Ep. 55: "A Welsh Troll"
Merlin: Hello.
Merlin: Hi, John.
Merlin: Hi, Merlin.
Merlin: Hi.
Merlin: How are you?
John: Merlin, man.
John: How are you?
John: You sound like a lot going on.
Merlin: Oh, you know, I'm so busy.
Merlin: Yeah, you're a busy person.
Merlin: I'm so busy.
Merlin: I hate when people say that.
Merlin: Busy, busy.
Merlin: Busy, busy.
Merlin: You know, life is like a big closet.
Merlin: You're going to fill up every one of them, no matter what.
John: Absolutely true.
John: You know, people say they're busy because I think it's indisputable that most other people in the world are not doing anything.
John: They're not busy at all.
John: And so those few people who are busy who say, I'm really busy right now, they're the getter-donners.
John: They're the actual busy people, and we should support them with all of our efforts.
Yeah.
Merlin: I got mixed feelings because when I say I'm busy, it usually means one of a couple of things and they're both my fault.
Merlin: I'm never, if I, I mean, I'm just because of the nature of what I quote unquote do.
Merlin: It's, there's never a time that I should be too busy unless I have chosen to be too busy.
Merlin: I mean, because in really it's kind of true of everybody, whether they like to admit it or not, but I, uh, with me, it means I've overcommitted or I plan poorly.
Merlin: Or, in the midst of all of that, I'm just not being very good or effective, if you like.
John: Yeah.
John: Whenever I say I'm busy...
John: I could just replace that with I'm behind the eight ball.
John: I'm behind the eight ball.
John: That's what I mean.
John: I'm sitting in a room right now that is basically just boxes and bags of things that I haven't attended to.
John: And the boxes and bags are stacked on other boxes and bags until I'm like a, I'm like a hoarder person where you can only get to my computer desk through a corridor and
John: Through a corridor, through like stacked old cat food cans, used newspapers tied with ramen noodles.
Merlin: A little taste of the Orient in your home organization.
John: And I'm just, I'm behind the eight ball.
John: Just even walking in here, I'm like, ah, behind the eight ball.
Merlin: Well, I hate to admit that I know this, but there are stages to hoarding.
Merlin: And there are, like, in the same way you look at a DSM, you know, there's all the, are you a person who has, you know, depression?
John: Is a DSM some kind of sex thing?
Merlin: Yeah, it's a role-playing thing.
Merlin: It's a DSM guide.
Merlin: Oh, the diagnostic.
Merlin: Stimulation modulator.
John: Yeah, four.
Merlin: They call it Sibian.
Merlin: Sibilance.
Merlin: Well, gosh, where do I begin?
Merlin: First of all, it's all I can do not turn this into one of those other shows where I talk about how I'm bad at stuff.
John: Stages of hoarding.
Merlin: Stages of hoarding.
Merlin: And, you know, I had a reason at one point in my life to learn about these things because of a family member.
John: You've been to my house.
John: Do you feel like I am on the hoarding continuum?
Merlin: John, we're all on the hoarding continuum.
Merlin: That's what makes it a continuum.
Merlin: You're right.
Merlin: You're right.
Merlin: Everybody's a little special.
Merlin: Am I somewhere out along the hoarding continuum?
Merlin: Well, as you know, John, I'm not a hoarding clinician.
Oh.
Merlin: Right.
Merlin: But, yeah, I forget how many phases there are, but once you become aware of something, it's hard to stop seeing it everywhere.
Merlin: And I have to tell you that I'm pretty sure one of the middle phases is paths.
Merlin: We have to blaze trails through stuff.
Merlin: I think you're on the exceedingly slightly more special part of the continuum.
John: That's like when you buy a Volkswagen bug and then all of a sudden you see Volkswagen bugs everywhere that you didn't notice before.
Merlin: I think this is a version of an availability heuristic.
Merlin: You make decisions about what's going on in the world based on the information that's available to you and your own experience.
John: Right.
John: Like for instance, I never used to see PT cruisers at all.
John: Thank God.
John: You were lucky.
John: I know.
John: I had a PT cruiser screen on my consciousness, like a filter that came down.
Merlin: Like a little, like a little protective visor.
John: It was a protective visor, a mental visor that screened out PT cruisers.
John: But then one time Kathleen Edwards came here to visit me and she rented a PT cruiser.
John: That's so cute.
John: And we're driving around town in this PT cruiser.
John: And all of a sudden I'm a member of the PT cruiser fraternity.
John: And people are like, beep, beep, hi.
John: And there are PT cruisers everywhere.
John: And I have to see them.
John: I'm in one.
John: And it changed me forever and not in a good way.
Merlin: No.
Merlin: No, I feel the same way ever since I was a little kid.
Merlin: This is probably a phenomenon with a name.
Merlin: But you feel like there's a word that you haven't heard your whole life.
Merlin: And then one day you hear it.
Merlin: And then that same day you hear it again.
Merlin: And so either you heard that word before and you didn't remember it, or there's some dark matter going on.
John: And when you say it's probably the name, you mean your name, Merlin Mann?
Merlin: Never heard it.
John: Got a visor.
Merlin: Protective visor.
Merlin: Well, you know what I hate is a lot.
John: So the first time somebody said abracadabra to you, you were like, abracadabra.
Merlin: Candyman.
Merlin: But you got to hate an unintentional left-handed compliment.
Merlin: At a job my wife had a few years ago, her boss, they're just talking about whatever like you do in an office because you don't really work in an office.
Merlin: And she said, Madeline, have you ever seen those PT cruisers?
Merlin: And she's like, yeah, sure.
Merlin: She goes, that seems like the kind of car you would drive.
Merlin: Oh!
Merlin: And, you know, I think that's a way of saying to somebody that you really know mostly through work, it's a way of saying you're a fun, like, kicky individualist.
John: Oh, interesting.
John: It's a kicky, it's a quirky car.
John: It's like a Pontiac Aztec.
Merlin: This is from a lady who's reached that kind of menopausal age where you start wearing a lot of chunky jewelry and saying what's on your mind.
Merlin: But she wasn't saying it in an unkind way.
John: No, no, no.
John: She meant that Madeline was like a funky gal.
Merlin: Totally.
Merlin: And it's, you know, the things that we buy for other people as presents, as an example, as another example, usually say much more about us than it does about the other person.
Merlin: Often it shows that we have bad judgment and no taste.
John: Well, I hope that Madeline enjoys the pearl-handled Derringers I bought her for Christmas.
John: She treasures them.
Merlin: She won't let me give her anything with pearl on it.
John: That's good.
Merlin: it's uh but you know that's that seemed like a sweet thing to say but you know oh gosh where do i even begin here i want to get back to the hoarding but uh yeah yeah you know it's like when you're a little kid and and uh you know you know exactly the kind of gi joe that you want like a very specific or in my case i was in a big gym for a while big gym yeah which is kind of like a bi-curious gi joe who likes to go to the beach how about stretch armstrong did you have a stretch armstrong test marketed it for kenner what
John: How were you the kid that got to test market Stretch Armstrong?
Merlin: John Roddick, did you ever have a really cool little car called an SST where you pull out the T-strip and it flies across the floor?
Merlin: Test marketed?
Merlin: I saw them.
Merlin: I never had one myself.
Merlin: No, they're broken by your mother.
Merlin: The whizzer, the whizzer top, those tops that you go across the floor to wind them up.
Merlin: I was a test marketer for Kenner Toys when I was a child.
Merlin: How did you get this gig?
Merlin: I was bored in class.
Merlin: And I think what happened was Kenner, if memory serves, I think Kenner is based in Cincinnati or at least has a big outpost there.
Merlin: And this is the kind of thing you could do in a public school in the 70s is you would take, I mean, let's be honest, it was the smart kids, the kids that could afford to just miss a whole class to go play with a toy.
Merlin: And boy, did that ever make the other kids love us.
Merlin: They let you test market toys in school?
Merlin: So me, Jenny Balcom, Billy Schaller, they take us out, they say, come on, let's go.
Merlin: And all the kids who are already done with the work, they get to go and play with toys while the other kids... Oh, I hate you.
Merlin: I hate you, I hate you, I hate you.
Merlin: I hate me too.
Merlin: That's terrible.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: I mean, it's wonderful, but it's terrible.
Merlin: No, it's awful.
Merlin: I hate me too.
Merlin: I'm like a PT cruiser.
John: You know what I had to do?
John: I had to pretend I was sick and go to the nurse's office to...
Merlin: Did you have a method?
Merlin: Did you put a thermometer under your arm or up against a light or anything like that?
Merlin: Oh, no.
Merlin: Your mom went to C-ripe.
Merlin: You actually would have to get a disease.
John: Clearly, I was sick.
John: That was never... You know, it's funny.
John: We had cats my whole life growing up, and I'm allergic to cats.
John: So I always was a little sick.
Merlin: Oh, really?
Merlin: You're like Wolverine.
Merlin: You have to constantly call upon your healing abilities in order just to stay alive, and that causes baseline pain to you all the time.
John: Exactly.
John: There are so many ways in which I'm like Wolverine, but that is one of the ways.
Merlin: Canadians fucked you up with all that metal?
Sigh.
John: Let's not go into it.
John: Let's not go into it.
John: So nobody ever thought, maybe this kid is allergic to cats.
John: So I had a constant scratchy cough and runny nose for, I'm serious now, 14 years.
John: Did your eyes?
John: Did you get the eyes?
John: Itchy eyes.
John: And so I would sit in class, and if I wanted to, if class was boring and I wanted to get out, I would just be like, I'm really thick right now.
John: And they'd send me to the nurse's office, and I'd lay on the...
John: lay on the cot in the nurse's office and count the dots in the ceiling tile you could you could call upon your your your conquest space fantasies from really any room where you could be supine yeah i just wanted i just wanted to go somewhere lay down have them turn the lights down a little bit and then leave me the leave me alone and you know and they thought i was sleeping but i was just you know what you needed you needed fake chronic migraines
John: Oh, interesting.
Merlin: Because I think people are very... Think about it.
Merlin: It's one of those things where the etiology is really tough.
Merlin: You can't look at somebody and tell whether they do or don't have a migraine unless they're really good at looking like they have a migraine.
John: Well, or chronic fatigue syndrome.
John: Now, I don't want to get into chronic fatigue syndrome because I believe it's a real thing and there are people who... Is it?
John: Well, the people who suffer from it
John: are very very serious about it being a real thing and and they have impressed upon me that if it is a real thing and no one believes you that is got to be a terrible terrible fate right to be like completely sick and you're essentially telling somebody that they're uh either insane a liar or both
John: Yeah, right.
John: These people go to the doctor and they're like, I feel like I can barely function.
John: And the doctor's like, you're imagining it.
John: And for years this goes on.
John: So I won't make jokes about chronic fatigue syndrome, except...
John: Except that it does sound like they're faking it.
Merlin: It does sound like it.
Merlin: But, you know, there's a funny thing in medicine.
Merlin: As you know, I'm not a physician.
Merlin: But there are a range of things where they know that there's a condition that exists, but there's no etiology for it, and there's no tests for proving that it exists.
Merlin: Right.
Merlin: And having one of those things sucks.
Merlin: Sucks.
Merlin: It sucks.
Merlin: And chronic fatigue syndrome is one.
Merlin: You know what?
Merlin: I've got to tell you.
Merlin: Up until...
Merlin: And you're going to get email about this.
Merlin: But up until the last few years, I was pretty sure that kids with food allergies was mostly a fake thing.
Merlin: I thought it was maybe a doting mother or something.
Merlin: But why is it suddenly everybody has food allergies and it didn't used to be?
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: To tell you the truth, I don't know why that is, and I kind of don't care.
Merlin: Because now I do – I have a friend whose kid, just in brief, when they knew that like one time he like touched a piece of cheese and it left like a tattoo on his arm.
Merlin: Whoa.
Merlin: Yeah, just from like a little piece.
Merlin: So they took him in to get tested.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: And they started with I think an eighth of a teaspoon of milk.
Merlin: And I think – this is such a horrible story.
Merlin: He said, Mom, I feel crazy or I feel weird or something.
Merlin: And his eyes rolled back in his head.
Merlin: he went into anaphylactic shock and they had to give him like two or three EpiPen shots and take him to the emergency room.
Merlin: He almost died at the hospital.
John: Holy cats.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: So like he's, so when you hear stuff, when I first heard like, so he's a little lactose intolerant is what you're saying.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: He's a little lactose intolerant.
Merlin: But here's the thing.
Merlin: Now imagine now this wonderful – the parents he has are good friends of mine, and she's a pistol to begin with.
Merlin: She's a pistol.
Merlin: Oh, she's a pistol.
John: You're sounding more and more like my dad.
Merlin: I think you follow her on Twitter.
Merlin: She's very – this is a known public story, Amy Jane Gruber.
Merlin: Their kid has an extreme allergy, and she carries EpiPens everywhere, and she's ready.
Merlin: But the thing is, I have to say, a few years ago, when I was a kid, I remember Julie Schlesinger didn't like oranges, so she had to wait in line for a banana.
Yeah.
Merlin: Oh.
Merlin: And she would cry.
Merlin: Now that might have been a food allergy.
Merlin: But no kid I knew had stuff that they just couldn't eat because they would get sick that I knew of.
Merlin: Yeah, yeah.
Merlin: But I am 100% positive that it is real now.
John: But this is the problem with being from our generation and before.
John: This is wonderful.
John: This is one of those.
John: I remember the first time I heard ADD, I was in a psychologist's office, a psychiatrist's office, actually.
John: And he said...
John: I want you to sit in front of this computer and play this game.
John: And I sat in front of a computer and I played this game where things flashed at me and I was supposed to choose this thing or that thing.
John: And then something shot across the screen and I was supposed to choose between two options.
John: And I get to the end of this not very fun game.
John: And he goes, well, here's the problem.
John: You have attention deficit disorder.
John: And I said, what's that?
John: And he said, oh, it's this new diagnosis where people who are struggling to...
John: ...integrate themselves into the world, it turns out that you are not lazy or dumb.
John: It's just that you can't stay focused on things, and there's a medicine for that.
John: And I said, I was old enough at this point, like 17...
John: And I had been going to psychologists for a long time, but I was suspicious of them, and I was suspicious of this diagnosis, as I think a lot of people were at first.
John: ADD, what the hell is that?
John: Attention deficit disorder?
John: What is that?
John: And then attention deficit hyperactivity disorder.
John: And these were things, when we were kids...
John: If you had that, what they did is took you out of class and let you test market some toys in your stupid school.
John: You know what I mean?
Merlin: Here's your prescription.
Merlin: Go play with Stretch Armstrong.
John: Yeah.
John: Or like, he's a spirited little kid or whatever it was.
John: But all of a sudden, it had become a pathology.
John: And now, of course, we live in a world where...
John: I mean, I don't spend a lot of time in grade schools yet, but I imagine when you're in grade schools now, the number of kids that have attention deficit hyperactivity disorders or something on that spectrum, it's probably 40% of the kids in the school.
John: And when you combine food allergies, Asperger's,
John: uh all the other ways in which we're now um you get dyslexia yeah well i mean dyslexia clearly is a is that's a known thing it's a long time thing and it's like yeah right here's the kid writes his letters backwards but but there are a lot of parents that are self-diagnosing their kids as asbergian and a lot of parents that are still like in denial about it but their next door neighbors are diagnosing their kids as asbergian
Merlin: That's the irony.
Merlin: I mean, I've got a couple of kids in my life with legitimate, like you can tell, plus the doctor said, Asperger's.
Merlin: And everybody but their parents was ready to cop to that.
John: And the parents were the last.
Merlin: Well, yeah.
Merlin: I mean, if your kid's got a thing, you don't want them to be labeled.
John: You know what I mean?
John: Well, right.
John: Except that, I mean, in Park Slope right now, if your kid doesn't have a thing.
Merlin: They gotta go to a special, special school.
John: He's the outlier.
John: And I mean, you remember when we were, and this is true all the way through high school for us, there were kids that were separated out and put in special classes.
John: There was one special class.
John: There was one special class and everybody went there, including probably now that I think about it, kids who were mentally functioning at a high level, but they just had a palsy or something.
Merlin: Oh, it was ridiculous.
Merlin: And the same thing happened with my dad with dyslexia and poor vision.
Merlin: And it happens with a lot of people.
Merlin: And you get this one place that basically becomes like a pedagogical holding cell.
Merlin: And so people with profound personality problems, legitimate depression, serious health problems, or maybe they just read too fast.
Merlin: Yeah, right.
Merlin: Read too fast.
Merlin: Right.
John: Well, but I guess getting back to your point, which is that it's very, like, we were raised, certainly I was raised, in an environment where my initial response to this, like, proliferation of...
John: human problems was suspicion that people were making up these diagnoses, that chronic fatigue syndrome and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder were on the same spectrum, which was the spectrum of people making shit up about themselves to excuse their shoddy performance.
John: And as time goes on, you accept that these things are real and
John: You think back to our childhood when none of these things existed and everybody had to just cope.
John: If these problems existed 40 years ago, your solution was cope or go to the special class where you have to wear a helmet.
Merlin: Absolutely.
Merlin: And I mean in terms of like today, so many kids go to private school.
Merlin: I mean, and again, you can't compare.
Merlin: There's so many different variables that have changed in the last 40 years.
Merlin: But the only kids I knew who went to private school went to private school because it was a Catholic school.
Merlin: I don't know anybody who went to the Huntington Academy or something like that.
John: Yeah, they went to private school and got a finger in the pooper.
Merlin: Sure.
Merlin: And free bread.
Merlin: But, you know, so I've become more sensitive.
Merlin: But you know what?
Merlin: Gosh, there's a million threads here.
Merlin: It's supposed to – again, we've made it through the age of reason.
Merlin: We don't believe that there's a troll in your head, tiny troll causing your headache and stuff like that.
Merlin: Actually, I used to talk about it.
Merlin: John, are you an animist?
John: I used to say to my dad, he would say stuff, you know, he'd be like, oh, it's great that you're a musician.
John: It's your genes.
John: Your genes are responsible for you being a good musician.
John: And I would say, screw off!
John: That's that Welsh troll in your head.
John: There's a Welsh troll that lives in your brain.
John: Oh, that troll is so fucking Welsh, it's not even funny.
John: He comes up with shitty things to say.
Merlin: He's drinking the rubbing alcohol in your brain's bathroom.
John: Takes the credit away from me, that Welsh troll in your brain.
John: And he was like, I don't have a Welsh troll.
John: And we would argue about the Welsh troll that lived inside us.
Merlin: You know exactly who would say there's no Welsh troll is the guy who has a Welsh troll.
Merlin: Yeah, yeah.
Merlin: His Welsh troll is what's saying there's no Welsh troll.
Merlin: I'm not in denial.
Merlin: I'm not a Welsh troll.
Merlin: You're a Welsh troll.
Merlin: I'm sensitive to that.
Merlin: Well, I got a couple things here.
Merlin: Oh, yeah, irritable bowel syndrome.
Merlin: That's another thing.
Merlin: You know, I've got intestinal issues, but I do not have IBS.
Merlin: And in some ways, I'm grateful.
John: You don't have Crohn's disease.
Merlin: I got the other one.
Merlin: Oh, right.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: But we can talk about that if you want.
Merlin: But IBS is bad news.
Merlin: Do I?
Merlin: Do I?
Merlin: You stayed there when I'm having a tough time.
John: Yeah, I know.
John: But unlike a lot of people, you don't keep chopsticks on the back of the toilet to go through your... Oh, you mean in terms of just kind of sifting through, doing a little bit of panning?
John: Yeah, a little panning.
John: A little panning for corn.
Merlin: I keep some poultry shears and a very fine mesh and, of course, some index cards.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: Yeah, I've got an old toilet.
Merlin: Yeah, so anyway, IBS is a bummer because you get this weird – it isn't like IBS.
Merlin: Sometimes you get diarrhea and sometimes, but a lot of the times you're constipated.
Merlin: But mostly you're kind of in pain.
Merlin: Like Beth Thornton, that singer, that Beth Thornton lady had it and it really screwed her up.
Merlin: That's one of those though where you go in like with a migraine.
Merlin: I don't think, unless you do one of those made-up phony baloney fMRI kind of things, I don't think you can go in and say, oh, yeah, you have migraines.
Merlin: I think it's all based on symptoms.
Merlin: There aren't that many – you know, they've got signs and symptoms.
Merlin: Symptoms are what you tell the doctor.
Merlin: He's got them bad, and I think he's good and, like, drugged up on stuff that he doesn't like taking to keep them even manageable, and even then they're not super manageable.
John: My mom gets them.
John: How often?
John: Well, that's the thing.
Merlin: I've had like four ever, but they were crippling.
John: She has that pain threshold thing.
John: Oh, your mom and the pain.
John: Where when she says like...
John: There's a headache coming and I need to close the blinds and go upstairs.
John: Move over, Gibson.
John: It's so disconcerting because she is so unaffected by pain in most situations that it's like, oh no, what is this madness?
Merlin: I was wondering about that when you said that you got them because – you know how you said how God gives you the beard that you deserve?
Merlin: I wonder – pain is one of those things that's so hard to quantify because it is – you're the only one who's feeling the pain and certainly based on history, they can say that if you've got a gunshot wound to the abdomen, there's a pretty good chance you're going to call that a 7, 8, 9 or maybe 10.
Merlin: Yeah.
John: Yeah, that's traditionally one of the pain centers.
Merlin: That's one of the pain ones.
Merlin: That's the pancreatic cancer of gunshot wounds.
John: Gunshot to the belly.
Merlin: Yeah, right.
Merlin: That's pretty bad news.
Merlin: But with your mom, see, that's the thing.
Merlin: When you say that God gives people the beard that they deserve, I wonder if you get the migraine that... I mean, I bet you a migraine sucks for everybody.
Merlin: I bet there's not that many people that get a migraine that just go, I can just deal with this.
Merlin: Yeah, you don't brush it off.
Merlin: Yeah.
John: Yeah, and yet it doesn't... She starts seeing the halos of light and the flashing light.
Merlin: Yep, that's the classic.
John: And she's like, I'm out of here.
John: And it doesn't even hurt yet.
Merlin: She's just like... I get delirious and I throw up and I want to die.
Merlin: I have never had a migraine.
Merlin: I'm pretty fortunate.
Merlin: And for a lot of people, there's the triggers, right?
Merlin: You could have red wine or chocolate or there's, I guess, all kinds of things.
Merlin: And if you're very sensitive, don't listen to this because even listening to this could probably give you a migraine.
Merlin: But all those things, they also... Because you feel like you're monkey balls, right?
Merlin: Like all of a sudden you got this thing nobody can see.
Merlin: But let me say one more thing about the ADD because if you got two little kids, let's say you're having a play date.
Merlin: Another kid comes over, and you know the classic.
Merlin: You must have faced this in your own home.
Merlin: Actually, I'd love to hear how your mom handled this.
Merlin: There's one large piece of cake left, and there's two kids.
Merlin: And so what do you do?
John: My mom throws the cake in the yard.
Merlin: That's my cake.
John: That's not your cake.
John: My mom says, no cake for anybody, ever.
Merlin: She keeps it on the counter in some Tupperware, and it's just there.
Merlin: And then finally you ask, out the window.
John: My mom used to buy grape juice for my sister.
John: It was a special treat that she would give my sister a glass of grape juice.
John: It's expensive.
John: She was insane about grape juice, and it was very expensive in the 70s.
Merlin: Our weekly food budget was like... Of the juices, it was one of the more costly.
John: Yeah, and we had like $4.35 to feed the three of us for a week.
John: She would buy grape juice, and she would apportion it out in glasses to Susan.
John: I didn't really care about grape juice, but this grape juice was for Susan, and she gave it to Susan so sparingly that the bottle of grape juice routinely turned to wine frequently.
John: It turned to cooking vinegar in the fridge before Susan was able to have it.
John: Oh, that's miserable.
John: I know.
John: Yeah, and then it sat in there.
John: Every time you opened the fridge, like, there's the grape juice.
Merlin: But in more conventional homes, when you have a large slice of cake and two kids, the classic way to do this, prisoner's dilemma kind of thing, right?
Merlin: Or, I don't know, game theory, I guess.
Merlin: One of you cuts...
Merlin: And the other chooses.
Merlin: And the other chooses.
Merlin: And that ensures that one person is going to make the most even cut possible.
Merlin: Right.
Merlin: And I think that that is an interesting principle in many things.
Merlin: Another example, a place that I used to work, we did environmental consulting.
Merlin: But one thing that gave us credibility was that we did environmental assessment but not environmental remediation.
Merlin: Because we're like, why would you go out and hire the same person to tell you what your problem is and then how much it would cost for them to fix it?
John: Oh, you just described the entire Chinese economy.
Merlin: And your father and the mechanic.
John: Well, yeah.
Merlin: There's a certain elegance to it.
Merlin: Half of the graft in America.
Merlin: But this is, again, this is a problem with the public schools now.
Merlin: And I've had several, a handful of friends with kids in schools.
Merlin: And it's just very, in a class with 50 kids where your kid cannot take up more than 2% of the time.
Merlin: Is that what that would be?
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: If you've got a kid who, for whatever reason, takes up 4% or 8% of the time, you pull them aside, you bring the parent in, and you say, this is your problem.
Merlin: This is not our problem.
Merlin: Our problem is we have no money in a class full of 50 kids.
Merlin: So you need to figure out how this kid goes back to 2% or less.
John: Oh, I wish they had used that metric when I was a kid because I wanted to be taking up 0% of the teacher's time.
Merlin: just being left alone to sit at my desk and draw army men or look at look at look at an encyclopedia look at the encyclopedia or stare at a spot on the wall and they kept trying to engage me i you keep calling on me i if i could just be if i could just go to that shelf with the uh with the world books and just sit there i would have done that all day long yeah i will listen i'll listen in on your class on your silly ass class and
John: And I'll be over here with these books.
John: And if you are addressing something I don't already know, I'll look it up in these books.
John: How's that sound?
Merlin: And here's the thing.
Merlin: If, for example, I can't find H through I because someone has not put it back in the proper place –
Merlin: I will raise my hand and ask where the location of H through I is.
Merlin: And apart from that, we don't really need to talk here.
Merlin: Yeah, exactly.
Merlin: But, you know, this has become a cliche, but I think it's true.
Merlin: At least in one instance I know of, it's very true where they said, look, to get your kid back to the nth percent that he or she needs to be, you need to take care of this.
John: So essentially they're saying...
Merlin: Well, I mean, I think that – let's look at it this way.
Merlin: A lot of households, if you've got two parents in the household, which is increasingly not so common, you know everybody is working.
Merlin: Everybody is busy.
Merlin: Everybody – there's not that much you can – there's not that flexibility, much flexibility for anybody.
Merlin: And so, I mean, I think that the response – I cannot prove this yet because luckily our kid is not in a public school yet.
Merlin: But, you know –
Merlin: that apparently happens when you, especially when you get to fifth, sixth, seventh, eighth grade, they're going to say, look, here's your options.
Merlin: Focalin or Adderall.
Merlin: Are there any questions?
John: Well, you know, and that's why we need to, we need to institute that third option, which is building trail.
John: Like you give, you give your kids some of this, uh, this like personality dulling medic medication or get them out in the bright sunshine, fresh air, wear them out.
Um,
Merlin: I see it every day.
Merlin: I see it every day with our kid that the wearing out is good.
John: I mean, the ultimate thing about this undiagnosable, unseeable malady epidemic that's happening, I think, in America, like for me, it comes home to roost because I suffer from depression.
John: I'm outing myself if it wasn't already abundantly clear.
Yeah.
John: And it is very hard for me to accept that.
John: for myself like it is very hard for me to acknowledge it as not being a personality flaw you know like a weakness yeah so I look at you know I look at the course of a typical day or I look at the arc of nine months of my life and I go hmm the only thing that can account for the way for the choices I've been making is that I'm suffering from depression I'm clearly suffering and everywhere I go every time I talk to a doctor and I say here are my problems doctor
John: And I run down my problems.
John: They're like, well, you have severe depression.
John: I go, yeah, yeah, I know.
John: But come on, help me out here with something.
Merlin: Is there something physically difficult that I can do or something that I could resist doing for a few months that might improve this?
John: I'm pretty good at that.
John: I mean, anybody could tell that.
John: Give me something to work with here.
John: And, you know, and I was like, for a while there, I was thinking, listen, I'm a drug addict.
John: But, I mean, Adderall's not a drug.
John: It's like an attention focuser.
John: And people were writing me, I said this on the internet a couple of times, people were writing me like, Adderall is a drug.
John: It's totally a drug.
Merlin: Don't kid yourself.
Merlin: I miss it.
Merlin: I miss it if I don't take it.
John: Yeah.
Merlin: But I do feel different.
Merlin: How long have you been, I don't know, like, okay, talk about that.
Merlin: How long have you been okay talking about that?
Merlin: About being depressed?
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: I mean, you mentioned it on Twitter like last year.
John: Well, the thing about depression is that I think when I was a kid, when I was a... What?
John: Like early teens?
John: Being diagnosed with depression...
John: I didn't feel like it had any stigma at all.
John: I felt like it was a fairly glamorous diagnosis because depression was a... It seemed exotic.
John: It seemed like a German disease.
John: It seemed like something that if you had depression, you would ultimately...
John: You would ultimately be wearing a black suit, lounging on a chaise, and someone would be painting you in oils.
John: It's certainly an interesting thing to have.
John: You know?
John: And particularly as a 10-year-old, to have somebody say, like, well, it seems like you have depression...
John: I was like, that's a very adult-sounding thing to have.
John: And it feels very continental.
John: And I'll accept that.
John: So I never felt that depression was a thing.
John: It was only later when people started coming out as depressed and being...
John: And talking about the stigma that they felt, it was only later that it even occurred to me that there was stigma around it because depression seemed, I guess to me, like the only reasonable response to an insane world.
John: Why would you feel a stigma?
John: But...
John: And so whatever reticence I had to talk about it was entirely a reticence based on I just don't like to reveal things about myself to strangers.
John: Right.
John: You know, like I don't mention my daughter's name or whatever.
John: Same thing.
John: Like I don't talk about my problems because ultimately if you say something on the internet, you get a bunch of concerned –
John: like DMs from your friends going, is everything okay?
John: Are you okay?
John: And it's like, yeah, I mentioned, I mentioned the depression that I have, that I have had for 17 years.
John: It's not like a, it's not like I'm peaking.
John: I'm not standing on a bridge.
John: Um,
John: But as time goes on, I guess why I'm talking about it more is that I always thought as you got older that depression was a thing that you had when you were in your teens or early 20s and when you were very – your peak dramatic years, when you're feeling very dramatic.
John: And it continued into my 30s because –
John: Every aspect of my youth continued into my 30s.
John: I was still a teenager at 37 years old.
John: But now that I'm in my 40s and it is not waning, if anything, it is waxing.
John: it started to be a thing like, okay, you know what?
John: I'm going to just start talking about this more because it's actually a feature on my landscape.
John: It's a thing that every morning I wake up and even if there are no owls in my room, there is always this bugbear.
John: And I go, ugh, you again?
John: And a lot of the stuff that you and I talk about
John: orbits around this issue, that feeling of dissatisfaction.
John: I mean, the feeling of everything that you've accomplished adds up to bupkis.
John: You know, there's no... There's no...
Merlin: reasonable way i could think that and that's what that that's because depression is unreasonable it's completely unreasonable and and the thing that has caused me to misunderstand it and really really eat the booger on how i dealt with somebody important in my life who had depression oh i know was that i was of the okay that's long enough it's time to buck up
Merlin: school and and you know uh i think you tell me if this is incorrect in your experience but my understanding is that the most insidious thing about depression is not that you're a little sad it's not that you're really really sad it's not even that you sometimes think about harming yourself like that's actually stuff that a lot of people feel like a fair amount of the time it's just that no no matter what day it is it it feels completely impossible to imagine a world where it could be better
Merlin: For a lot of people, the worst part of it, and the part that I think this sounds like I'm already saying that, but I think that doesn't really sink in for people who don't have depression, is that it is fairly constant.
Merlin: It does sometimes get a lot worse.
Merlin: And the last thing in the world that you could ever imagine is having it get better.
John: Yeah, it doesn't abate, but it also attaches itself to your normal sense of reason.
John: Like how you see and decide?
John: Yeah, it's not like some kind of crazy republicanism where all of a sudden you think the president is a Muslim and it's not like madness.
Right.
John: I heard he went to college at a Burger King.
John: It is a thing where you make normal assessments in a way that seems absolutely rational, but your conclusion is that you really fucked it up.
John: You are a real turd in this situation.
John: I'll start making a pot of macaroni and cheese and
John: And there'll be three or four opportunities in the course of waiting for the water to boil and adding the powdered cheese packet and eating the macaroni and cheese where I feel like this macaroni and cheese is a metaphor for how I am not thriving.
John: And so the macaroni and cheese tastes like it turns to ashes, you know, like it robs you of the potential to enjoy even the simple things because you are finding you're finding like all the.
John: All the evidence you need in the simple things that you do for why you are.
Merlin: a flop so things around you that on an intellectual level you may not think have anything to do with it start to become emblematic of like what bad personness or failure or everything becomes evidence evidence is that fair to say yeah and you're using your capacity to
John: It is a capacity that I prize in myself to look at the evidence, to walk out the door and look at the evidence and make decisions based on what I see and what I know.
John: And that is this prized faculty that I use everywhere I go.
John: Like, aha, I see how this is going to go.
John: This guy over here is about to throw his milkshake and, aha, he did!
John: I saw it!
John: But when you turn that faculty...
John: and all the evidence points to that you are a drag, that's when, you know, that faculty is normally the thing I lean on.
John: So when it returns this evidence to me that I am, you know, that everything I've ever made belongs on the dustbin,
John: It's very hard for me to go, well, in that instance, your faculty for seeing is flawed or broken.
John: Because I use it all the time.
John: I trust my faculty for seeing.
Merlin: That is so super complicated because I'm just – I'm processing what you're saying here.
Merlin: But it's – I mean you're a very rational guy in a lot of ways.
Merlin: You're certainly monkey balls in many ways.
Merlin: But no, you're a guy who really thrives on saying no.
Merlin: Like what is the thing that's really here?
Merlin: What is the essential nature of this conversation that we're having?
Merlin: What is the essential nature of this deal that you're trying to offer me and keep changing the topic about?
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: It seems to me that like you have the scars to show for being somebody who was surrounded by things that dulled the influence of the outside world to where you now seriously seem to really thrive on having a more direct experience of what the fuck is really happening.
Merlin: And that you, if there's anything you trust about yourself, it is your ability to know that you're always being as honest as a human can be about what the fuck's really happening here.
Merlin: And when you turn that on yourself... In the past, that's become something... And you certainly have every reason to be proud of that because you went through a lot of shit to get to where that's your MO.
John: And is that close?
John: Well, and so the problem is that when somebody says to me, if you take this serotonin reuptake inhibitor, it's going to make you not feel that way anymore.
John: I go, I am suspicious because it doesn't feel, the depression doesn't feel alien.
John: That is what is insidious about it.
John: It does not feel, it certainly feels like a handicap, but it doesn't feel like a stranger.
Merlin: It doesn't feel external?
John: No, not at all.
John: Because what happens is I look around the room and I go, well, come on.
John: I mean, look at that.
John: Look at that poster on the wall that commemorates that great show that you played.
John: That should be a source of uncomplicated pleasure for you.
John: You have a beautiful poster that commemorates this wonderful show that you remember fondly.
John: How can you find a downside to that?
John: And then the voice doesn't even need prompting.
John: It says, well, only someone with a low self-esteem would need a poster to remind him that he was...
John: that he had good things in his life.
Merlin: And how did you get this number?
John: Yeah, only a person, you know, and then look around the room like, oh, everything in this room is just some kind of sham, reflective surface broadcasting your own
John: life back to you in these discreet chunks to try and make yourself feel better about what a shit job you've done.
John: And, you know, there's nothing, there is no small thing that cannot be robbed of all its joy.
John: By this friend who sits next to me in the cockpit and whispers in my ear and says, oh yeah, no.
John: I mean, everything that you love is a thing that you love because you are a sham.
John: And you just, you know, and talking about it to people, you know, I remember the friend that you referenced earlier, you know, this person that was lovely and you loved and she struggled in the same way.
John: And, you know, I have seen that happen with people who struggled with depressions more severe than mine who are no longer on this earth.
John: And, you know, I feel lucky that I never...
John: the idea of harming myself has never occurred to me because I feel like when it's time for me to go, I'm going to take as many motherfuckers out with me as I possibly can.
John: There's going to be, I mean, if there isn't a mushroom cloud, at least to mark my passage from this world, I really will have failed.
John: But, but at the same time, like this living in a kind of low level gray, um,
John: is just no way to be.
John: It's just no way to be.
John: And unfortunately, I can't get over the hump of thinking that a serotonin reuptake inhibitor or crosstops or exercise or more blowjobs or whatever it is that I get prescribed by people.
John: And I know talking about this, I'm going to get a thousand tweets from people who are like, all you need to do is blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
John: And let me just, I hate to break the fourth wall, but please don't send me your cures.
John: thoughtful people for the love of christ uh but you know i mean as soon as you start talking about it there are people that want to help help cure you and that is the problem the the very principle of of of trying to seek a cure is um like i have a million reasons why
John: that isn't going to work.
Merlin: And the truth is, it's very rarely as simple as bada-ba-da-ba.
Merlin: Bada-ba-da-ba is what somebody reports because that eventually worked.
Merlin: And thank God and God bless them.
Merlin: But a lot of my friends who've gotten treatment for depression, it was a pretty fucking rough go.
Merlin: And sometimes it got worse.
Merlin: And sometimes they couldn't get a boner.
Merlin: And sometimes it took two years.
Merlin: I'm not trying to say don't look for help, but I'm also saying don't pretend that it's as simple as drink some green tea and walk in the woods.
John: You're saying that I'm looking into a no boner future.
Merlin: I think remember when the boner will stare back at you from the boner abyss.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: Well, you know, I don't have anything like depression as far as I know.
John: If I had your poop problems, I'd be even more depressed.
Merlin: Well, you know, you got to just be careful about the onions.
Merlin: And I know how hard that would be for you.
Merlin: So I think really we have an O'Henry situation here.
Merlin: You can have my onions.
Merlin: I'll take your – My hair combed.
Merlin: I'll take your occasional lack of mania.
Merlin: But I don't know.
Merlin: There's just something that when I learned that, that really resonated with me because I really got it.
Merlin: I got it that that's the capital D part of depression is that it doesn't feel like it's a veil that can be lifted.
Merlin: And as you say, it isn't a matter of flicking this bugbear off your shoulder or saying, Satan, I rebuke thee.
Merlin: It's a good deal more complicated.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: Do you renounce Satan?
Merlin: Michael Ritzy.
Merlin: But you know, another way to put this, and as you know, I'm not a depression psychiatrist, but if you saw somebody walking around with bronchitis, you wouldn't just tell them to buck up.
Merlin: You would have to understand that to get rid of that bronchitis, there's certain things.
Merlin: To really get rid of bronchitis, you've got to take some antibiotics and stuff.
Merlin: Well, sure.
Merlin: For that matter, if you saw somebody who was missing a hand and you said, well, just try harder to get handy.
John: But here's the trick is that you have mania.
John: I have depression.
Merlin: I have a little mania.
Merlin: I don't have a lot of mania.
John: I got other problems, but I don't have that much... But these things are also talents.
John: Like, Kierkegaard had mania and depression...
John: And his name rings out, you know, for 50,000 years of human history, mania and depression were things that were useful talents, you know, that made people become monks or philosophers or scientists or conquerors, you know.
John: These are not just...
John: They are a very complex sort of rainbow of qualities.
John: And our fixation now... And part of why my depression is so hobbling is that I live in a world...
John: where I have the resources and I have the inclination to further isolate myself from people and to live in an ivory tower.
John: And at any time prior in human history, unless I was a very, very rich person, I wouldn't have been able to do that.
John: And so I would have been out in the streets and my depression would have been mitigated somewhat by just having to
John: go down to the cart, to the onion cart, and buy an onion every day if I wanted an onion.
John: And your mania would be, likewise, more assimilated into...
John: the culture and particularly given that the life expectancy of people was 37 years by this point we would already be dead and uh and our problems would you know would be uh whatever whatever our personality was they would just remember us in our village and they'd be like yeah he was amazing you see that church spire
John: He once climbed up and ranted about how the president was a Muslim for a couple of days before he got tired and fell into the onion cart.
John: So that's the flip side is that it is in this family of modern diagnoses of mental pathology that
John: Some of which, I mean, I don't see what the upside to chronic fatigue syndrome is, except that it used to be called, what, plurzy?
John: I mean, it was a thing that very aristocratic women fell victim to, where they had to lay on a soft... On their fainting couch?
John: On their fainting couch with their...
John: You know, they're ether-soaked... Opera glasses.
John: Yeah, they're ether-soaked opera glasses.
John: Exactly.
John: Finally, I can see clearly.
John: So, looking back through history, like all of these, if these modern diagnoses have analogs in the past, a lot of them were either considered talents, including bordering on, like, mystical talents...
John: Or they were, you know, they were integrated into our culture as a, like, oh, she's too delicate for modern life and we need to bring her, like, lukewarm tea.
John: And now we are, you know, we're shooting this same person full of hormones or, I don't know, or amphetamines most of the time.
John: Mm-hmm.
John: So...
John: It all falls into this family of psychopharmacology that, very much like the internet, I feel like still is in the bicycle engine stage.
John: of aviation where the wings are made of tissue paper and somebody has a one and a half horsepower single piston engine and they're flying!
John: We can fly!
John: We can affect the brain now!
Merlin: Let's do this!
Merlin: It's all still like – it's amazing how much stuff in medicine in general and in psychopharmacology in particular is still just a little bit northeast of medieval.
Merlin: I mean how in some ways like pain medicine is so simple.
Merlin: The way that pain medicine works is just ridiculously simple.
Merlin: It's not doing something super sophisticated.
Merlin: It's blocking the receptors.
John: Right.
John: It doesn't go to the broken hand.
John: It goes to the brain.
John: Right.
Merlin: Right, and like when my shrink, you know, and who I always, I hate to misquote because he's a very exacting man, but he can sit there and show me like, oh, these two hands represent the two sides of this, you know, and these drugs work together and does this and that, and it's all completely cogent.
Merlin: But the part that I really understand is that if my brain does not make enough of this juice that lets me be happy in life, I get distracted.
Merlin: Right.
Merlin: And some people get too much of that juice.
John: Too much juice.
John: I just described everybody I went to high school with.
John: Too much juice.
John: Too much of the one kind of juice, not enough of the other kind of juice.
John: And it all presupposes that there is a correct degree of humanness, you know, that there is an ideal amount, an ideal balance to any mind that translates across all minds.
John: So what we're seeking is this balance, this broken, this healing of brokenness.
John: Where, I mean, I honestly cannot, in some ways, separate my depression from my personality.
John: And this is the problem with schizophrenics who take medicine and they're like, but I don't feel fun anymore.
John: I mean, admittedly, I was living...
John: under the Embarcadero, but God, I was seeing some colors.
John: Right.
John: And I don't want to take this medicine because it makes me feel dull.
John: And, you know, and they, they give up their job and apartment and wife and they go back to living under the bridge because, because they're, they feel like they're, like their mind isn't theirs.
John: And, uh, and for me, like, I, I'm not sure what amount of healing I'm seeking.
Right.
Merlin: Have you ever wanted to be quote-unquote normal in the first place?
Merlin: Well, I never assumed it was an option.
Merlin: Right.
Merlin: This is one of the many articles I didn't finish reading this week was about the diagnosis of autism in different societies and how it's such a tricky thing because there are – and again, I haven't finished this article yet.
Merlin: But it grabbed me because part of the notion is that a lot of what we consider autism today –
Merlin: you know there are these tests like do you make eye contact with people can you follow this conversation and you know there are a lot of cultures where it would be very disrespectful for somebody for like a kid to look an elder in the eye while they're talking to them you might look at their face but you wouldn't look them in the eye interesting there's you know i mean this again you could do that in any variety of decades this is that's probably this is a long walk off a short pier but you know it's i mean i think the the thing that's
Merlin: I hope this doesn't sound too homespun, but I think it's just natural to want to not feel like you're on the edge.
Merlin: It isn't even to say that anybody necessarily craves like, oh, I want to be like other people.
Merlin: You just want to not feel like fucked up.
Merlin: It's just not fun to wake up every day and feel off balance before you even get out of bed.
Merlin: It's really depressing.
John: Yeah, it is depressing, although that was exactly the feeling I sought from the ages of 16 to 30.
John: Like, I wanted to feel on the edge all the time.
John: That was how life felt meaningful and real to me.
John: Mm-hmm.
John: Who are engaging life in a very different way than I did when I was that age.
John: I did this video shoot down in L.A.
John: a month or two ago.
John: And one of the camera operators on the shoot was like 21.
John: And very competent person.
John: camera operator and I got chatting with him and said, you know, how did you get here?
John: And he's like, well, you know, when I graduated from high school, I really wanted to make movies.
John: So they were filming an episode of Portlandia in my town.
John: I was 16 and I just went over and hung around until they gave me a job to do running to get coffee.
John: And then pretty soon I was assisting the camera person.
John: And then I was running one of the cameras.
John: And, you know, now I live in Hollywood and I'm 21.
Merlin: That's unbelievable.
Merlin: I hate that person.
John: It's unbelievable.
John: But, of course, there are so many examples of people that at 16, 17 years old, they're like, I want to be a rock star.
John: I want to be in Hollywood or I want to be a writer.
John: I want to be in politics or whatever.
John: And they had no doubt about that choice.
John: They just went and did it.
John: And then at a young age, they're very accomplished, and they're on a path, and they're not sitting there saying, but what if I should have gone to medical school?
John: What if I should have been an astronaut?
John: They're like, I'm doing what I love to do, and this is what I wanted to do, and here I go, off I go.
John: And I can't help but contrast myself against them when I was that age, 21 years old.
John: I was...
John: you know, sitting somewhere on a bar stool, imagining that I could and should be doing everything, and didn't know where to begin doing everything, wasn't exactly sure, like, how you got a degree in doing everything, and was, I mean...
John: Not just was it inconceivable that I would go down to a film shoot and stand around saying, hey, can I lend a hand until somebody was like, yeah, hey, kid, come over here and hold this.
John: Not only was it inconceivable that that would happen, but to my mind at the time, what a waste.
John: Now you're just running coffee for some guy.
Merlin: In a half second of repose, you might go, wait a minute, I'm supposed to be a senator.
Merlin: I'm not in the senator line.
John: Those people are certainly a model of
John: But if I compare myself to somebody like that, I cannot win.
John: I cannot think, like, that is normal, and I need to fix what's broken about me to get closer to that.
John: Because I don't resemble it in the least bit.
John: And I admire those kids.
John: I love to sit and talk to them in conversation.
John: But comparing my own attributes to theirs would be like comparing my looks to theirs.
John: There's just nothing I can do to be that successful, really.
John: To be that single-minded and to be that sort of...
John: on a course and happy with the results.
John: And I don't know, I don't know why, I do not know, if you assume that there's a bell curve of humanity and we are apportioned different traits because there is a clockmaker who has put this universe into motion in order to accomplish some inscrutable goal,
John: I cannot imagine why you would load up a human person with my attributes and set them loose on this world.
John: I do not know what I am contributing or why you would even put so many sort of self-contradictory
John: qualities in one organism and basically set it loose upon itself like here you go here you go animal go get them
John: The animal immediately starts punching itself and saying, you don't even know how to punch.
John: You call that a punch?
John: Like, why would you do that to a thing?
Merlin: Right.
John: But there you have it.
John: It's one of the things I would point to to say, perhaps intelligent design is not actually helpful.
Merlin: of the universe's work.
Merlin: It's the kind of design.
Merlin: But I mean, to have to have that constant, even when it's not that dramatic for effect, the constant leveling of that message in your head can't help but become a distraction from taking a step in any direction.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: Self-doubt must, you know, of some kind must always be looming.
John: And it raises the question, take a step in any direction for why?
John: Yeah.
John: You know, and that's the insidious part.
John: I admire people who build houses for poor people, like Habitat for Humanity.
John: I admire Doctors Without Borders.
John: But I do not feel the pull to help people in that way.
Merlin: Well, there's another – I keep thinking about what you're saying like with the kid doing that gig and something I mentioned last week about if you want somebody to do the right thing rather than trying to tell them to do the right thing or demand, it's useful to create the conditions for the right thing happening.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: And that is something – if you'd said that to me or if I had said that to me 30 years ago, I don't think I would have – I would have understood grammatically like what it meant.
Merlin: But I wouldn't have really gotten what that meant.
Merlin: And that's the difference between that kid who's now 21 and doing that for a living versus any range of people who are going, how did that guy end up there?
Merlin: And, and I, at the risk of sounding really subtle, I think this is actually super duper important because I mean, we all know, and this, this does shade into some stuff I've said in the past about acting like you're an artist and buying a beret and, you know, doing all of the affectations that you've seen other people do to essentially trace the shadows of someone else.
Merlin: And imagine that that's even close to that, what that human being is who,
Merlin: But that's what – now that I'm at the age that I am and know what I know, that's what blows me away about that guy is anybody could go, hey, I want to make – I want to have videos be on MTV back in my day.
Merlin: Or like I have this gut sense that I would be a great prog rock drummer.
Merlin: And on the most fundamental level, you go, well, you ever played drums?
Merlin: And you're like, no, no, no.
Merlin: But I know I'd be really good at it.
Merlin: And it's like, well, the first test would be to go out and see whether you like playing drums.
Merlin: Do you have access to drums?
Merlin: Is that what you would want to do?
Merlin: And you certainly can see where I'm going with this, but it's worth going a little bit.
Merlin: Okay.
Merlin: Well, what if actually you don't really like playing drums?
Merlin: What if you try playing drums for a while and you realize you don't like being in a band?
Merlin: What if you don't like being around people in the music industry?
Merlin: These are all the kinds of things that will never occur to you if you don't try to play drums and get it.
Merlin: But there's another kind – if there's anything in my head I wish I could change about myself from the past that it's – I don't want to say it's too late now because it is still useful to me.
Merlin: It's that idea of like –
Merlin: Rather than trying to see a result of something and emulate that, I really admire the people who instantly understand a process over the product.
Merlin: And in the case of that guy, there's something about – in that case, maybe he just got lucky.
Merlin: But he understood there was a big difference between arguing with his friends at Starbucks about who would be a better director versus just showing up and starting to do something.
Merlin: Now, maybe he got lucky.
Merlin: Maybe there's some other things he tried and it didn't work out.
Merlin: But that's like being able to fly, as far as I'm concerned.
Merlin: To be 21 years old, or even in that case 19 years old, and show up somewhere and not seem like a total dingus, and be able to figure out what this job needs, what these people want, and can I adapt myself to it?
John: A big part of it is he was able to show up at that video shoot at age 16 or 17 and not seem like a total dingus.
John: And that is a thing, perhaps, that is a talent perhaps I lack.
Merlin: Whereas I would go in wearing joppers, carrying a folding chair with a riding crop, maybe shave my head and have a monocle.
John: Folding chair that says Merlin on the back.
Merlin: director where do i set this chair up because i gotta tell you all along the way not to change the topic but like all along the way at the things i've tried to nominally succeed at that i didn't even fucking understand you know to begin with um i've always been put off by how this wasn't how i thought it was going to be so yeah a lot of times honestly it was organized music things because i was never a good team player it helps to be a good team player before you do anything on a team or it helps to be open to the
Merlin: So, you know, I think to be on the team.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: And excited to set aside whatever your notion of how this should go is that you're not constantly raising your hand and saying, shouldn't we be saying Roger Wilco now, you know, or whatever your idea is from things you've seen in movies and played over in your head again and again.
John: When I look at the kids that I started out with in high school and college, the vast majority of them knew what they wanted to... I think we would have said knew what they wanted to be rather than knew what they wanted to do.
John: They knew what they wanted to be.
John: At 15 years old, a whole big group of my friends in high school decided they were going to medical school.
John: And I think it's largely because there was...
John: one good biology teacher at East High School in Anchorage that I did not have.
John: I did not take his class.
John: But he was an inspiring teacher such that
John: freshman year in high school, I'm sure there were a couple of these people who were like, I think I want to be a doctor.
John: But by junior year, a whole lot of kids had decided to go to medical school.
John: And when I think about those kids now, they are my age, you know, a lot of them now 45 years old, and they are doctors and have been doctors for
John: Basically, since they were 15 years old, you know, they've been on that path.
John: I remember I was living in a fraternity house at Cornell for a summer.
John: And one of the guys who was living in the fraternity with me over the summer was he was going to join the Navy to be a fighter pilot.
John: And at the time, I guess I was 20, 21, something like that.
John: He was that age.
John: And he was graduating that summer from Cornell and on his way to flight training school for the Navy.
John: He had enlisted in the Navy already.
John: Well, when I think about that guy, which I do periodically, if he succeeded in getting his wings...
John: He was a fighter pilot in the Navy for 20... He's now entering his 23rd year as a Navy pilot.
John: And he knew to make that decision, or he made that decision and stuck with it.
John: I extrapolate, but I assume that this guy is now a full captain in the Navy and retired from flying jets and either retired from the Navy or is running a battle group somewhere.
John: And I contrast those life choices, those life arcs, against my own, which has mostly consisted of filling up paper bags with stuff from thrift stores and then arranging it in piles.
Merlin: You make it sound so unglamorous.
John: Yeah.
John: Arranging it in piles.
John: Periodically losing the thread of which pile of hats belongs in what bag.
John: And then it's 25 years later.
John: Where's my gold watch?
John: And I'm thinking, where's my gold watch?
John: And I go, I do have an awful lot of cool hats.
John: You know, that is something nobody can take away from me.
Merlin: I'm not even going to try to buck you up because I know there's no point to it, but so many people would love to be you.
Merlin: Isn't that sad?
John: I have no idea how fat I am.
Merlin: Really?
John: Yeah, when I take off all the corsets, I just look like Veruca Salt.
Merlin: I want my own Oompa Loompa now!
Merlin: Oh, my God.
Merlin: Oh.
Merlin: Yeah, I do not like comparing myself to other people.
Merlin: It's terrible.
Merlin: It's terrible.
Merlin: And I just don't find it useful.
Merlin: I mean, I guess I still kind of do it.
Merlin: Maybe I'm just scared to do it, but it's just so... It feels so unproductive to me, and it doesn't... It's not even that it makes me feel bad or good.
Merlin: It just, you know, it just...
Merlin: I just don't know.
Merlin: I don't know what I would do based on that particular, like identifying the Delta between these two things will help me do what better or do what differently.
Merlin: Now I know where we have slightly different minds about these things probably, but like for me, I just, I, when I, I, all I know, let me put it this way.
Merlin: When I watch other people doing that, like all the time, I just, it just makes me like almost seethe.
Merlin: I'm like, what are you doing?
Merlin: Like, tell me how this turns out great.
Merlin: How about you spend less time comparing yourself to other people and like more time just doing a thing?
John: Yeah, it's very unattractive.
Merlin: I don't feel like you really do that.
John: Do you really do that?
John: I don't.
John: It is more an emblem of the darkness that settles on me.
John: You know, when I first read the book No Country for Old Men,
John: I was in some ways furious because I have been daydreaming about stumbling on a drug deal gone wrong and, and sifting, you know, like walking through what has clearly been a, a, a showdown shootout and finding like a truck full of drugs and money and,
John: that was at the center of this pitched battle.
John: And then, like, pushing the body that is in the driver's seat off into the dirt.
John: In your mind, you've already done this a hundred times.
John: I had done it a hundred times before I read this book and was like, someone stole my plot.
Merlin: But... Your plot for easy money falling into your lap was stolen.
John: Someone stole my easy money plot.
John: Like, I'm not a guy that's going to do direct marketing, but I am definitely a guy that if he sees brake lights up a dark road and hears gunshots...
John: he is headed that way.
John: I am headed that way through the woods, not, not away because this is a scenario that has, that has always, you know, you know how it starts, you know, you know the, the signal that something just went down.
John: Yeah.
John: Somebody tried to, somebody tried to like sneak around the back and, and get the drop on him, but they actually had the money there.
John: It was like a, they had the money.
John: It wasn't going to be a ripoff, but then a overzealous, you know, young lieutenant decided he was going to circle around behind and then somebody, you know,
John: shoots him, and then he shoots back, and then everybody shoots everybody, and then everybody's dead.
John: And the cars are all still idling.
John: Is it probably in a gym bag, the money?
John: Full of money and drugs.
John: Well, you know, depending on how far I want to go with this fantasy, it's a suburban full of gym bags full of money, because they're buying a metric ton of squeak, and the street value of squeak is like minting Krugerrands.
John: But anyway...
John: It caused me, after No Country for Old Men came out, it caused me to turn that light back on myself and reflect on why I have spent so many hours of my life playing out this scenario and what that easy money... I mean, I think everybody... Maybe not everybody, but I think carrying around an easy money fantasy is a big part of being a human being or being an American...
Merlin: Having it happen or being finally able to do a specific thing?
Merlin: Well, that... Like, I can finally buy a carousel.
John: Yeah, I can... Like, I'm going to be relieved of all of my money tension and happiness will alight on my shoulder, like a bluebird of happiness.
Mm-hmm.
John: And as I've played out this scenario, like, okay, now you have this untraceable duffel bag full of pesos.
John: Pure opportunity.
John: And what are you going to do?
John: And the reality is, everything that I would choose to do in that moment, that would be, that I have, having run the scenario, would be something I would actually choose to do, is something I could just choose to do right now.
Yeah.
John: If I had $10 million, what would I do?
John: I'd move to New York.
John: Well, just go move to New York if you want to do that.
John: Well, I'd move to New York and I'd live in a really nice apartment.
John: Well, go move to New York and within a year or two, you'll probably have a pretty nice apartment because that's how it goes.
John: The idea that there are still things in my life I'm waiting to pull the trigger on and the only reason I can't do it is that I have not found a duffel bag of drug money at a crime scene
John: is this like, it's an incredible three-way mirror on myself because all the other things that I, you know, all the more elaborate things
John: choices i would make like i'll move to england and live in a castle well you would be lonely and cold if you did that because you don't have any you know like you the friends that i have in england would come visit my castle a couple of times you know that i'm not going to move to some little village like if a friend of yours found a bunch of money and moved into a castle wouldn't you be like what an asshole
John: Yeah, I would say.
Merlin: He's a castle asshole.
John: That's what you did?
John: You moved into a castle?
Merlin: That's not going to last.
Merlin: It's not like you'd run out and go, oh my gosh, let me go celebrate his good fortune in his new castle in which he lives alone.
Merlin: Right.
John: And nor would I move to Florida or Southern California.
John: Good.
John: Because I have been many times to Florida and Southern California, and I don't even want to be there that long enough.
John: Just passing through.
Merlin: This is that quotidian middle class bullshit dream of retirement.
Merlin: It doesn't have to be.
Merlin: If you mind your whole life and you can barely breathe, well, God, I hope you get to retire soon.
Merlin: But it's just this whole idea of the big journey being to get to this place where you don't have to do anything.
Merlin: That's so depressing to me.
John: And what I really want to do in life is write a book.
John: I want to have an article that I write be in the New Yorker.
John: I want to be consulted for your expertise as a retired.
John: That's right.
John: I want to be on the board of directors of several Fortune 500 companies.
Merlin: I think that's so much more.
Merlin: That is so much more in your grasp than you realize.
John: Everyone else on the board quivers in terror as soon as I clear my throat and sit forward in my chair.
John: Like all these other guys are like, oh, shit.
John: Oh, shit.
John: Don't let it be me this time.
John: Don't let it be me.
John: Like, I want these things.
John: And these are not things that any pile of bags of money are going to get from me.
John: And if I found all this drug money, I would still be dissatisfied.
John: I would still want to write a book.
John: I would still want to be published in The New Yorker.
John: And so...
John: And yet, this fantasy is still a great comfort to me.
John: When I'm sitting staring at a spot on the wall, I no longer am commanding a space battle group like I did for so many years in my childhood because I've decided that that is an unrealistic goal.
John: To be an admiral.
Merlin: Even with the pace of technology, I guess now increasingly the lack of pace of lack of technology.
Merlin: We're not where we should be.
Merlin: We're not where we should be in that stuff.
Merlin: Let's be honest.
John: If right now I was watching sea beams glitter off the shoulder of Orion and saw space battleships on fire outside the Tannhauser Gate...
John: He dies right after he says that.
John: I would have a little bit more hope for that possibility.
John: But what it seems like right now is that if I really pursued that, I would just be one of those kids playing multiplayer video games and convincing myself that I was a space battle.
Merlin: I like it better that you're operating at a higher level.
John: So, but now, you know, when I'm laying in repose and staring at a spot on the wall, I confess more often than not, I'm playing out some scenario where a truck full of money goes off a cliff and I'm the only one to see it happen.
John: And that is embarrassing.
John: Uh, even personally embarrassing, not even, I mean, I'd never admitted it to anybody until now, but I was already embarrassed by it.
John: I was pretty embarrassed just because the one me that looks at the other me is like, seriously, it's pretty mundane.
Merlin: It's like having your ultimate sexual fantasy be to kiss boobs.
Merlin: It is exactly that.
Merlin: Like, no, no, I want to know, like, what is the most outlandish thing you've ever had?
Merlin: I'd really like to kiss a boob.
Merlin: Kiss boobs.
John: I think about it a lot.
John: A million dollars in a bag.
John: is actually a million that's small potatoes you gotta think it's not outside my grasp right a million dollars in a bag if i was like if i if i said on the podcast today you know what i want a million dollars in a bag yeah how long do you think it would take me to get a million dollars in a bag like if you tried or if people just if i was like single-mindedly i'm going to do whatever it takes 18 months 18 months that's right that's about what i think
Merlin: And if you don't think that's true, you haven't really thought it out, a lot of you.
Merlin: Money is – it's not that it's easy to get money.
Merlin: It's just that very few of us are prepared for what else comes along with getting money and what you give up to get money, which sounds really cliche because you don't have the money.
Merlin: But once you get the money, you realize that it's not simply just a rich person problem.
Merlin: It's that there are there are like everything is fucking complicated.
Merlin: It's just what are you going to give up to do it?
Merlin: And I'm not even I'm not even doing a Kobayashi Maru here.
Merlin: I'm not even saying that you've got to go like cheat to do it.
Merlin: I'm not even saying you've got to go cause the truck to fall off.
John: I think ultimately I would probably have I would actually pull a Kaiser Sose.
Merlin: No, I haven't seen the end.
Merlin: Don't tell me how it ends.
Merlin: This is one of the many, many reasons that I find I really, really... I'm trying to use this word less because it's not a good word.
Merlin: I hate lotteries.
Merlin: I hate lottery tickets.
Merlin: I hate scratch-off tickets.
Merlin: I certainly hate the lines that they create.
John: The word that you don't want to use is hate.
Merlin: I try not to use the word hate.
Merlin: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Merlin: Right.
Merlin: That's a strong word.
Merlin: And despise is a cop-out that I use a lot.
Merlin: But I'm trying to avoid saying that for everything because I don't hate it.
John: You poop on it.
Merlin: I poop on it.
Merlin: You know, I poop on lottery tickets because for the obvious reasons that any liberal would have is that it's whatever.
Merlin: Sure, it's a tax on poor people.
Merlin: But it's also – it makes it hard for me to get my tequila and my daughter's milk.
Merlin: And we both need those, right?
Merlin: Wait, do you get your tequila and your daughter's milk at the same place?
Merlin: It's not a great tequila and it's not super fresh milk.
Merlin: I'm not going to lie to you.
Merlin: But this concept that if you want it... Yeah.
Merlin: Well, let me finish the one thought.
Merlin: The only one thought to finish here, and this is the problem with the lottery, is in some way the same problem with the John Truckful of Drug Money fantasy, which is that I think those people who go in there, and I waited in line behind a guy the other day...
Merlin: who paid for his lottery tickets with a hundred dollar bill he bought and he got it like a dollar he bought a hundred dollars worth of lottery tickets the guy in front of me and i don't know enough about the lottery system to know whether that's a great bet or not but i don't think you need to win a lot to keep doing the lottery i think you like any gambling you need to just win just enough to show that the system's not totally rigged and to get that little you know dopamine burst but it's
Merlin: The lottery at the most basic level – this is a very subtle Oscar Wilde, soul of man under socialism kind of point probably.
Merlin: But it's the ensmallening of the human soul that the lottery causes because you're getting into such a stupid habit that every time you do it, you make that habit stronger.
Merlin: You go and you do it over and over.
Merlin: And have you done the fucking most basic modicum of research to find out whether people who win the lottery are happy?
Merlin: Right.
Merlin: Right.
Merlin: Because people who win the lottery – people who win.
Merlin: No, no.
Merlin: I don't mean like you get a free scratcher.
Merlin: You get the – You win $300 million.
Merlin: You win $300 million.
Merlin: Go out and find out whether those people are happy because you know what?
Merlin: They're not fucking James Bond.
Merlin: They're not Tony Stark.
Merlin: They're people who now have new problems and they are new problems they never knew existed because they don't have the training to have $300 million.
John: They take their country kitchen aesthetic and they apply it.
Merlin: Everything's a duck in a basket now?
John: They apply it to a 40,000 square foot home.
John: And there are ducks in baskets everywhere.
John: They get a 42-foot duck in a 70-foot basket.
Merlin: And here's the thing.
Merlin: They buy the world's largest duck.
Merlin: And it makes them – you know what?
Merlin: Now I need the world's largest basket.
Merlin: The fucking basket was supposed to be here by 1030.
Merlin: It's not here.
John: This is the thing that you can, and I've run this on my, I've run this.
John: You run this scenario.
John: I've run this scenario.
John: I've run this, you know, this admin on my own mind, which is, let's say you won $300 million.
John: Yeah.
John: Now what would you do?
John: And the reality is, if you don't immediately, I mean, first of all, you give half away to taxes.
John: If you don't immediately give another half, the next half away, just like the first thing you do,
John: You're on the road to madness, like $150 million.
John: If you have that, you start from zero.
John: You're just going to be eating larger amounts of the same shitty takeout food.
Merlin: You're going to be tipping more for the same fucking pole dancer.
Merlin: Nothing is going to change.
John: I have an incredibly active imagination, and I cannot think of what I would spend that money on.
Merlin: You don't have the training.
Merlin: That's what I'm trying to say.
Merlin: It's like you don't just show up on day one.
Merlin: It's like those people who are like, oh, you know, I've never been in a fight, but I'm pretty sure I'd be good as a fighter.
Merlin: Like I've never run more than half a block to catch a bus without feeling like I'm having a heart attack, but I'm pretty sure I could run a marathon.
Merlin: You're doing the existential – your whole life is completely – I'm not trying to say don't make money, but I am saying that like –
Merlin: just imagining like you give away so much in your life by fantasizing about something that would actually not be that great for you.
Merlin: It's not so different from saying, I wish I had all the weed in the world.
Merlin: If I, well, if I had all the weed in the world, I'd be so fucking baked all the time.
John: What I would do is I would Lord it over all the fucking stoners.
Merlin: I would make them do fancy dances.
John: Hey, what's up stoners?
John: Want some weed?
John: Hmm.
John: Where are you going to get it?
John: I'll require a fancy dance for that.
John: You get it from me.
John: And you know what?
John: I don't want to give you any weed today.
John: Come back tomorrow.
John: Maybe tomorrow I'll have some weed.
Merlin: It's like with your sister.
Merlin: You just give them one, you give them a lid.
John: You just give them one tiny little bit.
John: Yeah, this is the thing about weed.
John: Like, you know, they become obsessed and you're like, yeah, come back tomorrow.
John: I don't have any weed today.
Merlin: It's like it's the one-eighth hit shit.
Merlin: Oh, yeah.
Merlin: Anyway.
John: But the thing is, the first thing I would do if I had $150 million, of course, is buy both of my neighbor's houses and tear them down.
Merlin: Would you tell them first?
John: I'd walk over there and I'd be like, what's your best price?
Merlin: The main difference is how much warning.
Merlin: Okay, here's the thing.
Merlin: Here's the thing.
Merlin: Think outside the box.
Merlin: What you really want is to not have those houses there and for them to be gone, right?
Merlin: The question is, how much warning do you have to give?
Merlin: That's how much money you got.
Merlin: Because if you could literally have it leveled while you were away.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: You just pay everybody off.
John: You pay everybody off.
John: It's like that great old – this may be completely apocryphal, but the great Craigslist gag where a guy – I guess it was a millionaire's club situation where a bunch of laborers are outside of a –
John: laborers are outside of a labor hall and guys come up in a truck and say, you, you, you, and you get in the truck.
John: And he's, he's like, you know, this guy pulls up in a truck and he picks 15 guys off the street and he says, I'm going to pay you all, you know, 40 bucks an hour to do some demo work for me.
John: He drives over and there's a house and he's like, you know, we need to tear this house down.
John: Yes.
John: And these 40 guys all go and they tear the house to the ground and then the guy never comes back and it turns out it was his ex-wife's house.
Merlin: Right, right, right.
Merlin: That's probably, that's probably a Snopes, but that, it is a good one.
John: It's a,
Merlin: super good one but no yeah but that'd be a great feeling to walk up to your next door neighbor knock on the door and say your house is worth 300 grand i'm gonna throw in an extra 50 if you can be out by this afternoon oh and this well it's like what they're like uh the magic christian right um like what can you get people to do for money but but here's here's the thing this kierkegaard addresses you know despair certainly probably better than than just about anybody i think we had this discussion inside out
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: He knows wherever he speaks.
Merlin: It's a great thing for people to read.
Merlin: But I think it's one thing to have freedom and it's another thing to have impunity.
Merlin: And I think people think small.
Merlin: And they think if I had $150 million, I'd finally be free.
Merlin: I wouldn't have to do these things that other people make me do that are how I am.
Merlin: But impunity would be so fucking awesome.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: It would be so nice if you were a truly kind of damaged person who craves that large amount of money without knowing why.
Merlin: If you were just going to say, I'm going to build the world's biggest bong, I would say more power to you.
Merlin: Why don't you get to find out exactly what that would cost and then maybe do a Kickstarter or something, right?
Merlin: But if you really did want to become like an evil super genius, that is what I can really admire is somebody who says, no, no, I just – it's not even that I want these houses gone.
Merlin: I just – I want to be able to do that and not get in trouble for it.
John: Yeah.
John: I mean, as somebody who already feels like he mostly operates without impunity, with impunity.
Merlin: You don't need a permission slip.
Merlin: Without impunity.
Merlin: You work with punity.
Merlin: You operate with punity.
John: I do have punity.
John: No, I feel like for the most part,
John: The real shaping influences on me are, you know, the opinions of my close friends.
Merlin: I would take 50 grand to like you.
Merlin: Exactly.
John: I mean, I could tear down every house in this neighborhood, except that some of my friends would be like, that wasn't.
Merlin: Again, now John's an asshole.
Merlin: Before, he just seemed a little bit like a curiosity, right?
Merlin: Yeah, and you can't buy your friend's love.
Merlin: You can't buy fear.
Merlin: You have to instill fear.
Merlin: There's no scratch-off ticket for fear.
John: Oh, if I had some, if I had a lot more money, I think I would be able, I would be around, I would be buying some food.
Merlin: And you know, unlike all those other people, the bong builders and the dream makers and the rainbow sniffers, you are literally practicing this in your head every day.
Merlin: You know exactly what you do.
Merlin: You've probably got plans.
Merlin: I don't say, you've probably got plans in tubes right now that you could roll out.
John: My first plan is to build a giant trebuchet and then just huck like big sort of 50 gallon cans of Quaker oats and
John: Just huck them all over the city.
Merlin: Just see what, to see how far they can go?
John: Well, yeah, it's just a thing nobody's going to expect.
John: Because if you look up in the sky, you look up in the sky and you see that thing of Quaker Oats.
Merlin: There's so many levels.
Merlin: No, no, no, it's not even a thing.
Merlin: All they see is a 55-gallon drama.
Merlin: They're thinking oil.
John: But if it looks like... Because the Quaker Oats guy... Oh.
John: It's a big picture.
John: Would you draw the Quaker on it?
John: Oh, you'd have... You would make facsimiles of the Quaker Oats little canister.
Merlin: That changes everything.
John: Except out of a 50-gallon drum.
John: So the perspective...
John: of that flying through the sky, you would have no sense of how big it was.
John: You'd be like, what is that flying Quaker Oats thing?
John: And then as it got closer, it would just keep getting bigger and bigger.
John: And your mind would think, is this thing 50 stories tall?
John: You'd have no sense of how big it was until it landed and there were oats everywhere.
John: A Pringles can.
John: If you had a trebuchet that was throwing giant Pringles cans and everybody knows what it looks like, everybody knows how big it is,
John: Yeah, it's got a very familiar form factor.
John: It's flying through the sky, and as it gets closer, you have no idea what's happening, how big the world is.
Merlin: So that's just warming up.
Merlin: At that point, you've had some trebuchets.
Merlin: Now, do you have a sense of, you shouldn't say.
Merlin: I think for $600,000, I could accomplish that.
Merlin: Okay, I'm going to put that down, $600,000.
Merlin: I think you could get, and if I could say, you should probably have a trebuchet and a backup trebuchet.
John: And that includes fines.
Merlin: They jam.
Merlin: That includes the fines.
Merlin: Okay.
Merlin: You mean the zoning?
John: You're not zoning for trebuchets?
John: If I'm hucking giant Quaker oats cans all over the city, I'm going to paste the fines.
Merlin: Because it's not zoned for oats.
John: Yeah.
John: There are going to be complaints.
John: But that's factored into the price.
Merlin: How crooked is King County and Seattle?
Merlin: Would there be a way that you could start crossing some palms in advance?
Merlin: Would you do it before or after the trebuchets arrived?
Merlin: It isn't a sense of it being crooked.
Merlin: It is a sense of I am very wired.
Merlin: You show up at meetings and they say, there's that guy.
John: I know all the power brokers.
Merlin: Do you maintain those relationships?
Merlin: Is there a Roderick bloodline that runs into the corridors of power still?
John: Uh, actually, most of the, most of, most of those guys, most of the people that know the old school, they're all gone.
John: There are a couple of guys like, uh, Mike Heavey is a, uh, sort of a powerful, um,
John: politician local paul and he is the son tessio you got uh you got sally right clemenza there are a lot of there are a lot of sons of guys who were you know little clemenza partners of my dad's but but i have made my own relationships with the local the the new younger generation of of uh politicians here and this is like the bike mayor
John: Yeah, it's the bike mayor and it's the rock and roll county executive.
John: The rock and roll county executive.
John: And now the Democratic candidate for governor has expressed an interest in liaising with me.
John: So if I get a guy in the governor's chair, then I feel like this Quaker Oats plan...
John: You know, they're going to be fine.
John: So listen, they're going to be fine.
Merlin: This happened.
Merlin: I don't want to make it about Hitler, but there's been a lot of times where you could get some materials or material, as you say, you could get some stuff that looks like it would be useful for something that wouldn't be a trebuchet.
Merlin: You need springs.
Merlin: You need a large cup.
Merlin: You need some kind of, I don't know the details.
Merlin: Logs.
Merlin: Okay.
Merlin: But see, no logs.
Merlin: You could be making, again, you could be making nature trails.
Merlin: A log would be a perfect way to make a nature trail.
John: Sure.
John: I need one truckload of logs.
Merlin: You got tons of logs.
Merlin: They still got logs, right?
John: Absolutely.
John: In fact, I think you could build a trebuchet entirely of logs.
John: You wouldn't need any other parts.
Merlin: Can I just fuck this whole thing up for you, John?
Merlin: I don't know what you're doing for the rest of today.
Merlin: It sounds to me like this is something you could make today for about $40.
John: Well, I'd be like a preliminary one, a smaller one.
John: A prototype.
John: Yeah.
Merlin: Maybe you could take out that bodega with some oats.
John: That was one of my early internet punk rock names, Trey Boucher.
John: And I actually met a girl who knew me as Trey Boucher.
Merlin: You're kidding.
Merlin: You didn't just write that on a folder when you were 13?
John: No, that was my Friendster profile, Trey Boucher.
Merlin: No one ever got it.
John: But there was a girl who knew me as Trey Boucher on Friendster who came to a long winter show.
John: And she had no sense that I was Trey Boucher.
John: She came to the show randomly and came up to me at the merch table, and I recognized her from Friendster as someone that I had communicated with many times as Trey Boucher.
John: And she was like, that was a great show.
John: Oh, my God.
John: Amazing.
John: Wow.
John: I'm so blah, blah, blah.
John: Can I buy your merch?
John: And I was like sitting there thinking, should I tell her I'm Trey Boucher?
Merlin: You're Felicio Ontology 69.
Merlin: Yeah.
John: And no, her name was something like Xanthan Gomer.
John: I don't remember.
Merlin: X cutter X goth X X eyeliner.
John: And, uh, and, uh, I never, I didn't cop to it.
John: I was just like, I sold her my merch.
John: I took my picture with her.
John: I high fived her and, uh, off she went into the night and I was like, I never, I never outed myself as trebuchet.
Merlin: Well, that would be unprofessional, right?
Merlin: I mean the whole point of good – as I understand it, don't say if you know, but it's my understanding that you want to keep your secret a secret long after it doesn't even need to be a secret.
Merlin: Like we don't want to let you – we don't even tell you how this enigma thing worked.
Merlin: We're not going to tell you any of that.
John: Exactly.
Merlin: I mean isn't that true?
Merlin: Aren't there all kinds of things from World War II that given – because of the Cold War, we just didn't want anybody to know how we – we kept our secrets secret for a long time.
Merlin: That's how you do, right?
John: Right.
John: Yeah, well, and some of that stuff, I think, is still secret, not because the thing itself, but because the methodology.
Merlin: And who would have known who would have been involved at what times?
Merlin: Yeah, right.
Merlin: Because you can triangulate.
Merlin: You can triangulate all kinds of things once you have a little bit of information.
John: Some of those methodologies are still in play.
John: The whole concept that...
John: There are two concepts about espionage in World War II.
John: One is that no Nazi spy survived the war in England.
John: Undiscovered.
John: What?
John: How would they know?
John: Actually pulled up the carpet on every single Nazi spy in England.
Merlin: That's one of the World War II... And they know that because the Germans kept such good records...
John: Well, yeah, and that the Germans had almost no espionage successful.
John: They turned every agent.
John: So the Germans were – they weren't getting any good espionage.
John: They were getting all plants, planted espionage, planted information.
Merlin: Double agent, double operative, what do you call that?
Merlin: Compromised?
Merlin: What's the term for that?
John: Yeah, double, triple secret probation.
Merlin: Okay, got it.
John: And the other myth is that the UK, and see, I don't know if that's a myth.
John: Nobody knows if there were Nazi spies who actually were providing good intelligence that went undiscovered.
John: Nobody knows.
John: The other, I mean, somebody probably knows, but we don't as a people know.
John: The other myth is that the British were putting all these guys in trench coats with briefcases and poison-tipped umbrellas, parachuting them behind enemy lines in Germany, and they were providing all this incredible actionable intelligence.
John: And the reason that we think that is that...
John: The Germans captured some of these guys with umbrellas and trench coats, and they thought, well, if we're capturing, you know, if we captured 50 of these guys, it must mean 500 got through.
John: But I don't think that that is actually true.
John: The Germans might have captured every single spy.
John: It just served the British to perpetuate this idea that their spies were getting through.
John: A lot of the British intelligence just came from turncoat Nazis.
John: But it served them to perpetuate this idea that they had spies everywhere.
John: So I think some of those, some of those, they're still fueling some of those myths.
Merlin: Because you never know when the secret might be useful again.
Merlin: Exactly.
Merlin: If you've got, if you've got like a, what do they call it?
Merlin: Not a drop, pigeon drop.
Merlin: What do you call it?
Merlin: What do you call the place where you just stick something in a hole and then make a dead drop?
Merlin: You got a dead drop and you know, as far as you know, it's not been discovered.
Merlin: Like, why would you tell everybody, oh, here's where all our dead drops were.
Merlin: Have a nice day.
Merlin: Right.
Merlin: Because, because you don't even want to tell people what you didn't know.
John: Yeah.
John: Don't tell them.
John: I do that every day.
John: I have safe houses all over this country.
John: I'm never going to tell anybody.
John: You said too much already.
Merlin: So he's the Rock and Roll County Executive.
John: Dow Constantine, Rock and Roll County Executive.
Merlin: Does he play guitar?
Merlin: Is he like a Lee Atwater type situation?
John: Does he rock out with the blues?
John: He loves rock music.
John: He goes to shows.
John: He's a hip guy.
John: So you're familiar with this guy?
John: Oh, he's a bro.
John: And a powerful local politician.
Merlin: Good man in a corner.
Merlin: It seems like somebody, if you run into some trouble with this whole trebuchet thing, a county guy is going to be nice to have.
Merlin: You're going to want people working all different angles, right?
John: Well, that's the thing.
John: I'm going to call him and I'm going to say, listen, I misread the zoning.
John: I thought my neighborhood was zoned for trebuchets.
Merlin: You're like an old woman telling a cop that you didn't see the sign.
John: Listen, I thought I understood it, but it's a very complicated language.
Merlin: I just want to be real clear with this.
Merlin: I was completely aware that I was making a trebuchet and shooting 55-gallon drums of oats.
Merlin: Obviously, I can't take it back.
John: Look, if I had turned it around and was shooting to the south, would that have been all right?
Merlin: I have to tell you, I just, I didn't know.
John: Listen, listen, maybe we can forget about, forget all about this.
Merlin: Give some tickets to the show.
Merlin: I love the word trebuchet.