03 NovEpisode 177 | Bonus: Regarding Blippi, Duo Lingo’s training of humans, Travis Barker’s True Romance obsession, Nabokov’s letters, the key to getting good at anything, and… a deathaversary
Annie's life has two speeds right now. You'll find her physically trapped underneath her two young daughters using a suite of remote treat dispensers to train her dog, or she's at a local co-working space in a tiny room alone, talking to herself. In this bonus episode, on the one-year anniversary of her beloved dog Amos passing, she is in the latter mode, recording a kind of phone call to her late father, who she thinks would've enjoyed learning what she's learned about the Youtube star Blippi, aka Stevin John, fka Steven or "Steezy" Grossman (no relation). A line of thought about loving those who are no longer alive leads her to discuss the nature of pet love as something that exists inside of us and how the expression and feeling of that love is, in many ways, projection of something that doesn't go away when someone gone. She somehow relates this both to Travis Barker and Kourtney Kardashian's recent public display of their love of the movie True Romance and the way in which Nabokov's letters to his wife and to his mistress were sort of fungible. Also: She talks about how the app Duo Lingo is manipulating our behavior in a good way and she reveals the not-so-secret key to getting better at anything, which she only really understood after she became a dog trainer.
Want to use a remote trainer to train YOUR dog while your kids are climbing on you? Get a Treat and Train at schoolforthedogs.com/TT.
Subscribe: iTunes
Related episodes:
Transcript:
Annie:
I'm sitting in a vertical phone booth, coffin-like, although rather brightly lit, tiny, windowless room in a We Work. If you can call this a room. I guess actually it does have windows, but not external windows. And I feel like my life rhythm is funny right now. I'm either in a spot like this, alone, either staring at a screen or talking to myself as I am now, or I am home underneath two small children, often literally lying down underneath them, it seems.
Although to bring it back to dog training, I have set up a Pet Tutor and two Treat and Trains in my apartment because I feel like I have so little time to devote to training Poppy. And so I've been trying to use these moments where I'm like paralyzed under the two girls to do push button training, basically triggering the Treat and Train, one of the Treat and Trains.
I have one on her bed, one in her crate, and then like her relaxation mat. So like go to bed, go to crate, go to mat. I just sort of have her going from one to the other with this hilarious, like all these buttons that I'm wearing, one for each dispenser. And it's, it's ridiculous, but I think it's been good for her. If only because when I have the two of them piled on me, like I don't also want her piled on me, which she has a tendency to do cause she likes to be snuggly. Anyway.
But that moment is not this moment. This is the isolated-in-a-coffin moment. And I just wanted to share a couple things. One is that this is the one year anniversary of Amos dying today. And so I've been thinking a lot about him, but of course I think a lot about him every day. And I guess just, you know, feeling those feelings.
One feeling that comes up a lot is guilt. And I'm saying this because I have to guess that there are plenty of other dog owners who feel some degree of guilt over their dog's health decline. Like it was my fault. Or like, not that it was my fault, but like if maybe if I had brought him in sooner, last summer than I did, like we could have caught the ultimately fatal tumor that he had. He wasn't eating well over the summer, and I feel like I was neglectful that I didn't rush him to the vet right away.
But of course, hindsight is 20/20. And I remember expressing this to my friend, Dr. Lisa Lippman, a vet who I talked to a lot during those last weeks. Also to Dr. Andrea Tu. And something Dr. Lippman said at the time was that she had a similar feeling after her dog in vet school died. And here she was like in vet school. But of course it was a 15 year old dog. I treated him as well as I possibly could have. I gave him as much love as I possibly could have.
And the other thing I've been trying to think of, I did a podcast episode about him last year that I have never even gone back to listen to. But one thing I think I said in that episode, which is a thought that I often have is like, at least I know I gave him an amazing life. Like I wish I could have milked his life another year or two or five, but I know that the 15 years he had were great.
And if I have any regrets about the time we did have together, it's that, I don't know, maybe that I didn't get into dog training a little bit earlier. He was five when I started really learning about training and I wish that I'd had the previous five years to work with him on stuff. Just because I think it would have been fun for him. But we did do training before that just sort of informally and I wasn't as tuned into his person. because I think you get more dialed in on who the animal is and how they feel about things the more training you do.
But the other thing I've been thinking about is how my love for him lives in me and like how I saw him, which is sort of true really about so many — I mean, maybe all love, so much of it is projection. It's, you know, no two people are seeing the same person in the same way. No two people are seeing the same dog the same way. But ultimately those feelings live within us. They don't live, my feelings did not live within Amos. He had his own feelings.
And hilariously, maybe, this led me to think of two things. So the first one is Travis Barker of Blink-182, who has been in this wildly public romance recently with Kourtney Kardashian, the oldest of the Kardashians, and I've heard called the least interesting to look at. If you can't think of anything mean to say about someone, that's something to say. I was never really like that into watching Keeping Up with the Kardashians, but I guess I'm as aware of them as any other woman my age who watches some amount of TV and looks at some degree of social media.
And I don't know if everyone else is like this, I have to think not, but like they come up in my newsfeed on like Apple news or whatever all the time, and I'm probably just feeding it because then I like go and look at whatever they're showing me about the Kardashians, making the algorithm feed me more Kardashian news.
But my sort of vague interest non-interest in the Kardashians was piqued recently because of this romance, specifically something that has come up regarding his ex-wife, who pointed out that — Well, I guess I should first say that Courtney Kardashian and Travis Barker posted recently all this stuff about the movie True Romance, the Quentin Tarantino movie from the early 90s. Like, they posted themselves dressed up as the two characters from the movie in like a very produced photo shoot with her and a blonde wig. And posted these photos.
And then she also posted quotes from the movie, like, there's this quote about like, “You're so cool.” Sort of like they say, you're so cool, instead of like, I'm in love with you or I love you. And I mean, even if she weren't a celebrity, like, okay, I guess you're into this movie with your boyfriend or fiance or whatever. And like you're sharing your newfound joint obsession with this 1990s movie.
So after they did this, his ex-wife came out and was like, ‘You know, what's so weird about this is like, whoa, that was kind of like my movie with him. And we had a True Romance themed wedding. And we named our daughter Alabama after the character in True Romance.’ Which is, you know, like that's a weird thing, I think to be sort of publicly sharing this stuff that seems like it was like proprietary of another relationship. Of course, like your relationship doesn't own your interest in a film or any piece of art.
And I thought, you know, I think this kind of thing probably happens a lot, just like in less public arenas, where someone has like a favorite movie, or a favorite thing, and they bring it into a relationship, more than in just one relationship. Because you bring the things you love and maybe the other person loves it too.
What does this have to do with anything? I guess I was thinking about how our feelings about love and relationships and all of that exist within us. And this guy, it seems like his feelings are wrapped up somehow in this movie. And whoever he's with gets sort of put into the slot of the character in this movie that for him is like a good feeling.
It reminded me a little bit of a book review I once read of a book about Vladimir Nabokov, and this book, I guess, had love letters that he wrote to his wife Vera, but also to some other woman that he had an affair with, and the person writing the book review pointed out how similar these love letters were to each other. And the book reviewer wrote, you know, it should be encouraging to some that even Nabokov only had one language of love. And I remember I remember that line.
Anyway. So that's what the whole Travis Barker Kourtney Kardashian thing made me think of in terms of love. And as I thought about it, I thought about my dog Amos, and how my love for him is still inside of me, and he's not around, but I can still feel those feelings. And it made me think of my dad who, I remember a year or so before he died, when he had a health scare, he said to me something like, I'm inside of you. And made me think of that too.
[laughs] The other thing that I wanted to talk about, which sort of comes back to that is — well, I guess it's something that I felt like, oh, I wish I could call my dad, who died in 2018, and tell him about this. Cause I think he’d think it was really funny, but of course there's no phone number I can use to call him. But then I thought maybe dead people listen to podcasts, or maybe just the act of me sharing this silly thing as if I was telling him about it will make me feel, like, get in touch with my feelings of love towards my dad and like touch the part of him that's inside of me.
I can't believe I just said that it sounds really cheesy.
But anyway. So there's this guy named Blippi. And if you don't have little kids, you probably haven't heard of Blippi, what Blippi does, is he's on YouTube. He's he goes mostly to children's museums, but other fun places, like he'll go to a firehouse or he'll go to an aquarium, or I think I've even seen him go to animal shelters and he'll just interact.
So he'll go to a children's museum and they'll like play with all the toys and and he's kind of goofy. He wears blue and orange beret and these big orange glasses and suspenders. And he has kind of like a Pee-wee Herman vibe. I feel like that's the best way to describe him to someone who hasn't seen him, except Pee-wee Herman doing more of like pretending to be a little boy more than Pee-wee Herman was pretending to be. Peewee Herman seemed like an adult, but Blippi seems like he's a child. But he's not, he's like a 30 something year old man.
And after watching many hours of Blippi with Magnolia, I wanted to figure out who this dude was. Because he's not like with a network or anything. It's just his own YouTube channel that like clearly is doing really, really, really, really well. And God bless him for figuring out this niche, interesting thing to do that clearly is captivating to tiny kids.
So I Googled Blippi, and it turns out his name is Stevin John. S T E V I N J O H N. And do-do-do-do, I'm reading, reading, reading, reading on Wikipedia or wherever it turns out his name is not really Stevin John, if you can believe it, his real name is Steven Grossman! Which is my last name. And this is why I would have called to tell my dad this story, because my dad, who was Robert Grossman, he would kind of collect Grossmans, sometimes.
He had this like telephone book next to his telephone that he would make notes in when people called. He'd write it in, or like if he had an appointment. It was like his ongoing diary. And he would also use it kind of like a scrapbook. And sometimes he would paste things in, like, if he saw someone named Grossman who was doing something interesting in the newspaper. And the funnier the Grossman referenced, you know, the better.
Like I remember there was this New Yorker cartoon that showed a picture of a guy like standing at his boss's desk with really, really long sleeves that are dragging on the floor. And the boss is saying “Grossman, good news. You can now wear short sleeves to work.” Which is kind of funny cause it's one of those New Yorker cartoons that I kind of don't totally understand. [laughs] Why did they make it about someone named Grossman?
But I dunno, there'd be other things too. Even if he didn't literally clip something out and paste it in his book, I don't know, I feel like he was always collecting things. I remember he was really excited to learn that there's a mineral called Grossmanite, which was invented by — I mean, not invented, I guess, discovered by someone named Lawrence Grossman.
I think part of the reason he thought it was funny to kind of be collecting Grossmans was because my father had two sons, my older half-brothers, and both of them were born Grossman and ultimately changed their name. One took his middle name because he was going into acting, and I guess Grossman sounds, I don't know if it just wasn't euphonious, like, it's not nice to have the word gross in your name, or if it had to do with it being like a name that sounded Jewish. Which I remember my dad being like, it's good to be a Jew in Hollywood. Signal that to people by your last name. But I dunno, for whatever reason, he changed his name when he went into the theater.
And the other brother, who lived in Paris for a few years in his twenties, changed his last name to Rimbaud, like the French poet Rimbaud. R I M B A U D, which people have a hard time pronouncing. Anyway, that was also for his performing career, although he did give that name to his children as well.
And I think the whole thing kind of bothered my dad who was like, Hey, you know, this is the family name. Why isn't it good enough for all of you? So the story of this super successful guy, Blippi on YouTube, who has the last name Grossman, I think my dad would have found really funny, who then took the name, John, which I'm guessing was his middle name, Stevin John.
And the punchline of the Blippi tale, which is, you know, reading further, further down on this Wikipedia page. Apparently before Blippi had this very successful YouTube career playing in children's museums, he was best known on the internet by the name Steezy Grossman. And Steezy Grossman's thing was taking videos and posting videos of himself shitting on his friends. Literally pooping on his friends. And I guess doing it to music. The Harlem Shake most famously. So I think my dad would've just, I think he would have just died laughing. I wish I could hear him laughing about what I learned about Blippi.
And then just to bring it a little bit back around to talking about learning, if not dog training, and something I've learned about learning through dog training. So Blippi, I looked up, I guess I looked him up…so in the reading a little bit more about Blippi I got into watching some interview he recorded where he was pointing out that his show is now translated on YouTube into Spanish.
Which actually knew, because my husband has this rule about YouTube with Magnolia, which is if she's watching cartoons or Blippi or whatever, it needs to be in Spanish because her babysitter talked to her in Spanish and he feels like he just wants her to be exposed to Spanish as much as possible to work out that part of her brain. And she already understands Spanish pretty fluently. She says many words in Spanish. I mean, English is her main language, but…
And so I've watched actually Blippi in Spanish, I've watched a lot of Peppa Pig in Spanish. And so anyway, I knew that his thing was in Spanish. And when he was talking in this interview, they were like, well, are you doing it in Spanish? Or is it like overdubbed? And he said, no, no, it's not me. I don't speak Spanish. I wish I spoke Spanish. And he said it in sort of this like, wistful way, like if only.
And it made me think about how I think about learning now versus how I thought about it before I got into dog training. Which is that the way to get better at doing anything pretty much is just to do it over and over again. I mean, the fact that this did not totally dawn on me until I was, I don't know, like 30 is maybe pathetic, maybe this is something everyone knows, and I just like, never learned it, but the heart of it is like practice, practice, practice.
It's how you get to, that's the punchline of the joke, How do you get to Carnegie hall? You just have to do it over and over and over again, you don't need like some sort of special — I mean, sure. There are some people who are going to be just maybe incredibly gifted at languages, I think. My husband's a linguist, and I think he's talked about how there's like, I forget what it is, like 4% of people who have some sort of extra special ability, but for the rest of us, it's just a matter of doing it. And whatever it is.
And with languages, I mean, that's part of the reason why our daughter is listening to, I mean, watching so much Peppa Pig and Blippi in Spanish, is it's all about the doing it. And I thought, you know, Hey, Blippi, if you really wanted to be good at Spanish, you could probably learn good enough Spanish to be able to talk in your very simple videos, if you just devoted time to it.
But we all know that he's been instead devoting time to playing in children's museums and taking a crap on people on video. [Laughs] If only all of those hours, or even some of those hours had gone towards trying to learn Spanish, speak Spanish, you know, he'd probably speak Spanish by now.
And I think one reason kids are at — so many kids learn instruments, is because they just have a lot more time to sit and spend hours and hours and hours, banging away at whatever the instrument is. All the stuff kids do. If they're into it and are choosing to give it time, they're going to get better at it, which is something I think I didn't get as a kid. And I think I thought, like I have to find the thing that I have a special gift in, and otherwise I'm just not good at X, Y or Z. But the reason I wasn't good at the piano was because I just wasn't like either willingly or not willingly sitting in front of the piano for hours a day
And on the subject of learning Spanish, which Blippi, Hey, I think you should do. It's worth mentioning that I think some of the best like human training based on what we know about how animals learn and how animals are motivated, some of the best human training I've seen recently is Duolingo.
And if you don't know, Duolingo, it's an app where you can learn languages. And it's incredibly well done. They've just gamified things in just the right way. They set up the user for success. They feed you new bits of information in ways that are not overwhelming. They give lots of encouragement, prizes, goals. They get behavior in a way that is so awesome.
Because there's a lot of stuff about manipulating human behavior out there as something that is done to our detriment. A lot of the stuff about Facebook, social media in general, it's not necessarily influencing our behavior, or using what it knows about our tendencies to behave in certain ways for our benefit.
But Duolingo certainly is. It's giving just the right amount of encouragement. It's shaping things, shaping new skills very thoughtfully and carefully to keep the learner engaged, and it's doing it all so that we can speak a new language, which is good for so many reasons. Even if you don't actually ever end up using it somewhere, I think it's just kind of like a good way to exercise your brain, probably better than scrolling through social media when you're on your phone, as far as brain health goes.
Okay, thank you for listening to my thoughts on, what am I going to call this? Something like Amos, Love, Travis Barker and what we learned about Blippi? What I learned about Blippi. Alright, got to figure out a title that sums up this one. Thank you for listening. Bye.
