Ep. 333: "The Turtle Just Goes"
Merlin: What happened?
Merlin: I'm so fucking mad.
Merlin: Now it's recording.
Merlin: God damn it.
Merlin: It was great.
Merlin: Call recorder was just grayed out.
John: It was great.
Merlin: Oh, no.
Merlin: Shit, that was so fucking good.
Merlin: Call recorder was... The whole time it was?
Merlin: Or when did it stop?
Merlin: So basically, while we're recording, I glanced down, as I do, to see... Oh, don't do that.
Merlin: Don't glance.
Merlin: Well, I just glanced down to see where we were, and call recorder was...
Merlin: in the do you want to record state but grayed out as in like it wouldn't let me record for some reason now it's recording fuck me gently jesus christ what do you want to do now did you go back and listen a little bit to see where it stopped no it wasn't recording the whole time the entire entire fucking thing now here's the thing so our genius episode unless you are you recording on your end
John: shit the genius episode that we were almost one hour into yes is like tears and rain it's fucking tears and fucking rain and i'm so sorry i don't know why it ate the booger i didn't change anything now are you recording right now i am well see then this is the show what's in the show is in the show oh my god i know i know we we
John: I know.
John: We covered it all.
John: We basically covered it all.
Merlin: Oh, my fucking God.
Merlin: I'm so sorry.
Merlin: This is actually not my fault for once.
John: Listen, I am not bothered by it because you know what?
John: Yeah.
John: Hashtag aloha.
John: Oh, shit, you're right.
John: Now, there are going to be people out there.
John: There are going to be people.
John: Jokin in Germany and Captain Miriam are going to say, well, now, wait a minute.
John: What do you mean you covered it all?
Merlin: They're going to wonder, right?
Merlin: Okay, I'm going to give you an option at this point.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: Here's your option.
Merlin: The option is we do not have a or any sponsors this week.
Merlin: oh interesting so if you choose and you can i will however you want to do this is fine i'm still so fucking mad i want to spit uh if you want to if you want to skip this one especially given this frustration that would be fine and you would not but i am but i'm not frustrated you're not how are you not frustrated because hashtag aloha merlin
John: Jesus fucking Christ.
John: There are so many things that I am constantly living on the very razor's edge of what you're talking about right now, which is, was that recording?
John: Really?
John: Wait a minute.
John: Does all of this count?
John: Like everything I do, I'm like, wait a minute.
John: Does this count?
Merlin: I mean, you know what?
Merlin: I need Aloha because all I can, we had, it was so, there was so much there.
Merlin: I know.
Merlin: Is there any in the tank?
Merlin: We had like almost an hour?
John: Well, the thing is, where we are now is where we are.
Merlin: We're down the beach.
Merlin: John, can you talk me through this?
Merlin: You've got Aloha.
John: Yeah, well, I don't have 100% Aloha.
Merlin: Well...
Merlin: I have some.
Merlin: I feel we lost a lot of potentially classic stuff, and we lost maybe getting a Wikia out of this thing.
Merlin: So walk me through this.
Merlin: How should I be...
Merlin: Are you able to say – you're a little bit of my three-eyed raven right now.
Merlin: I don't know if I'm talking to Bran or I'm talking to the raven, but you tell me, how should I feel about this and how should I – should I even proceed?
Merlin: Given your position with Aloha, should I continue?
John: Well, so I'm confronting this exact thing right at this moment, which is that I put my house for sale as part of, now I have to say, this felt like the culmination of a year's worth of putting my house on for sale.
Okay.
John: Right.
John: You and I've been talking about it for a long time.
John: I've been working on it.
John: We go back to some rebuilding the porch.
John: We got the you know, we put in the new thing.
John: We did the whatever.
John: My mom came in and filled all the nail holes with toothpaste.
John: There was a lot of this.
John: There was a lot of that.
John: There's talk about moving to a new mid-century house where I don't have any swords.
John: All of this.
John: It's all going in my head.
John: And you know how I am about thinking.
John: I do.
Yeah.
John: You know, I sit and think.
John: So I'm thinking, I'm thinking.
John: I go to the thrift store the other day.
John: There was a powder blue radio that was a tube radio from 1955.
John: And I turned it on in the thrift store and it was like, and then the radio came in because I was moving the knob and there was actual terrestrial radio through a tube tube.
John: And I was like, I have to buy this thing.
John: It was $5.
John: And I bought it because it's a powder blue space age radio that is going to go in my new house that's all made out of glass and whatever else.
John: And then I so I put my house on sale.
John: Everybody high fives me all around the world.
John: There's a website that puts it up and they're like, hey, guess what?
John: Marc Maron is selling his house and so is John Roderick.
John: Lol.
John: And I was like, wow, there's me.
John: You know what I mean?
John: Like, there it is.
John: It really made it.
John: Yeah.
John: Yeah.
John: There's going to be so many people rolling up on my house, just throwing bags of money at me.
John: I'm going to have a house full of space age radios.
John: And then nobody makes an offer.
John: And at the end of the week, at the end of the week, on the following Thursday, I woke up in the morning and I stretched all like a big bear.
John: And I was like, got a busy day today.
John: Going to have to go look at the 10 offers on my house and pick the one that appeals to me most.
John: So if there's like, if the high one is some kind of developer, I'm going to say no.
John: And I'm going to pick the one where they wrote me a nice letter.
John: And they were like, we keep a small bag pack.
John: Can we buy your house?
John: And I was like, all morning.
John: And at about one o'clock in the afternoon, I was like, huh, I kind of expected a phone call by now telling me that they had to stop taking offers because it was overloading their system.
John: And about five o'clock at night, I talked to the real estate agent.
John: She's like, we didn't get any offers.
John: Not a single offer.
John: Not any offers in the market that you're in.
John: At what I consider to be a very low price point for the house.
Merlin: I was shocked when I saw that.
John: We had like 120 people come through the various open houses.
John: She was like, this is a big, big, big event.
John: I was a hot home on Reddit.
John: They put me on the news in Seattle.
John: Not a single off.
John: And I was like, did the excitement freak everybody out?
John: And she's like, we have no idea.
John: Nobody has any idea.
John: So another week went by where all of that happened all over again.
John: At the end of the week on Thursday, I woke up in the morning.
John: I wasn't a little I didn't stretch like a bear at this point.
John: I woke up and I was like, hey, don't risk it.
John: Don't risk tentatively stretching like a dorm house.
John: I call her.
John: I'm like, so?
John: She's like, not a single offer.
John: Oh, my God, John.
John: So here we are into week three.
Oh, my God.
John: No offers.
John: Nobody understands why.
John: And what I'm confronted with, Merlin, like you and I, who just did a classic episode of our show.
Merlin: Am I exaggerating, John?
John: Was that potentially a classic episode?
John: It was a classic episode.
John: And it turns out it's not recording.
John: Oh, my God.
John: What happened to me was I spent a year getting ready to sell my house and buy a new house and move into that new house full of tube-powered radios and clocks that look like a sun, clocks that look like a sunshine, and couches that are too low to comfortably sit on but that look great from across the room.
John: Blonde wood?
John: Blonde wood.
John: I was going to have one of those Ames chairs that is impossible to get comfortable in.
John: There's no posture that you can get comfortable in one of those, but they're very pretty.
John: They sure are, yeah.
John: And all of a sudden, it's not just that my house doesn't have any offers on it.
John: It's that my dream doesn't have any offers on it.
Merlin: Oh, my God.
John: A year's worth of dream that involved a thousand moving pieces all...
John: is like,
John: the the number one the first like not the first because i've been working on it i've fixed up my freaking house and you know it's like the universe like you don't even know if they got the call you know nobody picked up but but did the universe even get the call so here's the thing i can't be mad at the real estate agent she did a great job i can't be mad at myself because i did a great job i can't be mad at the world because the world how are you going to be mad at the world i spent enough time doing that sure sure sure it's nobody's fault okay
John: It's not even mine.
John: It's not even nobody's fault but mine.
John: It's not even mine.
John: It's just like nobody's fault.
John: And then there's no like – it doesn't even resolve.
John: And so every morning I wake up and I'm like, what do I dream about now?
John: Like I got this clock.
John: The clock doesn't – or I've got this radio.
John: It doesn't go with the old house.
Yeah.
John: And so I'm like, do I just move back into my house?
John: It's a nice house.
John: I like living there.
John: Especially now, huh?
Merlin: Yeah, it's really pretty.
Merlin: You got kind of a hard reboot of your house.
Merlin: You can go any direction you want now.
Merlin: My shit's in the storage.
Merlin: I'm like, shit, this place is pretty nice.
Merlin: It's pretty nice, right?
Merlin: I could live here.
Merlin: The photos are, I don't like to talk about the house on the show, but it is in the show.
Merlin: And the photos that I saw were stunning.
Merlin: What they did with that joint is crazy.
Merlin: They make it sound so nice.
John: And the thing is, they decorated it with all my own stuff.
John: So they could just leave.
John: They could just pull up their sign and take their business cards with them.
John: And that's my house.
Merlin: Wow.
Merlin: You would kind of get a new home in an existential way.
John: Right.
John: But I...
John: But that wasn't my dream going into this.
John: And the thing is, I don't need to sell my house.
John: It's not like I got a job offer somewhere.
John: It's not like I'm in financially bad straits.
John: It was just a dream.
John: I was just like, oh, let's move up.
John: Like go to the east side with a treehouse apartment in the sky or whatever.
Merlin: This is the part that I find so resonant for me is what you're describing.
Merlin: I don't know if this is the right word for it, but it's sort of like a misaligned expectation in some ways where you think about all the stuff that you've done over however long –
Merlin: So not even including the part where you're like, hmm, however long you thought, hmm, I wonder if I should sell my house and get something different, even before you did anything overtly like an action to get that in motion.
Merlin: We've got to get through the John thinking part, which is, I'm guessing, probably for a pretty long time.
Merlin: But then you get to that point, and you're doing and doing.
Merlin: There's more and more.
Merlin: There's a snowballing.
Merlin: And I imagine, I can only guess, but I imagine it felt like once the expectation...
Merlin: is that once you got to the point where it was done on the market, well, now it's like the replacement sale over but the shouting.
Merlin: Like, you've got, right?
Merlin: I mean, you get up to that line of like, okay, right, we're ready to sell the house.
Merlin: And now it's just a question of like, who's going to buy it?
Merlin: And it's very disruptive that your expectation...
Merlin: got realigned that hard.
Merlin: Not that your expectation was wrong, but like it wasn't 100% right.
Merlin: And that must be very, it must leave you somewhat unmoored about like what the fuck you're actually doing.
John: Well, it's almost exactly like recording a classic episode of this show and then tears and raining it.
Merlin: It's not even a metaphor.
Merlin: It's worse than a metaphor.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: What are you clinging to?
Merlin: You know what I mean?
Merlin: The John Syracuse material.
Merlin: It just never went anywhere.
Merlin: It's not there.
Merlin: Marco Arment.
Merlin: Marco Arment, the Corvette.
Merlin: We talked about blood.
John: We talked about... Conflating our Walton shong, bespoke onomatopoeia, online burlesque.
John: Online burlesque, that's right.
John: We talked about being a non-player character in Fortnite.
John: And so the thing is, all I harken back to is the turtle practices non-attachment because the water, the ocean, does not let the turtle fixate on any one piece of seaweed.
John: As soon as the turtle goes in to take a bite of seaweed, the water comes in and just moves them along.
Merlin: It's like literally living in a Heraclidian world.
Merlin: You're literally in the water.
Merlin: It's never the same ocean.
Merlin: And the turtle does not know.
John: Oh, shit.
Merlin: He hasn't seen that David Foster Wallace video called This is Water.
Merlin: He just knows I am turtle, if he knows that.
John: That's it.
John: The turtle has never gone on a cruise ship and knows that he's never going to do it again.
John: Okay.
John: The turtle didn't write a long essay about that.
John: The turtle has never tried to eat seaweed that wasn't on a rock underwater.
John: Yeah.
John: So, you know, it's just like the two bacteria making champagne that drown in their own sugar poop.
John: And they never realize it.
Merlin: So it goes, yeah.
John: They never realize it made champagne.
John: That's right.
Okay.
John: It's one of these situations.
John: And so what can I do except either move back into my house and just say aloha?
John: Or sell it for, I don't know what, less than I thought, which is also I just want it to feel like a distressed property.
Merlin: And you can't just leave it.
Merlin: I mean, I don't know if this has changed since my mom was a real estate person, but you don't just leave a house on the market for three years.
Merlin: Like there's generally a certain amount of time for the contract.
Merlin: And you're like, okay, let's try again.
Merlin: We got to figure out what we got wrong.
John: Well, or what we got right, my sister is like, the universe didn't want you to.
John: And I'm like, stop right there.
John: Stop right there.
John: The universe doesn't... I don't think the universe wants anything.
John: No, it does not telegraph its intentions.
Merlin: That's what makes it the universe in some ways.
John: Well, and also...
John: The ocean does not care.
John: It is not antagonistic toward me.
John: It just doesn't care whether I live or die, right?
John: If I drown— The boot has no quarrel with the ant.
John: Mm-hmm.
John: Recissement, as we say on this show, which you would know because it would have its own wiki.
John: Yeah, why can't—how do you get a wiki?
Merlin: It would be right there.
John: Recissement, right?
John: It would have its own wiki.
John: Somebody made me a— That's like three different pages right there.
John: Somebody made me, they didn't make me a hat.
John: Here's the thing.
John: I have a hat that says entrepreneur.
John: And it was an expensive hat that was handmade by somebody in Hawaii.
John: And it was purchased to me, purchased for me by a millennium girlfriend because she thought it would be hilarious that I was wearing a baseball hat that said entrepreneur because the only other people that had them, it was a custom hat.
John: The only other people that had them were some San Jose entrepreneur types.
John: It was a thing that some dickheads had.
John: And she got me one.
John: She's dressing you up like a kitty cat.
John: She was like, you're going to be a dickhead in this and it's going to be hilarious.
John: And so I got it and I like it.
John: I like it.
John: It's got that weird flat brim that makes you look like you're on a baseball team.
John: But like you're also a little hip hop.
John: Oh, like a little bit of vanilla ice.
John: Yeah, it's not the kind of thing that I would normally wear.
John: But but she was correct that it was just hilarious enough.
John: And so she, I think, took a picture of me and put it on the Internet where it said entrepreneur and someone else.
John: Someone I do not know.
John: I cannot tell you who they are.
John: They photoshopped it.
John: So instead of entrepreneur, it says precise mole.
John: Now, with all the accents and everything.
John: And now what I want, I've never wanted anything more.
John: What I want.
John: You know how many wikis that would have?
Merlin: You would have to do it.
Merlin: And once again, like you didn't hear in the fucking episode that didn't record.
Merlin: See, you can go and find out every time that Griffin McElroy says in the Japanese style, but you can't find out how many times John Roderick said precise mole.
John: Now, wait a minute.
John: Was the interpants on the internet, is that us or was that them?
Merlin: Was that this episode or the one we lost?
Merlin: Which one?
Merlin: Was it here or was it there?
Merlin: You know what I'm realizing, John?
Merlin: You could tell me how wrong I got this, but there's a thing a person can think about, which is when you get into a certain state of mind, I don't know which state of mind it is, but there's a certain state of mind where you find yourself, one finds oneself maybe noticing that one is angry.
Merlin: And sometimes when one is angry, one tries to direct, like, what is it that I'm angry about?
Merlin: Who am I angry at?
Merlin: What situation is causing the anger?
Merlin: And then sometimes when you really get down to it, you realize you're angry at nothing.
Merlin: in some ways, which is a good sign that you're probably mad at yourself.
Merlin: And I think sometimes the universe, such as it is, serves as an anger sink, and we're mad at whatever.
Merlin: Like, it is anger in search of a source, and the poor universe is going to be the one who receives it.
Merlin: I feel like, and I could get this wrong, but in your turtle wisdom, I think part of what you're saying here is it doesn't make sense to be mad at
John: the universe or nothing let alone anything because it's not going to sell your fucking house exactly but but there's a but there's another element please it doesn't make any sense to be sad oh but please continue can't be you can't be mad we know that but you also can't be sad for the same reason
John: The turtle is not sad about being moved along.
John: The turtle just goes on to the next piece of seaweed.
John: Or not.
John: Or not.
John: The turtle just goes.
John: So what am I sad about?
John: I've been very sad.
John: I was laying on a bed for an entire day, but not laying on my back staring up at the ceiling.
John: I was laying on my front.
John: I was...
John: I was laying on the front and I was just – my head was off the end of the bed and I was staring at the floor.
John: Oh, no.
Merlin: You sound like a Peanuts character.
John: Yeah, with the light off but with the door cracked so there was enough light coming in that I could see the floor to stare at.
John: So I wasn't just staring into the darkness.
John: I spent a whole day like that.
John: And now I'm like, well –
John: If you can't be mad, you can't be sad, bro.
Merlin: You can't be mad, you can't be sad.
Merlin: Once you let go of being mad, because in my, another great word we lost, Weltanschauung, in my unified field theory, I feel like anger is the terminus for most feelings and most emotions.
Merlin: Like once something reaches its illogical conclusion, it ends up at anger.
Merlin: And I don't have time to go into it because we lost.
John: No, I understand.
Merlin: I understand.
Merlin: But I do feel like I do feel like when you're out of other options, you end up with anger.
Merlin: And I do feel like sadness.
Merlin: This is maybe a Kubler-Ross kind of thing, except for life, is that along the path to what will eventually turn into inevitably into anger is sad.
Merlin: And I'm very interested in how one gets less sad.
Merlin: Kabula Montana.
Merlin: Is that right?
Merlin: Kabula Montana, I guess it is.
John: Kabula Montana.
John: Kabula Montana.
John: Which was it?
John: Is it?
John: Well, see, so if Interpants on the internet didn't make it in, how do you not be sad when
John: But at the same time, how can you be sad?
John: How can you be sad?
Merlin: Should I be thinking about what it is that I'm sad about or am I on the wrong track?
John: No, no, I think you're on the wrong track.
John: I think that's what Uncle Jack is doing right now.
John: He's trying to figure out what he's sad about.
John: It doesn't matter.
John: Figuring out what he's sad about.
John: Okay.
John: Doesn't matter.
John: Does not matter.
John: So I was always, so all of my emotions didn't go to anger.
John: They went to catatonia, right?
John: Until I was 38 years old, if something, well, until I was 31 years old, if something affected me in really in any negative way,
John: at all any feeling anxiety anger depression all I did was just shut completely off I was catatonic I just stared at the floor stared at the floor until the people around me got bored trying to get me to respond and they went away and then I would return I would return because there was nobody there asking me anything or looking at me or making me mad or making me anxious or sad does it wear off or like what is the change that makes you stop staring at the floor if you know because those people are not there anymore with their fucking people energy okay
John: OK, because I didn't I didn't know.
John: I didn't know.
John: I didn't know.
John: I had no other way of expressing that emotion.
John: And then when I discovered anger was a thing, was a component.
John: Uh, and then I started being angry.
John: Oh, that was terrible because I was very angry.
John: I didn't realize it that whole time.
John: And now all of a sudden I was angry.
John: I was angry at everything.
John: I was fucking angry at everything, furious.
John: And then I realized, oh, I was scary when I was angry.
John: It's a bad thing.
John: It's, it's, uh, it's bad for other people to be that angry.
Merlin: I've seen you struggle.
Merlin: I've seen you struggle with it.
Merlin: It's, it's, um, it's, it's difficult.
John: Yeah, because you're not sitting on the bed staring at the floor.
John: You're going, argh!
Merlin: Or in some cases with you, you're trying to hold it in.
Merlin: And that makes you emotional in a way that can be scary.
Merlin: I think you're not unusual in that regard.
Merlin: I've been like that.
Merlin: I've been like that so much.
John: So now what am I trying to do?
John: I'm trying to – you don't want to not be angry.
John: You don't want to stop being angry.
John: Right.
John: But you want to get, in some cases, like what am I angry about?
John: Am I yelling at somebody now because of what they did in traffic because really I'm sad about not selling my house?
John: Right.
John: It's a waterfall.
John: It's a – if I can get to a place where I'm not –
John: where my feelings about not selling my house are aloha, then maybe I won't be so grumpy when somebody at the cooperative grocery store doesn't know how to go down an aisle and
John: conscious of the fact there are other people in the space right somebody going down they don't keep moving they don't get out of the way they very definitely do neither thing yep in concert there's a reason it's keep moving and get out of the way yeah that's right and that should be a lot of people think they're good with just one or the other and you're not and if there was a wiki if there were a wiki that would be there it would be right there but we have to let it go okay we have to let it go
John: You know, if it were carved into a piece of burned toast or half of an avocado pit.
John: They're not going to get that reference, John.
John: Right.
John: If somebody listened and paraphrased it, if somebody listened, translated into German and then paraphrased it and put it on their own wiki.
John: Yes.
John: But that's not in the show anymore.
Merlin: It's not in the show.
Merlin: What's not in the show is not in the show.
Merlin: Whoa!
Merlin: Wait a minute.
Merlin: It works both ways.
Merlin: What's not in the show is not in the show.
John: See, that didn't occur to me until...
Merlin: It never.
Merlin: Oh, I heard a podcast the other day.
Merlin: It's a podcast I enjoy a lot.
Merlin: And probably enough, it's called You're Wrong About.
Merlin: And it's probably my favorite Turns Out podcast right now.
Merlin: And it's very good.
Merlin: And they basically go through and talk about something that you think you understood.
Merlin: And based on usually media coverage and police corruption and ineptitude, it's not actually what you thought happened.
Merlin: And it's a very good podcast.
Yeah.
Merlin: And I celebrated Saturday on the anniversary of Columbine by listening to the Columbine episode.
Merlin: And they were talking about like how much stuff people got way, way wrong about Columbine.
Merlin: And turns out most of what they got wrong was shown to be wrong in sometimes a month or less.
Merlin: And in other cases, definitely less than six months.
John: What do we know about Columbine that we're wrong about?
Merlin: Some of the things were like the role of bullying, which I'll come back to in a second.
Merlin: Another one is, I don't want to get too into it because it's super sad.
Merlin: Well, that's their podcast.
Merlin: Well, that's not in the show.
Merlin: But where one of the guys walked up to the girl and said, do you believe in God?
Merlin: And she said yes, and they killed her.
Merlin: She didn't actually say that.
Merlin: It was a conflation of what somebody else said.
Merlin: And then the person who actually heard what they said couldn't come out and say it because they'd written a book about her and all this stuff.
Yeah.
Merlin: But the bully—so I mentioned it.
Merlin: So anyway, go check it out.
Merlin: It's called You're Wrong About, and it's very good.
Merlin: Did the girl that say yes about God, did she become a hero to the God people?
Merlin: And her parents wrote a book, and the evangelicals took her on as a like, if Dylan and Eric had found Jesus, this never would have happened.
Merlin: Look at this girl who's a martyr.
Merlin: And certainly it's horrible.
Merlin: I mean, so it's like anything that's a good turns out, you learn about—
Merlin: how complex everything is that you think you understand.
Merlin: But the bullying part, and I only mentioned this in passing, the thing about the bullying part is something I know and always need to rehear because you get mad at a bully.
Merlin: When somebody harasses your kid or harasses another kid, you're always like, that kid should go to kid jail.
Merlin: That's a bad kid.
Merlin: The thing we all know... The thing we know about kids and forget about, though, or any kind of bully, and it's not fun because it requires sympathy, but bullies do not come from super happy, well-adjusted, communicative families.
Merlin: Seems to be true.
Merlin: Kid bullies in particular...
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: Everybody, almost everybody, including certainly me, felt bullied by the people who were higher status and tougher than them, and then found a way to further humiliate people that were lower status than them.
Merlin: I did that.
Merlin: I own that.
Merlin: I am aware of that.
Merlin: I mean, I didn't threaten people physically, but I was terrible to people, saying awful, awful things to people who I knew did not have any power to fight back.
Merlin: But the bullying comes from somewhere, is what I'm saying.
John: Well, when my dad ran for district attorney...
John: uh of um the state of washington uh he went in uh to the governor this is a long long time ago okay and he said and the governor said you're running for district attorney and my dad said that's right and the uh the governor said you know that's the public prosecutor and i'm i'm i'm paraphrasing this because of course my dad knew it was the public prosecutor yeah it wasn't recorded
John: That's right.
John: I'm just – I'm extrapolating.
John: Are you doing a German paraphrase?
John: Yeah, and my dad said, yes, of course I know that it's the public prosecutor.
John: And the governor said, all right, let me ask you.
John: A guy shoots up a church, let's say.
John: This isn't what he said, but I'm modifying it for the present day.
John: Yes.
John: Because whatever he said –
John: whatever the governor at the time in the 1950s said, it would not resonate with the young people of today.
John: But shooting up a church or, you know, young people would recognize that as a bad crime.
John: And he said, what if a guy shoots up a church and it turns out that that person had a bad childhood, that his father beat him?
John: Would you take that into consideration in the process of prosecuting him
John: on behalf of the state.
John: And my dad said, well, of course.
John: And the governor, who was a Democrat and a liberal Democrat, said, well, David, that is not what we want in a public prosecutor.
Merlin: And... You want somebody who is like a cold indictment machine?
John: Well, no.
John: The...
John: defense attorney is going to try to convince the jury that the fact that the guy had a bad childhood is salient to the question of whether or not he shot up the church.
John: But the state does not have an opinion.
John: The state is not taking into consideration all the mitigating factors.
John: The state has an obligation to prosecute
John: the the criminal person on behalf of the victims and on behalf of the state his job is to prosecute not to consider mitigating or ameliorating evidence that is the jury's job yeah the jury does that after the evidence is presented to them and so the question of um the question of the the
John: guilt or innocence or mitigated innocence of someone who does a crime is not the prosecutor's business.
John: And my dad said, but we're Democrats.
John: We're trying to make the world a better place.
John: And the governor said, even Democrats trying to make the world a better place have an obligation to perform their jobs in the world.
John: And so although a bully in a school may have reasons, almost certainly has reasons, that's also not really always the responsibility of the victim to consider.
John: The victim is not obligated to think about the bully's pain.
Merlin: Part of the prosecutor's job, it seems, and I've just learned this from political Twitter, it seems like part of the prosecutor's job, and this obviously gets used and misused different ways, is like, so a law has supposedly been broken, a person is accused of a crime, what can I prove?
Merlin: Isn't that part of the consideration?
Merlin: What will the evidence show in this case?
John: Well, you have to take that into consideration.
John: You have to share evidence.
John: But again, the state has an obligation to pursue justice on behalf of the person and on behalf of the state itself.
John: The state has interests.
John: The state is not...
John: is not benevolent, nor is it kind.
John: Like the state has interests and those interests are, uh, order and, uh, and like, um, it has to show that it is prosecuting crimes.
Merlin: I mean, that's one role.
John: It has to show that it's prosecuting crimes, right?
John: You cannot have a state that says, well, uh,
John: This, you know, this like shoplifting is OK if you're homeless.
Merlin: In this case, it's not the prosecutor's job to decide whether the law is just.
Merlin: It's their job to see that it's enforced.
John: Correct.
John: And it's the legislature's job to make the law.
John: It is the court's – it is the judiciary's job to decide if the law meets the qualifications of a law, if it's just within the context of the Constitution of the US and of the state.
John: Everybody's got a job.
John: And so a lot of people on the internet feel like the court is unfair or the judges – the cops are unfair.
John: The judges are unfair.
John: They're all – the institutions are unfair.
John: But the institutions all have –
John: governing principles and they're all doing a job you know they're all doing the job that we need them to do not just that not just that bad people want but you know like you cannot unless you are a unless you're truly an anarchist you can't expect there to be no police right you wouldn't want it you really wouldn't want it and you wouldn't want it nearly as much as you think you do right you do not want to live in a world where shoplifters aren't prosecuted
Merlin: and even if they're homeless you don't want to live in that world i guarantee it um it might it might be nice for a couple days but like that's not gonna be a couple of days you'd feel real good about yourself yeah i take that i take that i i i this is to my own discredit um i forget why i brought up columbine and bullying
Merlin: If this is recording, I will go back.
John: Oh, because you were listening to a wonderful show that you liked called You're Wrong About It.
Merlin: I was, but why did I bring that up?
Merlin: It had to do with the deeper issue of this program, if it's being recorded.
John: Did it have to do with the deep web?
John: Did it have to do with the under web?
Merlin: That's the other one, John.
Merlin: They're not going to know.
Merlin: Is that the other one or this one?
John: Well, I think it's me.
John: I think it might be the other one that we talked at length about the undernet.
Merlin: Which said, I'm finding a way to not be as bothered about the overware on the undernet.
Merlin: I'm not going to worry as much about it.
Merlin: I'm trying to get closer to this.
Merlin: And forgive me if I'm flogging a dead Dark Knight horse here.
Merlin: Dark Knight, is that the guy?
Merlin: Is that the blue guy?
John: No, that was the Phantom.
John: We talked a lot about the Phantom.
John: The Phantom, right.
John: We talked about the Phantom.
John: We talked about Phantom Power.
Merlin: And the Phantom Power, yeah.
John: The Revenge of the Phantom Dead, yes.
John: We talked about the power of the Phantom.
Merlin: Troy, I'm making this about me, which is bad, because I want to be a good turtle, or I want to be a turtle.
Merlin: I don't know if you can have a good turtle.
Merlin: That's maybe the law.
John: That's the other thing, do we?
What?
John: Do we want to be the turtles?
John: Are the turtles really our role models?
John: Who would we prefer to be?
John: You want to be the water?
John: I don't know.
John: You don't know.
John: Sometimes you want to be an eagle, don't you?
John: Yes.
John: Sometimes you want to soar with the turkeys?
Merlin: I would take flight over underwater breathing, and that's one way we differ.
Merlin: Would you take flight over invisibility?
Merlin: I think we got that one.
Merlin: What are you going to do?
Merlin: Are you going to fly into a bank and rob it?
Merlin: You land on a fraction?
Merlin: My thing I'm trying to get at, though, is I realize I'm approaching this in a left-brain way that defies aloha, because aloha does not have a brain side as far as I can see, but I'm interested in the idea of the what is it you have the feeling about part.
Merlin: Because that misdirection is the wrong word.
Merlin: That's like a magic word.
Merlin: But the way that we end up landing on something as the source of why we feel how we do feels so innately human and fucked up.
Merlin: The way that we decide that we feel the way we do because X happened or Y might have happened...
Merlin: Do you see where I'm going with this?
Merlin: Maybe I'm just talking about me because this is me, but I feel like that's a big part of turtle life is to not only not be sad, but not be cleft to the idea of what one is sad about.
Merlin: Or to paraphrase from a book that I like a lot, if you focus on your content, you think you're focusing on your content, that's where the anxiety comes from.
Merlin: It's like actually you keep remaking something important because you've decided that it's about your mental content.
Merlin: What you're really sad about or anxious about or mad about, you're mad about your own personal noise that is being generated, about what you perceive to be content.
Merlin: But your brain gets away with that because it's fooled you into believing you're actually being a responsible maester of content.
Merlin: Does that make sense?
Merlin: Yes.
Merlin: And I feel like that's, I don't know if I'm anywhere near turtle life, but I do know that my brain will do a lot of fucking cooking to come up with what caused me to be how I am right now.
Merlin: And if this recorded, that means we started with the, I felt the way I felt at the beginning because the tears in the rain were never caught.
Merlin: So what is it I'm mad about?
Merlin: Right.
Merlin: And I think it seems to go to the notion of Aloha and Pound Sign Turtle life.
Merlin: Because is the turtle anything about anything?
Merlin: If it's not in his show, it can't be in his show.
John: And what is the turtle's show and who's listening to it?
Merlin: That's the other thing.
Merlin: What are the expectations?
Merlin: Does the turtle know what Wikia is and feel like it's overdue that he have one or she have one?
Merlin: I don't know.
Merlin: Well, I mean, right.
Merlin: Is there any way to know what's not in the show if it was never in the show to begin with?
Merlin: What are they going to say?
Merlin: If a tree falls in a podcast, is he a great man?
John: Yeah.
John: Are they going to say he was a kind man or that he was a wise man, that he had plans, that he had wisdom?
Merlin: You know, if you're talking to somebody who's in a very, very, very narrow cage and asking these kinds of questions, you know, I don't think you're always going to get straight answers.
Right.
Merlin: No, you're not.
Merlin: You're not.
Merlin: I mean—
John: Yeah, that's exactly right.
John: I mean, what are you going to do?
John: Are you going to land on a fraction?
John: Are you going to go from Venus or something?
Merlin: I'm already feeling better.
Merlin: I'm not feeling a lot better.
Merlin: We're talking about dialectic physics.
Merlin: Not a lot better, but I'm feeling a little bit better.
Merlin: You know what?
Merlin: I don't know I should probably do anything.
Merlin: I don't know if I should probably do anything.
John: Were you about to say that you should probably make sure that this show is recording?
Merlin: It looks like it's recording, but you know what?
Merlin: Maybe I shouldn't worry about it.
Merlin: Because even though we never collected the tears that were co-mixed with the rain, did anybody get the rain at all?
Merlin: You know what?
Merlin: Maybe it doesn't matter.
John: Maybe it's the friends we made along the podcast.
John: I mean, this is the thing.
John: This past year, were my dreams being recorded?
John: Were they recorded?
John: No.
John: No.
John: No.
John: When I looked back at the recording of the last year... Yeah.
John: i found no waveform it was all grayed out whoa zero k like nothing nothing was nothing was captured to disk so no one is going to talk about the plosives no one marco arment is not going to make any recommendations that dan benjamin uh refutes or or denies yeah uh john is not gonna he's not gonna be
John: mad about things you got wrong.
John: You and I are not going to have an entire conversation in Wookie.
John: Can't even do it.
Merlin: You do it.
Merlin: We missed like five of those.
Merlin: But you know what?
Merlin: It's not going to bother me because you know what I learned this week, John?
Merlin: I feel like, and I don't know because I don't know if this is recorded, but I feel like what I learned this week is that whatever is not in the show is not in the show.
John: See, that's the most important lesson.
John: You know what's not in this show?
John: What?
Merlin: That blue tube radio.
Merlin: The blue tube radio that would have featured so nicely in your notional mid-century modern house with the blonde wood.
John: It used to matter so much, now it's sitting in a bag.
John: And I'm not saying that the radio has blue tubes.
John: I'm saying the radio is blue and it has tubes.
Merlin: And it's not in the show.
Merlin: It ultimately comes back to like semiotics and structuralism, doesn't it?
Merlin: Or does it?
Merlin: Or does it?
Merlin: It's dialectical.
Merlin: I feel so much better now.