football field in length with his pistol.
With his pistol.
That's a pretty good shot.
And hits a valve...
Which there is no explanation for the existence of.
Of which there is no explanation for existence.
And so then all of a sudden there's a scene that's taken directly out of Road Warrior 2.
let's call it, where you're just like, why is this happening?
This was supposed to be a solar.
It is in the two seconds before it is revealed to be a solar-powered facility.
As they are walking across the facility, it is revealed to be solar-powered.
And that is supposed to communicate to us that it's Technotown.
But then right in the center, there's a valve on a pipe.
which shooting at once causes the entire facility to explode into an oil fire?
Oh, you got the Death Star problem.
Come on!
Yeah, that one vulnerability.
Yeah, it's just like... We really should have put some kind of a box around that.
Shooting womp rats, you know?
You talking about that in Baker's Canyon?
Talking about it in Baker's Canyon.
You're just nailing womp rats.
They're much bigger than two meters.
So what I'm saying is...
And you could just – it could just be something else.
You know what I mean?
It could just be something else.
It doesn't have to be that.
It's just something else.
There's a control panel inside where the solar power – you turn the knob and the solar power goes out of control because solar power and –
You don't mess with that stuff.
No, it redirects the sun's rays into some kind of collector that overheats, and that causes it to explode.
Just don't fucking bullshit me with the shoot of valve.
So there's 40 moments like that in the film where you just go...
All you needed was a script doctor to just go through this with a comb.
So spoiler alert.
You can definitely admit then that Skyfall is definitely a better movie.
So Skyfall had so much of this in it where you're just like, wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong.
The villain's great.
I mean, I love the actor.
Love him.
But the entire film –
And all this guy's like... It was all a trap all along.
He wanted to be caught.
He wanted to be caught.
It was all because he was mad?
He was mad at Em because she was the mom that... She was a bad mom?
Mm-hmm.
Like, no!
No, no, no, no, no.
She let him die.
Have a better...
fucking idea at the center of the movie it wouldn't even take that much you just sit and think about it for another two minutes it's not that he's mad at m he's mad at m it's you know he's mad at something sure he's a villain but he's not destroying the world because he's mad at his mom
Like that's, he's mad at his not even mom.
He's mad at his mom.
His mom.
You know?
No, no, no, no, no, no.
It's gotta be, he's gotta be even, he's gotta either be crazier than he is to justify that or the, or the crime has to be worse.
Yeah.
Don't you like the rats in a barrel speech?
Yeah.
Isn't that great?
It's nice.
And whatever the mercury poisoning.
I mean, there's a lot of good stuff in that.
I think it was cyanide, John.
Whatever.
But then there's that weird homoerotic thing where James Bond's in the chair and he's coming up and he's got all his mainframes going and do-go, do-go, do-go, do-go.
You didn't like that?
What about the lady with the shot glass?
Did you like that?
No, no, no.
I didn't like those because if you compare it to Casino Royale where they are literally – they are torturing his balls.
They're torturing his balls in a way that legitimately feels like torture.
Yes.
Every time they whack him under that chair with that thingamabobber.
They're not just inconveniencing him with a chair.
No, no, no.
They're whacking his balls really, really hard that are hanging underneath his body sitting in a chair with no bottom.
So that's some fucking hardcore shit.
What about the parkour at the beginning?
I think you just like ball smacking.
Come on.
Yes, I do like a little ball smacking.
You know what, Merlin?
To be honest, I like a little ball scalding.
Oh, right.
Sure.
You're growing as a person when you're scalding.
I'd like to scald the balls rather than whack them.
Okay, fair enough, fair enough.
You know what, also, just in terms of our ongoing continuity, you talked about Macau a couple weeks ago, and I couldn't remember what I knew the name from, and now I know what I know the name from.
Is it from a James Bond movie?
It's from Skyfall!
Let the sky fall!
that's another scene where they set it up so well it's so great and it's got the lady in it and they and the gambling and the and the bag full of money you love a bag full of money i do love a bag full of money but then the the end of that is just too it's just the guy falls into the the pit it's like it does with the komodo dragon in it it doesn't even live up to i mean when you're talking about octopussy
When you're talking about Moonraker, those are some scenes where the bad guy gets his comeuppance.
Is that where he runs across the alligators?
Yeah.
Is that Live and Let Die?
That's Live and Let Die.
No, that's the one.
He falls into the shark tank.
That's the one where he's a clown.
Jaws falls into the shark tank.
Oh, sure.
No, no, no.
The clown came later.
The clown came later.
That was, yeah, kind of.
The other thing is, I'm not sure how you scale up a casino.
Boy, I had a Playboy with her and Dolph Lundgren in it.
Do you remember early 80s?
Sure do.
Yeah, that's right.
There was a parody, Playboy.
And they only made one issue as far as I know.
But it was a full-on parody of Playboy where they had nakedness in it.
It was the National Lampoon era.
And I got a hold of this parody.
And the centerfold was Princess Diana.
And they had superimposed Princess Diana's head on a naked lady.
Yeah.
And for me, that's the kind of thing you send James Bond out for.
Right.
At age 12, I was very affected by this.
But it was a little awkward, too, because, you know, Princess Diana, she was good.
She was.
She was a candle in the wind.
Yeah.
She was a good girl.
And you didn't want to.
Yeah.
Yeah.
You didn't want to.
Sure.
Yeah.
Sure.
You didn't want to defile her.
You got to save that for later when you're when you're older, a little more broken inside.
That's right.
That's right.
And at that age, I still was pure as the wind.
You got to save the innocence for later.
So, action movie script doctor.
Now, there are a lot of guys out there, and gals too, presumably, who have that job.
They're on the list and people are like, huh, this script isn't that good.
What do we do?
Let's call the script doctor and let's leave the comedy script doctors aside.
Let's find the action movie script doctors.
But whoever those people are, they're doing a fucking terrible job because action movies are by and large terrible.
They don't have the snap and crackle.
of the where the script is alive because there's this sense of like we can't make it too smart it's gotta it's gotta be like at the six-year-old boy level here except we're gonna show incredible violence right no child should ever witness yeah you don't want to think about the plot too much and so when you see it when you see an action movie that where the script does crackle you're like oh thank you thank you my god
Thank you.
Yeah.
And I could do that job.
And the problem is, just like getting into Yale, those people are not looking outside of their patrimonious Rolodex.
It's kind of a sickening professional myopia.
No one is listening to this podcast, and none of those people are real, or if they are listening to this podcast, they're not identifying themselves.
Right.
It's all too Sarah Cole's interpolation.
They don't know you're talking about them.
I'm talking to them.
You're talking to them specifically.
And there's somebody listening.
You need a doctor.
Call the doctor.
That's right.
And they're like, it's probably Michael Bay is listening to this podcast.
And he's like, did they just say my name?
I've been a loyal Roderick Hahn listener from the beginning.
And I've been making Transformer movies or whatever.
And I've been doing a shitty job of it.
I don't know what to do about it.
He also did that Rob Cordy movie with The Rock.
Oh, I didn't see that.
That's pretty good.
I know Rob's a good fan.
Rob took me to the premiere for that.
It was really weird.
I saw Michael Bay.
Super weird.
Really?
Yeah.
Is he a tall guy?
Michael Bay?
No, he's kind of dolorous.
He kind of looks like Sam Shepard meets Werner Herzog, but sadder.
He's got a heaviness to him.
That does sound like a lot of dolor.
He's dolorous.
Sam Shepard, for me, will always be Chuck Yeager.
Sam Shepard.
Oh, I'm sorry.
I misspoke.
Who's the stranger in The Big Lebowski?
Yeah, he's the one with the mustache.
Sam Shepard and who am I confusing him with?
Sam Peckinpah.
Sam Rockwell.
He's the one who dances in Iron Man.
Sam Rockwell was the one that was alone on the spaceship and he was full of himself.
The spaceship was literally full of himself.
Funny thing, yesterday was, as you know, Sunday's Daddy-Daughter Day.
In my ongoing mission to ruin my child, I decided to take her to see a film called The Martian.
And we showed up at the theater, and that place is usually just dead.
Dead like Trotsky on a Sunday late morning.
The theater literally has an ice pick in its eye.
It's usually completely dead.
You can just walk right into the theater.
You walk right out of the concessions, whole nine.
This place was packed to the gills, and I'm like, what is going on?
on.
We'd already bought our ticket.
We were kind of already in.
And she's like... And I went and looked it up on the Fandango and they had almost all of the theaters.
Probably half the theaters were showing some version of Spectre.
It was crazy.
So it's too late to spoiler alert, right?
Because anybody that's been listening this far...
Knows it's a piece of shit?
Has either seen it or is like... Screaming, screaming at the doctor.
Totally screaming at me and saying, why are you telling me this?
I'm going to go to this movie and I'm going to... I'll bet there's a terrific twist that you haven't revealed yet.
Oh, fantastic.
Oh, gosh.
All the great twists.
Twists and turns.
I didn't see that coming.
What?
He what?
But there are.
Have you seen The Martian?
Have you seen The Martian?
I did see The Martian.
Holy shit.
The Martian was fantastic.
It looks so, I mean, setting aside the fact that it's just, it's fucking great in every way, but like just the way it looks, it feels like a new kind of movie.
Like something about the, I can't quite describe it.
I don't know what part of the production design to put my finger on, but like it looks, it looks different.
I ate it with a spoon.
It was the Instagram filter that they chose.
I think they used Rising or something.
Yeah, I got to get on that.
The thing is it looked – it might have been like they were doing the high frame rate or something like that.
But there was something about it.
Anyway, don't want to get – that's for another show.
That's for another show.
My only problem with The Martian.
Oh, boy.
Here we go.
Science fiction movie script doctor.
No, no, no.
It was great.
It was great.
They should not have cast the talented Mr. Ripley at this show.
Oh, whoa.
That's crazy talk.
No, no, no.
I don't think – just picture that same exact movie, exactly the same movie, but with Matthew McConaughey in the star.
god that's that's who belonged there why you gotta ruin your show like that why you gotta do that crazy talk no it shouldn't be there's a pattern you got it you got it murph there's a pattern of sand and some moving books no i want i'm gonna sand the shit out of this i wanted here's the here's the other thing that they can't do they can't open a huge movie like that with an unknown actor at the center
Well, I thought he was terrific.
I mean, you know, the only thing is in the book, there's a lot more nerdy math, which I'm not a mathematician.
I'm not even an arithmetician.
But I really love – and I was saying to my daughter after, like, did you notice like how much –
like arithmetic how much math he had to do and it was like you started to realize how fun it was first of all it's very funny it's a very funny movie too it's not like a like a baggy pants movie a lot of I mean it's a thriller it's sci-fi it's funny but just all I was like did you notice honey how much there's like math and then a decision and then math and a decision and like this is not a spoiler but but basically that science
Well, but he's got to go like, okay, so problem.
Like there's like five different ways that I'm probably going to die here.
Like which one of these can I do?
Okay, let's focus on this one thing.
I could turn the spaceship into a farm.
Math.
I could get this many meters out of this.
Okay, decision.
Do I want to do that?
Well, do I have enough water to do that?
Math.
How do I make more water?
If I make more water, I still need my 50 liter supply.
Yeah.
I loved it.
It was so fun.
Oh, that scene where he seals the pod with plastic sheeting, and then he's laying in bed, and there's a Martian dust storm, and the sheeting is going whack, whack, whack, and you're like, no!
It was so lonely, and he's packing up everybody's stuff.
I mean, it's not a perfect movie, but it was right in the pocket for me.
Here's where it shouldn't have been Matt Damon.
There's an idea at the center of that movie.
which is that the reason he survived was that he was an optimist.
At any point along the way, a pessimistic personality, not a pessimistic occupation, but a pessimistic personality.
Right, right.
There could have been a person with the same exact resume, all those math skills, who in that first moment laid down and said, well, that's it for me.
And at any point along the way, laid down and said, well, I just blew up the space station and I cannot rebuild it.
And so I am going to open my helmet and die.
But his unfailingly optimistic can do Johnny on the spot, like Navy pilot mentality.
was the thing that saved him ultimately.
Like the math skills, yes, but it was the fact that he had a cheerful disposition.
And so that idea and the idea that we pick astronauts from this category of people who are indefatigable, who are just like thumbs up can do,
who are in the world actually kind of annoying.
Like they are annoying to work with, these people.
They're annoying to be in relationships with, but they are a tool in the human toolkit.
And we need to identify those people and employ them.
Like that idea wasn't quite explored enough.
And I think part of that reason is that Matt Damon isn't actually that guy.
Yeah.
In his own life.
So he's communicating this like yippy skippy thing, but it's not in his eyes.
Yeah.
I ain't no Hollywood script doctor, but I'll tell you what I like about it.
God, this whole conversation, I can't help thinking about Edgar Wright movies, which we should talk about someday.
But in this instance, I thought the economy of storytelling in this was very good because there are so many different rabbit holes they could have gone down, including like – I mean you had to just take a lot of stuff as read.
And just kind of buy in or not, including the fact that there's people on Mars, which we have not done yet as far as we know.
But all along the way, I thought they were really good at just having what they needed to have in there to tell this particular story.
And if they'd gone off into too much of like a Dark Knight of the Soul thing in a way that wasn't good for the movie, it would not have been as good.
So I admired when I see an adaptation like that.
And like I say, the book is way nerdier in some ways.
And there's still a lot of exposition for explaining things to ding-a-lings like me.
But I admired their restraint in keeping it focused on the story that needed to be told when there could have been a million different rabbit holes to go down.
And just kind of alluding to different things.
But the whole story – the whole story is –
I mean, the tension of the movie the entire time is you're thinking to yourself, would I not would I know the math to do this?
Because, yeah, you're asking yourself.
Would you would you even just how long would you even entertain the completely fantastical idea that you might survive this thing?
You're smart enough to know how impossible the situation is.
Like, what would it take to actually then try and do something to save yourself?
Yeah, right.
I mean, what do you do 180 days in when you wake up one morning and you go, you know what?
I just don't have it in me today.
Well, and again, it's more math and decisions, math and decisions, math and decisions.
Because if you say to yourself, well, okay, his plan was obviously pretty –
Pretty ambitious.
So if it were me – and obviously I would never make it onto a spacecraft for a variety of reasons.
I pee and poop a lot.
I'd be bad.
I would make a lot of compost.
But also anyone who was too conservative in thinking about how to stay alive in the short term, short to medium term, would be dead meat.
You would have to think about what resources you're willing to sacrifice –
That could keep you around longer.
Like how do you level your resources in a way that lets you do this thing that seems impossible?
That takes a huge leap of imagination.
Sam McConaughey.
Are there other movies, if you can say, are there other movies that we remember Matt Damon for where Matthew McConaughey would be better?
Do you see him in a Bourne Supremacy?
A Bourne Identity.
See, this is an example of Matt Damon is great in the Bourne Supremacy, Bourne Identity.
Yeah, Bourne Identity is one of my favorite movies.
It's a great movie.
And when you look at Matt Damon and you look at him being a very internal actor, he belongs in that movie.
I buy him as like a robot killer who has lost his memory.
And is just trying to figure it like, but he has a, but there's a moral center to him where he's trying to figure it out and he's making moral decisions within the context of this.
But every once in a while somebody comes in a window and tries to kill me and I kill them.
So I'm not a normal guy.
Uh, but, but like there, but there's a moral compass to him.
Like I buy him in that.
Uh, and that's what, and I, and I buy him in the talented Mr. Ripley where it's like he is, he's the ugly guy.
There's something really ugly about him.
But what I don't buy is Matt Damon as the like Pollyanna, the Pollyanna super scientist.
Don't you think that kind of being a Pollyanna in that situation would not be reasonable?
That you would have to have that balance of what you call optimism.
I don't know if I call it optimism exactly, but there's certainly like a lot of realism to figuring out like what resources you level to stay alive and do this incredibly ambitious stuff, like digging up the nuclear reactor or whatever.
But this is the thing.
It's realism of a kind.
It's the type of person who has never sat down and said, humans are pig dogs and there's no point.
And if you've ever thought that, you're never going to make it through a scenario like the Martian because that thought will creep in when your farm blows up and you're just like, you know what?
I gave this a good try.
I gave this a good try, but ultimately my survival isn't that important.
and so i'm gonna like spare everyone myself included this fucking travail but he does he that never occurs to him his survival is like is now he's got a new plan which i do not want to be in your script doctor meetings telling you i would be i would i'm the guy that would be fucking throwing uh cronuts at people
You even brought a Cronut into this meeting?
Stop right there.
Stop talking.
Quack.
Cronut.
I want to see it in his eyes.
I want to see it in his eyes that he has never had a deep thought in his life.
I want to see that in his eyes because that's the key to this.
And likewise, in the James Bond movie...
I want to see in all of their eyes more than I'm getting.
And what that would require was that when they first ran through the script, it made any sense at all.
Because there are a lot of great actors in that movie that are being pretty wasted.
pretty wasted because they are being given some dumb shit to do you know that feeling where it's like oh i i i got dumb shit to do oh yeah yeah i can't stand it so action movie script doctor is another one of the jobs that i will deign to take if only the world is constructed why are people not approaching you for these things i don't know i went to that billionaire party with you and not there wasn't a single billionaire that walked up and said will you be the ceo of my company
And I was right there.
I was in their fucking laps.
They're certainly familiar with your work.
Well, to varying degrees.
And different kinds of work.
I mean, if Elon Musk is at all scrobbling, which I got to assume he is.
Sure.
He's got a room full of scroblers.
Sure.
He's probably got a dedicated wing of scroblers.
Right.
And they are scrobbling through all the podcasts looking for Elon Musk references, just like Courtney Love at a magazine stand in 1997.
Right.
Where it's just like, let's see my picture.
This is not a library.
Courtney, Courtney, look, look.
I found you in Teen Beat.
Let's get it.
Oh, my God.
I look so fat.
You're Elon Musk.
You are scrabbling all the podcasts looking for references.
He's hungry for ideas, John.
Hungry.
Right?
And so he has to have listened to every episode of this program where we have discussed him as an archetype.
At least by proxy.
He's aware of it.
Right?
Sure.
Or somebody on his team is.
Somebody on his team is presenting to him on papyrus.
a list of references that we have made to him and some of the ideas that he needs a little script doctoring on and he's what and I'm at I'm at a fucking surrealist party with him and he's wearing some kind of feathered headdress and I'm just dressed like a normal person which is ultimately the most surreal costume and
He doesn't walk over.
He just, he stands over there and waits for me to approach him.
No, no, no, no.
He doesn't understand how this works.
He doesn't.
They fundamentally don't understand how it works.
And I think it's because it's programming culture.
You think it's the programming?
I think it's programming.
I think they're programmed to not know how to not be programmed.
So, I mean.
You're here.
You're here.
You will pick up the phone sometimes.
Well.
How should they contact you, John?
Is there a way you would prefer to be contacted by the people who need help for things?
Yeah.
Text me later.
I heard you give out your address on a podcast the other day.
It was my office address.
Oh, and it might not even be real.
It might be another office.
It might be a, what do you call it?
A double blind, a pigeon drop.
Yeah, it's like an office.
First of all, the address is completely unbelievable.
There is no Seattle Boulevard in Seattle.
Oh, it's a trap street.
That'd be kind of idiotic, right?
But that's my address and it actually works.
The letters do get to me.
Your letters will get to me.
Or the various gifts, the socks that people send you.
The socks, the gifts.
What I said on the other podcast was, I will entertain any of your gifts.
If I heard correctly, your only proviso was, don't send me a living thing unless it's been prepared and preserved.
Yeah, right.
Don't send a dead beaver unless it's mounted or the bones have been bleached.
Thank you.
Exactly.
But otherwise, if you are an artisanal maker of some kind and you would like to test your product out on me and hear my true thoughts about it, absolutely fucking send it to me.
And I'll put it through the paces.
Or a script.
If you want a script doctored, then that's a thing.
I mean, you know, the first couple of these I'll do gratis.
Are you kidding me?
You would do that?
I'd do it just to demonstrate.
It's a public service because a lot of people are going to see these movies and they're shit.
What I want to do is I want to have the director make a movie.
For instance, you could make this Spectre movie.
They already did.
and then everybody sees it and then i doctor the script and we remake it oh that's good and then you then that comes out six months from now and then we just do a little bit of a side by side we'll see we'll see what people think about that and what we're talking about you figure if it costs 240 million to make the first one it's like a it's like a toyota the second one's got to be cheaper
Exactly.
They could reuse a lot of the parts.
They could probably use sets, some of the sets.
They could reuse, I guess, I'm guessing you're going to get rid of the valve.
But what's he got, a Walter PPK in this one?
He carries it.
So here's the number one problem of this movie.
Too many pistols.
Every problem in this movie is solved with a pistol.
Now, James Bond should be solving problems in his movie with things other than a pistol.
Like mind bullets.
He should be using mind bullets.
I mean, there's one moment where there's an exploding watch.
But the stuff that his Aston Martin does is all stuff from Thunderball.
I've heard it said there's some recycling.
It's meant to look like a ha-ha throwback, but it's actually a little bit of recycling.
There is a moment where I actually was grabbed like, oh, that's pretty.
I didn't even say, oh, that's pretty good.
I was like, oh, uh-huh.
Yeah, there you go.
But there's so many missed opportunities, and the biggest one is don't let James Bond solve every problem with the pistol.
Give him some shit.
To monkey with and let him also show some of his math and science skills.
I was going to say, let him science the shit out of some spy work.
He can science the spy stuff just as well as Bourne can.
Mm-hmm.
Right?
He should be setting that.
But at every turn, it's not even always his Walther.
He's taking pistols off of people.
He's finding pistols lying around.
You can really overdo the pistols.
And then...
And so the climax of the film, I'm not even talking about him shooting the valve.
The climax of the film involves him
In a moving vehicle, shooting at a moving target at a distance of hundreds of yards with a pistol.
And we are meant to believe it because he shoots four times and doesn't accomplish it.
And then the fifth one, he really aims.
He gives the squinty eye and he's like, this is my last shot.
And he really aims and he accomplished it.
He puts a bullet in.
into the mouth of a sparrow at 600 yards and doesn't kill the sparrow.
It just goes down and comes out its butt.
That is the implausibility of that shot.
And it's just like, this is the climax?
That's got to be a hard time for gun enthusiasts right now.
There's so much confusing stuff out there.
I feel bad for them.
I really do.
On the one hand, I want to make it very hard to own a gun in America.
Mm-hmm.
I want there to be a lot of hoops you have to jump through.
I want there to be tests.
I want it to be a thing that you get a license that seems absolutely reasonable that that should be the case.
And I say that as a gun owner.
Well, what if they gave you a license, but it's really, really, really big and you have to carry it?
What if it's the size of a child science project?
What if the license has to be in a frame and you have to wear it around your neck?
That's pretty good.
Or you can wear it like a sandwich board, but in a way that would prevent you from using a gun because you got to carry the fucking license.
I have a gun license and here it is.
You can clearly see it.
It's around my neck.
I do believe that these are tough times for gun owners because they're completely unlicensed nature.
The fact that you can have as many guns as you want.
causes a lot of confusion for gun owners they need some limitations in order to clarify really the guns they absolutely have to own you know they should look at their guns and say does this gun bring me joy oh sure if not clean it out of your closet right and just keep the guns that really bring you joy and
Enough joy that it's worth it to you to go through what will probably be an onerous amount of rigmarole, kind of equivalent to getting a motorcycle license.
I think you should not be allowed to have more guns than friends you've spoken to personally in the last week.
Oh, wow.
That's a tough standard.
I know.
You know, somebody said to me, oh, you know who it was?
It was the psychiatrist I'm going to see.
Oh, okay.
This is a little bit, you know, this is giving away quite a bit.
I wouldn't have said this when I was running for office because you don't want to admit any weakness in public.
Nobody running for office goes to a doctor.
None whatsoever.
You shouldn't need it.
They're already perfect.
But I have gone to a psychiatrist now twice, which is – which more than – That's more than all the other times put together.
More than all the other times in my life put together.
And at one point – and I think he's kind of a ding-a-ling.
But at one point he said, you know, you can only have five close friends and you can only know 100 people.
And I was like, that's interesting that you probably read that in psychology today in a 1986 issue.
Turns out.
But I know a thousand people by name and I consider them.
That's just the waitresses.
I consider them friends.
Like I know 5,000 people on site.
And 2,500 of them I don't know well enough to know whether they're a friend or not.
But like, no, you don't know what you're talking about.
I have more than five close friends.
If I am capable of having a close friend, let's just say that.
Merlin Mann is my close friend.
Those are two very different issues.
So it's one thing like that thing sounds – that sounds a little cute.
It's very cute.
It's very cute.
The whole profession is cute.
Yeah, I get that.
Cutesy little things like that.
Like, it's only possible if you bend over and tie your shoelaces with your left hand, that means that your mother didn't pet your knee when she was disciplining you.
Mr. Roderick, look at your fingernails.
it's all it's all ted talk shit it's total ted talk turns out bullshit ted talk turns out it makes me want to talk into my wallet it makes me want to fucking answer a phone call in my wallet is what it makes me want to do i'm sorry i have to take this i can run flat out for a half mile before my hands start shaking now why would i know that
Hmm.
Turns out.
Turns out that the pressure points in my feet are related one, like related each to another to my mustache hairs.