Ep. 487: "My Own Switzerland"
Hello.
Hi, John.
Hi, Merlin.
How's it going?
It's going good.
Sounds good.
Yeah, it sounds good.
It does.
Yeah, the Skype song sounded different.
Huh.
It sounded a little mellower.
Is it because it did like a different arrangement?
No, same exact arrangement, but it just sounded, I don't know, maybe everything sounds a little mellower.
You're pretty good at music.
I think you'd know the difference.
I did a second sleep, so maybe I'm... Did you capture bonus sleep?
No.
Well, I went to sleep at 9.45.
Oh, you're talking about that kind of colonial sleep where you get up and you have intercourse or discuss Thomas Hobbes in the middle of the night.
Exactly.
Although I don't know if I'm doing it right.
It's called Hobbsnacht.
It's Hobbsnacht.
It's stupid.
Hobbsnacht.
I love that you had that.
The joke is so beneath you, which is what makes it funny every single time.
It was said at one time.
I remember when I was following this in the trades, they would say that up until fairly recently, Americans in particular would have two sleeps, like colonial era, maybe different times as well.
But the idea was you'd go to sleep.
Say you work from candle can't.
You go to bed pretty early.
You don't want to waste tallow.
And then you wake up of your own accord in the middle of the night.
You get up for a while.
Maybe you consort with Daniel Webster under the stars, and then you go back to bed.
Did you do something similar to that?
Sunday night?
You know, I think that that's a it's such a lovely vision the way it was described.
People go out and they lean on the front fence and their neighbors come over.
Are they sucking on a wheat stalk, you think?
Yeah, probably.
They have a pipe in the night and like you say, they read some hobs and lock and debate a little bit, but not vigorously.
And then back to sleep.
And I don't
I've spent a little bit of time looking into it.
As you can imagine, it doesn't seem like it was really that common.
It's a nice idea.
It's a nice vision.
Right.
I follow some people on Instagram that post pictures of little Swiss towns.
In the mountains.
And they have little trains running through them.
I mean, they're normal-sized trains.
Normal-sized trains, normal-sized towns.
But the towns in general, in the aggregate, are small.
It's not like a miniature of itself or something.
Exactly.
And it's in tall mountains that maybe makes them look smaller.
Forced perspective.
Okay.
But you look at them and you think, wow, people actually live in that town.
They have such a different life than I do.
They can't help but lean against their little fence.
They can hear the bells around the cows up in the hills.
Ding, ding, dong, dong.
And, you know, and they might wake up in the middle of the night and, you know, discuss, like, predestination.
They could see people on their way taking the funicular, I assume, to the chocolate factory.
Making watches.
The chocolatier du Croftverken.
Yeah, exactly.
And I've been thinking about that a lot, how where you are,
really how your death style really determines your lifestyle huh how your lifestyle determines your death style right we talk no i understand you make sure a kind of monster i think is what you're implying yeah exactly uh but uh but yeah just trying to just trying to put you know the your life this is the instagram problem of course oh jiminy christmas
And I don't want to get into that.
I made the mistake of looking at a couple of snowboard videos, and now Instagram just thinks that's all I want to see.
Yeah, I've heard about this with TikTok, where supposedly when you're on TikTok, it's just really, really good at knowing what it is that you want to see.
Yeah.
I don't know.
I don't like to talk about it.
But you know what?
I kind of like the For You tab on Twitter.
There's parts because so many people are gone now.
I don't really have a lot to look at.
And so they had the sense to leave.
But I'll look at that.
You're being nice about this.
But you're actually I don't want to drag this out.
But you are actually kind of touching on something that I do think about a lot, a lot.
And I mean, we could blame it on Instagram.
I would personally blame a lot of it on Instagram.
Because Instagram is one of those things that feels like a good idea and it's probably not.
It feels wholesome.
It used to be wholesome.
But you know what?
It's like I made this crack in passing the other day.
And like so much of the more wise things I've said, I'm still thinking about it.
Alex and I were talking about transparency.
You know, the buzzword, transparency.
Yeah.
And I was kind of trying to contrast that a little bit with what we used to call honesty.
And I think, I mean, this is mean, and maybe this is a little bit, who's the guy from the 20th century who had the, maybe this is a devil's dictionary type thing.
I think transparency, when it's not what it appears to be, which is almost always, it's a performance of honesty.
And a performance of honesty is not the same thing as honesty.
I'm not saying you can't be editorial in how you present the truth, but I haven't been on Instagram in years, but my sense is that it's kind of...
a lie agreed upon.
We all admit that none of this is actually that real.
You know what I mean?
But you're not allowed to say it.
I don't know.
I don't know how you can end up anyway, but envious might be too strong of a word, but everybody seems to be doing better than you.
Not you, but one on Instagram.
Kind of?
Yeah, well, I think about...
the performativeness of everything too and it feels almost like that critique oh god am i gonna regret this no no no no no no no because because yeah i i'm just i'm just saying like i i i agree with you i agree with you and i don't think there's anything on the face of it wrong in fact i would say the more people should perform they should just perform differently do better do better but but also that like you know sometimes you know you just want to say you know you're not fooling anybody
Well, sheesh.
Sheesh.
No, no, no, it's not.
And yeah, I don't want us to go down that road either.
The problem is if we get the Swiss mad, that touches on Germany.
And you know what happens in Germany, apart from the tubas, is that there are a lot of people listening to podcasts there.
We did a thing the other day where we talked, you and I, and I said something to the effect that there were a lot of things that I thought about when I was young about big picture stuff and, you know, the kind of like sweeping what does it all mean kind of questions and that a lot of that I had just reduced down.
I had simmered it down to a roo.
And some of those things I didn't... But flower and truth.
Just flower and truth.
And I think a lot of that is true, but the question of trying to understand...
What the difference is between being honest and performing being honest, or being ethical and performing being ethical, or really, I think, being sensitive and performing being sensitive.
That's the one I encounter the most.
I'm taking it too far to say caring and performing caring.
Yes.
And trying to navigate a world where performance of caring is a higher order than caring is
Because you can't show how much you care, but you can perform how much you care.
Because that's what Instagram is, that's what Twitter is, that's where we're living.
And the only solution seems to be to not live over there.
To just not live in a place where you have to watch people perform caring.
Yeah.
I don't know.
You know, this week, down in San Francisco, as you probably know, is Sketch Fest.
And you and I performed at Sketch Fest every year.
For what, a decade or close to?
Well, I mean, I know, you know, it's funny, it's my family and I visited the California Academy of Sciences a couple weeks ago.
Oh, isn't that nice there?
They got a shark.
They got, you know, like a lot of your... No, an alligator there.
They have a single sat alligator.
I don't see color in alligators, but they're smart.
They built the aquarium on the first floor.
They made a lot of good decisions.
But of course, it reminded me of our time in the stuff.
Remember, there's probably an Ibex or a stuffed ape.
where down at the other end of the room we were in, which is the old, we were in, I love it personally.
It's the old janky African Savannah exhibit, which had to be like, I don't know, like say about Disney, like a day one, like, you know, attraction, like the railroad or something.
We're like, I think, so down by the penguins at the other end, there was what appeared to be some kind of a startup cocktail party.
And we were on the other side of the room by the stuffed mammals trying to entertain people.
And it was distracting.
Yeah, that was Sketchfest.
Yeah, Sketchfest.
Sketchfest.
Yeah, you know, I was not aware of, I wasn't aware that Sketchfest was happening.
You posted something about being at a comedy show.
I wasn't either.
Well, I, because, well, it's a long story, but basically I went to see a comedy rock act on Friday night with my kid, which was really fun.
But I was hoping to get to see, I mean, talking out of school, I was hoping to visit a friend of the show, Stuart Wellington, on Thursday night, but I knew I couldn't do both.
So suddenly I was like, oh yeah, duh, it's January, I guess it's Sketchfest.
And I think I chose well.
But, okay, so here's the thing.
God damn it.
I think a lot of stuff in life, at least I feel like maybe it's because I'm from Ohio.
Maybe it's because I'm how I am.
Maybe it's both.
Maybe it's the same.
But I feel like we ought to be unkind when people are just trying to get by.
Yep.
And I think there's a lot of what we do.
Your mom might appreciate this, even though she came from a different side of Ohio title.
Which is that, you know, she came from the top part.
I come from the bottom part.
She did.
I hope she did.
Is that, like, man, don't bag on people because they're making the best with what they've got.
That's what we're all doing.
It's that...
And again, you and I, as old school fans of the British office, we know how painful and how funny it can be to watch somebody trying to pull it off and not pulling it off.
And there's just this part that's like, oh, do you really need, do you really need to be, I don't know if this is even something people do anymore, but the mommy blog shit of like having a little board with the letters on it and talking about, you
And then you got to make little doilies for all the party favor bags and everything.
And it's also like that just – you're just putting your shit onto so many other people as well as putting your shit onto yourself.
I don't want to be mean.
We're all doing the best we can.
But like there is this kind of like –
Not envy machine, exactly, but a certain kind of performance of success, or at least getting by, that I don't think is as healthy as it feels sometimes.
Well, you know, that's the top tier, the top domain of this podcast.
You know, this question where every house looks like a Property Brothers house.
Yeah, right, right, right.
But the lower level, like just before – or there's a thousand lower levels.
It's turtles all the way down.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
But just before we got on the program here, you gave me a little push.
We got to 1059.
Yeah.
And then you were like, what about 15-minute push?
And I was like, wow, we got really – that was like – I could have done it, but I needed to upgrade the app.
Upgrape.
Yeah, you upgraded it.
I had to upgrade the app that records the program, and I didn't want to make you wait while I did that.
Well, so, of course, I log on to something.
I don't even remember what it was.
I logged on to something, and there was a shark video because somehow – Just the surfeet of at symbols.
Whoa.
One of these at simple places was like, oh, this is the guy that loves sharks.
And I was like, I don't love sharks.
I never said that.
I watched one thing that was something about sharks.
I looked at it.
Like Patton Oswalt and his bit about the TiVo.
Like, you know, where like I watched a Western one time and now TiVo thinks, oh, I want to see her horses.
Yeah, right.
Or the weird ones where you log on and it shows you things you've already watched and you're like, what algorithm is this?
And I know there are people that log on to the internet and it immediately is like, oh, these are the people that like to see Nazi stuff.
But apparently the internet thinks I like snowboard videos and sharks.
I don't.
I don't care about either thing.
But I log on and a guy jumps into the water and there's a shark.
And it's like a 10 second thing.
And then, of course, what I did, of course, is I read the comments.
Of course.
Of course.
Yeah.
There were a thousand comments.
Did the shark thing, the 10-second shark thing, do you feel like that commended comments?
Oh, well, that's the thing.
Yeah.
Everywhere I go, because I got back on the internet, as I've said many times, to look at the war in Ukraine.
Yeah.
And then, of course, you read the comments because there's a guy who's a general in an army who says, oh, well, these boots are something.
And then there's 200 comments.
Initially, it was a lot of stuff like, believe me, you would not.
I mean, some of them, I have no way of vetting this.
But if I remember right, when I was not as into it as you were, but following it more closely, it was stuff like, well...
Given what I know and what I know is a lot, these are the kinds of things you wouldn't be seeing if this were going well for the Russians, for example.
Well, yeah.
And a lot of, you know, the first one of these all the way back in February of last year was like.
The convoy.
Yeah.
The guy that walked in and said, you know, the problem with this is the tires.
And everybody was like.
And he's like, yeah, they didn't take care of their tires.
And now all they got is flat tires.
And it was like.
Think about that.
Me too.
And it was like this revelation.
How do I even know if I'm doing my tires?
I don't even have a car and I worry about my tires.
Yeah, your tires.
That was, you know, the army runs on its tires.
And then all these generals were like, he's right.
You know, it's the tires.
And so I'm in the comments.
This is just two minutes ago.
And there's a guy that's like, but it's a great white.
And somebody else says, no, it's a basking shark.
I haven't seen it yet, but I think it's a nurse shark.
There are 200 comments.
A lot of people in here think that this is a basking shark, but they don't know sharks.
I know sharks.
And everywhere I go now, there's that.
everywhere there's and and i know people watch it for sport i know people go in the comments to see because there are people in the comments saying i just came here to see all the people say that's a it's a basking shark oh did somebody put up uh maybe somebody put up a gif of uh stephen colbert or bill hater with popcorn maybe no those are the gifs that you see because those are the people that you like no i see my algo
I see 100% different GIFs.
I see the dog saying this is fine.
What about Denzel Washington relieved that somebody's not actually dead?
Nope, nope.
I never see that one.
No, I never see it.
So fortunate.
I see completely different GIFs because that's what I want because I looked at a snowboard video once.
Oh, you do blame yourself in some ways.
I do.
Well, I see a lot of like Shinu Ipsos and they all have sunglasses on and they're – That's a blockchain dog?
That's a blockchain dog, right?
That's a blockchain dog.
A Shizu Ipso.
Okay.
Ipso.
It's a factor.
so i no i know i know i had a second sleep last night because i woke up at one in the morning i went to sleep at 9 45 i want that part because i feel like you're leading up to something because this is the thing if it were me ending and i'd say and then at the end i don't feel better i don't feel good at the end i just feel merely like i have a slight film of humanity on me and not in a good way i feel awful i hate it i fucking hate it
I woke up at one in the morning.
I stayed up from one to seven in the morning.
Now this, I was not discussing Thomas Hobbes with my neighbors.
Okay.
I was sitting on my couch.
Cover that in the depositions.
I was sitting on my couch.
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I was sitting on my couch watching shark videos and, and, uh, and snowboard videos because that's what it's serving up to me.
And, and I, and I feel powerless at this point.
What do I do?
As soon as I, as soon as I click on a video of Jeff Beck, uh,
All I'm going to get for two weeks is like blues guitar.
Like guys going like... Oh, I'm just adjacent to that.
As somebody who, as a larf, showed one's family No More Lies by Neil Schoen and John Hammer.
Yes.
Yeah.
You're talking about HSAS?
It might have been HSAS.
I think this might have been... I think this is earlier.
Albertson and Shreve?
Albertson and Shreve, attorneys at law, guitarists at law.
This is the one that's inside of like a new wave cage.
No, I think it's just shown in Hammer.
And it's lies.
No more lies.
I can see it.
And Neil Schoen, God bless him.
He's like Jiminy Glick.
He's got the world's shortest waist you've ever seen.
And he looks real funny.
He's wearing one of those Robert De Niro t-shirts.
And now all the time, I'm getting all the Jan Hammer.
And I like Jan Hammer.
I liked... Is Highway Jam...
No, wait, that's not Pat Metheny, is it?
What was the one that he and Jeff Beck did that was really good?
I want to say Highway Jam.
Yeah, well, that was it.
But, like, you know, Jan Hammer, before he got, as you say, over his skis a little bit, like, he was a great sideman.
He's in lots of very funny, very funny proto pre-MTV videos.
But, like, Jan Hammer for me is almost like a 1910 fruit gum factory.
Like, I'll really one of those a year and I'm good.
yeah like a shark i so i like uh you know over the years right i followed you on twitter back in back in 2007 and you were doing it you were doing a thing then that's back when you were merlin man and then over the years you know we all did things it was fun over there we we talk about that ad nauseum right now following you on twitter because you go you do these uh these these i don't think about people reading what i'm sorry
Well, no, but this is the thing.
The music, all the music with the music.
Yeah, but you don't do super deep dives.
What you do is dives.
You're like, hey, look at that.
It's a nurse shark.
I want to reach the addressable audience.
I'll tell you the secret.
Here's the secret.
For people who could love what I love and do love what I love, I'd like them to be able to get a little wink from me and go, oh, God, yeah, Rockpile really is good.
But for like, but really good.
Billy Bremner is amazing.
But like, it's also that like, if there's any small, this is why I do Spotify playlists.
It's not, I mean, I don't like, I'm not like studying the numbers on that stuff.
It's just that like, if you could think you might like the kinds of things I like, I feel like it would make me feel good in the same way that people in my life, including you, including my friend, Michael, like all these friends, my friend, Alan, all these people in my life who like brought me so much stuff I wouldn't have known about.
I'm always going on about the Waterboys.
I wouldn't know about the Waterboys if it wasn't for Alan Partlow and Mike Rennie.
But then they put Red Army Blues from Pagan Place on a record.
And that's before I even got into the Hole of the Moon.
So I'm trying to say, hey, not even youths, but like comrades, you know, comrades Stalin said we'd become too westernized.
It's a very sad song.
But I just, yes, that's what it is.
And I do like to share it there.
And like, I don't do it during the day.
I do it at night and it's way too much music.
And it goes away in a week, so it doesn't hurt anybody.
Well, no, no, no, but that's the thing.
You sent me on a David Fincher thing last night.
I didn't know all that about David Fincher.
Did you ever know how much CG is in his stuff?
Because I sure didn't.
No, I didn't at all.
The camera going through the coffee pot handle.
Jesus Christ.
Super good.
Well, did you know that then I'm off, of course, doing my thing, right?
I put on my roller skates and you're like, no, no, no, look over here.
And I'm like, did you know that Fight Club and Zodiac are his two lowest grossing movies?
I did not know that.
He's got six movies.
Wait, Zodiac and Fight Club?
Yeah.
He's got six movies that have a worldwide gross of over $300 million.
The game did better than those.
Yeah.
Those two are $80 million.
And he's got six other movies that have $300 million.
So Dragon Tattoo did a lot better than it probably.
Big, big money.
But other ones that are just like, huh?
Huh?
And I wouldn't have thunk that that movie, because of course, I think of Zodiac and Fight Club as seminal films.
Fight Club is one of the big movies.
And I think it's good.
It's good.
It's not as good as I remember, but it's good.
But I do think of Zodiac as maybe partly because of the incredible technical accomplishments of it.
But like, yeah, I think of that as one of the very good movies for sure.
And maybe the word seminal is the right word because maybe those are boy movies and don't have wide appeal.
But I was just stunned.
That is wild.
Movies that were like, what are these totals about?
But that's a thing.
If I'm up at six o'clock in the morning in the middle talking about Hobbes with my Swiss neighbors, that's the kind of thing that I go down.
Do you guys both stay neutral or only one of you?
No, no, no.
We both.
Oh, did you read?
There's a thing.
This hacker just discovered the American no-fly lists.
i saw a headline about it and that sound is it true somebody went in like figured out the aws buckets and the keys and stuff and like got in and found the like not as plain text but once they got past the doors they were able to basically see the names of people who aren't allowed to fly is that correct yeah it was some it was something that was in some some back file in a in a local airline that nobody secured the server and this and this uh hacker
This non-binary person in Switzerland who's like 20 years old who's already under indictment from the US government.
Do you need a hacker?
Get somebody from Europe who has a Hello Kitty over their mini monitors.
That's exactly what it is.
Don't fuck around.
But they can't get at them because Switzerland won't extradite their citizen.
And Switzerland's policy is we won't extradite any citizen without their consent.
That is so considerate.
That is really considerate.
Interesting turn of phrase or interesting idea like, oh, if our citizen agrees to, if they consent to be extradited, then, you know, then, yeah, of course, we'll turn them over.
It's weird that I kind of love that.
What's kind of strange about that?
That's great.
But, you know, that's a deep dive that in the middle of the night, I'm looking at the Swiss extradition policy.
Here I am.
But
You know, two years ago, there was a house that I almost bought that was on a lake.
And I didn't buy it because... Was this your mid... A different mid... Was there a point where you were doing a little bit of mid-century modern adjacent dive?
That's what it was.
Where you're doing lots of open houses and looking at things and... Yeah.
And this was one that I actually made an offer on.
And the offer was accepted.
And I stood in the living room of it and I had some friends over and I was like, what do you guys think of this house?
And everybody was like, it's great.
Yeah.
Just the one with the sunken living room?
Well, yeah, basically.
It had that vibe.
It needed a lot of work, but everything does.
I do.
Yeah.
And it was on a lake, which I thought was really cool.
You need a different kind of licensed agent for that.
You know.
It's why I don't get a doctor.
She comes by all the time and puts flyers in my door.
Hi, I'm ready to.
They usually come in the morning, right?
That's when they're checking on you, the welfare check.
This is why I won't get a doctor.
Because I know if I start going to a doctor, I'm going to become like my family that was going to the doctor all the time.
And then they all died.
And I think the same thing could be true of real estate agents.
Life is fatal.
Yeah, it's true.
Yeah.
Am I right?
But I think about that house sometimes, not because I loved the house, but because it was two blocks from the YMCA.
And when I was looking at the house, I walked up and down the street.
I met a lot of people in the neighborhood.
I liked them all.
Um, I, because I went there a couple of times and I would, and I walked down the street and I, and somebody would be out there in their driveway and I'd say, Hey there neighbor.
And they'd come over and Hey, I'm just working on my train set.
And I'd be like, ah, I'm thinking about moving down the block.
And, but I had this, I started to develop this picture.
I'm going to go to the YMCA every day.
I'm going to walk over there.
I'm going to lift some weights.
I'm going to jazzercise.
I'm going to see my neighbors.
It would be so different.
It's one reason I find it so difficult to even contemplate moving from where we are.
Partly because it's, you know, I mean, it was more salient when my kid went to elementary school two and a half blocks away.
Right.
But, you know, I...
The trouble is, like, we took the subway real quick.
So we took the subway to go to this show at, oh, you know, on the way, I'm telling Billy, a place that we have seen you and your band and various combinations of John Roderick things, maybe more than anywhere else.
Well, mainly, you know, Cafe Denord.
But this was at the Swedish American Hall next door.
Oh, Denord.
Yeah, and I've seen Death Cab there.
I've seen so many people there.
But, like, I was saying, like, it's really – because if I were to, like, just totally reevaluate at this point, this is still a good place to be 50.
But without the subway line, it's not quite the bargain it used to be.
But what you're describing, I think, if I hear my hearing, is, like, that could be – it's not merely just a willful, like –
misunderstanding of your own motivations.
But the truth is, if you were, I don't even know how much you're kidding, but if you were in walking distance of a YMCA, you would be nuts not to become a member and go there literally every day just to go sit in the steam or the sauna.
And swim.
You could just swim with the Russian guys at five in the morning.
When I think about it now, because of all the trouble I'm having here at my house with my neighbors and all of the stress that that's bringing into my life, which it continues to do.
And I think about, I didn't really love that house, but if I could trade right now for that house, I think I would.
And what it did was it reintroduced that idea that I had my own Switzerland.
I had the possibility of my own Switzerland and it was a decision I made two years ago and my own Switzerland might be right over there, two miles from here.
There was a Switzerland where I actually loved my neighbors and every day I went and jazzercised
And I would be, and my mind would be mentally clean.
Now I know if I had done it, if I had thought that house.
As opposed to dreading, I don't know the directions, but like dreading the like right turn, right turn, left turn, and going like, oh God, here we go.
And then like the sun's out there, you know, watering his lawn or whatever.
Like it's hard not to, and I don't think it's just purely like a sort of deception, but it's hard to know at the time if you're making the right decision about something, but then is it regret?
Not a thousand percent, but it would be nice to have your own Switzerland.
It's not even, you know, I'm Instagramming myself there, right?
I'm imagining my own life.
That's your feet on your boat.
It is.
And if I were there, I know I would walk around that house every day and be like, oh, man, I wish this house had a basement.
Oh, geez.
You know, if I had just bought a 50s house over in the other neighborhood, I'd be over there right now having cocktail parties.
And instead, I'm here.
You know, on a great lake, two blocks.
But I remember as I pulled out of that deal, I said, you know, I was going to buy that house just because of the YMCA, and that's not reason enough to buy a house.
And now I'm like, maybe it was.
You know, maybe that was reason enough.
So at the time you said to yourself the equivalent of, come on, like at the time you went, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, let's pull back.
You know, let's zoom back a little bit and go, how much of this is just because I got that idea in my head of being near.
Do you feel like so it must have felt in retrospect, you know what?
I probably made a really good decision there because I didn't.
I didn't make a dumb decision based on something I got fixated on.
I kept the broader scene in mind, right?
I did.
I felt wise.
And, you know, in the fall of 2019, I really felt like I was on to something.
Like I'd gotten rid of that old farmhouse.
I was going to get rid of so much garbage.
I had 40 candlesticks and I was going to...
Take that down to two.
All you need is two.
You don't need 40.
I was going to build a house or build a place where people that came through town could stay.
And I was going to have a sort of cocktail party life where people wore clothes.
floor-length 70s gowns that kind of wrapped around?
Was it a gown?
Was it a house coat?
Can I mention something in passing, though?
You tell me if I'm remembering this right, and our listeners may already remember this, but just to refresh here.
You went by something kind of quick just now, the whole walking around and talking to people and visiting.
If I remember correctly, in lots of things that you do, and I have to imagine in looking at a potential area you might want to live in, you make a very specific point of going and talking to
to people seeking people out and like not just like saying oh what's the vibe at the bodega but like really trying to figure out what what the people who live near here are like and that must dog you a little bit just because just that sense of well sure better than what I've got now
Well, and what happened, I remember very distinctly, before I actually closed on this house, I was walking, and I walked past the local swim club and went in, and there was this little teenage girl behind the counter, and I was like, hey –
uh tell me about the swim club and she was like oh well i mean i grew up here and was on the swim team since i was four and now i work here at the front desk selling candy bars this is like something out of this out of our childhood it's like something out of the 70s yeah exactly and that's exactly people who like go to camp and then become camp counselors and like there's like this very virtuous cycle in some ways of like reinvesting in the community that made you
Yeah, I felt like it was, I literally said to somebody, I was like, it's the 1970s there.
And then I was walking over toward this house and I had already met my next door neighbor who runs a daycare.
And I saw her walking through the neighborhood with one of those little trains of four-year-olds all holding hands.
And they were walking to the park.
You know, and somebody was pulling a wagon and we waved to each other.
Hi.
And she was like, hi.
And the little kids waved.
And I was like, wow.
You know, and at my open house, the woman I'm now in a dispute with was at the open house.
And she was like, I live over there.
I just wanted to see the house.
And she and I chatted and got along great.
And what I didn't realize was I was stepping into a bear trap, which is what happened.
You know, I moved here and I was really happy.
And then it turned out I just stepped into a bear trap.
And I thought this was my Switzerland.
And now I'm just, like, I just carry around.
Your property, the way you've described it being situated, it's not exactly a corner lot, right?
But, I mean, it's not part of, like, a grid.
It's closer to, like, a slice of a big slice of a cul-de-sac in some ways, right?
You don't have a regular, like, four-sided polygon.
Well, I guess it must be in some ways.
But, like, you don't have, like, a rectangle or a square, right?
You are situated amongst several different people in one way or another, right?
The property is literally the shape of a slice of pie.
There's only three sides.
So kind of like a cul-de-sac, the end of a cul-de-sac.
I guess the end of the cul-de-sac is a cul-de-sac.
Yeah, sort of.
There's a neighbor over there.
There's a neighbor over there.
When I moved in, I couldn't see any of them.
And it just felt like, how could I possibly get into trouble here?
Before you discover the fence of menthol cigarettes.
Yeah.
How could anything ever trouble me here?
I can't even see another living person.
You might as well be in Oklahoma.
I might as well.
Except it was a jungle.
Except it was a jungle.
I might as well be in Borneo.
Yeah, right.
But...
But the poison of what the internet and my devices are now, and we've been talking about this, I swear to you, since the day we started.
Absolutely.
The poison of these devices.
When we started doing this show, I don't even think I had an iPhone yet.
I think I still had a flip phone or a Blackberry or something.
And I don't think I had a laptop.
I think I did all of my recording from a desktop computer.
And I remember you had two desktop computers.
And one of them was an IBM computer.
And I was already complaining about...
how how devices were inside my head and now they are my head like they're in their entire your attitude was so different in some well you had a very guarded and I think very mature approach to this which is like one of the first things we did after getting a website was to make a forum where people could hang out and
I remember you saying fairly early on, like, you know, I don't want to be in here all the time.
I mean, in my head, what I heard you saying was nothing would be weirder than the singer of the band that the forum is about being here more than anyone else.
And so you would lurk.
Hi, guys.
Hi.
Yeah, but you weren't fronting.
You actually didn't want to be there all the time.
And when you did, you would lurk.
And then you would be, I feel like in retrospect, pretty circumspect about deciding when you wanted to get involved in whatever it was.
So there remained kind of a treat that John's here and not something where, you know...
I don't know what it would be like.
Basically, you've got some kind of a kiosk at the mall.
Come and get your phone signed by the guy from the Miller Beer ad that never aired.
I still live with the idea that it should be a treat if John is here.
I thought about that the other night when I marched directly into the green room.
of this event and my kids start skittering down the hallway and I'm like, look, do you want to meet Ken Marino or not?
Because if you want to meet Ken Marino, I want you to come and I want you to meet David Wayne.
He's a hero of mine and he's one of the nicest people I've ever met.
And David had to actually run down the hallway to catch him because he was running so fast the other way.
I'm like, you're forgetting the first rule.
The first rule of John Roderick is we don't talk about John Roderick.
The second rule of John Roderick is walk in like you own the place.
Walk in like y'all in the place.
And you do, and you will.
I walked into Puddles Pity Party dressing room a week ago, and there was nobody back there except Puddles and Dave Hill.
And I was like, hey, how you doing?
You're in my dressing room.
And he was like, hello.
Wow.
Hi, nice to meet you.
Thanks for letting me eat your grapes.
And I was like, no problem.
Don't eat them all.
But I don't...
I spend so much less time in that land where I used to live all the time and so much more time in the, boy, these people are swimming with sharks, and I couldn't tell you whether that was a basking shark or not.
It was a nurse shark.
But what I'm doing is watching them do that, and I don't even care about them.
I wouldn't watch that if I were there.
If I were staying in an Airbnb on the beach...
In that place.
And they were like, hey, you want to go out with these ding-dongs and watch them swim with the shark?
I'd be like, no thanks.
Like, not how I'm going to spend today.
But I am awake at 5 o'clock in the morning watching them do this.
Not because I chose it.
but because I'm being, I'm being spoon fed like garbage and I'm, and who's there.
I'm there.
I'm the only one there.
That stuff could have happened 200 years ago for all I know.
Right.
There's nobody there.
There's nobody enjoying it with me.
If I got nothing to say, I'm reading the forum.
I don't know if any of those people are real.
It could, they could, that could all be an AI.
Yeah.
And, I mean, I know it's not, but it could be.
Well, you tell me.
There's a phrase I like a lot.
I find myself doing something.
I never chose that I can recall to do this thing.
I didn't choose to just do three gestures on my phone and I'm back looking at Twitter again.
I didn't choose to do that.
I found myself doing that.
And I'm not saying that I didn't cause that to happen.
But what I am saying is, like, it wasn't something that was on my calendar that day.
It wasn't something that...
You know, something I've realized recently is like I've got this iPad right here where like if I choose to, like when things are hot and heavy with politics, you know, I'll have cable news on in the background.
But with the volume turned down, like the 56 year old man that I am.
And like the thing is, though, I've started to realize I say this to Madeline like every night where it's like, wait, I keep turning like MSNBC in particular.
I'll turn this on.
I don't know what I think I'm going to get out of it.
Apart from like, oh, you know, the rage about Mr. Trump from 2017 kind of stuff.
But like, I turn this on.
I'm like, the result is almost always immediately disgust and like, ah!
I make a noise like that.
I go, ah!
Ah!
You know what I'm saying?
You're not happy.
Ah!
Ah!
I thought I could find him.
One nice bikini for Irving.
But no, but you know what I'm talking about?
And I found myself there.
And then I'm like, why do I do that?
What is it that causes my thumb to do these three movements that bring me back to this place that I know...
Not only does it make me happy, not that the world needs to make me happy, but it's just, it's not wholesome.
What is this in service of?
What, you know, how am I, what am I getting out of this?
There's ugliness.
And so I'm going to a psychologist.
in addition to a psychiatrist now, because I said, uh, the psychiatrist is prescribing me the medicine, but, um, but psychologist closer to what you might call a therapist, a therapist, right?
Because I go to the psychologist and he's prescribing medicine.
We talk about stuff and then he's like, well, I can prescribe you medicine.
Um, and, uh, you know, and he wants to talk about Marcus Aurelius and, uh,
And I'm like, well, sure, but I feel like I've got these lower level problems that are just about being happy and there's no medicine for it.
A lower level, as John Syracuse would say, closer to the metal.
We say lower level, more like foundational struggles, challenges.
Or even if they're just frivolous or passing, right?
But I've been saying lately, like...
I didn't choose this.
There's nothing about what's happening in my emotional life right now that I can say is a result of things that I chose to do.
And yet I did choose everything that got me here.
You may not have ticked one box that says create this situation, but the accumulation of, let's be honest, hundreds or thousands, weeks and years of decision making is necessarily what leads us to where we are, whether we like it or not.
Exactly.
And because of the way a certain type of mind works, I can't, because I have that kind of mind, I can't then not conclude that I earned it or I deserve it.
Right.
because i chose all the little things that got me here and and you know and his job is i'm not laughing at you i'm i'm laughing in recognition yeah i know exactly what the fuck you're talking about because because we're all trying we're all trying all the time to self-evaluate all the time am i doing am i doing right am i helping people am i being good and
Am I on the side of justice?
Am I performing empathy?
I stopped using straws.
Like, what else do I need to do?
Like, aren't there things?
But the thing I guess I'm trying to say is you don't, one cannot, unless you're really, really weird or 14, it's probably not healthy or wholesome to ground yourself completely in this, like,
I mean, we have a Greta Thunberg and I'm glad she's out there, but not everybody can be like that.
You can't make every decision in your life based on some really, really, really big idea unless you are like pretty much literally a monk.
There is an element of satisficing and there is a level of I wonder what I'll have for lunch.
And it's just that that stuff can really accumulate in ways you just don't anticipate until it's already happened.
Yeah, you get rid of plastic bags.
You got to use paper bags.
You get rid of straws.
You got to use those cardboard straws that turn to mush in your mouth.
If you can't wear leather shoes, then you got to wear plastic shoes, but plastic shoes.
Plastic's oil, John.
Yeah, well, they get caught in whales' mouths because people throw them in the ocean with one foot in them.
Like that all, you know.
Can we get the sharks on that?
If you lived in the Northwest, something's causing all these feet to wash up on the beach in one shoe.
Nobody knows what they are.
Maybe it's that Kemper.
There's like 10 feet and they're all left feet.
You mean as in three yards or as in, oh, you mean little feet?
Yeah.
Like human feet that are still in tennis shoes that wash up on the beach.
This is different from those Michael Air Jordans that fell off the boat in the 90s.
This is different, right?
Well, this is different because they have human feet in them.
They ship that way.
I don't know if they do.
You know, China's very inscrutable.
I bet it was on the foot.
Yeah, no.
Well, okay.
Okay.
Hope those shoes never have to parallel park.
Where is that ding?
I was reading something.
I have a new app that I love that's made it easier for me to read things.
And this is something from a writer I like, Oliver Berkman.
It's a short piece, but it's from like three days ago.
And I don't think this is going to make your life better, but that doesn't mean I won't share it with you.
Is it Marcus Aurelius?
Yes.
Is this a short thing that he's never going to do again?
I only, yes, it's a short thing he'll never do again.
That's right.
Because Hannibal Lecter and, you know, David Foster Wallace covered a lot of the same ground.
Quid pro quo, Clarice Marcus Aurelius.
I don't know why I'm doing it in the voice of Snape.
This guy, Oliver Berkman, who I think is a good writer on stuff.
And he's, the headline of the piece, it's very short, but the headline of the piece is, what if you never sort your life out?
And he quotes somebody as saying, you know, talking about how their life, you know, feels like it's always unsettled.
And a person says to them, are you still under the illusion that you'll one day reach a point in your life where you no longer have any problems?
Ha, ha, ha.
Who would ever think that?
Next paragraph, though, brings me a phrase I had never heard before.
Embrace yourself because it's someone from Swiss.
Someone from Swiss called Marie Louise van France.
And she phrased, have you ever heard this phrase, the provisional life?
Oh, but I get it right away.
Right.
A thousand percent, right?
Where you go, oh, shit, I don't need to read another word.
I know exactly what you're talking about.
There's a strange feeling that one is quoting here.
There's a strange feeling that one is not yet in real life.
For the time being, one is doing this or that, but there's always the fantasy that sometime in the future, the real thing will come about.
Or, you know, or like Robert Zimmerman once said, you know, life's what happens when you're busy making other plans, you know, kind of feeling.
But it's like, you know, ah, geez.
Gosh, I wish I could have heard this about 15 times more often when I was 30.
Just because even if I didn't have the ears to hear it, it would have been nice to get some roots in with this idea.
But like, this is it.
This is life.
You know, the one you get to go and have a ball.
So while you're here, enjoy the view.
Keep on doing what you do.
And for now, we'll muddle through one day at a time.
I was on social media.
I didn't intend to end up there, but once I started, there's no way I was going to stop.
Remember Schneider?
Remember Schneider and his keys?
He let himself in.
Ding, ding, ding.
Hello.
No, that's Lenny.
That's Lenny and Squiggy.
Hello.
It's the same.
It's the same.
If you take Lenny and Squiggy, put them together, what do you get?
Schneider.
Oh, that would have been tough because one was on ABC, one was on CBS, but I would love to have seen some kind of ambitious crossover where Schneider brought together a super team of people.
Oh, Kramer.
Kramer could have been.
It's wacky neighbors who come in without being asked.
Oh, somebody's got to do a super cut of this, right?
Hello.
Wacky neighbors that come in and... Yes.
Anyway.
But doesn't that kind of give you something, at least for me, in the way my brain works?
I'm like, oh, Merlin, you ding-a-ling.
You do this all the time.
You keep tacitly sort of acting like...
you know, I know enough about this also to have said something like 15 years ago, there's no such thing as arriving.
We talked about this in the backdoor pilot for this show in my backyard, literally the backyard pilot, right?
They'll like, oh, you're so lucky you get to tour with your band and all that stuff.
And like nobody arrives.
And I think the phrase that I hope I'll always properly quote you with is even Bono has a boss.
Everybody feels like they have something more to achieve in this world, which is fine, but that doesn't,
I don't know.
I'm trying not to just be cheerful and like, I don't know.
I should fully inhabit my personal Irma Bombeck here.
But like, I do think we, I know I tend to do this.
I suspect you tend to do it, which is to say like, oh, you know, prosperity is just around the corner.
Like we're so close to this thing really coming together.
And until then, I will, I've had 55 years of a provisional life.
I saw a thing go by, a David Crosby quote that's making the rounds right now in between the other things that I was looking at, the NAFO dogs that are buying school buses for the children.
I might have just had a neurological event because everything after David Crosby, I'm not sure what that was.
Is it okay that I didn't know what all that meant?
No, that's fine.
Dogs are buying buses?
Little dogs.
Okay.
They're shibunazus.
And they're buying buses for kids.
They're buying ambulances.
Okay.
But David Crosby says in this quote that I have no way of knowing whether he said it or not, but it sounds right.
I favored all of them and retweet none of them because I could be so easily talked out of any of them existing, but they're all so good.
And what he said was time is the real thing.
And there's no money.
There's no power.
There's no anything else.
Time is the real currency of life.
And don't waste it.
Don't squander your time.
Something like that.
It could be embroidered on a pillow.
It could be in a dentist's office on a poster with a little dog driving an ambulance.
It could be completely a lie.
But but I read it and my first thought was, well, David Crosby, I'm completely squandering my time.
I'm sitting here.
It's it's four o'clock in the morning and I'm looking at quotes from you that are posted on some influencers website.
And I don't know that influencer and I never asked to be here.
And I'm literally being told not to waste my time on a time-wasting platform where that's all I'm doing is wasting time.
And then I'm mad at David Crosby.
Yeah, you're ticking away the moments and seconds of your partially lived provisional life.
My provisional life.
And I'm doing it in an environment where the environment is telling me not to do that.
And that's what's keeping me there.
I'm there to read that I shouldn't be there.
And it's there.
It's there to tell me that I shouldn't be there and keep me there to keep me there because that's what I want to hear.
And I, and I pictured David Crosby all through the seventies strung out on dope with, you know, with big sores on his face.
I think about him in the eighties where we were like, this guy's not going to live through the week.
Do you remember when Melissa Etheridge was like, I'm going to have a baby with David Crosby?
I remember every cubic inch of everything you're talking about, and it came up several times last week.
On at least two occasions, I overtly said to Madeline, the thing I've been thinking since at least the late 80s, which is if there's anybody in this fucking world, the people that would still be alive in 2023, would you imagine David Crosby and, say, Keith Richards were amongst those people?
No.
Those two in particular, Keith Richards should have been dead three times by 1973.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
I mean, the fact is... David Crosby had a liver transplant?
Oh, yeah, absolutely.
He should be totally dead.
I should be dead.
I think about four or seven different times when it's like, oh, what?
There are graveyards full of people that did that exact thing and did not somehow dodge the arrow.
I don't know why.
And it's being presented to me online as an embroidery that's like, oh, David Crosby's given us the stuff.
But it's really, it's Merlin Mann writing books on efficiency in an office where the walls are covered with post-it notes.
Because it's not, it's not, I know.
I'm going to finish it anytime now.
I'm almost done with my effectiveness book.
At the time, I was like, people were like, oh, Merlin Mann has really straightened out my life.
And I was like, you know, he's writing that book to himself.
He doesn't care whether you're efficient or not.
Can't say it enough.
He's trying to talk himself into being efficient.
And I'm glad that it's helping you.
How can I be a hypocrite about this if I know I'm worse at it than you are?
I mean, in some ways, doesn't that make me the transparent one?
Have you thought about that, Colonel Sanders?
Look at that.
Maybe I'm the one who's actually transparent, and you're the one fronting.
Listen, if you have gotten organized enough to be able to have a PayPal that you attach to somebody taking a class from you, you're way better off than I am, and you're unqualified to teach a class like that.
Ha ha ha!
Ha ha ha!
Ha ha ha!
Like a priori, my friend.
Like if you're that organized, you got nothing to teach because you never had the problem.
I mean, it would be like, it would be like, I always forget which is which, ectomorph, endomorph, but like a very like eternally slender, high metabolism person teaching a weight loss class and like pretending like that's how they got how they are.
And it's like, no, no, no.
This is what I'm doing to stay afloat.
And that's one reason, I don't like to say this too much because it gets tiresome.
But to me, I hope that's one thing that people take away from the wisdom document is like the wisdom project.
I'm not trying to hector you to do this stuff I've heard.
What I'm saying is each, every single fucking thing in here is something I didn't used to know about and didn't used to do.
And it's made me less of a complete shit.
To realize that if people tell you what they want to be called, you should call them that.
Like, I didn't used to do that, right?
Or, for example, to learn that, like, do your chores around the house without expecting a parade.
Like, there's all this shit.
And, like, no, I'm not doing that to be some fucking newspaper columnist.
I'm saying, like, I'm the guy.
My albatross has an albatross around its neck.
I'm just walking around.
I'm wandering around, like, through the various analogies of 19th century literature saying, like, yeah, like, I'm not saying I'm good, but, like, thank Christ I got to be slightly less bad at just this one thing for a little while.
So, you know, you don't clap out of the provisional life.
You don't get to, like, there's no vacation for the provisional life.
You live the life that you've got, and this is this, to quote Christopher Walken.
Yeah.
This is this.
This is one.
I'm not going to look this up, but I did like it.
This purports to be Bob Dylan on David Crosby.
And it's so good.
It's got to be fake.
But anyway, I'm not going to do the voice.
Crosby was a colorful and unpredictable character, wore a Mandrake the Magician cape, didn't get along with too many people, and had a beautiful voice and architect of harmony.
He could freak out a whole city block all by himself.
I liked him a lot.
That sounds like Dylan right at the end.
The mandrake cape I'm not so sure about.
I write about this in my unpublished, my 22, 23-year unpublished book that I've been writing about my walk across Europe.
And it happened to me several times on that walk where I came down some hill into some valley, and the valley was shrouded in mist.
Could it be called How to Walk Across Europe Over 25 Years?
Oh, that's a nice idea.
Put in your pocket.
And the sun is going down and I know that I'm going to sleep in a field that night.
And I don't have any, you know, and I don't even have a Snickers bar.
And I'm just like, I just, you know, before this, before it gets completely dark, I need to find a place to unroll my sleeping bag where I'm not going to get.
Terrific example of like all the problems of the world.
Yep.
Want to help with all of that.
But also I need to find a place where I won't get robbed or die.
And like, I will be slightly.
Yeah.
I mean, that's not selfish to, to hope that you could find a place that particular night that would accommodate you.
But as I come down the hill into the valley and I see a little village and the smoke's coming out of the chimneys, and the thing is, it's summer or late spring.
It's not even a crispy fall night.
Some of it I'm hallucinating because I'm seeing these little houses in the mist, and I'm picturing the people there all sitting around the fire, and they're all—
And they're eating a hearty stew, and they love each other, and they couldn't be anywhere else.
That's the only place they could be, and they want for nothing.
Because it's not just that they have all the material needs, but that I'm alone.
I'm sleeping under their bush, and they're in there loving one another.
And as I would do that, I would hallucinate my own friends back in Seattle and picture them all sitting around in a ski lodge.
drinking cocoa and laughing and loving each other.
Wow.
And I'm out here under this bush and now the sun's going down and I'm, and I'm shivering and I'm trying to, and I'm, I'm trying not to imagine Snickers bars, but what I'm doing is conjuring up this world that I knew was,
And no, never existed.
My friends are not in a ski lodge.
They are embroiled in the same petty disputes that they were when I left.
They are sleeping with each other's girlfriends and they are super mad at each other.
Here's an update for you.
Absence makes the heart grow delusional.
delusional because i was like that with girlfriends like if i wasn't if i had i was in a long-distance relationship with somebody i was well the words i would use today that i was infatuated with which is worse than love in some ways very infatuated with like i would conjure up the craziest fucking visions now and like nowadays if my family's gone for a night i feel like i'm living on like a new yorker cartoon desert island and then the second they come back it's like okay back to normal everything's good back to normal can you can you not leave your dirty dishes in the sink
But your mind, your soul will create these stories, like really exaggerate.
I mean, I'm trying to avoid a phrase that I've used way too much in the last week, fake nostalgia, like ginned up nostalgia, where you come up with these kinds of nostalgia where if you said anything to anybody, like you hopped on a mobile and called them right then, they go like, what are you talking about, John?
We never had marshmallows and hung out and talked about our feelings.
What are you talking about?
You passed out and punched a curb.
I forget what, in what order.
That's exactly it.
And, and, and, and in those moments, it was so clear that I was hallucinating, but the hallucin, and it was an emotional hallucination.
It was not all the, and I don't see in pictures or I don't think in pictures, but I did think in pictures in those moments.
And it was entirely an invention of,
And it was an invention where all the pieces were real.
It was just that I was putting them together in an order, in a picture that didn't exist and never would exist.
And I was, like you're saying, like falsely nostalgic for a thing that had never existed and never would, that was made out of components that I knew were true.
And I feel like part of my provisional life
is that I am doing that even now, knowing that David Crosby was right back in 1972 when he said time begets time.
I'm sitting here at 54 years old, not having...
learned anything hmm well not having learned or not having i mean not to correct you but like kind of like a phrase i learned from a pal max um maybe you haven't operationalized something that you do know like you have in turn something you quote unquote know
into like the tent pole of your behavior and decision making that it maybe wanted to become kind of this this is the question of i'm here and i don't want to be here and all i can do is trace my decisions back and at no point did i make a decision to be here at every point along the way i made decisions that felt like they were taking me somewhere else and every one of them i was like good job man you based you know you made that decision based on what you knew and
And you've learned every step along the way, you learned something and now you're making this decision.
And it just, it's just like, and I'm right back here and there's Jugdash and there's Muhammad.
Same couch, different year.
Same couch, different year, man.
You know, John, you made me want to shout.
Yeah.
A little bit louder now.
A little bit louder now.
A little bit softer now.
A little bit softer now.
Now wait a minute.