Ep. 468: "Patterns Aren't Sufficient"
Hello.
Hello.
How are you?
So you can hear me.
Yes.
That's wonderful news.
Yes.
Yes.
It's very loud and distorted, but that's how you roll.
Is that how I normally do?
I don't know.
It seems fine now.
Did you turn something down?
None of my business, but you know.
I just took the microphone further away from my face.
Oh, I see.
Because that's where the sound comes out.
That's exactly right.
It comes right out of my face hole.
I don't know what this is about, but today is going to be – well, it's not going to be – the episode is not different, but our conditions are a little different than usual.
Okay.
One of my conditions – just about to see what my condition was in.
I'm doing something different.
It sounds like you're doing different.
And I feel to a pretty high level of confidence that neither one of us knows what's different.
Okay.
Oh, interesting.
Okay.
So are we, are we guessing?
Guessing.
Um, we're, um, I think we're gonna, yeah, yeah.
How about I start?
Cause I have a little more clue than you.
Okay, go.
You're recording somewhere different than the place you normally record, possibly with different equipment and maybe with a different kind of connection.
Am I close?
Yes, you are.
You very much are close.
In fact, all three of those things you said are true.
Are you on a tall ship?
No, but I can see ships.
Okay, okay, okay.
Huh.
Are you in the brig of something?
No, if I were in the brig... Oh, I have to be paying for this call, and it says, you have received a call from the shipping brig.
I suppose if I were in, like, Tortuga, I could be in a stone castle and looking out the window at tall ships as they went by.
Does that make you a pimper now?
Is that a dry Tortuga?
Is it the dry heat?
What's a Tortuga?
Is that Spain?
You know, Spain's very hot right now, John.
Oh, that's right.
Spain is super hot.
Spain and Portugal.
You mean hot in like real estate market terms?
Yes, but also the temperature there is mini centigrade.
Yes.
Did you know that Portugal is now making it easy for American expatriates to move there?
No.
Now, this is going to confuse a lot of people.
I used to think they spoke Spanish there, but you know what they speak is Portuguese.
They do.
They do.
It's right there in the name.
Well, what about Brazil?
Also Portuguese.
Okay.
It's right there in the name.
Brazil.
Yeah.
Good point.
Good point.
Okay.
Okay.
I don't want to belabor this.
Say what you want to say.
I'm never going to guess it.
Maybe are you visiting with family somewhere?
Nope.
Nope.
Although, yes.
But also, no.
Did you just get married in Las Vegas and you're looking at a ship that's actually a casino?
A ship that's in a fountain.
No.
Oh, God.
All that fresh water.
Dude, now, wait a minute.
Now it's my turn.
Oh, you'll never guess it.
Well, it sounds like you are, by saying that you were guessing that I was in a different location, it sounds like you are in the same location.
I'm in the same location, but my situation's a little different.
Yeah.
Did you move everything around?
Did you put Wilberforce on a different shelf?
Okay.
Kind of.
Okay.
Kind of.
I got a wild hair, as my mom used to say, or a bee in my bonnet, like my grandmother used to say, and I'm trying something a little bit different.
That's very odd to me.
Hmm.
Are you in a stand-up desk?
Yes.
Did I get it right?
Yes.
Yeah!
Shit.
Yeah!
Yeah.
I bought a board.
Well, technically a shelf.
I bought a shelf, and I put that on a bangers box, and now I'm standing at my desk.
I'll send you a photo.
And are you, like, are you bouncing from foot to foot?
Like, la-da-da-da-da-da-da-da.
John, it's going to take everything I can do not to make this the whole show.
This is...
So, I mean, like the thing is there's things in life where you're like, oh, I bet if I did that, it would be weird.
And then you do it.
And after two minutes, you're like, oh, you know, it's not that weird.
It's just different.
And this is there are numerous things about what I have done here.
I set this up literally this morning while I was waiting for my Macintosh to finish updating.
Set up, meaning I put a gallon of de-rusting liquid into a banker's box so it wouldn't move.
I put the lid on the banker's box, got the lime and the coconut, and then I put a tiny bit of that micro suction tape on the underside of the shelf so it wouldn't move.
Yeah, and now my $16.99 shelf is here, and I'm typing on it, and it's really fucking weird.
It's so great because I've got a gallon of de-rusting liquid right here and I didn't know what to do with it.
I love de-rusting liquid.
John, John, it's almost like hydrogen peroxide.
Not quite, but once you get into de-rusting liquid, you've just opened a whole new world of projects you didn't know you wanted.
Can you put it in your bath like you do hydrogen peroxide?
No.
That's a really good question.
We know that's a debriding agent.
It's nice on a canker sore.
It's nice just as an anytime mouthwash.
You can lighten your hair a little bit.
I have not done that.
I have taken a lot of the very, very, very old rusty things I found in our very old house's garage and made a project out of trying to de-rust them and then polish them.
So almost like a YouTube thing, yeah.
I don't want to violate OPSEC, of course, but you do live close to the ocean.
Yeah.
The salt air.
I could probably see tall ships.
I can see those Maersk-style boats out there.
Yep, yep.
Sometimes you can.
Most of the time, they're shrouded in fog, right?
Most of the time, what I see is barely outside my window.
But so de-rusting material must—or de-rusting liquid—
Must be more important to you because of the rust.
Oh, yeah.
That's a good point.
I don't know.
I don't need this at all.
I don't have any reason for this.
I just like de-rusting things.
Yes.
You know, if you want to talk about this, I'll talk about this.
It's a real affliction.
It started with Brasso.
It moved on to jewelry cleaner, hydrasonic things.
It moved on then to like Easy Off.
Yeah.
But then I moved on to basically, I don't even, I think they're two-gallon Ziploc bags that I nest in each other.
And then the stuff sits in the de-ruster.
For legal reasons, I'll say overnight, but let's say for four days sometimes.
So interesting.
I got a rasp.
I found a rasp from probably early in the 20th century in our garage.
Well, closer to a nail file, but a big-ass file.
Yep, yep, yep, yep.
And I did that.
And you know, John, as one of the ways I use to keep my demon dogs at bay, I have a stack of projects, which is sometimes I find things on the street.
And when I find metal on the street, I collect it in a collection.
And if it's particularly good metal, I polish it.
Yep, yep.
That's for my demon dogs.
Yes, yep.
So you probably don't want to get super into it unless you do, but I have a lot of totally unnecessary projects that are good for my brain.
Do you have a brush or brushes that are part of a dedicated rust removal system?
Is this the thing you really want to know?
Oh, yes.
Oh, yes.
Where are you?
Where am I?
Yeah.
Just got to close that parenthesis.
So do you want the whole story?
Are you?
Yeah, hang on.
Oh, sorry, sorry, sorry.
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I can do a tight three minutes on it.
No, no.
You're missing my point.
Or I'm missing my point, more likely.
No, I want to know all of it.
I'm standing up, John, and I'm really fucking confused right now.
I know.
I know.
Moving.
Well, I'll go ahead and just skip straight to the highlight, which is the 11 years I've been in this office.
Everything's always been mostly in the same place.
The desk stuff has always been exactly in the same place.
Right.
I've had a desk with a computer machine.
I can picture it.
You can almost see into the bathroom around the corner.
I remember you being here.
You remember House Trotter?
How could I forget?
That was a weird lunch.
But you know where there's something that's always been here for the 11 years I've been here, right behind me all the time, is a chair.
Yeah.
And I guess I didn't realize how much I had become accustomed to a chair always being right where my ass would go if I started to sit down.
And I tumbled backwards.
Oh.
Oh, you did!
Landed on my ass, and I almost knocked down a shelf, but not quite.
You can't write this stuff.
That is actually the least of my worries.
My ass is not something I worry about.
There's hardly any of it left.
But it's so strange to just be, what?
I mean, the banker's box is probably, what, 12 inches?
Maybe 12 inches.
So, you know, John Syracuse had got me onto the RSI stuff, so I've been thinking about I need to raise where my keyboard is enough to...
My hands are below my elbows.
I think that's the rule of thumb.
And a banker's box is actually perfect for that.
Yeah, it's the same thing about playing the piano.
You want your wrist relative to your hand.
And don't you want to curl your fingers, John?
I feel like I've heard people talk about curling their fingers.
Well, your fingers, yeah.
You don't want to have them straight.
Because then you look like a Dracula.
Yeah.
You look like a Dracula is exactly why you don't want to do that.
Imagine going to a concert.
Everything I know about piano I've learned from Glenn Gould, which is probably not a good idea.
I have a tiny little stool I carry from city to city.
I wear gloves.
No, I mean, every once in a while you see, like, if you look at the TikTok demo of the girl who wrote the song Lost Boys...
I am a lost boy from Neverland Usually hanging out with Peter Pan Lost Boys TikTok, is that from Broadway?
Nope, it's just she was a young woman And she posted like a five second long TikTok video Where she just sang that I am a lost boy from Neverland I love that that exists And then it just looped And a lot of people wrote her and said That's really good, you should write a whole song
And so she was like, oh, okay.
That's risky.
When they did that with the community theme, they cut out all the parts of that song I don't like and then made just the theme song.
Do you think a whole song of, and by the way, that song has so many great misheard lyrics in it, but I'll put a pin in that.
In this instance, and then she capitulated to that because do you think she's thirsty to get TikToks views?
No, no, no.
I think she was just young.
She's an artist, John.
I think she was so young.
Who knows?
When I was her age, I was just like, ah, pfft.
You know, like, what if I fart in a plastic bag?
If you just fret the notes of power chords correctly, it's a victory.
I couldn't have done that, although I did spend a week.
That little slide is tricky.
That bow, bow, bow is tough for new people.
I spent a week trying to learn the guitar solo to, what, what, Bad Moon Rising?
Yeah.
Yeah, Bad Moon Rising.
And I actually... Exactly.
I'm trying to think how the guitar... Oh, it's got a bluesy... It's got some slides in it, right?
Yep, yep.
And I think that was the first guitar solo I ever learned.
And I did that about the same age as this young woman who then wrote a full song about being a lost boy from Neverland hanging out with Peter Pan.
And it was a really good song.
Very touching, very moving.
The bar has risen, John.
There's no question about it.
She's so good.
And then it got 17 million YouTubes.
Well, I mean, like, I get that part.
But the part I want to just cover before it passes us by too fast is the shit that I've written as full songs played by other people.
Other people had to learn my songs.
Oh, I know.
And I've gotten...
I don't know if I have any songs that are a contender for a million, million views TikTok.
It's mostly Girls Are Mean to Me and Here's Any Minor Chord.
People love those songs.
But John, do you think it's exposure?
Is it something in the meats?
How has the bar risen so much with these youths?
It's like this.
When I was a downhill skier, the best downhill skier in our whole resort was
could do a back scratcher and maybe at the end is that what i'm getting you touch the ski touches your back yeah and then at the end of the year maybe they could do a helicopter like a 360 helicopter okay now you go online and there are people who are just skiing they're not they don't even go off a jump they just go off
They just suddenly lift off.
You're talking about consumer skiers.
Just regular skiers.
Yeah.
They lift off the ground and they do three front flips while spinning and also like opening their mail.
So that's 360 times three and they open their mail.
And they land backwards.
And they're wearing blue jeans.
And you're like, how is this?
This is not humanly possible.
But compared to what used to be the best thing we could possibly do.
This is so beyond, and I think it's true of everything.
If you go on YouTube and watch young guitar players, they play unimaginable things that the best guitar player in the universe could not have played.
And these are just kids.
And of course, they all like Jack Johnson for some reason.
Their music is always like super smooth.
Like jazzity jazz jazz.
If you're thinking about just – I don't like to speak to the listeners.
If you're thinking about having kids, it's so important to understand what music they have access to.
Yeah, yeah.
You really do.
For me, in retrospect, I'm not sure I would have chosen the 8-track of Mary Poppins as something that I listened to as much as I did, or The Music Man.
I'm not mad about it, but it could have been real different.
That and Montevani.
In this instance, that's too much Johnson.
We were really lucky that the first record my sister bought was the Dolly Parton record that came out along with the 9 to 5 movie.
Oh, it was like a single from that?
Well, no, she bought the LP.
Oh, the actual donk, donk, donk, the actual OST, as they say.
Yeah, and it has a bunch of great songs on there.
Oh, I didn't know that.
She's got some song about a multicolored dress that her mom made for her because she's a poor girl.
Oh, that's her classic song code of many colors.
A Code of Many Colors, right.
I don't even remember if that was on the record, but Susan listened to this record up and down, backwards and forwards.
Well, you know, that's how Nick Lowe is Rich's Croesus now, just because of that Bodyguard soundtrack.
Oh, sure, of course.
Nick Lowe had a song that was, at least when I was a younger person, the best-selling soundtrack of all time.
It wasn't just whoever wrote the Whitney Houston song.
Oh, that would be Dolly Parton.
There you go.
Whoa, isn't that right?
Wait, didn't Dolly Parton write I Will Always Love You?
I Will Always Love You, yeah.
Story goes, I don't know if this is true, but I heard it on a podcast.
There's a really good podcast about Dolly Parton, with Dolly Parton, hosted by, I think, the Radiolab guy.
And the story goes, I believe that she supposedly wrote, I'll always love you and Jolene on the same calendar day.
Wow.
So how do you feel about that bar?
See, that's what I'm saying.
She'd kill on TikTok.
That sense of humor she has about herself, woof.
Oh, she'd be amazing.
The one thing to remember, though, is that the young woman who wrote...
who wrote Lost Boys, she plays in that TikTok, the original TikTok.
She plays with flat fingers like a vampire.
Oh, interesting.
She's got the Dracula style.
She plays Dracula style.
And when I saw the TikTok, I was like, what are you doing?
That's not how you play the game.
Oh, that poor woman.
Can you imagine how many comments she got from that particular guy?
Oh.
Oh, but the thing is that, no, I think all the comments were like, oh my God, oh my God, oh my God.
My kid looks at a lot of TikTok, so much TikTok that I don't try not to think about it too much.
And that seems like it's kind of the good platform right now.
Used to be that Instagram was that.
Because also TikTok, it seems like TikTok understands what it is.
Correct.
You know, every social media, who knows, they'll screw it up.
Even the Chinese could screw up a steel trap, let's be honest.
But, you know, a lot of them, you know, you forget what's good.
I recently stipulated on a program that I think the worst thing that ever happened to Twitter was mentions and at responses.
Oh, smart.
Because that's what – yeah, quote tweets made it worse.
But they screwed themselves up by not doing the good things, like making it easier to talk to just your pals or all of those things.
But TikTok, I just learned about something.
I want to say it's called stitching.
But there's a thing with TikTok where the whole redoing stuff with other people's stuff is part of the fucking platform, which is such a good idea.
If that's what it is –
On YouTube, you know, I mean, everybody's monitoring that.
I'm not sure how that goes.
You can't remix, though.
You can't remix on YouTube.
You can't land on a fraction.
Well, you kind of can because there are certainly, I guess, once you've run out of stock videos that you can get, like you start, you know, or like, this is big in the Disney community, John.
When you use somebody else's video of something that only one person ever got like a video of.
Yeah.
Like this one thing that you get the hat ghost or whatever.
Wait, is it an NFT?
I guess it could be – I think anything can be an NFT.
Oh, that's cool.
Okay, we got way far away.
Just a quick update.
I'm already seeing several really upsetting things about what I'm doing.
One is I do have a knee injury that I've had for almost a month.
I'm locking my knees when I stand here.
Oh, that's bad.
I know for military school you don't want to do that.
No, you're going to pass out right in front of the queen.
You could pass out, but also locking is not what a knee is for.
No, locking and popping, though.
Yes.
Yeah.
Well, that's super fresh.
You're a B-boy and always were.
I suppose I always have been.
Also, my left heel, my heels hurt a little bit.
Maybe I should get a pad.
Okay.
I'm sticking with this, John.
I'm going to try it for at least this episode.
Let me ask you this.
Please.
The stand-up desk seems to be a San Francisco tech culture thing.
It seems like you've been living, you've been soaking in it for a decade, maybe longer.
Yes.
Well, you know, it is, John, when you're in a culture and you – maybe – You don't have to put the er at the end.
You can just say cult.
When you're in a cult-er, you know, like, however you're feeling about whatever the au courant thing is, like, there is a certain –
What's the word I'm looking for?
Like gravity that wants to pull you into that.
I don't have a strong feeling about standing desk.
We have something like a standing desk.
Well, it's a standing desk at our house.
That is like a standing desk.
Well, it's when my lady decided she'd had enough of me using my kid's IKEA kitchen as a standing desk.
Because, you know, the IKEA kitchen, it's got to be one of the greatest toys of all time.
It's the one that sizzles.
huh like paris did did you put your computer on top of the refrigerator portion of it no i put it on the top part like where you might put your accessories oh i see i'd stand there i'd look out the front window at the confederate ghost park and i could type on a small computer and it was the best and eventually my wife did this really really sweet thing which is uh amazingly she took away the great she took away the great thing that worked and replaced you know this trick john you know there's things that you can give people as a gift that send a message
Oh, sure.
I have a friend whose ex's mother once gave them towels and soap, which I thought was funny.
Yeah.
Now, that person who happens to be my wife thought it was also funny and sweet.
And I said, are you sure she wasn't saying she thinks you're stinky?
Yeah, right.
It's like giving breath mints...
Breath mints, deodorant, other kinds of things.
So she got this really nice, like, you know, it goes up and down.
It's got a motor and stuff.
I like that.
Oh, cute.
It's a good point.
San Francisco is the worst.
But also, the reason people were doing it, I think, varies.
One thing in the early days of standing desk that you would hear is that people, you know, they say people sit too much, and that's bad for your heart, I want to say.
Okay, your heart.
Yeah.
Have you ever heard that, though, that sitting too much is bad for you?
I think if you could put – if you could just do like one of those books, like a – what are those called?
The magic books where it's like put a noun here, put a verb here, and you make up a story.
Mad Libs.
Oh, Mad Libs, right.
I think the ultimate Mad Lib is blank is bad for your blank.
Blank.
Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.
And you could just fill that out.
And then a year later, it's the opposite of blank is bad for your opposite.
Oh, your heart is bad for sitting.
Yeah, yeah.
We've been hearing about coffee for a pretty long time.
Anyway, I'm not sure why I did this, except that this probably is not the best time to do it, given that my knee is swollen.
But I bet your heart is swollen, too, so it's probably good.
Well, don't even get me started on my heart.
I've got a lot of calls to make, John.
But anyway, I thought I'd give it a throw.
So far, so good.
And I think I'll probably acclimate to it.
I don't understand how you didn't do it so long ago.
It seems like this would have been a thing that you tried.
No, no, no.
I just – every tech office I've ever been to in San Francisco was A, open plan, B, had a room full of cereal in tubs, and C, had standing desks that were at various levels.
Like this person was standing.
The person next to them was sitting.
Oh, if you're going to sit there, you got to use a yoga ball, right?
Or one of those – what were the ones made out of like bended plywood where you were supposed to sit forward on your knees?
Yeah.
Oh, I think that's called – I want to say I had one of those in college.
I bought used.
I think it's called a balance chair, I want to say.
A balance, yeah.
I would not be surprised just in terms of the turns out aspect of this that's already sub Rosa in this conversation.
I would not be surprised at all to find out somebody goes, are you fucking kidding me?
You sat in a chair with all of your pressure on your knees so that you could have a future rocking chair?
Yeah.
Think about that.
Maybe not so great.
Blank is bad for your blank.
Blank is bad for your blank.
But, you know, if you're in a big warehouse room and Ev Williams is sitting over there on a balance ball, like, what are you going to do, right?
And I just would have assumed that back then – You look like a turkey, as we used to say.
You look like some kind of hillbilly.
You look like a turkey.
Yeah.
But back there in 2003 when you were Merlin Mann and talking into your shoe – I remember that.
You weren't also standing up at like an Ikea kitchen.
I'm going to close this because this is super boring, but I don't want to hear about what you're up to.
But like the here's the things to know about this is that a couple of things.
First of all, in terms of what you described.
Yes, absolutely.
Serial, standing desks, all of the things.
And then you add something like I think I've heard it called different things, but hoteling.
That idea that when you come in, you sit at a desk, almost like you would think about your desk in homeroom versus your desk taking the SAT.
One is much more your desk than the other for formal reasons.
And then you add to that the idea of the standing desk.
And I'm going to say something a little bit cynical here, just a tiny bit cynical, which is thinking about one difference of a standing desk.
Technically, you could fit a lot more people in an area if they all stood up.
Oh, it's like those new airplanes they're designing where everybody stands up.
Exactly, where it's like a subway strap or you do the double-decker with the butt in your face like they're doing on that one airline.
But no, you could be a strap hanger.
Sure, sure.
You can do flex work like in the movie 9 to 5, where today this is your desk.
Tomorrow it's this other person's desk, right?
I love Lily Tomlin.
Isn't she the best?
She's pretty darn good, yeah.
Yeah, I was making my kid watch that and the band played on recently, and Lily Tomlin's very good.
As is Phil Collins, if I'm being honest.
Phil Collins plays somebody who runs a bathhouse in San Francisco with an accent.
I am personally not a Phil Collins hater.
I know.
I don't know if you remember this, John.
I'm an Eric Clapton hater.
Well, there's reasons for that.
But I don't want to talk about this except to talk about it, which is just to say there was a time where we created on our program a certain – Go on.
Go on.
Say it.
Let's just say you like aspects of Phil Collins slightly more than I do, even though I like Phil Collins.
But my sense is that you dislike Billy Joel in a way that I like.
Okay, so I like Billy Joel.
And then that became a thing where we go back and forth like who's the worst.
And then, of course, you're getting into what?
John Gatetsnare.
That's the thing.
And if you're against gated snare, then you're pro-Billy Joel.
And if you're pro-Billy Joel, I don't see how you can appreciate gated snare.
But this is the time to really heal those wounds in so many ways.
You know that Kate Bush song from the Netflix program got popular?
Well, most of the world now thinks of Running Up That Hill as something from a Netflix show.
I heard about that.
I knew it as the new single from the lady who did The Hurting.
That's how far I go back.
Yeah.
I like Sat in Your Lap.
Sat in Your Lap is my jam.
Didn't her music video have Donald Sutherland in it?
I think that might be the one.
Yes, I think it was.
It was Cloudbusting.
Oh, Cloudbusting.
I still dream of Organon.
Remember about the guy who thought Organon was a thing and he was going to learn how to put it in clouds?
It's an interesting story.
I remember.
Running up that hill is about wanting to switch bodies with your lover so that you can understand each other.
Right.
That happens all the time, too.
And then the song sat in your lap goes... Do you remember that song?
You remember the key relationship there was Kate Bush and Peter Gabriel.
Which is why I mention it.
Because if you go back to, say, let's say Intruder, let's go back to about circa 1980, and I think it was Hugh Padgham, probably, was the guy.
You know, Brian Eno gets a lot of credit for things.
Hugh Padgham, I think, was T-H-E, gated snare guy on stuff like Peter Gabriel.
Yes.
which is very different from what not David Bowie, which is actually, who was the actual guy?
Not Bon Jovi.
Who's the other guy?
The guy who really did the Berlin records.
What's that guy's name?
Oh, you're talking about Lanois?
No, no, pre-Lanois.
No, no, good pull.
But no, the guy who actually did the production who had a brother, and it's not Bon Jovi, it's a different one.
Oh, Bon Jovi.
Oh, fuck.
Okay.
Okay.
it's a buono john john is going to be hard to search so i'll say david bowie heroes david bowie heroes what's happening oh wait oh are you doing intruder are you doing that song intruder alert tony visconti
Tony Visconti, of course.
Everybody credits Bowie.
Or excuse me, everybody credits Eno for all of those.
No, you can't credit Eno.
He's overcredited.
Well, he's a little overcredited.
He's very influential.
I have his oblique strategies on my desk within a hand shot right here.
I have that.
I've told you about my handmade set of oblique strategies.
No.
Wait, did we close all our parentheses?
No.
Oh, no chance.
No chance we did.
I had a thought this morning when I was waking up that it's loose ends that drive people crazy.
That if you can become comfortable with loose ends, life will be less troubling.
That's a thought I had this morning.
I learned, and I think partly it was on this program, learning that loose ends are the path to godliness.
Well, you can certainly give a lot of your demon dogs a vacation, if not a retirement, if you learn that loose ends are a part of life.
And can I tell you how I thought of it?
And then we'll be done with this parentheses as I was getting ready to leave the house.
And I was watching a little bit of cable news before I left to find out what I'm supposed to be scared about today.
And I was thinking about how one problem with cable news and news in general is that the nature of news, even if you report it totally uncynically, is
It's to tell you what's new.
That's why it's called news.
New.
But it's also to constantly, like I say, remind you what you're supposed to be scared of and how you're supposed to be scared of it.
And just to remind you that there are so many loose ends.
Loose ends.
And loose ends keep you coming back for more.
They make you into a little bit of an addict.
And I was thinking about how I've got some loose ends right now that I'm dealing with, trying to figure out where a package that was delivered didn't go.
I was wondering if I could handle – a lot of different things.
And then I thought, you know, but what if I decided to be less bothered by loose ends existing?
You know what you should do?
What?
You should switch over to split ends.
Okay.
And if you focus on split ends, I got you.
Oh, my God.
That's all I want.
You know, that band's really actually underrated.
Oh, they're incredibly, they are directly properly rated in this household.
No shit.
Did you know that song, the one that, not Neil, but what's his head sings?
That was my mistake.
Do you know that song?
Tim?
Tim.
Tim.
Tim.
If we're being honest, I think that was the cause of a lot of the trouble that they eventually got back together for that wonderful Brothers record.
But I think there was some acrimony because Neil had the pop sensibility.
Neil was very good, but I think Tim actually joined Crowded House.
Tim was the performer.
No, no, Tim was the theater-ish guy.
They would not be up there dressed like Ventriloquist dummies if it weren't for Tim.
Look, Tim was very handsome.
He should have been if we went back.
Tim was a young boy.
Oh, my God.
Yeah.
That guy's amazing.
But loose ends.
Loose ends, John.
Whenever you think about loose ends, whenever they start to bother you, just think about split ends.
And that's it.
There it is.
That's all it takes.
Now you're somewhere else.
Did you like Crowded House?
That's probably not your tempo.
I did like Crowded House.
Me too.
And I saw them live in concert.
early on.
Like 86, 87, 88, that kind of thing?
Yeah, like before they had become like a global phenom.
Yeah, Don't Dream It's Over because the video was, I feel like was on MTV a lot.
It was on MTV a lot, but I thought they were great songwriters and that was an example of one of those bands where it's like,
You couldn't have predicted this.
And you know what it is, John.
I'm going to say it again.
Canonical Bands, you got Oranger, you got The Who, you got Minutemen, which I know you don't like.
But everybody loves a power trio.
I have a special affection for – and it's OK.
I've been going through a major Radiohead thing lately.
And watching Radiohead at Glastonbury in 1997, which might be one of the great things, they've got like six people on stage.
But you kind of need it.
yeah oh yeah right whereas somebody's got to play a tinkle tinkle and then run across the stage and go boop boop johnny greenwood and his narrow hips he always has to on the one part of he has to change from his give fiddle to run back to the keyboard get ready for from a great height john if you'll permit me to share it with you i will share you a stolen oh oh wait we're just doing the spirit of radio oh
Because that's another great power trio.
It went right into it.
It went right into it.
What you need to do is do a mashup of Subterranean Alien and Spirit Radio.
Oh, you know who's going to love that is the ladies, because you can get out there and slow dance.
I bet you there's some 5-4 parts that we could lock up.
1,000%.
Because they both like a 5-4.
You know what I've been doing on YouTube?
No.
You can find, this is going to blow your mind.
Okay.
And that was a little bit of a ride.
I'm standing, so go easy.
I don't have a chair to break my fall.
You can find incredible videos with pretty decent sound of the dead Kennedys in the early 80s.
You can see them in the studio in San Francisco.
Isn't that incredible?
The Nazi punks fuck off in a studio in San Francisco with Klaus Fluoride cutting up.
Oh, my God.
They're so much more lovable.
It's incredible.
It's so great to watch.
And all that studio stuff.
And the drummer.
Is it Darren Pelligrew?
The drummer?
He's fucking amazing.
They're hilarious.
And they're playing so fast.
And they're looking right into the camera like, ha ha, get a load of this.
That's what I'm saying.
The drummer with the glasses.
Klaus Floride.
He's mugging.
Yeah.
What are you guys even doing?
And you don't look punk rock at all.
You look like a bunch of guys that work in a Safeway.
Oh.
But then, here's the fun, right?
I've been watching these because there's a lot of live videos.
Had to carry out groceries for Diane Dragon Lady Feinstein.
God, he hated her.
A lot of really good live videos.
But then you can also go.
Yeah, like Maya Habu Gardens or whatever.
Yeah, absolutely.
There's a surprising amount of shit.
Ditto with Minor Threat.
There's a surprising amount of very good videos from the early 80s.
There's a wonderful hour and a half long show from Portland, Oregon that's just like – it feels like being there.
It's at Satircon or something.
But then you can go and find videos of bad brains basically the same week.
All the way across the country in New York.
There's a part of me that thinks everybody needs to keep avoiding Bad Brains as a band that they don't know just so they can save it up for when they really need it.
And you're like, oh, I felt that way about Minor Threat.
I mean, I didn't know Minor Threat.
I was into Black Flag at that time.
I was into Dead Kennedys at that time.
And what I'd heard of Minor Threat, I thought, oh, this guy can't really sing, per se.
But then I discovered Minor Threat.
And I was like, are you fucking kidding me?
It was there all along, Merlin.
It was there all along.
Has there ever been a band whose slugging percentage on this amount of released songs and this many are this good?
And then, like Buddy Holly getting into the orchestra stuff, then they start adding lockenspiels and shit.
And you're like, fucking Minor Threat.
Bad Brains passed under my radar for a long time.
Oh, yeah.
It's easy because that first record doesn't sound very good.
What's the one?
What's the Eye Against Eye?
Is that the one?
That was incredible.
Like, Rico Kasich recorded one of those records.
And it doesn't super sound as good as you wish it did.
In terms of, like, modern sonic music.
But going online and watching these like East Coast, West Coast punk rock videos from the very early 80s, it's like time traveling.
You understand America so much better.
You understand everything that came – Especially like the America of the time, right?
The America of the time but also like all of alternative culture, all of punk rock from then on.
You watch these videos and you're like, this could be today.
And that is not true of so much other stuff in the world.
You couldn't go back and watch a video from 1960 and say, like, this could be today.
This is fascinating on so many levels.
I mean, there's a thing that I think we talk about lightly, but it gets sort of kind of missed.
It's weird how so much – if you go to YouTube, which I look at YouTube quite a lot, and I love –
watching and listening to music-related things on YouTube, and I follow my nose, and it's just – it's really gratifying to go and, you know, see what all is out there.
Just out of performances, right?
But what's wild is there are these periods that feel –
I think about periods in my life where, like, I didn't take many photos or I didn't watch much TV.
Like, when I started college, I wasn't watching – I totally missed a bunch of 1987 to 89 TV, even though that's what my thesis was about.
There's other times where, like, I just didn't take many photos.
You know, there's just times in your life where there's, like, weird holes.
And then other times where there's, like, so many photos.
Think about this.
Isn't it weird how much stuff –
from the 60s and 70s that was shot on film has survived.
Think about how much stuff we should have from the 80s and 90s that mostly existed very widely.
I'm making this poorly, but there was so much shit that existed so widely on VHS, but the tapes didn't survive.
The tapes looked terrible.
where, okay, if you want to watch Throwing Muses, do not too soon, which you should.
I do it like a couple times a month.
Like, yeah, the video was on MTV, ergo, that has continued to exist.
But do you ever notice how there's things where like, there's more stuff about Mungo Jerry than there is about like some stuff from the 80s and 90s, unless you have the video for that.
Isn't it odd though?
Like I had a video that I bought with money.
I only bought a handful of VHS videos with money.
you know, like the REM videos one, uh, REM succumbs, I think it was called, but I had something, it was a label called flip side and they put out these punk rock videos, you know, all the way down to the, the, the credits such as they were, were done by punching in on the camera.
Yeah.
Those weird letters.
But I had one that was a concert.
It was two, two bands.
It was minute men and minor threat.
Like, and that was just the thing that you could buy if you sought it out, but you did have to like seek it out.
Yeah.
And I don't know, I'm just really struck sometimes.
But like with Bad Brains, what was it that got me into that?
I forget what it was, but I finally put on the actual, I guess I came across a video that was talking about them.
And I was ashamed.
I put on the fucking record and I was like, are you kidding me?
Maybe I just didn't have, you know, you just don't know.
No, no, no.
You were saving Shakespeare for prison.
Saving Shakespeare for prison.
Yes.
No cheating.
No cheating and just kind of dipping into King Lear.
Same at all.
Listen, you find bad brains when you're ready for bad brains.
Bad brains will find you.
You know what I'm saying?
They are really something.
Yeah, they are.
Yeah, they are.
Yeah, go.
And none of it makes any sense.
I mean, don't try and figure it out.
I was talking about this with somebody the other day.
I was like, I've got a really good friend.
He's Generation X, right?
So he's adopted a very cynical posture for the last 30 years.
But he actually has a lot of hope in his heart.
He's a hopeful man.
Are you sub-tweeting me right now?
He's a hopeful man.
All right.
He's always hopeful but discontent.
And I said, well, that's right.
For writing out the day's events.
Completely discontent.
And I was – you know, I was just – I was typing on my phone with my thumb.
I wasn't really thinking about it.
And I said, you know, the thing about it is that he –
He doesn't have any God in his heart.
That's why he will never fully be hopeful.
I said, what he's doing, instead of having God in his heart, is he's looking for patterns.
He's trying to figure it out by looking for patterns, and that'll drive a man crazy.
And as I wrote it, I didn't send it without thinking, and then I was like, wait a minute.
He doesn't have any God in his heart.
He's looking for patterns, and that is how he's trying to figure out the world.
And I was like, am I subtweeting myself?
I always take almost everything you say very credulously, because by definition, everything you say is true.
Did you actually just get that off the dome while you were texting?
Yeah, I was just texting.
I was just like, oh, here's this guy.
John, it's pretty – well, I mean, if this were a pie graph, it's 80%.
Holy shit, that's smart.
And 20% –
Yeah, right.
Exactly.
Yeah.
Looking for patterns.
Wait a minute.
If that's not the way to God, what have I been doing all these years?
Oh, shit.
He doesn't play at dice, you know?
No, he doesn't play at dice.
And yeah, you're not going to find him by looking for patterns.
But you know, you've got to look for God and you've got to look for love.
One of my favorite podcasts is – just because this is another thing that came out of fucking nowhere.
I was listening to an episode of The Flophouse, which is a podcast I love.
They watch a bad movie and talk about it.
I've heard about it.
Yeah, that's cool.
At the end, they do a thing called Final Judgments where they say, was this a good, bad movie, a bad, bad movie, or a movie you kind of like?
And Stuart Wellington, who's amazing, he just said something like off the dome that like so – sometimes you hear – what I'm saying is this is how I felt when you said what you just said, right?
He said, I watched this movie, and it was this really, really bad, really boring movie.
And I should find the actual quote, but he said something like, I couldn't find any love in this.
Mm-hmm.
Which is a kind of unusual thing for somebody on the Flophouse to say because it's really mostly just like, you know, a flurry of hilarious associations and words, which is why I love it.
But he's like, I couldn't find any love in this.
And I was thinking like, man, that summarizes so much about what I find frustrating.
Like when you and I talk about computer products and like I talk about Apple TV, my problem with Apple TV is I don't know if anybody ever loved this.
I can't find the love in this.
Oh.
Are we all really ultimately looking for instances or for – not proof of love in God, but instances of love in God?
What are we looking for?
I think you have to be, and I think it's what's so off-putting.
And patterns support that or work across purposes with that?
Well, that's the thing.
I think patterns support it.
I just feel like you can't – but patterns aren't sufficient, right?
Patterns are – Patterns aren't sufficient.
No, they're a path.
Talk more about that.
Patterns are a path, but they're not the end result.
You don't figure out the pattern and then close the book.
Patterns are nothing if you're not chasing.
That could go to what John Syracuse calls evolution.
That could go to politics.
Patterns aren't sufficient and correlation is not causation.
It's what we hate about modern culture so much because people are throwing up patterns all the time and going, this is the story.
Oh, shit, dog.
This is the deal.
All you have to do is –
You know, all you have to do is connect the dots and then you get the prize and it's like, no, that's... Yeah, yeah, yeah.
And my feeling would be if I were, you know, hey, how about you give that a second pass?
How about you give that a second pass and try to figure out if there's any other thing besides the first pattern you noticed that could prove what that means.
And the problem is if you look past the first pattern, you go, oh, I see the second pattern.
There's no love in this.
The second pattern is you didn't make this out of love.
You had no love going in and you took no love coming out.
Right.
Right.
And so you're just like, oh, and it just starts stacking up like coordinates.
It goes for stuff that I've been a real shit about my whole life, which is that I'm currently doing an apology tour about some of this stuff because I hate that I was like this, but I never considered myself a racist person, especially compared to my family.
But for example, when people would say stuff like, if black people hate living in poor neighborhoods so much, why don't they just move?
I did not agree with that statement, but I did not disagree enough with that statement.
You didn't understand the context.
Because I looked at the first pattern.
And the first pattern was, hey, honestly, give me a break on this one.
Look at me.
If I really hated who I was roommates with...
like I would find different roommates.
It's like the real, right?
And the real kind of simple pattern to see, hey, why don't they do what I would do?
And what I would do is grab my bootstraps and find a better roommate.
And you know what I mean?
Instead of going like, hey, look, how about, what about if the second or third pattern you see is something that is so widespread and so deep in our culture that you couldn't even see it?
And you announcing that first pattern, I mean, that qualifies you to write a Bret Stephens, you know,
opinion piece for the New York Times, but I sure wouldn't want to hang a whole ethos on that.
Well, and this is what I've always said about, I think, or what I guess it took me 10 years to realize, but, you know, right-wing politics—
is is always literal it always takes the first it takes the the the um the take that's right in front of you like oh well this person and that person are in competition for a thing let the best man win and liberal politics always presume a second and third layer of understanding and it's why you're never going to you're never going to convert someone who believes that
If something is literally true, then you can't contest it, right?
Because it's literally true.
A liberal will always say, yes, but context, context.
Wait, you know what it is, John?
And this has to do with my being really deep in a big, big, big re-watch, re-read, re-everything of Game of Thrones.
It's like arguing with the Dothraki.
Right.
Like the Dothraki call it the Poison Sea, right?
And I'm not trying to make fun of the Dothraki here.
No, not at all.
They're horse people.
Everything is about horses.
Like when you want to reward Jorah Mormont for protecting, you know, Khaleesi, one of the best things you can do is walk outside and you pick any steed you want that's not Daenerys' horse or Khal Drogo's horse.
Yeah.
Because it's all about horses and the greatest honor we – isn't that a little bit what we're talking about on the right?
Is like they have such a almost one-to-one understanding.
The literalness of things that they don't realize could have some more nuance to it.
And are you going to argue with them?
Are you going to cross the Poison Sea?
What are you going to do?
At the furthest extent of that, they take one of the greatest poems of human history, the Bible, and turn it into a literal document.
Yeah.
Yeah, don't recognize the Bible.
We need to stop doing that.
Look, this is a big song.
Are you kidding me?
Like, the Bible is like a psychedelic – it's like a – It's like saying everybody should have guns because of Alice's restaurant.
It's really odd.
The Bible is a moody blues record from the late 60s, right?
It has no – it's just like, lights in white satin, and people are like, nope, they're literally knights, and they're literally in white satin.
Right, except if it had been actually sung in Aramaic, and then they acted like the English translation they had made sense.
And then it got translated, yeah, into Southern English.
Spoken Aramaic, written in Greek, but, you know, letters not written, never meaning to send.
Born in Babylon, moved to Arizona.
He got a condo made of stoner.
That might be good right there.
Fucking A. Well, wait, but I didn't tell you where I am.
Oh, shit.
Hey.
God, we have so many parentheses.
John, when I listen back to this for the editing process, it's going to kill me how much stuff we just left on the table.
Don't worry about loose ends, Marlon.
Just think about split ends.
Holy shit.
Hey, John, have a question just real quick.
Remember in the video, they're in the painting and then they start playing and they move.
I don't know why sometimes.
Have you ever heard Ted Leo cover Six Months in a Leaky Boat?
Yes, I have.
It's really good.
If he wants to, when he talks, and I've had the pleasure of talking to Ted Leo on a couple occasions, he has one of the lowest, deepest, quiet, but deepest, like he sounds like he should be doing, he sounds like he should be reading you Game of Thrones.
He has a very deep speaking voice.
But when he sings, when he wants to,
Jiminy Christmas, how does he do it?
You're the same way.
You're the high voice on Car Parts, not Sean.
I don't know how it works.
High voice, you got to get the high voice, even though you're talking nice.
Wait, they don't love you like I love you.
Wait.
Ted Leo, he's a very good musician.
He's a great musician, and he can strum.
I was making the case the other night on the internet, because I watch videos at night and have a drink and talk about it, and I was talking about it specifically.
If you'll permit it, here's a thread to close.
I'm terribly sorry.
I would like to, if you'll allow it, send you my Summers.720p copy of Radiohead at Glastonbury in 1997, which I consider to be one of the great performances.
People from England go, hello, hello, hello.
It's still on the iPlayer, isn't it?
And I said, yeah, but America don't got the iPlayer in it.
But if you would allow it, I'll send that to you because I think you'd enjoy it.
But like, you know, they do the chunka, chunka, chunka, chunka.
There are points in, especially in, God, the revelatory song from that performance, I think is the Benz.
Right.
And the case I was making was, this concert is such an amazing moment where you see a band that takes what it's becoming to leverage what it's been.
To improve what it's been.
The Benz is a great song.
Good record, right?
But when you listen to it as a record, forgive my saying, you could confuse that as just another song in a pile from the grunge era.
I mean, you could say, oh, yeah, that sounds like Sun Temple Pilots or whatever.
But what they do with that in 1997...
Yeah.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
They elevate it, as they would say on Top Chef.
I'd love to send that to you.
They do Chunk-a-Chunk.
What I'm here to say about Ted, Ted can do—his rhythm guitar work should be in the Pantheon.
Oh, I see what you're saying.
He can do a Chunk-a-Chunk-a-Chunk.
Chunk-a-Chunk-a-Chunk is not as easy as it seems.
It's not at all.
If you're doing straight eights up and down, or even all down, like the Ramones—
Woof.
It's hard to do.
There are a lot of musicians like me that if I can do it, you've heard me do it, right?
There's no secret.
Right.
There's nothing left and my quiver is empty.
That's right.
John does not come out and play Brahms.
Yeah, well, you don't come out and get handed like an ELO style white violin and start playing Paganini.
Holy shit.
Could John play Paganini the whole time?
Could he play that?
No, he cannot.
And that's the thing.
Everything you've heard me do is actually like one or two clicks better than I'm actually capable of.
If I may, John, everything anyone has heard you do is everything that you can do.
It is all on the table, right?
You're exhausted.
You're like an empty toothpaste.
The pitcher is empty.
But there are all these musicians out there that what you hear them do is their thing.
And then they're sitting around the living room and they pull out a gut string guitar.
And they play Segovia.
And you're like, if you can do that, why aren't you working?
That always gets me with piano, where people will just sit down and, like, be – God, there was an example of this really recently that I was thinking of.
But, you know, you think about, oh, guitar players play guitar.
You know, you have a concentration in this thing.
The weirdest thing when I was a kid was, oh, you play a band instrument in, like, a concert band, but you also play a rock guitar.
That was common.
But what you wouldn't get is people who could play almost anything.
Like you pick up a Chapman stick and play a song.
Or you pick up a sitar and can do something greater than George Harrison levels of guitar.
Some people just seem to have that in them.
But also then the people, like you don't get good at piano accidentally.
That's a lot of fucking work.
Well, and the same is true.
So there are guys like, and Ted Leo is one of these, and weirdly Ben Gibbard is too.
If you say, hey, Ted, play some Stevie Ray Vaughan, he's just like, write it.
He can do it.
Couldn't stand the weather.
He can play guitar like Stevie Ray Vaughan.
And you're like, okay, Ted, now play guitar.
I bet he could also – somebody yelled out another girl on another planet.
I bet he could just know – he probably knows it for some reason.
But if he doesn't, he would pick up enough –
And mentally do the forward thinking calculation fast enough to know like, OK, this part's pretty simple.
I'm just playing.
And like when I get to the chorus, though, I'm going to need to do this.
And by feel, you know what I mean?
One of those kinds of like a pure musician.
My grandmother was like that.
No shit.
She literally was somebody that would sit at the piano in a party and she would say, you know, call them out.
And people would call out songs.
That's a magic trick, John.
And people would say, do you know this song?
And my dad used to say this all the time.
He would say, hum a few bars.
And he was quoting his mother.
who would say, why don't you hum a few bars of the song?
I don't know that one, but hum a few bars.
And the person would go, and she'd be there with the chords.
And in her head, I bet she could hear the chords that would go with that as well.
And then she would start to figure it out, and the person would lean on the piano and go, no, no, no, but there it goes.
And then they'd know the song.
The person would start singing, and my grandmother would play the chords.
And it's a kind of thing that's lost to time.
I mean, I don't know how many people can – it's like Steve Allen.
Having – I mean, this is one of those like old man things.
I never lived in a house with a piano in the house, a big piano that somebody could play.
I mean, now, I mean, we've had a Yamaha keyboard I bought for my kid to learn stuff on.
You know, they got pretty into it for a while.
But having an actual piano in the house with people who could play it, I mean, not to sound too –
old here, but there was a time in America, there's a reason that sheet music was the way a lot of money was made in music.
Before everybody had a way to play recordings, you'd buy sheet music, and you'd learn how to play it, and then you'd play it at parties or at night.
I mean, that was, isn't that kind of like radio or TV for the time?
Yeah, it was before radio.
That's what people did.
And that's why there are so many accordions in thrift stores.
That's why there's so many.
Oh, because somebody decided it's like family business.
You're not going to keep the deli going.
You're going to let it go.
It used to be that the accordion was an extremely popular instrument in America.
No.
And thousands and thousands, tens of thousands of people knew how to play them.
So there was one in the corner.
Portable, right?
Yeah.
You pick it up and everybody starts singing, roll out the barrel.
We'll have a barrel of fun.
And then one day, and I think it was in 1985, the last person that played the accordion died.
And Al Yankovic picked up their accordion and said, I will carry on.
And then the thrift stores just flooded with them.
And, you know, I have like six accordions.
I was, well, I was scarred by an accordion, as you know.
I was compelled to take accordion lessons Saturday mornings.
You know what's funny, John?
I'm looking through my history.
I was trying to find examples of what I was talking about on July 4th this year.
I'm looking at my history.
I love my YouTube history.
Dead Kennedys Live, 11-1979, Portland, Oregon, Earth Tavern.
Any chance that's what you were talking about?
And I probably was watching it the same day.
I watched at least the first 10 minutes of it.
I feel like you and I were across the West Coast.
We were both like, middle of the night.
You know what?
You know what I need to see right now?
Yep, yep, yep.
And I think I got to it by going to that San Francisco, you know, in the studio takes.
Yeah.
Is this why I have a standing desk, John?
Be honest.
It might be.
I mean, right?
Weren't you stipulating earlier that there's something in the water vis-a-vis standing desk in San Francisco just a matter of time before I got into the splash zone?
I do believe.
I do believe.
You just have to... Merlin, don't lock your knees.
Oh, fuck.
They're locked right now.
Unseen hand.
Huh.
Huh.
That's it.
That's beautiful.
Yeah, now that's it.
That one.
Now you stuck the landing.