Docket Deep Cuts

Welcome to the Judge John Hodgman podcast.

I'm Bailiff Jesse Thorne.

We're in chambers this week, clearing the docket.

Live with me from Brooklyn, New York City, where they paint murals of Biggie, is the great John Kellogg Hodgman.

Hi, John.

Wow, you revealed my middle name.

Yeah, well, people need to know about your association with flakes.

You know what?

I have no truck with flakes, Jesse.

No truck with flakes.

I like solid people, and I like crunchy cereal like grape nuts.

No flakes, nuts.

You know what I mean?

That's what I'm about.

I also love grape nuts.

I am not a descendant of John Harvey Kellogg, the founder of the Kellogg Sanitarium, whose brother invented corn flakes.

Right.

Actually, his brother ran the Kellogg.

Oh, someone's going to write me a letter.

There's two brothers.

One of them was a health nut, not a grape nut.

This is going to be T.C.

Boyle is going to write you a letter.

Yeah, exactly right.

T.

Karagasen Boyle.

That guy goes by his middle name.

His middle name is his calling card.

Karagasen, that's my middle name.

That's what he says.

It's a sketchphrase.

Yeah.

Jesse,

we're clearing the docket.

Next week, we're going to go back to live litigant cases.

We've got another docket to clear.

And I've been thinking about rollicking through these dockets over these trying times.

Every time you end the episode, you say the docket is clear.

And you know why that bothers me a little bit?

Why is that, John?

It's false, not true.

Dockett's not clear.

Docket is never clear.

Wow.

Because I was working with producer Jennifer Marmor over there in Los Angeles.

Hello, Jennifer.

Hi.

And, you know, we put the docket together.

I was like, there are some cases, like, there are a bunch of docket cases that I've never heard.

I put them in the docket folder, well, I don't know, one, two, maybe three years ago.

and never got back to them.

So yesterday I was like, I wonder what the first

email I got in the docket was.

And it goes back all the way, Jesse Thorne, to the year 2010.

2010, starting with Ian's letter from October 23rd, 2010.

Today we are going to be doing some docket deep cuts.

Wow.

Clearing the docket from docket cases that were submitted within minutes.

In fact, in this case, even before the first official episode of Judge John Hodgman ever aired.

Ian writes from 2010, I have a immense respect and admiration for the president, but there are some small areas

where I disagree with him.

Therefore, I will not be voting this year.

Okay, he says,

I have a dear friend in Seattle with whom I've nearly come to blows in regards to burger chains.

Up here, we have dicks, which locals tend to love, but is basically vile cafeteria quality BS.

Meanwhile, I grew up in Reno and have great fondness for In-N-Out.

I know it's not the best burger ever, but it's certainly the best fast food burger.

Discussions on this topic have left civility behind and mar our friendship.

Please help.

Jesse,

as I mentioned, this letter is from October 23rd, 2010.

Yeah.

And it's very sobering to find a letter that you've never responded to that is more than 10 years old.

And as I I mentioned, this was before,

this is sobering for another reason, because this is before we even officially launched the podcast in November 2010.

We had done Judge John Hodgman as a segment on JJ Goh a few times.

And I guess we must have put out a call for cases for this new podcast we were launching, Judge John Hodgman.

And if I had looked more closely at this, this is what is harrowing.

If I had looked more closely at this dispute from Ian and thought about it, maybe there never would have been a judge, John Hodran.

We might have invented the Doughboys.

Wow.

We would be so rich, John.

We would be

so dramatically more popular than we are right now.

We might have accidentally created the Doughboys, or at least had cause to sue them when they created Doughboys later on.

God, I wouldn't.

I would love to sue the Doughboys.

I don't want to sue those off.

Let's sue their pants off.

No, they're not.

We're coming for you, Mitch and Wags.

We got to to get that pie.

In any case,

this is a dispute between two rival burger chains.

Jesse, it's been a long time since we've been to Seattle, play that Neptune theater.

I hope to come back there again soon, but did you ever go to Dick's Drive-In in Seattle?

I'm not familiar with it.

Do you know it?

No, I've never even heard of it.

The main Seattle thing I know is wearing shorts when it's raining outside.

And

I guess Mark McLemore and I get Mack Lemore and the rapper Mack Lemore,

but mostly Mariner's second baseman Mark McLemore, after whom McLemore is named.

Oh, I didn't know that.

Interesting.

I just thought he mackled more than anyone else.

No, just a medium amount of Mac.

I guess Dick's drive-in is the open-air market where they throw the hamburger to your face.

We're really scraping the bottom of the barrel of our

Seattle rattle.

We're talking about flannel shirts, and that's going to be the end of it.

It's just, it's just, it's just Seattle.

You got that nice library.

Like, so, like,

so much of our beloved North American touring route,

Seattle feels very distant to me, very much of the past.

This is making me extremely nostalgic, and so I must plunge forward.

I have not tried Dick's.

I cannot assess Ian's assessment of Dick's Drive-In food.

I hope that we can try it out soon and settle this at a live show in Seattle.

We'll get some In-N-Out flown up or something.

I don't know.

I don't know how we're going to do it, but I can tell you this.

I did go to the Dick's Drive-In website and I can tell you,

taste untasted that their french fries are better than In-N-Out for sure.

Zero, zero question.

Jesse,

you don't have a response to that?

You want to defend the In-N-Out french fry?

They're fine.

It's fine.

The premise of In-N-Out is that the food is fresh, right?

So you watch them put the french fry through the press, and that's the kind of French fry that you get.

They don't use frozen food, so they don't use parboiled

or once-cooked frozen french fries, which is what many other fast food chains do.

A lot of people don't like that kind of french fry.

It's fine.

I don't have strong feelings about french fries in general.

I'm not a huge French fry guy anyway, so it doesn't bother me that much.

Yeah, I can see Jennifer Marmor shaking her head in dismay.

I mean, I like the fries, but I'm a huge French fry guy.

Yeah.

You're a fry guy?

I'm a big fry guy.

Do you like the fries better than the fries at other fast food chains?

Well,

not better than McDonald's, but infinitely better than Burger King.

Let's not even talk

about it.

My one and a half-year-old loves fries so much that if we make fries or bring fries in from somewhere, he cries, fry,

fries,

fries,

until we give him fries.

And we were on a really long travel day visiting my in-laws, and we went to, we stopped at Burger King really quick just because we were all ravenous.

And he kept crying for fry.

And I kept giving him the Burger King fry, and he would not take it.

No, no fry.

That's no fry.

Tet fry.

Jen's child is a French fry reply guy.

I drove by a Burger King the other day

and, you know, look,

until I started listening to those Doughboys, I probably had not thought about eating fast food in a decade or more.

Now, I think now, you know, I'm just the biggest fan of that Wendy's in Southborough, Massachusetts, right off of Route 9, right off of 490 there.

If you learn one thing from listening to the Doughboys, it's that people's judgments about fast food are not about rationality.

They're about weird childhood romantic associations that they have about going to Wendy's with their nana.

Wait, wait, stop.

That is why if we had invented the doughboys, it would have been different because it wouldn't have just been nostalgia about going to eat fried clams at the clam box in Quincy with your mom.

It would have been about what's true about food

and also what's true about interstates, Jesse, because it's off of 495.

So stop writing those letters.

I said 490, I was wrong.

495, Southborough, Massachusetts, Wendy's.

See you there on June 27th on my way north.

French fries, look, French fries are made good one way, double fry.

You can't just fry them once.

It's not true.

You know what?

It's not true.

You're right.

You're right.

Because there's someone in my family who tried to convince me that their favorite online cooking writing person

that their recipe was possible, which is to start to put the fries in cold oil and slowly heat it up.

That's what I was going to say.

That works so good.

It's so good.

You have to use waxy potatoes, though.

That worked once well.

And I guess maybe we didn't know to use waxy potatoes the second time because it was an incredible experiment, so counterintuitive that it seemed like magic.

But then it was not reproducible in its results.

But okay, we'll use waxy potatoes next time.

But everybody, within the sound of my voice, if you are doing deep frying, you're doing your french fries,

you got to par cook them.

You got to fry them once, give them a rest, fry them again.

That's why when you go to In-N-Out, if they're only frying them once, even if you ask them to do those fries well done, which you can do, you're still getting a paper bag of warm grubs.

But it's not about the French fries.

I agree.

I love In-N-Out.

Love.

That's the

secret of In-N-Out.

This is the secret of In-N-Out.

All other fast food hamburgers taste bad.

And In-N-Out is pretty good.

Like, it's not the greatest cheeseburger ever.

It's just that, like, a cheeseburger from McDonald's is horrible.

It's not a double cheeseburger from the Wendy's in Southborough, Massachusetts.

That's true.

But it's very, very, very good.

Love In-N-Out.

I love their hiring practices.

Hamburgers are really good.

French fries are really bad.

Taste untasted.

I'm going to give dicks the win win for fries because they had a video about how they make their fries and I know that they double fry them.

Taste untasted, I'm going to say probably Dicks is not as good a hamburger as in and out.

We'll settle it in Seattle.

Here's something from Phil.

My cat insists that there is milk kept somewhere in my neck, but I'm certain I have no neck milk.

Who is correct?

Dude the cat or me?

Jesse, I have to,

you're my friend, but I have to critique you.

You added a a clarifying element to that letter.

I did.

Yeah, you added the modifier, the cat, to dude.

Yeah.

Whereas,

and I, and I, and I think that that's clearer for the audience, right?

But it takes away from the weird, sublime, and unsettling mystery of this these spare couple of sentences that have haunted me for

3,870 days

since this letter was was sent to me November 6, 2010.

My cat insists that there is milk kept somewhere in my neck, but I am certain I have no neck milk.

Who is correct?

Dude or me?

There's a poetry to it.

You have to do a little work there to figure out the dude is the cat, which, by the way, dude is a great name for a cat, but this email, you can see this is the second email that I got after we...

It may be the first email that I got after we put out the first episode of Judge John Hodgman, because it's like days afterward.

And every now and then I would go back to this email and I'd be like, What do I do with Phil and dude?

Because this is

weird.

It's like, you know, it's gross.

This is a gross letter.

Obviously, a body doesn't have neck milk.

That's science.

Body doesn't have neck milk.

Yeah.

And it was just,

I was like, was this really happening?

And only since then.

And also, I didn't know what I didn't know what Phil was talking about.

It sounded weird and gross.

But I've learned since, I've learned about many things as a cat owner in the past decade.

I've learned about cats chattering.

You familiar with cats chattering?

No, I've heard women in Iowa chatter, pick a little, talk a little, pick a little, talk a little, pick, pick, pick, pick a lot, pick a little more.

The music man.

Yeah.

No.

The music man.

Our cat, Lilla, the dumb, dumb cat, would look out the window at birds and make a different meow than she would otherwise ever make.

And at first we thought this cat who is so dumb that she literally bumps her head when she sits up under a coffee table like she has no sense of field awareness whatsoever

was secretly a genius because she would talk to the birds because she would meow in a different way at the birds than in any other way.

She would look at these birds and go.

Then I learned very recently that that's what cats, lots of cats do that.

Cats have this habit of looking at birds and making a distinct vocalization that is called chattering and it is rather rather uncanny, and you can find lots of videos of it on the internet, and those cats will creep you out.

Now, do the creepy cat

is exhibiting a different behavior, which I now understand to be quite common since I first read about it way back in November of 2010, and that is

post-mature suckling.

And you remember our friend in Toronto, Sarah, who is the cat groomer up there in Toronto?

Sure.

We talked to her a couple of times over the rollicking dockets of the winter.

I just wrote to her and I was like, is this a thing, right?

Because I've heard about this.

And she confirmed, yeah, quote, suckling behavior is common in cats who are taken from their mother too soon.

It is commonly believed to be a way for them to comfort themselves by attempting to substitute for their mom's presence.

It can be exhibited during times of stress or massive change for the cat as an attempt at self-soothing, similar to thumb-sucking or nail-biting in humans.

And that made sense to me, Jesse, because, you know, the dude was going through a massive change.

An incredible new podcast had just been announced and had had its premiere episode, and the world was rocked.

Yeah, honestly.

I mean, I get a lot of letters from cat owners saying, what's going on?

Why is my cat running around in circles and chasing ghosts?

Like, the podcast's out.

In any case, Sarah says they will tend to go for wool or blankets because that's warm and fuzzy like their mom.

So it's possible Phil's cat has just decided his neck is a good option.

So, Phil, I don't know whether you have or had a warm and fuzzy neck,

but that is the explanation for what dude is doing.

And

I'm using present tense.

I hope dude is still with us.

This is 10 years ago, plus, 10 years plus.

I hope dude is abiding.

And if not, I'm sorry for your loss.

I think you will agree that dude really pulled the room together.

Let's take a quick break to hear from this week's partners.

We'll be back with more cases to clear from the docket on the Judge John Hodgman podcast.

Hello, I'm your Judge John Hodgman.

The Judge John Hodgman podcast is brought to you every week by you, our members, of course.

Thank you so much for your support of this podcast and all of your favorite podcasts at maximumfund.org, and they are all your favorites.

If you want to join the many member supporters of this podcast and this network, boy, oh boy, that would be fantastic.

Just go to maximumfund.org/slash join.

The Judge John Hodgman podcast is also brought to you this week by Quince.

Jesse, the reviews are in.

My new super soft hoodie from Quince that I got at the beginning of the summer is indeed super soft.

People cannot stop touching me and going, that is a soft sweatshirt.

And I agree with them.

And it goes so well with my...

uh quince uh overshirts that i'm wearing right now my beautiful cotton pique overshirts and all the other stuff that i've gotten from quince why drop a fortune on basics when you don't have to?

Quince has the good stuff.

High-quality fabrics, classic fits, lightweight layers for warm weather, and increasingly chilly leather, all at prices that make sense.

Everything I've ordered from Quince has been nothing but solid, and I will go back there again and buy that stuff with my own money.

John, you know what I got from Quince?

I got this beautiful linen double flap pocket shirt that's sort of like an adventure shirt.

And I also got a merino wool polo shirt.

Oh, it's like a it's like a mid-gray, looks good underneath anything, perfect for traveling.

Because with merino wool, it like, it basically rejects your stink.

You know what I mean?

It's a stink-rejecting technology, John.

It says, get thee behind me, stink.

Yeah, exactly.

And, you know, honestly, even if I do need to wash it, I can just wear it in the shower when I'm traveling and then.

roll it in a towel and it's pretty much ready to go.

Quince only works with factories that use safe, ethical, responsible manufacturing practices and premium fabrics and finishes.

Quince has wonderful clothes for women, men, kids, babies.

They have travel stuff.

They have gifts.

They have quilts and bedspreads.

They've got everything.

Go over there and find out for yourself.

Keep it classic and cool with long-lasting staples from Quince.

Go to quince.com/slash JJHO for free shipping on your order and 365-day returns.

That's q-u-i-n-ce-e dot com slash j-j-h-o to get free shipping and 365-day returns.

Quince.com slash jjo.

The Judge John Hodgman podcast, also brought to you this week by Made In.

So, you know that Made In makes the pots and pans and griddles and woks and more that pro-chefs like Tom Calicchio use every day at their home than in their restaurant.

But they are also used by non-pro chefs like me.

You know, I spent the summer smashing those burgers on my big carbon steel griddle I've been talking about all the time.

But fall is on the horizon and it's time to stop smashing and start braising and stewing and roasting vegetables in your carbon steel pan or slow-cooking chili in your Maiden stainless steel stockpot.

Or maybe you've got a kid who's going to college.

Maybe they're going to UNC Chapel Hill shop Maiden's collegiate collection and you can send your kid a UNC Dutch oven so they can host one of those classic tar heel dorm room pot roast parties.

I'm sure they exist.

Whatever you want to make in your kitchen, though, you can make it, you can serve it, you can savor it in Made In.

From cookware to tableware to glassware to pro-grade knives, Made In is dedicated to making exactly what demanding chefs are looking for.

The carbon steel cookware is the best of cast iron and stainless clad.

We've talked about it before.

It gets super hot.

It's also rugged enough for grills or open flames, and you can season it to a non-stick surface.

Really special stuff.

And all of the made-in products are sold online, so you get professional-grade cookware for a lot less money than other high-end brands.

If you want to take your cooking to the next level, remember what so many great dishes on menus all around the world have in common.

They're made-in,

made-in.

For full details, visit made-incookware.com.

That's M-A-D-E-I-N Cookware.com and tell them that Judge Judge John Hodgman sent you.

Welcome back to the Judge John Hodgman podcast.

We're clearing the docket, and we have a case here from Alex.

A recent screening of the animated Richard Linklater film Waking Life sparked a discussion about free will.

Is man a free-thinking creature with power over his own decisions, or is he a product, or prisoner, if you will,

of the various idiosyncratic concoctions of neurochemical transmitters that make up his brain.

My free-spirited girlfriend strongly asserted that even as we argued, she was making decisions and using her own free will.

I said, advances in neuroscience over the last two decades all but prove that man's thought and behavior are determined by neurochemistry.

All but prove.

My girlfriend did not appreciate what she felt was scientific condescension and minimization of her decisions as a free-thinking human being and demonstrated her free will by angrily flinging a ladle of hot spaghetti sauce all over our kitchen.

As you can imagine, this did not settle the argument.

I have a hard time imagining.

Yeah,

that's a much settlement.

I struggle to imagine my neurochemicals are really having a hard time with imagining that not settling this argument.

That's pretty much the ultimate, to quote John Worcester, the ultimate argument settler.

Yeah.

Yeah,

that rocks and rules and eventually will rot if

they don't clean it up.

That is a reference, of course, to the great Sharpling and Worcester.

I don't even know how you would term it, comedy album, pretty much.

Rock, rot, and rule.

Please look it up, rock, rot, and rule.

So this letter comes from November the 9th, 2010.

I think you can hear how we feel about it.

But I chose it in part because I wonder what I might have said back there in 2010 when I read this letter.

What I would have heard in this argument when I was merely 39 and the movie Waking Life by Richard Linklater was merely nine.

You know, I've learned a lot from all of you listening and writing into this podcast.

I've had access to so many different perspectives, and sometimes it has been painful or sort of embarrassing but mostly incredibly

a beneficial thing to grow through the experience of doing this podcast and talking to so many people and

you know I would have called myself a feminist back in 2010 but I'm not sure I would have honestly flagged the fact that Alex writes exclusively about man's free will like free will has a gender like that I probably I might not have picked up it was only a few weeks ago that I was just cavalierly talking about man-made islands which you know what artificial islands, not just men making them.

I'm not sure I would have flagged the phrase free-spirited in, quote, my free-spirited girlfriend as demeaning code for silly and unscientific.

Because Alex, you might have said my partner, or you might have said the whole human being that I live with who actually has a name and a complete inner life that I do not erase for my own intellectual amusement.

And a ladle full of spaghetti sauce right now.

Yeah, exactly.

So, Alex,

I'm going a little hard on you here.

But, you know, I'm not, this is not personal, and that's part of the reason why I changed even Alex's first name, Alex is a pseudonym.

Because perhaps Alex has grown too in the past 10 years.

I mean, obviously, Alex, you were aware that you were being condescending and diminishing of your partner's sense of full humanship because you wrote about it in your letter.

You chose to do that.

Or did you?

Did you choose to write about it?

Or was it a mind control wave that I was sending to you right now from the future?

Yeah.

Can't rule it out.

Yeah.

Zip, zap, zop.

There it is.

Look, we talked about free will back in verdict number 516.

May it please Descartes.

And what we determined there, thanks to guests Drea and Morgan, is that, sure, we may lack free will.

We may live in a simulation.

We may all be androids programmed by a super scientist from the future.

That's me.

We all may be a mess of evolutionary programmed neurons, but we don't know and we can't know.

And so it's just important to treat each other like whole human beings.

We may be in a simulation, but we got to treat each other like humans.

Because free will or not, that's how everyone experiences their own lives.

Unless I was right all along and you are all robots since I was born.

So, okay, Alex and Alex's partner, thank you for letting me air that out.

I hope you're both doing well

11 years later in, I presume, your new relationships.

Or the same one.

I don't know.

Do you know why I called him Alex Jesse?

Why?

Well, Jesse, he's named after the internet conspiracist Alex Jones, who appeared in Waking Life, I didn't know.

What?

Yeah.

Because it's a Richard Lincoln movie.

It's all about Austin, Texas, and Alex Jones was in Austin, Texas at that time.

And I think he had a, I've not seen this movie.

Have you seen this one?

No, I haven't.

I'm a big everybody wants some guy.

Yeah.

It stars Wiley Wiggins of Dazed and Confused Fame and that time that we went out together after South by Southwest.

A really lovely person, Wiley Wiggins.

Probably best known, yeah.

Yeah.

As for having dinner with me and Neil Pollack that night.

Yeah.

Author of the Neil Pollock Anthology of American Literature.

And the illustrator Divya Srinivasan.

Yeah.

That was a great night, Wiley.

I miss you.

And I look forward to watching this movie, Waking Life.

I hope it does not blow my mind.

Oh, hey, and Jesse, before we move on,

after the episode May It Please Day Heart came out, I received a letter from a person named L.

Ashley Squires here in the year 2021.

This is a contemporary letter.

And Ashley Squires is a professor of blade runnerology in Moscow, pretty much.

And she wrote a really interesting letter about free will that I will share with you after the credits.

Here's something from Troy.

Please consider a case similar, but distinct from, the chili case.

This was the original Judge John Hodgman case, the chili case, right?

Yes, you're absolutely right, Jesse.

This was the first time you asked me if I would be a judge on Jordan Jesse Goh.

And the case was between a couple of guys who were at different sides of the argument whether chili counts as a soup or not.

And if my memory serves, and it probably doesn't, I said, no, it is a stew

or a braise.

So,

what does Troy have to write about then?

My friend Scott believes that the hard, shrink-wrapped, dehydrated ramen noodles are soup.

This could not possibly be a soup.

It comes just as I described, or possibly in a styrofoam cup, and does not contain any meat or vegetables.

The water used to cook the noodles is also drained at the end of its preparation, provided, of course, that the one consuming said noodles has any decency or self-respect.

Not only that, the preparation requires merely boiling water, and packages of this pseudo-food can be acquired for pennies.

This is not soup.

Wow.

Pretty classist soup argument there.

Affordability is not one of the definitions of soup, as far as I know.

If anything, I mean, I think soup is something of an economy food traditionally.

I mean, I have not read

what you make from your odds and ends.

Yeah, I've not read the history of soup either

in the Western world or in the Asian world.

I know a little something about the history of soup, John.

Please tell me.

Originally, a stranger would come to a village and tell everyone that they knew how to make soup out of stones.

They would put...

some stones into a big pot full of water, and they'd boil the water, and each member of the village would bring something to put in with the stones, and then eventually you'd have a soup made out of stones.

That was the original soup.

When in that story does a stranger open a door and I walk right through it unknowingly.

Now, there's a second part of the story, which is

there's this guy who's trying to sell hats.

Right.

Huge pile of hats on top of his head.

Yes.

There's this Strega named Nona, and she has this guy who works for her named Big Anthony.

What Jesse is referring to is

some classics of children's literature, which display

basically the three stories in all of Western literature.

A stranger comes to town and makes soup.

A stranger comes to town and sells hats.

Yeah.

And then.

And man versus spaghetti.

Man versus spaghetti.

Exactly.

A child is nude in the night kitchen.

Those are the stories.

Those are the stories.

Yeah, milk in the batter, baby.

So

it's this is, you know, you really put your finger on it.

This is a classist argument here because Troy seems to acknowledge that ramen traditionally prepared is a soup.

Troy's only problem is with pre-packaged ramen, which

is also a soup.

I mean, don't be a snob about it, Troy.

The fact of the matter is, I went on something of a ramen journey over this winter.

And

more and more in

traditional American grocery stores, but certainly in Asian grocery stores, you go in, there are a lot of prepackaged ramens you can find.

A lot of different styles, a lot of different flavors.

Some of them are very

definitely not being made for Western taste buds.

And that's because I presume Asian and Asian American people are buying and eating them and believe them to be good food, or at least

a fun, pleasurable food, which is ultimately what ramen is.

It's a pleasure food.

It's not a fancy food.

It's a pleasure food.

Jesse, you ever put a slice of cheese in your ramen?

Ever do that?

No, but that sounds pretty dope.

Yeah.

I read about that in the newspaper.

Put a slice of American cheese on it.

It's good.

I had coconut milk ramen.

That's hecka good.

Or you had the coconut milk yourself?

No, I got it from a coconut milk ramen store.

Oh, I didn't know that was a thing.

Incredible.

Apparently, Troy approves of using it just as noodles.

Yeah, he wants to say it's just noodles.

I mean, you could put some ramen noodles into your stir-fry and make a little noodle vegetable or whatever, but

that's a different thing.

Yeah, and

Troy's disdain for people who don't drain the soup from their pre-packaged instant ramen as being, what did he call them?

Damnable monsters.

Lacking decency or self-respect.

Yeah, that's Troy, you're wrong.

Lots of ramen is very, like all comfort, like all true comfort foods, ramen is personal.

You mot it out with a slice of American cheese if you want.

You had a few shakes of sesame seeds and toasted nori on top, maybe.

Put an egg in it.

Put an egg in anything.

It's delicious.

Put an egg in it is real good, yeah.

I've done that.

You ever have the Samyang hot chicken ramen?

No, that sounds good,

I'll tell you what, that's not a soup.

I'll give you this, Troy.

That thing, you're not supposed to

drain out the water.

It's more of a stir-fry, but it's packaged as a ramen.

And that thing is hot, Jesse.

It is hot.

And don't get the 2x hot chicken ramen because you won't be able to talk to your family for a long time.

You're going to have to go and stare into space for a while.

It's incredible.

You know who the only person who gets the 3x hot ramen is?

No.

Buster Poindexter.

He likes it hot, hot, hot.

Thanks, guys.

Wow.

Yeah.

Wow.

That joke was old in 2010.

Yeah, that's the beauty.

It came back around.

Nong Shim Premium Noodle Soup Shin Black 2.64 ounce cup.

That's what I say to you, Troy, and I'll say it again.

Nong Shim Premium Noodle Soup, Shin Black, 2.64 ounce cup, spicy pot of full-flavored ramen is really

one of the tastiest soups I've ever enjoyed.

Don't disdain something just because it's on a grocery store shelf.

Some people get it right.

Nong shim, premium noodle soup, shin black, 2.64 ounce.

You wouldn't call chunky soup not a soup just because it's on a grocery store shelf and is too disgusting to contemplate.

Someone chose to name it chunky.

That's a bad decision, but it's still a soup.

I always drain my chunky soup, by the way, because I have self-respect and decency.

You know what movie my wife and I watched recently?

Is it the movie about ramen?

Yeah, it is.

But I can't remember.

They showed this at the Clich Corner movie theater so many times.

I saw it four or five times.

It's called Tempopo.

Tampopo.

I didn't know that was still around.

Boy, oh, boy.

That movie was on my

Turner Classic Movies selection in my HBO Max, and I was like, oh, we got to watch this.

Tampopo, look,

there are some things in Tampopo that you could read these days as being gently misogynist.

It obviously has great reverence for its protagonist, portrayed by the director's wife.

But, you know, there's stuff from the Western genre and stuff that are cultural differences that I think

are a little...

a little

have a gentle waft of misogyny.

But other than that, Tampopo is basically the greatest movie ever made.

It is a, if you haven't seen it, it is a Japanese comedy that takes the form of a Western, but it is a Western about a man who blows into town and decides to help this woman create the ultimate ramen shop.

And man, it is one of the funniest,

most charming, delightful.

If you're not in love with that movie after you watch it, you're a monster.

And boy, oh, boy, does it make you want to eat ramen soup?

Oh,

I think I know what I'm having for dinner.

Anyway, when I've never been happier than when ramen became a popular fad food in the United States because it is so wonderful, I will gladly eat it.

I will eat B-minus ramen.

all day long and be grateful that it exists in the U.S.

And the fact that there is now really good ramen available here is spectacular.

It's truly a person, like, and Tampopo is all about what a sort of like deeply, like, emotionally nourishing food it is, that it is a deep comfort food and

Proustian in that way that, you know,

I will never think about this winter spent in exile in Maine without thinking also of Nong Shim Premium Noodle Soup, Shin, Black, 2.64 ounce cup,

pot of fu, spicy pot of fu

style flavor.

So when I was a teenager, John, my father and stepmother joined the middle class.

Now, I'll be clear, they did this because my father got his post-traumatic stress disorder certified as a disability.

So that was how we joined the middle class.

But when we joined the middle class,

we did a couple of great middle-class things.

We got cable.

We got a car.

We didn't previously have a car car or a car that worked.

And we joined Costco.

And from Costco would come

basically pallets

of ramen noodle, instant ramen noodles, and giant boxes of frozen corndogs.

Wow.

And these were foods that we had, as people who had to carry our groceries home from the grocery store in our arms, these were not the kind of foods that we were eating previously.

These American convenience foods were not on the table before.

Like living the suburban dream.

You can't carry a pallet of ramen home in your arms.

You need a car.

You need a car and a half.

Exactly.

Yeah.

And

those were the foods that I would prepare for myself when I got home from school and was hungry.

And

I do have fond, romantic associations with those foods in a way that I don't with fast food restaurants.

Frozen corndog, you said?

Yes.

Not a sandwich.

Let's take a quick break.

When we come back, we leap forward to the year 2011.

I'm Emily Fleming.

I'm Jordan Morris.

And I'm Matt Lee.

We are real comedy writers.

Real friends.

And real cheapskates.

On every episode of our podcast, Free with Ads, we ask, why pay for expensive streaming services when you can get free movies from apps with weird names?

Each week, we review the freest movies the internet has to offer.

Classics like Pride and Prejudice.

Cult classics like Point Break.

And holy sh, what did I just watch?

Classics like Teen Witch.

Tune in every week as we take a deep dive into the internet's bargain bin.

Every Tuesday on maximumfun.org or your favorite pod plays.

The Flophouse is a podcast where we watch a bad movie and then we talk about it.

Robert Shaw in Jaws, and they're trying to figure out how to get rid of the ghoulies.

He scratches his fails and goes, I'll get you a ghoulie.

He's just standing above the toilet with a heartbreak.

No, I was just looking forward to you going through the other ways in which Wild Wild West is historically inaccurate.

You know how much movies cost nowadays when you add in your popped corn and your bagel bites and your cheese critters?

You can't go wrong with a Henry Camill Mustache.

Here at Henry Camill Mustache is the only supplier.

The Flop House.

New episodes every Saturday.

Find it at maximumfun.org.

Welcome back to the Judge John Hodgman Podcast.

I'm Bailiff Jesse Thorne.

With me, as always, Judge John Hodgman.

John, do you remember Pete Fields, who was a musical guest on our show a year or two ago?

My childhood best friend, Petey?

Yeah.

You know what his comfort food was when we were that age?

No, I do not.

He would walk down Bernal Hill, where he lived,

down to the lowlands of the Mission District, where I lived.

He would break into my house and eat our cereal.

He would

like three o'clock in the afternoon after school.

He'd get home.

No one would be at his house.

So he'd walk down to our house, 15, 20 minute walk, break into our house, and my

dad would come home, or my stepmother would come home, and there would be Petey at our dining room table with a salad bowl of honey nut Cheerios.

Yeah.

Because this was, this was also, this was right in the Costco time.

We were also getting honey nut Cheerios from Costco.

And nothing, look, honeynut Cheerios, Cheerios are a venerable cereal.

Honeynut, not for me.

That's just not the way my palate goes.

But I'll tell you, there's nothing sweeter than that stolen honey nut.

Ooh.

Oh, that ice-cold stolen milk.

Mm.

Jesse, before we leap forward into 2011, as promised,

back in 2010, I had not yet issued our ban on food fights.

There had been a lot of food fights that came up surrounding the issue of, is a hot dog a sandwich?

And after a long time, we decided

no more food fights about whether X is a Y kind of food.

But back in 2010, this hadn't happened.

And right after we started the podcast, we got a ton of letters, often the same letters, surrounding food disputes.

And so I'm just going to clear those out of the inbox right now.

This is going to clear this docket right up.

To Shugo and Patrick and Kevin, cheesecake is a cake.

To Sam, ice cream cake is a cake.

Polly, you are absolutely correct and Bill is absolutely wrong.

It is fine to eat an ice cream cake with a fork, just as it is fine to eat ice cream with a fork, as we've discussed before.

Ice cream forks are a thing historically.

They're a great way to eat your ice cream, especially if it's salted.

You can get four ice cream forks today in the Loxley pattern for only $8.99 apiece at Replacements Unlimited in Chapel Hill, North Carolina.

Jesse, do you have any ice cream forks in the Put This On Shop?

No, but I should.

I've definitely had some ice cream molds in the Put This On shop.

We should probably commission some Judge John Hodgman ice cream forks.

Wouldn't that be a thing?

So rich.

We're going to get Doughboys rich.

Oh, okay, Lucas.

Your girlfriend is correct.

A black and white cookie is a cookie.

You are wrong.

It is a large cookie, not a cake.

CJ, you are wrong.

A rice krispy treat is not a cookie.

Your friend Tracy is correct.

It is a bar.

Carl, a taco is a taco.

It is not an open-faced sandwich.

It is a taco.

Things can be their own things, right, Jesse?

Absolutely.

Also, Carl wrote, quote, as a side argument, the matter of a hot dog being a sandwich was brought in, since it is a similar food as a taco and the arguments hold for it as well, Unquote.

Jesse, this was November 10, 2010.

This was the very first time anyone brought up is a hot dog a sandwich, and it was in passing in a PS in Carl's letter.

It was years

before someone else wrote in and I settled that in the New York Times magazine and started this whole thing.

Carl saw it coming.

If I had handled this with Carl back in 2010, the years of our lives we would have regained by not arguing about hot dog sandwichness.

It's amazing.

If you're still confused, Carl, or anyone,

if you want to know why a hot dog is not a sandwich and a taco is not a sandwich, you can hear my final discourse on this subject at bit.ly slash JJ H O T D O G.

That's JJ hot dog, all capital letters.

And to wrap it up, Adam, your Canadian girlfriend is wrong.

Frozen yogurt is not ice cream.

And here's a tip.

Ice cream is not gelato.

It's got a lower fat content and less air in it.

It's served at a warmer temperature.

And if you're in Venice, Italy, and you are buying strawberry gelato in Italy, you should just say strawberry.

Don't say Fragalo, because then the woman serving the gelato will roll her eyes and say, it's fragolo.

Don't make the mistake I did.

John, that's...

everything we've got in the docket from over a decade ago, but do we have any letters of note?

Yes, Jesse.

We received a couple of non-dispute letters in the end quarter of 2010 when the podcast first started.

But really, no one wrote a classic, you're wrong about this, Judge John Hodgman letter until...

You're talking about a Judge Wrong Hodgman letter?

Judge Wrong Hodgman letter.

Thank you, Leela.

We never received a Judge Wrong Hodgman letter until April the 1st, 2011.

Maybe it was a prank.

But Mike wrote, first,

thank you for turning me on to The Third Man two days ago.

That's how long ago I was

flogging The Third Man.

So, this is a letter from 1954, huh?

The Third Man was my favorite movie of all time at that time.

I talked about it a lot early on in the podcast.

It is no longer, I would say, my favorite movie.

I don't even know what I would say is my favorite movie.

But I would say, I'm going to say this:

One movie that is better than The Third Man.

You ready for this world?

Yeah.

Into the Spider-Verse, for sure.

Wow.

Yeah.

The other day, my wife told me her favorite movie was Ladybird, and her childhood favorite movie was Wayne's World.

And I was like, that's unimpeachable.

It's perfect choices.

I'm not going to say that.

I agree.

Absolutely.

Those are perfect.

Those are perfect choices.

And I'm not going to say that Into the Spider-Verse is better than the third man as a movie.

It's just, it's taken a higher spot in my heart ranking.

It's really good.

Our daughter made us watch Book Smart yesterday, speaking of Ladybird, and that's a terrific movie.

Terriff.

Anyway, those are some plugs.

I forgot Mike was telling us stuff.

Thanks for turning me on to the third man.

Second of all, as for wrapping your arm around a fan, and I think this was

in relation to a dispute over getting selfies with

famous people, which was something that was just getting going at the time, and whether it was appropriate to grab and hug them.

And I said, rather presciently, don't touch people.

Mike said I was wrong.

I think it's fine, said Mike, to display a reasonable amount of camaraderie.

Just a few weeks ago, I had my picture taken with Mr.

Michael Ian Black at South by Southwest.

He put his arm around me, mine around him, then I thumbed up.

I think as long as you're comfortable with the fan, then go crazy.

Photo attached for proof of of kinsmanship.

It's an adorable photo, Mike has an adorable mustache.

And I'll say this, Mike,

your arm is not around Michael Ian Black, and Michael Ian Black's arm is not around you.

This is the trick of memory.

I wrote to Michael Ian Black this morning to get his reaction to this photo 10 years later.

And he says, hmm.

I think I'm okay with the photo, although as usual, not thrilled with my face.

I blame genetics for for that more than the photographer.

Arms around each other from my perspective is fine, but I can certainly understand why somebody would not want to be touched because people are gross.

Also, I miss you too.

That's Michael Ian Black writing back to me.

He's a nice man.

I also wrote to Mike, who sent in this photo.

I haven't heard back from him yet.

I just sent him a little email saying, I'm sorry, it's been 10 years since I responded.

What have you been doing?

We'll see what he says.

You know what I would hate?

What?

Personally?

I don't mind touching other people or being touched.

So as long as somebody checks in with me, I think they can put their arm around me if we're taking a picture together.

That's fine with me.

But for me, personally, the deal breaker would be if in the picture we have to be wearing lanyards.

I just feel like they're wearing lanyards in this picture, and I would just be uncomfortable had there being pictures out there of me wearing lanyards.

Of you wearing a lanyard.

But that's the South by Southwest thing, Jesse.

Someday we're going to go back to Austin, maybe for South by Southwest.

Maybe we'll have dinner with Wiley Wiggins and Neil Pollack and Divya Serena Vassin.

And it's just going to be like it was.

Or maybe, you know what?

Maybe it's going to be better.

Maybe it's going to be better than it was.

Yeah.

Maybe Griffin and Rachel McElroy will come.

Kick it up a notch.

We're going to have fun, everybody.

I hope everybody is.

doing as okay as possible, getting vaccinated, doing what they have to to get healthy and get us to this new and better normal.

And I hope that that means soon

the three Js, Jesse, Jennifer, and me, John Hodgman, will soon be able to go to Austin and Seattle and all these other cities to eat their burgers and wear their lanyards again.

Thanks for letting me take this trip down the memory lane.

And oh, by the way, Jesse,

I have a breaking news flash.

I just received word back.

I told you that I sent a letter to Mike saying, I'm sorry, it took me 10 years to write back.

How are you doing?

This person wrote back saying, I changed genders, comma, lol.

I'm Sammy now.

So, Sammy, I hope you're doing great.

Great to hear.

Everybody's growing this decade.

Everybody's growing in this decade.

We're out here coming into ourselves and surviving the nightmare.

Thanks, everybody, for surviving with us over 10 plus years.

It's been great to get back to some of the, we'll get back to some other old, old, old, old docket cases again in the future, but we are going to move forward

into a new and better normal.

So, fantastic.

Our docket is clear.

That's it for another episode of Judge John Hodgman.

Our producer is Jennifer Marmer.

We're on Twitter at Jesse Thorne and at Hodgman.

We're on Instagram at JudgeJohnHodgman.

Make sure to hashtag your JudgeJohn Hodgman tweets, hashtag JJ Ho, and check out the Maximum Fun subreddit.

That's maximumfun.reddit.com.

Submit your cases at maximumfun.org/slash JJ HO or email hodgman at maximum fun.org.

And we'll talk to you next time on the Judge John Hodgman podcast.

Hey, it's your Judge John Hodgman here at the Surprise and Credits moment.

We just wanted to mention that we ran everything in that segment about Sammy's letter and follow-up by Sammy afterwards.

And Sammy gave us the go-ahead to present it as we did.

Obviously, dead names for trans people are a big deal.

So we wanted to be clear.

We checked and we ran it in the form that they preferred.

Now, on to the regular surprise, haha, post-credit sequence.

Surprise, it's me, your judge John Hodgman here in the hidden dimension of the post-credit sequence.

I had mentioned a letter that I received from L.

Ashley Squires.

regarding Simulated Worlds, Free Will, Blade Runner, and The Matrix.

And it's an incredible letter, and I didn't know quite how to share it because it's somewhat long.

So

what better place for it than here in this timeless void of the post-credit sequence where we are all disembodied minds here to encounter each other?

So

if you haven't seen Blade Runner, see it.

It's really, really good.

And I think you'll understand why I say so when you hear Ashley's letter.

Dear Judge John Hodgman, I am a few weeks behind.

I've just finished listening to May It Please Descartes.

And I wanted to suggest that the cultural touchstone that perhaps most usefully expresses your perspective on the, quote, is my consciousness fake question, is not the Matrix, but rather Blade Runner.

Personally, I've always found the debates about whether Decker is a replicant to be missing the point.

The true meaning of Blade Runner, in my opinion, is that Deckard can never know for certain whether his consciousness is real, whether his memories are implants, or whether he is a machine cruelly created for the purpose of destroying his own kind.

Because at the end of Blade Runner, Elden Tyrell, his creator,

aka God or whatever, is quite literally dead, murdered by his own creation in an expression of profound existential despair.

The question is unanswerable.

But what matters is not whether Deckard's consciousness is real.

It is real for him.

Those memories, implanted or not, as Rutger Howard tells us, are precious and meaningful and singular, like life itself.

Deckard's decision to take Rachel and run has always represented for me the decision to go on living and treasuring life regardless of the answer to that, am I a real person or not question.

And with all due credit to the Wachowskis for their marvelous filmic achievement, I think the Matrix has had a somewhat pernicious influence on the culture at large when it comes to this issue.

Whereas Blade Runner says that you can never know if your consciousness is real, but life is precious anyway, the Matrix says that you absolutely can know for sure, and that if you are simply the bravest and purest of all human beings, you too can know the absolute truth of existence, and thereby gain superpowers to be used not only against the robots, but against the consciousnesses of the people still in the Matrix who might at any moment be used by the system to thwart you.

It isn't an accident that red-pilled is the byword of neo-fascists.

And while that usage is no doubt based on a tendentious and self-serving reading of that film, I do think its central metaphors leave a bit too much room for that kind of epistemic overconfidence.

Doing my best to keep it short and failing beautifully, Ashley Squires.

Thank you, as always, for your wisdom.

Awesome shucks.

Thank you, L.

Ashley Squires, Director, Writing and Communication Center, Assistant Professor, Department of Humanities and Languages, New Economic School, Moscow, Russia.

Yeah, watch Blade Runner.

Watch The Matrix 2, but watch Blade Runner.

MaximumFun.org.

Comedy and Culture.

Artist Owned, Audience Supported.