Ep. 122: "Parliament of the Moment"
Music.
Hello.
Hey John.
Hi Merlin.
How's it going?
Good.
How are you going?
I'm going.
It's early.
It's pretty early.
It's early.
Pretty early, but I'm living a new way.
I've got a whole new life, so I feel like this isn't even early for me anymore.
Wow.
Is this something you could talk about?
It's just like, come on, bring it.
Really?
I'm tired of being on the wrong side of history.
Oh.
Just like up, up, and going, and just living.
And you're achieving.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Oh, yeah.
Are you just dodging bullets?
Yeah.
No, I'm definitely not just putting out fires.
I am living in the now and in the past and in the future.
Oh, wow.
Yeah.
Wow.
Is it anything in particular that's led to this change?
It's just your schedule's gotten busy?
No, it's just, you know what it was?
It was just that I decided that every single...
book and pamphlet and website link that I had ever been given to a life improvement style philosophy.
I was just going to sit down over the course of a weekend.
I was just going to digest it all and implement it.
That's the best way to do it.
Yeah.
If you're going to let that stuff pile up, it's like the old New York Times or something.
You just want to really sit down and just really get through them.
Yeah.
Well, the thing is, a lot of the words are the same between philosophy.
So I was able to kind of go through and kind of like when you...
originally learned to do fractions, you know, you kind of cross off these sort of similar words.
Yeah, like when you're doing long division, you know, I still do stuff when I'm doing long division that I learned in third grade.
And I probably don't need to, but I feel like I'm doing better division if I show my work.
I feel that way, too, with a lot of stuff.
Although times tables, I'm very proud of having memorized my times tables a long time ago.
And so, you know, you'll never catch me rolling my eyes up to remember my times tables.
Six times seven.
Six times seven is 42.
I make a... You know, like there's a... And actually, six times seven was a very important...
equation.
If you took those, what would that be?
What would it be?
100 different multiplication problems that create the times tables, right?
So you figure you get, you know, if you look at like 1 times 2 and 2 times 2 and those, those are at the very far left end of the curve.
6 times 7, there was a very long tail.
7 times 8 and 6 times 7 both took me, those were like the last two that I learned.
I found them incredibly difficult.
Well, and so this is why 6 times 7 was so important to me, because 6 times 7 was the first one I learned.
Oh.
Because 42 is such a nice number, and 6 times 7 seems to be, you know, 6 times 7 just seems to produce nothing, right?
I mean, it's just like 6 is there, but 7 is a weird number.
What would you ever want to multiply in that way?
Like 7 half-dozens of eggs?
Yeah.
It seems pretty random.
Yeah, but that happens.
Like, okay, well, how many are in a bushel?
Six of them.
All right.
So how many do we have?
Seven of them.
I find myself doing that all the time.
Sure.
But six times seven was such an ungainly and awkward equation, produced such a beautiful number, 42, that it stood out in my head.
And so it was like, it was the linchpin.
It was the capstone.
Yeah.
Of my whole, well, no, that's the wrong way.
It shouldn't be a capstone.
Is it your gateway drug?
Capstone is the first one you, or is the last one you put in there.
It's not a keystone, then.
No, it's not a keystone.
I guess it would be a cornerstone.
Because I would, then I could work.
It's a metaphor, Rock.
I could work either direction from 42.
Right?
Because I knew six times seven.
So if you say, you know, seven times eight, I know, like, I can work from 42.
I work from 42 in either direction.
And it helped me, it helped me, you know, memorize that.
It was an arithmetical stake in the ground.
Yeah, that's right.
That's good.
Six times seven.
And so you had all this stuff.
Some of it was electronic.
I'm guessing a lot of it was things you've printed out probably since the early 2000s, things about leadership, inspiration, self-improvement.
People printed stuff out for me.
I don't typically print stuff out, even when I'm asked to print stuff out.
Yeah.
Because you're considering the environment?
Well, yeah.
And also it just seems like printers, really?
Fax machines?
God.
Seriously?
Are we still?
I remember when printers were described as being on the way out, currently obsolete.
in what was that probably 1990 90 yeah because the laser rider when the laser rider came out with the mac and you could have like a mac se 30 and a laser rider and you could make a production quality publication that was life-changing but it wasn't long before people going you know maybe we don't even know this production
Yeah.
Seems like we make a lot of paper.
Do you remember that?
Have you ever worked in an office where you would just get, everybody in the office got the same, like, 30 sheets of paper every day?
I used to work at Piper Jaffrey, which was an investment company.
Oh, and they had, like, a whole floor of paper, did you say?
Multiple floors.
Their office was in a building in downtown Seattle that was designed by the same guy who designed the World Trade Center.
Okay.
and it was like a proto-World Trade Center.
This building was built in the mid-60s, and it's a much smaller sort of, you know, like, archetype of that style, of concrete construction.
And if you look at it, knowing that it was designed by the same guy, it kind of takes your breath away.
You're like, oh, my God, it is sort of like a little World Trade Center.
And...
The top three floors of this building, which should be the most expensive offices in it, and could be some of the nicest offices in downtown Seattle, are... The windows are papered over, and it's just full of boxes of papers of long-ago business transactions.
But the whole...
The whole reason we were encouraged to start using computers was that they were going to do away with paper.
And now I get five emails a week from people saying, well, print this out, fill it out, then fax it back.
Oh, my God, John.
Go die.
Go die.
I would rather not do the job.
I would rather not get paid the money.
Let's say what it is.
It's how anytime there's a relationship that will involve money, you're going to have to send almost always, especially with large institutions and organizations, you almost always have to send them like three pieces of paper.
Mm-hmm.
always but you know what's weird though is if i think back to that time and i was working in an office i was making um mostly by the time i was well in the early mid 90s i was making a lot of courtroom exhibits that we would print out sometimes on a very costly color printer but but the truth was like nothing felt real like nobody could relax until it had printed out in multiple copies
It wasn't real yet.
It wasn't a thing.
It didn't matter that we were doing – I'd set up automated backups and stuff like that.
It didn't matter.
It didn't exist until it was something you could put in a FedEx envelope.
Well, and as you know, I mean, it's a cliche to say, but as I was going through my dad's papers, probably a refrigerator box full of paper.
Receipt, school photo.
Well, that, sure.
But then at the top, you know, the kind of gibberish that used to be at the top of every email you printed out.
And then it would be like, hi, honey, how are you?
I've just been thinking about you.
Okay, write me when you can.
And he's, like, printing out emails.
Not just the emails that he receives, but, like, also printing out his part of the email.
And, you know, in emails he'd get back, like, everything's good, Dad.
Talk to you soon.
It's just like, wow, you're printing these out.
And partly it's he's printing it out because...
uh he wants to have a record but i think a big part of it was it wasn't real it wasn't real until i mean he'd look at it on the computer screen he'd be like what uh yeah i mean not to put too fine a point on it but i think for a lot of people i when i was working at a dot-com i told you the story about our cto there who thought that i should invent email attachments because that would be a neat idea he was completely backward he knew nothing he didn't know the scroll wheel on his mouse confused him i've told you about this guy
And he basically – I think his workflow was a common workflow in the late 90s, which was the same way that today we would read email and you might flag it or you might – if you're me, you turn that into like an action somewhere else.
That's a tip.
Anything you printed out was something that you either had to read or you had to do something about.
And that's the way you did your email.
Anytime you got to – for old people, when you got to an email, you actually had to do something about it.
You printed it out.
Print it out.
Otherwise, it wasn't real.
Right.
Right.
Didn't you post a thing, didn't you post a, I might be misremembering this, but did you post something with your dad's letter to the car dealership about his last payment on a car?
Oh, I don't think that was me.
Was that you?
No, I think that might have been, maybe that was Dan Benjamin.
Could be.
I like when people post those kinds of things.
I love that ephemera.
I have a lot of that stuff, but I think a lot of my dad's correspondence is still protected under some sort of lawyer-client privilege.
I imagine under various transit laws, intelligence.
But I'm telling you, I've decided to adopt all principles of self-improvement.
I'm so excited to hear about this.
Yeah, and one of them is just like, I just woke up at the crack of dawn this morning.
I made a blender of raw eggs.
Yeah, then I ran around Lake Washington.
You ran up to that museum in Philadelphia.
Pumped my fist in the air, and then I started immediately writing the best work of my life.
And all it took was that one weekend of reviewing those materials.
Yeah, and now here I am
At a time that formerly would have been pretty daunting to me, I've already done so much today.
Wow.
Yeah.
And, you know, I'm thinking about getting married.
There's a lot.
I mean, you know, I'm not just thinking about it, but I think I'm over the hump on it.
I feel like.
Do you have anybody in mind?
You know, I read a lot of stuff that said that married people are happier.
Yes.
And so.
You know, you live longer, John, if you're married.
You'll take fewer risks.
Seemed like a thing that had, you know, up until just a little while ago, I was pretty anti-marriage, but now I'm.
I'm reevaluating.
I'm reevaluating a lot.
I would love to hear about all of this.
Seeing all of that at one time in one place lets a lot of that deep data really sink in.
Whereas if you're eating a piecemeal throughout the month, just a little nibble here, nibble there.
But you really sat down.
You're an information trencherman.
You sat down and said, love reign over me.
Tell me, what should I do?
That's right.
I went into the tank.
I went into the tank and now the formaldehyde of self-knowledge
has permeated all my cells wow so you're getting up early you might get married you're gonna here's here's the problem here's the problem a lot of these books lead me to the inescapable conclusion that i need to log off oh you mean the internet i need to log off the internet because of productivity
Well, because of productivity and because of spiritual cleanliness.
You know, it's not just enough to not read the comment section because the internet has become a comment section.
The entire internet is.
And so to avoid the comments page, you have to avoid everything.
I mean, I remember just it was not a couple of years ago that I felt like a genius because I was getting my news from Twitter.
And it was a thousand times better than getting my news from the news.
But now Twitter is the news.
Yeah.
It's the same news and you feel the same bad way.
And yet you're it's like it's like the new it's like I've reverted all the way back to that era when people couldn't take their eyes off of CNN.
Oh, yeah.
Remember when Headline News – I remember I was living with my horrible stepfather when Headline News got popular.
And he would just leave – he would sit there in a chair and watch the 30-minute summary of the news all day long.
Yeah.
And every half hour, they would add one little new –
Not even a new bit, but like sometimes just a word to the scroll that one word would change.
Like instead of pending, it would say, you know, it would say something else.
Yeah, no.
I'm not that awake.
It's a pretty long time ago also.
No, but you're right.
And now, I mean, you still see that today.
You go to an airport.
It's just wall-to-wall CNN.
I don't know who that's for.
I really don't know who that's for.
Well, but unfortunately now Twitter has become this.
Like whatever the news it is that Twitter has decided is the important news, which sometimes Twitter still is very proud of itself when what it decides is the news is not the same as what CNN decides is the news.
Sometimes it does a pretty good job.
And it does an amazing job.
Especially at first.
Except now it's doing an amazing job and I am back as a person watching the freaking news, which is not a person I want to be.
I don't want to follow the news closely.
Following the news closely does not produce happiness or productivity.
Was that in your papers, John?
The things you read there?
It sure wasn't.
Some of these things predate Twitter, but they were telling me stuff about the news that I had to reflect and realize that it applies now.
The magnetism of constant news updates seems to be inescapable for anything.
Remember, like, oh, there was such promise on the internet.
God, it had such promise.
Yeah.
Or it's going to be analysis.
And there is.
Still, Twitter is better because you get 100 voices and you can put together an analysis.
But still, the cult is chase the news, chase the updates.
And it's just not good for a person.
It's not good for one person.
I can't tell how serious you're being, so I'm going to act like you're being a little bit serious.
I used to have a habit.
This is a terrific example of life hacks gone awry.
One of the things that I would do, probably starting in the early 2000s, whatever the point was that you could have tabs, I had a tab set where with one command click, it would open six different news sites in a window.
And then I'd just scroll through each one and look at all of them.
But it's so strange how all it took,
to create six tabs of information was me hitting the little, you know, splat key and clicking.
And I could have 35 minutes of sadness and irresolution in my life.
They would only be slaked by going back a few minutes later and doing exactly the same thing again.
Yeah.
Not unlike my email inbox, but that's a different show.
I feel like if...
If all the news I got was delivered once a month in a brown package wrapped with white string along with some other staples... Like eggs and milk?
Some eggs and milk, some lard...
Oh, God, I love that service.
Eggs, milk, lard, salt, a rasher of bacon.
The office supply store should rebrand as Staples.
Staples, we bring you absolutely the basic shit you need once a month.
Staples should just start calling themselves Staples.
And actually sell staples.
And when you go in there and say, what's up with the news?
It's actually not that much new.
Just get back to work.
You know what they could do?
They could wrap the lard and sugar and bacon and coffee in the news.
You read the wrapper.
Yeah.
Like a bazooka Joe.
You get there.
You open it up.
You're putting your stuff in your dugout cooler underneath your cabin.
And then you're like, oh, look at this.
Holy cow.
The Japanese bomb Pearl Harbor.
And that is about as current as you need to be.
Every two weeks, every month, if you just got a roundup,
But you want to keep your anger fresh.
I so don't.
I want my anger to be so stale.
I want it to be the stalest thing in my cupboard.
Oh, man.
I'm stoking it all the time.
And not only am I stoking the anger, but I'm stoking confusing emotions in me.
Right.
Where it's like, oh, there's so many opinions.
It's not healthy to see that many opinions, I guess is what it is.
You know, we like to think, oh, the more opinions you get, the more well-rounded your eventual take on things will be.
But in fact, like...
The more polemical opinions you read, the more it feels like, well, all opinions are equally dumb.
All opinions are equally unfounded.
And maybe partly also they're ultimately somewhat recently updated.
It's not an opinion of five years.
Oh, right.
It's an opinion on this one or two degree change in something hopeless, not hopeless, but something that's really awful that I can't personally do very much about today.
But me getting that, you know, it also has this self-selecting bias of making you more and more, even I think unconsciously, seek out the little sub-tunnel that goes to the stuff that you agree with or that makes you feel angry in the way that makes you happy.
Well, this is the thing.
I mean,
How do you feel about killing babies?
The ones that deserve it or the white ones?
See, there you go.
You've just opened up a can of worms that I set there on purpose.
Yeah.
And the can of worms said, Merlin, do not open.
And you opened it immediately.
I did.
You know what?
I didn't even read the label.
Which babies?
I mean, good babies?
Bad babies?
But the concept of killing babies is such like a universal, galvanizing, flaming sword.
And it fits into a tweet so well.
Killing babies is bad.
Send.
And, you know, I look out the window.
I look out the window and I scan across the city.
And I think about all the dead babies through history.
So many dead babies.
Really?
Like, you know, pallets of them.
Oh, God.
And you go, is that really a thing that I'm going to have motivate me in a day?
Like, to prevent it, to think about it at all?
Not to say that to avoid thinking about it is good, but just like...
Yeah, I think – I'm going to get you off dead babies for a second.
Thank you.
I remember feeling this feeling when I had been away and on my own and fancy for a while, and then you go spend some time with your relatives.
You were fancy.
Well, you know, and you get to – you go and you read books and you look at Harper's and stuff and think you've got it going on.
But I just, you know, it always, whenever I would go back home, and I don't mean to make people sound provincial and unfancy, but it always really struck me how much, and this is so not part of my universe, but I think it's a lot of people's universe, like watching the local news at night.
It's something like all old people did when I was a kid.
It was something my family did.
You'd always watch the local news, then you'd watch the national news.
And now today, like I kind of...
can't even fathom having been out of that particular pallet of babies for a while going back to it and just seeing like how how awful on every level the reporting is not only awful in terms of the subject matter but also how it's presented and how narrowly it's presented and basically if you got your impression about life from watching your own local news you would understand that there's a 50 chance of rain and society is falling apart
Every night all you get is this new thing about like – you get a really clouded idea of how often a given thing happens.
And let's be honest, you could keep seeing the same mugshot of black guys who supposedly stabbed somebody or whatever.
Or a young person in a parka standing in a dark parking lot with a microphone telling you about an apartment fire where like four grandmothers and a cat died.
And it's like, that is not essential information.
It just stokes a thing in me.
It is meant to stoke a thing in us where we feel on the verge of catastrophe at all times.
Oh, God, yes.
I do not want to know about the latest apartment fire.
I just don't need to.
And...
And as an empathetic person, I need to make sure that the empathy is channeled in the right direction.
You know what I mean?
What that is doing is it's opening the spigot on my...
on my empathy maple and it's letting the empathy syrup drip drip drip drip drip onto the forest floor and where it does nothing i am not collecting it in a bucket and i am not making and i'm not putting it over delicious pancakes i'm just dripping my empathy syrup on the forest floor it's not it's not what i want anyway so i am worried i'm very worried
But I'm worried that all of the self-help manuals that I have digested in the last weekend point to the inescapable conclusion that maybe the best thing, best practices are to, for someone like me, it's to log off.
And if I were someone who was not given to abuse of substances...
Maybe I could be someone who did not abuse the internet substance.
Oh, yeah.
But I am a substance abuser, and the internet is another thing that I can't... You know, because lately I've been asking myself the question.
I'm sitting there, I'm staring at my phone, the world is going by, my child is growing up, the water is boiling over on the stove...
And I'm staring at my phone.
And there's a voice in my head that's conscious of it and is saying, look at you.
Look at you.
You're sitting here staring at your phone.
You know, things are going awry.
And the other voice, the retorting voice says, well, what would you have me do?
Not look at my phone?
That seems irresponsible.
Yeah.
Right.
And I don't have an answer for it.
If I'm living in this world where I'm a part of social media, where I perceive that that's important to my career or important to my self-expression or my sense of belonging, then yeah, what would you have me do?
Not look at my phone?
It's impossible.
Right.
And so I had to go a step back and say, like, well, what has Facebook done for me lately?
And then, oof, I didn't have an answer, Merlin.
What has Facebook done for you lately?
You don't even go on there.
I deactivated my account a few years ago.
And so what do you think?
You tell me.
What do you think would happen to me if I stopped going on Twitter?
Just stopped.
Oh, I mean, as we record this, it's a Monday.
I know you've had a lot of knowledge come at you in the last... Are you really up for this?
All weekend long, I've been reading, reading, reading, and my brain is open.
Yeah.
My synapses are open.
I want some of that patented hot dogs, ladies, computer-thinky wisdom.
Yes, yes, fecundity.
Culture-thinky wisdom.
Yes.
That's what I do.
I know.
I relish these talks.
Well, I got a couple thoughts.
You know, one thing I want to toss out, you used to work at a newsstand.
I heard in a recent interview you worked there for three years, did you say?
Maybe longer.
My newsstand job was the longest job I ever had.
But back in those days or even today, you ever pick up a copy of The Economist?
I used to subscribe to The Economist.
Now, I'm not here – now, I understand even mentioning the name of a magazine, we're going to get into bias or whatever.
But whenever people preach or advise at me about the importance of staying informed –
via, you know, forcing a fire hose into your mouth for 18 hours a day.
I'm always tempted to say, you know, in the past when I felt like I wanted to stay informed, one of the best things I think a person can do, this is not necessarily for you, but this has helped me, is to do exactly what you're saying, which is to spend less time seeking out news sources that are basically about what's changed in the last 12 hours.
Yeah.
And I don't know.
I think it's real old guy thinking, I guess, but find a source that you like.
One reason I like The Economist is that you can go through and you can read.
We've probably talked about this.
You can go through and read those first, whatever, half dozen pages, which has like a paragraph or two about what's happening all over the world.
And you should – I think what you might want to do, person, is even – The Economist is very Tory.
Yeah.
They're very pro-capitalist.
But with that said, it's – I mean the thing is you could also pick out which of like – do you read five different encyclopedias?
Well, no.
You read an encyclopedia enough to know what to look at next.
So whatever one's given sources, the reason I like that though is it is a way of going in and saying, wow, I didn't even know the name of this country in Africa and they're having a problem down there.
That's something I didn't hear about with the fire hose I had jammed in my mouth.
Well, right.
And The Economist is great for that because they do talk about the world.
It's a quickie.
The only reason I mention that, though, is that – and I'll take out my long knives – the people who are okay with unintentionally or unconsciously spending –
three to six hours a day consuming what's changed in news in the last few minutes or hours, I wonder if they could find the time to sit down once a week and read all the way through even just that digest of information.
Because that's a real test.
If you really care that much about what's going on in the world, why don't you sit down like a gentleman and find out what's actually going on in the world?
Yeah.
And that's not the only thing to do.
But I think that's a good place to start.
Because now, if you go and follow all of that stuff, that's what smart people do.
They look at different sources, but they also try to get at least a gloss on what's happening all over the place.
That's what smart people did.
Well, you look at, you know, look at even Clemenza.
Clemenza knew Hitler was a problem years before anybody else did.
You know what?
Listen, if you're going to need to make sauce for a bunch of guys...
What are you going to do?
You got a little meatball?
Yeah.
You know, some tomatoes?
You don't want the stick.
You know, but pay attention.
Yeah, I don't know.
I mean, I struggle with it because I've gone back and forth with, you know, in my location and my personal stuff was struggling with what you're saying.
And there's a school of thought that's all about unplugging the router.
Yeah.
which I think can be useful.
Like if you've got a deadline and you just need to make words on a page, that can be a good short-term thing.
And yeah, in some ways it's a little similar to a cold turkey with a substance.
But in the end, I think it's about sort of re-digging the road.
I almost think about a wagon wheel's ruts in the road and how hard it is to get out of any kind of habit like that.
I think you kind of have to learn to be mindful on your own that you're doing that.
is more than just the regular consumption of news.
This is a problem we've talked about before.
It's a problem that's kind of been... It was true even in the daily newspaper days.
If you got the daily newspaper, you would be reading the same... Watching the evening news, like we've said.
But what's happening... What's different about the Internet is that there is...
This semiotic discussion happening simultaneously.
Oh, yeah.
You know, and so it's not just that you're reading the daily news, it's that you're reading the daily news and then every single editorial column in the country...
Including a wide number of editorial columns from, like, the Nation of Islam and editorial columns from the Socialist Workers paper and editorial columns from...
Five or six written by high school students.
You know what I mean?
I'm having semiotic overload.
I do not want any more analysis.
I'm not getting anything out of it.
I don't feel like the ball is being advanced culturally.
by every single person having their anger, every single person expressing their doubts and confusion in the form of what they imagine is the real solution.
Right, an announcement.
Right.
Here are my doubts couched in the form of a pronoun.
Presented as like a monograph or a monologue.
Right.
And so that seems to be the thing I cannot avoid.
I turn on, I mean, I follow a,
really wide swath of people and thinkers.
I try to have a really wide ranging sort of balanced group of people that I'm following.
And so what that produces is a Twitter feed that's like
The Israelis are the most evil people who ever lived on the face of the earth.
They are just like Hitler.
So you're like at the worst, most argumentative party ever?
Yeah, and then absolutely the next tweet is like, the Palestinians are using children as shields.
And then the next one is like, did you ever notice that the Ukrainian government is infiltrated by Russian spies?
And then literally the next tweet is just like...
Russia has a right to maintain the integrity of our own borders.
And it's just like I'm reading all of the propaganda from every sect.
So it ends up almost being like you're almost finding yourself getting your information from amateur press releases.
And then every 15th one will be a professional press release that just seems to be like, in comparison, like incredibly mealy-mouthed and noncommittal.
And it's just like, oh my god, I don't want to be...
I do not want to be in the parliament of the moment.
You know?
I want to be in... I want to read the historical record.
I find that interesting.
And I want to sit in the Algonquin Hotel with a bunch of smart people and listen to their, like, witticisms about things.
But what I'm listening to is the Minister of Information...
Of one million sects.
Most of them are a sect of one or a sect of four or a sect of 40.
And I feel like... And then over on Facebook, of course, it's all of the ministers of information for a thousand different families I don't care about.
And so, anyway...
Again, it's two different baby problems.
You got pallets of babies on Twitter, and then you got literally thousands of photos of fresh babies on Facebook.
Fresh, happy babies.
Babies are kind of the linchpin here.
Yeah, babies which are being...
You're being shown that they are being swaddled in privilege, which you already know they're going to have to really confront later.
I look over on Facebook and it's like, look at all these babies swaddled in privilege.
And then I go over to Twitter and they're like, all these babies swaddled in privilege.
And it's like, I don't want to be a part of that conversation.
It's not interesting to me anymore.
And I thought it was.
That's what's crazy.
What can you add to that?
And what can you derive from it?
And this is why I feel like I need to log off.
Because I sit down and I try and write my own thing.
And I go, this is just, I'm just another person.
I'm just another person.
I don't want to be another person.
I have never been another person.
That's no good.
I am this person.
I am the person.
Not a person.
This happens mainly on your phone, right?
It happens mainly on my phone.
And one of the great things was I moved my desktop.
From my house to my office.
So at three o'clock in the morning, I am no longer sitting at my desk in my home.
Reading about firing pins or something.
Right.
Yeah, exactly.
Following, you know, like I, it's not as fun to sit on your phone and like read the biography of Wellington.
Yeah.
And so that, you know, moving my computer down to my office has been very healthy.
And it might be a thing where I go back to, you know, when I originally was on Twitter, I only did it from my desktop computer.
I didn't have, because I didn't have a smartphone, I just had a flip phone.
And, you know, it might be one of those, but you know what that feels like?
That feels like I only drink brown liquor, or I only drink...
beer on wednesdays or you know it feels like i know i know yeah no i get that the reason i say it is uh um i mean i think one first line of defense if you haven't already is to turn off as many notifications i don't have any notifications
All right.
Well, I find out every day how many people have notifications for things like at responses, and it kind of blows me away.
Yeah, I can't believe those people either.
And you know who they are because they reply to you instantly.
I know, I know.
Another thing you can do, this is a very low level, high level?
Silly life hack, which is the apps that you find yourself most attracted to, you might want to move that way off the front page.
It's not that much harder to get to, but if there's something that's what lawyers call an attractive nuisance, I find even something as simple as, for me, definitely taking it out of the dock.
you know the little shelf at the bottom and further to that taking it off of the home page further to that take it to a far away page and putting it all in a little folder i can still just as easily search for it but it's still more work than turning on my phone and hitting that button which is i maybe you're not like this but for me i'm like a little monkey when i when i hit that see that home screen it's i'm like a little um what like almost like a like a one-armed bandit you can see my little cylinders flipping around trying to figure which one of these distractions i should click on first
I very rarely click on the thing that lets me write something.
I'm more likely going to hit something like email or TweetBot or Twitter, you know, in my case.
That can help.
Here's what I click on on my phone.
Okay.
And this is, you know, and I've always been embarrassed about this.
I'm kind of embarrassed to share it.
But I go to, I turn on my phone, I look at my email.
And generally, I have a feeling of dread as the email's loading.
And then I go to Twitter.
And I generally have a kind of a mild feeling of dread as my at replies load.
Like which person is going to yell at me for something that I wrote two weeks ago.
Right.
And then that feeling of dread goes away when I read a bunch of like at replies that are trying to enlist me in some kind of hijinks.
But it's that like, oh God, don't have this be bad.
And then it's like, oh, this wasn't bad.
This was full of praise and this is great.
I have that like up and down.
And then I go over and I click on Facebook and almost half the time the app is slow to load or Facebook has some, you know, Facebook right now wants me to...
Yeah, and right now they want me to download their Messenger app, and I refuse to do it.
So I have this backlog of messages that people have sent me in Facebook that I cannot read.
Oh, my God.
Because Facebook insists that I download their thing.
I can't read it, and so I haven't read them.
And maybe some of those people are like, time-sensitive people.
help but you have crabs sorry sorry shouldn't have tried to contact me on facebook and then i then the fourth thing i do on my phone is i go play solitaire oh and see i i don't want to spoil the ending john my suggestion is you need more video games i don't see that's the thing i don't have enough video games and i don't i'm serious you need to get yourself i'm gonna suggest a game called threes that i think you would really like a lot is that does that is that uh like is it titled by its by like age appropriateness
Yes.
The thing is, I'm just telling you, whenever I find myself, this is, you know, antithetical to lots of things, but when I find myself going, I go to read this dumb news article I don't want to read, and then it loads slowly, and then there's a pop-up that I have to dismiss, and then there's a slideshow to find out, you know, 17 important celebrity boobs, and I'm like, no, what am I doing?
I close it, and I open up threes, and this little song goes...
And I move little cards, little tiles around, and I find it incredibly centering.
I might do that for 20 minutes.
It's so good.
And it's a better thing.
It's a waste of time, but it is a solitary, apolitical, non-emotional waste of time.
See, and I play this fucking solitaire game.
I used to play Mahjong.
Really?
You played Mahjong?
I played Mahjong like a little... I never had the first idea about how to play Mahjong.
I would get along so much better in my neighborhood if I knew that.
Oh, yeah.
I loved... I had to take Mahjong off my phone because I did it exclusive of almost everything else.
And before that, of course, it was Tetris.
Oh, yeah.
And I find... I know I'm not alone.
Oh, right.
Of course, we've talked about before Tetris, it was Minesweeper.
But if you could get paid to play Minesweeper, I would be the richest man in the world.
Because it's all I want to do, really.
But I think the revelation, without question...
When I first started really participating on the Internet, because you remember when I was at the height of my music career, I was actively discouraged by a lot of people from even going on the Internet to comment on things or participate.
Because initially the idea was you're a rock star.
Keep that mythology.
Keep the mystery about yourself.
You don't want to be too accessible.
You don't want your fans to feel like you're just a regular person.
I mean, I got this counsel from all kinds of people.
When I met you, you had a very strongly held opinion on that.
Yeah, right.
Well, because I'd thought about it a lot, and I was like, listen, I don't want to just be on there just like a regular.
Yeah.
Because it would diminish, and this goes straight back again to this interview you had with my friend Brett Terpstra the other day, where you were talking about your impression.
You've said this numerous times.
Your impression of arriving in rock up through the late 90s was, I think you get a private jet with the Zoso symbol on it.
Yeah, yeah.
But that's not the kind of people who respond.
You don't sit on your jet responding to comment threads.
Robert Plant never wrote a letter back to a kid.
He'd just slap you in the face with his dick.
Yeah, he'd just send you a fish in the mail.
The jet not only had Zoso written on the side, but it had a sunken living room in it.
And the shag carpeting, John, the shag carpeting.
So at a certain point, in 2007 or whatever, I abandoned that.
And I went into the internet.
I remember when I first joined Twitter, I tiptoed in and I was sending tweets out that were intentionally kind of like just a different side of myself, kind of like funny little surreal little tweets that I never ever referred to even music, let alone my own music.
I was just talking about the mundane stuff around my house and I really enjoyed it.
I enjoyed the response.
Yeah.
It was a different world.
I mean, what did you come up with?
2008, 2009, something like that?
2007, 2008, yeah.
And it was a different time, and I don't want to be all sentimental about it, but then there was a very definite time in the sort of middle part where I...
I absolutely felt like being a participant in the internet was furthering my... It was advancing my personal brand.
It was advancing my career in a way that people knew me now differently.
I wasn't reliant on...
The small handful of music magazines that were writing about me, I wasn't reliant on them to get my message out.
I didn't have to hide.
I wasn't creating mystery about myself because I didn't need to create it because I was intrinsically mysterious enough.
And so people started asking me to do things.
I started to get work.
I was able to maintain a career, even in the absence of releasing new records.
You know, the internet felt like a great, and I was having arguments with people in rock and roll.
who were, some of them mad that I was wasting time on the internet, some of them jealous that I was able to do... People could watch you not doing what they were expecting you to do.
Yeah.
And a lot of my fellow musicians were envious of the kind of...
Other life I was able to have on the internet, because they would go on Twitter or whatever, and they didn't know what to say.
And they were grateful for the fact that their message had been masked.
They were grateful that they only had to give five interviews a year.
They felt like going on the internet was like giving an interview every day, and that was their worst nightmare.
Oh, so it was not only a distraction, but it was – what's the word I'm looking for?
Watering down their messaging.
Yeah.
Well, yeah, and also it was revealing about them something that they feared, which was that their music was the most interesting thing about them.
And the music was the message.
And if you took away that, then they just didn't have anything to say.
They didn't have an interesting viewpoint.
Right.
The music was their interesting viewpoint.
Right.
And I still meet people all the time that are like, well, you can do that because you seem to have things to say, but I fail at it.
And those are all those Twitter accounts for bands that are just like, here are our upcoming shows, or whatever.
But at a certain point...
It's inescapable to me that the world has changed and I have changed and now I do not feel anymore like I am.
I'm certainly not unique among entertainers who have found a separate voice on the internet.
That's very common.
And the groupthink and the reciprocal echo chambery nature of all of the places that exist right now
I'm not, I don't feel, not only do I not feel special there, but I don't feel like I'm getting anything out of it.
And maybe I need to, maybe I need to go live on a mountaintop.
I mean, you know, I would still talk to you from my mountaintop.
Thank you.
I would talk to you on my shortwave radio.
But, you know, mountaintop, maybe?
What do you think?
Back to the mountaintop?
Nah, you don't want to know what I think.
When I wrote Pretend to Fall, I was living in an apartment.
Oh, yes, when you were in New York City?
In New York City.
I was living in an apartment at 118th and Lexington.
The first Long Winter's Record had not come out yet, and I was convinced that I was, like, at 32 years old, was, like, completely over the hill, and
Whatever relevance I had was going to be a kind of quaint relevance.
And I was living in this apartment in a neighborhood where nobody would have recognized me as anything other than that guy that vaguely looks like a cop who comes in every day and gets two donuts.
We in Harlem?
Yeah, 118th in Lexington, Spanish Harlem.
So a lot of the people...
The people at the coffee shop at the corner where I got my coffee and donut every morning didn't speak English at all.
And in that place of total anonymity, I did not feel alone.
I did not feel disconnected.
I went home every day and wrote all the songs for that next album.
And I have not really had that feeling of complete sort of...
The freedom of no expectations.
I haven't had that feeling since then, because the moment that next record came out, or the moment my first record came out, then I imagined that there were people who had expectations of me, and then there were people who did.
But I give those people way more weight than they deserve.
And ever since then, I've been writing for an audience, I guess, as opposed to just writing for me.
I think that's pretty perspicacious because I've always felt like – I hear you.
Because when I was writing something every day –
and putting it up online, I developed one, I think, very good habit, which was I knew that that was my job to put some words together and make it go somewhere.
And that's a good habit.
That's a good habit.
But what I accidentally picked up were several less good habits, and the less good habits have been much more durable for me.
The less good habits are after I'd posted that series of words, regardless of how well edited and thought through it was, I would immediately go and see how well it was doing.
So when I got Google Analytics on my site, boy, that was a real – You could see every aspect of it.
Yeah, and I mean I'm not trying to beat myself up here, but I think that I'm probably not the first person in the world who would spend N minutes writing something and N times three minutes looking at how well it was doing.
Now, for you, we talked about this in our early interviews.
When your record comes out that first week, you really want to ride on the sound scan stats to see how things are going.
That's one week out of two or three years.
I'm not trying to oversimplify it, but the trouble is it doesn't take very much.
It certainly doesn't take very much in terms of hits on your own ego or feeling of ability, self-esteem.
Just ability.
It doesn't take very much to go pretty quickly to, like, I can't wait to go see how this thing did way more than I'm going to be okay with nobody even knowing what I'm doing for a month.
I mean, can you even imagine that today?
Nobody even knowing that you're working on something, it feels unheard of.
That's what I'm trying to picture.
I'm sitting here trying to imagine.
You sound like John Deck or something.
You sound like some kind of crazed person out in the woods who's sitting there with this toy piano in his real career.
Yeah.
What would happen to me, psychologically, if no one gave me any praise for a month that wasn't standing right in front of me?
Oh, my God.
Oh, that's a thought technology.
You know, and what would happen if for the next month I worked on something and saw things with my own eyes and shared them with no one?
So not only would you not create stuff with the idea that you would be congratulated on it, like, not only would you not...
happen upon those things.
You would go out of your way to not even notice what somebody thought about you for a month.
If I saw a duck carrying a, uh, like carrying a banana, I would not take a picture of it.
No photo.
I would not talk about it.
I would not come up with a third funny thing to say about a duck carrying a banana.
Look at this guy.
Hey.
Hey.
Nice banana duck.
Nice banana duck.
No, I would just see it And I would go, huh Just like I used to It's another fucking duck with a minute There it is If I had a dollar And then I would get on with my fucking life
that's so funny to me i don't know why i don't know and you know and the thing is right now if i saw a duck with a banana out the window and i didn't get a picture of it i would be like oh fuck right my whole my whole week is ruined that was like ah i had oh he's right there he had it was i had the phone pointed at it and then my fucking iphone shut down because it only had 29 battery power
We'll be right back.
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We could not do it without them.
Like, how are we supposed to live?
How are we supposed to live, bro?
I went to my daughter's Halloween day at her school.
And I don't know if I told you this, but she was awesome.
She had this great Captain America costume.
All her friends looked adorable.
And I took lots of videos.
Lots of videos, lots of videos.
And I didn't realize until I'd taken like three or four of these really good like three-minute videos that I was doing this thing that I always do, which is I didn't realize that I hadn't turned the video, hadn't started shooting.
You were just taking pictures the whole time?
No, not even that.
No, it's like imagine me holding it up to all these adorable five-year-olds dressed up in costumes.
So I hit the button.
I'm shooting that for three minutes.
And then I hit the button to stop.
Only realizing in that – you talk about this is some fucking Jean-Paul Sartre shit.
The second you hit that button, it goes boop and starts recording.
And you realize that you weren't recording for three minutes.
And that's such a feeling.
And that's a pretty good-hearted one.
I really wish I had more videos of my daughter and her friends.
But it's also like, man, there goes a fucking duck with a banana, and I'm sitting here with my iPhone in my hand.
Pointed at it.
It was right there.
And I just didn't put my thumb on the button.
I set it up right.
I got the sun behind me.
I know what I'm doing.
I'm a professional.
I know what I'm doing.
Yes.
God damn it.
So this sounds like a project you're thinking about.
Well, you know, I have to say that the reason this intruded upon me so profoundly was that I have always had, for the last 15 years, well, let's say the last, yeah, let's say, well, let's limit it to 10 years.
For the last 10 years, I have had five outstanding projects, all of which sometimes a project gets completed.
In that time, I made three full-length record albums and an EP.
And in that time, I have produced some number of podcasts with you, and I've written some newspaper articles.
But for that entire 10 years, I have had on the wall a post-it note that says, graduate from college.
What an asshole.
I hate that post-it note.
I look at it and the edges are curled.
It's all yellow.
The ink has faded.
It's in fancy script.
Yeah, but it says, graduate from college.
And I look at it, and I go, it would be very easy for me to graduate from college.
I have all the credits necessary.
I just need to fill out the forms, hand in one paper on Karl Marx that I copy out of Wikipedia, and submit my ungainly thesis to them, which is written...
but which I withhold from them because I don't feel that they have earned it.
And so I look at that and I go, well, I, yeah, I should absolutely, you know what?
There's a new quarter coming up.
I should absolutely go down there this quarter and I should figure out how to graduate from college.
And I have gone down to the university at the start of the quarter eight times in the last 15 years and said to my friends down there, hey, I really want to graduate from college this year.
quarter and they say oh well you got a hand in that paper for about marks and i go god damn it and i go home and i and i do nothing and and uh in that time the people at the university have changed right the the the uh my uh my original advisor passed away then the chairman of the department and
handled me for a long time, and then he retired, and then the guys that had been PHCs when I started, now we're running the department, and then now they are retiring.
The next generation of professors are starting to retire, and I'm still going down there with the same problem.
So there's that.
There's my book about my walk,
There is the Long Winters album, the fourth full-length Long Winters album, which is completely recorded except for vocals and has been for four years.
And then there are the various other projects that I could sit and describe to you but that are fully formed in my mind, just have never like no boots on the ground, right?
Yeah.
And now, you know, there's this new concept of like, why don't I have a television show?
Somehow, people I meet in an airport and talk to for five minutes are like, why don't you have a television show?
They were giving away for a while.
And I'm like, fuck, why don't I have a television show?
She put that on a post-it note.
See, right next to graduate from college.
And the thing is, I did not have a post-it note that said, have a kid.
But I went ahead and did that.
I got that done.
So I'm thinking about what is keeping me from finishing these things?
And honestly, right now...
It's insecurity more than anything.
I know it.
You know, I look at the thing and I'm like, oh, God, oh, God, if I finish that and it's bad.
I'm right there with you.
Yeah.
And so why do I, where is this insecurity coming from?
And I just, I feel like at the very least, the Internet is not helping.
The Internet is not helping me feel less insecure.
And I'm not, you know, insecurity, that's not my bugbear.
Mm-mm.
You know, I'm important.
I'm meant to be here, Merlin.
You're a legacy.
I'm a legacy.
My dad was important.
Totally important.
He was a very important man.
I'm here to fulfill his dreams.
He let me know that multiple times when I was a kid.
And as the years went by, how disappointed he was that that wasn't working out?
Yeah, like, why, you know, I mean, see, and that's number five on my list, be a U.S.
senator.
Which, you know, I have not abandoned that idea.
Being a U.S.
senator is still very real to me.
Yeah, but I mean, there's so many parts of all those things.
As big as the project is or as small as the project is, as promising as it is, as overdue or, you know, incomplete as it is, there's still some part of every one of those that can feel...
like the beginning, the handle that helps you grab that thing, can feel just slightly out of reach.
And the fact that it's just slightly out of reach ends up being much more damaging than the fact that it's completely out of reach.
If we're completely out of reach, you say, of course I'm not going to do that.
I'm not going to become a jockey.
I'm too tall to be a jockey.
I don't need a handle on that.
I won't fit in the plane.
I have bad odds.
But these things are, you're right, some of them seem tantalizingly close.
but just far enough away.
I think you got to look at video games.
You're saying that video games are going to be that they are the, they're the talcum.
It's not a panacea unless you end up writing an iOS app called panacea, but I just sent you a link in the, in the robot.
You can go look at threes.
I think you should download it today.
You move those off your page and you know, maybe, uh, yeah, I don't know.
Maybe you think those post-it notes are helping, but you feel like it would, it would be an indictment if you took down the post-it note.
well what am i giving up so this is the so let me let me just the college thing for instance
I feel like I have gotten a lot of satisfaction out of never having graduated from college.
I feel that there are lots and lots of cocktail parties where everyone is comparing their smart college that they graduated from.
And then it comes to me and I am the only one in the room that hasn't graduated from college.
And that's a little reverse snobbery, a little point of pride.
but do I want to go to my grave not having graduated from college or do I want to graduate from college just to, just so that my father and my uncle and his uncle before him can all rest in their graves and say, you know, like it's the, it is any more the middle class, uh,
It's some kind of lay that you get when you get off the airplane in the Honolulu of the middle class.
In the existential Hawaii.
Right.
And you just should have it, right?
Especially having done all the work.
People ask questions.
They're sort of like, hmm, I wonder why.
That seems kind of odd.
He seems like he should be one of us.
Yeah, and so if I am going to do it, if I'm not going to take that post-it note down,
If I intend to do it, then why not now?
Like, why would I let another 10 years go by?
That's a question I can't answer.
That's a question I can't even answer.
Somebody asked me the other day, how do you picture the narrative in your mind?
They were saying that the ideas that they have, they see go by like a ticker tape.
Like a scroll on CNN.
The thoughts.
Their thought timeline.
And I said, I see my aware mind as a kind of foggy moor.
And there are faces coming out of the fog, and some of them are very close.
The fog is extremely thick, but some of those faces are close enough that I can discern their features, and they are speaking the loudest.
And then there are faces that are a little further away, and they're less distinct, and I can hear their voices too.
And then there are faces that I can just make out sort of the basics of their features.
And then there are faces that are just an outline, just a shadow.
And then in the distance, voices I can hear where I can't see the faces, but I can still hear, you know, their voices are still audible.
And the faces that are proximate keep changing.
Like the ones that are closest to me then back away into the fog.
And other ones come step forward.
And it is this sort of like whack-a-mole on a foggy moor of different people saying different things.
And...
what will ever like, and I think one of those voices is one of those people just lives in the moor.
And every once in a while walks forward and goes, college.
And then steps back.
And then turns his face away.
You can't see who it was.
Yeah.
He might have other jobs.
He might walk forward every once in a while and say, marriage.
Retirement.
He might have like seven things he says.
But he's like, how am I ever going to quiet that guy?
Yeah.
Hand him a diploma.
He's Welsh.
He'll step forward one day.
College!
And I go, here!
Hand him a diploma, and then he's like, oh, shit.
Thank you.
Thank you.
That's good.