Ep. 568: "Imaginary Pipe"
Hello.
Hello.
How are you?
Hi, John.
Is that a turn signal in the background?
Are you recording from your car?
Don't.
You know I don't have a car.
Do you want me to start over?
No, are you kidding?
What's in the show is in the show.
I don't know if it'll show up to the listener.
Oh, that's true.
I do have a cute hearing.
It's fine.
Yeah, no, it's fine.
Is it something digitally printing?
No, no, I meant that your hearing's not that cute.
No, you know what it is.
It's my goddamn scooter.
Blinky, blinky.
That's not interesting to talk about, but yes, it makes a noise, and I should probably turn it off manually before I record a podcast, but then I get here, and I'm hurrying, I'm rushing, I'm trying to make sure everything's set up.
I don't like to be late for things.
You're always Russian.
I'm always Russian.
You don't like to be late to things.
Even Russians love their children, too.
They do love their children.
Did you know?
Did you know?
Did you know that the lady in the Nikita video by Elton John...
Where he's driving around in a red Rolls Royce and she's a Russian guard marching on the wall.
The Nikita lady is the same...
Person in the Macintosh 1984 ad that throws the hammer at the screen.
The devil you say.
I'm here to tell you it's the same person.
Is this something from your other program that you learned?
No, no.
How'd you learn this?
I learned it by really liking the girl in the Nikita video.
Right.
In the 80s.
And then I was remembering the 1980s.
At the time, this is going to be hard for people to understand, but at the time, if you saw a lady that you liked in a catalog or in a magazine, like in an advertisement,
You wouldn't know any, there would be no other way to know anything about her.
Can I toss in one more?
Uh-huh, one more.
Lady Saw in a Music Video.
Or Lady Saw in the Music.
The Lady with the Headband in the Abracadabra video by Steve Miller.
I don't know her name.
She's going to reach out and grab you.
Well, let's go easy.
Consent.
So there were a few.
You can't tell these kids.
I just didn't know lyrics to songs for 20 years.
I just didn't know who did songs.
I had heard Games Without Frontiers for probably five years, and I had no idea what that song was.
It was like something from another planet to me in ninth grade.
I was like, what is this song?
And I guess if I were paying attention, I probably could have picked it up.
But there was not a place, let's just say, that...
combine a bunch of searchable computers where you could go find stuff.
No, there were not.
You had to add abracadabra with your imagination cadabra.
And for me, there was... I think I've talked about... Have you come back and watched that video?
Because I have.
No, I watch it.
I watched it a couple years ago.
All that stuff.
It's outstanding because it's abracadabra.
And so I guess whoever made the video decided, oh, we'll take this puffy guy who has some guitar songs and we'll make an MTV style video that involves magic.
I think there's a tiger in it at one point.
Do you remember when that song came out?
John, let's not be coarse with one another.
Of course, that was right.
You were in seventh grade, right?
Maybe.
I don't know when it came out, but I do know that during the Blessed Period when we had MTV for a year or so, I forget how long, but that was right at the beginning of my MTV period.
I mean, really, at the same time as, like, you know, I Ran by Flack of Seagulls or probably Only the Lonely by Motels.
There were just those songs that were just, like, always on.
Yeah.
You're right, that was like 8th grade.
That was probably like 81?
Yeah, I would say that.
I would say 8th grade, maybe I was 6th.
That song's made of cocaine, John.
You graduated what year?
85?
High school I graduated, I successfully graduated in 1985.
85, yeah, so exactly.
You would have been 8th grade, I would have been 7th, maybe something like that.
But this girl that was in this Elton John video, boy, she really struck me to the core at that age.
She just... I have the strongest feeling this has come up before.
It may have because I've definitely talked about the girl that was in the Obermeyer ski magazine advertisements.
Obermeyer was a company from Portland that made ski films.
Obermeyer.
Obermeyer.
But they made ski clothes and they would put advertisements in ski magazines and I read ski magazines and it was and they had a model for a very short period of time that I just oh I just would have I don't know what I would have because I was a teenager I wish we could do a whole episode about this about about the combination of I don't know Someone at a distance early inaccessible utterly unknown
You know, a good example of this, in some ways, like, we don't have to be cute about it, but Pictures of Lily by Pete Townsend.
I mean, that's putting it a little bit coarsely, but that's what we're talking about, which is like, I don't even, I don't know what this is.
I don't know.
I just know that I feel very strongly about this person.
It's my whole life.
You're describing my whole life.
Oh, my.
Oh, John, it's so insane.
All the sadness.
And then people were dating and light petting.
And that didn't seem right.
That made everybody look bad.
Didn't you agree?
I did.
I was very judgmental.
I was very judgmental of my friends that were heavy petting.
I was like, well, well, I just harumph.
I mean, that's just like very advanced.
It's very advanced Yeah, my idea of heavy petty was a brushing past the library.
I'm in the biography section It's funny though at that age my my male friends would Ask me for a relationship advice.
I Had had never been in a relationship.
I had no Yoda
Yeah, but they would say, oh man, I'm having all this problem with my girl, and I just... She said this, and I said this, and I'd be like, well, let me explain what your girlfriend is really saying.
Did you make finger tints?
Like, hmm...
I did.
I did.
In fact, with one friend, I had an imaginary pipe, and he would say, you know, can I talk to the, it's like Lucy Van Pelt.
Can I talk to the doctor?
And I would put the imaginary pipe, and I'd go like...
What's your problem, son?
Yeah.
Seventh grade.
I knew so much, but I knew so little.
Oh, but sometimes really advice is, I don't know.
It depends.
I could be kidding about this.
It's a lot easier.
Yeah, you can give it even if you don't, even if you haven't lived it.
Well, there are times when somebody, this is going to sound crazy and counter-truth, but sometimes you need to hear from somebody who's not you.
And sometimes you need to hear from somebody who has a completely outside point of view that's not just, quote, an adult.
That can be helpful.
But also, people do seek a lot of advice from people who really are in no position to give it.
But I bet you gave great advice.
What are you going to do?
What are you going to do?
Give advice?
What can you do?
What can you do?
You going to get paid to give advice?
I'm sorry, you don't want your friends to be happy?
Is that the thing?
Is that the thing you don't give your friends advice when you don't know what they're talking about and nobody knows what they're talking about?
You don't do that?
Oh, boy.
I do it.
I do it.
I'm not going to lie.
Giving advice all the time.
Oh, yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I've ended five marriages.
Mm-hmm.
Just by sitting next to a guy on the bus and like, hey, how's your day going?
And he's like, ugh.
I'm like, listen, man.
Uh-huh.
You're not supposed to imaginary smoke on this bus.
It's going to get worse before it's going to get better.
Puff, puff, puff.
Well, and also sometimes, you know, it ends up being like a Seinfeld thing where you don't mean to accidentally...
like drop a truth bomb just because you are, there's a phrase that people use.
There's all kinds of different terms for this, but a term for people in development, they call it rubber ducking, which is if you're not sure what to do about something.
I have not heard of this phrase, rubber ducking.
Well, I mean, there's lots of other names for it, but like different, no, no, no.
But basically here's what it comes down to.
It's this crazy thing that nobody believes until they try it, which in that instance is if you're not sure how to approach a problem, explain the problem to the rubber duck on your desk.
And the thing is, a lot of times a friend can be a duck.
Robert Ducking, you're the one.
I would like to visit the moon, but I don't think I'd want to live there.
Hello, I'm Carl Sagan.
I live with my longtime companion, Bert.
I feel like this is... There's a puppet Carl Sagan that lives with Bert.
That would be so cute.
Anyways.
If only we made the culture.
Billions and billions of pigeons.
Now I'm wondering, is Ernie a Carl Sagan avatar?
Well, you know, I mentioned Yoda.
Ernie predated Carl Sagan in the public consciousness by a decade.
In the public consciousness a little bit.
Was Carl Sagan a celebrity until Cosmos?
I think he was kind of like a slightly obscure but cool celebrity because of the...
What was the Mars mission called Viking?
Like when they did the record and everything, you know?
Oh, yeah.
But no, I'm not sure.
Wait, I'm sorry.
I'm going to drop this and lose like a ton of nerd cred.
But you know how there's those crazy connections in life?
Like how, in retrospect, where you're like, oh, yeah.
So Plato was Socrates's...
you know, student.
And then Aristotle was Plato's student.
And then Alexander the Great was tutored by, you know, those kinds of things.
Or like, oh, there was this, I imagine you love these too.
Like in this one day in 1921, like Freud and Captain Caveman met and everything changed.
You know, like we were like these two, like really wild figures meet.
I don't, I think, I think Ernie was pretty well established by the time most of us knew who Carl Sagan was.
Yeah.
It says here in 1968, Sagan was denied tenure at Harvard.
Was it the world mind virus, John?
I think it was.
I think it was.
They don't like teaching classes to underclassmen.
Who is that?
That's horrible, because it's also a little bit Jello Biafra.
Who else has that terrible voice?
That's a terrible voice.
Oh, really, though?
I mean, isn't that just comic book guy?
Here's the thing about Bert.
Sorry, here's the thing about... Is it Bert?
Yeah, Bert.
But you really hear it.
Once you start hearing the Frank Oz voice, and that unlocks the key, you're like, have you ever noticed that Yoda sounds like Grover and Miss Piggy?
And, you know...
And then when I end up trying to do Yoda, I end up sounding like Grover is my problem.
Like just in the course of your daily life?
When I try to say something like, there is no trying.
Or whatever the fuck.
I don't care.
Grover is so deep in us.
Grover is so deep in you.
Yeah, you ever get to the end of that book and find out who the monster is?
I did.
Holy shit.
It freaked me out every time.
I was at a cocktail party a few years ago.
I didn't want it to be not like this, not like this.
And I saw the book on the shelf, and I had not seen it since whatever, 1977.
Yeah.
And I see the book on the shelf, and I'm like, wait a minute.
Hang on.
I know that book.
And I pulled it off.
It had not come back in any kind of nostalgia trip.
I didn't have a kid yet.
Exactly.
Let alone having proximity to people who would be reading that to a current child.
Yeah, right.
And I pull it off and I'm like, I'm looking at him, holding it in my hand and I'm like, what is this magic book?
Just looking at the cover of it, I couldn't believe that in a way like this was real.
This was real the whole time.
uh and then read it you know sitting at this party boy i was the life of that party uh-huh but uh but yeah i got to the end and the kind of guy shows up a party you remind people who they are who they should be you know i don't want to read a book i'm not the kind of guy that's going to say that out loud but you know it's nice of you that's what i admire about you is you you seem um you seem so go on
Reserved.
Oh.
Yeah.
No.
Those books are good.
We were pretty picky about kids' books.
We don't need to talk about kids' books.
But I have extremely good taste in kids' books.
And I'm also good at recommending kids' books, I think.
Do you have, I have to guess that you do, a Maryland spreadsheet about kids' books?
I don't think so, but we were pretty involved.
It doesn't seem like a Merlin Kidd book list would be... I mean, depending on how you look at it, it is both a true thing and a funny bit.
Both are true.
Those are both true statements about that.
I was looking at my list of actors from Sweden and Norway spreadsheet last night, because I'm always confusing the Starsguards and the Mickelsons, let alone the guy on Game of Thrones, who's also from Dane.
Who's a Starsguard and a Mickelson?
No, no, but Nicholas Kolfskoff.
His grandmother was a...
No, no, Nichols, I can pull it up if you need me to, but there's like three Skarsgårds.
It's very confusing.
You got Stellan, you got the other one, and then the one from Nosferatu.
And they're all in the sheet, and then you got the Mickelsons, and then it gets confusing, because Michael Norkvist, he's not related to those people.
He's doing his own thing over here.
But you got Mads Mikkelsen and Lars Mikkelsen, and they are brothers.
Right.
Right.
So to answer your question, duh, I have spreadsheets about all that.
And the difference here is, unlike things like Celebrity Heights spreadsheet, to which Sabrina Carpenter, five feet tall, exactly was added last night, those are the kinds of things where I don't know information, or if I did know information, I would easily forget it.
But more importantly, I need the context for comparison of information that you asked.
But one thing that makes it a spreadsheet for me is there will be probably something over time that will update
We'll want to be able to do formulas and comparisons and stuff like that.
That's usually that.
So the thing is, I was in the game at the time, actively involved in the children's book, you know, racket.
Right.
Having had ones I considered successful, seeing what other people liked.
And, you know, I'm going to tell you something, John.
I don't know if you ever had a kid, but this kid's stuff can be a real racket.
Right.
And there's a lot of not very good things out there.
And there are, in fact, things that most, perhaps most corrosively, things that look like good things that aren't good things.
And sometimes you need somebody to come along and go, hey, worry about that, but don't worry about that and that and that.
I think a lot of people look for that.
A lot of people want somebody to come over and tell them.
And especially because it's the most useless kind of expertise a person can have.
Because it would be nice if you were, quote, always fighting the last war, but you're never caught up about anything, including the stuff you thought you understood a year ago.
So, but like you are especially, maybe you're not, but like I always felt anxious is the wrong word, but unsure about the right way to do things a lot of the time.
And something can come along.
I'll tell you one thing.
A friend of the show, Matt Howey said something before our kid, when we were just, when my wife was walking around with a kid, insider, and said, hey, look, you know, you're going to hear all this pressure to like go out and buy like Ramones t-shirts and funny things and like, you know, cute $80 shoes.
And he's like, your kid's going to grow out of everything immediately.
All you really need to start out is
Of course, I ignored this advice.
All you really need to start out is like a ton of whatever your diaper choice is and a bunch of onesies.
And it doesn't need to have the Ramones on it.
Your kid does not know who the Ramones is.
But of course, you know, you want all new fresh baby stuff for your fresh baby and you buy at Robies.
Robies were good shoes.
I'm glad we invested in this.
But like whatever it is you get.
Your kid's going to outgrow it in like a minute.
You know what I mean?
So what I'm struggling to say badly because I'm still waking up is that I think sometimes you can, you know, maybe you may not be able to send somebody to the moon, but you can at least show them where your finger's pointing.
And you can say, hey, if your values in life or the things you care about are this kind of thing, here's a good place to focus.
If it's these kinds of things, you might look at that.
But under no conditions should you get into baby Einstein.
Because that seems...
The thing is, that seems like it's good for your kid, but if Baby Einstein worked, they wouldn't be selling it at the record store.
And also, you wouldn't need 80 of them.
Are there 80 Baby Einsteins?
I don't know, but... What do they do?
I never saw Baby Einstein.
Well, when I say Baby Einstein, I don't mean to impugn and really contact my counsel if you have a problem with me.
But no, no, it was a thing you've heard, and I think this goes back to even the 90s, that like, oh, if you play classical music for your baby, they'll be smart.
And then I think at some point that got some science sauce sprayed on it and it was like, well, you can't have too much stimulation, but if you do this kind of stimulation and then there are folk ways that I happen to believe, which is if you want your kid, if you'd like your kid to be able to read and you'd even prefer that they enjoy books, make them comfortable around books.
So they have lots of books in the house that they can make a fort out of.
Like it doesn't matter.
Go to the library.
Yes.
Even though they can't read that exposure to books helps them.
So there's all these folk ways where we don't really know what's true, but there are rackets.
Right.
I know this from watching MSNBC because I see what's being advertised to me and is being advertised to all these other.
And it's always to try and recapture something you never had in life, whether it's your boners or your cool hair.
It's just the whole thing is about this kind of... Sorry to be all like, you know...
second level buddhist here but jesus fuck people people are just always and people oh well there's a chance i can make my kids super smart well no like there's not a shortcut to that and but you don't want a super smart kid god you want to keep him under your imagine if you had to deal with that what imagine if what imagine imagine if you had two kids maybe got irish twins and and like one of them super smart and the other one is incredibly strong and they decide to collaborate you do you want that baby einstein and that and that baby farigno
That's not what you want.
You want your kids to be placid and valuable.
You want your kid to sit very still and silently shh.
Just enjoy this teething ring until you're 13.
We got really lucky because I can't recommend this highly enough to people.
This is a great system, which is have a friend's sister have two kids that are one and two years older than your kid.
Oh, that's so good.
That's what cousins were for me, kind of.
Yeah.
It's really valuable.
What's crazy is that this mom and her two kids, we only met them once or twice in our lives.
But for the first eight years of our child's life, every six months...
10 garbage bags worth of stuff would appear.
I see.
That angle.
Oh, my God.
You're right.
Especially once you get over the whole, like, my baby has to have fresh, beautiful, organic things.
And the thing is, then Ari and I would sit on the couch of an evening.
And we would pull all the stuff out and all the stuff that was too stained or too blah, we would just put in a pile that we were going to then send that into... We were going to wash it first and then send it out into the world.
It was shop rags for me.
But we would keep...
We would keep all these clothes.
We never bought our daughter a single thing until she first started to say, I want that.
It's like she's got that XXXL Marlboro shirt from the late 80s.
But what was incredible was up until those kids, up until our friend's kids started expressing their own style,
it was just it was just clothes it was like oh this has got flowers on it and this has got a duck on it and this is you know these are that and then we watched those girls turn into jock girls
And we only knew it because the clothes that were coming down the line.
Yeah, the bag started to have a bunch of soccer stuff on it.
And there were all these Nike things.
And we were like, what's going on over there?
And then little by little, it was like, oh, obviously both of those girls are really into sports.
And that was when our little girl was like, well, wait a minute.
I'm not going to wear this.
It's still play clothes, right?
I mean, you probably don't want to dress like Pele or something, especially don't black up.
By the time you're eight years old, I guess,
You've lived long enough that you qualify to have new clothes bought for you.
But a lot of these baby Einstein decisions were kind of made by what was coming in the door.
Where it was like, oh, I guess what we're into now is this little... We're into this blue duck now.
This is our...
Sophie the giraffe, you say.
All right, we'll try it.
So if you're listening and you have a little baby and you have friends that have babies that are slightly older than yours, make friends with them.
That is the golden stuff.
Lightly used.
Would we be centralizing the Soviet too much to say maybe people should start planning around this?
You take somebody like my wife.
My wife.
Take my wife.
I'm not going to say it.
No, I said it.
Yeah.
She said she wants to go someplace she's never been.
I said try the kitchen.
Because it implies she doesn't cook for me.
Youngest of seven.
And you know the grouping's pretty tight.
It was seven kids in 15 years.
That's incredible.
But see, now that you've got a built-in ecosystem there.
where poor Madeline's just going to have the filthiest, most ragged piece of clothing that's left over, like the one binky that has fallen off everybody else.
But could we start doing that?
Could the Soviet kind of organize this?
Because I think you're also bringing up something that's valuable.
What I thought you were going to say, first of all, it is valuable to have these relationships with people where you can get their free clothes.
Let's just take that as read.
But it's also nice to have somebody to beat your kid's ass.
One a little older and maybe one a little younger who's a startup.
And then maybe your kid could look into beating their ass.
But having kids around the same age, it's good.
You can call it a play group.
You can call it a wine club.
Whatever you call it, you've got to have your kids around other children.
I suspect they will become psychopathic if they don't have exposure to other people.
But I don't know.
Really struggled.
We really struggled with this.
I mean, you know which part the well our our child Struggle get worried when you when you modulate the voice of your Child's struggle to make friends I think for a lot of her young life
um and it was i mean you know if you if you watch instagram long enough there will a video will come along where somebody will tell you what some what everything is you know i bet that i bet that say that sentence again because that was a good sentence if you what instagram long enough what yeah the reel will come along that will explain to you what everything is there you go okay yeah it just paid is it a game of patience do you feel like
Well, but the thing is, it's not what I'm looking for.
I'm looking for the videos where some Chinese guy makes silk into thread, and the video is like 45 minutes long, and he's walking up a mountain trail.
He's stomping into a glass jar.
I get sucked in, and then all of a sudden, there's a mommy blogger in Australia that's like, if your daughter doesn't make friends,
And you're like, oh, no, I'm getting information.
Oh, no.
Oh, you've got to be, but you've probably got to be careful.
A lot of that's coming.
If your child doesn't eat sand, he won't socialize, right?
Yeah, there's a lot of that.
But one of the things.
Take the shit out of your kids and store them in the barn.
I think what I've learned is that.
That's my mommy blogger voice now.
That's your good mommy.
Store them in the van!
You're not allowed to come inside until the sun's gone down and the dingos are out.
That's not what I thought you were going to say.
Oh, because daddy and mommy are fucking?
Are we having a shag?
Isn't it?
Also, we just moved to London.
But no, I wish we had more friends when we were little.
We didn't grow up in a place where you could just kick the kid out and run in the streets.
The whole Swiss cheese really lined up in the 70s for me.
I'm not saying I had an unfortunate childhood at all, but I think a lot of cultural things lined up alongside my family's personal hang-ups.
It was like, woof, it was a rough time to be nine.
Is that right?
In what way?
My mom was, understandably, after my father's death at my age of seven, her age of 40, she was very protective of, you know, me not dying and getting lost.
And she had to work.
And you can just think about all the anxiety of being a single person.
a widow at 40, 41, and having to raise a kid.
It's a very anxious venture.
I understand that now in a way I couldn't have at the time.
But there were just a lot of rules that would help her, to use our phrase, sort of keep her demon dogs at bay.
Like if she had to go to work for 10 hours, she, I think, I can't say, I haven't talked to her about this, but I suspect that...
It would be less difficult for her to do what she had to do for us if she knew that I wasn't having fun in the woods with other children.
That I was at home not watching TV because I also wasn't supposed to watch TV.
Well, that puts you in a bind between not playing with kids and not watching TV.
Oh, I'm not saying I didn't cheat a little bit, but she hated TV so much that it got very emotional.
And then now in retrospect...
God, I feel like Richard Splatt in Veep where I'm just constantly realizing things now.
I think also the fact that she would do shit like cut the cord off the TV every few months.
And then we'd have to put a new third-party plug on the TV.
Because how do you feel when your kid did something...
unwholesome or unhealthy that you didn't know about you end up feeling like a bad parent a little bit and she didn't need that that's just my speculation I only say that just because like you know I guess it got way worse at a point where even the safest place in the world in America from the 80s on people thought your child would be abducted into some kind of satanic cult or you know what I mean like that kind of thing but you know I never had that green field childhood that people talk about
Well, give me a sense of, were you in a cul-de-sac?
Were you close to town?
Yeah, that's a good question.
Were you in a rural area?
No, that's actually an incredibly appropriate question.
We were on a street in Cincinnati in the suburbs in this two-bedroom, one-bath house.
And it was almost all, it was a lot of folks who had moved into their, like older, slightly older folks that had moved into their house in the 50s.
And there were a lot of young families, almost all Italian Catholic families on our street.
Uh-huh.
And I had, you know, I don't know, you know how it is when you're a kid.
I had 15, I had five good friends and 15 friends and acquaintances of some kind just on our like two block, you know, stretch of it.
Had a crush on the girl across the street, like whole nine.
And there were like woods.
Two blocks over, like, you know, just past Melissa's house, you could go into the woods.
And that's like, what does a kid do?
Every kid goes home and plays in the woods.
But playing in the woods, it's almost like a Grimm Brothers thing.
You know, the use of woods and forest and, you know.
I'm sorry, you know what I mean, right?
Where it's like the darkness, right?
This is full of dark elves, wood elves, the worst kind.
I hate those elves.
I'll take a drow elf over a wood elf.
Yeah.
But, but, but, but, but, but.
No offense to any wood elves that are listening.
Well, and I am offending drowls, you know.
Now I'll block out for that.
But here's the thing.
But, and like, I wasn't supposed to like, depending on what the like, how she, I think how she was feeling.
She wasn't capricious.
But no, to me, I just, I wasn't, there's just a lot of stuff that was, and I'm not complaining, but like a lot of these kids, let's be honest, they're Italian Catholics.
sometimes it was almost always dad was working sometimes mom was working but you know they were they could pretty much just go and run around they could even go to northgate mall you know whereas i had very mom needed to know like when she could expect me to be at various checkpoints i'm not i'm not criticizing but i don't know if everybody had that i was very fortunate to have the successful childhood i did but uh i was envious of the catholic children right
Envious of what now is an internet trope of free-range Gen X childhood.
Oh, yeah, not a phone in sight.
You see that every day.
Every day somebody's talking about how wonderful it was, free-range childhood.
Well, and, you know, like everything from other times, I think I'm thinking here of the every generation, people tend to cherry pick the stuff that looks good in retrospect to the kind of person whom they are and tend to not look at maybe the rest of the pie graph for how that went for everybody else.
You know what I'm saying?
I'm trying to be subtle about this.
When was the first time that you had unfettered freedom?
Yeah.
Well, there's a kind of unfettered freedom of like, you know, well, on the one hand, it's like, well, I graduated college and I pay rent.
But then on the other end, there's a sort of like, could it also include stuff that like what I could mostly dependably get away with?
I don't know.
I mean, camp sort of sometimes, but not really.
There was a lot of scheduling at camp.
You know what?
I'm going to say eighth or ninth grade.
My friend Rich and I.
We're just, we're super tight.
He lived with us for a few months when he had some family problems.
Well, when his family problems became enough that he had to live with us.
And we would go out and do, we understand I'm 15 years old.
And we would do this thing called, we call it mutant training missions or ninja because we played defender or ninja training missions where we would wear black clothes and put a sweatshirt over our head and carry shurikens and run through people's yards.
And we were doing that in eighth or ninth grade.
And you understand there that part of it was being stealthy.
So like getting away with it was part of the fun.
It's not like we were, you know, at least at that point, vandalizing things.
We just like to run around.
You know, it's exciting.
It's for shit.
Back to school night is exciting.
It's exciting to be someplace where you've been in other circumstances at a different time of day with different people.
It's always interesting, especially when you're a young person.
Do you know what I mean?
Do you remember you go to school every day?
You're there for fucking nine hours a day in always exactly the same conditions.
And then on one Monday night, your parents come to school and you walk around and you see your locker and there's people just wandering the halls.
And it's like, you know that feeling?
Absolutely.
It's so exciting to be able to walk around the school.
It's crazy.
It's nighttime.
It's nighttime.
The bathrooms are there, but they feel different.
There's adults in the bathroom now.
Look how they sit in the tiny chairs.
Well, so when you first got that, was it something that you were like, oh my God, and you leapt toward freedom and autonomy, or was it something that you were like, oh my God, and you weren't sure about penetrating the veil?
Right.
I think part of it, and this drives probably some manner of like, you can understand a lot about how I am through things like this, the following question I'm about to pose myself.
Like, I see things on TV.
I see what it would like to be Lance Kerwin in real life, you know, or like Jackie Earl Haley.
Like, you know, I had a type that I would like to have been.
And I could see what that would be like.
But I also know that if I could actually just fall on my ass and my mom would be heartbroken and she'd feel terrible.
And so then I'd just climb the door frames like Spider-Man for hours.
That's how I got good at climbing things.
But you know what I mean?
I'm not putting that well.
I'm not really answering your question.
But there is that element of, you could call it guilt.
I think it's more nuanced than that.
But, you know, I've realized this since my kid was probably one or two that every day your kids make concentric circles around you and trying to get further and further away before they have to
run back and that'll change over.
And when I say change, I don't mean just get bigger.
Sometimes it'll contract.
And you know what I mean?
Sometimes the amount of space they need to you or to home changes.
And I was, I, that comes out of my own experience.
Like there was times when I just really needed to be in my room and away from other people.
And other times when I was like, Oh my God, I would thrive if I just, if I just didn't have to live with an adult in a house in Ohio.
Yeah.
You know what I mean?
But every single bit of that, and I would never say this to the young me, because young me who didn't have ears to hear this and it would be frankly cruel, but you're not in a position to decide any of that stuff because you haven't had enough experience yet.
And unfortunately, it takes experience to get experience, but also...
You're not in a position to say if you want to be a doctor.
You don't know enough yet to say if you're going to be.
I mean, you can say that all you want, but people are not going to take that seriously when you're eight.
And when you decided that you'd like to have emancipation because you're 11, and I don't know, you want to go to a Bob Welch concert.
I struggled with that.
I think I was somewhat of an overthinker.
Somewhat of an overthinker.
Shit, I had plenty of time.
So when Jackie Earl Haley rides his motorcycle across the outfield, and the mom is throwing her bottle at him or whatever, is that the one that you were like, I wish I could be that kid?
Well, I'm being a little bit... So, like, in 1977, my favorite character in Star Wars was not Han Solo.
My favorite character was Luke Skywalker.
In a surprise to absolutely no one at all.
I'm probably glossing up and sexying up.
Lance Kerwin... You're very Luke.
I'm very Luke.
And I would pull my socks up over my pajamas.
Ladies.
And wear my bathrobe.
And you'd be extremely angry about having to go out and clean the flux capacitor.
I want to go get some power converters at Tosche Station.
Story's got a bad motivator.
Oh.
I like that movie.
You ever seen that movie?
You ever seen it?
It's really good.
It's a pretty good movie.
And then he says, and then Uncle Owen says to one of the little Jawas, hey, hey, what are you trying to sell?
And he throws out his arm and he goes, what, what?
Mopping, mopping, what, what?
But then Uncle Owen ends up being a charred skeleton.
You know, I didn't realize that.
I didn't realize that.
Oh, you didn't see it?
Your eyes didn't see it?
Those did not read as Aunt and Uncle skeletons to me.
Wow.
And I'm kind of glad.
That's a very PG-13 image.
When did you first see it and realize that it was skeletons?
You know, this is going to sound like something out of Westworld.
I can't even tell you.
It would be at least two or three times.
That I saw it.
Who knows?
I mean, because I was mainly, you know, looking at the bright part of the screen.
Yeah, your eyes were scanning the horizon to see where the stormtroopers were, not like to see the smoldering wreckage of all Luke ever knew.
Yes.
And we don't even know yet.
Like, you know, his sister, Billy pointed this out two days ago when we were watching Star Wars.
And Billy said, you know, you think about it, knowing what we know now, you know, there's a lot.
There's
Sorry, this is going to sound like a bit, which it might be, but no, there's not going to be a bit we do, but I'm just a bit I'm going to mention, which is true.
Like after you've seen the prequels, you're like, Jesus Christ, Obi-Wan, how did you come up with this?
Like, how did you come up with this plan?
I'm going to go put them on this planet and then I'll live there and they'll know of me.
But I guess the idea is Obi-Wan will be able to look over him while, you know, I'll go in and brew, take care of him.
Oh, and by the way, your sister, she's going to go, she's going to go live on Alderaan with a senator's family.
You're going to stay in this mud hut and shut down the main reactor?
Yeah.
You can't even send in your application to the Academy yet.
No, it doesn't seem that cool.
It doesn't seem like we've got the good.
It's an interesting decision.
No, no.
I'm going to, like, the little girl's going to go to this really sweet planet, beautiful planet, live with Jimmy Smits.
You're going to go over here, and you're going to live in a dirt hut with a mean couple that just way overuses Tupperware.
Yeah.
What's that?
Well, you know, it was a gendered world.
You know what?
A long time ago.
It was a different time.
That's right.
It was a long time ago.
Yeah.
Things have really changed.
Yes.
And also, the galaxies are not as far away.
So when you saw that... You see the galaxies?
There's billions and billions.
When Luke was suddenly, like, when everything was gone, everything in Luke's life was gone.
It was all gone!
Oh, my God.
I never thought about this before.
This is like every Disney movie where the mom and dad are killed in a fire.
Every Disney movie, yeah.
And you are the Luke in this character.
You're the little Bambi wandering around now.
You thought you wanted freedom, but now you want your mama.
Yeah, and now you're trying to deal with Obi-Wan.
He's not very friendly.
And then you're driving into town, and you can't even go into the bar.
Your best friend is a gay butler.
And within two days, you're on some ragtag pirate journey.
ship with some some western cow you need to check yourself before you ruck yourself Luke Starkiller life has changed life has changed for Luke in a very short amount of time it's kind of a little bit like my own private Idaho it's like a little bit like he's gonna be like a street hustler now or something you know it's like he's got this like the kid with insomnia now he doesn't know what is what he's doing anymore he definitely needs a haircut and him and his sorry ass bathrobe and his gay robots
Get on a smuggler ship.
Smuggler ship that can do the parsec in 21 gigawatts.
So let me ask you this.
Yes, you there.
Were you sitting on the edge of your chair like, this is what I want.
I want to be taken away and sent into space.
This is a testament.
Like Starkiller.
Like Starkiller Luke.
This is a testament to the various levels on which one can read a text.
Like, one thing I remember from the movie, and I remember from what passed for a trailer in those days, there were a couple scenes that, like, are pretty well known now that were, I feel like I remember seeing in some kind of ads.
And one of them was the door opening and this kid jumping in and saying something along the lines of, I'm Luke Skywalker, I'm here to save you.
And it's like, fuck, I want that to be me.
I could save a girl.
And then she'd kiss me for luck.
And I wouldn't know she's my sister.
I wouldn't care.
Out of sight, out of mind.
That's what I want, too.
I want to save somebody.
You know, that's the thing.
A lot of us don't realize that the way to save ourselves is to save someone else.
whoa, wait a minute.
That's the kind of thing somebody says when their pet dies.
We rescued him, but the truth is I like to think he rescued us.
Is that the kind of thing you say?
He rescued us, exactly.
Exactly.
By saving Princess Leia, you allow her to save you.
You know what they say?
You know what the Torah says?
They said this to Schindler.
Isaac Stern, who's not the violinist, said this to Schindler.
He says, you save one life, you save the world.
Save the life you save the world and then that guy was a good Russia life saves you
He has a he has a comedy club in Branson now off of that one joke you're kidding in Branson always had one for years It's a it's a it's a ruble-making machine You oh my god are you he makes he makes money like a doorknob in a wet sweater that fucking guy He makes huge money and it's all from this one joke in Soviet Russia Television watches you right that was the original joke that we all loved great joke
It's a very funny joke.
And the fact that it's become the hook, it's sort of like a kind of thing.
Like, it's actually very, it's a very good joke.
I mean, it's almost like pushing up against a little bit of like a Stephen Wright joke.
Yeah, that's right.
That's right.
In Soviet Russia.
Television watches you.
At the time, we wanted friendly Russians.
Because normally you watch TV in America.
You watch TV in America, you understand.
You do.
The television's watching you because they're spying.
Unless your mom doesn't let you.
Unless your mom doesn't let you watch TV.
Unless her and Zhukov cut the cord off.
But you know what?
Now this is the thing about this streaming, about TikTok, because now TV is watching you.
This is the thing about Facebook.
Every day there's somebody telling me that I need to go change my permissions so that Facebook can't watch me.
And I'm like, I haven't been on Facebook in six months.
I can't pass this.
I wouldn't even know how to know if Facebook's watching me.
Tell you the truth.
Boy, it's a complicated thing to have to... It always feels like... Somebody's watching me!
Hey, I guess... Did you watch the Grammys?
No.
So, I guess... I don't...
If somebody else were writing this show, I'd tell them to cut this out, but I don't fucking care.
Hey, John.
So we're just doing Michael Jackson again now, and that's okay?
We're all back in with Michael Jackson.
Is that what I'm getting?
Did we stop doing Michael Jackson at some point?
Oh, fuck me.
Gently.
I don't know if you remember this, but he gave vodka to children and had sex with them.
Do you remember that?
Oh, but that seems like it was back in Star Wars time.
I know.
He called it Jesus Juice.
But I started noticing it playing in stores.
Michael Jackson.
I'm not even going to address a lot of this stuff.
I'm done with you people.
But Jackson 5 was my first favorite band.
I've had a lot of hand stuff to Michael Jackson's music.
It's really important in my life.
And I just love Michael Jackson's stuff.
Yeah, he's a good musician.
It's just interesting.
And you know what?
Actually, I withdraw it.
But we'll put a pin in it.
Because how is it that we're giving a pass to Michael Jackson?
And who...
I thought we were still weighing up sides on who was the worst of the bad people.
And then Janelle Monáe was doing a dance as him last night.
And I'm like, wait.
Who was?
Oh, the wonderful singer Janelle Monáe.
And she did a Michael Jackson dance?
She had the black shoes and the white socks, the glove.
Oh, the whole band.
She did the Motown dance.
Oh.
I don't know if we say that anymore.
Actually, you know what?
She was just burning, doing the Motown dance.
Don't, don't, don't, don't, don't, da, da, da.
There weren't actual pointers.
I can't really keep it all straight anymore, and I'm not even trying.
Okay.
That's all being kept in a book somewhere.
It's all very complicated.
There's a big, big book.
I like to think of it as like St.
Peter's book, except it's the book of what is and isn't, what's fine and what isn't, and someone else is keeping it, and I'm going to show up at the pearly gates one day, and they're going to open the book, and they're going to have so much to say, and I'm going to be like...
I see you're I'm sorry just just for our younger listeners who don't know double entry accounting You're talking about the guy upstairs.
He has a helper guy Right, and he's writing stuff down in the book.
He's capturing the television is watching you.
So that's called Peter TV That's right Peter TV You can stick a card into the top of the box and unscrambling, you know, that's why all the smoker channels Yeah
The thing is, I don't believe you could live in a world where there wasn't Michael Jackson.
I'm not sure what I would... I'm not sure how I would... And this is the first of seven reasons we can't get into it, is that I agree...
And it's so vital that you just say, that's interesting, Merlin, and then we move on to the next thing.
Okay?
Okay.
Can I just ask you for that?
It's February.
It's my birthday.
No, that's fine.
I'll just... How does one... That's interesting, Merlin.
I don't think there's a great deal of value...
And certainly not a great deal of practicality.
In any group of people, self-elected, democratically elected, anybody elected, I don't think it's valuable when people tell other people what they're allowed to accurately remember about their life.
And on a certain level, when you tell people, no, that's not actually how people talked then...
I'm not saying I should be able to use the N-word or the R-word because we used to use it.
That's not what I'm saying.
But what I am saying is if you act like that is not what fucking everybody said all eternity till the early 2000s, you're not a learned person.
And in fact, I find it...
a little galling when people try to tell me what was or wasn't happening at a given time, especially when they weren't born for 30 years after that.
Now, I want to just make clear here, because you and I have differences on these things.
There's a million things I'm not saying here.
I'm not saying people have to accept my wisdom.
I'm not saying people have to find me interesting.
I'm not saying any of that sort of stuff, but what I can tell you is
If you really stop and think about what it means to tell people, no, that's, no, Michael Jackson, we're not going to, we're just going to act like when we do top tens from now on, that's just not going to be in the mix.
And you're like, okay, well, first of all,
Boy, there's all kinds of ways that bugs me.
I understand the good intention of that, but if you get somebody to never mention Michael Jackson again, what will you have achieved apart from telling a lot of people that they don't remember how their life went, let alone what the emotionality of those moments were, and let alone how it formed who they are now and sometimes made them better people?
We just have to excise all of those chapters and act like they didn't happen because people in their late 20s are uncomfortable knowing those words might be said.
This was a... You want me to help you with your line here?
I'm pivoting.
That's very interesting, Merlin.
See you next week on Roderick on the Line.
On Friendly Fire, I often was in the position, my late lamented podcast, often in the position with the two millennials of explaining to them that in 1943, John Wayne was going to express his contempt for the enemy
And he was going to try and get his fellow Marines to be angry at the enemy by using certain words.
Like the three-letter word?
Right.
But can we just agree without saying it that there's the three-letter word?
Yeah, it's a three-letter word.
It refers to the Axis country in Asia.
The Axis country in Asia.
And it would be the three-letter word for how he referred to particularly soldiers of the imperial regime.
And watching movies on Friendly Fire, of course, these were not movies made in 2015.
People were saying it in the 90s.
They were movies made in 1943.
Yeah, that's right.
I mean, you're saying it in 2011.
But, but yeah, that was, I think that was, that was one of the reasons that that was a popular show because people could listen in and they could hear, they could hear somebody be upset and then they could hear somebody be not upset depending on who, which one, which kind of person you, you wanted to hear.
I'll tell you another example of that that's allied, because believe it or not, you wouldn't know this, but I'm on a little bit of a World War II jag right now.
You are.
Yeah, but this is not a desire to cause equivalence or anything, but a few of the ugliest things that you'll see in your life are things produced by Himmler, or excuse me, Goebbels' propaganda department, including some movies to educate the German public about people of the tribe and why they were a problem.
and i think there's one where they're literally called rats and it's basically the controlling metaphor for the whole movie is how jewish people are like rats and in the following ways just pound it into everybody's head um uh let me let me risk being unsubtle here um should people not know that that existed
Because I super feel like people should not only know that that existed and listen, keep listening, people, I'm not done.
You don't get off that easy.
They should not only know that existed, they should know that a great deal of effort went into making that, that a great deal of effort went into, to certain extents, consolidating messaging across these different kinds of things.
And there's a variety of reasons I think that's a good thing for people to know.
And just a couple off the dome.
One is that we're all sitting around so shocked that you could never have gotten to 1945 if you hadn't gotten to 1933.
Well, how did you ever get to 1933?
And how did you get to 36, 37, 38, 39?
And it's like, well...
What do we say, John?
A terrible thing in life is everyone has their reasons, okay?
And so maybe one reason it's good to know that is that a huge amount of resources went into making those things.
On top of it, Goebbels loved movies, like Hitler, loved movies.
And it was important to him that his movies get seen and get out there.
So these movies were very heavily promoted.
Is there any possibility that the people...
When we get to 1945 is through a slow progression of things like those movies that convince you Jewish people are rats and maybe you shouldn't feel that bad about asking them to move east Now that's not the same thing as saying my kid is developmentally disabled Don't use the R word and yet it kind of is or don't call my dad a JAP Like the guess what?
That's all fucking horrible.
It's all horrible
Who benefits if we just act like that didn't happen?
Who benefits?
Do you think the people who were treated like rats in Poland will be hugely honored that you took that movie away from the public because it upset you to see Jewish people called rats?
That's the fucking point.
And that's the point of doing blackface in a satire.
That's the fucking point, is to get you to realize how fucking stupid it is and to realize how hurtful and dumb and unnecessary it is.
They could have done that part without the blackface.
They probably could have, but then they did.
And it was so embarrassing and cringe that you would never in a million years at this point do blackface in a way that maybe you would have if you'd just seen, I don't know.
We'll see Archie Bunker doing blackface was really good.
I don't know if I ever saw Archie Bunker doing blackface.
Archie Bunker did a minstrel show thing.
Oh, my God, John.
If I ended up remembering this even halfway right, I'm going to be impressed.
I think it's when Gloria goes into labor.
And he and the other guy, the guy from Kelsey's, they're in the union or whatever.
They were doing a minstrel show that night.
I think he had to go to the hospital in a white tux suit with tails in blackface.
And it will not be show art for this week, probably.
Anyway, I don't know if I'm getting up on a bucket here.
No, I think, you know, you're... You could have queen.
Well, and it's not like it's causing any harm and distress in my life, but...
Sometimes you gotta, you gotta just, as Stuart Lee says, for a quiet life.
Sometimes you just gotta let somebody win because you've got other stuff to do.
And like, in the same time, in the same time that not every queer person has time to explain everything about who they are to you just because you ordered a coffee, I think, I think we oughtn't expect people, I don't expect people to forget the 30, 40, 50, 60 years of your life or have it constantly sort of
Have your memories recalculated by people who think they have a better idea about what happened.
You know, because sometimes I think it's valuable to say, you know, John and I, there's one of those horrible words, two of those words, that John and I have used on this show.
I would never use it again because I know it's hurtful and it's dumb.
So I don't.
But if I acted like I hadn't done that...
And I acted like fucking everybody, and we were the nice guys, not to cover ourselves with glory.
But the grown men that I worked with at every job I've ever had, it would really upset a lot of you to know how those people talked every day.
Was it a good thing, and did I like it?
It was not.
It was not.
But would I act like it didn't happen in order to save some people the discomfort of realizing that that's how America actually is?
I mean, you and I were both the ones that, I mean, it was inconceivable to me that I would delete my past tweets.
Because what was the point of any of this?
We were all leaving a record behind.
It would be like tearing pages out of a book on the shelves.
Yeah, but all of the people that were 10 years younger than me or 15 years younger than me were like, oh, you have to delete all your old tweets.
And, of course, me not deleting my old tweets ended up being part of my undoing for a lot of the same things you're saying.
Yesterday, my daughter was talking about a video she'd been watching because she, like you, loves YouTube.
She has a whole YouTube life now.
You should have her check out my playlist.
I have a lot of really good playlists.
I will.
No, you won't, but I appreciate you saying you would.
No, I want her to be influenced by you.
I want you to influence her.
Okay.
I'll say it.
But she was talking about this video and she was like, and the guy who's doing the video, a guy I really like, a historian, he kept positioning himself on the screen in front of the swastika that was in the movie he was showing.
And he's talking about it.
And he actually says, he actually says, behind me.
Does he like acknowledge it?
Yeah.
He's like, behind me, there is a thing that I'm standing in front of, so you don't have to see it.
Please tell me he's from like Australia or New Zealand.
He's English.
If you're wondering why I'm standing in front of this flake.
and my kid is like pixelation around his hair she's telling this story like you know and so we you know because of course we can't see swastikas because if we saw one I don't see swastikas John if we saw one I don't know what would happen we would all
You know what it would do?
You'd be like Bucky Barnes.
You'd Winter Soldier them.
You'd like reactivate all these people who didn't realize that they were Nazi cells.
All the teenagers would see it and they'd be like, what a cool sign.
Yeah, you'd be the Uber group in selling.
Yeah, I'm going to draw that on my notebook.
See how it goes.
Instead of the Steam S, which for whatever reason is it.
Is that the classic S?
The kids still do that, right?
Yeah, the S. I got one on my wall right here, my kid.
What the fuck is with that S?
Oh, nobody knows.
Yeah, no no no no.
I mean that's that's that's more genetic than genes I mean, it's just more genetic than genes more genetic than genes.
Hi.
I'm Calvin Klein It wasn't my oh my god was Brooke Shields ever a Sexy deliberately sexy 12 year old girl on television.
You know what?
She's super was and you watched it and Calvin Klein thought it was okay and
She was in Playboy.
Did you watch that?
It's a dumb question, but let me put it differently.
Do me a favor.
Tell Ari she should watch the two-part Brooke Shields thing.
It's very, very good.
It's called Pretty Baby, and it's very good.
Is it going to upset her?
More than you?
Well, I don't know.
I don't get upset.
I have no human emotions.
You were always bullied as a child because you're half Vulcan nature.
They're always shoving you into the education semicircle.
Fascinating.
Can you imagine if Winona Ryder was your mom?
That'd be complicated, wouldn't it?
Well, later, Winona Ryder, she seems really fragile.
Oh, my God.
Like in Stranger Kids?
Yeah.
She's so delicate.
Very delicate.
What were we talking about?
So, so, so.
You don't know that's a 30-rock joke.
Okay, how that happens.
You, you, you, your kid is trying to learn about history, and you got the dinko stole this guy's head, and you got this guy over here, he's in front of the swastika, because he, because something, right?
Yeah.
Yeah.
Think about, by the time you were in high school, how many swastikas you'd seen.
All of them.
I have seen 100 million swastikas.
Giant, giant books you could check out of the library that just had big swastikas.
The thing... Every page.
There were 10 swastikas on every page.
I probably mentioned this to you, but there's a show on Netflix right now that I've been recommending to the Hitler-adjacent crowd called... I think it's called Hitler something-something evil on trial.
And the two hooks for this, whatever, four, five, six-part series is it's about...
The two through lines are The Nuremberg Trial and William Shirer, who was a reporter starting in the 30s, an American reporter in Germany, and stop me if you know this.
But he also wrote many books, including most famously The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich.
So it's an interesting, the reason I've been recommending it to people who are Hitler curious is that you don't have to go down a rabbit hole of wondering if this YouTube video is any good.
I'm not saying that it would be full of lies, but there's just a bunch of shovel glop on YouTube.
If you're interested in this stuff, this is a lens, like the through line of Hitler from the beginning to the end, but...
The lens for it is it keeps coming back to the Nuremberg trial, right?
And so the bookends, the real bookends are Shirer in terms of storytelling, because Shirer was there at the beginning and he was in Munich on the rise up.
And then he was at Nuremberg in 46, like in the audience.
And they had this new audio that they recently discovered and basically remade it with people.
And
So I've just been recommending that to people.
But wait, what was my point?
Going back to your child.
Oh, yeah.
How many books have we seen?
How many swastikas we've seen?
Like all of them.
It was everywhere.
And in fact, I have to say that perhaps like the Confederate flag or Confederate battle.
We saw a lot of those.
What's it called, John?
Just so I don't get yelled at.
You just say the Confederate flag.
If anybody's got a problem with that, they can contact me.
It's called state's rights, John.
They can contact me over here.
Do you prefer to name the battle after the river or after the city?
Do you have a preference?
Because I think it might tell me a lot about you.
Oh, boy.
You know, I really love decoding battles that are named after rivers, but it's a lot easier to locate them when they're named after cities.
I think the way it worked, and maybe I'm being wrong and dumb here, but I think the way it worked was...
I know it's one or the other.
The Confederate folks named it after the river, the nearest river, and the Northern people named it after the nearest city.
And that's why we can't even agree on what the battle's called.
That's so Raven.
You know what I mean?
It really is.
Manassas, my asses.
Ha ha ha ha!
Hey, that's kind of funny.
Shiloh, Shihai.
Shiloh, Shihai.
Let's do some other funny ones.
Bullrun 2.
Electric Boogaloo.
Solved it.