Ep. 472: "Pillow Inflation"
Hello.
Hi, John.
Who's there?
Who's that?
Who's that?
It's me.
Hi, Merlin.
Was that a what's up or a Cosby?
Oh, no, I never did a Cosby impression.
I never thought he was funny.
I didn't watch half of Bill Cosby himself this weekend.
The chocolate cake behind you.
Oh, hello, John.
Hi.
You know, I'm sitting here.
I bought some pillowcases.
Ooh.
And I bought some pillows to go in them.
And as I was buying the pillows, I was like, these pillows aren't big enough for these pillowcases.
I hate that.
Oh, I got a lot to say about pillows and pillowcases.
But I did it anyway.
These are couch pillows, not home pillows.
Oh, I see.
So in the trade, they call it more of a cushion.
Yeah, that's right, a cushion.
But the disparity still bothers me.
It bothers me.
And my pillows on my bed are all too big for my pillowcases.
Yeah.
Yeah, that's what I got a lot to say about.
There's been a lot of pillow inflation, and I think it's bullshit.
The pillows are enormous, and I've got all these great pillowcases, and I can't use them.
This is like that classic.
You know, the hot dogs come in a set of eight, and the buns come in six or whatever.
Yeah, the hot dog's too hot.
Yeah, you didn't like to call your mini golf ball?
Yeah, we got it here for you.
We got the tiny chairs.
The rides weren't scary enough?
So what I did, I was sitting here on the couch, the couch, the pillow, the cushions were saggy.
And so I took a pillow out of one.
I put it in the other.
So I got two pillows per pillow.
But see, now you're changing physics.
Yeah.
So if I understand correctly, the cases that you got in good faith were too big for the internals of the cushion that they would be housing.
They were selling them right next to each other.
Here's the pillow.
Here's the pillowcase.
Oh, now that's just irresponsible.
I held them up.
I was like, are you sure about that?
But it was all wrapped and everything, and I didn't want to unpack it.
But do you want two cushions of depth?
Yeah.
Well, so this is what I've been confronting.
Now I've got pillows that are, they are generously stuffed now.
And I put two of them here because I was going to bolster them.
myself.
I was going to bolster in order to do the show.
My lady has a bolster for doing some of her stretching exercises.
Yeah, yeah.
So these would be podcasting bolsters.
This would be your couch exercises.
And they were too big.
The pillows are too big.
The rides aren't scary enough and the pillows are too big.
But I'd rather have that.
I'd rather have that than a pillow that looks like a used condom.
I've had both.
And it almost makes me think the Germans got the right idea with standardizing everything.
You know, whether it's paper sizes or other things, like making sure that things fit in other things, I think is a good idea.
You know, they say, John, it is said that, you know, we used to have the railroad barons.
I've heard this.
I haven't read this.
But supposedly, once the railroads started popping up, it didn't occur to people, hey, we should have the same gauge, width, track, business is the technical term.
And I guess in some ways that helps you keep the monopoly.
But I guess a little bit, it's like beta versus VHS or Blu-ray versus the one I don't remember.
Mm-hmm.
But I think it's – I would like to see standardization.
I would like things to fit.
And I would not like – I would like merchants to stop doing a jam-up where there's an implied relationship in that instance.
I think it's wrong.
You're absolutely right.
I did an omnibus on railroad gauges.
It's exactly the type of thing.
Oh, jeez.
I'm so sorry.
I'm covered with shit.
No, you're not obligated to listen to omnibus.
But there are a lot of gauges –
But I think, you know, someone is always posting online whenever somebody complains about how many fathoms it is to get to an acre.
They're like, you know, how many hectares are in a hog's head, that kind of thing?
Yeah, they said, we did solve this problem.
It's called the metric system.
And Americans will do almost anything to describe a measurement.
When it's really just 500 milliliters.
Because it has to be that way.
And we roll our eyes when the rest of the world says, you know, we kind of solved a bunch of these problems.
There's ways to solve these things.
We were making a cake the other day because I realized...
Wait a minute.
Wait a minute.
Sorry.
Okay.
All right.
All right.
All right.
Okay.
I don't believe in continuity, but you did struggle last week with a cake that is, if memory serves, one foot thick.
So what had happened was... What had happened was... We were over at my daughter's mother's slash partner's house.
And we were going to go downstairs.
My daughter was excited to watch some movie that I didn't, some bad movie, some terrible movie.
You're going to have to be a lot more specific.
And I was like, oh, sweetheart, I love you.
You know I love you.
Uh, and, uh, unfortunately, you know, we don't, we don't split off and watch movies on our own.
Like she, she has never said, I'm going to go watch a movie.
And we've been like, Oh, your daughter does not go off and, and watch, um, because I was about to do some kind of really inappropriate poll like frozen, but your kids are grown up practically now, but whatever it is, you don't, the kid doesn't grab a device and go to the other room and you play spend the choice.
Everybody just watches what they want on device.
You know, you're, you're a family.
You're saying.
Yeah.
Yeah, we've never had free-floating devices.
Unfortunately, we don't have an iPad, which I know is a wonderful device.
But when it's time to watch a movie, it's kind of like when I was a kid.
You get your small bowl of ice cream and you go and you all watch a thing together.
You all watch Happy Days together at 7 o'clock.
Or Carol Burnett, probably.
Or Carol Burnett Show.
That's right.
It's almost bedtime.
Get your small bowl of ice cream.
We're going to watch Tim Conway crack up.
That's right.
It's almost bedtime.
That's exactly how we do it.
And unfortunately, I have watched many...
more seasons of uh the star wars adjacent in between clone wars and um yeah there's the other ones yeah where the where the clones all have the the same personality but different and i've watched all of those this is taking too long
John Roderick, John Roderick, do you know why it is that sometimes when you say something, I respond with Roger, Roger?
Do you know why?
Roger, Roger.
Yeah, it's probably that one episode I've seen a million times with the Lerman.
The Lerman.
With the little rolling guys who just want peace, but they don't understand.
You know, they don't understand sometimes you got to fight and they roll around.
It's probably that one.
Isn't there one where one of the robots says, this is taking too long?
Yeah.
I think so.
I say that out loud in my house.
This is taking too long.
What I don't understand is how those Trade Federation guys haven't been canceled for being incredibly racist.
They're the worst.
To whom or to what group?
Oh, well, I'm not going to say because it's even racist to say.
It's even racist.
Oh, I see.
Because it just seems, you know, it's like Jar Jar's pretty racist, but, you know, you don't want to say exactly what.
Oh, I see.
Me so understand.
Anyway, you've seen a lot of those.
And you watch The Clone Wars is the one where the guy gets beheaded.
He looks kind of like a wooden statue.
What's that guy's name?
You know who I mean?
Yeah.
The guy they fight, when they fight two of them, they cut his head off because George Lucas has real hard on for amputations.
Christopher Lee's character, what's that guy's name?
Count Dooku.
Dooku.
Dooku, yeah.
He's not the one with asthma.
That's the other guy.
But then there's also the Bad Batch.
There's all these ones.
Oh, right, of course.
We go downstairs, but you know, we got a TV, so we're flipping through the things, and we flip across Great British Baking Show Children.
Oh, I saw that on Netflix, and I think I would like to watch that.
Flipped across it.
Most children's cooking shows of old make me very tense.
The one with the Gordon Ramsay one, where the kid has to start his mashed potatoes over, it's very stressful to me.
But Big Off is, you know, it's, what do you say, bucolic, verdant?
Are they in a tent?
It's nice.
They're in a tent.
It's outside.
I miss Sue.
But the problem is that any contest where someone has to go home at the end, I can't bear it.
I'm too emotionally fragile.
Yeah.
And so, but she, little one says, oh, great British breaking show.
Children, whatever garbage I wanted to watch, now I want to watch this.
And I said, oh, I can't stand it when somebody has to go home.
And she's like, toughen up.
Oh, so, so we, we turn it on and of course it's adorable kids that are just a little bit older than her and they all have super cute British accents and they're trying to make frosting and they're trying to make marzipan.
Mm hmm.
And I'm watching and I'm just like, oh, no, this kid is struggling.
Can you mention being 10 and waiting for your meringue to set in England?
Oh, no.
And they're putting it in.
This one's in the fridge.
And there's, of course, one kid that's just like an artist making these cakes that you could sell.
Yeah.
And then there are these other kids.
They just can't get the dough to rise.
Yeah.
And I look over at my daughter and she's just wrapped.
No kidding.
And at the end, I don't want to, you know, I read a thing yesterday.
You might have read this already.
A study that spent like the last four years, long time studying whether spoiler alerts actually help anybody or not.
And they concluded that spoiler alerts— Whether it is in the end—if there's a benefit to people not knowing stuff that twists especially in a plot.
Is that right?
Oh, no.
They were talking about—oh, I'm sorry.
Not spoiler alerts.
Trigger warnings.
Oh, yeah, sure.
Content.
Content warnings.
They were saying trigger warnings have zero effect.
People just go ahead and watch it, and then if they're triggered, they're triggered.
The whole thing is just a big kerfuffle.
But spoiler alerts, I always get those two confused.
That's okay, you're good.
Anyway, spoiler alerts, or spoiler alert, they don't send anybody home at the end.
They line them all up.
They're like, one of you is going home.
See, in a weird way, that makes me mad.
I get a little bit mad sometimes, like, on the occasional, like, top chef or top dress, where they end up saying, no, it's okay, everybody stays.
And I'm like, well, then that's not, I mean, that would be like Shirley Jackson's short story of the lottery ending with everyone just having a picnic.
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Well, in this case, the kid that knows he's the loser, he knows he's going home and he's just like fretting about it.
He's like jumping up and down.
He didn't have to go home.
Oh, I see.
But was he previously kind of losing his composure that he was going to be a loser boy?
Oh, yeah.
And his stuff was just not up to snuff.
I would have sent him home.
I felt terrible.
What do you think interested her so much about it?
Well, so at the end, I say, you know, I'm like, well, why are we so fascinated?
Well, she's never... By the time I was her age, my mom and I used to bake...
And it was something we would do on the weekends.
And my sister wasn't interested at all, but my mom and I would go in the kitchen, starting when I was young.
And we would mix up a thing and the eggs.
Mostly following a recipe?
Yep, following a recipe.
She had a very old, annotated joy of cooking.
And then we would make some things, some cake or cookies or something.
Never a pie.
That was considered too... Baking's hard, John.
Those fat cats don't tell you.
Again, on Top Chef, that's the thing.
You make a risotto.
You run front of house on Restaurant Wars.
Or you try to bake something.
There's never enough time.
You don't do a good job.
Well, and so this... So we're like...
Okay.
Well, not to do too much of a callback, but this was one of these situations where she didn't know how to use a can opener.
I was like, I said, you've never baked a cake.
Well, let's bake a cake tomorrow.
Oh, boy.
And so we get all the ingredients together.
We get all the bowls.
We get everything together.
And then I remember, oh, the next door neighbors have invited us over for a garden party at 4 p.m.
And she says, well, let's take the cake to the garden party.
Oh, my.
I love this assertiveness.
Yeah.
And I said, well, it's noon.
It seems like we have a lot of time to make this cake before the 4 o'clock garden party.
But having a little bit of baking under my belt, I don't know if we can do it in four hours.
And she was like, we can do it.
And her mom finds a recipe for some kind of warm milk cake that requires- Probably like some kind of like a World War I cake.
Yeah, where you have to sit and beat the eggs with the warm milk for seven hours.
Oh, I see what you're saying.
You're saying not an easy, good to go.
Here's stuff you got in your pantry you can just make something with.
You're saying there's a little bit of a production.
Oh, it's a big production.
And you got to do all these emulsifying steps and so forth.
Garden party.
And I'm doing the thing where I'm, where she's like, well, how do, how does this work?
And I was like, well, figure it out.
How much is this minus that plus this?
And she's, you know, she's dutifully, you know, little tongue sticking out of the side of her mouth, you know, putting little cups of this and little, this little bit.
And she's like, what is baking soda?
And I'm like, I don't even know.
I don't know.
Right.
In and out, in and out.
I use it to clean the drain, get the stink out the fridge.
But no, I don't understand.
And I don't understand.
And please, baking powder.
Oh, no, baking powder.
Oh, see, I was hoisted by my own baking.
Baking powder, baking soda, once again, I don't know the difference.
Yeah, well, and we were using baking powder, not baking soda.
You don't want to get this mixed up.
It's like messing up your sugar and your salt or your sugar and sand.
You're going to mess up your sugar and sand.
By the way, we have had requests to have this song released, just FYI.
All right, all right.
Well, maybe we'll put it on our Patreon bonus.
A little Patreon bonus.
so we get it all going we get the cake finally get the cake in the oven there's stuff all over the counter how are you doing on time at this point do you have time is starting to you know we're we're good on time except i know cake's got a cool bro oh isn't that one of those things like we do that thing where you stick in a chopstick or similar and like doesn't come out without without stuff on it that kind of a thing
Well, that's how you know when it's done, but then you can't frost a hot cake.
You can't frost a hot cake.
Unless you're reading Penthouse Forum.
I never thought this would happen to me.
You cannot frost a hot cake.
The cake's got a cool... Sounds like a Roger Miller song.
Can't put frosting on an uncooked cake.
So the time's ticking away.
The cake's in the oven.
We start working on the frosting.
From scratch?
Yeah, from scratch.
You got butter and sugar and vanilla.
That's all it is.
Butter, sugar, vanilla.
All it is.
Sublime.
What are you talking about?
She decides it's got to be purple.
And so out comes the food coloring and she's mad science saying, you know, it's got to be the perfect amount of purple.
And it comes out this crazy Pepto-Bismol.
If you took Pepto-Bismol and you mixed it with raspberries.
Ooh.
You know, so anyway, four o'clock comes and goes.
Oh, no.
The cake is sitting in coolant.
I'm sorry, real quick, how's her stress level at this point?
Is she handling it okay?
Well, she's cool.
Is anybody else worried?
Well, her mom is worried.
Her mom is worried about the cake, and I'm worried about the party.
You're the time master.
Well, yeah, because I'm like, well, the party, and it's the neighbors, and it started at four.
Neighbors don't know we're making a cake.
They don't know.
They're just going to think we're late.
So we get to the point and mom kind of takes over.
She's been standing in the back kind of momming the whole time.
Like, you know, like the momming is a version of, you know, I could take over at any time and just you two get out of the kitchen and there wouldn't be half as much mess.
Sort of a little bit almost the role of a lifeguard.
Like you're not going to teach them how to swim, but if they do start going down, as they say, for the third time, mom blows a whistle and jumps off the big chair.
Yeah, the difference between us is I'm prepared to sit for six hours and work on opening a can.
That's how you learn.
And I'm also prepared that this cake be a failure.
And her mom is not prepared.
You don't learn that much from success in life, John.
Yeah.
And she does not want this cake to be a failure.
So she's going to jump in if she sees us go sideways.
I get it.
And I'm like, well, you know, if the cake's a failure, hey, what's the, you know, it's a failure cake.
But no.
And so...
So she, the cakes are in the oven, the frosting's made.
She says, why don't you guys go to the party and I'll just finish up here.
And I'm like, finish up?
You mean... Make the cake.
Make the cake, cool the cakes down and get them out of the pan and put the frosting on?
Like, that's the big finale.
Yeah, that's the cake.
And she's like, no, no, no, no, no.
I'll just take care of it.
Well, then the little one...
switches over to party mode.
And she's immediately like, oh, well, this cake's almost done.
And I guess she said, well, let me thoroughly clean up this mess I've made first.
Yeah, right.
No, come on.
No, not at all.
You know, stuff everywhere, right?
She's covered with powdered sugar.
Believe me, I'm the chief guacamole cleaner-upper.
I got to clean out the little stone thing.
Everything's everywhere.
The refrigerator is open.
It's basically, it looks like E.T.
has been in our kitchen.
That's exactly right.
And stuff's getting put, you know, bowls of batter that are dripping off the side are getting put on the stove.
And I'm like, where's that batter going?
The batter's going down into the stove.
You don't want that.
Put the batter anywhere.
On your cook surface?
You don't want that.
Put the batter anywhere.
In the sink, in the garden, not on the stove.
Well, so her mom says, you know, I'll just finish up here.
And I'm like, well, wait a minute.
That's like saying the cake is almost done is like saying emptying the dishwasher is almost done.
The all-consuming fire is almost out.
Right.
The cat litter box is almost clean.
It's like a friend of the show, John Syracuse, says.
You remember when we were kids?
I think it was Cascade.
It was virtually spotless.
Well, if it's virtually spotless, it's got spots.
It's got spots.
It's not cake yet.
No, it's got spots.
But the little one switches into party mode.
She's like, party?
Let's go to the party.
We go across the street to the party.
We're going to come back and work on the cake.
We just got to let it cool or whatever.
We go across the street to the party.
And three things are immediately evident.
One is that all of my neighbors are old.
Two is that the entire buffet at the party is salty, savory.
It's like artichoke hearts, olives, pickled everything.
Oh, those are all grown-up flavors.
Grown-up flavors.
There are zero cakes here.
And the third thing that is immediately evident is that they have a swimming pool in their backyard.
Hmm.
And they say, oh, go get your swimsuit.
So, of course, she, her mind just goes blank.
Wait, you've had a nearby house with a pool this whole time?
Didn't know.
Oh, my God.
And there's a pool.
Maybe neighbors aren't so bad.
I found out at this party there's a pool, a kitty corner to us in their backyard.
Didn't know either of these pools existed.
Hmm.
So she gets her swimsuit on immediately in the pool, the end.
No more thought of cake, huh?
Cake is sort of out of her mind.
She swims over at one point and she says, dad, the bottom of this pool is curved.
It's not, it's not, there's no, there are no corners.
And I said, yeah, that's a old style of pool.
And she said, well, I can't tell how deep it is and it's making, and it's weirding me out.
And I said, well, you gotta swim down and, and,
Put your hands on it, and it's not any deeper than a normal pool.
And she was like, but I have no sense of, I'm swimming here.
I look down, I have no sense of the depth.
And she was worried.
And so I gave her a mission.
I was like, well, go down and touch that vent and touch that little.
There's a can of beans down there.
Yeah, exactly.
Here's your can opener and get after it.
She figures it out.
Anyway, an hour, two hours go by.
And I'm like, what's going on with the cake?
Like the party is... Your daughter's mother at this point, she hasn't like texted you to say 20 more minutes or just about to frost.
You haven't gotten any updates.
Zero.
So I go back across the street and here is the cake in mid-creation.
Being sort of frosted and assembled in a way...
That maybe it's how they do it in Bellingham, but it's not how we did it back in shoreline in 1976.
And so then I am invested in this cake now being right.
Cause I got a party that's got no cake.
It's all savory.
So I say, why don't I take over now and you go to the party and I'll finish the cake.
And that's what happened and frosted the cake, showed up with the cake and
Daughter in the pool has no, you know, she's like, normally she would be there like.
Of course.
But the cake rolls in and you should have seen all these olive eaten old people light up like Roman candles.
Old people love cake.
And pink cake.
Yeah.
I mean, you know, it's like with the Germans, it's not a meal until you got the cake.
And I think with old people, I've heard it said, again, I haven't read this, but I've heard it said that sweetness is not only a very, you know, sort of nostalgic flavor of the taste, but it's one of the ones you lose last, which is why my Alzheimer's grandmother would still enjoy moose tracks.
She didn't know who we were.
That's sweet.
I don't want to make it weird, but are you kidding me?
The old, see a pink cake come in, they light up.
So this sour beer was to a guy with a handlebar mustache.
They crowd around and this cake just, just like it fills everyone with joy.
Little one gets out of the pool.
She has a big slice of cake.
She gets to walk around and say, I made it.
And everybody congratulates her.
And, uh, and the cake resounding success.
There's only like one little slice of cake that we take home that she gets to have the following day, which is one of life's great joys.
And so the whole cake just keeps, cake just keeps finding a way into your house, doesn't it?
Yeah.
Well, and so I still have, I never took the, the, the foot cake.
as we call it.
I never took it out to the garbage and threw it in the garbage.
It's still sitting in my refrigerator.
Wow.
And in fact, at the end, when we were deliberating, now, where does the pink cake go?
Marlo said, well, dad already has a cake.
Well, yeah, it's true.
I do.
I do have a cake.
So she's like, well, the cake goes to mom's.
You're, you know, you got more cake than you can handle.
So,
Anyway, it was a, it was a big moment.
We, we British baking show slash kids, kids, kids ourselves here.
And it, you know, it felt like a rite of passage.
Now, whether we ever do it again, I don't know.
How does your kid do a little pivot?
That's a great story.
How does, you're welcome.
How does your kid do at an event like that?
Is she cool being at an old people grown up thing?
Does she find ways to amuse herself?
Because I guess the obvious thing maybe to just state is that like every other kid, including mine, has a device that they'd like to probably be looking at right now.
Or when I was a kid, they send you to the Rumpus Room, and then you can watch the Barefoot Contessa on UHF or whatever, right?
Yeah.
That kind of thing.
Does she amble around?
Does she talk to people?
Does she want to talk about Dark Vader?
Like, how does she do an event like that?
Well, she's her father's daughter, and I was my father's son.
So, you know, my dad, from my earliest age, was like, get your short pants on, we're going to a rotary meeting.
Yeah.
And so I'd be seven years old and I'd be at a rotary meeting and standing, you know, I'm knee high and all these guys are standing around going, oh, the tax structure has got to change.
Counselor.
There he is.
There's that fella.
Love that gal.
And so I just got used to that.
And when I was, when I was little, you know, I would go hide under the, the, the tablecloths because it was just an adventure.
I wasn't scared.
I was just, you know, like make, make a spin gold out of the straw.
But as, after I could sit in the chair, um,
I would sit and drum my fingers on the tablecloth, and the men would come by.
You are well known, at least on this program, for being somebody who can find a way to amuse yourself.
I hope this is not too intimate to say, but it strikes me that as a kid, as a tween, as a teen, you had a vast interior world upon which you could call.
You weren't a kid that got bored, and if you did get bored, you just light something on fire and throw it off the back of a train.
You found ways to amuse yourself.
Is that fair to say?
I did, and I was amused by listening to these people, you know, talk about their business.
I love being around grown-ups and hated it when I was excluded.
Yeah, and I never wanted to be pushed over to some group of kids because they were always dumb.
And I was jostling.
Yeah, and talking about baseball, and I didn't, you know.
Yeah.
So I raised my kid that way.
I was just immediately like, well, I'm going to this meeting, so you are too.
And so she's used to just being in a room full of adults who are talking about esoterica.
So when she goes to a party like that, she just wades right in.
Everybody...
Everybody sees a confident little kid and so says, oh, look at you.
And she has kids.
Most kids.
I mean, there are kids who are extremely social and there are kids who are extremely not.
And there's a lot in between who are just confused because that's your job as a kid.
But I think sometimes it can be very it can be very fun for a grown up, especially if you're a grandparenting age to have somebody that you can, you know, you can ask them questions about life.
Yeah.
And there's always, in a group like that, there's always one grandparent who really knows how to talk to kids.
Love that grandparent.
You know, really their eyes light up and they talk in a way that isn't condescending, but is still fun.
Yeah.
And, you know, a little teasy, and there was a grandmother at this event who was like, do you want to see, and said something, you know, do you want to see a group of dolls that come alive in the night and stab neighbor cats?
And she was like, do I?
Would you like to see the room where the ghosts settle their unfinished business with the corporeal world?
Yeah.
And she put on this blindfold.
She, you know, and off they went.
And I was like, all right, well, good luck, you know, on whatever adventure that is.
But she's more, my kid is more action Jackson than I was.
I was, I was, as you say, very content to kind of sit in a chair and watch, watch everybody go through and each, every other guy say, can I get an extra slice of roast beef?
And the guy in the chef's hat is like... Did you find yourself just enjoying the atmosphere?
It's a viewport into adult life, which is kind of exciting, but also it is extremely weird because I keep thinking about this show I love and I've been watching on Hulu.
I've watched a couple times the Fosse-Verdon show about Bob Fosse and Gwen Verdon.
Only important in the sense that his kid comes to a lot of parties and we see her getting older throughout the show, but it really took me back to the 1970s.
Right.
We're like, I mean, of course it's Bob Fosse.
So his daughter's doing stuff like, you know, lighting his new cigarette and that kind of stuff.
Just so many cigarettes and, and a lot, a lot of grownups to whom a child eventually, if they work it out and have enough, you know, JB on the rocks, they'll just stop noticing their kids there at all.
And they'll act like themselves.
Yeah.
Which I think is always, it was always fascinating to me to see people not acting like put-together church-going adults.
Well, you know, my dad did the thing, and I do this too.
On the way to the meeting, he would say, now you gotta know that this guy, you know, Ralph, is an asshole.
Yeah.
He'd say this in the car while you're driving there?
Yeah, but he thinks he's— Excuse me, the rundown.
He's the chairman, so he thinks he's running the thing.
But the other guy—so he'd go down, and the main characters, he'd sketch them out.
And so when I got there, you know, the guy that got up and had a very neatly knotted tie who called the room to order—
I already had a sense that he and my dad didn't like each other, that he was the guy.
And he had a faction in the group.
And that faction, according to my dad, was a rules-based bunch of nudges.
Oh, you're saying these guys are – what are they – it sounds like they're tightly wound.
What is it they're tightly wound about?
Yeah.
Well, you always got businessmen.
Oh, businessmen, of course.
Yeah, who are doing business.
And then you got government men.
Those guys have a certain frame for life that they have no compunction about putting over whatever's happening.
It's kind of always their party, those types of guys.
Yeah, right, because it's just like the Republicans that get on the school board.
They get elected to the chairmanship.
But then there are guys like David Green, Alaska's master furrier, who's making his own rules, right?
David Green shows up, and he's wearing a hat with a wolf head on it.
Oh, you've seen this guy's a bit of a wild card.
Exactly.
And, of course, those guys love my dad.
Yeah, your dad's really walking astride these two worlds, right?
And your dad's a go-along-get-along guy.
He's a politic, adjective, adjectival sense, a politic guy.
He knows how to work the room.
He knows what to say and not to say.
But his younger brother, my Uncle Jack, was a straight-lace.
Oh.
Now, not a straight lace, I don't think necessarily in his heart, but he was trying to be an establishment wheel, and that's why he got elected mayor.
Yeah.
But he always had this relationship with my dad in these big meetings where my dad was always the star of at least a corner of the room, if not the whole room.
And my dad was constantly embarrassing his younger brother.
Interesting.
By getting into some kerfuffle with some straight laced guy who actually ran the newspaper or whatever it was.
And it seems like when you act like that, you seem like a person who doesn't know how this works.
Yeah.
And so Jack was always standing there in a very tailored suit, talking to somebody about very serious matters.
And my dad would roll up and go, well, how's it going over there in the John Burke Society?
And the guy would say, God damn it.
And Uncle Jack would hit him in the shoulder and go, David.
And I'm watching it all.
11 years old, snacking on whatever little cracker they put on a plate for me.
I imagine you had some Ritz and some Triscuits.
And cheese.
This might be before the advent of spinach dip.
But I bet there was at least French onion lipped in French onion dip, probably.
There was.
For crisps, as you say.
But that was too sophisticated for me.
Mm-hmm.
But, you know, I read this stuff about kids, and your kid is obviously ahead of mine, and so you might know better.
But, you know, they talk about the advent of abstract thought, that it arrives.
Mm-hmm.
And when I cast back on myself at 11 and 12 years old,
I remember being pretty aware of subtext and pretty aware of social dynamics.
And I can't really say that I wasn't thinking abstractly already.
Although the childhood development people say, no, no, no, that's impossible.
It doesn't come on until some later time.
Right, right.
Now, I didn't understand consequences.
But, I mean, there's – I feel like there's a distinction worth making – I'm making this on the fly – but between, like, being able to see something and fully understanding it.
Just because you don't fully understand it doesn't mean you don't see that there's something up.
For example, at that party, if you or in some flashback, your kid said, hey –
Who's the drunkest person at this party?
I bet you could, right?
I mean, that sounds silly, but you could peg that.
And how do the other people at the party feel about that?
Well, there's probably some people that think it's funny, but I bet a lot of them think it's a little much.
And it makes the person seem kind of sloppy.
But that's the thing is like, I'm not trying to say this like an old guy.
I'm not saying I want this to happen.
But you talked about, for example, like get in the car, we're going on an errand.
Like, with our kid, you have to basically go and, like, make a formal, you know, presentation, an application.
You have to talk about timetables.
You have to talk about bribes.
All the things they're going to get this godforsaken child to get in a car to go do something we need to do for the family.
There was a time where a lot more of a—and again, I'm talking here about the 70s.
So it's not like it's the 1800s, but there was a lot more of being exposed to stuff that was not—
happening for you and stuff that was not happening to amuse you.
And in fact, a lot of what you would have to do is kind of like go in for the long haul and sort of kind of get through it.
And yes, you find ways to amuse yourself, but don't you think that's kind of part of it is you're like, oh, there's a little gain to me figure out, figuring out what's going on here at a certain age.
I think that's pretty abstract.
My dad used to pick up hitchhikers.
So we'd be driving along and he, and he'd pull over and there'd be some type.
No.
Whoever needs it, get in.
You know, he was already 59 years old and he'd pick up hippies.
And we had a pretty strong feeling about hippies.
Well.
Which was.
It's American.
Get a job or whatever.
But, you know, he'd pull over.
Long hair covered in dog hair.
John, were they wearing clothes with fringe sometimes?
A lot of the time.
Like on Adam 12 or Dragnet?
Okay.
Yeah.
And he would open the door and he'd say, where are you headed?
And depending on their answer.
he sometimes would say, what?
Hell no.
Depending on their answer, because he could gauge how long they'd be in the car, or did they have a knife?
No.
What was he, you know?
He felt like some destinations were completely legitimate.
Get in.
Oh, I see.
And some destinations were outrageous.
You what?
No.
Particularly if it sounded to him like they were going to want him to go on a separate mission to get them where they were going.
Yeah, I got to go to this one guy's place.
I'm pretty sure he's there.
Yeah.
Or, you know, oh, it's over on the other side of town.
And it's like, what?
So there were a couple of times where he'd say, you know, hop in the back seat.
And, you know, a lot of times somebody would pile in.
And how'd you feel about it when you pick up a hitchhiker?
I was a little anxious about the hitchhikers.
I would be totally anxious.
I mean, I'm older than you.
And I came up in a time where like, no, do not pick up hitchhikers.
That was, I mean, that had already become kind of conventional wisdom amongst white people.
But my dad absolutely conveyed that he could handle any situation.
So it was never a question of like,
Oh, I get it.
Hop on any hippie pants, but be on your best behavior.
Yeah.
I mean, you have to have a certain amount of confidence to tell a guy who's already sitting in the car that, no, you're not going to give him a ride.
Get the hell out.
Like that.
I don't even know if I would do that.
Yeah.
So, but, but just having a stranger in the car who smelled weird and, and, uh, and oftentimes, you know, he's going to stick around long after they've gone to that one guy's house.
Well, that, but the worst part was these were often young people who didn't know how to make conversation.
They were boomers, you know, boomer kids who were now 22 and were trying to get across Alaska with their, with their duffel bag.
And, uh, and my dad was like, so where are you from?
What are you, what are you all about?
What's going on?
And if they were duds, that was hard for me because I was not used to grownups that didn't know how to make cocktail party conversation.
Everybody I knew could stand there and be asked.
Because most of the people you knew were like, not just that they were like prosperous, but that they had gotten where they are in life by knowing how to be.
Right.
Right.
Anytime we encountered an adult who was uncomfortable, that was very rare for me that an adult would betray their discomfort.
Because it used to be, I mean, like I do all kinds of stuff that a father in my time would never do.
I'm sympathetic to my child.
I cry with my child.
I use the F word and talk about all kinds of stuff.
That just would have been... But what I'm trying to get at, John, is when I was coming up, anybody who broke, in the improv comedy sense, I guess, anybody who broke from the bit of being an adult, I think was seen as being...
Maybe not weak, but definitely like a little disorganized in their thinking and behavior.
It seemed erratic.
Not somebody that you would do business with.
Hell no.
And when you say like, who was the drunkest person in the room, they were all shit-faced.
But they didn't, you know, trying to figure out who was the drunkest was kind of impossible.
Because they were, you know, the alcohol steam was coming off of every guy in the room.
But they were not visibly drunk.
I get it.
You know, they were all... They weren't, as we used to say, the phrase we used to say, they weren't sloppy.
No.
If they needed to put their feet an extra couple of inches apart just to stay on balance, they knew how to do it without... Bill Cosby has a funny bit about that in Bill Cosby himself.
Yeah.
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But, you know, you got to take care of yourself.
You got to know how to do you.
You know what I'm saying?
So my kid doesn't have a thing that she can go stare at.
So she's either got to make hay out of looking in potted plants for little beads.
A mission.
A mission always helps.
She's got to have a mission.
Yeah.
But she can stand in a room.
And she's more anxious, I think, than I was.
Um, and I, it may just be a product of the times, but you know, she wants to, she definitely wants me to go into the room first, which I did too.
I wanted my dad to lead the way.
Uh, but once she's there, she just, she comes alive and, and,
I only wish that when she'd arrived at the party, she'd had the cake in her hands.
But, you know, I guess it's good that at least she wasn't fretting about it, I guess.
No, not fretting.
But what I wanted for her was the feeling.
This is an incomparable feeling.
Where you walk in the door and you are instantly the most welcome person there.
And that's been a big feature.
That's a really good goal.
You know, that's been a big feature of my life.
And eventually I got to the point where I believed I was always the most welcome person.
Until Dan Harmon came in.
You know, you've seen me do it.
I've seen you do it.
Hello!
Hello!
Counselor.
And everybody turns and is like, he's here.
I don't even know who he is.
This is kind of random, but when you think about the... I mean, where do you begin with this?
Okay, so let's start with this phenomenon that there's a kind of movie called a PG-rated movie.
And PG-rated movies used to mean a lot of different things, especially into the 80s.
We've talked about Dan Aykroyd getting a beach from a ghost and that kind of stuff.
But you think about the way that so much of TV...
just media stuff in general, just life in general was supposed to be like family friendly was a later term, but more like the kind of thing that could amuse the older people and the younger people.
And there was more stuff that was not for anybody and kind of for everybody.
Right?
I mean, I'm thinking here especially of media, but this goes to lots of different things.
I mean, there was probably a time before there was a kid's Sunday school thing at a lot of churches, right?
Where you would just go into the sanctuary and sit very still and maybe have a starlight mint.
But now today we see something so different, which is maybe there's a little bit of that, you know, bowling alone kind of thing.
But now there's so many things that you can find the thing that is for you and is not for somebody else.
And again, I don't want to beat this to death, but I realize there's fewer and fewer opportunities to be put somewhere that's not for anyone in particular.
And it's only kind of a little bit for everybody.
And it's those kinds of situations.
Like you think about a children's party at a bouncy castle.
Well, there's a certain kind of behavior there.
But there's probably not a lot of executives in their 60s taking their shoes off and jumping into the castle.
There's more stuff today that's specifically and like we're not exposed as much to stuff that's not for us.
Right.
My dad never once went to a play date.
Good point.
He would take me to a birthday party.
I'm sure there were birthday parties where he had to stand and talk to a group of adults on the porch for a while.
Because I call them the other moms.
The other moms.
Love talking to the other moms.
But I don't think either of my parents ever went to a play date, nor did we ever have a play date.
Kids came over.
That's a new term.
And when kids came over, whatever adult was in the house kicked you immediately out of the house.
But also the implication of play date, I feel like play date is one thing when you're, you say like, Oh, this is that wonderful phrase, parallel play.
You got two babies that can sit up, but don't know how to be people yet.
So you set them next to each other and then you have red wine while the kids throw blocks or whatever.
But you know what I'm saying?
But like, I, I, I,
The idea, a play date to me is the essential part of what we now call a play date is it was arranged almost always by somebody that's not the kids.
Oh, exactly.
Yeah.
Which is pretty different from I'm going to do a sleepover at John's.
Yeah.
Or I'm just going over to Todd's.
Yeah.
We're going to go.
We're going to build a Florida play war.
Yeah.
We watched, and this was against my better judgment, but my daughter's mother said, we're going to watch Three Amigos.
Really?
That's a very interesting choice.
Yes.
She loved Three Amigos.
And I feel like it's an age difference between...
uh, myself and my daughter's mother.
Sure.
Yeah.
That, uh, when, uh, three amigos came out.
Yeah.
You're already like a, uh, you're already abusing, uh, substances.
Yeah.
And I had already seen spies like us.
I didn't need to see that ever again.
Right.
Like I don't need to see that.
And Dan Aykroyd was a big part of ruining that movie.
But I did.
I never needed to see those.
It's like an American pie.
Like I'm aware of American pie.
But I was in my 30s when that came out.
It's really it's not, as I say, it's not for me.
But I understand that that's formative to some people's sense of humor.
I hate to say this, but in the same way the Caddyshack or Holy Grail was to mine.
Right.
Which also then makes it, I can't show my kid Caddyshack, not because it's gross, but just because I don't think my kid would think it's funny.
My kid would not understand why it's funny that Rodney Dangerfield is in this movie, why it's funny that Ted Knight is in this movie.
And then what am I going to do?
Am I going to dad-splanation mode and go like, oh, that guy used to be on Mary Tyler Moore.
Oh, that fellow right there was Ted Baxter.
Here's the thing about golf resorts.
Yes.
Here's what you need to know about Rodney Dangerfield.
I want you to buff it.
Yeah, exactly.
And honestly, Fletch was right on the board.
I love Fletch.
Yes, Fletch is the crossover.
Fletch is everything after Fletch I have no obligation to appreciate.
It's got George Wendt in a small role, which is nice.
I felt like Fletch was maybe for kids that were one year younger than me, but I was very much there.
I was very there for Fletch.
Has there ever been a vehicle more for better or for worse, better tuned to what Chevy Chase is good at, but also just seems to have no trouble performing?
Oh, he just skateboarded through that movie in a great way, in a wonderful way.
Dr. Rosen Rosen.
And what you wanted to be was Fletch, right?
Oh, absolutely.
But so we watched this ding-a-ling movie, Three Amigos.
And this is just for our listeners here.
Now, this is, if memory serves, this is, I want to say, well, the big one, of course, is the Lifetime Friends.
Steve Martin, Martin Short, and I believe Chevy Chase.
Is that correct?
That's right.
That's right.
And I'd been hearing references.
I'd never seen it.
I'd been hearing references to this movie for years.
And then another one with Curly's Gold, and that's the one where Jack Palance did push-ups on stage.
Pretty sure.
Curly's Gold.
I love that one.
No, wait.
I may be thinking of a different.
That's the Billy Crystal series.
Yeah, Billy Crystal.
I missed all of those, too.
And Three Amigos has nothing to do with a Disney cartoon where they wear hats.
That's totally unrelated, right?
And it's nothing to do with the Billy Crystal at a dude ranch.
Yeah, I'm sorry.
Same era.
Three Caballeros, I think I'm thinking of.
And it's got all these lines like, look up here, look up here, you two, you two, that are funny.
It's funny.
But watching her watch it, this is a PG movie.
There's no real sex or drugs.
And there's violence, but it's cartoon violence.
But also the jokes and the kind of just the vibe of these three movies.
ding-a-ling's in their 40s, is just like, who is this for?
It's not for 10-year-olds.
It's unbelievable.
I just did a quick Google to just jog my memory.
Here's a few.
These are movies that were rated PG when they came out.
Obviously, QED, Ghostbusters, Jaws.
Jaws!
Jaws is rated PG.
No, you're fucking kidding me.
No, it was totally PG.
Jaws should be rated X. Grease was PG, which may not seem like a big deal, but the people at my church basically came in and did presentations about the five minutes of Grease they saw before they walked out because it was like Sodom and Gomorrah with leather jackets.
It is extremely rapey, at least at the beginning.
Airplane.
Well, so I believe every kid should see Airplane, but maybe not at age 10.
Bad News Bears, he got, what's his name, Butterfield?
He's got all those beers, Buttermaker, he's got beers in his car, Gremlins.
Oh, Temple of Doom, that was scary.
The thing that freaked me out about Bad News Bears was that scene where she played pool with him and said, if I win... With Walter Matthau, not Jackie O'Haley.
No, no, no, she played pool with the, yeah, the kid with the motorcycle.
Jackie O'Haley, yeah.
And she said, if I win, you join the baseball team.
And if you win, you can do whatever you want.
Oh, yes.
Oh, dear.
Have you ever seen the meme where Jodie Foster as a young teen is being interviewed and what she'd want in a boyfriend?
And the whole meme is just her expression when they ask her that question.
And of course, this is Tatum O'Neill, right?
Oh shit, I got him mixed up again.
John, what is happening?
No, it's okay.
Tatum O'Neill, fuck.
Was Jodie Foster in the sequel?
Well, that I don't know.
I never saw Bad News Bears.
Worst News Bears?
But the moment that, because I, you know, for me, as you know, I was a Christy McNichol guy, but at eight years old.
But Tatum and Jody, you know, very close second.
Oh, for sure.
Sure.
But when Tatum said that to him and he got a crafty look on his face.
Oh, God.
There, you know, she's...
11 and you know and he's 13 and I that I absolutely saw every second of that and knew what it all meant and it blew my mind way more you know butter maker spilling beer on the kids and all the kids saying that was a big star well and that was that just felt like that's normal life what adult hasn't exactly right exactly right and that's the problem with this fucking family friendly label where it's like well I mean
You know what?
It's too much of a thing to get into.
I'm on the Wikipedia, the fan wiki for Bad News Bears.
Amanda is the name of the character that Tatum O'Neill plays.
She's selling maps to the stars' homes.
Oh, my God.
She's so good.
She was originally going to be played by Jodie Foster, but Jodie Foster dropped out to be in a little movie called Taxi Driver.
Oh.
Which is the greater film?
Which is the greater film?
I don't know, but Tatum O'Neill doesn't have an Oscar.
I was going to say, you didn't ask for a recommendation, but I know you didn't ask.
I don't know if you have a problem with Bogdanovich, but for what it's worth, Paper Moon is probably a lot funnier than you remember.
Well, and I think Paper Moon is very good.
I think that's what she won the Oscar for.
I think the, yeah, the terrible stories that come out of Madeline Kahn.
Madeline Kahn's so good in it.
I think the reason that I was scared to see Little Darling was even though it had my two gals in it.
was because I was not ready for all that camp kissing and doing it.
I was so attracted to those movies, John, but it made me so uncomfortable.
Mine was the movie that, like, gave me funny feelings.
And, of course, I went with my mom to see this movie.
Oh, no!
A movie called A Little Romance.
And it was with a very young Diane Lane and some French boy and, I believe, Sir Laurence Olivier.
And it's this romantic film about teens.
You know?
Oh, tell me the name of this movie again.
A Little Romance.
Now, listen, last night I made a remark on Twitter that I think has been fairly widely misunderstood.
And I apologize for talking about the internet on your program, John.
But last night I was watching Hot D. I was watching the new Game of Thrones.
And the woman who plays the Targaryen is, she's just fucking tremendous.
The actress is so good.
I just love the way that she looks.
And so what I said was, I said, man, I said something like, see under, I said to my wife, something along the lines of, you know, cause she'd appreciate this.
I said, Hey, you know what?
People with under bites can be super hot.
You know?
And then I said something and she said, well, that girl looks pre-orthodontic, which is a phrase I don't think I'd ever heard.
But I said on the internet last night that, what's her name?
Rhaenerys Targaryen?
I said she's pre-orthodontic and I think I may have a type.
Everybody thinks I'm a child molester.
No!
No, I'm not lusting after her.
I'm saying I think I like actresses with screwed up teeth.
Ally Sheedy?
You know you can't say anything on the internet.
You can't say anything.
Not anything.
Yeah, exactly.
And then, you know.
I remember seeing.
Got thrown off the network, you know.
I remember seeing a little romance.
My friends turned on me.
And it blew my mind.
And this is a thing that never, you would never make this movie now because it's about.
That is bears.
It's about two 13-year-olds.
Oh, little darlings.
No, no, no.
I'm talking about a little romance.
Oh.
Oh, my God.
And the whole point of the movie is they're supposed to kiss under this famous romantic bridge.
Yeah, two 13-year-olds falling in love.
Did you see what Diane Lane looked like back then?
I do.
I do.
I mean, I've had a crush on her.
I've had legit have a version of a crush on her.
And Christy McNichol.
We were watching something the other night, some compilation thing on YouTube, and Christy McNichol came up.
And it's like, you know, talk about a type.
My goodness.
Oy.
Oy Gavalt, as they say.
Yeah.
But see, John, here's the thing.
And I'm not advocating for this.
This is not a cutting trail situation yet.
But I am saying that I think it is beneficial to have exposure to things that are not for you.
Not just to make you patient, or not just to make you tolerant, or not just to like... Almost everything comes down to like, you need to respect authority.
Like, when I tell you to do something, you better do it.
No, I'm not talking about that.
I just think it can be...
The guy from Mayfix Twin talks about this, how he needs to get really, really bored in order to make music.
He makes great music.
But he needs to get into a state where there's nothing else he can do except make music, and then he makes hundreds of songs.
And I think there's a similar thing here.
I think being a little bored in that situation is the beginning of perception that goes beyond the thing that you expected or the thing that is for you.
And I'm saying a pool party is a nice way into that.
I had an experience the other day.
I've started going to house parties, obviously, because I went to one last week or two weeks ago, and then I went to one yesterday.
Oh, so technically that's a pattern now.
Now I have a pattern, a house party pattern.
But I was at this house party, and this house party was the type where there were a bunch of teens.
There were teens there.
And they were all congregating on their own and they were eating hot dogs and, you know, kind of, but they were all teens that could sit at tables and talk to grownups for a little while.
You know, they weren't, they weren't.
Yeah.
And they're in that stage where they're like Ultraman, the light starts blinking and they got like just a few minutes before they're going to be depleted of adult energy.
Yeah.
Right.
But they can do it.
I'm at the party.
I'm enjoying myself.
We're all hanging out and so forth.
And at one point I have to go to the bathroom.
So I, so we're out in the backyard and I walk in through the kitchen and you have to go through the kitchen and you turn left and then there's the bathroom.
Okay.
And there's a kid standing at the intersection.
Now he's not blocking the path at all.
He's standing back kind of in the dining room, but he's at the turn where you go through the kitchen, you turn.
Right.
And he is there well out of the way.
And as I'm, and I'm, you know, and I'm walking at a, at a regular pace, I'm not tiptoeing.
I'm, I'm like walking the kitchen.
I'm going to take five steps through the kitchen and take a left to go to the bathroom.
But I'm walking directly at this person for the space of these five steps before I make the turn.
You're not a small fellow.
I'm not a small fellow.
You're probably, I mean, with all respect, your stature, you're probably filling up a fair amount of that hallway, casting a shadow on that boy.
Here I come.
Here comes John.
But I'm clearly going to the bathroom.
I'm not wielding a sword.
I do not have a dragon mask on.
And the child, who is, I estimate, 13 or 14, as I approach them or as I turn the corner, I go, hi, how are you?
And the child does, in kind of a split second, four or five body motions that
Oh, like you caught him off guard and now he's like, does not compute?
Well, no, he's watching me walk in the door.
He's not off guard.
He does a sidestep, then a sidestep back, like a twist.
He does a little, like a hand tremor.
All of them extremely broadcasting social anxiety.
Yeah.
Yeah.
But they are, to my eye, extremely studied, like extremely about the broadcast because there's nobody else in the room.
Like to whatever degree, to whatever degree, like he could turn or he could, I don't know where he could go sit in a chair and
But it seemed to me that this child had grown up in a culture where social anxiety had its own— Vocabulary.
Well, not just vocabulary, but had its own kind of loftiness.
Like he was, in his school and culture and the teens he'd grown up with, rewarded in some way through special treatment—
for his social anxiety.
Okay.
Enough that he developed a body vocabulary to communicate it to his peers, I think.
Mm-hmm.
Nothing he was formally taught, but something that you would pick up, like, you know, a family in America might, you might learn Vietnamese at home, and nobody had to, like, sit you down and show you a book.
Something in his world, he picked up this almost performance.
Okay.
Yeah.
And he, or he might've learned it at school, but he was used to doing this little quiver and people responding to it.
And, and I think catering to it like, Oh, Oh, Oh, Oh, Oh, Oh, Oh.
And I walked past on my way to the bathroom and his little performance, I think, I mean, what the experience of it was, it was,
It made me extremely uncomfortable and was designed to.
Do you think it's a little bit like a puffer fish?
Well, in a way that in the old days, a kid would have been hostile.
A kid would have gone... Or a teen, just being a teen, would have done something, would have worn too much eyeliner.
This was a thing where...
There was no need for it.
I was just going to the, I'm just a regular person on the way to the bathroom, but now I have to accommodate this person's performance.
And I thought about, as I'm sitting in the bathroom, I thought about what my dad would have done in that situation.
Had your dad been you in that situation?
Had my dad walked through there and somebody had done that little moment.
Because whether or not the person does have social anxiety, and I believe they probably do, this was a performance unrelated to it.
Or I mean, I'm sorry, attached to it, but not necessary.
And I couldn't imagine what my dad would have done.
I didn't know what I did.
I almost jumped.
It was startling enough that it was almost like they'd said, boo!
Because all of a sudden I was intrusive or I was assaulting them by trying to go to the bathroom.
Yeah.
And it was, I mean, it was something, I guess, I've been trying to culture my daughter never to do.
And maybe it's based on a rotary meeting thing where you're not supposed to show that you're drunk.
Yeah.
Right.
But there's a characteristic about, and I'm just repeating what you're saying, but the same way that like a classic dad or a classic mom, what was I watching?
Oh, of course, I was watching some Hitler documentaries.
And I watched this really good BBC series on Auschwitz.
And this guy was talking about the only time in his life he ever saw his mother cry was when she was staring at the piece of paper to let her know that her husband had died.
And I was like, you've only ever seen your mother cry once?
Right.
And like that, to me, that's wild.
But again, in that time, in our, well, in our time, and you would never break character.
You would never like, you're like, I'm guessing your dad would never do something that I would do.
Like go, look, I'm sorry.
I'm being kind of a putz right now because I had a really hard day.
It's actually seriously nothing against you, but I just, I just need to go like lay down and like, I'm not depressed.
I'm just overwhelmed.
Yeah.
A parent from any other decade would never say that.
You can't break character, right?
The only time I ever saw my dad cry was when he was old.
He would tear up at Church of Latter-day Saints commercials.
Sorry.
What?
You know those ones from 10 or 15 years ago where there was always some, you know, it was like a baby in a hospital in a basket, and the father is looking at the baby through the glass, and he's holding a thing of cigars.
And I don't know what the Latter-day Saints were trying to accomplish with these.
I mean, what they were trying to accomplish was that you joined the Church of Latter-day Saints.
I'm not sure, but they were— I mean, that's that kind of ad, obviously, I think.
That's the kind of ad that it's not like, oh, it's not like the Church of Scientology saying, buy Dianetics and join Scientology.
That's a brand—kind of a brand management campaign?
Yes.
Like, I want you to feel better.
I want you to feel good about us.
I want you to feel more humane about who we are, apart from who you think we are.
And they connected with a sentimentality in him that was related to being a parent, being a father.
Being an American and having lived in our time.
You never know when it's going to hit you.
The stuff that makes me cry just comes out of left field.
And I'm like, I wasn't expecting that.
And it's that abruptness, the vulnerability that you have on that particular day that really hits you, right?
But other than that, I never saw him cry once in my life.
And my mom...
Have I ever seen her cry?
Well, I mean, we know that she does feel pain, but she doesn't seem like she feels pain.
I've surely seen her cry.
And I'm not sure.
I made my mom cry so much, I should have put it on my resume.
I don't remember what, maybe she had a glass of wine?
Oh, I see.
Once in 1977.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
So I don't know.
I cannot say anybody cried around me.
Well, I can't say nobody.
But you know what I mean, though?
You don't break.
You don't break character.
Right.
You never say to your kid, hey...
Sorry, I'm kind of being a... Here's why I'm acting like this.
Yeah, or like, you certainly never say shit about I'm having a crisis of faith or I'm worried about money.
No, or I'm sad.
I'm sad, yeah.
No, you would not.
And that... So that kid, though, he's a little bit of a... Now, how... This is none of my business, John, but give me a description of the stature of this kid.
We're talking about a young man, 13 or 14.
Is he already in the gawky growing phase?
He's probably... He's actually probably 16.
Like, if he was...
So he doesn't look like a scallop.
No, he is a full grown person enough that, I mean, enough that he could have adopted this as a performance.
I think a 12 year old wouldn't know.
I guess it worked.
Yeah, right.
Exactly.
This is something he learned between 12 and 16.
And I think given the world as it is, when he goes to college, it will maybe still play.
It will still play for him for a few years.
But that is not a thing that will ever play in a workplace environment, for instance.
Right.
Right.
But the only theme I was trying to tease out, though, is that, like, we learn from adults of our youth that, like, no, I mean, you didn't even have to say it.
You never break character.
Your minister doesn't, like, suddenly break down and talk about his affair with the secretary, which is the thing that happened at my church.
Like, you don't get that kind of stuff.
You don't break.
You've got to, like, you've got to stay in character.
And I think that's what this is, too.
I don't think that kid can afford to break.
Yeah.
I mean, like, what an adult of the—so your dad versus you.
Your dad of the 70s versus you of the 2022s.
Like, contrast how he would have acted with this Paul Dano character.
He's Paul Dano in my head, just for what it's worth.
Yeah, and I think that that's pretty correct.
If Paul Dano had—because he had long hair.
He had hair down to his chin.
Yeah, we'll talk about maybe like a slightly shorter version of Little Miss Sunshine Paul Dano.
There you go.
I think that all of my teenage and childhood rebellion, although my father didn't understand why, he absolutely understood the what, right?
He understood.
He didn't know the why, but he understood the that.
Yeah, I like that my actions, there was no generational gap between what you expected and
how you expected a person to behave you might wonder why the hell they're behaving this way but but there was no behavior that was new um and you know and my dad had watched a million kids rebel and what they couldn't figure out about me was why i was so why i was so passive what the hell if you're if you're angry get out there and and do some damage and my thing was just to you know to shut down
But that was something that you could at least look at and go, well, the kid is still sitting here.
And he'll still eat macaroni and cheese even in this condition.
But there were so many, I mean, I can't even begin to describe how many adults in my life, especially in my early tween through teen years, that in retrospect, I could look back at these adults and they're almost all men, some women, but mostly men, who obviously there's some little light that went off in their head and they thought, I need to straighten this kid out.
I have encountered people, like in the case of, let's say my stepfather's son-in-law, Randy.
No, not Randy.
What was his name?
Maybe Don.
He looked like a Randy.
He had a fucking mustache.
But that Randy, I know that guy was like, I'm going to man this kid up.
I'm going to teach him.
I'm going to make him do things that are not for him.
When he asks for Coke, I'm going to tell him that the store was out of Coke.
This guy lived to torment me.
And it was probably just because I was just a piece of shit kid.
But like, did you ever encounter people in your life who obviously were like, this will not stand.
I need to straighten this kid out.
Oh, for sure.
But I think in this situation, the kids movements were subtle enough, but also I was attuned to the culture that produced him.
So I recognized what they were signaling.
And I don't think my dad would have.
I think my dad would have said, well, this kid needs to go to the bathroom or he has an infection or something.
He had not received the cultural or formal training.
Like in the way when you got a baby, you go like the five S's or whatever.
You swaddle, you soothe, you do the shushing, all those things.
Like he probably didn't have a lot in his toolbox for him.
for surly sullen teen.
Well, no, because I don't think anxiety existed.
No, no.
And so there wasn't a, there wasn't a way to express it.
Um, that would have been recognizable to them.
Right.
So it was, it looks like nothing to me in this situation.
That team did have an audience because I did understand what all of that was about.
Um,
And it was only because I think he was still just young enough to be unsophisticated that I saw that it was a, you know, it's very hard to say an act, but that there was acting.
along with it, you know?
Well, something that I've quoted you on a lot, I think one of your most important thought technologies from way a long time ago was that idea of trying ideas on, like a jacket, an idea that I have not only stolen and reused, but have adapted to talking about how kids do a thing that I call rehearsing life,
where like you're trying out a personality you're trying out a tone of voice you're doing this kind of stuff and sometimes you do that if you trust your parents you do it around your parents right seems like counterintuitive but it's true you you're not going to go try and like act like fonzie around the cool kids at school unless you're an idiot you're going to practice that at home and that's a lot when we see kids doing in this case what you're calling i think you're calling acting it
it's also that they're maybe trying something on and seeing what works, what they can get away with, what makes them feel good or whole.
Don't you think that's part of it?
Is like we're going through that phase and, you know, trying to be more than just a collection of things you don't like.
Maybe you want to figure out affirmative, like who you are.
Well, yeah, but I... But not in the 70s.
That didn't exist in the 70s.
No, and I'm not sure that, you know, I'm... Thinking back at us...
We chose a lot of antisocial behaviors as part of bonding with our peers that would have, to an adult, looked like, you know, why are you doing that?
You're never going to be able to get a job with that tattoo.
Or you're never going to be able, you know, that's not going to help you in life, what you're doing right now.
And we did it.
We did it with all that teenage sneer.
What you're doing is unusual and confusing to me.
So now it's my job to bring down the boom and talk about what I really want to say is I don't understand you and I think you're weird.
But the way that comes out is here's how you need to change if you're going to become an adult.
Well, and that change is part of being an adult.
There is a moment where you go, oh, well, obviously now I can wear tattoos to work where I couldn't have before because there was enough people doing it.
But there's still – I mean, I remember the lead guy from –
from Band of Horses, showed up one day when we were still coming up and he had a neck tattoo.
And I thought it was kind of the first time somebody I knew had gotten a big tattoo on their neck.
And I thought, whoa, that really limits what you can do.
It does.
But he became a huge rock star.
And his neck tattoo only helped.
Classic example, though, of us looking at the past versus us wondering about the future.
You look at the past and you go, what are you really saying?
Not you, I'll speak for myself.
When I see somebody with a neck tattoo, I'm really thinking about, well, you would never be the principal of my high school in 1972.
Wow.
That's what it really means when we're looking backwards and trying to square something against our own background.
And yeah, it's definitely didn't pass the test of, you know, this is for me.
Neck tattoos are not for me.
People with neck tattoos, not for me.
But also we're like really unintentionally, I think, like talking about like, oh my God, it was so hard for me to get a job in 1991.
Can you imagine if I had a neck tattoo?
Right.
Instead of thinking about, again, an Overton window change, we're like, it's not...
that's not that weird now and it's not, it doesn't mean that you're in a biker gang.
Right.
Exactly.
And, and I think the hard thing for, for me and for you and me and maybe every member of generation X is when that extends, does that, is that the same thing?
And does it extend to taking your shoes and socks off on an airplane and putting your feet up on the armrest of the person in front?
They're going to be studying that in universities for years.
They will.
They better.
Somebody needs to figure it out.
Like now you can have a neck tech too and be the CEO of a tech company and everybody's like, high five, bro.
But when we say as members of our generation, hey, you can't do that.
And we actually, and I mean, back when I was on Twitter and I would say, you can't put your feet, your bare feet up on the seat in front of you.
I like to be comfortable.
I paid for this ticket.
Exactly.
And all that actual pushback, like legitimate pushback from people is like, why can't I wear a G string on an airplane?
And you think, is that an example of me being an old?
I absolutely agree about the question.
I'm not going to give you my answer to the question because I think you know my answer to the question.
But I think that's a very – you're right.
That's a very valuable question to ask.
Another way that I like to put it that's a little more –
Frank or cutting is like, how much of this is about my shit and how much of this is about their shit?
Because I'm trying to get out of the business of criticizing people for their shit when I'm really mad about my shit.
Yeah.
And I wonder whether not having someone else's feet on you is your shit or their shit.
We talked about this on Dubai Friday.
There was a guy who had to be escorted off a plane because he wouldn't stop masturbating over and over and over.
But he paid for that seat.
Yeah.
Well, let me ask you this.
If it's literally that they're putting their shit on you, is that your shit now?
That they're putting their poop on you?
They're smearing their poop because they paid for their seat.
You dove into the very heart of the analogy and then removed...
the heart inside the heart and you took it out.
And that's, that's where you'd say to somebody, pardon me, ma'am, I need to get through, put my bag up.
Also, here's some of my shit.
I'm going to put it on you.
Here's my poop that I need to put on you.
I'm going to masturbate for three hours until they land the plane.
And that's in order for me to feel comfortable in, in, on the plane.
I'd pay for this seat.
Oh,