Ep. 210: "Parents and Other Dingalings"
Merlin: This episode of Roderick on the Line is sponsored by Concert Against Humanity, an epic comedy show and concert hosted by Cards Against Humanity.
Merlin: That's Friday, August 5th, 2016 at the Murat Theater in Indianapolis.
Merlin: To learn more and buy your ticket now, visit cardsagainsthumanity.com slash concert.
Merlin: Hello.
Merlin: Hi, John.
Merlin: Hi, Burblad.
Merlin: Bye, John.
Merlin: How's it going?
Merlin: Good.
John: It's early.
Merlin: It is early.
Merlin: It's early.
Merlin: You were on time today, man.
John: Yeah, well, yeah, 10 o'clock.
John: 10, 10, 10.
John: Just like every time.
John: Right on the button.
John: Yeah, buttons.
John: Right on the noses.
John: I had one of those nights last night where I just could not stay asleep.
John: Oh, that's the worst.
John: I had some kind of dream that there was a spider.
John: I woke up and I had to move all my pillows around.
Merlin: Oh, no.
John: And then I was like, I can't go back to sleep.
John: There's a spider in my pillows.
Merlin: Of course, there wasn't.
John: I mean, not per se.
John: You're right.
John: But the dream that I had about a spider was a dream not reflective of the number of spiders that were in my pillows.
Yeah.
John: And then I do an admin.
John: Oh, no.
John: You got up and did admin?
John: Right about 3 or 3.30 in the morning.
John: I was like, you know what?
John: It's about time I joined Snapchat.
Merlin: Oh, good for you.
Merlin: Did you get one of those little icons with the ghost?
John: Well, you know, I joined it and I went through, you know, I went through the rigmarole.
John: And then I got in there, and I was like, well, I'm not going to start Snapchatting right now.
John: I'm not going to choose my avatar right now.
John: Four o'clock in the morning.
John: You're not crazy.
John: I've got some sense.
John: And so, yeah, I woke up this morning to some congratulations from people about my having joined Snapchat, which felt good.
John: That felt good.
Merlin: A little bit of admin in the middle of the night.
Merlin: Just keep the lines right.
John: Just keeping the lines right.
John: And what else did I do?
John: Oh, I ordered.
Merlin: I organized my apps.
Merlin: On your phone?
John: Yeah.
John: Oh, God, I love doing that.
John: Got rid of some.
John: I moved them around.
John: Folders, folders, folders.
John: You know, I folded a few, let's be honest.
John: Yeah.
John: But, you know, I was more like, this is the literary page of the apps.
John: And this one is the banking page.
John: You know, like that.
John: This one is the one of all the astronomy ones.
Merlin: It's like organizing your library.
John: Yeah, that's right.
John: So I did some of that.
Merlin: Doesn't it also feel good to get rid of ones?
Merlin: Here's my test.
Merlin: If I'm not sure what this does, I delete it.
Merlin: Because sometimes I'll pause and I'll go, I don't really remember what this does.
John: Yeah, well, I went through a phase where I really believed...
John: Do you have one of those five-year diaries?
Merlin: I'm familiar with them, but I don't maintain one.
John: Yeah, for the last five years, I've had a five-year diary sitting on top of a bookshelf.
John: Every morning I look at them, I'm like, tomorrow is the day that I'm going to start keeping a five-year diary.
John: Wouldn't that be a great thing to have?
John: That'd be a great thing to have.
John: Wouldn't that be great to look back and say, I kept that diary for five years, and here it is, a record for everyone.
John: Haven't been doing it.
John: If I had one for the last five years, boy, what a resource it would be.
Merlin: Yeah?
John: Yeah.
Merlin: For like kind of just where your head was on a given day?
John: Yeah.
John: You know, my mom and dad kept...
John: Check registers.
Merlin: Oh, yeah, sure.
Merlin: Between that and your phone book, you know, your phone and address book, those are real documents in the house.
John: Yeah, I've got check registers for my folks back into the 70s, and you can just flip through it.
John: It's like, oh, well, here is the actual entry for the check that paid for the first piano lesson.
John: Wow.
John: And it happened on this day.
John: You know, it's like really heavy...
John: particularly you know when my folks were like um you know they were kind of fighting for custody for a while i mean it's very interesting to see like how much time i actually spent with them what we were doing so a five-year you know five-year diary you'd have all this stuff of like today we went to the zoo yesterday we went to the zoo go to the zoo every day
John: Our lives are totally unchanging from day to day.
Merlin: It's not as fun to do with, like, say, Quicken.
John: Exactly.
John: Yeah.
John: Exactly.
John: And so there was a little brief period there where I downloaded a couple of apps that were like, take a picture of yourself every day.
John: Sure.
John: It was Adam Lizagor that got me thinking about it because he did some.
John: Was it Face Jam?
John: What was it called?
John: I don't know.
John: He's got 10 million apps.
John: Mm-hmm.
John: It was one of the Adam Lizagor apps.
John: I remember that.
John: You take a picture, and then you can make that into an animation that shows you aging.
John: Yeah, right.
John: Yes.
John: He was sitting on a park bench, sadly eating a sandwich.
John: Yeah.
John: But he took a picture of himself each time.
John: Here I am, sort of, you know.
John: Being Adam.
John: I'm the lovable sandwich-eating guy.
John: And now look at me.
John: Look at me for a whole year.
John: Sad, sandwich-eating guy every day.
John: I wanted to be that.
John: So I downloaded some of these and I took some pictures of myself every day for like a week, six days.
John: And then I forgot to keep doing it.
John: And so I deleted all those.
John: I'm trying to, there's a ringtone I really want.
John: I've never wanted a ringtone before.
Merlin: Yeah, the acapella one.
John: The acapella one.
John: I really want this one.
Merlin: I would be more than happy to help you with this.
Merlin: I have an app made by my friend, Paul Kafasis, where you take the file, you drop it on there, turns it into a ringtone.
Merlin: Easy peasy, lemon squeezy.
Merlin: But I want to edit it.
Merlin: Oh, yeah.
Merlin: He also has an app for that called Fission.
John: I love this.
John: I love that there's an app for that.
John: You know, we haven't done super tech support in a while.
John: No, that's true.
John: There's a lot of things.
John: So I want this thing, and I downloaded two apps.
John: And I spent, I swear to you, two hours in iTunes just trying to figure out how to work it now.
Merlin: Yeah, iTunes is not a good place to start anything.
Merlin: Every time, you know, it used to be you and iTunes, there's five choices you go.
Merlin: iTunes is a little bit like a dream because you're pretty sure it's like, oh, it was my music collection, but it wasn't.
Merlin: And you were there, but you weren't.
Merlin: And my Ren's demos were not there and they should have been.
John: Yeah.
John: And meanwhile, every time I would try and I'd push some button and I'd get into something, I'm like, this is where I want to be.
John: And I'd try to back out of it.
John: Yeah, good luck.
John: I'd have backed out of it and I'd have backed all the way to Paraguay.
John: And I'm sitting around.
John: I don't speak Spanish.
John: It's like, how did I get to Paraguay?
John: No, it's bueno.
John: No, it's bueno.
John: So I stopped doing that.
John: I still don't have the ringtone.
John: Well, I'd be happy to help you with that.
John: I woke up this morning, Merlin, too.
Ta-da!
John: And I had an idea that one day I would wake up to this acapella, wonderful acapella music.
John: Still.
Merlin: Well, there's a lot in there.
Merlin: And you have to tell you, you're getting into an area, this is a very John Roderick topic, I think.
Merlin: Oh, really?
Merlin: Is that right?
Merlin: Well, just because, like, for myself, like, I'll, you know, I don't really do anything.
Merlin: I don't have that much stuff to do.
Merlin: But I'll sit there and I'll just get started a little bit with manscaping my apps.
Merlin: And then, you know, 45 minutes goes by.
Merlin: Because first of all, all the games that my daughter has downloaded are now pushing everything way off the screen.
Merlin: You just have pages and pages of games about cooking.
Merlin: And so I just drop one on the other, makes a folder called games, and then I drop, drop, drop, drop, drop.
Merlin: And then I create another one.
Merlin: It creates a folder called games.
Merlin: Drop, drop, drop, drop, drop, drop, drop.
Merlin: Do you drop it?
Merlin: Do you drop, drop, drop?
Merlin: Dropity drop, drop, drop.
Merlin: I put it all right in there.
Merlin: But no, but I think there's something.
Merlin: I wish Apple would help us a little bit with that.
Merlin: I mean, I kind of feel like there's two things.
Merlin: One giant wish and a small wish.
Merlin: The giant wish is I wish it would really, really kind of does this with that little screen to the left.
Merlin: But I wish it would really realize, hey, ding-a-ling, you know, you've got 200 apps on there.
Merlin: But like here's the six you use constantly.
Merlin: And here is the 30 you've used in the last month.
Merlin: and automatically move dumb stuff away.
Merlin: I know that would drive some people crazy, but I would like that because I get sick of moving that stuff around, but I find it very rewarding.
Merlin: I'm trying to find a recent ringtone I've got.
Merlin: Oh, I know you're familiar with the work of the comedian Patton Oswalt.
Merlin: Yes.
Merlin: But there's something that I yell at my cat several times a day based on one of his routines, and so I made that into my ringtone.
Merlin: Here we go.
Merlin: Of you doing it?
Merlin: No, from his album.
Merlin: Let's see here.
Merlin: So I like to yell that at my cat.
Merlin: I tell her she's a hideous monster, and when she moves from one room to another, I say, what are you doing?
John: See, this is what I want.
John: I want my life to be full of fun.
John: Yes.
John: I want it to be full of memes.
Merlin: John, these are your devices.
Merlin: You should be having fun with this.
Merlin: You should get turned crunk, and you should get on fleek.
Merlin: I should.
Merlin: Yes.
John: These are some of my squad goals.
John: Yes, pound sign squad goals.
John: I should have, my devices should represent the inner me.
John: Oh, God, yes.
John: Right?
John: Because when I'm fucked up, that's the real me.
John: Oh, you kidding me?
John: And I want it.
John: Is that when you're into club, John?
John: It's fun.
John: I guess it is.
John: It's getting hot in here.
John: This is what I want.
John: This is how I envision my life.
John: What are you doing?
John: I want to be one of these fun guys who's opening his garage door remotely.
John: Oh, you want the Matt Howey device?
John: Yes, and I want my phone to go, or whatever I want it to do.
John: where's my phone that's what my phone should say where's my phone uh so i but i don't have i have no access to some of these worlds yeah um and uh and i feel i feel like i'm just life is passing me by oh my gosh you know what i mean i was standing i call it fomo
John: FOMO?
Merlin: FOMO.
Merlin: Fear of missing out, they call it.
Merlin: That's what the Millenniums call it.
John: Yeah.
John: Yeah, I was sitting, I was watching people catching Pokemons.
John: Yeah.
John: And the wonderful thing about people who are catching Pokemons is that they are very nice and very happy to tell you what they're doing.
Merlin: They're having fun.
John: They're having fun.
John: And so, you know, and I'm a curious person.
John: So I say, which Pokemons are we catching today?
John: And they say, well, you know, here's some of the Pokemons that we are waiting to see spawn.
John: And...
John: You know, and they're saying all of it while they're watching to see Pokemon.
John: To all appearances, photographing a sidewalk.
John: Right.
John: So they're not, you know, they're kind of busy photographing the sidewalk, dude.
John: They sort of look up.
John: They make a little bit of eye contact because they're all very nice people.
John: But then they're back to the game.
John: Yeah.
John: I still don't understand it.
John: And I'm curious about it.
John: I don't know what Minecraft is.
John: Like, I'm so out.
Merlin: I can explain.
Merlin: Minecraft is explainable and very, very cool.
Merlin: Try this one.
Merlin: I got one for you.
Merlin: I have not.
Merlin: I will not play the Pokemon's game.
Merlin: But here's what I'll give you a line.
Merlin: Huh.
Merlin: What, did you catch another Eevee?
Merlin: Try that one.
Merlin: Eevee?
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: Oh, what'd you get?
Merlin: Another Eevee?
John: Are Eevees fairly commonplace?
John: That's a Pokemon.
Merlin: Yeah, there's a Pokemon called an Eevee, and I think there's a lot of those, and people, you know, you got to catch them all.
Merlin: There's a variety of reasons I won't do it, but, you know, I can have two minds about this.
Merlin: It's absolutely not for me, but I am very happy that people are having fun with it.
Merlin: And I'm not even going to get into the whole illustrating outside.
Merlin: Shut up.
John: People are having fun.
Merlin: Don't be catching Pokemon.
Merlin: Who's that?
Merlin: Your mom.
John: No.
Merlin: Oh, excuse me.
Merlin: No, my daughter has, you know, she likes the Pokemans, but she and she's expressed an interest in it.
Merlin: But I have been mostly mute about it because that's not a franchise that I want to get into.
John: Oh, is that right?
John: Because did they support David Duke or something?
John: Like, what's so bad about Pokemon?
Merlin: Listen, people love me.
John: Yeah.
Merlin: The stuff I do is tremendous.
Merlin: Everyone says so.
Merlin: I've been very successful.
Merlin: And, you know, I'll have to look into that.
Merlin: That's right.
Merlin: So.
Merlin: No, no, it's just it's just, you know, I don't know.
Merlin: She's she's she really expresses an interest.
Merlin: We'll we'll get into it.
John: But, you know, it's my big question.
John: Why is she downloading twenty five thousand games where you pay extra money to put a cherry on top of an ice cream cone?
John: ...to your phone?
John: Why does she not have her own device?
Merlin: This is not a particularly interesting answer, but I'm happy to share it with you.
Merlin: First of all, we have something called family sharing, which means that once one of us has gotten for free or bought an app, it's accessible to the others.
Merlin: And if she's using one of my devices and she says, can I get this free game?
Merlin: I say, sure.
Merlin: And so point number two, we either buy games for money...
Merlin: Or we get free games and we don't do in-app purchases.
Merlin: Like, we don't buy magic coins and stuff like that.
John: Oh, you don't buy magic coins?
Merlin: No, no, no.
Merlin: I mean, when she gets to the point where she has an allowance, that can be a dumb thing we argue about.
Merlin: But no, the cooking games are fun.
Merlin: You know, you have to cook things.
Merlin: And you gotta go, you know, make some teriyaki or something like that.
Merlin: No part of that is fun.
Merlin: It's fun for a little kid.
Merlin: It's sort of like playing threes.
Merlin: Remember that diabolical game we hate?
Merlin: It's sort of like that where you know these little motions.
Merlin: I still play threes.
Merlin: I played threes yesterday.
John: My feeling about threes was I went through a long period where I didn't play threes.
Merlin: I have not gotten any better.
Merlin: I still max out at around 9,000.
Merlin: And I played thousands and thousands of games and I can't get past like 9,000.
John: It's very hard to get better.
John: And I have this weird sense that I used to be better at it than I am.
John: Do you remember – we used to talk about threes on our program in the early days, and I remember having some high score.
Merlin: Your score was much higher.
Merlin: You were definitely in the five digits.
Merlin: I think you were in the high five digits.
John: Well, and I remember being able to accomplish amazing feats within threes.
John: And now I can no longer accomplish amazing feats.
John: It feels like Threes has been, it feels like the algorithm has changed.
Merlin: Oh, you think they changed the algorithm?
Merlin: You think they rewrote the encryption?
John: I feel like they rewrote the encryption, and now every time you're about to create an amazing feat, they just give you seven red ones.
John: They give you blue on the wrong side.
John: And you're like, what?
John: And then you're dead.
John: Yeah.
Merlin: Asher, we remember we visited with the developer of that game, and he told us that basically everything we think about that game is true.
Merlin: It is trying to fuck with you on purpose.
Merlin: I guess that's what makes it a game instead of a mom.
John: Yeah.
John: He seemed to not understand his own game or how it worked.
Merlin: I don't know if that's essential to being a developer.
Merlin: I think you just mainly need to know how to get on the App Store.
Merlin: That was a fun time.
Merlin: No, I mean, you know, you'll go through this at some point when you give up on the things that you're good about right now.
Merlin: And, you know, your kid will want to do things with games and stuff like that.
Merlin: And those are pretty harmless.
Merlin: Minecraft is amazing.
John: Listen, I don't want to talk about Minecraft.
Merlin: It's basically imagine, like, a video game version of Legos with unlimited Legos.
John: First rule of Minecraft, don't talk about Minecraft to me.
John: It's me all along.
John: I was in a house yesterday, and there was a teen there.
John: But he was a preteen, but a very advanced preteen.
Merlin: He's like a postgraduate tween.
John: Yeah, that's right.
John: He's right there between.
John: He has to decide whether he's really going to go and do a dissertation or whether he's just going to become a carpenter.
John: It's a tough time for a kid.
John: But he was Pokemon-ing, and his mother expressed a lot of apprehension about Pokemon.
John: Not that Pokemon itself was bad, but augmented reality.
John: She did not like augmented reality.
Hmm.
John: And I said, well, you know, in a couple of years, we're all going to be, it's going to be the Google Glass.
John: And she said, aha, but Google Glass failed.
John: And I had this sudden awareness that there are many, many millions of people who think that Google Glass failed.
John: Therefore, we will never have to deal with the we're never going to have heads up displays or there's never going to be anything.
Merlin: Very, you're very on point with this.
Merlin: I happen to totally agree with you.
Merlin: It's very people's idea about this stuff.
Merlin: Like so many things, it becomes very short sighted based on like what's available right now.
John: Yeah, right.
John: Like, well, it failed.
John: And I'm like, yeah, it failed because it was a beta-ass thing and it looked dumb.
Merlin: Yeah, like those planes with 17 wings that fell off a cliff.
Merlin: Why are we going to bother to fly anymore?
Merlin: Who would even try?
Merlin: Look how silly they look.
Merlin: It's all sped up and playing piano music.
John: Exactly.
John: Go look at the airplanes of 1907 and then we'll, you know, let's talk.
John: Or the airplanes of 1925.
John: You know, there were a lot of hilarious airplanes and now we're still using them.
John: But anyway, I was saying...
John: listen, you know, life is going to be like a Mario Brothers.
John: She was like, no.
John: And I said, yeah, here's your augmented reality.
John: You walk out the door, and Pokemon is introducing this now to everybody.
John: People will do this, so you as a company can do it too.
John: You're walking down the street, and here's a little thing that's like,
John: If you grab the coin, you get a free ice cream cone at McDonald's.
John: Oh, that's augmentation.
John: All right.
John: And you're like, whoa, you know, catch them all.
John: And you're running down the street catching coins on your way to the nearest McDonald's where those coins will, if you catch enough of them, will add up to a cheeseburger.
John: And, you know, and it's just going to be that's going to be everywhere unless and you'll be able to obviously turn it off because I'm going to be busy walking around looking at my augmented reality is going to tell me all of the places you can access Seattle's underground sewer network.
John: Right.
John: All the manhole covers that are unlocked.
John: But these little McDonald coins are going to be popping up and people are going to be saying, everybody's going to have a little light bulb over their head, like elucidating their marriage status.
John: Oh, I see.
John: Reality is going to be very augmented, Merlin, and not very long.
Yeah.
John: And this mom that I was talking to was younger than me, but she did not want anything to do with it.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: I mean, I've been talking about this a lot lately.
Merlin: Because, you know, I think it's an important thing to... Have you been talking about this on other programs with other people?
John: Yeah.
John: See, then that's...
Merlin: Well, here's I mean, there's several parts to this.
Merlin: I mean, one of the things is that I think as you get older, it's harder and harder not to suffer from, which is to develop these heuristics for the things that you're going to dismiss because you either at first you don't understand them.
Merlin: They seem silly or they seem dangerous.
Merlin: And you never bother to learn much more than the thing that they showed on the news for two minutes.
Merlin: And that's that's not any way to grow as a person, because the stuff that makes a thing a thing, you may not really understand it until you start doing it.
Merlin: Like if you described rock music to people, it wouldn't sound all that interesting.
Merlin: It helps to go to a concert.
Merlin: There's lots of stuff like that.
John: The other thing is that... It's like the word heuristics, which you use all the time and I never use.
John: And when you say heuristics, each time, I think, that's a word I'd like to use.
Merlin: Also, hermeneutics.
Merlin: I'd like to start using that more.
Merlin: Hermeneutics?
Merlin: Hermeneutics.
John: I, you know, and I think to myself, as you continue to talk, I kind of try on the word heuristics for myself.
John: Like, hmm, sort of the heuristics.
Merlin: Okay, how about instead I say increasingly lazy shortcut?
Merlin: Like people want an increasingly lazy shortcut where they go, I don't have to think about that anymore.
Merlin: Like chunky, right?
Merlin: Not for me.
Merlin: But here's the other thing about parents and other ding-a-lings.
Merlin: is that I can tell you that anything my kid is a dick about with screens is nobody's fault but my own.
John: Nobody's fault but mine.
Merlin: What is that?
John: It's a really great Led Zeppelin song that should have been on a
John: I feel like I know that song.
John: Yeah.
John: But it wasn't on an album.
John: It was just on a – it was just a thing.
Merlin: Just to say that we tend to – as we – when we're being parents, we tend to go like, oh, well, like we know stuff and kids don't know stuff.
Merlin: And so they are little vases into which we pour wisdom and information and experience.
Merlin: And it's like that's bullshit.
Merlin: I mean –
Merlin: Like, I guess what I'm saying is, like, if your kid is a dick with the iPhone, it's because you let them become a dick with the iPhone.
Merlin: It's not the iPhone's fault.
Merlin: It's your fault.
John: I'm a dick with the iPhone.
John: I'm a dick with the iPhone.
Merlin: It's incredibly hypocritical.
Merlin: So we're like, okay, listen, we let you watch Gilmore Girls for six hours this morning, and now, you know, you're cranky.
Merlin: So you don't get a screen for a while, but Mom and I are going to sit here and look at our iPads.
Merlin: That'd be cranky.
Merlin: Yeah, because you're a vase.
John: Yeah.
John: I had a real problem the other day.
John: I was in a parade.
John: Oh, nice.
John: And it was a big, big, big parade.
John: And my job in the parade was to ride in the back of a 1976 El Dorado convertible color root beer brown and wave wearing a sash.
John: And I thought that this would be fun for my daughter also because last year when I was running for office, we were in several parades where we walked the length of the parade waving at people and waving signs with my name on it.
John: And so, you know, she started to think that being in parades was normal and that that was one of the things that we did with daddy, right?
John: With mama, you go to the swimming pool and with daddy, you go march in a parade.
Yeah.
John: and waved to 50,000 people.
John: And so this is Seattle's big parade.
John: The Seafair Parade is the big one.
John: The Torchlight Parade.
John: And it's not a Torchlight Parade that ends at a rally.
John: There's no Kristallnacht-like experience.
Merlin: Were there just a healthy number of tubas, or were there like a lot of tubas?
John: A lot of tubas.
John: There were several fire department bagpipe bands.
John: Oh, boy.
John: There were, I mean, you know, a lot of floats featuring princesses.
John: There was the apple blossom princess and there was the under the sea princess and there was all the princesses were there.
John: There were the seafarer pirates in an enormous ship that has a cannon.
John: Yeah, there was a lot going on.
John: There was the U.S.
John: Army.
John: There was the U.S.
John: Navy band.
John: Anyway, so we just— This sounds like a pretty big production.
John: It's a big production.
John: And we were in this Cadillac, and the driver of the Cadillac was doing the S-turns because that's the only thing.
John: We didn't have any other elements.
Merlin: You mean like an entitled guy on a fixie?
John: Yeah, except he's doing, he was a very smooth guy.
John: We got this Cadillac from a local car museum.
John: He knew what he was doing and it had a, you forget what car horns were like in the 1970s.
John: He would lay on this horn and it was like a ship, it was like a ferry boat coming into port.
John: You know, like totally great horn.
John: Anyway, this was our job.
John: Drive the length of the city at two miles an hour waving, wearing a sash.
John: And so I brought my little girl and she was totally amazing for the entire thing until after we'd been doing it for four hours and there was no end in sight.
John: She finally was like, she just had that experience of like, okay, 100,000 people.
John: I've waved at 100,000 people and now I'm a little freaked out.
John: Is that where is the end?
Yeah.
John: And I'm like, oh, still a little ways to go.
John: And she was like, I now want to hide.
John: And she went down into the footwell.
John: Oh, poor thing.
John: And I was like, I'm not sure.
John: I'm not sure at which point I became a bad father here.
John: All along the way, you seem to be doing fine.
John: Yeah, this is intense.
John: And frankly, the part that I became a bad father was I was like,
John: i did what my dad would have done which is i said get your ass back up here what are you doing we got we got parading to do here don't leave daddy up here just waving by himself and she was down you're making me look bad she was down there you know with her with her little bunny rabbit sucking her thumb in the wheel well and i was like god damn it get up here
John: People want, you know, people pay no money to watch this.
John: Come up here and help daddy.
John: And so then I was up there waving, you know.
John: Thank you.
John: Have a happy parade.
Merlin: Last thing you want to see when you go to a parade is just miles and miles of a child being admonished.
Merlin: Well, and also, yeah, that's right.
John: You can't, I can't, I couldn't actually be parenting.
John: You're on stage.
John: You're on stage 360.
John: Yeah, I can't be like, hey, psst.
John: You know, and I kind of was.
John: I was like, hey, psst.
John: She was like, no way.
John: And I felt, you know, this was a, I don't think maybe a unique parenting problem, but certainly there's not a lot of role models.
John: Like I can't call a hotline and say, what do you guys do when your daughter doesn't want to do fulfill the entire parade at five years old?
John: So I was, you know, so yeah, I admonished her a little bit and then afterwards I was sorry, but then I was like, but also, you know, you don't want to be a quitter, but also I understand that you retired and that you didn't quite know what you were getting into, but also look, daddy's got weird things that he has to do sometimes, parades and other events where he may drag you up on stage and
John: Because he wants you to, because just as my dad used to leave me sitting in Alaska bars for two hours while he did something.
John: And he justified it to himself by feeling like it was teaching me how to sit in a bar, I guess.
John: It was teaching me how to meet adults and keep them from stealing me.
Merlin: Well, there's a lot to that.
Merlin: I'm not saying I agree with this, but there was a time when the ability to sit quietly in a bar was something a child was expected to do.
Merlin: I mean, it's something about learning restraint, self-control, right?
John: Well, except, you know, when he would come back two hours later.
John: you know i'd be sitting on the bar they'd be feeding me whipped cream out of a out of shot glasses uh i'd be you know i'd be dancing regaling them with stories like there was i didn't sit demurely and and hope that the big men in the wolf skin coats would leave me alone i was like is that a wolf skin coat did i ever tell you about the time i saw a wolf would you buy me a shot glass full of whipped cream and now a timely message about concert against humanity
Merlin: Cards Against Humanity is coming out to play.
Merlin: They've got a giant theater and some shit to give away.
Merlin: It's August 5th at 8pm, there's not much else to say.
Merlin: So buy your seats today.
Merlin: It's the second show like this that Cards has gone and done.
Merlin: They promise lots of comedy.
Merlin: They promise lots of fun.
Merlin: And if they don't sell all the seats, they'll fire everyone.
Merlin: They'll fire everyone.
Merlin: Like you and you, you're fired too.
Merlin: Your mom, your dad, they're all fired.
Merlin: You get a pink slip.
Merlin: You clear your desk out.
Merlin: But I'm retired.
Merlin: Ha!
Merlin: You're still fired.
Merlin: Jonathan Colton.
Merlin: He's fired.
Merlin: Paul and Storm.
Merlin: They're both fired.
Merlin: Aparna Nanchirla.
Merlin: Eugene Merman.
Merlin: Fired, fired, fired.
Merlin: The entire cards office.
Merlin: They're all fired.
Merlin: The Murad Theater staff.
Merlin: All fired.
Merlin: Everyone attending Gen Con.
Merlin: Fired, fired, fired.
Merlin: Your Uber driver!
Merlin: Fired!
Merlin: You're welcome!
Merlin: Taylor Swift!
Merlin: She's fired too!
Merlin: The cast of Hamilton!
Merlin: All the Queen's Corgis!
Merlin: Fired!
Merlin: Fired!
Merlin: Fired!
Merlin: The moons of Jupiter!
Merlin: Are fired!
Merlin: A better cabal!
Merlin: Get out of here!
Merlin: The letter R!
Merlin: Taylor Swift again!
Merlin: Fired!
Merlin: Fired!
John: Fired!
Merlin: So buy your tickets, take your seats, and kneel before your masters.
Merlin: We hope this show does not become a huge goddamn disaster.
Merlin: Seats are moving pretty well, but they could move much faster.
Merlin: So buy your seats today!
Merlin: You won't want to miss this show, so get your tickets quick.
Merlin: Because if you miss it, you'll feel like the biggest, blackest dick.
John: My dad probably won't be back for a while.
John: We could probably get one more round of whipped cream.
John: Seriously, that was my gag.
John: I would order a shot glass of whipped cream.
John: And bartenders love it.
John: It's hilarious.
John: That's a pretty easy drink.
John: It's not like a mojito.
John: Right.
John: And so then I'd be sitting at the bar and I'd be all hard-bitten, my shot glass in front of me.
John: What a day.
John: The bartenders would come back and they'd be like, another round.
John: hit me.
John: Oh, we'd laugh and laugh.
John: I'm guessing it's Ready Whip, right?
John: They're shooting it out of the can.
Yeah.
John: And then, you know, it's like when you put peanut butter in a Kong and give it to a dog.
John: You know, I'm sitting there trying to get the last bit of whipped cream out of the bottom of the shot glass, but, you know, you're
John: Can't quite get in there.
John: Mm-hmm.
John: So loads of laughs I would pay I would pay $600 to watch a Supercut of all the times that I did that as a child I especially like to see the dancing
Merlin: Well, you know, I'll start dancing.
Merlin: No, I've seen adult John Roderick bust out a dance with very little provocation.
Merlin: I'm just seeing the young you, the mascot of the bar with his high on whipped cream doing a little jig.
Merlin: I'd enjoy that.
Merlin: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
John: It sounds, you know, sometimes there are aspects of my childhood that sound like a Western where it's all happening in like a saloon.
John: But that's actually what happened.
John: And the way that I, in many cases, the way I learned to dance, my first dance instruction came from a woman in an Alaska bar where I was sitting, where I had been deposited.
John: and she was uh it's not looking i mean i don't know i i can't say for sure but i think now retroactively that she was a working lady sure she was probably at least a bar fly oh she was certainly that but i think she was also i mean she was she was like this is tough parlance these days yeah she was she was uh professional it was alaska right so maybe she was a semi-professional
John: Yeah.
John: Everybody was wearing a wolfskin coat and she was, you know, she was nicely attired and there was some music playing and she, and I'm sitting there with my whipped cream and she said, do you want to dance?
John: And I said, I don't know how to dance.
John: And she said, I'll teach you how to dance.
John: Oh boy.
John: Now I was a little bit older.
John: Now I was probably 10 and I
John: I didn't say no or I didn't know how to say no.
John: I don't think I wanted to say no.
John: And she took me out on the dance floor and taught me how to dance.
John: That's dynamite taught me how to dance pretty well.
John: She gave me like the, the top six to eight moves.
John: And she said, listen, you gotta, you know, I'm leading you right now, but you've got to learn to lead.
John: You've got to be the, you know, the expectation is that you're going to lead.
John: So then she had me lead for a while.
John: I stepped on her toes and she said, one of the things you can't do is step on the other person's toes and
John: And, you know, I was 10 years old, so I wasn't, you know, I wasn't a little kid.
John: I was big enough that we could approximate dancing.
John: It stuck with me.
John: Even now when I dance, I have this, you know, there's this connection, this element to that first time.
Merlin: I think, I feel like most of what I know, here's my life hack for this.
Merlin: Here's what I know about dancing.
Merlin: I'm not a big dancer.
Merlin: I'm not a big public dancer.
Merlin: You rock out.
Merlin: Sure, I'll rock out.
Merlin: But here's what I know.
Merlin: If you're not moving your butt, you're not really dancing.
Merlin: And that's the rookie mistake, is a lot of people think you can just do a little jukey thing with your arms.
Merlin: Yeah, that'll work.
Merlin: But to really, not just to look like you're dancing, but to feel like you're dancing, your ass should be in motion.
Merlin: You gotta move your butt.
Merlin: If you move your, I mean, it sounds really obvious, but if you look at people who are dancing awkwardly, it's because they haven't found their butt and moved it.
John: Oh, right.
John: They're moving their knees.
Merlin: They're moving their, they think it's like, you know, sort of like when you think about your hair, people think about combing the front of their hair, but not the back.
Merlin: The thing is, it's the junk in the trunk that's really making the funk.
Merlin: I just made that up.
Merlin: I literally just made that up.
Merlin: Yeah, no, that's the thing.
Merlin: It's like, if you want to improve your dancing, you know, in your repose at home, well, work on moving your butt a little bit.
John: Well, this is one thing that a lot of people don't know.
John: Also, moving your butt, right?
John: That's right off the top of the list.
John: But here's what you dance to.
John: You do not dance to the guitar.
John: You do not dance to the vocals.
John: You do not even really dance to the drums.
John: You dance to the bass.
Merlin: Dance to the bass.
John: And if you look at the group of people dancing and you are and you actually listen to the music, you will see that they are the ones that are moving correctly are moving to the base.
Merlin: That's a really good point.
Merlin: And a lot of a lot of I don't want to make this all about the dudes.
Merlin: Right.
Merlin: But, you know, a lot of the dudes, they're actually they're literally playing air guitar sometimes.
John: Don't do that.
Merlin: Don't do that.
Merlin: I mean, if you're having fun, you know, just to get in there, have fun with it.
Merlin: So bass and butt is what you're saying.
John: You got to move your butt to the bass.
John: And 99% of the people are completely unconscious of it.
John: And I think about 90% of the people in the world couldn't pick the bass out of a musical composition.
Merlin: The bass is the part that makes you want to dance.
John: That's right.
John: That's the whole job of the bass.
John: Yeah.
John: And that's why the bass is so important.
John: And that's why when you're, when you're starting out playing rock music, when you're a teenage kid, you're just like, why would I play the bass?
John: The bass has got no, the bass isn't flashy.
John: I want to be the flashy guy.
John: That's like, that's why everybody wants to be a guitar player.
John: But then along the way you realize, Oh, the whole thing is, the whole thing is just sitting on top of the bass.
John: And without it, I mean, the bass is the thing that is motivating the whole, the whole song.
Um,
John: And then you start watching like what people are doing with their bodies and you're like, oh my God, the bass is in control.
John: And the bass players are like, and that's why bass players are creeps.
Merlin: Oh, because they know the power.
John: Yeah, and they're like, they're moving people's butts.
Merlin: Like the Sengalis.
John: And they're like, you know, they're Rasputins.
John: Rasputins.
John: They're like, I'm not, I don't need to make a big, well, they're kind of not Rasputins in that sense, but they're like,
John: Maybe not historical Rasputins, but they play by their own rules.
John: They play by their own rules.
John: That's right.
John: They smell like people in a wolfskin coat.
John: And that's what you're, you know, that sounds a little Seinfeld-y.
John: But think about when you watch Seinfeld, right?
John: Everybody's dancing.
John: What are you moving your butt to?
John: Yep.
John: Not to Jerry.
John: Pointing with the thumbs.
John: I feel like there's another, one other thing about dancing.
John: Which is the two and four.
John: Right?
John: Not the one and three.
John: The two and four.
John: You move to the two and four.
John: Right.
John: Unless you're Stuart Copeland.
Merlin: But, you know, this is the other thing.
Merlin: He dances to the beat of his own drummer.
Merlin: That's right.
Merlin: Yes, I agree with you.
Merlin: And you see this again with the Sorry White People.
Merlin: You see this with the clapping.
Merlin: You see this with the clapping on the one.
John: Yeah, don't clap on the one.
John: Don't clap on the one unless you really know what you're doing.
Merlin: I think, well, if you're Stevie Wonder, here's the thing.
Merlin: It sounds to me like there's an extension course waiting to happen right here, which is whatever your community college or something.
Merlin: You should do a course on helping people understand what dancing is and how to do it.
John: Things have been lost.
John: They truly have.
John: Like the accordion has been lost.
John: There are very few people that learn the accordion now, and most of them are doing it somewhat hilariously.
Merlin: Well, and also I think speaking as someone who is forced to learn accordion, I think accordion is something you force someone to learn.
Merlin: There aren't that many people who are like, hey, mom, can I get an accordion?
Merlin: But in 19... There's also just, in fairness, John, there's also just not as much exposure to accordions anymore.
Merlin: Exactly.
Merlin: We used to have accordions every... We were lousy with accordions in the 1970s.
John: Accordions all the way down.
John: And in 1950, a lot of people learned the accordion out of their own avidity because they said, this is a great way to entertain at parties.
John: That's true.
John: In 1920, everybody played the piano.
John: You couldn't go to a party... But you get an accordion, you got a piano on your chest.
John: Exactly.
Exactly.
John: Now all that stuff has been lost to time like tears and rain.
John: And one thing that has been lost, I'll tell you as somebody who occasionally will be inspired and will grab a partner and say, dance with me and dance around.
John: They are almost always like excited and thrilled.
John: Like, oh my God, someone's dancing.
John: We're dancing.
John: Yes.
John: I want to be that.
John: I want to do that dance here.
John: You know, and I'm talking about like holding one another dancing, not standing apart from one another and making choo-choo arms.
John: Oh, no, you're talking about grown-up dancing.
John: I'm talking about like, I am going to now dance with you and spin you around and we're going to dance properly.
John: But even in the course of my own lifetime, the number of people who know what that means has declined.
John: So when I was 14...
John: I could grab a hold of somebody that I didn't know, you know, do you want to dance?
John: Yes.
John: And then you are holding them and dancing.
Merlin: I think there's a high bar.
Merlin: I mean, like singing, I think people used to just randomly, and this could be because I enjoy musicals, but I feel like people used to somewhat more randomly sing and dance more.
Merlin: People dance now is like, oh, not me.
Merlin: I mean, there's always been an element of that, but I don't think dancing is part of what we do.
Merlin: I don't think singing is so much a part of what we do.
Merlin: Singing used to be a thing people just did.
Merlin: They did it.
John: Yes.
John: Well, and often, and this is the life hack here.
John: A lot of times you'll be somewhere like on a cliff or say, you know, in the, in the surf or in the forest.
John: And you think, I would like to ask this person to dance, but there's no big band here.
John: There's no dance.
John: This is not a, this is not what other people would consider a dance opportunity.
John: You'll find like EDM in the wild.
John: But, well, an EDM in the wild is one of the best festivals.
John: But it is actually an opportunity to dance.
John: You just have to identify it.
John: It's like searching for Pokemons.
John: If you pull out your own imaginary augmented reality and you look at the cliffside and you say, is this an opportunity to dance?
John: And a little monster pops up and goes, yes!
Yes!
John: You can actually say, would you like to dance?
John: And the other person will go, what?
John: And then you put your arms around them and you sing and dance to your own singing.
Merlin: Like a little bit of... I mean, you've lost a couple bars of any big bands.
Merlin: What's the one, String of Pearls?
Merlin: You do... Anybody, children should be taught that song so they can dance on demand.
John: And if you know a dozen of those songs, you can, you know, you can do, you don't have to jitterbug.
John: You can do some slow, you know.
Merlin: You can do a slow, like, begin the begin.
Merlin: That's a lovely thing to do in front of a mountain.
John: That's right.
John: And so you're dancing and you're kind of spinning your partner out and back in and then a little bit of this over here and a little bit of this over there.
John: Yeah, a little over there.
John: And you are providing the accompaniment.
John: And if you know a little bit of jazz, you can just sort of improvise the song.
John: I'll do this all the time.
John: and it's nothing it's just it's just that sounds totally plausible yeah it's just gibberish right jazz gibberish but you're dancing and what i have found in recent years is that
John: And as very excited partners are like, wow, we're really doing this, but they don't know their job, right?
John: There's no longer a sense of like, okay, you are the one who's A, singing, and B, doing this, so then C, you are probably going to lead me around.
Mm-hmm.
John: You know, as soon as you start, they're like, they start tugging like, wow, because we've lost the we've lost the people on how to be led.
Merlin: They think it's a dominance thing and it's not.
Merlin: It's more like just, well, you know, one person's driving and the other person is is riding.
John: Yeah.
John: Somebody's got to, you know, sort of.
John: And the wonderful thing about old fashioned dancing, right, was the man's job was to or the person leading that person's job was to not make a big show of themselves.
John: No.
John: But to show off their partner to their best advantage.
John: Totally agree.
John: So it's like I'm seeing you now and I'm featuring you here.
Merlin: It's more like you're driving.
Merlin: It's like imagine a parade.
Merlin: You could say, oh, yeah, that person's driving.
Merlin: Yeah, they're driving so the other person can wave.
Merlin: Exactly.
John: I'm driving the Cadillac and honking the horn.
John: You are sitting up on the valance and waving in a sack.
John: Yelling at your child down in the wheel well.
John: And so, you know, to lead in dancing is not to be the featured player.
John: But so, you know, like that intellectual, like that group knowledge has something is gone and can't be recaptured, I think.
John: And it's the casual Friday problem.
John: Nobody, it just, it was seen as an element of freedom.
John: To be able to go to work dressed as a furnace repair person.
John: And now in one generation, how to dress or be professional, all of it was lost.
John: And now you have this sort of culture of young people who are like, I'm dressing up.
John: I'm dressing fancy.
Merlin: It's sort of like... Like getting dressed up like an adult is like a separate special thing.
Merlin: There's been mission creep, and personally, I have to say, I mean, I know we differ on this.
Merlin: I'm a casual dresser, but I take your point.
Merlin: There's been mission creep on the whole idea of Casual Friday to now it's just Casual Week.
John: Casual Week.
John: And it has spawned a generation of, you know, these young Macklemore haircuts who are really into menswear.
John: Let's call it menswear.
Merlin: Yeah.
John: And I mean, you know, young women have always had an opportunity to express themselves in their clothes.
John: Men, not so much.
John: And you have to really make a point of it now because you're not forced to by professional by professionalism.
Merlin: Well, and it's – I mean this is off the top of my head, but for a long time, I would say definitely even through the 60s, men's fashion was a way of how well – sort of how well you could fit in by looking like a polished version of everyone else.
Merlin: And with women, it was like you – I think you would distinguish yourself by –
Merlin: actually distinguishing yourself by looking different but still fitting in you know what i mean i don't know maybe that's not a distinction but i feel like it is i mean you look at photos i was looking at some old photos of our of our neighborhood um there's a site that has like all these old photos of muni and stuff like that and like the work the guy like getting into his workman's truck is wearing a hat like with his sleeves rolled up like like a plumber and he's wearing a hat you just you had to do that you couldn't go out without a hat on
John: Of course not.
John: And if you were working as a professional person, like white shirt, you'd look at a picture of 50 people working in an office and they were all dressed exactly the same.
John: So in a sense, you didn't have to make any choice at all.
John: You just had to be able to.
Merlin: You've got to wear a dark suit and a conservative tie.
John: Yeah, and you had to iron your shirt, and it had to be laundered, and your hair had to be combed.
John: Like my mom said at Safeco Insurance Company, where she worked in the 70s, until 1979 when she left the company, you still could not undo the top button of your shirt and loosen your tie in the course of a workday.
Merlin: Even like through disco?
Wow.
John: Oh, no, no, no, because this was an insurance company.
John: There was no, this wasn't, you're not here to disco.
John: And my understanding, and I'm pretty sure this is true, that if your boss saw you at lunchtime sitting at a lunch counter with your tie unfastened, that that would be cause for reprimand.
John: Because if you were out in the town having your lunch, you also were a representative of Safeco Insurance.
John: Sure.
John: And that is the kind of thing that Casual Friday and the casualization of professionalism sought to undo.
John: Or, you know, it was regarded as a perk.
John: I work at this company where you can loosen your tie at lunchtime.
John: We're having fun over here.
John: And then that has extended to now, like...
John: Hey, I work at a tech company and I am an engineer so I get to wear a diaper to work.
John: Because engineers are the new prince.
John: And nobody can tell us no.
John: Because we'll make their garage doors go up and down if they push us around.
John: But for me, I see young menswear enthusiasts all the time, and I appreciate the effort, but there's also this self-conscious kind of Peaky Blinders old-timiness.
Merlin: I mean, I don't know a lot about it, but it strikes me that it does approach a costume.
Merlin: Not that that's bad, but it's a little bit like a costume in some ways.
John: Well, so I was thinking about this.
John: At what point will we have come around and some really, really cutting edge new tech company that everybody wants to work for.
John: It's not one of those situations where it's like, how do we get new engineers?
John: Oh, why don't we, you know, why don't we locate ourselves in Tahiti and pay everybody a million dollars because engineers are so hard to find.
John: but a thing where it's like this is the company everybody wants to work at.
John: This is the cool guy place.
Merlin: People want to work there because the work is interesting?
John: The work is interesting.
Merlin: You're doing something you think is important.
Merlin: It's pre-IPO.
John: Oh, sure.
John: All the shit.
John: At what point does some 26-year-old entrepreneur say,
John: Rather than ping pong tables and endless Cheetos in our company workroom, we're all going to wear black suits.
Merlin: Like non-ironic suits?
John: Yeah, that's going to be the dress code.
John: Black suits, like nice black suits, tailored black suits and shoes and ties.
John: We're going to dress like people.
John: Like Don Draper.
John: We're going to dress like Don Draper.
John: Because all of these tech companies that I go visit now, they all have mid-century modern furniture.
John: You know, they all love – they're very conscious of aesthetics.
Merlin: Yeah.
John: But then it's like every single person I see is just Gingham Brothers.
John: You know, they all are dressed like Scott Simpson.
John: Gingham on Gingham.
John: Gingham Brothers.
John: And I'm like, how much – when is it going to happen?
John: Because it surely will.
John: That's some really, really hot company where the leading entrepreneurs in the group are conscious of the fact that they're trying to distinguish themselves.
John: They are a special group.
John: And it's going to be suits at which point does that catch a fire?
Merlin: That's a really good point.
Merlin: And I think... Actually, people have written and talked kind of a fair amount about this.
Merlin: I think one of the things is that it's...
Merlin: For a time, it was a different kind of way of telegraphing – in Silicon Valley anyway, it was a way of telegraphing your power – was that Steve Jobs was not going to show up in any monkey suit.
Merlin: No, no.
Merlin: A black mock turtleneck is no monkey suit.
Merlin: Yeah, but you just got to deal with him because he's Steve Jobs and that's how he rolls.
Merlin: But there's an article that went around last week where Eddie Cue –
Merlin: The guy at Apple who's been trying to negotiate all their deals with the TV places to try and get like over the top.
Merlin: You basically can get it's like having imagine having cable except, you know, without having to have cable.
Merlin: But he's been meeting with people like kind of more, you know, San Francisco is kind of West Coast more than Los Angeles in some ways.
Merlin: Los Angeles is still kind of a business town.
Merlin: It's a little bit more like New York.
Merlin: And like he showed up in like gym shoes with no socks.
Merlin: And apparently it really put off the people that he was meeting with.
John: Oh, I bet it did.
John: Yeah, it did.
Merlin: So, I mean, I guess what I'm saying is, like, I think part of it, part of it is this, like, there's this ethos in several historically, I can't say in the last five years, but historically, Silicon Valley has been about, you know, the sort of the mavericks and the casual people and seeing themselves as being a part of a meritocracy.
Merlin: Right.
Merlin: Where you didn't have, like, you know, ideally, you're there to be known for the quality of what you produce rather than how much you hew to this company's idea of, you know, this IBM-like idea of looking like, you know, the model worker.
Merlin: Like, you could be a real weirdo at a company like that and design one part of this electronic device that is world-changing and, you know, people aren't worried so much about your footwear.
John: I think that's where it started.
John: I don't know if that's where it is now, but I think that's where it started.
John: I think that's where it started too.
John: But, but you know, that, that, that becomes a sort of arms race, an arms race of casual where, uh, pretty soon you are, you are actually demonstrating your power by how much of a slob you are, how much Cheetos dust there is on your black sweatshirt.
John: Yeah.
John: And then, yeah, then we're living in a world where that where, well, the world that I have described many, many times on this program where standards have declined.
Merlin: I remember when the company that funded the dot-com that I was at, a very, very well-known Silicon Valley VC, and on the rare occasion that the guy whose name was in the company came to the office, he— You're talking about Binklestein?
Merlin: Binklestein.
Merlin: He looked like he had just come from the gym, and on top of it, he brought his dog.
Oh.
Merlin: Oh, yeah.
Merlin: Such a power move to bring your dog into somebody's office.
Merlin: Hey, what's up?
Merlin: Can you imagine doing that?
Merlin: Like you going applying for a job and like bringing your dog with you?
Merlin: Bring your dog.
John: You might have to take my shoes off.
John: Oh, that's better.
John: This is my dog Garfunkel.
John: Hey, Garfunkel, sit over there, man.
John: We're doing some deals.
John: Hey, can I get some water for Garfunkel?
John: Well, I told you, right, my lady friend who is in the San Francisco tech world, and she is a lawyer.
John: Oh, I met her.
John: She's nice.
John: Yeah, she's nice.
John: She's a lawyer, and she's on the professional side.
John: And when I first met her, she would go to work in a hoodie and yoga pants.
John: And I'm like, this seems weird to me.
John: This is a large company you work for.
Merlin: And she's doing – here's the other thing.
Merlin: I'm sorry to interrupt you, but also she's doing like real work.
Merlin: She's not sitting around going like, I wonder if we should change the color of the button.
Merlin: She's got to deal with lawsuits and stuff.
John: Oh, yeah.
John: And she's dealing with other lawyers and talking and she's on the executive board or whatever.
John: And she said, and I don't remember if we talked about this, but she said, you have to dress this way because you don't want to make the engineers uncomfortable.
Merlin: Oh, really?
John: Yeah.
John: And I said, what does that mean?
John: And she said, well, the engineers are the most important people.
John: And if you are walking around like dressed up,
John: up, they feel like that's... Like you're being fancy and trying to show them up?
John: Or just that you're... You're putting on airs.
John: You're putting on airs or that you're creating an uncomfortable work environment for them.
John: Okay.
John: And so she said, you know, it's like... And I think there's a little bit of that, we don't have to dress up because it's a meritocracy, but also you don't want to dress up because...
John: There's really – remember the Twilight Zone episode where the kid has magic powers and everybody in the town is super scared of him?
John: They send you out of the cornfield, right?
John: That's right.
John: And super weirdly and his parents too.
John: Everybody is just terrified that he's going to kill them.
John: But the appearance of the town is everybody is super nice and happy and friendly like –
John: Oh, of course.
John: Why don't we all put chocolate sauce on our heads?
John: Great idea.
John: This is great.
John: He's like, mm-hmm.
John: It has that feeling, right, where you walk through and the engineers are like, I don't think that your shoes are creaking too much.
John: It's like, oh, shit.
John: He or she will move to a more new company.
John: Don't offend them.
Yeah.
John: So, yeah, so and I encouraged her over time to think of herself as a member of the professional community and wear shoes that she doesn't also exercise in to work.
John: Women love fashion advice from men.
John: Well, but, you know, if your man is, like, clued in.
John: And, you know, her whole career she's been in tech.
John: So she's never had a female mentor that was like, oh, I like the way you dress.
John: Everybody's just wearing fleece.
John: Fleece from head to toe.
John: And that's true in Seattle, too, in the sense that the billionaires here dress like they're renting kayaks.
John: You know, like they're the guys behind the counter at the kayak rental place.
John: Right.
John: And so there is no dress code in the nicest restaurant in Seattle.
John: You could never say have a blazer because then some billionaire will sweep in.
John: Right.
John: And, you know, with his pet seal –
John: Say hi to Garfunkel.
John: Can I get some water and some fish?
John: For Garfunkel.
John: For Garfunkel, my seal.
John: And so I've had people come visit from the Midwest or from back east and they're like, oh, we're going to dinner.
John: Should I put on something else?
Merlin: Like in New York City.
Merlin: You just don't go out like that.
John: No, you don't.
John: I mean, you know, it's you're going to go out like that.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: I mean, it's you really I don't know.
Merlin: I don't know.
Merlin: I don't know.
Merlin: I don't find it like I don't find like overbearing.
Merlin: But I feel like it's definitely a thing that, you know, you need to maintain a certain appearance.
Merlin: You need to have hard sold shoes with a shine on them.
John: And I just wonder just like whether or not this is whether or not this is a thing where we're.
John: I absolutely think that we all are in the present moment thinking that because this is now and we cannot even see five hours into the future, it's assumed that this will always be the case.
John: But I really do believe that things are cyclical and this will cycle back.
John: There will be another era where –
John: Where there will be a gradual realization that appearances do matter, that that stuff – you're not communicating that you're just a worker bee.
John: You are communicating that you are trying.
John: Let's say trying.
Merlin: Well, it seems at least partly to be –
Merlin: Just use that fabric.
Merlin: But there's also just that sense of, in some ways, the more weird and difficult your life gets, the more important it becomes to you to look wired together right.
Merlin: So I think that ability to look casual or be casual feels tied to a certain kind of status or success.
Merlin: Specifically, I remember...
Merlin: Something like Casual Friday in the 90s where I worked.
Merlin: And it was still kind of a pissing contest.
John: Taco Tuesday?
Merlin: Well, not precisely.
Merlin: But people would come in like, what Tommy Hilfiger shirt were you wearing?
Merlin: Like when you were doing Casual Friday, meaning mostly khakis and a shirt with no tie.
Merlin: You know, some guys, like sales guys, would still, they basically dress like they would any other day, except they wouldn't have a jacket and tie.
Merlin: And then the other guys, but they were constantly competing with, like, they reckon, oh, that's that one Jerry Garcia tie.
Merlin: That's that particular, again, Tommy Hilfiger was really big at the time.
Merlin: But it was still, it was still status.
Merlin: You wouldn't come in in, like, a bloister culture.
John: Well, and also, right, there were very, very definite standards of casual Friday.
John: Oh, absolutely.
John: You couldn't wear denim.
John: Yeah, you had to have – you had to be – that was why Dockers became a brand.
John: Dockers was the casual Friday brand.
John: Somebody should give us a PBS special.
John: you know what?
John: Where's my PBS special?
John: Merlin and John go back through Western history.
Merlin: All the things you thought you understood, turns out.
John: Let's talk about Dockers.
John: This episode brought to you by Dockers.
John: I am almost certain that
John: That when this sea change comes, you're right.
John: It will be a reaction to something in the world.
John: And I imagine, you know, I think that this rise of authoritarianism that's happening.
John: in our world and sort of across the world where it seems like, Oh, authoritarianism is fashionable.
John: Now that's really unusual.
John: That seems like a thing that we have for a very long time.
John: All agreed was not, was, you know,
John: not an aspiration we spent a long time actively unless it was somebody a middling level dictator that we needed for their resources land and bases it generally was something that we fought for 60 or so years well and certainly within ourselves we imagined like oh there are little petty despots around the world exactly as you say that we ally with or battle depending on how depending on how much oil is under the sand but in america
John: We're progressing away from despotism.
Merlin: Well, think about all the things we celebrated over the years, thinking in particular the Berlin Wall.
Merlin: And the Berlin Wall, there's a lot of layers to why that felt like a success.
Merlin: One of them was it felt like kind of between that and Glasnost, it felt like the end of Soviet era communist domination or the fear of domination.
Merlin: Like we could kind of exhale.
Merlin: But also just the idea that like this wasn't a divided city anymore.
Merlin: This wasn't a divided Europe anymore.
Merlin: Like I know that's not entirely true, but it felt very symbolic.
Merlin: Which is why the Van Halen song right now was used so often at the time.
John: That's such a great example of how Van Halen was on the bleeding edge.
Merlin: Think about just a few years later, it was all running with the devil.
Merlin: Remember waiting in line for gas, Star Wars?
Merlin: Am I right?
John: But I do.
John: Where's my Netflix show?
John: But I do feel like this weird rise in authoritarianism – everybody is worried about Donald Trump obviously.
John: We can just talk about – Who is that?
Merlin: I'm not familiar with this word.
John: The guy that's on everybody's lips, the A-line of modern fashion, Donald Trump.
John: But I don't think – I think Trump isn't the problem.
John: The problem is that – People who support Trump are the problem.
John: Well, 40 million Americans are going to vote for him.
John: Yeah.
John: Right?
Merlin: And that's for – And every day that passes, they become more certain that they are not going to change their mind.
Merlin: And the more someone tries to change their mind, the less likely they are to change their mind.
Merlin: And that's what our side still doesn't get.
John: But that's 40 million people.
John: That's a lot of people.
John: A lot of people.
John: And so Trump isn't going to win.
John: But those 40 million people have been – are like –
John: happily ready to have a boss, like ready to think about the president of the U.S.
John: as like the big boss, like Idi Amin, you know, like we're going to call him Papa or whatever.
John: We're not that far.
John: No, no, no, no.
John: From a lot of people really like just coming right out and saying.
Merlin: Think about Uncle Joe.
Merlin: Think about Uncle Joe, how people had such mixed feelings about Stalin.
Merlin: On the one hand, there was this this huge part of them that was like absolutely terrified and had members of their family lost.
Merlin: you know, to Stalin, but still had this strange attachment to him.
John: Yeah, he made the trains not run on time.
John: That's right.
John: But Stalin wasn't, we weren't elect, you know, they weren't electing him, but we're going to buy, we're going to voluntarily, it's not going to be Trump, but in the next however many years, that's going to rise, that's going to percolate, and then someone's going to come along who is appealing, who's not, you know, who goes, who's dog whistling, but also taking pages from Trump's book, but he's not repulsive like Trump is.
John: And it could be, you know, and the Nixon in China move would be for it to be a woman.
John: And they're just, you know, with this like, we're going to make America great again model.
John: And then all of a sudden we're going to be, it's going to be very, very different here.
John: America is going to feel like Pink Floyd's the wall.
John: And I think that's when...
John: more severe fashion will come back in because we're going to be using all that fabric for all that docker's fabric for parachutes right we're not going to be able to use that oil and gas that we were formerly using to make um to make t-shirts with like curious tech logos on them we're going to go back to a thing where it's like all white shirts for everybody
Merlin: Did you see this?
Merlin: I just sent you a link.
Merlin: Did you see this thing David Frum wrote in The Atlantic?
John: David Frum in The Atlantic.
Merlin: This kind of, I think, at least to me, this is very related to what we talked about a few episodes ago on the OG Howley's episode that a lot of people liked.
Merlin: And it's called Why Trump Supporters Think He'll Win.
Merlin: And David Frum essentially writes this...
Merlin: in this first person, all in quotes, like, here's the voice of mini-Trump voters.
John: Oh, yeah.
Merlin: And I think something like this is really useful for people to read, because I don't think he's just taking the piss out of people.
Merlin: I think there are so many elements of truth in...
Merlin: in what he's saying that helps us under helps me understand like my big point in this is this is not one group of people this is many many many different individual people who see something many many right i mean that's the part of this is like when you treat this like a movement that's about donald trump you really you really lose the story yeah that's he is this cipher in some ways that everybody can project their desires and fears
Merlin: anger and in some cases hatred but i think hatred is not nearly as big a deal as it looks like the hatred the hatred is what gets people stirred up but it's that feeling of inequity uh and that feeling of being set aside and that feeling of like you know what won't get fooled again like i'm so over thinking this system works yeah so i would encourage listeners to go find this uh say hello to the new boss same right and and basically saying like hey look you know i'm just looking at you know examples throughout here i think it's a very good piece and
Merlin: Everybody talks about this great country and this system, but we feel, some of his supporters feel very left behind by all these things that you want to just kind of patch.
Merlin: Not left behind in a rapture sense.
Merlin: No, not really.
Merlin: But maybe.
Merlin: But I mean even down to – and I'm not saying – I just think this is a thought experiment to read something like this and take yourself out of your own way of thinking and then try to read this as somebody – and not just somebody who's angry and powerful, somebody who's maybe sad and not powerful.
Merlin: And so they're looking for someone to make them feel powerful.
John: So I've been doing this exact thought experiment.
John: recently, not just because of OG Howley's, but I got a, I got a message from our good friend, Dave Eckers, uh, of the, um, of the McSweeney's empire.
John: And he said that he, uh, that the, the description of the pitch was the Trump rallies, the RNC rallies were using a lot of music and
John: to punctuate the event and almost universally the musicians that made that music disapproved of it being used.
Merlin: Big time.
John: And so Eggers was like, let's make an album of music where the songwriter approves of it being used at a Trump rally.
John: So we'll get a bunch of musicians and they'll all write songs intentionally to be used by the Republican Party.
Yeah.
John: Oh, man.
John: It's a very Eggers-y idea.
John: And so, and it's like kind of a rush thing.
John: And you remember his Dictionary for a New America and Soundtrack for a New America that happened a long time ago now.
John: I think during the election for the second George W. Bush election, right?
John: That would have been 2004.
John: or 2000, yeah, 2003, 2004.
John: It rings a bell.
John: And actually that record was the debut appearance of The Commander Thinks Aloud.
John: The Commander Thinks Aloud as mixed and shepherded by John Flansburg.
John: So it was before it was released.
John: And it was put on this album of tunes done by Barsouk and Eggers as a kind of support for not Bush.
John: And so it's this new idea.
John: And so I went upstairs and started writing a song for inclusion on this record.
John: And I didn't want to do – because a lot of my friends, fellow musicians are going to be on the album and it's like the stated sort of –
John: mission is I know the other songwriters.
John: I know how it's going to be interpreted by them or I assume I know because it's so open-ended.
John: It's like write a song for the RNC and I'm kind of guessing what we're going to get from everybody.
John: And I was like, you know, I'm going to write a song that I'm going to try and write what is like really an, really an anthem for them.
John: Not a song that's like, screw you guys.
John: Here's your song.
John: I hope you choke on it.
John: But like, yeah, this is the song that a Trump supporter would write.
John: And so of course it sounds like a little bit of Tom Petty and a little bit of John Cougar Mellencamp.
John: And I'm writing this tune in the voice of somebody who's just fed up, you know, fed up with like the DMV and fed up with the nanny state.
John: The real thanks Obama song.
John: And about three quarters of the way through writing it and singing it, it started to feel very dangerous because...
John: It was like a – Horse vessel lead?
Merlin: Yeah, a little bit.
John: Yeah, we can rally around this.
John: We've been aggrieved.
John: And I was trying very hard not to sing it in a like, yeah, I'm going to get back to America.
John: Support our troops.
Yeah.
John: Thank you for your service.
John: I wasn't going to do that.
John: I wasn't going to Nashville it.
John: I was going to sing it because a lot of that RNC stuff that they choose is just rock and roll music.
John: It's not trying to be country.
John: And so I was writing it as a Tom Petty song.
John: So kind of rootsy.
John: Rootsy.
John: And I was getting into just the whole write a rock song thing.
John: Is it in C or G?
John: Good question.
John: It is in C. Okay.
John: And just enjoying myself and writing a rock song, and I was trying to make the lyrics not exaggerated for comedic effect.
John: You don't want to be too on the nose about it.
John: Too on the nose, and so it obviously is a sarcastic tune.
John: I was ratcheting it back so that it also was sort of dog-whistly,
John: You know, you say like urban problems or make America great again in order to camouflage your racism.
John: And it was turning into a good song with a chorus.
John: Weapons grade parody.
John: America, I'm proud.
John: I'm proud.
John: Like I'm proud of my heritage.
John: I'm not a bigot, but I'm proud of my heritage.
John: Sure.
John: It's like this song is going to get on the radio.
John: And it was this same kind of Froome thing of like, get inside that mind and it's internally consistent.
John: And it does evoke feelings of pride and American exceptionalism and all this stuff.
John: And it was like, I'm very curious to see how this song turns out.
Merlin: But it sounds like if I'm hearing you, as the song took shape,
John: and started to feel more like a song or even potentially a good song that was it was kind of troubling to you well in the sense that you don't want it to be too too good as i was writing the lyrics i was conscious of of you know very i was i was very into the art of of camouflaging the true meaning by using sort of platitudinal language and
John: And the and it was very it was very obvious to me and hilarious, like certain words, but also certain word order where.
John: you were describing situations in a, in a, in a very colored way, right?
John: Like why should, why, if somebody worked to build a small business, who are we to tell them who they can serve type of thing?
John: Where as, as the language got, as I was honing it more and more, then I forgot.
John: And then, then the fourth time I was singing it, trying to get the melody right.
John: I forgot the irony.
John: I forgot I was being clever because the platitudes are just easy to sing and the platitudes themselves are hard to disagree with.
John: Yeah, I do support our freedoms.
John: Right.
John: So third or fourth time through, I was just singing it.
Merlin: Or even that, you know, think about most patriotic songs have something that, you know, talk about the greatness of the country, but also then that we are under threat and we deal with that because we have to, because what we got here can't go away.
John: That's right.
Merlin: Which is not – I mean that's the Star Spangled Banner.
John: Well, sure.
John: And that's really a lot of love songs too.
John: We've got to defend our love against all of the things that are going to keep us apart.
Merlin: I think when people are trying to do a parody – sometimes when people are trying to do a parody of these dum-dums that support Trump in their mind, I think they get the tone of it a little bit wrong because the tone of Donald Trump –
Merlin: The reason people like Donald Trump is because they articulate something.
Merlin: He articulates something that they have trouble articulating on their own.
Merlin: He's doing it well.
Merlin: It's no different than Ann Coulter or Rush Limbaugh at a different time.
Merlin: I think what you miss is the sadness and the hurt.
Merlin: And yeah, a little bit about feeling threatened.
Merlin: But the feeling threatened is what comes through in Donald Trump's rhetoric.
Merlin: The rhetoric of these people on the streets is everything has changed so fast.
Merlin: Nothing is getting better.
Merlin: And I feel really threatened, and I feel sad, because the things that used to be a tradition that everybody in my community and family understood have gone away, and now I feel under threat.
Merlin: Now, you can agree or disagree with that emotion, but we've all had that emotion, and we can understand that emotion.
Merlin: It's not even that far off of a song about your ex-girlfriend.
Merlin: But to get the tone right, it can't just be angry.
Merlin: It can't just be jingoistic.
Merlin: It has to be about how something—it's got to be almost more like a ballad,
Merlin: where like something precious is going away.
Merlin: It might be too late to save it, but we have to try.
Merlin: But that's, you know, do you follow what I'm saying though?
Merlin: I mean, I think people focus so heavily on all this.
Merlin: They call it racism.
Merlin: They call it hatred.
Merlin: They call these things.
Merlin: That's what Donald Trump says.
Merlin: That's not what all of these people that you meet at a rally say.
John: And that's why if we don't get that right, we're going to fuck this up hard.
John: They feel under threat because, you know, in a lot of cases they legitimately are.
John: There's quite a bit of culture...
John: on the internet now that says white men can't complain about their problems yeah you're not you're not allowed to you're not allowed to participate in this let alone be mad about this yeah right i mean you just told me a minute ago that i wasn't you know that women uh just love to have men comment on their clothes and that is a within our culture right that's a that's that's not really what i said but you know don't take it but you know like that's that we consider just for other women let's be honest
John: That we consider that a legitimate critique and a, and, and something that we say in good humor to one another.
John: Right.
John: But, but that, that voice is, you know, you transmit it through three cultural apertures and somebody out in the world is just like, what, I can't, I'm not allowed to say anything anymore.
John: And they do, they feel like it's all being directed at them, all targeted at them because in, on, on the West coast,
John: It's not considered radical that we would try and have diversity.
John: But in Oklahoma, what that effectively means is that they're no longer – it's mandated now that they not be able to do business the way they always have.
Merlin: And that's, again, part of this heuristic, though, and this could be a, I don't know if you call it a coincidence, or it's not causative, but so many things have changed.
Merlin: Look at the way that it's more difficult than ever for somebody who does not have the right kind of college education to know they can get a good job.
Merlin: If you have a good college education and you've got debt, that's still, that's a pretty tough gig.
Merlin: But for people who don't have that, the things that used to be, right, wrong, or otherwise, just hear me out.
Merlin: The things that used to be in place, whether that was tradition, whether that was cultural, whether that was family, whether that was familiarity, like alongside all of those kinds of economic things going away, now alongside that, and probably coincidentally, it's becoming more diverse.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: Which feels threatening.
Merlin: That's threatening to people.
Merlin: If you live in Washington or New York or Seattle or San Francisco, I mean, it's great to be in a diverse community and you're used to that because that's what's there.
Merlin: That if you see your economy going down as people of different backgrounds are coming around or you see them being fought for when you feel not fought for.
Merlin: I don't think that's that difficult to understand.
Merlin: I'm not saying it's right, but I don't think it's impossible to understand.
Merlin: And if you refuse to try to understand it, you're going to lose, lose, lose this race.
John: Particularly because the diversity that we're trumpeting in our West Coast cities is still not...
John: Truly diversity, right?
John: I mean, we are also struggling even in the hotbed of like intellectual pursuit, intellectual and practical pursuit of a world devoid of discrimination.
John: We're a long way from it.
John: And so at the theoretical level, we're pushing, pushing, pushing to expand the franchise and to be as radical as we can be in terms of trying to be inclusive.
John: And so people out in the center of the country...
John: are already struggling with the amount of diversity that we were aspiring to in 1982.
John: Alongside infrastructure that is fucking falling apart.
Merlin: Right.
Merlin: The idea, I heard this, I'm just parroting something I heard in the last few days, but, you know, it's, you know how the,
Merlin: the record industry and a lot of entertainment industry got a really false idea of what was possible with CDs because of the mid to late nineties that became their unintentional benchmark for what music sales should be.
Merlin: And when that, so that, this is another funny coincidence of history that right at the time that CDs were the most profitable, there was an under never been a spike in sales of music.
Merlin: Like there had been with CDs and it had never been as profitable.
Merlin: And instead of saying, wow, we had a good half decade.
Merlin: They said, I guess this will keep going for 20 years.
Merlin: And when it went away,
Merlin: in two years they were totally blown away that's not dissimilar from from what we're talking about here well and i i worry all the time and i think a lot of us do if you think the 70s if you think the 70s in most normal cities the early 70s late 60s if you think living in detroit in the 60s was the benchmark for what you could expect from an urban city you have the wrong idea you had a lucky break for a while i worry about twitter
John: Twitter, the company?
John: Well, no, I don't care about Twitter, the company.
John: But we have invested so much of our lives in Twitter.
John: And the benchmark, and a lot of us are still back in 2010 or 2011.
John: And we've been sounding the death knell for this cultural marketplace since 2011.
John: But it's still there.
John: I still go there multiple times a day.
John: And I still put, in some ways, my best thoughts there.
John: Or at least, you know, or at least I am trying there.
John: Within Twitter, I'm trying and have been now for years.
John: Like we're coming up on what?
John: not 10 years yet.
John: Yeah.
John: Yep.
John: Yep.
John: 10 years.
John: It's coming up, you know?
John: And so you think about how long Twitter has been very central, both to my news gathering, my it's just, it's, it's still in a lot of ways, socializing, unwinding, making friends.
John: Yeah.
John: Very, very key.
John: And, and so each one of these new, uh, social media, uh,
John: incursions, Snapchat being the latest, uh, like it threatens my club and I, and I'm very afraid with each decline in the quality of Twitter and each, and we've just weathered, I think a period where it was just, it was, it had become so toxic there that, but we kept, we all stayed there and
John: Or a lot of the people that make up my world are still there and still tweeting at each other.
John: And some have dropped away.
John: I don't see... Colton is barely there.
John: Hodgman is much less there.
John: But I'm still tweeting.
John: I'm still tweeting.
John: And I'm very... What you tweet is Instagram, though.
Merlin: You're not putting out as many words as you used to, for sure.
John: That's true.
John: That's true.
John: My tweets are not as good.
John: And, you know, I always hated people that tweeted links to their Tumblr.
John: I don't want to go to your Tumblr.
John: But now I'm out there tweeting links to my Instagram.
Merlin: It's not a positive sign that, yeah, what you're describing.
Merlin: But I mean, like, well, I...
Merlin: Right.
Merlin: To seem sensitive.
Merlin: But I mean, we have to say that I feel like I have to say, yeah, there are a lot of people who just left because they had to because they got chased off of Twitter.
Merlin: It's us in a more privileged position sitting here who can say like, wow, sometimes I really feel like leaving here.
Merlin: But we don't face anything like what some other people face.
Merlin: Like for us, it's like, oh, my God, this is so boring or this got mean if I look in this area.
Merlin: But we don't get the same kind of treatment that a lot of people get.
John: Well, it's true, but we also have really, really truncated what we say in our language.
John: I mean, I know you and I both tweet within a modern context where it isn't just a question of being actually sensitive to other people and actually –
John: Actually changing ourselves in a positive way where we understand that there's responsibility to broadcasting, but also just fear of tweeting something that absolutely makes sense.
John: But if it is potentially misunderstood by the 2% of people that are looking for a problem –
John: You know, it's just not worth the effort.
Merlin: Well, if you're not, I mean, there's a time when I was much more confident for a variety of reasons in trusting that whatever I said would be understood in a certain tone, in a certain context, by people who are familiar with certain references.
Merlin: And so there was a time when I would be a little bit more ambitious about what I was doing.
Merlin: But I do feel, and I'm not saying this is always bad, but one thing definitely that has changed is I'm trying to be more sensitive to not saying things that are hurtful without knowing I'm doing it.
Merlin: And like, you know, I don't want to be hurtful.
Merlin: I don't want to be unkind to people.
Merlin: And that's just a personal change that I hope is reflected on Twitter.
Merlin: Sure.
Merlin: To specific people in particular.
Merlin: But you just can no longer trust that people are going to understand what you meant to say and who you were saying it to.
John: Right.
Merlin: And when you get that wrong unintentionally or usually unintentionally, like there are such ramifications to that now.
John: Yeah, and all it has to do is go one iteration out from what you consider your family, and, you know, it's broadcast.
Merlin: Pretty soon it's a lot of guys in suits and ties in their avatar.
Merlin: Oh, boy, here they come.
Merlin: Here comes the suits and ties.
John: A lot of guys with the American flags in their avatar.
Merlin: I don't know.
Merlin: I get the most trouble.
Merlin: I defy people to show me differently, but the most trouble I get is from guys whose picture is either them with a girl, presumably, or God bless you if you have that as your photo, but a lot of people within a suit and tie.
Merlin: The tie people cause the problems for me.
Merlin: Interesting.
Merlin: I get a lot of like, well, no, actually Bernie Sanders is a sellout from those guys.
John: I see.
John: I see what you're saying.
John: There is absolutely an element of people swinging in on a vine, insulting me.
John: And then when I say goodbye, they go, oh, well, I guess you're not interested in a debate.
John: And I go, no, I'm not.
John: And they say, well, why are you publishing this?
John: Why are you broadcasting?
John: Law.
John: Law.
John: Why are you publishing?
John: Why are you going into the public sphere if you're not prepared to deal with every single monkey that comes at you?
John: And it's like, look, man, I'm not coming to your Twitter feed and talking to you about your shit.
John: This is not a public service, right?
John: I am not obligated to you.
John: This is my place and it made it to you.
John: And now you've replied and goodbye.
John: Fuck you.
Merlin: Just because you figured out how the door works doesn't mean you get to come in and shit on my couch.
John: Yeah.
John: But I don't know.
John: But I can't see the future either.
John: And every once in a while I don't mind a little shit on my couch.
John: But looking five years from now.
John: and trying to imagine what my relationship is to this new public world.
John: I was talking to Dave Bazon the other day, and he said his new goal for himself is for the next five years to release an album every January 22nd.
John: Wow.
John: And I was like, it was very inspiring to me.
John: Dave works very hard.
John: What's the significance of that date?
John: I don't believe there is one, or at least he didn't communicate that there was one, and that would be one of the things he would have communicated.
John: I think he just said it arbitrarily.
John: But...
John: You know, looking ahead five years.
John: That's ambitious.
John: To the idea that he will have released five records.
Merlin: It's ambitious to say you're going to do one.
Merlin: It's ambitious to say you're going to do more than one, but it's really ambitious to put yourself on that particular unerring schedule.
Merlin: That's a lot to do.
John: It's a lot to do, and it feels like an act against vanity in the sense that
John: If it's coming out January 22nd, that means you have to be done with it August 22nd because it takes that long now to manufacture stuff.
John: And so if you have to be done with 10 songs by August 22nd, you have to not be vain about your songs or you cannot be precious about them.
John: You have to just be like, this song is done, moving on.
Merlin: Yeah, it's like you're making burgers and you're not going to be judged on the one great burger you made this year.
Merlin: You're not going to have a business if you don't keep putting burgers out.
John: And that seems great to me and like crazy, but like crazy in a great way.
John: But thinking about how five years ago I would have tried to promote a new album if I'd had one five years ago.
John: And thinking about how I would try to promote it now.
John: I cannot imagine how I'm going to try and promote it five years from now.
John: Particularly if I make one a year, which I almost certainly will not.
John: But...
John: But even now, five years ago, I would have used Twitter a certain way.
John: Now it's sort of like every single day I log on and my friends are trying to promote their things.
John: Nobody's listening.
John: Are we going to retire?
John: Are we at the age now where we're going to gradually recede from that scene?
John: And partly I think that's why I signed up for Snapchat today because I'm not quite ready to be over on Twitter with the olds and not be inexplicably on Snapchat with the news.
Merlin: Sure.
John: But I don't know how many more of those –
John: progressions I'll be able to make just because probably the next one will require a knowledge of references that will exclude me.
Merlin: The next one's the one your daughter will be on.
John: Yeah, or maybe not her, but there will be that interregnum where it's still... She's going to be on it sooner than you think.
John: Maybe so.
John: If she can climb her way out of the padded room in the basement where she lives.
...
Merlin: Let daddy have his parade.