Ep. 411: "The Anxiety Family"
Merlin: Hello.
Merlin: Hi, John.
Merlin: Hi, Merlin.
Merlin: How's it going?
Merlin: Rabbit, rabbit.
Merlin: Rabbit, rabbit.
Merlin: Rabbit, rabbit.
Merlin: It's the first of the month.
Merlin: You got to say rabbit, rabbit.
Merlin: Ossie, ossie.
Merlin: Mas o menos.
John: Yeah, mas o menos.
John: Apparently, ossie, ossie is in Spain and mas o menos is Mexico.
Merlin: Oh, Cast La Significa De Rabbit Rabbit.
John: Rabbit, rabbit.
John: I don't know the significance of it either.
John: I don't know why you say it first of the month.
Merlin: Well, it's why we cut the ends off the roast.
Merlin: You know what I mean?
Merlin: It's one of those things we've just always known.
Merlin: You cut the ends off the roasts?
Merlin: Story goes, I learned about this from a friend of the show, John Syracuse, and it describes a certain kind of cargo cult thinking, which is somebody says, hey, mom, why do we always cut the ends off the roast before we cook it?
Merlin: And, well, it doesn't have to be a mom.
Merlin: Sure.
Merlin: But, you know, it could be a bearded dragon.
Merlin: The bearded dragon says, well, my mom always cut the ends off the roast.
Merlin: I see.
Merlin: And you can guess how this goes.
Merlin: You can keep going all the way up and up and up until the great-grandmother, who luckily got vaccinated, says, well, we just cut the ends off the roast to make it fit in the pan we had.
John: You know what I'm saying?
John: Yeah, that's why we cut the ends off the roast.
John: Isn't that meaningful?
John: That's why we say rabbit, rabbit.
John: Cut the ends off the rabbit.
John: We say rabbit, rabbit because that's how big the pan was when we were growing up.
Merlin: Yeah, I think it has a certain, you know, Jewish-American quality to it.
Merlin: Rabbit, rabbit.
Merlin: Rabbit, rabbit.
Merlin: Anyways, I'm just dicking around.
Merlin: That's why I'm late.
John: Yeah, no, no, dicking around is good.
John: I don't...
John: I don't have the luxury to dick around anymore, Merlin.
John: Really?
John: What happened?
John: What changed?
John: It's all serious business now.
John: Oh, business, business, business.
John: Everything is serious now.
John: Oh, I see.
John: You haven't earned levity.
John: I got off the phone with the electrician just a minute ago.
John: The electrician was supposed to be here this morning, but it was a miscommunication between the electrician and the electrician.
John: Yeah.
John: Everybody's mad.
John: You know, everybody's mad all the time.
Merlin: Yeah, but isn't this a classic contractor problem?
Merlin: Like, the contractor always owes money to the last person, and the electrician's probably mad about their last client.
Merlin: And then when they go to their next client, they'll be mad at you.
Merlin: Isn't that how it works?
John: I think so.
John: I think so.
John: I've definitely made the contractor very mad.
John: He's got to be taking it out on everybody he meets.
John: Oh, no.
John: The gas station, his family.
John: Oh, no, you hate to hear that.
John: It's really running downhill from him.
John: Do you know why?
John: If the way I'm treating him is any indication.
Merlin: Oh, no.
Merlin: John, if you can say, I mean, I don't want it to be litigious or something.
Merlin: What did you do?
Merlin: Were you hurtful?
John: No, no, no, no.
John: Not hurtful.
John: It's a situation where when we were beginning the project, working together with one another, it was all, as you can imagine, it was all...
John: It was all breezy summer afternoons.
John: John, it's a world of hope.
Merlin: When you start any project, you know what I'm saying?
Merlin: It's all about the hope.
John: And one of the things he said was, you know, some contractors will come in here and they'll make a bid on the whole project.
John: They'll say, I'm going to do this for 80 grand or whatever.
John: Hmm.
John: That's not how we do it.
John: We're, I'm just going to charge you every week for the work that we do.
John: Oh boy.
John: And that's going to save you money over time.
John: Hmm.
John: And I was like, sure.
Merlin: Seems like it would work real well for the electrician.
John: Well, this is not the electrician.
John: This is the general contract.
Merlin: Oh, you can tell how little I've had to deal with this stuff.
John: Yeah.
John: I said, Oh, you know, I get what you're saying.
John: So every week I'd be able to see the progress.
John: We'd be able to make a plan for next week.
John: You know, we stay in budget, this type of thing.
John: Well, the problem was that as time went on, and it's a simple thing, as that my house was far enough away from his house and where he normally worked that he sent his guys, but he didn't really ever come by.
Merlin: And these are his lieutenants.
Merlin: This is obviously not the head guy.
Merlin: He's too busy for this kind of stuff.
Merlin: He sends in his dudes.
John: Yeah, and then the lieutenant
John: who was nominally the foreman, was a ding-dong.
Merlin: Oh, no.
John: And he kept saying things to me that were ding-dongy.
John: He was one of these guys that's like, oh, well, we'll just, you know, you can fix it with spackle.
John: I don't love the word just.
John: Yeah, we're not going to fix it with spackle.
John: And so we had three or four or five of these.
John: And I, and I, so I called the general contractor and I was like, this guy and I do not, he's just not, he does not get what I'm doing.
John: And so he comes and he talks to me about stuff and it's always, it's always wrong.
John: He never, he never gets it.
John: And I explained it to him and he's like, right, right, right.
John: And then he goes to Lowe's and he comes back with a thing that's wrong.
John: And so, so we're, we're spinning our wheels.
John: And so, you know, let, let's, let's,
John: Why don't you put him on a different job?
John: And the general contractor was like, right, no problem, got it.
John: And he went away, but then he was not replaced with anyone.
John: There was no foreman on the job.
John: And the foreman job fell to the lead carpenter, who...
Merlin: is a good carpenter but not a project manager we ran into this all the time in the dot-com days where everybody was working two levels above where they really should be at least yeah and it was hard to get people you remember back in the day you probably had this in seattle in like 98 99 they couldn't find people to work at mcdonald's let alone at a dot-com because everybody was getting a job where they were operating at some level above their uh
Merlin: Better paying job where they're operating somewhere above their expertise and project management like all management is is a different art from being a practitioner That's right.
John: And and right now it's that you know, it's a it's a builders market, you know, they're there aren't enough Carpenters in the country doing house things they're doing house things.
John: They're building building building Seattle keeps growing even though I don't know why why would anybody move here now?
John: But everybody is still
John: And so all these guys can name their price.
John: And the lead carpenter, God bless him.
John: You know, he's got a multitude of talents.
John: But he is not... He's someone who...
John: is a little dramatic.
John: Hmm.
John: He's a little dramatic with, with other people that he works with.
John: He's a little, he's just a little dramatic.
John: He's got, he's a, he's a younger guy.
John: He, he grew up on telenovas and he, Oh, I see.
John: You know, he, he'll, he'll, he throws a fit or, you know, there's other things happen, but the, but more importantly, saying hot Latin blood for obvious reasons, more importantly, uh,
John: There's no one standing in the center going, well, that over there has to line up with this over here.
John: Oh, God.
John: This is my nightmare.
John: So the one thing gets built, then the other thing gets built, then it's off by an inch and a half.
John: And it's like, now, wait a minute.
John: Somebody, I can't be here predicting what the mistakes you guys are going to be making.
John: So somebody's got to be doing it.
John: Well, the general contractor's like, God, it's a long drive.
Merlin: Well, that's a shame.
Merlin: Too bad you can't telecommute.
John: So over the course of the year that they've been working on the house, they've put stuff in.
John: They've had to rip it out and put it back in again.
John: They've had to rip it out and put it back in again.
John: This doesn't work.
John: That doesn't work.
John: Apparently they tested it.
John: But then the first time I tried to turn it on, there was no power to it at all.
John: And it must have been a broken part from the factory that worked one time when they tested it, but then immediately self-destructed.
John: And that happened three or four times for a faulty part.
John: It's not their fault.
John: From the factory.
John: I blame the factory.
John: They did test it before they tiled over it.
John: So it's not their fault.
John: Anyway, and so over time, what's happened is this like, well, we just charged by the week.
John: The guys that are working on the job are not incentivized by anything to go to their boss and say, well, we spent
John: eight hours ripping out the thing that we put in.
Merlin: They have their own internal yardstick, probably to the general contractor, right?
Merlin: Which is like, get this chunk of this done in this amount of time for this amount of money.
Merlin: But that is independent of this cockamamie scheme where that contractor just keeps doing that until it's done.
Merlin: Yeah, right.
Merlin: They're getting paid in a different way.
John: And for me...
John: agreeing to the principle of like okay you didn't make a bid on the whole thing you know i bet you've been screwed by that before um i'm gonna pay you week by week but now and and i believe that everyone in the situation is generally trustworthy i think that they are honest generally trustworthy people but when when i say like install
John: The heat pump.
John: What I assume is that installing the heat pump includes that it works.
John: I didn't know I had to put that in.
John: I left out that particular codicil.
John: Shame on me.
John: Now, what they are saying is you paid for us to install the heat pump.
John: Now that it doesn't work, we have to take it out and replace it.
John: But that's not our fault because it was a broken part.
John: And so, you know, so this is part of the hourly, you know, like there are things where they, there's no way they could say that they didn't screw the thing up where they are like, we'll take those hours off.
John: But there are, there's just a general 10 to 15%.
John: of the money that they've charged me that's just kind of in this, like, wait a minute, wasn't this wall already tiled?
John: Oh, yeah, we had to take the tile back down because this thing inside, you know.
Merlin: Well, what you're not saying in all of this is that you're an unpaid project manager.
Merlin: Otherwise, they're going to steal your copper pipe.
John: And so my contention here at the end is there are a couple of outstanding invoices.
John: There are some things that still don't work.
John: And it was only when I said, I'm not going to pay these invoices until these things work.
John: That all of a sudden, after a year, the owner has started to come to the house and make sure that it's done right.
Merlin: If memory serves, that's pretty far away from where he lives.
John: It's, you know, it's 20 minutes.
Merlin: Oh, geez.
Merlin: He has to drive a truck or a van.
John: Or a car.
Merlin: A car.
Merlin: Oh, see, he's not the van guy.
Merlin: He's the car guy.
Merlin: He's in a car.
Merlin: Uh-huh.
Merlin: It's like when the fire guy, most of the fire people are on the truck.
Merlin: Rear, rear, rear.
Merlin: But then they send out the, not the fire marshal, but maybe the fire chief.
Merlin: Fire chief is in their own special red fake cop car.
Merlin: Sure.
John: He's in this case.
John: The lieutenant.
Merlin: Yeah.
John: Yeah.
Merlin: Did you say tenant?
Merlin: I said the left tenant.
Merlin: Oh, I thought you meant the Christopher Nolan movie.
Merlin: I can't finish.
John: Okay.
John: Because firemen don't have like all the sergeants and all the captains and all the, the fire department ranks
Merlin: Yes.
Merlin: Really different.
Merlin: They leapfrog.
Merlin: You're probably not allowed to do certain.
Merlin: You're not allowed to do certain things.
Merlin: Also, we've got to keep a little bit in the can because there might be another fire because project management in I'm guessing with fires, you know, poor project management or non-existent consequences.
John: You've got to manage a fire.
John: Manage a fire.
John: Absolutely.
Merlin: And the number of alarms, and they say it's a three alarm, four alarm, five alarm, that means how many big trucks they send?
Merlin: Do you know what that means?
John: I think so.
John: I think so.
John: I think it's how many different stations respond to it, I think.
Merlin: So you don't get that, though.
Merlin: I'm sorry.
Merlin: I want to get back to your story, but I just want to clarify here.
Merlin: This project management thing, this guy walks around, probably puffs off his chest, gets out of his fake fireman car, and he's like, oh, what's all this then?
John: Hmm.
John: You know, when I was there in Berkeley for the Berkeley Fire in 1990, what was that, 91?
Merlin: Something like that?
Merlin: Is that the one with the Oakland Hills?
John: Yeah, Oakland Hills.
Merlin: Oh, that was bad, man.
Merlin: That was residential.
John: It was nuts.
John: It was nuts.
John: I was there.
John: I was actually up there.
John: with some friends in a car driving around trying to like get as close to the fire as we could and then we saw a wall of fire and we were like oh shit yeah see that's a lot of a lot of a young man's life is spent getting as close as you can to the fire and then thinking oh shit yeah we did and we turned around why do i want to be so close to the fire
John: Super fast.
John: Three point turn.
John: Like, oh shit.
John: Turn around, drove, drove, drove fire behind us, fire on the sides.
John: And we got down and, and, and then we pat, then we got to this checkpoint where, uh, the firemen had blocked the street and they were like, what the fuck were you doing up there?
John: We had cleared all that, you know, get out of here.
John: And we got out of there.
John: And then, you know, within the next six hours, uh,
John: everything was gone like the whole that whole hill was gone and where those firemen had been standing was gone like like firestorm gone not like nothing like like just the hubs of car tires so freaking scary to me it was not but that later i think later that evening we drove out to santa cruz
John: And driving over that road to Santa Cruz, it was just a steady stream of fire trucks going toward Berkeley from the coast.
John: They were emptying out fire departments all the way down to Carmel, just sending trucks from every direction.
Right.
John: And lieutenants and spaceships and dogs and cats sleeping together.
John: It was crazy.
Merlin: Lieutenant colonels.
Merlin: Lieutenants.
Merlin: Lieutenants colonel.
John: Lieutenants colonel.
John: Anyway, the contractor is a guy about our age.
John: And he...
John: I know he's got stuff going on in his life the same way that we do.
John: Maybe not the same way that I do right now, but he's also got stuff going on.
John: He's probably got a mother-in-law that's ailing.
John: He's probably got bills to pay.
Merlin: Maybe he's got sugar diabetes.
Merlin: He's probably got stuff he's dealing with.
Merlin: Maybe his dick hurts.
Merlin: Maybe his wife doesn't appreciate him.
John: He's got this contractor.
John: He's got this lead carpenter that's very dramatic.
John: He's got this guy out in this far-flung neighborhood 20 full minutes away who keeps wanting special tile that isn't made anymore.
John: He's got a lot on his mind.
John: And my guy, the carpenter, said at one point, you know, he and I, there's a little bit of a
John: Little bit of a language gap.
John: And so some things that we talked about where I was like, this has got to go over here.
John: And he was like, got it.
John: And then I came back the next day and I was like, ah, that's not, I said over here.
John: And he was like, no, you didn't.
John: You said it here.
John: And I was like, I didn't though.
Merlin: There's no reason.
Merlin: There's no reason.
Merlin: Don't gaslight me.
Merlin: There's no reason in the world that I would say anything like that.
Merlin: And in fact, it's exactly the kind of thing where I personally, because I'm a communicator, I would say, so we understand this thing goes there and you're going to do that on this day.
John: Yeah.
John: Well then the problem was that I would walk him over and I would go see this X that I made on the two by four yesterday.
John: You and I were standing here and I made this actual X here.
John: And he would look at the X and he'd go, oh, oh, that's, I thought that that meant this, but sure, I'll just tear it out and do it all over it.
John: I'll take the money off the invoice.
John: But he had no actual motivation to go to his boss and say, ah, fucked up again.
Merlin: Yeah, and if you had not been there and said that and then double said that,
Merlin: It would have just gone by like so many things.
Merlin: It is, as I just stipulated, it's up to you to be the person who ensures that this is going in the way that we discussed, let alone the way that I would want.
Merlin: But you're not even doing the thing you said you were going to do.
Merlin: And it's really it's kind of sick that I have to be the one who's the bad guy in this situation to ask you to do your job with some level of integrity.
John: The problem is I'm terrible at that.
John: Absolutely terrible project manager myself.
Merlin: Terrible.
Merlin: I sound like such a whiny asshole.
Merlin: Both parts are important.
Merlin: Whiny and asshole.
Merlin: I'm an asshole because I'm going, are you sure that's right?
Merlin: And then I'm whiny because I'm going, and there's no way to begin a sentence for a grown man.
John: No, it's absolutely true.
John: I don't like it either.
John: No.
John: And there are a lot of things that I would look at and go, well, that's wrong, but I'm not going to complain about it.
Mm-hmm.
Merlin: Fuck it a bigger fish to fry yeah, and it's powder dry because I mean sometimes with these kinds of things you've got a if you know It's a real shit storm You cannot sweat the little stuff because you know at some point you're gonna have to go.
Merlin: Hey this one big thing This is also an area in my experience is also an area where it is not beneficial to go.
Merlin: Okay This is the final straw you did one two three four five six and seven wrong and five was a really big deal We need to talk about that
Merlin: You know what I mean?
Merlin: You really are only, I feel like in those situations, you're only allowed to look steely-eyed and stare at the person and say, this one thing is wrong.
Merlin: Otherwise, you sound like you're just a whiny asshole.
John: Absolutely.
John: And there are quite, so I'm in exactly that position right now where I have composed a letter.
Merlin: Oh, you're writing again.
Merlin: I'm glad to hear it.
John: The thing is, I'm not on social media anymore.
John: I have a lot of energy.
John: I found a new game for my phone and it is very addictive and I hate it because, you know, leaving behind social media is going to be a very, very, very, very, very hard thing for me.
John: And it is...
John: Uh, and, and a lot of it is emotional, but a lot of it is time management and what do I do with my hands?
John: What do I do with my eyeballs?
John: What do I do with, you know, it's like quitting smoking and,
John: Where you're just like well now wait a minute every day I fidgeted with a pack of cigarettes and a lighter Mm-hmm 20 times it's the default time filler your phone now is a cigarette.
John: Yes And it's like, you know and
John: Like my dad used to say that the phone would ring and he'd light a cigarette and then he'd look down and there'd be a cigarette in the ashtray that he was already smoking.
John: It was just that the sound of the phone ringing was like, well, better light a cigarette because I'm going to sit and talk on the phone.
John: Yeah.
Yeah.
John: And my phone is... There's something very attractive.
Merlin: One thing that something like Twitter has going for it or had going for it is that it is just a compact little thing where you just go bloop and out it goes and you're done.
Merlin: That's a very different kind of energy than going into anything that you actually want to even informally publish.
Merlin: And it's very much not the same thing as going, lol, Mitch McConnell.
Merlin: Well, yeah.
Merlin: That's an easier publishing schedule, yeah.
John: It's like, you know, you put it out there, you get, it's, I used to think that you put, I mean, in the early days, you put tweets out there and you got little, you got some applause from people you admired and you were like, yay, I'm somebody.
John: But then, you know, it, it, it turned even before it turned into a, into a giant shit show, it turned even in the early mid 2010s to a thing where you were chasing faves and you were, you know, your status was up and down 25 times a day.
John: Like, I'm in, I'm out.
John: I'm in, I'm out.
Merlin: Twitter was fun because it was so ephemeral.
Merlin: I don't want to make this episode sad.
Merlin: Twitter was fun because it was ephemeral, but then anytime you can put a stat on something,
Merlin: you're going to look at the stat usually.
Merlin: Or put differently, it's difficult to stop looking at the stat, I feel like.
Merlin: But in the early days, it was really fun.
Merlin: You go around, you shuck and jive, you do your things.
Merlin: Like I said, I met the You Look Nice Today guys because of Twitter.
Merlin: You Look Nice Today was supposed to be a podcast about Twitter.
Merlin: And it's really fortunate those episodes never came out because it was really, really stupid.
Merlin: But that was fun.
Merlin: And then Favard came along.
Merlin: And at first, it could not have been any more fun.
Merlin: Favard.
Merlin: Favard came along.
Merlin: The big chicken came.
Merlin: Yeah, Favard.
Merlin: But at first, this is going to sound impossible, but at first it was just fun because you would find people who you didn't know about who were really, really funny.
Merlin: And Dean had the good taste, God rest his soul, Dean had the good taste to not put everybody on there.
Merlin: He put the people he thought was funny on there.
Merlin: And, but then what happened?
Merlin: Then you talk about chasing buddy.
Merlin: Woof.
Merlin: Now you're chasing, where are you on Favard for this too?
Merlin: And I thought that was really funny.
Merlin: Why did no one else like it?
Merlin: Or that was really stupid.
Merlin: So now I got to post three more things.
Merlin: So nobody sees it or whatever.
Merlin: But like, then that became like, wow, I'm putting ice cream in my vagina on Saturday night.
Merlin: What do you think guys?
Merlin: Stars, stars, stars, stars, stars, stars, stars, stars, stars, stars.
Merlin: And it was, and nothing against the, you know, vaginas or dairy products, but.
Merlin: You're right.
Merlin: Don't mix them, though.
Merlin: Well, you know what they always used to say?
Merlin: Don't do the thing you love for a job or you'll start to hate it.
Merlin: It's like if you take something that has almost entirely intrinsic value and it gets increasingly extrinsic until there's really nothing intrinsic left to it, and you're just like a hollow balsa wood man, just trying to make ends meet with your stars.
Merlin: It's the worst.
John: It is the worst.
John: And somehow we all know it.
John: And yet I spent seven more years doing it.
Merlin: I know.
Merlin: I used to spend hours a day writing tweets.
Merlin: Like composing them.
Merlin: I read all my tweets outside of any posting apps.
Merlin: And I used to do it in an app that had a character count.
Merlin: So I could know when I was exactly going to nail 140 characters.
Merlin: And I am, I'm not super embarrassed, but I'm pretty embarrassed with the four plus hours a day I would often spend getting it exactly right.
Merlin: Fact checking on Wikipedia, making sure the Oxford commas were there.
Merlin: Like that all mattered to me.
Merlin: And in the end, it was all just tears and rain.
Merlin: And that's before the real tears came, John.
Merlin: You know what I'm saying?
Merlin: I made your eyes is what he said.
John: I did the exact same thing.
John: I sat at my desktop computer.
John: Crack your knuckles.
John: And wrote tweets.
John: And then, like, you know, it was like, I think I'm ready.
John: I think I'm ready to send this one.
John: You know, here you go, baby.
John: Fly!
Merlin: Yep.
Merlin: You're not mine anymore.
Merlin: Now you belong to the world.
John: But, you know, a month ago I got hit by a tornado.
John: Yes.
John: And the mitzvah is...
John: This is the thing that allows me to not be on social media anymore.
John: It is the thing that has broken me.
John: I'm not there anymore.
Merlin: Back to your smoking, just real quick, back to your smoking.
Merlin: If you're a person who smokes a lot, it's really difficult to imagine a world in which you don't smoke.
John: Impossible.
Merlin: Yeah, and I mean, even if you're not heavily personally quantifying it, but if you're smoking a pack or two a day, it's not...
Merlin: It really is difficult to imagine a world in which you wouldn't.
Merlin: It seems silly to imagine that.
Merlin: But then maybe you have a health scare.
Merlin: Maybe you get COPD.
Merlin: Maybe you have heart problems.
Merlin: You stop smoking, and you go like, wow, I can't believe how long I smoked.
Merlin: That's an extreme example, but it's not that that far off.
John: It's not extreme at all.
Merlin: Well, the health scare that got you off of that might have saved your life.
Merlin: And in the end, you go, wow, I don't stink and have trouble breathing anymore.
Merlin: Maybe that wasn't so great.
John: It's even heavier than quitting smoking it.
John: Really, really, really feels to me like quitting drinking because, because it's not, you know, when you quit smoking, you don't leave a bunch of friends behind.
John: You don't have smoking friends that are like, oh, he doesn't smoke anymore.
John: I can't hang.
Merlin: There might be people that you know casually outside the office where you go to smoke.
Merlin: But if you can't drink, you know what that's like.
Merlin: You go to parties.
Merlin: And if you're lucky, you get a fruity pleaser or a diet fresco.
John: And what was hard for me when I, looking back at drinking, you know, for the last 20 years, I've looked back and said, well, I lost a lot of friends along the way.
John: But, you know.
John: But in fact, some of those friends were good friends.
John: And they weren't just drinking buddies.
John: They were like tight friends that were there for me.
John: But when I quit drinking, that was what we did together.
John: And they weren't going to quit drinking.
John: And I had to lose them.
John: And it was not just that I had to get over the physical addiction, that I had to get over the emotional addiction to alcohol, that I had to break this incredible...
John: awful cycle, but I also lost my life in a way and had to start over building the basics.
John: Like who are my friends?
John: What do I do?
John: What happens at 7 PM in a normal person's life?
John: Because
John: I know what happens at 7 p.m.
John: in my life.
Merlin: Yeah, I mean, I don't think it's going too far to say, because again, if you haven't found something to replace it with, then good luck.
Merlin: But there is that sense of black and white thinking that creeps in when you're trying to get off a habit you don't love.
Merlin: I think one of those first thoughts is it's either this thing that I, I don't want to say that I love.
Merlin: It's just the thing that I do.
Merlin: It's somewhere just below autonomic things like breathing.
Merlin: What do other people do?
Merlin: Like nothing?
Merlin: Cause it really seems like all there is, is the thing that I do or like blackness.
John: Yeah.
John: Well, and especially since on Twitter, at least the ecosystem now over time, it, it evolved to be the ecosystem of,
John: Those were the rules that I followed, and they weren't rules that I completely bought into, but those were the rules because that was the Joko Cruz.
John: That was MaxFun.
John: Those were places that were fully vested in a Twitter ecosystem, not Instagram.
John: They weren't making their own independent rules.
John: They were agreeing to a set of... It's like the rules that are posted by the pool.
Merlin: It's the rules that were posted by the pool.
Merlin: There are big letters and you don't get to negotiate.
John: Yeah.
John: It became the place where the news was.
Merlin: Yes.
John: So all of that now, I'm sitting here a month in with...
John: you know, my creative energy intact, my soul is intact.
John: My, um, my confidence is intact.
John: Um, my confidence in my, in my viewpoint even, but you know, my, my life and my loves, um, are all, um,
John: Kind of undamaged.
John: But my life, my house and my neighborhood just got completely, the Missouri River overran its banks.
John: And the house was washed away.
John: So I am writing a lot of long-form letters to contractors.
Merlin: Oh, good.
Merlin: Where I'm like, dear sir.
Merlin: You should publish those as an e-book.
Merlin: I think people enjoy that.
Merlin: It's called John Roderick's.
Merlin: It's like a John Cheever thing, like the electrician letters.
John: John Roderick, I've got more time on my hands now.
Merlin: Dear McDonald's, I recently visited one of your establishments.
Merlin: I just wanted to say that the server called Debbie was really quite rude.
Merlin: I mean, I'm not like... That's the guy's John Roderick.
John: I'm not Karen-ing, but I am... No, no.
John: I am... Well, so the thing is, the thing that I cannot account for... No, I can account for it.
John: The thing I cannot manage right now is that I am...
John: I am feeling more stress than I have ever felt.
John: The stress that I feel, and I can't put another name.
John: You know, a few years ago, I was suffering from anxiety.
John: You remember that.
John: We talked about it a lot.
John: Yeah.
John: And anxiety was this nightmare because I was constantly, you know, you know what it is.
John: I don't have to tell you.
John: But, you know, you feel like you're just, there's a wolf.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: And like one problem that when people, I feel like when I get the sense that somebody does not understand what I mean by anxiety, you know, I've gone around with my wife about this, but she really gets it now, unfortunately, which is somebody's, you say like, oh man, I couldn't sleep last night.
Merlin: I was really anxious.
Merlin: Now it's very normal for that person, especially if they love you and care about you to say, well, what are you anxious about?
Merlin: And you say, I'm not anxious about anything.
Merlin: I'm anxious about everything.
Merlin: If I was anxious about something, I would say that I'm fearful.
Merlin: I'm not fearful.
Merlin: I'm anxious.
Merlin: My brain is creating dozens, hundreds, thousands of like this spider web of possibilities and none of them are good and they all end in terrible personal ruin.
John: yes yes that's that's anxieties enjoy hakuna matata yeah well and for me like anxiety was they all end with me being suffocated you know like suffocated in a police car with a bag on your head yeah with a bag on your head and like put into a grave yeah and then you hear the dirt on the coffin like you know like that was the feeling that everything
John: ended in i was gonna drown basically and it was just like hey you know like i'm gonna i'm making sandwiches for lunch what kind do you want and it was just like i'm drowning can't you see what's happening sandwich is gonna drown me are you fucking kidding sandwich man which i'm dying now with the stress it's a very different and i i imagine it's part of the anxiety family
John: But I wake up – I'm sleeping about four hours a night.
John: Oh, John.
John: And what it is is I wake up in the middle of the night.
John: I'm tossing and turning.
John: I can't sleep.
John: But it's not that feeling of like that someone is sitting on my chest and holding my nose.
John: It is a feeling that I'm just being hit by baseball bats.
John: Like everywhere I look – it's the same as anxiety.
John: Everywhere I look, I see –
John: that everything is going wrong, and it cannot be fixed, and it will never change.
Merlin: It's also a little bit in the anxiety family, also a little bit in the kind of paranoia family, just in the sense of I don't have a rational basis for assuming threat here, but something in my body and in my mind is telling me to be on the watch
Merlin: For things people events that are harbingers of the thing I'm worried about well and What's terrible is that?
John: You remember back before I, before I started taking bipolar medicine, we went through a couple of years where I was just always on the verge of running for office.
John: Well, yeah, that, but, but you know, like catastrophic depression and I was blowing it off and not, and dealing with it.
John: Because I thought I deserved it.
John: And it was not, I did not believe it was depression.
John: I believed it was a rational response to how things are and should be.
John: And so me hating myself and hating everything was not depression, not a chemical imbalance.
John: It was wisdom.
John: And it made me sensible and reasonable where everyone else seemed like a Pollyanna.
Merlin: Like how are you just moseying around acting like everything's fine.
John: Yeah.
John: And so, and I directed all that energy at myself when in fact, you know, a lot of it was just
John: a kind of madness.
John: Yeah.
John: And now you're getting, you're getting bad signals.
John: I'm getting bad signals.
Merlin: I mean, isn't that part of it is like, well, it was with the bipolar.
Yeah.
John: Yeah.
John: But now I recognize that I'm getting hit with these bats and I hear my voice in my head say, these are, all these things are actually real and you deserve them all.
John: And these are, um, you are not having an episode.
John: You are not as stuck in a cycle, uh, you know, that you, that you cannot arrest and you're not in a thing that's going to resolve itself.
John: These are actual problems.
John: They are actually insurmountable and there are too many of them to ever possibly address.
John: And so this is the new state in which you live.
Ooh.
John: And so I wake up in the middle of the night and you want to know the list I mean, there's 40 things on the list and I just go down and they're all related They're all and they're all related and they're all real There's like there's a guy who coined this phrase that is very meaningful to me I chain worrying, you know
Merlin: the idea that like worrying about this one thing leads to this other thing and then that at the right arterial it connects up with this other thing and it this is all I don't want to say it's in your mind I don't mean it's not real but just in the sense that it is all in your mind and there is no way to survive it because unless you check that it's going to keep going until dawn yes and it's exact it's chain worrying but it's chain worrying to the to the extent that I'm just like the thing is I have not tipped over
John: into like, well, nothing to do now but burn it down.
John: You know, I have not gone all the way.
John: I'm still trying to
John: Resolve it.
John: I'm still on the phone with contractors.
John: I'm still writing long letters where I'm like, look, you know, you say I owe you 30 grand and I think that I'm not going to pay it.
John: And here's why.
John: Because part of the money that you were charging me was for your supervision.
John: The carpenter, you're only paying him $40 an hour, but you're charging me $60 an hour for his time.
John: Why?
John: Why?
John: Because so that you can say my house is too far for you to drive to.
John: Right.
John: So over the course of the length of the project.
John: The $20 an hour extra that you're charging me for your administrative work to pay your dudes?
John: I could have paid them.
John: I could have paid them in cash.
Merlin: I imagine that when you get the letter back, it would say something like this.
Merlin: But if I said to that person, look, if I hired a – let's say somebody's getting married and I hire a caterer for the party –
Merlin: And you show up six weeks late, charge me twice what you said, and everybody got food poisoning.
Merlin: It's not cool to say, well, you know, blame Publix.
Merlin: It's like, well, okay, but there's a whole chain of things where your credibility as somebody who knows how to do your job within the constraints that you agreed to, it's not fair for me to have to be the whiny asshole who says, that's not cool.
Merlin: You can't do that.
Merlin: I'm sorry you lost your pan or one of your people got the flu.
Merlin: You communicate that and then you make good on it.
John: And in this case, you know, my, my natural sympathy is like, ah, this guy's 54.
John: I don't think he's getting along with his wife.
John: He had a major thing where he invested a bunch of money into a house and it turned out that it was all wrong.
John: Are these true things?
John: True things.
Merlin: I don't know for sure.
Merlin: In literature class, we call that genetic criticism and we generally try to stay away from that.
Merlin: I don't need to know about Ozzy Osbourne to enjoy Crazy Train, but I guess it helps.
John: Well, so yesterday I was trying to put some trim around the fireplace because this was work that not only hadn't they done,
John: But in fact, they had cannibalized the trim from around the fireplace to finish the trim in a different room.
John: Was that part of the deal?
John: No.
John: Okay.
John: But they're wandering around and they're like, well, we need some extra trim.
John: Well, this trim's here.
Merlin: Did you see a frame sign here that says, help yourself?
John: The thing is that I had taken the trim down because I was going to refinish it.
John: So at one level in a project managerless situation to a carpenter, it looks like a pile of trim.
John: Now it's all 1952 mahogany that cannot be duplicated at any price.
John: The wood doesn't exist anymore.
John: Right.
John: And so he's like, well, it's got to go somewhere, go down here.
John: And what he's not looking at is, well, you know, this pile of trim is sitting in a room that already doesn't have the trim up.
John: And it's the trim that belongs to the room.
John: And, you know, there were, the carpenter would bring his cousin in who was 20 years old and tell him, well, clean up the garbage.
John: And the carpenter, the cousin, nobody's supervising him.
John: He takes all the shit that I was saving in the corner, throws it all in dumpster.
John: Right.
John: So I'm trying to fix this.
John: And there's one piece of wood left in the whole house that will fit this place.
John: And I'm there.
John: And, you know, my mom, of course, is like, you got to finish the trim.
John: And I'm like, yes, mother.
John: Thank you.
John: Thank you for your message.
John: And so I'm down there all afternoon yesterday and I'm a perfectionist about carpentry and I love to do it.
John: But.
John: It's like a little puzzle.
Merlin: Like if you put the pieces together wrong, it's not finished.
John: And here's the thing.
John: The fireplace had settled a little.
John: This wall had bowed a little.
John: There was a piece of slate that was a quarter inch higher than the floor.
John: There was this and that.
John: And I'm looking at this piece of wood and I'm like, well, let's see.
John: I got to jig out this and I got to bend it a little here, but that's going to pull.
John: It's too far.
John: The wood's not going to, it's going to pull out.
Merlin: So you're thinking like a project manager.
John: You're realizing that all these pieces have to fit together.
John: And the problem was I went downstairs with my chop saw and
John: And I made the cut and it was a little long, but which is what I intended because I needed a little bit of extra to, to put it, you know, exactly right.
John: Yes.
John: And then the second time I went down to cut it, I cut it wrong.
John: And I'm a major three times cut once guy.
Merlin: Oh, join the club.
John: I cut it wrong because the saw slipped.
Yeah.
John: and you should not be working with a chop saw where the saw ever has a chance to slip.
John: But I was doing it a little hack.
John: I had the wood balanced on a,
John: On like a plastic bag of survival blankets.
John: And when I was trying.
John: What was the thought in your mind?
John: This will just take a second.
John: And I was trying to use the chop saw a little bit like a jigsaw.
John: You know, I was trying to do stuff that a chop saw can't do.
John: But I was like kind of moving the wood a little to get this little burp.
John: And it just slipped.
John: And it's not like it slipped and cut through the whole thing.
John: It just slipped and made a cut where I didn't want one.
John: And then I was like, well, I'll fix it in post.
John: And I cut it.
John: And then it was too short.
John: And so now I've cut the piece of wood, the one piece of wood, and I've cut it too short.
John: And even in the too shortness of it, it still doesn't work to solve the other problem.
John: And so at the end of the day, I'd spent five hours on this and I had ruined a piece of wood and I had not solved the trim problem.
John: And I walked out of there like, did I need another thing to keep me up at night?
Merlin: I because I got these two problems.
Merlin: I mean in addition to whatever damage you did now You you you have to punish yourself because you did it wrong.
John: I did it wrong and and it's in it's in the family of things that in the past when I'm when I would make a Thing and I would go.
John: Oh, I kind of did that I kind of swung for the fences on that one and didn't quite connect with the ball and
John: I've always punished myself for it.
John: But, you know, if it's the only thing you're punishing yourself for, oh, you can luxuriate in it.
John: But right now, like... Take a number.
John: I take a fucking number.
John: But it's there, you know, it's just... I limped back to a cold pizza.
John: You know, at the end of the day, I just limped back.
John: And it comes down to...
John: The fact that my life is upside down right now.
John: And when I quit drinking, one month in, if you remember from the multitude of stories I've told about it, I didn't have a toothbrush and I carried an open spider coat knife in the pocket of my jacket in case someone...
John: attacked me.
John: You know, I like, I was walking, I'm walking around.
John: I hadn't had a toothbrush in four years and I was carrying my, and I was walking around with my hand on the knife.
Merlin: There's probably a larger percentage of Americans than one would imagine who both is in the Venn diagram of carrying an open knife and doesn't own a toothbrush.
Merlin: But it's not what one aspires to.
John: When you walk down the street and you see people walking past you, the number of them that are holding open weapons in their pocket is not zero.
Merlin: Oh, and first I was worried about coven now.
Merlin: I'm thinking about knives.
Merlin: Well, that's the or like, uh, or like, uh, like, uh, like a, what do they call it?
Merlin: Like a, you know, like a brass knuckle.
John: I mean, when, when I was, when I was walking across Europe, by the time I got halfway across Romania, I was sleeping with an open knife on my chest because I needed to get to it.
John: I felt like I needed to get to it that fast and I wasn't wrong.
John: But that's a way to not sleep very soundly.
John: No.
John: And, you know, I've been in that situation before.
John: And right now I'm not sleeping with an open knife in my chest, like laying on my chest.
John: But I feel like I'm even more stressed.
John: Because at least when I was in Romania, I smoked.
John: And I could sit up and laugh and have a cigarette in the middle of the night.
John: Yeah.
Merlin: I can't even do that.
Mm-hmm.
Merlin: So he drove his fire car to the house.
John: Oh, so anyway.
John: What had happened was.
John: And I wrote him this long letter that says, I'm not going to pay you this money.
John: I'll pay you some of it.
John: But I'm drawing a line because your narrative that all of the cost overruns and all of the problems you've had
John: Are because I needed special tile.
John: I mean, I agree with you that I am a problem.
John: Believe me.
John: I've known long before you met me.
John: But you haven't.
John: done your job and there's, and you don't have any oversight because you're the boss, but you've asked me to be the project manager on this whole, on this whole project.
John: And here's the thing.
John: I'm the boss.
Merlin: Oh, you're the captain now.
John: Yeah, I'm the captain.
John: But the, but the issue is there's like, we're caught between a rock and a hard place because there are all these things that he installed that still don't work.
John: And so I'm like, I'm not going to pay you until you get out here to finish this work.
John: And then he limps out and tries to finish it.
John: And he's like, oh, there's a part broken from the factory.
John: And then he's like, well, I'm not going to come out and fix those things until you pay me.
John: And the problem with the letter is I haven't sent it because the letter says, come finish the work and then I'm not going to pay you.
John: Finish the work because I already paid you for the work.
John: But then I'm not going to pay you for the work that
John: You didn't do over the course of a year.
John: And from a contractor perspective, I mean, there are contractors listening to this right now who are rolling their eyes because contractors.
John: Typical, typical customer.
John: That's right.
John: And contractors live according to the laws of their own ecosystem.
Hmm.
John: But contractors get to feel like they're holy warriors because they're so needed by people.
John: They're so desperately needed.
Merlin: And they can – They spend so much of their career – I mean I can't – now I'm just being unkind.
Merlin: But there are people you meet in this world who have never done anything but the right thing.
Merlin: And they can be real difficult to deal with.
Merlin: because they make a practice.
Merlin: Like I said, you know, you don't want to get in a fight with a frat boy because they do it all the time and they like it.
Merlin: And, you know, there's always those people out there who are like, well, you know, I have a legal thing where I could sue you.
Merlin: I'm like, well, have fun with that.
Merlin: But it's not that fun to sue or get sued.
Merlin: And it's, you know what I'm saying though?
Merlin: And like, but if you're dealing with somebody who's accustomed to just steamrolling over everybody and,
Merlin: and being able to just walk away unscathed.
Merlin: I mean, there's one guy in America who gets away with that and you don't, you don't, you should not aspire to be that man.
John: And I know they're talking about the ex president, you know, there, there are contractors in Southern Illinois that are just trying to scrape it together.
John: Right.
John: Sure.
John: Sure.
John: But contractors in Seattle, they walk on water.
Merlin: I get it.
Merlin: I get it.
Merlin: I get it.
Merlin: It's like if you found something that was really obscure, like we really need to get our cat groomed.
Merlin: And part of the problem, our cat's a grotesquerie, as you know.
Merlin: But it's also that like everybody you deal with for cat stuff, it's one of those things where I'm like, how are there not more people that will fix our cat?
Merlin: Like there's this crazy lady that, God bless her, just total nut job who used to come out in a van and I think abused the cat a little bit.
Merlin: And she was a real dick to work with and she needed to use the hose to refill her water tank.
Merlin: And she was just, it was just bleh.
Merlin: So we tried to go other places.
Merlin: Other places were like, oh,
Merlin: Your cat, like you got to sit here and like hold the cat while I groom it.
Merlin: And I'm like, I don't understand how in the entire fucking city of San Francisco, there's not somebody where we could pay double the market rate to do a good job of fixing the fucking cat.
Merlin: But you hear things like your cat's too matted or your cat, our six pound cat.
Merlin: You can't just shave the fucking cat.
Merlin: But it's like, I mean, like you started to, I feel like I'm losing my fucking mind.
Merlin: How is it so difficult to find somebody who will take care of this thing where I have to imagine this is not the only cat in San Francisco, although that would be a good name for an independent film.
John: The only cat in San Francisco.
Merlin: The only cat in San Francisco.
Merlin: You know what I'm saying, though?
John: Shave the only cat in San Francisco.
Merlin: Shave the cat.
Merlin: That's the famous book.
Merlin: But you know what I'm saying?
Merlin: If you're somebody who's like, this could be something like an obscure, like...
Merlin: holistic medicine person or like, but you're describing this crazy market thing that happens that's totally real, which is you can play real fast and loose because there's always somebody else, you know, who will want to hire you.
Merlin: Just somebody shave my cat, please.
Merlin: Just shave his cat.
Merlin: Shave the fucking cat.
Merlin: She's so gross.
Merlin: Her anus is like a collapsing star.
John: No, your cat is gross, it's true.
John: I love her so much.
John: I'll send you some photos while we're talking.
John: You have chosen that cat, and that cat has chosen you, and that is God speaking to you.
Merlin: The relationship between the cat, the lizard, and the Roomba is a very interesting triad, and that's all I'm going to say about that.
Merlin: They all are somewhat indifferent and yet somewhat curious about the others.
Yeah.
John: My cat and my daughter have a, like a crazy Stockholm Syndrome relationship.
John: Is it what they call a folie adieu?
John: My daughter treats that cat like the cat is made of, like the cat is a sack of beans.
John: And the cat, when I try to touch it,
John: the cat reacts as though I am a Roomba.
John: But my daughter grabs this cat and swings it around her head and hugs it like her life depends on it and the cat's life depends on it.
John: Really?
John: How's the cat respond?
John: The cat, as soon as my daughter puts her down,
John: Walks out of the room the cat follows her and the cat that's codependency John cannot get enough of what I would consider total abuse and my daughter Is happy as a clam completely oblivious to the fact that when she got the cat around the neck and the cat's going Like and she's just like oh kitty and then she puts the cat down and I'm like that cat is gonna run from her and
John: Because the cat won't let me put a finger on it half the time.
Merlin: Maybe you smell funny to the cat.
Merlin: You know what I mean?
Merlin: Not in a bad way.
Merlin: But I mean, maybe there's something.
Merlin: They say dogs can smell fear because you produce this weird extra stinky sweat when you're anxious.
Merlin: So I'm probably real stinky.
Merlin: And yet dogs love me because they can tell I love them.
Merlin: There's something about you and the kid.
Merlin: But the cat wants it from the kid.
Merlin: Likes to be flung like a sack of something.
Merlin: I guess so.
John: I mean, my cat, Louis, showed up on the front door of my house.
R.I.P.
John: RIP.
John: I opened the door.
John: There was Lewis.
John: He looked at me like he'd known me forever.
John: He walked into the house.
John: I was like, oh, hello.
John: And he was like, well, I live here now.
John: And I was like, I guess you do.
John: And we totally understood each other.
John: He would come and interact with me all the time.
John: I knew exactly what he needed and what he wanted.
John: This cat, the cat that lives in this house,
John: Every time I walk into the room, it looks at me like it's never seen a human before.
John: And I'm like, I'm the same person I fed you.
John: That's so insane.
Merlin: Like cats are like contractors though.
Merlin: Or like that lady who, when they first opened the sandwich place near my house, I went in there.
Merlin: Madeline and I were talking about this just this morning.
Merlin: This place where this woman, she was obviously not at all interested in owning a place that makes food.
Merlin: And there was something that's particularly confounding about this because it was, you know, down on the corner, down by, you know, out on the street.
Merlin: But you know what I mean?
Merlin: Like right in the place, like right on the corner.
Merlin: I mean, literally like half a block from my house and I go in there
Merlin: And each time I went in there, I had the same experience that you have with cats and contractors, which is not only had she never made a sandwich, she had also never eaten a sandwich.
Merlin: And it's entirely possible that every single morning is when she found out that sandwiches were a thing.
Merlin: And she would make these things like, this is sandwich?
Merlin: And you're like, I mean, it's got some of the components, but Beethoven's a lot more than just black dots on white paper.
Merlin: That's not really a sandwich.
Merlin: You're not making, to bring back Publix, a Publix-style sandwich, a sandwich that is made to be eaten.
John: The best kind of sandwich.
John: Oh, roast beef sandwich from Publix.
Merlin: Oh, shit dog.
Merlin: Fried chicken.
Merlin: Fuck.
Merlin: Anyway, but all these people you're in, you're like, contractor dude, you have a career.
Merlin: Like you have a magnetic sign on your fireman car that says you're Johnny Contractor.
Merlin: And yet everything you do suggests that you've never successfully, everything in my experience with you, maybe it's just me, is that you've never eaten a sandwich.
Merlin: And you've never completed a project within scope on budget and time.
Merlin: And now you're blaming me and I'm the whiny asshole?
John: Me?
John: So I talked to the electrician today, and he's like, well, that bathtub is powered because it has bubbles, and it needs to be plugged into an outlet that is RFI compliant, right?
John: Oh, with the little red button ones?
John: Yeah.
John: And my contractor, who installed the tub and the outlet, didn't put the RFI outlet there.
John: Which is a thing that any contractor would know to do.
Merlin: Because the reason you're allowed to be a contractor for money is that you know things like that.
John: That's exactly right.
John: I'm not paying you for me to tell you that.
John: That's not how this should work.
John: You know, like code demands that I put an RFI outlet there.
John: Well, somebody's paying for that, and it's me, but I already paid to have that outlet installed.
John: It was just a matter of picking the right outlet at Lowe's.
John: But nobody was in charge.
John: And the guys that put it in were like, well, they had to know that that was RFI, had to be RFI compliant.
John: But they were like, well, this is the one I got and nobody's ever going to notice it.
John: It's under some drywall.
John: It's just like, wowzy, dowsy.
John: Yeah, for sure.
John: Anyway, the other problem is that, you know, the anxiety that I had three years ago, a lot of it was financial.
John: I did not, I was doing all those podcasts and I wasn't getting paid for them.
John: And I was 50 years old and had kind of built a life for myself that I really enjoyed work-wise.
John: It was just that I had not unlocked how to make a living.
John: And I
John: People all around me were telling me that they were making a living from podcasting and that it was a simple matter of just putting A, B, and C together.
John: But because of the people I was working with, it was apparently twice as complicated.
John: You needed to put A, B, and C together, but that needed to happen within these parentheses of C, D, and E. And I solved it.
John: And when I solved it, I was...
John: Some of that anxiety went away because of Aloha, but some of it went away because I, I solved one of the problems, you know, a big problem.
John: Well, now having been, having my house washed away by the flooded Missouri, which now has ebbed there, there were a couple of casualties, you know, a couple of things that mattered to me.
John: uh, friendships.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: I'm sure it didn't involve any people that you otherwise trusted and loved.
Merlin: Right.
John: But one of those, one, one of those in particular was a, was part of my income and not an insignificant part.
John: And it washed away like it, like it had never, like it had no foundation, like it had never, uh,
John: Like it was made out of straw.
John: And I thought and really believed that it was made out of brick.
John: And it washed away so out of my control, so effervescently.
Merlin: Just to be clear here, this is not something where you said, oh, I'm having a rough time.
Merlin: I need to step away for a week or nine.
Merlin: No.
Merlin: This is something where it was just pulled out from under you.
Merlin: It's like that line in The Simpsons where the guy says, I worked here for 20 years and I don't even get a thank you.
Merlin: He says, I don't recall saying thank you.
John: It was, uh, it's in, it's inconceivable to me that the, the, the, the end of it, the destruction of it, I had no say in it.
John: It was just taken and taken for reasons I cannot comprehend.
John: Um, me neither.
John: And so, well, and so I'm going to talk about it, but I'm fucking mad.
Merlin: I'm not going to talk about it because I don't need it.
Merlin: I don't need the aggravation, and I don't want my poop to make a big splash.
Merlin: But, man, I thought I knew some people better than I did.
John: Yeah.
John: And I can't be – I can't account for it, and I can't also – you know, it all happened within an ecosystem, right?
John: And an ecosystem that I'm now out of and trying to make a new life.
John: But I don't know –
John: So this morning I launched a Patreon, my first Patreon.
Merlin: Oh.
Merlin: Your own bespoke John Roderick Patreon.
Merlin: Patreon.com slash John Roderick.
Merlin: People, go.
Merlin: We'll put it in show notes.
Merlin: This is awesome.
Merlin: We'll put it in show notes.
John: You can go to John's Patreon.
John: Check it out.
John: It's probably not.
John: So the idea is that now I'm in a new life and I'm going to be writing more.
John: I'm going to be releasing music.
John: I'm going to do the long form stuff and
John: that social media didn't, you know, that wouldn't fit on social media and that I had preferred social media to doing, doing the work.
John: And, you know, and it's hard for me because it's also like trying to think about what I do as work, trying to think about podcasting as a job, trying to think of.
John: Sort of professionalizing.
John: And it's because during this whole thing,
John: people that listen to this show people that listen to my other shows have reached out to me in the hundreds saying we love you please don't go you know come back please you know don't this isn't about you and and it you know like warmed me um
John: And I felt, and I felt a responsibility to it.
John: Like, and I feel a responsibility to it because, because the fact that the fact that a show that I loved could go away, did not take away the people that listened to it and loved it.
John: You know, like the people that listened to it and I are over here.
John: wondering what happened yeah and we had no power over it no control and that was a thing that i didn't realize i didn't realize i had no control i didn't realize that i uh was yeah that you could be fired fired from from your own job the your job without without actual cause yeah right and fired by friends and friends that were just like um i don't know friends that disappeared overnight that i'd known that i'd had for 15 years yep
John: And so that feeling of not just insecurity and not just like danger, but also a feeling of just like sort of desperate sadness or a feeling of obligation to the people that had come to also love the thing.
John: Yeah.
John: And a desire to give them peace.
John: to give them more because I wanted to give them more.
John: I intended to give them more.
John: So anyway, you know, you and I don't normally shill on this show and we don't like to, but I, I, I'm trying not to feel that way.
John: That's a thing that we put on ourselves.
John: I'm trying to say like, I want to keep doing stuff.
John: I want to keep working for people and I can't do it in that way.
John: In a way that I thought was stable, but it turns out isn't.
John: I need to be in charge of it.
Merlin: Yeah, well, sort of related to what I said a minute ago, to be truly your own boss, because you just found out that you weren't your own boss, because there was, I guess, a secret weekend meeting, and now you're not with the organization anymore.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: You don't have, but you can't put your hands to the levers, you know, if somebody else owns the levers.
Merlin: You're just moving their levers.
Yeah.
John: and you know i trust you i trust big mistake big mistake i know but i trust you because i know you and i know you know i have a sense of what you're gonna do and i know that there have been times where this show was like huh where are we right now like we've been doing this show for 10 years
John: We've had some ups and downs.
John: Really?
John: I mean, don't you think there were times when you were like, I can't stand your voice.
Merlin: I don't like having to do extra work, is my thing.
Merlin: But I...
Merlin: I treasure doing this show and something that I said to you privately that I hope you won't mind my sharing was that of the things that I'm aware of that you do, I would like to think that this is the one that is, I would like to think that could change in an hour, but I would like to think that this is the one where there, first of all, there's no, there's not really a topic apart from what we're talking about.
Merlin: People come here or don't come here because they like or don't like it.
Merlin: what we're doing here.
Merlin: And that is, in one sense, perilous, and in another sense, for obvious reasons, very freeing.
Merlin: But the, see, I hate talking about this.
Merlin: But the shit that went down, anybody who bought into that
Merlin: is not allowed to listen to the show.
Merlin: Because if you actually believe the horse shit that a bunch of bullies said, shame on you.
Merlin: Because of all the things that are incredibly fucked up about you and about me, the things for which you were accused, it was deeply wrong and deeply unfair.
Merlin: I'm sorry I'm saying this out loud, but it was very, very frustrating to me that people who know you better than the strangers and friends who listen to your programs, people who know you better,
Merlin: I didn't get that.
Merlin: And I need to either get a lot more information or develop a lot more undeserved forgiveness for those folks because I'm having a real hard time with that.
Merlin: But this show, and you nice people who listen to it, I hope you were able to look down at things that people said and go, who are you?
Merlin: What?
Merlin: Really?
Merlin: Like, huh, okay.
John: And so many people did.
Merlin: To quote Roger Stone, I guess it was just your knight in the barrel.
Merlin: But that has consequences.
Merlin: I'm glad to hear that you were doing this.
Merlin: I love doing this show, and I'm going to stop talking now.
Merlin: Patreon.com slash John Roderick, correct?
Yeah.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: I love this show and it's the show.
Merlin: This is the show.
Merlin: It's in the show.
Merlin: I mean, like the thing is, whatever we talk about, I don't love what I'm talking about, but I can't take it out because it's in the show.
Merlin: QED, motherfuckers.
John: I don't feel canceled, you know, and I recognize what happened.
John: I acknowledge it.
John: You know, I apologized and I was sincere.
John: Yeah.
John: But I
Merlin: But there's never enough.
Merlin: You will never become the person other people think you should be, which is usually them.
Merlin: You will never become that fast enough.
Merlin: And a huge problem we all deal with now is, like, if it was your knight in the barrel or you lost the Shirley Jackson lottery...
Merlin: Whatever you say, it's not going to be enough.
Merlin: Whatever you do, because it's not what you did or didn't do.
Merlin: It's what people imagine.
Merlin: The person people imagine that you are and then how you get to be the one with the stone rather than standing in the middle of the circle.
Merlin: And it's fucking revolting.
John: I told you, didn't I, that a dozen people reported me to Child Protective Services and they were obligated to come and interview my family and sit here.
John: Interrogate my daughter.
John: And they were wonderful.
John: Child Protective Services were wonderful.
John: And they were just doing their jobs.
John: But the idea that an internet mob could actually unleash and would actually...
John: Believe that that was the right thing to do and that child protective services.
John: I'm sure I'm sure they were genuinely extremely worried Absolutely worried about my yeah about my my incredibly pampered child you got you basically got domestic swatting somebody swatted you domestically, but that you know that puts fear into you because it's not the kind of like oh, maybe my Account is gonna get hacked.
John: It's like
John: The police are going to come based on some person in Kentucky who read 10 tweets and decided that they were – and don't know enough about what Child Protective Services does to – because talking to them, they were like, this is really not –
John: Good use of our time, but we have the caller ID does not pop up with Kentucky Karen Right, like they don't they don't know they've got a job to do and then it was a wonderful experience In the sense that they were lovely and I got a better understanding of what they do do Because we spent a lot of time talking about like here's what we're capable of here's what our resources are and here's what
John: we, you know, look for.
John: And, you know, I was like one of those things where I'm just curious and learned a lot.
John: But it was also awful.
John: And fortunately, my daughter really liked the girl.
Merlin: I bet you develop a certain, the better ones, develop a certain kind of personality and comportment that is probably, like, friendly and civil, but also, like, you get a good eye.
Merlin: I bet they can kind of
Merlin: I'm sorry, I don't want to minimize the work that they do.
Merlin: But I mean, part of it must be you can walk in and go, I have a pretty good idea already, which way this is likely to go.
Merlin: And she did.
Merlin: I need to do the work.
Merlin: But like, I'll bet, you know, when they walked in and didn't discover your child, like some kind of Mr. Show character, like sitting in a pile of her own filth, like, like, like cradling a can of beans.
Yeah.
John: Yeah, they went downstairs and played Barbies for an hour.
John: And, you know, and my kid came upstairs and said, well, here are the questions that she asked.
John: She said, what's your favorite thing about your dad?
John: What's your least favorite thing about your dad?
John: You know, this type of thing.
John: And I was like, well, what is your least favorite thing about me?
John: And she said, well, you don't play with Legos as much as I would like.
John: And I was like, yeah.
John: She said, also.
John: It's going to be a second call now, John.
John: Also, you sometimes call me sweetie.
John: A little block man with a briefcase is going to come to your house.
John: We received some very concerning reports.
John: You call me sweetie heart and I asked you not to.
John: Right.
John: And I'm like, yeah, well.
Merlin: Breakfast in a bass stick.
Merlin: I get it.
Merlin: I get it.
John: Panatos.
John: But that type of thing, you know, it makes me realize in a way I don't belong on social media and I haven't for years.
John: It's not for me.
John: It isn't where what I do belongs.
John: Yeah.
John: And that's really hard because like when I quit drinking, I don't know where what I do belongs right now.
John: And I need to, I think I need to build something in a world where all the things that we used to build, nobody cares about it.
John: Nobody goes to websites.
John: Nobody's on message boards.
John: You know, it's all...
John: Happening in a place that I'm not.
John: Yeah.
John: And yet you can build something in the world.
John: You can make things and people will people will find it.
John: And so, anyway.
Merlin: Yeah, I've given this a fair amount of thought as well.
Merlin: I continue to give this a fair amount of thought.
Merlin: And it strikes me that there are environments or systems or whatever that is.
Merlin: That could be a business or it could be your college.
Merlin: It could be your church.
Merlin: Whatever your community is, you try to learn.
Merlin: You can't help but notice after a little bit of time what makes people...
Merlin: thrive.
Merlin: And eventually you learn what makes people succeed.
Merlin: And then eventually you learn what's necessary just to survive.
Merlin: And you don't always learn those in the same order.
Merlin: But any place where you're thinking, I need to go pretend to be somebody whom I am not in order to survive,
Merlin: It's one thing to pretend that you're somebody that you're not in order to succeed or thrive.
Merlin: I wouldn't call that thriving personally, but to at least appear successful.
Merlin: But if you find yourself constantly on the sort of knife edge of needing to... How am I going to survive given whom I'm... You notice I'm not saying who I'm expected to be.
Merlin: Who I'm expected to pretend to be.
Merlin: And that to me is virtually the definition of...
Merlin: the opposite of success.
Merlin: That is the opposite of happy.
Merlin: If you have to spend a lot of your time trying to figure out how to make people who don't know you seem like somebody else for the one moment they discover you exist, that is not a healthy environment.
John: No.
John: And what's weird is we all have said social media is a toxic place.
John: It's terrible for us.
John: There are movies about it.
John: It's awful.
John: None of us like it there.
John: And yet, none of us have the discipline to stop going there.
John: And I didn't have the discipline to stop going.
John: I tried and tried.
John: You know how many times I've quit it.
John: And then I start lurking and then I come back.
John: Because it'll be fun for 20 minutes.
John: Yeah.
John: I see you post something.
John: I see somebody post something.
John: But then all of a sudden I'm waving my hands trying to attract somebody.
John: Like, hey, give me some thieves.
Merlin: And you end up just being lucky if it's simply people explaining your joke to you.
Merlin: That becomes the best of circumstances.
Merlin: I hate to compare it to stand-up comedy, but it is like going to a performance where after every sentence, everybody in the room gets to hold the mic for the amount of time that you spoke.
Merlin: And then that is a performance.
Merlin: It's actually probably hundreds of performances, but it's not a show that's part of a career I would like to have.
John: Well, another thing I realized is a thing we always knew.
John: which is that podcasts are actually not on the internet.
John: Nope.
John: Podcasts do not, they're not on the internet at all.
John: They are, they are on the fucking radio and all the people that listen to this show and all the people that listen to my other shows found it and live in a separate ecosystem and
Merlin: Even from other podcasts.
Merlin: I mean, this is like to compare what we're doing here to Joe Rogan or Marc Maron or Serial or the shows I love even.
Merlin: Like to compare it to something like You're Wrong About or any of the other like dozens of shows that I listen to every week.
John: Jordan and Jesse Goh, right.
Merlin: Yeah, they each exist in their own little pocket universe in some ways.
John: They do.
John: And weirdly, people have found these things and live in them.
John: So many people wrote me and they're like, I'm not on social media at all, but I couldn't help but hear about this because it was on the BBC.
Merlin: I heard it mentioned on a podcast that went up on Saturday.
Merlin: People we don't know, a very, very famous podcast.
Merlin: There's a two-word phrase that was used that I'm just like, really, this is still going on?
Merlin: This is like your new Where's the Beef?
John: And, you know, like everybody had a hot take.
Merlin: Sure.
Sure.
Merlin: Q-tip had I never liked you at all.
Merlin: I wasn't surprised at all You know, it's always the opportunity to come out and say no be actually actually actually I never liked at all actually actually I've always had my concerns even though, you know, we were great internet friends I always had my concern.
Merlin: Yeah, I was very really problematic.
John: Yeah, but But this where we are is a separate world and I think you know, maybe
John: um i can live i can live a full life and not and not be on baby steps john let's not go crazy yeah you still have the cigarettes up on the uh up on the door somewhere not around here they're probably still they're still above the doors at the farm it wasn't the electrician's fault patreon.com slash john roderick