Ep. 471: "Foot-Thick Cake"
Hello.
Hi, John.
Hi, Merlin.
How's it going?
Oh, so good.
Are you having a rough morning?
It's really early.
Yeah, it is.
Yeah.
Woo.
No, no, no.
What happened?
What changed?
Nothing changed?
I went to a party last night.
Mm-hmm.
And they bought some Costco cakes.
Pride of Kirkland.
And at the end of the night, the hostess said...
Oh, what am I going to do with all these desserts?
And before the words could leave her mouth.
And I said, listen, don't worry about a thing.
I'm here to help.
I'll give him a good home.
That's right.
And so I didn't really see the scope of the desserts that were left over.
I was just sitting at a table kind of, you know, waving my hands in the air.
Ah, whatever you got, you know, put it all on a pallet.
Yeah.
And so, you know, she sends me out the door with like an entire cake that's a foot thick.
That doesn't sound safe.
You know, Costco, they're trying to feed like a... Well, let's point out that when you get a Costco cake, you're getting a cake for a group.
It's not a personal pancake.
That's right.
It's to feed a group of fishermen.
You know, like, and then also on top of that, a whole other little pastry tray of some little lemon torts and apple fritters and cookies and all this stuff.
And so I walk out of there just feeling like I hit the jackpot.
No kidding.
Not only did I go to a good party, but I got like $50 worth of steak.
You did a nice thing for the host person because I think it's nice to know – well, let's be honest.
It's the reason people take their broken shit to goodwill because it feels like a guilt-free DMZ, right?
Even if it's shit that nobody wants.
In this case, it's nice to know it's not that person's problem now.
Yeah.
It's not their problem, right?
They've done a mitzvah for Cakey John.
And the thing is, they have plenty of room in their house for a cake.
It's not a question of how much room they have.
They got room for a foot-sized cake?
What they don't have is the emotional room for a foot-thick cake in their lives.
Oh, yeah.
Oh, God, that's a good way to put it.
Yes.
Right?
And I thought, of course, well, I have room for a foot-thick cake in my life.
Yeah.
But then I came home, middle of the night,
I'm like, well, I got this cake.
So I had a piece of cake in the middle of the night.
Well...
Then I'm tossing and turning.
I got little, you know, demons poking me with pitchforks all night, laughing at me.
Yeah, you're basically like in a Fleischer Brothers cartoon.
Boom, boom, boom, boom.
And they got the pitchforks and they're dancing in some kind of repetitive circle, little demons with their butts sticking out.
Their butts, exactly.
All I was looking at all night.
Believe me, believe me, they visit my house quite frequently.
Yeah.
The little butts dancing around laughing.
There's little fire.
Hope you like your cake day.
He, he, he, he.
Ate a piece of cake.
And now, so then.
Foot thick.
So then in the middle of the night, I wake up and I'm like, I got to throw that cake in the garbage.
Oh, no.
Like, I can't have that cake in this house.
Attorneys call that an attractive nuisance.
Thank you.
Mm hmm.
And for me, it's like, where did I in my right mind think I had the emotional stability to have a foot thick cake in my house?
That's crazy.
It should go immediately into the into the whatever.
I don't even know if you can put it in the food waste.
Compost?
No, because it might be made out of other, you know, that might ruin somewhere way downstream.
It might have a key or a ring or a baby inside.
You don't know until you finish the foot thick cake.
Thank you.
It might be the key that rules them all.
That's a good point.
And don't they put babies in cakes in New Orleans?
Isn't that a thing?
It's sort of like eating the worm.
You've got to buy the next baby if you get it.
All I'm saying is you don't know.
That's a lot of cake.
You know what that is, though?
That is gustatorial debt.
In a way, right, we know about financial debt.
We know about technical debt.
And that is an unpaid bill in some ways.
And then you feel bad because you're like, oh, that cake's getting dry.
Yeah.
Yeah.
There's a million reasons why I got to eat that cake, right?
It's there.
It's the middle of the night.
I got to eat it.
Now it's getting dry.
I got to eat it.
You're like Sir Edna Hillary.
You don't even need a Sherpa.
And whoever knows how, I mean, I don't know how much this cake cost, but it was at Costco.
So what is it?
$15?
$20?
I don't know.
I read an article about how they're still able to charge $5 for a chicken.
So I don't know if it's a similar thing with what they call a loss leader, but
The thing is, it doesn't matter if it was $1 or $1 million, because that is a cake that should probably not reside in your own house unless you have a plan for feeding a like-sized group.
I don't want to be normative about this, John.
People should enjoy what they enjoy.
That's right.
Don't yuck their yums, Marlon.
I don't.
I don't.
But I face this, John, and it's a secret shame.
Yeah.
It's making me roly-poly, but I have a similar problem with ice cream, where there's a certain time of night where I make, it's not a Sunday exactly, but I make something very, very complex with many ingredients, and then I eat it and go to bed.
It's like I want to be a sumo wrestler.
And if it's there, I'll eat it.
After a certain point, it's like the 11 o'clock dining plan for me.
It's bad.
Yeah.
Is it one of those like Tony Soprano used to make for AJ, where he'd yell at him about being fat, and then he'd say, come on over here, and then they'd make this sundae.
Oh, I do.
My whole family.
I shake him awake, get him out of bed.
Want to see what your daddy's made of?
Watch him eat a foot-thick cake.
I just cry and cry as I eat the cake.
So all night long, tossing and turning, because I got all this cake in me.
That sugar kicks back, man.
Oh, it does.
And now I know it's in there.
It's in the other room.
It's just sitting there.
I hear it's siren song.
I see the little demon touch.
But I mean, isn't it a little bit like, I don't know.
Gosh, I don't even want to mention it.
The book made me so sad when I read Old Yeller when I was a kid, or any of those kinds of very sad children's stories that they like to have us read.
But isn't it sort of also a thing like, don't you kind of want to take that dog for one last walk?
I do.
I am going to... Let him sniff his favorite places.
I'm going to toss this cake.
Believe me.
Yeah, okay.
But am I going to toss this cake before I have one more piece?
That would not be... A sayonara piece?
You get a sayonara slice.
It's a foot thick.
Uh-huh.
Uh-huh.
Um...
Yeah, but then on the other hand, we talked about the cigarettes on the door frames.
There's an element.
But the thing is, okay, here's the problem.
Cigarettes, like other kinds of things you'd see on health posters when we were in middle school, they got the cigarettes.
Like venereal disease.
Venereal disease, alcohol, bennies, dexies, like all those different things.
Yeah.
You know those are off the menu for you.
And so having them around makes you strong like a bull because you go, uh, but the problem is right.
Cake is not on the health food poster.
Maybe you should get it on a poster.
That's right.
You know what I'm saying?
Because like a cigarette, you go, well, I'm not supposed to have that.
And so it makes me – you sharpen your edge by having them around.
But in the case of the cake, you have not, as far as I know, drawn an official line in the sand to say cake is – in fact, it's your responsibility.
You adopted that cake.
Right.
But I know, you know, $20, let's say it costs $20.
$20 cake.
I'll take the $20, you know, I'll take $20 and give it to the next person I see, right?
I mean, you know, you used to light cigars with $20 bills.
I know I light $100 bills with $20 bills.
No, I adopted a guy.
I got a guy in the neighborhood.
His name's Larry.
He's my guy.
And when I see him, I give him $20 and he's my guy.
There you go.
My mom has several people she gives $20 to.
And I can feel the world changing for the better, even now.
Yeah.
I don't do it for him.
I do it for me.
The cake's got to go.
And what it is, you know, I don't know.
Did you ever do it?
Did you ever go Atkins all the way?
Did you ever go keto?
Did you ever do it?
You know I did.
Well, I know you did.
You used to make fun of me.
I did.
I did.
Well, and I was telling my kid this.
Like, I...
It's too much to get into, but I've had a variety of old man injuries and probably the onset of arthritis.
Alongside getting this new bike that I like to ride, but I haven't been able to ride it too much.
I've been looking at my weight, but more importantly, I've been looking at my fat and muscle content and trying to say, okay, my goal is not to get skinny.
I don't care if I gain or lose weight.
What I care about is what my smart scale is.
will tell me, like, what is your muscle mass?
And I figure, you know what it is?
Well, not too soon.
It's like eating an elephant or a foot-thick cake.
You do it a bite at a time, right?
Yeah.
But, you know, I've been putting on weight.
I'm nowhere near where I was when you first met me.
But I don't feel good.
I don't like sitting down and feeling my gut as a presence.
I've accepted it because I'm old and I'm alive.
And for that, I am grateful.
Yeah.
But I was telling my kid, I said, you probably don't know this about me, but I have a chronic health issue.
And I was like, have you ever heard of the Atkins diet?
We talked about Atkins.
And I was like, first of all, let me be clear.
This is not a healthy thing to do.
But if there's anything called a diet that was made for me,
Even in the less abusive version where you don't eat three pounds of bacon a day.
It really did work.
It made my health a lot better.
I lost a bunch of weight.
I got a lot of energy.
And from a health standpoint, I'm not saying this is good.
I'm not suggesting this to anybody.
All I'm saying is I walked away with two big takeaways.
One was that the chronic health issue that had ruined my life got better really fast by cutting out.
Oh, yeah.
And so consequently, what I learned was I can have some beer, I can have some onions, I can have some bread, but I can't have all the beer, all the onions and all the bread.
And especially on the same night or my friend Tony's birthday party is going to be really, really a bummer because I'm going to be in his bathroom in the Western Edition all night.
So all I know, John, is that I feel better if I do something like that.
Now, you had a bit you like to do, I remember, where you said you're not going to get on the Atkins diet.
Do you remember this bit?
I don't think so.
Oh, you had a great bit.
Because it was real popular around the time we first met.
And I was doing it, and it worked.
And again, I'm not recommending it.
But you would say, oh, you're doing the Atkins diet?
And they go, yeah, it's worked really great.
I got energy.
Like, oh, did you see how that guy died?
And the other person would go, yeah, he slipped on ice in his head.
And you'd go, well, I don't want to go like that.
Please listen closely.
Roderick on the Line is an important program about ideas.
Hitler, the Beatles, ravines, sleeping in landfills, and getting out of the way.
You are listening to it now.
In any case, for the first time ever, you can now support this vital work directly by visiting patreon.com slash roderick on the line and choosing to make a monthly pledge.
Now more than ever, your monthly gift ensures that new thought technologies will continue to shape our youth and discomfort our elders.
Once again, that's patreon.com slash Roderick on the line or giverodrickyourmoney.com.
Because by the time Super Train arrives, it may already be too late for you.
Is that a chance you really want to take?
I just retold your joke, but it was funny.
It's good.
It's good.
Those were the good days.
But then you turn it into a South Beach or a paleo.
Paleo is the really funny one to me because it has that science sauce, science spray feeling of like, well, our ancestors gathered around an open flame.
It's got the curly mustache.
And ate a variety of elk.
Anything that has a curly mustache, I'm all in on it right now.
Oh, yeah.
It's a diet with a monocle for sure.
Yeah, I did it and it worked.
And the reason I mentioned it to my stupid kid is like I'm sorely tempted to do – and I'm not saying I believe this from a science standpoint, the whole ketosis, peeing on a strip thing.
Yeah, I've done it all.
What I'm saying is that if I were to spend two weeks –
cutting out almost all carbs and focusing on not deadly proteins.
Dimes to donuts, so to speak.
I can just about promise you that I will feel better and have more energy in two weeks.
Whether or not I am in active ketosis is not a concern to me, but something's got to give.
I am at that stage.
I am at that stage.
Do you feel gross?
Well... No, I mean, any way you want to take it, but do you feel like...
I do, and it's more even than just that I feel bad now.
It's that I know that
And you've got to be here, too.
I know that— We're fighting gravity.
Yeah, that mistakes I make right now are going to affect how I live in 10 years.
A thing I like to say, you know, the thing I'm always referring to, the wisdom document, the wisdom project, you think you want to get better in life, but my feeling is that before you get better, it's vital to stop getting worse.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Because the thing is, that's the gravity.
We're defying gravity, like in the musical Wicked.
Because what's happening is, our armor class, as regards health, has changed a lot over the years.
And now, to say you're fighting that, I don't know if that's accurate, but I do know that the inertia or the gravity is going to tend toward roly-poly and sad.
Yeah.
Yeah, well, and swollen and arthritic and diabetic.
Yes.
And all these.
You know, I went to my doctor, and he's thumping me, and he's listening to me, and he's poking me.
And I said, so how does it look, Doc?
Because I still talk to him like my dad talked to his Doc.
How am I doing, Doc?
You're smoking a tiny hobo cigar on a toothpick.
And he's still all tense.
Yeah.
He's a Chinese guy who's about 65, and he's got no time to sit and chit-chat.
Although, as soon as I leave his office, he's just going to play tiddlywinks on his desk.
It's not like he's out of time.
Just don't get me started.
So anyway.
You know what it is?
I finally realized it, John.
I've said this to you before.
But the phrase I think about all the time with these fucking doctors, they're fucking try-hard nerds.
And it's no fun dealing.
It's one thing to deal with a try-hard.
And it's another thing to deal with a nerd.
And what I'm here to tell you is that these are try-hard nerds.
And they are much more interested in showing you all the things they know combined with making you admit vulnerabilities that makes them feel strong.
And I do not prefer it.
Wow.
They're try hard nerds.
Wow.
Kapow.
But don't you think that partly explains it?
Well, who knows?
You know, I tried to find a doctor.
That's all I wanted.
I just wanted Dr. You know, my dad had Dr. Tyler.
That's like being examined by the head of student council.
Wow.
And it was just, you know, I went to this one, I went to like the clinic, I got a nice lady who was from overseas and then she wouldn't answer her phone and I, and she, and she stopped giving me a medicine and I got, you know, and I left a one star review, you know, all this terrible stuff.
And finally, there was this doctor that would accept me in a local clinic.
Yeah.
And he had one of these offices where you walk in and it said, live, laugh, love.
And it had been decorated by someone else.
If he signs that, that's technically a prescription.
If he gives you a throw pillow that says, live, laugh, love, and he signs it.
That's a prescription.
That's a prescription.
Yeah, you can take that to Walgreens and just watch what they say.
Will I?
Is this a new prescription for you?
Yes, ma'am.
It'll be covered.
It'll be covered by my insurance, my Cobra insurance.
Yeah.
Oh, God, Cobra.
Anyway, so he thumps me, he whacks me, all these things.
And I said, so how do I look, Doc?
How's it going?
And he says, well, you know, you have what I would call American health.
And I was like, oh boy, what does that mean?
And he said, well, you're pre-hypertensive, you're pre-diabetic, you're pre...
He said, you're on the verge of five major health catastrophes.
Yeah, but I mean, also, doesn't that kind of show that you're ahead of the curve?
That's right.
Like pre-algebra, that's a smart kid.
But I was like, well, what do I do?
And he was like, well, you know, every American has all of these problems now if you eat macaroni and cheese and don't exercise.
And I was like, that's me.
And he said, well, you know, you know what to do.
And I was like, I do.
And he said, well, there you go.
So you're 53 and there it is.
So here, you know, don't let the door hit you in the ass on the way out.
And I was like, see you later.
Well, okay.
But like real talk, cause I'm going through a thing too.
And I finally, I hate this shit so much.
I don't, I mean, everybody dies, but I'd like to put it off a little while if I can.
And, um,
So I'm doing a Zoom call with somebody who might become a primary care person for me.
I'm doing that on Thursday because apparently it's time for me to get into the fucking system.
So did you not have a primary care physician before?
No.
Well, where did your primary care take place?
In the bathtub with a bowl of ice cream?
Well, and like, you know, in the pill aisle in Walgreens.
Oh, right, right, right.
No, I've got a libertarian shrink and he gives me what I need to keep me going.
But no, it's a thing I'm doing.
And it all started with a trip to a dock in the box probably six or eight weeks ago, which went exactly as shitty as I expected it to.
I just want to be very clear.
You know that I love my wife.
I love my wife.
I'll love her forever.
You've seen me love her.
yes yes yes big fan big fan she is however utterly gay bones for the medical system she loves that stuff and she's constantly reminding me about our insurance and like i think it would be sort of a failure for her if i i died for a dumb reason without even knowing why i think that would probably be galling to her yes and but she's okay talking although she'd love filling out the forms
She's great at forms.
If you died, there would be a lot of forms to fill out.
Yeah, that's where she's a Viking.
She's great at that.
But I was like, okay, fine, fine, fine.
But this Doc in the Box experience, and that was where the theory of the try-hard nerd really landed.
Because I had a very... I'm not going to say anything.
I'm going to say this.
It was a dude.
We talked.
And he spent our brief time together telling me how many different grave things I might have...
Oh, dear.
And basically, but like he wasn't doing it in a way to say, yeah, I told you about Jerry the Mechanic.
Jerry the Mechanic was our mechanic back he retired eventually to be with his husband and he'd just do his own thing.
But Jerry the Mechanic was fucking the best.
And I fucked up at my peril because I didn't listen to Jerry.
Because Jerry was the one good mechanic in America who would say, hey, look, you came in because of this.
Yeah, we can fix that.
That's going to be this much better.
But, you know, I also noticed this other thing that's going to be, that's like already kind of a problem and we should fix.
And then, of course, the classic, the timing belt.
Your timing belt is going to go in the next six months.
It always does.
But he would do the thing, John.
He would do what I want in a doctor, which is to say, first of all, don't give me any fucking commentary about my life.
Just take care of the thing.
Right.
Just, but, but he would also say, look, if you got an extra 300, that's going to be cheaper to fix that now than later.
And I'd be like, Oh, Jerry, you're so wise.
And you know, as consequence, I trust Jerry.
I never went into, I never went into Jerry with say, what's one of the classics like squeaky brakes or, Oh, what's the one where the, you get the clanging sound when you turn.
I used to get that all the time.
you're steering.
You know what I mean?
Yeah.
The, the conk, conk, conk, conk, the differential, but you know what I mean?
Yeah.
The, what's it called?
It's the... It's the... We turn, it goes Kong, Kong, Kong.
Well, it's the... It's a classic.
It's the different... No, it's the steering... Yeah, the thing with the boot.
It's the U-joints.
No, it's the... U-boats?
It's the part with the... But the thing is, if I go in there and I say my... It goes Kong, Kong, Kong, when we turn left, he's going to go, okay, that's because you're...
your thing correct name here isn't working and fix it but he would never go like oh you know it also you also might have these other problems like it would suck if he just goes oh just speculates about your car like he's some kind of grand master like don't fucking don't do that and definitely don't do that with my body it might be arthritis or you might be seconds away from a stroke and
You know, it really could be you fucking try hard nerd.
Like you mainly and the thing is then what they, you know, I'm sorry, John, they exercise power.
They love, they love exercising power because you're supposed to treat them like a great wise man.
Again, like they are a maester, like they forged their own chain.
I've been watching a lot of Game of Thrones.
They forged their own chain at a good state school, and now the tryhard nerd gets to sit there in their fucking white lab coat with their... Oh, yeah, I get it.
Yeah, you're Jonas Salk, doctor.
Yikes!
And I don't... I don't want...
our interaction to be about starting with you feeling like you need to like get something up on me.
Right.
Are you sure you don't smoke?
And I said, no, I don't smoke.
I've had two cigars in the last year and I don't smoke.
But like, but like this whole like, cause if, Oh, if I catch you smoking, like then I get to like lecture you about that.
And it's like,
fucking try hard nerds you know my mom is is 88 now and she's got um she you know things are happening you know things are things are in motion and she also has this uh this same feeling that you do that she's going into the doctor as you would a mechanic and she's saying all right fix the problem and the doctors are saying well it could be this it could be that it could be nothing
And she's like, no, have some more system, have some more tests, have some more appointments to be made.
And so they're doing that.
She's been to a thousand tests and she's like, look, tell me what it is.
I'll do it.
And they're like, well, we don't know what it is because your body is a mystery.
Your body is a wonderland.
And it could be this.
Maybe it was just the day of the test.
At one point they said, have you had any heartbreak lately?
She's like, what?
No.
And they're like, okay, well, we'll just have to rule that out because that could be what's going on.
It's like, you what now?
The heartbreak?
That's a term of art for when one's heart is broken, not literally.
But apparently...
American doctors now are gonna tell you that if you have figurative heartbreak It actually can really affect your heart the actual heart I am actually kind of interested in this stuff well
Or generational trauma, that kind of stuff.
And I don't think that 30 years ago a doctor would have said that.
Oh, hell no.
Well, when I first went in for my chronic medical condition, which has no known etiology, and it's not IBS.
It's more than IBS.
It doesn't matter.
But it's like IBS, but not.
It's not.
Don't worry.
But the point is, you know what one of the etiology is?
First of all, we know it.
Most people who get it are Ashkenazi Jews, which I'm not, as far as I know.
But the other one is they say unresolved grief.
Yeah.
It causes a deep gut problem.
And when I first heard that, you know what I said?
Psh!
That's what I said.
Same as when I first heard about highly sensitive people, I went, psh!
But there's kinds of things where you go like, you know what, though?
Anecdotally, I have encountered some people who I think might be highly sensitive people, and that explains a lot.
And unresolved grief, unresolved trauma?
I don't know, man.
I don't know.
My mom had gut problems her whole adult life, and then...
The day she retired, it went away and it never came back.
Woof.
And it was unresolved trauma.
Absolutely, 100%.
100%.
Ooh, like having to live with the- And I'm not somebody that just says 100% as one of those like- Yeah, but day-to-day stress or do you think it was something- No.
A life thing?
Yeah, it was all the way from childhood and it was just, it was the unresolved trauma that caused her to put all of her work stress into the hole.
God.
John, I would love to get you excited about trauma.
I don't like to give you homework, John.
I'm so sorry to do this.
I don't like to give you homework.
What do I do?
What do I do?
I send you a YouTube video, right?
I don't give you a ton of homework, right?
No, that's true.
You do send me YouTube videos.
But yeah, and they're usually pretty – it's like I said to my fucking kid.
Do you honestly think I'm showing you something that I think you'll hate?
No, I'm showing it to you because I feel like I know you.
And I feel like John Roderick would enjoy a 35-minute YouTube video about PowerPop history.
It's true.
It's true.
But like, it's, I, there's this book that I heard about through an interview.
It's called The Body Keeps the Score.
Oh, yeah.
I've heard about this book.
Okay.
It's a little bit, I know it got trendy, that whatever.
I discovered it way after it was trendy.
Like so many things in life.
I heard an interview with this guy.
He's the guy who helped kind of pioneer and formalize PTSD as a thing.
dealing with mostly veterans at this hospital in, I think, Massachusetts.
Anyway, I'm not going to go on and on about it.
Maybe what I'll do is I'll find you the interview where I first heard this guy.
And it's one of those things that John Siracusa, a friend of the show, has taught me to be leery about anything that feels like a skeleton key.
But holy shit, trauma explains a lot.
Yeah.
Because starting with the fact that we refuse to call it trauma because we think we aren't worthy of having been traumatized We know my great-grandparents on my dad's side They both emigrated to the United States when they were 13 or 14 from Wales and my and my great-grandmother
Her immigration, I think I've probably told you this before, her immigration looked like this.
They were like, we're going down to the port to see your uncle off to the United States.
Families used to love stuff like this.
And they all went down to the port and they were like, actually, it's you that's going to the United States.
And they put her on the boat.
13 years old, down in steerage somewhere, gave her a bindle.
They put her on a boat in Wales.
Yeah, in Cardiff.
And she had a little bindle.
And she went to New York and then met my great-grandfather, who was from the same region of Wales, who was already in the United States.
And he was the ripe old age of 15 or whatever.
whoa and then they went into ohio and started mining coal which is what they had which is you know what they'd done in wales and then he joined the uh the army and went out and was the first where he was in the first group of troops to come find little bighorn after custer had been wiped out no what what year we talking about here
Well, what year was Little Bighorn?
1880.
Very late 1800s?
Yeah.
Okay.
And then back to Ohio, more coal mining.
So then my grandfather...
went to World War I, and then his whole thing, you know, he collapsed like a house of cards.
And then that got passed on to my dad and his brother, Uncle Jack.
I was just out of curiosity.
I mean, to draw the obvious inference here, was he in the infantry?
He was.
So he's dealing with World War I infantry stuff, which includes usually incredibly stressful, stress, warfare, horrible health conditions, watching your buddies die, and the constant fear of being gassed.
All of that plus a lot of weird immigrant – like his folks had, I don't know, six, seven kids and they lived in this little town of Worcester, Ohio the rest of their lives.
But he went off thinking – I don't know what – it was some kind of class arc that he was on.
That combined with the war stuff, who knows, alcoholic, bad times, died in an SRO in Los Angeles and nobody went to claim the body type of life.
This is your grandfather?
This is my grandfather.
He died in a flop house hotel in L.A.
in 1954.
Apparently everybody in the hotel called him the professor and
Uh, if that, uh, that's not a surprise.
Right.
But then he died and the, and the county coroner of LA wrote to my dad and uncle and were like, who, you know, do you want to come claim the remains?
And they were like, nah.
And so he went into the, to the, you'll bring home a cake, you'll bring home a cake, but they, they didn't want the veteran.
No, they didn't.
And so, you know, when my dad was 86 and dying, I, you know, we were going through it all.
Right.
And my sister was like, do you, you know, like it's time to forgive your own father.
And my dad said, fuck it.
And went to, you know, went to the grave, like carrying the flag of fuck that guy.
My Uncle Jack, all he talked about was his dad in his last 10 years, trying to figure out the trauma.
He used the word trauma all the time because my cousin Libby introduced that to him.
What is this trauma, this continuing trauma?
Look at how many fucked up men are really at the heart of it still dealing with something about their father.
Something all the way back.
And my oldest brother, David...
When he died, his fingernails were six inches long because he was like, ah, fuck it.
And he fucked it all the way.
He, he really fucked it all the way down.
But like, I went to his house one time and, and, uh,
Oh, it was terrible.
It was terrible.
I won't even describe it.
Well, fair to say it was reflective of a disorganized mind?
It was tremendous.
Just being in the house recapitulated whatever trauma it was that my great-great-grandparents had experienced.
He had a pistol under his pillow, but no sheets.
Yeah.
It's not funny, but it's terrible.
And he told me that the pistol, you know, they took it off of a cop, which is like, did you really?
I don't know.
One time he couldn't get out of the bathtub and he was there for four days.
There's all this terrible stuff.
And apparently he died and left his condo to my niece.
And she says he haunts the place.
He turns the lights on and off and stuff.
Long story short.
all of that my dad definitely was traumatized and uncle jack was too they both had these weird vague stories about how their father at one point tried to kill them when they were little uncle jack said he tried to drown him in the bathtub and my dad had something where his dad tried to to kill him by throwing him off a building and it was always just like the type of story that they would tell at christmas time like ha
Oh, that's great.
One of the things this guy gets at, and there's just like a dozen things this guy gets to in this book.
I'm sorry to make it real here, but a lot of it comes down to this idea, well, what is trauma?
And something I've finally come around to is that a lot of stuff I refuse to call trauma really was trauma.
And this guy puts it all so much better than I do, but part of it is this idea that...
We think about some of the classic trauma stuff, especially that happens to kids.
There are some fairly common things about it.
And one of them is like, you were helpless.
There's something that happened to you that where you were unable to make something really, really bad stop, whether that's your pain.
mother being hit by your dad or whether that's you being, you know, messed with by your uncle or whatever it is.
So part of it is like that helplessness that then leads to later in life, way overreacting or underreacting to things.
The things that make us, you know, say fight, flight or freeze.
Well, there are things where people are just like way people like me way overreact to everything because that's my wiring is that that kind of fear of trauma or fear of feeling that feeling you used to feel.
Even more than what you're feeling now or what you could feel, that feeling becomes very overriding.
But here's the other one, and this is, I think, so important.
You think about what happened with the Roman Catholic Church.
Somebody who was supposed to protect me didn't protect me.
And in some cases, the person who was supposed to protect me was the one who hurt me.
And that, so much more stuff clicked for me.
Because, of course, I'm like Elaine Bennis on the subway going, people live through the Holocaust, I can make it through this subway trip, right?
The kind of thing we all do where we're like, oh my God, I will be able to console myself by saying, oh, other people have had much worse things happen and they were fine, which is an incredibly poisonous idea to have.
I mean, we see it in other ways today, which is like, if you have any kind of a problem that's anything above a third world problem, you're unworthy and ungrateful and you'll be canceled.
You're not allowed to feel bad because somebody else might feel worse.
But that idea of somebody was supposed to protect me and they didn't, and maybe that was the person who caused this to happen—
I think that's where a lot of trauma comes from.
And it's really difficult to get over with.
Like, what are you going to rethink?
What are you going to undo?
Are you going to rehumanize somebody who's been a monster in your memory in order to go like, oh, I guess they had their bad days too?
Because you've got to find some way to stay accepted in the tribe.
And if you say that Father Phil...
diddled on your Twingus like you're going to be thrown out of the tribe because he is a great man, and you obviously attracted him with your boyish wiles.
You know what I'm saying, though?
That's just a taste, but doesn't that give you some feeling of like, oh, maybe it's more and wider and broader and deeper than I thought it was?
Well, for me, I've definitely, there have been a couple of times in my life where I felt like
I got an insight like a like and it wasn't like an intellectual insight.
I got an emotional moment where I said that I could forgive myself.
And it was and both times they were brief.
Part of it is you feel like you've disappointed people a lot.
Well, that and also I think a lot of this trauma, the way that it recapitulates is that the next generation just owns it from the last one.
It gets handed to them and they're like, I guess this is mine.
My dad hit me and look how I turned out, which is the kind of thing you say when you didn't turn out great.
Well, and whatever my dad, I have no idea what he was carrying.
It got diluted.
I don't have the same degree of trauma that he does, but I also inherited my mother's trauma.
You got like the tasting platter.
You got a flight of trauma.
A flight of traumas.
I really do.
I have a one-foot cake of traumas.
This episode of Roderick on the Line is brought to you in part by Squarespace.
You can learn more about Squarespace right now by visiting squarespace.com slash super trained friends.
Squarespace is the all in one platform for building your brand and growing your business online.
You can stand out with a beautiful website.
You can engage with your audience and you can sell anything, your products, content you create.
You can even sell your time.
This is true.
This is new and it's true.
And it's amazing.
It's Squarespace.
Yeah.
Okay?
Maybe you're out there, what some people call it, creative.
I would not use that word.
I would say people who make things, right?
But maybe that's what a lot of us do, and you need a website for that.
Squarespace wants to help.
And, you know, it's bringing together a lot of the old and the new in a way I find very invigorating.
Remember blogging?
Does anybody remember blogging?
Well...
You can create a community on your Squarespace website with a fully integrated commenting system that supports threaded comments, replies, and likes.
You can use their powerful blogging tools to categorize, share, and schedule your posts as well.
This is amazing.
This is like stuff from the future where we all will spend the rest of our lives.
You know, you may know this.
This is huge.
This is huge.
All Squarespace sites are optimized for mobile.
That means that the content on your pages will automatically adjust so that your site looks great on any device or dingus.
That used to be an entire separate career.
Squarespace does that for you.
Maybe you want to save time with cross-posting.
You want to get your message out there.
Well, it's built right in.
Squarespace can auto-post your content to Twitter, Tumblr, or Facebook, personal or brand pages.
All post entries and images are optimized and tagged, so descriptions and titles will be correct wherever you are posting.
You know, and let me just put in my own personal word for Squarespace.
It's like my friend Marcus says, you know, you can pay me to talk about it, but you can't pay me to like it.
Well, I like it and I'm going to talk about it.
So, you know, can't two things be true, right?
I've used Squarespace for a very long time.
And in fact, you are using it right now.
I mean, definitely over 10 years.
Roderick on the Line, our podcast that you're listening to right now, is hosted on Squarespace.
And that's over 10 years.
That's a very long time.
You could have a child that's almost done with elementary school at this point.
Mine's older than that, so it's horrible having a kid.
But Squarespace can't help with that.
It's not their problem.
They want to build it beautiful is what they say.
So right now, do me a favor.
Go ahead and head over to squarespace.com slash supertrain, and you can get a free trial.
Okay, free trial.
No credit card required.
You go in there.
When you're ready to launch, you're ready to take it and put it live, push the big red button.
I don't know if there's a big red button.
Terms and conditions apply.
Use the offer code supertrain, and that's going to save you 10%.
off your first purchase of a website or a domain.
Once again, please, squarespace.com slash supertrain, offer code supertrain.
They've been great to us.
They're going to be great to you.
And our thanks to Squarespace for supporting Roderick Online and all the great shows.
Yum, yum.
Because the hostess of the party didn't want it in her house.
Sure you can have it.
And the thing is, you know, my mom has no trouble forgiving herself, but my dad never forgave himself for a single goddamn thing.
Yeah.
And so I've got a, you know, yeah, I've got a tasting platter.
But a couple of times I've felt that breath of air where it was like, wait a minute.
None of this is mine.
I don't need any of this.
Like I've got – I had a great conversation last night with a guy at this party where we were talking about – we're both in our 50s.
You know what happened was he said – he's a guy I've known for a long time.
He's Korean.
He ran for city council at one point in Seattle.
He's a smart guy.
Worked for the Gates people.
Just recently retired.
At 55 or whatever, not retired, but left the Gates Foundation and is now just kind of like, what do I do?
And he said to me at one point, because I was wearing golf pants.
Let's be honest.
It was a party, a summer party.
And I said, I'm not, you know, golf pants aren't just for the 4th of July.
Uh-uh.
And so I'm wearing golf pants and a Hawaiian shirt.
It seems to me you have a – especially for somebody from the Pacific Northwest, you have a really admirable wardrobe of summer weight apparel.
I do.
That's exactly right.
I own one seersucker suit and that's it.
It's kind of a joke suit.
I have really invested in what you would call Easter clothes.
Yeah.
And it's partly because I feel like I look good in pastels.
But I also... Yeah, that bonnet.
You know, I also have a furnace inside me.
I'm hot-blooded.
Yeah.
And so I like to wear white linen pants.
I just do.
I just do.
And I get them dirty.
I get spaghetti sauce on them.
Well, pants are for wearing, John.
Pants are for wearing.
And that's what was happening with these golf pants.
Yes.
I was like, look, it's the end of the summer.
You know, it's the...
It's not Labor Day.
I'm not a monster.
Yeah, let's get some.
Did you wear white bucks out of curiosity?
I had on my signature red boat shoes.
Okay.
I do have white bucks.
I didn't wear them to the party.
I don't know why.
I should have done.
But so he says, are you interested in the game of golf?
And I said, not at all.
And he said, well, let me tell you about the game of golf.
And I was like, go on, because I'll listen to anybody talk about anything they're interested in.
Sure.
Well, we talk about golf.
We talk about, and of course, as you're talking about golf.
It's like that Raymond Carver story, what we talk about when we talk about golf.
What we talk about when we talk about golf.
Yes.
And he's a first generation Korean American.
He went to Yale.
So he's got this back and forth, right?
He's like, well, I'm this, I'm that.
And he's playing.
He loves golf.
He just got into it during the pandemic.
And we're talking about the class, the social class, and also all – Environmental.
Should he feel guilty about playing golf?
He does feel guilty about it.
He also loves playing golf.
He's going to all these places he never would have been able to go before.
And also – and he's like the only –
He said, it's funny because golf is very popular among Koreans.
And that is kind of allowing me to do it because it feels like a connection to my ancient tribe.
And I was like, go on.
Golf is connecting you with your Korean heritage.
And he's like, a little.
Because of the people who play it.
Yeah.
It's not because he's from Scotland.
It's because the people who play it.
Because it's very big in Korea.
And he sees a lot of Koreans on the courses.
But he says...
I'm also from Yale and worked for the Gateses.
So I get invited to golf clubs where there are no Koreans or Jews.
And now I'm in a place where I would never be, I would never have gotten, no one can get, you know, these are gated communities, places I've never seen before.
And I'm like, oh yeah, I love this conversation.
Go on.
And then at a certain point it gets to, wait a minute, we're both in our fifties.
What is the purpose of life?
And it's so funny how any time.
It takes less time to get to that than it used to.
It gets so fast.
Yeah.
And he was like, I can't be retired.
I'm 54 years old.
I got so much life left.
I'm playing golf.
And I was like, I know, right?
So what do you want to do?
And he's like, what do you want to do?
And I was like, leave behind my generational trauma.
What do you want to do?
And he was like, me too.
Oh, my God.
So it's in the air, Merlin.
It's in the air.
I had a – this is a deep one.
Well, you know, they can't all be funny.
This is a somewhat deep one.
We go through phases with the programs that we watch at our house.
And we have these sort of like – these shows we watch over and over.
And we were just doing a recent rewatch of The Office, which is a show.
Oh, yeah.
That's a good show.
The American or the British?
Well, I mean, you know, they're different shows.
Sure.
You introduced me to the British office.
You're the one that did it.
I'll save it for the show.
But I really come around on The Office.
And I think it's funny.
It's a very normie show to like.
But I was saying something to my kid because I have this unified field theory about the shows of Mike Schurr.
Like shows that he's been a producer or like a writer or showrunner creator on.
Like, it's actually one of the smartest things I ever said and only seven people will ever appreciate it.
But I think each one of the worlds that Mike Schur has created is asking a question about life.
um, including The Good Place, um, uh, you know, Parks and Rec.
You know, Parks and Rec asks the question, can I be, uh, I think it's, can I be respected?
Um, Brooklyn Nine-Nine asks the question, can I be loved?
Um,
You know, anyway, I have a whole theory about this.
But I was saying to my kid, we were watching The Office, and I was like, The Office to me, like, I'm sorry, this is so dim, but I studied TV in college.
I'm broken.
But, you know, there's something you can really learn from The Office.
You see something on The Office that we all deal with every day.
In addition to the whole, like, you know...
David Brent, Michael Scott person who's not pulling it off and thinks he is.
But one of the things you see on The Office so clearly is the contagion of shittiness.
That, like, you've got your deal and how you are.
And you may not like how you are.
You may not like that the world is the way it is that makes you be how you are.
But you have the ability to pass what I would just generally philosophically call your shit, right?
You can always pass your shit on to other people.
Maybe it's just because you're in a sour mood.
Maybe it's because Todd Packer made fun of your butt.
Like, who knows what it is?
But do you know what I mean when I say that there's a contagion to that?
So, like, if Michael Scott is in a terrible mood, then, like, he's going to want to do the employee evaluations and Pam has to suck up to him.
But we all have the ability to pass our shit on to other people, not on, like, a glacial scale.
Yeah.
not even on a decades-long scale, but within the day, the shittiness that we pass on to other people can be very contagious.
Because once you've put somebody on their back foot and you've made them feel bad, you've passed your shit on to them, maybe you try to unintentionally sort of overlook somebody.
But I was thinking about how that show, and I don't mean to make this deep, but The Office is so good at really highlighting...
The unconscious or unintentional ways that we harm other people with how we're fucked up, which in turn then makes whatever their dumb shit is gets passed on to somebody else.
And that may not be trauma precisely, but I think it's analogous.
I think the way that we are...
And the way that we respond in ways we aren't always aware of passes shittiness on to other people and like really spreads it around and makes sure that our shit becomes primary in their life in a way that can really sort of screw them up.
And I'm not sure if that's exactly relevant here.
I can imagine that your Korean Yale friend has probably gotten that from a lot of different angles.
But I feel that all the time.
I feel myself on the precipice between, like, I could choose to be a shitheel about this with somebody or I could choose to, like, not be like that.
Yeah.
I'm not merely trying to be like Johnny Sun or Rex Chapman here.
I'm really saying that the way that we conduct ourselves day to day has an effect on other people.
And even if it's not full-on, full-blown trauma in which that is based, whatever made us vulnerable in a way that creates shittiness, that can be passed on to somebody else who may be vulnerable in a different way that will then make them a little bit shittier.
And I think we should all stop trying to do that.
What's interesting is that when my daughter was young,
I had yet to get bipolar treatment, and I was desperately sad all the time.
You remember.
It was a feature of the show.
Those were the glory days.
What I remember is it all felt utterly who you were, and if you like, normal.
As in, like, this will never go away, because this is just my curse.
And since I've been treated for bipolar, the worst of it has gone, but I'm still a desperately sad person.
And when my kid was young, I said, you know, the things that had the most profound effect on me watching the adults in my life were when there was clearly something going on and they told me it was fine.
Because when I was little, I knew that it wasn't fine.
And I knew that... You can't fool a kid.
You can't fool a kid.
And telling me it was fine not only didn't fool me, but it made me not trust you.
And so... Now you're sad and a liar.
Yeah.
I never pretended that I wasn't sad around her.
And when she asked me what...
Was going on I would say well, sweetie, I'm sad and it's not your fault.
It's not anybody's responsibility It's not really in response to anything.
It's just that I'm sad and as she's grown up she's grown up knowing that That that's what's going on with me and I'm the only one in her life who
that will sit and stare at a spot on the wall for an hour.
Without a smile pasted on your face.
And also, I never smile.
You know, like, I don't smile when I'm making a joke.
It's a deadpan.
I mean, if I smile, it's...
If I genuinely smile, it's really something gets, you know, something gets to me.
But I don't smile frivolously, right?
Like, just to smile?
What the hell are you doing?
And I know if you smile, you feel better.
You know, I'm smiling right now.
You can hear it in my voice.
I remember when Eddie Vedder first came out and he was like, and everybody said, why is he opening his mouth so large?
And I talked to some people, music people, and they were like, well, you can hear it in his voice.
He opens his mouth and his voice comes out.
All these mumblecore people that sing through pursed lips, that's not how you sing.
That's not his head voice.
He's singing from his diaphragm.
He's really singing.
You open your mouth.
You smile when you sing.
It helps.
You can hear it.
Well, so she now has just started...
At the age of 11 and a half saying, I know, right?
Oh, they get old so fast.
Mine's in high school.
She has started to say at times, daddy, stop saying bad things about yourself.
And I go, huh?
What?
And she's like, well, you just said that, um, that people, uh, like to not like you.
And I was like, well, it's true.
And she was like, no, well, whether it's true or not, you need to stop saying it.
And I said, no, it's part of my brand.
People love to hate my guts.
It's part of the, it's the whole story.
It's like what, and she was like, I'm going to sit you down when we get home and tell you that not everybody doesn't like you and that it's not part of your brand.
And I'm like, OK, now I've now somehow she ends up working.
I'm going to start doing it again, too.
Well, and I don't know.
So, you know, of course, I'm I'm running all these scripts and I'm like, now, wait a minute.
Have I passed on?
Is my daughter now filling the role?
Is she taking on my emotions as hers?
She's like Max von Sydow being filled with the demon.
Or not Max von Sydow, sorry, Father Damien.
Like, basically, the sin eater, if you like.
So this is what I was worried about.
But then I look at her, and she takes absolutely none of my sadness on herself.
Really?
That's shockingly healthy.
Because that's what I did when my mom told me everything was fine.
You take it on yourself when you don't understand what's happening.
That person can't admit that they're sad.
It's like when your little kid is sick, and I would always think, like, I wish Madeline and I could split your pain.
I wish we could each take some portion of what you're going through right now.
And that's kind of what you did, right?
You're like, oh, if you're smiling and acting like everything's fine, then maybe I should take some sadness for you.
Well, I think what happens if your parent tells you that everything's fine, you assume there's a reason that they're lying to you.
Maybe you're part of it.
Well, right.
The reason they're actually doing it is because they don't want you to be affected.
But you're affected anyway, and so you assume the reason they're not telling you is that it's your fault or your problem or you're part of it.
Yeah, yeah.
And so my kid feels apparently, at least it seems to me,
feels zero responsibility for my sadness because i've been telling her her whole life it's not her problem it's not her fault and it's not her you know like it's just what daddy is yeah so she is trying to she's doing what i have done to her over the years which is like come on sweetie you know like
You might not win this race, but it is important to run it.
That's a gutsy thing to do.
It's impressive.
But the thing is, my parents passed their stuff down to me, even though they tried not to.
Nobody ever tried to drown me in a bathtub.
And I'm trying to do better, too.
Everybody tries to do better.
Who knows if when she's 40 years old, she's going to be like, oh, my dad with his fucking sadness.
That was my number one thing is I know I'm anxious.
I have anxieties.
And my goal since –
Even before this was even a project was I really would like to the extent possible to not pass that along to my kid.
But that, guess what?
Obsessing over that in my case has done it through sort of a side door.
It's like, you know, when you, when you, when I know you don't do this, but when I go like, Oh, everything's fine.
Everything's fine.
You know, like it's like dog smelling fear.
I think kids know there's some, there's some shit going on.
They hate seeing their family members, especially parents being sad and vulnerable, but we're not, we don't help them.
I'm just repeating what you said, but we don't help them when we act like it's not real.
All we do again, part of this other project is trying to talk people out of their feelings and
And like I say again in the document, like be careful about how often you tell somebody their negative feelings are wrong because now you're saying they're sad and a liar.
And like kids get that.
They know when mom and dad just had a fight before they walked in.
Like they know all that stuff.
But you're right.
It's the then telling them that's not what happened to use a word I don't love.
We're gaslighting them a little bit.
Yeah, that's right.
That's right.
And the last thing I ever wanted to do was gaslight her because it wasn't just that I felt gaslighted, gaslit, gaslidded by my parents because I didn't especially feel that way, but I felt like I was gaslit by adults everywhere at school.
Everywhere you went.
Half the television programming was like, you're good.
When you gaslight a smart kid, you make them fucking crazy.
Because they know enough to put the pieces together.
And you're saying, no, no, no.
Those pieces you put together, they're trying to tell you what the image of that puzzle makes.
And they're saying, oh, no, no, no, no.
You put that puzzle together wrong.
It's really actually something else that I can't tell you about.
But everything's fine.
Are you fucking kidding me?
And the whole middle class thing that we got in the 1970s and 80s was there is a very narrow strip of success that you need to work hard to get to.
And if you don't, you're in the 94% of the world that is an utter failure.
It's like if you don't get these grades and go to these schools.
Get into a good school, yeah.
Then you are basically, I don't know, digging ditch in a mercury mine.
And it's like, what?
Aren't there a lot of other jobs, too?
Like, what college did John Belushi go to?
I don't think he went to – did he go to a knowable one?
I'm not sure.
But, I mean, it definitely – I mean, like, you know, it's like that joke about, like, tell me you think X without telling me you think X.
It's that thing where you're basically saying, like, you've created this, I almost want to say negative capability.
But it's like when you take up this rug and there's a clean part and everything else is dirty, all that part is clean.
But all it really does is highlight how dirty the rest of the rug is.
But the absence of that thing, even though you haven't said to them –
Maybe you're not like a tiger dad.
You're not saying you must go to Harvard Medical School or whatever.
But the implication of what they are supposed to do, you've left it to their own devices.
You've basically, not you, but one creates this pressure, this world, where even without saying it or especially without saying it, you're making it very clear what that narrow line they need to walk is and that everything else will be disappointment.
And I feel like I'm still walking that line.
Like whatever my trauma is, you know, I'm talking to my friend last night.
He was like, well, what is your deal?
And I said, I feel like I was put here to do something.
I feel like it's somewhat –
You know, the reason there are churches is that all of that religiosity, ancient people realized that you need to confine it to a house with a large roof.
You put it all in a big building that's got a very tall roof.
All that religious fervor can stay in that building, and then we can just go back to work outside.
And if you ever feel that feeling— So you're saying it contains it, intensifies it, or just keeps it contained?
It keeps it contained, right?
Because if all that religiosity is just free-ranging— Oh, you can't be in the field all day thinking about ontology and teleology and all that kind of stuff.
No, you can't be walking around the town where we're trying to do business and sell goods and services—
And be proselytizing or even feeling the passion.
If you start to feel the passion, please go into the big room, the big building and close those big doors behind you.
And there are people in there who will help you who also are kind of administrative.
You know, they're not they they are passion administrators.
Oh, my God.
There's a lot of passion on the walls.
There are people dying on the walls.
There's a lot of gold in here, too.
I watched a 40s video about Paris Island, a World War II War Department movie about Paris Island that was really interesting.
And one of the things they talk about in there is like, hey, look, not everybody's going to become a Marine.
Until you get out of here, until you go past the battalion commander's review, you're still a recruit.
Like, we'll decide when you're a Marine.
If you have trouble with being a Marine, they have, like, little sub camps.
And this is touched upon very much in Full Metal Jacket.
But, like, if you're – let's just say what they did.
Hey, you know, if you're fat –
We're going to put you into this group that is going to be focused on you losing weight.
If you're having trouble with the written part of the test, there's like a remedial thing.
But you know what the other one is?
Another one is the motivational subgroup with so many air quotes.
Like you have not.
And this is something Gunnery Sergeant Hartman says.
He lacked the proper motivation, you know, in my core, get off my obstacle.
But like the motivation one, that's in some ways, that's kind of what you're talking about.
Like I can't have you.
And when we say motivation, what do we mean?
It means you're a pain in the ass.
You're talking back to me.
You're doing the kind of shit.
And like, you know what?
I can't have you infecting the rest of it.
of this unit.
So, and as they say in this movie, the drill sergeant is the one person in a parasitial and recruits life.
They're going to be with that person literally 24 hours a day, like all the time, whether they're on the gun range or the rifle range or they're on the obstacles, whatever it is, Gunnery Sergeant Hartman's going to be there.
You get taken out of this group, you get put over there, you're going to get fucking motivated.
But it also, as you are sort of getting at here, contains it.
Like, your shittiness and lack of motivation not only needs to – before it needs to be fixed, it has to be contained.
I can't have you, private joker or whoever, screwing up my unit, so you're going to go over here and get fixed.
If you don't get fixed, you're out of here.
Isn't that kind of what a church does in some ways?
In the same way that a Walmart manager doesn't want the problem to leave his or her store, the clergyman is – it falls to them to, like, get you back on track –
In privacy to like where you haven't caused an embarrassing problem for your family or your workplace.
Like we got to get you squared away on this Sunday and then you go back into it.
You could put on your backpack and get back to the exercises.
Right.
Well, that but also I just feel like in any town, in any civilization, religiosity just has to be contained.
It is reformative for some people, right?
There's a great spectrum.
And I'm always misquoting Oscar Wilde.
I don't even know if it was Oscar Wilde, but I think it was, who said, you know, truly creative people, truly inspired people are terrible guests at a party.
They're awful friends.
They are like Robin Williams or something.
Well, or yeah, or Van Gogh.
Like you don't want to have them around, right?
They're awful.
The best guests at a cocktail party are sort of pretty talented people.
But they're mainly good at being at a party.
Yeah, not geniuses, right?
They're smart enough to have at the party.
They make the party incredible.
But they're not quite geniuses.
And I think he was, as he was saying it, kind of lumping himself in there.
And for me, it's that one quote and then William James' Varieties of Religious Experience.
Those two things, like bookend my feeling about
And inspiration and where it belongs.
And William James says in his book, every truly inspired religious person who really gets hit with the lightning bolt is treated as a total pariah, kicked out of the church.
They live in a cave.
Nobody wants them around.
It's only after they die.
That their inspiration then gets integrated, gets put into the big building.
They get a star on the wall.
You might want to invite Luke or Peter, but if you were alive, John the Baptist probably would not be that fun at a party because he's a nun.
No.
No, he's a nut, right.
But he becomes – he's canon later, right?
Yeah, sure.
And for me, I've always felt like, look, I don't belong in the big building.
It's not where – I'm not – I don't have that.
I'm not there to minister to people in that way, and I'm also not so inspired that you put me in there to contain me.
But – and I don't belong in a cave, right?
I belong on the edge of the village, and I don't know exactly why.
Mostly keeps to himself.
You know what?
I'm not on Main Street.
I'm not trying to get business done.
I don't belong in the building, but that's closer.
I'm not so nuts that I belong in a cave.
In England, they call you an eccentric.
Right.
And the little boys who are brave and the little girls who are brave, they come out and they lean on the fence and they ask questions.
Here are some villages, Boo Radley.
And I talk to them until their mother comes along and says, shoo, shoo, shoo.
They hit you with the spray bottle like a cat.
But there's no – where is there a place for that in a big city, on the internet, in a world –
And we've talked about this before.
This is why we need podcasts, John.
That's why we need podcasts.
But I feel like Apple Computer, God bless them.
Yes.
They did a real number on our culture at large.
And I know we're talking about social media a lot and what a big number it did.
But Apple Computer did a really interesting thing, which was they commodified creativity.
And they did it.
They took it from 70s and 80s gifted programs.
in elementary schools where they were like, no, no, no creativity.
That's what we need.
Apple turned it around and said, look at this beautiful machine that will help you be creative.
And they made creative a thing you could buy.
So even if you weren't creative, even if you were just a regular and, and being not creative is not a crime, right?
Right?
You don't have to be creative.
You don't have to go to college.
Well, especially it depends on how you define creative, but I happen to believe a lot of work is extremely creative, but like the productivity porn or creativity porn version that we sell of the artist in the Garrett, you know, with the palette and all the stuff is like, it's out of reach for a lot of people for a lot of reasons.
Well, and just as being able to throw a football 30 yards is out of reach, right?
It's just everybody's got different skills and creativity is not a mass problem.
It's not something we need from everybody.
But Apple put it into a box and said, look at this beautiful box we made.
And what it will let you do is finally make that movie or that novel or that blog or that, you know, all these things.
You can finally do it.
I think it applies to notebooks, too.
Well, yeah.
And so all of a sudden, everybody's got a blog.
And most people aren't creative, right?
So it's an Instagram feed about their cat or about their flowers or it's a blog or it's a podcast even.
Yeah.
And it became the expectation that you would – and we all talked about it like it was such a gift.
Like, oh, my God, it's so amazing.
Everybody's so creative.
Just think about a garage band.
I mean – and I don't mean this as the old man anecdote, it seems like, but I made payments on a –
I was a TAC or a Tascam, like a four track cassette recorder for like a year and a half, two years to be able to record my shitty songs in the nineties.
And now there's no excuse.
I mean, I've gotten paid money to do projects that I made in garage.
It turned out well in garage band on my iPad.
There's no excuse if you've got that.
You've got something like Procreate or other drawing apps.
I mean, really, you can't really blame a lack of tools at this point.
If you have a song in you, if you've got, I don't know, a drawing in you, whatever you want to say, it's not because of the corollary to what you're saying is there's really no reason not to have done that if that is a burning desire for you.
Well, GarageBand...
Well, I mean, a lot of the programs have taken all the work out of it.
They give you the drums.
They give you the bass line.
They give you the guitar sounds.
They do it all.
It's not just that it allows you to record.
It allows you to make a fully realized rock track without ever picking up an instrument.
Yeah.
And I don't think that's an improvement in music making.
Yeah.
But the idea that creativity is something that's in all of us, which was a thing that got said so much.
We're all creative.
It's just like we just need to touch our inner child.
It's like a poster in elementary school kind of feeling.
You're somebody.
You're special.
You're creative.
What Apple and then social media did was make everybody – was sell that to you as a thing that costs money.
Like we're going to give you the tools.
Yeah.
And so now everybody on the internet is a journalist.
They're all critical thinkers.
The word you're looking for, John, is that they're a creative.
They're all creative.
They're a creative.
Everybody's creating all the time.
And the sheer mass of created things done by people who were not given the desperate gift by God to actually need to create things—
Well, it's a glut, right?
You can't find real art now or real thoughts.
You can't sort them out from the chaff.
Because it's noisy.
And it's created so much noise.
And for me, I know I'm not a genius, right?
I'm a guest at Oscar Wilde's cocktail party, but also – and I'm leaning on the piano and I'm like, so then she said –
But at the end of the night, I don't belong in town, right?
So I'm somewhere on that spectrum.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
And so what does happiness look like?
What am I supposed to do in middle age?
I don't know.
I don't know what – I don't think there is much – I don't think there are many role models, right?
Most of those people die about now.
of congestive heart failure or they fall off of a boulder.
Slip on the ice.
You know, slip on the ice.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I don't know if you saw this.
I really enjoyed this.
There's a documentary about Val Kilmer.
I don't know if you've seen this.
So I've been avoiding it just because I look at it and I go... It's going to make you sad.
Or just like, I don't know.
I don't know.
Am I going to watch a guy videotape his...
Well, that's what I was going to say, though, is that like, so I think, you know, at this point, some of famously Val Kilmer has lost through, I think it was cancer, was lost, doesn't have his speaking voice anymore.
But there's just this, I don't know how you describe this.
He was great in Top Gun 2.
Oh, yeah?
Wait.
Did you not see Top Gun 2?
The Maverick one?
Electric Boogaloo?
He is... When I think about what is creativity, I think about people I have known.
And this is not to be a bar.
I don't mean this as a bar or any kind of a sorting algorithm for me telling you whether or not you're creative according to me.
Like, who fucking cares?
Yeah.
Like, you think about your friends who, like, I have a friend—the guy who drew my icon that I use on Twitter, my friend Dave Gray, that comes out of—every time Dave would go to, like, see a talk somewhere, he would doodle the whole talk.
He's also a guy who— Oh, he's done that.
He did that to me at XOXO.
Yeah.
It's a brilliant thing.
But he also, but like what may not be obvious about Dave is like, he's also a guy who like basically invented this whole kind of, not invented, but like really rarefied this certain kind of storytelling and, you know, using these like, um, anyway, point is he's a doodler.
Um,
But like, people who doodle and can't stop doodling.
People who like, I think about somebody like Linda Barry.
I think about people who like, I don't think you could stop them from whatever it is they're doing.
They're not making art.
This is just what they do.
And Val Kilmer's like that.
You get that in this movie is like, he's constantly doing all this insane, the kind of thing, like nothing against scrapbooking, but like you go like, I think it's what scrapbooking wants to be.
He's constantly, he's got materials all the time.
And it just seems almost like he's driven by a motor to make visual things.
I don't want to say art, but that's a term of art.
Yeah.
But, uh, tautology of tautology.
But, but anyway, I, one thing I really loved about the movie, he, first of all, he's totally charming.
You really pull for the guy.
But like, I think about people like that who like just can't stop making stuff.
That could be a way that you pile coins.
That could be a way you, but there are people who are just ceaselessly, restlessly dying.
Doing a certain kind of – and even if they never display that art or sell that art or whatever, that tends to be what I think of as creativity is like you write stuff and you never publish it like me and lots of other people do.
I write because I like to write.
I don't have anywhere to put it.
I don't want anywhere to put it.
But in some ways, that's it.
But the problem with that –
The other side of that, whether that's through a Mac or a notebook or a nicer pen, is like, I think it can very easily lead to a certain kind of fairly profound emptiness inside when you go like, well, what if I'm just buying all these tools and I'm a carpenter that's never made a table?
Or, you know what I mean?
That kind of a feeling.
Because if it is fair to say that we have been vended a certain idea of self-expression and creativity through consuming things or choosing, curating things...
Like, you know, you could walk around your whole life kind of feeling like, well, I bought this beret and now what?
And I think that can lead to a really sort of an empty feeling.
And I'm not sure whose fault that is.
I think it might be culture's fault that we've derived this idea that you should be in some kind of like a creative and artistic class that's defined by the academy, like how you're supposed to be.
When like, man, why don't you just doodle more?
You might be happy if you doodled more.
I know I'm happy when I write a little bit.
And recording songs on your phone while you're waiting for a plane?
Well, that may not be the White Album.
That might just be a thing where you like, you know, as Stuart Brown says, the art of play.
Like, putting your hand to things and manipulating them can be incredibly satisfying, but...
Again, though, that bar is always feels so high of like, well, is this art?
Is this something that people will admire?
Will people star this on Instagram or whatever?
And that's the most pernicious part to me now is just that feeling of like, whatever it is you could be, I don't want to say good at, but you could be guided by or consumed with.
Like we love that in little kids, but like in adults, we look at that as like, oh, you know, what are you doing?
You're some kind of a loser.
Right.
Yeah, but I think that for the vast majority of people, the whole idea is forced.
Like we're talking a lot about the student loan crisis.
What that is is a lot of people that never should have gone to college or should have gone to a local – like I've been saying about computer maths for a long time.
Like at some point along the way, the idea of creativity got connected to it.
When really it's a trade.
And there are a lot of things in life that are trades that don't have to be creative.
that are still gratifying and satisfying and valid and wonderful.
And thank God.
But the idea that we decided that you needed a four-year college degree at $40,000 a year or more in order to do those jobs.
Because that's what everybody else is doing.
That's what your parents want you to do.
You need to take on this debt.
That's what the college industrial complex has told us all it costs?
I wish it would crumble.
I really do.
And so, you know, so we're in a situation where people are 24 years old and they're $200,000 in debt and they didn't need to be.
It's not a crisis of like unaffordability.
It is way back up the stream of that is not what you should have decided to do.
That isn't debt you should have taken on because it wasn't necessary to have life, to have a great life and to do what you want.
But it's tied up in this notion that everybody should be making all the time and that we should all be like peak performing.
Well, this is why I hate that word creative.
Another perfectly good adjective that got turned into a noun.
That really bristles really almost on the same level as when we say content.
I have to do ad reads sometimes, there might be one today, where I will go in and often substitute the phrase stuff you make for content.
Because content is a way of looking at people's output as, well, it's content.
Well, and like, I'm not even being as incredibly cynical as I can be about this.
It's just that when you say content, it sounds like it's grist for a machine.
It sounds like you got to push your content out.
Like, oh, you got a blog on Sundays and dah, dah, dah, dah, and all this stuff and pushing that out.
But like, it's the stuff that you make could be, you know, whatever it is.
I don't know.
We're probably coming up just from different ways.
But like, there's a lot of, there's plenty of perniciousness to go around.
Yeah.
You know, ain't that the truth?
It's so true.
And I got to talk to a fucking, he's actually an osteopath, which, and my wife says that's fine.
She says it's fine.
You don't need an MD.
An osteopath will be fine.
That's the thing.
You don't need an MD.
You don't even need somebody that went to college.
You just need a guy to, you know.
You're talking, you're saying this, oh, okay.
Now, if I understand what you're saying here, and I may not, you're saying that like it's a trade being a doctor.
So maybe I get somebody that's closer to a Theodoric of York situation.
You come, you say a little off the top.
And also, am I having a stroke?
And then they put a leech on you or similar, but something they could learn on their own pickup, maybe through scouting or something.
I feel like... I would love that.
I might do that.
I might become a late-onset doctor.
My dad's generation just went out and threw a ball around for half an hour.
And they were happy then?
They were so happy then.
Are you going to have one more piece of cake?
Are you kidding me?
It's the first thing I'm going to do when we get off the air.
It's the sayonara slice.