Ep. 220: "Find the Hippopotamus"
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Hello.
Hi, John.
Hi, Merlin.
How's it going?
Mmm.
Pretty good.
Hmm.
I am.
Having a little nosh?
No.
Mmm.
Mmm.
I guess I'll sip my coffee while you're eating.
I always forget that you're really Johnny on the spot.
Johnny on the spot for starting a half hour late.
Yeah.
I am.
There's a spot and I am Johnny upon it.
You are upon it and – Boy, I gave you the signal.
Yeah.
Which is an uninflected beep.
That's right.
Yeah.
We established this very early on.
This very, very early on, we would say bleep or bloop.
I don't think we've discussed it much or ever, but that's how we would speak to each other on the internet.
We would say bleep and bloop or thus and such.
Yeah, bleep and bloop for a very long time.
Not to be confused with gleep and glorp.
No, no, I have nothing to do with it at all.
You would say bleep.
And I would say Blorp or vice versa.
And then we would start the show.
Yeah.
And then it got shortened at some point along the way to Beep.
I would just write Beep with no punctuation.
So I sent you a Beep just a minute ago.
And you immediately called me, and I had a mouthful of peanut butter sandwich.
Jeez Louise.
I'm sorry.
Well, okay.
I turned a corner.
Here's something I turned upon which Johnny turned a corner spot.
Tell me, Johnny.
Yeah, okay.
I'll share this with you.
You know, I think there's a couple schools of thought.
Well, there's many schools of thought.
There's many, many schools of thought about doing things.
Mm-hmm.
and uh and there's two kinds of people yeah right two kinds of people one kind thinks there are many yes schools of thought yes yeah and so uh i historically was well there's a variety of things that i do differently than other people something i used to do in the past that almost everybody does here's the thing most i'm trying to diagram this sentence
Okay.
Well, it's hard to describe because here's the thing.
We don't – how can I put this?
I don't edit this show.
No.
It is fun, funny, and farcical to me when I see what my wonderful, wonderful friends go through with editing a show, and they proudly display all these millions of cuts to take out every mm and aah.
Mm-hmm.
And the extent of editing I've done on here was before you just started saying your daughter's name like a crazy person.
I used to try to bleep it.
Then I said, forget it.
I'm done with that.
That's too much work to add a bleep there.
And then occasionally there's episodes I just didn't put out.
That was my editing.
But it's two big swim lanes straight across.
And in my thinking, you know, it's yes and.
As soon as we are on the stage, the show has begun.
Yeah.
So let's share with our listeners that unless your internet breaks, which it does, we don't have a thing where I say, good morning, John.
Are you ready to record our podcast?
Because that would ruin it.
I want you to see us.
We're picking up the phone.
We're speaking to each other.
Uh-huh.
and we don't there's no there's no like i don't want any kind of in-band signal about whether you're ready to use your phone beep beep bloop and so then the other part is so i believe in that and and lots of people disagree with that because they love their editing oh i know they do they love their editing the other thing is i used to be the kind of person that said when i saw you saw a person show up on skype i'd skype at them and i'd say hi are you ready to record our internet podcast
And they go, yes, I'm ready to record our internet podcast.
Or no, I'm almost ready to record our internet podcast.
I've got to go make a number one or a coffee.
I stopped doing that.
See, I stopped doing that.
So now when people do that to me, I'm like, they say, okay, you're ready to record?
And I always say, yeah, you know, I was ready.
I'm here.
Yeah, right.
I was ready when I was here.
You stopped doing that with everybody.
Is that what you're saying?
Well, you know, the last one was I used to do with John Syracuse.
He's the worst.
He's the worst at this because he shows up at exactly our point in time.
Always, always, always.
Well, that's right there a problem.
Yeah.
He's an Italian.
So he shows up.
And then I used to say, hi, are you ready to record an internet podcast for podcasting?
He would turn into the penguin?
Well, like Squidward, but yeah.
And then we've recorded, I don't know how many episodes, 37 episodes of that show, and he's never the first one to talk.
So I see the line.
The line has been picked up.
He does not acknowledge me.
Wow.
Oh, my goodness.
And so then I said, they said, and eventually I said, you know, it's funny.
I said to him, I says, it's funny, John Syracuse.
You never, never talk first.
Yeah.
And then he stays quiet for a while.
Oh.
And eventually I realized it's because he's one of these monsters who's used to being on a show that is edited where you say, hi, are you ready to record our internet podcast?
Oh, dear.
And then you go around, you say, is everybody recording?
You say, is everybody had their stuff turned off, turn off your air conditioner, and you go through all this stuff.
This show is, what's the word, eagetic?
Everything that happens on this show is happening on this show.
That is 100% true.
Including this conversation about the show.
Everything that happens on this show is happening on this show.
It's all happening.
Right.
It's very unusual for us to do anything that is not part of the show on the show.
It's well, I can't think of a single time it's happened, but then I've never listened to the show.
Yeah.
I when I go on someone's when I am on a guest as a guest on someone else's podcast and they pick up, they call me on the Skype and I say, hey, what's up, guys?
And they say, hey, John.
It's me, Bill.
And hi, it's me, Tony.
Or, you know, hey.
Let me start by telling you a little about myself.
Well, you know, I have guested on podcasts where we talked for 15 minutes.
Top shelf talking.
At least on one end.
And then they say, well, we should get started.
And I have almost logged off.
I've almost logged off the internet forever.
when that has happened.
Are you fucking serious?
That's monstrous.
Do you think I've got 40 hours to do this?
I was just giving you, that was already good, good, good shit.
Always be taping, you know?
Just get it all.
Yeah, let's get started.
Because, you know, it's – but there's these shows, these people.
Why are we talking about podcasts?
I don't know.
From the internet.
This was a car ride IRL.
Oh, dear.
Okay.
And they were in town to do a live version of their podcast.
These aren't people that we know, if you know what I'm saying.
Oh.
These are some people that I know.
Okay.
So we were driving around after their live podcast show.
And they were talking to one another, still performing.
Let's be honest.
They'd only been off the stage for half an hour.
We were on our way to an IHOP, which is, for those of you in other countries, it's the International House of Pancakes.
It's ironic.
Yeah, so if you don't have IHOPs there, you must not have International Pancakes in your country.
They're probably flying, I think it's called a Flag of Convenience.
Right.
Well, the flag of convenience of International House of Pancakes is, if you recall, all the flags.
Or at least all the Scandinavian flags.
Remember their original branding was like all the flags of Scandinavia or something.
I remember it feeling like a kind of house we used to call an A-frame.
It had a kind of Scandinavian feel to it.
And I always remember they had a variety of syrups on the table.
They did.
They did.
And the roof was an A-frame in order for the snow to slide off in their home country of Scandinavia, where International House of Pancakes surely started, just like Haagen-Dazs ice cream is a great Scandinavian brand imported directly from Scandinavia.
That's right.
And not at all made in a suburb of New Jersey or whatever.
And, oh, I remember when, you know, International House of Pancakes...
is for me dated to a time back when certain kinds of chain fast food was still fancy.
do you remember when absolutely we had like we had a chain called bill naps and it was kind of like up up up k-n-a-p-p and it was kind of like uh slightly like nicer than perkins but like slightly upscale chain comfort food but it's like where you go places you'd go after church if you didn't go to a cafeteria you'd go to one of these kinds of places bob evans is another one bob evans bob evans that's a quality brand
Yep.
And I want to be called Bob Knapp from now on.
Bob Knapps.
Bill?
Bill Knapp?
Or Bill Knapps.
I feel like that's a super good internet handle.
Hi.
My handle, Bill Knapps.
We want to welcome our guest this week.
We're going to bring in Bill Knapps.
Anyway, I'm driving with these guys.
This isn't the show yet.
We'll always get started.
I was driving with these guys, and they were talking.
This was not a thing that they didn't solicit my opinion, but they were like,
yeah you know the thing about our podcast that makes it so successful is that we're you know we both come from radio oh yeah this is the best podcast and so we know what we know what people want to hear we know how to make podcasts uh because we come from radio and the thing you know the one thing i can't stand and the other guy's like
What?
What?
I can't stand those podcasts where it's just two guys talking and they don't do any editing.
And I was sitting there.
I was sitting on my hands at this point.
I had a lollipop in so I wouldn't talk.
Yep.
And they went on a 10-minute screed about how podcasts that aren't edited are just the worst crime against the listener because people want crafted radio.
People want podcasts that are crafted, handcrafted.
And and and I was just I was sitting there like, well, shit, I don't know.
You know, our podcast is pretty fun.
Yeah, it's fun to do.
You know, and up until this point, Merlin, up until this point, we have never spoken about we have never spoken with pride about the lack of work that we put into this podcast.
I think a lot of people think you're supposed to be ashamed of not working.
Boy, you should listen to my speech.
I gave it XOXO this year.
Oh, yeah, that's right.
That's right.
Oh, yes.
Yes.
So there's the podcast you do with me that you don't listen to that you felt bad.
You thought it was – I think your phrase – your word was illegitimate.
Illegitimate.
Illegitimate.
All the work that I do that is the best is also work that I feel is illegitimate.
But that's a whole other –
Everybody should go.
I don't know if that speech is even online yet.
Is it online?
I haven't checked, but I'll look that up.
Well, it's not that you would have to check.
It would just come down your timeline, right?
It would just end up in your feed.
I'd be in my TL, my primary TL.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
In your feed.
I enjoy, I think unlike you, you don't really listen to podcasts at all, do you?
I mean, unless it's something for a reason.
It's not part of your workflow.
You're not a big podcast person.
For the most part, until, well, let's see.
Let me think about this now for a second, if I can still say this.
I believe I can still say that I have never heard a podcast.
Okay.
I listen to an irresponsible number of podcasts that are often very, very different types and kinds of podcasts where – I mean especially with this particular – I don't want to talk about politics.
But with this particular season, I have adopted half a dozen really good podcasts about politics.
A second ago – I'm sorry to interrupt.
No.
Everything that's on the show is on the show.
A second ago when you said types and kinds of podcasts, was that a sort of insider podcast way of saying types and kinds?
Oh.
Like, you know what I mean?
I'm going to let you wonder.
It's like types and I listen to types and kinds of podcasts, but I also listen to types.
It's like people saying things like fam.
Like you just assume that's somebody's vernacular.
That must mean something.
Yeah, fam.
They say fam.
And then other people say fam because they heard other people say fam.
Earlier this day, when I wrote you, earlier this day, that's my daughter's syntax.
Just a moment, just a moment.
Earlier this day.
When are we going to eat this day?
Mm-hmm.
Earlier this day when I wrote you a text and I said, can we start recording a half an hour later than we normally do?
And you said yes.
What did I write back?
You said two mini things.
One of them was TTYL, which I'm a fan of.
I'm sorry.
You taught me that, TTYL.
I had to go to Urban Dictionary to figure out what you were saying.
Don't be careful on that site.
And what was the other one?
Did you say Bazinga or something?
What did you say?
I said, Perf!
Perf!
Exclamation point.
A thing which, as I did it, I realized I had never done.
That's not part of my lexicon.
I liked it.
I liked that.
I sometimes respond, sometimes with my wife and me, and I started doing this with other people and I got very confused.
I would adopt a pronunciation of the great Ricky Gervais from the first scene in The Office, which is to say perfect.
Perfect?
I would say perfect.
perfect that doesn't mean anything to anybody but my wife and me if i say perfect nobody's gonna know what that means i don't think that's a bit but i liked i liked uh i liked uh your uh i liked your your neologism perf perf i yeah and that's how it's pronounced right it's not perf so all i'm trying to say is and i want to get back to these pancakes of yours all i'm trying to say is everything that happens on the show happens on the show and and and my only point being that i i don't understand this is what freud calls the narcissism of minor differences
I don't understand why there has to be so much hue and cry, sturm and drang, about all of the people who are doing everything wrong because they're not doing it like you.
I mean, my God.
First of all, I have to tell you, a lot of the podcasts I hold dearest in my heart are...
similar to our show are not high production value things i'm there because i love the people there's a there's a program that a lot of our listeners also listen to that i will not mention by name it's a very very funny podcast that's not a comedy podcast because i don't like comedy podcasts but is it adam carolla his pancakes are not on my plate
And it's kind of a running joke that they've been doing this show for almost 10 years, and they still can't quite get the audio quality where they'd like it to be.
But you'd listen to it because it's great.
You're talking about Marco Armentz.
Oh, see, now, Marco Armentz.
Now, he's got notes for us.
I mean, not specifically, because I don't know if he still listens to the program.
Because you blocked him?
No, no, no, no.
I love Marco.
But he is really...
he's very into audio quality i don't know if you're aware of this so like for example and and this isn't the show yet so we're gonna cut all this out audio quality the uh yeah because i mean we we do eventually need to teach you how to record your side that you're talking about me now no i'm not making this about you i'm making this about the industry i'm making this about the privilege that people don't realize they have
having editing skills but here i just don't you know and i i don't i i'm sounding more um dramatic about this than i actually feel my actual feeling is more like this noise poof now poof because it's like well can't you just can't there be different kinds of things yeah can't we all just get along can't we all just can't we all just get along and i guess what i'm trying to say is that like it's it would be very weird to me for somebody who claims that they're really into podcasts to only listen
to really highly produced radio-style shows, because that's not what I consider a classic podcast.
I don't think reading a very well-written essay over a music bed is a podcast either.
I listen to shows like that.
I consider a classic podcast to be spur-of-the-moment talking between people about whatever.
See, now that's a classic podcast.
Well, I don't know.
But I mean like – I mean then you take something like another program I used to do with Scott and Adam and that was edited within an inch of its life to much great effect.
Right.
And that's why you don't do it anymore.
That got time-consuming.
Yeah.
My sense is that if we had made any attempt to edit this podcast or do anything to it at all – and I don't know what the other things you can do a podcast are besides edit it.
But I think that there must be some things.
You could run it through a filter.
You could run this entire podcast through a flanger.
We could both be talking into vocoders where it's turned way, way up.
Hey, Merlin, how are you?
I might just add a flanger to just that little bit because I think I can do that, but I'm not sure because I'm using a 10-year-old program to edit this.
There you go.
There you go.
Just running through a flanger.
You said it.
You said it from your mouth to Rodney King's ear.
Why can't we all just get along?
Can't we just let people like the things that they like?
Does it have to turn into some kind of land war in Asia just because people do things differently?
It's so odd.
My sense of this conversation is that –
So first of all, do you believe me when I say I've never listened to a podcast?
No.
I see.
I think I would be very surprised.
No, no.
You asked me.
Everything on the show is on the show.
That's right.
I would be very surprised if you had not listened to almost all of the Song Exploder episode about The Commander Thinks Aloud.
You're right.
I have listened to a podcast because I listened to that one time.
Wow.
Boom.
Boom.
It's true.
I was listening.
So here's my problem, which is that this is the only problem I have.
All right.
It's amazing that somebody that has only one problem and is able to identify it, that puts you – you're in some pretty rare error, my friend.
Well, as my mom likes to believe, people are on earth living iterations of their former lives –
based on how they performed in earlier life.
Are you, your mom believes that?
Yes.
So exciting to me.
As you progress through the, through the ladder of enlightenment, you are here on this planet living a life in order to learn things that you did not learn earlier, but also the presumption is that you are advancing.
So there are,
There are people who are here and they've been bumped up from being a dog or whatever.
They're humans.
But they're really at the beginning of the ladder.
And then there are old souls who are at the – they're really up there with very few things to learn left.
But the things they do have to learn, boy, they really – I mean it's a whole lifetime –
Just in the pursuit of learning this thing.
And then at a certain point, you know, you're you're you reach Valhalla.
Holy mackerel, Andy.
So the one thing that I have that's true about me, let's say that is that I like to read reviews.
I like to read reviews.
More than I like to consume any of the things being reviewed.
But you would make this something separate from criticism in the classic kind of academic sense.
I like to read criticism.
I'm sorry.
I didn't mean to interrupt you.
But you studied –
It wasn't comparative literature.
It was the history of ideas?
No.
What was it?
That's right.
The comparative history of ideas.
Which is like a complete with a master's degree.
I mean it's a lot of like thinking about things in the abstract.
You think about the thinking about things.
Metacognition.
And so reviews have always been a big part of my – so there's criticism but there's also just the – it's younger sibling –
The jolly little review, which – and review is a very uncomplicated child depending on how well it's written.
But I enjoy – and Mad Magazine was an early purveyor of this to me.
I never saw the movie Kramer versus Kramer, but I remember Mad Magazine's parody of Kramer versus Kramer very well.
Do you remember what it was called?
Oh, boy.
Squacker versus Bluffer.
Right.
Right.
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Whap versus whap.
And so, you know, very early on, I realized that you could get the gist of something by reading the capsule review of it.
And that when you then saw the thing, it either confirmed or exploded the review.
But that even didn't matter.
Like even a bad review.
I loved to read.
There was a magazine published in the Pacific Northwest, and by magazine I mean broadsheet, like an alternative paper.
I don't know if you'll remember this, but it was called Snipe Hunt.
And Snipe Hunt was just an entire newspaper, like as big as the SF Weekly –
But all it was was capsule reviews of new records by indie bands.
Oh.
The entire thing.
And the reviews, none of them were more than about three column inches.
And every single record was reviewed by Snipe Hunt.
And I never – I've never known like who the snipe hunt people were or how it was that this thing existed.
But it was just like a free paper that you would find lying around in bars.
And whenever I saw – and it came out quarterly or something.
It wasn't something they could do every week.
But –
I would grab Snipe Hunt and I would just – first I would go through and I would read every one-star review because that's what you really want.
You want every one-star review first of all.
And then I would read every five-star review and then I would – I'd go through it.
Eventually I'd read every review because it was so great and I had no intention of listening to any of those albums.
Not even a single one.
Not even the five-star, five-star review.
You know what?
I get this.
I totally get this.
And so listening to you talk about podcasts is in a lot of ways better than listening to podcasts.
You assume?
Who knows?
I'll never know.
Don't find out.
I finally listened to after, you know, after being on the receiving end of 400 tweets that were like, this is great.
I listened to it and it actually, I actually was like, oh, this was a nice thing.
This song, Exploder, that people praised was really nice.
It was nice to listen to.
It made me feel emotional about my own song because of the way it was edited.
That show, he's so wonderful and I'm not even going to begin to try and pronounce his name.
He prefers to go by Rishi.
okay he uh he's very good and his that's that's it's interesting you should mention that example because i often have no idea who the artist or the song is but like um like mgmt you know that one of that big hit they had back when mgmt had their first big hit like the breaking down how that song it's that one song you know how it goes and uh but but yeah it's the one and so hey ho oh
But no, that's that's an example of a show where like, even if I don't know or I'm not into the song, I really like the format for how he does it.
It's very solemn and maybe a little too solemn.
But the way he puts that show together is terrific.
Now, that's an example of a very heavily edited show that I think is very well done.
Yeah, he does a very good job.
And it doesn't hurt at all that it's one of your best known and certainly one of your most moving songs.
And the story you tell on stage was just the way you tell it was great.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Well, it was nice that it was in front of a live audience.
So I had this terrible experience the other day, which was a recapitulation of a terrible series of experiences I've had over the decades.
Can I ask one question as a follow-up?
Of course.
Did we cover the one thing that you don't do well that you know about and that's that you like reviews better than things?
Oh.
Well, so here we're about to enter into another room of it because this is what I have to learn in this life because my mother has never called me an old soul.
She'll talk about kids that she met as old souls.
But I stand there with my hands in my lap waiting for her to bless me with old souldom.
And she never does.
She passes over me.
She passes over me like the angel of death because apparently there's some blood splotch on my door.
But opposite, right?
She's not preserving me.
I think she's throwing me back into the pond because she thinks I have other things to learn than what I think I have to learn in some subsequent life.
But I don't know.
Maybe at some point she'll bump me up a few notches in her estimation.
But she has decided once again that she's clearing out her house.
My mom and I have very different ideas about how much stuff should be in a house.
And my version of how much stuff should be in a house is as much stuff as the house can contain.
And her version is the opposite, right?
As little stuff as a house can contain.
If you walk into a room, it should have a couch in it or it should have something to justify itself.
The room should announce what its purpose is and it should justify itself by its contents.
But as few contents as possible.
And so she decided that she was going now to go into the basement, which is a space that I think should be an archive.
And she was ready to get rid of stuff.
And so I came into her house.
I sat down on the knockdown chair that we've had since I was in high school.
Hey, what's up?
And she said, oh, I'm glad you're here.
And then she goes into the other room and she plops a bin, a bin from a bin store.
A plastic bin full of CDs.
And she says, I want you to go through this.
I'm like, oh boy, what is this about?
And she said, I'm getting rid of all these CDs and I want you to go through and take the ones out that you want.
I was like, oh mom, these CDs belong in the basement.
It's not necessary that you go through these.
And if you are going to go through them, you should go through them when you're 85 years old.
But all right, I'll go through these CDs.
And the bin just contains CDs that start with A and B. They're not – it's just like the beginning of this enormous collection of CDs.
Oh, boy.
And so I start going through them and I realize that I have a collection contained within these CDs of every album released between 1998 and 2007.
Like every single one.
Because you get – what's the word?
Not comps, but –
Pre-release, you know, copies of stuff.
Right.
And some of them are very unique.
Like the first Band of Horses album, I have the demos of when the band was still called Horses.
And Ben Bridwell said, hey, I want you to listen to the demo of my new band, the songs that I'm working on.
And it is all the songs of the first Band of Horses record with him scatting over them.
It's the same exact melodies of the tunes.
Wow.
But he didn't have the lyrics yet.
So he's like, you know.
No, that song he had the lyric.
He had at least the lyrics.
But, you know, there's a lot of scatting on it.
And he is a guy that was unembarrassed about having –
about handing his, his friend.
I mean, people, he knows this CD like with scatting on it because he was so proud of it already.
Like I have documents that are, that are very, very interesting of lots of bands that sent me early copies.
Did I ever tell you about the time I was, I was, I was, I played a show in Montreal and, um,
And these kids came up after the show and they handed me their CD.
Oh, right.
Right?
And then they became the band that waved the flags and played the typewriter.
That's right.
Drumsticks on the helmet.
That's right.
Drumsticks on the helmet.
Some other ones were the – Were they Quebecois, John?
Yeah.
Some of them were Quebecois.
And they spoke with adorable French accents.
They were young kids at the time.
And they were like, you know, we want you to hear this.
We loved your show.
We want you to hear this demo.
And then they became like a very big band.
So I have a lot of things like that in addition to every release.
All of them, you know, cutouts and stuff.
And my mom plops this bin down in front of me.
And I realize – and then she starts talking about them, talking about the records.
And I realize that she has listened to all of these albums.
She's gone through.
What?
Listened to them.
Put them into her iTunes.
Put the CD into her computer.
Loaded it into her iTunes.
Put the song on her iPod mini.
And –
And listen to it at least once.
And then she wrote a review of it on a post-it note and stuck the review to the CD.
And the reviews are often like tuneless, yelpy, soft rock.
Do you think she was doing it to jog her memory or to just be, have some closure with that particular item?
Yeah.
Yeah, I think it's closure.
Who was that note for?
That's a good question.
I think ultimately it was for me because, again, my mom doesn't share the same consumptive habits that I do.
And she was trying to make it easier for me to listen to this music.
And if it was tuneless, yelpy, soft rock, she put that on there kind of to save me the trouble.
But the problem is that tuneless, yelpy soft rock maybe would be something that I would think is good because she has different tastes than I do.
Sure.
But the primary difference is that I'm never going to listen to those records.
I have listened to like 4% of the records that are in this bin.
And mostly it is the 4% of, I mean, it's almost that I've heard the songs of 4% of these bands because the ones that I've heard are ones that I've toured with or seen live.
I hardly ever put a CD in a machine to listen to it or listen to an MP3.
So I'm going through this and I'm seeing that I actually had an enormous amount
slice of the culture that i was actually a part of i had not just access but ownership of this this wall of cds or room of cds you're a witness to history i i i am a possessor of history i have the amber or the hair with amber eyes here and i did not consume it and now it feels like too late to consume it
I'm pulling CDs out and I'm like, I remember this band.
This was the band, you know, this was this band from Modesto that one of the members was, you know, formerly dated the younger brother of one of the members, one of the later members of Granddaddy or whatever.
This was the guy that, this was the CD of the bartender at the Mercury Lounge.
And I'm going through and I'm just like, well, the only ones of these that I want to keep, frankly, are like every once in a while you pull out a Sam Cooke record.
And you're like, well, I got to keep this Sam Cooke record.
You know, the greatest hits of Lynyrd Skynyrd.
Oh, you got to keep Golden Platinum.
And I sent the rest into the river because my mom's cleaning it out.
I don't want to bring these things home to my house.
I know I'm never going to listen to them.
Really?
I'm amazed.
I'm amazed you pulled this off.
Baby, you're amazed?
Baby, I'm amazed with the way you got rid of those CDs all the time.
But I was sitting there a little bit covered in shame.
And my 82-year-old mother had a better sense of what – a much better sense of what indie rock in 2001 –
than I, as far as the recorded output of it, than I ever would.
And she listened to all the demos, everything that came across my bow, she took because she was curious and she was looking to develop her musical taste.
And she wanted to know what was happening in the indie rock world that I inhabited.
And I like, I have no context.
I don't know what she experienced in that.
And now, right now, she's super into Miles Kennedy, who is in a band, who's the singer of a band featuring at least two members of Creed.
Oh, my.
And so she puts Miles Kennedy on and it's like – She's eclectic.
She decided at one point that Slash's snake pit was good.
Can you just remind our listeners roughly the age of your mom to be specific?
She's 82.
Okay.
And so then through that, she said, should I listen to Creed?
And I said no.
And she said, I think I'm going to ignore your advice.
And she went and –
listen to a Creed album.
And she said, this guy sounds like an asshole, but this music is great.
And I said, that is the consensus of a lot of people.
Some people can't get past the fact that this guy sounds like an asshole so much that they, they can't even appreciate the like of the tunes.
And she was like, that's, you know, I think the band is good.
And I think this asshole at least is,
He's a good singer.
And so she bought all the Creed records and she's walking around.
I'm sure right now she's out for a walk with her iPod mini listening to Creed.
And so on the one hand, she's listened to all indie rock music that was ever made.
But on the other hand, that has delivered her unto Creed.
Whereas I never listened to any of that music.
And so I'm absolved of ever listening to Creed.
But she's having a more pure experience of the music as its own thing.
Utterly.
Is that fair?
She has no sense of like, this band belongs in this box.
These people are from this part of the country.
She doesn't have a sense of like, this person told me to not touch their craft services.
Or I know the real deal with this guy.
She's unburdened by your insider knowledge as a professional and as a kind of...
Not fan, but like as somebody in the industry, she's unburdened by that.
Unburdened by that and also unburdened by what what John Flansburg used to call treble kicking indie rock, which was when it comes on.
She doesn't even contextualize it within the history of rock.
She just listens to every album more or less with a clean slate.
She puts it in and she's like – I mean I don't even think she looks at the cover and sees how put a bird on it some of these bands are.
She doesn't go in prejudiced.
Like a lot of the band, as I'm flipping through the CDs, I watch the, I was, I'm watching just from the covers, the rise and fall of put a bird on it culture.
And I see the proto, the proto birds, a lot of those records where the band would never in a million years put a picture of themselves anywhere on the record or any information about themselves at all, because that would, I don't know what, say something about them.
Yeah.
But by not doing it, they are very definitely saying something about them.
I'm watching these CDs go by and I see Quiet is the New Loud go up and down.
I see Loud is the New Quiet come and go.
And so I have all this historic context.
And in a way, I'm writing reviews of records that I've never heard just by watching them, just going through a bin of the A's and B's.
And then the next time I come to her house, she plops down a bin of the C's and D's.
Season D's Nuts, which is a joke from this era, right?
I never heard it with the – so you season the nuts?
I don't know.
I never knew what that meant.
It was something from a movie.
Yeah.
I was reminded the other day of icing.
Did you ever get iced?
I don't know.
Give me a high level on what icing is.
There was a fad backstage at festivals –
For a very brief period, somewhere back there in the mid-2000s, where some beer that was called ice, ice beer.
Oh, the ice beer era.
Ice beer era.
You could get like a Bud Ice.
Right.
And to be iced was – one of these iced beers was particularly terrible.
Maybe like a Keystone?
No, it wasn't that it was terrible because it was cheap.
It was terrible, maybe not only because it was cheap, but because it was just terrible.
I don't remember why, because I don't drink beer.
But to be iced was to walk up to somebody and take a knee, bend down, and hold up this brand of iced beer.
which it's kind of like the ice bucket challenge.
Now that a person has bent down and handed you this ice beer, you have to drink it.
You have to drink this terrible beer, which everybody agreed was terrible.
And then you had to, then, then you were tagged and you had to go ice somebody else.
I saw this go down.
I saw this go down many times backstage.
And then whenever somebody would try to ice me, I would ice them with my eyes and they would go ice somebody else.
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But, like, what the hell was that?
That was, you know, that was, I expect, bucket challenge level of everybody's doing this, and now nobody's doing this because it was idiotic.
So I'm going through these CDs.
So now you're in the Ds?
Everyone that passes through my hand, I feel a little bit of guilt at not having listened to and not having – because some of them I'm sure are gems.
Some of them would be those albums that are like, wow, this album really changed me.
Do they still have Post-it notes at this point?
Some of them do.
Some of the Post-it notes have been – and when I find a stack of my mom's Post-it notes that are detached from the thing that they posted originally, detached from the post, those are also wonderful.
Just little notes and remarks about things?
Yeah.
You could make a coffee table book just of her Post-it notes saying –
Cause she's also fond of, cause she likes to put things away.
But I would yell at her because she would put things away and I couldn't find them because my organization style is I know where things are.
They're already put away.
That one is put away on the coffee table underneath some other things.
Oh, but she thinks it's not put away enough.
It's not put away enough.
It has to go in a drawer.
And so she would put something away, but then she would leave me a post-it note saying the thing that you're looking for that was under that stack of other things is now in the following drawer.
Ha!
It's in the third drawer to the left.
She leaves you a little breadcrumb trail.
A little breadcrumb trail.
And if I didn't immediately go and retrieve that thing and put it back where I wanted it, then the note became completely out of context because a lot of them were referring not specifically to the thing itself but the prior location of the thing and its present location.
And those locations change over time.
So it becomes a treasure map to treasure that is constantly in motion.
And I find those still all the time because a lot of those post-it notes I didn't want to throw away.
And so I put them in a stack of things.
Whoa.
Yeah.
So I'm going through a stack of things.
I find a note about a prior stack of things that she's moved.
That goes in the note collection.
Yeah.
And I think –
Do I keep this note because it's so – Oh, that must drive her crazy.
She's hoisted by her own petard.
She is.
Or do I get rid of the note now that it's meaningless?
But if I stopped and got rid of every meaningless note –
Like, how would I recognize my own past?
Well, I mean, what do we mean by meaningless?
Sure.
She took the time to leave me these insensible notes that are describing her need to move my things into drawers.
And I would love a record of that.
I don't blame you.
I mean, I keep garbage like that.
I keep, like, my wife mostly makes our daughter's lunches now, but in the time when I was making her lunches a lot, I would always, I would take an index card, I'd put a sticker on it, and then I'd make some kind of a remark.
And I would always do that.
And I saved them.
About the lunch?
Well, it was usually like a Marvel character sticker, and I'd try to say something clever that was really just a dad joke.
You know, it'd be Thor, and it would say, enjoy thy lunch, or whatever.
And just really stupid stuff.
But I saved those, and I'm glad I did that.
For me, it's not for her.
They're not particularly clever.
Right.
Well, she was like four years old and couldn't read.
Yeah.
Yeah.
She got better.
She's a really good reader now.
Well, I imagine.
No, I mean, she's a really good reader now.
I think being a good reader is better than being a good sports.
Oh, please.
But not everybody shares that feeling.
I know.
Some people think that being a good sports is better.
Is it more important to be smart or kind?
Oh, or is that is that a non equivalent unfair comparison?
I could put that in easier ways for you.
I could say, is it better to test well or be a good person?
I'm deliberately leaving it a little bit wavy gravy.
They were talking about this on the National Public Radio today, and now I'm thinking about it a little bit.
Do we need more kindness?
I feel that we have a little bit of kindness overload right now.
This is not politeness.
This is kindness.
Kindness.
Well, yeah, because the definition of kindness is a moving target.
Well, see, here's the thing.
And they talked about this on the National Public Radio.
And I thought this was a nice distinction.
A bully, you take a bully, you take a, not a Scott Farkas, but let's say you take an Eddie Haskell.
Think about, oh, Mrs. Cleaver.
Like a bully can be extremely polite, but is not very kind.
Well, sure.
Yeah.
But you can be kind.
You can attempt to be kind.
And what ends up happening with a lot of kindness is that you are presuming to know what other people need.
You're presuming to know what other people need and what they want.
Or what they expect even.
Or what they expect.
And so I see this a lot in our current culture.
People are presuming to act on behalf of other people and generally motivated by a desire to be kind.
But what ends up happening is that they are imposing their worldview.
They are taking other people's agency in a lot of ways or they are presuming that what the person needs is them, an unrelated person, behaving a certain way.
And real kindness, which is just going – I mean going through life and acting kindly, is a thing that doesn't need to be talked about on NPR.
It's not a thing that we need to write think pieces about how we need more of it.
Because the Thinks piece inspires –
people who are looking for accolades, who are imagining that they are saintly, who are trying to change the course of the culture in ways they think the culture needs to be changed.
And kindness is a thing that you – I think some people have and some people are forced to have.
But – and the people that have it are –
are kind.
And, and I, and I think a lot of it really as a parent now, I see things like that being present innately in children, um,
where they haven't been taught it.
There are, there are children I met when they were one and a half years old that were already intrinsically kind.
And there were children that were awful and it wasn't a thing that their parents had any effect on.
It was just like, Oh, apparently God thought the world needed another unkind person.
And so he made this one check.
Uh, and then he needed some more kind people.
And so he made these, but, but I, I see people, uh, assuming, uh,
assuming that their kindness is needed, and a lot of them are Eddie Haskells.
So it can be a kind of passive-aggressive or even aggressive move because then you get to put your frame on how this situation is happening under the guise of being kind or being helpful.
Yeah.
Yeah, right.
That people – I mean I think one of the most common problems of people interacting with one another is that – and again, there are lots and lots of extroverts in the world who aren't thinking this much about interaction.
They're just being.
And when you talk to a lot of introverted people who overthink their interactions, they will say, I don't trust extroverts because they aren't –
neurotic and neuroses seems like a good indicator of intelligence and without neurotic at least thoughtfulness thoughtfulness but i mean thoughtful in the sense of you think about things and thinking about things is how we describe intelligence you know like i mean you know what i mean like i do but i think there's a difference between book intelligence and emotional intelligence and i think yeah i'm not advocating for this thought i'm just okay all right um you're thinking a lot about introversion these days
Well, yeah, I mean because I have self-identified as one and so introverts now talk to me about it.
But what I see people doing is they are – they're imagining that their behavior is important and whether or not they are a racist or not a racist is important in the world.
And what they're doing in a lot of cases is leaping ahead of the present –
predicting a future, and I'm talking about even in immediate terms, like predicting the future of this engagement 15 minutes from now, imagining in that future the other person, the person they're talking to, and trying to move the experience, move the interaction in the direction of what they think the future should be, rather than letting the interaction unfold.
And so they are – they're trying to behave in a certain way to produce a certain outcome which they have arrived at and are now trying to accomplish as a form of being kind to this person or sensitive to them and their needs.
But they're also not being a very good improviser.
They're not improvising and they're not – and what they're ultimately doing is trying to take control and trying to – and I think in this process, they imagine that they know better.
what the other person needs than the person themselves.
Is it possible they are not aware they're doing that?
It's absolute.
I think in most cases they're not.
And I think it derives a lot of time from teachers and parents having listened to an NPR piece about how we need more kindness.
And then they interact with this...
That's a slight mischaracterization, but I'll allow it.
It wasn't a think piece on how we need more kindness.
It was about ruminating on – never mind.
Go ahead.
But there's a lot of this in the culture.
There are billboards now that say like we need to combat bullying.
And I think that at one level – and you and I have talked about this in terms of your own daughter's experience in school.
Like, yes, we need to combat bullying in the sense that we don't tolerate bullying.
But what ends up happening is that we're leaping ahead and addressing students who aren't bullies, addressing the wide spectrum of people with the goal of eradicating bullying, which is – bullying is not a single thing.
It's not a certain kind of behavior, like it's a mentality.
It's something intrinsic to humans.
Some kids, and again, I've seen two-year-olds that were just born bullies.
But in this desire to not have bullying affect the sensitive kids, we're making these blanket assumptions about how people interact, trying to head them off at the pass.
And so then we create kids who are self-editing, editing their friends, you know, vigilant over things that could potentially be bullying and creating not necessarily a culture of kindness but a culture of hypervigilance about other people's behavior and about potential outcomes of interactions that aren't really even sown together.
in the interaction, they're not present.
They're only present in the prognostication.
So part of it is, if I'm hearing you, part of it is that in our drive to eradicate this thing we all agree is bad, we end up artificially rerouting a lot of how people operate with each other?
Yeah.
That's part of it?
Well, yeah, because, I mean, you're charging...
young kids with the authority to know, to look at an interaction between people and try and head it off, identify behaviors as
as certain kind of behaviors that are in psychological silos.
And you're teaching kids – and I'm not saying whether I agree or disagree, but I'm just clarifying.
It also seems like – be careful with that kind of stuff because you're creating a new kind of pattern matching machine.
I mean, you're encouraging people for whether it's a good, bad, or whatever reason or outcome that you're looking for.
In the same way that high-stakes testing makes kids want to have to be good at tests, in this case, you're encouraging a certain kind of pattern matching on somebody using equipment that maybe isn't completely developed yet.
Right.
Or is even capable of being developed.
Like my personal version of it dating back to the 1970s and 80s was that I was raised in an environment where I heard all the time about how men wanted sex and pretended to understand what love was in order to accomplish sex.
And women wanted love and they pretended to enjoy sex in order to get love.
And it was a completely simple reduction of the truth.
in order to explain a perception of the gulf between men and women that was a product of the kind of revolution, both sexual revolution and feminist revolution of the late sixties, early seventies.
And so that was transmitted to me as a young person in the seventies and transmitted to me in the hope that I would not be this type of person, that if we could reach a generation of young men and say,
This is the – this is our perception of the conditions currently.
And if you know about it and you are – and it's explained to you and it's explained to you that this isn't something we want to recapitulate, then we can interrupt this longstanding sort of patriarchal pattern.
And what it produced in me was when I was sitting and interacting with girls in my early days, I was trying to head this tendency off at the pass and say, listen, I don't just want sex from you.
I do want to experience love and I want to be there for you in the ways that you want me to be there.
And in a lot of cases, that was just wrong.
It wasn't a description of what was happening at all.
It was the best thing that my parents' generation could come up with to describe what they perceived.
But in a lot of instances, the girls I was interacting with as a teenager were saying, what?
No, I just want to experiment with sex.
I'm excited about it.
And I just want to play in that space.
And I was like, I know you think that, but this is part of our indoctrination.
And what we really need to do is, and by that time, a lot of those people had already gotten up out of their chair and were going to somebody else to talk to them and hope, hope that that next person might just give them some sex.
And for many, many years, my own development was inhibited from
by the job that I'd been given by adult humans who thought they understood what human interactions were and thought they had a formula, and all we needed to do was teach our kids.
And I created more problems, both in my own life and for other people, because I was leaping ahead in our interaction to a time when the girl was sitting sobbing because all I wanted was sex.
You know, like I imagined that I knew better than they did what they wanted in the future.
And so I see in our culture now another iteration of that.
We can never know in our own time how ridiculous we're going to look to people 30 years from now.
And our understanding of what we need and what and how much we can intervene is going to seem ludicrous.
But we're doing it so actively and so aggressively, like getting into kids' minds, trying to create, trying to engineer a future that we imagine is better for them.
And those kids are just like, oh, okay, I guess, you know, like the contemporary versions of it are something else.
We think we've unlocked the secret.
And, you know, in my own interactions with my kid, I try to just sit in the chair and listen to what she says.
There's a kid at her school right now that hits her.
And every day she comes home and says, well, you know, Billy hit me again.
And we're sitting here as a family going, is the teacher not watching this?
Is he, is she saying that he's hitting her and he's hitting everybody?
And it's a, it's, I mean, what, she doesn't seem super traumatized by it.
She just doesn't want to play with Billy.
She doesn't understand why he's hitting her.
And so today we're writing a letter to the teacher saying, is this happening?
Would you watch this?
Would you see what this is?
But yesterday I got a letter from two parents in the school who, in my daughter's class.
And the teacher, this is a kindergarten class, the teacher has been assigning homework.
And you bring it home and the homework is trace the letters, find the hippopotamus, learn the following 15 words by sight.
You know, kindergarten homework.
And my daughter loves it.
It's work that she loves to do.
But there was a letter sent around to everybody in the class by two parents who obviously work in a high-level tech world.
And the letter was 40 paragraphs long.
saying, we don't think it's right that the kids be assigned homework because of the following theories that we've read about childhood development and the necessity of play and the danger of high expectations and so forth.
And they ran down 40 different theories of childhood development that they had read.
And a big part of the letter, I think, was to illustrate all the things that they'd read and how
And really what it communicated was we are high achieving parents and we want our kids to be high achievers.
And the way to get a kid to be a high achiever is to not stress high achievement in them.
but to let them just learn and love and play.
And they were trying to enlist all the other parents in confronting the teacher about the homework and, and applying this like huge file folder of child development theories on a kindergarten teacher who's been doing it for 20 years.
And they wanted us all to sign on to this letter.
And we read the letter and it was like, well, gee, our daughter really loved doing that homework.
She also loves to play.
I don't feel comfortable signing on to the letter.
I'm not opposed to write whatever letter you want.
So, yeah, I am.
I guess I'm I'm a little bit more like if my kid was going around hitting people and I found out about it, I'd sit her down and have a talk with her that we don't hit people.
But I don't think I would write a letter to all the other parents about like, you know, the theory of what to do when a child hits another child.
We should get started.
You want to start the show?
Yeah, we should get the show going.
How's it going, John?
Yeah, super good, Merlin.
Thanks for being on the podcast.
This is terrific.
Let me start by telling you a little about myself.
Do you have an outline of how you'd like this to go?
That's terrific.
My background is in content and in helping brands develop
to express their brandiness with regard to content, both earned content, unearned content, viral content.
Are you going to be talking long enough that I can take a bite of this sandwich while you're talking?
I mean, I'll push the mute button.
That's super.
I don't know, man.
It's too much for me to get into, but I'm going to let you have this one, boy.
I got thoughts, buddy.
I know you do.
I know you do.
I'll give you a thought that we may not argue about.
Is this a thought experiment?
It's not even a thought technology.
I'll say this snarkily and then walk away.
I'll light this stink bomb and walk away.
Glad you like homework.
Because, boy, there's more coming.
Well, I don't personally like it.
Hope you love it.
Get ready for a lot of tears.
I don't like homework, as evidenced by the fact that I never did any of my own homework.
Makes it very difficult.
This is a whole other show, as they say.
But, yeah, boy, homework, that's a hell of a thing.
But, you know, here's one thing I do think is you said something I agreed with in there.
Which is the part of – it's really fucking hard to be a teacher and to be a teacher who has been through this and has – this is not their first day, as you like to say.
They've dealt with a lot of kids that were not just your special angel, but they have –
They know from kids like they have done this for years.
And I always try to bear that in mind whenever I'm about to insert when I'm about to go in and email a link to something I saw on The Atlantic.
I'm very circumspect about doing that because I think it's something people do.
And I bet it's.
not as useful as it feels and for situations like that i'm not saying i'm good at this but something i try to do if there's something i don't understand or something i and you know let's be honest a lot of times things that we don't like are ultimately things we don't understand especially when it involves something like a school because we don't know how that place runs but we sure have our reckons about how it works but if there's something i don't understand uh i have i have learned to do a couple things and this doesn't happen that often but
But let's say it's a concern or it's a reckon or it's a something.
One thing I do is I go in person.
Like if I pick up my kid every day.
So one nice thing is to go in person and then to ask a question.
And not a question that you think you can trick somebody into answering a certain way.
A leading question.
But you go and you ask a question.
Like I go to the after school program and I say, hey, you know –
Do you think there's any way that you could let us know if you guys are going to be at the playground until 5?
Just because that kind of throws us off in terms of what we're doing, if we've got to go – that kind of thing.
And they'll say, well, we've thought about doing that.
Is that something you want?
I said, just if it's not hard, but also I want to understand why you do it the way you do.
And that –
I hope I don't sound like a dick when I do that because I actually am really trying to seek to learn.
And when homework becomes hours and hours of tears a night, we went to the teacher and we asked about it and we got a lot of illuminating information we would not have gotten just from our daughter and from the handout.
But every time I do that, I don't know if I'm... Why do they give tear-inducing amounts of homework?
um i think there are many reasons so i'll just finish the one thought which is just that i don't know if that improves their relationship with me but i definitely feel like it improves my relationship with them when i go in and i talk to the teacher and i say look i i don't really understand what's going on here let me just give you it's like going to your doctor and like telling them what kind of cancer you have and the doctor's like you don't have cancer you just need to walk and
No, no, I'm pretty sure I have this thing I printed out from WebMD.
And I do.
I'm not saying I'm great at it.
But I genuinely like the people at this school.
And when I go there, I do try to make it an opportunity to first listen and find out what's going on before you make a lot of assumptions about it.
I'm not saying you're doing this, but that's something where I'll go, God damn it!
Why is there all this fucking homework every night?
And then it's useful sometimes to go and ask and then to say, hey, just so you know, like we're having a lot of drama about this homework.
And I want to understand what part of this is important to do well, right, thoroughly, correct.
Because if we do every stitch of homework perfectly, my child will no longer have any time between coming home and bedtime.
This is my question to you as somebody who's ahead of me in the parenting game.
Let's just say you're down – you're further down the line.
You're further up the ladder, right?
You only have a certain number of lives – parenting lives you need to live.
Yeah, right.
And I have a lot more parenting lives to live.
But what are the consequences of not doing –
the homework that is upsetting, only doing the homework that is interesting when you're in third grade.
Are they not going to advance you?
Are you going to be in trouble?
Well, I mean, like so many things in life, I imagine it's the parent's concern and anxiety that gets passed on to the kid.
Like for the kid, it's just a sheet in a folder and a request.
For us, it's like it's a lot of hand-wringing.
And so should this – are we focusing on –
Filling up this whole area where all of the lines are, is that really important?
Like, does it need to be this long or longer?
Does the spelling need to be right?
Should we be worrying about the grammar?
Do you have to color in the picture as well as draw it?
Now you're asking, you're saying to yourself, that's insane.
I could do that in five minutes.
I know.
Believe me, I know.
I could do that homework in two minutes, but I'm 50 years old.
And so it does become... It gets to be Thursday night.
You get the homework assignments.
It's due on Friday morning.
And I have found out from talking to other folks, we are not the only ones that have had some very, very stressful Wednesdays and Thursdays.
Why is it there?
What is it for?
I'm not entirely sure.
And sometimes it seems like this is not a reflection of our school with the teachers and the staff, but this is just from time to time...
It really feels like busy work.
It's something somebody got off the internet, and they printed out, and then Xeroxed.
It's easy for them to assign.
Sometimes it has typographical errors, which drives me crazy, and misspellings.
And sometimes it has incredibly unclear instructions.
The one thing I really wish my kid would get...
is like how important it is to read the instructions.
Because if you don't read the instructions, you know, just read the instructions.
You read the manual.
I do.
But here's the thing.
There's three sentences that describe what you're supposed to do here.
If you just glance the headline that says story about your summer, you might really miss out on what they're looking for here.
So I think this does become a good testing skill, too.
It's so fucking boring.
You're describing my entire life, right?
I never read the manual.
I always opened the box, pulled the thing out, plugged it in.
realized that there were more parts in another bag.
So with the thing plugged in, tried to install the other parts as I saw fit and then commenced using the device.
often without really understanding how it worked until it broke.
I never read the instructions.
I'm mostly like that with lots of things.
But I guess what I'm trying to get at here is this is not just, I think, a sound piece of advice.
I think it's a great trick.
It's a great – I mean you will learn this in testing.
Like you will learn how the people who make those tests think by reading those instructions.
Oh, I'm not arguing for a second that you're correct.
Just that I have never done it.
Oh, OK.
Like I'm not advocating for not reading.
But here.
So then you get into a situation where like she at after school, she's done her whole week's homework.
It's all done.
She's very excited because now the homework is done.
She knows that we won't make this face at her.
And so she shares it to us, but she didn't do it right.
Yeah, right.
And you ever try to tell your kid to go do a different picture because they drew it wrong?
Or you've got to go like this thing you painfully pulled out of yourself as a young writing person?
Like, no, no, you've got to go redo that because you're supposed to be doing it this way.
And this is back to the thing that I wonder.
I wonder a lot about.
which is there's so much that we do when talking about kids that presumes that every child is a prior or that every child is tabula rasa.
And we're still doing that because that was a fashion when we at some point in our lives – And it seemed the fairest way to proceed.
Yeah, that's right.
Every child is tabula rasa.
And so if we treat them all equally when they're young –
We produce uniform outcomes.
And knowing your daughter just a little bit that I do, it's possible that she's like me, born to not read the instructions.
Now – and maybe there's a way that you can teach her to read them.
There was no way to teach me to read the instructions.
My mom reads the instructions compulsively.
She tried every method to get me to read the instructions and it just wasn't possible because that's not how I was made.
And every Sunday night from the time I was in fifth grade until the present, every Sunday night I was consumed by fear and self-loathing that I had not finished the homework.
Yeah.
So in that case, something like the report that's due Monday.
Absolutely.
And I remember – because we skied during the winter, right?
So Saturdays and Sundays we were skiing and Friday nights.
And Friday night I would be skiing, night skiing, which is the best kind of skiing.
And I'd be thinking, boy, I've got to do that homework at some point this weekend.
And then Friday night we would have hot chocolate and we would sit around the fire and I wouldn't do the homework.
And then all day Saturday I'd be skiing and thinking, mostly thinking on the chairlift, right?
Because when you're skiing, you're not thinking about your homework.
You're thinking about not falling.
But then you have all this time to sit on the chairlift.
And I never understood what people who didn't think did on the chairlift because it's a long period of just sitting and waiting in the cold.
And that was time that I spent thinking hard about things.
And I would sit all day Saturday and say, you've really got to finish that homework.
But then there would be relief where the other voice would say, well, it's only Saturday.
You're fine.
Like you'll get it done.
It will happen magically at some point.
Saturday night we would party Sunday night or Sunday day.
It's fine.
There's still time.
And then Sunday night skiing every week.
It would descend upon me.
Yeah, I'm going to get down.
I'm going to take off my skis.
I'm going to take off my boots.
We're going to get in the car.
We're going to drive home by which point it will be seven o'clock.
And then from 7 o'clock until whenever I collapse, I have to write a 10-page paper on the life of a cell.
And I don't know – and I have never read any – I don't know anything about the life of a cell.
It's not something I can wing.
And that feeling of not having it done –
had such a much larger effect on my life as an adult, much larger effect on my childhood and the quality of my childhood than it ever had an effect on teaching me the value of life.
Working, you know, getting the work done early of being diligent of, you know, like it sounds like it didn't have the desired effect.
It did not.
I was made to be what I am.
And all of those things, including like, here's your homework assignment.
You're not going to get it done.
That's proved.
And although you're an independent reader, a person that really thrives on self-education, you're enormously curious.
You already at the age of 10 years old have this like weird –
weirdly specific knowledge of general knowledge about a ton of things.
Somehow it's very important to us as adults that you write a 10 page paper on the life of a cell.
And if you don't, you're going to get an F and all the other work you've done this year is negated all the reading you've done, not only negated, but turned into shame and garbage in your heart.
Oh, and it becomes a kind of emotional debt.
We're like, that accumulates.
That really does accumulate over time.
All those terrible feelings on a Sunday night.
I was very much the same way.
Were you?
Oh, absolutely.
I hated Sunday nights.
The worst.
It was the worst.
And, you know, it's – but –
I'm trying to figure it out because I know it's very important to learn there are times when we have to do things that we don't want to do.
It's very hard for me to really get my back into it when I think it's bullshit.
That's the difficult part.
My kid read three books yesterday just for fun.
I mean, like, you know, Babysitter's Club books, but like she just reads constantly and quickly and she retains.
And like there is this dad part in my heart that breaks a little bit when I can feel myself saying something to her that I know is the kind of thing that made me hate writing when I was little because he did it wrong.
because you didn't use the index cards and then make the outline and then do the five-paragraph essay, and that's never how my brain worked.
I didn't like writing at all when I was really little, but I was more excited to make the book out of wallpaper and stuff like that, those kinds of projects.
I came to like it, but I also realized that people were trying.
They were trying really hard to fill this empty vessel that was me with some kind of really useful information by showing me the right way to do this.
But you weren't empty.
But you're absolutely right.
I was probably half full.
It's just not what I needed to be full of for them.
And it made me neurotic.
It made me anxious and anxiety that I still have today.
And it made me feel a little bit shameful because I knew that I was a smart kid that was not performing as well as I should.
And I knew I was supposed to feel bad about that.
And that was the point.
Yeah.
I always assumed that when you talked about index cards...
And you used them in the early versions of our shows.
That there was something deeply ironic about it.
That your use of index cards was connected to a failure to have used index cards.
When it was required of you in 10th grade.
I never thought of it that way, but it could be.
But also remember the use of index cards – and this is just supporting your point – was really grinding.
You have a box with your index cards and you go and you have to write –
This is going to be the notes on this book, and you have to write the title this way, and you have to write the author note this way, and then you're going to do this on the back and this way.
And the shit that you're doing to basically delouse your brain of creative stuff, to get all the stuff out somewhere, is the most turgid thing.
prescriptive process that has very little room in it for how you actually would like to create this thing.
Maybe you'd like to draw a picture first.
So in my case, though, the idea of this almost near non-expense item that I could put literally anything on and do literally anything with continues to be very freeing to me.
In eighth grade, they started
They started – not they, but my teacher.
The media, John?
The Jewish-run media.
Falling New York Times.
Started – liar Hillary.
Started to teach me how to write a report for college because that was an unimpeachable plan, right?
If a parent comes in and says, my child is crying every Sunday –
about these reports.
The teacher, the eighth grade teacher can say, well, this is the level of work that's required in college and we're trying to teach them that now.
I've told you before that my eighth grade teacher required that all of our reports be written in pen because that was what was required in college.
And if you wrote in pencil, she wouldn't accept the report.
And so I wrote my reports, including the life of a cell.
in pencil and those reports were not accepted and I got an F because the primary thing she wanted was for – well, for the rules to be followed exactly.
You didn't read the instructions or you didn't follow the instructions that you read.
I didn't follow the instructions.
I read them.
She said then – every time she put a big red F on my page, she said, I told you these need to be in pencil and you're not going to give and I'm not going to give.
And what ended up happening when I was in college –
was what I'd always done, which was I read the book.
I never wrote a single thing down.
I never underlined or bracketed a single passage.
I read the book.
I thought about it.
And then the night before the thing was due, I won it and wrote a thing.
And the thing was good and the teacher liked it and I got an A. And I didn't really footnote things very well.
It wasn't, you know, it wasn't done correctly.
I never touched a single note card.
But this eighth grade teacher thought she was helping me be a better college senior.
And what it turned out was everything she taught me was irrelevant because I went through college the way I was going to go through college.
I chose the classes I was going to choose.
My teachers all had peace sign belt buckles.
And when I went and talked to them and said, look, I can't do these footnotes the way that you're supposed to, they were like, oh, man, don't worry about it.
The quality of your work is really high.
I love reading your piece.
And I found the path that was meant for me.
But in eighth grade, I was consumed by shame and anxiety because I couldn't do it.
It wasn't that I didn't know how.
It wasn't that I hadn't – it hadn't been explained to me enough times.
It wasn't that I hadn't been punished enough times.
It was that the punishment –
The shame punishment and the bad grade punishment and everything that went along with that was not sufficient to cause me to be a different person than I was.
And I still walk around with all – I still walk around with the after effect of having spent eight years as a child being told by every adult that I encountered that I was doing it wrong.
It's no different than developing a muscle.
I mean in my former career, I would often say habits are like muscles.
So like whatever it is you do the most is what becomes you.
And in that case, if – whether it's right, wrong, indifferent, but if every –
If everything that you face is just a recapitulation of how disappointing you are, you can't help but internalize that.
Yeah.
Well, and imagine that you're a huge disappointment to everybody the rest of your life.
Which is something I genuinely feel.
Like I have never felt not a disappointment.
I feel like I'm a disappointment to you right now, Marlon.
You said this on your other program this week that you also – if I'm not a disappointment to you now, I will be at some point.
Right.
Oh, and this is interesting.
You listened to my other program.
I don't know.
And listened to it and assimilated the conversation.
Listened to it with real ears.
I didn't even need an outline.
You weren't sitting at your workbench.
Mm-mm.
working on your Geppetto doll, which would be very... And that would be a twist.
That would be a twist if Pinocchio made a Geppetto doll.
Right?
Or if Geppetto was just a doll for a larger Geppetto.
We should really start this show.
You ready to start?
How's it going, John?
There was an insurrection.
I'm reluctant to talk about this because I don't want to get anybody in trouble.
I don't know how official or pseudo-official this is, but in my daughter's grade, there was an insurrection early this year.
Among the kids or among the parents?
Amongst the teachers.
And I guess it wasn't so much of an insurrection that it was quashed.
I guess it was an insurrection that was – I don't even know if it was welcome.
This is only ever talked about in whispers because you know how it is when you don't want to ruin a thing.
But –
Initially, you get things to take home and do, but we were already a week or two into the school year.
I was like, hmm, this is interesting.
We're not getting this pile of shit somebody got off the internet to fill in.
Copyrighted material.
Eventually, we learned that it was decided.
Not exactly unilaterally.
I'm not sure who all was involved, but the teachers just decided they're not doing homework this year.
Wow.
So, yeah, I mean, they read articles, too.
They listen to NPR.
Whoa, karate chop.
Yeah.
So we were talking about it just last night where, you know, she was sad, not sad, but she was like, oh, we can't watch any more Gilmore Girls because it's time for bed.
It's school tomorrow.
Yes, all of those things are true.
But I was like, you know, isn't it kind of better?
And of course, she'll never agree with me on anything.
But I can tell you, it's way, way better.
And, you know, can I tell you most of all what I don't miss?
Because I hope I can get you on my side with this one.
The one I really don't miss, the reading log.
so what is that even well it's it seems like such a good idea so what do we want our kids to do read when we want them to do it every night so part of the homework for at least two years was you you get this sheet this you know again a xerox sheet it's like what did you read who is the author what time did you read it how many pages did you read
Oh, my God.
Yeah.
So because you got to read.
And, you know, the understanding is you read at least 20 minutes a night, which is I'm sorry.
I'm on the verge of bragging and I don't mean to be accepted.
I am very proud of our daughter.
She's a she's a very intelligent leader.
She's a reader.
And I could not be happier.
I want to sing it from the mountaintops.
So that's it's she's.
And but there are other kids who are not.
I mean, I have I have really good pals who kids with kids who are really smart or, you know, really something.
They're they're not awful, but they have a sports intelligence, maybe.
Maybe, or maybe they just don't like fucking books.
Like, they're not into it.
They've never fucked a book.
Well, you know, first time for everything.
Depends on what kind of work he does.
So, it seems like a good idea.
You come home with a sheet, and you say, okay, Diary of the Wimpy Kid, number three, I read these 20 pages.
Guess who does that?
Fucking nobody.
It's due on Friday, and now guess what you have to do, to use John Syracuse's term, you have to back-solve your week of reading.
You've got to go figure out, oh, God.
And so every night I say this, write down in your reading log.
And it's tearing.
It's tearing.
I want to tear my eyes out saying, did you fill out your reading log?
It's tearing this country apart.
Well, let's take this thing that this kid somehow figured out how to love and do every day.
And then let's make it into a time card.
Yes.
So, I mean, you know what it's like if you don't fill in your time card and you got to go in and like figure out how you spent your week.
So, yeah.
So then it would be a guess what now we've take.
Congratulations, San Francisco.
You've ruined reading because now we found a way to take something.
This kid, for whatever reason, pound sign blessed.
They like to read.
And now we've turned it into work.
And I get, I get, I think I get why they do it.
They want to make sure that the kids are reading at home or that the parents are reading to them.
Did you read this with somebody?
Did you read it by yourself?
Was it read to you?
How difficult was it?
Please fill out all of these things.
And it seems like such a good idea in the abstract, but it was a complete source of unnecessary anxiety, not solving a non-problem.
And I honestly feel – and I know that these are – I know that you often go quiet when I talk this way.
Oh, God.
Please, please.
Oh, my God.
It's exactly hour 25.
I know.
And I'm only going to say – I'm only going to say one or two sentences.
All right.
And then I hope – hopefully you won't put this show into the show pile that never got released.
But I feel like it is like the –
The attempt to prove that everyone is getting a good education often results in this kind of what seems like a good idea because it's leveling behavior.
Everyone can prove that they read the books.
And what it doesn't do is serve the kids that already read the book.
And it's meant to prove that the teachers have done a good job.
And it's meant to prove that no one got left behind.
Yeah.
It seeks to ensure – there's a phrase people have been using so much this election season that I think is very interesting, the idea of the ceiling and the floor.
Like this candidate has a fairly high floor.
Yeah.
For whatever reason, he's probably not going to drop much lower no matter what happens.
But he also has a fairly low ceiling.
In that instance, you're saying, well, let's make sure that that floor doesn't get too low for everybody.
But let's put spikes on the ceiling because that would be fun.
Yeah.
And my big question about the teachers that had an insurrection and decided not to do homework is up the chain, up their chain, their Geppetto's Geppetto is –
is going to suffer some consequences, right?
There's pressure from the top down.
And from the sides.
I can just – I'm not going to get ping-ponged.
There's going to be some notes about why their kid isn't being worked harder.
Yeah.
It's a thing.
It's really a thing.
And that all is – there's that cultural aspect of it.
But also somewhere up the school board or somewhere in the school district, they've read some articles.
And they're charged with that being their job.
They have note cards to do and footnotes to write.
Because when the Geppetto Geppetto's Geppetto calls them into their Geppetto office and they say, hey, show me that everybody's reading, they're going to have their dick in their hand.
Right.
And when the SATs, which are a bad indicator of people's education and intelligence and future capabilities, when those tests come back,
That's how they determine whether or not the principal keeps their job.
And the thing is, none of it worked for me.
It wasn't what I was meant to do.
And when God made me, he or she said, we need one of these.
We don't need a lot of these.
You're a limited edition.
But right now we need one of these.
And at every step along the way, adults, half-educated adults, some presuming to be educated in things that I don't think you can even be educated in, which is the complete understanding of the human mind and soul and heart.
Every step along the way, adults were intervening and telling me that who I was and how I was made was wrong.
And what I needed to do was this, this, this, and this.
Things that were not just incompatible with who I was.
Misidentify the problem, misidentify the solution.
But isn't that part of it, though?
It's this whole, like, well, I am here to set you straight.
I'm going to tell you that you are broken, and then I'm going to tell you to fix it in a way that wouldn't fix it even if it were a problem.
It's a non-solution to a non-problem.
Right.
And in the case of my own daughter, I have said the following things.
Do not put your hand down your underwear in a restaurant.
Do not
Stand and hit daddy.
Stand on a bench and hit daddy in the face.
Do not have a breakdown screaming crying fit because there's rice on your plate.
Beyond that.
But potatoes are okay.
No, she doesn't like potatoes because that's born into her.
Yeah, it's in her blood.
But beyond that, like what's going on with you?
And what's your deal?
Talking about feelings.
Yeah.
And she's most of the time like, you know, I don't everything's fine.
I don't have a deal.
And I'm like, all right.
Right on.
I'm not going to sit here, even though I have a deal.
Even though I think having a deal is very important.
Oh, God.
Everybody's got a deal.
They just got to figure out what it is.
Yeah.
And I'm sitting here desperate.
You got a deal, buddy.
You got a deal.
I'm in the I'm in the catcher's crouch with with my big catcher's mitt.
waiting for her to throw the pitch of her deal at me.
And I'm sending her signals like, please throw a heater right down the middle.
And she keeps turning around and throwing the ball to first base and looks at me and shakes off my calls.
And I'm like, well, what can I do?
You know, what the adults did to me, well, it didn't work.
And my parents tried to correct the mistakes of their parents because their parents were
Like, don't I tell you, my grandfather told my mom not to stick her butt out when she walked.
Oh, that's a nice note.
Because that was suggestive.
Oh, so it was a sexy thing.
Yeah, in the farm town of Vanward, Ohio in 1942, if you walk with your butt sticking out, it's bad when you're walking home from school.
And so it changed the way my mom walks.
Huh.
God.
And, you know, and my dad's dad was like, you need to listen more when I wake you up drunk at two o'clock in the morning.
So I'm going to put you into a cold bathtub, like a bathtub full of cold water.
So my parents were trying to do better than that.
Yeah.
And I'm trying to do better than they did.
And in my case, I don't know what's going to happen when she brings home homework that makes her cry.
But I'm pretty sure what's going to happen is that I throw it in the fireplace.
And then when they send a note home with her saying, your daughter isn't doing her homework, I'm going to send a note back that says, I know.
And that's going to go on until the time when they send me a letter that says, we cannot advance your daughter.
to the next grade.
But that's never going to happen because at a certain point she will, through her love of learning, figure out a way, you know, she's never going to get held back because she didn't, because I didn't, you know what I mean?
Like I never got held back.
Right.
They couldn't, even though they tried.
And so, but that is a, but that's maybe teaching her a terrible lesson about the world and
But I think the lesson I'm trying to teach her in the world is there's a place for you in the world.
There's a point for you being here and there's a place for you.
and find it you know i'm not going to tell you where it is don't let a teacher tell you where it is either like find your place in the world there is one that is good you know and and maybe i'm going to have to homeschool her and get that uh get that jeep start the long drive yeah if i homeschool her what will end up happening is she her mind won't get polluted with this evolution business oh my god from your mouth to to geppetto yeah are you uh you ready to start
Should we do the show now?
Yeah.
I don't have my bell.
I'm going to eat this sandwich now.
Donald Trump says he alone can solve America's problems.
At his rallies, he whips his supporters into a violent frenzy and says that people who have criticized him will suffer when he's president.
Trump blacklists members of the media that write negative stories about him and says that when he's president, he'll restrict the rights of the free press.
He openly calls for the U.S.
to commit war crimes and says that we should torture and kill the innocent children of suspected terrorists.
Regarding waterboarding, he said, even if it doesn't work, they probably deserved it anyway.
A veteran told Trump that American soldiers wouldn't follow that order.
And Trump said, they're not going to refuse me.
If I say do it, they're going to do it.
Dictators around the world love Trump.
He is praised by Vladimir Putin and Kim Jong-un's state-run media.
Back in 1990, Trump's wife told her lawyer that he keeps a copy of Hitler's speeches by his bedside.
Trump surrounds himself with yes-men, sycophants, and fools.
There's nobody in Trump's inner circle that will tell him no or correct him on the facts.
Now Donald Trump gets classified national security briefings, and he has repeatedly asked why the U.S.
can't use its nuclear weapons.
As Americans, it is our duty to resist fascist dictators wherever they rise up in the world.
This November, we are not going to elect one here.
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