Ep. 541: "Looking Over God's Shoulder"
Merlin: Hi, John.
Merlin: Hi, Merlin.
Merlin: How's it going?
John: Good, except for your guten Abend fraulein scary picture.
John: You want me to change that?
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: That's Nightcrawler from the X-Men, just saying that.
Merlin: It's scary.
John: Those little guys are called bamfs.
John: Bamfs.
John: Bamfs.
John: It's a great ski resort in Canada.
Merlin: Is that right?
Merlin: Oh, and I had a friend who went to college there.
Merlin: He had a shirt that said Banff.
Merlin: He went to college in Banff?
Merlin: I'm pretty sure.
Merlin: He spelled it with an N, so he might be from Quebec.
Merlin: Mm-hmm.
Merlin: Bam.
Merlin: This is a bam-f.
Merlin: Mm-hmm.
Merlin: That's the sound.
Merlin: That's the sound.
Merlin: Of the men working on the chain gang?
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: That's the sound of the very Catholic devil man.
Merlin: Teleporting with his brain.
Merlin: They took it really far at a point.
Merlin: Who?
Merlin: Oh, the writers of X-Men.
John: Oh.
Merlin: Are they people you know?
Merlin: Have you ever met them?
Merlin: Yes.
John: And?
Merlin: Well, unrelated...
Merlin: But, oh, actually, I used the word unrelated in a really rude way two days ago.
Merlin: I still feel bad about it.
Merlin: Oh, my God.
Merlin: Ooh.
Merlin: Ooh.
Merlin: Like you hurt somebody's feelings with it?
Merlin: I worried about it.
Merlin: I'll tell you about it if you want.
Merlin: You're like, mm, unrelated.
Merlin: Time was, you know, this happens in the world of those superheroes you enjoy.
Merlin: They start out with a certain set of skills, much like Liam Neeson.
Merlin: And in the case of, I think it started Nightcrawler could teleport, but he had to be able to see the thing that he was teleporting to, which I think is a nice constraint.
Merlin: That isn't, you know, we need constraints.
Merlin: Well, for superheroes to be interesting, long story short, eventually it got to where like, oh no, my Fraulein, we've got to like get these people from Los Angeles to Rochester, New York.
Merlin: And he bamfs across the entire country, which I think is not.
Merlin: Oh, see, you can't see across the country.
Merlin: Well, I mean, if you've got a gazetteer.
Merlin: That word I forgot, remember?
Merlin: A gazetteer.
Merlin: It's like a cross between an almanac and an atlas.
John: Yeah, a gazetteer.
Merlin: Yeah, I'll change that probably by next week.
John: Well, I believe the children are our future, but I also believe that superheroes should have constraints and that those constraints should be followed pretty carefully.
John: You know, you can't just fight a million people.
John: I don't think Superman should be able to make the world go in reverse.
Merlin: He shouldn't be able to make time go backwards.
Merlin: I don't think so.
Merlin: I think the ramifications, I imagine, I'm just, John, I'm just guessing.
Merlin: You know more about this than I do.
Merlin: I'm guessing this is a conversation that people have had since 1978.
Merlin: Sure, I bet.
Merlin: But a person, a reasonable person might watch that very good film, the first really good superhero movie, might watch that film and say, you know, if you make the earth go backwards, there's going to be consequences beyond time changing.
John: A lot of consequences.
John: This is what we're always talking about.
Merlin: You know, that's your comic.
Merlin: That's the comic you should write.
Merlin: So you could work with Jade Gordon, I think it was, on the one about the ladies in the windows in the Netherlands.
Merlin: Yeah, it would be an alternative comic.
Merlin: Let's just put it that way.
Merlin: Oh, you'd say like a different universe.
Merlin: Oh, an alternative comic.
Merlin: I see like an R. Crumb.
John: Yeah, like an alt, you know, like it'd be part of a, well, you know, what does that even mean anymore?
Merlin: I know in the 80s it was meaningful, and it's an edgy alt take on sequential visual storytelling.
John: Do you think that you were at any point a member of alt culture?
John: Are you now?
Merlin: I mean, this could be a trap, but that's okay.
Merlin: Yeah, I think so.
John: Yeah, yeah, right.
John: It was a thing.
John: It was a real thing that you aspired to be a member of.
John: You had to walk through the door.
John: You had to walk through the door and to alt.
Merlin: Well, you know, do you want to talk about this?
Merlin: Because I think it's interesting.
Merlin: I do.
Merlin: And I think it's... I think it's directly germane to some of your temple values, if I could say.
Merlin: When you choose alt...
Merlin: I need to just get this out on something called Usenet, where you could go and talk to other people.
Merlin: They had this structure for how the things were named, and it would be abbreviations like science.computers.linux or whatever.
Merlin: And any one of those that began with alt was like, ha-ha, we're the bad boys.
Merlin: We're creating our own areas.
John: Is that right?
Merlin: Yeah, alt's where all the good stuff was.
John: Oh, I never understood what those were.
John: I just thought it meant that you pushed the alt button.
John: To get there or something.
Merlin: Yeah, or there's escape.xmen.johnroderick and stuff like that.
Merlin: All the different keys.
Merlin: All the great keys.
John: All those keys I never touched.
John: So it was like computer.science.whatever, but then there was alt.computer.science and those were the edgy boys.
John: Edgy, kind of the kids' table.
Merlin: Imagine the kids' table actually being in the rumpus room.
Merlin: So you could go in there and shuck and jive in a way that wouldn't upset Grandpa, Uncle Joe, or whatever.
Merlin: You could go and do your shucking and your jiving.
Merlin: But what's interesting about this, to me, and the thing that gets me thinking is, well, when you choose alt...
Merlin: you are making a culturally, contextually important decision to say, like, I'm interested in something that's not what I perceive to be the mainstream, kind of, right?
Merlin: Yeah, right, right.
Merlin: I mean, alt is a sliding scale in some ways, right?
Merlin: Think about the things we talked about so much about, like, publications, right, in the 90s, stuff like research, stuff like zines.
Merlin: I mean, stuff like, really, like... 2800.
Merlin: The hacker mag.
Merlin: 2,600.
Merlin: Oh, sorry.
John: Well, 2,800.
Merlin: 2,600.
Merlin: Whatever it takes.
Merlin: You got there!
Merlin: Martin Mull.
Merlin: But the reason I think it... Go.
Go.
Merlin: No, alt.
John: I was just prompting you with alt.
Merlin: Because here's the thing, though.
Merlin: I mean, like, to me, well, here's a real, this is a very consumer, very materialist way to look at it.
Merlin: It's like there's the stuff you could buy at the mall, and there's the stuff you had to go somewhere else to find.
Merlin: Kind of, right?
Merlin: Like you could find, if you go to Record Bar or Camelot or later on like Sam Goody's, you could go and find these five Led Zeppelin albums that were always there.
Merlin: But like you take something like, this is a crazy example, but the first true indie band...
Merlin: in some ways, was the Buzzcocks, who, like, recorded their own record.
Merlin: They printed their own sleeves.
Merlin: There's all that kind of stuff.
Merlin: For reasons that are obvious, I think, like, you're not going to find that at Record Bar.
Merlin: They didn't make that many of them.
Merlin: It was 1977.
Merlin: And, like...
Merlin: but for a variety of reasons to get outside of the culture of what you could get at a mall.
Merlin: That's kind of an alt decision.
Merlin: It might seem like a pretty simple one, but isn't that one of them is like, you have to step outside of the places you are accustomed to in order to dip your toe into with research, like learning about, you know, the super masochist, Bob, what's his name?
Merlin: Or like, you know what I mean?
Merlin: Like learning about even not something as extreme as a, you know,
Merlin: a single that was released in Manchester in the seventies.
Merlin: If you wanted to find even blue Monday, 12 inch, you probably had to go somewhere that wasn't record bar, but it begins in some ways with this, like I'm donning my cloak and I'm going into like this alley in the village where the bad stuff happens.
Merlin: Like if it's thieves guild or something like that, you know what I mean?
Merlin: Like, isn't there, when you, when you go alt, it's a personal decision to get outside of the bubble you feel sort of constrained by.
Yeah.
John: Yeah, in my case, it was, I think, all to do with, you know, I don't think a lot of that stuff was edgy just for edgy sake.
John: But you had to be prepared to be challenged in your conventional, not just thinking, but in your conventional taste.
Merlin: And your conventional, if you like, consumption.
Yeah.
Merlin: Because when you go alt, and that can mean lots of things we could probably explore, but when you go somewhere that's outside of the mall culture, not only will you see things that you kind of hope to see that might seem strange, but you will almost definitely be challenged by new things that seem exotic or dangerous.
Merlin: Well, yeah.
Merlin: G.G.
Merlin: Allen.
Merlin: Like when you first deep your toe into G.G.
Merlin: Allen, right?
Merlin: Exactly.
Merlin: Because you heard about G.G.
Merlin: Allen.
Merlin: Now you're going to go read about G.G.
Merlin: Allen and maybe by, I don't know, I guess a video of G.G.
Merlin: Allen, right?
Merlin: No, please don't do that.
John: It's not very good.
John: No, it's not.
John: And that was also part of the risk.
John: But you definitely couldn't go into alt and maintain a feeling that there were lines that you... There were fewer guardrails.
John: Yeah, and you couldn't be offended if you were there.
John: The whole point of being there was that you somehow were mastering whatever it was about a person that made them offended.
John: You know, that was part of alt was that you...
Merlin: There was a kind of bravery to it like I'm not gonna be grossed out by this I'm not gonna be I'm not gonna be offended or bummed out by this even if it is totally offensive and first first time you go to a gay bar be honest like the first time you go to a gay bar like I was not sure and I was going to gay bars because they always had the best music and drink specials and Those both matter to me I had a friend who DJed at a gay bar in Tampa and we would drive from Sarasota to Tampa most I think Tuesday nights and
Merlin: And, uh, yeah.
Merlin: And we got like, like drink all you can drink Amaretto Sours, like, and, and, and plus he was playing, you know, Harley David's son of a bitch and stuff that like, I wanted to hear from that time.
Merlin: But when you go into that, you, it is, we're the first time I ever went to a punk rock show.
Merlin: It was so overwhelming, like a hardcore show.
Merlin: It was so overwhelming to me, but you're saying that that's part of what you buy into, you know, buy the ticket, take the ride kind of thing.
Merlin: Right.
Yeah.
John: Well, yeah, and I guess what it always felt like to me was just consuming this is not necessarily endorsing it.
John: Just because I love R. Crumb comics.
John: Just because you know about it doesn't mean you approve.
John: Yeah, I do not share R. Crumb's attitudes about women, but I love his comics.
John: And to be able to contain those multitudes and say, I have 15 albums and 40 books that I think are
John: are repulsive at one level, but at another level, like I read them and enjoy them.
John: I listened to them and enjoy them.
John: And that is part of being alt here.
John: You don't have to, you don't have to have everything in your life align with your values.
Merlin: But you could also say like, I can handle this.
Merlin: I can handle it.
Merlin: Exactly.
Merlin: Metal machine music is not an album that,
Merlin: I don't think I've ever listened to Metal Machine music all the way through, but I knew it was considered, A, like a big deal, and B, was considered by a lot of people, frankly, unlistenable.
Merlin: Right?
Merlin: Or, I mean, there's other things like that, but those are, you know, I mean, when you put on the Ramones, like, oh my gosh, it might be, quote, punk rock, but the first Ramones record, it's as much...
Merlin: influenced by girl groups as, like, an MC5 or something like that, right?
Merlin: But, like, there's some things where you're like, I just, I need exposure to this thing that I'm not familiar with, partly because I'm not familiar with it, but also because, like, I kind of, I got a tickle to be challenged by something that's outside my comfort zone.
John: And I felt like that about, you know, reading politics, reading politics,
John: reading the position papers of all the different isms and trying to figure out not what I believed, but trying to survey.
John: It helps to start with what actually happened rather than what you've heard.
John: there's that right but also like give me your worst what what have human beings conceived that i can't handle what what what weirdness what ugliness but what like super smartness like what i guess what are my limits right where where where do i arrive where i'm like well i don't understand this anymore or this is too gross for me to
Merlin: It's too challenging to stuff that has helped you.
Merlin: For me, it's getting too close to things that are tentpoles of my own culture and belief that are like heretical, not necessarily to a religious or spiritual feeling, but heretical to a cultural certainty or, again, a guardrail that I just kind of tacitly always believe were put there to protect me.
John: Well, right, and my capacity to go on the internet and watch Chiapas beheading videos is really low.
John: You're a terrible edgelord.
John: I have zero to gain and a lot to lose in watching this kind of brutality.
John: It doesn't appeal to me, and there's nothing to gain.
John: I'm not going to learn anything.
John: But if those people were writing a manifesto, if there was a manifesto, I would read it.
John: I would gobble it up.
John: What the hell is the manifesto about these beheadings, right?
John: I would want to know what their thinking was.
John: I don't want to see it.
John: But that's weird because there's a lot of popular culture.
John: that I don't want to watch movies where a child is harmed.
John: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
John: I don't want to watch superhero movies where the person has unlimited power.
Merlin: I feel like these things are not... If there's something you have to buy into... Again, this is contrary to what you're saying.
Merlin: What you're saying makes so much sense to me, which is just because it exists in the world doesn't mean it's something I should avoid and not learn anything about.
Merlin: That's a certain kind of...
Merlin: I feel like that comes out of a spiritual religious tradition that's hundreds of years old.
Merlin: But it's also not necessarily, sometimes it's like, oh, I just want to see a boob, or I heard about faces of death, where you want to like, which always, the idea of which just scared the crap out of me.
Merlin: But you need to push yourself a little bit, and it's that pushing of yourself a little bit that makes it so thrilling, really.
Yeah.
John: Well, yeah, and whatever that wall was between regular and alt, we could talk about a thousand different ways in which the culture was so different then that it's not even comprehensible now.
Merlin: On so many levels that would be difficult to understand or explain.
John: I was thinking about this the other day because I was doing some deep dive on, I forget what, plate tectonics or the... Oh, no, no, no.
John: You know what it was?
John: I was like, I am so frustrated.
John: I was frustrated with myself for not knowing more about the periodic table.
John: Like, I'm embarrassed...
John: at how often I feel like I should know just one layer deeper of understanding of the periodic table.
John: And so I pulled up the periodic table and I was reading about it and looking at it and like trying to, and just in that, just in 15 minutes,
John: i suddenly understood something about the periodic table that i hadn't before about like the structure yeah just like oh okay so just the way that you know these these these columns and rows are meaningful yeah and and and how is it that that atoms exchange electrons like i never fully
John: Got just at that basic level like oh there are different because carbon's the carbon's a gobbly bitch But there are different orbits of electrons around around nuclei and The inner orbits don't they're solid they don't interact it's only the outer layers of electrons that can interact with other electrons and
John: And so I was like, oh, okay.
John: Oh, I get it.
John: So at different, oh, sure.
John: And I was having all this fun with the, just trying to get this, whatever, just this basic next understanding of the periodic table.
John: And I suddenly remembered when we were kids and teenagers, that feeling of,
John: That normal, regular adults were excited by newspaper articles about new discoveries in, in physics, chemistry, geology.
John: Um, because these things were, a lot of these things were new.
John: The periodic table itself was fairly new, you know, like within living memory new.
John: Like the modern one.
John: And space travel was new, and supersonic flight was new, and the idea of plate tectonics was new.
John: You remember when we figured out that the Gulf of Mexico was an impact crater?
Mm-mm.
Merlin: There was a moment where somebody said, somebody who lived very near to that body of water for most of my youth.
John: That's good to know.
John: I mean, look at it on a map.
John: It's a giant impact crater.
John: uh and that's there used to be land there john maybe i mean we're talking about a long time ago but maybe that's the source of florida got its wing on yeah well and that's and that's why the dinosaurs died or whatever you know all those things were new but they were in the newspaper and regular people read the newspaper and so there were conversations happening between lay people about
John: You know, like they discovered a new element.
John: Did you hear?
John: Oh, really?
John: What is it?
John: Oh, well, it doesn't really exist.
John: But in a lab they made.
John: And this was a thing that that regulars would be talking about and would have to know a little bit.
John: about the world in order to even understand it.
John: And that was an adulthood that was exciting to me as a kid.
Merlin: Because you and I both shared an interest or obsession, I think.
Merlin: I don't like to speak in wee sentences, but I think you and I were both people who not only performed
Merlin: I prefer to be around older people, especially adults.
Merlin: And I did not shy away, except for sex things.
Merlin: I did not shy away from learning things that were not supposed to be things I would be interested in or know about.
Merlin: And so you kind of crave that access to learning this information.
Merlin: But to learn this information and have it be interesting, you also need the context for where it belongs and why it's different and new, which it's hard to get when you're eight.
Merlin: Do you remember when they discovered Lucy in Ethiopia?
John: Not specifically, but I know it's a big deal.
John: It was a huge deal.
John: It was all anybody was talking about.
John: This archaeological find.
John: The missing link in some ways.
John: The missing link.
John: And everybody had an opinion about it, and it definitely excited the moral majority in a different way than it excited my own parents.
John: But it was archaeology that was...
John: Something everybody was talking about and talk, you know, like an able to talk about.
John: without there being and you could you can without somebody going honestly like why are you talking about this yeah or just like you know you can't like that's like whatever i mean or just yeah what are you talking about right how does that how do how do you find 15 people in the modern world that just have a just have a common understanding even of like uh basic stuff that isn't popular culture stuff
John: Because science is still discovering.
John: One of the things as I was looking at the periodic table, I was struck by the fact that this is a brand new in human history.
John: This is still very brand new.
John: This little map.
John: In terms of the big clock, the big timeline.
John: In terms of the big clock, even in terms of the small clock, right?
John: It's 100 years old.
John: i mean mendeleev like figured out the basics of it in the mid 19th century but you know it was only in the 30s that that it was really starting to make sense but if you look at it one of the things about it that strikes me is that it looks so incomplete right it looks like this weird arrangement but in a way it's
John: We're looking over God's shoulder and 20th century physics and 20th century math and 20th century chemistry, all of a sudden,
John: able to look at the very beginning of the building blocks and i was looking at this periodic table like 2 000 years ago what is the period i'm sorry 2 000 years from now what is the periodic table going to look like to us and it's not going to look like this well it can we get like a third dimension
John: Yeah, we're just standing on the threshold of a thing.
John: We put this together, but it's real.
John: It's, like, real.
Merlin: And I mean, and as new... So, like, the thing that's so... And I defer to you here, because I did not excel at chemistry.
Merlin: I wasn't interested in it.
Merlin: Well, it wasn't able to grab me, and I was not...
Merlin: I was not a good student of that in any variety of ways, but it does seem so interesting to me because I am aware that the rows and columns mean things, the numbers mean things.
Merlin: And isn't it interesting that the elements we know about seem to fit into this structure, which makes a person ask, well, at what point does the structure get in the way because it doesn't fit?
Merlin: Not that we don't want to have to reprint this or something like that, but you know what I mean?
Merlin: At what point do you rethink the periodic table as it is and go like, okay, this was good for the 1800s, but now we need to update our idea of this because we've learned more about rather than trying to make something fit in the box that we've built, how do we think about whether a box would even accommodate these things?
John: Well, yeah, and there's all these, I mean, one of the great things about it is there are all these diagonals in it.
John: No shit, I didn't know that.
John: Yeah, it's trying to represent a lot of different things in chemistry at once.
John: I don't think there's anybody that believes like, well, this is the definitive document.
John: You know, I think most people probably look at it and go, right, this is what we know so far.
John: Why does hydrogen share all these characteristics with metals?
John: You know, I mean, I don't know.
John: Hydrogen is the simplest of all the things.
John: But I'm thinking so much lately about presentism and how toxic it is.
John: In both directions.
John: Every direction.
Merlin: No, seriously, right?
Merlin: Part of it is the presentism makes you feel like a very enlightened person because you can look at the past and go, well, I sure understand that.
Merlin: And then it also can become kind of a hindrance to understanding the future because it's not difficult to get so wound up in your own breadth of what you perceive to be your breadth of knowledge that you don't think there is a place for new information or like you kind of reject it, right?
John: I think the way presidentism is being talked about in the culture now is the first one you described a lot, you know, saying like, oh, well, we're judging history according to
John: these unrealistic modern standards but i'm talking about like you said just now the other presentism which is thinking that we're at the end of history and thinking that we we know as much as there is to know we are the we are the ones with complete understanding so much progress in science and technology that like clearly we must understand something about the world and when new information comes along that hints at that being not
Merlin: Complete or completely correct version like how do you where do you find a place for that information?
John: And because that really that's that's the science of science Well, it is and and I think I see it all the time in doom scrolling.
John: I was talking about this online the other day Doom scrolling
John: always you know there's all this evidence right of that everything is awful and the evidence all is true i mean you can just look at and go yes there it is that's i can't argue with that either i can't argue with that you know that all the all these facts are true but then there's the leap to and therefore all these other things are inevitable and in that leap between here are things that are true and these are the things that are inevitable
John: We go from observation to fantasy, to poetry.
John: There's nothing inevitable.
John: Absolutely nothing is inevitable.
John: And to stack up like, oh, well, the seas are rising, and so it's inevitable that one day there will be a land war in Mexico.
John: And it's like, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa.
John: Wow.
John: And we make that leap so fast.
John: That sounds dangerously close to prophecy.
John: Right?
John: And that's the thing.
John: But we're all so ready to jump.
John: to the future based on what we think is our complete understanding of how how everything works and how everything you know things result it's just an it's just this march forward and from here we can just see 50 years in the future or or five years in the future and go well it's inevitable and
John: I mean, when Trump was running for president the last time, we said, well, if he gets elected, it's inevitable that the following 50 things will happen.
John: It's the end of history.
Merlin: Inevitable in that case often being another way of saying the worst thing I can imagine.
John: The worst thing I can imagine.
John: You're exactly right.
John: Inevitable all so often is synonymous with the worst possible scenario I can imagine.
John: And Trump was a terrible president, but we held him in check.
John: And most of those things didn't happen.
John: And when we look at him now and it's like, oh, what if he's president again?
John: It's the end of the fucking world.
John: And it doesn't seem good.
John: But at the same time, nothing's inevitable.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: But like, what if he what if we did survive?
Merlin: How would we be?
Merlin: That's, that's, you know, there's, um, I don't know, this is a little bit Kierkegaardian, I guess, but like the sickness unto death is like thinking that your despair can be enough to like overtake you.
Merlin: But the sick part of existentialism is no, you'll continue to exist as long as the world, for whatever reason, decides you're not dead yet.
Merlin: And the, like, you know what I mean though?
Merlin: Like there's that, there's that sense of like, well, I'm taking the worst thing that I can imagine and imagine it being a species ending event, at least for me.
Merlin: And like, well, what if you survived?
Merlin: What would that be like?
Merlin: Because that's closer to how the world actually goes is you survive.
Merlin: I'm not saying you thrive.
Merlin: Terrible things happen.
Merlin: But like there hasn't been that many things that have happened in the history of Western civilization where we really did like start over.
Merlin: It's pretty rare.
John: Well, there was the flood.
John: and all the aminals had to go on a boat.
John: You might remember that one.
John: I do, I do.
John: And then I'm trying to think of another one.
John: I've got several.
John: The plague?
John: Banjo music.
Merlin: Yes, because there are some things, there's some bells you can't unring, you know?
Merlin: No, I was sitting here, like, just thinking about, like, the things that I learned this weekend, right?
Merlin: I was, like, and you're talking, and, like, as you've been speaking, I, like, was thinking about things that, like, I learned over this past weekend, over the past, like, three days.
Merlin: And one of those things is that...
Merlin: One of the really big set aside things like the climate change, climate change in the sense of like the ice age or whatever.
Merlin: That's all fascinating because of how it affected the world and wildlife.
Merlin: I'd watch an animal video to learn more about that because that's where it's most interesting.
Merlin: Learning about how undersea creatures were some of the only things that survived.
Merlin: After the ice age is pretty fascinating, but in terms of human history I was watching a BBC documentary from 1969 about so it was called civilization and like the guys talking about like they're really there haven't been that many times where we had to kind of just really start over and the conventional wisdom is that you know the Greeks
Merlin: In some ways came about as far as you could get in a lot of ways.
Merlin: Like most of Western civilization is based on stuff that the Greeks were working on thousands of years ago.
Merlin: But he was talking specifically about basically when the quote barbarians overran Europe.
Merlin: Germans.
Merlin: Yeah, but also the Vikings and all of that, and the conventional wisdom that art died at that point, and medicine died, and everything died.
Merlin: He's like, no, but look at these fucking boats.
Merlin: Look at these Viking boats.
Merlin: They are art.
Merlin: Just because they're barbarians, you can't just write that off.
Merlin: No, it just becomes part of the soup.
Merlin: Eventually things kind of turn around a little bit for reasons not obvious or related to another thing, but like...
Merlin: it's still part of the ongoing soup of civilization in one way or another.
Merlin: Certainly, it sucked that for 200 years, we lost of what was making Western civilization good, but it wasn't gone forever.
Merlin: I have other things I learned, but I think that's the same as banjo music, right?
John: In a lot of ways, yeah.
John: It just comes in and it's like, well, here's what you were doing, and now...
Merlin: Well, yeah.
Merlin: Now, I mean, it's like we all know about, I hate to bring up politics, but most of us of a certain age are familiar with the concept of dueling banjos.
John: Yes, we are.
Merlin: But are the banjos ever going to get their own homeland?
Merlin: And how do we get the other banjos to agree with that?
Merlin: Because they all think that there's this one city that all the banjo players agree is the most important.
Merlin: Then you've got those people dying.
Merlin: A thousand people died during the Hodge this year.
Merlin: Did you know that?
John: I just saw that 1,300 as of today.
John: I don't want to say that with a merry voice.
John: LAUGHTER
Merlin: Breaking news.
Merlin: It's worse than what you thought.
Merlin: I learned last week, not this weekend, but last week I learned about the Hodge.
Merlin: And I learned about the Big Rock.
Merlin: And I learned why you have to walk around it seven times.
Merlin: And I learned about how that building has evolved over time.
Merlin: And I'm mentioning that, I guess, partly to show off how smart I am and how good my taste is in YouTube videos.
Merlin: But also just to say, there's a bunch of stuff that I'm more, I won't say I know, but there were a bunch of things I'm more aware of now that I wasn't aware of last week.
Merlin: And I think those will help me think,
Merlin: better about things.
Merlin: It doesn't mean that I'm saying, you know, I didn't, did you know the big, what's it called?
Merlin: You know, the big rock with the, with the tapestry on it in.
Merlin: Yeah.
John: Yeah.
John: The rock.
Merlin: There's parts to the rock.
Merlin: There's like a big mouth on the side where a piece got knocked off and people want to go up and like kiss that area.
Merlin: And then there's this other area that's got a fence around it that you're not supposed to, there's all these different aspects of it where it's like going to a theme park with your friends and your friend wants to go on the Scooby-Doo roller coaster and you're like, no, I'm going on the racer.
Merlin: You're like, ah, I'm not going on the racer.
Merlin: I'm going on Son of Beast.
Merlin: And then I'm going on Beast.
Merlin: And like, oh, some people are not going to go on Beast because, you know, that's just too crazy.
Merlin: And in this instance, like if you're doing the Hodge and you're doing your visit there, it's a lot to learn.
Merlin: Now, does that mean?
John: Did the video that you were watching take you inside the Kaaba?
John: Yeah.
John: Did you go in and see the Black Rock and everything in the video?
John: Yeah, yeah.
Merlin: Oh, wow.
Merlin: It looks kind of like a...
Merlin: Well, the one I saw with, you know, they keep a lot of like oils and stuff in there.
Merlin: They store stuff in there that's important to like the maintenance chairs and stuff.
Merlin: No, honestly, it looked kind of like a reception center at like a convention hall.
Merlin: It's nicer on the outside.
John: It kind of is.
Merlin: It's a reception center.
Merlin: It is for, you know, the profit and, you know.
Merlin: But you got, no, I'm not making fun, please.
Merlin: Don't kill me.
Merlin: But you got, but like they change that tapestry thing that hangs outside.
Merlin: They change that every year.
Merlin: They cut it down.
Merlin: And then they distribute the parts to people.
Merlin: And it's fascinating to learn.
Merlin: Has that turned me into an instant Just Add Water Muslim?
Merlin: No, it hasn't done any of that.
Merlin: But my brain's got plenty of room to accommodate new information about things.
Merlin: That could just be interesting, but often will help me understand a little bit more about the world.
John: That's all it is.
John: That's all it is.
John: It doesn't hurt.
John: A little bit more.
John: A little bit more.
John: Is that alt?
John: Was I alt this weekend, John?
John: It feels a little alt.
John: I mean, all you have to do is... I think all you have to do is, well...
John: It used to also involve baby doll dresses and combat boots.
John: Uh-huh.
John: But I think... Oh, for sure.
John: The all-time looking for now is... That was a great look.
John: Yeah, it was.
John: Wasn't that a tremendous look?
John: It really was a tremendous look.
John: I still support it.
John: It's like, look, there was nothing wrong... Those little skinny legs and the combat boots?
John: Jiminy Christmas.
John: Yeah, the combat boots, first of all, and then just whatever you're... And when you see them, you've got to walk around them seven times.
What?
John: You got your empire waist over here.
John: You got your tangled hair over here.
John: Like, come on.
John: Uh-huh.
John: And which empire?
John: Why does it have to be so high?
Merlin: Why does it have to be so high?
John: No, that's the thing.
Merlin: How did it get so high?
Merlin: Oh, he talks like an ordinary guy.
Merlin: Oh, that's really true.
Merlin: That's talking about Katie Lee.
John: Yeah, that's right.
Merlin: See, this is the thing about a liberal arts education.
Merlin: Other things I learned.
Merlin: I did a deep dive.
Merlin: I discovered this new channel that I'm really gay bones for about paintings.
Merlin: And I learned about Mona Lisa and how the Mona Lisa represents a culmination of everything Leonardo da Vinci had learned, not just about, quote, art.
Merlin: It was what he had learned about painting.
Merlin: It was about the emergence of new pigments that had not existed before.
Merlin: This is huge for Van Gogh.
Merlin: This is huge for so many 19th century painters back then.
Merlin: It was like the emergence of these new, like for a long time, you couldn't get blue.
Merlin: For a long time, there was no good bright blue.
Merlin: There was no good, like very heavily capitalized on these new things.
Merlin: What I didn't know, I did not know that you take a garden of earthly delights.
Merlin: by Hieronymus Bosch, which is a piece of art I've always thought was fascinating.
Merlin: And there's just all this turns out stuff about it.
Merlin: It's not an orgy.
Merlin: It's an extremely pious triptych about falling short of what God wants from us.
John: And I won't go on and on, but boys...
Merlin: All you have to do is look at it closely.
Merlin: You go to that third one.
Merlin: You're like, that's a bad orgy.
Merlin: Well, you don't want to end up the guy who has a trumpet in his butt or whatever.
Merlin: I learned about that.
Merlin: But I learned about the Garden of Earthly Delights.
Merlin: I learned about how white castles are built the way that they are and fascinating things about castle fortifications I'd never known before.
Merlin: White castle restaurants?
Merlin: Partly, sure.
Merlin: It's part of a rich tradition.
Merlin: And they got those, uh, they got those, uh, crenellations at the top and what they call, you know, they got a key, uh, they got a loophole, loopholes that you can shoot your arrow through.
Merlin: But even those evolved over time, the corners of castles.
Merlin: It's fascinating how it was started out.
Merlin: They were square.
Merlin: Well, that's no good.
Merlin: Like once we get to the era of gunpowder, people are shooting stuff.
Merlin: They're knocking corners off your castle.
Merlin: Don't you want round corners, but wait, what if instead now you started creating hexagon sides?
Merlin: So that they can, you've got all kinds of angles on people coming at you, which is what defending a castle is all about.
Merlin: I learned about that.
John: Now you're talking about things that I spent fully just 10 years thinking about nothing else except castles.
Merlin: Oh, castle videos, John.
Merlin: I'd love to send you a couple that have really rocked my, I learned based on a Conan O'Brien video, there are buildings at the border between North and South Korea that
Merlin: that can be, it's kind of like Battlestar Galactica, no spoilers, when you go to meet the Cylon.
Merlin: They've got these bespoke areas that have a border running right through the middle of the room where North and South Korean people can, if they choose to go.
Merlin: And I didn't know about that.
Merlin: I didn't, I didn't, there's just every one of these little dumb things I learned about from watching a fucking YouTube video.
Merlin: It's like, I don't know.
Merlin: It just, it makes me feel less bored.
Merlin: when I learn about how little pieces of the world fit together.
Merlin: It doesn't make my general life puzzle any easier to put together, but, like, I watched a fucking hour-long video about a painting of two people that, from the guy who, some people say, invented oil painting, that's not accurate, but, like...
Merlin: I watched this 15, that was like this 15 minute video that just completely blew my mind about all the signification in this.
Merlin: I don't know now.
Merlin: It sounds like I'm bragging and I don't mean to be.
Merlin: It's just that like few things are more satisfying to me than choosing to learn about things I don't need to know about because it doesn't take that over much time for me to realize these are things that actually do heavily relate to other things that I would like to know.
Merlin: And that's been my whole approach to life without me realizing it for a long time, is tell me about these existential rhymes.
Merlin: Tell me about these things where something that the impact didn't seem like it would be a big deal, but then it was.
Merlin: We had an old episode this week of Dubai Friday about...
Merlin: a wonderful TV series from the 70s, you might remember, called Connections with James Burke.
Merlin: Or you might know a show, The Day the Universe Changed.
Merlin: And it's like, and you're learning, you learn so much about how these seemingly wildly unrelated things.
Merlin: How is it that the ability to can food and create thermoses is what enabled us to make rockets?
Merlin: Or how is it that, like, the example I keep bringing up,
Merlin: The whole idea of a punch card, that idea was invented to replicate complicated patterns and weaving.
Merlin: That leads to the technology of player pianos.
Merlin: That leads to the technology that would become punch cards for computers.
Merlin: It's like, I don't need to know any of that.
Merlin: But you know what I really need to know from all of that is like, holy shit, dude, stop imagining you have the whole periodic table filled in and done.
Merlin: Like, how do you keep learning that there's like, if nothing else, it's not even the facts that you have now in your dumb cocktail party quiver.
Merlin: It's more like just the constant realization that there are fascinating things out there that would be nice or interesting for you to learn.
Merlin: And, you know, you might just learn something.
Merlin: You know, this might be stuff that you could apply in other places to understand the world is not done being built.
Merlin: The world is not done being made and the world is not done being understood.
Right.
John: 100% of what you're talking about is just leaning into hopefulness.
John: You know, there's no point in learning all that about castle design or punch cards or bubble wrap or whatever if you're not looking...
John: forward to i mean really just as simple as looking forward to knowing it could be entertaining but it doesn't it has a more functional component than you may first realize well entertaining but also every every one of those things i think applies to doom it's a it's an antidote to doom
John: because each one of those things didn't used to exist and then did and if you can put yourself in the moment before they existed and then how celebratory the moment after them after they existed must have been whoa check it out we invented bubble wrap holy you know this is going to change everything
John: All it can possibly do is fuel that sense in us all that that is also tomorrow.
John: There's some bubble wrap being invented right now.
John: There's some, like, just me knowing this makes tomorrow bigger.
Merlin: Or it could be bubble wrap they discovered in the 60s that we just haven't found a use for yet.
Merlin: And maybe it's not to protect packages in transit.
Merlin: That's kind of the big pivot that I think people are somewhat resistant to, is that all this piecemeal, fact-based information can have a role in the future, and the people who will figure that out are not people who are pursuing doom.
John: That's right.
John: That's right.
John: The solution to nothing is doom, right?
John: There's no doom.
John: It gives us nothing.
John: It's only hope that gives us anything.
John: And even if you feel like doom is inevitable, you have to have hope to make any difference.
John: Back to Kierkegaard.
John: What are you going to do before the doom finally consumes you?
John: Yeah.
John: Hopefully you'll be doing something other than watching TV.
Yeah.
John: I mean, I've lately.
John: Is that a slam on me and my YouTube habits?
John: No, I love you and your YouTube habits.
John: No, it's not a slam at all.
Merlin: I appreciate it.
Merlin: Even if you're not being truthful, I appreciate it.
Merlin: I'm just saying, you know.
Merlin: You should watch some of these painting videos.
Merlin: You understand.
Merlin: Leonardo understood shit.
Merlin: This is also just a good video if you're like, what's the big deal about Leonardo da Vinci?
Merlin: Because holy fucking shit.
Merlin: Because, you know, he used to take bodies apart.
Merlin: He would go into the morgue and figure out.
Merlin: So he figured out how a smile works.
Merlin: Hmm.
John: with the muscles can i spoil this video for you know merlin yes so much fewer so many fewer muscles to smile you know this you've cut open some faces it does to frown well you know my he learned how to turn it upside down that was leonardo that came up with my father was diabolical and he he used a razor blade he said why so sad and then oh i remember
John: And I was like, oh, oh no.
John: Some people just want to watch the world burn.
Merlin: Yeah, and you pull out a pencil and put it on the desk.
Merlin: Yeah, I was like, hmm.
Merlin: But there's all this crazy shit of they've gone in and they'll do infrareds on all of these.
Merlin: This channel's just terrific.
Merlin: I won't link to it here.
Merlin: I'll link to it.
Merlin: Maybe I'll mess it on.
Merlin: Who cares?
Merlin: But like you do infrareds, you do different things.
Merlin: You can see like cross sections.
Merlin: But one thing is like a very novel way.
Merlin: If you've ever seen like watch Bob Ross paintings, you know the unusual way he does wet painting that's different from a way along.
Merlin: So he starts out with these layers of like white and the super white.
Merlin: And why does he do that?
Merlin: Well, he does that because then
Merlin: he understood the translucency of these paints.
Merlin: So technically they're, I guess they're stains, but like whatever.
Merlin: He puts paint on things, but he knew that light could pass through and bounce back.
Merlin: He understood this stuff about optics.
Merlin: But here's the really wild one.
Merlin: The smile thing is fucking crazy.
Merlin: But what it comes down to is his research into optics helped him understand something that I think would not be, quote, real science for a while.
Merlin: But he understood that when you look at, you have kind of a couple different kinds of vision.
Merlin: You know, you've got your macular part and you've got the other one.
Merlin: There's your peripheral vision and then your vision when you're focusing on something.
Merlin: Why is Mona Lisa's smile so interesting to people for hundreds of years?
Merlin: If you look at her eyes and look at her mouth,
Merlin: If you look at her eyes, it looks like she's smiling.
Merlin: And if you look at her mouth, it looks like she's not smiling.
Merlin: Also, the background has a slight difference in the horizon that causes your brain to compensate for a difference in horizon that practically makes it look animated.
Merlin: And I never heard that explanation of the Mona Lisa smile part.
Merlin: First of all, he understood how to paint something where the smile would look the way he wanted it to look.
Merlin: But if you just zoom in and stare at her mouth with the slightly downturned corners, it doesn't really look like a smile.
Merlin: Your brain
Merlin: is turning that into magic.
Merlin: And he understood something about that that other people from his time didn't.
Merlin: And somebody from my time didn't understand until last night.
Merlin: I'm like, I'll take it.
Merlin: Like, is there any greater example in Western culture of something that has become the symbol of like, you're so overexposed to this that you no longer see why people used to think it was great?
Merlin: Literally, the Mona Lisa is that example.
Merlin: You use that as the referent to say, like, this is the Mona Lisa of something.
Merlin: But then once you learn that, yeah, the reason people are interested in that and couldn't explain why is because of the physiology of your personal optics seeing things that aren't there.
Merlin: Why do the eyes follow you is a pretty common trick for the time.
Merlin: But all that stuff comes out of his entire, he was pretty old when he made the Mona Lisa.
Merlin: And it was before we even get into why isn't she wearing fancy clothes?
Merlin: Why isn't she wearing jewelry?
Merlin: Why are her hands like that?
Merlin: But like just in terms of like the science that he had accumulated on his own at that time is what made that painting possible.
Merlin: That tiny little dumb painting of a woman.
Merlin: And like I'll take all of that.
Merlin: I will take all that con gusto.
Merlin: Like I will find a place for all of that.
Merlin: I wasn't expecting to talk about it today and I don't know if it'll interest anybody.
Merlin: But it sure does interest me.
John: My feeling about what, I see a lot of, obviously, one of the favorite things for Gen X to do right now is to say, boy, things are a lot different than when we were kids.
John: And I think, and then there's the inevitable kind of response to that of like, okay, boomer or whatever.
John: And I think the implication of a lot of the pushback on, or not pushback, just snark directed at that kind of comment.
John: Eye rolling at the least.
John: Is that we're criticizing the youth
John: right we're saying oh things were different when we were kids and today's world sucks and it's because of young people but young people who don't get it young people who don't get it and keep fucking it up yeah yeah and i i was thinking about it the other day and i and i realized no it's really the opposite i'm when when i say things were different when we were kids i'm talking about when i was a kid and
John: I had no hand in making that world.
John: I was just a kid in it.
John: You didn't get to pick.
Merlin: You were a vessel.
Merlin: We were all vessels.
Merlin: And we did not get to pick what was poured into us by anybody.
John: So kids today are living in a world that is being, if I have a critique about the modern world, it's not the kid's fault.
John: I have a critique about the modern world that we have made.
John: We were bequeathed a world, and we are the ones that squandered it.
John: And I'm not talking about student loans and all that fucking shit.
John: No, I know.
Merlin: I know what you mean.
Merlin: I know what you mean, and I understand your need to add that rejoinder.
Merlin: Yeah, right.
Merlin: Exactly.
Merlin: Listen, listen, listen.
Merlin: I know things are bad.
John: Boy, a mortgage payment.
John: Oh, are you kidding me?
John: Oh, wow.
John: What I'm saying is when we were kids, right, and a grown-up walked in the room and their leather-soled shoes went tap, tap, tap.
John: And you sat at the dinner table and they talked about things you didn't fully understand as though they knew it.
John: My dad couldn't have told you, couldn't have understood the periodic table.
John: I mean, he could have understood it, but he didn't know the periodic table.
John: But when you talk to him about advances in chemistry, he was curious.
John: He read that article.
John: And from then on, you could say things like, well, you know, it turns out that isotope does this and he would follow.
John: And that was a world that we inherited.
Merlin: But your brain has been, it takes practice.
Merlin: You have to take your brain to the gym.
Merlin: You've got to keep taking it into places where there are things that you don't already know.
Merlin: Or even more saliently, things where you don't think you know it.
Merlin: You know what I mean?
Merlin: You've got to be open to this idea that the world is not done.
Merlin: And I am not done.
John: Well, you have to share that, though.
John: Like we're living in a very siloed world where we find these things out and then we sit and I don't know what we do with them.
John: Like, do we share them with our kids?
John: Do we talk to them around the water cooler?
John: There is no water cooler.
John: But we're very much living and we predicted this 20 years ago.
John: where we said, oh, the Internet's going to be great, and it's going to give us all really curated feeds, so we're only going to have to read the news that we want, and we're only going to have to spend time with the ideas that we want.
John: And I think even 20 years ago, we could have predicted, 25 years ago, we could have seen the dystopian side of that and said, well, this is bad if everybody just gets the news that they want.
Merlin: Especially if there's a financial incentive in getting people more dug in,
Merlin: Not even just politically, but for whatever it is where you're constantly being reminded that your priors are correct.
John: Even if there isn't, even if it's just demagoguery, even if there's nothing to do with money, then you put money on it and it gets really sinister.
John: But even if it's just all the people over here and all the people over there, it's not the same as the other voice about the internet back then, which was, this is going to bring us all together.
John: Like they're opposite ideas.
John: But as soon as you start making playlists and not sharing them, I guess, basically, you're becoming more and more internal.
John: It's becoming more and more.
Merlin: Literally, while you're talking, I literally just made a playlist of these painting videos to put on the internet.
John: Because I can't stop.
Merlin: Say what?
Merlin: You're sharing them.
Merlin: Oh, it's, like, look at this, look at this, look at this.
Merlin: I mean, like... Yeah, and that is the world that we grew up in.
Merlin: Except in my case, it's not a beheading video.
Merlin: Right.
Merlin: You know, it's learning about why these two rich people, actually, this wife is dead, and you wouldn't know, and also he used a single-strand brush to paint the life of Christ in the background.
Merlin: Like, what?
Merlin: How does... I want everyone to know about this.
Merlin: This existed.
Merlin: This was crazy.
Right?
John: Yeah.
John: Right.
John: I mean... What used to happen...
John: was that there was a shared culture, I guess, is what it comes down to.
John: And kids didn't have to independently pick and choose every item on the buffet and create a world for themselves.
John: We were handed a world.
Merlin: To use your analogy, it was more pre-fee, like a fixed price.
Merlin: You come in and here's what the courses are and how much it costs and sit down and enjoy your meal.
John: And there was a lot of talk in the course of our lifetimes of that being elitist or inaccessible to everyone.
John: Oh, getting into issues of the canon and the great man and that kind of thing?
John: Yeah.
John: And rightfully so.
John: And it's another form of presentism.
John: And I don't mean past-looking presentism.
John: I mean future-looking presentism.
John: Where where we said, oh, we have to dismantle this.
John: We have to dismantle it in order to in order to create a world that's more inclusive in it and and is more useful to everybody.
John: But we didn't understand what we were dismantling.
John: And adding technology into it.
John: So we're dismantling it and also adding technology of kind of infinite access to information.
John: And now we're all living in tiny, tiny, tiny little bubbles.
John: And there isn't any kind of shared adulthood.
John: This is what I'm talking about.
John: It's not a shared cultural life.
John: It's that there's no model for adulthood.
John: I was at the swimming pool the other day and looking at the grownups around the pool.
John: You know, I have, I have 50 grownups to choose from looking around the pool.
John: And these are middle-class suburbanites, right?
John: And their kids are in the pool, and I'm looking at them, and I go, there's not an adult here.
John: All of the men here are dressed like little boys.
John: They're all wearing branded sports clothes and baseball hats on backwards with sunglasses perched on top of the hat.
John: And all of the women are dressed like little girls, basically.
John: And nobody here is a serious person.
John: Like, no one here... If I were a kid, if I were a 10-year-old, and looked at these grown-ups, I would see no reason to want to be an adult.
John: Because all of the good things that they have are the same good things that I have as a kid.
Merlin: There's nothing you're denied...
Merlin: About that.
Merlin: It's like your dad can wear denim shorts just like yeah, right?
John: Well, and not only that he's allowed to look at his phone all the time and and childhood I mean he what what you bond with your dad doing is you both sit down and play fortnight together Like the only difference is that your dad has to work and your dad has to go At pay bills and your dad is somehow stressed about stuff like adulthood Does not look appealing to kids
John: in a way that adulthood looked incredibly appealing to us.
John: Not that it wasn't hard.
John: It looked weird and scary, but it looked like another world.
Merlin: To me, it mostly looked, honestly, it mostly looked boring, but inside of that thing that was mostly boring was a lot of opportunities and, honestly, freedom that I couldn't even imagine.
John: Right, right.
John: And what it definitely wasn't was just childhood prolonged.
John: Like it was utterly different.
John: You know, there was no thing about adulthood that was just childhood with a hat on.
John: It was that as you grow up, you leave behind childish things.
John: You become like a functioning person in the world and not somebody who's just trying to remain a boy.
John: Yeah.
John: and just trying to um instead of just being a an affluent confident super teenager yeah exactly or even affluent and in and not confident teenager and i think that lack of confidence is part of the issue but when i was looking at that group of people i realized and i feel like generation x played a big role in this we that's us right yeah that's us okay we rebelled against adulthood
John: and and felt like that was alt and edgy like we're not we're not gonna be like your you know man your adulthood trip or whatever and we were the i think the first gen because the boomers whatever sucked all their air out of the room and we've all talked about that a thousand times but we were really the first ones to say we're just opting out completely we're not even rebelling
John: with a with an alternative plan we're just not playing and we're the ones i think that introduced uh introduced the set of cascading uh no thankss that resulted in everybody wearing pajama pants it was just and again unforeseen consequences
John: Unforeseen consequences.
John: You know, like, well, you know, ties are just restrictive, uncomfortable.
John: I call it a noose.
John: You know, it's a noose, man.
John: It's like social restriction and blah, blah, blah.
John: And so we're going to do away with those.
John: And then it's like, well, you know, like long sleeves or whatever, like a collar on your shirt.
John: Like, why can't I wear a T-shirt with three wolves howling at the moon to my job?
John: Because it's not, you know, public faith.
John: They fear the truth.
John: yeah like why do I have to wear a waistband like why can't it just be a drawstring and at each level we thought that was a freedom we were freedom fighters like oh we're fighting for comfort and freedom and it's just like don't you want to put your feet up on the bulkhead your bare feet don't you want to be able to do that and what we could never have foreseen is like the next generation of kids goes well so what is their
John: Why would what is there about growing up?
John: That's if I'm just going to be in pajamas, except I'm going to be like fatter and have to work harder.
John: What?
John: Yeah.
John: Why can't I just stay here?
John: Why can't I?
John: And that's why we've got all these kids that are like, I'm going to make a living as a YouTube creator.
John: Yeah.
John: And some of them will, of course, you know, God bless them.
John: I love large numbers.
John: There's got to be some of them.
John: They got to be coming from somewhere.
John: That's right, because there's an infinite number of... I mean, every day I go on Instagram and there's some 20-year-old that can play guitar better than anyone I ever saw.
John: And I'm like, I would be watching this and learning something if you weren't so over my head that there was... I mean, there is nothing I can learn from you because your starting point...
John: is so far you feel kind of silly though when there's like a 15 year old japanese girl who can do like steve vai solos it's kind of depressing i mean it it makes you at one level it's kind of a confirmation of all that stuff we used to say like you only use 10 of your brain and it turns out i mean if she can do it then someone in czarist russia could have done it it just hadn't been invented i mean look at the four minute mile
Merlin: I mean, I don't know if it's the same thing.
Merlin: It's definitely a similar thing where there was just it was just understood for, I think, at least decades that it was not possible for a person to run fairly run a mile in less than four minutes.
Merlin: And then it happened.
Merlin: And now, flash forward, I know this is a fact lots of people have heard before, but now there's all kinds of records that stood forever until somebody broke that record.
Merlin: And then suddenly people are doing it even faster.
Merlin: That's weird.
Merlin: Is the existence of that belief that caused it?
Merlin: Probably not, but kind of.
Merlin: I've said that to me personally, super personally, one of the most dispiriting things about growing up in Florida was the horizons that had been provided to me.
Merlin: Let's talk about the guardrails or the vistas.
Merlin: Just that idea, and I don't mean to bag on anybody in particular, because I'm banging on everybody, because that was the culture.
Merlin: The culture is that this is what you can expect life to be.
Merlin: And I had not had that much exposure to people saying, well, not only is that not how life can be, but let me put it even better for you.
Merlin: Here's seven different versions of how life could be.
Merlin: And that's not something that...
Merlin: i got until i did go alt and did go look beyond what was at the mall and you know take it any way you want but like that i do think there's something to that where if everybody tells you the four minute mile can't be broken like why would you even put your shoes on well and that is what alt did for me too because no one could have predicted the spanish inquisition with the spanish inquisition in this case i watched a video about that too
John: That feeds into Hieronymus Bosch.
John: About the Spanish Inquisition or about Monty Python doing the Spanish Inquisition?
John: Are you talking about the comfy cushions?
John: But the fact is that I came out of high school, because somebody, I was talking about this with somebody the other day, where they had made some comment to the effect of, well, somebody with your skills, it was inevitable that you would be a success.
John: I love what people think is inevitable.
John: And this is the thing about inevitability.
John: At any point in my life.
John: Nothing is inevitable.
John: No.
John: Stop telling people anything is inevitable.
John: Up until you and I started doing this podcast and even passed it, right?
John: Until 2015.
John: It was at no point in my life inevitable that I would not end up living in a tent.
John: I wasn't sure which way you were going to go, and I like the way you went.
John: Oh, John, you've arrived.
John: Most people felt like I had all the signs of one of those.
John: It's an archetype of people.
John: One of those bright, precocious kids who can't.
John: can't conform and flames out early and becomes a drunk and then you know ends up being a bitter drunk who dies at 50 like every sign pointed that i was going to be one of those people for well from the time i was 13 to the time i was 33 and
John: and at no point and i knew so many creative people better musicians than me smarter people than me you know beautiful people who could really dance lovely movers and i always felt like i was just you know just running in their in their exhaust
John: You were paradising in their wake.
John: I was paradising in their wake.
John: There was no point at which it was inevitable that I would be any kind of success, let alone what, you know.
Merlin: People who say that that are trying to sound encouraging, it's not.
Merlin: It's really not encouraging.
Merlin: It's just dumb.
Merlin: And then once you're old enough to realize that you're like, I fucking hate everybody who told me anything was inevitable.
John: But here's where we are.
Merlin: So pointless.
John: I'm talking about presentism.
John: Jesus Christ.
John: There's no way that a guidance counselor or a supportive friend in 1994 could have looked at you or me and said, oh, well, don't worry.
John: By the time you're in your mid-50s, you'll have...
John: you'll be making a living talking to your friend on the phone on a computer other people will be listening like you do it on your computer they'll listen on the on your computer and for a while that'll be a way you it sounds way more insane than saying i'm going to be a youtube uh influencer you know like at least we all know what a youtube influencer is supposed to convey at that at that point people would be like
John: What?
John: I would have said, you mean on a radio?
John: Like I'd be a disc jockey?
Merlin: This was so relevant for me and my pals in college.
Merlin: I realized it fairly quickly within a couple years.
Merlin: I mean, I don't mean to take off topic, but I think it's germane.
Merlin: Is that we all went, me and my pals all went into college and somewhere or another wanting to be a writer.
Merlin: Or maybe an achomedition.
Merlin: Achomedition, yeah.
Merlin: In a bastic.
Merlin: In a bastic of some kind.
Merlin: But what we all discovered in kind of an interesting – it's not – it is neither inevitable nor unpredictable.
Merlin: But like most of us were in what was then called new media.
Merlin: Some of my friends were working on CD-ROMs and CDIs.
Merlin: Some of my friends were building web applications.
Merlin: I was a web designer.
Merlin: And yeah, I continued to, but I wrote for the places where I did their website too.
Merlin: And like, well, what's the web?
Merlin: Ask me what the web is in 1992.
Merlin: There was no web.
Merlin: You know, it's like it would be like everybody going to trade school and then coming out on the other side.
Merlin: I don't know.
John: With a new kind of carpentry that didn't exist before.
Merlin: Kind of.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: It's like I know so much.
Merlin: This is an old joke at this point.
Merlin: I've been saying this for 25 years.
Merlin: Almost everybody I know has a job that didn't exist when they went to college.
John: That's it.
Merlin: That's it.
Merlin: And I think that is a little bit different than being an artisan in the 1600s.
John: Well, it is.
John: And here's why it's a drag.
John: Why it was a drag when we were teenagers is because that wasn't a value-neutral idea.
John: Which part?
John: Well, we're all doing something that didn't exist back then.
John: But at the time, the presentism of that time...
John: was that that you're going to fail that you are that you're not just going to fail that you are currently a failure oh that you're you're basically staking your i'm going to put it in a dumb way that somebody from a boomer might is like you're staking your entire future on a career that doesn't really exist well no we didn't even know that we were doing that there was no career that didn't exist yet so we were i mean i was just like throwing lawn darts at at a baby
John: and not even realizing I was doing that.
John: I was just trying to get out from under people screaming at me.
John: I mean, this was partly I was thinking about this.
Merlin: I hate how much I agree with that.
Merlin: I despise how much I absolutely agree with that.
Merlin: Like, just how much of my entire use was just people telling me I was doing it wrong, even as I was obsessed with every single minute of my life trying to please the people who would always tell me I did it wrong.
Merlin: They thought they were helping me.
Merlin: It didn't matter if I was doing it wrong.
Merlin: It was more important to them than I just be told that I was always doing it wrong because that's how you adulted back then.
John: And this is going to sound to an acute listener like I'm contradicting myself, right?
John: That there was an adulthood back then that was a great thing that somehow I had squandered, but at the same time it was that same adulthood that was telling me I was going to be a failure and that there was no possibility for me to find a creative life.
John: Does that seem confusing?
John: Welcome to the club.
John: And that is, that is like a contradiction, internal contradiction in this because both, and I don't necessarily think that the, that the latter necessarily followed from the former, right?
John: That there was an adulthood I wanted to join and I am actually a member of it now.
John: And I don't think that pajama pants were necessary for me to have survived and succeeded, right?
John: But the thing is, if 80% of our listeners right now are listening in pajama pants and they're like, actually, bro, I wouldn't be listening if I was wearing wood-soled shoes or whatever the hell it is you're singing about.
John: Or wooden pants.
John: Or wooden pants, you know, that maybe I am caught in it.
John: Wooden pants are inevitable.
John: I'm caught in some gyre where it's like, well, I have all this feeling that adults used to be so...
John: Formidable.
Merlin: I was so successful until I bought Ugg boots.
John: And, you know, and now I'm sitting here like, well, let me tell you, kids.
John: Yeah.
John: Once upon a time, clocks had hands.
Merlin: Oh, clocks.
Merlin: Hands.
Merlin: Clocks.
Merlin: New York City.
Merlin: Oh, should I hit the bell?
John: I don't know.
John: Were you going to hit the bell?
John: It sounded very bell-hitty.
Merlin: Yeah, it is.
Merlin: Should we do a second take?
John: Okay.
Merlin: What in pants?
John: New York City.
John: I missed the rope.
John: Oh, fuck.
John: All right.
Merlin: Thanks, John.
Merlin: All right.
Merlin: Good.
Merlin: Looking over God's shoulder.