Ep. 360: "Chicken Arse, IA"
Merlin: Hello.
Merlin: Hi, John.
John: Hello.
John: Hello, Merlin.
John: Hello.
John: How are you?
John: I'm fine.
Merlin: Yeah?
John: Yeah.
John: Yeah.
Merlin: How about you?
Merlin: No, I'm good.
Merlin: I'm good.
Merlin: The train's extra loud today.
Merlin: I noticed that.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: I think some days, I don't know if it's humidity or barometric pressure, but some days are louder than others.
Merlin: Yeah, I can't explain it.
John: Do you think it might be that the local kids are putting pennies on the track?
John: And maybe some days it's like because it's squashing pennies?
Merlin: I don't know.
Merlin: I don't know.
Merlin: There's so many things that are still a mystery to me.
Merlin: You know?
Merlin: It's one of the great things in life, I suppose, is that there's still so much for me to not understand in life.
John: You know what?
John: That's a real Generation X thing.
John: Tell me more about that.
John: Well, you'll notice that the boomers and the millennials don't think there's anything they don't know.
John: Whereas we don't know anything.
Merlin: Never did and still don't.
Merlin: No, so we know what we know we don't know.
John: No, I don't even think we know that.
John: I don't think we know what we don't know.
John: We don't know what we don't know we don't know?
John: I think we know that we don't know what we don't know what we don't know.
Merlin: Boy, that is so interesting.
Merlin: I'm literally looking at the page for an episode.
Merlin: It reminded me of Greek philosophy.
Merlin: Is that fair to say?
Merlin: You bring that kind of talk to the situation?
John: Oh, sure.
Merlin: I'm looking at the Star Trek, the TOS that we watched today, which is Plato's stepchildren.
John: Plato's Stepchildren.
John: I think I remember that one.
Merlin: If you remember anything about it, you're going to remember that there's this dude who controls their bodies and makes them walk funny.
Merlin: Let me see if I can say it.
Merlin: I just sent this to my kid.
Merlin: I'll send it to you.
Merlin: Now, I don't know why that happened, but I know I don't know why I don't know.
Merlin: Christopher Pike.
Merlin: We're really deep in Star Trek right now.
John: Is it enjoyable?
Merlin: Oh yeah, look at them.
John: It's not that they're drunk, it's that they're being controlled by a puppet master.
Merlin: The puppet master then makes Kirk and Spock do a funny dance with each other.
John: That's funny.
John: That's funny when that happens.
Merlin: Summoned by an urgent distress call for medical help, the USS Enterprise landing party consisting of Kirk, Spock, and McCoy find a group of aliens who supposedly model their society on the teachings of Plato, a later suffering from an infection.
Merlin: So it's Plato's stepchildren is what it's called.
Merlin: Supposedly.
Merlin: Supposedly, yeah.
Merlin: I mean, I don't know.
Merlin: I don't know.
Merlin: It's a very, you know, as much as they try to be
Merlin: Not Earth-centric.
Merlin: It's a very Earth-centric.
Merlin: Let's be honest.
Merlin: It's a pretty Earth-centric show.
John: That's, you know, that's why I don't watch it.
John: It's too Earth-centric for me.
Merlin: It's like, you know.
Merlin: Okay, so I gave my daughter an unrequested example of this, which is like when we were kids, we used words, well, we certainly used words like foreign, but even more importantly, we used words like oriental.
John: Well, we used words like bleep blorp.
Merlin: We sure did.
Merlin: Yes.
John: See, that's not Earth-centric.
John: Yes.
Merlin: Well, because, no, the only reason I say is I think you shouldn't, I think foreign, for example, you know me, I like words.
Merlin: Do you know that about me?
Merlin: Foreign.
Merlin: Foreign.
Merlin: I would say foreign could be like a foreign substance or you could have a foreign influence, like something that foreign having that connotation.
Merlin: I think if you mean international, you should say international.
John: International.
Merlin: And if you say oriental, I mean, that means lady with slanted eyes is what that used to mean.
John: No, it means carpet.
Merlin: Oriental rug.
Merlin: Rug.
Merlin: Does it match the drapes?
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Merlin: That's unfortunate.
Merlin: You want to start the show?
Merlin: Sure, anytime.
Merlin: Okay, how's it going?
Merlin: Good, good, good.
Merlin: I'm a little off my game.
Merlin: I'm a little off my game because, like I said, we've been watching a lot.
Merlin: We're having Jubilee because it's a three-day weekend, and we're thanking people for their service by watching a lot of Star Trek.
Merlin: It's what we're doing.
John: Oh, yeah.
John: You know, I don't know how anymore... I don't know how to...
John: what is it thank people for their service I'm not sure how to do it it's become such a I heard you're not supposed to do that but I've heard some people say that they think it's fine
John: I don't, most of the people that I've talked to served don't like it, but, but then, you know, they also don't, they don't like it enough to stop getting it.
John: That's true.
John: But it's more, it's more than that.
John: It's like, I'm not sure.
John: I'm not sure.
John: I'm not sure how, it's not a thing that we used to do, you know, and like no one ever thanked my dad for his service.
John: It seems like a real modern affectation, but at the same time, I don't want to, I don't want to put anybody down.
John: I don't want to mistake...
Merlin: the politics of it for i don't i don't want to do the reactionary thing where it's like well i don't like that so i'm going to do the opposite yeah like a war on christmas type situation i think part of it is the glibness of that package at this point yeah at least me amongst my friends it's a cliche that like you would never in a million years say that you would find if you if you absolutely uh had that feeling about somebody you'd find a way to say it in a way that wasn't uh kind of shark tank when they say it i think it's really annoying
Merlin: When Robert or Mark says, thank you for your service, just because somebody used to be in the Army, I mean, it's really glib.
John: When I went over with Lieutenant Colonel
John: Matt Martin and did that tour with Jonathan Colton and David Reese of the Air Force bases in Africa, people thanked us for our service.
John: You?
John: For your service?
John: Yeah.
John: Oh, that's interesting.
John: And it made me go, you know, it had become a ritualized way of, I don't know, acknowledging.
John: It made it seem...
John: I don't know.
John: I don't know how it made it seem.
John: It made it seem like there was a, not a secret code, but like a sense that supporting the military was unusual.
John: And so you needed special recognition because you had done something, you'd done something odd and
John: And I guess from the standpoint of like a bunch of musicians, like I'm kind of the only one I know personally that's ever done that.
John: So from that standpoint, I guess it is odd, but it's probably not odd among country stars or rap stars or something.
John: You know what I mean?
John: Like I think they go do that a lot.
John: So I don't know.
John: It just it feels like it's it's it's code at like three or four different levels.
John: But like Mike Squires posted a picture of himself in his Marine Corps uniform on Instagram yesterday and
John: And I think he, as a former Marine, feels... Careful.
John: You're not supposed to say former Marine, right?
John: Oh, God, you're right.
John: Oh, geez.
John: Let me take it back.
John: Let me walk it all the way back.
John: Mike Squires, as a Marine, as a Marine forever, he still feels that bond, that solid, solid bond.
John: And so he posts the picture, and he says, like,
John: But he says something like, hey, bros, you know, or like the Marines really helped me is what basically what he posts.
John: And then in the comments, it's just like, thank you for your service.
John: Thank you for your service over and over and over.
John: And I and so I don't know, you know, like, I don't want to thank Mike for his fucking service.
John: I know what he did.
John: He was in the typing pool and he got kicked out for drinking.
John: No, I'm sorry.
John: He didn't get kicked out.
John: He's always a Marine.
Merlin: Oh, no.
John: Always.
Merlin: Always.
John: But at the same time, you know, like my dad was a veteran.
John: I want to in the in the old days on Veterans Day, like it was a it's a somber holiday.
John: You sit and.
John: You think about it a little bit.
John: You know, the World War I ended.
Merlin: Yeah, I like Armistice Day.
Merlin: I mean, nothing against the veterans.
Merlin: I mean, but I really, you know, it used to be Armistice Day, they called it.
Merlin: Armistice Day, that's right.
John: That's a good day.
John: We should all be wearing poppies.
Merlin: Yeah, in Flanders Fields.
Merlin: Yeah, I mean, yeah.
Merlin: You know what?
Merlin: This is a thistle.
Merlin: This is a thistle.
Merlin: I'm glad everybody's doing their best with whatever they're doing.
John: It's a thistle that's pinned to our kilts as we merrily march off
John: To make war on our brothers.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: Well, yeah, that and we don't really pay teachers enough.
Merlin: So all the teachers, all the teachers that can find a place in San Francisco have roommates.
John: All the teachers in the house say, yeah.
Merlin: All you zombies.
Merlin: Watch Predestination the other night.
Merlin: What is that?
Merlin: You've seen the movie Predestination?
Merlin: I don't think so.
Merlin: It's based on the story.
Merlin: Is it Heinlein?
Merlin: No.
Merlin: Sorry.
Merlin: Sorry.
Merlin: Sorry.
Merlin: Oh, my God.
Merlin: We're going to get so much feedback about this episode.
Merlin: And it's already making me sad.
Merlin: I don't want any.
Merlin: I don't want any feedback.
John: All you zombies.
Merlin: Their faces.
Merlin: That's where they get.
Merlin: That's where that comes from.
Merlin: It's a short story by.
Merlin: Oh, it's one of the big ones.
Merlin: It's one of the big ones.
Merlin: Heinlein.
Merlin: Bradbury.
Bradbury.
Merlin: Yeah, Heinlein.
Merlin: Heinlein.
Merlin: Mm-hmm.
Merlin: And to say anything about it would spoil it.
Merlin: But you know what?
Merlin: You like time travel stuff?
Merlin: I know you don't want to talk about time travel.
John: I don't really want to talk about it.
Merlin: You should check out Predestination.
Merlin: It's really good.
Merlin: Okay.
Merlin: That and Star Trek.
Merlin: Why did I mention it here?
John: You like media.
John: You like to talk about media.
Merlin: Well, I try not to talk about it too much because it's, you know, everybody's, you know, opinions are like buttholes, as they say, you know.
John: You know, everybody's got one.
John: Oh, I see.
John: Everybody's got an opinion because everybody has a butthole.
John: Because everybody poops.
Merlin: Everybody poops.
Merlin: I don't know, man.
Merlin: Yeah.
John: I'm glad everybody.
Merlin: You know what?
Merlin: Thank you to everyone.
Merlin: OK, but as long as we're here.
John: You know what?
John: All lives matter.
Merlin: Thank you to everyone.
Merlin: Thank you to everyone.
Merlin: Can we just say that?
Merlin: Thank you.
John: I am.
Merlin: I am.
Merlin: Boy, as long.
Merlin: I don't want to talk about this.
Merlin: I just want to say this and then we should talk about gardening or something.
Merlin: I think the hard on that this country has gotten for what we call first responders.
Merlin: I know it is extremely difficult and dangerous work, and I am incredibly grateful that there are people who've chosen as their career things that help a lot of us and that put their lives in danger.
Merlin: But something about the particular current – the culture around the current occupant of the White House has fetishized this whole notion of those two words, first responders.
John: It happened in the Bush administration though, didn't it?
John: I mean, I feel like it was – I feel like it's a post-9-11 thing.
Merlin: At least – I mean like – OK.
Merlin: So boy, you hate to get into reforming the reputations of the Bush family.
Merlin: But I'll just put it this way.
Merlin: I think the current president has a difficult time –
Merlin: feeling let alone expressing let alone feeling empathy for pretty much anybody and I think he sees it as weakness and I think the weakness of people who have gone through a hurricane or an earthquake or a mass shooting to I think it's virtually impossible for him to express empathy for those people
Merlin: And so that gets expressed as the great work of our wonderful first responders.
Merlin: And there's something like amongst all the hundreds of great things that he does.
Merlin: That's one that I worry has, you know, will have an impact for a while of really reducing our amount of empathy that we're having in the public conversation, even as we continually continue to fetishize cops in particular.
Merlin: And I don't love that.
John: You know, I said it kind of as a joke at the beginning, but I really am starting to think that maybe we oscillate between two poles in this country, between periods where moral absolutism is the currency, and then other times when moral relativism is the currency.
John: Like, those two things seem to be two poles together.
John: That we seem to bounce back and forth between.
John: I mean, you know, more and more I'm realizing the boomers weren't always conservative.
John: They were liberals.
John: They were the most liberal.
John: Right.
John: They were the hippies.
John: They were the freaks.
John: They were like the original.
Merlin: They were the original Trastafarians that also.
John: Right.
Merlin: Right.
John: Well, you know, I mean, they were not really.
John: That was an era of like where there was a real middle class.
Merlin: I just mean like the people, the people you would meet like in my college, you know, people who are in a position to explore a lot of usually far, far left or.
Merlin: sometimes libertarian ideas but like the idea they're like getting outside the mainstream because it's like my uh my ex used to say you can't choose to join the proletariat you're you're in the proletariat because you know i'm saying and like that's they were the i feel like they were the ogs they were the ones we learned from you dad was that whole idea of like well i have i have the i have the privilege to drop out of school i don't mean to over lean on the privilege but you know what i mean they had the funding let's put it that way
John: Well, but it was not that they were rich.
John: It was that the barrier to entry was so much lower, right?
John: I mean, that was all the product of the toaster.
John: Including college, including college.
John: Including college, right?
John: It was like after the war, suddenly washing machines and toasters and irons and whatever, public swimming pools or whatever, it all combined to make a society that we'd been intending.
John: It was the whole project for 400 years was...
John: Can't we free ourselves from labor so that we can be – so we all can be philosopher kings?
John: And it was the whole premise behind education, like send kids to public schools, like make public schools in the first place so that we would have that leisure, which wasn't the leisure of –
Merlin: wealth it was the wealth of leisure you know like a middle class person to try and reduce scarcity and privation through things like automation and productivity and you know there's you can read a million books from the last 30 years about no washing machines just increased the expectations didn't reduce the work right and now we need more people we need more people to tend to the ais or whatever it's not it's not like people just get to go and have their you know four-hour work week or whatever
John: We know that now, right?
John: But at the time, the boomers, their dads and moms were all – half of them still working in factories.
John: But they had the luxury to go to college because college was $500 a quarter or whatever.
John: But they were leftists and then they turned right.
John: And so we're right now living in this world where we're making the mistake of thinking that the millennials will be leftists their whole lives.
John: And I don't think they will.
John: I think the boomers had –
John: The boomers had that same conviction that they were right, the same conviction that they saw through the false mask of the world, and they knew the truth.
John: I mean, it's exactly the same conviction.
John: And later on, they got...
John: You know, they got a little bit of wealth, they got a little bit of property, and they became conservative.
John: And the millennials would have us believe that there's no opportunity for them in the world.
John: But of course, that's also what the boomers thought and also what we thought.
John: I absolutely thought that.
Merlin: Yeah, that was a big part of my brand was that coming into graduating college right into a recession.
Merlin: You know, it's like, wow, this has got to be one of the worst economies of the last 40 years.
John: No opportunity, right?
John: I mean, no 30-year-old in the world sees a clear path to owning their own home.
John: It's just that the current generation thinks that they should or thinks that that's evidence that there won't ever be.
John: And I think what's going to happen is that when they all turn 45, they're going to start turning to the right just like
John: just like happens every generation.
John: And then we're going to see suddenly another boom generation that believes that they were right their whole lives, that never had to really consider their beliefs because they were such a big generation that nobody challenged them.
John: And then they all become conservative.
John: And then we're living in a – we're going from one moral absolutist –
John: plan to the next and you know generation x is nothing if not morally relativist at least always was right and we're always like well you know but this and you know it's interesting that i mean you know we never settled on it on an ideology we never we never promoted one because we couldn't ever we couldn't we didn't have enough conviction about anything you know all we were convinced of was that everything sucked mm-hmm
John: And that hasn't lended itself very well to creating a government.
John: Everything sucks isn't really a good model.
John: It's not really an ethos.
John: But you know what I mean?
John: I do.
John: It's not dogmatic either.
Merlin: Well, it's like every little kid has that innate sense of justice about who got more candy than them.
Merlin: And all super clarity about the times that they got less candy than somebody else.
Merlin: I think a lot also about alignment in D&D and how that maps.
Merlin: So I feel like the innovation with alignment, and I don't know if Gygax was the first one to do it, but I'm so interested in that idea of saying, you know, it's one thing to say, like, are you a good guy or a bad guy?
Merlin: Like, are you, you know what I mean?
Merlin: Are you...
Merlin: good versus evil or whatever, like a classic sort of spectrum.
Merlin: But then introducing that y-axis of how you feel about order versus chaos, you know what I mean?
Merlin: It's so fascinating to me.
Merlin: And that's why you can have a million memes.
Merlin: You can have memes that are just, I've seen one hilarious D&D alignment meme that's just nine different George Costanzas.
Merlin: But, you know, I think that idea of your approach to order or law, if you want to put it that way, I think order is a better way to put it.
Merlin: You know what I mean?
Merlin: Like how much, you know what I mean?
Merlin: Like, so you can be the, when you first get into D&D, it seems really strange that you could have something.
Merlin: Certainly you can understand lawful good and you can understand chaotic evil.
Merlin: Right.
Merlin: But, you know, I think a lot of us would probably say we're neutral good.
Merlin: A lot of us, you know, or maybe lawful neutral even.
Merlin: But like when you get into like lawful evil, that's a very interesting alignment.
Merlin: And I think there is, it does not map directly to real life, but it probably wasn't too far into college that I realized there, on the one hand, you do have the, let's call the X-axis conservative, or not conservative versus liberal, like say progressive,
Merlin: versus, I don't know the exact words, but I feel like when we say stuff like liberal and conservative, that actually is more like a y-axis, where there's how you feel about a political position, but then there's also how you feel about the importance of systematic change.
Merlin: And those are very different.
Merlin: And I think for a long time, a lot of us, at least I'll speak for myself, for a long time, I got those conflated in a way that was not useful.
Merlin: And so remember, how many times have we talked about hippies?
Merlin: I mean, hippies are selfish evil.
Merlin: The basic hippie thing, the hippies, a lot of the hippies I have known, is they ended up being, they seem like they branded themselves as being all about freedom and sharing and stuff like that.
Merlin: But ultimately, they were some of the most selfish people I ever met in my life.
Merlin: And when you encounter the helpful white ladies and the helpful white men of certain parts of the sort of mainstream,
Merlin: Democratic Party, you realize that if you were to map something like alignment to them, they're actually, as we've talked about this before, they're actually quite conservative in many ways in that they don't want things to change.
Merlin: They want to go back to 2015.
Merlin: or whatever and i think that's part of the debate right now is like is there a thing to go back to and that's one reason i think people like bernie and liz warren are so threatening and scary to people is that they're proposing something that isn't just a classic sort of post-war liberal model they're proposing in the case of some of the stuff like something pretty substantial i'm sorry that was long
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: Do you take, do you take my meaning though?
Merlin: Like it's, I, I, I don't know.
Merlin: After, after playing D and D as a kid, I got more and more interested in like, okay, well like is how many, how many axes are we really talking about here?
Merlin: When we try to understand our differences and our similarities, when we try to find common cause with people, like how is it so difficult sometimes for us to all agree on this one thing and then find this other thing so difficult to agree on?
Merlin: Um, yeah.
Merlin: And you can even see this right now, where we allow the liberals to just eat each other alive over a standard that folks on the other side of the aisle are not holding themselves to.
Merlin: And it's pretty crazy to watch.
John: I mean, that is what separates the liberals from the conservatives, right?
John: But, I mean, in a way, like in a fundamental way, because there's much more ideology in the liberal world.
Merlin: Yeah, you could also have an access of practical, practical versus theoretical, or is your morality about being practical and achieving a certain outcome, or is it about adhering to a set of values?
Merlin: I guess that's a kind of lawful versus chaotic.
John: The thing is that, you know, Bernie and Elizabeth Warren, I mean, all they're proposing is what the Democratic Party stood for in 1937.
John: You know, like they're not, it's not, it really isn't radical.
John: It's just the, it's just old liberalism.
John: We just, we lost it.
John: I guess.
John: We lost it along the way, you know.
John: Like the idea of a social safety net, you know, that's like FDR stuff, right?
John: Right, right, right.
Merlin: So it's... But by today's standards, it's pretty radical.
John: Well, yeah, only because we've slid so far sort of in the direction of – it's the wonderful thing about conservative ideology, which is that the practical and the ideological are really the same.
John: Like they don't – you don't have to – in the left, for you to follow along even, for you to believe in leftist principles, you have to accept all these –
John: all these premises, right?
John: About the way people are, the way they interact, the way they, the way they're socially ordered, the way they, what they aspire to be, what's holding them back.
John: You know, the left like, like has a lot of philosophies or, or theories about, for instance, just what's holding people back, right?
John: We, it's not as simple as, well, if this, if people had more money, they would be better, right?
John: Because that's not,
John: That's not the liberal mentality.
John: People need a variety of sort of things to encourage them to grow.
John: And on the right, it's really not.
John: It's not that complex.
John: Their idea is like, well, if people have money, then they improve.
John: And if they don't improve when they have money, then they're hopeless.
Right.
John: You know, so so basically their practical thing is do things that make money or that, you know, that that increase opportunity for people if they want it is basically the the whole premise.
John: Right.
John: And so and that's the philosophy and the action all rolled up into one.
John: Whereas on the left, you have to have read a bunch of books just to get – It's a real obstacle course to get anything going.
John: You can read those books and you can read them a certain way and then someone else reads them a different way and now you're both liberals but you hate one another because you don't agree on the interpretation.
Yeah.
John: And that's, I mean, that's a thing that's, I think, intrinsic to the, it's not relegated to America or even modern politics.
John: It goes all the way back to the first people that ever had an idea about what the solution to a problem was.
John: There's somebody that's like, well, the problem is just what you see and we need to solve it.
John: And there's another person that's like, the problem started somewhere before the problem.
John: And if you're someone who thinks the problem you're trying to solve has a root cause that you need to try to solve before you can solve the problem you're trying to solve, you're a leftist.
John: And if you're a person that believes that whatever came before is irrelevant and what you have right now is the problem you have to solve and stay focused and here's what the problem is, solve it.
John: You're conservative, it seems to me.
John: And that is – I don't think those two sides will ever meet in the middle.
John: You know what I mean?
Merlin: Especially if we think it's about this thing when it's really about that thing.
Merlin: And maybe a more ham-fisted example is various territorial – I don't even want to get into this too far because even the words you use can be really rough.
Merlin: But like let's just say – let's look at the Troubles in Northern Ireland, Israel and Palestine, apartheid to a certain extent.
Merlin: You know, there's this difficulty.
Merlin: It's, you know, or just go to Kentucky and look at the Hatfields and the McCoys.
Merlin: It's like this most recent killing is not what we're really talking about.
Merlin: What we're talking about is the killing that led to that killing, you know, that preceded that killing, preceded that, and all the way back.
Merlin: So we're still trying to figure things out from 1968.
Merlin: We're still trying to figure things out from 1972.
Merlin: There's an irresolution to that that makes it difficult to,
Merlin: To focus on what maybe a younger person even would say is a practical thing that needs to be accomplished here.
Merlin: Or as Rodney King says, can't we just get along?
Merlin: Which is, you know, it's, no, we can't.
Merlin: We can't just all get along.
Merlin: That's the problem.
John: Yeah, or maybe, yeah, who knows?
John: Yeah.
John: Who knows?
John: Want to talk about Star Trek?
John: No, not at all.
Merlin: I feel like you've got a background with Star Trek and I don't know if we've ever really explored it.
John: Yeah, but you know, I think what's happening to me is that I'm sick of talking about pop culture.
John: It seems to be when people, I mean, you know, like everybody's so frustrated with talking about stuff and so they default to Captain America and I can't take it anymore.
Merlin: yeah it's not you know i don't mean that i dig at you i just mean that's fine i just want something i just want to get something we can put out and i'm worried that one of us possibly both of us are gonna go down a road from which we cannot come back what do you like to talk about
John: Well, you know, that's the problem, right?
John: War movies, you like war movies.
John: Well, you can't talk about war movies anymore.
John: You can't talk about that because it's pop culture.
John: Well, no, or it's political.
John: Political culture.
John: It's either political or pop culture.
John: We did it on Friendly Fire.
John: We watched Captain America, the first one.
John: And we reviewed it as a war movie.
Mm-hmm.
John: And we came down on the side of not thinking it was very good as a war movie.
John: Well, yeah.
John: And as you know, and as a movie that is anything other than just like completely brainless, turn your mind off stuff.
John: And so we you know, we recorded our friendly fire episode.
John: The way we normally do, which is we just start talking about the movie that we just watched.
John: And, you know, Ben Harrison is a is a millennium and Adam is a one of those Generation Y people.
John: And they both are super fans of Star Trek and all the sci fi or whatever.
John: But there's just kind of no escaping that if you really look at the movie.
John: and ask any questions at all about what the movie's trying to say or do, you kind of come to the conclusion that like, yeah, I mean, sort of not, it's not really worth very much.
John: Well, we put that episode out and, you know, and the thing is we recorded it before the Martin Scorsese comments.
John: We recorded it a month or two ago.
John: Mm-hmm.
John: And absolutely, ooh, boy, is right.
John: You know, our social media, which for that show happens all over, right?
John: There's a Facebook page, there's Reddit groups, there's Twitter, there's people all over that are talking about the show in various different places, depending on whether or not they believe, whatever social media platform they believe in.
John: And, you know, just the predictable amount of...
John: mcu uh fan community that really really really really takes it personally takes it you know like deeply personally that we talked about captain america in a way that was not um
John: Where we, you know, we just kind of came to these conclusions.
John: It's very tribal.
Merlin: It's in the sense of like, you know, you've just identified yourself as not only not being in my tribe, but like the personal part is like it's also I take this hit on behalf of the whole tribe when you say something.
Merlin: It's not that we, you know, can just differ in what it is that we like in life.
Merlin: It's that like when we differ about this thing that I consider part of my tribal brand, we're going to have words.
John: Yeah, yeah.
John: But it's not even, you know, like if they were just mad, but they're hurt, you know, and betrayed.
John: And those are reactions that, you know, I don't really feel about anything that someone else made.
John: You know what I mean?
John: Like if you come at me and say, your songs suck and your music is bad, I feel those feelings.
John: Mm-hmm.
John: Um, but if you say that about something someone else made that I just like, like if you say, oh, you know, AC Newman is a bad songwriter.
John: I go, all right, whatever you think, you know, it's fine.
John: Like if you say this, the, the, um,
John: the Declaration of Independence is stupid.
John: Overrated.
John: You know, I go, okay, well, you know, like whatever you think, man.
Merlin: I'm a Magna Carta man.
John: I'm not, I don't think that you're correct, but like, fine, you know, like keep on keeping on.
John: So, so I, so it's not just that like, I don't like the thing, but I can't begin to imagine how an adult person would
John: Um, would have that, uh, would have that re that reaction of feelings.
John: And, and, and so when I look around, when I cast around now, like, do you know who Ari Dworkin is?
John: He was the guy that started Hebe magazine.
John: Do you remember Hebe?
Merlin: Uh, I know the name of that, but I don't, I don't know Ari Dworkin.
Merlin: I don't think I know Andrea Dworkin.
Merlin: Andrea Dworkin, she was amazing, right?
Merlin: She's quite a ball player.
Merlin: She's a little ahead of her time.
John: I miss her now.
John: She seems so moderate now.
John: She's so mad.
John: But, you know, he wrote me the other day and he was like, what do we do?
John: Like, what is there basically like, what is there to talk about?
John: What can we talk about?
John: And, uh,
John: And I don't, I don't, I, I didn't have an answer for him and I, and I don't have an answer now.
John: You and I used to talk about everything, everything.
John: Yeah.
John: We talked about everything.
John: And then little by little, there were things we couldn't talk about or didn't talk about.
John: And gradually that list got longer and longer.
John: And, you know, it's you, you know, we, but because we're, because people are listening, we know that, but also like, I don't know.
John: I found on Twitter now that I'm muting as many friends as I am random.
John: Like, you know, you went through that period where you were muting trolls and muting.
John: You'd say something and there'd be like these people that came out of nowhere that are just talking shit and you're like, mute.
John: Mm-hmm.
John: But these days, like I said on Twitter, and I'm just reading my feed, and I'm like, yeah, I just don't want to hear from you anymore.
John: And you're a friend.
John: Like, I hope I run into you at a thing.
John: But I don't want to be part of your Twitter feed anymore.
John: It's just not helping me.
John: It's not fun, and I don't believe you.
John: I don't believe in you anymore.
John: Or I don't believe in your public persona, right?
John: I don't believe it represents who you are or what you –
John: I mean, I guess it believes it.
John: I guess you are starting to believe it.
John: You're starting to believe your own Twitter feed is, I guess, maybe.
Merlin: Well, that has a as we each do that, I think I would imagine all of us are doing that more and more.
Merlin: But as we each do that, it has a perhaps unexpected knock on effect of insulating us even more.
Merlin: from other people.
Merlin: Because we're doing it to them, they're doing it to us, and it's basically we're just alone with our farts more and more of the time.
Merlin: And, you know, it's for myself, some of my guiltiest, lowest, like, why am I here moments are where I'm like, no, actually, I don't want to know what a ton of people think about something, let alone, by God, what it is they have to say about what I'm doing here.
Merlin: No, thank you.
Merlin: I'm good.
Merlin: So then what is it that I'm doing?
Merlin: Am I just writing stuff on a whiteboard in the men's room?
Merlin: Why am I here?
Merlin: You know what I mean?
Merlin: It's challenging.
Merlin: I don't know.
Merlin: I'm not on Instagram anymore.
Merlin: I haven't been on Facebook in 10 years.
Merlin: And yeah, it is strange.
Merlin: And I do find myself consuming a lot more
Merlin: Like I look at for political stuff.
Merlin: You know, what I picked up from Max, what I just call political Twitter, which is a couple of lists that I look at 90% of the time that I'm on Twitter.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: But that, I mean, I'm not saying it's good or healthy.
Merlin: I'm just saying it's what it is.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: Right.
Merlin: I'm bounced out of that completely.
Merlin: Like, you know, we're different, but that's what I'm saying is like, it used to be a place where I hungrily in a very unhealthy way, spent literally hours a day writing for Twitter.
Merlin: I don't blanch at that at all.
Merlin: I was really fucking good at it.
Merlin: But like then it got to be not that fun.
Merlin: And but at the same time, I was like anybody.
Merlin: I'm addicted to like what people the nice things that people have to say in this very kind of beige way.
Merlin: Like they hit the icon and then I get like, you know, a nano a nano liter of dopamine.
Merlin: And it's like, ugh, wow.
Merlin: But also, like, I just don't – but then all it takes is – so I'm having fun.
Merlin: I'm shucking a job with my pals.
Merlin: And all it takes is, like, one person to come in and, like – and, you know, certainly to be a dick.
Merlin: That's no fun.
Merlin: But, like, increasingly I'm so overly sensitive to, like, what I call bring your own joke.
Merlin: It's like, no, if there's a thing happening here, read the fucking room.
Merlin: Figure out what the thing is before you bring your own joke.
Merlin: Because that's really lame.
Merlin: And now you've kind of ruined it.
Merlin: And it's like, now it's not fun.
John: Well, bring your own joke or, like, just hold your thought for a second.
John: Like, I posted a thing on Instagram the other day, or on Twitter it was, where, how did I stumble on this?
John: uh oh oh i i follow an instagram account called cheap old houses and it's just an account that this person you know finds these houses in like this strange rural places that used to be a river crossing or whatever and so there's a 1901 house with 10 bedrooms and
John: And it's in, you know, chicken arse, Iowa.
Merlin: Is that the British arse?
John: It's British arse, yeah.
John: Chicken arse, okay.
John: It was settled by British people.
John: Oh, nice.
John: Poultry arse, I guess.
John: And so it's this 10-bedroom house, and it's on an acre of land on the bank of a river, and it's $65,000.
John: And, you know, there are these houses all across America, and none of them are really... The houses are incredible, but...
John: when you really try and situate them, situate them in the geography and imagine yourself moving to a part of South Carolina, that's an hour from any, you know, like even a piggly wiggly.
John: It's like, Oh, right.
John: I see why this house is $65,000.
John: Like it's, it would be a complete, you would be going completely off.
John: Right.
John: But I love these houses and I often go and, um,
John: Try and figure out, you know, I like geography too, so I try and figure out where they are.
John: Oh, yeah, yeah.
Merlin: This is your little project with the, your little project.
Merlin: The thing we were saying to, it's your little bullet thing for your idea, your thought technology.
Merlin: Yeah, that's a really neat, actually, I'm not going to do show notes, but that's a really interesting project.
Merlin: You got good results.
Merlin: Yeah, it's really neat.
Merlin: Could you tell people what that is just because we don't really do show notes anymore?
Merlin: I can find it here if you want.
John: It is just that when I would go to these little towns, you know, you click on the link from the house and it says it's in Poultry Arce, Iowa.
John: And then you click on Poultry Arce, Iowa, and you can see the Instagram feed for everyone who hashtagged their photograph Poultry Arce, Iowa.
John: Mm-hmm.
John: And invariably what you get is a bunch of prom photos, a bunch of people in camouflage baseball hats who have just shot a wild turkey or a deer or a duck, some local color.
John: But some of these towns are just a crossroads.
John: And invariably in those prom pictures, there will be an interracial couple and there will be –
John: So much so that it became a kind of thing that I was just like, well, let's see what's in this weird town.
John: Well, let's see what's in this weird town.
John: And there's always something in the little photographs.
John: And I mean, they're completely unrelated to each other, right?
John: They're just people that are hashtagging.
Merlin: That's the whole point, right?
Merlin: In some ways, is that when you do this, you will be surprised what turns up, and that's the fun of it.
John: And it really is fun, and it really is surprising.
John: It's difficult to predict, right?
Yeah.
John: Completely unpredictable, right?
John: And you are going to see some stuff that confirms your expectations.
John: There is going to be somebody with a MAGA hat on and a deer draped over his pickup truck.
John: But then the next photograph is going to confound you because it's not that.
John: And as soon as you start thinking that rural America is monolithic, just as soon as you start thinking anything is monolithic, if you get an opportunity to like...
John: If you want to challenge that, there's a million opportunities.
John: And this was just one I stumbled on.
John: So I posted it and there were a lot of people replying to that that were like, hey, this is really fun or wow, you know, and people were posting pictures of things that.
John: Like this is the first picture I saw and it was of a prom date in some tiny little Wyoming town and it was a Japanese guy and his blonde girlfriend.
John: It's just like, well, that's not what I thought I was going to find in this little – because every other picture is a guy spitting chew spit on his cowboy boots, right?
John: So it's like, yeah, as soon as you think what you're going to see is – and that is confirmed.
John: I mean it's almost like you could put –
John: certain blinder on and just see what you want to see but there's always going to be this outlier picture that is a shock and so people are commenting and it's really fun and it's like yeah this is a neat experiment like and then somebody clearly who had not done it uh tweeted um yeah well until they start voting with the because i said you know you'll be surprised at the diversity you find
John: And this person was like, well, until they start voting that way, nope.
John: And I was like, wow.
John: And it was the first thing that I looked at when I woke up in the morning.
John: Like I opened my eyes the following day.
John: I opened Twitter.
John: I looked at it and here's this.
Yeah.
John: And this, you know, it's not a person I know.
John: It's not a person even that follows me.
John: They're commenting because somebody else retweeted it.
John: Oh, yeah.
Merlin: You get so much of the shittiest stuff that way.
John: But this is a person that...
John: is a liberal.
John: Oh, no, they're the worst.
John: They're absolutely the worst.
John: I probably share 90% of my beliefs with them.
Merlin: Well, I guess, but you go and look at, go in and like, you just, when you go and look at anything, well, so I see this because of political Twitter to start with, which is that like, ah, orange Cheeto, beep, boop, mark.
Merlin: It's like, ugh.
Merlin: And it's just, it's, it's,
Merlin: People always talk, so like friends on my side of the aisle, I like to talk about the Russian bots.
Merlin: Oh, yeah, this is just a bot.
Merlin: It's probably not a bot.
Merlin: It's probably just a person who disagrees with you and thinks you're a dick.
Merlin: You think everything that disagrees with you is a bot, and that's not a smart way to go through life.
Merlin: And I'm just here to tell you that some of the absolutely worst simple-minded people on that website are people that you would consider in some way your ally.
Merlin: Right.
Merlin: And they are not any smarter or more perspicacious in their approach than all the people that you think are bots out there.
John: God, I love the word perspicacious.
Merlin: I got that on an evaluation once in college and it made me so happy.
John: I've not said that word in 25 years.
John: No, it's not a word that's in my common, like my quiver of words, but it's so good.
John: Perspicacious.
Merlin: And now that person comes in, they dive bomb in.
Merlin: They make it about the thing.
Merlin: And I've said this on so many shows, John, the part of what's so sad and depressing right now is that basically everything has become about Trump
Merlin: or Twitter, or Twitter, Andrew.
Merlin: Just give me a minute away from this, and then now you come in and now you've made it about Trump and about Twitter, even though it's on Twitter.
Merlin: We had a moment here for a minute, but then you came in and went, yeah, beep, boop, orange Cheeto.
John: Beep, boop, orange Cheeto.
John: A couple of weeks ago, I think I talked to you about this, but I started to feel that feeling that I think it's probably like...
John: a lot of people's normal feeling now they're like baseline feeling, which is that feeling of, um, the feeling that the tell the phone, my smartphone is this slow morphine drip of dopamine hits that is actually fogging me.
John: You know, it's, it's like, if I do it's, if the phone is in the room, if it's in the house,
John: It's it's calling to me just like my hash pipe, just like my just like my methadone, like I can hear it and I can't focus.
John: I can't I can't really carry on like a very smart conversation with another person because I'm thinking some portion of my brain is is elsewhere.
John: It's looking for the phone.
John: It's wondering where it is.
John: It's waiting for my next chance to be alone with it.
John: Yeah.
John: And I was feeling it, you know, really deadening me.
John: And it's made clear by the fact that I have an eight and a half year old daughter that wants my attention and needs my attention.
John: And when I feel that attention divided, when I'm thinking about something else and she's there and she's just like, hey, play with me.
John: Or she's like, you know, has something to talk about.
John: That's when I really feel that.
John: deadening on me as what it is, which is a real disease.
John: And in trying to be rid of it, it isn't anymore enough to go put that phone in the other room, to put it on the nightstand, to put it in a bag, because that is just like putting your hash pipe away.
John: It sits over there and it calls to you and you're not thinking about it.
John: I'm sorry, you're not thinking about what you're thinking about.
John: You're thinking about it, a portion of you.
John: And it's really, it's real.
John: And I say it as a drug addict, right?
John: I say it as somebody that's felt this about drugs.
John: And, you know, and I work hard to resist it, but it's past the point.
John: And so a couple of weeks ago, I was like, you know, I bought this iWatch precisely for this to remain in touch, but to not have access to the...
John: to the constant just taint diddling that the, that this fucking stuff does, you know?
John: And so I, so I put the phone down, I strapped on the watch and I went for six days where I never touched the phone.
John: It was in a drawer.
John: I had the watch on.
John: And because the watch does provide that connection,
John: you know that baseline connectivity you can text you can get phone calls you can look at a map you you're reachable without also sacrificing the attention that will go into you wanting to reach everything right and so so what so the first thing i noticed is when i pulled up to a stoplight i just sat there i did not immediately reach for the phone and look at it until the light turned green and i just sat there and i re and i remembered what it was like to just sit at a stoplight and have to wait
John: And watch the people walk in front of you and look around the intersection.
John: And then when the light turned green, I was looking at it.
John: So I went.
John: And pretty soon, you know, the trip from that stoplight to the next stoplight, because I wasn't thinking.
John: Because I had not just put down my phone and was driving to the next stoplight where there would be another opportunity to pick it up.
John: I wasn't I didn't spend that intermediary time.
John: Also sort of still in my phone head.
John: I was just in the car and I was driving and then I was at the next stop line.
John: Anyway, for a week I was, I was doing this and, and it only takes a few days for the pattern to kind of,
John: start to i'm not going to say rewire but certainly like for it to get out of your system the same way it would be like with your first morning without coffee you're pretty definitely going to have a headache if you're going cold turkey but it really only takes what three four days for it to be yeah you get the i mean if you're a big coffee drinker like you or me you get the itches you feel the bugs under your skin um your teeth start to hurt and you know but then it's over
John: But then, of course, just like when you go on a low-carb diet or when you decide you're going to stop drinking for a week or whatever on Saturday, I picked up the phone because I had something to – I had a – I don't know.
John: I needed to look something up.
John: And within a week, I was back to looking at it six, seven hours a day.
Yeah.
Merlin: It's not hard.
Merlin: It's not difficult to slide back into that.
John: It's not.
John: But, you know, I think a lot of us are on a kind of precipice where we're starting to accept that this is our reality and this is how the rest of our lives are going to look.
John: Because if we don't interrupt it, it is how the rest of our lives are going to look.
John: It's not going to ever...
John: It's not going to ever turn the other way.
John: No, no.
John: Right.
John: I mean, Apple's not going to make things less interesting if they can help it.
John: And the and the connected world isn't going to add the uglier it gets, the more it kind of sucks us in.
John: I mean, just like you, I used to spend five hours a day writing for Twitter for free.
John: But it felt and I remember getting a lot of criticism.
John: I found a letter that I wrote to Barsook.
John: in 2000, 2011, because, uh, the folks at bar suit and in particular, one person, not Josh wrote me an email that said, you know, you're spending all this, you're wasting all this time on Twitter instead of working on your album.
Um,
John: And I don't know if I ever told you this story, but... Oh, no, one of those.
Merlin: It's one of those.
Merlin: It's a flavor of the, like, you've got time to do this thing in public, but you can't answer my email, that kind of thing.
John: It wasn't that.
John: He actually ran some numbers.
John: Oh, Jesus.
John: And he said, here's what your album sales were like in the six months before you joined Twitter...
John: And here's what your album sales have been in the year since you joined Twitter.
John: And you'll notice that even though you think that Twitter is like some big promotional thing and it's raising your public profile, you'll notice that your album sales have not experienced any significant bump as a result of all your Twitter fans.
John: I guess it wasn't Emily either.
John: It wasn't Emily, no.
John: But it was, you know, someone high up in the organization.
Merlin: I think I have a pretty educated guess, yes.
John: Yeah.
Merlin: All right.
Merlin: Well, is that really the best use of that person's time, I wonder?
John: Well, so this is 2001, 11.
John: I wrote – because I think what precipitated it was I said – I was in New York.
John: I was playing a show.
John: And I looked at the Barsook Twitter feed.
Merlin: Oh, I remember this.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: And you said, why aren't you promoting this?
Merlin: Yeah.
John: Yeah.
John: Why aren't you promoting my show?
John: The Barsook Twitter feed, like, had a tweet from the day before that was like, hey, you know, coffee cups are available in our store.
John: So why aren't you promoting my show on Twitter?
John: Like, I'm a Barsook artist and, you know, like,
John: Why aren't you pitching it?
John: And they said, we don't want to – I remember this.
John: What was the phrase?
John: It's really stuck in your craw.
John: What was it?
John: We don't want to clog people's inboxes with too many tweets.
John: And I was just like – I was flabbergasted.
John: But I just found the letter I wrote them in reply where I was saying –
John: I was not defending, I was extolling the virtues of social media and how it was, you know, I was not doing it to promote my albums.
John: I wasn't doing it to raise my public profile.
John: Like it was a, it was its own creative outlet.
John: And it was, you know, it was a future that they could barely understand and so forth and so on.
John: You know, I remember feeling that way.
Merlin: And I mean, this is not I'm not here to bag on them.
Merlin: I love those people.
Merlin: But they were in the sense that we were talking about 53 minutes ago, maybe however long ago, very conservative in some ways as a company and very, very resistant about acknowledging, let alone accepting the changing environment of post 2000 music world.
Merlin: In a lot of ways, I feel like.
Merlin: And they ended up doing... The phrase that I used in a somewhat memorable call was, you know, when you give away John Vanderslice MP3s at, like, low bit rates, you're like the Safeway sample guy, like, deliberately over-salting the samples because you think these people are freeloaders.
Merlin: It's like your whole brand is high-quality audio.
Merlin: Why would you put out...
Merlin: And I'm like, well, you know, then they won't buy the record.
Merlin: And I'm like, that's not how this works.
Merlin: You're not going to trick people into buying a plastic CD by putting out like a, you know, an incredibly low bit rate MP3.
Merlin: It's like, that's not how this works.
Merlin: But that felt, I think to them, that kind of thing, like the social media stuff, felt like a bridge too far in terms of what they're willing to do to sort of accept the changing climate of things.
John: You know, and they're a lot younger than me.
John: I mean, the people that run Barsouk are all seven years younger than I am or something like that.
John: You know, they're quite a bit, or at least, yeah, I think so, six, seven years younger than I am.
John: But they just hadn't...
John: They just didn't click with – because they were the new version of the old media paradigm, and they didn't realize that although they were the latest version, they were the last version of an old –
John: of old media, right?
John: I mean, they, they, they were selling CDs.
Merlin: Yeah.
John: Yeah.
Merlin: I mean, like, like just not, just not simply in time, but like they were closer to something like, like what factory or rough trade.
Merlin: I mean, they were, they were closer to like, you know, this is a, we managed this portfolio of, you know, of, of bands, of,
Merlin: and we're going to define how you like them.
Merlin: We are going to maintain control, and I don't think they are anywhere near unique in this, but I think it's one thing that was a pretty risky position for a long time, was like, we are going to continue to believe that we will control how this is consumed, and in fact, how this music is enjoyed.
Merlin: Like, we will be the arbiter's
Merlin: of that, and you will not be permitted to become a consumer of ours unless you will hue to our idea.
Merlin: This is the way a link opens on the website.
Merlin: Each one of these is a JavaScript link that we have written in this way.
Merlin: It's a nonstandard way to do that, but that helps us maintain the illusion of control over stuff down to how you click on a link.
Merlin: And it's like, well, that's a real that's a pretty old fashioned idea.
Merlin: I mean, that's like there used to be companies that would say, like, we're going to provide this, like, we'll give you this software that will make it impossible to take a screenshot on a device and this kind of stuff, which, you know, it's true as long as you have a totally wrecked old version of Windows.
Merlin: But like everybody else in the world is like, you've got to be kidding me.
Merlin: You paid five figures for that.
Merlin: It's like, yeah, well, it protects our IP.
Merlin: It's like, no.
Merlin: Why don't you maybe more get with the idea that these people are super fans.
Merlin: How do you make them feel incredibly welcome and part of a family rather than being some kind of threatening visitor?
Merlin: There's this woman who owns a toy store here in town who hates kids.
Merlin: And you can just tell.
Merlin: As soon as you walk into the store, she's just like, can I help you?
Merlin: What are you looking for today?
Merlin: And you're like, wow, you're not really here because you want kids to be happy.
Merlin: You're here because you want to jam toys down a kid's throat and get the parents to...
Merlin: Don't be that label.
Merlin: Like be the, you could be, and again, something I said so many times, you can be two years ahead or 10 years behind.
Merlin: It's really up to you.
Merlin: And like every day you spend not getting with what the new thing is, it's going to be harder and harder to play catch up.
John: The most incredible version of this, and I honestly don't know how they've done it, is the degree to which Instagram restricts your ability.
John: You cannot repost Instagram.
John: without an outside app.
John: You can't link to a link in a comment or in your posts.
John: They have all those restrictions that I would have thought would have killed them because people want to repost.
John: People want to put links to things.
John: And they just built it so you can't.
Merlin: They want you to have to use that app because their model depends so heavily on your use of that app.
John: Yeah.
John: And they don't they don't want you to go out from it.
John: But like when Facebook decided that in order to DM people on Facebook, you had to download a separate app.
John: Yeah, I resisted it.
Merlin: And to this day, do not have it was the thing that that made me decide that you got yelled at because you hadn't responded to like, was it somebody coming to a show or invitation to a party?
Merlin: Like you hadn't responded to a separate app hailing quickly enough and the person like it damaged your relationship with that person.
John: Yeah.
John: Because I didn't, I didn't have Facebook messenger app on my phone.
John: And I was just like, look, man, I don't, I don't, it is so disagreeable to me that I could be on their program and they are like, oh, you didn't do the other thing that we now require you to do.
John: I was just like, fuck you.
John: And it's such a small little pointless stand to make in the world.
John: But like, I don't, you know, it's the same thing.
John: Like, what the fuck?
John: Like, you couldn't get me to go on LinkedIn or
John: And I've got a profile there.
John: It's sitting there moldering away.
Merlin: I keep stuff just because I don't want, I often just would prefer people not have, you know, a username that's kind of associated with me.
Merlin: Right.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: But no, but I agree with you.
Merlin: I think, you know, this goes back to my old racket of, you know,
Merlin: how we communicate with each other.
Merlin: And it used to be so frustrating to me that I always felt like I was expected, it wasn't enough that I was expected to constantly be monitoring email and respond on somebody's terms to email, where you could put fucking anything you want in an email at any time of day and make that demand to people and then get all pissy that they didn't respond to it in the way you would prefer.
Merlin: But boy, you know, when that became, oh, you also need to get this app and you also need, you know, and you're basically mining personality Bitcoin fucking all day long.
Merlin: And it's like, no, you're not allowed to add new mailboxes to my house that I'm expected to check, let alone put them someplace else.
Merlin: And I'm just supposed to discover there's a mailbox that you're mad I didn't check.
Merlin: Like, fuck that.
Merlin: Like, don't do what's convenient to you.
Merlin: Do what's useful to us.
Merlin: And like, it's unsustainable.
John: When Omnibus was on iHeart Media and then iHeart Media got purchased by... Oh, wait.
John: No.
John: Yeah.
John: iHeart.
Merlin: It was originally on the HowStuffWorks and then HowStuffWorks got acquired by iHeart Media.
John: In both cases, both HowStuffWorks and iHeart Media gave...
John: us email addresses, johnroderick at iheartmedia.com.
John: And they would send me email there that was pertinent to our business.
John: But they never told me that I had an email address there and I had no idea how to access it or that any mail was going there.
Merlin: Unbelievable.
John: And so they were sending me mail and Ken, uh, sending us mail to, you know, our names at iheartmedia.com.
John: And then, uh, when we didn't reply to those things, they were, they assumed that, that silence meant consent and, you know, that it was just like,
John: Eventually we were like, Hey, what, where did all this happen?
John: And they were like, Oh, I mean, we sent you all that stuff.
John: And we were like, we never didn't get a thing from you.
John: They were like, we sent it to you.
John: Well, you sent it to us where, well, your email account, which email account.
John: John Roderick and I made it.
John: And I was just like, you've got to be fucking kidding me.
John: And so I finally went on there.
Merlin: Can you imagine you trying that with any other self-possessed adult that you're acquainted with?
Merlin: You say to them, you say to them, here's a couple things.
Merlin: First of all, I'm mad.
Merlin: And one of the reasons I'm mad is I created a new source of input for you and I put stuff there and you didn't figure that out.
Merlin: So see, also, I'm mad at you.
Merlin: Yeah, that would be that is a showstopper.
John: But they are they are also like there were 600 emails there because I was because Ken and I were CC'd.
John: On every office business communication where people are like, well, you know, I think that that font would look better if it was one size smaller.
John: Oh, okay.
John: Well, I'll give that a try.
John: What do you think about this?
John: Yeah, I'm kind of not really into Helvetica anymore.
John: You know, back and forth, back and forth.
John: And we're CC'd on all of it.
John: Because that's how they're doing business.
John: Exactly right.
John: Business, business, business, business.
John: And at the end of the day, they hit that punch out clock and they're like, I earned my pint of, you know, bitter down at the local pub.
Merlin: I guess I better go home and check Facebook messages.
Merlin: Oh, God.
Merlin: Oh, my God.
Merlin: It's like when you see those photos of like, usually, I think in like India or China, but you'll see those banks of phones where people are doing ad clicks.
Merlin: Oh, yeah.
Merlin: It's essentially it's like, you know, throwing a little kid into the into the train and snow piercer.
Merlin: It's just some young person having to deal with this bank of... That feels like so much of modern life to me, where you just have this rictus of pain all the time because you're smashing on buttons to prove to people that you're still alive.
Merlin: What a fucking way to live.
John: You know, when you first... Several years ago now, maybe a long time ago, but when you first started to very... I think it was right after you...
John: you told the publishing company, you weren't going to finish your book.
John: And you said, I'm out, you know, like you started to pull back and just say, I'm not going to be Merlin man anymore.
John: And I want to do less of those things.
John: I want to do, I don't.
John: And, and you know, and it was a surprise to a lot of us because your career arc looked like it was, and there were all these things where it was like, Merlin, all they want you to do is just fly to the,
John: fucking north carolina and spend two days there and give a presentation and they'll pay you all this money and you were like yeah it's just not worth it i don't want to and it it you were like it ends up not being just a day it ends up being three whole days of your life and they want you know they want everything and they don't want to pay for it and i'd rather be home
John: And I remember watching you do that and feeling like, what is he doing?
John: Because you'd done the thing.
Merlin: It seemed like self-defeating or damaging to what I was there for.
John: Well, because you had invented for yourself...
John: a career that didn't exist before.
John: It's not like you got a job somewhere.
John: It's like you became Merlin man, which was the thing that we kind of all wanted to do.
John: Right.
John: Hodgman was becoming Hodgman.
John: He wasn't getting a job somewhere.
John: And, and, uh, and I was trying to be John Roderick and not just be some, be some guy and you had done it and it seemed like you enjoyed it.
Merlin: Absolutely.
John: Absolutely.
John: And then you pulled back and and and it was.
John: But now did it seem confusing?
John: It was confusing.
John: It was confusing.
John: Now I feel it more and more when I look at my calendar now and there's nothing on it for two straight weeks.
John: I want that to be the new normal.
John: Like I want to not because everything feels like it asks more than it's claiming and it delivers less than it claims.
John: Oh, man.
John: Like everybody wants more and they give less.
John: And I would rather just not.
John: I'd rather not.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: I mean, I don't know how much of a response you want, but yeah, you've got all that's correct.
Merlin: Yeah, so the quick response to that is, first, something I feel like I first heard Pat Rothfuss say on a podcast he used to do with Max called Unintended Consequences.
Merlin: And he said this thing, I don't think he had any idea how brilliant this was, but he said something like, don't compare your backstage to other people's onstage.
Yeah.
Merlin: and i still think about that so often because think about how much we all look at somebody else's on usually that in a way of like going like gosh i'm envious that person on stage right now is so good my backstage is a mess and it's like that's don't do that you know stop doing that like for a variety of reasons take that analogy any way you want there's so many ways one could find usefulness in that the one i bring up here is yeah
Merlin: This is, boy, believe me, if you do open that hatch, you're going to see a whole lot of complicated shit under there.
Merlin: Because, yeah, first of all, yeah, it takes time to do anything.
Merlin: Even things that look easy take so much time.
Merlin: The time you're talking about, I'd just come off over a year of asking extraordinary sacrifices for my family to do something that I kind of felt continuing all along was, on the one hand, just outside my grasp, but also utterly, literally impossible.
Merlin: And I'd missed a lot of my kids growing up for that time.
Merlin: You know, boo-hoo, but that's important to me.
Merlin: And I had the, I don't know, I had the gumption to think that that's something I should be there for.
Merlin: But then, yeah, you're also getting to this thing.
Merlin: There was one particular example that just leveled me, which was I was struggling mightily.
Merlin: trying to keep my publisher and my agent happy and really doing a bad job.
Merlin: I remember it so well.
Merlin: Well, they were extremely cool with me, and I can't believe they put up with me as long as they did, but enough said.
Merlin: But I also wasn't doing that much new work, and I got this offer for a speaking gig with a very prominent company,
Merlin: not far down the road from here, but a very prominent company to speak at this event.
Merlin: And so if we look at it from onstage and backstage, it was as simple as, we're going to give you a bunch of money.
Merlin: It's like, come here for an hour.
Merlin: And it's like, yeah, great, let's do it.
Merlin: And so if we stopped at that moment and said, OK, the story's over there, let's put that alongside.
Merlin: Boy, I've asked a lot of my wife and my kid for a year.
Merlin: Boy, I've really got to get this book out.
Merlin: I've really got to get this draft in.
Merlin: If it's not here on this drop-dead date, I am fucked.
Merlin: And I was.
Merlin: But on top of that, this easy, low-hanging fruit of come out and talk to us for a day.
Merlin: Well, let me spoil the ending for you.
Merlin: They gave me basically the Boeing contract.
Merlin: They wanted a million dollars for me to come out and quote-unquote speak for an hour.
Merlin: I spent about six weeks in negotiations with them having to take this hundreds of page long contract and run it through a lawyer.
Merlin: All of this stuff, all for this quote unquote easy one hour talk.
Merlin: It never happened.
Merlin: I blew, on top of blowing what I blew with all the time that I was doing a shit job with that book, I also wasted so much time on that seemingly easy thing of just come down to Daily City and do a talk at our genomics company.
Merlin: Well,
Merlin: It never happened.
Merlin: And I blew dozens of hours with these people.
Merlin: Dozens and dozens of hours because it looked, it's so easy.
Merlin: And I fell into my own trap.
Merlin: I fell into a couple of my own traps.
Merlin: I didn't have the sense to like stay focused on my dumb book thing.
Merlin: But at the same time, I needed to make dough and had this quote unquote easy gig.
Merlin: And it didn't happen because it was never easy.
Merlin: It only seemed easy because I wanted it to seem easy.
Merlin: Because I looked at my own onstage and my own backstage and I said, wow, there's a bunch of money to go and talk to these ding-a-lings for an hour.
Merlin: And it never happened because it was never easy.
Merlin: And most of us are unwilling to admit that what looks easy for everybody else is rarely easy.
Merlin: And in my own case, I kind of blew it with that.
Merlin: So it became, it became, it seems like I was trying to be some kind of like a daredevil or a contrarian in like taking my career stuff a different way.
Merlin: But it was like, I'm not having fun with what I'm doing.
Merlin: The way people make money with what I'm doing is changing very quickly and was getting real scary real fast.
Merlin: And real recession-y still at that time.
Merlin: But then, you know, it wasn't fun.
Merlin: And what I had to sacrifice to get what I got was becoming very inconsistent.
Merlin: And, you know, if you try to invent yourself for, as Jonathan Goldstein says, having to birth yourself, you don't really do it one time.
Merlin: You've got to be open to those changes all along the way.
Merlin: And, like, I don't know.
Merlin: I'm sorry.
Merlin: I carried on longer than I wanted to.
Merlin: But part of it is that I am a contrarian, and part of it is I don't like people trying to define who I am.
Merlin: I don't like people putting new inboxes and mailboxes on my house.
Merlin: But I also think it's very practical to say, like,
Merlin: Do I want to become one of the people in life?
Merlin: This is a super privileged thing to say.
Merlin: Do I want to constantly just feel like I'm not allowed to have good things?
Merlin: Do I really want to feel like I'm just not allowed to like who I am?
Merlin: Do I really want to feel like it's so important for me to be, in order for me to be authentic, I have to be unhappy for the rest of my life and feel like there's no possibility of change in my life.
Merlin: And it's like, I mean, I hope not.
Merlin: I hope everybody has some part of them that goes like, I can't have everything, but gosh, I hope I can have something.
Merlin: And that means having to do some weird, dumb, stupid shit sometimes where it seems to everybody else like a crazy career killer.
Merlin: And it's like, I don't know.
Merlin: I don't know.
Merlin: I'm glad I got out of the productivity stuff in particular because the podcast stuff is more fun.
Merlin: Talking about creativity with Dan ended up being a lot more fun.
Merlin: And I mean, there were still consequences.
Merlin: There's stuff I've had to deal with that sucks.
Merlin: But anyway, that's the answer to that.
John: Yeah.
John: Yeah, well...
John: Let's hope podcasting lasts.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: I mean, something, something with audio will be around forever, but like, you know, we're kind of back to axes at this point.
Merlin: Like what's a related access to what I'm doing?
Merlin: Like if it's, it isn't, you know, is it, you know, radio versus podcast?
Merlin: Is it this or that?
Merlin: And like, and then getting back to you and talking about your interest at one point and like, you know, saying, wow, it kind of seems like I'm turning into something like an MC.
Merlin: I wonder if that's a thing that I'd want to explore.
Merlin: You like writing things.
Merlin: You maybe don't want to write this particular book that's this long, but you like writing things.
Merlin: You like doing things like that.
Merlin: It's valuable.
Merlin: But like I said, I've said this quietly a couple times in the last little while.
Merlin: There's a reason I don't write much anymore.
Merlin: It's like the audience is not fun, the money is not there, and the publishers are all terrible.
Merlin: Why would I want to dig into this idea of the race car bet I thought I should have when I was 12?
Merlin: let alone 40.
Merlin: Like, no, thank you, hard pass.
Merlin: I don't want to be going, hey, guys, on medium for the rest of my life.
John: Yuck.
John: Race car bed.
Merlin: Finally, I sleep in a big boy bed with my wife, to quote Homer Simpson.
Merlin: Beep, beep.
Merlin: All right.
Merlin: That was a challenging episode.
Merlin: Thank you for your service.
John: Thank you for your service.