Ep. 485: "Ancient Woo"
Merlin: Hello?
Merlin: Hi, John.
Merlin: Happy New Year!
Merlin: Happy New Year!
Merlin: See, I needed that.
Merlin: Yeah!
Merlin: Yeah, I gotta... Happy New Year!
Merlin: I haven't really talked to anybody in two weeks.
Ha ha ha!
Merlin: I mean, like, I've talked to some food delivery.
Merlin: A guy delivered some new parts for my Dremel.
Merlin: We talked a little bit about rain.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: But apart from that, you're cracking my eyes.
Merlin: I'm getting the fresh stuff.
Merlin: Ooh.
Merlin: The ungood shit.
John: Open that loaf and smell that...
John: Fresh, yeasty Merlin.
John: You're saying I'm a split-top loaf?
John: Is that what you're saying?
John: It's got the butter in it right there in the top.
John: Butter crevice.
John: You've been getting an atmospheric river, is that right?
Merlin: Yeah, that's what they say.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: I don't know, man.
Merlin: It seems like that's one of those phrases they use a lot in the websites they don't read too often.
Merlin: And then when I do go – we have a local website.
Merlin: I don't even want to mention the name because it's so bad.
Merlin: But you go there and you probably – I don't know if you have –
Merlin: Well, SF Chronicle I'm hardly even allowed to look at because heaven forfend I have an ad blocker.
Merlin: But yeah, SF Gate, it's pretty bad.
Merlin: And the writing is extremely bad.
Merlin: But they use phrases like atmospheric river.
Merlin: Yeah, we're getting that.
Merlin: We got a lot of rain, probably not by your standards, but like we got a lot of rain.
John: It's funny because I never heard that phrase before, atmospheric river, until it feels like three years ago.
John: But now, boy, it's not all anybody talks about, atmospheric river.
Merlin: Well, I think they go through these things, and I don't know.
Merlin: It's difficult because I learn about these things via, as you say, the mainstream media.
Merlin: I learn about it from the media.
Merlin: And the thing is, it's hard to know, is this a media thing or is this a thing?
Merlin: And I know that sometimes if it's a media thing long enough, it becomes a thing.
Merlin: Like the El Nino 20 years ago, you'd hear about the El Nino thing.
Merlin: We heard about that a lot.
Merlin: Or the La Derecha or whatever one gets.
Merlin: But, you know, it's – you know, John, I haven't talked to anybody in two weeks.
Merlin: The thing about the news is they love keeping you off balance, John.
Merlin: They do.
Merlin: It's all about keeping you off balance.
John: Well, when I look at the radar, which I do all the time – you know, I have my home radar, but then we have the neighborhood radar –
John: And the LIDAR.
John: Yep, yep, yep.
John: And I look at the radar, and it looks like a river.
John: It really does.
John: Coming right across the Pacific Ocean just looks like a river, according to the radar.
John: Oh, that's because the radar says that.
Merlin: Yeah, I don't know.
Merlin: I mean, it was a lot of rain for us, and I think there's more coming.
Merlin: You want to rope your mom in on this one?
Merlin: You want her to get in?
John: We can talk some weather a little bit.
John: She's got a lot to say.
John: You know, the river goes up, the river goes down.
John: In this case, it's hitting you.
John: It's missing us.
John: It's nice and sunny here today.
Merlin: Yeah, I mean, I guess that's how it works.
Merlin: It's like whack-a-mole.
Merlin: God, the writing on this website is so bad.
John: You either get it one place or you get it the other.
John: Mom's got feelings about it, but, you know, I've become...
John: I think maybe my sister is still the head weather and natural disaster talker in our family.
Merlin: Oh, I'm very interested in this.
Merlin: I'm interested in the weather talkers.
Merlin: I think that comes from the, is that, what is that, the Sioux?
John: Yeah, the weather talkers.
Merlin: They were very important in World War I. World War I, but then they're actually the one they worked at Bletchley Park.
Merlin: They came up with the Apache.
Merlin: I can't even make a joke at this point.
Merlin: Oh, gosh.
Merlin: I'm interested in that.
Merlin: I like those roles.
Merlin: I like those roles.
Merlin: For example, my wife's role is to read sad Twitter and to go aww.
Merlin: Yeah, exactly.
Merlin: Go aww.
Merlin: And then we each go.
Merlin: Now, when my kid goes aww, I know that's because it's a cute dog that we should adopt.
Merlin: When my lady friend does it, it's because something horrible has happened.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: So we get that.
Merlin: And also I think technically my wife is kind of the weather person.
Merlin: Your sister is the weather and natural events correspondent for the Roderick clan.
John: Yeah.
John: But, you know, I think my mom and sister are both avid readers, as you know, and they – but they – kind of long ago –
John: They didn't veer so much as they just started to dabble in a lot of paranormal stuff, books about other universes.
John: Your mom?
John: Yeah, very much.
John: Because she's one of those people that in the 1950s, as she was leaving her small Ohio town, she decided that she was going to be unencumbered by
John: The Tenets of Methodism.
John: She was going to discover the new future.
John: She was a science fiction fan, and she was going to put together her own cosmology out of bits and pieces, out of a parts bin.
John: And this is before – this is many, many decades before that became a very popular thing for people to do with the pop religion.
John: Right.
Merlin: Over the years, it became something where like you bought into – I feel like the idea was especially – I mean jokes aside, given that there were only so many sources of information most of us had in our lives, you tended to buy into a portfolio –
Merlin: of beliefs and worldview and that Holy cafeteria Catholic thing, uh, being applied to things like climate and UFOs that she's ahead of her time.
Merlin: That's what I'm saying.
John: Well, yeah.
John: And she was just, I think, I think she was with somebody that was, that was pro science, but also if it made sense, why would you'd have to argue, you'd have to argue against it, right?
John: If it makes sense.
John: And if it made sense to her, um,
John: And so she adopted a lot of different, what I wouldn't call conflicting ideas, but ideas that suggested knock-on effects where, well, if you believe in that, you're kind of already bought into believing in that.
John: And then when the waves of books on those topics came along, there was lots and lots of fresh
John: material.
John: A lot of it's science or science adjacent.
John: Um, and, uh, and then a lot of it pseudoscience.
John: And, and the thing is that there, there, uh, I would say my mom was fairly agnostic about, about it going into a book.
John: She, she doesn't begin to read a book already
John: already hoping that book will um will fit in as much she's she's not a confirmation bias based reader no typically not right she'll she'll she'll uh she'll see the premise of a book and she'll go oh let's see about that and then she wants to talk about it with me she she and my sister talk about it um but what's happened over the years is they're very very they're very very good readers but um
John: And always churning on new ideas.
John: But what they have – what they don't have, if I may, is, for instance, we got a – my mom went in for an EKG.
John: And the doctor gave her the results in the form of some unedited and untranslated medical –
John: with three pages of results.
Merlin: Well, one might call telemetry, like the unprocessed signal, right?
John: That's right.
John: No one is explaining what this is.
John: This is just medical signal written in medical jargon with symbols and graphs and so forth.
John: But to the layperson, you look at it and you go, I have no idea what any of this means, right?
John: Right.
John: And so this comes through and my mom looks at it and my sister looks at it and they're like, this is incomprehensible.
John: And they begin to speculate about what it says.
John: Like looking for patterns?
Merlin: Well, or just –
Merlin: How do you begin?
Merlin: I don't know what that looks like.
Merlin: I can kind of guess what that looks like.
Merlin: I think of something like sleep data.
Merlin: Like if you get unprocessed, like any kind of health data, right, where you've got a line item per whatever, minute, second, hour, month, whatever.
Merlin: And you can try to get at that several different ways.
Merlin: You can Google about it.
Merlin: But one way, it seems to me, like I said, is patterns.
Merlin: Do you see something like, ooh, something interesting seemed to be happening at this point?
Merlin: I wonder, was I nervous about taking the test?
Merlin: Or is it that kind of thing?
John: Well, that's the thing about EKG.
John: That's the thing about any kind of, well, really, let's be honest, medicine or science.
John: You can find all kinds of things in the data.
John: Especially if you call it the data.
John: The data.
John: And, you know, with a thing like with the heart, I've been very surprised because, you know, my mom has had a little bit of a heart disease.
John: At the age of 88, her heart is sort of functioning less than 100% capacity.
John: And in talking to doctors about it, it's easy for them to diagnose what's happening.
John: It's easy for them to describe what's happening.
John: And it's very hard, too impossible to explain why it's happening.
John: Much like the weather.
John: Right.
John: Oh, shit.
John: Did you mean to make that comparison?
John: Because that's really good.
John: Whoever knows what I mean to do on this program, Marlon.
John: No, no, no.
Merlin: I'm not trying to be contrary.
Merlin: I'm saying, holy shit, that's absolutely true.
Merlin: It's one thing to say it's raining out.
Merlin: And it's another thing to understand why it is raining out.
John: A butterfly flapped its wings is always the ultimate answer.
John: And in the case of the heart stuff, the doctors actually said, well, it could.
John: They did.
John: But they said it in doctor talk.
John: Exactly.
John: Exactly.
John: They said it could have been that you contracted a virus.
John: It could have been.
John: Several other things, right?
John: Sort of like, well, we can't tell if you had a virus, but that could have been it.
John: We can't tell if this, but it could have been that.
John: I had this same visit like two months ago.
John: The last thing the doctor said was, or, I mean, have you suffered a broken heart recently?
Hmm.
John: And we were all like, what?
John: You mean like a valve problem?
John: No, like, have you been really sad?
John: And we were like, I don't know.
John: And my mom's like, no, not really.
John: And he was like, because it could be that, that you just were really sad and upset.
John: And we were like – That's an unexpected turn.
John: Yeah, that could cause like a physical decline in the capacity of the heart.
John: And the doctor was like, yeah, kind of, kind of.
John: I mean, anyway, moving right along.
John: And can I just say I believe that.
John: Yeah, sure.
John: And the thing is that comports very much –
John: with the sort of science adjacent reading that happens, but it also lends itself to some of that real, um,
John: It trends into metaphysics pretty fast, right?
John: Or it's – now we're talking spooky action at a distance.
Merlin: You're always like a half of a step away from getting onto like a different conveyor belt.
Merlin: You know what I mean?
Merlin: Like it's – but that's – gosh, I've got so much to say about this.
Merlin: But absolutely.
Merlin: I mean it feels sciencey.
Merlin: It feels correct.
Merlin: But in some ways I kind of wish that was the first question you asked me.
Merlin: Am I a little sad?
John: Because that might explain a lot of things.
John: It might explain a lot of things.
John: So we get this results.
John: And this is just one example.
John: This probably happens once a week where something will come across the transom of our family, some document, some new information.
John: Something comes over the family transom.
John: Family transom.
John: And the two of them immediately begin a kind of speculative journey of
John: through like, well, have any of us had a broken heart lately?
John: Even in terms of like, well, why is this plant wilting?
John: Why is traffic so bad?
John: Whatever it is.
John: And I have found myself now in the role of being the one who goes online and Googles how to read an EKG.
John: And then I read the one-page article on how to read an EKG.
John: And then I read the EKG.
John: And this is because I grew up on my father's knee –
John: And his thing was legal writing is intentionally hard to read, but it's not hard to read.
John: Here's how you read it.
Merlin: Legal writing, it seems to me like maybe I watched too much Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul, but I think part of legal writing is an extraordinary level of care and clarity and precision when it suits you.
Merlin: And then I don't want to say just hand waving, but a certain amount of something that reflects the whether you have the facts, you know, the old joke about if you have the facts on your side, if you have the law on your side, like where you can do a lot of like rubble, rubble, rubble.
Merlin: As soon as you get that rubble, rubble, that's when you start poking around and going, well, why weren't they so specific here?
Merlin: Yeah, what's the robble-robble?
Merlin: What's the robble-robble, yeah.
John: Well, and the ultimate example of that is critical theory, which I studied in the 90s and 2000s as you dabbled.
John: We all dabbled in it, but I studied it pretty carefully during exactly the time when there were long magazine articles being written about how critical theory is intentionally hard to read and what are they hiding.
John: And therefore, you can establish that none of it means anything.
John: And so learning to read that and realizing, oh, this is actually readable too.
John: You just have to wade in and understand what they're –
John: I find myself now, Merlin, defending critical theory to you, which is not what I thought I was going to be doing this morning.
Merlin: Well, that's... But so, anyway, so I'm... I need to learn what that means.
Merlin: I'm not sure I know exactly what critical theory is.
Merlin: And if I know, I've forgotten.
Merlin: So if you would not be insulting my, in fact, you would be rewarding my intelligence if you were to give me a gloss on what critical theory is, because it sounds like it might be a science adjacent to our conversation.
John: Well, let me ask you this about critical theory.
John: Have you had a broken heart lately?
Mm-hmm.
Merlin: Because that's going to affect... It's never been anything but broken.
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Hi!
Merlin: Anyway, so... I'll tell you one thing, Adam.
Merlin: I got a big pile.
Merlin: I've been writing the whole fucking time.
Merlin: I have, as you know, I have a chronic health condition currently in remission of... It's not IBS, but it's another... It's another thing.
Merlin: It's another thing, but it's like IBS.
Merlin: It's of unknown etiology, which is a way of, you know, of all those boffins going like, well, we know there's a thing that's happening, but we don't know what causes it or why it is caused.
Merlin: But there is some speculation...
Merlin: See, the thing I've got, there's a whole bunch of crazy stuff.
Merlin: One is that, for some reason, nicotine helps you go into remission.
Merlin: So sometimes they will prescribe nicotine through its various delivery systems.
Merlin: I thought that was kind of an interesting turns out.
John: Like a gum or a patch?
John: Or a cigarette.
John: Or just some chewing.
Merlin: Yes.
Merlin: I don't know.
Merlin: I don't read the trades.
Merlin: But the other one was that it's believed that...
Merlin: I can't believe I'm saying this.
Merlin: I read this somewhere over 20 years ago.
Merlin: But it was that the kind of IBD that I have may in part be caused by unresolved grief.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: And I never pursued that over much because I went, eh.
Merlin: Yeah, right.
Merlin: Well, on the other hand, you know, I got a prescription for something called enteric aspirin, which is $600 aspirin that doesn't fall apart until it's near your ass.
Merlin: And that didn't work.
Merlin: The first $500 is what gets it all the way down there.
Merlin: Yeah, exactly.
Merlin: It's the second $500.
Merlin: But it's like they say, I'd piss on a spark plug if I thought it would do any good.
Merlin: When one is motivated to resolve a situation, you're willing to look into where you get vulnerable.
Merlin: Not just vulnerable as far as like, oh, I'm a guy in Oakley yelling at people in a parking lot about their trans goldfish or whatever.
Merlin: But when you feel like under attack, whether it's by your body or the Lord or whatever, you know, any port in a storm, you'll start looking stuff up and wondering, well, has my heart recently been broken?
Merlin: One might wonder.
Merlin: Let's put it this way.
Merlin: If there's a difference between me getting a few more days on this side of the turf, I might look into that.
Merlin: Mm-hmm.
John: Well, we're living in a world.
John: In a world.
John: But I, like all of us, am living in a world where some— I like all of us, too.
John: Yeah, I like all of us.
John: I like all of us.
John: And like all of us, I like all of us.
John: So I have a family that is a little bit more woo than I.
John: And you would think that my mom was an empiricist because she is, mostly, but also – Anyone who's ever interacted with her for pretty much any period of time – I mean, I'm not just doing this to shine her skirt.
Merlin: I'm saying, like, your mom is amazing and your mom is cool.
Merlin: She's smart.
Merlin: She's really – she's a sweet person, but she's also – she –
Merlin: does not she does not abide bullshit well and she's don't agreed and she's got an amazing radar for it and she will she has no compunction about cutting straight to the chase on something that she just does not have time for is that fair to say it is but we're living in a time
John: I think it started in her young life, right?
John: When people first started once again revisiting some of these ideas like, oh, is a broken heart going to affect your bowels?
John: And then tying that into all that 60s exploration of Eastern philosophy that led to Eastern medicine and understanding like, what if acupuncture works?
Merlin: Well, it generally became known very generally and lots of interesting pieces to this.
Merlin: Well, it generally became known as the human potential movement, which is sort of the sort of slightly cleaned up version of a lot of 60s hippie stuff that eventually became cults and stuff.
Merlin: But, like, there's something to that.
Merlin: The idea of, like, in the 70s, people thought anything was possible in the early 70s.
Merlin: Like, oh, my God, anything can happen.
Merlin: And I think that name is kind of interesting, the human potential movement.
Merlin: Like, in order to really become fully human and utilize all of the things that we are capable of, we're going to have to look beyond what's right at the end of our nose.
Merlin: And I think that was the cause of a little widely acceptable woo, whether that's yoga or, like, you know, whatever.
Yeah.
John: Right.
John: And it's very hard to say that acupuncture is woo considering it's thousands of years old and is, you know, like a – Don't call it ancient woo.
John: No.
Merlin: I'm sorry.
Merlin: I'm hearing you walking into the room and playing the sound.
Merlin: Where's my keyboard?
Merlin: Anyway, sorry.
John: But all of it, and we've all surfed this wave, right, of like, oh, I guess we all now believe in these other things that we don't understand.
John: We've taken this world of things that we didn't understand and we've replaced it with this world of things that we don't understand.
John: But there's all this cross.
John: We're like – we're going to our Western-trained doctors and expecting them to talk to us about not just nutrition but –
John: like soul nutrition.
John: And then there are these guys over here in tank tops that are talking about antioxidants.
John: And then there's this whole recent thing.
Merlin: If your quote unquote doctor offers you something that involves not a prescription, but a subscription, like to their health and wellness products, like, you know, that's good to be aware of.
John: No, no, no.
John: If you drink this tincture, it's going to clean your pancreas.
Merlin: Well, your problem is you drink too much of it.
Merlin: To get all the homeopathy out, you've got to use hardly any part of the buffalo.
John: But the thing that's been really interesting the last 10 years is this sort of like, well, quantum math...
John: is so trippendicular that it doesn't take much for it to gloss over into... Ah, totally.
Merlin: It doesn't mean Newtonian physics is over and done, but you're seeing something on this level that does not comport with most of the, at least the Western idea,
Merlin: of how reality works is.
Merlin: I mean, talking to my kid about the binary, and I sound like an old man, but I'll be like, one problem with the binary and gender, forgive my saying to my kid, I said one problem with it is that, like, when you're dealing with the idea of gender, it's not just a matter of, like, oh, they put out kitty litter boxes for trans kids who identify as cats.
Merlin: It's not even that nonsense.
Merlin: It's the idea that you're fighting...
Merlin: Arguably at least thousands of years of an idea of a dyad in the world.
Merlin: Right?
Merlin: I mean, I'm not just talking about yin and yang.
Merlin: I'm talking about not just good and evil, but like, you know –
Merlin: It's not good, evil, and Steve.
Merlin: Like, this is our entire Western culture has passed on this idea that failing at any other model.
Merlin: I mean, Hegel's just the one that made it into a chart.
Merlin: I mean, this has been around for a very long time.
Merlin: Just the idea that, like, you know what I'm saying?
Merlin: Yeah, this and math.
Merlin: Yeah, exactly.
Merlin: And, like, I know that sounds really dumb to say to a 15-year-old kid, and who fucking cares?
Merlin: But I think it's useful to realize that one reason that stuff is complicated is that it's practically in our brainstem, this idea.
Merlin: But that's true of, I mean, Newtonian – I hope I'm saying that right.
Merlin: But, you know, the idea that, like, something's happening when you're doing – whether you're – you know, all the stuff that we came up with from the 20s on, we –
Merlin: I'll include myself in that.
Merlin: You and me.
Merlin: Oh, me and Plonk.
Merlin: Actually, technically, it was man's constant.
Merlin: But all that, exactly what you're saying in the spooky action edition at a distance, which we like to have fun with and talk about, or the butterfly wings or the whatever.
Merlin: Well, or as Sir Kuthva would say, evolution.
Merlin: Evolution, natural planning.
Merlin: Yeah, exactly.
Mm-hmm.
Merlin: Right up to the edge.
Merlin: Right up to the edge.
Merlin: And will you know if you are still setting your mind to something that – will you still know that you're setting your mind to something that you regarded as a potential scientific adjacent idea?
Merlin: Will you know when you've moved over to something different from that and should it matter?
John: Yes.
John: And in my own case –
John: I spent a lot of my youth thinking – trying to think deep thoughts.
John: Yeah.
John: And trying to – Trying, trying, trying.
John: Trying, trying to look behind the curtain, trying to look over God's shoulder and see what he – check on his work.
John: See what he's reading.
John: See what he's reading.
John: Look over and see if – Tilbert.
John: What?
John: See if I can copy any of the answers.
John: He loves that pointy-headed boss.
John: That pointy-headed boss is such a nut.
John: Um, and, uh, and when I, when I think about the way I live now and, and walk through the world, uh, and, and I think about this creatively too.
John: When people ask me, you know, you were, you wrote these records and then you stopped writing records and what was the, what happened?
John: And it's easy to say, oh, writer's block or whatever, but, uh,
John: But I did arrive at a place in my life in my 40s, early 40s, or around the age of 40, where a lot of the questions that had driven me to seek, seek, seek, always seeking answers to these intractable questions, some of those questions I kind of answered to my satisfaction.
John: I understood...
John: more about, and that's not to say understood more like now I have a deeper knowledge, but understood to my satisfaction why it is that people act the way they do, why it is that I had so much trouble making plans and plots and personal contracts with people.
John: I got it.
John: enough that I no longer had that incredible frustration.
Merlin: You're describing something – you can tell me if I could get this way wrong, but I think you're kind of describing too – when we talk about you've figured it out enough, it's like, well, at least for myself.
Merlin: I feel like there's things where like, oh my gosh, well, the implication is that I need to learn really everything about this with a level of certainty.
Merlin: But there's a certain kind of thing that happens later on, especially as you're confronted with more and more information, good or bad or otherwise in the world, or useful or not in the world, which is like, I understand enough of this to feel satisfied that I don't need to pursue this with the same brio that I did before.
Merlin: It's not that I have a complete answer for all time, but it's not going to keep me up at night wondering if I've discovered every last dram of information about this that exists in the world.
Yeah.
John: Yeah, yeah.
John: And I think what's common in youth is a feeling of frustration at not understanding what you assume is an interconnected big picture that either is being hidden from you or is made up of lies or whatever it is that you need to find the key to it before you can move forward.
John: and realizing, I think, at a certain age that
John: Um, no, there's not a code.
John: There's not a system really.
John: Uh, if you do find a system that answers all your, uh, questions, you're, you're, you made a wrong turn somewhere.
Merlin: And that's practically the definition of a, of a, not a faith, but of a religion.
John: Yeah.
John: And a cult.
John: Right.
John: And, and, and if, if you found it, found a system and, and it's, and you call it science or you found a system and you, whatever it is, it,
John: There's no easy answer.
John: But for me, realizing that my problems with other people were not because I didn't understand some fundamental truth.
John: It was because of a lot of small things that I started to get a better picture of.
John: And as a result, I stopped having that desperate need to be understood that you hear in my music.
John: The Long Winters records are this howling, desperate attempt to communicate on the topics that plagued me that I couldn't talk about another way.
John: And when that
John: When that started to resolve itself... Oh, sure.
John: Yes.
John: I was like, I don't have the same... Were you aware of it?
John: Were you aware of that being the case?
John: I'm guessing later on.
John: When I started to try and write lyrics for the record that never came out, and my dad had just died, died during that process, and...
John: I had also kind of come to – I had just bought a house, right, with the money from the Miller Beer ad that never aired.
John: And I just started to come to terms with who I was in relationships.
John: And some of this had to do with that first blast of excitement at someone telling me I was an introvert.
John: And understanding like, oh, that's, you know, I am that and that's not what I thought.
Merlin: Well, we got an Eric in the water fountain situation because you should bring that to me was like a very much similar thing.
Merlin: I still think about it constantly.
John: Remember?
John: Remember the power of it?
Merlin: Yeah, yeah.
Merlin: And all of a sudden – That I can be a little of both.
Merlin: That I can be the most extroverted, please shut the fuck up person you've ever met in your life up to a point.
Merlin: And I make it sound like it's something where a portcullis comes down and I have to just run away, which is not precisely the case.
Merlin: But it's just that I don't have an unalloyed –
Merlin: I don't have a way that I can depend on knowing that a given event will give or drain energy from me or however you want to think about it.
Merlin: All I'm saying is – let me just put it in the most unuseful way possible.
Merlin: Knowing that introversion and extroversion were not what I thought it was has been a lot to think about.
Merlin: A lot of angles.
John: There's a lot of angles once you start exploring it.
John: next to their Ukrainian flag and their, uh, pronouns is where they are on the introvert extra extrovert spectrum.
John: But at the time, I'm sure introverted even say sitting in the back, sitting in that backyard with that friend of mine and me going, you know, as the, as a big extroverted guy, I don't understand why I have so many problems with people and, and hearing her laugh and go, you're the most introverted person I ever met.
John: And, and, and I thought of her as a very introverted person.
John: So I was like, what are you talking about?
John: From that moment on, realizing that every one of those Long Winters songs, because Long Winters songs are, each one of them is a constellation of little sense impressions.
John: Every line is another sort of like, here's another event that I don't understand why.
John: I thought I was going into it this way, and I thought you were there.
John: with either a catcher's mitt or a, or a, on a pitcher's mound.
John: And then that's not how it, that's not how, not how it worked out.
John: And, and I'm going to put that event, I'm going to put that little flash of, of, um, anecdote next to, or I'm going to nest it in 15 other anecdotes.
John: Which is the way it is in your mind.
Merlin: Like when you do it, I mean like whether that's verse or, you know, a lot, lots of things in art, but verse is one that comes to mind.
Merlin: Um,
Merlin: Gosh, I'm thinking it's a wonderful bit where Mitchell and Webb, where they're making fun of, I don't know if this is a well-known quote, but there's a bit where they're making fun of Gordon Ramsay shows where the chef is yelling at the completely incompetent guy in the kitchen.
Merlin: And he goes, it's just a simple dish.
Merlin: You just put it together.
Merlin: Damn, just a salmon, fresh, fresh.
Merlin: And he goes, it's just ingredients.
Merlin: And the poor chef guy goes, yes, yes.
Merlin: And Henry V is just English words in the right order.
Merlin: You're better at this than I am.
Merlin: And I think about that, but when you think about that, that's what the artfulness is, is deciding what to put near the other thing.
Merlin: And maybe it'll make sense to other people, but it makes sense to you.
Merlin: And sometimes it produces, as Queen says, a kind of magic.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: A kind of magic.
John: Yeah, yeah.
Merlin: That juxtaposition is difficult.
Merlin: Like, how did you decide to do this versus that?
Merlin: It's like, I don't know.
Merlin: It's just that's what belonged there.
Merlin: And that's somewhere.
John: That's the kind of poetry and pop music that I like.
John: Me too.
John: And so anytime you're looking for a narrative in a song that I've written, the narrative is in the...
John: Here are all the ingredients of Henry V. Now you put it together.
John: You're saying you're like Blue Apron for Indie Rock?
John: Yeah, exactly.
John: Just take all of the stories.
John: Farm egg.
John: All of the things that happened in a novel.
John: But you take them out of the framework of a novel.
John: And then you put them in somewhat of a random order.
John: But it's all still constituent parts.
Merlin: And also spies.
Merlin: Spycraft.
Merlin: Spycraft.
Merlin: You got some spies on your songs, too.
Merlin: I happen to know.
John: But who are the spies, Merlin?
John: Who are the spies?
Merlin: The spies are we.
Merlin: Are they vaccines?
Merlin: Are they... Oh, I see what you're saying.
Merlin: Uh-huh.
Merlin: So... Her skin of cinnamon, her skin of cinnamon.
John: For me, like...
John: My cosmology went kind of along a similar path where – I'm guessing this did not happen in an afternoon.
John: No, not at all.
John: But looking at myself now and realizing like in the course of a day, all the things that I'm thinking about, churning on, all of the –
John: All of the stuff I'm out there in the world looking for and bringing home and unwrapping and trying to fit into the other stuff that – trying to work it into the mashed potato tower that I'm building on the dining room table.
John: I'm not really looking for quantum answers.
John: I'm not looking for – I'm not trying to peek behind the curtain at –
John: why things are the way they are anymore i do not ask myself or the universe in the course of a typical day why and i used to ask why so much it was it was 80 of what i was doing asking why yeah and so
John: For me, sitting in the doctor's office and looking at an EKG and understanding that it could have been a virus or it could have been a broken heart.
John: Both things could manifest in this instrument, in the readout of this instrument as it tries to interpret what this organ in your body is doing.
John: And I understand that the question of why is
John: Might be – well, how do you begin to address – how do you treat it if you don't know why?
John: But I'm curious for a second.
John: Like, oh, isn't that interesting?
John: Could have been a broken heart.
John: Huh.
John: Well –
John: What do we do now?
Merlin: You know, that's exactly what I just I've written down many things.
Merlin: And one of the things I wrote down just now, and this is one of this is part of my I don't know, some kind of big codex for life for me is like that I'll apply directly here.
Merlin: If you knew why, whatever happened, happened or why, you know, if you knew why, what would you do differently?
Merlin: And I think a lot of times – What would you do differently now?
Merlin: Now, today, whenever.
Merlin: Right.
Merlin: But you grow up knowing so little, especially at a time when you couldn't just go look up, is heart disease caused by, quote, unquote, a broken heart?
Merlin: That's going to be tough on Google.
Merlin: You're going to get some namespace pollution.
Merlin: But if you knew why something happened in the world, like why aren't girls nicer to me?
Merlin: Why didn't I have more money?
Merlin: Why did these things – not even things that explain one's cosmology, but if you knew why something happened, what would you do differently?
Merlin: Well, you know, sometimes – I'm not saying you can kind of clap out of that great, you know, sort of epistemological, like, just kind of that philosophical, like, ruminative approach to life.
Merlin: But, like, let's cut to the chase in some ways.
Merlin: You only get so many more hours on this – at this joint.
Merlin: What would you do differently if you knew it was caused by this, you know –
Merlin: I'm reminded – and boy, this is going to have to be a whole separate episode.
Merlin: I've got a lot to say about Christianity and science that I need to share with you and what frustrates me about both of them that I hope you'll interrogate me about.
Merlin: But what I am saying is like – It can be an After Dark episode.
Merlin: It might be an After Dark, but I'm dead fucking serious.
Merlin: My basic beef with science is my basic beef with – not science.
Merlin: My beef with scientists is my same beef with a lot of Christians.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: which is that they've really lost the thread about why they do what they do and are more interested in being clerics than they are in helping people learn why they do what they do.
John: I'm ready.
John: But we can save it.
Merlin: I can do it quick.
Merlin: But the thing is, when my wife got really, really sick with some mysterious thing that may or may not have been meningitis, this is like eight years ago now, I think I told you about this, they brought in all these different people.
John: I was there.
Merlin: As they say on MASH, they brought in the pros from Dover, right?
Merlin: Like, they brought in all these people with all their cockamamie theories.
Merlin: And, of course, everybody's – I see it because I was a fan of things like Monty Python and I'm allowed to think this is absurd.
Merlin: All these incredibly pretentious people in lab coats walking around trying to figure out – trying to find anything approaching the nail that works with their particular hammer.
Merlin: And my wife's boss, who –
Merlin: because she works at a medical school, was a physician, came in in the nicest way possible without making the dear, sweet, very young man who was the attending feel bad, basically said, let me just give it to you in pigs and bunnies.
Merlin: Why don't you try throwing everything that's not harmful at this problem and see if it goes away?
Yeah.
Merlin: Have you considered just putting on antibiotics and doing this and doing that and knowing that that's not contraindicated by anything we've seen so far?
Merlin: Rather than sitting here and trying to find the answer to this solution.
Merlin: I said this in the wisdom document last year.
Merlin: Don't look for a specific USB cable.
Merlin: Look for a USB cable.
Merlin: You don't need to find the box with the USB cable.
Merlin: You need to get something connected.
Merlin: Or do you even need to do that?
Merlin: Let's do the seven whys here.
Merlin: Once you've got that USB cable, what is it you're going to be able to do?
Merlin: Oh, I'll be able to recharge this thing for my Dremel.
Merlin: What are you going to do with your Dremel?
Merlin: Oh, I'm polishing a piece of lead that I found in the garage.
Merlin: Oh, really?
Merlin: Uh-huh.
Merlin: You want to keep going?
Merlin: Wear a mask.
Merlin: I'm going to stop right there because that's – what am I doing?
Merlin: What am I doing?
Merlin: I got so hung up trying to find that.
Merlin: And in this case, these – like Dr. Hammer is out there like wondering if they can figure out if she ate lunch meat in San Mateo County in a week when it would have mattered to her diagnosis instead of just trying to like fix her.
Merlin: And so here's – in a nut, without going too far, we can make this our –
Merlin: If we ever do our – if we got our first abortive Patreon, we got to do – maybe our second one could be – but here's what I'm trying to say about this.
Merlin: In the same way that Paul, let alone Jesus, would not recognize the religion that we call Christianity in the 20th and 21st century –
Merlin: Like, there's a lot going on with science that bugs in a similar way, which is like, I do feel like there's – and I include medicine in science, which is like there's a lot of playing both sides of the street.
Merlin: There's a lot of like – and certainly I'm not the first person for thousands of years, maybe almost as long as we've had opposites.
Merlin: We've had the idea of like medicine – medical people are clerics.
Merlin: Like, you really see that in some ways in indigenous cultures with what we call –
Merlin: kind of idiotically a medicine man.
Merlin: But this is a person whose role is to give medical care and to give comfort and to give consolation, to be like a combination doctor slash clergy person.
John: Yeah, right.
John: World interpreter.
Merlin: But they're trying to, I don't think they're necessarily trying to like fool anybody.
Merlin: But what bugs me is like the both sides of the street shit in medicine of like, hey, listen, hey, hey, hey, hey.
Merlin: In science, it's really about like what we can prove for now.
Merlin: And we're all very humble about that experience of like always saying we'll know more.
Merlin: And, oh, you know, every time you hear that wine is good for you, wine is bad for you.
Merlin: Oh, no, no, no, no.
Merlin: The thing is that that's just confusion in like the lay media.
Merlin: But like the people who are actually looking at the results, like, oh, we're all so humble.
Merlin: And whenever you go up to, you're so honored and you're so fucking humbled.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: But at the same time, there's a guy who can stand there in the office and credulously say to me, you either are about to have a stroke or you might have gout or I guess maybe I might have unresolved trauma in my life.
Merlin: And I really, I don't think you're allowed to be that cocky about how other people should see information, let alone run their life.
Merlin: And at this point, I am going to start running science, run alongside Christianity.
Merlin: God, you know what the idea was?
Merlin: I was telling my kid about this.
Merlin: Fucking Jesus ruled, man.
Merlin: He was so cool.
Merlin: Jesus was really down to earth.
Merlin: Jesus was way cool.
Merlin: He was extremely cool, and I'm not doing that as a bit.
Merlin: This is not like an indie rock song.
Merlin: Shut up.
Merlin: I'm fucking serious.
Merlin: He really, he bent over backwards in the three, three, three years of his ministry.
Merlin: He bent over backwards to help everybody he could, especially the people who didn't deserve it.
Merlin: He spoke truth to power.
Merlin: He dealt like, whether you looked at it as historical, literary, religious, whatever, Jesus was an unimpeachably pretty cool guy.
Merlin: Now, when you get into the stuff of him giving his life, his father, whatever, fine.
Merlin: But now we're getting into the religious stuff.
Merlin: But there's a lot to like and admire about Jesus.
Merlin: In the same way that there's a lot to like and admire about any scientist of old or new who says, these are my observations.
Merlin: This is what you need to do to try and replicate them, et cetera, all that stuff.
Merlin: But you're not allowed to act like, I love Jesus because he was nice and...
Merlin: tell trans people they should die.
Merlin: And, you know, maybe I picked the wrong week to watch the White Noise movie because I loved it too much.
Merlin: Holy fucking shit.
Merlin: I don't care what anybody says about this movie.
Merlin: Just the scenes alone...
Merlin: I can't recommend it to people because it's obviously made only for me.
Merlin: But the scenes of Jack meeting with his doctor are so funny to me.
Merlin: And it's exactly how I feel in every interaction with the doctor.
Merlin: Well, it's very important we have this doctor-patient relationship.
Merlin: And like, oh, it's hard to know.
Merlin: We don't know anything about that.
Merlin: And you got to see it to understand it.
Merlin: But that's how I feel.
Merlin: It's like these chodes fucking love playing every—and a Christian doctor?
Merlin: Don't get me started.
Merlin: And by the way, can I just mention, ministers love being called doctor.
Merlin: Where I'm from, if you don't know what to call somebody, you call them doctor.
Merlin: My frustration is not with Jesus.
Merlin: My frustration is not with, and as anybody, very frustratingly to a lot of my friends, I ain't mad at Jesus.
Merlin: I ain't mad at Christianity.
Merlin: I'm not mad even at faith.
Merlin: Like, I got plenty of time for that.
Merlin: What I don't have time for is weaponizing something that you regard, you as the practitioner, weaponizing something that you regard as a source of power and status and holding it over people to tell them they're not doing life right.
Merlin: And I feel like when you press, whether you're talking about Christians or whether you're modern Christians, contemporary Christians, or contemporary physicians and scientists, when you press them on this stuff,
Merlin: They sometimes get a little huffy about it, you know?
Merlin: And we're just as much to blame for people who begin sentences with dependent clauses like according to science.
Merlin: You're like, what the fuck does that mean?
Merlin: That's like referring to something that's coming from the government.
Merlin: What does that mean?
Merlin: What the fuck does that mean, the government?
Merlin: I know you mean federal government.
Merlin: Which branch of the federal government?
Merlin: Which, you know, it's like, it's just this whole thing of like, I just, I'm so...
Merlin: I'm sorry to carry on like this, but this is the year, this past year.
Merlin: Now it's a new year.
Merlin: But this is the new year.
Merlin: Happy New Year!
Merlin: The baby's dead.
Merlin: But this is the year that I finally realized I've had it with a lot of stuff.
Merlin: Okay.
Merlin: Including a lot of elements...
Merlin: the various powers.
Merlin: Wait, you're turning against the elements?
Merlin: I'm turning against some of the elements.
Merlin: Any element above 140.
Merlin: I've never trusted beryllium, I'm going to be honest with you.
Merlin: Einsteinium, that's not a thing.
Merlin: What the fuck, Jeopardy?
Merlin: But I guess this is the year that I finally realized people like John Syracuse have always talked
Merlin: Like to make fun of me for being so sort of oppositional and anti-authority and things like that.
Merlin: But like this is the year I really operationalized it.
Merlin: A handful of things have happened in the world and in my life in particularly the last year or two where I've just been like, that's it.
Merlin: I'm fucking done.
Merlin: Like I am done buying in to all of this because I said so stuff from people.
Merlin: It's become very frustrating to me.
Merlin: And we don't have time for it today.
Merlin: But I also think the implicit shame that we're all supposed to feel about life all the time comes straight out of shit like science and Christianity.
Merlin: And finally, it took me this long to realize it really personally.
Merlin: You know?
Merlin: It was the cop saying, yeah, there's been a guy living outside your house in a car for a year.
Merlin: Quote, what do you want me to do about it?
Merlin: Was a phrase that he used.
Merlin: Or it could be, again, the doctor who I went into because of knee pain who told me, quote, I might be about to, quote, stroke out is what the man said.
Merlin: Good God.
Merlin: Had a $600 appointment with an osteopath in a t-shirt, which is not a Morrissey song.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: There's just been a lot of shit in the last year where it's been, like, it's really come home where, like, as a white man, certainly there's a lot that I've gotten away with.
Merlin: But maybe even that power is flagging at this point.
Merlin: And I've had to realize just how shitty so much power stuff is.
Merlin: And when you use it to say to somebody...
Merlin: I don't know.
Merlin: Now I'm off topic.
Merlin: But it just frustrates me because everything you're talking about here I feel like has kind of an analog in my own interior world of like, well, the questions that I want answered are not so much about like why girls weren't nicer to me in my teens.
Merlin: My deeper question now is like how do we develop a –
Merlin: some kind of a praxis for protecting one another from the people who feel that they're empowered to change what we are based on what they think they know.
Merlin: That's a lot, John.
John: It is.
John: Well, but the thing, you know, Ancient Wu.
John: Well, what I come back to is the word policy because I,
John: Throughout all of this, throughout this whole era that we're discussing throughout your and my lives,
John: And all of the things that we have seen come and go in the culture that briefly really matter and then are kind of like, well, that still matters, but we're on to something else now.
John: And we've been building a kind of culture on this like – Some of this even can be something like, wait, you're still mad about that?
John: We're not mad about that anymore.
John: Yeah, right.
John: Haven't you kept up with what we're mad about now?
John: And that idea, right, that we're standing on top of a pile of bricks of settled law –
John: And we say policy as in like the policy of like legal things.
John: Well, I mean that in the that's how it gets used a lot.
Merlin: But what we're looking for in all of this policy can also mean United is going to give you credit and not your money back because that's our policy.
Merlin: That's right.
Merlin: What's our policy?
Merlin: What's our policy?
John: Yes.
John: And when we're looking at all this woo stuff, when we're looking at all this personal experience, we're coming up with what are our policies and
John: Which is to say like, well, I'm going to be confronted with a new situation today, something that's never happened before.
John: I'm going to meet somebody at the grocery store I've never met before.
John: What are my policies?
John: How do I – based on past experience, based on the insurance that I had to pay when I lost all those people's luggage, what are our new policies about my responsibility for your luggage?
John: What are my policies about how I'm going to – I mean, you know, what pronouns do I use when I meet a stranger?
Merlin: As in, like, we've already figured out what our – I mean, they would never say this, they, whoever they are.
Merlin: But we've already decided what our – preemptively, we know what our approach to this is and should be.
Merlin: And we've operationalized a response even before it was needed.
John: If I am driving a Dodge diesel 3500 pickup –
John: That I have equipped to roll coal and I am driving past four people in spandex who are riding bicycles on the side of the road.
John: Do I roll coal on them or not?
John: The answer is, let's go to the policy.
John: What's our policy?
John: I outfitted this truck to roll coal.
John: On whom?
John: If not these bicyclists.
John: Find someone better.
John: They deserve it.
Merlin: Look at them, spandex.
John: But when we look at the way we conduct ourselves, not just personally, but in our group, you and I have policies.
John: that we've developed over years about how we talk about certain things, about what things we do and don't talk about, about what our shared values are.
John: And maybe you have shared values with me that you don't have with other people.
Merlin: Yeah, where the parameters are.
Merlin: The phrase I like to use, the phrase I found myself using, within normal parameters.
Merlin: We know when something is or is not within normal parameters, which leads to things like, hey, I'm going to bracket the thing I'm about to say in such a way that...
Merlin: Because I feel like it's outside of what we normally – what would normally be considered dinner conversation, for example.
John: Right, right.
John: And you and I will – sometimes we're talking to each other and we're using our candid set of rules.
John: And then we remember that there are 40,000 people listening to us.
John: And then all of a sudden we're like, and also, just to be clear – Also, I don't like Christians or doctors.
John: So pass that around.
John: But I feel like in the culture at large –
John: This idea that, okay, we're all talking about this right now.
John: And then we're not talking about it anymore because we decided pretty much what it is.
John: And then that becomes a brick and we put it in the ground.
John: And then we start stacking bricks on it.
John: Now, whether or not we ever really came to any real conclusions about what that was before we decided it was settled...
John: And once it's in the ground, it's very hard to go back and review because of all the bricks that are stuck on top of it.
Merlin: Yeah, precisely.
John: And we're standing on top of that ziggurat.
John: And none of us, very few of us, want to have anybody go down and look at any of those bricks down below and go, now, let's take another look at this.
John: And what that ends up being is policy.
John: And we want everything now that comes across our transom to – what we want to know is how does this affect policy.
John: And we want everything to be policy because we want there to be laws.
John: We want to govern one another.
John: We want people to be bound to behave according to the Zuggarat that we're standing on.
John: And we're standing on – everybody's got their own.
John: And for me, walking around, I'm very interested in policy.
John: I'm interested in figuring out what other people's policies are.
John: And I'm conscious of what my policies are.
John: I think about this a lot because I'm talking to my kid all the time, and she has different policies than I do.
John: She's standing on a very different set of bricks.
John: Oh, absolutely.
John: And she really wants to know what mine are.
John: Because she's confronting it every day now in her own life where she's like, well, I don't have the same policies as my friends and I don't understand why not.
John: And I'm like, aha, oh, well.
John: And she's like, well, so what are yours?
Merlin: Policy, just so I'm clear, policy, obviously, it doesn't just mean things inside of law or companies.
Merlin: You're using policy to potentially mean a lot of very broad range of things.
Merlin: Not that the things are broad, but the range of them is broad.
Merlin: So that could be things like, oh, let's take a dumb one, like something from a romantic comedy, don't call her the next day after a date.
Merlin: That's a kind of policy, right?
John: Right.
John: But also, if you believe that your intestinal issues are related to unresolved trauma, you're going, if that is a settled brick, which it isn't for you, it doesn't sound like, but for a lot of people it is.
John: And they put that brick in the ground.
John: It could be a load-bearing brick.
John: It's a load-bearing brick in a lot of cases.
John: My stomach issues are a result of trauma.
John: Right.
John: Not a result of a bad sandwich I once ate or a virus, but my heart condition— Or that puddle water I keep drinking.
John: Right.
John: My mom doesn't have a heart condition.
John: My mom thinks that her heart now is a result of having gotten COVID but never having been diagnosed with it, which seems like a very science—
John: Conclusion to come to when the doctor says, well, it could be a virus or maybe you had a broken heart.
John: My mom goes, well, I don't think I had a broken heart.
Merlin: Also, it answers a question.
Merlin: It does answer a question.
Merlin: We watched the episode today where we're getting to the end.
Merlin: We watched the episode today where Hank is looking at the Leaves of Grass book.
Merlin: And only real heads are going to remember the connection with what – I don't know if you've ever seen the program I'm talking about, Breaking Bad.
Merlin: But there's the initials WW are an important factor in an earlier season.
Merlin: And it's there the moment that Hank understands that, no, it wasn't – what's the guy's name?
John: Gail.
Merlin: That Gail was talking about Walter White, not Walt Whitman.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: And I think he's always taking a shit, of all things.
Merlin: But that kind of like, oh, that explains a lot in a way that now upends literally every part of my life.
Merlin: I just made, you know what I'm saying?
Merlin: That kind of like, you're like, oh, because I'm not saying your mom's would be anything near as big as Hank's taking a shit while he's reading Leaves of Grass.
Merlin: But he sings a song of himself.
Merlin: But isn't that kind of part of it?
Merlin: Because my family's very much like this.
Merlin: My family's practically like, I don't know, we're like somebody from the Wicker Man where we'll go like, oh, but this also explains because you got the exposure at this one time and then you touch that door and you touch your eye and you come up with all this banana stuff to like, but like for your mom, that would go like, oh, so I'm pretty sure I had COVID and I'm pretty sure I wasn't diagnosed and this would quote unquote prove it potentially, right?
John: Except in that same moment, sitting in that same doctor's office with that same mom and sister saying,
John: Because of their woo books and their belief in ancient aliens and in the fact that there's spooky action at a distance and that quantum feelings get sent through mushrooms and you can feel –
John: The sadness.
Merlin: The toxic airborne event.
John: What a great book.
John: The trauma of the Norman invasion in 1066 is still felt in our fingernails.
John: When the doctor said it could have been a virus or a broken heart, that doctor was coming from a tradition that's not very many years old of saying, well...
John: It might be science or it might be love.
Merlin: It might be science we can prove or it might be science we don't know that much about.
John: That's right.
John: It might be the wind upon the willows.
John: It might be an atmospheric river.
John: And my mom could have just as easily said it was a broken heart.
John: Either one of those became a brick that –
John: Everything that she thought about it from then on was going to be standing on.
John: And in this case, that brick went into the ground as I probably had COVID and the virus hurt my heart.
John: And for the rest of her hopefully long life, we're going to talk about her heart condition based on that.
John: And we're going to have policies based on that because that's the policy.
John: I get it.
John: But if it was love, if her IBS was a result of unresolved trauma instead of a result of a sandwich you had in Mendocino, then you have a completely new set of policies and all the people around you are affected by them.
John: And they are expected to live as though that is settled law.
John: That's good.
John: And that is what I spend a lot of time walking around going like, what?
Merlin: So in some ways, you end up being the loyal opposition, like unintentionally, because you're the one who goes, yeah, I just checked that and that's not a thing.
John: No, I'm the one that says, I'm the one that says, well, I read the document that tells you how to read this and here's what this document is saying.
John: It's saying stuff we already knew, which is that the left ventricle is pumping at a reduced capacity and they don't know why.
John: And what I do is I take away the woo of believing that you don't need to know how to read the document because you can just lay hands on the document and feel what it is.
Merlin: I'm getting something.
Merlin: I think I'm getting something.
Merlin: Hey, wait a minute.
Merlin: Wait a minute.
Merlin: Hang on.
Merlin: Hang on.
Merlin: Hang on.
Merlin: Were you alive?
Merlin: Were you alive in 1957?
Merlin: Yes, I was.
Merlin: I knew it.
John: I knew it.
Merlin: That's the day the music died.
Merlin: Are you a Taurus?
Merlin: Uh-huh.
John: Yeah.
Merlin: I knew it.
John: Oh, boy.
Yeah.
John: I should talk to more people.
John: Well, you know, you're back now.
John: You're back.
John: It's the new year.
John: How is this new year going to be different for you?
John: Yeah, you're going to make some changes this year?
John: I don't know.
John: Your kid is making changes that you don't have anything to say about, right?
John: Like your life is going to change a lot this year.
Merlin: The fact that I agree with all of it and I'm into all of it is not germane.
Merlin: Mm-hmm.
Merlin: Because if the kid decided in a different direction that I didn't like, if I got like a little Alex P. Keaton on my hands, like I don't think I'd have any more power than I do now.
Merlin: Right.
Merlin: We probably, instead of doing Wii Bowling together, we would fight more.
Merlin: And I'd rather play Wii Bowling.
Merlin: So it helps that I like my kid.
Merlin: I'm lucky in that regard.
John: I mean, I'm noticing for sure that more and more –
John: decisions are being made not by my kid or by me, but by the fact that she is there and she is going to be, she is going to be.
John: And so I'm just, because, you know, I'm trying to reinvent myself, right?
John: The last two years have been hard for me because I don't know
John: I had an event where some of the things that I knew weren't me, but I had let them be me.
Merlin: I had let them define me.
Merlin: Talk about that all you want.
Merlin: I totally agree.
Merlin: They say in life that sometimes you need to repot yourself, which is a phrase that I like a lot.
John: That's a great line.
Merlin: Yeah, you need to repot yourself.
Merlin: But sometimes in life, you get repotted, whether you're into it or not.
Merlin: And that is a time where you are, whether you feel like it or not, you're going to realize a lot of stuff that had just, that was happening.
Merlin: Maybe there's some stuff that was happening because of good luck or bad luck or whatever.
Merlin: But you look at a fair number of your load-bearing bricks for a while after that.
John: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
John: Well, and I'm trying to decide who I'm going to be next.
John: But all you have to go on is the bricks that you laid down.
John: You know, I'm not trying to decide who I'm going to be next and saying like, I used to be a brick house, but now I'm going to be a house made of sticks.
John: They were mighty mighty.
John: That's right.
John: But I still haven't resolved that.
John: Yeah.
Merlin: And so... You feel like that might be this happening?
Merlin: Something has to happen.
Merlin: Not a calendar thing, but it's a happening thing.
John: If you and I look back at our lives, it always is the case where you go, oh, it was already happening and I didn't realize it.
Merlin: Oh, absolutely.
John: And then one day I was all the way in it and then I look back and it looks inevitable, but at the time... And I have to assume that's true now.
Merlin: Nobody remembers what life was like in America in 1942.
Merlin: We have to mention this a couple times a year.
Merlin: We didn't know we were going to win the war in 1942.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: Not a great time.
Merlin: It was not a great time.
Merlin: We look back and we go, oh, 1942, finally America's in, we're going to fix this.
Merlin: It's like, that's your life, dude.
Merlin: There's so much stuff where you're like, I don't, I mean, I tend to believe that whether you want this is a little bit of a little shaker of Kierkegaard, but we tend to survive whether we want to or not.
Merlin: And so I think it behooves us to act like we will survive and to conduct ourselves accordingly.
Merlin: I don't follow that every day.
Merlin: A lot of times I just sit on the couch and I look at the Venetian blondes.
Merlin: But that's the truth.
Merlin: And like you don't...
Merlin: All the things, all that sort of settled law and settled policy, the bricks of the past, can be handy or they can be a hindrance.
Merlin: Sometimes you feel like you really got to – this analogy is falling apart.
Merlin: But I think it's real, man.
Merlin: I think you're right about it's difficult to know when something is happening until it's already – maybe not over, but like there's really – you're not going to –
Merlin: For some reason, it was across the Satyricon.
Merlin: I think the Satyricon is an Italian film.
John: It is, and it's also a club in Portland, Oregon that Hole used to play at a lot.
John: Is that right?
John: Yeah.
John: I think it's really important to remember the flags that you've planted.
John: I think about this a lot because— Oh, that sounds like a you thing.
John: Yeah.
John: I very distinctly remember sitting in a cafe, looking out the window in the summer of 1992, and thinking—
John: the revolution is here and the revolution is going to be bad.
John: It's going to be bloody, but it is inevitable.
John: It cannot go on like this.
John: And this was at the, this was at the very end of the Bush administration.
John: And, uh, during the election of that summer, I felt like that civilization is, is
John: is collapsing around our ears.
John: This, this is, we are at the turning point.
John: And I remember that conversation with myself very clearly.
John: And I planted a flag there because
John: When I hear people, when I have heard people over the subsequent 30 years talk about us being at a moment where we've crossed the line, like this was the fail-safe point, we've gone across it.
Merlin: Other people's version of crossing the satiricon.
John: Yeah, crossing the satiricon, and now the revolution is happening, or the collapse is coming.
Merlin: There's no turning back, yeah.
John: And I think back to that moment in 1992 and then I contrast it with the fact that now we all look at the summer of 1992 through this super fuzzy lens of like, oh, those were the days like –
Merlin: Remember when everybody in Congress, they fought hard, but by the end of the day, they always settled things, and they were like the coyote and the dog.
John: Yeah, that's right.
John: Good night, Al.
John: Good night, Sam.
John: And, oh, music was good then, and those were the halcyon days.
John: Oh, if things could only be so simple now.
Merlin: When people would ask things like, hey, man, is that...
Merlin: Freedom Rock, and then someone would say, yeah, and they'd say, well, we'll turn it up, man.
Merlin: Turn it up, man.
John: And they would turn it up, man.
Merlin: That's all we needed.
Merlin: They would turn it up, man, because they knew that that was Freedom Rock, and the rock was Freedom.
John: You could still say, where's the beef?
John: You could still rock in America.
John: That's right.
John: That's right.
John: But it was before you would go, what's that?
John: And then the other person would go, ah.
John: Oh, that's true.
John: It was before that.
John: We didn't have that in our rearview mirror.
John: No, we didn't.
John: But those flags that you can plant and go back to and think, oh, that's where I was then.
John: That's where I stood.
Merlin: You're a braver man than I, Gunga Din.
Merlin: No, thank you.
Merlin: I will love you forever.
Merlin: I don't even love me forever.
Merlin: Fuck.
John: I'm not standing on a ziggurat that's made of bricks that's based on the revolution that happened or didn't in 1992.
John: But I can see that.
John: I can see that flag.
John: Yeah.
John: And and that's because I was that what that flag lets me do is go back and say, wait a minute, this brick.
John: What I can't have that brick under me and have my pyramid be stable.
John: Because you can't have that and then also have 30 years of not have the revolution and have that be anything other than a mistaken impression.
Merlin: But sometimes it feels secure to say, I've got this brick, so I'm going to put more bricks.
Merlin: On that brick, I'm putting a ziggurat of memories.
Merlin: And then on top of my ziggurat of memories, I'm going to put the seven-sided lighthouse made of dreams.
Merlin: It would be – it would really – there's no – there's never – something we used to say in my circles, there's never a good day to stop smoking crack.
Merlin: There's never a good day –
Merlin: To tear down your ziggurat and examine one brick.
Merlin: And you're out there sighting flags.
Merlin: Yeah, right.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: You're trying to plant new flags.
Merlin: New flags.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: New bricks.
Merlin: We also thought Y2K would be a bigger deal.
John: You know, turn off your computer.
John: Turn it off.
John: On New Year's Eve.
John: Yep.
Merlin: Yep.
John: And now here we are.
John: Now here we are.
John: How's your computer?
Merlin: Oh, it's fine.
Merlin: It's fine.
Merlin: I've been typing a little bit.
Merlin: Things are good.
Merlin: You know, it's funny.
Merlin: Now that Twitter is not as good as it used to be, and a lot of people have left, and there's not as much there.
Merlin: It's the Woody Allen joke about the food's terrible and the portions are small.
Merlin: I do find myself reading a little bit more, but then I just get mad.
Merlin: Because then I'll go read things, and I'll be so angry at how poor...
Merlin: Something is written.
Merlin: Or I'll just be mad, so mad about the headline for something.
Merlin: And then I'm not sure what to do.
Merlin: And I'm like, well, I know it's not going to make me happy to go back.
Merlin: And I'm not.
Merlin: Listen.
Merlin: Listen.
Merlin: Cool your jets, people.
Merlin: I'm not going to become book guy.
Merlin: Oh, I love books.
Merlin: Oh, I love books.
Merlin: You notice they never say I love reading.
Merlin: They're always like, I love books.
Merlin: Oh, I love to be surrounded by my books.
John: Why is it Lumpy Space Princess that's saying that?
John: I love my bucks.
John: Everything I read on the internet, I look at and go, what policy are they trying to tell me I need to?
Merlin: Oh, sister, I could sing that.
Merlin: But they love QED, John Roderick.
Merlin: They love keeping you off balance.
Merlin: That's what it's all about.
Merlin: New York Times, I'll tell you.
Merlin: You know, I had a credit card I didn't know expired, expired for obvious reasons a couple days ago.
Merlin: And, like, I love that.
Merlin: To me, that's what I believe Robin Williams or Terry Gilliam has called a Buddhist gift.
Merlin: A Buddhist gift when your credit card expires.
Merlin: Because at that point, you start getting all the emails.
Merlin: You know what I mean?
Merlin: Yeah, and then you're like, oh, I'm not going to read that.
Merlin: And you're like, actually, I would prefer not to.
Merlin: I'm not going to do that.
Merlin: You sent me to the login too many times, defector.
Merlin: I'm donezo.
Merlin: I asked you to make it better, and you didn't.
Merlin: Anyway, no offense.
Merlin: No shade, no lemonade.
Merlin: But I guess I'll probably read things.
Merlin: But I don't know.
Merlin: books I love books oh I'm always don't write in your books they're books ooh books you might as well be Christian yeah