Ep. 397: "Open Ticket"
John: Hello.
Merlin: Hi, John.
John: Oh, something's weird, Marlon.
Merlin: Yes, it is.
Merlin: Everything is weird, John.
Merlin: So many things are weird.
John: It's weird because the interface is wrong.
Merlin: Do you want to just do it this way?
Merlin: It kind of sounds like you're in an old phone booth in an empty train station.
Merlin: It's very nostalgic.
John: For many Ukrainian phones.
Merlin: I think it's your computer mic, not your mic mic.
John: Yeah, that's what it is.
John: I'm on my computer mic.
John: But it has here, it says default device here.
Merlin: It doesn't say... Option click on the speaker up in the menu bar.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: If you option click on that... Yeah.
John: Does that give you... Speaker bar?
Yeah.
Merlin: Yeah, you should be able to select your input device there.
John: Where is there a speaker?
Merlin: Oh, you may not have the speaker.
Merlin: You could also go to Apple System Preferences Sound.
John: That's some simple path of some power.
Merlin: This is stupid.
Merlin: Sound.
Merlin: And then you get your sound effects output input.
John: Yeah, sound effects.
John: Okay, we can go over to sound.
John: Input.
John: Internal microphone.
John: Well, that's not right.
John: Why is it not seeing my thing?
John: I can see my thing.
Merlin: Why is it not?
Merlin: You could unplug and replug, blow out the dust, you know what I mean?
John: Oh, and that's going to be a hot plug.
John: All right, ready?
Merlin: Hot plug.
Merlin: Oh, boy.
John: Here we go.
John: It's not going to change you and me.
Merlin: Nothing could change you and me.
John: All right, here we go.
John: We're going to hot plug it.
Merlin: Hot plug.
John: oh boy oh boy oh hot plug so output now is that input should be that yeah it's like you left the train station oh look at that hey you're in my uh you're in my phones am i on your phones yeah i mean you're in my cans that's gonna change me and you what no nothing can change me and you
John: Oh, boy.
Merlin: Oh, boy.
Merlin: Just keeps going.
John: It's another day in paradise.
Merlin: Yes, another day for you and me.
Merlin: Doesn't get any better than this.
Merlin: Am I right?
Merlin: Well, I hope so.
Merlin: I hope it will.
Merlin: No, this is good.
Merlin: Don't get me wrong.
Merlin: This is real nice.
John: Sure, sure, sure.
Merlin: But you'd like it to get a little better.
Merlin: It's not you.
Merlin: You're not the problem.
Merlin: I mean, sometimes you're the problem, but rarely.
Merlin: Very rarely.
John: Rarely.
John: Rarely.
John: The problem.
John: Do you ever look through your photos...
John: And think about the things that you've done, the crimes that you've committed.
John: You know what you did.
John: Do you look back to like, let's say just what seems like not very long ago, like 2010.
John: That doesn't seem that long ago, does it?
John: Uh-uh.
John: And when you look at photographs from 2010, and I'm not talking about like looking at pictures of your kid, but I'm just talking about like, oh, your friends and the things that you did.
John: Oh, remember that dinner and that type of thing.
John: And it just feels like, wow, that was...
John: On the one hand, I don't think it was that long ago.
John: But on the other hand, it feels like a million years ago.
John: But on the other hand, it doesn't seem like that long ago.
Merlin: Oh, John.
Merlin: First of all, yes.
Merlin: Let's just stipulate there are a lot of hands.
Merlin: There's no question about that.
Merlin: I got a lot to say about this.
Merlin: I do do that.
Merlin: I do that.
Merlin: I just sent you one that I posted on your birthday.
Merlin: That gave me a memory called Hot Rod.
Merlin: And that's the two of us together in different situations and other people.
Merlin: But I do that a lot.
Merlin: Well, the two big areas here, because it's always two things with me.
Merlin: The one is, yeah, the time thing.
Merlin: I mean, what else can we say?
Merlin: The time thing, it's not any one way that time feels fucked up.
Merlin: It's in all of the ways.
Merlin: And so we can talk about that part.
Merlin: The other part is I love seeing old photos.
Merlin: Believe it or not, there's a new version of the iPhone operating system.
Merlin: And it came out last week.
Merlin: And one of the things that it does that I love is that you can put you a widget on your screen and it does stuff.
Merlin: I don't want to belabor this, but my favorite part of this, it's so trivial.
Merlin: I love it so much.
Merlin: It uses computer smarts, they call it, computer smarts to figure out a photo that you might want to see today.
Merlin: So sometimes you get a photo.
Merlin: Like, for example, I see one here of me and the You Look Nice Today guys.
Merlin: It says, on this day in 2009.
Merlin: And I think we were in Portland, Seattle, somewhere then.
Merlin: um i love that and so my wife and i like we send each other photos every day it's like oh my god on this day in 2013 when our daughter still loved us and she would cuddle with me and read comics not that i'm sad about losing that we'll get that we'll send that to each other and we'll say look at that face look at that face you know what i'm saying look at that face i do know exactly what you're saying i
John: You know, I like to divide up my life into stories and cross-hatch it.
John: You know, like it's this story and that story.
Merlin: You're called cross-tabs.
Merlin: You're going to cross-index the stories of your life.
John: And so not very long ago, you know, it's very easy to remember when you and I met.
John: We had a – as soon as we met, we had a –
John: A immediate rapport.
Merlin: Rapport.
Merlin: And then... I felt it.
Merlin: I don't know if you did, but I felt like... And Sean, too.
Merlin: I don't understand all the guys.
Merlin: But yeah, I had an easy... I feel like I had an easy rapport.
Merlin: I like the give and take.
Merlin: I like the push.
Merlin: The push back and forth.
Merlin: And I liked...
Merlin: For one of the rare times, definitely since college, and in some ways since my teen years, meeting somebody who will have a, by turns, very serious and extremely stupid, very long conversation about something that almost nobody else cares about, that's a friend.
John: Yes, absolutely true.
Merlin: Nothing's going to change me and you, is what I'm saying here.
John: But when you and I met, it was at a very...
John: It was at a tentpole, which is that you met us very early in the Long Winters career.
John: We were on one of our first tours and one of our first shows in San Francisco, really, and you were there.
John: So then I know that Merlin was with me through all of the Long Winters stuff.
John: And it's never hard to remember where did Merlin come into this and when did that happen?
John: Because it's just like,
John: Well, I can pretty much tell you where Merlin was.
John: He was right by my side through all of that rock and roll stuff.
Merlin: This is just to say also, yes, very much tentpole.
Merlin: Nothing's going to change me and you.
Merlin: And I'm also here to say this is also when time made more sense.
Merlin: When you could pin something to your chronological board.
Merlin: And you could say like, oh, I remember, I can tell you that the Eagles album, The Long Run, came out in 1979 or 1980, because I remember getting up early before dawn and waiting in line at military school for Pancake Day.
Merlin: And I remember hearing that song.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: Right?
Merlin: I mean, this is, for a new music nerd, this is life, is that you have a very specific association, a certain
Merlin: Just moments in a specific podcast, I can remember where I was walking in Wellington, New Zealand, when I heard that sentence.
Merlin: Like, that's the brain that we're with.
Merlin: And now time is very confusing.
John: Yeah, that's the old brain.
John: Old brain.
John: Honestly, as soon as the Long Winter stopped touring, up until the time that the Long Winter stopped touring, if I look at a picture, I can tell basically by the length of my hair and by the glasses I'm wearing.
Merlin: And the teeth you do or don't have.
John: And at that point in time, I had my teeth all the time.
John: It didn't come in and out.
John: It was a good one.
John: But I know where I was, where I was coming from, where I was going to.
John: I can look at a picture and say,
John: Yeah, I was with you then, but I was here a week later, you know, and I was there a week later, a week after that.
John: And I can, you know, it all makes sense.
John: But I was talking to Hodgman about this not very long ago because I met Hodgman toward the end of my, not the, not the very end, but toward the middle end of the touring years and, and Colton too.
John: And there's a very jumbled kind of like, now wait a minute.
John: We met on this day, but we didn't really start hanging out until almost a year later, maybe a little longer.
John: Yeah.
John: but that was still a long time ago.
John: And it was in that period, like after I was no longer able to just tell where I was because where I wasn't an album cycle.
John: And, and it's like, I had long hair and I had a missing tooth, but that kind of came and went a few different times and ways.
John: So it's like, was that, is that missing tooth volume one or missing tooth volume three?
John: But yeah,
John: I don't know if you've met Kathleen Edwards, and you and Kathleen were both here at my house at the farm.
John: She rules.
John: At one point.
John: That lady can sing.
John: The thing about Kathleen is she's one of these tentpole people in my life where it feels like very recently, I mean, not like
John: in the last year.
John: But when I think of Kathleen, I think of her as a very present person in my life that I think about all the time who is, um, part of a, part of my most recent life.
John: But in looking at my photos the other day, I realized that Kathleen first came out here to Seattle to visit me in 2009, maybe 2008, 2009.
John: Mm-hmm.
John: and I don't know if I've ever told that story, but we met at Austin city limits music festival and she came over backstage and was like, Hey, you're John Roderick.
John: Like, nice to meet you.
John: I'm Kathleen.
John: And she had a, she had like that group of hovering people around her that like somebody that's, that was there kind of to style her or maybe a manager or something, but like people hovering around her that were like,
John: Because she's talking to me, they're all looking at me, but you can feel the nervousness that they have about like Kathleen has somewhere to be.
John: Kathleen has someone more important than you to talk to, you know, that kind of like.
Merlin: Just a, just a... I'm very, very familiar with that, I guess.
Merlin: Just a vibe in the force.
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Merlin: And they're looking at the indie rock look over the shoulder, you know?
John: Yeah, right.
John: And I didn't know who she was.
Merlin: We have mutual friends who can play that off pretty well, and you don't even realize they're mostly scanning the room while they pretend to be interested in you.
John: Now she was very interested.
Merlin: It was very charismatic.
Merlin: So she had handlers and I don't talk out of school, but I know at one point she had an involvement with somebody who's pretty famous.
Merlin: Was she with that person?
John: This was years and years later after that.
John: I mean, I'm sorry, her involvement with anybody.
John: I mean, no, I think she was involved with famous people the whole time, but this was, this was early in my, um, well, I didn't know her when I, I had, and I hadn't, and I didn't know who she was.
John: Because, you know, I never knew who anybody was, but no, she was like, Hey, I really like your record.
John: And I was like, thank you.
John: You know, thank you.
John: Um, pretty lady.
John: And then she, you know, she and her entourage went off into the, into a dust cloud because it was Austin city limits festival.
John: And I went into my dust cloud, but then she was coming through Seattle.
John: She was playing with John doe.
John: She and John doe did a tour together where they had, where they were just doing duets and
Merlin: Oh my God.
John: And I went to see the show because I had, I'd made a connection with this person like, Oh yeah, yeah.
John: I'm going to go see her play because that was back in the day when you went to see shows of people that you'd only met once that you had a, you know, you were like, what am I doing tonight?
John: I'm going to the show of this person.
John: And I was just blown away, just like enraptured.
John: And I honestly don't remember the precipitating incident.
John: I think,
John: After the show, I went up and said, hey, I really liked the show.
John: And I was very much like waiting in line to talk to her and expected like a sort of handshake.
John: Like, hey, you know, nice to meet you.
John: And she said, oh, wait around.
John: And, you know, that's always fun.
John: Like, wait around.
John: Okay, I'll wait around.
John: Waited around, but it got laid or there was a complication.
John: Phones weren't very good back then maybe.
John: It was kind of a misconnection.
John: But sometime very recently after that, you know, within a very short amount of time, I don't know how long that time was.
John: The way I remember it is there was a knock on my door and I opened the door and she was there with a suitcase and
John: I don't, I can't imagine that that's actually how it went down.
John: She didn't call ahead, huh?
John: She must have.
Merlin: Did you see the yellow cab just driving away?
John: I feel like if I looked at my email, maybe there would be like the earliest email from her is like, hey, I'm coming to Seattle.
John: But whatever it was, it was very natural.
John: Like, oh, you're here.
John: You know, like, let me show you the guest room.
John: And she stayed with me for a week.
John: And maybe we went to Portland together and stayed down there for a week.
Merlin: I mean, this is the point of your story, I imagine.
Merlin: But this is unusual for you because you really seem very tethered.
Merlin: Events seem very tethered to a given time and a sequence.
Merlin: And as you said earlier, a story.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: This is a fairly new thing where you're feeling flummoxed about whether and when and in what order something happened.
John: And, and, and the thing is I would have been able to order this until we've spent six years now in the upside down in a, in a time where everything kind of all feels like it just recently happened all at once.
John: Like when you came up, when you and Scott Simpson and Hodgman and Colton,
John: And I did the Game Changers.
Merlin: Now, was Kathleen there for that?
Merlin: Because I'm looking at a photo in your yard.
Merlin: I'm looking at lumber in your pool.
Merlin: La, la, la.
Merlin: August 28, 2012, I got pictures of us eating with Colton, Kathleen, and Simpson.
John: So now what's crazy is that Kathleen was there.
John: And at that point, she and I had been friends for years.
John: Game Changers feels like it happened a thousand years ago, but Kathleen's and my friendship feels like it happened more recently than Game Changers.
John: If you had said – Which is not logically possible.
John: Not logically possible because when she came to Game Changers, I think –
John: What I wanted was for Kathleen to be a part of game changers.
John: And when she came, she spent like a day with us while we were rehearsing or coming up with ideas.
John: And I think she took me aside at one point and was like, I don't know what I'm doing here.
John: Like, this isn't my thing.
John: And I'm not sure what I would add to this.
John: And it was kind of like a little bit of a, it was one of those.
John: There's a lot of testosterone in the building.
John: Yeah, there was a lot going on at that point.
John: But it was also like a moment between us where I was like, oh shit, I didn't mean to like, I didn't mean to invite you to a thing you didn't want to do.
John: And she was like, no, it's cool.
John: I've got other things like, and she like bailed.
Merlin: Is this a different time than when you and Dave and everybody, and Simpson shot that video of you guys rehearsing that beautiful, I think a Page of the Lion song.
Merlin: Is that a different time or is this after I left?
John: That was a different time.
John: Would you even be able to know?
John: That was a totally different time.
John: Okay, all right.
John: So I went on this deep dive of like, well, let me see all the pictures of all the different, because she and I did many things together.
John: We did shows, we did...
John: We traveled together.
John: We did a lot of things.
John: We wrote some songs together.
John: She came out a number of times and they all stand in, they're all, you know, big events in my memory.
John: And in trying to piece it all together and find all the pictures and put it all together, like the, the, the, um, uh, the kind of framework of our friendship, I realized that most of it happened when,
John: Between 2009 and 2013, you know, a long time ago, I still talk to her.
John: It still feels like we're, we're, and, and this is maybe my own, um, this is where my personality diverges from others, but I keep feeling like she's going to show up on my door at some point.
John: with a, with a suitcase and we're going to write some songs.
Merlin: Like it still feels like, it still feels like, uh, in tech, you might call it an open ticket.
Merlin: Like this is something where this, this is not complete.
Merlin: There have been these chapters in the story, but the, the, the book is, is still open and, and Kathleen could show up with a suitcase anytime.
John: Right.
John: But if you look at Kathleen's timeline, she's put out, uh,
John: a handful of records.
John: She dated Justin Vernon.
John: She quit the music business and opened a cafe.
John: She ran the cafe for a long time.
Merlin: Yeah, I feel like I saw an article about her in COVID times and something related to that.
Merlin: I didn't realize she was gone and back.
Merlin: Yeah.
John: So she was gone long enough that she could have the story be
John: you know, I'm back and not have it be embarrassing.
John: It was like, she was gone for five years and ran a cafe or longer, maybe who knows, bought a house.
John: And the whole time it's felt like, Oh, there's an open ticket on this.
John: She and I are going to, it's just, we're not, we haven't written a song lately because it's just been, you know, hard to get on each other's calendar.
John: But, but looking at it, I'm realizing no, no, no, wait, she's lived forever.
John: she's lived a whole decade of her life and I haven't seen her in years.
Merlin: But you're struggling with this because it's not very science-y to say parts of the brain, but maybe something like Daniel Kahneman's thinking fast and slow, the two modes of thinking.
Merlin: But I think I know part of what you're describing, not to tell you your story, but I think part of it is that there's a difference between the sort of
Merlin: I don't know.
Merlin: The part of us that knows things happen in a certain sequence at a certain time, we can piece all of that together.
Merlin: But there's also this more visceral emotional component of it, where the valence of all these different events in your life feel like they have to have gone in a certain order.
Merlin: And then when you actually sit down with it, and you really try to put your mind to it and make an actual timeline, a lot of what you believed and felt may not be supported by
Merlin: What actually happened?
Merlin: It doesn't mean like you're not friends or something, but there's these warring aspects of how memory is constituted.
Merlin: And I think that these sort of different ways that our mind works can make it very confusing for us.
Merlin: Because then when we say, hey, wait a minute, let's go board meeting.
Merlin: Let's all get together around the table, parts of the brain, and let's really put this together.
Merlin: And it can be really shocking to see like, you know, this thing that I kind of assumed or thought or
Merlin: just lived with for a while, it could not have happened the way that it happened.
Merlin: It doesn't line up, but that doesn't make the emotional memory of it change immediately, if at all.
John: Does that make sense?
John: The challenge is that I have a lot of very good friends and very great memories of the last 10 years that are disconnected from time and place.
John: Like you and I have never lived in the same town.
John: I don't live in the same town as Hodgman or Colton or Kathleen or Jesse Thorne or any of the, uh, any of my friends, you know, I do.
John: I mean, I, uh, Ken Jennings lives here and I have my old friends that live in Seattle, people from rock music and whatnot.
John: But most of my friendships and professional relationships, um, from 2010 to the present have been with people that
John: It's not like we lived together at one point and then someone moved away.
John: There are relationships I made and that became like super important and central to what I do.
Merlin: And also it seems to me very importantly, just to state the obvious, it's not like you decide, okay, I'm going to go take a flight to this one place and visit this person and then fly back.
Merlin: A lot of these friends are people who you would meet because you and they all feel
Merlin: mostly traveled a lot for what they did.
Merlin: And you'd kind of bang into each other in these different places because traveling someplace that isn't your yard was a big part of everybody's career necessarily, right?
Merlin: So you're going to run into people at Lake Arrowhead.
Merlin: You're going to run into people in Portland.
Merlin: You're going to, you know, all these, all the great cities, Manhattan.
Merlin: All the great cities.
Merlin: But it's not because, it's not as though it's a one-way street or a one-way flight where you're going someplace just to visit with somebody.
Merlin: It's also that maybe they come to Seattle or maybe both of you
Merlin: are gonna be in Atlanta or whatever, right?
Merlin: Isn't that part of it?
Merlin: It's like you're part of this group of travelers.
John: Well, and that's what complicates it, right?
John: Because it's always, there are an awful lot of photos in my timeline that are pictures of me sitting on an airplane or looking out the window of an airplane.
John: And if you and I just took every picture of us from the last 10 years,
John: That where we're together, there'd be a lot of sketch fest pictures and you and I can tell which sketch fest it was.
John: Which haircut, which shoes.
John: Yeah.
John: Which haircut, which shoes.
John: If we look at the pictures of us from the 10 years prior to that, they're mostly in your house or at the bottom of the hill.
John: And so it's, it's like, you know, like how, how big an order of dim sum was it would determine like how many people were there.
John: But with, with a lot of my friends, it's just as you're saying, were we in Florida?
John: Were we in California?
John: Were we in Europe?
John: Were we on a cruise?
John: And on a cruise.
John: And often it's like, I flew out to New York.
John: We did a show.
John: And then three days later, someone flew out to Seattle and we did a show.
John: And then we were both in California four weeks after that.
John: doing a show with someone else.
John: And then I, and that person did a series of shows so that the, the whole thing is like this, every one of those stories I can recall every one of the events, but it's almost impossible to fit them together in any kind of narrative.
John: Cause there isn't a narrative.
John: There is no actual traveling from place to place.
John: It like there was in the old days.
John: We don't know, pile into a truck.
John: It's just airports and you know, like there was the period at Jonathan Colton's house where they had an actual guest bed.
John: And then there was the period where Christine decided that that room was going to be her office and they took this wonderful queen size bed out of their house and
John: And replaced it with a series of Ikea foam blocks.
John: The things that people make you sleep on.
John: Covered with a sheet.
Merlin: Like that inflatable taco we had for a while.
John: And they were like, here's your guest bed.
John: Oh, it's not the inflatable taco came after your guest mattress that was shaped like a taco but claimed to actually be a mattress.
Merlin: And the child bouncing the ball.
John: That was incredible.
John: Remember that?
John: Remember your overhead?
John: Yeah.
Merlin: I think your quote was, who lets a child bounce a ball?
Merlin: I think is what you said.
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John: Anyway, it's very confusing to me.
John: And Hodgman and I were trying to figure it out.
John: The same exact game.
John: Like, OK, look at your pictures.
John: Now, I know that prior to this day, we didn't know each other.
John: After this day, we knew each other, but then we don't show up in each other's pictures until this day, which feels like
John: A long time ago, but also that thing that we were doing on that day doesn't feel that long ago.
John: But then two years after that, there's a picture of us doing a thing where it feels like a million years ago.
Merlin: Well, this feels very Slaughterhouse-Five in some ways.
John: Yeah, right.
John: It's absolutely a novel.
John: It's a novel where you're just bouncing around and
Merlin: But you're also, like, you're experiencing, like, what's the word I want?
Merlin: Like, avatars of experience of, like, things that repeat themselves, you know?
Merlin: Not to sound like a Jackson Brown song or something, but it's true.
Merlin: I mean, you described it really well to say, like, well, it becomes this blur of, like, who was there at that time, that particular weekend, who left early, who stayed long, you know, that kind of thing.
Merlin: The time you stayed at our house for, like, a little while, that one time.
Merlin: Yeah, I mean, that's all.
Merlin: But it's so difficult to try and line all of that up.
Merlin: And for me, I think I've said this before, but so much of my ability to check my memory or to augment my memory, my sort of upward brain, comes down to Gmail and Apple Photos.
Merlin: Because Apple Photos has for some time now, as you know, had geolocation in it.
Merlin: So you can see, oh, that, of course, that was in, you know, that was in, that was at the airport in Portland, or that was in this, that's in such place.
Merlin: And they are in order, unless you change something about the date and the location.
Merlin: That's a pretty irrefutable record of what happened.
Merlin: And I went through this just the other day where, long story short, something related to You Look Nice Today, I ended up looking at a bunch of old photos for something and making a little album to share with the other guys.
Merlin: But it's wild because I'm so dislocated.
Merlin: I'm so Billy Pilgrim.
Merlin: I'm so unstuck in time.
Merlin: And this photo, a very funny photo at Jesse Thorne's wedding of the three of us holding up a sign that says, sorry about everything, and Scott making this hilarious face.
Merlin: My baby was a baby then.
Merlin: And we have a photo, my wife and my kid and I, in the same with the black backdrop.
Merlin: But that could be from any point since I don't even know when.
Merlin: It could be from 2005.
Merlin: The only thing is seeing that big fat baby head in it is what
Merlin: puts it there.
Merlin: And then seeing all these things in order and seeing, okay, the first picture we've got of this is, oh, this is the time when Colton and Hodgman, we went in the studio and did three episodes with them.
Merlin: But if I tried to do that on my own, maybe it's just a result of having a kid.
Merlin: Maybe it's a result of mostly working from home.
Merlin: Maybe it's a result of not needing to travel much anymore.
Merlin: But I have five-year periods that are
Merlin: I don't see a blur, but I do really need to work my system to be able to figure out what happened when, with whom, and in what order.
Merlin: I know I got this office, and I believe in 2010.
Merlin: I know my kid was born in 2007.
Merlin: There are fixed points in time, as the doctor says, but I don't find it easy at all.
Merlin: And then I find myself doing something that my friend Jason Snell and I call dropping a decade.
Merlin: We were like, oh my God, you know, can you believe that we do that bit, right?
Merlin: With like, oh, the time between this and that.
Merlin: And oh, it's been 30 years since that happened.
Merlin: Somebody goes, no, it's been 40 years.
John: I'm like, oh shit, I did.
Merlin: I just dropped a decade.
Merlin: I do it all the time.
Merlin: You know, it's because maybe it's just my brain.
Merlin: Maybe it's, but I think you're onto something.
Merlin: It doesn't diminish the friendship at all, but if it diminishes anything, it's our own trust in the thing that's, you know, floating around in that bucket we got upstairs.
John: The thing that's unsettling to me is this open ticket thing that you gave a name to, which is that I feel like I have open tickets with all these people.
John: If it was just a matter of, oh, I knew that person then, you know, like there are so many people in my life that I knew then and I still consider myself a friend if they called me up right now and were like, hey, I know I haven't talked to you in 20 years, but you're the only person I can call.
John: Can you come, you know, can you come rescue me from this place?
John: I would drive six hours to go save some friend that I hadn't seen 20 years ago or hadn't seen for 20 years.
John: I'm like, I like to drive and I like a mission.
John: And also I don't,
John: I mean, I have a lot of relationships with people that kind of ebb and flow.
John: There are a lot of people that are mad at me.
Merlin: It can be dormant.
Merlin: It can be dormant for a while.
Merlin: But the nature of the open ticket is that this doesn't, at least for me anyway, I don't think we're done with this.
Merlin: Like maybe we're on a break.
Merlin: It could be like an X that you kind of find yourself tumbling around with every few months or whatever.
John: But those are my old friends that I have open tickets with that are just like,
John: They're stamped.
John: They're hanging up on the wall.
John: It's, it's not an open ticket so much as it is just like I'm open to, I mean, frankly, if a person I didn't know called me and said, I need somebody to come get me, uh, because I'm in trouble, I would go get them.
John: You know, like, uh, I got nothing keeping me from helping people, but my, but my friends, my close, you know, my 15 closest friends that I've done shows with for the last decade, I feel like the ticket is awesome.
John: like, like, Oh, it's like a short order ticket.
John: It's like, when's the next burger coming up, but there's nothing.
John: And it's, it's partly related to COVID, but partly just in general throughout that whole period, it was when we said goodbye, when we like stood in an airport and said, you know, my flight's leaving over here and your flight's leaving over there.
John: And it was like, all right, see ya.
John: There was never a plan for the next get together.
John: Or if there was, it was like, we knew we had something in June.
John: But there was, but there were always going to be four things that came up between now and then, but now there's no real clear sense that I'll ever see anybody again.
John: Right.
John: I mean, I don't, what's the next, if the Joker cruise doesn't happen, like,
John: I mean, I'm texting with all my friends on a semi-regular basis, but we're not actually in a band with each other.
Merlin: Well, you know, it's like the distinction in, well, I guess in most languages, probably between like hasta la vista, like until the next time I see you, right?
Merlin: It's sort of like see you later versus farewell, goodbye.
Merlin: You know what I mean?
Merlin: Right.
Merlin: You wouldn't say to somebody, oh, I'm just going to run out for a pack of cigarettes
John: farewell you'd say i'll be back in 20 minutes and with the looking at the pictures because this also and maybe this is something to it too this decade is the decade where i went from taking 15 pictures a year to taking
Merlin: 300 pictures a year oh yeah when you see when you're like on whether whether it's on flicker or apple photo or whatever when you get that little sort of thing running down the side of the screen showing you like what year you're in like i'm getting more and more photos inside of each year mostly yeah yeah me too and there are i had whole relationships with people in 2006 that i don't have a single photograph of them
John: And I had like a three-year relationship with a girl from 2002 to 2005.
John: And I have maybe four pictures of her total.
John: And they were all taken from a flip phone.
John: And they look like you're looking at them through mashed potatoes now.
Merlin: I mean, I have more photos of poor punctuation on signs than I do of most people I knew before 2007.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: And a lot of gas station quotes, not so much my best friend from my, I don't have a picture of my best friend from my youth.
John: I don't have, I don't have pictures of any of my friends.
John: We get the yearbook, you know?
John: Yeah, there's that.
John: But like through the nineties, like all the rock years.
John: Yeah.
John: Yeah.
John: I don't have, I don't have pictures of any of those people, but I have a thousand pictures of,
John: of, uh, me and Hodgman sitting in an airport, um, just like waiting for our flight.
John: And he's, you know, he's, he's making a face.
John: I'm making a face.
John: So, so maybe the, um, I mean, it's, it's a combination of this was, this was my most recent life, but also the one that I'll never not have documented, you know, 40 years from now, I'll be able to look at the first picture of Kathleen Edwards I ever took and
John: And go, oh, yeah, she was.
John: So she showed up on my door.
John: A talented gal.
John: Very talented gal.
John: And I was like, who are you?
John: And she was like, step aside.
John: I'm coming in.
John: Dave.
John: You know, like, what the fuck?
Merlin: Did you ever see – I mean, I just thought of nothing.
Merlin: One of my favorite movies, very controversial – not controversial, but divisive movie.
Merlin: Did you ever see Synecdoche, New York?
John: I did, yes.
Merlin: I did.
Merlin: I mean, that to me is – there's so many reasons that resonates with me.
Merlin: But even setting aside all the extremely emotional family stuff, it's just that idea of like, wait a minute, what –
Merlin: Wait, huh?
Merlin: Like, what?
Merlin: How is that?
Merlin: How is that little girl, like, now living in Berlin?
Merlin: Like, again, very Billy Pilgrim.
Merlin: Very, like, I cannot... I have to think now to tell you, you know, what year it is.
Merlin: Is this the aughts?
Merlin: Is this the whatever?
Merlin: Is the teens?
Merlin: Like, I don't know.
Merlin: And, like, it's all so fakakta.
Merlin: It's really hard to keep it all straight.
Merlin: And, again, those sort of, like, again, those flashes of...
Merlin: the valence of these memories can be kind of overwhelming.
Merlin: But you're saying here, if I hear you, you're saying like, maybe it's COVID stuff, but also it's that, is this causing you to wonder how many of your tickets are still open?
John: Well, I always have that little bit, which I think is not uncommon, where if you haven't seen a friend for a while, you're like, maybe I'll never see them again.
John: Maybe they never liked me.
John: Maybe now that they don't have to see me, they'll never want to see me.
Merlin: That's been a safe opening assumption for me, for sure.
John: I know what I did.
John: Maybe that's the last time I'll see anyone.
John: Yeah.
John: But, but it's also part of this, you know, this idea that I've been chewing on for a long time, I think since my dad died, which is, Oh wait, if you, I used to say when my dad died and I realized that as far as the internet is concerned, his obituary is all there is of him.
John: There's no – if you go into the Library of Congress or the Department of Defense and you dig down deep, you might find his service records, although they may have died in a fire.
John: And there might be some – certainly in the newspaper archives, if you went on microfiche and read the Seattle Times in 1967,
John: the 61 there would be articles about my dad.
Merlin: I feel like I remember you having some of his campaign materials like, Oh, there's a lot.
John: And in the, you know, in Anchorage, he's in the newspaper a lot, but it's, you know, those are newspaper archives that have not been digitized or if they have their, their, their photo stats, they're not, they're not searchable.
John: And why anyone is ever going to, I mean, it might happen with automation, but,
John: that the, the archives of the Anchorage daily news in the 1970s get put online in a searchable fashion.
John: But as far as right now is concerned, you know, my dad's life condensed to his obituary.
John: That was the first thing about him that was ever posted online because he died at 87 years old.
John: And the last year,
John: And the last 10 years of his life were the 10 years that things really started to go online.
John: And he was an old man.
John: There wasn't anything about him to say.
John: And so realizing that, oh, it's not just my dad.
John: I mean, I went to high school with people that have never been online as far as you can tell.
John: They're not even on Facebook talking about QAnon.
John: They're like completely, they're 50 years old and they never had an email.
Merlin: Might as well be, might as well be a ghost by, by today's standards.
John: And so compare that to the people who are, as we say, very online and you realize future historians aren't going to bother worrying about somebody who's not online.
John: Because the people who are very online have generated so much material that a future historian is like, well, I could go examine this person's life who took 40 pictures a day, or I could try and find something out about the millions and millions of people who never put anything online, which one is going to, you know, produce more work for me or which is going to be more validating.
John: Yeah.
John: And so thinking about, thinking about it and thinking about the fact that, and this is a thought experiment I've been running for a long time.
John: It's kind of at the heart of the omnibus project, which is like, if, if a thing doesn't make it into the web now during this transition, then it will not exist in the future.
John: And you and I are, are being,
John: balancing in the cut kind of like the first half of our lives are are not on the internet and so to the future we're going to seem like we kind of walked out of the we're the first generation that kind of walked into existence went from not existing to yeah we were born we were born 32 yeah that's right and and then so i've been churning on that idea for a long time but now i feel like i'm looking at it
John: Internally, like, wait a minute.
John: In a way, I weirdly feel like I was born 32 or 40 even because I have this incredible record that I don't think I would have noticed not having until I did have it.
John: I mean, there are a lot of people that were rock people in my era who didn't pivot to whatever I pivoted to.
Yeah.
John: Your ticket's still open too, buddy.
John: But, you know, they're 50 years old and they have a bunch of copies of Magnet magazine where there's an article about them on page 13, like up and coming new artist.
John: But they didn't transition to...
John: to being very online.
John: And you know, like, like Phil Wondershire, the guitar player of Jesse Sykes and the suite hereafter just recently moved to Spokane and is posting pictures of himself on Instagram, going to like motorcycle swap meets out in the County.
John: And it's like, wow.
John: I mean, that's not, he's not, he's not posting that on Instagram because that's content.
John: He's posting that on Instagram because that's what he's doing.
John: And yeah,
John: So this feeling in my heart, I guess, of like all these open tickets and all this time, this croissant of folded layers of time.
John: The croissant of time.
John: Croissant of time of the last 12 years.
John: It's this thing coming home to roost, I feel.
John: The thing where my dad won't exist in the future, but I will.
John: But I will how?
John: I feel like time, in a way, I still feel like I'm at the beginning of that time loop.
Merlin: One thing this makes me think of is, well, there's been a really interesting conversation this week in the discourse about the way that, I guess, AI or machine learning deals a lot of dirt to people of color.
Merlin: And there's a thing going around on Twitter this week where like, if you post a photo, if you post photos, uh, photos that include white faces and black faces for, I'm not saying this is for any reason apart from this is just how it works.
Merlin: And it's a bummer, but like it will almost always favor the photo of the white person as in the thumbnail that shows up on Twitter.
Merlin: multiple instances of Zoom, like assuming that a person's black face is some kind of noise and they would rather, you know, focus on the soccer ball.
Merlin: People who, the one I saw yesterday is an African-American person trying to log in to do their mock, I think, bar exam.
Merlin: And no matter how, where they went and how much lighting,
Merlin: was used to like, you know, on them, like on the computer, the computer would not authenticate them by face because no matter what they did, it still said that it was too dark in the room.
Merlin: So like those are the kinds of things.
Merlin: Well, that's really interesting.
Merlin: And like that takes us back to not so many years ago when the way that film was benchmarked, created, and processed was based entirely on QA standards of usually white women.
Merlin: And like that led to a lot of strange problems with the way that worked.
Merlin: You know, there's such a history of this whole, like, you know, what, you know, how are we, how are we recording this?
Merlin: What is this going to be used for?
Merlin: But it also takes me even further back to like, think of every like Matthew Brady photo you've seen where like, or like, you know, there's like hard, hard scrabble family pictures.
Merlin: on the plains in the late 1800s.
Merlin: And everyone, of course, is sitting very still and looking very stern.
Merlin: You see very few photos of people rocking out and having fun.
Merlin: Because, in part, you gotta stand real still because of the way this daguerreotype is gonna be captured.
Merlin: You know, you're with me so far?
John: But- Yeah, nobody's even smiling.
Merlin: Right, but does that mean those people never smiled?
Merlin: It does not.
Merlin: I mean, they probably didn't smile as much as a lot of influencers who like taking pictures of their feet on a fucking boat.
Merlin: But that doesn't mean they never smiled.
Merlin: It just means that all of the photos that we have, for largely technical reasons of the time, makes it look like they never smiled.
Merlin: Are you seeing the pivot here?
Merlin: So like today, what's the version of that today?
Merlin: There could be, like I say, a million photos of gas station quotes.
Merlin: But like, you know...
Merlin: We're going to remember people by what we can look up, what we can remember.
Merlin: How can I put this?
Merlin: People will enter that great archive, whatever that great archive is, assuming that there will be compatible formats, which is a big assumption.
Merlin: But there'll be stuff out there like, I can't open up my jazz and zip drives anymore.
Merlin: I have no idea how I would even begin to open that stuff.
Merlin: But whatever makes it into that omnibus archive in the future is there's going to be some
Merlin: some weird stuff about it that's peculiar to the time remember that time when i was really into taking god you used to get so mad at me because i take so many fucking photos at your show and i would do that the curtain flash thing i called it the rock and roll flash and so every picture i have for like a year and a half is all fucked up because that's how i took photos because i thought it looked cool not so different from putting a fucking instagram filter on everything you ever post that makes you look like a smooth bunny like you got some great pictures out of that though
Merlin: I did.
Merlin: I did like some of the night on the town that, you know, you and the cape and the cigar, but you know, you see what I'm saying?
Merlin: Like each and every instance, there's going to be something about what, what and how we capture stuff, how it gets stored and remembered and indexed.
Merlin: And, you know, who is this person in this photo?
Merlin: Well, I don't know.
Merlin: They don't, they seem like they never smiled and they have suspenders, put it in the archive.
Merlin: And I wonder what the version of that is going to be, you know, the next version of that.
Merlin: You know what I mean?
Merlin: We have so much stuff, so much material.
John: And that's what it's going to be.
John: It's going to be volume rather than quality.
John: And we're still, I have to keep reminding myself of this, that we are, because we stand astride these two universes, we can't help but still bring an importance to photographs that comes from a time when you went and had your film developed once a month later.
John: And it costs a lot of money and pictures were precious.
Merlin: We just did a rewatch of Back to the Future yesterday morning.
Merlin: Kid and I had breakfast and watched Back to the Future.
Merlin: And I was like, oh, yeah, just so you know, that thing, that little tiny house in the mall parking lot that the DeLorean hits, I said, that's a photo of that.
Merlin: And that is a place in the parking lot of the mall.
Merlin: I might as well be speaking –
Merlin: I might have just been saying mouth sounds to her.
Merlin: I was like, yeah, so what you do is you take your 110 film, you put it in this envelope, you see how many prints you want, you go and you drop it off to the person in that little booth.
Merlin: And then something like, what, usually three days, a week later, you get your photos back.
Merlin: And she was like, I don't think she was even faking it like the youth does.
Merlin: But she just was like, you've got to be kidding me.
Merlin: I was like, yeah, it was costly.
Merlin: Eckerd Drugs had a policy of like, you didn't have to pay for the ones that you didn't like because it was so costly to get film processed.
John: The booth didn't have a toilet either.
John: That's the other thing.
Merlin: No toilet.
Merlin: I think a lot of them are like for like espresso, bikini espresso places now.
John: Now they are.
John: Yeah.
John: Yeah.
John: But the but the thing I don't know if you've watched a surely you have watched this social dilemma documentary.
John: I can't bear to.
Merlin: I want to but I'm so scared to watch it.
John: I don't think that you need to because there's nothing in it that you don't already know.
John: It's just you hear the people saying it directly to you and you're like, oh, great.
John: Great.
John: Thanks.
John: I knew that already and I've heard you all say it.
Merlin: Everything is worse than you thought.
Merlin: Let me show you some examples of how everything is worse than you thought.
Merlin: Again, John, I'm not on Instagram.
Merlin: I'm not on Facebook.
Merlin: So I only hear second or third hand the shit that you just described, the QAnon stuff, everything that's going down.
Merlin: I do hear the statistics, the kind of cold statistics about the number of people who believe this certain wackadoo thing.
Merlin: Definitely very interesting to follow somebody like, I believe her name is Charlotte Alter.
Merlin: And she is doing like, she's making a lot of enemies in the Twitterverse because she's out there talking to actual people in actual places.
Merlin: And an astonishing number of them in a short conversation will say something completely batshit insane.
Merlin: This shows you why do not assume that Biden's going to win because there's some crazy shit going on out there.
Merlin: You know what I mean?
Merlin: I do.
Merlin: It's really, it's a land of contrast.
Merlin: But I'm not on Facebook, so I don't see that.
Merlin: I only hear about it.
John: Well, the thing that will probably happen is that I can't help but think that in the future there will be all these people with 10,000 photographs and future historians are going to wonder how to sort through them all.
John: But, of course, in the future, I bet –
John: All we are is – all any of this archive is, all any of our online behavior is, our pictures, it's all just fodder for – For the machines.
John: Yeah, for the machines.
John: For Skynet.
John: And other than you personally, like when you die, your kids probably won't even have the –
John: the keys to your photo, uh, thread, but the photos won't go away.
John: The ownership of them will just transfer to the machine.
John: And so all of it just belongs to the machine and it will only be connected to you through your, uh, very strong password that you, that you picked one time and your phone number and social security number that you put in some time long ago.
John: Um,
John: And it's just going to become the hamburger of information that's only even comprehensible by Cray supercomputers.
John: And we are, you know, like our, all our hopes and dreams, if they just get, they just get thrown into like black mirror style montages of wedding photos.
John: Oh God.
John: And so what to do about what to do about that?
John: Like,
John: I have no idea how memory is even going to work for someone who's 25 right now, who's never had an adult moment that wasn't in some way or another documented, maybe by, by 40 people who all geo located it.
John: And, you know, sometimes 80 years from now, they're sitting somewhere attached to a machine and the computer is like, would you like to see March 14th?
John: 2017 from every angle that that photo you know every angle all the all the security camera footage of you walking to the birthday party oh yeah 42 pictures you could basically put together a pretty effective i mean here's the thing also everything you're describing it's all speeding up so fast
Merlin: I actually did, I think, a really fun episode of a podcast I guested last night with these nice boys talking about music.
Merlin: And I actually used an anecdote from, I believe, you told at the Game Changers thing that Hodgman took over, where you said you were talking to somebody, you were getting interviewed, and...
Merlin: talking about music, and the person said, oh, I find out, I think they said something like, you can tell me, but I think they said something like, I discovered most new music from MySpace.
Merlin: And you're like, you learn about music from MySpace?
Merlin: Like, what does that even mean?
Merlin: You know?
Merlin: It's like, that's such a weird thing to say.
Merlin: And that wasn't that many years ago.
Merlin: That apparently was, yeah.
Merlin: So, okay, but here's the thing.
Merlin: Now today, like, and I said this to these boys, I go in and look at Spotify.
Merlin: I look at my Spotify stuff, my favorited, what do they call it?
Merlin: you know, favorited songs or whatever.
Merlin: And I go back two years and it's like whole albums, right?
Merlin: It's an album, you know, a whole album or even like all the stuff by an artist because that's how my brain has historically worked.
Merlin: It's like you start with their oldest album and then like you get them all like Pokemons, Pokeisman.
Merlin: And then the thing is, though, I look at it for the last two years, and it's a completely different affair.
Merlin: It's stuff that I favorited.
Merlin: Oh, yeah, because it's stuff out of – I don't know if you use Spotify much, but out of Release Radar and – what's the other one?
Merlin: Release Radar and Discover Weekly.
Merlin: And it's pushing out stuff that it thinks you'll like in Discover Weekly.
Merlin: And then over here in Release Radar, this is stuff that came out in the last week or two that we're pretty sure you'll like.
Merlin: And I diligently go through Release Radar every Friday, and I listen to the first 10 seconds of each song, and I might heart it.
Merlin: That ends up then feeding into these playlists that I locate and make.
Merlin: And it's a very different situation than a few years ago.
Merlin: And I blame part of this, whoever the fucking geniuses are at Apple, they got me to sign up for iTunes match so all my stuff would be in the code.
Merlin: And now guess what?
Merlin: John, I'm lucky to have a copy of Sugar from Sand at this point.
Merlin: Because the shit just fucking went away.
Merlin: I don't know where it went.
Merlin: Don't lose it.
Merlin: But it's unbelievably not reliable.
Merlin: And I should have known when my own actual copy of the blueprint,
Merlin: um, got mistaken for the, uh, clean version of the blueprint, which is not as good of an album.
Merlin: And in the clothes, something happened and it got confused.
Merlin: I don't know what the fuck has happened.
Merlin: All I'm trying to say to you, John Roderick, the years, the decades that I spent, like at first, like, ah,
Merlin: Just listening to the radio.
Merlin: Then eventually you get a buck and you can buy a 45 and then it goes forward.
Merlin: Should I get REM's Murmur?
Merlin: It's $8.69.
Merlin: Boy, this better be really good.
Merlin: Forward, forward, forward.
Merlin: To where I was.
Merlin: Spoiler alert.
Merlin: Oh, God, yes.
Merlin: I was on a whole podcast about that one time.
Merlin: I really liked that band.
Merlin: Anyway, the point is, though, that, like, not to date.
Merlin: And so what?
Merlin: Did I want to be this way?
Merlin: I did not.
Merlin: Why am I talking like Robert Evans?
Merlin: I don't know.
Merlin: You bet your ass I am.
Merlin: But all I know is, like, I don't.
Merlin: I just go find stuff on Spotify now because Apple Music sucks.
Merlin: And Apple Music, like, flushed a bunch of my shit down the toilet.
Merlin: And it's the worst, John.
Merlin: You know, it's like having water damage.
Merlin: I had water damage a few years ago.
Merlin: Like, basically, all of my photos were,
Merlin: from an entire period of my life became one contiguous wet photo.
Merlin: I lost them all.
Merlin: It became one clump of photo.
Merlin: I don't even know what I lost because I couldn't bear to go through and see what even survived.
Merlin: And that's how I feel about the demos and rough cuts and stuff that you've given me or that like I've gotten like stuff I got from Charles.
Merlin: Like there's all this stuff where it's like, and so now here I am, I'm on Spotify and I'm renting my musical life in teaspoons.
John: But what's crazy is that you're in a relationship, like an emotional relationship with this AI that you're like, here's the music I like.
John: And the AI is like, great.
John: Have you tried this?
John: And you're like, wow, thanks AI.
John: Yeah.
John: And I mean, those relationships, that's exactly what we used to do for each other.
John: Like, whoa, have you heard Sunset Valley?
John: Yeah, cool.
John: Hey, thanks friend.
John: And the fact that your friend recommended that band.
Merlin: If you like Super Chunk, you should check out Archers of Love.
Merlin: I can be your collaboration engine here.
John: But that recommendation increased your friendship with that person.
John: Like you were like, oh, they get me.
John: They like my music.
John: Like I get them.
John: And I mean, I've had relationships with people die on the vine.
John: Because they put on a record and were like, check it out.
John: And I'm like, yeah, it's not that great or I'm not that into it.
John: Not a fan.
John: Yeah, I've heard it and it's like, no, sorry.
John: And they're like, you can see it in their face.
John: They're like, if you don't like that record, how can you like me?
John: How can you even pretend?
Merlin: Yeah, like Bob Pollard said, not liking the Beatles, that's like not liking air.
John: Yeah, right.
John: Although your friends, REM, claim to have never even heard the Beatles.
Merlin: Yeah.
John: Do you remember that?
John: That's very cute.
John: Do you remember that?
Merlin: I find that especially with Mr. Buck, I find that a little difficult to believe.
John: Yeah, a little hard to believe.
John: But I don't know.
John: I wanted to hear Highway 61 revisited the other day.
John: You go onto your Sonos or your friend's Sonos.
John: It always puts Pandora up first, which I never want to use.
John: And then I went down to Spotify and I found Highway 61 Revisited and I clicked on it and it played G-L-O-R-I-A by the them.
John: And I was like, I don't want to hear Gloria.
John: I clicked on Highway 61 Revisited.
John: I looked at it and I was on the Highway 61 Revisited channel.
John: and it thought what i wanted was to hear yes van morrison sing gloria which is not at all that's some very basic pandora type shit i hate stuff like that and i was like what the fuck like you know you're not my friend anymore whatever computer ai you are because and i turned it off and i threw my phone down and i was like this is all bullshit everything sucks but
John: And I'll tell you what the end result of all of that was, was that some computer somewhere in a mountain in South Dakota went, beep, he doesn't like it.
John: He doesn't want to hear the them.
John: Or maybe it didn't even – it's just like – Oh, my God.
Merlin: Oh, my God.
Merlin: I know exactly what you mean.
Merlin: And let me take that one step further because, like, this is my current – the state of my current madness.
Merlin: And it's that kind of madness where I'm not sure exactly which part I'm most crazy about.
Merlin: But – so I described to you.
Merlin: I get Discover Weekly.
Merlin: I get Release Radar.
Merlin: So I go in and it says – in the case of Release Radar, I mean, it's pretty good.
Merlin: It knows my shit and it'll bring up stuff in, like, a band that I –
Merlin: You know, you get one of those bands like, I want to say like Wire, where they don't put things out super often.
Merlin: But like, it doesn't like Wire.
Merlin: So it puts that up.
Merlin: Again, Archers of Loaf is kind of back at it, which was an easy sell for me.
Merlin: But then you know what happens?
Merlin: I'll get this.
Merlin: I can see them fucking see them coming right now because the name of the band is cute.
Merlin: The name of the band, you know, Tattoo, you're allowed to get away with this.
Merlin: Everybody else doing shit with lowercase and weird punctuation.
Oh, yeah.
Merlin: Die in a fire.
Merlin: I'm so sick of that, but you know what?
Merlin: It's my big signal because it goes like Lil Wiz Jack one point mop emoji featuring Rush.
Merlin: Featuring Rush?
Merlin: Sure, or whatever.
Merlin: Or featuring Sloan.
Merlin: And to a song, it's always completely generic trap music.
Merlin: And guess what?
Merlin: Here's where it gets crazy.
Merlin: I get what happened.
Merlin: There is a name for this.
Merlin: It is called Namespace Pollution.
Merlin: Which is that there is more than... I was trying to find some stuff about...
Merlin: I was trying to find some old, sometimes when you really want to find shit, you got to just, Discogs is the only place to go.
Merlin: If you go to Discogs and really dig around, they have good search tools and you can eventually find, I wanted to find this band called Green.
Merlin: That was actually from around the time REM's Green came out.
Merlin: But they're this band, I think from like one of the Carolinas.
Merlin: But I was able to go in and say, show me only exact matches, you know, for Green.
Merlin: And you go in and you find it.
Merlin: Well, guess what?
Merlin: There's like 30 bands whose name is just Green.
Merlin: it's you know it's very difficult it would be like trying to find the the on on google i imagine google's gotten smart enough about that um but the point is namespace pollution so here's where it's crazy so is this a did somebody go out and create an uh an account a career called rush did they create rush and they're a trapper rapper and
Merlin: And it never occurred to them that there was also a pretty well-known band from Toronto.
Merlin: Maybe it's only Canadian bands.
Merlin: So then what do I do?
Merlin: That came up in my recos.
Merlin: And it's like, fuck, man, I get three of these every week.
Merlin: It's the craziest shit.
Merlin: It could be, you know, Whackadoo Jizz Puppy, you know, featuring...
Merlin: It could be featuring Van Morrison.
Merlin: Anyway, and so what are my options?
Merlin: Well, you can go in and basically create an email to Spotify to say, you know, is this offensive content?
Merlin: For a while, like an idiot, it's like doing Instacart reviews.
Merlin: All it does is make them email you more.
Merlin: I would go and say, look, this is incorrect.
Merlin: I was anticipating this.
Merlin: I understand why it thinks, yes, I actually do really like this band Squeeze, but that's not my Squeeze.
Merlin: This is Trapper Rapper Squeeze.
Merlin: And I have stopped doing it.
Merlin: But now you know what my option is?
Merlin: The option is, if you can find it in their somewhat odd interface, is you can say, I don't like this song.
Merlin: I don't like this band.
Merlin: Now, if I say, now here's where the crazy gets even more inside the crazy.
Merlin: Like when I say I don't like this song or I don't like this band, is it going to be a wacky jizz puppy or is it going to be the Toronto band Rush that it thinks that I don't like?
Merlin: That's the AI that I'm dealing with.
Merlin: And so I threw my phone out the window and I'm never listening to music again.
Merlin: I'm only in on true crime podcasts are all that I will listen to now.
John: When you search for things online, do you use dark mode?
Merlin: Oh, like incognito mode?
John: Yes.
Merlin: No, not generally.
Merlin: On my phone, I have a VPN.
Merlin: I don't use a VPN per se.
John: Wait, are you behind seven proxies?
Merlin: Couldn't say.
Merlin: Couldn't say if there's proxies and how many there are.
Merlin: Sure.
Merlin: But I have done that in the past.
Merlin: If I want to see, let's put it this way, I watch a lot of YouTube.
Merlin: I pay for the no ads version.
Merlin: I love me some YouTube.
Merlin: It's like how I spend my evenings most nights.
Merlin: But you know what?
Merlin: Me going to watch some shitty Nazi video
Merlin: I'm not going to watch that on main because I don't want that signal being relayed to use this as part of my recommendation.
Merlin: So sometimes if there's something, it's not even so much that I want to see boobs and not have somebody know.
Merlin: It's much more that I don't want the system to get confused about what I'm here for.
Merlin: I'm so lucky on YouTube.
Merlin: I get so much less bullshit than most people do.
Merlin: It's certainly partly because of my good taste.
Merlin: but it's also because of this.
Merlin: Do you do that?
Merlin: Do you find yourself going incognito to it?
Merlin: You're going underground as the jams out.
John: See, I don't know how, or I mean, it never occurs to me to do, but as I was, as we were sitting here talking,
John: I was, I said like, Oh, I wonder how much namespace pollution there is around Merlin man.
John: So I Googled your name and there's no namespace pollution.
John: It's, there's only one Merlin man in the world and it's just like all of the different things.
John: And then you were like, what about the, the, I mean, I wonder what that's like.
John: And so I went and Googled the, the, and Google has figured out how to, uh, get you to the band right away.
John: There he is.
John: But Johnson baby.
John: But then all of a sudden in the Google search bar,
John: Um, it pulled, it was like, here are your last 10 searches.
John: And it was, they were the last 10 searches that I did from my phone.
John: And so having just watched this social dilemma movie that, that told me anything, everything I already knew, what I didn't know was that.
John: There was that much.
John: I mean, I know Apple is like, here's your emails that you just looked at on your phone and now they're on your laptop.
John: And you're like, wow, that's amazing.
John: I'm so glad I have these.
John: I have my phone and my laptop are the same brand.
John: You remember that when it was like, oh, you need to get an iPhone so it can sync up with your computer.
Merlin: Which was a real shit show for a while, but it has gotten a lot more better.
Merlin: In my opinion, a lot more useful.
Merlin: The handoff, I don't know how much you use that, but the thing of you copy on your phone and then paste on your Mac, that shit is wild.
John: Well, you have to teach me how to do that because I don't know how to do that.
Merlin: But I take your point.
Merlin: In that case, I'm guessing it's because you're logged in
Merlin: to google.com, and you have an account there associated with your Gmail, and that's going to remember all that stuff.
Merlin: And fortunately, there are some settings that you can go in and say, like, only remember this much, or like, don't do my location history.
Merlin: It's kind of a pain in the ass, but you can set that stuff up.
Merlin: But yeah, they're hoovering up all that shit.
John: And it's just a fundamental thing.
Merlin: desire on my part not to have that i do not want to go on my laptop and have my have the google there say like hi friend yes you know like hey here's well i believe in the eu at least the english name for this is i believe it's called the right to be forgotten law like you have the ability to go in to posposably what had happened was you go in you say hey eu like hey eu google like like you're not allowed to notice me anymore
Merlin: And I think especially in places like Germany, that's, they're very privacy focused, but yeah.
Merlin: Not allowed to notice me.
Merlin: See, I love that shit.
Merlin: That's the, that is exactly the turn of friends.
Merlin: I look on this show last night with these nice boys and they say like, okay, what do you want to plug?
Merlin: Tell people where to find you.
Merlin: I'm like, please don't just go do something else.
Merlin: Go work in a food bank or something.
Merlin: But like, you know, if you're not already listening to my podcast, don't start like, and definitely don't follow me on Twitter.
Merlin: My kid follows me on Twitter.
Merlin: It's very upsetting.
John: Oh, no.
John: Oh, no.
John: Does she bring stuff to you and say, what does this mean?
Merlin: Constantly, constantly.
Merlin: She'll just hold it up and go, oh, hey, cool.
Merlin: That's how you put up my Star Trek thing.
Merlin: And I was like, oh, God.
Merlin: Get off of Twitter.
John: What are you doing?
John: I have no idea what that's going to be like.
John: There will come a day when youth will pass away.
John: And what will they say about you?
John: Mm-hmm.
John: What will they say about me?
John: Yeah.
John: I'm so sad and lonely.
Merlin: I'm so sad and lonely.
Merlin: I'm so sad and lonely.