Duplo Jeopardy

This particular episode is dedicated to Carl Garner Jr.

You may recall that Carl Garner Jr.

was the student of a listener named Eric Little in Kentucky, who gained some attention for writing an essay about why a hot dog is not a sandwich.

He, unfortunately, we learned,

died due to gun violence in Kentucky.

I just learned about it today.

You can read about it by searching his name, Carl Garner Jr.

There's an article about it in the Kentucky Herald leader.

It's a very sad situation.

I don't have very many details.

And Eric Little has promised to help us

create some opportunity for you to express your sympathies if you wish to.

And as soon as we have those details, I will let you know.

But in the meantime, I just wanted to say thank you to Carl and his family.

We are thinking of you, and we're very sorry for this loss.

Welcome to the Judge John Hodgman Podcast.

I'm Bailiff Jesse Thorne.

This week, Duplo Jeopardy.

Caleb brings the case against his friend Ryan.

Caleb's ready to get rid of his Lego collection.

Ryan thinks he should keep it in storage.

Ryan says, even though Caleb thinks he's ready to let it go, he'll later regret parting with these sets.

Who's right?

Who's wrong?

Only one man can decide.

Please rise as Judge John Hodgman enters the courtroom and presents an obscure cultural reference.

Meet the hot dog vendor, elf maiden, butterfly girl, circus strongman, veterinarian, battle dwarf, dance instructor, gourmet chef, convoisseur,

corncob guy, Roman gladiator, rocket boy, pro surfer, retro space hero, the yuppie, the Internet Judge, and the Bailiff, aka Corncob Guy.

Corncob Guy, swear them in.

Please rise and raise your right hands.

Do you swear to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth?

So help you, God or whatever.

I do.

I do.

Do you swear to abide by Judge John Hodgman's ruling, despite the fact that he is the last remaining nerd celebrity not to have been rendered life-size in Lego?

I do.

Yes.

Very well.

Judge Hodgman.

Ryan and Caleb, you may be seated.

I was distracted there for a moment because I'm sending my bailiff, Jesse Thorne, an important piece of photographic evidence that we will discuss in a moment.

But for an immediate summary in one of yours' favors, can either of you name the piece of culture that I referenced as I entered the courtroom?

Oh, I don't know.

Caleb, you go first.

Unfortunately for Ryan, or fortunately for Ryan, since I'm speaking first, I do know the cultural reference.

No.

You are referencing one of the collectible Lego minifig sets.

Now, I don't know which one it is because I've lost track of them.

There have been, I think, something like 15 or 16 sets.

But

you are referencing.

I'm trying to get this all down so I can get it right in the guest book.

Oh, sorry.

Okay.

Sets.

And did you say you did or you did not know which series it was?

I don't know.

I think it might be

series 15, but that's really just a guess.

All right.

I'm putting that in the guess book, and I'm not making any

audio expression of whether that's right or wrong or expressing frustration in any way.

I'm just putting it in the guest book.

And now turning to Ryan.

Ryan, if he has guessed correctly, then he wins the case.

If you make the same guess and it's correct, then we go forward.

Or if you think he's wrong and you have have another guess, you may guess it.

So what's your guess going to be?

I'd like you to put me down for a ditto and then add number 12.

We're going to go with set 12 of whatever it was that Caleb just said.

Set.

All right, so you're putting in Lego

minifigure series

number 12.

That sounds exactly right.

Yeah, I got a good feeling about this.

Well, it pains me to say.

No, it doesn't pay me at all.

All guesses are wrong.

You're both wrong.

I got lucky this time because that, the hot dog vendor, Elfmaiden, Butterfly Girl, Circus Strong, Veterinarian, Battle Dwarf, Dance Instructor, Gourmet, Chef, Condoiser, Corncob Guy,

Roman Gladiator, Rocket Boy, Pro Server, Retro Space Hero, and Yuppie are all part of Lego minifigure series number 17, the most recent one.

Boy.

I I escaped by the skin of my yellow plastic molded injection teeth.

So this comes down to Lego.

Boy, we can hear this argument now.

Jesse Thorne, the piece of evidence that I was forwarding to you via a textual message is the link to series 17.

We will post this link on the show page at maximumfund.org.

Of course, I'm not sure that we can use this image on our Instagram account, which, of course, is Judge John Hodgman.

You should go and check it out and follow it for pictures of

amusing dogs and weird spaces.

I'm not sure we can link to this picture because it's proprietary to the very, very popular Danish company known as Lego.

But please, everyone, do check out Corncob Guy from Series 7.

On the one hand, it's just

you find it.

What is this?

Why is this?

What is it?

Ladies and gentlemen,

Lego brand interlocking bricks and minifigurines have been bringing joy to the entire globe for well over half a century.

And the joy that they bring sounds like Jesse Thorne laughing at corncob guy.

He is a guy.

He is not made of corn.

He is plainly wearing a costume of a corncob.

And he's got a tremendous mustache.

And if they had only put some glasses on him, it would have been a pretty good Judge John Hodgman dressed as a corncob minifig.

All right, everybody, there's a lot to talk about here because Caleb's got a Lego collection that he's trying to dump, and Ryan doesn't want him to dump it.

And when I heard of this case, I said, I will only hear this case if we may bring in an expert witness.

And we are joined in this courtroom by a friend and fellow child of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, a person named Seth Manookin.

Now, you've probably heard Seth's name before.

He is a journalist,

still a contributing editor of Vanity Fair or formerly contributing editor of Vanity Fair, Seth?

Still a contributing editor at Vanity Fair, but I wait every day for the missive saying that that has ended.

So at the moment, contributing editor of Vanity Fair, an author of multiple best-selling books of nonfiction, including Feeding the Monster, which is about Boston-area sports franchise, the Boston Red Sox, and most recently, The Panic Virus about the anti-vaccination movement and parents who didn't vaccinate their kids and then their kids got sick.

What a surprise.

He's currently a professor of comparative media studies and writing at MIT and the director of MIT's graduate program in science writing.

He is a former attendee of Newton North or Newton South High School?

Oh, please, Newton North, home of the Tigers.

And which one does Brookline High School dislike?

Newton North.

Newton North.

Newton North.

Although, yes,

Newton North.

The rivalry is between Newton North and Brookline High.

Well, here I say, let's make peace.

I agree.

So that we can talk about Lego, because not only is he accomplished in all of these different ways and a really talented writer and lovely guy, but also

what is called an adult fan of Lego.

Is that correct?

Yes, an A-Fall.

No, is that really what they say in Lego circles?

That is the acronym, A-Fall, yes.

Well, thank you.

So tell me a little bit, before we get into Caleb's hobby, tell me a little bit of your Lego fascination and your current collecting status.

So I actually did not play with Lego as a child.

My fascination began about five years ago when I bought an R2D2 set to build with my then three-year-old son.

And when the box arrived, it said it was for ages 16 and up.

And I had no idea that there were Lego sets only for ages 16 and up.

So I started to build that and found that it is an incredible outlet for people who are obsessive and obsessive and/or compulsive.

And

since then, I have spent many thousands of dollars on Lego for a pretty considerable period of time.

Tried to convince my wife that this was actually an investment and bought two of every set that I purchased, one that we would keep in the attic and sell at a future date when Lego stopped,

no longer manufactured them.

That has has not proven as of yet to be a very wise move.

Caleb, you are a Lego collector.

What is your status as a collector?

I'd say the biggest difference between Seth and I in terms of Lego collection is that I was a child fan of Lego.

One of my fondest memories of my

couple.

We just call them kids.

Oh, since, you know, most kids love Lego, at least, especially these days.

Of course.

One of my fondest memories of my now-deceased maternal grandfather was building my first Lego set with him at his kitchen table when I was probably four or five years old.

And going back then, it probably was a Blade Runner play set, right?

Lego,

right?

The Lego Bradbury building.

Yes.

That would be an incredible set.

I know, right?

I just said that and I realized that's an amazing set.

It doesn't exist, does it, Seth Manuel?

No, it does not, but I would pay a lot of of money for that.

No, back then you were just playing with raw bricks, right, Caleb?

No, they did.

Lego had started its own themes at that point.

So my first set was a space theme.

Space theme, those little space dudes.

Exactly, with the little swooshing spaceship that went around the little planet on their chest.

Oh, yeah, that's right.

And it had batteries and it had lights that lit up.

It was a great set.

But it was very square.

Yeah.

do you still have that set?

No, I still have maybe like four or five pieces from it.

They are ancient and deformed and they've just been played with so much that I don't think that they even snap together anymore.

You wore them down?

You wore out the nubs?

I did.

We usually call them studs in the A-Fall community.

Are you an A-Fall

or just a C-Fall?

I think of myself as a recovering A-Fall in the same way that one might consider oneself oneself a recovering alcoholic in that I don't know if you ever get it out of your system completely.

But I did have a period of time between childhood and adulthood where I didn't play with little plastic bricks.

A-Falls usually refer to that period as their dark age.

There really is a whole lexicon of terminology that's been popularized on the internet among A-Fols.

The dark age meaning the period of maturity where you're not playing with toys all the time.

Exactly.

I see.

I love Lego.

I would sit and play with Lego all the time right now.

A-Falls, don't get all mad at me on Twitter or anything.

When did your dark age end, and what brought you into your new enlightened time as an A-Fall?

And then

we'll get to the next stage where you're kind of going to put it behind you again, if you have your way.

Absolutely.

It was 2006.

I was in my last year of my undergraduate degree.

I was living with a roommate in an apartment in my hometown of Ottawa, Ontario,

which is also where I went to university and where Ryan and I met.

The capital of Canada.

That is absolutely correct.

Canada.

The nation's capital.

So you guys met in university in Ottawa.

All right, go on.

And

you and your roommate started throwing some bricks together and one thing led to another and you were addicted again.

Well, it turned out that I had just happened to see um a photograph of an original model by an a-fal named chris giddens um who had built this massive spaceship out of lego it was it was an original creation of his and it just blew me away and i thought i i can't believe that there are people building things this this incredible i mean it's it took thousands of pieces it was far bigger than than any sort of official set at the time.

And I thought, oh, I, you you know, I loved Lego as a kid.

I bet I could build something like that.

So I went over to my parents' place and I dug out my Lego collection and I took it home with me and tried to build something even

close to that scale and absolutely couldn't.

And so I started buying Lego again.

And you were trying to freehand something in the Chris Giddens master builder way.

Is that correct?

Yeah, so there are lots of different kinds of A-Fols.

There are collectors and there are builders.

And generally, I would have considered myself a builder.

I was more interested in building my own,

well, they call them my own creation or mock,

for short.

Do they know that moccasins exist?

They already have the lock on that nickname.

Mock's got a lock on mock?

I don't know if the community knows that.

No.

No, okay.

No.

I think you're wrong.

Because one thing Lego fans have, by necessity, have to be fans of is protective footwear.

That's absolutely correct.

A moccasin, the soft-soled moccasin, is designed so that you can feel the texture of the ground below you.

So I would be sure that most Lego people would not know what a moccasin is.

At what point did Legos

become about building the thing on a box and the thing is like a Batman?

Well, that's a trick question because there is no such thing as Legos, plural.

Thank you, Seth.

Oh, my God.

There are only Lego bricks.

I was being nice.

Well, that'll show you, Jesse.

Let's take a quick break and hear about some of the other great shows from maximumfun.org.

Hello, I'm your Judge John Hodgman.

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Welcome back to the court of Judge John Hodgman.

Let's get back to the case of Caleb, Ryan, and the Legos.

Okay, Ryan, you are a college friend of Caleb's.

Do you still live in Ottawa, or where do you live?

Now I'm currently living in Potsdam, New York.

All right.

What do you do there?

I've got a few jobs.

Mostly, I am a middle school teacher out here.

I teach seventh grade social studies, and I run a small software company out here.

We make video games.

And your beef with Caleb is what?

I don't know if it's my beef so much as society's beef.

I think, like, I don't want to make this personal.

It's not.

I am petitioning the court, Your Honor, to um to compel caleb to see reason here um caleb has what we would call a a mercurial personality um he tends to to change his mind uh uh very rapidly and

he's looking to make a very rash decision about something that i think we can all agree has brought him a great deal of joy in his life and that decision is specifically

he wants to get rid of his legos he wants wants to sell them.

And

my argument here is that this is something that he will regret.

And so, Caleb, you want to sell what Legos you have?

I do.

You're going to go 100% brick-free?

Sell them all?

I might keep a handful of minifigs.

that have a little bit of sentimental value.

Like when the Lord of the Ring sets were coming out, I managed managed to collect all the entire Fellowship of the Ring.

So I might keep those.

There's like a little minifig that I made that sort of looks like me that I'd like to keep.

You modded out a minifig to look like Caleb?

I didn't personally mod it out.

There are people in the A-Fall community who like re-sculpt plastics.

I just picked pieces that I thought sort of looked like a face that sort of looked like me

and hair that sort of looked like my haircut at the time and

put them together.

What are the resculptors called?

I think they're called customizers, but they don't have a fun acronym, unfortunately.

Seth, can we get a ruling?

Yeah, I think customizer, that's the only thing I've ever heard.

I do have one question.

Caleb, are you yellow?

No, I picked a flesh-colored

Caucasian flesh-colored?

Yes.

Well, that's the other thing is the Lego company calls it flesh-colored.

That's actually something that

there's been a bit of debate about in the community.

Oh, yeah.

Well, there's no debate.

They're wrong.

Oh,

I agree.

I have full confidence a wonderful, inclusive company like Lego will come around to understanding why that's.

Lego, I will say, Lego has been doing much better recently with

ethnic diversity and picking licenses that have people of color

represented.

Like there's some great new Thor-themed sets that have

people of color.

Thor is white.

Sorry, did you not know that?

True, but the Cinematic Universe Valkyrie is black.

Yep.

And she has a minifig.

And Heimdahl, I presume, Idris Elba is represented in Minifig, I hope.

I don't think they have one.

What?

But I'm not that familiar with all the new sets.

I really have been sort of out of the loop.

He did have one for The Wire, though, right?

Yeah.

Those sets were sold very quickly.

Oh, my goodness.

There are Moana, a number of Moana sets that have been released.

And Lego has also been, I think it was last year for the first time, they had

someone in a wheelchair, someone with a disability,

which was a big, something that A-Falls and other Lego fans had been advocating for for some time.

Was it Professor X or was it a non-licensed character?

It was a non-licensed character.

It was just a scene in a park with a bunch of people, including a very frazzled father.

Well, finally, weird dads are getting represented.

He was wearing plaid.

Caleb, I have a quick question.

How big a set are we talking about here?

Or how big a collection?

It's about 42 pounds or 19 kilograms.

Is that the standard measurement for Lego collection size?

Well, no, I mean,

the problem is that because I did a lot of trading and a lot of selling and buying of individual pieces over the years,

it's really hard to say how many complete sets I have.

In fact, I don't think in my collection you'd find the pieces to make any single complete set anymore.

And

my pound-to-piece conversion, I don't have that at my fingertips.

So roughly,

how many pieces would that be?

It's really difficult for me to estimate that.

I can tell you that it fills four medium-sized duffel bags.

Okay.

Can I offer you a possible estimation?

You can just tell me whether it makes sense to you.

Sure.

Is that about many pieces?

It's many pieces, but it's not very many pieces in comparison to the collections of some of the other enthusiasts that I've spent time with.

Possibly still too many pieces, though.

I think for

if I were a child, it would be a sizable and impressive collection.

Among the AFOL community, it's pretty paltry.

Yeah, and I'm going to say, when you say fills four duffel bags, like you have them in duffel bags right now, ready to go, ready to toss in a lake, like bodies that you're trying to get rid of.

It's true.

I do have them.

They've been stored that way at this point for a little bit more than a year.

When was the last time you played with them?

I think it was

sometime, probably, in the middle of 2016.

And what was the turnaround?

Why did you put childish things away?

And why do you want to get rid of them now?

The major contributor was just the realization that I was never going to have the collection that I wanted.

I mean,

collecting Lego is a great hobby if you're, say, a deranged millionaire.

But

I have to admit, as a perennial graduate student, underemployed

freelance editor, even when I worked in mainstream trade publishing in Toronto here in Canada, it just wasn't in my budget.

You know, I wanted to have thousands and thousands of pieces.

I wanted to be able to build amazing dioramas.

I just realized that it wasn't feasible and it wasn't fun to build with the limited pieces that I had.

You know, I always wanted wanted more.

Wow.

See, because I had presumed that this was all going to be about, you know, you had mentioned before, like being someone who no longer played with Lego was like being a recovered alcoholic.

You could never really get away from it.

It seemed like you were maybe moving into sort of an addiction paradigm where somehow this was taking up too much of your life or too much of your money and you needed to put it aside to become a grown-up, or you simply decided you didn't want it anymore.

But this is truly a giving up of a dream.

I guess so.

It's also sort of a realization of

my own limitations.

I think the addiction side of it is when I was building most consistently,

I'd walk down the street and I'd see a car and I'd be like, oh, I know what pieces to build that car out of.

And that's not necessarily a good way to look at the world.

Why?

That's how car makers look at the world.

That's definitely how I looked at fields of lavender when I was playing Skyrim all the time.

I think that's a sentiment that both Ryan and I can agree with.

Look, I'm a guy who, when I played video games, I would fall asleep and see Command and Conquer maps on the inside of my eyelids.

I can appreciate that, how it can take over.

But I think looking at a car and thinking, oh, I know what bricks I could use to make that car, that doesn't sound intrinsically bad.

How is it affecting your life in a negative way?

It was taking up an inordinate amount of my mental space.

I have a lot of hobbies.

I have a lot of interests.

What are your other hobbies and interests?

I love drawing.

I love art in general.

Waste of time.

I love video games.

I played Skyrim like crazy.

Pandering noted.

I enjoy tabletop games like

Dungeons and Dragons and

Warhammer 40,000.

All of these are wasted time.

The only thing that matters is Lego.

What did you build out of Lego or attempt to build build out of Lego that was so grand that four duffel bags of Legos was not enough?

I really wanted to build a sort of kitchen table sized diorama of actually it's it of a of a cyberpunk dystopian neighborhood

of your own design.

Yes.

A blade runner set.

Exactly.

Wow.

For a thing that is hard to make circles with, everything is coming full circle in this one.

I love it.

So how many pieces would you say you are shy of that Blade Runner set?

How many more duffel bags would you need to get that thing done?

I'd need to probably triple

the number of pieces that I have.

Twelve duffel bags.

And what do you estimate the cost of a brick accumulation to do that?

I think it would be in the order of

possibly tens of thousands of dollars, depending on where I'd source them and how I'd procure them.

So how much are you planning on selling your four duffel bags for?

Originally looking at his bank account.

Originally I wanted to sell to a fellow

A-Fall for about $1,000.

But I found that

people didn't really want to buy a full collection.

They just wanted to pick and choose.

So at the moment, I don't know, maybe $500.

bucks.

And that's Canadian money, too.

So wait a minute.

You're saying that A-Falls didn't want these four bags of loose bricks?

I'm not sure I understand.

I would imagine that the collectible stuff, the stuff you would get real money for, would be what's in Seth Manookin's attic, these unopened full sets, right?

What am I missing, Seth?

No, yeah, that's absolutely right.

I mean, the other thing that you can get money for is individual rare pieces, either rare because it's a color that that piece was not produced in in great quantity, or because it's a piece that was not produced in great quantity, but is crucial for some building.

Yeah, I've been trying to get the cocaine brick from the wire for exactly

Caleb.

Is storage an issue for you?

Do you have a limited amount of space where you're living?

Yeah, that's the other issue: is as a builder, as someone who likes to build

their own models,

you really need to have your collection sorted by shape, by color.

and that takes up a lot of space.

And it's expensive to invest in storage of that kind.

So on top of buying the bricks,

I was looking at buying tons and tons of those little drawer sets that you put hardware in.

Yeah,

I know.

I have those.

Exactly.

I have friends in the A-Fall community who have entire rooms dedicated to Lego where the walls are just covered in those sets of drawers.

Ryan is not saying that he wants you to keep them organized.

He's just saying he wants you to keep them.

Just the four duffel bags, if you just put those in a corner somewhere, would those take up a significant proportion of your current living area?

At the moment, they're sitting in the top of my closet, so no.

Okay.

A couple of questions.

Caleb, do you rent or own your apartment?

I rent my apartment.

Yeah.

Do you foresee a time in the near future where you will own an apartment or a home to which you you can devote a Lego room?

I do not.

My partner is also

in academia.

She's currently a post-doctoral research fellow at the University of Calgary here in Calgary.

So, you know, another part of that is that academic lifestyle.

You have to be mobile today.

And Lego is not a mobile hobby.

Right.

You can't drive around in a Lego car you built yourself.

As far as I know, no.

Yet.

I am am pretty sure someone has driven around in a Lego car they built themselves.

Please do not at us.

Ryan,

why is this any of your business?

I mean, you've listened to your friend.

He's clearly reached a point in his life where he's like, you know what?

I'm in my 30s now.

It's time for me to admit failure.

and throw this junk away because I'll never be able to build my Blade Runner cityscape because I just won't ever have the money.

Why won't you allow him this ritual of growth/slash throwing away his dreams?

I respect the ritual.

I do.

I do respect the ritual.

But I want to be clear here.

This is not a case of my intervening in his choice.

This is a question of him approaching me and saying, I'm thinking about

getting rid of my Legos.

And my response is, are you you looking for advice or sympathy?

And he says he's looking mostly for sympathy.

And I say, okay, well, for what it's worth, I don't okay.

So here's my idea.

Anyway, so here's the advice that you didn't ask for.

I don't think it's a great idea.

I can't stop you.

I'm not going to stop you.

This is ultimately going to be his choice, but I don't think it's the right one.

We know it's his choice.

You tell him, I know that you don't think it's the right decision.

We also know it's his choice.

You have your chance to give him the advice.

Yes.

Give him the advice.

Tell him why he'd be making a mistake.

You're going to regret it.

You're going to regret it.

This is something that immediately after you do it, it could be a month, it could be two months, you're going to say, Man, I wish I didn't do it.

Man, I really want to play with those Legos.

Is there a precedent in Caleb's life for making a dramatic gesture of this kind that he then regrets?

There are significant precedents.

There's enough.

Let me hear the precedents.

All right, let's start.

2009, Caleb says to his friends, I really want to get into playing World of Warcraft.

And so we say, okay, Caleb, let's do it.

Let's play this game together.

And a few months will go by and he'll say, you know what, it's just too much pressure.

It's too much stress.

I'm too hooked to it.

I got to quit.

Which means we all got to quit because we were really playing it to enjoy just spending time with Caleb.

And then a few months will go by and he will say, actually, you know what?

I really want to go back into it.

Come on, guys.

Let's do it.

Let's just get back into World of Warcraft.

And we'll look at each other and say,

we literally just quit because of you.

And we'll do this again.

And then one day he'll say, look, I really want to get a game of Dungeons and Dragons together.

And for months, we'll get emails from him with all of his plans.

Make sure you plan this.

Make sure you set this up.

Make sure you meet us at this time.

Let's test this out, see if it works.

He'll play a game, at most, one game.

And then that will come that email that we're all waiting for that says yeah I'm gonna live with you guys.

I'm just not feeling it.

Not feeling anymore.

I think I want to do something else.

And then another year will go by or two years and he'll want to go back and start it again.

And then he'll play one game and then he'll quit.

We played with miniatures.

He wanted to play a tabletop miniatures game and he convinced me to get into it and I was fully infested.

And he says, look, I have a miniatures set.

I'm going to sell it to you for $400.

and you can paint it and set it up and do everything you want.

And I said, Let's go for it.

Let's do it.

So I gave him $400,

and we were going to play these elaborate games with

these tabletop miniatures.

And we played one game.

We got one game, maybe two at most.

And he said, yeah, not into them anymore.

I think

I see what you've very clearly established in masterfully Canadian barristers fashion

that you're both nerds.

Yeah.

Of the highest highest order.

That Caleb is particularly indecisive.

And also Caleb owes you $400.

But this could be a moment of real turnaround for Caleb.

This could be a new step.

He's talking about really putting this behind him and acknowledging that childish things are behind him.

Do you distrust him to follow through on this step?

Or do you think he's going to start sneaking around buying Lego on the DL after he throws this stuff in the lake?

I think we've been sold a line here when he says the reason why I'm quitting is because I'll never get the collection that I really dreamed of getting.

That collection has been providing him joy from 2006 up until 2016, he said.

We've got seven years of him being happy with those Legos, and yet that Lego collection had not received its fullest completion.

Do you teach math?

Social studies.

Social studies.

Okay.

Oh, yeah.

Okay, so my math is off.

Even longer.

Ryan has accused you of lying about your feeling that you can never create the thing you want to create with Lego and therefore you want to put it away and move on.

Yes.

Are you lying, Caleb?

No.

That's a big part of it was just the realization that I'm never going to have the collection I want.

The other

element was in 2016, I got a dog.

And dog ownership and Lego ownership are also not conducive to one another.

Dogs eat Legos and then bad things happen.

Exactly.

And then thousands of dollars worth of vet bills later.

Yeah.

Thousands of dollars you could have invested in loose bricks off the internet.

Has your dog eaten any Lego?

Because we have a dog who has coexisted quite happily with our Lego here at home.

She only had one opportunity and she took it.

She didn't manage to swallow any of the Lego, but it was definitely fished out of her mouth.

Why did you cover the Lego in peanut butter?

It helps the bricks stick together.

Got it.

Do I have this right?

Caleb, did you bring this case against Ryan?

I did.

So it, because that makes it sound to me like you want to be talked out of this, because you could have just gotten rid of them, and that would have been that.

And you're asking for a public airing of this in a form in which you will be compelled to go along with the decision, even if it's against what you say are your wishes.

There's definitely a subconscious desire to have an authority like Judge John Hodgman tell me to do it.

But it's also about Ryan is the person that I go to when I'm conflicted or when I have a big decision to make or if I'm feeling down about something, you know, I will pick up the phone or

open up Skype and give him a call and say, Ryan.

You know, I'm feeling this way.

Can you give me some advice?

Can you give me a shoulder to sigh on, I guess?

And

he's a really important part of my support network.

And I know that if I sell the Lego and I have any kind of regrets, he's going to be one of the people that I go to.

And he's going to be like, oh, God, Caleb, I told you so.

Well, first of all, let's just clarify.

You're not selling this Lego.

No one's going to buy your loose duffel bags of used bricks.

It's going to be like, it's going to be

like a tenth of a penny per brick is what you're going to get for this.

You're throwing it away

you might have a hard time selling them you definitely can donate them to uh to me and my family

i was thinking about ordering you to donate all that crud you have up in the attic what

so so

so that

it's a trap

finally fulfill his his dreaming of electric sheep

oh no

this has gone horribly wrong very quickly so i i think i've heard enough in order to make my verdict.

But Seth, I want to turn to you for a second here.

You know, one of the things I have to consider is where is the more mentally healthy place for Caleb to be?

You've heard the same evidence that I've heard, the same allegations and the same admissions about his sort of serial compulsion to get into a thing and then get out of it, and his rather plaintive admission that he feels his dream cannot come true, that he feels intrusive thoughts about replicating cars in Lego and that sort of thing.

I didn't imagine that we would necessarily go here, but it's part of

your public life that you struggled with addiction

and that to some degree Lego has become a different kind of addiction for you.

What is your profile of Caleb?

And if you had to suggest, where do you think he would be healthier, with or without Lego?

Well, it doesn't sound like the duffel bags in his closet are like he's white-knuckling it not to take those out every day.

It sounds as if he's been able to go through the last several years or year and a half, whatever it is,

without feeling particularly tempted or upset by the fact that he has all of that Lego up there.

So I guess my feeling was that if this was causing him active distress, then I would support him getting rid of it.

I'm not as like real life deterioration.

Yeah, or just even if it was, you know, if it was causing him stress in his relationship, if he was

spending time that he felt like he should be spending on his work thinking about it.

My concern is not so much that he'll decide he wants to build the entirety of the Blade Runner, either the original or 2049

set,

but that he will, there will come a point where he has children and he will be faced with enormous regret

that he has deprived them of the ability to make their own creations with what sounds like a pretty extensive set of bricks.

All right.

Well, thank you very much, Seth Manukin of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, or MIT, as we say, in AFOL circles.

And the AFOL circles call it MIT.

Yeah, that's right.

I have spent this entire time half listening to you because I've been constructing my own chambers out of Lego.

I'm going to go into it.

I'll be back in a moment with my verdict.

Please rise as Judge John Hodgman exits the courtroom.

Caleb, you brought the case.

How are you feeling right now?

Not great.

I think Ryan has the stronger argument.

He's the better debater.

The expert witness,

Seth, has, I think, is definitely on the pro-Lego

camp or in the pro-Lego camp.

So I don't like my chances.

Ryan, how do you feel?

Feeling pretty strong.

I think that

when we frame this as something that's an addiction,

it weakens my argument, but I don't think that anyone really believes that this is addiction that we're dealing with here.

More like compulsion, right?

Yeah, and I think that this is, I think that

belittles the power of addiction.

This is more just somebody who thinks he might want to clear a little space in the attic, but there's more space in that attic than we've given him credit for.

We'll see what Judge John Hodgman has to say about all this when we come back in just a second.

You know, we've been doing my brother, my brother me for 15 years, and

maybe you stopped listening for a while, maybe you never listened, and you're probably assuming three white guys talking for 15 years, I know where this has ended up.

But no, no, you would be wrong.

We're as shocked as you are that we have not fallen into some sort of horrific scandal or just turned into a big crypto thing.

Yeah, you don't even really know how crypto works.

The only NFTs I'm into are naughty, funny things, which is what we talk about on my brother, my brother, and me.

We serve it up every Monday for you if you're listening.

And if not, we just leave it out back and goes rotten.

So check it out on Maximum Fun or wherever you get your podcasts.

All right, we're over 70 episodes into our show.

Let's learn Everything.

So let's do a quick progress check.

Have we learned about quantum physics?

Yes, episode 59.

We haven't learned about the history of gossip yet, have we?

Yes, we have.

Same episode, actually.

Have we talked to Tom Scott about his love of roller coasters?

Episode 64.

So how close are we to learning everything?

Bad news.

We still haven't learned everything yet.

Oh, we're ruined.

No, no, no.

It's good news as well.

There is still a lot to learn.

Woo!

I'm Dr.

Ella Hubber.

I'm regular tom long i'm caroline roper and on let's learn everything we learn about science and a bit of everything else too and although we haven't learned everything yet i've got a pretty good feeling about this next episode join us every other thursday on maximum fun

please rise as judge john hodgman re-enters the courtroom and presents his verdict

lego are amazing and i'm working really hard not to say legos

lego are amazing

and obviously they click into a level of creativity that has beguiled imaginations for many generations now.

And for those who are true master builders, what they can make out of Lego is incredible.

Caleb, you mentioned Chris Giddens.

I have met

and seen the work of an incredible Lego artist named Nathan Sawaya.

who was on the Jonathan Colton cruise and presented Jonathan Colton with a full-sized Lego Jonathan Colton, which now sits in Jonathan Colton's living room.

And every time I go into that living room, it scares the living Lego out of me.

Yeah, I was going to say, it doesn't just sit in his living room, it also haunts my dreams.

Yeah,

it's super, super terrifying.

And not even because it's particularly lifelike.

It's pretty good, but it's in that uncanny valley, but it's a whole plastic human.

Lego is powerful and can exert a powerful hold over someone.

And my first, as I mentioned

in the run-up to this, my first question was, is this a hobby, a fascination, a compulsion that is healthy for you, Caleb, or not healthy for you?

And whether getting rid of them was a positive step towards maturity or a negative step away from joy.

Thanks to the wisdom loaned us both in ways of Lego and personal satisfaction that Seth Manukan gave us.

And thanks to your own testimony, I think your thing about feeling that thinking about how to construct cars out of Lego does not suggest that you have a real problem with Lego that forces you to get rid of this,

these four duffel bags of brick dope that you have up there.

If anything, I would say you are radically indecisive.

And I would say that your addiction or your, it's too strong a word, your compulsion, if anything, is to the taking on of new hobbies.

To the detriment of your happiness, you end up feeling like you didn't complete something.

And here is the true sadness.

I did not expect you to say,

I realized that I would never have the Lego collection I wanted.

And therefore, I had to get rid of it.

You're 33 years old.

And I can tell you that when I was 33, that's that's you're grown up.

That's grown-up time.

You know what I mean?

You are truly an adult fan of Lego.

Early 30s is a rough time because you realize, oh, yeah, I'm not in my 20s anymore.

I'm no longer becoming something in a sparkling way.

I'm becoming an adult of some kind.

I'm ending up as something.

What am I doing with these toys?

It was around 33 that I remember going to bed in my studio apartment in New York

watching some awards show and having been a lifelong lover of film and television, I think it was probably the Golden Globes.

And I just saw all these creative people being excited about being in the world that they were in.

And I thought to myself, oh, right,

that's over for me.

If I ever had any fantasies about being in television or film, it's done.

I'm 33 now.

I'm working in book publishing and magazine writing.

That's done.

And it was, and I thought that I was coming to a very mature conclusion.

But as you may know,

largely by accident and a certain measure of work on my own, I wrote a book which put me on television that while I never accepted one of those awards, I did get to go up on stage at the Emmys

with Jon Stewart.

And I could appreciate in that moment just

how much I had misjudged my life and my fatalism in my early 30s.

As I think anyone who has

grown through their 30s into their 40s, particularly if they've gone through hardship, which I don't claim to have gone through, but I'm, you know, I don't mean to speak for your life, Seth, but you went through addiction and you came out the other side, and I'm sure the idea of a life beyond it seemed rather illusory to you when you were in the midst of it.

Is that wrong to say?

That is absolutely correct.

Yeah.

And I think that

the thing that I could not tolerate

in your assessment of your life was not only

do I not have the Lego I need

to make my dream dystopia now,

but I will never have the Lego to complete my dream dystopia.

And that's not true.

That's not necessarily true.

It might be true.

I mean, it took a whole lot of weird,

weird currents to come together perfectly to, you know, put me on that stage at the Emmys.

And guess what?

No one's inviting me to the Emmys anymore because I'm not on the show.

That's all done now.

But I know well enough to say it's not done forever.

And I think that you're too young to have that attitude towards life and certainly too young to trade something that gives you pleasure and was a dream that you were chasing

simply to try to take up 3D character modeling or some other new hobby.

This is not the time to be giving up.

This is the time to be doubling down, locking those bricks together and building it piece by piece.

Even if you don't see the outcome that you want or can't see the full shape of the thing you're building yet, doesn't mean you stop building.

And so I would say this.

I see no reason to throw away what you have worked on so far.

I see no psychic benefit to it because it talks about giving up on a dream.

And I don't think that's a good place to be in your 30s.

And I see no legit benefit to it because those things aren't going to get you a lot of money.

If it were worth a fortune, I'd say, forget it, go for it.

But they're not going to net you what you want to move forward.

And you might end up missing them.

So what I'm going to order is that

You keep trying and you keep plugging away and you get more money and you make that dreamscape, or that nightmare scape.

I can't remember which it is.

You have to get a post office box in Calgary,

and you have to give us the address.

And with this show,

on the show page, we'll release the address for people to send Lego to you.

You're going to hang on to those four duffel bags, and we're going to see how much Lego you can get and get all the Lego you can

and then build the best nightmare nightmare post-punk, cyberpunk, Bradbury building, replicant-killing dreamscape that you can.

And

the address for that post office box is Seth Manukin, Massachusetts Institute of Technology,

77 Massachusetts Avenue, 02139.

You better watch.

Well, all right, everyone knows his post office box now.

Seth, you got to send him a whole set.

Some old set that you don't want anymore.

Send it to him.

Uh-oh.

And that's what you've got to do.

Not only do you keep this Lego,

but you're going to build.

And then and only then, once you get this out of your system and you realize

dystopias can come true, then you can destroy it all and throw it in the lake.

This is the sound of a gavel.

Judge John Hodgman rules, that is all.

Please rise as Judge John Hodgman exits the courtroom.

Caleb, how do you feel?

Overwhelmed, confused, happy, elated.

Ryan, how are you feeling?

I'm feeling great.

I think justice was served here.

Are you looking forward to maybe adding a few flourishes to this weird nightmare escape?

I am really excited to see this thing evolve.

I'm going to insist that I get regular updates seeing this thing evolve, and I'll be contributing myself to this

Blade Runner horror show that he is putting together.

Yeah, I wish I could send him my kids' Legos.

What a nightmare toy.

Just grab a handful.

They'll never know.

Canada needs Legos.

That's my baby's position on Legos.

Well, just grab a handful.

They'll never know.

Caleb Bryan, thanks for joining us on the Judge John Hodgman podcast.

Thank you so much for having us.

Yes, thank you very much, both of you guys.

And let me just say thanks again to our special guest, Seth Manukin.

Nice talking with you.

Likewise, and hopefully

we can do another Mandolin ukulele duet someday soon.

That's right.

We had a little event at MIT.

I think it was the day after the election.

Yeah.

It was pretty heavy.

Maybe we could all have a good cry again sometime.

But in the meantime,

where can people follow Seth?

On Twitter, I'm at Seth Manukin, S-E-T-H-M-N-O-O-K-I-N.

And my website, which has not been very active recently, but my website is also SethManukin.com.

And your most recent book is The Panic Virus?

Yes.

You have a new one coming out soon?

I'm working on a book about aging

that hopefully I will move from the working on to writing and finishing sometime within the next year.

Well, we wish you the very best.

Of course, you have tenure, so you can just,

right?

Yeah, that's right.

Great.

Thank you very much.

Thank you.

Judge Hodgman, before we dispense some swift justice, we want to thank Jonathan Reiter for naming this week's episode Dupe Load Jeopardy.

If you'd like to name a future episode like Judge John Hodgman on Facebook, we regularly put out calls for submissions there.

You can follow us on Twitter at Jesse Thornd and at Hodgman.

Hashtag your Judge John Hodgman tweets, hashtag JJ H O.

And you can discuss the episode in the Maximum Fund group on Facebook or on the Maximum Fund subreddit on Reddit, maximumfund.reddit.com.

This week's episode was recorded by Ryan Koichopoulos at The Beach Audio Productions in Calgary, Alberta, and by Joel Hurd at North Country Public Radio in Canton, New York.

Our producer is the great Jennifer Marmer.

Now, Swift Justice, where we answer your small disputes with a quick judgment.

Christopher says, My wife and I have an ongoing dispute.

Which animal is cooler, penguins or turtles?

Literally penguins.

The end.

Oh, geez.

But honestly, Jesse,

which do you think is a cooler animal, penguin or turtle?

Turtles.

I don't think penguins are cool.

I like penguins a lot.

I think penguins are really neat.

I think they're fun.

I think they're cute.

But I have a hard time seeing a penguin being cool.

Whereas I kind of think turtles are kind of cool.

They're not the coolest, but they're cooler than penguins.

Penguins are too busy like

doing goofy things and going,

I think they're pretty cool because they only fly underwater.

Yeah, that is kind of cool.

But they're, but that, which is, which is neat.

You're right, neat.

But those penguins are always active, whereas the turtles are frequently just chilling.

I take it back.

You're right.

These are not cool animals.

They're cute.

They're great.

Right.

Who's cooler?

Capybaras or otters?

Otters are super cool, man.

Come on.

Otters are always doing that thing where they extend their hand to shake your hand, but then when you go to shake their hand, they put it back like they're slicking back their hair.

Yep.

They are the masters of the psych out of the rodent world.

Otters can also just hit a jukebox and their favorite song comes on.

Yeah, exactly right.

Hey, what was the name of the coolest member of Delta House in Animal House?

I give up.

Otter.

Yeah.

Tim McKay.

Okay.

That's about it for

this episode.

Submit your cases, please.

You think it's Amadeus?

You think Amadeus is the coolest Delta House brother?

He was at the pledge.

Go on, say your things.

Maximumfund.org/slash JJ Ho or email Hodgman at maximumfund.org.

No case too small.

We'll see you next time on the Judge John Hodgman podcast.

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