Ep. 557: "Chatty G."
Hello.
Hi, John.
Hi, Merlin.
How's it going?
Oh, I'm on my knees begging for you to send $4.
Oh.
I'm begging.
Mm-hmm.
I'm really, we're at our wits end.
Can I, I mean, obviously I'll give you whatever you asked for, but just if you could tell me, has something come up or has something changed?
Is there an event that's made you contact me about the $4?
Yeah, Tim had a debate that was really great, and then the bad guys made a bunch of money from evildoers.
You know, sometimes you run across something, and it seems like just kind of a glib remark somebody made, but this one sticks with me.
Every time I get one of those, and here we're talking about tomorrow is the final day of the, well, official...
election cycle but we in the u.s like to now call election season which is always bad one oh you're a naughty one oh the text john um but somebody's anyway that like i say this this sounds like a throwaway bit except i find it a very memorable which is that every one of those texts especially when you just see like the first line you know in your messages it sounds like an like an x that's really losing it
I'm really desperately begging you to talk to me.
John, I know it's been a while, but Pennsylvania is this close to being lost.
Oh, we're going to lose it.
We're going to lose it.
Yeah.
You know, because Nancy Pelosi loves my $15.
Find you somebody that loves anything as much as Nancy Pelosi loves $15.
Yeah.
Hello, everyone.
Hi there again.
Hi.
Whatever sound I put in a second ago to indicate chaos and entropy is because my computer is being a little bit of a stinker.
What's going on?
You said last week that it was being a problem.
This is what happened last week.
It's the same problem as last week.
I'm still taking care of it.
Here's what I'll do.
I will describe it.
I will suggest a path forward, as the vice president says.
Yeah.
What had happened was there's something on my Macintoshes.
I have more than one.
Is it a Wilberforce figurine?
I'm not going to respond to that.
But here's what happens.
I'll be doing whatever you do on a computer.
So imagine you use a computer.
you're logging in you're doing stuff and then suddenly asking for a password you can't remember it yeah you get this guy over here and my problem is that then what will happen is in this case it was suddenly i didn't hear john's voice anymore and i went uh-oh and then i clicked on my my input device and nothing clicked and then my keyboard didn't click and i said okay it happened again the same thing that's been happening for a week yeah
Don't you know some computer people?
I know you know at least one.
I should get on the Discord.
So it might happen again.
It might not.
How about this?
How about we allow two more crashes and then that's the episode no matter what?
If I can put it together.
But just as an act of faith to our list.
It's not that I don't want to.
I like visiting with John.
I like having the episode.
You ever see how quick?
You don't know this.
I put the episode out very quickly every Monday.
Well, yeah.
I like it being out in the world.
Anyway.
You want people to hear it.
You want people to hear the wisdom.
You never know what's going to comfort a person.
Well, you can guess things that won't comfort a person, but, you know.
Yeah, but even then, even then, you know, there's one person not comforted by it.
There's another person that's like, oh, that's me.
Yeah.
There's a third person that's like, oh, there's no soup.
Do you think this is because I didn't send Joaquin Jeffries $4?
It might have been.
Is that his name?
Is it Joaquin?
I don't know.
You know, back in the 90s, I had four guys doing this.
I had this geezer over here, and I had our kid, and then I had this fucker on the kettle.
You're talking about outreach?
Yeah.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
But now, you know, now we have to do it ourselves.
Yeah, it's true.
We'll see how it goes.
The last thing that we were talking about...
Was what?
No, it was just that we are a current events podcast, but only today.
Yeah.
And, you know, I was just a little late, like four minutes late, which I don't like to be.
But it was because, and this is a computer problem, too.
Oh, John.
Yeah, for some reason, I only can find one USB cable, and it is three feet long.
No, it's not even.
Yeah, it's three feet long.
and so i have to be right next to this uh a to d converter and as you know i record on my couch so so my little focus right now has to be on the arm of the couch and i don't know why this is the conditions we have to under which we have to do this usb cables everywhere they carpet the ground but i can't find one give a system
No.
Okay.
I don't have any system.
What happened to your, if I could ask, and I'm not trying to shame you, what happened to the previous one that went to your A to B?
I don't even know.
Oh, you know what it was?
Well, here, what it was was I had a different little box here.
that had been given to me by the how stuff works network i what is it what was that that was called um uh clear channel stuff world oh okay something cool cool and and they had a whole team of people it was probably a slight processing fee for them to send it to you absolutely it was a convenience fee they call it right convenience fee a convenience fee
And they, uh, they sent me some fancy, fancy, uh, mixer and I had it here on my living room couch.
And I had this focus, right?
That I bought for a hundred dollars was the one that I recorded omnibus into over at the big, the big space, the big studio.
And at one point I was sitting here talking to you and I was like, Hey, wait a minute.
Why do I have this big fancy one here in the living room?
And I have this little dinky one that works just fine over at the place where conceivably, I don't know.
We might, I mean, I might interview my mom one day.
I might need three microphones.
I don't know.
And so I was like, I had a bright idea.
I got a bag out.
I put the thing in the bag.
Of course, I left it there for three or four days because I got distracted.
There's a lot of things to do in life, John.
My God, this kitchen table is not going to clean itself.
I'm not going to clean it either, so I don't know what's going to happen.
Something's going to change.
You know, maybe an eagle.
John, I think we can all agree that something's got to change.
Something's got to change.
Maybe one of the owls that lives in the ravine will come clean the kitchen table.
But then I did remember and I took it over and I got the other one and I brought it back.
But I think I brought the wrong USB cable or something.
I don't know.
How can I be expected to remember all these things?
You know...
Life used to be simpler.
In some ways, that was bad.
Because simplicity is not always good for everybody.
Yeah, true.
Some people like complicated.
Some people like to get up in the morning.
I've heard about this.
Yeah, I don't know.
It's definitely a trying time for everybody.
But I'm sorry about my computer.
I hope it doesn't harm the show.
I feel like even the things that aren't supposed to be in the show are technically in the show.
Yeah.
I imagine our listeners can infer that I don't do over much to remove things that maybe a different person would think ought to be in the show.
Yeah, right.
For instance, if the show was edited more than like for between two to three minutes, which wouldn't be good.
It would be bad for the show.
Well, you know what it is, the slippery slope.
Once you start editing, then you're editing.
Oh, I know.
And somebody like you would want to make it perfect, and then perfect is the enemy of good.
If you want to take out a phone number, somebody said, or something, or if it's one of your sacred podcasts, you want to take out a cuss, I think that's understandable.
At one point, you used to take out children's names, didn't you?
Or at least my children's name.
Well, that's complicated because you, I think, had said, I think you said as much that you would prefer, it's not like you want to act like you don't have a kid, but you prefer that your kid and the kid's name not be a regular topic.
And that's something, you know.
I think I tried to work, but then you just simply started saying your child's name all the time.
Yeah.
To where I took that as an implicit, I don't know, it's not Oberlin rules.
I probably should have asked first.
I don't know.
It's not consent, but I... Oberlin rules.
Remember Oberlin rules?
Well, what happened... May I groan?
What happened was that she got to be a teenager and she was like, why am I not famous?
Yeah.
When I Google myself, there are no pictures, and there's one picture of you.
When she Googles John Roderick child, or John Roderick daughter, or child, there's a picture of me holding your baby.
Oh, when you're missing a tooth.
Yeah.
That's a terrific photo.
That might be show art this week.
It's been show art before.
I know Captain Marm.
But I might do it again, because I love that photo of you.
You look like a mountain man.
And, uh, and, and my little child is like, what the, why am I?
And I'm like, well, because I was protecting you from the internet and I didn't want you to have all this, you know, footprints.
Hmm.
When you saw no sets of footprints, that's because I didn't want you on the internet.
Exactly.
But now she's a teen and she's like, my friends Google.
Oh, God.
They Google and they're like, where are you?
We're getting into things that I don't want.
No, don't give the internet a puzzle.
No, no, no, no.
Don't get a puzzle.
All of you, stop right now.
Follow the Merlin rules.
No, no.
Oh, come on.
Don't talk about me.
But yeah, it is complicated.
I think my kids root...
He writes really good reviews on the movie website Letterboxd.
Cool.
And he has approved any links to that.
Why can't you get me more followers is a phrase that I've heard.
Cool, cool, cool.
But he's a very – have you ever looked at Billy's Letterboxd?
No, but I will as soon as you send me a link to it.
I'll send him some followers.
I don't know if this counts as a form of log rolling for me to do that.
But let me see if I can find some.
That's one of those open kimono phrases that I don't know what log rolling is.
Oh, log rolling is when you're, like, promoting a thing.
You're kind of presenting it as, like, a general suggestion without, you know, expressly saying, oh, yeah, well, like, this is my new travel company or whatever.
Oh, it's like one of those things they do in the New York Times where they're like, full disclosure, I used to work for that campaign.
Oh, you ever look at the website Summaphore?
No.
Which is not spelled the way it sounds.
Yeah, they do a thing.
They've taken the Axios bullshit and gone to the next level because now there's like a whole thing of like, and here's what the person who wrote this thinks about that.
And here's why you shouldn't trust them and like all that sort of thing.
Which, you know, it's admirable.
You got to try different things, John.
The media environment today, you know, the environment's not what it used to be in a lot of ways.
Yeah.
Now, going back to your computer, doesn't John Tercusa make you get a new computer every six months or six weeks or whatever his timeline is?
I mean, it's hard to even make fun of him in a lot of ways.
Is it?
Well, it's difficult to make fun of him in ways that he's satisfied with.
Oh, right, because he has opinions about even when we make fun of him.
Oh, I mean, if there's anything that I've learned from John, and I've learned so much from John Syracuse, one of the things is that I can be doing something wrong and then find out that even the way that I'm doing it wrong is wrong.
Oh yeah.
Right.
You ever had anybody like that in your life, John?
You ever had anybody in your life that's just like, you just, you can't do anything right.
And like, if you had any sense, you'd be doing it wrong in the right way.
In the right way.
I feel like.
Yeah.
You have created a monster in my life.
Have I?
Yeah.
By acknowledging the existence of Jason Finn as anything other than a caricature in this, on this podcast, you now text him and talk to him and he thinks that he's real.
Yeah.
and so now he's got you know he's like well you know what merlin said to me and i'm like i don't know you don't exist or at least not in that world it's kind of like ai where like the more you talk to it the more real it seems or something yeah yeah my sister has started talking to ai
And she said to me the other day, she was like, well, you know what Chatty G said?
What did Chatty G say?
Chatty G was my favorite rapper in 1989.
And I was like, who the fuck is Chatty G?
Him, Tavis D, Clarice, Clarendon D. She said, I'm talking to Chatty G all the time about, you know, this and that.
And Chatty G said that I should blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
I was like, I don't even know what, what planet am I on?
You know, what, what country do you think this is?
Yeah.
And she's, she's asking it for advice.
She's saying like, well, cause she's got a, you know, not to log roll here, but she's got a book that she wants to publish.
Oh, okay.
And she's like, Chaddy G, what do I do?
And Chaddy G's like, Susan, let me break it down for you.
It can be very, it can be very absorbing.
Yeah.
I mean, really, honestly.
I have never spoken to Chatty G. And when Chatty G throws itself into my face... I talk to Chatty G all day long.
Do you really?
Are you talking to Chatty G?
Yeah, I use it for a lot of stuff.
I really do.
What was the last thing you asked Chatty G?
Let me find out.
I'm pulling up Chatty G. And just be prepared for this to not be particularly interesting because I use it for a lot of pretty anodyne shit.
um and then sometimes lbj's penis oh hey chatty g it says here try googling for hagar slacks you ever heard the phone call but who you ever heard the phone call where lyndon johnson talks to the president of hagar slacks oh yeah yeah hagar slacks it seizes up on his ball sack oh
Okay, I'm doing two things at once here, which I ought never try to do.
I'm looking at Billy's Letterboxd Reviews, which I'll send to you right now.
And I'm also looking up Chatty G. Correct window.
I'm texting that to you.
Chatty G. Okay, last thing I asked.
Okay, okay, okay.
Yeah, what'd you ask?
What'd you ask Chatty G?
You know that, well, like, there's two songs that are very similar in my head.
And basically... Is it Savor for Later and Flagpole City?
They covered that.
Let me down.
Wait.
Huh.
No.
No.
I'm not together.
They go, they're the same chords.
They go perfectly together.
D, D sus, D sus two, D sus, D, D, D, and then A in like an open sliding position on the fifth fret.
Is it D, D, D, A, A, A, A, G, G, G, G, right?
Something like that?
when i when i played it on the piano i was instructed by jeff lynn to only play the fifths and never play any kind of uh middle note that would suggest is he henry persil what the yeah he he was like ding ding ding ding ding and i was like but what if i and he was like no ding ding ding ding
And then when I switched over to the bass, you know, Aaron Huffman's bass lines are like Phil Lesch's bass lines.
They're like... I mean this in the best possible way.
He's got noodley, not noodley as in like... But as in like supple.
He's got supple happening bass lines.
I think Aaron Huffman was absolutely not even the secret weapon.
He was just the weapon.
So I learned all those bass lines.
I have no idea what the chords are.
This won't mean a lot to you, but I said to Chatty G, I said similarities between the songs got to be real and best of my love.
Because, well, think about it.
And think about that little descending bass line.
Right?
Don't you think they're kind of similar a little bit?
all right yeah okay i see it well anyway you asked um let's see oh brahms violin concerto i learned about that i'm having a big brahms face you're just chatting it up oh yeah i learned about uh mac os window snapping how to add columns to oh here's one so you know i have a list or maybe you don't know i have a list of um celebrity heights that i maintain in a spreadsheet it's publicly available okay this came up the other day because we were watching this new penguin show
Okay.
And Colin Farrell.
With that Irish fella.
The Irish fella who doesn't look like himself.
He's in 100 tons of makeup.
Yeah.
And, you know, my TV friend, my daughter's mother slash partner.
Loves to know what else that person was in.
She loves that.
She's just like you.
She could say, like, oh, you know, he was in that commercial for Mentos.
And I'm like, what are you talking about?
But she said, I don't think Colin.
I bet she knows Banshees of Vin Sharon, I bet.
Banshees of Vin Sharon.
I bet so.
Banshees of Bob.
But so she said to me something about Colin Farrell's height.
Okay.
And I said, he can't be a tall guy.
Look, he's standing next to all these other actors who I know for a fact are tiny people.
You know, he's got all these co-stars and he's just six inches taller.
You can do so much with movie magic, John, and shoes.
I know.
I know.
And that's the thing.
And so I looked it up and it was like, Colin Farrell is 5'10".
And I said, there's absolutely no way he's 5'10".
But maybe that gal is standing on a box.
I don't know.
It's harder the other way around because a lot of mine are tall women, like Elizabeth Debicki.
You got to be real careful how you shoot Debicki.
That's true.
I mean, she looks tall no matter what.
Go ahead.
Please go ahead and click that spreadsheet if you would.
I'm so sorry.
At least our episode is still running.
That's saying something.
But this is one where I'd uploaded my list and I asked it to do some fact checking for me.
I asked it to add a new column for where the person was born so I can start uncovering more.
Oh, you have them oriented here by height.
Yeah.
Although it's a table, so I could probably sort it however way.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Yeah, and so, as always, it starts with Robert Pershing Wadlow and ends with Lucia Zarate, both of whom you will remember, whether you know her or not, from the Guinness Book of World Records.
Sure, I remember.
Remember the tall guy, and then you remember the woman who's like a doll standing on a table?
Yeah.
Oh, yeah.
She was 20 inches tall.
And I remember the two fat guys with cowboy hats that are riding minibikes.
Billy and Benny.
Billy and Benny.
Yeah.
But you have other people that aren't actors here, like John Fetterman from the U.S.
Senate.
You have Julia Child.
I mean, you're not just rating actors.
You've got all kinds of people here.
Well, I mean, okay.
May I respond?
Okay, now this may not, for a variety of reasons, this may not be the kind of technology that you would like to share, perhaps, with your daughter's mother slash partner.
I think she'd be interested in this.
Well, that may be the problem, is what I'm saying.
She'd want to have input into this.
Well, okay, but here's what I'm saying, John.
That's why I say a technology, not this particular spreadsheet, because here's the thing.
Can I tell you a thing people learn when they follow the work of Merlin Mann?
If you give yourself permission to write things down, and then you start writing things down in a given place, you start knowing where information goes.
So a lot of people, they don't know where to write down something they need to do later.
No offense.
No offense.
No offense.
Although I did take a calendar off the fridge the other day, a calendar that I'd never looked at since January.
Oh, good.
Because I have agreed.
I have agreed to do things.
And I've agreed to do enough things.
You need more than a fridge calendar for that.
Well, that's what it is.
But that's just selling you old lies.
But in November and December, I've got like...
six, eight things that I said I would do.
This is stressing me out.
And I can't even tell you, I couldn't tell you every morning I woke up and I was like, oh God, do I have one of those things?
And so eventually I couldn't handle the stress anymore.
And I took the calendar off the fridge and I wrote, I circled days and I,
And I wrote in the margin, like, that's the day that I have that thing.
Oh, my God.
If only you knew people who could help you with this.
It didn't look right.
It didn't look emphatic enough.
Because now you've got circles and then certain amounts.
You've got a Norton anthology of shit you're not going to do.
Well, and so I went and I found a highlighter pen.
And I highlighted the circles.
Maybe the important stuff.
And then I was like, okay, okay, okay.
I can see this now.
And I had to look at it.
And I was like...
Okay, because I bought, I went to my promoter buddies and I was like, look, I need Billie Eilish tickets.
I don't know why, but I need them because I have a teen and she has friends and I need Billie.
And they were like, well, you know.
I mean, it's the same answer Chad gave you about other shows, right?
About everything.
Well, no, no, no.
Just in fairness, though, that a lot has changed and not just about how you're seen in the music community.
More like also like the whole thing is different now.
And the concert tickets are very expensive.
And the number of the latitude that we have to give any kind of...
access to people has changed right yeah well and i said to him two days ago i was like hey what about that sabrina carpenter show and yeah she does that espresso song yeah yeah he said the moment it went on sale i can't even get my staff all into it people are freaking out
Et cetera, et cetera.
And I was like, oh, so that means I'm not going to get five free tickets to it.
He was like, that's what it means.
You did a good job with that one, John.
You figured it right out.
But I did go to see Laura Ramoso, the comedian that does the imitation of her German mother.
I took my ladies to see her last night.
Live comedy is fun.
Oh, it was fun.
And she was very good.
But so I did.
So what the what what Chad said eventually was, first of all, that's Live Nation.
So that's not I have no control over them.
I think those people also own your analog to digital box.
Well, they own everything.
It's not all the same group.
Oh, I don't know.
Isn't it all like Clear Channel Live Nation?
It's all just one big monolith?
Yeah, I think it is.
But he's doing the thing where he holds up his wrists together and says, my hands are tied.
Yeah, but he said, you know the gal from Live Nation because you've met her 700 times.
Okay.
Here's her email address again.
Her name is Carrie Nation.
And what you need to do is email her and he said, ask...
to buy some holds i said ask to buy some holds yeah okay so i emailed her and i said i would like to buy some holds okay and she wrote back and she was like great hi john i realize this isn't the purpose of the story probably but did you know what that means you don't have to tell me but did you know what that means at the time well so what it means no it's okay if you don't want to tell me but did you know what you were asking for yeah i think so i mean what it means is it like paying to be on a on a wait list
No, it's like the promoter will always say, we didn't keep any tickets there.
Even if the mayor needs to see it, no, it's all sold out.
There's nothing we can do.
But that's always a lie.
Of course, if the mayor wants to see the show, they're going to give it to him.
So what it does- Well, a phrase you used in our backyard, in our literal backyard pilot, even Bono has a boss.
Even Bono.
A famous phrase of John Roderick, and I think that is very related to what you're describing here, which is, well, first of all, like, we can choose to give these to people.
What we don't do is just take chits from everybody who wants something free.
But, like, that doesn't mean—it means that, like, we can get people in, but the higher and higher up it goes, eventually you get to where, I don't know if—
I don't know who's somebody who's alive that's famous and everybody likes like if the ghost of Prince wants to get in we can do that but then we're gonna probably have to bump you or somebody else like yeah you're not like getting guaranteed kind of access that used to be easier when it was like I say arches of loaf or something.
Exactly.
It's like the presidential suite.
Is the president here?
No.
Then can I have the presidential suite?
Well, no, somebody already booked it.
Well, just treat me like the president.
You'd bump him.
I see.
Anyway, so what will happen, so what they do is they say, okay, you're going to get in, but we're not going to tell you where you're going to sit.
It's going to be good, but
But we don't know exactly how good.
And you're not going to know until the night before the show.
Sounds like some kind of prisoner's dilemma thing.
Well, it's one of these where it's like, you're going to go to the show, but it's going to cost you money, but not as much money, but definitely real money.
And then we're going to put you where we put you.
The Live Nation uses every part of the Buffalo.
That's right.
And you're going to be happy with it.
And I was like, I'm so happy.
And the thing is, when Taylor Swift came through town, I was like, hey, I'll do whatever it takes, except for pay $2,500 for a ticket.
And they were like, guess what?
I would do anything to see Taylor Swift except pay for it.
Except pay for it.
And they were like, guess what?
You're not even in the 700 people that we're going to think about before we think about you.
And I was like, yeah, that's what I figured.
Just to be clear, this is an issue about how you don't like disappointing your child.
It's not about you having any kind of status concerns.
Yeah, well, and the thing is, then I was in England, and I talked to Tim Rice-Oxley of the band Keen, and he said in order to take his daughters to the show that they were flying to Warsaw.
And I said, if you can't get tickets, then it makes me feel a lot better that I can't get tickets.
I mean, and it was so obvious.
A deeply sad thing to say.
When I asked everybody, I asked everybody, hey, what can I do to get into the Taylor Swift show?
Is it that good?
Is it really that good?
Well, no, I didn't care.
I know it's a get, but I mean, like, is the show that good?
No, but it also is maybe.
I don't know.
Is anything that good?
Richard Thompson.
You can pay $50 to go see Richard Thompson.
It'll be one of the greatest shows of your life.
Well, that's probably true.
And Nick Cave, too, is also absolutely worth whatever money it takes.
But I was greeted with such a resounding silence that it actually echoed in my head the amount of no reply I got.
I got below no reply.
You got an audible dearth of reply.
Yeah.
It was an aggressive lack of replying to me.
And I was like, I know.
Okay.
I'm sorry.
It's like when Al Neary slams the door.
You know what I'm saying?
It is.
That's exactly what it was.
This one time.
So anyway, so I'm going to Billie Eilish.
Really?
I like her.
I think she's wonderful.
I think so, too.
Of all of them, I think she's... I think her brother's odd, but...
Well, it's weird, but they're good.
I see them on SNL.
They were terrific.
But the thing is, every morning I woke up and I was like, oh, wait, is today Billie Eilish?
And then, of course, it's not.
It's not until December.
But I couldn't keep that in my head for some reason.
So I wrote it down on the calendar.
That's in December.
And the calendar, if I understand correctly, John, and I don't mean to get up in your chronology here, but it sounds like what you're describing is a calendar on the refrigerator where you keep your family's food, where your children play with their toys.
You've got a calendar up there that says January 2024.
You had that?
And then you knew there was something in December, which isn't yet now.
And so what we're seeing is this is part of your operationalizing this need to circle and highlight things.
Because realize you have six to eight things to do before the end of the year.
Yeah, that's right.
That's a horrible number of things to have done in the next three months.
It's just like I couldn't keep it all straight.
And so now I do.
I have it straight.
I can go in and look at the refrigerator.
Oh, John, really?
The calendar on the fridge?
And honestly, Merlin, six hours later, I walked by it, and I looked at it, and I had written what something was, but in shorthand.
No.
Oh, John.
And I couldn't remember what that meant.
I was like, BBAA?
Could that possibly mean?
And I went to the bathroom and I was standing there going BBAA.
BBAA.
BBAA.
Sounds like a Star Wars.
I couldn't.
It does.
And I couldn't put it together.
And then eventually I was like, oh, right, right, right, right, right, right, right.
I figured it out.
What do you mean?
And I can't say what it is.
Oh, I understand.
I work for the government and it's not, it's, you know, I can't say.
And you're here to help.
That's right.
I work for the government and I'm here to help.
Didn't Ronald Reagan say that's the scariest phrase in the English language?
I'm from the government and I'm here to help.
Oh, he did such a good job of transforming America.
Yeah, boy, he was really something, wasn't he?
Have you thought about having maybe a calendar that's not the one in your refrigerator?
Is it one of those big ones, like a Martha Stewart calendar with big squares you can write in?
Well, see, look, no, it's not.
It's tiny.
It's a tear off from a deli.
That's why I have to circle things and then draw lines to other places where I write down things like BBAA, and that's very hard to do.
I have those things in my phone calendar, but I have no idea how to use that.
Every time I log in, it's in a different format, and you can't— You don't trust your system.
No, you click on it and it does something else.
That's a phrase from back in the day when I used to help people, nominally help people with things like this, was you need a trusted system, which is that you know how things get in, how things get out, and you know what your role and schedule is in dealing with that input in your life and where it goes.
Now that we've moved past my excellent celebrity heights thing, which I had like a tight 10 on, we've moved past that.
But that's what I was trying to say was that this is similar to that, which is like, for example, I have a running list of things and I'm almost done.
But just to tell you what I think is useful anyway, or our listeners.
Keep a list.
Once you know a list where things go, like I have a list of grammar and usage that I dislike.
I have a list of fake names that I like.
I have a list of fake band names that I like that are extremely good.
And I have a list of good names of actual real names of real people.
Now, why would you want to write that down?
Well, you may not, but I do.
And the thing is, here's where I differ from your average bear, is I have a place where that goes.
So if I'm watching, and the only point I wanted to make to this in pivoting to Ari is, you look at this, and you can't tell from the order it's in on this list, right?
Because it's ordered by height, right?
Right.
But if you were to spend a little time with this, you'd go, oh, looks like Merlin and his family were watching Succession at some point.
Because suddenly Merlin goes— There's a lot of those.
How tall is Tom Womgans?
He's six foot three, which is the same height as Brienne of Tarth.
Isn't that interesting?
Cousin Greg is six foot seven.
Six foot seven is Cousin Greg.
And all of these.
And so I'll be watching something and somebody will show up.
And then, so what was I watching?
I was watching The Diplomat.
which is a very good show that I think you'd like.
That's a fine show, yeah.
It's a really good show.
Yeah, we're episode three, season two.
I love that show.
I think it's very well done.
It knows what it is.
It's like, you know, if you can get, here's my pitch.
I'm really Madeline should be credited with this.
If you can get with Homeland when it gets a little silly about Carrie's mental health, like you will easily get with Diplomat.
The cast is fucking great.
But then there's that guy.
And this is where it gets to the RE part.
There's the guy who plays Hal, the husband, right?
You know, the guy who's kind of coded as like a little bit of a Bill Clinton character in a couple of ways.
Like he can't get out of the game.
He's ceaselessly.
He does.
But even more saliently, as she tells Denison, it's like, no, it's not that he cheats on me with sex.
That would be easier.
It's that he does something that undermines what we're all trying to do here with this diplomatic project.
Right.
Because he thinks he's the big cheese.
He gives the talk at Chatham House and he waves the rule.
And then he says, you know what he says?
And I say this to Madeline all the time now.
I say, Madeline, you know, diplomacy does not work until it does.
Which is a great Hal Weiler quote.
Now, did you know that guy's from England?
Of course, yeah.
Fuck you.
She said the same thing.
She said the same thing.
That's how English people are.
Okay, well, that makes him a secret.
He's from England.
That makes him a secret Brit.
That makes him a secret Brit.
He was also Fortinbras in the wonderful Kenneth Branagh production of Hamlet.
You were Fortinbras.
She's a fucking... I'm glad I haven't crushed.
But all of those, or you look at Hannah Wantingham, and you're like, oh my gosh, she's the lady with the bell.
Shame, shame.
And then she's on Ted Lasso.
She's 5'11".
Well, the thing is, every time that you and I have any conversation about anything, then there's an alert in my calendar that you have changed some other thing.
You're like, oh, well now... That's how calendars work, John.
That's why we have them.
You and I talking now.
The calendar changes if the world changes.
That's why it makes a calendar rather than some kind of just a dream board.
I mean, is it though?
Is it though?
I don't know.
Every list I ever make says... I can sometimes, I often can tell when you're fucking with me.
And then there have been a handful of times when I genuinely cannot tell.
I don't think you're fucking with me right now.
And that's fine.
But it's a little bit like you're fucking with me.
Because it makes it very funny that you don't know or aren't up to date on aspects of what Syracuse calls the Merlin cinematic universe.
But like, you know, I have kind of a hard on about using calendars.
You sure do.
Well, that way you know when things are going to happen.
My family doesn't write down when things are going to happen.
If something changes five minutes, I get a calendar alert where you're like, oh, now it's happening at 8.05.
Because now it's correct.
If we said we were going to record at 11 and we moved that to 11.30, I changed the start time.
Now, why would I do that?
Is it because I need a reminder?
Maybe.
I don't think that's an undignified thing, but you know what it also does?
It gives me a historical journal of what time that show started.
I write down things that aren't just things I don't want to forget.
Sometimes I write down things I don't want to remember.
See, now, if I used it that way, I would love a historical journal because there are all those things where I'm like, you would love that.
I wrote a check for $74 on March 15th, and I have no idea why.
Well, I mean, okay, that may be, okay, I understand that's just off the dome, but what I'm talking more like, have you, I don't know, forgive me if we've talked about this.
I don't think we have.
I think it's Jermaine.
I've talked a lot with Syracuse about this is like the way that I combine several, this is not a bit, this is a real thing.
When I want to remember when something, sometimes you need to remember when something happened.
Absolutely.
For a variety of reasons.
Maybe you just like, for example, I was just texting with a friend of ours this morning, who had been at our baby shower in 2007.
And I wanted to send him some really cute photos of his now very grown up daughter.
And, you know, wonderfully, we have 400 wonderful photos of our with all of our children.
Web celebrity friends in Golden Gate Park.
And it's a wonderful set of photos.
And we ended up talking about stuff.
But I was like, OK, so wait, I got to remember when this happened.
Well, it'll be before the kid.
And this is a silly example, but it's easy enough because it's right before the kid was born.
Sometimes what I have to find out is like, I want to find out when the thing happened in the world.
And I have an association.
Here's one for you.
Um, like these songs that are really indelible to me from certain times in my life.
Like I'm pretty sure the devil went down to Georgia came out in the summer of 1979, which is not for the moment important, except that means I also, that also means probably that, uh, fins by Jimmy Buffett came out that summer.
The song about Skylab falling, the novelty song came out that summer a little later.
You get pop music by M that kind of,
takes me into a vicinity of when something happens and then i can sort of triangulate oh that's when i was at that happened when i was at military school listening here in the long run while i was waiting for pancakes in the pre-dawn morning at military school wait wait wait the devil went down to georgia didn't come out in 75 it came out in 77 nine 79
He knew that he could have been beat because he laid that golden fiddle on the ground at Johnny's feet.
He just said, just come on back if you ever want to try again.
I told you once, you son of a gun.
You edited it for content.
So why do we need to know that?
Don't worry.
Don't worry what I need to remember.
You worry what you need to remember.
Here's another one.
When was this photo taken?
Well, sometimes that's real easy because your phone takes care of that for you.
Other times, you don't know when this photo was taken or where it was taken.
Maybe now what are you doing?
Now you're looking at things like...
I'm searching.
Here's what I'm doing.
I'm searching Gmail.
I'm searching photos.
I'm searching Amazon.
That's three.
Because why?
Gmail in particular tells me things like when I bought an airline ticket or when I got I can see clusters of activity around like, oh, this is when I went to XOXO.
Right?
Gmail.
Like, that just tells me all kinds of stuff.
Photos.
Okay, if there's a photo, when was I visiting John that one time in Seattle?
I could find it that way.
Honestly, so weird, though, I'd buy enough stuff from Amazon that that's sometimes really useful.
Interesting.
And so...
I have a way of triangulating my past by looking at these records.
And I think we help our future when we leave the kinds of markers that are the sorts of things.
This is why I have a calendar called Journal.
It's not my feelings.
It's like when I changed my medication.
Or like when my kid went to the doctor or whatever.
It's just writing down when stuff happened.
Do you go through your photos and manage them and tag them with stuff and go like, oh, this is part of that.
Yeah, a little bit.
Yeah, I did it this morning for our friend.
I made an album to share with our friend.
But not as much, again, I'm no Syracuse, but all I'm trying to say is, like, it sounds trivial and, like, blah, blah, and, like, oh, Merlin's just hung up about this stuff.
And I am, just in the sense that I think it is a sign of character to be on time for things and to remember things.
And I don't say that, I mean, in part, I think I say that in a slightly passive-aggressive way about other people, but I also ultimately really say it about myself.
As a terminally late person for...
before into my 30s easily i mean i was it's just it became it was a character flaw and like it's because i didn't have a system that i trusted this is really boring anyway show this to ari because what will happen is you look and you go oh oh oh i'm watching the leftovers how tall is jill the wonderful margaret qualley by the way you should see the movie substance it fucking rocks um
Okay, now she's 5'8", but then you go down and you're like, wait a minute, so Olivia Munn, okay, I was watching John Mulaney's monologue for SNL on Saturday night, and it was a great episode, and he was talking about how all the people in his life are small.
His wife, the beautiful Olivia Munn, she's small, the mother is small, the children are small, and I thought, huh.
How small is Olivia Munn?
And I went and I looked it up and I added her to the list.
How small is she?
She's so small.
Are you ready for this?
She's so small.
Where is she?
Olivia Munn.
How small is she?
She's 5'4", which is just a little bit shorter than David Miscavige from Scientology.
Oh, right.
He's not very tall.
He's a little guy.
He's brutal.
And that means also David Miscavige is the same height as Carrie Coon, the wonderful actress.
And both of them are the same size as Jackie Earl Haley, you know, from Breaking Away.
Oh, yeah.
Oh, of course.
Don't forget to punch the clock, he says.
And I didn't have a way of measuring small because everybody seemed small.
Sure, sure, sure.
But then she was really small, and I didn't notice that she was extremely small until...
until I looked at her clothes, because I had a bunch of her clothes hanging in my closet, and I was like, wait a minute, this clothes is really small.
Who would this clothes fit?
What is this clothes for?
Yeah.
Yeah, and I went around and
Like, even my little child, who at the time was like, I don't know, seven, eight, was like, could you wear this?
And she was like, that's too small.
Do you have the chart up in front of you right now?
Probably not, right?
Oh, I should go back to it.
No, no, no.
I navigated away.
Last one, because I wanted to make this relevant.
Line 34.
in this current sorting order, is something that you told me that I could not believe, which is the height of Art Garfunkel.
Because in my head, Art Garfunkel is six... Isn't that amazing?
In my head, Art Garfunkel is six foot three, and Paul Simon is five five in my head.
Right.
Right?
Me too.
But guess what?
You told me this.
Listeners, are you ready for this?
According to my sources, in my journalism, Art Garfunkel is five foot nine inches tall.
He's shorter than I am.
And then Paul Simon is like the size of a mouse.
Well, you got to go down the line 48.
He's five foot three, which is small.
But like that Delta makes no sense to me between.
I know my whole life.
You look at that album cover and you're like, wow, Artie.
But perhaps now you'd like to know if you need a if you need a short short cut for how tall Paul.
He's the same height as Natalie Portman.
Paul Simon is the same height as Natalie Portman.
Yeah.
Now, shorter than them, you got Holly Hunter.
She's small.
Turn to the right.
I like that.
She's 5'2".
Emilia Clarke, who played Daenerys, is a little under 5'2".
Wait a minute.
Kristen Bell is only 5'1"?
She's 5'1".
You're kidding me.
Yeah.
But Laura Mayberry from the wonderful band Churches, she's really little.
She's five feet tall.
Five feet tall.
Then you get down.
Now, the last one, before you get to Lucia Zarate, is Linda Hunt, the wonderful actor.
Oh, wait a minute.
Wait a minute.
Now, I'm looking at a picture of Kristen Bell, and she's standing next to Dax Shepard.
Dax Shepard that everybody apparently likes so much.
Oh, he's so annoying.
My kid's favorite podcast just got fired from his network.
Oh, how come?
Oh, I don't know.
I think there's just no money in it.
David Ferrier, the wonderful New Zealand guy.
Oh, they didn't get canceled, is what I was asking.
Well, they did the nice one where they let him, I think, mostly keep his toys, but, like, you know, gave him the IP.
That's a phrase my kid used with me.
Oh, that's nice.
No, Dax let him keep the IP is the thing my kid said to me.
That's nice.
IP is good.
You got to keep the IP.
IP freely.
Or P.I.
Staker, in this case.
You got Stephen Merchant, who played P.I.
Staker in Hot Fuzz.
Stephen Merchant from The Office...
He's tall.
He's real tall.
Augie?
Is it Augie, right?
Yeah, he's 6'7".
He's 6'7", dude.
6'7".
So I'm done with this.
But what I'm saying is that when you trust your system, Tommy Toon is a very good dancer.
Tommy Toon is very tall.
He's 6'6".
That's pretty tall.
This all becomes relevant, Sean.
I know where it all goes.
If you count Sean Nelson's hair, he's at least 6'6".
I'm able to bring this into Chetty G, and then I can do things with it as well.
Which is a powerful idea to me.
Here's part of my problem is I don't have any systems at all, as far as I can tell.
That's such an unintentionally funny thing for you to say.
As far as I know.
That's like somebody asks you, do you have life insurance?
And you go...
Not as far as I know.
Not as far as I know.
If you come into my house.
Yes.
And you, okay, so the other day, Ari was in Singapore and then she went to.
Malaysia.
Malaysia or Indonesia or something.
Oh, sorry.
Yeah, my bad, my bad, yeah.
And she was scuba diving or something.
And I had encouraged her to do this.
I said, you need to take some time for yourself.
You need to go do a thing that you love.
And then while she was gone, I said, I know what I'm going to do.
And I bought a whole bunch of different things.
And I went into her basement, into this giant room.
Is this the thing where you get her basement organized while she's gone?
Yeah.
And I said to you, because you know women love that time.
I do.
I know.
All right.
I want to hear every cubic inch of this story, how it went when you organized your mother's, your daughter's mother partner.
Did you get shelves?
What'd you get?
Here's what I know.
Okay.
Which is do not go into her closet, her current closet and touch anything.
Don't even touch a thing in her current closet.
Okay.
But in the basement where all the things are in bags that are all labeled, like sometimes this is too small in the fall, but in the spring, it's not all that kind of stuff.
There's no way.
And her garage, which was just full of like half inflated pool toys and.
Just like, you know, just insanity.
Sounds like a liminal area that is somewhat unsettled in what it is for.
And for followers of the document, which is only me, people know that left to its own devices, almost any area in a house will become storage.
Yeah, well, and if you don't fight it, it all becomes storage and storage is the least muscular use of your space.
When I excavated her garage, I found garbage cans, waste paper baskets that were that had been used and were full of waste paper and had just been moved to the garage, not emptied into a larger can and then put out to the curb.
It's kind of a DMZ for refuse.
Yeah, like here's a waste paper.
Let the age a little bit.
I don't want to carry it upstairs right now, so I'm just going to put it in the garage.
Just a crazy thing.
Yes.
But so I go in and I bought all the shelving system, different kinds, you know, and I measured the space so it exactly fit in there.
Oh, man, that's nice.
Okay.
It fit in there so well you couldn't get a credit card between it and the wall.
And I bought all this lighting so that the whole place was illuminated like it was some kind of boutique.
You made this a project is what you did.
I really did.
I spent days on it.
I was like, oh, this is going to just blow everybody's mind.
And then my sister came in and she was like, oh, well, this needs a system.
And she organized all the clothes because I went and secured 10,000 hangers.
She organized all the clothes, not just by type and style, but by color and attitude.
And I had, I understood enough that I had built the shelves so that there were areas where you could hang a really long moo moo style seventies housewife dress.
And then there were things that for blouses.
You're leaving room for the human soul.
i knew that i knew that at least there needed to be all this i built this whole system and then it was a big hit which it was a risk you know she could have come in and gone like but she came in and was like wow oh that's so nice that's so nice did you appreciate the the approach you'd taken
Well, she said out of the corner of her mouth, she was like, yeah, too bad everything in here doesn't fit.
And I was like, oh, ouch.
And she said, no, no, no, no, no, no.
It'll help me because I'll get rid of the stuff.
There's clarity.
There's clarity about where stuff goes.
Even stuff that doesn't isn't like something you want to keep.
That is a big improvement over this is all just unprocessed stuff.
Big improvement.
And then she said, and then I can take the stuff that does fit that's in my closet, but it's, but it doesn't belong there.
Like the summer stuff now and whatever else I can move it down here.
And then our little girl can use this because I put up a whole, I put up a mirror that was the whole wall.
So with my dramatic lighting, you can go in there and try stuff on and look at it in the secret mirror and
And it's in the basement.
It's like an 80s video.
Yeah, you can close the door.
There's no window.
You can be in there and have your private time with your clothes.
You can put on your scarves and spin like Stevie Nicks.
Exactly.
Stand back.
Stand back.
So I did all this.
And then eventually I was like, oh, I'm sorry.
Everything doesn't fit.
And she was like, no, no, no, no, no.
It's great.
I'm sorry that I Bellingham'd you.
I was like, that's fine.
I mean, it's basically robbed me of all joy.
But that's fine.
That's fine.
And then two days later, Susan texts me and she's like, look, I know that if we touched even a broken pencil in your house, you would know it within an hour.
You'd be like, where's that pencil?
You would sense a disturbance in the force.
Yeah.
Even if it was under 16 letters, you would be like, wait a minute.
There was a pencil here that was broken that I was going to do something with.
I was going to put it in my pencil, my broken pencil can.
Part of your pencil recovery program.
So she said, I know that we can't do at your house what we did at Ari's house, even though it's what you need.
And she said, the reason we can't do it is that you would not approve of the shelves.
You would not approve of the system.
You would not approve of any of the things.
And, and so the only way we can do it is if we all agree that we're going to do it, but you're going to be there to approve.
And I said, this is such a fraught project.
The problem is that I'm not going to approve of even the small, I'm not even going to approve of you touching the thing.
And she's like, but we have to do something.
We, what do you mean?
Because you are living in a, in a state of excited insanity at all times.
Like,
So it started as a favor and turned into an intervention.
Well, a little bit.
She's like, you have 45 different framed magazine covers, not of anything from your life.
Magazine covers from the 1950s with it, where there's a priest smoking a cigar and holding a pistol upside down.
Hmm.
And you put it in a frame at some point, but there's nowhere for you to hang that.
There's never going to be again in your life a place you can hang that on the wall.
So she feels like part of it is bringing you to what you intended to be the last mile of parts of a project.
Like you did this, da-da-da-da, and you got 80% done.
And in Susan's conception of things, then the last 20% is getting those on the walls in an attractive way, for example.
Yes?
Yes.
Or get them out of the house.
There's nowhere that this is going to go.
That would be very different, but yes.
This 1945 copy of the Alaska Sportsman where there's an illustration of three wolves attacking a trapper, it doesn't belong in a frame.
So you want me to forget my history?
Is that it, Susan?
It belongs either in the garbage or at a thrift store or somewhere else, maybe out of the frame and in a drawer.
I don't know, but something else.
And I think, well, now, wait a minute.
When I say I don't have any systems that I know about, I do have a can full of broken pencils.
Is that a system?
I'm not sure.
I do have framed artifacts like, like, uh, napkins that had some deal memo written on them.
And you know, I have here on the shelf here, I have three different cans of dirt.
I have a can, I have a can of dirt.
from three different places where it was like oh i should bring some dirt back but i mean you've got them all in the same place well they're together that's what i'm saying i mean that's a form of organization i guess it is i guess it's a system do you know which is which yeah yeah yeah because i because well it's just clear which is which just i mean well i mean but like do you know what location the dirt is from
Yeah.
But the thing is, I guess it wouldn't be clear to anybody that looked at it.
Well, it's most important that it be clear to you.
But, you know, like last night when I put away the chili, I marked up the – I didn't need to mark up the noodles because I felt like that was fairly self-evident.
But when I put in leftovers, I write down what it is and what date I put it in the refrigerator because it's not a library.
Exactly.
And if you pick it up and it says Sunday and you don't know which Sunday it is, well, that should tell you something.
And the thing is, my sister, and even if they all were involved, they would look at those cans of dirt and they would go, why does he have dirt in cans?
And I would go, whoa, that's the dirt from the place.
Yeah.
And that would be very, it's very difficult to explain the dirt from the place.
Yeah, I mean, like, yeah, that's a different project.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah, but it's all part of the same project, because the project would be, how do we clear off these shelves?
And this gets us eventually, perhaps, probably not in the amount of time we have here, but, like, why is this such a big deal for Susan?
I'm sorry.
Is it just that Susan is so overflowing with energy, enthusiasm, and helpfulness that she cannot contain herself?
Why does she feel like this is so...
Like, is she embarrassed about you?
Like, why does she need to do this?
No, because we did such a good job organizing that closet that it that it feels like, oh, this is a thing.
We're actually good at this.
Like Susan and I together organized these closets in the basement.
of Ari's house in a way that's indisputably cooler than what was there before, which was a bunch of stuff in bags on the floor of a room that was lit with a fluorescent light.
And now you walk in there and it's like, I just want to live in this closet.
This is like one of those closets you see on Instagram where people are like, ha ha ha, here's my closet, bleebs.
And it's like, oh yeah, this is great.
So Susan's like- She wants you to have that, but it sounds like there's a little bit of like-
I don't know, like urgency, like this has to be done.
It has to be done to or for you and it has to be done by me.
And fourth, it has to be done now.
Well, in a way, because there's constantly, I think, around here, some desire, I think there's only one way to put it, which is some desire to help.
People want to help and they don't know how.
It's just like nobody knows what to get me for Christmas because there's nothing to get me for Christmas.
Sephora gift card.
Yeah, and yet they want to get something for you for Christmas.
And so they're like, well... You need so much help in so many ways that they just can't sit with the fact that you're not getting some kind of help.
Even if it's not the one you need the most right now, the help must be proffered.
There's got to be some kind of help.
A couple of years ago, somebody bought me a ping pong table.
And they said... It's called table tennis, John.
They said... Oh.
Oh.
A callback to Patrick on the line.
But they wanted to help.
Yes.
But they said, I know that there's no room for a ping pong table right now or a table tennis table.
And so what this is, is it's like my dad used to give me for Christmas.
It's a paper bag stapled once and inside is a certificate for guitar lessons.
He would put his last-minute pseudo-gift into a brown paper, like you buy nails in at the hardware store.
No, no, no, not that.
No, a grocery bag from Cars Grocery.
Oh, in that case.
Wow, okay.
Stapled once.
One ka-chunk.
Because it was obvious that he thought of this.
Now it's birthday.
Yeah.
And it said, you know, good for something that I was never going to remember to redeem.
And he wasn't either.
And it was just like, it's better than taking $50 and throwing it in the wind.
It cost only the cost of a staple.
And however much the ink on the page was.
So anyway, I got this piece of paper that was like good for one table tennis table the day that you finally have cleaned out enough space for a table tennis table.
Oh, I see.
It's a gift with a catch.
And so there's a lot of those.
This is like the standing desk that my wife gave me.
Which you do or do not use?
No, it's perfect.
This is exactly the same thing.
You know, you buy one of those Ikea kitchens.
It's got the sizzly top, and it's got the thing that could be a microwave.
You know what I mean?
This Ikea kitchen that you buy for every little kid.
It's one of the great toys.
Well, when my kid had aged out of that, and it had been the Millennium Falcon, it had been whatever Phineas and Ferb are doing today.
It had been many things, but then it became a place that I would stand to look out our front window while I typed on my computer.
Oh.
And then one Christmas, I got a standing desk, which is what I like to call John.
I think you've heard this phrase from me before.
It's called a message gift.
I got a message gift, which was, hey, look at this nice standing desk you got.
And the message is, I need to not have an Ikea kitchen in the window that my husband stands at.
Yeah, right.
Time to get rid of the thing and replace it with this thing.
It's not what I would have asked for, but it might be what I needed, and now it's what she uses at home.
You know what I mean?
Circle of life.
She's at home three out of five days a week, and that's where she works now.
I think people, and by people, I mean the people that surround me, which is weirdly all women, maybe not weirdly, maybe not weirdly.
And what I think everyone's worried about is if a table tennis table did come in here, it would immediately be covered with magazine covers that are in like... Next to a treadmill, John, it is the canonical example of something you just put things on.
And the thing is, I don't want a table tennis table that's covered with cans of broken pencils.
Like, that's not the future for me.
It's not the vision, yeah.
But, you know, systems elude me.
Like, if I look at the dining room table right now, just the number of coats that are hanging on the back of the chairs...
Right.
This is why I bring up the message gift, because I think a message gift is often ultimately kind of intended as a kind thing.
But the brutal take-home message of the message gift is, you need to be different.
yeah you're doing it wrong well yeah i mean like you know maybe that you buy you buy your lady lingerie or something you know yeah that's a kind of message gift but like with with with dudes like it could be like well here's a here's a place for you to put all the things that i'm sick of seeing everywhere around the house happy birthday you know not that it's i don't mean it as in like it's it's unkind or something because sometimes it's a message you really one really needs to hear but you know yeah yes
But it doesn't match your Weltanschauung, right?
You've got a broader Weltanschauung about how all these things fit together that goes way beyond, oh, those are broken pencils in a can.
You're like, well, to you, they're broken pencils in a can.
Like, to me, they're part of a larger project.
Yeah, well, because each one of those broken pencils has the name of some 1970s bank.
uh like embossed in it sure and so that's all like not just pencils those are documents of a time but you know all those banks closed in the uh in the subprime mortgage debacle oh that's true you know patty hearse patty hearse was uh was um the bank that she robbed you know that's just up the street from us right
I did not.
How have you never taken me there?
Well, it was a blockbuster video, and then it became a different bank.
But yeah, up on Irving.
Irving in the 20s.
The house that the Green River Killer lived in.
Gary?
Yeah, Gary.
He has a name.
It's right over the hill.
Really?
And somebody's living there.
They didn't tear it down.
That's what houses are for, John.
I know.
It's just on a cul-de-sac.
And it's like, terrible, terrible, terrible.
Terrible, terrible things happen to bear.
What's his name?
Gary River?
What's his name?
Gary Ridgeway.
Gary Ridgeway.
You think anybody ever came to his house and helped him get organized?
Well, that's the thing.
Things could have been different.
Ted Bundy or Ed Gein, any of those guys.
All those nurses in Boston wouldn't have died.
That's what I'm worried about, you know.
Me too.
I mean, nobody's going to die around here.
No, not anymore.
No.
I gave somebody a ride home the other night, and I had that bed frame in the back, you know, the bed frame that I bought in Portland that I...
it was so heavy that i couldn't get it out of the truck and none of the none of my usual counsel could help me move it yeah yeah i needed like some i needed like a tough guy yeah it ended up being susan she was like i'm a tough guy who are you kidding god i gotta catch up with susan she's burning shit up these days i know but so i was giving somebody a ride home and um and she looked in the back and she was like is that a coffin
And I was like, well, I didn't want to.
When you say coffin.
And I reached over, and I auto-locked the doors, and she was like, oh, hi.
It was fun times.
We have a lot of fun up here in the Northwest.
Right now, it's just a box.
It's not a coffin until I find the right person.
Yeah, exactly.
And then at the end of the night, she was like, do you want me to get in the box?
And I was like, oh, come on.
I said, no, don't get in the box.
That's too complicated.
That's going to bring up a lot of feelings.
She sounds like she's got a lot going on right now.
Well, this wasn't Susan.
This was somebody else.
Oh, this is your drifter.
Yeah, some drifter.
Just some drifter.
That's funny.
Do you want me to get in the box?
She was a funny drifter.
She was like, you want me to get in the box?
Oh, man.
Kind of.
Man, some of my biggest crushes have been funny drifters.
But here's the thing.
I'm trying to address the attention deficit disorder without medication.
And part of it is asking people for help.
And then the problem is that I don't want their help.
And so I say, look, this is, I got a call from my mortgage people this morning.
Some people like to help with the part of things.
Here's the thing.
This is way too much for whatever seven or eight minutes we've got left.
But like there's, there's, I'm just going to say it because I've been, I've done this as well.
I'm not saying this to be unkind to people who claim they're trying to help, although they are often just claiming to try and help, is that
This is a very complicated issue.
Because first of all, sometimes we need the kind of help that isn't the kind of help that we need.
I'm guessing at some point, probably in the 80s, you've probably had certain weekends where the help that you needed was not the help that you wanted, right?
We've all had things where, you know what I'm saying?
But it's also that there's another kind of problem, which is there are some people, I'm not saying this is Susan or the drifter,
Great show.
But there are some people who just like to ask and be thanked.
They don't really want to help.
They want to say, is there anything I can do?
Stay safe.
And you're like, fuck.
But then there's other kinds of people that want to give you the kind of help that they like to give or the kind of help that they think you need, which now gets us right back to, do you want me to find the phone number for the doctor?
No, I don't want you to, I know how phones work.
I know phone numbers work.
What doesn't work for me is everyone around me alighting the fact that there's so much more to getting something done than getting the phone number.
And like, you don't understand me if you don't understand that.
And this happened to me the other day.
I have a bunch of friends up here who are like, you need... That's right.
Well, and by bunch, I mean three.
Jason's mine.
I'm claiming him now.
Yeah, I know.
Jason belongs to you now.
I got nothing to do with him.
But although he does want to see King Giz and the Liz Whiz...
But that's a different topic.
But I have these three friends that were always hassling me.
Why don't you ever go skiing?
You need to go skiing.
You're a good skier.
You never go skiing.
And I was like, ah, skiing, skiing, skiing.
It's a lot of work.
It's a lot of money.
It's a lot of all this pain in the ass.
Why do you fucking care?
And then this group of guys I knew in college, they were like, listen, we're going to Canada in January.
We're getting on a helicopter and we're going to get dropped off up in the sweet pow of some Canadian Rocky.
I want you to come.
And I said, the Donner party brought their skis too.
And that's the thing.
I never, I grew up in Alaska.
I never skied any sweet owl.
Our ski resort was at sea level.
Like it was all just crazy ice monkeys.
And they're like, yeah, but this is the thing.
And I said, I don't know how to even, I'm not even sure I know how to do it.
Can you imagine what that would do to your knees?
Like hour one.
Well, so you remember the doctor said, um, uh, motion is lotion.
Yeah.
Motion is lotion.
But skiing is being.
Skiing is being.
No, I mean, I guess I don't have a bad term that rhymes.
I need to work on this.
I have these friends and they were like, okay, well, here's blah, blah, blah.
And here's what you need and blah, blah, blah.
They're putting together a ski, a guy's fun ski occasion.
And you are being gang pressed into that because it's something you need to do.
They rented some big log cabin and we're going to go up and ski multiple days with a helicopter.
And I said, I wrote them and I said, listen, here's the thing.
I need boots.
I need goggles.
I need all these things, skis.
And I, you can send me every link.
in the world to these things.
But I'm going to go on, I'm going to follow your link, and I'm going to go on the ski boot thing, and then I'm going to see that there's a sale on a different kind of ski boot, and then I'm going to find over there, and then they're not going to have my size, and then I'm going to go to this thing.
Pretty soon you're putting together a slideshow about ski looks from the 1950s, and you're not sure why, right?
You end up going down this rabbit hole where the thing that does draw you in gets the hook in more than the thing that the assignment that you've been given.
100 i'm going to start buying moriarty ski hats on ebay instead of doing whatever it is you were trying to get me to do which was buy some boots so i could go heli skiing with you
And one of the dudes, who is the publisher of Fretboard Journal, and who is from Sacramento.
Sorry, that was me tearing out the new Floyd Rose.
And he plays the electric saw, or whatever.
Is that at Fretz, John?
No, no, no.
There's no Fretz on it.
It's a fretless saw.
Fretboard Journal, but he plays the saw.
He said, why don't you meet me for ramen on Tuesday?
And I said, okay, I'll meet you for ramen.
I can do that.
That's a thing I can do.
I like ramen.
I'll meet you for ramen.
I meet him for ramen in Seattle's Fremont neighborhood.
And then as we're walking out, he says, oh, look across the street.
Weird.
It's Evo, the world's coolest ski boot store.
Hmm.
And I'm like, what are the chances?
I'm like, what did you do?
And we walked across the street.
You got incepted, my friend.
And he had made an appointment with the world famous boot fitter guy that you have to make an appointment six months in advance, but he knows him somehow through fretboard journal or whatever.
And I sit in the chair and the guy puts me in these ski boots and he's like, these are the ones.
And they're $900.
They're $900 for that.
That's two of them.
You get a pair.
Yeah, you get a pair.
That seems like a lot of money for footwear, John.
It's a lot.
I'm a little bit out of the trade, but that seems like you could get a pair of Louboutins for that.
Well, yeah, you could get two pairs of Uggs probably.
Or Ufos.
And I said, I can't do that.
And meanwhile, Jason is standing right there and he holds his phone up to the special boot guy.
And he's like, is there anything different between these boots and last year's model?
And the guy goes, nope, they're exactly the same.
And he said, and Jason says, oh, that's funny because here's last year's model for like less than half price, which is still $400.
Jason did that?
That's incredibly useful.
Yeah.
And then he says, I'm forwarding it to you.
And then it goes bleep on my phone.
And he says, buy it now.
And I went, okay.
Was it eBay and it was your size or what?
No, it was at this very store, but on their online clearance from last year.
And I was like, bloop.
And then all of a sudden I had ski boots.
And the guy was like, come in after you get them and we'll bake them in the ski boot baking oven and then put them on your feet and they'll form.
You gotta bake the shoes?
You bake the shoes.
Okay.
And I was like, uh, uh, uh.
I saw a guy building a log cabin.
I like to watch log cabin building videos.
I wish he would send those to me because I want to see those.
Oh, John.
Oh, John, John, John, John, John.
And he puts a log in the fire for a while, and then that kind of burns up the log a little bit, and I think it makes it more sturdy to be used as a post.
Would you actually like me to send you some of those?
Yes, I would.
It's like hardening a sword by pounding on it with a hammer.
It's forged in fire is the way I look at it.
So you're saying you bake the shoes, you get the $400 shoes, and you bake them, and that makes them fit better?
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Yeah, they bake to your foot.
Do your feet have to go in the oven, too, or is it just your shoes?
No, no, it's just the shoes.
Okay.
And then Jason says to me, guess what?
I have ADD, too, and I find this stuff impossible.
Did he just realize that while he was looking for the boots?
No, no, no.
He'd known it for a long time.
He said, I find this impossible to do for myself, but it's so easy to do for you.
Oh, it's like one of those hippie circles where everybody gets a back rub.
Pack your own chute, rub somebody's back, that kind of thing.
I just built a whole closet system for Ari, and I can't even organize the broken fences.
Talk about your hakuna matata.
You're saying each according to their needs and others according to their closet or needs, and you help a brother out, is what the program's called.
Help a brother out.
Yes, yes.
So it's like you're handing off...
John, if I could say, I'm not going to do this for you because you don't want this, but if you wanted very measured one hour of help with your calendar that would be useful today, I would happily do that.
I don't think you want that.
But is that not an example of what you're talking about?
It is.
It is.
And you could tell me if the intro to a song is too long or something.
I could do that.
I could do so many things.
I could go, I could clean up your house really well.
I'll let Madeline know because I think she'd be pretty into that.
I would do a pretty good job.
I have good news and other news.
You know, John, he's coming to town, so gotta go.
Hey, Merlin, I took every post-it note that says, hey, do it today, and I put them all together in a file called the do it today post-it note file.
No, no, no, no, no.
I know what you would do.
You would do the opposite.
You would come in where I would come in and tear down all your fucking...
ad hoc calendars and have you get one place that you... With mine, I think you would create what I'm going to call ambiguation.
You might come in and give me some... Maybe I need that.
I need red herrings.
I need false flags.
I need things that make me think twice about whether I'm being undermined and could I be doing that to myself.
You could plant that.
You know, Max Temkin hid playing cards in my office that I was finding for years.
Similar thing here.
Oh, it was amazing.
He blew my mind.
It was the longest con ever was he'd hidden a playing card.
He had me look like six months after he'd hidden it.
He had me do it during a podcast.
Oh my God, because it was a magic trick.
Well, yeah.
Wow.
What card am I thinking of now?
Two of hearts.
Well, no, what I would probably do is take all of the post-it notes that you have on the wall that said the same thing in various different places and ways, and I'd put them in a frame.
I'd put them in a picture frame and I'd hang them on the wall.
How would you know what order they go in?
But, you know, sometimes one needs to impose order.
But what you're saying is, because like I said, I think I've kind of gotten at this from a couple little remarks and angles and noises, is like almost every interaction you have in your life kind of sounds like it might become an intervention.
But what if that became, what if we normalize that?
What if we say that's okay?
What if we say from now on, it's oops, all interventions.
Like from now on, you just roll up on people and fix what you think is wrong with them.
There it is.
It's a human centipede except of fixing it.
Why are all these yellow notes in a frame?
And John did it.