Ep. 581: "The Velocities of Youth"
Hello?
Hi, John.
Hi, Merlin.
Oh, no.
I was unprepared.
Hello.
Oh, you weren't ready for once.
Always me.
No, I mean, I wasn't ready.
I mean, you were ready, but were you ready?
Are you really ready for this?
Are you ready for this?
I'm going to let you look good on this one, but I don't like it.
Oh, no.
Well, I'm going to let you look good.
We're starting late, which is fine because we agreed to that.
But then we started late on top of starting late.
I was distracted briefly because I was seeing when the new mount for my bird feeder would arrive.
Oh.
Tweet, tweet.
And what does the new mount do?
Holds the bird feeder.
In a new way.
In a new way, it mounts it.
Like a great Roman general riding an elephant.
And do you, does it have a button inside where you can push it?
Sorry, Carthaginian.
Carthaginian general.
Sorry, my bad.
You push a button and the bird feeder suddenly spins really fast and throws all the birds and all the seed in every direction.
Like a whirligig?
Like a flat ride?
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
The birds would never see it coming.
Okay, but you're missing, you're missing.
Well, the point is you got to wait a while.
It takes them a while to discover it.
Once they discover it, they got to get comfortable.
But at fifth or sixth visit, that's when it starts spinning madly on the mount.
Yeah, just like...
Sermon on the Mount.
It's an e-bird feeder.
It's got a camera.
Oh, E. It's an E-feeder.
It's an E-feeder, and so I get photos of my little friends visiting.
Oh, that's sweet.
Yeah.
How many photos does it take per visit?
Well, you know, it's a whole new thing for me, and everything's a project, so it takes iteration.
But so far, I did get one new breed of bird.
I think I told you it's an E-feeder, and it's got an E-camera, and it uses computers to identify who your little friend is.
It'll help you identify the breed of the bird.
And I've already got one new breed.
I'm pretty excited.
And so, but I'm guessing like everything in computers, you have to spend some time calibrating it so that A, it doesn't send you 40 pictures an hour.
Uh-huh.
And B, so that you, I mean, there's like, so it doesn't crash your system or whatever.
I mean, there's got to be 40 different pull-down menus.
Yeah, you don't want to run away process.
John, you've learned more about the internet than I guess I ever realized.
And you're putting that, no, you are.
You're putting it's absolutely true.
They have modes for how often you want to get things.
You can look at other people's bird feeders across the world.
No, you cannot.
John, I saw one yesterday where a dog was eating out of the bird feeder and it made me so happy.
Um, can you, are you, do you feel OPSEC wise that you're going to put, you're going to make your bird feeder available to people in Istanbul and, and, uh, and in the great country of Georgia to look at your birds?
I've cracked the encryption.
Oh, sorry.
That came out Scottish, but I meant it to be vaguely Middle Eastern.
So I think I've offended a lot.
No, wait.
I can't get enough powder, Captain.
That's it.
Okay, fine.
I'll come in.
I'll correct the encryption.
I'm in.
I can see his house, Finch.
It appears to be a male.
I mean, I do feel all the time now that things are asking me if I want to join the social side.
Yeah, post about this, John.
Yeah, share, you know.
Oh, you posted about it.
To whom?
On the internet?
What?
What?
I don't understand your question.
What's your question?
Oh, well, I was wondering, did you recently post about this very thing?
I did.
I did.
I put on the internet.
I put a picture of my first finch.
And I actually, I did something that was a little untoward that I don't normally do, but I posted a very delightful.
A naked picture?
Of whom?
The bird?
A priori, it's a naked bird.
Of you with the bird?
Oh, you mean like a bird sexed?
You ever sexed a bird?
Hmm.
Huh.
I don't even know.
No, I have.
I don't know how you'd sexed a bird because.
Oh, how you would.
No, no, no, no, no.
Because I know, listen, they could have somebody else manipulate the phone or maybe they have a bird phone, but I don't really know enough about what sex for a bird is.
So I would, well, I don't understand that much about sex in general, but with a bird, I don't know how to make a bird horny.
I see what you're saying, yeah.
Now, you've texted with a street car.
Sorry, a cable car.
Have you texted with a bird before?
Is that a Portland bird?
Did they put a bird on it?
No, but if you remember from the early days of this program, there was a time when I was kissing a bird, some other guy's bird.
You kissed somebody else's bird.
I remember that.
And he was mad that I was kissing his bird.
Yeah.
Birds have come up kind of a lot on here.
We don't do bits on this show, but birds... Our program is shot through with birds.
Yeah, there's no question about it.
I got into an argument with a bird yesterday.
Was that something you could share, OPSEC-wise?
Oh, it was just, you know, I was working in the yard yesterday.
It's a vacation weekend, and I was out working.
Jubilee.
And it's that time of year when the teenage crows start yelling from the trees at nothing, just up there yelling.
and i said you can tell the teenage because they're obdurate yeah and after a while i was like what seriously what and then he's like and he's looking right at me and i'm like what i'm here every day can you tell if these are crows you have any previous i mean what is the extent to which you know of a relationship with these these crows if any
Well, you know, when I lived at the farm, there were three crows that I saw every day, and I knew them, and they knew me.
Heckle, Jekyll, and Grekel.
Yeah.
Those are magpies.
Idiot.
Read another book.
But in this area, you know, the forest and everything, I think I'm sort of in a cusp area.
And what's weird is that the crows used to spend a lot of time on the ground at the farm.
They're always on the ground.
What?
Walking around.
I feel like crows don't like being on the ground.
Well, these crows.
Unless they're working a scam.
Northwest crows, I don't know.
You see them sometimes where they're like all day long just walking around your yard.
Buck, buck, buck, buck, buck.
But here in my yard, the crows all want to be 60 feet up in the trees.
Sure.
And so I'm always yelling.
I'm like the lunatic that's yelling at the sky.
Like, what?
What are you talking about?
So no, I don't have any like real relationships.
Well, my app claims to, I haven't used it enough yet, but once it's seen three images of the same bird from three angles, supposedly you can name it and it'll recognize it again.
Oh, that's a great app.
And I got mostly finishes so I could use that.
Can I tell you something related to this that I only mentioned because it's a big deal.
I wouldn't mention this if it were a small deal.
No, no, no, no.
Everything you and I talk about is a big deal at one level.
Everything I say is by definition a contract.
No, it's not that.
I'm very interested in birds and I'm a person who considered attracting crows.
And we've had the occasional, so we had this big green tree in our backyard and it gets animals in it.
One time it had a savanna cat.
That was awesome.
Somebody's savanna cat got out.
How old somebody's got out?
I imagine because those things are super expensive.
But anyway, it got up there and ate some crow babies, and the crows were not happy.
Now, here's the thing.
I'm basic enough that I confuse my corvids, and I sometimes get confused about what a big crow is.
I'm here to tell you, you know what's bigger than a crow?
Raven.
And we don't get a lot of those.
And we definitely don't get a lot of those in the yard.
Look at this.
This is from 23rd, three days ago.
I could not get a good picture.
Look at what I've got out in our tree.
Look at that raven.
Look at the size of that motherfucker.
okay and here look at him majestic and here's what you can't see in the photo because the photo was didn't want to play ball but there was at one point there were three crows on that same branch what do you call it a convocation of ravens of ravens and they were talking to the raven the crows were
Sorry, I take it back.
I meant to say, see, already I got crow on the brain.
Three ravens, and I used my artificial intelligence to verify my hunch.
And it was indeed, you could tell, look at the beak on that thing.
Do you clock this as a raven?
Oh, 100%.
Sean, would you say a raven is somewhat even dramatically bigger than a crow?
Well, in Alaska, where the ravens are the predominant corvid, there are ravens that are three feet tall.
Yeah.
I mean, they're the size of a toddler, and they're much smarter than a toddler.
Yeah.
I'm telling you, man, if the octopuses and the corvids ever get together, we are mega fucked.
But if you see a bunch of ravens sitting in a tree, look how serious that bird is.
The first thing I see is dignity.
I see a tremendous amount of dignity.
I also see a certain seriousness.
This does not seem like a crow who's afraid of silence.
God damn it!
This does not seem like a raven who is afraid of awkward silence.
In other words, like he's not going to make a joke to make the other raven laugh.
And the other ravens don't expect it is my assumption.
What's funny is if you threw out some food, some delicious food for that bird, that bird would just look at you.
it would not dignify you with even looking at the food.
It would just look at you.
For a variety of reasons.
Yeah.
This is not a bird that's going to fly down and eat the food that you threw on the ground.
I mean, you could hand, God bless them, you could give a golden retriever, you could say, hey, buddy, look, half a pine cone, and it would shit itself and run it in circles and eat the pine cone, right?
This bird, first of all, it's going to be like, okay, so how come all of a sudden you want to give me food?
What's the deal with that?
It's like really just an opening move.
It's just like you're trying to move your queen out, basically.
Yeah.
Yeah, that's right.
Well, and I love, there's a woman from Seattle who is the crow and raven doctor on Instagram.
Have you seen her before?
No.
She's a lady that you would like a lot.
And she answers people's questions about crows and ravens.
Oh, God.
And she's, like, very smart, and she's done her research on, like, things like crow funerals.
Like, she's got all this kind of— Thrown by people or other corpets?
No, by other crows.
Really?
If there's a dead crow, don't go over to the crow.
The other crows are watching you.
Don't even wear a mask.
It'll know.
They need, like, a full day to do all their crow funeral business.
This is what it sounds like—
When corvids grieve.
When corvids grieve.
Don't make me chase you.
If the bird is in a place where you need to move it, like wait until dark.
Don't let them see you.
I'm glad to hear all of this, but I, I, I approach or I interact in every way.
I interact with these birds.
So advisably, I look at them advisably, even if I think they can't see me.
I don't want to make it a bit, but it's actually true.
Look, you know what?
You can fuck around and find out.
Get a crow mad at you and see how it goes, is what I'm saying.
No.
I mean, I'm guessing that you're watching The Last of Us.
No, I'm behind.
I'm watching Game of Thrones.
There's a lot of ravens on that.
And crows.
The crows are the watchers on the wall.
Are you doing a re-watch of Game of Thrones?
Every single episode in order.
I'm up to S5E3.
Wow.
Is it exciting?
Well, there's a couple things.
Okay, here's you.
If you ever want to have an interactive experience, we could probably sell this on Etsy or something.
If you want to have an interactive experience of watching Game of Thrones with me, it's pretty fun.
Because first, you get things like this.
They show the previously on.
Yeah, previously on.
And you see, oh, oh, they're putting Tyrion in a box.
And then I say something, I say, you know what, I don't say something like, I say the same thing every episode.
I say, you guys.
Don't put Tyrion in a box.
Nobody puts Tyrion in a corner.
This is, I say, I always say, this is where shit gets real.
I say that every single episode.
That's good.
And then I will, sometimes, all throughout, I'll say things like, this part's really important to watch.
Yeah.
If you don't understand, I'm like, okay, okay, S5E1, who's that little girl walking around the woods with the other little girl?
I'm like, well, you'll find out.
But instead, I just go, that's teenage Daenerys.
And she's about, not, sorry, sorry, not teenage Daenerys.
That's teenage Cersei.
And she's about to get some predictions about the future.
And if you miss it, you're not going to appreciate it.
Dark Eps, that one.
Yeah, so, yeah, yeah, I am.
And that's so much better than almost everything else.
Did you watch, they had the big season finale last night, right?
Of Game of Thrones?
Oh, my God.
I've been missing some seasons.
It's so dark it wasn't even posted.
No.
Oh, no.
I don't want to talk about TV.
But let me ask you this.
Do you think, do you think, I know that this is against God and against nature and against everything that you stand for in the world, but what if...
there was a watch game of thrones with merlin like a thing like a only fans uh-huh would you do that as long as you didn't have to see anybody no i'd enjoy it i've been uh i've been wanting to do a watch i've never done uh because i've seen that functionality in a handful of apps
You know, where you can watch something together, watch party, whatever it's called.
And I've never done it.
I've always wanted to.
And I actually have thought about making that like a fun thing to do, like as a project.
What a fun thing.
Yeah.
Well, originally the idea was, I could do this with you too, but my idea was with Alex.
I prop up my phone.
and shoot myself videoing.
I don't know how you do this.
You probably use something like, I guess, Twitch.
I don't know.
But you could stream it, and you could see the people watching it, and other people could join in.
I don't want to read a chat room while I'm trying to figure out how Marjorie Tyrell is going to deal with this third husband of hers.
Yeah, that's right.
Boy, her smirk.
I don't want to miss a single smirk from Marjorie Tyrell.
I want every smirk completely there for me.
I've got a book club that I really enjoy, but it also has a text thread along, or a comments thread along the side that is sometimes related to what's being talked about, and other times people are making memes and doing their own bits.
People like to bring their own joke, you know?
I understand that, but I like the watching part.
I mean, it makes me so sad to go and watch a show that I like a lot of some kind.
A good example is George Lucas Talk Show.
And they did so many shows via Zoom, wonderfully, you know, during the pandemic.
But I can't see that thing pop up with all those faces on anything.
It could be the You Will Be Found sing-along from Dear Evan Hansen.
It could be like a choir all singing Nick Lowe.
There's something so depressing about the giant wall of faces.
You know what I mean?
It just takes me right back to 2020.
What is a George Lucas talk show?
Oh, it's something, it's a bit, but it's a very funny comedian.
There's a bit where he does a live show as George Lucas, but it's George Lucas as a guy who firmly believes that all of Star Wars was stolen from him by Disney, even though they did pay him $50 million or whatever.
Whatever it was, $5 billion.
I don't know what it was, but yeah, yeah.
And his sidekick is Watto from Phantom Menace, played by the great Griffin Newman.
So, anyway, it's a fun live show with this guy named Connor Radcliffe, who's kind of a genius.
But I did things like that.
I did that thing with Paul and Storm, where people wrote a bad chapter from a book, and then we read it.
That was fun.
Oh, yeah, that was a thing.
I did that.
I was on with Alexandra Petrie, who I think doesn't know who I am anymore, but I still admire her.
I mean, you've been part of the internet for a long time, for a very long time, since the very beginning.
Yeah, almost all of us now have been.
Since the day that the internet first opened its eyes and said, Mama, Dada.
Yeah, the opening day.
You were standing there with your arms open, your arms wide open.
Oh, like a baby chick with arms.
Yeah, and you were like, come to daddy.
Come to Merlin.
I love this raven.
Okay, yeah, yeah, I love the internet.
No, I mean, it's had its moments, but...
What's next for us, do you think?
What's next?
Oh, for everybody?
Well, you know, yesterday I was out.
I did a little earth moving.
I looked at the situation.
Before we get into this, if I remember correctly, didn't you have some kind of like a, I feel like I remember you, I feel like last week, just in terms of follow-up, you're saying all these wonderful things about your yard and your ravine.
Did you ever figure out the extent to which your toe might be broken?
Oh, yeah.
Because I feel like I want to close that parenthesis.
I realized that it wasn't broken.
And you didn't need a doctor to find out, did you?
That's right.
What would they have done?
They would have said, you're fine, go home.
They would have, well, after they took an x-ray.
Also, why haven't you gone back to LabCorp?
Yeah, they would have, oh, LabCorp.
They would have, it would have been a big pain in the ass, whereas what it was, was I just sort of hobbled around for a while, and then it was like, hmm, that seemed to be good.
It sounds to me like you walked it off.
I walked it off.
Now, that left foot is still a little bit numb from the whole heli skiing thing that happened.
Oh, we're back to your nerve damage.
That nerve damage you had, yeah.
But no broken toe.
No broken toe.
Okay, thank you.
That's all.
Yeah.
Oh, so yesterday I was like, you know.
You've been out doing earth moving, it sounds like.
Yeah, this pile of dirt over here, this enormous pile of dirt, I just realized, because I was like, oh, I'm going to move this pile of dirt over there.
And I got the shovels, and I was looking over there, and I was like, that's going to be so great when all this dirt is over there.
Is this in the service of your not-quite-fence-building thing?
No, this is more like...
What made you want to move the dirt John?
Well, so, so back when I was using chip drop, if you recall during the pandemic chip drop was the app where you go into chip drop and you say, bring me some chips.
And then anytime, uh, an arborist cuts down a tree and puts it in a chipper.
And then this is a thing I didn't realize was a problem until I learned about chip drop.
It's valuable to them because they don't have a place to put the chips.
And we're talking here about mulch type chips, right?
If they chop up a tree, they need a place to put that and they're happy to give it to you.
Is that the idea?
Yeah.
Sometimes people are using chips, but other times they're just like, they have to pay somebody else to dump their chips.
Take my chips.
So you say, I'll take your chips.
And then all of a sudden you're sitting in your yard and here comes a big dump truck and it just backs up and dumps this huge pile of wood chips.
So I was doing that all through the pandemic.
And basically what I did was I built about a foot of soil.
over the entirety of my yard, basically just by dumping chips on top of chips and then they decay.
Right.
And my mom was great at this because I would dump a bunch of chips and then she would go out there with her little wheelbarrow turning.
Yeah.
Moving chips around and chips over here, chips over there.
But then, so what you get after five years of chip drop is I've got.
Sorry, I like the way that sounds.
It's got a good mouth.
Chip drop.
I've got big, big piles of what were once chips that's now, you know, mostly dirt.
What you got there is super dirt.
super dirt and now i'm like well but these this dirt over here needs to be over there and this dirt over here needs to be over there and so i was like i'm gonna move this dirt i'm gonna put it over there and then as i was digging into the dirt with my shovel and of course the we have clay soil here it's not like your beautiful sandy soil that you know you could you could stand outside of your i could dig the china with my hands
Yeah, you could pour a 50-gallon drum of motor oil into the ground, and it would just go all the way to the center.
55, but yes, I have.
I've done that.
I poured an entire drum.
Yeah, of motor oil.
You could do it every day.
Here, it's clay soil, so it's a lot harder to work with, and plants are weird about it, and things are like, hmm.
It must cause weird drainage.
Different drainage, too.
Very different drainage.
Very different.
But I looked over where I was going to move the dirt, and then I looked right where I was standing, and I was like, wait a minute.
What I had was a porch that if you step off the porch, it's like a foot down to the ground.
And...
Everybody's tripping over it all the time and it just looked like the way the house was designed like oh You've got a little step there and you step a foot down to the ground And I'm standing here with this shovel of dirt and I was like, well, wait What if I just put the dirt?
Whoa to the debt up to the to the you're gonna make a porch into a patio It sounds like I'm gonna make it into it.
Yeah So now you can walk straight off of it without trip without falling down and
And then I'm standing where the shovel of dirt and I'm like, this is an all day dirt moving project.
That is a lot of dirt.
If only you knew somebody whose brother had a Bobcat.
I know, right?
But it's not quite Bobcat level dirt moveage.
I disagree.
I think it's a perfect start.
It would be a good start.
You're right.
Just to test the waters and find out how serious this brother is about lending you a bobcat.
He could do that job in four minutes for sure.
And it took me all day.
But part of the reason it took me all day is that I don't just have a shovel.
I have one shovel, then I have a different shovel, and I have three rakes.
And in the process of moving the dirt, I'm also raking the dirt.
And I'm raking the dirt.
because i the energy to the super dirt that's right and also because of attention deficit disorder and bipolar disorder there are a lot of things that coincide when you start when you start for the trouble man because you're like well i should filter this dirt and i should put the rocks over here and the chips over there the chips that haven't turned into dirt yet
Oh, for me, I'd be running different tests.
I'd make three or four different piles and see how they reacted to being in this part with the sun.
That's where it turns into a project for me is testing.
This whole bird feeder, the two days with a bird feeder have been nothing but testing.
Just testing, testing, testing.
Don't you do that?
Isn't that a little bit, you know, for all of us who literally have the same ADHD, isn't that the kind of thing you do?
Projects, projects, projects.
Because we have the exact same kind.
Exact same.
We grew up in the same 80s.
I mean, in the middle of the night last night, I heard it start to rain and it was a mild rain.
And I got up out of bed and walked outside in my altogether to stand on the porch and watch what the rain was doing to the raked dirt that I had at the end of my project.
Because after I spent all day at it, you need to know, you need to know before you change the structure of your porch.
You need to know these things.
Well, but I have, I have, you could now roller skate out my front door down through the dirt out to the street and
It is one continuous and it's, and I, and I contoured it.
Is there a gentle grade?
Oh, it's a gentle grade.
It just goes like this.
And so then I was like, let's see what the rain does.
And, uh,
And then I got up again, and it's the first thing I looked at this morning.
So I suppose that's a form of testing.
But, you know, I also, boy, did I rake.
I raked this way.
I used that rake for this.
You said you had three rakes.
Is one of your shovels a spade?
Sorry, we don't say that anymore.
You got a pointy boy.
Yeah, I got a pointy boy, and I got a flap boy.
Are the rakes the, like, tear up the grass kind or the gently rake the leaves kind?
all three kinds i've got a gardening rake which is like uh point the tines are pointed straight down it's all the way across and you can use those are serious those are serious yeah you can just grind the dirt and then i've got a big broad uh like leaves in autumn plastic rake that also is very good in dirt
And then I've got an old fashioned kind of wire rake and the wire rake does something else.
The wire rake is like, it actually is like sorting through the dirt itself.
And it's not, you're not like digging furrows.
It's like, let me grab this and let me grab that and let me get this over here and let me put that over there.
And so you go through with the one rake, then you go with the second rake, then you go with the third rake.
So interesting.
And then I've got a snow shovel too that I use for chips.
Is your back okay with all this?
Well, you know, part of... It seems to me, like, even, like, once you got to clay, I got very concerned.
But even for dirt, John, you know, if you're lifting a snow shovel's worth of almost anything, that's a lot to do to a man's back.
Well, but I'm really, really in this use it or lose it kind of philosophy about, like, I'm not, my back isn't getting any better sitting around eating donuts either.
Hmm.
Yeah, I know.
Yeah, I see.
I should be doing yoga.
I should be doing yoga instead of lifting snow shovels full of clay.
I know.
Don't should yourself.
I know.
Shut up.
But I'm doing this.
I'm doing that.
You know, these are the things.
These are the days of our lives.
Yeah, these are the days I know.
I know.
Yeah.
And, you know, the thing is, I don't know.
I don't know.
Ten years from now, somebody's going to come along and they're going to be like, huh.
But it's satisfying, right?
You get to see the progress.
It's nice to wake up in the middle of the night and know what you want to check.
That's right.
I mean, even Napoleon, even Bonaparte, probably spent part of his day...
like playing solitaire or, you know, moving things around on his dressers or I don't know what, you know, like even Teddy Roosevelt probably spent some part of the day trying to balance a pocket knife on his finger.
Barack Obama used to eat almonds.
He used to eat almonds.
Also, I've been doing, I wouldn't begin to call it a deep dive, but I've been doing a toe dip into Henry VIII's
Um, cause I really like Wolf Hall, but I kind of want to know more before I actually like set into it.
So I've been, I'm watching this amazing, really good video series on YouTube about Henry VIII.
Um, and it's really well done.
And you know, Zenit is Mace Tyrell.
Marjorie Tyrell's father is in it.
He's in lots of things.
He's one of those English actors that's in everything.
I watched it.
I watched that Wolf Hall.
I liked it.
A lot.
Hell yeah.
I've heard the second season's even better.
Anyways, so I'm going slow.
Anyways, but the point is, Henry VIII, like...
I mean, it's pretty wild what all he did in that period of time.
He starts out, he's brilliant.
People are like, he's a good poet.
He's a good songwriter.
He's a good everything.
Handsome too, handsome.
Handsome, good at jousting, even though he can't really joust actively because he's the king and stuff.
He's the king and stuff.
But he went through all those wives because he wants the male heir.
And it's kind of wild how much...
That was his, I guess you could say to invoke another, some other, some literature, that was his white whale.
But like, he fucked so much shit up.
Like, we would not have, as I understand it, the Church of England, such as it is today, if he hadn't really needed to have a male heir.
He killed a lot of people, including his own dudes and dudases.
But, you know, I'm just saying, like, everybody's got something like that.
Everybody's got a white whale.
I guess so.
Where you're like, I don't know if I'll ever be like Alex, my friend Alex with phone cases.
Alex will never find a phone case that they like enough.
They will always be on a quest for that.
I know I have things like that.
Interesting.
Well, I know.
I'm just curious.
Do you have any sense like that?
Because it seems to me that the management and movement of dirt on your property is a big part of your landowning.
Well, it is.
And I always love to learn things like that.
Because although I've never met Alex, we're adjacent by one.
We're just one kiss away.
And yet, I have put no thought into my phone case.
And I never think about it.
To me, that's the beauty.
That's the beauty is...
Again, I'll only say this quietly, way down in a thread sometimes, but the extent to which I can find myself completely carried away by something that almost nobody else cares about continues to be a source of joy for me.
I don't need you to love it.
I just need to do it.
I was like that with Bill Evans yesterday.
There's just some times where I'm like, I just want to learn about, what's his name, Scott LaFaro, his bass player.
You know, his bass player died like two weeks after a Village Vanguard show.
No kidding.
Yeah, it sucks, man.
He's fucking incredible.
But I'll just do that and I'll get a little deep dive.
Or Henry VIII yesterday watching this video series.
I'll send you the series.
It's really good.
But, you know, my white whale might be learning about other people's white whales or white's whale.
You know a lot of the time and this this I don't know if you do this but a lot of the time when somebody says Especially somebody close to me.
They're like, what did you do today?
I always say nothing and they go well, no, I mean, what did you do and I say nothing and
Yeah.
And a practical thing to say to normal people.
Yeah.
And eventually I went to work and I'm mad about it.
Okay, cool.
Most of the time, most of the time they let it drop because no one's really interested in what you did.
Absolutely not.
Every once in a while.
We're all ceramicists now.
Somebody would say, well, you didn't do nothing.
And like yesterday, somebody asked me what I did and I said nothing.
And I had just, so then they said again, no, seriously, what did you do?
This is before I even was moving the dirt.
Yeah.
And I, and I had to think to myself like, well, wait a minute.
What have I, I've been completely engaged for the last two hours.
What have I been doing?
And I said to the person,
Well, I've spent the last two hours reading papers about the latest DNA haplotypes of people that live in the Arabian Peninsula and the Levant.
And now I know all about the different DNA studies, and they're just like...
And I'm like, no, I've spent two hours doing this.
This is why I find myself saying to somebody sometimes, I don't mean this in a mean way.
I think this is a practical question.
Do you care?
Or do you really care?
Because as you were saying that, I was thinking if I had to describe my day yesterday to a fellow traveler, to like a kindred spirit, to another curious weirdo, I would have absolutely no problem describing what I did.
It's just that...
When people say that, it almost reminds me of somebody saying, oh man, what was your last poop like?
And you're like, oh, you know, it's just poop.
And you go, no, come on, like really, what was your last poop like?
You break down and you describe it and then they respond by saying, ew, gross.
And you're like, okay, well, then maybe you shouldn't have asked about that.
If you want to know how John spent his day, he will tell you.
But if you're one of those basic people who needs a context of the reason why you're emotional in a weird, different way today instead of...
doing something honorable that pleases you.
You know what I did?
I learned a lot about Bill Evans yesterday.
And like, I can tell you more, I can tell you so much about, John, I make breakthroughs every day in a way that normal people have absolutely no interest in.
And that's why I treasure my chance to talk to other weirdos about it, because I feel like they get it.
Yeah, I mean, I think that they get it.
But they just want to make you weird and colorful or eccentric and go, oh, John's being eccentric.
He's moving dirt again.
And like, I just have so much difficulty.
Well, if I'm being honest.
I'm having so much less interested in trying to stoke the curiosity of essentially incurious people.
And people who are curious not only about other people's experiences, they're incurious about the ways different people can look at the same thing and see different things.
Or ultimately, they're incurious about varieties of experience that go much beyond being mad on the Internet.
That's really how it feels to me.
That's really how it feels and I hate it.
Because that's all I get to see in people.
I'm like, are you like this all the time?
Or are you just saving this for me on the internet?
Are you this insufferable all the time?
Have you been interested in anything interesting in the last year?
Oh, they all are in some way.
I don't know that's why they shouldn't be online.
They seem like they're instantly distracted back to, like, what?
I don't know.
See?
Yeah.
And now it seems like this is all that I talk about, which it's not.
Yeah.
But I learned things.
You know what?
I'd have to sit down and write it down.
But I could come up with, for a curious person, I could not only tell you the things that I did yesterday, but I could describe to you the inbound source of that curiosity that led me there or made me re-curious.
Yes.
But I can, I can also tell you at least a punitive sort of like a straw man idea of like where I think I'm going with this and how it will connect to other things that I do.
It's called the liberal arts and you blew your opportunity by acting like it was bullshit.
Boo.
I mean, what if you said that to Aristotle?
You said, Aristotle, pick a lane.
Fuck you.
I feel like there are most people are meant to be local.
They're meant to be local.
Are you deliberately avoiding the word provincials?
No, not provincial.
I was thinking about this yesterday because I was writing this thing about this area of Eastern Washington.
I was doing it for some friends on the discourse site.
And I said, listen, this area has always been Republican, but it's been Grange Hall Republican.
They were people that were Republican because of the price of feed and fertilizer.
They there was nobody up there that believed that birds weren't real or the earth was flat.
They were just they were Republicans because they because they went to the hardware store and the pitchfork prices had gone up 24 cents.
But then the Internet came along.
And then all of a sudden they think they're part of some giant movement of people that are fighting for liberty.
And it's like, no, you weren't meant to ever see that.
You weren't ever meant to read those things.
Go back to fighting or go back to arguing at the diner about how much diesel is.
And don't think that you're part of a national movement or that anybody.
We're just.
Or just accept that, like, the only thing that gives you distraction and joy – oh, joy.
The only thing that keeps you distracted is watching a reality TV that you know is bad and watching it on purpose.
Yeah, don't do that.
Go back to standing out in the field.
But own that, you know?
Well, but nobody's ever going to own it.
Nobody's ever going to own it.
But we also get to this place where John can't talk about dirt.
I can't really feel comfortable talking about a bird feeder.
And there are people in the world who, like, apologize for taking a nap in life.
Because they're supposed to be angry and busy all the time.
If you're not angry and busy all the time, you're not a person of the time.
You know, nine out of 10 people that take naps go on to invent a cure for polio.
Nine out of 10.
Yeah, I read that on, or I saw that on Instagram.
It was a reel.
There was some footage of an airplane.
That's amazing.
I had never heard that before.
Yeah, they'd superimposed themselves down in the bottom corner of the reel talking about the footage of the airplane.
It turned out not to be about the actual story of the airplane.
It was just stock footage of an airplane, but they were laughing and yelling and pointing up at it.
Was Jonas Salk in it?
Well, no, then they said nine out of 10 people that take naps in the afternoon invent a cure for polio.
And I was like, I believe it.
I 100% believe it.
And I'm so grateful for that video.
I'm so thankful for it.
You know, thankful.
Even if it's not true, it's still useful.
I mean, I hope it's not true.
That's the marvelous thing.
How much more polio can we cure, you guys?
And if things are true, then I have to deal with all of that and all of what that means.
But every time I see Yalta, and you see all the Yalta conference, but you see all the links that they would go to.
To make it look like President Roosevelt could stand up?
I imagine you know this, but maybe our listeners do not.
There's, for a long time...
I think the press in particular was really cooperative about not showing the extent to which polio had affected the health of, just in general, of FDR.
And by the time he became president, I think it wasn't a sort of like a...
I don't know, it was just sort of agreed to a gentleman's agreement, like, not to talk about the fact that, well, sure, he's in a wheelchair sometimes, but look at that, he just walked up to the podium.
Well, my understanding is that, like, he was very tightly, very painfully strapped into the strappiest strap legs you've ever seen in your life, and was just able to basically bob side to side for a couple mini steps to make it up to the podium.
He was a very...
Not well man in that sense.
And, you know, but he's in World War II, you know?
But, you know, you go to Yalta, he's got a place to sit and he's always got a blanket.
He's got a little blankie.
I like the blanket.
I could get into that.
I mean, the press used to do all kinds of things, like not take pictures of them.
JFK.
Yes, sneaking girls into Kennedy's hotel.
Or just JFK's, like... I don't know if that's true, but... Oh, the fact that he couldn't walk up the stairs either.
So you see video now.
A lot of that, they call it gumping.
They're forced gumping the videos.
But, like, no, Kennedy couldn't walk either.
But didn't they hide, like, his Addison's disease medicines, like, all over the world?
Like, weren't there all kinds of secrets?
Because he was a...
Pretty frail person in some ways, wasn't he?
Was it Addison's disease, right?
Is that what he had?
Oh, he was extremely frail.
He was sickly as a kid, right?
Yeah, yeah.
Oh, and in pain all the time.
And that's why we all own those rocking chairs now.
And we have them all on the decks of our little yachts.
Is that how that started?
Sail around Maine.
Yeah, he found this rocking chair that made him feel really good.
I mean, he could sit in it and not be in constant pain.
Or maybe he was in constant pain, but it was less pain.
I wish everybody could find their rocking chair.
Everybody could find their rocking chair.
But first you've got to admit you're frail.
yeah that's it that's it you don't see tough guys with oakley's on the back of their head shopping shopping uh rocking chairs or maybe you know maybe they are they just put it in the cart and they're like oh this is for grandma i mean everybody's in pain all the time that's the thing that's the thing that everybody has got to know it's every we're all in pain all the time it's the very nature of the thing
My 100-year-old neighbor came out the other day, and he obviously has a younger nurse now who's like, we got to get out and walk around the neighborhood.
Is it Bill Belichick?
And he comes out.
Sorry, I was making a headline joke.
It was Bill Belichick.
No, it's... Have you seen him and his 24-year-old girlfriend?
Have you seen that?
No, no.
And I don't care.
No, I know.
It's pretty fucking crazy.
But this guy is a doctor.
He's like a hundred years old.
His name is Vandenberg.
And I, I, and the first time I met him, he came over, you know, kind of hobbled over.
He was only 95 at the time.
And, uh, he pointed at my chip drop.
And he said, what the hell are you doing here?
Yeah.
And I said, well, I got a chip drop.
And he said, well, this used to be a yard.
This is, you know, and he's got one of these meticulous yards.
And then you did a land acknowledgement.
Well, and I said, and I'd been told about Dr. Vandenberg.
And, uh, and Dr. Vandenberg is very Catholic.
If you, if you look inside the door, uh, the first thing you see inside the door of his house is a giant cross, like right in the middle of the door.
And I'm like, Dr. Vandenberg, let me explain chip drop to you.
There was a yard here, but let me, let me tell you, yards are not the future.
The future, sir, is, uh, native plants, uh,
And I'm like, that's also the past.
The past was native plants.
The future is native plants.
It's like a plant sandwich.
You got the old plants and the new.
And then in between, there was that time where we eucalyptus to everything.
We've been in the interregnum.
The interregnum.
here we've been this whole time in the interregulum yes you you're over here with your grass and your holly uh stuff and that in 1960 stay curious dr vandenberg that was the thing and so he and i would have these long conversations you could see that his brow was furrowed and he was he kind of disapproved did he feel like he was shenanigans john did he feel like you were up to something a little bit
It felt like all the neighbors around here where they were like, we had a way of doing things.
That's not what I would do.
And this is not attractive according to the principles of closely trimmed hedges.
Like this chip drop looks like a garbage dump.
And I'm like, well, but the thing is, it's, we got to have patience, Dr. Vandenberg.
It's going to be a long road, but when the chip drop turns to dirt and I start moving the dirt around with a snow shovel, you are going to see, and you may not be here for that because you're 95.
But anyway, so now he's a hundred, he's out walking in the street.
And I said, Dr. Vandenberg.
And he said, how long have you lived here?
And I said, six years or five years.
And he said, it's been that long.
And I said, yes, sir.
And he said, what are you doing over there?
I said, well, you know, the chip drop has, uh, has turned into dirt, sir, for the most part.
And now I'm putting in all kinds of things.
I'm moving dirt around with the snow shovel.
And he was like, hmm.
And his nurse was like, okay, let's go.
And I said, well, I don't want to keep you.
And he said, at my age, I love being kept.
And I said, well, let's stand here and talk a little bit.
It sounds like you need to get him on your team in some form or fashion.
Well, and the weird thing is like, you know,
Everybody knows everybody's like Dr. Vandenberg.
They talk about him with a lot of respect, but they also don't.
Nobody's like, oh, I'm friends with Dr. Vandenberg.
Yeah.
And, you know, one time I think I told you about it one time I was out there talking to him.
He came over to yell at me about my yard.
And, uh, he said, I don't understand why I'm still alive.
And I said, well, good health and no smoking.
And he was like, no, it's kind of bullshit.
All my friends are dead.
My wife is dead.
Everybody's dead.
Why am I still alive?
And, you know, an old guy, my Uncle Jack's best friend, said the same thing at his funeral.
He got up at his funeral, Uncle Jack's funeral, and said, why am I still alive?
This is bullshit.
Yeah.
And everybody in the room was like, huh?
And it was like you could hear a pin drop.
Mm-hmm.
And then his much younger wife, his name is Vic Fisher.
His much younger wife was like, okay, let's, you know, let's get you on your iceberg here or whatever.
Like I got, got him away from the microphone.
Nobody wants to hear it.
Nobody wants to hear why am I still alive?
I mean, cause this is, um,
I mean... We're all in pain.
We're all in pain all the time.
We are all in pain.
But the problem is the people who are young have only ever been young.
And that's how it should be.
Oh, yeah.
And there's nothing wrong with that.
But to continue having the certainty of youth as you move out of, strictly speaking, youth is not as...
It doesn't make you as strong as you hope, and it oughtn't make you as confident as you feel, right?
Because we realize that youth is the transient state, not the other things.
Whatever, that's fine.
Who cares?
No, you can't tell people that.
But I understand, I think I understand that question.
My mom has maybe not put it quite so starkly, but I mean, two or three calls ago, she was talking about how like everybody my age and
First, it was everybody my age and older that was dying, and now it's people my age and younger that are dying.
And if you can't in a million years wonder why a woman who lost her husband 50 years ago, for example, might say, why am I still alive?
I don't think that's supposed to be like a jokey line, like the hound saying, kill me.
Like, I don't think that's what that means at all.
I think it's a more existential question of like, you know, you can certainly change the stress a little bit and just say, well, why am I still here?
Oh, yeah.
Right.
Right.
Why am I still here?
Not full on like survivor guilt or anything, but more like everybody is so sped along by the propulsiveness and the velocities of youth that they don't need to stop and wonder about the world because they're just running to the next Thai noodle meal.
Yeah.
Oh, Thai noodle meal.
Yeah.
I love a Thai noodle meal.
Think about how much of your and my youth we spent eating noodles.
I know.
I got photos from when we even weren't young.
You know what I'm saying?
I feel like it was 25% of my life I've been eating noodles or looking for noodles.
So, I mean, you know, it's more like, I don't know, it's like, you know, trying to explain line dancing to a dog or something.
Like, why would you waste your time and bore the dog, you know, when you talk to people about that?
But there's also another part of this, if I could dive in a little bit, how do I put this in the most generic way?
If you are somebody like me, I'm not saying this is you, but if you're somebody like me who has projects and does things and has experiments, I'm not saying this to like...
Well, sometimes when you deal with the incurious in life, they don't understand the mess.
They don't understand the messes.
And in the case of Dr. Vandenberg, and is he an MD doing now?
Yeah.
Well, so the doctor across the street is a veterinarian and Dr. Vandenberg is a, is, was like an internist.
Okay.
Okay.
And Ariella's house, Ariella bought her house from a couple and one of them was a pharmacist and one of them was an anesthesiologist and they both smoked like chimneys.
No kidding, good for them.
Because they were, they're all in their 90s, all these people smoked except I think Dr. Vandenberg was too Catholic to smoke.
Hmm.
Which I don't think is part of Catholicism.
Well, it didn't used to be that way.
Father Damien used to smoke a lot in The Exorcist.
But the problem is, if people walk in in the middle of the project, well, here's one way to look at it.
If you want to really properly...
God, I'm so fucking boring.
Let's say you've got a drawer.
You've got a drawer.
We've got a drawer in our kitchen that is the primary drawer for kitchen implements, you know, spatulas.
Spoons, tongs, scissors.
Well, yeah, all the eating utensils are over here, but we do have this one.
We've got this big, like, one of those restaurant kind of islands, stainless steel islands that you see in TV shows.
Do you use scissors in the kitchen?
No.
Oh, John.
Scissors in the kitchen.
Scissors in the kitchen picking out dough.
I use those KAI scissors.
That's the ones I use.
I also have several pairs.
I deploy pairs of OXO scissors around the house.
I knew you were a scissors in the kitchen guy.
Oh, we got Kai poultry scissors that we hide because, first of all, they're not that good for things that aren't poultry.
They're crazy sharp.
You know, they got the chicken hole.
They got that little hole for cutting up a chicken.
Those kind of like for spatchcocking.
But you have a teenager, so you're worried that it's going to get used on construction paper.
Well, back in the day, in the papercraft days, we would have a lot of scissors disappear.
But, okay, here's what it comes down to.
That drawer, because... And it's not a junk drawer in any but a de facto sense, but it's where the stuff goes that we use to cook.
It's a little like measuring cups.
It's the...
food thermometer and that thing gets swollen with too much stuff in it right including oh now that's the sieve little hand sieve thing doesn't fit in there anymore because there's too much shit and like you just keep it just it just keeps turning over there's only one way to quote organize that drawer in my opinion which is to take fucking everything out of that drawer and if you're me and you're lucky that you're not and you're super lucky you don't live with me everything comes out of that drawer and goes in a box
Oh, yeah.
And I don't know if you know this.
As part of a reorganization project that has to start somewhere else.
This is a system of mine.
And I'm not saying this will work for everybody.
But if you have the kind of dumb fucking brain I do, this is helpful.
Take everything out of that drawer.
That drawer is now empty.
Okay.
Well, why is it all in that box?
Well, you'll see.
That's where it starts.
Well, I need a measuring cup.
I need a measuring cup.
Okay.
You go and use the measuring cup.
Does it go back into the silver drawer now?
Nope.
You have to use it twice before it goes back in the drawer.
Whoa.
Use it twice.
I need you.
I need the listener.
Yes.
Yes.
I need the listener to detach from their dumb fucking incurious version of the world and enter my little world for a minute.
I've just done the dumbest fucking thing.
I've emptied an entire drawer in a very important area and I put it in a box.
Put it in a box.
If you use the spatula one time, you put it back, you use it a second time, it gets to go back in the drawer.
That's one way.
That's one way.
Okay.
So the boxes on the kitchen counter.
Here's the thing.
If you did that system for a week, you discover that over two thirds of the shit in that drawer gets used a lot less than even once a month.
So why is it in the important drawer?
Because that's where it's easy to put away, not where it's easy to get to and use.
But you have a second drawer that you could put garlic presses and other things.
Yeah, it's a separate issue, but absolutely.
Thermometers.
But you can't organize until you, you can't organize.
Well, the second step in organizing is discarding.
The first step in organizing, we're not even up to like buy a label maker and shit like that.
But this is testing.
You're doing testing again.
It's testing.
It's a form of testing.
Because I need to prove to myself that's accurate.
This is an old one from 43 Folders that...
I might have stolen from Martha Stewart.
I don't really care.
But if you've got a box of stuff that you're not sure you really want to, this is not germane for you, but maybe for other people, if you've got like a box of shit, you seal it up, you put a date on it.
If you don't open that box, by the time that date comes up, you throw it away without opening the box.
Mm-hmm.
Whoa!
Oh, no!
Oh, my brain can't handle it!
Because you make a deal with yourself.
Now, you can do any kind of many different versions of that, but the truth is, if you've got boxes you haven't opened in 30 years, how important are they?
Right?
But anyhow, the idea, the problem is you come into that in the middle of that, and you're like, okay, why is all this stuff in a box over here?
Because one of the most important areas in our house has suddenly become overwhelmed with a lack of care.
And I need to reset my brain about what goes into this thing.
Do we need to be storing the bamboo pointy steak sticks in here?
What are those for?
Kebabs.
But when I jam my hand in there to try to pull out a silicon band that's somewhere down the bottom, guess what?
Now I got a sticker in my hand.
Is that where it goes?
I don't think that's where it goes.
I've never made kebabs in my life.
Where did I get those sticks?
I use them in the garden, actually.
I stick them in the garden.
That's good.
You could do that, too.
I put little flags on them.
The point I started out trying to make is not the point I ended up making, because I didn't really end up making a point.
The point I wanted to start out making is that...
is that for people who actually do actually in a healthy and wholesome way, I don't like, one reason I got out of my old racket, my old job, which was very profitable, was I felt very concerned by the extent to which I was encouraging people to, unintentionally sometimes, encouraging people to get into patterns of,
of procrastination, mental masturbation, like inward turning things that were not actually wholesome.
And that's why I say, for example, you don't get organized.
The way to get organized does not begin with a trip to the container store.
Organizing is not about finding a new way, a new more costly way to store shit you don't need.
Like organizing begins with the discarding.
My only point is whether it's making a porch into a patio, you know, a chip drop, if you like, or whether it's cleaning out just that one goddamn drawer.
Sometimes you've got to make a mess on the way to getting it clean.
Or getting it, however you'd like to think of it.
But just the general pattern I'm trying to establish here is sometimes you have to get messy to get clean.
If you want to clean the bathtub, you got to make a mess.
If you want to really clean the floor, you got to make a mess.
If you're just running a broom over it, you're not really cleaning it.
Hippie clean, we call that.
Hippie clean, thank you.
But I don't know if this is making sense to you, but I find, and this is not just about my family, it's about the world, but I think sometimes people get weirded out and frustrated by somebody who has a tolerance for an incomplete, quote unquote, messy project in order to achieve what they want in the long run with that project.
And sometimes you have to tolerate a little bit of temporary mess in order to get to your goal state.
And people don't like looking at that, especially Dr. Vandenberg.
He didn't see, he didn't see, he did not and could not see Porch.
No, he couldn't.
The first time there was a chip drop.
No.
Because neither of you knew that's where it was going.
Well, that's the other thing, right?
So don't ask how my day was and what I did unless you really want to know, because I will tell you.
I think that I, you know, the idea of just emptying the drawer into a box instead of onto the floor where you're sorting everything on the floor, sitting crisscross applesauce and people are like, what are you doing in the middle of the kitchen?
Why are you doing this right now?
and i'm like what are you talking about this needed to get done and why are these batteries in the same drawer as these punji sticks yeah and uh and then and then as people are walking around they're like that had better not be on the floor in an hour when we come back from the store and i'm like well
It won't be, but it's very possible that this drawer that has only lids and that drawer that has only bowls, that that's got to change too.
How many times have you organized, quote, organized lids?
You organize the lids for your pans.
You organize the lids for the innumerable containers and water bottles.
Lids, lids, lids, lids, lids.
Lids beget lids.
How many people have spent time organizing and reorganizing lids in the absence of asking themselves what the lid goes with and what place that has in their life?
It's not your job to be a water bottle museum.
Oh, my God, a water bottle museum.
I got 40 water bottles here.
Oh, my God.
I don't understand.
We've got whole boxes just full of water bottles we're not even using, let alone the ones that we don't have a place for that are out.
She walked out of the house with this Stanley.
And, you know, last year she was like, ugh, Stanley girls.
Oh, they're a certain kind of girl that have Stanleys.
I was there for the Hydro Flask period.
At some point, somebody gave her a Stanley.
The VSCO girls were very into Hydro Flasks.
And I said, are you a Stanley girl now?
And she was like, no, I mean, I have a Stanley, but I'm not a Stanley girl.
And I was like, okay, I don't even know, but fine.
And then, Merlin, that freaking Stanley, which is...
a pink b the size of a milk carton they're huge right um it's sitting next to the sink in my house for three months and i'm like i don't want this here at all this is why i move everything over to the baking sheet these are all the things that don't currently have a place where do these where do you imagine these things will go there is no place for this water bottle in the water bottle collection area because there's already 40 water bottles there
And yesterday she's walking out of the house and she's got it in her hand.
And I'm like, my God, you freed me from the Stanley, the curse of the Stanley.
And she rolls her eyes as she's headed out.
And I'm like, no, seriously, you've saved me.
I didn't know where it went in your hand today is a perfectly fine place for that to be.
I was so confused about it.
I didn't know what to do.
Like, I didn't know whether to shit or go naked.
And now you've got the fucking Stanley and you're on the road.
And if I never see it again, you know.
Oh, but then you go to an event or you win a race.
You bring home a new bottle and we got another bottle.
I want to just really reiterate this partly for you, but mostly for our audience.
We oughtn't be organizing lids to cover things that we don't need in our life.
That is not organization.
That is insanity.
Well, and it's the old sock in the dryer thing.
How did I end up with this lid and no container?
Or the old banana in the tailpipe routine.
There's banana in the tailpipe.
I'm not going to fall for that.
Where's the lid for this?
Where's the lid for this?
And what is this lid to?
So that's the new stress is, can we find the thing this lid goes with?
And just sit there with that for one minute and ask yourself, like when you're on your deathbed, how many of the moments in life will you have wondered about whether you've properly organized things you don't need for things you don't need?
Ugh.
I mean, 25% of my life is eating noodles.
Yes.
25% of it has got to be sorting rusty screws and trying to find what the lid is to.
Yep.
160% of mine is learning arithmetic.
But, you know, I should be invading Vatican City.
Oh, there's no question about it.
To do something else.
You should be, you should, well, as you can probably tell, you know, the rest is history.
He was talking about Carthage this week, so that's kind of why that's on my mind.
But, but, or, you know, or with your Henry VIII, you got to, you don't get to pick your white whale in life.
Hey, he's not my Henry VIII.
Yeah.
Not pound sign, not my Henry.