Ep. 304: "Go For Bounce"
Hello.
Hi, John.
I'm Merlin.
How's it going?
Good.
Wow.
I don't know if the call recorder caught that, but that was one of your more existential noises.
It was beyond a sigh.
When it first came...
When it first came online, I heard you exhale.
It was so inspiring that I felt like exhaling.
Leaving you all in my car parts.
Didn't have the money.
I would have gotten roses.
It's true.
Hospitaliano.
When you hear your family.
When you're not, fuck you.
Fuck you.
No, you can't take those breadsticks home.
It was nice because it was definitely a kind of, gosh, I hope that it was captured in the call recorder.
It had a kind of, it was definitely a kind of sigh, but it was also, it was a little bit annoyed.
It was kind of like, ah.
Mmm.
Ah.
You've got to practice all those things.
You know, there are so many things you can't say to your kid, but you need to communicate to your kid.
Oh, sing it, sister.
Some of those things have to be communicated.
There's a lot of stuff that you're not supposed to say to kids that you have to use a different kind of mouth noise for.
Let's be honest.
Words, such as they are, are a kind of mouth noise.
But it's not the only kind of mouth noise.
Good point.
It's a body noise.
There's a noise I make a lot around, like, I'm going to say 732, which is this.
Uh-huh.
Yeah.
Exasperated sound.
Oh, I have so much to talk to you about.
Yeah.
What's going on?
But then I got other stuff I want to talk to you about.
Like you just made me remember something I did the other night.
I don't watch TV at night as much as I used to like TV shows.
Yeah.
I get a little dad time after everybody's gone to bed and I used to use that for TV shows.
And I did that last night with Succession, which is a good show.
But increasingly, I watch YouTube videos.
Oh, and what are some of the good ones?
What are some of the good themes?
Well, there's the ones I can cop to that are very masculine and interesting.
Like a two-part...
deep music theory breakdown of peg oh well there's one i hadn't seen that a listener sent in that was great it's him and this guy who i guess had been in the band who has like a show and it goes real deep on how he chose the chords and the voicings
Oh, yeah, yeah.
I saw that.
I saw that.
It's him and a guy playing like an organ.
Have you seen that?
I'm so embarrassed now.
Oh, my God.
I saw this really obscure video about the breakdown of Peg, and I was like, oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.
No, no, no.
I know the one you're talking about.
And the way he chooses the voicings.
Oh, it's so good.
And then they play it.
They play Peg.
yeah now that kind of thing that's a very masculine thing for me to be watching so masculine it's very intellectual because it's about theory yeah it's a it's about jazz right jazz did you see the video of the moto gp2 rider who reached over and grabbed the other guy's break i haven't seen the video i saw the still image isn't that cheating john it's cheating merlin that guy should be in big trouble and i think he is
See, I don't know.
See, it's one of those things like pro wrestling or MMA where I'm not sure what you're really allowed or encouraged to do.
Yeah, well, you remember that scene in Breaking Away where the guy sticks his... The Italians.
It's the fucking Italians.
The Italians stick his bike pump in.
Team Cinzano.
That's right.
That's no good, boss.
You don't want to stick it into a man's wheels.
Yeah, fuck you.
But yeah, generally, if you're messing with someone else's brake.
You don't mess with another man's equipment.
No.
That's right.
That's right.
I didn't see that.
Unless you're a football player.
I still need to dive into the Venus Williams stuff.
But there are YouTube videos that you don't want to admit.
Sorry, Serena.
Serena Williams.
I think I was just normative.
Sorry, continue.
That's all right.
You can cut it all out.
People are going to email you about it if I get it wrong.
Yeah, email me for sure.
Send you a letter.
Are there videos that you don't want to admit you're watching?
See, that's the thing.
Okay, let's do this.
I don't look at the internet usually when we're recording, but I'm going to look at the internet and I'm going to look at my history.
Are they like Rainbow Dash videos?
Oh, like the Russian dash cam videos?
Oh, I love those.
Are you kidding me?
Did you see the one where the guy in the motorcycle got hit from behind and he went over the top of the car and ended up on his feet?
I did, and that's when I turned it off.
Because you know how YouTube works?
They give you increasingly more radical versions of whatever you're watching.
Oh, I didn't know that's how it worked.
Some of the Russian dash cam stuff is people just spinning out.
Right.
It's very wholesome.
You just see that's just, well, that's an example of bad Russian driving.
The Russian dash cams are the ones that caught that meteor that came down and exploded and blew everybody's windows out?
No kidding.
I'm not going to get back into it.
Okay, here's some history.
Okay, all right.
One thing that's actually on my list that I've done a deep dive on we need to talk about.
We need to talk about gang stalking and targeted individuals at some point.
That's how I spent my entire weekend.
Oh, yeah.
Oh, yeah.
Those are.
Oh, shit, dog.
Put the biggest fork you've got in that.
Okay.
That's a sign that the game is on.
Okay, good.
Wow.
Okay, so some wholesome things I've watched.
Somebody ordering a mystery box from the dark web.
John McWhorter, the linguist, discussing how Donald Trump speaks.
Siskel and Ebert review Goodfellas.
Marshall Crenshaw, The Knack, Nick Lowe, Sniffin' the Tears.
I did a deep dive on The Knack last night.
Number one record of 1979.
You know you can't erase till she's sitting on your face.
They said that in a song.
A lot of the problems with The Knack, turns out all their songs were about teenagers.
Yes.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Anyway.
And that was noted even at the time.
There were cultural critics at the time.
Okay.
You know.
Look at the cultural critics.
This is a little bit.
We should see what Chris Gow.
We should see what Chris Gow said.
Yeah.
Okay.
You got Slade, Blue Swede, a couple of wallpaper lace, Bay City Rollers.
Okay.
That's all pretty good.
But then I got into something that kept me up.
And this is user RWTDT09 who has compiled the opening credits to all of the new TV shows season by season.
So I sat down.
First, I watched a 21-minute video on the 22 new shows of fall 1981.
And then I proceeded forward.
Oh, dear.
Let's see.
Oh, no, this is where it started.
It started with, oh, I should send you this one, 36-minute video called 36 New Shows of the Hellish Mid-Season of 1979.
And so that's the kind of thing I find myself watching.
They had 36 new shows mid-season?
Can you believe that?
In 1979?
One season they had like over 20 new shows and only five of them made it to a second season.
So this person, he annotates them, he explains what's happening in the video.
You don't want to do that.
I'm not proud of those moments, John, when I look at the clock.
I'm a gentleman.
I try to go to bed between 10.30 and 11.
11 is when I really try to be in bed.
It doesn't matter when it is.
The point is that's the deal I've made with myself.
I look down.
It's 11.38 because I've been watching the opening credits from 80s TV shows.
How do you think that makes me feel?
That's not very good.
I feel small.
I didn't even realize you could look at your history of YouTube.
YouTube.com slash feed slash history.
I see here that I have recently watched the Stone Temple Pilots live at Daytona Beach.
How to pronounce Enver Ho-Ha, Hosha, Hosha.
I didn't even remember how to pronounce it.
Enver Hosha, the...
The leader of Albania.
Oh, and that's different from Smirch.
That's totally different from Smirch.
People want band shirts now.
There's an epic cat chases dog warning lots of hysterical laughter video.
Okay, okay.
There's a cat runs into a bakery door in France.
You know, that title, as good as it is, lacks what my lit professor would call, what do you call it?
Intellectual distance or existential distance.
A little on the nose.
Cat runs into a bakery door in France.
Suicidal tendencies institutionalized.
All I wanted was a Pepsi.
Let's see.
Oh, I don't know where this came from.
This must have come from you.
Ron Swanson meat lover compilation.
Oh, I want all of the bacon and eggs.
That's right.
All the bacon and eggs.
Yeah.
I've got some introducing Spot Mini, the latest robot from Boston Dynamics that looks like a dog that's going to kill you.
Oh, no, that's bad.
Yeah.
Those people need to be stopped, John.
How to install tile adhesives.
Okay.
How to pronounce fin de si cal, which I still can pronounce.
Fin de si ecla.
Fin de si ecla, right.
I still call it fin to see.
So I'd rather not see these things.
I didn't know that you could see this and I'd rather not.
I don't even want to talk about this, except I need somewhere to talk about this, John.
Don Rickles roasts Ronald Reagan.
Oh, that's funny.
Last night I was watching Burt Reynolds and Don Rickles.
Oh, they're fun together, aren't they?
Oh, my God.
I will sit and see.
This is not masculine.
I will sit down.
And you get Dom DeLuise in the mix.
Oh, get out of Dodge.
He's a good sport, that Dom DeLuise.
Yeah, he is.
But I dove deep on gang stalking and targeted individuals.
This is my new obsession.
Is this one title, gang stalking?
Oh, God.
I don't know if I even want to get into this.
This is something we should talk about later in the episode.
Do you know about targeted individuals?
No.
Betrayed by those we know and love.
Targeted individuals.
Gang stalking.
Gang stalking survivors.
Ex-gang stalking operative explains tactives and motives.
Yeah.
Okay, let's talk about this later.
I don't know what this is.
All right, targeted individuals.
I'm kind of tempted to say, I kind of want to leave it at this.
There's a targeted individual community.
Oh, shit, dog.
You talk about a community?
Yeah.
Oh, oh.
Oh, I'm going to send you some stuff that's going to curl your hair.
All right.
Okay.
Here's my, you know, I think, you know, I don't like to give you homework.
I know you're busy.
Yeah.
But can I just encourage you to type down two phrases?
Okay.
Gang stalking, but especially targeted individuals.
Okay.
Not just in YouTube, but on the internet as a whole?
Well, I'm going to give you a hint.
I'll give you, here's what I'm going to say.
I'm going to say start.
I'm not happy about this.
This is not a masculine thing to do.
Get on the Twitter website.
You do a search on targeted individuals.
Uh-oh.
I'm going to leave it at that.
First of all, I apologize in advance because this is going to be your week.
I just gave you a week of unintentional homework.
Oh, no.
Okay.
I think I know you and I'm a little bit worried because we're both very vulnerable people.
I worry that
Like me, you're going to be very drawn into this with a kind of, heh, thing at first, and then increasingly like a, hmm, and then like a, wow, and then like a, whoa.
So we'll see where the rabbit trail takes you.
But for homework, well, it's not homework.
We're colleagues.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
But anybody out there, just go look around for, look at targeted individuals.
Is this the same as when I discovered what incels were?
See, that one, that was an evening for me.
That was a full... That's not a full week like this.
There was a Reddit thread where a guy, it was from an HR director at a company who I think was, an employee was threatening to sue because that person was flaunting their relationship.
And because this person was looking for appropriate incel rights.
Oh, incel rights.
What about my needs?
By flaunting your religion, or I'm sorry, flaunting your relationship.
It's a kind of religion.
You're being discriminatory against.
Very normative.
Uh-oh.
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You will be.
Sorry.
Now, a phrase you used to use that you learned about from the internet was forever alones?
Oh, forever alones.
Is that similar to an incel, John?
Yeah.
Oh, I think so.
I think so.
You know, the other day... Forever Alone's got a little more of a sense of humor about it.
Oh, there's nothing funny about being forever alone.
No.
Okay.
On a separate podcast from this one, which it's hard to believe I have... I think you've got four.
You have four.
Is that right by my count?
You have four?
That's right.
Four podcasts.
We used the term neckbeard and got quite a bit of reader mail that that is no longer an acceptable term because it's... Because it's discriminatory against guys who can't grow a beard?
No, no.
It just suggests an entire type of person that is... Some of these writers were saying that what it does is it...
ultimately it's a it's a body shaming term because neckbeards are fat and um you know it's one of those things though where we wouldn't know culture shaming like people of a certain age know you don't call an african-american man boy oh no oh oh dude i was at the i was at the state fair yesterday and there was a big band
And I dragged my whole family over there and sat them down in the chairs and was like, you know, explaining to my daughter.
This is what Grandpa liked.
Yeah, this is my dad's music.
And of course, my mom listened to a lot of big band music because she was married to my dad.
She's too busy annotating CDs now.
But she was like...
Actually, I think they played Jumpin' at the Woodside or whatever, and she leaned over and was like, too slow.
Wow.
I was like, all right, all right, all right.
Just leave them alone.
Sing, sing, sing.
More like sleep, sleep, sleep.
It's a bunch of just peep.
Guys too young to have played this in time.
Tempo!
Not my tempo!
But then a couple of people get up, a couple of cheery, you know, like fresh-faced but middle-aged white people got up and said, now we're going to do some vocals.
So everybody, look out because here comes Chattanooga Choo Choo.
And I looked over and, you know, there's an African-American couple who are probably in their 70s.
And I was like, how's this going to go?
Oh, pardon me, boy.
Yeah, they just launch right into it.
Pardon me, boy.
And when I sing that song to Marlo, because it's one of the songs I sing to her, and she was excited to hear the song.
That's a perma song.
That's a very good song.
It's a great song.
But I just, years ago, when I started singing it to her, made the choice that I would say, pardon me, sir.
Is that the Chattanooga choo-choo?
That's so much more respectful.
Track 29.
Sir, you can give me a shine.
Wow.
I see.
But, you know, you're going to get a shoeshine somehow, right?
There are still lots of shoeshine people.
Gosh, you're so very tall.
Dude, you play basketball.
You don't say... When you go to the shoeshine guy now, you don't say, boy, give me a shine.
And so I couldn't help but look over at them as it's going down.
And, you know, obviously, they're just enjoying the music.
They're not going to...
They're not going to register.
They're not doing a deep reading against the text of what's happening with the audience.
No.
And they're also not 24.
So they're not like theatrically having a reaction to everything that happens in the world as though they're the, you know, as though there are cameras on the couple, the couple were just like watching the show, you know, and I'm sure when the song came up, whatever, I'm sure that they have, they've heard it all and seen it all and done it all.
And maybe didn't, maybe didn't even register, but it registered with me.
Yeah.
And it was interesting that there are lots and lots and lots of places in the world where I'm and I'm sure if I went and talked to those singers, they would say it's the text of the song.
And I would say absolutely it is.
But, you know, also, it's like pretty loaded word.
But that's a loaded word that we don't, you know, it's loaded in context, right?
It's not a loaded word that you can put on one of your millennium lists of words that you can never ever say again.
It's a word that you say all the time, but you can't say it sometimes.
And that's similar to neckbeard.
Well, I don't know about that.
See, I was in response to the... Do you think you're being insensitive to the... What do you call them instead of neckbeards?
What do you say?
The neckbeard community?
No, come on.
I don't... It's on the course.
I don't know.
I don't... The neckbeard community.
I don't know.
I honestly don't know.
Sipping coffee out of a styrofoam cup at that meeting.
The thing is, I know a lot of people that fall into that category, including some of my close friends.
My name is Carl, and I am a neckbeard.
some of my close friends like George Lucas and yeah.
And you know, and I don't know, no one's ever said that to me before.
So it was like, is this, is this one of these things is like mission creep now that we can't pass you by just pass you right by.
Or this is, is this like incel pushback where they're like, you know what?
We're a minority group too.
I just, you can never tell anymore.
Like who's the, who is on the white horse of justice today?
Well, and like something we would say,
Oh, boy, we're going to cut all this out.
Something we would say when I was younger is like, you know, you would say like, wow, check out that guy over there in a neutral way.
And there was a time where like at certain places I've lived, the easiest shorthand for that when somebody says which guy is you would say the black guy because he is the one black guy in this group of non black guy people.
That is what we once would have done.
Why try not to so much do that?
But I think what you could say, because you're still in the process of getting woke about the community formerly known as neckbeards, is you're trying to say, like you're trying to identify, no, it's that guy over there with a neckbeard.
Oh, no.
See, because when you use the term neckbeard, it is almost always pejorative.
Yeah, I guess.
Right?
You're like, well, so I was doing this, and then the neckbeards came in and told me that I was doing it wrong.
So it's like a geek or a nerd.
It's some kind of like a model train enthusiast.
Well, no, because it's not just – there is something pejorative about it because neckbeards – because here's the thing.
Sometimes I say, oh, this guy was mansplaining to me, and then I got a bunch of people – I got a bunch of letters that said men cannot mansplain to men.
Oh, I disagree.
I so disagree.
You're so wrong.
They do it all the time.
Mansplainers are a category of people, and they'll mansplain to the paint as it dries.
Yeah.
But then I was like, oh, so you can't mansplain to a man.
All right.
All right.
All right.
But, you know, there's something mansplaining about neckbeards.
It's not just that they're sitting there growing a beard on their neck.
It's a type, you know, it's a sort.
But anyway, lots of not a lot, but a little bit of communication on one of the fan forums about how that is no longer a term that it's coming after you.
Are you getting brigaded, John?
Are they coming after you again?
No, no, no.
You know, generally they're talking to one another.
This is the this is the thing about the fan community.
And it's why I shouldn't ever go there.
But they're talking to one another about how.
Upset they are about something.
Okay.
The other day, we reviewed on the Friendly Fire podcast the movie Kelly's Heroes, which is a war movie starring Clint Eastwood.
Don Rickles is in it.
Telly Savalas is there.
It's another one from the substrat of Dirty Dozen type movie.
That's right.
Donald Sutherland.
But it's a sub Dirty Dozen.
It's not as good as Dirty Dozen.
It's kind of a bad movie.
And I don't know whether it was because we record those shows.
We record them well in advance.
So this was a recording we made a long time ago.
And it aired, and there were quite a few people who were so sad that I was so mean to Kelly's Heroes.
I feel like you've already told this story, but I don't think you have.
It sounds like this is an ongoing theme.
This is brand new.
Of somebody whose feelings got hurt because of how you felt about something.
Yeah.
There were quite a few people that were like, I really sat down, couldn't wait to listen to this episode.
And then John really didn't like Kelly's heroes.
And that really...
seems unfair because kelly's heroes is really fun and i don't understand why he didn't like it that's a very um ironic way to address that i don't know in the sense that well i mean the whole basis of that person's i think i'm not reading i would i don't go to those communities either no way i i know how bad i am i don't need any help i shouldn't you shouldn't but like it sounds like the objection is i have a strong feeling
about whether I like or don't like this thing.
And I disagree with John having a strong feeling about whether he likes or doesn't like this thing.
I'll listen to that trolley in the background.
It feels so wonderful.
I think that the I think what I'm what I'm discovering is and I've known this for a long time, right?
That we've we crossed a Rubicon at some point into a world where loving things is all that matters.
You know, like if you are a fan of a thing, then that means you're almost equal to the creator of the thing.
You're such a fan of it.
Yeah.
And the two co-hosts.
Well, in fact, in fact, you could because you like it and understand it more than the person who created it.
You actually in some ways over time, you develop more agency to have the canonical feeling about it.
Yes, correct.
The two co-hosts of my program, Ben and Adam, have another show about Star Trek.
and they uh they love star trek and they tease it good-naturedly but they both agree that it's great and in the end in the end even though it's hilarious and there's lots to laugh about it's still amazing this is the patrick stewart next generation show right and um and i think a lot of their fans love to hear the teases and they're like oh my god they're
he's in Patrick Stewart or whatever.
But then at the end, everyone is brought back into the circle and they all, they all agree that it's great and everything is great.
And you know, my take on a lot of things is that they're not great.
They're bad.
And, uh, some things are bad.
Lots of things are bad.
In fact, some things are, are really bad.
They're bad for you.
They're bad and you should feel bad.
They're bad and we should say so.
They're bad.
I'm saying so now and you should agree with me.
Yes.
Or at least hear me out.
Um,
Um, and that is a different, that's a different temperature than getting to the end and saying, but Kelly's heroes is a great movie, super fun, five stars.
So I don't even remember, I don't remember doing that show.
I don't remember what I gave Kelly's heroes, but I'm sure it was something like Clint Eastwood is not funny.
Um, telly Savalas is not funny.
Donald Sutherland in this movie is really not funny, and there's a lot of stuff in this movie that's just not funny.
Donald Sutherland, if memory serves, he's almost like a stoner.
It's a World War II movie, and he's playing a hippie stoner who's like, hey, man, stop stepping on my vibes.
I think I remember this better than I thought.
I don't want to spoil it, but it turns out Telesis of Alice is kind of a bad seed.
Yeah, he's bad.
He's the crazy one.
No, he's the bad seed in Dirty Dozen.
Wait, he's in both of them?
I think so.
Jim Brown is only in the one.
Jim Brown is in Dirty Dozen.
Okay.
Lee Marvin?
Lee Marvin is in Dirty Dozen.
What's the one with Mark Hamill?
Mark Hamill was in Corvette Summer.
Corvette Summer?
Is that the one where he had the accident and had the facial injuries?
Yeah.
What's Force 10 from Navarone?
That is Han Solo is in that movie.
Han Solo is in it.
Now there's two... There's guns of Navarone?
So...
Force 10 from Navarone is a sequel to Guns of Navarone, although there are none of the same people in it, and it's not related at all.
Guns of Navarone has David Niven in his black and white.
Oh, I know you love him.
Is he the guy with the bomb in the briefcase?
He is, yes!
Woo!
Woo!
Yes, bomb in a briefcase.
Oh, my God.
Another thing you have a very strong opinion about.
The guy from Portugal, the man, John, the singer, texted me the other day a picture of himself wearing a T-shirt that said, suck it, Morrissey.
Wow.
And I said, how the fuck do I get one of those?
And he was like, it's in the mail for you, my friend.
Oh.
So I'm going to have a second Morrissey T-shirt.
Did I take you off your thing where you were talking about something else?
And now I'm asking about the genre of multi-person war movies.
He sent me a picture of a T-shirt that he isn't going to send me, but he thought about.
What is it?
Which is just the word Morrissey superimposed over a pound of raw hamburger.
Oh, jeez.
that's a little bit hurtful it's terrible it's awful but you know like it's when i find another i mean are you really caught up on this you understand it is murder it is murder it is murder when i find another brother in the world that's willing to publicly particularly in rock publicly stand up and say fuck you morrissey oh i just feel like we should he grabs and devours he kicks him in the showers he kicks him in the showers he grabs and devours bruises bigger than dinner plates
You and Colin Malloy should start a podcast.
Distended Barrow Boy.
Dickensian Roughneck.
Never wrote a song about a pirate.
Never.
Stop saying that.
He went to Yale.
Well, no.
No?
No.
Well, we can all agree that you're gauche.
I'm super gauche.
Let's not dig that up.
So I'm trying really hard not to go on the internet at all, really.
There's just no reason to.
I didn't go to XOXO this year.
I don't want to go on the internet.
I just don't see that there's any value to it anymore, except to watch movies.
Well, there's a lot of good stuff on YouTube.
There's that GP2 guy who reached over and grabbed somebody else's break.
I wouldn't have seen that.
Okay, so this morning, I was reading Pitchfork's reappraisal of Best Records of the 80s.
Whether or not I agree with it, it reminded me how much I loved Eric B. and Rakim back in the days.
They were great.
Well, yeah.
I mean, he was the greatest rapper up to that time.
The stage is a cage, the mic is a third rail.
And so that led me into some Spotify on Eric B. and Rakim, which I used to listen to obsessively and I haven't listened to in years.
And then I remembered that there was one of the first Eric B. and Rakim songs, besides Paid in Full, that I got super into, used to get played a lot at the clubs.
Do you remember this?
There was a remix of I Know You Got Soul that included...
like bars well but the remix had bars and bars and bars of i want you back by the jackson five and so i found that it's eric b and rakim i know you got soul six minutes of soul remix that led me down the rabbit hole to guess what isolated bass track for i want you back
Really?
And then that led me into the Adventures of Grandmaster Flash on the Wheels of Steel long version.
So that's how I spent my morning.
Now, in that case, that seems very wholesome to me.
That's a good use of the internet is what I'm trying to say.
That's a very good use of the internet.
Let me make a recommendation.
Write it down.
I was in a conversation the other day with a friend who is a professional musician who was on tour.
Mike Squires.
Nope, wasn't Mike Squires.
And I was saying, I want to put a little more bump in the bump-a-bump-a-bump.
Do you think you might want to add a little bit of ding in the ram-a-lam-a-ding-dong?
I have some of that, but I've been playing the bass more.
And what I'm lacking, I have good bass bass.
Melodies, but what I'm lacking is bounce.
I want bounce And I'm and the thing is it's not that I don't have bounce.
It's not that I can't go for balance No, well depending depending on what I do I try to play a lot of bounce when you do the two finger alternating thing There's a lot of bounce, but but I'm afraid of the bounce I'm afraid of the bounce because I want to be in the pocket and if I'm if I don't try and bounce
I can stay in the pocket, but if I start to bounce, like if I try and James Jamerson, I just don't have it.
So I was saying to this bass player guy, who's a very good bass player and very, very laid back in the pocket player, I was like, how do I get that bounce?
Yeah, give me that bounce.
And he said, you just gotta go for the bounce.
Just go for bounce is what I'm trying to say to myself over and over.
But he said, what you need to do is listen to Family Man.
And I said, listen to Family Man.
Black Flag?
No, Family Man, the bass player of Bob Marley and the Wailers.
Oh.
And he said, the thing about Family Man is that he is playing a co-lead vocal with Bob Marley singing.
And I was like, tell me more.
And then he started humming some, you know, humming some Family Man bass lines.
And of course, we all know them all.
Uh, and what I, what I, what I haven't quite done, what I haven't been able to do is, uh, is figure out if there are isolated bass tracks, um, of family man, because you know, it's so, it's so like ingrained into, so there are, well, they're not, are there there?
The thing is a lot of, a lot of the time you're like, Hey, isolate those bass tracks.
And then you get a, you get a YouTube video of some guy in Italy who's like,
Here is my family man bass tracks.
That's not an Italian.
You know, there should be a law.
I mean, like an international law.
They're like, you're not allowed.
You have to use the word cover title.
Please just use the word cover.
Yeah.
I click on them all the time where I'm like, oh my God, really?
And then it's just some.
I want to hear every extant version of ever long by Foo Fighters because it's maybe close to my favorite song.
I want to hear every version of that that Foo Fighters or Dave Grohl have done.
I don't need to hear you play that on the ukulele.
With all due respect, you should say cover.
Say cover.
Just say cover.
It's not that hard.
See, I look for isolated.
Now I'm getting like bass play along, isolated bass.
But it's not isolated bass.
It's a man with a bass playing.
Yeah, that's not an isolated bass.
Well, like Mike Squires does a good job with that app.
He does.
He seems to knock out the parts pretty well.
Well, Mike, you know, this is a thing I never did as a musician.
I never learned other people's music.
And...
So I didn't have my Beatles in Hamburg years.
I'm not like Jonathan Colton.
I don't understand how chords work together.
Every time I sit down with an instrument, I play a chord and then I... Could you play a diminished chord if I ask you to right now?
I would move my fingers around until somebody said, that's it.
But no, I wouldn't know how to do it.
I can do a six or a nine in my sleep, but I still don't understand augmented and diminished.
Please don't email me.
I can't really even do a nine.
A nine is just when you're doing like an A pattern bar chord.
Also hit the E. Oh, sorry.
No, that's a six.
That's a six.
For a nine, you got to do the Minutemen chord.
But you can do a six real easy, and it sounds like the end of every Beatles song.
How do you put the six on?
So imagine you're doing like a D on the fifth fret.
Now with your middle finger, also press down on the E string.
On the E string?
At the seventh fret or the fifth fret?
Yeah, seventh fret.
At the seventh fret.
Like you're continuing the A all the way across.
Oh.
And it sounds like the end of an early Beatles song.
And that's a sixth?
That's a sixth.
See, I'm not playing around.
I have no idea how to do any of this.
You should try it.
Get your guitar.
It sounds really good.
Every time I grab a guitar, it's like I put the second chord is a complete mystery to me.
Hang on, here we go.
So play a D at the fifth fret.
John's going to get his guitar.
All right, here we are.
So just do a standard D major with your bar on the fifth.
I'm playing a... So a listener to the program...
The name of Hector sent me a guitar.
Hector sent you a guitar?
Yeah, he said, I have this Univox, and it's like the Univox that's a Moserite copy.
You know the one that looks like a Ventures model?
Like lipstick pickups?
No, it's got cool little... I'm thinking of Dan Electro, I think.
Yeah, it's got cool little...
Little humbuckers.
It's the guitar that Kurt Cobain famously broke a lot of them.
It's a cool guitar, and he sent it to me.
That's so nice.
So here's a D chord.
Give me another one.
Hit that again.
That's the six?
Yeah.
Imagine you're ending on the one of a 1-4-5 song, and when you hit the last one for the...
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Try doing arpeggio.
Like just... Yeah, just like a slow swipe, yeah.
That's the one.
Okay, all right.
Yeah.
I can tell when I haven't played my guitar enough...
this should be a life hack.
If it's still open tuned, I haven't played it recently.
Oh, see, I go through, I go through the open tuning phases and, and then I'll put that guitar down and play a different, cause I have too many guitars.
So, so you're smart.
You're like a, you're like a B 52 or a Sonics youth.
I'm a Sonics youth, yeah.
I have guitars that are in different tunings.
Are you getting screwdrivers stuck in them, John?
No, I don't put drumsticks in my guitars either.
Bush League.
But I do keep them around in different tunings, and the thing is I'll pick one up forgetting that that is in a different tuning.
I have a guitar that is dedicated Nashville tuning.
But other than that, because that's different strings, but other than that, they all just end up being Nashville tuning.
Yeah, Nashville tuning.
Let me recommend that if you have a second guitar.
The Wound EAD is a six-string guitar.
Oh!
Oh my goodness!
Is that mostly for chords, or are you picking?
Well, so what Nashville Tuning is... High strong.
Yeah, what I think of the purpose of it being is that it's... Elliot Smith used a variant of Nashville Tuning on Tomorrow Tomorrow.
It's a 12-string guitar, but...
You're just using the high strings of a 12-string guitar instead of the low strings.
The low strings are a six-string guitar, and then you take the other ones and just put them on a normal guitar, but it sounds like a 12-string or like the high part of a 12-string.
Wow.
That's fascinating.
What it does is just, I mean, everything just sounds magical.
Give me Danger from Raw Power by the Stooges?
It has a Nashville tuning.
And then if you take a Nashville tuning and you capo it somewhere, you're just like, where did I get this?
Then you play it into an AC30 top boost with volume all the way up and travel all the way up.
Are you kidding me?
You'll take a plane out of the sky.
You'll knock an airplane right out of the sky.
Take it out of the sight.
Just knock it right out.
Black box.
I spent half a day last week trying to learn the song Falling Slowly from that movie Once.
Take the sinking boat and point it home.
We're still got time.
That song?
I don't think so.
You're kidding.
It's really good.
Tuning for that was pretty monkey balls.
Does not for me apply to that many different things.
And so now I need to retune, but my strings are kind of old and I, I'm a little worried.
Hmm.
But I used to do, you know what I liked?
I liked the Neil Young-ish drop down to D. That kind of basic one.
No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no.
Yeah, I was going to say, it's the Cinema Girl tuning.
Here's one.
That's just a drop D. They use that in grunge.
That's a big time grunge.
I was in a drop D metal band called Requiem.
No, you were not.
No, I wasn't.
Difficulty novice.
That's a spoon reference.
Version 3.
Difficulty novice?
How do you drop this?
We are underused.
That's a really good song.
A lot of them aren't.
Are you able to listen to
To Pavement now?
100%.
100% you still are listening to Pavement?
Yeah.
I maybe enjoy them.
The middle records that I think are kind of underrated, I like even more now.
I liked those records at the time.
The middle records.
And people were like, blah, blah, blah.
They were underused.
They were underrated.
I didn't know enough about it to be a snob about it.
Well, and they were cheeky.
Oh, they're so cheeky, but of course I'm not against cheeky, as you know.
I was offered the other day an editor of a magazine, a guitar magazine called Fretboard Journal.
There's a friend of mine.
It's a very, very nice guitar magazine.
Very glossy.
It's very smart.
Smart guitar magazine.
But it features, you know, a lot of the guys that are like, this guy owns 42 DeAngelicos and every one of them is worth a million dollars.
You know, it's like, it's a rich guy magazine a little bit.
But the editor was like, would you interview Steve Malcomus?
Would you, John Roderick, interview Steve Malcomus?
Yes, for a fretboard journal.
And I was like, sure, of course.
And then I walked around and I had a pit in my stomach for about a week.
Did you talk to your mom about it?
No, I didn't.
Is there something I should do?
What the fuck am I going to do?
Do I want to do this?
What am I going to do here?
What are you going to ask?
This isn't smart.
Steve Malcolmus terrifies me.
He's a bright guy.
He's a very bright guy.
I'm going to be like, hey, man, so about guitars.
And he's going to do that 90s punk rock thing where he's like, I don't even care about guitars or something.
You know what I mean?
He's going to come to an interview for Fretboard Journal and
I think the thing is, he's one of those guys, you know how there's some people who always seem like they've been the same age?
I think he's, like, terminally a very mature 24-year-old.
Yeah, right.
I bet he's not that hard to interview now.
Well, I don't know.
I've encountered quite a handful of my heroes who are now in their 50s who used to be in their 20s.
Okay.
And...
And some of them still have the same the same attitudes like or whatever, you know, like John John Lydon kind of thing.
Like it's right.
Like Malcolm doesn't seem like the type of guy that's going to geek down over his guitar gear, you know, like even though he's totally guitar oriented guitar player.
He just doesn't feel like he's going to say like, oh, well, then I, you know, I had a 74, but I replaced the pickups or talk about my distortion box or whatever.
I don't know.
You know, like what I would.
He might find it refreshing.
Maybe.
I mean, I think it's worth it.
You could go back and listen to some of the tracks and stuff and look at some videos.
And I bet you could come up with three or four really good questions.
Well, what, unfortunately what I did was I called the editor back and I was like, I don't think I'm the right guy to interview.
That's probably smart.
I think that there are other people who are better suited for this, who are like, who are ready to go along on whatever journey Malcolmus wants to take them on.
And for me, I feel like I would just be lost because if he, because if I was like, Hey, what about guitars?
What kind of amps do you use or whatever?
And he gave me any amount of,
I think it's kind of unimportant, whatever the, you know, the gear is.
I think it's really more about, you know, your intention.
I would just, I would be gone.
You know, I would like being, oh, all right, well, I should be interviewing you for intention board magazine.
Yeah.
I would so subscribe to that.
Right?
I would interview him for Intention Board.
Because it's called Intention Board?
Intention Board.
So we get past all of the blah, blah, blah about how you, like, rewired your pickups, and we talk about intentions.
Yeah, what were your intentions?
Every interview I would ever want to do, I would start off with that in question.
Where were you going with that in your head?
Where have you been going this whole time?
What have your intentions been?
And then, you know, and then if they're like, uh...
My intentions don't matter.
I'll be like, wow.
You ever oil up your pots so they're really fast like Eddie Van Halen?
Yeah.
You ever see any grown man naked?
You ever see like Gladiator movies?
You ever put pencil lead on your nuts so you could do a big drop?
Do you ever do that?
Remember reading about that?
I just I mean, I don't know.
You can drop and they come right back into tune.
One of the videos on my on my watch list that I as I was scanning, I went right over without mentioning was Eddie Van Halen talking about inventing tapping.
Oh, wow.
And the first thing he says is I didn't invent tapping.
But actually, I did.
And here's how.
And then he goes and he shows the whole like, the guy from Genesis is the one who first did it really well.
Yeah, but Eddie did the thing where he barred.
He barred with a finger and was tapping behind it.
I mean, he did... No, I mean, he is understandably, like, legit the guy who gets the credit for bringing that to the mainstream.
But, you know, who's the one guy?
The guy with the mustache from Genesis.
And there's one part in... Oh, you're talking about Phil Levin?
No, no.
No, no.
It's Steve...
Phil Levin.
Oh, my God.
Let's see.
Who was the guy who was in GTR with Steve?
Lucifer?
Jeff Peccaro?
What?
Jeff Spicoli?
Jeff Spicoli?
Denny Diaz?
Yeah, Denny Diaz.
Elliot Randall?
Denny Diaz has a... What was that fellow's name?
The guy from Genesis.
Elliot Randall.
Elliot Easton.
Boots Wellington.
It's the guy, Steve.
Anyway, there's a part in Supper's Ready where he does these ripping hammer-ons.
I'm taking you off your topic.
My topic now is I suddenly, I don't know where I clicked on this, but I suddenly clicked on a thing where a turtle is drowning a rat.
It's a really pretty intense video.
This rat's trying to get away, and the turtle's got him by the tail and just pulled him down under the water, and now it's just like...
There you go.
I don't think the rat's going to make it.
How Eddie Van Halen invented tapping?
I think so, yeah.
Okay.
This rat is really, really like...
This is, I mean, if you are a rat lover.
Okay, hang on.
Rat, turtle, drown.
Turtle drowning a rat.
Yeah.
Okay.
I'm not a rat lover.
We could start a Patreon and there would be a whole episode where you and I just look at stuff on YouTube together.
Oh my goodness.
You know, turtles are, they eat, they're eaters.
Snapping turtle eats three adult mice.
Telling you what, deep dive now.
We should just do a podcast just about turtles eating rodents.
There's a rat attacking a pigeon?
See, there's so much YouTube.
Yeah, there really is.
There's so much.
Is YouTube like Twitter where they're trying to control what's on there?
You can't just put any dirty thing.
You still can.
On YouTube.
And it's not hard at all to end up with Nazis.
Yeah.
So there's all kinds of bad things on YouTube?
Yeah.
Oh, really?
Yeah.
But more than just Nazis?
I mean, I see turtle killing rat, but... That's not a bad thing.
That's nature.
That's educational.
Sure, that's just nature.
That's how... Don't put a rat in a turtle cage.
The thing that's bubbled up in the last year that's caused a lot of trouble for YouTube and people, including parents, is there are these... How would you describe it?
Factories?
Factories?
workhouses that just put out a giant, giant, giant amount of clickbait videos for kids that are sometimes extremely disturbing.
But it's an example of like AI.
It's been cited as an example of AI in reverse because what happens is people go and look for trending words and titles and then actual actors will act out things based on trending topics and make short videos and they'll put up like dozens a day.
And what are those things?
Well, it could be like, I don't know, it could be like the girl from Frozen is kidnapped Logan Paul or whatever.
Like they come up with all these crazy scenarios based on just popular keywords because all they need is that click.
Uh-huh.
Yeah.
So are these like ASMR videos?
Ah, no.
Sure.
Are these, like, unboxing videos?
No.
No.
They're sometimes animated.
They're sometimes acted out.
But, you know, the key, you know, is to get a good, like, what do they call it?
The thumbnail?
Yeah, thumbnail.
Good thumbnail.
You get a good thumbnail and a good title.
It doesn't matter what the video is.
All they need is that click.
And then they want you to watch it for a while.
But the autoplay then just keeps pushing, pushing, pushing until eventually you get to a Nazi.
Could be Elsa and a Nazi, Logan Paul.
Now I'm watching a video of a guy in China on a motor scooter with five big dogs riding on the scooter with him.
Five big dogs?
Five big dogs.
Then they're big dogs.
They're dogs as big as people, and they're all on the scooter with him.
They all seem like they know what their job is.
There's the low dog.
There's the medium dog.
There's the dog with his arms on the guy's shoulders.
There's the dog on the seat, and then there's a little dog.
I'm sorry, four big dogs on one little dog.
That's okay.
And the little dog's all the way on the back.
I got a lot of Queen in here.
Oh, I made my family watch some guitar videos.
They really didn't like that.
I bet not.
You ever get into Michelangelo Battillo?
No.
The guy that plays the two or four necked guitar?
No.
Okay.
You're going to want to check that out.
Do you know who Mary Kobayashi is?
Mm-mm.
Mary Coco on the internet?
No.
Mary Coco.
Mary Coco.
She's a violin player and a keyboard player.
And I introduced her, along with a group of like-minded people, introduced her to the Shreds videos.
We watched Santana Shreds.
And it was very, it was very exciting to watch a person who had never seen Santana shreds for the first time and also laugh until they couldn't breathe.
I was like, thank you.
I was hoping that this wasn't one of those things that I watched one time and couldn't breathe.
It's still funny.
The Jakey Lee one, the Jakey Lee one still just kills me.
I heard that the, the, somebody was telling me that the Eric, Eric Clapton actually got the Eric Clapton one taking, taken down.
Oh, but I can't believe that you could do that.
Huh?
He's got that kind of power.
He does.
What happened when Bitcoins came out?
Why didn't you buy any Bitcoins?
Oh, I don't particularly understand it.
It's interesting.
But it seemed like a thing that you would have maybe been, somebody would have given you some or something?
I don't really understand money.
Yeah, I guess that's right.
It's all very difficult to understand.
trying to see what else i got here bass oh yeah yeah the bass 35 to 69 morrissey interview oh there's a lot of good stuff in here here's a guy showing you how to open velcro in the field tactically a lot of a lot of roller coaster videos we watch a lot of roller coaster videos
Oh, I showed my family Yngwie's arpeggios from hell.
They love that.
I've been thinking about doing an Yngwie Malmsteen episode of the omnibus, but I don't want to give it away.
Okay, enough said.
Yeah.
Here we go.
Mediterranean Sundance with Paco de Lucia, John McLaughlin, and Al Demiola.
You watch a lot more interesting things than I do.
Really?
Most, most, yeah.
Most of the things that I watch are just like, oh, that's embarrassing.
I'm not watching.
Oh, you watch a lot of fail videos?
Uh, no.
What are the ones that, what are the things I end up just watching things like, uh, yeah, like Austro-Hungarian plane crashes.
Uh,
Oh, okay.
Hmm.
Tell me more.
Okay.
Closing that.
Closing Nashville.
Closing that.
Closing Family Man Base Isolated.
Now I'm back to the tabs about the Apple event.
Are you excited about the Apple event?
Is there an Apple event?
Oh, there's an Apple event, Sean.
Is this the one where I'm going to finally get an iWatch?
This is exciting.
You know what the rumors is today?
You ready?
They're talking about changing the port again.
Ha!
Ha!
Oh, well, because... USB-C, it's fast, it's cheap.
Oh, it's so much faster and cheaper.
It's so much faster and it's a standard, except it's not exactly a standard.
I've been waiting for them to change the port again for so long.
It's almost like they're gang-stalking you.
Like, is John caught up on his lightning adapters?
Did he get rid of all of his 30-pin adapters?
Am I an incel here?
Do you remember that?
Do you remember you had all the 30-pin adapters and you're all up to date?
You remember that?
And then what did they do?
They changed it to lightning.
Yeah.
They changed it to lightning, and I had one for every room in the house.
Oh, sure.
You had all those years to catch up.
Now you're going to USPC.
Hakuna Matata.
Yeah, well, and I just changed those fucking adapters.
Change them.
Change them.
Get on with it.
We have to do it.
Targeted individuals.
What else we got here?
Made iced tea this morning.
uh it's a little late in the season for iced tea i think sometimes i like to switch it up i've told you before like the sure sign that i'm getting a cold is the coffee doesn't taste good with that said sometimes coffee just doesn't taste as good to me and i know it's time for a break so i'll make a big pitcher of iced tea from bags
So you're not sick right now.
You're ready for a break.
I'm ready for a break.
And sometimes what I'll do is I'll make a big pitcher of iced tea in the morning.
And then I'll get a one liter beaker, a scientific beaker.
I fill that with ice.
I put in some lime juice and then some iced tea.
And it's a delicious treat.
You get a little bit of caffeine without getting two crazy balls.
I don't know why I felt the need to write that down, iced tea.
What you're trying to accomplish is to have enough caffeine without getting crazy balls?
That's the whole reason I drink caffeine.
Yeah, but you can drink a pitcher of iced tea all day long.
You get to pee a lot, which is fun.
That's true.
I think it's a diuretic, John.
That's true.
And you get to do a kind of Hemingway maintenance drinking.
It's a manageable amount of caffeine.
Yeah.
So I've been struggling with the caffeine lately, I have to admit.
Which way?
Oh, well, I cannot get my head around the fact that I can't drink coffee at 6 o'clock at night.
I just refuse to acknowledge it.
And so I keep waking up at...
I keep going to bed at 4 in the morning and waking up at 5.30 in the morning and not knowing what to do about it.
I bet you've also got an elevated heart rate.
Elevated heart rate is telling your body it's not time to sleep.
I believe that's probably the case.
And so all of the people that are in a position where they're forced to...
uh look care about me right to listen to me uh talk about my day and they're like why why are you so groggy and it's like well i slept for an hour and a half last night all the people that have to hear that type of thing are in my life repeatedly repeatedly once you know uh in the spring it's a regular event for you well and it's not like i'm sitting there making them listen to me no they have to care about you but they don't have to listen
And they ask, you know, they're like, what's going on with you?
And it's like, oh, I don't want to talk about it.
Well, what is it?
Oh, well, I just didn't sleep last night.
Oh, and now they're in that position where they're like, let me guess.
You drank coffee at 6 p.m.
And I'm like, well, I guess so.
I guess I did.
And then they have, guess what, advice.
And guess what the advice is?
Don't drink coffee at 6 p.m.
It seems so simple.
Yeah.
And so I'm like, well, sure.
But then what do you drink at 6 p.m.?
And they're like other things, other non-caffeinated.
I think you might like some herbal tea, John.
I'm like, I don't want that.
I don't want herbal tea.
You don't prefer it.
Well, it's not just that I don't prefer it.
I don't want to be the person that's asking a server for herbal tea.
Oh, because then pretty soon now you're one step away from saying, could you tell me about all your herbal teas?
Yeah, right.
I don't want to hear about the herbal teas.
I wouldn't know what they're talking about half the time.
Like, I don't want to study up on herbal teas.
I don't want to be a person that knows more about herbal teas than some people know about wine.
Oh, God.
I just want to have my... Can you imagine that?
Can you imagine that?
That's what you become at your age?
Your tea connoisseur?
My sister will order tea and then send it back because it's the wrong tea.
You would do it if it had potatoes in it.
Well, but I mean, you know, they're not going to put olives in tea.
No potatoes in tea.
But I'm going to say, like, here's what I'm going to say.
Do you have any coffee brewed?
And sometimes I'll say, do you have any decaf?
But it doesn't matter.
I mean, the decaf isn't, I mean, it doesn't matter.
Decaf doesn't keep you from being awake at night any more than, I mean.
Are you drinking?
I'm not trying to help.
I don't mean to help.
Yeah, I know.
You like the taste of it.
Yeah.
And the heat of fresh coffee.
That's delicious.
Yes.
There's a guy I follow on the internet who did an interesting thing.
And my wife's doing a version of it now.
Where he wanted to wean himself off of.
caffeine coffee so what he did was over a period of i think like a month he slowly changed the percentage of caffeinated to decaffeinated in his mix yeah so he he tapered off my wife does that now she does she gets this really nice low acid coffee that's really delicious and um she does half decaf and half uh half caffeine and
I'm not offering advice here because, you know, we're good enough friends that I wouldn't try to advise you.
Have you considered something like that?
This is a different time.
We're out of the Sanka era.
You could have a delicious coffee that's not fully caffeinated.
Well, you know me enough to know that I'm a cold turkey guy.
Oh, that's right.
Leave it.
I believe in cold turkey, and I believe that any attempt you make to make your suffering be slightly less is just effectively causing you more suffering.
Yeah.
um and so what you do is you just put it down and then you leave it and when you reach for it you say leave it leave it and you do that over and over until they call it the gibson the full gibson that's right you do the full gibson and you end up doing that until you break whatever uh whatever animal inside you has any spirit left you break that animal and then you go lay in its cage and you say this is my this is my crate not your crate
And the little animal that really wants a coffee right now just stands there plaintively looking at you going.
You just do that.
You do that over and over to all the things.
And you don't do the thing where you're like, for the next nine months, I'm going to put a bunch of effort and thought into doing micro, you know, micro diminishments on the amount of coffee in my coffee.
And it's just like, oh, my God.
Here's the thing.
That's just a form of pain displacement.
That all sounds like worse pain than just having the creepy crawlies and the bad, bad headache for three days when you quit drinking coffee.
You've quit coffee cold turkey, right?
Yeah, I think it's a good way to do it.
It hurts.
It hurts.
It does.
But I mean, like I am.
I'm that person you're describing with.
I mean, I will have if I'm trying to have less coffee.
It's not that difficult.
I mean, I'll make a slightly less super strong coffee with slightly less in it.
And then it's really for me, it's really as simple as saying I'm only gonna have one of these to me.
And that's really what I have.
I have one cup of coffee a day.
Usually now I used to drink a pot and a half a day.
And now not as much because it doesn't make me happy.
It gives me exactly what you're describing.
And it took me years to make that association stick in my head.
But I now know that like the way that I will feel tomorrow is just it's too disruptive for me.
Oh, well, that's the other thing.
Like I arrange I have so far because I haven't quit coffee in a while, but I have arranged over the years my life in such a way that.
Um, if I need to take two days where I'm just being punched by the universe, like everybody will give me two days.
I, I, I've been thinking, I've been reflecting a lot on, on the fact that like
i've made a lot of life choices that have have arrived me here at this life that i currently have and those what a great word you have to feel like a transitive it's a transitive quality of having been arrived it's the opposite of being disappeared you've been arrived no you've been arrived and i have i have arrived myself and and so i cannot i have to acknowledge both
Um, both the positive and the negative, right?
So I can't just enjoy, uh, the, the, the ways in which I am like, um, liberated from the grind, uh, without also saying, Hey, all of the things, all of the disadvantages of this, I also have to own with the same amount of like, like, um, right?
Like I cannot get a bank loan and I cannot complain.
Right.
It's like when you if you are like, fuck the police, then when you get robbed, you can't call the police.
Right.
You can't say you can't say your weed got stolen.
Pig.
Yeah.
Right.
And you can't be mad either.
You know, you can't if you're like, I hate the police.
Uh, then, you know, if somebody like hurts you, you can't say, I can't call the police because fuck them or whatever.
You know what I mean?
You have to like a certain amount of citizenship you buy in and then you get the rewards of it.
But, but you know, if you don't have insurance and then you get hit, you're not going to be able to claim any insurance.
It's
This kind of is why I think your alignment is probably lawful neutral.
Like a lot of people, I think, misunderstand and think lawful means, oh, you know, if you're paladin, you follow the law.
It's more like you think there is some standard for consistency and propriety in the universe that you can't not do.
Yeah, agreed.
I think that I've never thought of myself as lawful neutral, but I do believe in certain codes.
And I've been reflecting, oh, I believe in a lot of codes.
I've been reflecting a lot on the fact that there, I cannot complain.
I just cannot.
And it's not, it has nothing to do with, um, all the ways in which people say like, yeah, you can't complain or I can't complain.
It's just my own thing of like, right.
I, um, I get to podcast for a living and therefore I don't, um,
I do not seem very trustable to the other kids or the other parents at my daughter's school, right?
And so if they are like, you know, if they're like, and they grab their kids as I walk through the hall, I go, lol.
Well, you thought the neckbeards had it bad.
Because I'm a podcaster, right?
Who speaks for us?
And so, yeah, I've been, you know, I've been...
But realizing that, like, I get to be in a position where I can quit coffee and I don't have to show up somewhere at seven o'clock in the morning with like a splitting.
It's a version of the P word.
I feel very much the same way.
Whenever I'm constantly demanding that people be on time for things, I ask myself, is that a version of the P word?
Because maybe they don't have the same flexibility that I do.
I feel like the P word has become overused.
I know, that's why I'm calling it the P word.
You know what I mean, though.
Conceptually, you know what I mean, which is the unexamined sort of lucky break that you can't un-have.
Although these are situations which we have arrived ourselves at.
So it's not really a lucky break.
Oh, it's been arrived unto us.
We made choices.
We made a lot of choices somewhere back in the back, back in the old days, that we have to live by now, right?
You can't make choices all along and then be like, why can't I?
You know, like, why don't I have the advantages?
How come I'm not a surgeon?
Yeah.
Right.
Or like, where's my 401k?
Yeah.
Like you don't get to, you don't get to.
And so, yeah, I'm, I'm chewing on that all the time because I see, I see now this was the thing that my, my dad,
I watched Reckon With.
When his secretary had to dive bomb in and say, you need a future.
Well, it was that, but he started... So my uncle, his brother-in-law, you know, was a guy that had a lot of money.
And they were part of this Seattle kind of the greatest generation culture of people who had money and socialized with other people with money.
And they had, you know, they went to museum galas and so forth.
And then a lot of them...
Uh, just decamped to Palm Springs as they got, as they got older.
And you know, my, one of my dad's, I mean, my dad and my uncle were both good friends with George Weyerhaeuser and they, and he, and he was regarded by them as one of the good rich guys.
Um, now we living on this side of the environmental divide would not think of like the warehousers as being the good guys, right?
Because they are the, they're the tree cutter guys.
But from their era, he was one of the good guys, you know, he wasn't a dick.
Uh, and so they all were at a certain point 20 years ago, they all started to be down in Palm Springs, having cocktails with each other, sitting around in the, in the warm evening, uh,
um, next to their pools.
And my dad would go, my dad was invited down.
These were his friends.
He would stand around at these cocktail parties.
He would get into disagreements with, uh, with women in Moomoo's who had very over sprayed hair.
Uh, he would get in disagreements with them because they would make some catty remark about his politics.
And he would say, Oh, I'll have, you know,
and you know and then they would but everybody would be drunk but him so and then he would come home he'd be mad but what he really was what really upset him was that he had gotten to be 75 and all of these and he had lived his life in a righteous fashion on behalf of others he'd worked in politics he'd been a
You know, he'd been someone who strove for justice and all of these people he'd scoffed at his whole life because they were just in it for the money.
And then at 75, he realized that they all had money and he didn't have money and he didn't mind being in Palm Springs.
And I remember many conversations with him where I was like, dad, you didn't choose to, you didn't choose to be in money.
And now you don't have it.
So what are you going to, you know, and he wasn't a complainer, right?
He would just be like, well, you know, I was down in Palm Springs and I...
asshole and I was like well he is an asshole dad you know he always was he was when he was 24 he was well I know but why should he big house and I'm like well he got a big house because he's an asshole it's like a one-to-one correlation and dad's like well yeah and I really think that he believed dad believed that
that the righteous got paid in the end, you know, in the kingdom.
But he didn't believe in the kingdom of heaven, right?
So he didn't, he wasn't like smugly looking at everybody going, well, I'm going to live in paradise and you're all going to go to the place down below.
Yeah.
He was just like, he kind of felt like he was banking up karma in some ways.
Or I don't know what he thought.
Jesus, you know, my dad lived in the moment.
That was part of his problem.
He just never thought about the future because he thought he was going to be 29 forever.
Yeah.
It feels that way for a while.
It does.
It does.
There are times, you know, when I sit down in front of my hot live podcast mic, boy, I feel like I could be 2079.
Yeah.
You podcast like a man in your 40s.
Well, thank you.
No, I mean like a younger man.
Oh, yeah, yeah.
That's right.
Like a younger man.
But, you know, when I'm out there in the neighborhood with my crossbow hunting cats, I feel the age.
Suddenly I'm the weirdo.
When Robin Hood does it, it's for social justice.
When I'm out smiting a dog, suddenly I'm the weirdo.
They're just another podcaster in a bathrobe.
Yeah, sure.
You know, I've got my wrist rocket and a mason jar full of marbles.
And I'm out trying to get the neighborhood dogs to stop barking.
Yeah.
I'm the weirdo.
That's so unjust.
You're like Obama.
You're a community activist.
Yeah.
Yep, that's right.
But I got political and now the vice president is mad, mad, mad.
So you're chewing on that?
Yeah, chewing on it.
Just trying to figure out.
I'm actually kind of excited to see all of the disadvantages that are going to start accruing to me.
Because of all the time that I've, all of the leisure time I've afforded myself.
That'll be fun.
Right?
I mean, the chickens are going to come home to roost.
And there's going to be a moment where I'm like, oh, shit, I should have been working.
Or something.
Yeah.
I don't know.
Or I should have been putting some money away.
Right.
I think that's what it's going to be.
I think it's going to be.
Well, the nice thing is it could be any of those.
Right.
Yeah.
Right.
I should have been doing deep knee bends.
I should have had my phone set to beep at me to tell me to get up and walk around the room.
Oh, because you're hip.
Because of my hip.
Because of your hip.
Should have bought dinner.
Do you have things beep at you?
To tell me to move?
Or to do anything?
Are there things that beep at you on a regular basis?
Yeah, I have an array of things I choose to have beep at me.
What are the things that beep at you?
Well, in terms of stuff like that, this is not super interesting, but, you know, I get various kinds of notifications.
I do have the thing where my watch, 10 minutes till every hour, tells me if I haven't stood up, it tells me to stand up.
It does.
So I have, I don't know how many days of standing 12 hours a day.
So tell me about, wait, I got you off of this Apple announcement.
It's a big one, John.
John, they're talking, it's going to start with the iPad Pro, but they're talking about switching to USB-C, which should be new adapters, yeah.
But there's got to be an advantage, right?
I mean, what is the, is the new watch going to be like a good thing?
It's got nine complications.
And a bitch ain't one.
i don't know if i can beat that i feel like that's good that's terrible terrible my mailman looks like jay-z it's really disorienting yeah yeah i don't say that i can't say that of course you can't i can't say that but he looks a lot like he looks like a confused jay-z which is surprisingly cool look like a bewildered jay-z jay-z already seems a little bewildered he does i don't think he comes off well in those videos
You know, next to that star power of Queen Bee.
You know what I'm saying?
I do.
Well, I mean, who's going to stand up next to her and look good?
Yas, Queen.
Oh, we got to get into the happy note.