Ep. 486: "Mystery Meat Colonel"
John: Hello.
Merlin: Hi, John.
John: Hi, Merlin.
John: How's it going?
John: Oh, so good.
John: Good morning.
John: Yeah, good morning.
John: Good morning.
John: I'm sitting here and, you know, long-time listeners to this show would probably not believe what my recording setup looks like.
John: Even people who know what it looks like probably wouldn't believe what it looks like.
John: Okay.
John: I basically now have got the system down so that I keep it under the couch for when company comes over so my house looks neat.
John: And then when it's time to record, I reach under the couch...
John: And I pull out my setup and I put it on the coffee table.
John: Well, hang on.
John: You're a professional.
John: Yeah.
Merlin: So you record with your professional equipment and then when you're done, like a big bear right before you stretch out on the couch, you just push everything underneath it?
Merlin: I just push it under the couch.
Merlin: Do your guests know they're sitting on your career?
John: No, I don't think they do.
John: I don't think they – I mean if somebody were to like drop something on the floor and lean down, they would see –
John: You know, a digital audio interface.
Merlin: There's not that many jobs where it wouldn't be obvious when they're sitting.
Merlin: If you were a baker, they would smell it.
John: Yeah, they're right.
John: If it were a pizza oven, it'd be hard to fit under it.
John: Automobile mechanic.
John: Yeah, you could have a killer set of tools.
Merlin: You could have your tools under there or maybe like a hydraulic lift.
Merlin: But in this case, you're done talking.
Merlin: Maybe you could also get those things like filling stations used to have where you run over and they go ding, ding.
John: Ding, ding.
John: Oh, where did those go?
Merlin: Welcome to the podcast studio.
Merlin: The what?
John: I want one of those.
Merlin: Oh, God, me too.
Merlin: Ding, ding.
Merlin: And you can never do it on your own.
Merlin: You jump on it.
Merlin: Yeah, that's right.
Merlin: Presence detection was in its infancy then.
John: There used to be a way station, a truck stop way station type of place outside of Anchorage that was closed at night.
John: And you could pull over there and go walk out on the scale, the truck scale.
John: And you could see in the window.
John: And it was so finely calibrated, it could weigh you.
John: No.
John: And you could see the digital display.
Merlin: I don't trust you.
Merlin: I don't trust the tear weight on my kitchen scale.
Merlin: I don't know.
Merlin: I mean, I have to because there's a certain amount of trust in the kitchen you've got to have whether you like it or not.
Merlin: But that is a very – John, because I mean – so you're telling me – it's like we got that out here, you probably know, near Tracy.
Merlin: We got the truck scales.
Merlin: You pull over near that big grade, that crazy grade.
Merlin: So you're saying what we used to in my day call an 18-wheeler.
Merlin: That's right.
Merlin: With the thing on the back, you pull on a semi trailer.
Merlin: Where's the rest of it?
John: Well, that's Demi trailers.
John: That's one of those things I've looked up 40 times.
John: Why is it called a semi trailer?
John: And they'll explain it to you.
John: In words, in the dictionary even, let alone the internet.
John: Yeah.
John: And I still – and I was thinking about it the other day.
John: I was driving and I was like, wait a minute now.
John: What was it again?
John: Why is it a semi – Semi, right.
Merlin: It's a semi –
Merlin: It's a Demi Mond, and Bruce Springsteen is worried about the Hemis on his automobile.
Merlin: That's right.
John: The Hemis, different deal.
John: Those are hemispheres.
Merlin: But a Hemi-Demi semi-quaver, that's purely European.
John: Yeah, exactly.
John: Yeah, that's German.
John: But no, this is a thing that I wish I could answer.
John: It's just nobody calls them semis anymore.
John: Does that sound like you're working blue a little bit?
Yeah.
Merlin: Isn't that in the parlance now?
John: A semi?
John: Is that like a little bit of a, is that just like just a tip?
Merlin: Wow.
Merlin: Your kids can have to listen to this.
Merlin: No, probably not.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: No, it sounds like a boner.
Merlin: But, you know, I don't know.
Merlin: Scales are interesting.
Merlin: I get rid of our scale.
John: You don't think your kid is ever going to listen to this program all the way through, do you?
Merlin: There's so many parts to that.
Merlin: Well, let me give you the short answer, no.
Merlin: If those are all, like, and statements, no.
Merlin: Absolutely not.
John: Absolutely not.
John: I feel like my child could not be less interested in listening to this program.
John: Just wait.
John: And what will happen if anybody... They'll get less interested.
John: If anybody in my family ever...
John: What I think of is that there will be a great, great grandchild, one of what I hope to be 800 great, great, great grandchildren.
John: And there will be one that's just like a weirdo.
John: Yeah.
John: And they will be the one that's like, you know, one of my ancestors used to do a radio show back in the golden age of radio.
Merlin: Yeah, I mean, it's like being like, I don't know, like one of those old-timey names, like a Cooper or a Wheelwright.
Merlin: Like, you know, I had – there was someone in my family who made barrels.
Merlin: He was a Cooper, right?
Merlin: But here's – well, I shouldn't say this on the air.
Merlin: But, you know, if you found out – let's say we did the opposite of that.
Merlin: Well, you're a buff.
Merlin: You like to know things about the past and your family.
Merlin: That interests you, it seems to me.
Merlin: And so if you suddenly found out you got this, let's say you found out you got this mystery meat kernel that you only know.
Merlin: It's a mystery meat kernel that you know only from this painting of him looking a little bit like Colonel Sanders.
Merlin: And you found out that there was some stuff that happened in Virginia in the 1830s.
Merlin: You dig around a little bit.
Merlin: I got a pretty good idea of what you're going to find.
Merlin: Do you understand?
Merlin: Yes, I do.
Merlin: Here's my question to you.
Merlin: Based on the way things are going right now, what if somebody, your great quote-unquote granddaughter, might be a grand robot for all we know, but that person discovers how much meat you ate.
Merlin: Have you thought about this?
Merlin: I think this is going to be the 1830 of food.
John: People are all going to be vegans.
John: They're all going to be living off of laboratory-derived slime.
Merlin: The 2090s are going to make the 1830s.
Merlin: Uh, look like the, uh, age of innocence.
John: So, so, so has, has PETA been slipping stuff under your door and you're beginning to realize that it's been a, uh, uh, like a, uh, a cow lacoste this whole time?
John: Ha!
Merlin: Uh!
John: I'm a Calicoast denier.
John: Yeah.
John: You know?
John: Ben Gibbard used to describe— That's why I had to leave Germany.
John: When you drive through that area right there around Sacto, right?
John: Very close to where you are.
John: The Sacto, yeah.
John: And a little south of there, that giant, that old, giant cow place.
John: That smelled like death from 1,000 miles where it was some kind of abattoir there.
John: But when you came over the rise, there were sometimes 200 million cows all standing around.
John: And Ben Gibbard – now, I don't know.
John: This might get a person looked askance upon these days.
John: but Gibbard used to call it Kausiewicz.
Merlin: Oh, boy.
Merlin: I wonder who the first person will be to regret that you said that.
Merlin: Yeah, I know.
Merlin: And anytime we would drive through there, he'd be like, here it comes.
Merlin: I thought what happened in the van stayed in the van.
John: I never said it, not once, but I did.
John: You quoted it.
John: I snorted when he said it.
John: But you're absolutely right.
John: There will be a time when people look back and go, my meat-eating forebears...
John: Who, you know, who were living on Chef Boyardee canned ravioli.
Merlin: Well, the AI, which, of course, is played by a little droid.
Merlin: Beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, the AI rolls in and goes, I have information about Progenitor John Morgan Roderick.
Merlin: And you're like, oh, what is it?
Merlin: What is it, Beep Bop?
Merlin: Beep Pop says... Keep it coming.
Merlin: Beep Pop, what have you learned about great, great, great granddad, John Roderick?
Merlin: Sadly, he said to always make all of the bacon.
Merlin: Wait, bacon?
Merlin: What is bacon?
Merlin: Is that a euphemism?
Merlin: Regrettably.
Merlin: It is strips of portion of pig.
Merlin: Pig.
Merlin: Salted and delicious.
Merlin: Ha ha.
Merlin: Wait a minute.
Merlin: You kind of want to try it.
Merlin: Yum yum yum yum.
John: Yum yum.
Merlin: I am history's worst monster.
Merlin: I am history's worst monster.
Merlin: That's the thing.
John: A pig will be president of the United Nations and everybody will be like, oh, we just didn't realize they could talk because we hadn't invented headsets or whatever that we can read their brains.
Merlin: Translators.
Merlin: The thing is, as you know, one of the little dust-em-ups with all this futuristic stuff is like –
Merlin: All we can really do is guess about the future based upon the past and the present.
Merlin: We all understand that.
Merlin: The thing that I think we are almost constitutionally incapable of understanding is how future things we don't understand yet will affect future things we super can't understand yet.
Merlin: Right.
Merlin: And there's all kinds of examples of that one could look at.
Merlin: But, you know, really, you're creating what my friends on the Flop House podcast call an evidence dungeon.
Merlin: You're really just gathering all of the evidence in one place.
Merlin: You ever notice that when a bad guy has this habit, not a crazy wall, but a bad guy, maybe a little bit silence to the lambs, but a bad guy always puts all of his evidence in one place, you know, in his secret lair.
Merlin: And I think that's kind of what you're doing for your forebears.
John: Putting it all here.
John: It's all down.
John: I mean, in my defense, I live mostly on spaghetti, but I do put a little delicious hamburger in the sauce.
John: I won't lie.
Merlin: John, we're not even going to get to talking about people like us.
Merlin: I'm talking about people who knowingly went in and ordered a salad with a meat substitute.
Yeah.
John: I know that's happening.
Merlin: But you understand that those people alone, that will be like us walking into a mall and saying, do you have any human skin?
Merlin: I mean, simulated human skin.
Merlin: And they'd be like, what do you need human skin for?
Merlin: No, no, no, simulated human skin.
Merlin: Like, give any crazy, super realistic human skin.
John: Yeah.
John: You know what?
John: I'm a virtuous person.
John: My boots are made of simulated human skin.
Merlin: Absolutely.
Merlin: It's made by – well, you can buy – like I discovered a few years ago – one doesn't want to say – you can buy, for example, a fuckable foot.
Merlin: You can buy a disembodied foot with a fake vagina in it that you can have intercourse with.
Merlin: Sure, sure.
Merlin: I look at something like that.
Merlin: I don't want to yuck anybody's yum.
Merlin: No, quite the opposite.
Merlin: What I'm saying is some people look at the future and say, what?
Merlin: Whereas I look at the foot and I go, huh?
Merlin: That's what Bobby Kennedy said.
Merlin: I'm saying that there are people out there who are thinking outside the bun.
Merlin: And you could be on the right side of history or you're the wrong side of the foot is my concern.
John: I was at a seafood restaurant.
Merlin: Pretty soon it's going to be normal.
Merlin: That's going to be like fuzzy dice.
Merlin: Pretty soon everybody's going to have a fuckable foot and they're not going to be eating any meat.
John: A fuckable foot hanging from their rearview mirror?
John: Not in a car, they're not.
John: No, they're not.
John: Nope.
John: No, that's right, because it's self-driving cars.
Merlin: Well, no, there's not going to be cars, John.
Merlin: You certainly can't drive a cow.
Merlin: You're not Mongo.
Merlin: You're not going to be like driving steer around Sacramento.
John: I was at a seafood restaurant two nights ago, and there was a service dog there, a beautiful Akita service dog with its tail, you know, curly tail in the back.
John: And the service dog was very attentive, standing at attention.
John: And it was unclear what the two people that had the service dog, what service the dog was providing.
John: You know, Amazon just sells those little vests.
John: Halfway through the meal, they started to serve little clams.
John: and uh saucy bits to the service dog and then the service dog would lick the person's hand clean oh no that's the service get something else and they would they would serve it to the dog my dog napkin and i love him very much now as you know it was not that long ago just
John: I don't know how long ago it was that that would have been like, what is happening?
John: But now that is so, so normal compared to what some people expect their dog is going to be able to do.
John: The fact that the service dog wasn't standing on the table.
John: was in my estimation like a like an improvement over what was possible that's called table service and i realized i realized that this is an example of a thing that like you're never going to put that back in the barn oh my gosh and like again like only you could hear this and appreciate this but like we're not
Merlin: In our lifetime, we're in modern times.
Merlin: I'm talking about ever since, even during the time I've just been old, it was not okay to just walk around with a dog.
Merlin: You couldn't just bring a dog everywhere.
John: No, no.
Merlin: You would be arrested anywhere you went.
John: Four days ago, I was in a Mexican restaurant.
John: I eat in a lot of restaurants.
John: I was in a Mexican restaurant.
John: It was cold outside.
John: There's a line of people, because it's a popular place, a line of people outside, you know, kind of waiting for their table.
John: And a guy rolls up with a dog.
John: Like a full dog.
John: A full dog.
John: Not like one of these pretend dogs, but like a full-on dog.
Merlin: Like a dog-shaped, normal-sized dog.
Merlin: Like a golden retriever.
John: The dog does not have a vest on of any kind.
John: No hat.
Merlin: You don't even need to bother at this point.
Merlin: No adornment.
John: No Christmas ornament tied to its tail.
John: please don't please don't pet me i'm a service animal and he the guy probably had a vest he probably had a patagonia vest because that's formal wear here in the northwest and uh and they just uh and they came and they they'd been waiting for their table i guess they do they do patagonia top and bottoms
John: That's funny, John.
John: Tacoma tuxedo.
John: Isn't that kind of funny?
John: Tacoma tuxedo.
John: Well, what did we call it?
John: No, I guess Canadian tuxedo.
Merlin: Canadian tuxedo.
Merlin: That's that.
Merlin: You and Ken Stringfellow used to do that.
Merlin: My lady friend calls it Jean Jean look.
Merlin: But you're telling me you just roll up with a dog.
Merlin: You don't even need the implicit social apology of a fake patch.
John: Up here, no.
John: And I was looking at the guy because I was sitting at the bar with my little girl waiting for our table.
John: And I was looking at him as he walked up and I was like,
John: I bet you that guy's coming in here with that dog.
John: And I bet you there's nothing you could say to him.
John: That would cause him to reconsider.
Merlin: It's not his first day.
Merlin: He's had to be fake offended about this lots of times before.
John: And the owners of the restaurant and the management of the restaurant have long ago succumbed.
John: Yeah.
John: And then I played this whole scenario out.
John: I was like, let's say I was the manager of this place.
John: And he walked up and I was like, I'm sorry, sir.
John: But we don't accommodate full grown dogs in our very crowded place.
John: Mexican restaurant that people are waiting 20 minutes to get it.
Merlin: Are there other animals where it's just okay to carry them everywhere?
John: Yeah, we do.
John: You know, I know that you want to put your two guinea pigs on the table during dinner, but we don't accommodate that here.
John: Thank you very much.
John: Come back another time.
John: And then imagining the Yelp review that he would write and the campaign that would happen over at the PetSmart where people would say, never eat there because they're haters of dogs.
John: Oh, it's worse than that.
Merlin: They're ableist toward dogs.
John: They're ableist towards dogs.
John: And then – and I played it out and I realized if I was the man – first of all, this is why I do not manage a restaurant.
John: One of the many reasons.
Merlin: Because you would feel bad about that or because you'd like it too much?
John: No, because I would lose my – because I'm not cool, calm, and collected.
Merlin: The manager of this restaurant has obviously – Oh, you're saying that's the kind of job where it's good to be if I could coin a word unflappable.
John: Unflappable.
John: And they've decided, you know what?
John: It's just not worth it.
John: Having an animal that licks its own butthole in my restaurant is easier than dealing with the fallout from saying we would prefer you not serve your animal clams.
John: From the table and have your dog licking.
Merlin: It wasn't that long ago.
Merlin: It was literally a law.
Merlin: It was literally a law.
Merlin: You cannot just bring an animal for whom you have purchased a vest for two day delivery.
Merlin: You can't just or even in this case, can you at least even pretend that you need this dog for some kind of a reason?
Merlin: You can even say it's going to put your drink on.
John: Even if you do, then somebody's going to say, well, it wasn't that long ago that you couldn't have Irish people in a restaurant.
John: I'm going to go, well, all right.
John: A dog is not an Irish person.
Merlin: Virginia versus Loving.
John: That's right.
John: Virginia versus Loving.
John: Yeah, I subscribe to her OnlyFans.
Merlin: But no, I realize... John, hang on.
Merlin: Thank you.
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Merlin: Yeah, you're talking about Virginia V. Loving.
Merlin: Yeah, she's got a place out by the airport.
Merlin: She's amazing.
John: And she makes great espresso.
John: Oh, so good.
John: It goes right through.
John: But I realized that ship has sailed and I'm still standing on the shore and I'm still going like, and now I'm man yelling at clouds, which I've clearly been for 15 years, man yelling at clouds.
John: And I'm that, but there's never, that's never coming back.
John: Right.
John: There's never going to be a time when, when, um,
John: It's only going to be a thing where my great-great-grandchild is going to listen to this and they're going to say, what a dinosaur, what a monster, what a monster that he would suggest that our animal friends aren't our dinner companions as well.
Merlin: And our – That's why – I mean I didn't – just to be super clear here.
Merlin: Our sex feet.
Merlin: I'm not – yeah.
Merlin: Okay.
Merlin: Hang on.
Merlin: Hang on.
Merlin: Hang on.
Merlin: Let's bracket this for a second.
Merlin: Now, listen.
Merlin: Just to be clear, I'm making a crack here.
Merlin: I'm not saying that owning a dog is like miscegenation.
Merlin: No.
John: No, no, no.
John: Just to be clear.
John: No.
John: I didn't even say Kausiewicz.
Merlin: You misheard it.
Merlin: I think I misapprehended that.
Merlin: But it's – gosh, I agree with you.
Merlin: I would not have the stomach to do that.
Merlin: I think retail is difficult to begin with and I think serving the public is very difficult.
Merlin: But it's also – I don't know.
Merlin: It's just kind of weird how like the stuff that the sort of – as you say, you can't put the toothpaste back in the tube.
Merlin: You can't get the genie back in the bottle.
Merlin: But you do – there is this thing where it's like –
Merlin: You know, I don't know.
Merlin: You know what?
Merlin: I'm not going to say anything.
Merlin: You know, John, I already self-cancelled.
Merlin: I self-cancelled a little bit.
John: You did?
Merlin: Recently?
Merlin: Yeah, I self-cancelled recently.
Merlin: I talked about a celebrity, literally a celebrity cruise that I went on once.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: And I described it to a friend of mine as being what I called a grievance vacation.
Merlin: And I don't say that phrase publicly because it's true.
Merlin: And if you say true things publicly too often, people get mad at you.
Merlin: But without going into too much detail, because I have a feeling I think you might have been in the same place I was at physically.
Merlin: Mm-hmm.
Merlin: On the clues for celebrities.
Merlin: But basically anybody was allowed to complain about anything.
Merlin: And you not only weren't allowed to roll your eyes about it, but you were supposed to get a thousand percent Nordstrom snow tire about it.
Merlin: And like no matter what anybody said, you were supposed to agree it's the biggest problem in the world.
Merlin: Mm-hmm.
Merlin: Mm-hmm.
Merlin: But now the thing is with that, the reason I mentioned that and why I'm getting canceled for that, things like saying the showers aren't large enough.
Merlin: But the point being, that's the kind of thing where, well, you know, sorry, I don't really control the size of the showers.
Merlin: That's not a thing that I control.
Merlin: But you're right.
Merlin: You're absolutely right.
Merlin: And I guess I just wonder, like, I think we are – I'm going to use an ugly, ugly word, John.
Merlin: I think we're old fogies.
Merlin: I just don't think it's going to be hard for us to keep up with the pace of change.
John: It's a little ageist, but yeah.
Yeah.
Merlin: Oh, it is a little ageist.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: But like, you know, maybe restaurants just aren't for us anymore.
Merlin: Maybe it's for the dogs now and their companions.
John: So the other day, you know, my kid is now we're looking at junior highs and the junior highs.
John: And we spent a lot of time.
John: Her mother and I spent a lot of time up in fantasy land.
John: Oh, maybe we'll send her to the junior high in Tacoma that costs $35,000 a year.
John: Yeah, that'll be worth it.
John: Yeah, where they walk around with dictionaries balanced on their heads.
Merlin: Oh, every kid gets a free geode.
Merlin: That's right.
Merlin: It's a good program.
John: Then, oh, no, no, no.
John: Maybe what we'll do is we'll move to England for two years and we'll send her to like a Hogwarts-y place.
John: where she can cosplay like an English girl, wear a uniform.
John: Oh, a dangerous boarding school.
John: Yeah, and in fact, those places are a lot less expensive than the place here in Tacoma that teaches you the same stuff.
John: And maybe we'd have fun living in England for two years, lol.
John: And then we said, ah, maybe we'll just send her to the Catholic school right up the road here.
John: And you know what?
Merlin: The Catholic school will give you— Depends on who you want beating your children.
John: They'll give you a huge discount if you go to church every Sunday.
John: They have like somebody that stands at the door with a clipboard.
John: And if you're in church every Sunday, they give you like 40% off.
Merlin: Oh, you get like a voucher or something?
John: Yeah.
John: And we're like, that doesn't seem.
John: And what's happened is we didn't do.
Merlin: Wait, I'm sorry, John.
Merlin: So wait, it's like, you know, they talk about like a Walmart or Costco, what they call loss leaders, which is like, we're going to charge less than it costs us for peanut M&Ms, put them on this end cap.
Merlin: And that's because we really want you to buy these $4 Levi's.
Merlin: I don't know how business works.
Merlin: Is it something there where they're like, look, we're going to eat it on education costs because these nuns scale up really well.
Merlin: We could scale up nuns to teach.
Merlin: But what we really need, the thing is we need to get some more Christians on the books.
Merlin: And I think – And we'll eat the cost of that nun-wise.
John: I think that they are savvy enough to know that they're not going to actually convert very many people to Catholicism.
John: But what they're saying is if you're a Catholic – Especially when there's money involved.
John: That seems to introduce a certain extrinsic value to it.
John: But it does – like it is a sort of like Catholics to the front of the line kind of thing.
John: Like, oh, hello.
John: Oh, sure.
Merlin: Oh, I see what you're saying.
Merlin: I see – like this is your – what do they call it?
Merlin: Like ambassador's club.
Merlin: Thank you for your service.
Merlin: One million milers.
John: Exactly.
Merlin: It's a boarding order type situation.
John: But what happened was we did not –
John: take action on any of those big ideas we did not actually start looking for a house in santiago chile we didn't uh we're not moving to japan what's happening is the year is halfway through and next year she's going to be in seventh grade and we're now saying we'll just send her to the public school
John: And the public school in our neighborhood, the junior high does not have a super high rating on Yelp.
John: There are a lot of conflicting Yelp reviews.
John: So I think you're allowed to feed your dog.
John: You're allowed to bring your dog to class.
Merlin: Bring your dog to class, but dumplings were a headline.
Merlin: Dumplings were cold.
Merlin: Bachelorette party ruined.
Merlin: One star for seventh grade.
John: You know, and I went to a junior high like that, and I was trying to figure out if I could avoid sending her to one that was just like,
John: She's going from a class that has 40 kids in it, and that's fourth, fifth, sixth, to a school that has 2,000 kids in it.
John: She's literally on the prairie?
John: Yeah, we're on the prairie out here.
John: Okay.
John: And so I was like, how am I going to help her navigate this?
John: And so I was talking to her the other day, and I said, there were two books that helped me a lot.
John: I read them both when I was older than you.
John: And so they may not make sense to you exactly.
John: I'm going to describe them to you and you can decide if you want to read them or not.
John: One of them that I read in high school was How to Win Friends and Influence People by Norman Vincent Peale.
John: And she was like, okay.
John: Hey, Bill Carnegie?
John: Oh, is that Dale Carnegie?
John: Yeah.
John: Who wrote – what did Norman Vincent Peale write?
John: He wrote The Power of Positive Thinking.
John: Oh, The Power of Positive Thinking.
John: I read that one too.
Merlin: I'm just trying to save you some email.
John: Thank you.
John: Don't send me any email.
Merlin: John, we had hardcover copies of both in my house.
John: It's Dale Carnegie.
Merlin: I don't know.
Merlin: One guy's a Scottish steel guy, and the other guy's a Scottish advice guy.
Merlin: They might be the same guy.
John: They're the same guy.
John: You know, there's a statue of Norman Vincent Peale in front of his church in New York City.
John: The one that the Trump family went to.
John: Oh, is that right?
John: That's the Trump family's home church.
Merlin: Oh, I didn't know.
Merlin: You know so much more about this than I do.
Merlin: Oh, no, I'm sorry.
Merlin: I wasn't trying to wisdom block you.
Merlin: I love that you do.
Merlin: But what's interesting is like just like the power of positive thinking like was a book and an ethos that shot through my entire childhood.
Merlin: And just in passing, the reason I would know that is, for example –
Merlin: The charismatic Christian ministry that my grandmother followed in the 80s was a woman named Catherine Kuhlman, who you might have heard of if you search for K-U-H-L-M-A-N.
Merlin: And her whole thing was – so Norma's appeal was positive thinking.
Merlin: Not too much later, Catherine Kuhlman's thing was miracles, like believe in the power of miracles.
Merlin: And really, it's got a huge – I mean, I haven't followed the trades, but I'm pretty sure that had a big role in what would become stuff like The Secret.
Yeah.
John: Yes, yes.
Merlin: Because they're all kind of – I don't want to say cut from the same cloth.
Merlin: If it works for you, that's great.
Merlin: But they're all kind of based on this idea of, like, you and God together have agency in, like, how this is going to work out.
Merlin: You are not just an unwilling participant in life, but the way that you perceive life and then, to use a more recent term, manifest the change you would like to see in the world.
Merlin: Yes.
Merlin: This is very adjacent, obviously, to Protestant Christianity.
Merlin: Well, mostly Protestant Christianity, especially.
Merlin: And door-to-door sales.
Merlin: And sales.
Merlin: No, not even joking.
Merlin: Then this gets right into a third book that was in my house, which is a guy named Zig Ziglar.
Merlin: I remember Zig Ziglar.
Merlin: And he wrote a book called See You at the Top.
Merlin: And he is the guy, if he serves, he's the guy who invented the round to it.
John: What's the round to it?
Merlin: Oh.
Merlin: Oh, you're going to get a round to it?
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: And so you go see Zig Ziglar and you get this little token, this little coin, and it's called a round to it.
Merlin: And now you never have an excuse again because now you've got a round to it.
Merlin: Oh, you got a round to it.
Merlin: Now, if you're the sort of person that finds that sort of thought technology persuasive –
Merlin: We have three books in our house.
Merlin: Oh, we also have an atlas and a book about Cincinnati.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: Oh, did you have, by any chance, a farmer's almanac?
Merlin: I mean, we had an older one.
Merlin: We didn't buy it every year.
Merlin: We're not made of money.
John: Well, so I say to her, you know.
John: I'm sorry.
John: I did not mean to derail that.
John: No, no, no.
John: That was a perfect, what you said was perfect because this was what I was trying to get at.
John: It's happening to a vein, John.
John: There's a vein here.
Merlin: There's a vein for sure.
John: And I was just trying to say to her, like, there are habits of the mind.
John: You can make lemonade out of lemons.
John: We're always working on this.
John: Like, how do you look at swim practice not as a drag but as an opportunity to challenge oneself?
John: And I've noticed in our culture now challenging oneself is out of vogue.
John: You know, we've talked about it a lot on this program.
John: Like we do not admire or I do not admire people who cannot experience some discomfort.
John: Right.
John: And challenging oneself is part of that.
John: And so how to win friends and influence people adjacent to that.
John: But like there are techniques that will allow you to.
John: approach social interactions.
John: Oh, absolutely.
John: And just bring a different mind to it, you know?
Merlin: That book, you can use that, and I think it could be argued by certain people in this world that you wouldn't have shit like, God, neuro-linguistic programming, as sexual assaulty guys think of it, or, you know, the pickup, pickup artist kind of stuff.
Merlin: That's cut from a similar cloth to that of, like, I know how you process information, other person, and that enables me to know not just, like, what things to say that's your quote-unquote love language, but to know with what they like to think they understand about neurolinguistic programming, that I know just the way, oh, I've invented this thing called nagging, where I'm mean to a girl, and now she wants to sire my children.
Yeah.
John: And this is the danger of all that stuff, that it can be weaponized.
John: Absolutely.
Merlin: Whereas it is just nice to learn people's names.
Merlin: I wish I were better at learning people's names.
Merlin: Dale Carnegie says that's the most precious sound in the world to somebody is their name.
Merlin: Genuinely, genuinely learn to get an interest in other people.
Merlin: That's actually really good advice.
Merlin: Anybody who's 11, 10 years old could be taught that and learn a lot from that.
John: My mom said to me not very long ago, she said, you changed my life.
John: She said this to me, her son.
John: You changed my life one time a long time ago because I was saying I hate parties.
John: I hate going to parties.
John: I never know what to say.
John: I'm always awkward.
John: I've spent my whole life not wanting to go to parties because I'm awkward.
John: And you said to me, son, mom, just ask people questions about themselves.
John: And you hear people all the time say, I went to that party and no one ever asked me a single question about myself.
John: Right.
John: And the thing is, you don't care.
John: You don't care if anybody learns anything about you.
John: Who cares?
John: You don't know these people.
Merlin: You're never going to meet them again.
Merlin: This is something covered in – pardon me.
Merlin: This is something covered from various different angles in my little wisdom document project.
Merlin: But I feel like you're getting at something, at least I believe, which is when people say things like, oh, I hate small talk.
Merlin: I hate parties.
Merlin: I don't like talking to people.
Merlin: I'm like, oh, I'm nervous.
Merlin: I'm socially anxious.
Merlin: I'm like, well, no, you might have social anxiety.
Merlin: Those are all real things.
Merlin: But if you had that and despite having it decided to fucking do something about it, one thing that you could do is...
Merlin: is to stop focusing on how you feel right now and how anxious you feel right now and instead do become very genuinely interested in another person.
Merlin: And when you're talking to someone, just to tie all this together, at least from my point of view, yes, like you said with your mom, when you're interested in someone, you ask them questions.
Merlin: And you say things like, so when did that happen and how did that feel?
Merlin: And then was that as crazy as it sounded?
Merlin: You will get interested in another person, but it starts with you being less incredibly fascinated with your own discomfort because no one cares.
Merlin: Right.
John: 90% of my education is a result of standing around asking questions of people that I wasn't really interested in when I started talking to them.
John: No, it did not used to be optional.
Merlin: You were going to go do this thing, and you had to be at this place and be around these people, and you didn't get to pick where you sat.
Merlin: I'm not saying that's good, bad, or indifferent.
Merlin: I'm not saying that's what we should go back to.
Merlin: But we didn't have any choice but to get interested in things we didn't care about.
John: Or you could be like my mom was, like, get me out of here.
John: Anyway, I said that to her just offhand one time.
John: Just ask questions to people.
John: You don't care if they ever ask you a question in return, because all you're trying to do is get through this party and have it be A, not bad, and B, maybe good.
Merlin: And you're just doing the most... It's silly to have to say this to adults, but you wouldn't think it's weird that monkeys find or chimps find a way to socialize, and if they've never seen each other, they figure each other out.
Merlin: Well, chimps can do that.
Merlin: When you're a human being...
Merlin: Small talk is a way – Put your finger in the person's butt and smell it and then they smell your butt.
Merlin: Right.
Merlin: And then they pick some fleas off of you and then you give each other a bonobo handy.
Merlin: That's what they call it.
Merlin: But all you're doing is – when you do things like ask people questions, if you want it to be real Margaret Mead about this, I think what you're ultimately kind of doing is saying like I'm safe and I'm not going to be too weird.
Merlin: That's it.
Merlin: You're negotiating like – you're being decent and civil to other people.
Merlin: If two people are decent and civil to each other, they have a lot of options for what to pursue in that 10 seconds to 20 minutes of a relationship.
Merlin: But if you go into it with this like – with having a puss on –
Merlin: As my family used to say, that's not going to turn out great.
Merlin: If you're both interested in each other, then you'll find plenty to talk about or not talk about, and it won't be weird.
Merlin: And you have to communicate to the person a little bit.
John: Like, I'm not asking you these questions because I'm trying to A, sell you something, or B, weaponize this as a way of nagging you to get you to sleep with me.
John: I'm just curious about your life as a bus driver.
John: Tell me more.
John: And there's a weird thing in our culture now, and this has always been – there's always been somebody – there's always been some John Bercher that thinks that the FBI is listening to them through their shoes.
John: But if you go to somebody and say like, oh, tell me what you do –
John: So you're going to meet people that are like, why?
John: Why do you want to know?
John: And fuck those people.
John: But 98% of the people are like, what do I do?
John: Oh, let me tell you about my latest trip to wherever.
John: And then the cocktail party.
Merlin: Or the opposite.
Merlin: Yeah, but the problem is the opposite here anyway and in other places.
Merlin: But the whole like – maybe it's just because of like where I am in the social strata.
Merlin: But like I tend to encounter – I do – when I'm outside of just like my regular old dumb Chinese neighborhood –
Merlin: I encounter a lot of people who are like kind of wanting to like gently jostle about status all the time, which I have trouble participating in, maybe in the same way that your mom used to find it difficult to participate in things where I'm like, look, this is not fun and it's not healthy.
Merlin: It's not wholesome.
Merlin: Like I don't want to speak in code about what house we could afford.
Merlin: Oh.
John: Well, and this is the thing about not wanting my daughter to see these things as potential weapons.
John: Yes.
John: Because you don't want to sit and listen to somebody rattle on about their status as a way of getting info on them.
John: You're just trying to make junior high not so brutal –
John: by understanding a couple of things.
John: Well, she, I say, I mentioned this book and she doesn't look very interested in it.
John: And I said, I said, maybe that's not until you've, maybe you have to be through junior high and have suffered all those injuries before you say, let me go back to that book about winning friends and influencing people.
John: But then I said, the other book that I really got a lot out of was Judith Martin's
John: Miss Manner's Guide to Excruciatingly Correct Behavior.
John: And I said, it's basically an Emily Post etiquette guide, except updated to modern slash, by which I mean 1980 sensibilities.
John: Judas Martin's very smart, very sarcastic, very proper.
John: And my kid's eyes lit up and she was like, what is this?
John: And I was like, well, it's a book that any social situation, Judith Martin is going to tell you the correct etiquette for handling that situation.
John: And she was like, get me this book.
John: And I saw in her eyes her desire to know that information absolutely in order to weaponize it.
John: And I said, slow down, slow down.
Merlin: It's like in The Crown when Olivia Colman keeps saying about Margaret Thatcher, have we given them a protocol sheet?
No.
Merlin: Like it becomes a running bit.
Merlin: Like, hmm, I wonder what they're doing.
Merlin: I don't like what they're doing.
Merlin: Have we given them a protocol sheet?
Merlin: She brought the wrong shoes.
John: You remember about that age, right?
John: Fifth or sixth grade when kids started to learn grammar and certain kids would correct your grammar.
John: And then you'd have those kids that corrected your grammar improperly.
John: Like they understood the first level of the rule but not the second level.
John: Ugh.
John: And then there are some people that never get out, never grow out of correcting other people's grammar.
John: And she's at that stage where she's just like she wants desperately to know what the rules are because she wants to get everybody else in compliance.
John: Right.
John: And I said, listen, the most important lesson that Judith Martin teaches is here are the rules, but the number one rule is never correct someone else.
Merlin: Etiquette, etiquette, you know, I guess if you're going to be cute about it, I've never thought about this distinction.
Merlin: But I guess, you know, manners versus etiquette.
Merlin: Manners are the way that I try to conduct myself and express character.
Merlin: and etiquette is, as we've stipulated, I think previously, etiquette is about having everybody know a set of rules, not to make them feel bad and awkward and out of place, but to make people comfortable with knowing.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: And it doesn't, I mean, like, there are ample bits about this, whether it's in Our Flag Means Death or Mitchell and Webb.
Merlin: There's
Merlin: lots of outside of the U.S.
Merlin: opportunities to show how you can express class aggression on people with things like, oh, that's the wrong Angostura bitters fork.
Merlin: And you're like, there's an Angostura bitters fork?
Merlin: And you're like, well, if you have to know, you can't have to ask.
Merlin: You can't afford it.
John: It's in your family silver.
Merlin: Go look.
Merlin: No, yeah, it's exactly.
Merlin: You work from the outside in except for this third, this Z dimension we're telling you about.
Merlin: You have to move from that, you know, like all these ways that you can, like you say, like weaponize that for people.
Merlin: Just to be clear in passing, my bit is already falling apart because as it happens, we did have more than those books at my house.
Merlin: We also had a book of Norman Rockwell paintings.
Merlin: And John, we had a book by – who were the two biggies?
Merlin: Emily Post and – was it Amy Vanderbilt?
Merlin: I think it might have been – but whatever one came out in the 50s or early 60s, whose edition my family had, it had little spotlight drawings by a young Andy Warhol in it.
John: Oh, that's one I'm going to go look up and say goodbye.
Merlin: How do I know that, John?
Merlin: Because I poured over that book forever.
Merlin: for so long the proper way to make a hospital corner the correct way to like write a thank you note like every single the way to prepare a guest room i studied all of that i had no cause really to know any of that but i wanted to be ready to be the fanciest lad in the room well in military school you probably put hospital corners on your beds didn't you yes that was that was a little after this would this would this would be a couple years before that
Merlin: That's right, John.
Merlin: If you must know, if you're going to humiliate me on your show, yes, I was obsessed with two things, Star Wars and etiquette.
Merlin: Yes.
Merlin: That was my 1978.
Merlin: I didn't even know about Rush Never Sleeps.
John: What's crazy is it's 2023, and those are the two things my daughter cares about, Star Wars and Etiquette.
John: Oh, Hakuna Matata, turn, turn, turn.
John: And what I loved about Judith Martin was she taught you all that stuff.
John: There are chapters in her book about a coming out party.
John: She tells you how to do a proper bat mitzvah.
John: But she also just hammers on this idea like what is the correct way to get someone to stop using the wrong Angostura bitters fork?
John: There is no correct way to get someone to stop doing that.
John: Like you do not correct other people.
John: This book and these rules are to teach you to keep your thumb out of the soup in order that you feel comfortable at a party.
John: If the person next to you puts their thumb in the soup, that is not a thing that you have any –
John: You are now obligated to do it as well, to put that in place.
John: That's right.
John: And I really hope that – because we sat down with the Guide to Excruciating Behavior and she wanted me to read it aloud to her.
Merlin: And so I was just thumbing through, just picking out – I did that with the elements of style and no one ever likes it.
Merlin: Oh.
John: she gave me do not say that you are nauseated unless you are certain you have this effect upon others oh there was one she was like she got into an art somebody wrote her and was like are they curtains or drapes and she was like they are always curtains never drapes and then somebody wrote in and was like um actually and gave her some curtains drapes argument and she was like yes you're talking about what what they're described in the
John: And it was like, I have no idea, but I was reading this.
John: I would love to know why.
John: And she was like, why?
John: And I'm like, this was this was written in 1980.
John: And I don't know why.
John: And maybe it's gone forever.
John: Maybe that is something lost to time.
Merlin: It reminds me almost of the I think you and I have joked about the Monty Python sketch with good woody words.
Merlin: And she likes woody words.
Merlin: She doesn't want to hear tinny words.
Merlin: It almost has that feeling of like, is it just the way drapes?
Merlin: Does it sound bad?
Merlin: I don't know.
John: Maybe it's too genital.
John: Well, yeah, like a wizard's sleeve.
John: But I know that there are people listening to the show right now who are wearing their Tennessee tuxedo, by which I mean mismatched sweats.
John: And they've got three colleagues sitting on their lap and they're feeding them clams.
John: And they're saying the fact that we don't do these things anymore is great.
John: It's more democratic.
John: It's free.
John: It's not classist.
John: It's not racist.
John: It's not sexist.
John: And all those rules and all that are part of an ancient patriarchal –
Merlin: Everything's everything.
Merlin: Words don't mean anything.
John: Dogs eat clams.
John: And why do John and Merlin constantly sit and talk about how you shouldn't – Because we never want anyone to have any fun or human rights ever.
John: What it is is unexamined privilege.
John: But I firmly believe that the ship has sailed on a lot of that stuff.
John: But I also –
John: Frankly, I am looking forward to the first president that wears sweats to a press conference.
Merlin: John Fetterman.
John: Can you see that?
John: Oh, yeah.
John: Fetterman in sweats at the White House.
Merlin: When he had had a stroke and he had to be in the debate, it looked like he was wearing a suit that someone had shot at him from a T-shirt cannon.
Merlin: Good look.
John: Did you read all the all the comments about Zelensky arriving in his like technical?
John: No, no.
John: He's got, you know, he decided because he does his like cosplay army thing.
John: Yeah.
John: At the beginning of the war, he was like, I'm not going to wear a tie until every inch of Ukraine is free.
John: And so he wears this, you know, I kind of wish that he actually wore like some actually sort of vaguely Stalinist.
Merlin: I know what you want.
Merlin: I think you want him to blouse.
Merlin: I think you want him to blouse his boots.
Merlin: And I think you want him to have a beret.
John: Yes, thank you.
John: And maybe like a mousy tunic.
John: But instead he's wearing Under Armour.
John: He's got some Under Armour stuff to get at the mall.
Merlin: Remember, I don't know why this is, John, and I've never even thought to ask you, but when you go to what used to be called Army Navy stores or Army Navy surplus stores, like where I got the Henderson jacket kind of place, right?
Merlin: Remember there's all this stuff from West Germany?
Merlin: Oh, yeah.
Merlin: There would be all this stuff.
Merlin: There was that one popular kind of green jacket everybody had that had a German flag on it.
Merlin: Sure, sure, sure.
Merlin: And for some reason, you could always buy those Tabi shoes, like ninja shoes there.
Merlin: And you could always buy a beret.
Merlin: And you could always get a small bag that couldn't hold very much.
Merlin: There were certain kinds of things that must have been surplus from West German government.
John: Those were gas mask bags, those bags that everybody carried around.
John: Oh, really?
John: Yeah, they were German gas mask bags.
John: That looks like that's where he got his clothes.
Merlin: I think Zelensky bought his clothes at those in the 80s.
John: That whole German jacket thing actually came up in the Ukraine war because somebody took a picture of a bunch of people standing around, you know, out on the front lines.
John: And they said, look, it's, you know, it's proof that Germany has sent all their troops to fight the war.
John: And somebody else was like, you can buy those jackets anywhere.
Merlin: That's like taking a photo of a kid in Africa wearing this shirt of whoever lost the Super Bowl.
Merlin: Yeah, obviously these are Denver fans or whatever.
Merlin: You're like, no, that's just where they dump shirts.
Merlin: Nobody needs.
John: Yeah.
John: And somebody else was like, actually, those are West German jackets.
John: I don't think the West Germans are sending a ton of army people in this essay.
John: I will dot dot dot.
John: But what I what I so she and I sat and discussed this.
Merlin: Can we go back to one?
Merlin: Let's reset to one for a second here.
Merlin: I've lost the thread a little bit.
Merlin: I need to refill my iced tea.
Merlin: I'm not totally on top of this.
Merlin: Okay, so what happened was your kid is going to eventually need to go to a junior hospital.
Merlin: high or junior high, as we call it, or today they call it middle school, your kid's got to go somewhere.
John: Yeah, that's right.
Merlin: And we're talking about some thought technologies for easing the way into this next transitional period of life, including things like a book about etiquette, which has interested your child.
John: Yes, and my plan was always to eliminate junior high entirely.
John: Cut trail, yeah.
John: Well, yeah, I was going to buy a Jeep in San Diego for $2,500 or less.
Merlin: Deliberately a little bit broken or it was going to break soon, right?
John: Because you don't want somebody jacking it.
John: You want a shitty Jeep.
John: Was it Dry Tortugas?
John: No, where are you going to?
John: Then my child and I were going to drive all the way down.
John: Well, we were going to get to the Darien Gap.
John: We were going to take the Jeep on a boat around the swamp.
John: And then we're going to head all the way down to Tierra del Fuego in the Jeep.
John: And then we were going to come back and we're going to fix the Jeep as we went.
John: And we were going to learn Spanish.
John: And this was how we're going to spend middle school.
John: And what I've discovered is the closer we get to that jumping off point.
Merlin: It really sneaks up on you, doesn't it?
John: It does.
John: And no one else in my family is even remotely interested in backing me.
John: You've been beautiful.
Merlin: Have you been kind of sort of soft pitching this gently for years?
Merlin: Sure.
Merlin: In fact, the whole – The time is coming near.
Merlin: You're going to need to really – whatever you do, your Carvana or your bring a trailer or whatever, you're going to need to – I mean to get the right Jeep where you don't die but also don't succeed too easily, you might need to get three or four different Jeeps and kind of have them on standby.
Yeah.
Merlin: And that needs to happen soon is what I'm saying, John.
John: The issue, though, is not the is not the Jeep, it turns out.
John: Oh, the issue is that that there that there needs to be buy in because you cannot just from the stakeholders.
John: Yeah.
John: You cannot just take the child.
John: And you cannot kidnap her and tie her to a Jeep, right?
John: You have to have buy-in, not just from the child, but from her mother and my mother.
Merlin: The mother, forms, yeah.
John: Everybody has to be in on it.
John: And what I discovered the other day was that what had happened was that during the pandemic, and I think this is part of the culture at large, I feel like there are three...
John: There are three zones.
John: There's three zones to the way we spend our day and our week.
John: There's the comfort zone.
Merlin: Whoa, easy text.
Merlin: This sounds like a big deal, what you're describing here.
Merlin: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Merlin: Okay, well, I just want to make sure.
Merlin: Okay, I might need to write some things down here.
John: Three zones.
John: Three zones.
John: There's comfort zone, there's challenge zone, and there's danger zone.
John: And the road from comfort zone to danger zone is not a highway to the danger zone.
John: But there are three zones to how we decide to live our lives, how we decide to spend our day.
John: And in the course of my regular life up until the pandemic, most of the time, most of the day, I expected would be in the challenge zones.
John: Because I'm somebody that as soon as I'm out of the house and dealing with other people, it is challenging.
John: It's not dangerous.
John: It's just like I would – would I rather be home in the bathtub with a meatball sandwich?
John: Yes.
John: And so anything where I'm out and I'm navigating the world and I'm having new experiences is in the challenge zone.
John: And that zone is broad.
John: And there are just the daily challenges of being in the world, but then there are bigger challenges that are in this family of like, are you challenging yourself?
John: Are you pushing yourself outside of like what you – what the sort of inertia or the laziness that's inherent in all of us?
John: You know, are you going for it?
John: When people say, hey, I'm doing this show in Tallahassee, are you willing to fly down for $500 to do a one-hour show with me at a roadhouse in Tallahassee?
John: And it's a challenge.
John: It's in the challenge zone and way out there to say, yeah, I'm going to fly down to do this.
John: It's not going to make me any money, but I'm going to do this because this is
John: part of what makes life, you know, interesting and you never know what it's going to lead to.
John: All that stuff is in the challenge zone.
John: And that's how I lived.
John: I lived my whole life that way.
John: Like somebody said, do you want to go to a second location?
John: You know, I'm headed to Spokane.
John: Do you want to ride with me?
John: It's five hours there.
John: We'll spend the night.
John: We'll come back tomorrow.
Merlin: It's kind of like when people go through those phases, especially in movies, where they say, I'm going to say yes to life.
Merlin: Say yes to life.
Merlin: I mean, I know it's not exactly the same thing, but I think that's analogous to something we all go through where maybe as a reaction to comfort –
Merlin: And for me, I mean, I really do enjoy comfort.
Merlin: And I despise inconvenience, which makes me ill-suited for challenge, as you know.
Merlin: But the point being, like, and it's not just about money.
Merlin: It's kind of maybe kind of about money, kind of about time.
Merlin: Kind of also about placing a bet.
Merlin: on like, there's probably very few ways that this will go horribly wrong.
Merlin: It could go great, but mainly it's just something different.
Merlin: And it's vital that I keep encouraging myself to do things that are different than what I've done before and to not find myself saying no to over many things because you never know, right?
Merlin: That's the who you want to be, yeah?
Merlin: It's a value.
Merlin: Ken Jennings was at the house the other day.
John: Oh, I like him.
Merlin: Please tell him I said hello.
John: He's a nice man.
Merlin: I really do.
Merlin: I don't know how to be slightly closer friends with him without being creepy and it wouldn't really have any benefit for him.
Merlin: But please tell him I say hello and if he ever wants to be my friend, I would be his friend.
John: I will.
John: I'm sure he already thinks of you.
Merlin: Don't say that to just everybody because I wouldn't want too many of those.
Merlin: Again, I could take a little bit of challenge, but I don't want a highway to the danger zone.
John: No, no, no.
Merlin: You don't.
Merlin: You wake up one day, you got too many friends.
Merlin: You know what I'm saying?
John: But Ken said, hey, I got two tickets to this pro wrestling match.
John: Do you want to go?
John: Yeah.
John: And I ran the numbers.
John: The answer to that is absolutely yes.
John: Absolutely yes.
John: Well, except here's the thing, right?
John: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
John: Post-pandemic, things are different.
John: Ah, yes.
John: And I said, well, you know what?
John: If you can get two more tickets for my daughter and her mother, then yes.
Merlin: Oh, my God.
Merlin: I would love to see Ari go to a pro wrestling match.
John: He said, you know what?
John: I'm Ken Jennings.
John: And he went beep, boop, boop, boop, boop, boop, boop.
John: And then he came back and he was like, I got us four tickets.
Yeah.
John: That's his regular catchphrase now.
John: You know what?
John: I'm Ken Jennings.
John: I'm Ken Jennings.
John: Let me just do a little.
John: So I went upstairs and I said, hey, we're going to a pro wrestling match.
John: And of course, everybody was like, huh?
John: But we were going to watch Adventure Time and eat Paschetti on the couch.
John: And I said, yeah, I know, but why don't we do this instead?
John: And we went, we had a wonderful time and we went backstage and we met the wrestlers.
John: Oh, you're kidding.
John: That's so cool.
John: And it was something that, you know, something that my daughter has now done that nobody else has done in her world.
John: It's a wonderful thing.
John: But it's what got me churning on this.
John: And I realized that during the pandemic, we all went into comfort zone and comfort zone used to be a thing that you would seek to
John: as someone who was living most of their life in challenge zone, you would say like, oh, I want to get to my comfort zone.
John: This is something I know how to do.
John: Could that be something like a vacation or a day off?
John: Well, yes, but also just in the course of any day, when you get home and you close the door and you kick your shoes off and you turn on your favorite shows, you're in your comfort zone.
John: But also at work, when somebody hands you something that you really know how to do and this is just what you're really good at,
John: That's your comfort zone But when you're at work, you don't want your job to just be People handing you things that you absolutely know how to do with no sweat
John: You want your job, I think, to have a certain component of like, well, this is a challenge.
John: This is hard.
John: This is me trying to advance my career.
John: This is me trying to get a raise.
John: You don't just want to be at 35 years old in a job where you can do everything effortlessly and then you just are there until you die.
John: You should always be pushing a little bit.
John: So that comfort zone applies across the spectrum, right?
John: If you're at a cocktail party and you are absolutely comfortable, you have no – there's no sweat at all, maybe you're not at the right cocktail party.
John: Maybe you're slumming it now and you're just like, hey, I got – I know who my friends are and I never want to meet a new person.
John: But during the pandemic, we were all forced into a posture where it was like, well, we're at home all day and we have food and we have our shows and we have our blankies.
John: And we were in our comfort zones a lot more of the day than we were in any kind of challenge zone.
John: Because so many of the challenge zone doors were just closed.
John: And at least around here, I noticed...
John: what that meant was we started to think that comfort zone was the norm and being anywhere out of comfort zone was not challenge zone.
John: It was danger zone.
John: And you know, danger zone is, is an area is that part of the day when you're like, your heart is beating.
John: You're like, what did I, what am I doing?
John: I don't know how to do this.
John: I can't get there.
John: You know, like who are these people?
John: Like that's,
John: that you kind of don't want to be in that much.
John: Maybe every day, every week, you should have a little danger zone, you know.
Merlin: But danger zones, I mean, you didn't ask, but to me, they're somewhat analogous to what I would call being busy, where it should be a time-limited, there should be, it's my belief anyway, that being quote-unquote busy should be a time-delimited challenge that
Merlin: that results from an earlier management error, it should not be how you live.
Merlin: Right.
Merlin: It's one thing to be time constrained.
Merlin: Being time constrained is being an adult.
Merlin: Being busy, you're only, you're busy, I mean, like, I can't, I would never in a million years say you're busy because it's your own fault, but you're mostly busy because it's your own fault.
Merlin: Ha ha.
Merlin: It's like if you took on too much, that's not on anybody but you.
Merlin: You're able to get a mortgage.
Merlin: Okay, but then that's my problem.
Merlin: How?
Merlin: Like everybody's time constrained, but you're the one who tolerates how busy you are all the time.
Merlin: And it sounds like what you're saying is that like by dint to the fact that there was not much to be challenged by and also just a lot of big bad world out there, a lot of like can we get hand sanitizer?
Merlin: It felt like we were really in this lock – when you say lockdown, not just lockdown as in don't go anywhere, but lockdown as in like try to achieve –
Merlin: some certainty in the short term because it may be a matter of at least health and illness, if not life and death.
Right.
Merlin: And then you don't get rid of that in one day just by going, hey, America's open again.
John: But a lot of us, if you recall, a couple of months into the pandemic, we were like, actually, this is pretty great.
Merlin: And I think what that was – I'm avoiding saying that because I think you're going somewhere with your point.
Merlin: I didn't hate it at all.
John: Right.
John: And what it was was we all got a license to be in our comfort zone most of the time.
John: We, you know, we, we, we, we got our food.
John: We got, and I mean, and, and I know that I'm, I'm not reflecting the reality of people that had to continue to work cleaning hotel rooms during the pandemic.
John: But for.
John: But for people who are independent and or knowledge workers.
John: We were, we were, we, we defaulted to comfort zone because a lot of opportunities to challenge us weren't there.
John: And, and,
John: And I'm somebody that spent a lot more time in the danger zone in his young life.
John: And because what I thought I was doing was pushing the border of what my comfort zone was.
John: Like, if I'm in the danger zone more and more, then more and more dangerous things become normal to me.
John: And that makes me able to take on more adventure and see more of life because I'm not scared of my shadow.
John: I'm not scared of riding a cross-country bus.
John: I'm not scared of eating...
Merlin: food that i know is going to make me sick you know like you've said things like you know one time like when you didn't want to call your mom from germany and say you know you really didn't want to go like okay mommy i'm at the end of my rope bring me home yeah which yeah which i would i would have done from like a boston airport before i left but right isn't that kind of what you're talking about it's like you're challenging yourself somewhere between training but also like you have a personality where
Merlin: You you need that like you really like to you don't want to take the same route twice You don't order the same thing twice like there needs to be right bumping right up against danger or you're not growing There were a lot of times when it was like, you know what?
John: Don't get in a car with a crack dealer and go somewhere that you don't have a way to get back from that's not a good plan what I realized about my kid was I
John: She's different than I am.
John: And my desire to put myself in the danger zone, she doesn't share.
John: And I don't want to be somebody that's like, we're going in the danger zone.
Yeah.
John: Because you got to learn.
John: But what I realized is the challenge zone is not the danger zone.
John: And spending two, three years in comfort zone makes challenge zone seem like danger zone.
John: Like, oh, we've got to go out.
John: We've got to go.
John: I don't want.
John: Why do we have to?
John: And the thing is, we don't.
John: We could stay home and order food and watch TV.
John: And trying to learn how to get back out is
John: is really i'm finding it incredibly hard not just for my crew but for me like oh is going to this wrestling match better than just watching tv and eating ice cream do i have to and then realizing like actually yes actually when it even when it's an option being in the comfort zone is not
John: Normal.
John: It's not where anyone – it's not normal.
John: That's not normal.
John: Challenge zone is normal.
John: Comfort zone is – it should be a portion of your day.
John: It should be what you're –
John: It's absolutely where you can want to be, but it's not where you – we shouldn't ever think of it as the baseline.
Merlin: But the challenge part necessarily entails a couple things or at least one thing.
Merlin: So it involves –
Merlin: Being outside of what you consider a comfortable environment and or being around people in situations that you wouldn't necessarily consider a guarantee of comfort.
Merlin: It's not a way of saying I'm jumping into the danger zone.
Merlin: It's a way of saying that, like, between getting out of my nest and between being around people where I don't have insurance about the outcomes, that forces me to somewhat kind of stay alive.
Wow.
John: I think for a lot of us – And growing.
John: For a lot of us, putting our phone down on the table, walking over to the bookshelf that's probably in most people's houses and taking down a book and sitting in a chair and reading it is sufficient to be in challenge zone, right?
John: Like just deciding not to look at your phone and deciding to actually read a paper book –
John: would be enough to put yourself in a place where it's like, ah, this is a stretch now.
John: And maybe there's nothing intrinsic to reading a paper book that's better than reading that book on your Kindle or looking at your phone all day.
John: But just the act of doing it is the act of reminding yourself that you need to
John: keep trying and keep doing things that aren't just the same.
John: And, you know, keep, keep reaching for the stars.
John: Keep your feet on the ground.
John: Yeah.
John: Yeah.
John: You know, like,
John: Try something new.
John: Try Ethiopian food.
John: Try – try.
John: I guess it boils down to try.
John: Yeah.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: And if – it's just that in another time, we were more sort of compelled for various reasons to – I – it's late in the show for me to – I'm not saying I disagree on this, but I have a – I have an angle on that that I think would be an interesting –
Merlin: I – well, one thing I see – and this actually might have nothing to do with what you're saying, but it feels similar.
Merlin: I think there was – you remember earlier I was talking about extrinsic versus intrinsic.
Merlin: Like are you doing these things like for some kind of –
Merlin: Is it more for your own reasons or because you kind of have to sort of reasons?
Merlin: And I think that gets complicated because you say things like, oh, well, I have to go to this party because it's good for my job.
Merlin: Well, it's good for your job to go there tonight.
Merlin: Well, no, it's just that over time, the number of appearances one makes at faculty events –
Merlin: does have an effect on how people look at you.
Merlin: So it's got a longer-term benefit.
Merlin: I don't personally like going to parties, but I do feel like I need to go there.
Merlin: And if nobody's there and I'm the only one who's there, I'll be remembered as the only person.
Merlin: You know what I mean?
Merlin: There's that element of professional development.
Merlin: There's a thing I very much see in myself, and I think I pretty much, I feel like might be happening with other people, which is that, and I'm going to, the reason I think these are related is I do think you could peg both of these to something that changed during the pandemic.
Merlin: But, I mean, there's a lot of people – there are ways that people want to turn things in.
Merlin: Oh, it's quiet quitting and people are doing this and nobody wants to work anymore.
Merlin: Nobody wants to go to work anymore.
Merlin: Nobody wants to do anything anymore.
Merlin: My POV on that is – and I think it's analogous but not the same thing.
Merlin: It's not that people don't want to be unchallenged.
Merlin: It's that people, I think, have for the first time in their life – and maybe for the first time in their whole life if they're very young –
Merlin: they've been in a situation where a lot of things that were seen as load-bearing walls of American culture and society were suddenly a little more squishy.
Merlin: Like the whole work-from-home thing is like a really good example of that.
Merlin: I'm not going to drag this out, but what I'm saying is I do think it is important to challenge yourself, whatever that means for you.
Merlin: But I do think also a lot of people have said, look, I'm tired of having those levels set, maintained, and enforced by other people.
Merlin: Through sometimes very specific sorts of threats.
Merlin: And in some cases, very kind of more like hegemonic, like in the air feelings of like, oh, if you don't come to this party, you won't be collegial.
Merlin: Right.
Merlin: There are a lot of people who will like, listen, nobody at my job.
Merlin: there are people in my job who know that I'm gay, but I still have to like be this certain character and overlook this and do that.
Merlin: And like do all these things where I like, I'm not really allowed to fully be who I am in this situation.
Merlin: And that could be, I can't fully be who I am as a father even, you know what I mean?
Merlin: I think there's situations where people are like, you know, I'm willing to be challenged and I'm willing to work hard and I'm willing to go places.
Merlin: What I'm feeling less inclined to do is let that bar, that rule set, uh,
Merlin: and that schedule of enforcement be given over to other people for sometimes very broadly defined benefits to me.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: Do you know what I mean?
Merlin: So like, I just want, I like, I do like the distinction though, between like, you know, like the same way I said, like manners are what we do for ourselves that reflect character.
Merlin: Etiquette is what we do as a society to put each other at ease, hopefully.
Merlin: And in this one, I think there's this thing where I think a lot of people are like, well, I'm not just going to sign on to everything with the same sort of rote,
Merlin: um, just have that feeling of like, I've got to do this.
Merlin: I've got to go to this thing.
Merlin: I've got to do this thing.
Merlin: I've got to, and then when those accumulate to the level of like a 2021 style, wait a minute.
Merlin: So like, I'm still being treated really badly by this company and I'm getting treated even worse.
Merlin: And plus I've got to be on meetings all day and my kid, I, you know, and we have to keep two jobs going in our family and we're stuck in this tiny apartment in Brooklyn and it's
Merlin: Something's got to give, you know?
Merlin: So I don't know.
Merlin: I do think that's interesting.
Merlin: But I think we're both getting at something deep, which is that you have to establish your own palm line for what things like comfort and normal and challenge and all those things are.
Merlin: And there is a benefit to, especially as we get older, there's a benefit to gently pushing yourself to keep doing stuff that, you know, we're not just making a bigger hole in the couch.
Yeah.
John: Yeah, I mean, I do come from a perspective where from the time I was 27, I've been, well, Jesus, from the time I was seven, I've been trying to create a life where nobody could tell me what to do.
John: So I succeeded in that a long time ago.
John: And so it's completely alien to me to be anywhere where there's a dress code that's anything other than something where I'm trying to set the bar.
John: Like, I'm the best dressed person here.
John: Like, here's the dress code.
John: my pocket square as opposed to like, oh God, I got to put on this monkey suit again in order to impress my boss.
Merlin: Or you have to go like, oh, it's Thursday and it's Hawaiian shirt day and the boss thinks that's hilarious.
John: Yeah, right.
John: So that's never figuring in my equation.
John: But just thinking about the world as a collective thing that we're all responsible for and realizing that a lot of us
John: knowledge workers and creatives and people that traditionally were the ones that brought a lot of color and life and interest to the world.
John: when we opt out and decide we're not going out anymore and we're not we're interacting with the world just fine via social media and the internet and the rest of the time we're getting everything delivered and we're just decorating our house now and watching streaming concerts we're not actually just depriving ourselves but we're making the world a more impoverished place because we're not bringing the kind of
John: light and energy to the actual meat space that we, that we used to do.
John: Um, if we don't go to concerts, then who's at concerts and eventually concerts are just things we watch on TV, but the actual world is out there.
John: Tumbleweeds are rolling through the streets and
John: You live in San Francisco.
John: I live in Seattle.
John: In order to avoid them being domed cities where there are big squalid slums of people that just work as delivery drivers, we have to repopulate the world somewhat with our fancy underwear.
John: Fancy underwear sponsorships.
John: Yeah.
John: I'd like to thank Mack Weldon for the sweatpants that I'm wearing.
Merlin: Tommy John.
Merlin: So all the great underpants.
Merlin: And so you're going to start with Judith.
John: We're going to start with Miss Manners, right?
John: I'm terrified that she is going to show up for the first day of seventh grade with that book under her arm.
John: And some mean girl is going to come up and go, oh, my God, I can't believe you're wearing those shoes.
John: And she's going to say, actually, commenting on someone's shoes is very rude.
John: And then she's going to hit the girl with the book.
John: And I'm going to be like, oh, my God.
Merlin: Yeah, but I mean, you've got to start from the outside in.
Merlin: Hit with the book you've got, is what they say.
Merlin: Learn the rules, and then you can break them, Merlin.
Merlin: And then you can quietly undermine her and maybe give her an eating disorder.
John: Yeah, you can quit.
John: Look, eating disorders run in my family.
That's a long call.