Ep. 146: "Science Farmer"
This episode of Roderick on the Line is sponsored by Cards Against Humanity.
This month, they asked the DoubleClicks to help me say hi to John.
Greetings, John.
What you've been eating today?
Roderick on the Line.
Hello.
Hey, John.
Hello.
Beep boop, beep boop.
Beep barp.
Would you like to begin a conversation online?
How are my pops and buzzes?
How's my buzz and crackle and pop?
Let me listen.
Pop, pop, crackle, crackle.
Did you change something?
Crackle, buzz, buzz.
On a lot of poetics.
It turned out that my... That's right, those are on... You know, I used to have a college teacher that... Did I ever tell you this?
No.
He pronounced that word onomatopoeia.
Ew, that's a little cute.
He added a ligature.
Well, he felt that the Greek letter that is A and E squished together.
I think it's O and E. Yeah, it's not a ligature.
It's a diphthong.
Yeah, he wanted it pronounced.
He felt that that was the correct pronunciation.
Onomatopoeia.
And he used that word all the time in the class.
I don't remember what the class was.
But now I cannot say it any other way.
It is the artist anal of 1990.
Onomatopoeia.
I don't want to take you off your tech talk.
Buzz crackle.
But I do want to talk about pronouncing something or doing something a certain way correctly, even when it sounds wrong.
I would like to circle back to that.
Okay.
So what turns out?
Oh, turns out all that buzzing and crackling was just in my voice.
Oh.
You just needed to clear your throat a little bit.
Yeah, I had a little bit of a 8-gig bite.
Oh, you had a roll-off on the ground switch.
Yeah, exactly.
That was the problem.
What I was doing was I was...
I was 8-bit.
I was talking in 8-bit.
Oh, you were doing 8-bit like a Nintendo.
Yeah.
It sounded kind of like the beginning of a lot of Sonic Youth songs where you get the deliberate plugging in of the guitar cable.
Anyway, it's gone and I'm thrilled.
Hooray.
I was still getting those toots from people.
It was an anomaly.
I think it was a gravity anomaly.
If you know anything about gravity anomalies, you know that they can be used to communicate across time.
uh by matthew mcconaughey is that right oh because of the flat circle that was a flat circle you saw a movie where he was a scientist is that correct i'm so mad i'm so mad i you know i was barely aware of interstellar as it was happening as it was when it was coming out and i remember there being some talk i think neil degrasse tyson had some just a long string of tweets about the science in it but i was just ignoring it all yeah
And then I was in a hotel room, and it was on the TV, and I watched it, and I was just fist-clenchingly mad the entire time.
You know, I'm probably the fifth best physicist that you know.
I mean, you know, give or take, right?
Yeah.
Well, you might be the only physicist I know, so I'm not in a position to say.
I think there are a lot of people that you and I know who, it turns out, are physicists.
Closeted physicists.
Yeah, that we just don't know.
I would say Grant Balfour is probably a pretty good physicist.
Yeah, probably John Syracuse, Grant Balfour.
We've got some physicist friends for sure.
I would say that they would say that they probably weren't physicists.
That's typical of a physicist.
That's right.
And I'm going to probably agree with them.
And I'm not saying – you know what?
I'm not the fifth best.
I'm in the top five physicists.
Because of gravity anomaly, that changes a lot.
That's right.
Gravity anomalies can often take a group of physicists and resort them and then do it again, right?
It's called lensing.
Lensing, and that's part of the parallax effect?
Is that what that's called?
Well, it's close.
You're on to something.
The doppelganger effect, that's where it sounds like the British siren's going by?
Meaner, meaner.
That's a whole different category, the doppelganger effect.
And it's actually pronounced doppelganger?
Doppelganger.
Doppelganger?
That sounds like the name of a nerd in an 80s teen movie.
Durpleganger.
He has a little guitar thing that happens when he comes in.
It's Durpleganger.
But I don't want to talk about it.
I actually do want to talk about physics.
It's interesting you should say that because what I wrote down was overpronouncing.
I'm going to skip that.
And now I'm going to willing suspension of disbelief, which I wrote down.
Because isn't it interesting?
It's super interesting to me what I will willfully suspend my disbelief about.
The thing is, here's my thesis.
And I'm not a physicist like you.
But as I sit here today, I can't tell you what it is about a film or TV show or novel that makes me go, sure.
Right.
And otherwise makes you go.
Right.
It's really hard to say.
All I know is I know that John Woo movies are not realistic, but I'm totally in.
I know Edgar Wright movies are not realistic, but I'm totally in.
How do you feel about it when people are performing karate while standing on top of bamboo shoots?
Yeah, we talked about this briefly once before.
I don't have a problem with it because I think if that's part of the universe, the cinematic universe –
You know, it's just, you know, the biggest problem, if I had to say one big thing, I don't have any specific examples of this in mind, but I know this happens a lot.
In a lot of movies, in particular, the first act sets up, there's a lot of world building.
The first act does a lot of establishing the ironclad rules that will lead to much of the drama that unfolds over the next two hours and 30 minutes.
I really like the way you're saying this.
Thank you.
And then stuff happens in the second act.
Right.
Stuff happens.
And then virtually every rule, ironclad rule that was established in the first third kind of gets thrown out the window without explanation.
And that's frustrating and I feel cheated and I feel duped.
Well, in this case, in this movie, the Interstellar movie, the first act is the problematic act.
Because the first act is both boring.
Well, it's boring and implausible, but also dumb, poorly thought out.
And it sets up the plot for the rest of the film.
Like the stuff happens part of the movie where the spaceships are going and people are spinning around and space is very quiet.
Shh.
and um and uh karen knightley or whoever the the female lead is it's not karen knightley it's um it's um some uh it's an un actress actually actually an actress that i have danced with huh can you remember her name at a wedding i was at a wedding she was there
And I thought to myself, I'm going to ask her to dance.
And then it was more of a group dance.
You know what I mean?
It was sort of like, I'm going to ask her to dance.
I think a lot of modern gals are going to want to start out with a friendly group dance.
Yeah, so it was like five of us kind of group dancing.
It's not like you just got back from Bastogne.
I mean, you're going to have to really earn it.
That's right, yeah.
You don't just grab somebody and kiss them in Times Square anymore.
You kind of have a group dance.
It was a group dance.
Actually, that was the moment that I realized that even famous actors...
Our first thespians, right?
This was a moment for me because you have a sense of famous actors that they are...
They're movie stars.
They're actorly, they're in a different category, but of course they're not.
They started out as thespians, as high school thespians.
And then they became college thespians, and then they became movie stars, but they are still in their heart thespianic.
And so we were doing this group dance, and there was so much thespianic
hands and face and body work that by the like in real time people were out there jazz handing around it was really happening and there was just a lot of like
Everybody's looking at us.
And I was already too old and grouchy to really enjoy it.
I was enjoying it more from the standpoint of like, I'm watching this.
But I walked away feeling like, oh, right.
I bet you...
I bet you even Harrison Ford is like this, right?
I mean, when you get him at a wedding.
You think so?
He's probably like, I don't know.
I'm trying to get this right.
So there's a drama to it.
There's definitely an element of performance.
They're dancing like people are watching.
Yeah, you remember being in high school.
Mm-hmm.
Yeah.
I do, vaguely, yeah.
You remember the people that were in theater and how they were.
Yeah, I was a little bit in theater, but I definitely know what you mean.
Yeah.
And that...
That thing.
That thing.
And so, yeah, even back then, a lot of dancing in a big circle and then kind of suggesting a gesture that everybody could do together.
Yep.
It's sort of like a goth conga line.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Well, yeah.
Well, yeah.
I mean, anyway, suffice to say that I know this actress and I don't remember her name because I have a very hard time.
She's probably on that community show.
Yeah.
Nope.
Nope.
No, I think she's a more famous actor than that.
Wow.
She was in some movies.
You know what?
It'll come to you.
In any case, she was there.
Matthew McConaughey was there.
Neither one of them did I for a moment believe was a scientist, but that didn't matter during the space part because who knows who they're going to put in space, right?
Yeah.
You know what I mean?
Yeah.
50 years from now who knows who the astronauts are going to be like i didn't buy that ethan hawk could get into the spaceship with his bad eyes in uh in the other space i get what you're saying though i mean things can be kind of it used to be you had to be an engineer and a pilot and you had to be at nasa and someday there could be app developers yeah you know
That's right.
That's exactly right.
It could be Elon Musk with the leather biplane pilot's helmet on in the front of the spaceship that he designed to actually look like his own face.
You know, shooting up into space.
The biggest penis of all.
So that part I didn't have a problem with.
But the part that was establishing like that...
Feel free to spoil it for me.
No, no.
Anne Hathaway?
Anne Hathaway.
You danced with Anne Hathaway?
In a group, a small group, five people dancing around.
At the time, I was like, you know, I was entertaining the idea that maybe our eyes would lock across a crowded dance floor.
But looking back at photographs of myself at the time,
I was missing a tooth, and I did have hair down to the middle of my back.
It's just contemporaneous with that video series on the YouTube of you.
The 13 Songs with John series?
Yeah, you had some real long hair.
Yeah, really long hair.
It got even longer.
And I think at this wedding, it was as long as it was going to get.
And so I can only imagine.
I mean, I'm talking about Anne Hathaway's artistic thespianic dancing.
But I can only imagine what she was seeing looking back across the circle.
Maybe that's why they group dance.
Mm-hmm.
Right?
Safety in numbers.
A little bit of that.
A little bit of like, huh, this is interesting.
How did this guy get in here?
I'm going to stay away from the biker.
Anyway, I don't blame her.
And I've seen her in some movies where I thought she was great.
And she was actually, well, no, she wasn't very good in this movie.
But that's not the point.
The point is science as a narrative...
If you go to a movie and you're like, science is going to motivate this movie.
Somebody's going to use science to tell a story.
It's going to turn on science.
And since watching the film, I have looked it up and I've read all the talk about like, oh, the science is really good in this movie.
They made sure that the science...
Yeah, didn't he call people in and consultants and people?
Yeah, and so the science, like the black hole that appears in the movie looks like a black hole is going to look if you ever see a black hole, apparently, right?
And so I don't object to that.
But the part where the dad, out of love for his daughter,
Goes into the black hole to communicate with her by knocking books off of the shelf in her bedroom in the past.
Was not... Is that what happened?
Not a thing that...
I'm not complaining about the science necessarily.
John, do you feel like they'd work out a system where she would know to watch out for falling books?
This is the thing.
Yeah.
The movie starts.
She's in her bedroom.
Books are falling off the shelves.
Hmm.
I wonder if that's going to play into the film.
I would be thinking more poltergeist at that point.
Right?
I mean, sure.
Anyone would.
Unless your father was a science farmer, unless he was a gentleman farmer who used to be a scientist.
Is that what it is?
I'm saying jet pilot, retired jet pilot science farmer.
And he says books are falling off your shelf.
There's no such thing as ghosts.
This is like the first hour of the movie where you're like, wasn't there supposed to be some space in this movie?
No, no, no.
We're talking about the books falling off the shelves and some other stuff.
None of it.
Oh, I see.
I see.
So the book's falling off the shelf that he is trying to explain away or actually later on turns out caused by him with this space forming future, manipulating the past through a multiple universes scenario.
Is this the controversial ending, John?
Or is there a more controversial ending after this ending?
I think if there were people that were creating a controversy about this film, about some element in it, I dismiss them with a scoff.
Because the controversy about this film is that it is a garbage barge.
I knew it was divisive.
The film is a garbage barge starring the ultimate over-tanned leather captain of a garbage barge, Matthew McConaughey.
And he recruited this poor Keira Knightley person.
Anne Hathaway?
Anne Hathaway.
She plays someone called Brand.
Yeah, she does some very bad acting in it.
And there are some other actors in it that do fine acting jobs.
But the entire thing is a garbage barge, and I cannot help but compare it to the more recent film,
which used science to create a robot raccoon that had a smart mouth and a big machine gun.
Yep, shouldn't work.
And think, everything in that movie I believed.
Yep.
100% and loved.
And this garbage barge of a movie which was supposed to be smart and which multiple, multiple film reviewers praised for its smartness...
People were, this is why I say divisive, because I haven't seen the film, but I heard a lot of people were just coming out of the theater freaking out and talking about how their life had changed.
And other people were like, did we watch the same movie?
You know, I learned – I'll probably get this wrong.
I'm doing this from memory.
But I learned a couple distinctions in the last few years that I think are interesting.
And you probably know these but won't admit it.
You know, like in genres, you got science fiction.
You got fantasy, right?
I know.
I know.
I know the difference between those.
Okay.
Okay.
That's a start.
Lord of the Rings is fantasy.
Fantasy.
Well, no.
Here's the thing.
But in fantasy, don't you have like – there's like high fantasy –
And like low fantasy, high fantasy is where it really it's like a whole different world, like a different universe or something like that.
And forgive me, everybody in the world is going to get mad at this.
But the distinction being there's a certain high fantasy.
Well, but then also I do know there's hard science fiction.
Oh, OK.
Right.
So there's a kind of science fiction where every conceivable detail is sweated to be as accurate as possible, but also even in a speculative fiction universe to really cater to the sort of person who like, you know, ask the question of William Shatner at the convention.
Like, you know, isn't that a distinction?
Because then there's some kinds of science fiction where you got a fucking robot raccoon and nobody minds.
Right, and this is the thing.
I love hard science fiction, and generally I find that it works best when it is, like Blade Runner, a plausible world where you've posited the future based on one or two...
One or two minor changes and it has produced this future world, right?
You take a lot of elements that we all sort of accept and know to be true and you introduce one fantastical science development.
Okay.
And I can handle those, even the ones that are like hard science except fantasy, right?
Like ones where time travel is possible or something like that.
Or what was the one where the guy was coming back into the – people in the future were sending people back in the past to get killed?
Oh, yeah.
Not Inception, but Looper.
Looper, right.
I mean, if you sit and worry about time travel, don't talk about time travel.
And they covered it right in the film, and it's hilarious at that moment.
And you're just like, okay, I accept that.
And then you go along with the plot, right?
And what this movie did was that it tried to get the hard science right, except nobody had done any thinking about...
about like the human element right they had they had they'd gone toward the hard science and they had forgotten they forgot about people john they forgot about people they forgot to make the human motivation plausible like a whole the whole uh the whole emotional core of this film uh depends on the idea that
a daughter, a father who is a space farmer, a science farmer, gets an opportunity to go into space.
And his 10-year-old daughter says, don't leave.
And he says, I must go into space.
I am a space farmer.
This is what science farmers do.
We go into space.
This is what science farmers do.
They go into space.
So that is a thing from basically every novel, every movie.
The father says, goodbye, daughter.
I am called out to the, I'm riding out into the West.
I am blasting off into space and I will, I will be back or I will bring you.
And he's either saying it to his daughter or his wife or, you know, somebody.
But in this film, the daughter is so betrayed by the fact that her father would blast off into space.
Even though she is herself a science – she is a science farmer herself.
She becomes a science farmer.
Is that right?
It runs in the family.
It's a family science farm.
Right.
But despite being a science farmer, she cannot ever forgive him for this decision to go into space nominally to save humanity.
And the whole film, all the drama in it is about Matthew McConaughey being...
primarily motivated to get back to earth to his daughter.
And she still, even as an adult, devastated, obviously never been in love, obviously never like fallen off her bike.
The worst thing that ever happened to her.
And the only thing that ever happened to her is that her father left.
And like, she doesn't forgive him for it.
And he doesn't – and he can't say like a space farmer has got to do what a space farmer has got to do.
Like there's no – But he doesn't have like a science phone to keep in touch.
So he's got to throw books.
Well, this is the thing.
No.
What happens is they get down close to the gravity of the black hole and time moves more slowly for him.
Oh, dear.
And I like this part.
This is interesting science, right?
This is the part of the movie that I wanted to watch all day, which is like an hour on this planet is seven years back home.
And so he's like, well, wait a minute.
I can't spend... They got down on the planet and their fucking engine flooded or whatever.
Come on, we got to start the fucking ship.
I got to get back.
That's another year that just went by.
And by the time they get out of the black hole...
Everybody on Earth is grown up.
Oh, gosh.
And it's like, that is one of the great... That's a great idea, right?
That's a great plot point.
That's a great thing.
And it also opens the door to a lot of humanity and storytelling, for sure.
Right, right.
Fantastic.
And what your mind wants to do is they can't get their motor started, and by the time they do, they come back out of the black hole gravity field and...
Earth is 400 years in the future.
Right.
That's what's interesting.
Yeah.
That would be an interesting story.
But instead, like they get off the planet and like his daughter's grown up and she's spent the last 40 years like sucking her thumb while becoming a genius scientist, but sucking her thumb because her dad didn't come back.
Mm hmm.
And it's like, seriously?
Dads don't come back all the time.
Dads go out for a pack of cigarettes and don't come back.
Like, if every kid in the world whose dad didn't come back sucked their thumb and became a genius physicist, well, we'd have a better space program.
But it sounds like the story needs her to feel that way in order for the, and again, I have not seen the movie, but in order for the drama from the McConaughey guy to work, there has to be that feeling from her.
And this is my objection.
The movie needs her to behave in a way that is not human.
right and needs him to behave like whatever whatever their bond is like people have those bonds but but anybody anybody with normal human feelings watches that and says you know what my dad i'm 10 years old or i'm 12 years old i love science my dad is a spaceship captain he's gonna go and i'm i'm gonna be sad but like we're all gonna we're gonna get on with our lives right that's the norm that is what any human would do that isn't like emotionally broken
I'm confused.
I thought it was the science that threw you off.
No, I liked the science.
It was the relationships, the people part.
So this is the problem, right?
He has access somehow to some sort of crossroads place created by future humans for reasons that are not explained.
he is in a crossroads where he can go from, he can go across multiple universes.
He can go across time, I guess, right?
He's in a, he's in a, he ends up in this black hole in a room, sort of a la 2001 A Space Odyssey, where he can go across time and he is using that incredible power not to kill Hitler, but
Not to go back to a time before he was born and give his parents a riddle that only he can solve.
Not to do anything interesting except to communicate to his daughter by knocking books off of her shelves in the past.
Two contradictory messages.
One, because the gravity field – this is so boring.
The gravity field and all of that is how he and his daughter found the NASA people in the first place.
So he must have done that.
He must have signaled to her to go find the space people.
which is what produced the situation where he flew into space, right?
So he sent that message and then spends a lot of time knocking books off the shelves in a coded order so that she receives the message, stay.
And the message stay is meant to be communicated to him in the past through his daughter, telling him not to go.
They took it and they turned it.
But if he didn't go, then none of the... It's just like the writing... Did he actually stay?
No!
He didn't stay because that's idiotic.
If he had stayed, then he wouldn't have been knocking... No, I know.
I know.
Well, that's the Hitler problem.
That's the kill Hitler problem.
But they didn't even address that.
If we killed Hitler, we wouldn't know who Hitler is today.
They didn't address the fact that in an infinite number of other possible multiverses, he did stay, right?
They didn't address any of that.
They're using all of that interesting physics and crazy, like, you know, Einsteinian, like, brain fuckery to tell the dumbest, dumb story featuring two dummies, right?
That you don't care about in the first place.
Like if you do care about their relationship, if you do care about this father and daughter, you are a dummy because they are such dummies.
And all of the physics becomes this like – it becomes like all this window dressing on a – On a pretty pedestrian –
on a pedestrian and sentimental story numb nuts sentimental story like if you took the science out of that movie and it was just like here's the story here are the people that you're going to end up caring about there's this father the daughter some other people and like do you care about their lives do you care about whether they succeed in their quest do you care if they are reunited do you care about any of that
And the answer is no, you couldn't possibly.
And ultimately, this is, I think, the key.
This is the message that Hollywood needs to receive.
You cannot care about Matthew McConaughey.
You can't.
You can watch him.
You can be interested in his actions.
Oh, come on.
No, no, no.
You can be interested in him.
He can walk across the stage and you can be like, uh-huh.
You're saying because he can't be trusted?
No, because you cannot care about him.
Think about this.
Look at his face.
Think about his role.
Now we're into some hard science fiction.
Think about it.
Is it possible to actually care about Matthew McConaughey?
Could you write a film where Matthew McConaughey was the actor playing any part, I challenge you, any part, and you are watching him and looking into his face and his eyes and you care about what happens there?
What about the Dallas Buyers Club?
Did you care about him?
I didn't finish it.
Right.
Well, there were people in that movie that you cared about.
It seemed like a good movie.
It was a very interesting movie and it was an actorly experience where you watched these actors really, really act the shit out of what they were doing.
I thought he was – the first part which I watched, nothing against the second two parts, but he seemed to really inhabit the role.
I really bought him as a scroungy, squirrely, druggie guy.
He absolutely did and a guy that you enjoyed watching but did not personally care about.
No, and a good role for Matthew McConaughey.
Fantastic role.
And then at the end, what you care about is the tens, the hundreds of thousands of people who are suffering from AIDS that this particular guy, his actions ended up helping them, right?
You cared about the people.
It starts out as barfly, turns into Gandhi.
Turns into Gandhi, right.
You cared about the people, but he you did not care about.
And I cannot think of a single... You know what?
My objection to Matthew McConaughey started in a science fiction role, which was... Do you remember?
Do you know?
Dazed and Confused?
No.
See, Matthew McConaughey was great in Dazed and Confused, and in fact, that may be the one example where I actually kind of did... No, I didn't care about it, but I sure liked him.
No, what movie?
Dazed and Confused.
Matthew McConaughey and I could have gone through life perfectly fine with each other, right?
He's on one path.
I'm on another.
He's playing most of the roles that he plays, and I am enjoying watching him but not caring about him.
But in that goddamn Jodie Foster movie where she built a space machine based on a Carl Sagan...
Oh, she goes and meets her father?
She goes and meets, well, she meets the aliens who have masqueraded as her father because she wouldn't be able to grok.
Spoiler alert.
She wouldn't be able to grok what they looked like.
Oh, I see.
Or not just their looks, but their whole form.
I get it.
So they could have appeared to her as a swarm of bees.
Coke machine.
They could have appeared as a talking Coke machine.
Belt buckle.
But instead, they chose to appear to her as her father, which is a fucked up thing for an alien consciousness to do, I think.
I can't believe that's even allowed in the alien ethics.
If they know enough to impersonate somebody's dad, they shouldn't be allowed to do it.
Right.
I don't want to be pedantic, but I just got to draw a line in the space.
Exactly.
If I were a Jodie Foster space scientist... Mm-hmm.
And I got out into a space world, and my dead father arrived and started talking to me in his fatherly way.
It's definitely me.
I would feel very manipulated by these UFOs.
I would instantly not trust them.
I would definitely want to talk to somebody else.
Yeah, right.
Like, okay, all right.
I've seen what you can do.
It's a nice parlor trick.
Can you appear to me as Richard Nixon now?
Yeah.
That could have been somebody who was new there and they were abusing the technology and were not fully aware.
You know what I mean?
Maybe there was a new alien on the job.
But that's the thing.
Really?
Are they contacting so many sentient races around the universe that this is something that they've assigned to an intern?
Well, what about Clarence the Angel?
And It's a Wonderful Life.
I mean, you've got to start somewhere.
Yeah, I've never seen It's a Wonderful Life.
I've seen that.
I've seen that.
It's got some multiverse time travel in it.
Anyway, in this movie with Jodie Foster, where the swarm of bees is appearing to her as her father, Matthew McConaughey plays a role where he is some kind of spiritual leader.
Hmm.
Yeah, this is, again, a fantasy future world where he is a – how would you describe him?
A young Billy Graham who has a lot of moral authority.
He's a charismatic spiritual figure.
Charismatic spiritual figure.
That's exactly right.
Like a young Billy Graham.
A young Billy Graham but with a lot of like a deep soul wisdom.
I can imagine that.
I can imagine him playing that.
But such that he is consulted by presidents and heads of state.
Like a young Billy Graham.
Like a young Billy Graham.
And he's on one of these advisory boards.
He's a central figure.
He is the voice of faith and religion in this science movie.
So I'm watching this movie and I'm like, I like Jodie Foster.
I like Carl Sagan.
I like the idea of a science movie.
I love the idea.
This is going to be a terrible spoiler alert if you haven't seen this movie.
I love the idea that space travel is basically time travel...
And the whole spaceship design is just that we on Earth perceive it to be like that she just fell through a hole and came out the other side.
It's just a cocoon that protects you from time for a while?
Yeah.
She was gone.
She was gone for a long time in her world.
And in our world, it appeared that the machine didn't work and nobody believed that she went.
Because of the blink of the eye.
Blink of the eye.
That's right.
So good.
That's such a nice... That's nice.
That's a nice touch.
It's a nice device.
A nice device.
Although...
Again, I feel like a panel of scientists would be able to understand this concept if she explained it to them.
And when she got back, nobody believed her and she was disgraced.
So what happens with McConaughey's character?
Does he learn a lesson about love?
What happens?
That is probably what happens.
Did you finish it?
Every time he came on the screen, I closed my eyes and I went, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no.
Because he's so callow, so unbelievable in the role of somebody that anyone would care about.
And to put him as the heart of the film, like the emotional heart of the movie, was such a terrible casting decision.
That's a lot of weight to carry for any actor, but it sounds like you're saying he wasn't up to it.
See, what you want in that role is a chubby guy.
If somebody's going to be the emotional heart of a science movie.
Oh, like Wayne Knight, Seinfeld's Newman.
Thank you.
If you put a guy with a little bit of a chunky guy in the center of a role like that, now that's the thing.
You're going to believe that a chunky guy's got heart.
You're going to believe.
You don't believe that a guy like Matthew McConaughey, who appears to be carved out of mahogany, that guy's got no heart.
You don't want to do stuff to your panties or maybe get into your bank account.
Yeah.
You know what he wants to do?
He wants to make some fish tacos and he wants to go boogie boarding.
He's a pan man.
That's what he wants.
He does.
He wants to go.
He wants to have Sammy Hagar over.
They're going to make some fish tacos.
He's going to make his famous fucking salsa.
And then they're going to go boogie board.
I heard it's pretty hot.
He does not want to be the emotional heart of a film.
You don't believe it.
Not for a second.
Sounds like you consider it a stretch role for him.
So in that TV show where he was playing against the guy from Cheers.
Yeah, yeah, sure.
He was very convincing in that movie because he was a gacked out bad cop.
He's good at druggy and laconic.
Yeah, and he was a dumb philosopher in that movie with a lot of dumb philosophy, but it was exactly the kind of dumb philosophy that a gacked out cop would spew, right?
He should be a consultant on these things.
He was not the chubby guy that should have been at the center of both of these science fiction movies.
Like Seinfeld's Wayne Knight.
Well, you know, he's a little – It doesn't have to be him, but maybe if he shaved his head, he might look wise.
I would even buy Seth Rogen in those roles.
I think just for what's worth it also, nothing – I don't mean to go on a chubby thing here.
I think Wayne Knight lost a tremendous amount of weight.
He had one of those transformative weight loss experiences.
Do you think that it was – do you think he got a lap belt?
Oh, that's the laparoscopy thing?
Yeah.
Could be, could be, or they give you the tiny tummy.
I think Jonah Hill also had a big weight loss thing.
Oh, I saw that, but he seems to be gaining it.
It's hard.
The yo-yo thing is real.
You know, my mom believes that people who lose a lot of weight by any method of exercise and diet, she believes that those people will always tell you what they did.
Always.
So that someone who loses a lot of weight suddenly, who does not tell you in exhaustive detail the method by which they did it.
invariably have had some kind of gastric bypass oh you okay not that there's anything wrong with that but there's extraordinary medical surgical means involved that's a big commitment she believes that anyone who has used a system of like changing their diet and exercise is going to bore the shit out of you about it
It's almost like if you had a bunch of people sitting around – well, four people sitting around in the room for any gender really.
But anybody – and then like one person starts talking about their kids.
Another person starts talking about their kids.
Or they're just talking about how their kid used to be adorable and is now a dick.
And then the second one comes in.
The third one comes in.
Mm-hmm.
There's a pretty good chance if you had a kid – well, let's be honest.
They probably turned out to be a dick.
You're going to jump into that conversation.
The only people who don't jump into that conversation are somebody who doesn't have a kid, God bless them, and goes, that really sounds like a pain.
Same thing here.
If you've done something, people are proud of what they've done, and especially with the things like pregnancy or weight loss or AA or whatever.
There are people who are going to give you – they've got their story.
I try very hard not to talk about my diet and I cannot help.
Oh.
I cannot help but not talk about it because as soon as somebody – We're doing so many things I swore to myself I would never, ever, ever do.
Not that I feel that bad about it.
That's the second part.
That's the painful part is it doesn't bother me.
It doesn't bother me.
I can actually talk about my bowel movements and cassette tapes.
Two years ago when somebody was talking about how they were gluten-free, I was like, oh, my God, you're so boring.
Stop it.
Stop talking.
And then when I went gluten-free, I was like, well, you know, I went gluten-free recently and blah, blah, blah.
And I was so proud of myself.
And I had completely forgotten, completely blocked out that I had formerly found people like that boring.
So anyway, that's my mom's theory.
But my mom has a lot of theories.
You have to take them all with a grain of salt.
Yeah, but in the aggregate, she's right a lot of the time.
I don't have a dog in this fight.
I think she is.
Do we ever talk about – there's this one episode of This American Life called The Seven Things You're Not Supposed to Talk About.
Was that one here we talked about that?
No, I think that might have been one of your other programs.
Yeah, but I want to find the –
It's basically – the notion of the show, it's kind of a silly idea, but the idea is Sarah Koenig, who went on to do ding, ding, ding, ding cereal.
Her mother – I believe it's her mother – has this list of seven topics no one should ever talk about.
And they are – let me get this right.
Your period.
What?
Your diet and what you eat.
Okay.
Your health in general.
These are some tennis club rules.
Okay, here we go.
Keep going.
I don't know.
I'm just tossing these out.
So wait, wait.
Let's go back.
We got your period.
We got diet.
Number four, we got sleep.
Number five, your dreams.
Oh, don't talk about your dreams.
But don't talk about sleep either, huh?
I'm just getting there.
I love this one.
Number six.
I love number six.
Root talk.
What's that?
How you got there.
Oh, man, we were going to take 280, but then it turned out we had to cut over and go down the 101.
Oh, you just took away 80% of what my mom and I talk about.
I know, exactly.
But I'm just saying that if we don't have these things to talk about, I'm not saying I agree with this, but that sounds like all stuff that if we didn't have those things to talk about and how your kids eventually become dicks, there would be not much to talk about.
You know what?
For me, diet and sleep.
If I can't talk about diet and sleep, what am I going to say at this point?
When someone is introduced into our family, when somebody gets to be friends with the Rodericks, one of the things that they have to sort of accustom themselves to is that any time my mom and I arrive at a place or depart, we're going to spend two minutes talking about the route.
Yeah.
You know, she's like, okay, I'm taking off.
You take the point a little bit, right?
Which way are you going?
And she goes, oh, yeah, I wouldn't have done that.
And if we're both in one location and we're going to a separate location, we will absolutely take different routes and compare.
And we're very interested in who gets to the place first.
Mm-hmm.
I think it varies.
I think it varies a great deal, especially as people get older and you can compare and contrast your different dietary problems.
I'd also just like to say, if anybody out there, I don't know if there's any producers, I would like to see a cable reality show called Getting to Be Friends with the Rodericks.
It would be a 10-season show, and at the end, maybe you would be friends.
Well, it could be lots of things.
It could be a contest.
Oh.
It could be an elimination thing.
Right.
It could be like a hidden camera, you know, Ozzy Osbourne kind of thing.
Yeah, at the end of every episode, my mom and I would sit down, and I'd be like, I kind of like this one.
And she'd be like, no.
It would be nice if you left now.
I went skiing this past weekend.
On a hill.
I went skiing for the first time in a long, long time.
Probably, well, the first time in many years, I went skiing.
And this used to, in your family, this was a thing.
Yeah.
I mean, your sister's like a big-time skier, right?
Well, and I was too.
Well, you were.
That's right.
Yeah.
Yeah.
You said that.
Yeah.
And it was really, it was very, it was very weird, Merlin.
Merlin.
Because it's a thing that I haven't done in a long time.
And probably in the last 20 years, I've done three times.
But it's a thing that I know how to do really well.
Oh, you still have it?
It's like riding a bike, as they say?
Oh, yeah.
Because between the ages of 8 and 23, I skied constantly.
I raced.
I trained.
Mostly in Alaska?
Mm-hmm.
Okay.
But I skied in college, too.
But in the summer, I trained...
We would go for a long run and then we would lay down in the park and our coach would walk around.
We'd all be laying on the grass with our eyes closed and our coach would walk around between us really slowly.
This is on a beautiful summer day in Alaska and he'd be like...
And you're at the top of the course and you're checking your bindings and then you hear the buzzer.
And then you're out and you're on the course and you're making that first turn and you're just carving perfectly.
Visualizations.
And we would sit and lay in the park while he would...
he would visualize an entire slalom race.
Really?
Even back then?
I mean, I think of this as being a modern invention, but you really did it back then.
1980, this was 84 probably.
Whoa.
Don't golfers do that a lot?
They say visualization is like 90% or something or 40% or something.
Yeah, I think it's a big sports thing.
And I think I remember at the time being told or feeling like this was really new and really innovative.
Yeah.
And it was really effective.
You would lay there after a long run.
You'd be feeling your body and the sun is beating down.
And you're thinking about this ski race and you're imagining yourself just skiing so well through this course.
And I absolutely, the following year during ski season, made a real leap in ability and
And I started winning races.
I got a couple of gold medals.
That's amazing.
People were starting to talk about me like I was a comer.
It all ended badly.
But it was a big, big part of my teen life.
And...
And it's a thing I haven't done in years.
Because it touches on athletics.
It touches on social stuff, right?
Obviously, it's a thing people would do for fun.
A thing people would do for fun.
It's also a very expensive sport.
So there's this other aspect of it where it ties into – it's a very class-oriented thing.
Like skiing is –
It's like horse people, right?
It's kind of like – it is like golf in that sense, right?
I mean where you've got – there's lots of ongoing expenses.
There's lots of costly equipment.
You could take lessons forever.
And like a lot of things that are tied to social class, there's the kind of confusing misattribution of like skill in skiing –
A skill in skiing is a sign that you are a superior person kind of, you know, like skill in golf or tennis or horse riding is a sign that you are.
I think especially if you make it, as they say, look easy.
Right.
That's like a very high status thing.
It's one thing to take a million classes and everybody know it.
But like people who can golf or ski or boat with apparent ease, I think that's super high status.
Yeah.
There's a lot of status involved.
But also for me like to be up on the ski mountain because it's also a solitary sport.
But it's a solitary sport where as you're making a run, you are conscious of being visible to people.
There are people standing all around the ski hill watching you ski.
There are people up on the lift watching you ski.
It's a solitary performance of a kind of ballet.
If you're skiing well...
Because when I'm riding the lift or standing on the side of the hill and someone skis by and is skiing well, I will stop what I'm thinking and watch them and admire them.
Every day in the course of being on a ski mountain, there are multiple times where you see somebody and you just admire their skiing and...
And it's a form of love.
And I don't feel that in very many other things as much as I do watching somebody perform a sport that I know what it feels like to do well.
And as I watch them do it well, I don't know them, I don't know anything about them, but I'm watching them ski well and I think, I like this, I like watching this.
And so when you're skiing, you're also aware that like 90% of the people around on the ski mountain are not watching you and don't care and wouldn't recognize that you were doing it well.
But there's this small percentage of people on the lift or on the hill that you're aware of are going to recognize that you are performing at a higher level and they're going to appreciate it.
One way that it seems a little bit like skateboarding even before there was snowboarding, right?
I mean in that sense of that, you would sit there and you practice and you do this thing all day long over and over and over.
And when you see somebody who's really capable at something you know is extremely difficult, you kind of can't help but stop to admire them.
That's right.
That's right.
And a lot of things like –
I mean millions of people love watching basketball highlights because there are these feats of incredible athleticism that we all recognize as tremendous, right?
But very few of us can also play basketball that well.
And imagine watching basketball highlights if you were somebody who was an incredible basketball player.
I get it.
That's a great distinction.
You can appreciate just based on the history of it, but you've never actually sunk a three-pointer.
Yeah, or like jumped up around the back, jumped over somebody's head and dunked a basketball.
And so I was having this incredible experience all weekend where I was like –
This is one of the few things that I am genuinely good at.
And there are very few of those things, right?
I do not consider myself to be genuinely good at playing guitar.
I'm good at guitar.
I'm passable at guitar.
But in a room full of people that are great at guitar, nobody's going to be like, now let's sit and watch Roderick.
I'm going to kind of smile and make a joke and play a joke solo.
I've heard you say that a lot of times in a lot of places that you feel like you didn't even get – you always say two things, that you never really got –
bothered to try and get good at guitar until you were in your late 20s, and even then you're just as good as you needed to be to do what you wanted to do.
You never saw it as this avocation to aspire to greater and greater rock.
Yeah.
Something like that?
Yeah, and part of it maybe is that skiing is something that I started to do when I was 10, or I'm sorry, 8, and
I didn't start playing guitar when I was eight, and I didn't really do much else at eight.
I didn't get good at baseball.
I wasn't good at Dungeons & Dragons.
I wasn't good at...
All those things that I wanted to do, I didn't practice drawing.
I didn't develop a skill to the degree that it was unconscious.
But with skiing, after not having been in 10 years, I go into the pro shop, and I'm like, look, I'm a 46-year-old guy, and I haven't been skiing in 10 years, but I'm going to want your best gear.
And they're like...
Okay.
And they bring out this gear and they put it out there and I'm like, yeah, no, not this stuff.
I want that stuff.
And I point up to the thing and they're like, okay, man.
And they put me in this stuff and I get up on the hill and as I'm riding the ski lift, I'm like, you know, this is pretty technical gear.
I hope I didn't overestimate my need for it.
I hope I don't get up there and skiing has changed so much and this gear is so radical that I'm going to be – You said about 10 years?
Since I went last.
Right, right, right.
And that was the first time I'd gone in five years and I went one day and then there was – I went one day five years before that.
I would not be surprised if that equipment is really better.
uh it's changed a lot but the art of skiing hasn't changed and i got off the lift and i made a couple of turns and i was like all right this is the appropriate gear and i understand how it works and then the rest of the day i was just in this place of uh in this place of like kind of training again where every turn i made i was thinking about and i was like
That was a good turn, and now we're going to set up the next turn, and here we go.
But from a cardiovascular standpoint, you could do it?
It seems very athletic.
Well, so after the first couple of runs, I was super tired.
My legs hurt.
Everything about me hurt.
And I recognized a few things, that I was 46, and so I could not get air anymore.
I was not going to go off any jumps probably ever again.
And there were, you know, in any kind of skiing, in any ski run where you're really pushing yourself, you're going to arrive at a moment where you're like, okay, I'm at the threshold now, right?
I'm on the outside of my ability.
And I think that's true of anybody, no matter how good they are, if they're pushing yourself.
their envelope, they get to the edge of it.
It seems like I only skied once when I was a kid, a very young kid.
But the way you – watching somebody do it and the way you describe it, it really sounds like not only is that true, that you're always pushing it, but that the need to push that in a way you might not expect could come up at like almost any second.
And that could be something of needing a certain amount of velocity you didn't expect.
I certainly imagine when you talk about things like even small –
just jumping around how hard they must be on your joints.
But then also just any like one false move and you're just going to tear some part of your body really, really hard, right?
Yeah.
You're going super fast down a place.
And even if you are very familiar with the terrain, which like the resort I grew up on, I knew every inch of it.
But even so, every day is different, right?
Because it's nature and the weather and the snow.
I mean, it's always different.
So an area that you know really well, you can come across it and then the situation has changed completely.
But as it was happening this past weekend, I was on completely unfamiliar terrain.
And every time I came over a rise, I had no idea what was on the other side.
It could be a mile-long groomed...
or it could be a cliff into a waterfall every time you come over a horizon.
And so the other thing being 46 really pointed out to me was that I needed to bring the edge of my envelope in considerably because really the last time I skied,
very much at all i was still young enough that the that the my boundaries were way way out and i needed to bring those way in and there were a couple of times on the hill where i was standing on the edge of some double black diamond run and looking down and like is this doable yes should i do it
No, I should not.
I should not do this.
Because I can do it, but I don't need to prove that.
And I...
And the risk of doing this and making even just a normal error is that I will hurt myself and then today will be characterized by my injury rather than by the fact that I'm having a really fun time.
And so that was new to me.
I had never stood at the top of a run before and looked down and said, can I?
Yes.
Should I?
No.
And I did that a few times, and I was pretty proud of that.
I think that's pretty smart, John.
I mean, it's as good as you may still be.
It's just the stakes are higher.
Oh, I'm old.
And what was great was feeling after a couple of runs that I was so tired that maybe I had made a terrible mistake in buying an all-day pass.
Maybe I should go down and take a bath.
Yeah.
And then skiing through that pain and loosening up and getting my, you know, and finding reserves of strength.
And by the end, you know, and then I skied until the last run and was sad that they didn't have night skiing, you know.
But it was very weird.
to feel like this was a thing that I know how to do and that is such a big part of my life, really.
And I have chosen not to do it for 20 years for reasons that are all about...
Well, it's really expensive and it's kind of a pain in the ass to get up there.
So anyway, it's better.
I'm going to go to the cafe this morning and read the newspaper instead.
And every day sort of making that decision for 20 years and leaving this side of me where I actually know how to do something that's really gratifying, that's physical, and that's in this other realm.
And I just...
It's not a part of my life.
And I'm still kind of grappling with it.
Grappling with how it is that I could go year after year and not even want to do it once.
Or want to do it but never have that desire to do it be enough to overcome the inertia of
of sitting around.
Well, I mean, doesn't the question kind of sort of answer itself, which was that you just, you hadn't, having not done it so long, I guess the question in some ways is, like, when do you start to not do something?
When does it start to count as you're not doing something?
Because then once you did it, you were like, oh, this is great.
But, like, it used to be a huge part of your life, so it seems strange that you didn't at least kind of check back in with it.
Well, yeah, I mean, it was, but it's sort of related to
You know, it's related to my, well, it's a relationship to action, right?
Like, I talk about this a lot.
I'll be on the freeway and a guy will drive by me in a truck and he's pulling a trailer and it's got two snowmobiles and two dirt bikes and a boat all on the same trailer, right?
And he's pulling this thing up into the Siskiyou's and you just know that this guy is
and his whole family's in the truck, and he's got a cabin up there somewhere, and he lives for this.
He works at his job, but he's always thinking about getting up to the lake, and my dad was like that with his freaking airplane, his goddamn fucking 182, and he just poured money into it, and every time the sun came out, he's down at the airport, monkeying with his airplane, and
Every spare minute he's like, let's go.
Let's get a hamburger up in Talkeetna.
Let's fly up to Nanilchik.
And he would get in the plane and he'd have his sunglasses on.
He'd have his reading glasses on top of his head because he needed them to look at maps.
And then he had a third pair of glasses on top of that.
to see long distance.
He had like three pairs of glasses on at all times when he's in his plane.
And when we're puttering along and I'm looking out the window and I'm like, you know, this is another thing I was raised doing, right?
If you put me in a 182 and said, fly me somewhere, I'd do it without thinking.
But
It never has interested me to have a jet ski or a lake cabin or a small plane because I have a different kind of relationship to action.
I don't care about action in a way.
I mean, do you care about action?
I'm not sure if I understand the question.
I don't think – how do you mean?
And what's that have to do with the guy with the jet skis?
I mean, the guy with the jet skis is making such a personal investment.
It's so costly to have that fun.
And that's what it always seems like to me.
It seems like it's a cost-benefit analysis, I guess.
Oh, yeah.
Sure.
And especially when you take into account the time.
The time and the getting up early and just the gasoline.
I think everybody has such interesting differences in what they gravitate towards in terms of what you could very loosely call a hobby.
Because there are so many – the way I look at it anyway and every anecdote you've just talked about in passing or in person reflects the many vectors to that.
Because you have things like should this be a largely practical thing or do I kind of like the fact that it's –
frivolous, if you like, or if it's something that doesn't have a practical purpose.
Some people like making furniture because then they can make beautiful furniture and give it away.
Some people like the fact that they're building something on a Minecraft server that's just for fun.
Is it something where I really – let me put it this way.
How much does doing this –
Expose me to other people and how do I feel about that?
Because I really think a big part, especially historically men's hobbies, is there's the one kind where you hang out with other people and there's the other kind where you kind of have to be left alone.
I think those factor into it.
And I mean I can go on.
There's things like – I think there is an element –
I don't know.
In the people that I like, I hope this isn't always an element, but there is the element then of conspicuous consumption.
Like do I want to have three boats or do I want to have – in that guy's case, he's a little over-transported in terms of the number of things he has.
But – and then there's just stuff like in my family, I think about how much the men love – and my uncle, my late uncle and my late father, me, just so many people – and I don't mean to just talk about men, but I think that's kind of the direction of what you're talking about here –
Um, enjoy the paraphernalia of the hobby, which could be stuff like reading magazines.
It could be things like, um, going to the bike shop, uh, to look at wrenches or whatever.
And then you get into stuff like, I guess this is kind of the, the social thing, but shop talk, like getting the chance to go fly out to the guy who fixes your dad's plane and shoot the shit with him.
So I don't know.
I think every one of those is, is so different and it could be something like, could be me reading a comic book by myself at midnight, um,
Or it could be you arranging a ski trip that's more money than you would normally pay.
And what makes somebody find that attractive, let alone relaxing, is so different.
The idea of going skiing to me is not appealing.
I'm not saying it's bad.
But that's very much not something that I would go out of my way to do because it doesn't tick my boxes.
It has no practical application.
Well, even still, I like – but I guess I'm just trying to say that all these things, men, women, children, whoever, there's something that fills a little part of your personality.
The nice thing about a hobby, if you want to call it that, is it's kind of like this spray foam insulation you can shoot into your life that fills this important part that needs to be filled.
And for some people, that's the social part.
For other people, it's like I just need to be left alone for two hours a week.
Mowing the lawn, great chance to listen to podcasts and not talk to anybody.
Yeah.
I don't know if that responds really to what you were saying, but I think that partly explains you had a lot of your social intercourse coming from rock and roll for a long time.
I'm not trying to say there's a one-to-one explanation, but I think it's actually sadly easy to understand why we fall out of things like that over time.
Because other stuff takes its place, and then the inertia now favors the new thing that you're doing rather than the old thing, which is admittedly an expensive pain in the ass.
I was driving in and I was driving past the railroad, which is how I get here every day.
I drive past the railroad and I look at the railroad.
And today I was like, the railroad, right?
The railroad.
It would have been to me so easy to...
talk about multiverses like there's a version of me that this is this is your sliding doors could one little change could have made a difference yeah there's a version of me that just stayed in the ski resort town where i grew up and is still there there are dudes like that in every i mean i rode up the lift with a guy who's like i've been in i've been at whistler for 32 years
I was like, right, I could have been in Girdwood for 32 years.
And that's an interesting version of me, the one that stayed in Girdwood.
But there was a version of me that really wanted to work for the railroad.
Oh, really?
Yeah.
I mean, the ski resort version of me.
As a young adult?
As a kid and a young adult.
That I get.
I mean, getting to drive around in the Truman car, I mean, that sounds... Pretty fun.
Pretty fun.
But when I was a kid looking at the future, I really wanted to be a ski lift operator.
That seemed like a great job.
And I wanted to be so many jobs at the resort.
I wanted to be the person that...
I wanted to be on the ski patrol.
I wanted to be one of those people that walks around the resort with a walkie-talkie and a baseball hat and is like taking care of business at the resort.
And that was a thing I could have pursued that job.
I never ended up having a job at the resort, but my sister worked at the resort for years.
But then the railroad.
I was friends with a guy who was a conductor.
This was a grunge rock friend of mine.
And he was one of those grunge rock people that had a straight job that was kind of fascinating.
I mean, most rock and roll people have a straight job that's not fascinating.
You're just a bartender somewhere.
Right.
In order to make it go, you kind of have to have something uneventful.
Yeah, but this guy, his job was that he had started as a brakeman working for Amtrak and had worked his way up by the time he was 30 years old to like conductor on routes leaving Seattle.
And he had one of those jobs like being an airline pilot where you worked, you were on two days off three or something.
And then he did the most amazing thing
I was pretty good friends with him at this time and I understood enough about railroad culture to know that there are two separate tracks.
You are on the conductor track or you are on the engineer track and there's no crossover.
Hmm.
If you're on the engineer track, you start at the bottom and you work your way up and you're an engineer.
And if you're on the conductor track, you become a conductor.
But you're different worlds.
And he got to be a conductor and gave it all away and started as an apprentice on the engineer track.
Started over at 30 years old because he wanted to be up in that engine and
on those three-day trips across the plains or whatever.
And he has since sort of disappeared from my life.
He became an engineer and literally drove that train high on cocaine.
No.
Probably not.
Yeah.
But like, you know, drove that train off into the tunnel of the future.
Yeah.
And watching those trains this morning, I was like, wow, what if I had just gone to work for the railroad like it's so elegant?
They're tracks.
Literally, you're on a track.
You don't have to worry about if you're on the right track.
You are on the right track.
Or you're on the wrong track, and that's terrible.
You're going to figure that out pretty fast, too.
Yeah, we all wonder about those things, but that's a particularly interesting one.
I mean, I guess there's worlds where I was still playing indie rock or being a waiter, but I like the idea of the train thing.
Other than playing indie rock, what was the fantasy job that you had that you think back and go, what if I had been a hot air balloon pilot or whatever?
Well, I mean, the ones that were...
Well, there were a couple that were surprisingly in reach because I did – I wanted to be a writer.
I wanted to do design of different kinds.
And I think at the time, I maybe – in retrospect, it's kind of surprising how much more in reach those things were than I expected.
I never in the modern age had anything like I want to be a baseball player or anything like that.
But –
um i don't know i don't know it's strange though because there's a funny thing that happens i think you've kind of addressed this in the past but it's kind of funny where like you watch somebody for a while you watch what they're doing you turn away from it you come back you're like whoa that guy's an engineer on the railroad now or whatever you discover these people who have been like quietly building this super interesting career and you kind of never noticed it because they were doing something else or you were you were more focused on maybe the music part at a certain point but i think those people are are are super interesting
And of course, as always, I'm very envious in a weird way of people who joined the army when they were young.
Oh, God, so am I. But all of this, I feel like, comes back to the fact that I am still just now even, just now grappling with the fact that I do not have access to a multiverse.
Yeah.
You don't even get the newsletter.
I've always lived, I lived my whole life as though the multiverse exchange station was going to be open to me and I was going to be able to walk in and say, now I'd like to be an army man for 25 years.
I think that's probably less silly sounding than you realize.
Yeah, I bet that's true.
Because
No, because I mean it pulls together several threads about your life and your self-assessment that I find very interesting.
I mean one of them being that you are in some ways more interested in breadth than depth.
You'd like to learn a little bit about many, many things.
I think that kind of matches up with that.
It matches up with the way that life kind of pinballs us around and we end up going into this place we never expected and wasn't that interesting.
But it would be nice to have a little view into what that would have turned out to be.
That's a scary idea.
Yeah.
Right?
I mean, and part of that is that I'm more interested in breadth than depth, but now that I... Well, forgive me, I probably put that kind of glibly.
No, I think that's generally true, but now that we're in our 40s and we see all these people that have tremendous depth, I would really like a breadth of depth.
Oh, brother.
Yeah, I mean, now mostly I have to deal with other adults because I have a child.
And so like the parents of other kids, oh boy, they make me feel terrible about my life.
There's one guy who's a scientist, and he's not just a scientist.
He's a biologist.
He's not just a biologist.
He works on a very, very specific kind of frog.
He does very specific frog work.
I love that.
He's like the go-to guy for that kind of frog.
Yeah.
Oh, yeah.
He's the guy.
I don't want him to know it, but I desperately envy that.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And that's the Matthew McConaughey in a contact problem.
To bring it around.
Which is that part of what made that role so infuriating is that he is this person with this sort of global religious wisdom, but he's like a young surfer asshole.
And that fantasy...
that you would be young and yet already be, this is the thing that Hollywood does to us all the time.
Like, oh, here comes the world expert on frogs, and it turns out it's a 24-year-old actress.
Right?
I mean, we see it's the James Bond.
Remember the Keanu Reeves movie with the dolphins?
Johnny Mnemonic?
No, I didn't see it.
I don't mean this to sound quite the way it sounds, but there's a lot of incredibly talented men and women out there playing many roles, but there used to be a thing, I think especially in the 90s, of taking a certain kind of very attractive young actress and trying to sell her as the science person.
I won't even always say it was the actress.
I think a lot of it was the material wasn't up to it, and so you end up, everybody sounds silly.
And that was like such a thing for a while.
It's just in this case, it's Matthew McConaughey who's the young woman.
What was that Timothy Dalton movie where – Timothy Dalton, James Bond where the – Oh, with – yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, the girl with the eyes from the movie.
Yeah, the gal with the – she's the one with the nose from Starship Troopers.
Yes.
I know exactly who you mean.
And she's like Vagina Clitorington or something.
She's a well-known scientist.
But she's, yeah, a scientist or a nuclear physicist of some kind.
Denise?
Denise Richards, who was – Very, very, very handsome woman.
But she was – yeah, she was like –
Did she have a lab coat, John?
She may have had a lab coat.
I'm trying to think, wasn't she married to the guy from Two and a Half Men?
I think she was married to Charlie Sheen.
Yeah, Charlie Sheen.
Before he was a tiger.
Anyway, yeah, her role, her commanding role as like the super scientist in that James Bond movie was, I think that was the example.
That was the peak moment.
That's a big peak.
Wow.
Really?
This is the one.
But I feel like this – I felt like in a way that sneaks into all of our minds and we all have this idea that like, well, there are some 25-year-old super scientists who also happen to be models and surfers.
And so I'm comparing myself against them somewhat.
Yeah.
But at this point in my life, I'm not the expert on the frogs.
It's so seductive.
Can you imagine?
What do I do?
I do this frog.
What am I doing tomorrow?
This frog.
What am I going to be remembered for?
This frog.
I know everything about this frog.
It may not be easy to explain, but it is simple to explain.
To describe exactly what I do with these frogs is going to take some time, but all you need to know is I'm the go-to guy for this one kind of frog.
Yeah.
Got a question about this frog?
Yeah.
I also know about other frogs, but this guy is my – this is my guy.
Yeah.
You know, but a lot of it is work.
It's a lot of work.
You know what?
And it may be, it may be, Merlin, that one day when they look back and they say, two guys talking podcast.
Right?
Two Guys Talking Podcast.
Have you heard of this?
Two Guys Talking Podcast?
Who's the expert?
Who's the expert on the Two Guys Talking Podcast track?
It's going to be Merlin Mann.
Science Farmers were their idea.
Right.
Right?
Who said thought technology first?
Oh, well, I think that's – yes.
If history goes a certain way, I think our future is going to be fine.
And the thing is, that's the thing.
We're inside it right now.
We can't see it.
We cannot see.
We're too close to it.
We can't see the forest for the frogs.
That'll do.
Do you think the presidents ever didn't want to meet with Billy Graham?
I don't think a single president wanted to meet with Billy Graham.
Every president since Truman met with Billy Graham.
And I wonder if at a certain point they're like, OK, what's our week look like?
Well, you know, we got to go.
We got to talk to Gorbachev about about this dinner.
And oh, looks like it's about time to talk to Billy Graham again.
Well, here's a question for you.
Which presidents do you think were actually religious?
People of faith who governed in part based upon their faith and beliefs.
Is that the question?
Yeah, I think Jimmy Carter was.
Oh, yeah.
And I think probably Ronald Reagan was.
Really?
He seemed pretty opportunistic.
Yeah, I don't know.
He's an onion.
He's tough to peel.
But like LBJ?
No.
Not at all, right?
Well, yeah, but I also would not want to imply that you cannot be a cynical, tough, you know –
Person in governance who doesn't also have faith.
Yeah, right, right.
I mean it would be a little bit broad.
But yeah, Jimmy Carter for sure.
I mean I think probably when he jerked it, he probably genuinely felt bad.
Yeah, right.
And despite George Bush Jr.
's – George W. Bush's like – despite him being so terrible, you genuinely did get a sense that he –
that he believed in his – that he believed in his religion and he believed in – and he was motivated.
Yeah, I kind of get that.
I get that he has – like at our church, they had all different – like when the kids were in Sunday school.
So you got the sanctuary thing everybody goes to and then you got Sunday school and all the little kids would go to Sunday school for their grade.
The grownups got to choose different groups, study groups if you like, or classes based upon partly demographics –
Based upon partly like what their interest was.
And so there was like a hip young singles Bible study group.
There was the like – they all had fantastic names.
Like I remember Lamplighters was one of them.
They had these great New Testament kind of names.
But then I remember this one.
Dr. Russell Cotterill was the leader of this one and it was like the MIT of –
adult church classes and if you went in there you didn't read the bible you studied the shit out of the bible and you brought a fucking concordance like a gentleman and you had to really sit down and talk about and turn over big ideas about you know the stuff that people even outside christianity enjoy talking about the paradox the trinity like how does that actually work is there is the holy spirit really i mean does he get really one third of the credit like how does this work there's all kinds of fascinating stuff when you get into like
You know, as I'm sure you must feel on some level, the discussion of Christianity can be extremely interesting.
And so why do I say that?
Because I see Jimmy Carter going to Dr. Cotterill's class and I see George W. Bush maybe just hanging up by the Ms.
Pac-Man.
I don't wonder if he really thought a lot.
Oh, I think it's a difference in – I think it's the transformation of Christianity, right?
I mean Jimmy Carter was practicing that – what we always imagined was the Christian spirit.
And by the time George Bush got into the church, it was much more of this prosperity gospel.
Wasn't his mostly – you know what?
This is so awful to talk about.
Now I feel bad.
But wasn't his partly an arrival out of the drawing up?
Yeah.
Well, yeah, but I mean you dry up and then there – if you are interested in going the religion route, then you just – you dry up and it's like you came up the escalator into the job fair of religions at the convention center.
You can pick whatever resonates with you, right?
You just see who's got the best tookbacks.
Yeah, right.
And there are plenty of people that dry up and become Buddhists or dry up and go back to being Catholics like they were when they were kids.
It seems like there must be a special appeal to a certain kind of slightly moist-eyed American Christianity.
And I think there is for sure.
And I think W was in every way already pointed at this version of sort of Southern Baptist –
But whatever that has morphed into where it's just like if you follow the four steps of like give yourself over and so forth and so on, then everything good is going to happen and you don't have any doubt anymore.
And that's so different from the one that Jimmy Carter practices where they're like –
He's like a full-time lifestyle guy.
Are we doing it right?
Are we doing it right?
How do we help people?
I mean, that's so different.
I don't want to sit here and just lionize Jimmy Carter, but fuck that guy.
But you also really do get the sense that whatever kind of human he is, that he does...
There's something inside of him where it's probably virtually impossible to tell how much of his personal generosity comes out of his faith and beliefs, how much it comes out of his ethics, how much of it comes out of his heritage.
But there's something to all of those things that make this Voltron of kindness that I find very admirable.
Say what you will about the guy's presidency and wrecking the chopper or whatever.
But he seems like a genuinely good guy.
Yeah, and that's what I mean.
JFK –
nominally a Catholic, we were all terrified of his Catholicism.
A papist.
You don't really look at the way he conducted his own life and think, well, there's somebody that really cares about Catholicism.
Yeah, I get the feeling rosaries were not on his mind when he was doing what he did.
And so I look at all the U.S.
presidents and they all saw Billy Graham.
They all profess to be practicing more or less the same version.
And I do not see much evidence of it.
Except in those two cases, right?
Carter as the completely thoughtful Christian and George Bush as the completely unreflective Christian.
And that's pretty phenomenal.
It's hard to know somebody's heart.
It's hard to know.
And I don't know.
As I sit here, I feel like we're being kind of unkind.
But I don't know.
I don't know the answer to that.
But in one of our many lost episodes, I think I said something to you one time that really means a lot to me, which is that – and you didn't disagree with this.
But I feel like I have these friends where you could be friends with this person for 10 years.
And it kind of only came up once or twice that they even, quote, unquote, go to church.
But there's something about the way they conduct themselves that is really admirable and kind and gentle and sometimes funny.
And maybe they drink and play in bands and stuff.
But there's nothing to what they do that's about like proselytizing or judging.
But they're always the ones who show up to help people out for stuff.
And that's the strain that I see in somebody like Jimmy Carter and that I saw like in the people I went to church with.
Are we getting into a bad topic here?
No, not at all.
I remember hilariously.
Matthew McConaughey now.
Wait, no.
We had a disagreement one time, you and I, a long time before we started doing this podcast.
It was one of those times when you called me on the phone to yell about the Beatles and we started talking about something else.
Here comes the third rail.
And it was a real telling moment where I said something like, listen, I don't think, if you're a Christian, I don't think you should smoke pot.
And you said, what are you talking about?
And I was like, practice what you preach.
And you were like, it has nothing to do with it.
One thing has nothing to do with the other thing.
That sounds like me.
Yeah.
And I was like, I think it has everything to do with it.
If you're a Christian, you can't also be an alcoholic.
And you were like, you're bananas.
You are bananas.
The two things are unrelated.
Yeah.
And we had this – we yelled at each other for like a half an hour.
We did, yeah.
Where I was like, no, no, no.
If you're a Christian, you goddamn drive – you should drive the speed limit and you should – Yours was kind of a walk the walk, talk the talk type thing, right?
Yeah.
Where you're saying like if you're going to be this, you should – it seems to you that you should also have to be all these other things.
Well, or it should show, right?
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
And it should show in all these other things that you do.
And in a way, it's a kind of, it's the argument, it's the predestination argument.
It's the Calvinist kind of like, well, you can't know whether you're going to heaven or not, but if you are one of the chosen, it would be exhibited in your actions.
And now that's a good time travel movie.
Right?
Predestination.
They will know we are Christians by our guns, by our guns.