This week, Merlin and John talk about:

The Problem: Like a young Billy Graham, referring to Matthew McConaughey in Contact playing the role of a spiritual leader that is like a young Billy Graham.

The show title refers to the movie trope of a scientist who after their career becomes a farmer and turns his back to his society, like in the movie Interstellar.

The episode starts by the Doubleclicks saying Hi to John: ”Greetings, John! What you've been eating today? Roderick on the Line”

Raw notes
The segments below are raw notes that have not been edited for language, structure, references, or readability. Please do not quote these texts directly without applying your own editing first! These notes were not planned to be released in this form, but time constraints have caused a shift in priorities and have delayed editing draft-quality versions to a later point.

John having problems with pops, buzzes, and crackles when Merlin called him the first time (RL146)

Apparently this is the second try of Merlin calling John because the first thing he says John wonders how his pops, buzzes, and crackles are doing. Those words are onomatopoeia. John had a college teacher who pronounced that word Annamanapaia because he felt that the Greek letter that is O and E squished together, a diphthong, needed to be pronounced his way. He used that word all the time in the class and now John cannot say it any other way. It is the artis-anal of 1990. Merlin wants to talk about pronouncing something or doing something a certain way correctly, even when it sounds wrong.

Turns out all that buzzing and crackling was just in John’s voice, he was talking in 8 bit like a Nintendo. It sounded like the beginning of a lot of Sonic Youth songs where you get the deliberate plugging-in of the guitar cable, but now it is gone and Merlin is thrilled and he will stop getting these toots from people. It was a gravity anomaly that can be used to communicate across time by Matthew McConaughey because time is a flat circle (quote from True Detective).

Interstellar, unrealistic movies (RL146)

John was barely aware of interstellar when it was coming out. There was some talk, Neil deGrasse Tyson had some long string of tweets about the science in it, but John was just ignoring it all, and then he was in a hotel room and it was on the TV and he watched it and he was fist-clenchingly mad the entire time. John is probably in the Top 5 of physicist that Merlin knows, give or take, he might be the only physicist that he knows. There are a lot of people they both know who it turns out are physicists. Grant Balfour is probably a pretty good physicist, John Siracusa, they got some physicist friends for sure!

It is super-interesting to Merlin what he will willfully suspend his disbelief about. He is not a physicist like John, but as he sits here today he can't tell you what it is about a film or TV show or novel that makes him go: ”Sure!” while others make him go: ”Mhmmmmm…” It is really hard to say. He knows that John Woo movies are not realistic, but he is totally in. Edgar Wright movies are not realistic, but he is totally in.

What about people performing karate while standing on top of very tall bamboo shoots? Merlin doesn’t have a problem with it because it is part of the cinematic universe. In a lot of movies in the first act there is a lot of world building, a lot of establishing of the ironclad rules that will lead to much of the drama that unfolds over the next 02:30 hours.

Then stuff happens in the 2nd act and virtually every ironclad rule that was established in the first 3rd gets thrown out the window without explanation and that is frustrating and Merlin will feel cheated and duped! In the case of Interstellar the first act is the problematic act because it is boring, implausible, and also poorly thought out and it sets up the plot for the rest of the film. The ”stuff happens” part of the movie where the spaceships are going and people are spinning around and space is very quiet.

Anne Hathaway was there, Matthew McConaughey was there, but neither one of them did John for a moment believe was a scientist, but that didn't matter during the space part because who knows who they are going to put in space 50 years from now, who knows who the astronauts are going to be. He didn't buy that Ethan Hawke could get into the spaceship with his bad eyes in the other space movie (Gattaca). It used to be you had to be an engineer and a pilot and you had to be at NASA and someday it could be app developers, it could be Elon Musk with a leather biplane pilot’s helmet on in the front of the spaceship that he designed to actually look like his own face, shooting up into space, the biggest penis of all.

That part John didn't have a problem with, but the part that was establishing… science as a narrative motivator. If you go to a movie and you are like: ”Science is going to motivate this movie! Somebody is going to use science to tell a story. It is going to turn on science!" and since watching the film John has looked it up and read all the talk saying that the science is really good in this movie, they made sure that the science was good, they called people in as consultants. The black hole that appears in the movie looks like a black hole is going to look if you ever see a black hole, apparently.

John doesn’t object to that, but the part where the dad, out of love for his daughter, goes into the black hole to communicate with her by knocking books off of the shelf in her bedroom in the past was not a thing! John is not complaining about the science necessary, but the movie starts, she is in her bedroom, books are falling off the shelves: ”I wonder if that is going to play into the film!” It would be more Poltergeist at that point, unless her father was a science farmer, a retired jet pilot science farmer, and he says: ”There is no such thing as ghosts!” This is the first hour of the movie! Wasn't there supposed to be some space in this movie? None of that stuff was interesting!

He was in the future, manipulating the past through a multiple universes scenario. If there were people that were creating a controversy about this film about some element in it, John would dismiss them with a scoff because the controversy about this film is that it is a garbage barge starring the ultimate over-tanned leather captain of garbage barge Matthew McConaughey. He recruited this poor Keira Knightley person, Anne Hathaway, who does some very bad acting in it, and there are some other actors in it that do fine acting jobs, but the entire thing is a garbage barge.

John cannot help but compare it to the more recent film which used science to create a robot raccoon that had a smart mouth and a big machine gun, and he believed everything in that movie 100% and he loved it, while this garbage barge of a movie, which was supposed to be smart, and which multiple film reviewers praised for its smartness…! Merlin hasn’t seen the film, but he heard a lot of people were just coming out of the theater freaking out and talking about how their life had changed and other people were like: ”Did we watch the same movie?”

There is Science Fiction and there is Fantasy (see RL191). Lord of the Rings is Fantasy. There is High Fantasy and like Low Fantasy. High Fantasy is where it really is a whole different world or a different universe. There is also Hard Science Fiction where every conceivable detail is sweated to be as accurate as possible, even in a speculative fiction universe, to really cater to the sort of person who asked the question of William Shatner at the convention. Then there is the type of Science Fiction where you got a fucking robot raccoon and nobody minds.

John loves Hard Science Fiction, which works best when it is like Blade Runner a plausible world where you have posited the future based on one or two minor changes. You take lots of elements that we all accept and know to be true and you introduce one fantastical science development. John can handle those, even the ones that are like Hard Science, except Fantasy, the ones where time travel is possible, like Looper where people in the future were sending people back in the past to get killed. If you sit and worry about time travel (don't talk about time travel!), they covered it in the film and you just accept that.

Interstellar tried to get the Hard Science right, except nobody had done any thinking about the human element, they forgot to make the human motivation plausible. The whole emotional core of this film depends on the idea that a father who is a science farmer gets an opportunity to go into space and his 10-year old daughter says: ”Don't leave!” - ”I must go into space. I am a space farmer. This is what science farmers do!” This is a thing from basically every novel and every movie, he is either saying it to his daughter or his wife or somebody. But in this film the daughter is so betrayed by the fact that her father would blast off into space, even though she herself becomes a science farmer.

But despite being a science farmer she cannot ever forgive him for this decision to go into space, nominally to save humanity, and the whole film is about Matthew McConaughey being primarily motivated to get back to Earth to his daughter. And even as an adult she is still devastated, obviously never been in love, obviously never fallen off her bike, but the worst thing that ever happened to her, and the only thing that ever happened to her, is that her father left, and she doesn't forgive him for it. He can't say: ”A space farmer has got to do what a space farmer has got to do!”

They get down close to the gravity of the black hole and time moves more slowly for him. John likes this part, the interesting science, he could to watch all day: An hour on this planet is seven years back home! And by the time they get out of the black hole everybody on Earth is grown up. That is a great idea, a great plot point, and it also opens the door to a lot of humanity and storytelling. They can't get their motor started and by the time they do, they come back out of the black hole gravity field and Earth is 400 years in the future. That would be an interesting story!

Instead they get off the planet and his daughter has grown up and and she has spent the last 40 years sucking her thumb while becoming a genius scientist, but sucking her thumb because her dad didn't come back. Seriously? Dads don't come back all the time! Dads go out for a pack of cigarettes and don't come back. If every kid in the world whose dad didn't come back sucked their thumb and became a genius physicist we would have a better space program!

John’s objection is that the movie needs her to behave in a way that is not human, and whatever their bond is, anybody with normal human feelings watches that and says: ”I am 10 years old, I love science, my dad is a spaceship captain. He is going to go and I am going to be sad, but we are going to get on with our lives!” That is what any human would do that isn't emotionally broken. Merlin thought it was the science that threw John off, but it was the relationships!

He has access somehow to some crossroads place created by future humans for reasons that are not explained. He is in a crossroads where he can go across multiple universes, he can go across time, he ends up in this black hole in a room a la 2001: A Space Odyssey where he can go across time, and he is using that incredible power not to kill Hitler, not to go back to a time before he was born and give his parents a riddle that only he can solve, not to do anything interesting, except to communicate to his daughter by knocking books off of her shelves in the past to send two contradictory messages:

1) The gravity field and all that is how he and his daughter found the NASA people in the first place, so he must have signaled to her to go find the space people, which produced the situation where he flew into space. 2) He spends a lot of time knocking books off the shelves in a coded order so that she receives the message: ”Stay!”, which is meant to be communicated to him in the past through his daughter, telling him not to go, but if he didn't go, then… Of course he didn’t stay because it is idiotic if he had stayed, then he wouldn't have been knocking the books off the shelves!

They didn't address the fact that in an infinite number of other possible multiverses he did stay, but they are using all of that interesting physics and crazy Einsteinian brain-fuckery to tell the dumbest dumb story featuring two dummies that you don't care about in the first place! If you do care about their relationship, if you do care about this father and daughter, you are a dummy because they are such dummies, and all of the physics becomes a window dressing on a pedestrian and numb nuts sentimental story. If you took the science out of that movie, do you care about any of that? No, you couldn't possibly!

John having danced with Anne Hathaway at a wedding in a group dance (RL146)

John once danced with Anne Hathaway at a wedding. He asked her for a dance, but it ended up being more of a group dance of five people, it is not like you just got back from Best Stone (?), you are going to have to really earn it. You don't just grab somebody and kiss them in Times Square anymore, you have a group dance. That was the moment that he realized that even famous actors are first thesbians. You have a sense of famous actors that they are in a different category, but of course they are not, they started out as High School thesbians, then they became College thesbians and then they became movie stars, but they are still in their heart thesbianic.

They were doing this group dance and there was so much thesbianic hand and face and body work, just a lot of: ”Everybody is looking at us! Wheeee!” and John was already too old and grouchy to really enjoy it, he was enjoying it more from a standpoint of: ”Haha, I am watching this!”, but he walked away feeling like even Harrison Ford is like this when you get him at a wedding. Suffice to say, John knows this actress, but he doesn't remember her name. Merlin says that she is probably on Community (reference to the All the great shows story where John couldn’t remember the name of the actor from Community he knew). No, she is more famous than that and she was in some movies.

At the time John was entertaining the idea that maybe their eyes would lock across a crowded dance floor, but looking back at photographs of himself at the time, he was missing a tooth and he did have hair down to the middle of his back, it was around the same time as the video series on the YouTube called The 13 Songs with John but his hair got even longer and at this wedding it was as long as it was going to get. John is talking about Anne Hathaway’s artistic thesbianic dancing, but he can only imagine what she was seeing looking back across the circle, maybe that was why the group dance. A little bit of: ”Ha, this is interesting. How did this guy get in here?” John doesn’t blame her and he has seen her in some movies where she was great.

Matthew McConaughey, why John doesn’t like him, the movie Contact (RL146)

The message that Hollywood needs to receive is that ultimately you cannot care about Matthew McConaughey. You can't! You can watch him! You can be interested in his actions, he can walk across the stage and you can be like: ”Mhmmm!” Look at his face! Think about his role! Could you write a film where he was the actor playing any part, and you are watching him and looking into his face and his eyes, and you care about what happens to him!

What about the Dallas Buyers Club? Merlin didn't finish it, but there were people in that movie that you cared about. It seemed like a good movie. It was a very interesting movie and it was an actorly experience where you watched these actors really act the shit out of what they were doing. He really inhabited the role and Merlin really bought him as a scroungy squirrelly druggie guy, and a guy that you enjoyed watching but did not personally care about.

At the end what you care about is the hundreds of thousands of people who are suffering from AIDS that this particular guy, his actions ended up helping them, and you care about the people, but him you did not care about. John cannot think of a single… his objection to Matthew McConaughey started in a Science Fiction role… John liked him in Dazed and Confused, but he still didn't care about it.

John and Matthew McConaughey could have gone through life perfectly fine with each other. He is on one path, John is on another, he is playing most of the roles that he plays, and John is enjoying watching him but not caring about him, but in that goddamn Jody Foster movie (Contact) where she built a space machine based on a Carl Sagan short story. She goes and meets the aliens who have masqueraded as her father because she wouldn't be able to grock what they looked like. They could appear to her as a swarm of bees, as a talking Coke machine, but instead they chose to appear to her as her father, which is a fucked-up thing for an alien consciousness to do!

If John were a Jody Foster space scientist and he got out into a space world and his dead father arrived and started talking to him in his fatherly way he would feel very manipulated by these UFOs and he would instantly not trust them. Merlin would definitely want to talk to somebody else. Maybe there was a new alien on the job, are they contacting so many sentient races around the universe that this is something that they have assigned to an intern? Merlin wonders what about Clarence the angel in It's a Wonderful Life? You got to start somewhere! John has never seen It's a Wonderful Life!

In this movie with Jodie Foster (Contact) where the swarm of bees is appearing to her as her father, Matthew McConaughey plays a role where he is a charismatic spiritual leader, a fantasy future world where he is a young Billy Graham who has a lot of moral authority and a lot of deep soul wisdom, but such that he is consulted by presidents and heads of state. He is on these advisory boards, he is a central figure, he is the voice of faith and religion in this science movie.

John was watching this movie, he likes Jodie Foster, he likes Carl Sagan, he likes the idea of a science movie, he loves the idea that space travel is basically time travel and she was gone for a long time in her world, but in our world it appeared that the machine didn't work and nobody believed that she went. That is such a nice device and a panel of scientists would be able to understand this concept if she explained it to them, but when she got back nobody believed her and she was disgraced.

Every time McConaughey's character came on the screen John closed his eyes and went: ”Nanananana!” because he is so callow, so unbelievable in the role of somebody that anyone would care about, and to put him as the emotional heart of the movie was such a terrible casting decision. What you want in that role is a chubby guy, like Wayne Knight, Seinfeld's Newman. If you put a little bit of a chunky guy in the center of a roll like that, you are going to believe that a chunky guy has heart, but a guy like Matthew McConaughey who appears to be carved out of mahogany? That guy has no heart! He wants to make some fish tacos and he wants to go boogieboarding. He is a Pan Man! He wants to have Sammy Hagar over, they are going to make some fish tacos, he is going to make his famous fucking salsa, and then they are going to go boogieboarding. He does not want to be the emotional heart of a film! You don't believe it! Not for a second!

He was very convincing in the TV show True Detective playing against the guy from Cheers (Woody Harrelson) because he was a gagged-out bad cop and he was a dumb philosopher in that movie with a lot of dumb philosophy, but it was exactly the kind of dumb philosophy that a gagged-out cop would spew! He was not the chubby guy that should have been at the center of both of these science fiction movies. John would even buy Seth Rogen in those roles! Merlin thinks Wayne Knight has lost a tremendous amount of weight in a transformative weight loss experience. John Hill also had a big weight loss, but the Yoyo effect is real!

The Seven Things You’re Not Supposed to Talk About (RL146)

John’s mom believes that people who lose a lot of weight by any method of exercise and diet will always tell you what they did and someone who loses a lot of weight suddenly and does not tell you in exhaustive detail the method by which they did it, invariably had a gastric bypass. Not that there is anything wrong with that, but there is extraordinary medical surgical means involved. She believes that anyone who has used a system of changing their diet and exercise is going to bore the shit out of you about it. People are proud of what they have done, especially with things like pregnancy, weight loss or AA or whatever. These are people who got their story. That is her theory, but she has a lot of theories and you have to take them all with a grain of salt, but in the aggregate she is right a lot of the time.

John tries very hard not to talk about his diet and he cannot help! Two years ago when somebody was talking about how they were gluten-free John was like: ”Oh my God! You are so boring! Stop it! Stop talking!” and then he went gluten free he was like: ”Well, you know, I went to gluten free recently and blah, blah, blah, blah!” and he was so proud of himself and he had completely forgotten that he had formerly found people like that boring.

There is an episode of This American Life called The Seven Things You're Not Supposed to Talk About where Sarah Koenig’s mother has a list of seven topics no one should ever talk about: Your period, your diet and what you eat, your health in general, your sleep, your dreams, route talk which is how you drove there and is 80% of what John and his mom talk about. If Merlin can’t talk about diet and sleep, what is he going to say at this point?

When someone is introduced into John’s family and gets to be friends with the Rodericks one of the one of the things that they have to accustomed themselves to is that anytime John and his mom arrive at a place or depart they are going to spend two minutes talking about the route, and if they are both in one location and are going to a separate location they will absolutely take different routes and compare and be very interested in who gets to the place first.

Merlin would like to see a cable reality show called Getting to Be Friends with The Rodericks. It would be a ten season show and at the end maybe they would be friends. It could be lots of things. It could be a contest. It could be an elimination thing. It could be a hidden camera Ozzy Osbourne thing. At the end of every episode John and his mom would sit down and John would be like: ”I kind of like this one!” - ”Hmm. No!” - ”It would be nice if you left now!”

John going skiing for the first time after many years (RL146)

John went skiing this past weekend for the first time in many years. Skiing used to be a big thing in his family and both John and his sister were big time skiers. It was very weird because it is a thing that he hasn't done in a long time, and probably in the last 20 years he has done it three times, but it is a thing that he knows how to do really well. Between the ages of eight and 23 he skied constantly, he raced, he trained, mostly in Alaska but in College, too.

On beautiful summer days in Alaska they would go for a long run, and then they would lay down in the park on the grass with their eyes closed and their coach would walk around between them really slowly and be like: ”You are at the top of the course and you are checking your bindings, and then you hear the buzzer and then you are out and you are on the course and you are making that first turn and you are just carving perfectly!” and we would visualize an entire slalom race in 1984.

At the time John felt like this was really new and really innovative and it was really effective! You would lay there after a long run, you would be feeling your body and the sun is beating down and you are thinking about this ski race and you are imagining yourself skiing so well through this course. Absolutely the following year during ski season John made a real leap inability, he started winning races, he got a couple of gold medals, and people were starting to talk about him like he was a Comer. It all ended badly, but it was a big part of his teen life, and he hasn’t done it in years!

It touches on athletics, it touches on social stuff, it is a thing people would do for fun that is also a very expensive sport with an aspect of being a very class oriented thing, like horse people. Like a lot of things tied to social class there is the confusing misattribution that skill in skiing is a sign that you are a superior person, like skill in golf or tennis or horse riding is a sign that you are (inaudible). It is also a solitary sport, but a solitary sport where as you are making a run you are conscious of being visible to people. There are people standing all around the ski hill and on the lift watching you ski.

It is a solitary performance of a type of ballet. When John is riding the lift or standing on the side of the hill and someone skis by and is skiing well, he will stop what he is thinking and watch them and admire them. Every day in the course of being on a ski mountain there are multiple times where you see somebody and you just admire their skiing, and it is a form of love. John doesn’t feel that in very many other things, as much as he is watching somebody perform a sport that he knows what it feels like to do well, and he doesn’t know anything about them, but he is watching them ski well and he is thinking: ”I like this!”

When you are skiing you are also aware that 90% of the people around on the ski mountain are not watching you and don't care and wouldn't recognize that you were doing it well, but there is this small percentage of people on the lift or on the hill that are going to recognize that you are performing at a higher level and they are going to appreciate it. Millions of people love watching basketball highlights because they are feats of incredible athleticism that we all recognize as tremendous, but very few of us can also play basketball that well. Imagine watching basketball highlights if you were somebody who was an incredible basketball player.

John was having this incredible experience all weekend: This is one of the few things that he is genuinely good at. He does not consider himself to be genuinely good at playing guitar, he is good at guitar, he is passable guitar, but in a room full of people that are great at guitar nobody is going to be like: ”Now let’s sit and watch Roderick!”, but he might smile, make a joke, and play a joke solo. Merlin heard John say previously that he never really bothered to try and get good at guitar until he was in his late 20s, and even then he was just as good as he needed to be and he never saw it as an avocation to aspire to greater and greater Rock.

Part of it maybe is that skiing is something that he started to do when he was 8, and he didn't start playing guitar when he was 8, he didn't really do much else at that time. He didn't get good at baseball, he wasn't good at Dungeons and Dragons, he wasn't good at all those things that he wanted to do, he didn't practice drawing, he didn't develop a skill to the degree that it was unconscious, but with skiing, after not having been in ten years, he went into the Pro Shop and said: ”I am a 46 year old guy, and I haven't been skiing in ten years, but I want your best gear!”, and they bring out this gear and John said: ”No, not this stuff. I want that stuff!”, and he pointed up to the thing and they put him in this stuff.

As he was riding the ski lift he thought that this was pretty technical gear and he hoped he didn't overestimate his need for it. It had changed a lot, but the art of skiing hasn't changed, and John got off the lift and made a couple of turns, and was like: ”All right, this is the appropriate gear, and I understand how it works!” and the rest of the day he was in this place of training again, where every turn he made, he was thinking about: ”That was a good turn. And now we are going to set up the next turn!”

After the first couple of runs John was super tired, his legs hurt, everything hurt, and he recognized that he was 46 and he could not get air anymore, he was not going to go off any jumps probably ever again. In any ski run where you are really pushing yourself you are going to arrive at the threshold where you are outside of you ability, which is true of anybody, no matter how good they are. If they are pushing their envelope they get to the edge of it.

Merlin has only skied once when he was a very young kid.

You are going super-fast down a place, and even if you are very familiar with the terrain, and the resort John grew up on he knew every inch of it, but even so: Every day is different! It is nature and the weather and the snow is always different, and an area that you know really well the situation can have changed completely. This past weekend he was on completely unfamiliar terrain and every time he came over a rise he had no idea what was on the other side. It could be a mile-long groomed run, or it could be a cliff into a waterfall every time you come over a horizon.

The other thing being 46 really pointed out to him was that he needed to bring the edge of his envelope in considerably because the last time he skied very much at all he was still young enough that his boundaries were way out and he needed to bring those way in. There were a couple of times on the hill where he was standing on the edge of some double-black diamond run, looking down and thinking: ”Is this doable? Yes! Should I do it? No, I should not!” John can do it, but he doesn’t need to prove that, and the risk of doing this and making even just a normal error is that he will hurt himself and then today will be characterized by his injury rather than by the fact that he is having a really fun time.

That was new to him! He had never stood at the top of a run before, looked down and said: ”Can I? Yes! Should I? No!” and he did that a few times and he was pretty proud of that. After a couple of runs he felt so tired that maybe he had made a terrible mistake in buying an all-day pass and maybe he should go down and take a bath, but then he was skiing through that pain and loosening up and finding reserves of strength and then he skied until the last run and was sad that they didn't have night skiing. It was very weird to feel like this.

This was a thing that he knows how to do and that is such a big part of his life, and he has chosen not to do it for 20 years for reasons that are all about: ”Well, it is really expensive and it is a pain in the ass to get up there, so anyway, I am going to go to the café this morning and read the newspaper instead!”, every day making that decision for 20 years and leaving this side of him where he actually knows how to do something that is really gratifying, that is physical and that is in this other realm, and it is not a part of his life anymore. John is still grappling with how it is that he could go year after year and not even want to do it once, or want to do it, but never have that desire to do it be enough to overcome the inertia of sitting around.

What other lives could you have lived if you had made other decisions? (RL146)

Sometimes John will be on the freeway and a guy will drive by him in a truck pulling a trailer with two snowmobiles, two dirt bikes, and a boat all on the same trailer, pulling this thing up into the Siskiyous, and his whole family is in the truck and he got a cabin up there somewhere and he lives for this. He works at his job, but he is always thinking about getting up to the lake.

John’s dad was like that with his freaking airplane, his goddamn fucking Cessna 182. He poured money into it and every time the sun came out he was down at the airport, monkeying with his airplane, every spare minute he is like: ”Let's go! Let's get a hamburger up in Talkeetna, let’s fly up to Ninilchik and he would get in the plane and he would have his sunglasses on, he would have his reading glasses on top of his head because he needed them to look at maps, and then he had a third pair of glasses on top of that to see long distance. He had three pairs of glasses on at all times when he was in his plane, they were puttering along and John was looking out the window.

This is another thing John was raised doing: If you put him in a 182 and said: ”Fly me somewhere!” John could do it without thinking, but it never has interested him to have a jet ski or a lake cabin or a small plane because he has a different kind of relationship to action. He doesn’t care about action in a way. The guy with the jet skis is making such a personal investment. It is so costly to have that fun and that is what it always seems like to John: It is a cost/benefit analysis: The time and the getting up early and just the gasoline.

Everybody has such interesting differences in what they gravitate towards in terms of what you could very loosely call a hobby. There are many vectors to that: Should this be a largely practical thing, or do like the fact that it is frivolous. Some people like making furniture because then they can make beautiful furniture and give it away. Some people like the fact that they are building something on a Minecraft server that is just for fun. How much does doing this expose you to other people and how does Merlin feel about that? When it comes to men's hobbies there is the one kind where you hang out with other people and there is the other kind where you have to be left alone.

There is the element of conspicuous consumption. Do I want to have three boats? In Merlin’s family, his late uncle and his late father, and Merlin himself enjoy the paraphernalia of the hobby, which could be stuff like reading magazines, it could be things like going to the bike shop to look at wrenches or whatever, and then you get into stuff like shop talk, getting the chance to go fly out to the guy who fixes John’s dad's plane and shoot the shit with him. It could be Merlin reading a comic book by himself at midnight or it could be John arranging a ski trip that is more money than you would normally pay.

What makes somebody find that attractive, let alone relaxing, is so different. The idea of going skiing is not appealing to Merlin because it doesn't tick him boxes. The nice thing about a hobby is that it is like spray foam insulation you can shoot into your life that fills this important part that needs to be filled. For some people that is the social part, for other people they need to be left alone for 2 hours a week. Mowing the lawn? Great chance to listen to podcasts and not talk to anybody!

When John is driving to his office he will drive past the railroad and look at it, and today he was like: ”The railroad!” There is a version of John that just stayed in the ski resort town where he grew up and is still there. There are dudes like that! John rode up the lift with a guy who said he has been at Whistler for 32 years. John could have been in Girdwood for 32 years and that is an interesting version of him, but there was a version of him that really wanted to work for the railroad.

When John was a kid looking at the future he really wanted to be a ski lift operator, that seems like a great job, and he wanted to be so many jobs at the resort. He wanted to be on the ski patrol, he wanted to be one of those people that walks around the resort with a walkie-talkie and a baseball hat and is taking care of business at the resort. He could have pursued that job, he never ended up having a job at the resort, but his sister worked at the resort for years.

John was friends with a Grunge Rock guy who was a conductor, one of the Grunge Rock people who had a straight job that was kind of fascinating. Most Rock’n’Roll people have a straight job that is not fascinating, you are a bartender somewhere, but this guy started as a brake man working for Amtrak, and had worked his way up by the time he was 30 years old to conductor on routes leaving Seattle. It is like being an airline pilot where you worked two days, off three, or something.

John was pretty good friends with him at this time. In railroad culture there are two separate tracks: You are on the conductor track, or you are on the engineer track, and there is no crossover. If you are on the engineer track you start at the bottom and you work your way up and you are an engineer, and if you are on the conductor track you become a conductor, but those are different worlds. He got to be a conductor and then gave it all away and started as an apprentice on the engineer track at 30 years old because he wanted to be up in that engine on those three day trips across the Plains and he has since disappeared from John’s life and drove that train off into the tunnel of the future.

Watching those trains this morning, John thought: ”Wow, what if I had just gone to work for the railroad? It is so elegant!” There are tracks! Literally you are on a track! You don't have to worry about if you are on the right track! You are on the right track, or you are on the wrong track and that is terrible and you are going to figure that out pretty fast, too!

There are probably worlds where Merlin was still playing Indie Rock or being a waiter. There were a couple of dream jobs that were surprisingly in reach. He wanted to be a writer, he wanted to do design of different kinds, maybe in retrospect it is surprising how much more in reach those things were than he expected. In the modern age he never had anything like wanting to be a baseball player or anything like that. Merlin is also very envious in a weird way of people who joined the army when they were young, and so is John.

John is still even just now grappling with the fact that he does not have access to a multiverse, although he has always lived his whole life as though the multiverse exchange station was going to be open to him and he was going to be able to walk in and say: ”Now I would like to be an Army man for 25 years!”

John is generally more interested in breadth than depth, but now that he is in his 40s and sees all these people that have tremendous depth he would really like a breadth of depth.

Hollywood portraying experts unrealistically as young people (RL146)

Merlin mostly has to deal with other adults because he has a child, and the parents of other kids make him feel terrible about his life. There is one guy who is a biologist who works on a very specific kind of frog and he is the go-to guy for that kind of frog, and Merlin desperately envies that. That is the Matthew McConaughey in Contact problem: Part of what made that role so infuriating is that he is this person with this global religious wisdom, but he is like a young surfer asshole, and that fantasy that you would be young and yet already be…, this is the thing that Hollywood does to us all the time: Here comes the world expert on frogs, and it turns out it is a 24 year old actress. It is the James Bond…

There is the Keanu Reeves movie with the dolphins called Johnny Mnemonic, and there used to be a thing especially in the 1990s of taking a certain kind of very attractive young actress and trying to sell her as the science person. A lot of it was the material that wasn't up to it, but often enough you end up where everybody sounds silly. That was like such a thing for a while, and in this case Matthew McConaughey is the young woman.

There was that Timothy Dalton James Bond movie with the girl who is the nose from Starship Troopers (Denise Richards). She is called something like Vagina Clitorington (actually Christmas Jones, and the movie was The World Is Not Enough and the James Bond was Pierce Brosnan), a well known scientist or a nuclear physicist, a very handsome woman. She may have had a lab coat. She was married to the guy from Two and a Half Men (Charlie Sheen).

Her commanding role as the super-scientist in that James Bond movie was the example, the peak moment. Really? This is the one! In a way that sneaks into all of our minds and we all have this idea that there are some 25 year old super scientists who also happen to be models and surfers, and John is comparing himself against them somewhat. At this point in his life he is not the expert on the frogs, although it is so seductive: ”What do I do? I do this frog! What am I doing tomorrow? This frog! What am I going to be remembered for? This frog! I know everything about this frog!”

It may be that one day when they look back and they say: ”Two guys talking podcast! Who is the expert?” It is going to be Merlin Mann! ”Science farmers were their idea!” - ”Who said Thought Technology first?” If history goes a certain way their future is going to be fine, but because they are inside it right now they cannot see it.

Which presidents were religious? (RL146)

Every President since Truman met with Billy Graham.

Which presidents were actually religious? People of faith who governed in part based upon their faith and beliefs! John thinks Jimmy Carter was, Merlin thinks probably Ronald Reagan was, but John has his doubts. LBJ not at all! But you can be a cynical tough person in governance who also has faith. Jimmy Carter for sure, when he jerked it he probably genuinely felt bad. Despite George W. Bush being so terrible you genuinely did get a sense that he believed in his religion and he was motivated.

In Merlin’s Church when the kids were in Sunday school the grownups got to choose different study groups based upon partly demographics, based upon partly what their interest was. There was a hip young singles Bible study group, all with fantastic New Testament names like Lamplighters. Dr. Russell Cottrell was the leader of one that was the MIT of adult Church classes. If you went in there, you didn't read the Bible, you studied the shit out of the Bible, and you brought a fucking concordance like a gentleman, and you had to really sit down and turn over big ideas about the stuff that people even outside Christianity enjoy talking about: the paradox, the Trinity, how does that actually work? Is there the Holy Spirit, really? Does he get really 1/3rd of the credit? How does this work? There is all kinds of fascinating stuff when you get into it. The discussion of Christianity can be extremely interesting.

Jimmy Carter would be going to Dr. Cottrell’s class and George W. Bush maybe just hanging up by the Ms. Pacman. It is the transformation of Christianity: Jimmy Carter was practicing what we always imagined was the Christian spirit, and by the time George Bush got into the Church it was much more of this prosperity gospel. Wasn't his partly an arrival out of the drying up? You dry up and then if you are interested in going the religion route, then you dry up and you came up the escalator into the job fair of religions at the convention center. You can pick whatever resonates with you! See who got the best toad-bags.

There are plenty of people that dry up and become Buddhists or dry up and go back to being Catholics like they were when they were kids. W was in every way already pointed at this version of Southern Baptist, whatever that has morphed into. If you follow the four steps of give yourself over and so forth and so on, then everything good is going to happen and you don't have any doubt anymore. That is so different from the one that Jimmy Carter practices: ”Are we doing it right? How do we help people?” That is so different!

JFK was nominally a Catholic and they were all terrified of his Catholicism. You don't really look at the way he conducted his own life and think: Well, here somebody that really cares about Catholicism!

All the US presidents, they all saw Billy Graham, they all professed to be practicing more or less the same version, and he does not see much evidence of it except in those two cases. Carter as the completely thoughtful Christian, and George Bush as the completely unreflective Christian, and that is pretty phenomenal!

In one of their many lost episodes Merlin said something that really means a lot to him: He has friends where you could be friends with this person for 10 years and it only came up once or twice that they even ”go to Church”, but there is something about the way they conduct themselves that is really admirable and kind and gentle and sometimes funny, and maybe they drink and play in bands and stuff. Nothing of what they do is about proselytizing or judging, but they are always the ones who show up to help people out for stuff. That is the strain that Merlin sees in somebody like Jimmy Carter and that he saw in the people he went to Church with.

John and Merlin had a disagreement one time, a long time before they started doing this podcast. It was one of those times when Merlin called John on the phone to yell about The Beatles and they started talking about something else and it was a real telling moment where John said something like: ”If you are a Christian I don't think you should smoke pot!” and Merlin said: ”What are you talking about?” - ”Practice what you preach!” - ”One thing has nothing to do with the other thing!” - ”It has everything to do with it. If you are a Christian you can't also be an alcoholic!” - ”You are bananas! The two things are unrelated!” and they yelled at each other for half an hour. If you are a Christian you should drive the speed limit.

It is the predestination argument, the Calvinist: ”Well you can't know whether you are going to heaven or not, but if you are one of the chosen it would be exhibited in your actions!” Predestination is a good time travel movie.

”They will know we are Christians by our guns, by our guns!"