Ep. 490: "Sandwich Joe Dorito"
What?
What was that?
I can play that game.
Hang on, let me see.
I think I can do this.
I'm not really set up for this.
Hi, everybody.
Welcome to Roderick on the Line, where John has video on, and I think I do now, too.
Oh, no, we've never done this.
Oh.
Oh, wow.
Look at you.
Okay, I'm going to screen grab this because we look real different.
You look like you're in witness protection.
You got to see this mustache.
We got to turn this off because this will be so distracting.
Look at the mustache.
No, I can see it.
It's phenomenal.
It's absolutely phenomenal.
It's been broadly encouraged.
Oh, good.
Well, I support it.
I was against it.
I was against it.
No, no, no.
It's a whole thing.
It transforms you.
Huh.
huh um don't you think it transforms no i'm sorry i'm so fucking distracted by this um dude okay here's me here's the thing john this is the show i think we should turn off the video really this is but how long we've been doing this show 10 12 14 years i've never seen your face before i would need scientific notation um you've seen my face you've seen me in my underwear
Yeah.
Not on the show.
No.
I'm just wearing sweatpants today.
The problem is, I don't know if this is recording as video.
Oh, I hope it's not recording as video.
What do I look like?
I have no sense of how I appear.
I'm not a big coffee there.
I'm not a cinematographer.
I think you might be described as slightly backlit.
Oh, there you go.
There's a big shot of light.
Look.
You got a real, oh, I don't know, Shakespearean quality.
Oh, yeah.
No, you're not quite a King Lear, but you're definitely somebody who probably gets hanged in Henry V. Oh.
Do you like my mic stand?
Was that your tummy?
Yeah.
It's not tough on your neck to do that?
No, it's not touching my neck at all.
I just put it on my tummy.
And it's basically just pointing up.
This is tremendous.
Okay.
I wonder if this is recording.
Well, but who would watch it?
patreon oh wow dig it um my suggestion would be that we turn off this gruesome video yeah and and then plan oh and we could do that and we could i could test it on my own this is all inside baseball stuff but whatever's in the show is in the show what do you think of my um elephant six records
It's a great shirt.
It's a great, great shirt.
I'm pretty sure it was personally packed by either one of the guys from Olivia Tremor Control or maybe his wife.
I noticed it right away.
I noticed the shirt right away.
I had one of these.
Just to clarify, up above you, behind you, is that a mirror that lets you see around corners on the ceiling?
Okay, I thought we were going to turn this off, but listen.
Let's see.
This is the theater of the mind.
If this is recording video, which I'm pretty sure it's not, I'll put it up.
That's a very good question.
First of all, I need to say that this is, I'm using the camera inside of my computer monitor and it moves when I move.
Oh, whoa.
What is that?
It's a robot.
I know.
How do it know?
Let me try standing up and see if I can get it.
So what you have behind me is what's called a hair light.
Oh.
I can turn it on using my stream deck.
Hang on.
Stand by.
Yeah, turn it on using your stream deck.
Oh.
And I have lights all around me.
Oh.
Because sometimes I have to do video stuff.
Oh, now you get a look at this mustache.
Hang on.
Let me really get in there.
Oh, yeah.
Oh, yeah.
Well, oh.
Oh, it's so good.
It retains moisture in a way that I'm not entirely comfortable with.
You know, those wonderful pictures of you back when you were in the new college and you were living in a New York City subway station and you had those.
I remember that.
You had that wonderful mustache then, you know, that that Dread Pirate Roberts mustache.
How did you not wear it the whole time?
Well, you talked, if memory serves, last time we recorded, you talked about how you had a mustache that wouldn't join in the middle.
Now, for example, our listeners, thank you for listening, are not going to be able to see that I held my index finger over where I imagined John's mustache didn't close up.
You did, but I was there.
The problem is these are new glasses and they're progressive lenses.
Oh, I'm going to write that down.
I want to talk about that.
I just got them and I have no idea where to look.
Oh.
Because you're blurry if I move my head out like this or that.
But like right in the middle, it's very sharp.
My progressive lens glasses that I've had for probably three or four years, long story short, I damage them and I can't use them.
So I can't really see.
I have them.
I would be happy to give you some of my personal pro tips on how to do that.
You're talking about up here because you're the kind of broken that, regrettably, I am.
You maybe have trouble seeing at a distance, but you also have trouble seeing up close.
That's right.
And there's not like one Mr. Magulis you can put on like an astronaut.
So you've got up here in the scene.
You're waving your hands around in the air.
Aren't I animated?
Yes, you are.
This could be very amusing.
Now, up here at this level, it's helping me see far away.
Down here, it's helping me see up close.
And in between is a kind of a DMZ and no man's land.
Yeah, but what I didn't expect is that the peripheral vision is so affected.
Like, if I turn my eyes without turning my head, I have no idea what I'm looking at.
It's just...
Oh, that reminds me a little bit of what it was like to just very first get glasses.
Like when I was a little kid and I put on my dad's glasses, my dad had really bad vision and I put on his incredibly strong glasses.
And usually with family service, the floor looked very far away.
And everything like literally like Coke bottle, like everything was so distorted.
I found I had that happen at first, bless you.
But I, but what happened with these is here's what you got to get used to.
And my lady friend could never get used to this.
Let's say you've got for just for the sake of argument, some McDonald's hash browns.
and you want to i would never have those yeah but that but they're beautiful so like but if it's far away and go hey look at that that there is a golden arch i got no problem with that but i go like this and now here's the key you'll notice i'm bringing this down and what will happen is there's one at least on mine i can't speak for yours i'm not an optometrist on mine there was exactly one spot where i knew i hold it and that would be in perfect focus
yeah yeah yeah yeah right but so you figure out where that is well you learn and it becomes it becomes almost like how you know you give a monkey a rake and and eventually it starts to uh have a sensory input of of the end of the rake even though a rake is not part of monkey and then it makes a japanese garden hi hi hang on
This episode of Roderick on the Line is brought to you in part by Squarespace.
You can learn more about Squarespace right now by visiting squarespace.com slash super train.
Squarespace is the all-in-one platform for building your brand and growing your business online.
You can stand out with a beautiful website and engage with your audience and sell anything, whether that's your products, the content that you create, even your own time.
So much you can do with Squarespace.
You can create a community on your very own Squarespace site with a fully integrated commenting system that supports threaded comments, replies, and likes.
And you can use Squarespace's powerful blogging tools to categorize, share, share,
and schedule your posts.
All Squarespace sites are optimized for mobile, so they look great right out of the box.
Your content will automatically adjust to whatever template you choose.
Your site looks great on any device or dingus.
And maybe you want to save time on cross-posting.
Well, you can.
It's built right in because Squarespace can auto-post your stuff to Twitter, Tumblr, Facebook, personal web brand pages.
All post entries and images are optimized and tagged, so descriptions and titles will be correct wherever you are posting.
I'm a big fan of Squarespace, and you're using Squarespace right now because that, of course, is where we host the Roderick on the Line podcast.
They've been great to me, and they're going to be great to you.
So head on over to squarespace.com slash supertrain,
Get yourself a free trial with no credit card required.
And when you're ready to launch, use our very special offer code SuperTrain.
That's going to save you 10% off your first purchase of a website or a domain.
Once again, squarespace.com slash SuperTrain.
Offer code SuperTrain for 10% off your first purchase.
Our thanks to Squarespace for supporting Roderick Online and all the great shows.
Should I expand this?
What I wanted to do was make the picture of you medium-sized.
But it appears to only want it to be either small size.
Hang on.
Let me see if I can.
I haven't used this feature very much.
I'm turning off center stage.
Or I can turn on portraits so I can be fuzzy in the background.
That's probably not as fun.
Oh, no, that's not as fun.
I want to see Wilberforce back there.
Oh, I'd be happy to give you a tour of the whole place.
God damn it.
If we don't have video of this, I'm going to be so mad.
And now I'm just going to go look.
John, this is so disruptive.
I'm so sorry.
no i'm not sorry you're sorry you you're the one fucked it up that's right i'm not sorry i didn't i didn't here's the thing i didn't touch a single button yeah you called and i that's my problem i was in the middle of texting chris and i and the phone was ringing excuse me i have a little cold the phone was ringing and i said to myself
I'm just going to finish this text to Chris.
I'm going to just say... You said Chris Ballou?
You moved your tummy mic right when you... Was that Chris Ballou you were talking about?
Chris Ballou.
Today is President's Day.
And on every President's Day, I send out a text to all the members of the presidents of the United States of America.
Even Jason.
Even Jason.
And including all past... So Dave Diederer and Mike Musburger, who used to be their drum tech.
And I say happy Pusa Day to everybody.
Aww.
And that's an opportunity for us all to celebrate.
Oh, John, that's so wise.
I used to do a thing where I would try and keep in touch.
If there are people who are important in my life, I try to keep in touch with them usually every six weeks.
Same way you get a haircut, I would try and schedule some kind of interaction every six weeks just to make sure I never got to.
And I abandoned that after probably 12 weeks.
Yeah, it's hard.
It's a lot of work.
It's a lot to keep track of.
That's nice of you to do that.
We were talking about not a surf last night.
Yesterday, yeah.
Who's we?
Oh, just the family.
We were driving to the mall to get some Nintendo Switch products.
I'm not going to talk about Daniel Larco, but he's rocking quite a look right now.
Isn't it just the same look he's always had?
Yeah, but now he's younger than me.
No, really?
No, he's actually 51.
I didn't know that.
Now, my people from Kentucky would say about, with all due respect, he's from, I want to say Spain.
He is from, well, he is from Spain, but he grew up on that island that is half Haiti, half Dominican Republic.
Because his father was the Spanish ambassador to the Dominican Republic in the whenevers.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Okay, sorry.
I just made the exploding brain emoji thing with my fingers.
You did.
Yeah, his dad was the ambassador, and so he grew up
Well, yeah, living in some ambassadorial home.
He's a fancy boy.
You don't get hair like that by accident.
Yeah.
I don't have a computer that follows me around as I move, and I really wish I did.
Where do you get one of those?
Oh, you can get one over the place.
You can go to our mall if you want.
We can go to UCSF and pick one up, use my wife's discount.
Considering we've never done this, but you have a room full of lights, backlights and stuff, when do you do this?
What shows do you do video?
Forgive my asking a question I find myself asking my family three times a week.
Do you care?
Well, I do, yeah.
Okay.
Well, sometimes I do video things.
Oh, God, now you're back late again.
We've got to turn this off because no one can see this.
No, no, no.
The problem is I'm... Oh, shit.
Are you into it now?
Well, no.
It's just that my computer is sitting on my tummy, and so it's broadcasting like my underbeard.
Well, that's okay.
This is not for anybody but me.
Oh.
But still, you always like to be a good host.
What video content do you make on the reg?
Well, during the COVID times, we had kind of brought back You Look Nice Today with two changes.
One was we were recording it via Zoom, I guess.
Well, the other guys both died, right?
Who did you replace them with?
Oh, we got sandwich Joe.
That's a good enough sandwich anymore.
We got sandwich Joe Dorito.
Uh-huh.
I didn't even get the Three Stooges joke right.
Curly Joe Dorito.
God damn it.
Curly Joe Dorito.
But Sandwich Dorito, I'm going to write that down.
That's pretty good.
The three of us would record it.
And the idea was that we would do it with video and that it would be less actively edited and would be edited by somebody that's not Adam.
Because Adam's a big businessman.
He's a busy guy.
So it's fun.
We do some fun stuff.
And then, you know, here's how I am, John, is I like projects.
And I sometimes get real into something that I don't, I absolutely don't need to get into.
And at one point I got really into the video setup.
So I got a really nice camera, like as in like a pro quality video camera.
But that's not what's pointing at you right now.
Shit, no.
It's in a box.
Also, you know, you know.
It's got a lot of new microphones that weren't, you know, what I want.
Oh, that's beautiful.
Oh, this is a beautiful microphone.
Yeah, it's really noisy.
But that's what we did.
But yeah, and then sometimes I thought, well, you know, I'm going to talk to my shrink.
I got a lot of inspiration for my shrink, who has a Blackmagic camera, like I got a 6K Blackmagic camera, and he's got a really nice setup.
Like a Blackmagic woman.
Mm-hmm.
Speaking of which, I saw you favorited a tweet about Journey last night.
Mm-hmm.
I did.
Don't you feel kind of bad for Greg Raleigh?
Mm-hmm.
I don't know.
It's hard to, I've got a list of people that I feel bad for, and I don't know where, I don't know.
You don't know where it is.
I don't know where it is.
Yeah, it's right around here somewhere.
I mean, I don't lose sleep over it.
But, you know, he's the guy who sang, if memory serves, he's the guy who sang Black Magic Woman in the band Santana.
Yes.
And then, but then 1978 rolls along and they're like, Oh, Hey, there's this new guy.
He's coming to practice.
It's going to be whatever.
And he's like, Oh, it's this kid.
This kid, I don't think his name is Steve Perry or whatever.
Yeah.
This young guy.
And then he gets up there on his keyboard and he goes,
I open my eyes to a new kind of way.
And then, and you're like, holy shit.
And Greg Raleigh's just like, it's like watching Donovan watch Bob Dylan.
Well, you know, it's like Steve, Steve, the guitar player, Steve, Steve, the guitar player of Def Leppard.
Steve Collin.
Collin?
No, that's the other guy.
Phil Collin.
Phil Collin.
Two L's and an E, and he had three humbuckers on a flying V.
Three, well, he was, you know, Phil Collin, didn't he have, he had a Explorer.
Oh, Explorer, sorry.
Explorer.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
But, that's him, right?
But Steve was the, he was originally the lead guitar player of Def Leppard, and then Phil Collin came in, and then he took all the leads, and then Steve was just,
He was just like a young kind of blonde, handsome guy.
You're right.
Explorer.
I'm sorry.
I'm confusing my, um, handsome.
He's kind of balding, but yeah, he had that, uh, what my wife calls a hipster comb over hipster comb over.
Yeah.
We have a mutual acquaintance here in town who has a hipster comb over, um, knowingly, or is it somebody that you want to stage an intervention?
Um,
I don't get out as much as I'd like.
No, wait a minute.
That's false.
You don't get out as much as you used to.
Which is exactly as much as I would like.
Oh, dear.
Coffee's coming back on you.
I took a COVID test.
Good.
John, do you see some of our listeners?
No.
This was not my idea, okay?
No, no, no.
To do this in video.
John took the microphone off of his abdomen and turned to his left and went, ca-ha, ca-ha, ca-ha.
But I pointed the mic to the right.
That's because you got good mic skills.
Yeah, I got mic skills.
Is that the proximity effect, John?
Is that what that is?
No, the proximity effect is a different thing.
That's also the name of a Not A Surf album.
Yeah, Hyperspace is on that one.
Ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding.
Oh, Jesus.
Sorry, Syracuse.
Hands up, who thinks it's now?
Do you remember when somebody actually made us, years ago, somebody made me a cough button, and they sent it to me in the mail.
Just getting its coughs.
Hey, here you go.
Yeah, it just had a loop of all of my best coughs.
That's like buying your girlfriend a vagina.
What an odd gift.
I was like, well, but now, you know, now it's going to affect my signal chain.
Oh, shit.
Yeah.
And so I ended up.
Yeah, I got some, I think I've got some circles in my mic cables because sometimes I pick up phone signals.
So I probably need to read you all of that.
But I don't like to touch anything, John, because, you know, if it works mostly, it's better than it not working.
Yeah.
Yeah, it's probably 62 cycle hum, maybe 60.
Did you say 62?
62, 63 cycle hum, yeah.
Okay.
Yeah.
Syracuse is going to like that, too.
So you just want to leave – is this a pilot program?
We're just going to try this one, even though I can promise you our listeners will not be able to see this.
Do you think we can get through this?
It's very, very unusual.
I mean, it is nice to see you, but –
But I also, because of my new bifocals, I'm not sure where to look.
Normally, I don't look at anything.
You look really wise.
Oh, thank you.
You look like, well, I mean, obviously, you have played a Wes Anderson-style character in a December's video, but you do kind of look like you might be in the Royal Tenenbaums a little bit.
It's good.
Yeah.
I think that that's where it's going to end up for me.
Do you have a certain character you're angling for?
Angelica Houston.
Is there somebody you'd like to be in the gritty Royal Tenenbaums reboot?
Yeah, Royal Tenenbaum.
There's no other job for me.
The titular Royal Tenenbaum.
Yeah, who else am I going to be except for the chainsaw?
Well, you could be Martin Starr, or I think the character you were meant to look like a little bit in the video, the Bill Murray, Oliver Sacks character.
Right, right, right, right.
You know, when that movie came out, Sean Nelson and I went to see it, and he said, Royal Tenenbaum is basically your father—
And it had not occurred to me because we didn't live in New York and we didn't, we weren't that fancy.
But, uh, it's not entirely wrong.
And I kind of am sort of ready to, ready to be that, you know, I'm, I'm, I'm about that bad.
Right.
Wouldn't you say?
Um, I'm thinking about it because I'm trying to take away the sort of like, okay, like if you had to, what's the, as I say in, you know, the,
the business what's the log line for this movie and like what's the if you had to like distill this down to what happens in this movie in this case if we do that for this character you're gonna go oh he's this guy he's duplicitous he can't be trusted he's kind of a con man he's very self-involved but you know there's also just a certain kind of dad from a certain time who was not around all the time
Right.
Or maybe like certainly emotionally.
I remember in college first hearing that phrase emotionally unavailable, which at the time I thought was a little fruity.
But now I love it.
Like, I don't love it, but I think it's meaningful.
And I think your dad, it sounds like it's from an age of ambitious men.
who had the reasons for doing things and and i think gene hackman had that too probably i don't know what do you think i don't think you're i don't know if you're awful i don't want to know if you're awful i've had it with knowing about people and their awfulness me too thank god i'm not a penis lawyer you know you said it i'm tired of hearing about other people's awfulness tired of it
What do you want me to do?
I'm not awful.
No, I'm amazing.
Yeah, that's true.
But the thing about emotional unavailable, and I almost said the thing about emotional unavailability, but then that would endorse it.
So I stopped, and I said the thing about emotional unavailable, because I wanted to pull back on it.
Hell, you kind of want to change your thesis statement.
Yeah, that's right.
That's the wonderful thing about typewriters.
You get halfway through a sentence, and you can't.
what the what are you who's your example are you thinking okay my god this is another reason we don't shoot video is this so you cannot see merlin drinking iced tea out of a one one liter beaker oh yeah or a thousand milliliters as it says there the pyrex but it is the wrong iced tea and that looks like an arnold palmer if i'm not mistaken
No, it's got lime juice.
Also, it's a little cloudy because it's from Friday.
It's cloudy, and that really amplifies the, this is a sample taken from, this is a sample.
Oh, no, from a man who's not well?
This is a sample that's part of an autopsy.
Susie, rush this to the lab.
We put a hose into his abdomen, and this is what came out.
It smells like a downtown theater.
Mock schnell.
But no, the thing about emotional unavailable...
Is, are you emotionally available?
See, that's going to be a tough question to ask me because I will answer it.
My problem is, as I've realized in my journey, is that suddenly I'm talking about Kenneth on 30 Rock.
The clicker has a water bug on it.
I don't think I'm emotionally unavailable.
I think sometimes I have what I would call
I have called this the wrong emotion and inappropriate emotion.
I think sometimes there's a disconnect between what's happening up on my mind grapes and then like what's actually happening and how I act with people.
No, I don't think I'm emotionally unavailable.
I think of all my things that are terrible about me, I think I hope I'm emotionally available.
I can be very effusive with people.
I don't think I'm withholding.
That's an old, old jab.
No, I don't think I am, but there's a lot of dads who are like that, because it's dads all the way down.
I mean, that's a joke.
We're making, you know, what, a Richard Feynman joke there?
But there really is this whole thing of, like, kids and boys and their dads and the dads and the dads, and it's just this...
It's all just like, it's all just like such tragedy.
I don't think I am, but like, I'm probably more, I wish I was more of a rock sometimes.
But then the truth is, I like how I am, which I know you're not supposed to say, but I do.
I think you're supposed to say that.
Why would you say you weren't supposed to say that?
That's lovely.
I like who I am.
Is that considered a humble brag?
No, God, is there a higher aspiration that any of us could have?
I mean, I don't like how I am.
Oh, right, right, right, right.
But I like how I am.
But I like who I am.
I mean, if I could be like Lily Tomlin and punch in some different quarter-inch jacks into different holes and have different people through to the president, I would do that.
But I can't.
I mean, this is what I've got.
I'm just as God made me, sir.
The thing about emotional unavailable...
is there's the when you're done with that is that does that become a hyphenated like an adjective the thing with no it's a noun isn't it yeah emotional unavailable emotional unavailable there's no comma or not even applied comma no okay oh you could put a hyphen emotional unavailable okay it's you know like uh like howley smoot wait i know that go oh wait there get there uh uh uh is that as a ferris bueller
That's an act about business, right?
Okay, all right, good.
Am I there?
Good, you're very close.
Smoot Holly.
Smoot Holly.
There you go.
Laffer Curve.
The Laffer Curve.
Something do?
I'm really sorry, Syracuse.
I can't see the actual shot of you expelling your sputum across the studio.
I should have moved the microphone on that one.
Oh, that's okay.
No, but so my question is always— And I don't know if your dad—if you can bring it back to your point, though.
I don't know if your dad was like that.
I mean, Gene Hackman is at least a character in a movie.
I wouldn't draw too much from it.
But I do think that—and I don't want to get into a thing here, especially when we're looking at each other.
But a theme that's become very—
i don't know unavoidable for you is this whole thing of like what we talk about what we can't talk about and all those kinds of things and i honestly one of the things that i find a bummer is that um when i try and tell you a tell somebody a story from the 1970s or the 1980s and i say and here's the word we would have used for that it sounds like i'm committing some kind of contemporaneous hate crime it's like no what i'm saying is like i would never say that now because i've grown and
But in order for, and it's not important for you to know that I've grown, but it is important for you to know that change has happened in the world.
And for me to use a different word than the word that was used, let's say way that my family would refer to the guy who was pumping their gas in the early 1970s.
It was not a pretty word because that's the word everybody in my family used to talk about that kind of person.
And for me to say, you know, whatever fully inhabited vomine of color is not what we would have said.
And that was the problem.
I'm trying to point out what the problem was, but I can't tell you that was a problem if I'm only allowed to say what you think is acceptable in the first quarter of 2023.
Yeah.
It bums me out.
Well, it does me too.
And I feel like the tide is turning and that's maybe, that's maybe a, I don't know whether that's a conversation or not, but I do feel like, and we've all been saying this for years, this can't, the center can't hold.
And I do feel like something's changing right now.
And everybody's mad.
And that's wonderful.
Also, Twitter's not as good as it used to be.
Hey, you know, I've noticed that too.
It actually got worse over the weekend.
Yeah, I noticed that.
I don't know if you noticed this.
Twitter actually somehow got worse over the weekend.
Yeah, it really does feel like you're on a bobsled and everyone's facing backwards.
Well, it sounds like it's stopping a circle jerk, and it's just turned into putting up flyers for a circle jerk.
Yeah, flyers for a circle jerk.
I'm going to write that down.
Emotional unavailable.
My problem with it over the last, let's say, 30 years is that I don't know...
There's the emotional unavailable that you feel you might be, that you're working on, that you're trying to change.
You're trying to be, and when I say you, I mean me, trying to be more available because you've heard yourself described as emotionally unavailable by others.
And you go, oh, am I?
I didn't.
That's not a thing that you feel, right?
It's a thing that you recognize because somebody else says it enough times that you're like, what does that mean?
So eventually maybe you get a little bit like annoyed or sensitive about it.
Well, and then you try to figure it out.
You try to figure out what are they talking about?
What does that mean emotionally unavailable?
I'm here.
I'm here in the room like everybody else.
Like if you say things to me, I respond.
If you cut me, do I not bleed?
Precisely so.
And, uh, and so then you think like, oh, well, okay.
So enough people say it and the tone of voice they use when they say it means that this is something that they want me to work on.
Is this something I should want to work on about myself?
Well, and it's like the way I would put it is that it sounds like they're saying this is the way that you need to speak.
Or by extension, I guess, think.
But I feel like sometimes what they're really saying is this is how I need to hear you.
This is how you need to present yourself.
It's like I have this little pamphlet I'm going to hand you of all the ways that you have to claim the world works in order for us to go back and forth with each other.
But the other problem is that emotional available is that for a lot of men, I feel...
Whether they realize it or not, the default emotion tends to be anger.
So that emotion is frequently very available.
What's difficult for everybody, including dads and current people, real people, is that resisting the urge to put yourself at the center of everything that's happening at any given time.
And if we sit with that for a minute, then that becomes a way of also understanding, oh, that's why you keep telling me that you're an introvert and here's how to care and feed for you.
Here's how you tell me that what I'm doing is regressive in your estimation and here's how I need to speak and all these things.
But if you, maybe it sounds cynical, but...
The line that runs through almost all of those things almost all the time is an inability to notice, let alone resist the impulse to put yourself at the center of every single exchange.
For me, it always was levied as a critique of my performance as a companion.
Right, like as a boyfriend, as a lover, as a friend, as a family member.
As a man-mate?
Well, no, because— But more with romantic partners.
Yeah, I don't think a man has ever told me I was emotionally unavailable.
Um, but then again, you know, among my friends, like I've, I've had, uh, I've had problems.
I've had serious issues that have plagued me for 10 years that even my closest friends don't know about because I wouldn't.
That's not what, that's not what you do.
You don't tell your friends that stuff.
You think Royal Tenenbaum would do that?
Yeah.
What the hell are you going to go out?
That should be a little rubber bracelet.
What would Royal Tenenbaum do?
You know, hang out with your friends.
Hey, how's it going?
Oh man, some really bad stuff.
It's been really plaguing my heart.
Oh dude, tell me more.
No, it's actually, I'm so glad you asked.
It's actually been really, really bad and I can't keep it in anymore.
Ooh, geez.
Look at that.
There's one correct answer to how's it going.
Correct.
Great, dude.
How are you going?
Anyway, fine, fine.
Let's do whatever it is we're here to do.
But so but I did, you know, because as you know, I like to I like to imagine that I'm at fault for everything.
And so when somebody over the years would say, oh, well, your problem is you're emotionally unavailable.
it seemed like they were handing me the keys to like, oh, here's how I, here's, this might solve your problem if you just became emotionally available.
And I've tried, I've tried, I've spent decades trying to, A, figure out what that means, and B, figure out if it applies.
Right, right.
And all this stuff that you were just talking about, about our society and civilization right now,
is all about other people diagnosing each other, people constantly diagnosing each other.
You know what your problem is?
Yeah, it's a kind of, it's the new pastime in America is binning, like figuring out what bin you go in and what that says about you, right?
But for me as a person that has wanted to get better, there's also like what you're doing inside.
And I continue to be told that I'm emotionally unavailable by people.
But I've spent 30 years thinking about it, and I don't think I am.
I think I was, but I think I've done a lot on that subject.
And when I hear somebody tell me I'm emotionally unavailable now…
What I hear is them saying something about themselves.
I try not to do that because it's really just inverting the same problem.
And yet it's difficult to avoid sometimes.
Is that like, well, you've got, you know, sometimes one meets people in life where I don't could say that they have a hammer and everything's in a nail, but they do have a preference for hammers.
And like, I would prefer to turn this into, well, I'll put it Merlin's words.
Hey, I'm Mr. Dude out here, and I want to turn this into a thing that's the thing that I like to be, let's be honest, angry with people about.
Or I like to be, you know what I mean?
So it is kind of, it is not hypocritical exactly, but it's a little bit ironic how often it turns into, well, let me stop you there and just tell you how you actually are and why that's a problem.
I have a friend, I went to dinner with her the other night, and she works at Harborview, which is a level four trauma center.
and she works there in a capacity as like a trauma triage person and as you can imagine like if you are a sex worker you develop a certain uh idea about about men and sexuality if you are a trauma input person at a at a trauma center you definitely get a worldview that um because you have that job it kind of
it kind of trumps other people's worldview if you're in the game of trumping other people's worldview right and which is again another thing anybody who has a job where you meet you will sometime this week and probably today you will encounter somebody having the worst day of their life and at the very least you're expected to help them or you're expected to like make up for the fact that they think it's your fault
And I'm not a fan of cops, but a lot of cops do have to meet somebody on their worst day.
And then like, you know, well, you know, and they're mad because they got arrested or whatever.
But you know what I mean?
Like it's, this goes for United Customer Service, which I'm not sure is even a thing.
But you know what I mean?
All those different kinds of things.
They're listening right now.
Of course they are.
They're now part of NSA.
It's part of this.
You can transfer your SkyMiles.
But the thing about this gal is that she's very smart and she is wise.
And so a lot of people defer to her, her take on whatever it is, because she has not only the authority of being a smart person.
Is she a medical-ish person?
No, she's not.
She's a social worker.
So the triage is not.
Is that like an MSW?
But some kind of like dealing with, so it could be, I mean, could it be something like a person who's been a victim of domestic violence?
A lot of that.
A lot of that.
A lot of trauma, but not, it's not like people on their worst day.
My God.
It's not motorcycle crash trauma.
It's like, it's a thousand other kinds of trauma.
Oh, don't worry.
I know, I know from trauma.
Yeah, I know you do.
I've read a book about it.
But, uh, but the problem is, you know, of course that that is a, that that is a skewed worldview.
And yet in the world that we're living in right now, where everybody is trauma forward, everybody's putting their trauma at the very beginning of the, their introduction.
It's like, hi, I'm so-and-so and here's my trauma and that's how I want to be addressed.
And that's how I want to be thought of, um, to be someone that is in social work in a trauma field puts her in a situation where kind of conversationally, um,
Um, everybody goes around the table, Hey, how's your day?
And then it, you know, and then she kind of has the final word on it.
Um, and knowing her for a long time and, and knowing that when she and I talk like the, and this is the thing that gets me in trouble with the world is that I don't necessarily cede that authority to her, uh, to, to have a take on things that,
derived from her experience as a trauma counselor that becomes like, I won't let her say things about all men or all of late stage capitalism or all of- That's implicitly a flex of saying, let me stop you there because I do this all day and ergo-
this yeah exactly not necessarily her but that is a thing people do and that's a thing we see we see now everybody doing right they take whatever their experience is as an airbender or a waterbender or a or a firebender and then they say as a firebender it's not just that everything is a hammer but you know everything is flammable or everything is uh
I don't know enough about airbenders to continue that analogy.
Well, when your only tool is a hammer, everything looks like Uncle Iroh.
Yeah, when your only tool is an analogy of an airbender show that you've only watched a couple episodes of.
You should try Korra.
Korra's really good, too.
Everything is an airbender, which I'm not even sure what an airbender is.
They bend the air.
Yes, they do.
Yeah, but what is air, man?
But that becomes – it becomes really tricky now these days to kind of assert anything –
Without being able to refer to your priors to give you authority, right?
Like the way you would introduce in a courtroom setting, you would introduce an expert witness.
And this is ironically enough.
This is actually something I know about because this used to be my job was to help help people who helped attorneys who were expert witnesses appear prepared for cases.
Oh, I won't confront you or challenge you at all.
Well, you're very emotional and available.
Sounds to me.
No, no.
But that idea of like, for that matter, it could be like a cop.
Anytime you've been on jury duty, you know how they bring somebody out and they like, first they like, they swear a man, they do their bona fides.
And there's always this thing where they're like, you know, I've testified in 1000 cases and blah, blah, blah.
And I've done this.
And I have this many, you know, papers that I've published and things like that.
Kind of like that, where like you begin, before we even hear from this person, we need to establish their bona fides.
And the flip side of that now is, of course, there's all these realms where we automatically walk in saying, look, I'm not an expert here.
I don't know anything about this.
I can't speak to that because I'm not a person.
I'm not a member of that group.
I'm not a person that had that life experience.
And so...
I'm absenting myself from having an opinion here.
Yeah, like you have to provide a heartfelt recusal.
Yeah, that's right.
So we're living in an era where your authority is something that you –
that you can claim, right?
Like none of us know, because you see this all the time.
People go like, well, do you know my life experience?
Like, did you know that I grew up in, it's the Jesse Thorne thing.
Like, no, no, no.
I grew up in East Oakland.
Like I can talk about hip hop.
And you're like, mm, mm, eh.
Everybody's trying to establish.
Because that doesn't match my model.
No, you can't be.
Look at you.
You're a guy who wants to be on public radio.
You can't be from a city.
This weird thing about having to establish your authority before you're able to talk, whereas really anybody can talk and have an opinion and an informed opinion.
You could grow up in a library, only read books, never have seen daylight, and yet have like a really interesting perspective on a thousand things.
And the flip side is you could live on the streets.
You could be a person that's been around the world and know not a goddamn thing and have no useful opinions about anything.
Like having opinions and having ideas about things really –
It is related to lived experience, but it's not a one-to-one correlation.
Lived experience does not commute immediately to wisdom, and lack of lived experience doesn't negate the possibility you might have –
true wisdom about a thing or about a lot of things but but also that i mean just from my point of view like the the the the thing that runs through all this i'm just repeating myself now that whole like putting yourself at the center of it and um you know it sounds like some kind of like john mulaney bit we're like okay everybody everybody like stop talking and let's do the thing i say that i'm good at
Like, I've decided now we're all going to talk about this particular way, which sounds silly, except that it's actually kind of what people do a lot of the time.
And, you know, one of my, I have so, oh God, I used to say this was my least favorite dependent clause, but I have so many now.
But one of my least favorite dependent clauses is, in a sense, that begins well as a,
Insert name of thing.
You know, it's almost like a cliche, a comedy cliche at this point, you know?
You mean like as a chef?
Yes.
Well, as somebody who grew up... Cream sauce.
As someone who... Let me give you the full show.
Well, as someone who actually did grow up in Oakland...
Let me just or like, you know, as somebody who strangled chickens for 10 years or like whatever it is.
And it's like, well, you know, we've it's part of that hegemony that we each carry with us is that ability to make the thing all about the thing that we want it to be.
And like, as I get older, I think the things that I think and some of the things that a lot of things I say are actually becoming a lot less profound and maybe in some ways.
depending on your point of view, maybe less useful.
But a lot of times my observation about that was, wow, whatever you know and whatever you believe, you were kind of a dick about that just now in a way that was not only unnecessary, but it seemed like you kind of do it a lot and really like being a dick about that.
And I don't know fuck all about choking chickens in Oakland, but I do know that you're the sort of person who I would not...
want to be real close to and I definitely wouldn't trust everybody's a fucking dick now it's really it's such a thing do you think it's fear of vulnerability and looking weak it might be emotional unavailable
Emotional and available.
Yeah.
You know, the thing about, and I'm not trying to throw Jesse under the bus, although he belongs under the bus.
Throw him under the BART.
But his opinions about hip hop really can stand on their own.
He's got good opinions about hip hop.
He doesn't need to have been from Oakland.
It does not, being from Oakland does not bear, really.
It is a false bona fides.
And it's because of a feeling of insecurity that I'm a white guy and I'm on NPR, and so I can't talk about this because I don't have authoritorial – is that even a thing?
Authoritarian standing.
Authoritarian available.
Yeah, authoritarian available.
But in fact, you do, right?
And I mean, we grew up in an era where the generalist was still admired.
Because the implication in all of that is, yeah, but you're not black, so you can't know much about it.
That's right.
It's so weird.
So what, you heard it on the BART, and that gives you authority?
You heard it coming from the streets?
Like at your private school?
Like at your Waldorf school over wooden speakers?
Yeah.
One wonderful thing about you, Merlin, is that you are a polymath.
And I say it to people all the time.
Merlin's a polymath.
He's an autodidact.
Please don't talk about me to other people.
He's a self-educated genius.
He's got a big-ass tea.
He drinks other people's samples.
And that's what I always aspired to do, too.
I mean, the thing about Royal Tenenbaum is he's been around the world.
He's a lawyer.
He's a lawyer.
He's a lawyer, right?
But he's a bad lawyer.
But, you know...
He was stabbed by his House Martin.
All I ever wanted to be was somebody that had been everywhere and seen everything and done everything and not been really good at or been an expert at any of those things.
And I think I'm on that path.
I think I am not good at any particular thing.
You're halfway there.
And I'm on my way.
I've been halfway around the world.
but we're living you've been you've been undressed by kings yes and you've seen some things that a woman just ain't supposed to see i have for sure you've you've been to paradise but you've never been to john i'm trying to get to john that's what this is all about you know what that's what this that's what this journal of mental hygiene is all about just trying to get i'm trying to get to john you're trying to get to merlin
Yeah, I don't know.
So I do not like to be in conversations where it's a pissing match of who has the authority to speak.
Yeah.
Like that's a shit way to construct a world.
And it's a really shit way to construct a conversation.
And what is the world if not a conversation, right?
And being on Twitter now...
is is so awful because it's people with like i mean following the war in ukraine you look at you look at four-star generals can you believe he would go over there on president's day the insult can you believe the insult to american history that on a make on a make believe on a make believe how do you even describe it on a make believe clusterfuck rat king of a fucking holiday that's never been very meaningful
Half birthday of two presidents that never knew each other.
Since I was a child, John, it's up with Arbor Day for, like, the least meaningful holiday.
It's a day off.
It's a holiday-free time in the, you know, like February.
In the calendar, yeah, until Easter, yeah.
I just kind of want a little thing here.
Yeah.
Sorry, go ahead.
Ukraine.
Well, only to say, right, I don't have any authority, and yet—
Authority.
Yeah, you cannot silence me.
The end.
Mic drop.
But as a consumer of that information or as somebody who has a thought or a reckon about what's happening and what will happen?
That's the thing.
A thought or a reckon about what will happen.
I will not challenge a four-star general about tank tactics because I –
I am a full-grown person and know better than to walk into a warehouse and go up to the logistics manager and tell him he's doing it wrong, having only been there for five minutes.
But also just the fact that you like, you're like a 60 year old man dressed like a Morton Joe.
Like you're a 60 year old man.
You're still like your whole place is like you've, I understand it's all about honor and your buddy's dying face down in the mud and all that kind of stuff and honor and honor and all those things.
But like, Jesus, it's so, it's so sweaty.
Can't you just go and do a good job without constantly going to some kind of fucking Keith Olbermann mode about service, sir?
And you haven't figured out how to silence your cell phone for a TV interview.
I mean, the thing is, we're all good at some things, and a lot of us are bad at lots of things, but does everybody else, is it a zero-sum game?
Does everybody else have to be not the general for you to be the general?
Do you feel like you're doing a good job at your job?
uh yeah i think i do a pretty good job i i mean just to to problematize it or complicate it a little bit i think i try pretty hard at my job given how quote-unquote easy it is but i think i do i think i do a pretty good job at the but the thing is my job has jobs so like there's go on well i mean a podcast is um okay john are you all right you see me blowing on your camera what are you doing you can't see this but i wish i could get a really good big shot of this
Oh my God.
It's like, it's like I told somebody I wanted a dog and they gave me a very ill terrier.
uh yeah i think i'm pretty i think i'm pretty good at it it's not at the jobs that are your job or at the job that is your jobs well i mean i'm i don't know i i'm trying to give you an interesting answer that's not overly long and complicated but like i i said this recently to my friend alex and i don't talk about this too much because who fucking cares but like i realized or accepted that uh the way that i think of what i do is that i'm a writer that okay now we're getting somewhere i like this
Well, even though I mostly do podcasts and stuff, I'm not going to say even that it's just my mind or my approach, but it's at the center of everything that I do, even or especially if you don't notice it.
Especially if you don't notice it, you'll never realize that my job is to be a writer.
Sometimes that's deciding what the title for this show will be or what the problem should be.
And then the decision of like, what's the alt text?
This is just for one episode of the show.
What's the alt text on this photo?
What photo do I steal from somebody?
What's the problem?
What's the thing?
What's all those different things?
And like each one of those decisions is considered.
Like there's nothing in there.
unless I've made an error, none of those is just something that just happened or it was just fast and easy when I write the show notes for something.
All those kinds of things.
And so, although you can tell that I'm still kind of self-conscious about having any kind of job that's not working in a coal mine,
because that's down down down but the uh i think i'm okay good at it i think i'm i think the things that i produce are pretty good if for no other reason then oh that's the thing i wanted to make you know this show it's okay if you don't like this show but this show turns out pretty much exactly how i wanted it to turn out and i consider that a success
um and so like as i like unsubscribe from more and more and more podcasts where it's no longer you can no longer even hide how uninterested anybody involved in the project is oh like um yeah like like a lot of stuff that i used to be really super into there's all kinds of ways i won't go into it but like i think i'm okay good at my job i think um one note i could take from you that i probably won't but i could is to be a little bit more ambitious um
not just in terms of future proofing, but I probably could, as they like to say, challenge myself more.
But I also don't, I care about quality of life and I care about time with my family.
And so I'm pretty picky about what I'll just try for the hell of it, especially if it's time consuming.
And so, yeah, I think I'm pretty good.
What about you?
Well, you know, I got a feeling I know how you're going to answer.
I wouldn't claim to be a writer because think of all the writers who are listening to the show who are like, you know, I went to 17,000 years of school and I wrote one million billion trillion pages.
John, are you talking about real writers like people who went to the program at Iowa?
That's right.
Real writers who have a right to speak about writing that you and I have not earned.
Thank you.
Have not earned the right.
I watched my buddies die face down in the mud in Ames, Iowa, trying to defend their thesis.
That's right.
I went to seven community colleges, sir.
Sir.
And I wrote in every one of them.
I fulfilled all the core requirements in seven distinct two-year programs.
I have a friend that was scared to go to college, and so she went to community college, and she stayed at her local community college, coincidentally, in Oakland.
Hayward.
She went to that community college for like eight years.
Eight years.
Speaking of Wes Anderson.
Has nine associate's degrees.
Because she was too scared to leave Hayward.
Captain of the Yankee Racers, the Rushmore Beekeeper Society.
She's a legacy.
He's one of the worst students we've got.
She's like, I don't regret any of it.
And I'm like, I don't know.
You could have just gone to Lincoln.
I see something in that.
For some reason now, of course, I'm obviously, I'm going to think of a million different things like arrested development, like where Buster has learned, had like $100,000 worth of cartography classes, but doesn't know that the blue part is the water.
Like there's all those kinds of things or or like Connor on succession, you know, like, God, what a wonderful role.
What a wonderful Alan Rock is so great in that role as this guy who just does not realize he's just not as smart as he thinks.
He's had so many classes and he does.
He's totally unaware of the basically life of.
He's had a life, maybe not a life of leisure, although he has.
I would call it a life.
He's had a life of options and didn't realize it.
He doesn't even realize the options that he was able to pursue came out.
But I think there is.
I'm old school.
If I were on the wall, I would be Sam.
Because I don't know how to fight.
And I like girls more than I want to admit.
And I like to read.
Do you know the character I'm talking about on Game of Thrones?
He's the guy who is Jon Snow's friend on the wall.
Oh, sure.
He becomes a maester.
Samwise Gamgee.
Something like that.
He's the one that discovers, spoiler alerts, that Jon Snow is not actually a Stark.
And he discovers that only in the very end.
Yeah, but he's still the king in the north, and Ned Stark's blood runs in his veins.
He refused to call.
But like that, like, you know what?
I almost went to electronics school.
I had the parking sticker.
I was enrolled to go to the school near the, I've told the story before, but I was enrolled in 1985, early 86th.
I was enrolled to start school at the United Electronics Institute.
To learn to solder?
Partly, yeah.
My friend Darren went there and became very successful in NCR.
A lot of air conditioning, more like cash registers, small business machines.
That's what I was going to do before the new college thing happened.
And, and then instead I went, I got to go to new college, I think probably cause I knew somebody, but like the point is though, like I could have taken more practical things, but I didn't want to.
In retrospect, I now realized that, you know, like they say, like, especially with pregnant ladies, like you're hungry for certain foods and you don't know why.
I don't know if that's true, but like your body may crave iron.
Like I, I think what I, I mean, I didn't even know what I was in for, but in retrospect, what I can say is
I did not know how hungry I was to learn how to learn.
And it's one thing to go and be, think about this.
And if that doesn't make sense, think about the people you knew in college in your program at UW versus the try hard, sweaty, straight A, like all my friends who were girls basically in 11th grade, everybody who was in the top 10 of students every year.
Like if they can get a straight A, they fell apart, they studied hard for every test.
They end up going to a school like New College and they're there for a month because there's like, wait a minute, how will other people know that I'm great at this?
And what is the structure for, what is the clear structure for me becoming great at this?
Those folks will find a path in life, but there are people like me who are like, oh yeah, but like maybe what I need is to have something that's really as ultimately not that significant as metaphysics or phenomenology
Maybe that's something I need to look at for a while to learn about how to learn, to learn how to use a library.
This all sounds silly.
I'm not trying to sandbag.
I'm saying like, that's such a valuable thing.
And to this day, I still carry that with me.
And so like, I guess the pivot I'm making so poorly is maybe Buster doesn't know how to find water on a map.
And maybe Connor is never going to be president.
He got the wrong kind of sand for Willis play.
And that gave Greg might.
But I do think there's something so valuable if you're fortunate enough to end up getting a chance to be away from all of the rough and tumble of young adulthood to be able to focus on learning something.
And for some people, that honestly is the army.
There are people that like fucking straightens them out in a way.
There are people, I bet there are people who are like, I don't say Navy SEALs because I think they're sort of canceled, but people who are badasses, like who are in like some kind of like, just even, not even, but a Marine.
Being a Marine is not easy.
And it's like, but there are people, I'll bet you some of the folks who came into that program were really kind of a piece of shit.
Oh, yeah.
And then got real straightened out by having a structure.
It's just that we do need different things, but I'm not against 14 years of associate degrees, especially if you get to keep reading books and it meets your schedule and the people in your life don't mind.
I don't think there's anything wrong with that.
I remember one of the wonderful things about the comparative history of ideas, which, as you know, was my UW program, was there was very... Is it pronounced Chud?
Chid.
And that was always...
A bone of contention for me because it shouldn't have been Chid, comparative history of ideas.
It should have been Choi.
But they called it Chid.
Also, is it the histories that are being compared or the ideas?
The histories of ideas are what's being compared.
Okay.
Okay.
But I remember standing in the back of a big lecture hall.
And, uh, standing with Jim Klaus, who was running the program and he was watching a big room full of, you know, students.
And this was a lecture hall.
This was a class that everybody had to take in order to be in the program.
And he said, you know, it's a cliche to say it, but, but really we, we measure our success here in how much the people that come out of the program understand how little they know.
Which is so fucking smart, and it's not just clever.
That is basically one of the few very good things Plato or Socrates ever said.
It really is true that you cannot, until you're a little bit more rasa of a tabula, there's not going to be room to mark down the good new information.
And he was saying it as an actual...
like a practical teaching philosophy, right?
That's a good way to build a scientist, I'll tell you that, right?
He wanted every one of these students to, at the end of every class, have more questions than they had answers.
Will this be on the test?
What I realized in going through that program and in thinking about that moment with him over the years is that that is incredibly hard
not just incredibly hard for each individual student.
And a lot of people bounce out because that's not what they're looking for.
Like you say, they're looking for a good grade or they're looking for the smartest class to take.
And what they are not prepared to do is no less when they leave than when they came in.
Right.
You know, that's a kind of gamification of your life.
Like I'm, I'm excited about, because if you come out of college feeling that way, you're going to feel like that the rest of your life.
Um, but that's, but that requires that you be a certain kind of, of kid going into the Marines.
That's like a special kind of teacher too, though, because there you go.
So that's exactly what I'm talking about.
You have to have such a tolerance for like, you have to be the opposite of sweaty.
You have to be very dry because like to be the kind of teacher who could say like, I'm going to teach you how to ask better questions than I'm asking right now.
And I'll only know I succeeded if you start asking better questions than I do.
Well, and when you ask questions, I'm not going to give you answers is the hardest part of being a teacher in that program.
Even though that would be the way to show you're smart.
That's exactly right.
I am not going to give you the answer, not only not the answer that you think or that you expect or that you already are having and you hope to have confirmed, but I'm not going to give you really any answer.
It's incredibly hard and the results are really personal between any teacher and student, right?
Because a lot of that has to do with trust.
Like one student will walk up to Jim Klaus and have a question and Jim Klaus will say, I'm not going to give you the answer.
And that student walks away with a lifetime love of learning.
Student walks up asked says what's the question?
Jim Klaus says I'm not going to give you the answer terrible review of him Yeah, and says like this class is bullshit and they're just you know, they're just fucking with me the teachers a fraud but it makes me think about the we've I've I've gone on and on about what I think is the cult of college education in this country and I think there are a lot of people that should have gone to electronic school that instead have master's degrees now in a thing that they never understood and
But we're living in a country where coming out of a situation and saying, I don't know the answer.
I don't have a hot take.
I don't have the answer.
I don't even know.
I know less about what the question is now than I did before I walked in here.
That is really out of fashion.
It was acceptable in the 80s.
It was.
In, again, to just name check a bunch of bullshit that I barely remember, post-structuralist philosophy, Derrida, like certainly all post-postmodernism, it was considered to be kind of like a, I don't know, almost a blood sport to be able to get weirder.
about the levels at which you were delving into something.
And it was, I don't know, it seemed as kind of like a joke.
It was almost like binge drinking.
You're not supposed to do that anymore after college.
But outside of that, at least in my experience, my lived experience, I did not see that much stuff where ambiguity, where like...
We start with ambiguity, and instead of trying to get the answer by the time the clock rings in 45 minutes, what if we use that to try and discover what it tells us about different, larger, and more significant ambiguities?
Like, what if we just tried to keep coming up with more questions we don't know the answer to, and it's like, well, how many credit hours are you getting for that?
Like, aren't you supposed to have your mind filled with knowledge by some John Hausman character?
Yeah.
Right.
And then be able to weaponize that knowledge as you go through life to shut other people up.
Well, actually speaking.