Ep. 419: "God's Cursive"
Merlin: Hello?
Merlin: Hi, John.
Merlin: Hi, Merlin.
Merlin: How's it going?
Merlin: Caribbean queen.
Merlin: Sharing the same dream.
Merlin: William Ocean.
John: I have an Alice in Chains song stuck in my head.
John: And so what does one do about that but try and get it out of your head by singing Billy Ocean?
Merlin: I feel like I remember hearing that there's a universal cleanser.
Merlin: I don't think there could be a universal, like truly universal.
Merlin: That seems like the type of thing you would know, though.
Merlin: That's a very Merlin man thing.
John: The universal cleanser.
Merlin: I'm going to do what I usually don't do.
Merlin: How to get a song out of your head.
Merlin: Roll the bones.
Merlin: I was going to say either Abba.
Merlin: I was going to say the Ramones.
Merlin: Ramones was my first pick.
Merlin: Abba was my second pick.
Wow.
Merlin: Um, get out of the loop, do a puzzle.
John: Did you always say ABBA or did you at one point say ABBA and then you switched to ABBA like Moog and Moog?
John: Yeah, I did that.
John: Yeah.
John: Second one.
John: That's all right.
Merlin: Do you think I'm, do you think I'm being a little bit fancy or as we say in my house, fancy?
Merlin: ABBA.
Merlin: ABBA.
Merlin: What does your aunt say?
Merlin: Ugh.
Merlin: You know, you know, I'm mobbed up with that now.
Merlin: It's so dumb.
Merlin: It's so dumb.
Merlin: It's my uncle.
Merlin: Your uncle.
Merlin: Um.
Merlin: Ha ha ha.
Merlin: It's, I'm pretty sure it's got to be a, you know, if not a Providence thing, maybe a Rhode Island thing.
Merlin: Maybe it's a North, Northeastern thing, like a New England thing.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: New England.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: Yeah.
John: I, uh, I, I don't say aunt, I don't say Abba, but I do say Moog.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: Because I don't want to seem dumb.
Merlin: But see, then there's also the corollary, and I'm not going to look this up, but I've heard it said, and you can tell me because you're a Francophile.
Merlin: There's a film festival in a city.
Wow.
Merlin: Oh, con.
Merlin: Well, time was Americans would say the Cannes Film Festival.
Merlin: And then for a while, at least, fancy people would say the Cannes Film Festival.
Merlin: But I don't know if this is a double turns out or just a single turns out, but I've heard it's actually Cannes.
John: Cannes.
John: Cannes con.
John: I think it may be like they keep telling us about Scandinavian, that there are just –
John: Sounds that we don't make.
John: So the French are making an ah-ah, somewhere in between ah-ah, ah-ah.
John: They switch between ah and ah so fast that the human ear can't discern it.
Merlin: If you're interested in this stuff, and I hope you're not, but if you are interested in this stuff, there's a really interesting fellow on that does YouTube videos.
Merlin: He's a dialect coach, mostly.
Merlin: He's a linguist, but he's also a dialogue coach for people who are actors.
Merlin: And he helps them get very specific.
Merlin: Like, you know, if my English accent was, like, that wouldn't be very telling.
Merlin: But he could teach me how to do, like, a really good, like, specific Yorkshire accent.
Yeah.
John: I love those YouTube videos where one person will switch between – there's one where there's a guy that does every UK accent, and it's not every one, but he does 15, 20 of them.
Merlin: I love those.
Merlin: Yeah, and a friend of the show, David Wayne, has one where he does every New York City accent.
Merlin: Those are good.
Merlin: But this guy just concluded a big, big three-part series on accents of America.
Merlin: And no, it's not all of them.
Merlin: But he does it in that voice.
Merlin: And he'll say things like, oh, and in, I want to say, South Carolina, there's this place called Brunswick Island that has this extremely specific accent.
Merlin: But then he also ties it to a little bit of physiology, which I think is interesting, about why people from New Orleans sound like people from Manhattan.
Merlin: that there's this there's certain things you do you got your got your goat goat fronting you know you got your you got your dropped you know this and that yeah you dropped this and that now a friend of the show john syracuse said this is virtually is the center of his life is correcting people on how they pronounce things well and he is from long island where they barely speak english there you want to hear his criticism of the language guy
Merlin: Okay.
Merlin: All right.
Merlin: I mean, it's got to go somewhere.
Merlin: I do want to hear it.
Merlin: He thinks he didn't establish enough of a baseline.
John: Oh, you need a baseline.
John: You need a baseline.
John: You know, the baseline, and I've gone on record with this before, and people know where to send their letters, but I believe that the English that you and I spoke, or the English as she has spoke,
John: Is the English, right?
John: Your English, my English.
John: This is the English.
John: Because English, you know, it started in Englishland and it migrated to, you know, various places all around.
John: We've improved on a lot of their stuff over the years.
John: That's the thing.
John: It kept getting better and better as it moved west.
John: Oh, until you get to Seattle, and that's when it reaches its apotheosis.
John: There it is.
John: Between San Francisco, Seattle, and Anchorage, it got to the end.
John: It got to the end of the line.
John: Now, if you go all the way to Hawaii, it's gone too far.
John: Because then it's coming from the other direction.
Yeah.
John: Oh, absolutely.
Merlin: Prevailing language winds.
John: Yeah.
John: Seattle, and specifically, I think a little bit further out, like Nia Bay, but like Bremerton, that's where English really just found its highest expression.
John: And I think there's ample evidence for that, that all the American accents, if you go...
John: The further back east you go, well, just the more primitive they are.
John: Think of the English that John Syracuse speaks.
Merlin: I'm not sure where the letters will go, but if you wanted to say, what do you think is the worst American accent?
Merlin: Oh, the worst American accent.
Merlin: You know what?
Merlin: Never mind.
Merlin: Never mind.
Merlin: Never mind.
Merlin: Let's keep it friendly.
Merlin: You know, I got a lot of struggles with this, with the English, you know, the UKers.
Merlin: I know.
Merlin: You're always struggling with the English.
Merlin: Well, you know, they got to feel like they're different, you know.
Merlin: But it's, you know, okay, so my baseline is.
John: You know, we have a lot of listeners in the United Kingdom.
John: And, uh, and it's assorted colonial, uh, properties.
Merlin: It's, uh, what are called the principalities?
John: Yeah.
John: The principalities.
John: We have a lot of listeners.
John: I mean, they, they, they, um, they shake out, you know, it's like when you shake out the bedclothes and all of a sudden there's all these crawdads in the bed, except in our case, it's, um.
John: It's UK and Anzac listeners.
John: Some would call them crayfish.
John: Yeah, well, some would.
Merlin: Doodads.
Merlin: Doodaday.
Merlin: I have mixed feelings because I am one of those people who is a bit of a pill sometimes about words.
Merlin: I enjoy the specificity of a word.
Merlin: And I've learned from hard-won experience that choosing the wrong word when you mean something else has consequences.
John: Okay.
Merlin: All right.
Merlin: I'd be happy to share some anecdotes about that.
Merlin: But I do feel I don't know if I'm prescriptive descriptive.
Merlin: I don't know which one I am.
Merlin: But you know what?
Merlin: Here's the thing.
Merlin: And I go around with this with a beloved person in my household.
Merlin: Listen, listen, if you understand what I meant, you don't need to correct me.
Merlin: If you didn't understand, like if I did a full on, you know, may I mambo dog face to the banana patch, I will take your notes on being clearer.
Merlin: But here's what's important to me as a communicator.
Merlin: And let's be honest, a storyteller.
Merlin: Okay.
Merlin: Which is, I want you to join me on a journey where you listen to this anecdote because of the part that I want to get across to you.
Merlin: rather than you being there throwing yellow cards about whether or not I got Kirsten or Kirsten right.
Merlin: First of all, Kirsten is not a name.
Merlin: Kirsten.
Merlin: I mean, I know that's a John Roderick kind of name.
Merlin: That's a redhead name.
John: But there's Kirsten, and then there's the one that we can't pronounce, which is Kirsten.
John: It starts as Kirsten and then halfway through it changes its mind.
Merlin: Well, it screws you up because my wife has worked with a Kirsten.
Merlin: She's worked for a Kirsten.
Yeah.
Merlin: But okay, so we can talk about that or not.
Merlin: The other thing I want to say is that, and again, I'm criticized by a friend of the show, John Circuso, about this, which is he thinks Don and Don sound different.
Merlin: He thinks Mary, Mary, and Mary sound different.
Merlin: And I'm just here to say that they are different if you're from somewhere where people say it different, but I'm from a place where everybody says words all the same way.
Merlin: Everything's a homonym in Ohio.
John: Yeah, that's the – and it's the highest expression of the form.
John: I mean he is saying these words differently because he's – Right, because he's an East Coast cuck.
John: Yeah, he's speaking a primitive version of the language.
Merlin: Yeah, he grew up in Long Island and so he says a lot of really bananas stuff.
John: Yeah, they're all out there.
John: They learn English from like guys working on Camaros.
John: Oh, that's right.
Merlin: Then he moved to Baston.
John: Yeah.
John: Well, you remember in high school where some high schools you had the football coach was also the history teacher?
Merlin: Mine was the driver's ed teacher.
John: Well, see, there it is.
Merlin: Well, actually, I take it back.
Merlin: In 11th grade, I had a very incompetent man.
Merlin: He's the man who said that the Native Americans would get two-fifths of the land or 40%, whichever was more.
Merlin: He was the JV football coach.
Merlin: Right.
Merlin: Exactly.
Merlin: And he kept the mimeographs for the tests where he knew people could find it when he went to get coffee.
John: Back East, that, I mean, that's a Western thing.
John: Back East, it's the football coach and is the English teacher.
John: Oh, man.
John: So that's why they speak like.
John: Yeah.
John: You made me think of a couple of things a second ago.
John: You know, here.
John: Yeah.
John: Here at the house – Where you live?
John: Yeah, the variety of houses.
John: Where your children play with their toys.
John: We talk a lot about – and by we, I mean I. I talk a lot to them about the difference between the letter of the law and the spirit of the law.
John: And you're saying like, are you listening to the story or are you trying to find where all the rusty nails are in the story?
John: And for me, I'm always trying to impart that it's not that the spirit of the law is more important than the letter of the law.
John: It's just you have to go in knowing which one you're talking about.
John: You have to...
John: You have to decide which thing.
Merlin: This is when we say, I mean, you're saying sort of not strictly metaphorically, but you're saying in general, there are things that let's even call it a rule that we've all agreed to.
Merlin: And the reason for the rule should be kept in mind when we adjudicate whether the rule has been followed in the spirit of it.
Merlin: Correct?
Merlin: That is absolutely.
Merlin: You're talking about like a seventh graders loophole of like, well, technically I was in bed at 10.
Merlin: Even though then I went outside and, you know.
John: But I'm talking about the evolution of that now to include storytelling.
Merlin: Oh, please.
Merlin: Can't we get a codicil, an amendment, something that just cuts me a break because I said Kirsten wrong in the anecdote where the name didn't matter?
John: Because the spirit of the law of the spirit of the law extends to...
John: Um, extends to, you know, it encompasses all this stuff.
John: Like, what are we, what, what is the point of this story or what is the point of you?
John: And, and I could not agree with you more, John.
John: What's the spirit of the law of this conversation or of this, even this, this project that we're doing, or is it a letter of the law conversation or, or a trip to the swimming pool or, you know, or birthday party?
Merlin: If you said to a little kid, and you tried to make it real plain, and you said to a little kid who turns out to be a child lawyer, you say to them, hey, listen, it's really important you're not playing in the street.
Merlin: And then they go out and read a comic book in the street.
Merlin: They're not honoring the spirit of the law.
Right.
Merlin: It's not, it's not really about the playing part, you know, bad on me for not being a better legal scholar.
Merlin: But the really important part is I need to get it through your head that the street is not the place to be.
Merlin: You're passing through the street, keep moving and get out of the way, you know, and go watch your six.
Merlin: Right.
Merlin: But with storytelling, with storytelling, there's always somebody there.
Merlin: Right.
Merlin: To, to kind of like, to kind of like give you, give you a little dig on, on, on a detail you got wrong or, or in perhaps in my case, like a word I didn't use correctly or pronounced correctly.
Right.
John: The tricky thing that I'm engaged in right now is that we are – she just turned 10.
John: Oh.
John: Oh, right.
John: See, I was guessing it was your partner mother.
John: Oh, no, no, no.
John: This is the young one.
Merlin: Oh, get ready, John.
Merlin: It's so fun.
Merlin: They love being right a little bit.
Merlin: Well, and I like that.
Merlin: Yeah, sure.
John: But where we stand right now is –
John: It seems to me in the doorway of more interesting reading.
John: And I'm lucky.
John: mazel tov to me that she is a diana yeah that she's a she's a reader she's always been a reader and very lucky in that regard yep yep yep um i i introduced her to many of the you know many of my favorite things all of the graphic novels and the comic books and everything and and the adventure stories and the
John: And she's become very, she's, she's very star Wars.
John: Um, she's so star Wars, but that's another conversation.
John: But now at 10, you know, at 10, uh, was the moment where adults started to get suspicious of my reading and started to quote unquote challenge me by, by basically like, um,
John: you know, by, uh, experimenting or like throwing me hard books to see what, what I, you know, like, Hey Mikey, he likes it.
John: Like they, you know, they would say like, Oh, apparently you're a really good reader.
John: Well here, read the Bible.
John: And it's like, and so adults started to, to, um, to almost treat my reading as, um, as something that was fucked up about me that they needed to, um,
John: they needed to plumb the limits of.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: But it's part of this bigger pattern.
Merlin: I'd love to talk about sometime of, of adults who claim reading is important, doing everything in their power to take these special things about reading and make them unspecial and drudgery.
Merlin: So like, Hey, you enjoy reading?
Merlin: Well, you've been like, you really blew through all those Henry Huggins books.
Merlin: Like, you know, have this, uh, this troctatus to read.
Merlin: Like I, I haven't made this not fun.
Merlin: Hi, you know, it's fun.
Merlin: A reading journal.
Merlin: Why don't you write down how much you read?
Yeah.
Merlin: Oh, no worries.
Merlin: What am I, a cab driver?
Merlin: Like, no.
Merlin: Like, the kid reads.
Merlin: Don't worry.
Merlin: Don't worry.
Merlin: The kid is reading.
John: Well, and I had that conversation with Ken Jennings the other day where he came by and I was like, you know, because I was talking to him about this thing that I'm kind of, you know, I'm kind of standing on the precipice of.
John: You're up against it.
John: And he said the same thing.
John: Like, ah, it doesn't matter if they're reading.
John: As long as they're reading, it doesn't matter what they read.
John: Agreed.
John: But, you know, my daughter has learned to read.
John: She's a skimmer.
John: And I am, um, I'm a, I'm somebody that reads every word.
John: Are you a saver?
John: Yeah.
John: I'm a slow reader and always was, you know, if I sit down with a book, like I, I am on a long, slow walk and I do, I read every word.
John: I read a lot of sentences twice, three times, not because I lost, not because I drifted off, but because I read it and I was like, now let's, what is that again?
John: Now let's read that again.
John: Like, wow, look at the way it does it.
John: Like I really, really, really spend too much time with the words and she's the other way.
John: Like she, and she learned this, she was like this from the very beginning, which is just as she's reading, she's like, and she's looking for the meat of the story.
John: And then all the exposition, she's like, blah, blah, blah, blah.
John: You know, you just see her, her eye kind of, you know, heading, heading on through.
John: And so when, at the end of, as there, as her books have gotten more complicated and
John: At the end of the book, I say, well, what, you know, like, what was that book about?
John: She's like, oh, you know, and she tells the, she sketches out the story.
John: And I'll ask a few more questions.
John: And at a certain point, it doesn't take long to get to a place where she doesn't, she didn't get that.
Merlin: part of the book you know she skipped over the pages where I run into this right now with TV shows where it's like if you didn't see the scene where like Aunt May if you didn't notice the half second shot where Aunt May puts down a coaster just as Peter Porker is about to put his cup on the table like that's storytelling I know you understand now the monster guys are going to come and fight but like you miss so much of the mood and what the writer the storyteller is doing if you're just trying to say like no no no come on just give me the log line
John: Yeah, right.
John: She, she, um, so, so she started to push back a little bit like, ah, these books, you know, this, cause she's, she's at that next level.
John: She's walked into the next level of books and, and she says, these books are so boring.
John: It's like nothing happens.
John: And I'm like, well, yeah, but I mean, you're very, very used to reading, reading a whole book.
John: Like giant spectrum of books where on every page someone fights a dragon or someone, you know, like everyone has superpowers.
John: Everyone is running away from home.
John: Everyone.
Merlin: You're saying in kids books especially that like they're real, they're fast paced.
John: Yeah, and all of fantasy and science fiction.
Merlin: And again, true with visual media.
Merlin: The post-MTV generation, there's a lot more fast cuts and editing and all that kind of stuff.
Merlin: And you go back and watch some kind of a classic thing, and you watch 2001, and it's like, what is happening?
Merlin: It's just people walking around on a moon.
John: But so we've started this conversation where I'm like, well, so part of the fun of reading is...
John: the reading yeah and it's not it's not something to be done with yeah right you don't you don't like the words aren't something to get through on the way to um they aren't simply something to get through on the way to having the you know the kind of uh most skeletal spark of the story
John: Yeah.
John: Which is super easy to digest.
John: And it's like, oh, the girl went to the thing and she had magic powers.
John: And then she fought the guy.
John: And at the end of the fight, she won book over.
John: But it's all part of this.
John: In order to have the satisfaction of the words, you have to kind of read them for their own sake.
John: And I hear myself struggling.
Yeah.
John: To explain, and it isn't a case where I'm sitting and like, now you have to read Wrinkle in Time.
John: And she's like, I just want to read Adventure Time comics.
John: Oh, they're so good.
John: But it is a thing where I've started to realize like, oh, all of those like really great, you know, they didn't have graphic novels when I was a kid.
John: And she has grown up reading graphic novels.
John: We had Harvey.
Yeah.
Merlin: Right?
Merlin: Get Harvey comics.
Merlin: Harvey the Rabbit?
Merlin: Sorry, my bad.
Merlin: No, no, we talked about this.
Merlin: You know, you and I, we had Archie.
Merlin: We had the Archie.
Merlin: Well, not just Archie.
Merlin: But, you know, we had the Archie family.
Merlin: We had the Harvey family.
Merlin: You go to Spinner Rack and get a parent-approved comic, it's not going to be like Dark Knight or Watchmen.
John: No, but they also didn't have all these ones that are targeted at preteen girls, you know, braces and these ones where, where characters have, they have real world house.
John: They have real world problems, but you know, there's also like, uh, when somebody is surprised, there's an interrobang instead of, uh, two pages of explaining how their emotions were, you know, like that.
John: Um, the visual media does a lot of the, the heavy lifting.
John: And so you don't have to sit and, and, uh, even, you know, even reading Beverly Cleary, there's the words have to do the work.
John: Anyway, it's, it's been a challenge for me because I don't want to be a nuge.
John: I don't want to be a parent that's like, you're not reading right, but I do want to help her.
John: make this transition because i have known and this is what i was saying to ken and ken you know ken's just like whatever but in the same way a little too relaxed in the same way that jonathan colton was like ah just let them yeah you know just let them do whatever they want on the internet it's fine they'll grow up to be fine and his kids screens in his his house are like ashtrays were in my house exactly but um
John: But what – but I do know a lot of adults and have my whole life known a lot of adults who are incredible readers.
John: They're compulsive readers even.
Merlin: Yeah, I think that's a good word.
John: Yeah.
John: They read and read and read and read and read.
John: But at a certain point, they arrested their development in terms of what they wanted to read.
John: And they stopped somewhere –
John: where they were comfortable you know they read books where they were comfortable and they read and so their language and their storytelling and their imagination just you know they got some place that and and in in our culture if you were reading it is assumed by most people that you're smart and that you are fine and like oh they're reading leave them alone they're they're they're smart they're doing good they do good in school leave them alone
John: But you can make that choice for yourself.
John: And there's a lot I feel now where people are like, well, this is what I want.
John: This is what I like.
John: Don't yuck my yum.
John: I want to read Louis L'Amour books for the rest of my life.
John: And when I get to the end of them, I read them over.
John: And that's what I want.
John: And watching her and realizing, like, I have to be partners with her in this and
John: And part of the job, I think, of dadding is at least continuing to talk about the challenge of like, yes, this book is harder than that book to read.
John: It's harder to enjoy even until you learn – until you decode the language of reading it.
John: It isn't even decode the book.
John: It's decode the way of reading.
Yeah.
Merlin: And there's a lot of I would say in the same way that I would say there's a lot of movies that I've heard referred to as mood movies.
Merlin: You know, I mean, something like a Terrence Malick movie or something like that, where it's like the story, the dialogue, like that's that's not entirely why you're here.
Merlin: You're here for the visual medium of film.
Merlin: And in the case of a book, if you're reading a book by.
Merlin: Cormac McCarthy.
Merlin: Like, are you there for the story?
Merlin: Or are you there for that insane language?
Merlin: That could even be for Stephen King in some cases, where it's like, you grow up with like, okay, here's a story.
Merlin: And you know, and John, I blame some of this on the history of things like SRAs, where like reading is supposed to be some kind of a quick skills challenge and you get a badge.
Merlin: Instead of like just being something or like in my case, like Kurt Vonnegut, I bet there's a lot of people who are super annoyed by the way that he writes, but it really hit me at the right time when I was 16.
Merlin: And I loved his repetition.
Merlin: And, you know, that's the thing about an author.
Merlin: It's not just that they can tell a story.
Merlin: And again, back to movies and TV, some of the best things that I can recommend to people, I could tell you not only the story, I could tell you the twist, but it's still not the same as watching the movie, where you have to disappear into the movie and see how that story is being told.
Merlin: And that's in some ways the most challenging part.
Merlin: And how do you get a little kid or a kid, how do you keep them excited about what comes next without making it seem like eating your vegetables?
Yeah.
John: Well, and, and the whole, the whole thing about, you know, eventually, eventually you go to college and someone says, what did the author mean by this?
John: And you're either excited to ask and answer that question or you couldn't, you couldn't care less.
John: Right.
John: And, and to get to a place where you're, where you're interested in that question rather than say like, I mean, because at a, at a young age, at 10 years old,
John: you're not even really conscious of the author as a participant.
John: You know, you read the story and you take it in and you're like, I am in this story and then I'm out the other side.
John: And I've been trying to introduce to her, like, not all authors are reliable.
John: Not all words on a page are true.
Merlin: That's the whole point of several very good Faulkner novels.
Merlin: No, I mean, like when you get into something like Sound of Fury or Absalom, Absalom, one of the reasons I love Absalom, Absalom so much, or loved it so much anyway in college, I haven't read a lot since then, but it's like each chapter is told by a different person who has a different POV.
Merlin: You know, it's like Mississippi Rashomon.
Merlin: Right.
Merlin: And that's kind of my voice's EP.
Yeah.
John: That is, that's exciting.
John: And, you know, and I don't want to, I definitely look back in our life and think and remember myself at six years old when she was six.
John: I don't remember myself at six.
John: Well, I do, but I don't remember thinking this at six, but I remember watching her at six and being concerned about something that by the time she was eight had resolved itself.
Merlin: But I also.
Merlin: Right.
Merlin: Right.
Merlin: Somehow, somehow she got over this thing that I thought would be, you know, an extinction level event for the child.
John: You know, when you're in college, you can't keep putting peas up your nose at dinner.
John: Like, I need to teach you this now.
John: And then, you know, and then it's like, you can do that when you're back in your dorm.
John: But but in terms of like reading habits, I mean, this is something that matters so much to me.
John: And made a difference in my life.
John: And it's very hard for me to go back to 10, for instance, and remember or have any conception of what my relationship was to books other than that I relied on them and I was there with them a lot of the time.
John: But, you know, I remember and it was right about this time, fifth, sixth grade, where it's like, oh, wait a minute.
John: Watership Down is not just a story.
John: It's some other it's there's other things happening here.
John: And this is more interesting than I was prepared for.
John: And that just being like.
John: So it's not like reading is just a thing that you do instead of sports, but it's a thing that.
John: that, uh, uh, that brightens the corners, you know, that, that, that turns into your life.
John: And I don't, you know, and to be a guide there, it's one thing to sit with her and say like, all right, now carry the nine.
John: Okay.
John: Now,
John: What do you do?
Merlin: I totally – this is why I continue to believe math should be taught somewhere besides school.
Merlin: There should just be math school where, like, you could just take all the courses that, like, you could be interested in.
Merlin: But math is in some ways like, you know, computer maths, really.
Merlin: It's a trade.
Merlin: It's – I hate when there's a hang-up that makes everybody dread the other – well, math kid – dread the other classes because of the one class.
Yeah.
John: Yeah, that's crazy.
John: And, you know, I have a friend whose daughter at the age of, what, 12 or 13?
John: The word math made her fall on the floor and cry.
John: And it's like, what happened?
Merlin: It really does feel like a cruel trick until you understand.
Merlin: I mean, I got some follow-up on this in a sec, but that's very much one of those things that feels like a cruel trick until you understand, like, that there's a method to this.
Merlin: Instead, they just throw you in the deep end a lot of the time.
Merlin: Do they still teach stuff like, you know, of being like a division problem or, you know what I mean?
Merlin: Like the ways there were keywords you could look for that would like let you in on like which information is germane and like what.
Merlin: I remember that feeling though.
Merlin: I was practically panicky about word problems for most of my childhood.
John: And I think it's word problems that did it to my friend's daughter too.
John: And I remember I was at dinner with them and I was like, what have we done wrong in life that
John: That a thing that is so natural, so native to the world, which is God's cursive, which is math.
John: God's cursive.
John: That's pretty good.
John: Everything is written in math.
John: It's all written in math.
John: Yep, yep, yep.
John: By God, it's the only language he really speaks.
John: God doesn't fucking speak Hebrew.
John: He doesn't need to speak.
John: He didn't need to talk at all.
Merlin: That's the thing about Pauly.
Merlin: He moved slow because he didn't need to move for anybody.
John: It means Pauly ain't going to come around no more.
John: But somehow we've turned it into a thing that is like, yeah, absolutely, like hot coals under fingernails.
John: Yeah.
John: And my kid has just started to say word problems.
John: uh, are a nightmare for her.
John: And honestly, when I look back at my own life, I loved word problems.
John: And maybe that's why I've had so much interpersonal success in my life.
John: Why every relationship has worked out because I love a word problem.
John: Um, I didn't like, do you like it?
John: Do you like it?
John: Cause it's easier because you like the challenge.
John: What I found was word problems were this, and, and we joke about it all the time, a train moving from X to Y. We, we, uh,
John: What was...
John: What I discovered was that the word part of it was the hard part.
John: And once you decoded the word part of it, usually it was an easy math problem.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: That was the thing.
Merlin: I mean, it's at worst like pre-algebra.
Merlin: You might need some parentheses.
Merlin: But it's the decoding.
Merlin: I agree with you.
Merlin: It's the decoding that's hard.
Merlin: It's also just that feeling that like I can tell somebody wrote this in a way that's a little bit confusing because they think that's going to help me be better at removing the confusing parts or decoding the confusing parts.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: But it feels a little bit hostile to me.
John: It is.
John: And that was what I liked about it as a kid was I can decode words.
John: And so I'm not fooled by your fooling, foolish adults.
John: I looked at the page and I was like, I see you, adults.
John: I will miss you fools.
John: You're right there on the other side of that one-way glass.
John: And let me show you how easy it is to decode your dumb sentence.
John: I mean, there were a couple of tests that I took where I corrected the grammar on a word problem.
John: as a component of solving the question.
Merlin: You know, step zero, homework should not have typos when it's handed to you.
Merlin: That does not help credibility.
John: Well, and I found a grammar error in an Iowa basic test one time.
John: And I had to convince the teacher that it was, I mean, you know, I was that kid who was like, well, you should be that kid.
Merlin: They should move you into like a, like a move up your SRA.
Merlin: They should put you in at least a green SRA at that point.
John: And then what would have happened?
John: Then where, where would I be now?
Merlin: Where would you be now?
John: Maybe now.
John: I'd be working for NASA.
John: I'd be the first man on Mars.
Merlin: We'd be there already.
Merlin: This does dovetail with a thing.
Merlin: Here's a big pattern.
Merlin: Let's start from first principles, Clarice, which is most people who are trying to do stuff with kids do generally have good intentions.
Merlin: And I think when so many things happen with kids with good intentions, and this is going to be so different for everybody, there are people who hit their kid because they have good intentions.
Merlin: They think, I turned out fine.
Merlin: It's like, well, no, you didn't.
Merlin: If you think hitting a kid is okay, you didn't turn out fine.
Merlin: But anyway, that's my own opinion.
Merlin: But our own hangups seep through every page of these books.
Merlin: And you and I probably suffer from it too.
Merlin: There's a kind of neurotic...
Merlin: A neurotic or anxious way that we feel like we're trying to help a kid avoid some kind of a crash or some kind of a terrible oversight that we worry we either didn't survive or barely survived.
Merlin: Of like, oh my gosh, if somebody spent more time teaching me to read good books, and then we pass that along to our kids.
Merlin: And we feel like, maybe not you and me, but I feel like in general, even with our best intentions, we end up really putting our dick in the mashed potatoes by trying to overly manage things.
Merlin: the education of kids, partly because there's scale problems.
Merlin: It's difficult to do, but even if it's one parent and one child, like you, one can find oneself taking a lot of the, definitely the fun, but even just the like nascent curiosity about something that somebody has.
Merlin: You can do this when you become that, like, let's turn every time we cook into a math problem or, you know, it's like, let's make this all about like, you know, number lines and, and, you know, proportions.
Merlin: And it's like,
Merlin: okay, but like your kid, if you are actually paying attention to what your kid is into and likes, like you don't even, you don't need to press them.
Merlin: And of course, and of course I break this rule all the time.
Merlin: I just, there's graphic novels.
Merlin: I'm constantly pressing into my kid's hands, but like we unintentionally, when we're anxious about, here's a big one for me.
Merlin: When we're anxious or neurotic about something, kids can read that way better than we think.
Merlin: Maybe as good as a dog.
Merlin: They know what our hangups are.
Merlin: And when we get too wound up, whether we're as a teacher or a parent or anybody who's well-intentioned, when we get too wound up in trying to bandage our old wounds, we create the opportunity, at least, for a new wound on that kid.
Merlin: Because now you're getting intense.
Merlin: You're paying attention to them in a style and level of intensity that you normally don't.
Merlin: And you're practically gritting your teeth with the whole like, you know, this is actually really easy.
Merlin: You just have to like stick to it.
Merlin: And like, I don't know, man, maybe I'm just too easy on my kid.
Merlin: But like, I really want to try to catch myself doing that.
Merlin: Because I mean, in my case, I agree with you.
Merlin: A pound sign privilege.
Merlin: My kid loves to read.
Merlin: But for me, I used to feel it was such a low point for me in second and third grade, for her second and third grade, where I was expected by the teacher, by the school, to constantly browbeat her about filling out her reading log.
Merlin: And it's like, I mean, I understand why you need to do that.
Merlin: I think you need to make sure that you have a manageable way to make sure the work is getting done and nobody's being overlooked.
Merlin: But like, have you considered, especially given that you spend most of your time on the kids who are real pain in the ass, have you considered that all of this browbeating about not finishing your reading log could bleed over into now?
Merlin: I think reading is something that I get punished about.
Merlin: Like, am I overstating that?
Merlin: I don't think so.
Merlin: I think grownups with good intentions do a lot of really dumb bullshit based on their own neurotic behavior instead of, like, trusting the curiosity of their kid.
John: This is the – I mean, you've hit on two things.
John: Bring it.
John: And on the one hand, it's –
John: Exactly what I'm afraid of.
John: I mean, one of the triggering events that had us take her out of public school and put her in Montessori was that she went to read a book in her class in her public school and the teacher came in.
John: Said, you can't read that book because you've read it already.
John: You read it.
John: You filled out the form about having read it.
John: So Brazil.
John: We submitted the form.
John: And so you can't.
John: Now you have to read another book because if you read that book.
John: You have to fill out a form, but you've already filled out the form.
Merlin: Which is basically a way of saying this is a waste of my time.
John: Or something.
John: I mean the teacher was like – the teacher had already become powerless, right?
John: Like this wasn't her choice.
John: She would let her read it.
John: But I'm afraid that somewhere – the George Bush administration doesn't want you to read it twice.
John: My daughter is somebody who wants to read a book three or four times, partly because she skims it and then she can read it again.
John: My mom is like this.
John: My mom has read The French Lieutenant's Woman 15 times.
Merlin: Sometimes there's, again, back with me and TV, there's a ton of TV and movies where there's so much stuff I only catch on subsequent viewings because I'm not trying to overread it for story.
Merlin: I'm looking for subtleties and I'm looking for the expression on this woman's face, like on Hot and Catch Fire.
Merlin: There's a great scene where there's an expression on this woman's face very briefly as she notices that the boss suddenly doesn't mind writing a big check.
Merlin: And my kid didn't catch it because she wasn't... She was looking at her phone, which is fine.
Merlin: But, like, that's actually really big.
Merlin: You just missed a big part of that story if you're only reading, or in this case, watching, for the log line.
Merlin: I don't mean to criticize, but, like, there's benefits to reading things more than once.
Merlin: Like, how...
Merlin: That's so gross.
John: In my part, the thing I'm concerned about is that I am very aware – like I don't teach my daughter how to ski anymore because I was too invested in –
John: And two and, you know, she felt my frustration and it turned skiing into a problem.
Merlin: That was the walk walk right up to the edge of being.
Merlin: Well, just what my dad was that guy who like over coaching.
Merlin: But I had to teach her to ride her bike.
Merlin: Nobody else was going to do it.
John: I wasn't going to be able to hire it out.
John: I wasn't going to be able to get the neighbor to teach her how to ride her bike.
John: And it was a real problem between us for many years.
John: And it took her a long time to learn to ride her bike because somehow we tilted against each other.
John: And I did everything I could think of, honestly.
John: You know, I said, do it at your own pace.
John: I said, why don't we try this?
John: I said, let's go ride with friends.
John: I said, let's watch a video about it.
John: I said, let's, you know, why don't I walk alongside?
John: Why don't I ride?
John: Why don't you ride with me?
John: Why don't we put the training wheels on backwards?
John: Why don't we wear a funny hat for three years?
John: And she decided somewhere in there early on that she wasn't going to make it easy.
John: And she was just a little child.
John: So I don't know what could have happened differently.
John: But the day that she learned to ride her bike, which was a year ago yesterday, and I put it in my calendar because it was such a momentous occasion.
John: You know, the day she learned, the day she finally soloed, two days before that, it was...
John: It was still like this three-year-old thorn in both of our paws, this awful, awful experience, this thing that divided us, this ogre thing.
John: that that followed us everywhere every time we looked at a bike the two of us got and then one day you both you both have reasons to dread it at that point but then she was a bicyclist and it was the greatest thing in her life and she rode away from me and was like bye dad i'm riding my bike now and we just bought her her first gear bike oh wow a couple of days ago and she's just like bike bike bikeity bike bike bike and so
John: There were so many times in that three years where I thought to myself and other people said, well, maybe she's just one of those people that never learns to ride a bike.
John: And I felt like this was some kind of – it really felt like a crisis to me.
John: To to be in a situation where your only response as a parent is to say, well, maybe she never learns to ride a bike or maybe she learns to ride a bike when she's 15 because.
John: her because it's only the pressure of her friends.
John: You know, it's the same thing that, that they said about me with piano.
John: They were like, well, you know, he doesn't like piano lessons.
John: So if he ever wants to learn how to play the piano, he'll do it sometime when he cares about it.
John: And I did.
John: And I play the piano like,
John: Like a person with six thumbs, right?
John: Yeah, but I can't so with with my daughter of course like she takes piano lessons and they're completely there with my brother and they are completely like piano lessons Which are just in you know, they're they're the most playful possible piano lessons There's absolutely no
John: Uh, no expectation, no rigor to it.
John: It's just like sit at the piano and I'll sit at the piano and we'll just find, we'll just make, make noises.
John: Yeah.
John: And I'm super fine with that because I know the trauma of piano.
John: But I, I'm very worried.
John: I'm worried is the wrong word.
John: I mean, no worried.
John: I'm worried about myself that because I'm not trying to correct a problem.
John: by encouraging her to learn to be a better reader because I am a good reader and I'm not trying to
Merlin: This isn't something where I'm like, I didn't learn to play the piano, so you're going to learn to do it, which is how my... And the more important we perceive that thing to be, the more empowered we feel to kind of press it, unless we catch ourselves.
Merlin: And then you've taken something, one can end up taking something that is very precious, especially to us, and then turning that into this source of bike-adjacent anxiety...
John: Right.
Merlin: Without meaning to.
John: You're trying to do the right thing.
John: I'm super, super not wanting to do that, but also feeling a responsibility to be up to – and I'm feeling a responsibility that to be a parent is more than to just be your –
John: child zookeeper while they figure out everything for themselves.
John: And your only responsibility is to keep them out of traffic and feed them, you know, like, like to be in some ways more of a guide than I ever had where, where, but, and, and, and 90% of that is wait for her to ask the question.
John: But a lot of it is, I mean, and in this case,
John: The implied question of a 10 year old who walks in, throws a book down and says, this book is boring and goes over and, and reads the same Scrooge McDuck comic that she's read 40 times.
Hmm.
John: the, I hear the chorus of people saying she's a reader, just let her, you know, she'll figure it out.
Merlin: Yeah.
John: But she, that's not necessarily true.
John: No, you're right.
John: There are, there are 50 year olds who are still reading Scrooge McDuck comics and, and maybe it is, maybe this is a bell curve thing and that you are the reader you're meant to be.
John: You only ever become the reader you're meant to be.
John: And just as you cannot, not just as everyone can,
John: doesn't end up being a ballerina.
John: So to does, you know, is there a, a, a graph of the level of book that you're interested in and the level of reader you want to be and only you can find it.
John: But I don't think that's what education ever used to mean.
John: And I, and I do feel like there's so much in our culture now that is so many of the new rules are don't tell anybody to do anything.
John: Don't,
John: Don't make anybody do anything.
John: Everybody just gets to do what they want.
John: And if you even stand in between someone doing what they want and anything else, then you're a criminal.
John: And we're increasingly creating a world where everybody just gets to do what they want whenever.
Merlin: How do you decide?
Merlin: I mean, I feel like maybe this is implicit in what I'm about to ask, but isn't it fair to say that
Merlin: Well, I guess one way to put it is you have to pick your fights.
Merlin: But is it fair to say that you wouldn't want to do that about every single thing in the world?
Merlin: You wouldn't want to become one of those, like, I don't know, American beauty dads that's just beating up on your kid about everything.
Merlin: You can say whether you agree or not.
Merlin: But how do you decide what rises to your own standard for, yeah, this is the thing I need to press on a little bit more?
Merlin: How do you know what's the right kind of thing and when's the right time?
John: Well, I think that's, that's, I think that question is, is pregnant in everything I was just talking about and everything that I talk about, about raising her.
John: Like I'm clearly not a, I'm not a tiger mom.
John: Like I'm, I'm watching her.
John: I'm letting her do everything that she wants.
John: And it's only in these moments where, where her frustration is,
John: Her her her momentary, very temporary frustration about a thing causes her to force quit and go immediately back to the because the thing is that we all have we all have comfort blankets.
John: And in my case, I spent a lot of years where my comfort blanket was was getting high.
John: And where my comfort blanket was getting fucked up and where my comfort blanket was like risky relationships.
John: And I know a lot of people in their 50s whose comfort blanket is having the television on all the time or their comfort blanket is podcast, frankly, or their comfort blanket is whatever.
John: And when I see that my daughter encounters a challenge and –
John: And hard quits.
John: I don't jump in, right?
John: But I watch very carefully because there are plenty of people who hard quit at long division.
John: And it's possible with the way the world is now that if you hard quit at long division, no one's ever, particularly if the philosophy is like, oh, everybody will figure it out.
John: They do what they like.
John: then you never learn it and no one's ever going to make you learn long division.
John: And there are people I'm sure who are like, there are calculators now, why bother?
John: And it does just increasingly seem like the spaceship in Wally.
John: Um, and so what, you know, what are my obligations in helping somebody navigate the world when they say, I don't want to learn to ride a bike and you go, well,
John: there are a lot of great reasons to ride a bike and they go, yeah, it's too hard.
John: And you go, well, it is hard, but you know, I learned to do it.
John: All the people, look at all the people on bicycles.
John: They all had to do it and it wasn't easy for any of them.
John: And at a, at a certain point, like you do have to be a shepherd and,
John: Yeah.
John: And I don't know what those I mean, she still lives on macaroni and cheese and black pepper.
Merlin: I feel like it's the timing in some ways that's hard.
Merlin: I mean, the bike thing is an interesting example because bikes were such a fixture of of at least my life where I lived for a lot of reasons.
Merlin: And bikes are very much a fixture of where I live now and what people do.
Merlin: But at the same time, there's it's not the fixture that it was.
John: Yeah.
Merlin: But then there's other stuff.
Merlin: Like I'm talking here about like, I mean, maybe I'm even asking a weirder question, but like learning division.
Merlin: I mean, like so many things I figure, oh, yeah, yeah, they'll learn that eventually.
Merlin: But like there's certain kinds of stuff where you're like, maybe it is like the bike thing, but where like enough time has passed that like I've waited for you to find this on your own.
Merlin: Here's one for you that'll make it more generic.
Merlin: But like if you're worried about your kid –
Merlin: Put this however you want.
Merlin: You're worried about your kid getting into college, let alone a good college.
Merlin: And yes, I know this entire conversation is fraught.
Merlin: But if you feel like your kid is 14, 15, 16, 16 probably is like where it's really going to pick up.
Merlin: And you feel like they're not taking...
Merlin: the rat race of getting into college seriously enough, whether that's the classes that they're taking, are they doing test prep?
Merlin: You know what I mean?
Merlin: All that kind of stuff.
Merlin: I think that is a pretty good example of one where it's difficult not to feel like you need to press your kid on taking this seriously or at least differently, right?
Merlin: Is that an example...
Merlin: this kind of example, right?
Merlin: Of like, this is, you have one chance at this really.
Merlin: I mean, sure you have other chances, but like, if you want to like keep going with the way all your friends are going, you can't be the only one who just decides taking the SAT sounds annoying.
Merlin: Like there's some, there's stuff you've got to do today.
Merlin: And we know that as, as adults, like it was something like that.
Merlin: Like, how do you know when it's the, is there a right time to press on that?
John: Well, and you're absolutely right about the bicycle thing, that when you and I were
John: were seven years old, and we looked out the front door of wherever we were living, the streets were filled with kids riding bicycles.
John: Yeah.
John: And that's not true now.
Merlin: It was the car before you had a car.
Merlin: Like, it would be like not wanting to drive when you're 16.
Merlin: If you live in Florida, you're dying to be able to drive, so you can do freaking anything.
Merlin: If you live in the suburbs, you want to be able to, like, pedal to the convenience store and buy a Hulk comic.
John: But that's not true now.
John: Like, when she looked out, well, there just aren't kids free-roaming like there were.
Merlin: That's true.
John: But what she...
John: And so she didn't have that social thing that I had as a kid where I was like, I'm the last kid on the street that doesn't know how to ride a bike from her standpoint where she was being driven to play dates and all of her play dates were happening in third locations where there were seven parents sitting on park benches around, uh,
John: some public square where the kids were like, okay, now you have an hour to play.
John: So the Marthas are all on the rim and all the handmaids are in the middle.
John: Like we're headed over to Mila's to play.
John: We have an hour and a half before choir lessons start.
John: So get, get playing quick.
John: And she didn't have that thing where it's like, hey, if you can ride a bike, you can come with us.
John: And if you don't have a bike, you can't.
Merlin: Right.
Merlin: That's a good point.
Merlin: That was a lot of like implicit pressure, which is like if you want to go jump ramps in the woods, like first of all, you need to have a bike and know how to ride it.
John: Yeah.
John: But now that she's 10, all of a sudden knowing how to ride a bike, although it was not necessary when she was eight to go out and play with her friends, now she's 10 and she wants a little autonomy.
John: And I have said to her, look, to go between your mother's house and my house, which is one mile, I don't want you walking it by yourself, but you can ride your bike by yourself.
John: You can set off from mama's house and ride to my, and this is in the suburbs, you know, or you can ride past the elementary school.
Merlin: If you ride safely and stick to the right side at the curb, like you're mostly going to be okay.
John: You got your helmet on.
John: It's going to take you 10 minutes to get from mama's house to my house.
John: You're going to tell me when you're leaving and I'll be waiting for you with a giant catcher's mitt.
John: And that is not a thing that if I, if she was like, I want to walk.
John: by myself, like if she and another 10 year old girl or two 10 year old girls wanted to do that walk, I would say fine.
John: But I, but if she wants to walk it by herself, no, but you can ride your bike.
John: Now that's a thing that she could not have anticipated, right?
John: That's a, that is a degree of freedom that she only has now because she went through that process.
John: And that the whole argument that like, well, we learned to ride our bikes in a different time and that time doesn't exist anymore.
John: So it's not necessary.
John: It just makes that transition more abrupt because we didn't.
John: But the difference between us riding bikes at six years old and 10 years old, it was a continuum, right?
John: By the time we were 10, we were riding our bikes all over the city.
John: And but we didn't we weren't aware of the different of of acquiring those different rights and freedoms because it came in this.
John: it wasn't so abrupt.
John: It's not like, well, I have supervised every single play date you've ever had.
John: And now today you're, you can make your own decisions.
John: Hopefully you've learned, hopefully you're prepared.
John: Good luck.
Merlin: And yeah, yeah.
Merlin: It's a different kind of throwing them in the deep end.
John: It is.
John: And, and I feel like, you know, it's the thing about long division is it's not just not learning long division.
John: It is the day you stop trying to learn long division.
John: You have stopped doing math.
John: because you cannot do any math past that.
John: It's not like you decide not to learn long division and then do decide to do algebra.
John: That's a gating factor for your math future.
John: Yeah, it is like, this is not just itself.
John: This is the beginning of a process.
John: You have to learn this in order to learn this.
John: You have to know your times tables if you are going to be good at math.
John: You don't have to know them.
John: You can always use a calculator.
John: You can stop at multiplication.
John: And in high school and in college, there are going to be plenty of opportunities for you to fake it and for you to take an elective and for you to, you know, to struggle through some remedial math in order to make your, you know, you can do it, right?
John: There are people that graduate from high school and can't read.
John: But if you're going to do the next thing, you have to do this thing, even if at this moment it doesn't seem like, well, it's not fun.
John: is what it boils down to.
John: So, you know, I didn't prepare for college.
John: I was that kid my junior year where everybody was off, you know, filling up their college resume with the fact that they suddenly were in math club.
John: And it was like, math club?
John: What even is that?
Merlin: And it suddenly got very interested in, for example, you know, volunteering at a nursing home.
Merlin: Like suddenly there's all this stuff that we were told is a real resume builder for college.
Yeah.
John: And I didn't do that, and you didn't do that, and I didn't go immediately to college, and I didn't go to Yale, and I was never tapped for Skull and Bones, and I didn't reject Skull and Bones because I was a Western man that didn't believe in East Coast elitism.
John: Like, none of those things happened.
John: I didn't ultimately actually join the CIA, but work within a grunge context, trying to ferret out, like,
John: where the soviet union was trying to infiltrate oh you're the ultimate black operative i wasn't doing any of that you didn't even know you were doing it no get that off the table as far as like thinking about what i've been doing but somehow you and i made careers for ourselves we're here we're in our we're in middle age we're doing fine we've made you know hopefully made the world a better place in small matters or measures like so some things are fine you know ultimately and and honestly i
John: I wish there'd been an adult when I was 10 in 10th grade that said, look, you're going to be fine.
John: You don't, you know, like it doesn't all start and stop with.
John: Right, right.
Merlin: Well, yeah, because you've got this whole legacy, this whole career of, I mean, you can disagree, but I feel like we as a culture, as schools, parents, churches, whatever it is, are constantly giving you this message that if you don't do this thing, you're facing a catastrophe.
Merlin: That catastrophe could be that I'm going to be mad or worse, even disappointed in you.
Merlin: But, you know, I do feel like that's a big part of at least American Western culture is this pressure to use negative –
Merlin: Almost negative imagery or, you know, certainly like a negative mindset to get you to think that, like, how do I get this kid to straighten out?
Merlin: Well, you make them more scared or you make them more, you know, dug in on their position when the dirty secret is if they met somebody really cool that was a little older than them or that they really liked and admired that wasn't their family.
Merlin: They might discover stuff that I don't know about that would be wonderful for them and take them in the big life direction.
Merlin: Right.
Merlin: Remember like knowing cool people who were like five or 10 years older than you and you would do anything because they thought it was cool and you discover interesting stuff.
Merlin: But then that's a diversion.
Merlin: That's like reading a book twice.
Merlin: Now you're counter revolutionary because you're not you're not hewing to the thing that we demand you be frightened about.
John: Well, God, I don't know why I'm so phlegmy today.
John: No, you're fine.
John: You're Flemish.
John: I'm Flemish.
John: I mean, one of the problems with quarantine, right, is that there is no – she spent a year with no –
John: socialization right there are no cool kids across the street that are already smoking cigarettes there's nobody to tell her that you know that her parents suck and the cure is the only band um and so she doesn't have some ambient goth influence she doesn't have that but also we're living in a very different world right where as where
John: all of her experiences like like kids today a lot of them are mediated there's always some adult there because kids can't do what they want um by the time i was her age i had spent hundreds of hours unsupervised playing with fire sharpening sticks to turn them into weapons you know like um like trying to balance on my bicycle seat at
John: The number of closed head injuries I had by the time I was 10 could fill a medical journal.
Merlin: You're a medical miracle, John.
Merlin: I really am.
Merlin: Honestly, your entire body, your whole history is written on your body, like Quee Quag or something.
Merlin: It's amazing that you can still use any part of your body consistently.
John: I sometimes think I would be twice as smart if I hadn't injured myself so many times, if there wasn't so much blunt force trauma.
John: I would be twice the man I am today.
John: But so, so filling that gap with something other than YouTube videos is because I don't, you know, like, yes, you want your kid to, I mean, she's embarking.
John: She's right on the edge of like, well, now her friends become more important than you.
John: And now like trying to, uh,
John: Trying to make it in the world and trying to fit in and trying to follow people who have been there already.
John: Like this starts to take over.
John: I've read all the books.
John: But like when those books were written.
John: The presumption was that kids had more autonomy than they do today.
John: I mean, what we forget about those books is that they were written 25 years ago.
Merlin: And assumed a certain kind of like free range suburban.
John: Yeah.
John: And even the books that are being written today are written by people who read the books that were written 25 and 30 years ago and are basing their theory on that.
John: I mean, there's no book about –
John: about right now this is what i mean one of the major themes of the of the replies i got during bean dad one of the major themes was ha ha ha this is ridiculous just let her figure it out on youtube like my kids would have figured out how to use a can opener on youtube a long time ago and i heard that over and over there were hundreds of replies that made a joke the effect made a joke to the effect that
John: The real problem here was that my daughter didn't know how to teach herself things on YouTube.
John: And it was a joke that was also very serious.
Merlin: I just want to say if your law, our law was passed, that would be very much considered a grave story telling foul.
Merlin: The entire Bean Dad thing is just one yellow card after another of like you're missing the bit.
John: Yeah, and it was bad storytelling on my part.
John: But the idea – the incredible response I got – I mean, first of all, I'm very grateful that so many tens of thousands of better parents than I were willing to share their wisdom.
John: That's really – that's a mitzvah.
John: But the idea that –
John: YouTube plays such a large role in what parents are – how kids are supposed to learn how to do things on their own.
John: That's the thing.
John: It's not – if people were like, oh, you should take this online class or she should have been part of the Khan Academy or whatever, it would be one thing.
John: But it was – it being patiently explained to me that this is how kids learn on their own.
John: is they search online for a video about it and, and to not be able to do that is to not have autonomy or to not be a child that is, um, that's like, uh, self-educating.
John: And, you know, in my reply until I stopped replying was like, my daughter has never looked up how to do something on YouTube.
John: I find the whole idea like incredible.
Um,
John: Because I also know there are plenty of, uh, 10 year old girls who just watch Disney product unboxing videos, uh, with like an ASMR component.
John: Or, I mean, I know a woman who still watches pimple popping videos every night after work in order to unwind.
John: She's like, Oh, I've had such a stressful day.
John: I'm just going to go watch some pimple popping.
John: And it's like, wow.
John: Okay.
John: Right on.
John: Okay.
John: I get it.
John: But like, um,
John: I don't know how to – the child-rearing philosophies are just not up to date with now.
John: And I know I can't raise my daughter in 1975 and I wouldn't want to because there was a lot of awful things about being a kid in 1975.
John: Right.
John: But everything you said half an hour ago about not wanting to be a parent, that is, or rather an adult of any kind.
John: who is filling childhood with anxiety, filling, taking things that are naturally fun and good and turning them into, uh, like reading journals, like trying so hard.
Merlin: Everything gets converted to drudgery.
John: Not even trying hard because it's, because that, that was what I suffered from too.
John: And I, it's, it's not in my nature to do it.
John: Right.
John: My nature is to say, tell me what, you know, like,
John: Because she's happy to tell me about the relationship between Archie and Betty and how Betty is a superior choice for Archie relative to Veronica and to express a lot of confusion about why Archie keeps choosing Veronica.
John: And a lot of, you know, she identifies herself as a Betty.
Merlin: Is it Betty?
Merlin: Do you feel like it's a, is it similar in some ways to Betty is Marianne is to Betty as Ginger is to Veronica?
Merlin: Oh, but yeah, but Ginger wasn't so, I mean, Ginger's got that aspect of like a Marvel, a cool Marvel girl, like an MJ or a Gwen or something like that.
John: Betty's a little too good, obviously.
John: And I mean, Veronica feels like actually a fairly realistic character.
John: Ginger was just self-absorbed.
John: Betty's a pistol, though.
John: I love Betty.
John: And Marianne, frankly.
John: It all boils down to Marianne.
John: Oh, come on.
John: Shit dog.
John: But we use Archie to talk about...
John: People she knows in life, you know, she has established that I am kind of half Archie, half Reggie, but mostly Jughead.
John: I was going to say.
John: And we both agree.
Merlin: Well, you do have Reggie components, but I think if he's a Jughead, you love to eat.
Merlin: I'm very Jughead.
John: You got that cool hat?
John: She and I have talked a lot because when she, you know, she identifies as Betty because of the gender role and the blonde and wanting to be nice.
John: But when she really thinks about herself, she'll say that she's a jughead, too.
Merlin: If I look back at myself in high school, I love to think of myself as a Betty, like a very low status Betty.
Merlin: But I was closer to just like a pretty mean Veronica.
John: Well, and so many people are Veronica's and don't know it.
Merlin: I know.
Merlin: I don't want to be the one to say it, but I totally agree.
Merlin: No, there's anything wrong with Veronica.
John: What I learned about Jughead was that Jughead is a Zen character, right?
John: Like Jughead is not just interested in hamburgers.
John: Jughead somehow is present everywhere and yet never...
John: His feet never touch the ground, right?
John: He never gets blood on him, right?
John: And there's carnage in every episode.
John: In every Archie comic, there's just fucking emotional carnage everywhere.
John: People are just like, it's like Carthage.
Merlin: Oh, and you're saying he kind of runs between the raindrops, sort of?
Merlin: He does.
Merlin: He does.
Merlin: Jughead always ends the story.
Merlin: He might be a really good parent.
John: Well, I try to Jughead it.
John: Jughead the parenthood.
Merlin: That's so interesting.
John: Because Jughead, he sees it all, but Jughead exits the picture the same as Jughead entered the picture.
John: Whoa.
John: Jughead is a godhead.
John: It's not Jughead.
John: It's Godhead.
John: He's the unchanging, ever-present godhead.
John: Yes.
John: Whoa.
Merlin: Oh, man, this should be at least an e-book, John.
Merlin: This is good.
Merlin: Everything I need to know about Parenthood, I learned from Marchy Comics, specifically Jughead.
Merlin: That's a long title.
John: Trying to be Jughead, right?
John: And trying not to be Veronica, because it feels like those are the opposites, right?
Merlin: See, this is literature, man.
Merlin: We're learning a lot from this.
Merlin: And you got to read all the words.
Merlin: You can't just skim.
Merlin: Don't skim.
Merlin: You can read every ad.
Merlin: Read it all the way through.
Merlin: Read every ad.
Merlin: So I figure we'll probably wrap soon.
Merlin: Can I bring you a couple things real quick before we bounce?
Merlin: Yeah, do.
Merlin: Okay.
Merlin: First of all, I would love for you to suffer me a short thing to read.
Merlin: And then I just want to talk a tiny bit about getting a song out of your head if you want.
Merlin: Oh, okay.
Merlin: Yes, please.
Merlin: Or we can save it.
Merlin: We can save it for the next show.
Merlin: Do you want to save it?
Merlin: No, no, no.
Merlin: Let's do it now.
Merlin: I can just read you this thing if you want to just, I'll read this and then you can tell me what you think.
Merlin: Do it.
Merlin: This came across my transom yesterday.
Merlin: I don't normally do things like this, but this came up, was posted a couple days ago, came across my transom yesterday.
Merlin: This purports to be the prologue, this is a screenshot, prologue from a calculus book that was put out in 1914.
John: You mean a Tintin calculus book or calculus?
John: Talking about Tantan?
Merlin: Tantan.
Merlin: Is his dog Snowy?
Merlin: Tantan.
Merlin: No, Tantan.
Merlin: Tantan McCutes?
Merlin: What are they called?
Merlin: What are the ones where you thought they smelled better?
Merlin: Yeah.
John: Yeah.
John: Exactly.
Merlin: Okay.
Merlin: All right.
Merlin: And, you know, again, I say this purports to be because that's how I like to report things that are out there.
Merlin: Right.
Merlin: You know, I wish I could do this with advertisers.
Merlin: I wish I could do this with all things, which is like when you want me to read something, I would like to say, this is what this company says.
Merlin: Rather than, I'm not here to stand for this page from a book that purports to be from 1914.
Merlin: Not just because it might turn out to be fake, but you just never know.
Merlin: Let's take just a minute.
Merlin: The first page of a book called Calculus Made Easy, published in 1914.
John: Okay, read away.
Merlin: Prologue.
Merlin: Considering how many fools can calculate, it is surprising that it should be thought either a difficult or a tedious task for any other fool to learn how to master the same tricks.
Merlin: Some calculus tricks are quite easy.
Merlin: Some are enormously difficult.
Merlin: The fools who write the textbooks of advanced mathematics, and they are mostly clever fools, seldom take the trouble to show you how easy the calculations, how easy the easy calculations are.
Merlin: On the contrary, they seem to desire to impress you with their tremendous cleverness by going about it in the most difficult way.
Merlin: Almost done.
Merlin: Being myself a remarkably stupid fellow, I have had to unteach myself the difficulties and now beg to present to my fellow fools the parts that are not hard.
Merlin: Master these thoroughly and the rest will follow.
Merlin: What one fool can do, another can.
Merlin: Isn't that kind of good?
Merlin: It really is.
Merlin: I mean, it is because like, and what's, what's implicit in that?
Merlin: Well, for me, what's implicit in that is this thing of like, I'm the wizard and you're not even the Padawan.
Merlin: I guess I'm mixing up my genres here.
Merlin: Sure.
Merlin: But like, you know, I'm Gandalf and you're one of those guys who smokes like whatever.
Merlin: Like, but there is this sort of mystique of like a certain kind of seemingly good hearted, tough teacher.
Merlin: And we're not talking here about Gunnery Sergeant Hartman.
Merlin: He's a hard ass because he's trying to save your ass in the nom.
Merlin: Right.
Merlin: He's not your friend.
Merlin: He wants to make you make you a killer because that's what might save you.
Merlin: And that took me a long time to appreciate that about Gunnery Sergeant Hartman.
Merlin: Yeah, sure.
Merlin: Totally right.
Merlin: Like, yeah, you know, again, driver's ed.
Merlin: Like, it's important.
Merlin: Like, I wish everybody learned to use their turn directional indicators.
Merlin: There's all kinds of stuff I like about that.
Merlin: But there is also this certain sort of like I'm the wizard.
Merlin: And a handful of you might get to become a wizard, but most of you will fail because you don't know my wizard tricks.
Merlin: And, like, I am the master of this, and you are the empty vessel that is to be filled with whatever I have decided is appropriate –
Merlin: just by fiat to, like, make you the less dumb person that you might eventually be.
Merlin: I'm overstating this, but, like, I do feel like this does go back to this problem of us needing to turn everything, not us, but, you know, the world, needing to turn everything into this fearful venture that cannot be mastered.
Merlin: Everything is an impossible giant ball of string that has no ends to it.
Merlin: There's no inroad to any of this stuff.
Merlin: And I do feel like sometimes it takes something like a little bit of a trick or something.
Merlin: Like, how old were you before you learned that a 20% tip was like twice the tax or whatever?
Merlin: You know, there's all those little kinds of things where I'm like, oh, goddammit.
Merlin: Why did you never teach me these stupid heuristics that would make all of this less...
Merlin: opaque to me.
John: Because remember all those years when a tip was supposed to be 15%?
John: Why make it so hard?
John: Yeah.
John: I mean, a 10% tip.
Merlin: You're pushing a rope a little bit, but you could also just be cheap and not tip.
Merlin: And I guess now you're the math master.
Merlin: I don't know.
Merlin: I read that.
Merlin: It purports to be this thing.
Merlin: And I thought, I agree with the person who wrote this, who said this is exactly what textbooks should be doing.
Merlin: They should all be honest about how terrifying the topic names are, too.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: Yeah, I mean, like, this is a real normie dad kind of thing to Star or Hart, whatever we do now.
Merlin: But I agree.
Merlin: I think there's something to be said for, like, the reason I'm teaching you this or the reason you're being taught this is because you can learn this.
Merlin: Anyone can cook.
Merlin: It's not that everybody's going to be great at this, but rather than making everything seem like this impossible uphill battle that burnishes your reputation as the most hard-ass wizard at the academy, can't we do something to make this less fraught?
Merlin: One of the tricks I learned a long time ago about procrastination is that procrastination is based on fear of something.
Merlin: And if you can understand what it is that you're afraid of, you can begin to address it.
Merlin: But you don't do that by creating new fear.
Merlin: Creating new fear has never gotten rid of procrastination in anybody who actually procrastinates.
Merlin: That's my thought on that.
John: It's funny because I read a New Yorker article the other day about you.
John: About me?
John: About you that I didn't know had been published.
John: It was published just a couple of months ago.
John: Yeah.
John: And you and I were talking to each other probably the day it came out, but you didn't mention it because that's your style.
John: You're very humble.
John: I just want to not be noticed.
John: I just want to be left alone.
John: You don't want attention drawn to yourself, although there was a very long New Yorker article that used you as the...
John: Well, that you were the star.
Merlin: I was the unintentional primary source.
John: Yeah, you were the illustration of a whole universe.
John: Yeah.
John: But I read it and, you know, I had the most interesting kind of reaction to it.
John: Because all of the events in the story, I was there for.
John: And yet you and I were occupying a, um, uh, like an, uh, an alternate universe.
John: Like you, you and I talked every Monday during, and also saw each other in person.
John: And we, we were coming off of a period of 10 years where we saw each other all the time.
John: The 10 years that led to the revelation that, you know, like I was there when you started 43 folders.
John: I was there when you gave the talk to Google, you know, I was next to you.
John: We were having weekly conversations, and yet that was all happening in your life in a way that I never fully –
John: uh, understood it.
John: And part of it was that you were, that you were reticent to, to self promote, right?
Merlin: You didn't come on this show and say like, well, I was pretty ashamed about how everything with the book I was supposed to write went.
Merlin: That was a real shame spiral for me, but that was already, that was icing on the cake of like, Oh my God, what kind of monster have I created?
Merlin: Or what kind of monster have I become?
Merlin: Vending tips about time management to people who are addicted to tips about time management.
Yeah.
John: I remember the book trauma because that was something that we talked about a lot, not on this program necessarily.
Merlin: No, it was before that, yeah.
John: But sidebar, we talked about that a lot, and that was a big event in your life.
Yeah.
John: But the excitement that you expressed in the article when you first discovered this stuff, I mean, I remember that.
John: I remember coming into your office and seeing the fucking Post-it notes and being like, wow, this is a universe.
John: You have a lot of notebooks for somebody who hardly ever writes.
John: I like to brag that when I met you, you still had a PC up and running in your office.
Merlin: That's technically true.
Merlin: I had an old like –
Merlin: 386?
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: Do you remember?
Merlin: It was on a piece of plywood on the left.
John: Sure, I do.
John: You could boot it up.
John: It was a left-hand PC.
John: You would go over there and say like, well, I'm kind of making the transition over to Mac, but I still have – Beginning boot sequence.
John: All my cookbooks are over here still in the PC.
John: But no, listening to – reading that article and just – and trying to – and using it as a way of kind of filling in gaps –
John: For myself and for your and my relationship and like the – and your arc that – you know, because you and I kind of have a – there's a tacit agreement that, you know, we don't ask too much.
John: You know, like we don't dig too much.
John: too much right like i don't i don't i don't know um and so what we don't stand up to scrutiny very well at all that's the thing though but what we know about each other is what we tell each other about each other about ourselves right and and we're content with that where it's like that's our relationship you tell me what you want i tell you what i want and reading this it was just like
John: Oh, this is something else.
John: This is a conversation that, that, that you and I would never have had because you were like, well, you don't want to know about.
John: you don't want to know about 43 folders.
John: I mean, we had two conversations where you were like, if you want to know about how to streamline your work process.
John: Organize your index cards.
John: And I was like, hard pass.
John: And you were like, that's what I thought.
John: But interesting that... What did it tell you?
Merlin: It sounds like this had at least a small impact.
Merlin: What is it you realized or thought?
Merlin: Well...
John: I mean, in a way, I've always known that you were a star somewhere.
John: Yeah.
John: In, in a place, you know, we used to go to bars and parties in San Francisco and people would come up and, and, and drop a bouquet of white lilies at your feet and then back away slowly bowing their heads.
John: And I would go, what's up with them?
John: And you'd be like, never know.
John: Uh, but, but realizing that you, and I always knew this, but just kind of filling in like how much you, when we talk about like, I used to be Merlin Mann and,
John: When you say those things and it's like, oh, yeah, yeah, right.
John: But it was truly a moment like it was for The Long Winters.
John: There was an indie rock – you had an indie rock career that was big.
John: You were a big band.
John: And then in the same way that I kind of just didn't keep doing that, right?
John: You didn't keep doing it either.
John: But hearing the –
John: I think that I'm often a person that hears your, it's just natural that you talk about your frustrations with me about things.
John: You know, that this is just an environment and you're in my friendship is one where you're like, you want to talk about the challenges.
John: And part of it is the humility, right?
John: You don't want to talk about your triumphs.
John: You want to talk about the challenges.
Yeah.
John: Because it's more manageable.
John: But reading that article and getting an inkling of your triumphs was really good.
John: It made me glad.
John: That's really cool.
John: I appreciate you saying that.
John: Yeah, I felt like, oh, you know, like Merlin was in love with this and the world loved him for it.
John: And then when you quit it, when you realized its limitations and when you said like, you know what, I have become something other – this isn't – the point isn't to be addicted to tips about tips.
John: You know that – because you do have that very strong ethical –
John: thing in you.
John: But to walk away from... I'm basically a professional Holden Caulfield.
John: I'm always looking for phonies.
John: Right.
John: But you were not shooting yourself in the foot, which often kind of is a thing that when someone has your opportunity and then says like, no thanks, there's a tendency to say like, well, he was afraid of success or whatever.
John: He shot himself in the foot.
John: And I remember being there for the book and feeling like, no, no, no, he...
John: He does not want to write a phony book and he feels like he's now been pushed into a corner where the only thing he can do is turn in a phony book or no book at all.
John: But realizing that you made those decisions really affirmatively and not passively also felt like a triumph.
Hmm.
John: That means the world to me.
John: Thank you.
John: Yeah, yeah.
John: I really enjoyed reading that article.
John: And of course, like, oh, here I am like four months later.
John: And oh, was there an article about Merlin?
John: How weird.
John: No, you're good.
John: You're good.
John: Just skim it.
Merlin: Where would I have heard of that?
Merlin: You don't need to read it twice.
John: Please don't read it twice.
John: I wonder.
John: I'm surprised no one sent me a text about it.
John: No, no.
Merlin: It's my standing order to everybody.
Merlin: Please don't talk about me.
Merlin: In one Finnish study, they studied, I believe it's in Finland, they studied something called INMI, involuntary musical imagery, which is the fancy psychology term for an earworm or a song in your head.
Merlin: I only mention this to you because there are certain songs, and we can cover this next time because we're running a little long.
Merlin: There are certain songs that seem to trigger this more than others, a lot of things by Queen, by Lady Gaga, there's certain kinds of songs.
Merlin: When they ask people for what they came to call the cure song, now that doesn't mean Boys Don't Cry or Hannah Forrest,
Merlin: What is a Cure song?
Merlin: A Cure song is a song that one has realized will help them get rid of the earworm.
Merlin: And amongst the people they talk to, there's only one song that came up twice.
Merlin: You want to know what it is?
Merlin: What is it?
Merlin: Kashmir.
John: By Led Zeppelin.
John: It cleanses the palate.
Merlin: I made out to that song once and it was extremely memorable.
Merlin: Oh, I bet.
Merlin: We're under a blanket.
John: You keep going and going and bigger and bigger.
John: I woke up this morning going... Oh, I got one for you.
Merlin: Caribbean Queen, we are sharing the same dream.
Merlin: I just want to take me back home I don't want to run