Ep. 57: "Unfair"
Merlin: Hello.
Merlin: Hi, John.
Merlin: Hi, Merlin.
Merlin: How's it going?
Merlin: Good.
John: Good.
John: I just have some mouth noises to make here.
John: Top of the set.
John: It's the season.
John: It's the mouth noise season.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: Do you drink a lot of water?
Merlin: Yeah.
John: I do.
John: When I was young, I couldn't stand water.
John: Me neither.
John: Hated it.
John: Yeah, hated it.
John: And then somehow, somewhere along the line, I got my sister, and my sister in particular is a real water sort of pusher.
John: And somewhere along the line, I got a taste for it, and now I probably drink a half gallon of it.
John: Just every time I walk past the sink, I chug a big glass of water.
John: And I love it.
John: I can't get enough of it.
Merlin: That's pretty much exactly my experience.
Merlin: I wonder if part of it, two things.
Merlin: One, if my palate developed from just wanting a 12-pack of Coke a day.
Merlin: And then the other thing is that you don't... Oh, I'm scared.
Merlin: Wow, that's... Boy, you're really on a tear.
Merlin: Yeah, go ahead.
Merlin: I'm listening.
Merlin: Let's see.
Merlin: I think there's... Are there any we missed just because of mic placement?
Merlin: What about lip smacking?
Merlin: No, we did that.
Merlin: You should get an SM57 on that red leather chair.
Merlin: Oh, put it on the chair?
Merlin: Yeah, and then do a Chris Wallach.
Merlin: Get a room mic with a trigger so you get that kind of David Bowie low thing when it's a real dinger.
Merlin: Our chairs both make noises.
Merlin: Have you ever seen a photograph of my chair?
Merlin: I'm not sure.
Merlin: I read all the magazines.
Merlin: You'd remember.
Merlin: You'd really, really remember.
Merlin: It looks like I have a cat.
Merlin: Is it stained?
Merlin: It's hard to tell.
Merlin: At a certain point, it's like, think about the industrial carpeting you have in parts of a bar where it becomes one kind of contiguous stain, like one hypnotic stain.
Merlin: Yeah.
John: So the high traffic areas of your chair are sort of more stained than the low traffic areas.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: I use those blue mechanics paper towels.
John: This chair kind of fell apart at a certain point.
John: And I fixed it with... I made my own plywood.
John: You have homemade plywood?
John: Yeah, I took some... I didn't know you could do that.
John: Well, I didn't either until I did it.
John: But I drilled a hole...
John: where the thing had broken, where the dowel had broken.
John: So I drilled a larger hole, and then I took a bunch of wood chips and matchsticks and stuff, and I crunched them all up, and then I poured a bunch of glue on that, and I made a kind of matchstick and glue amalgam, and then I puttied it into the hole...
John: Let it dry.
Merlin: You get so much more accomplished than you give yourself credit for.
John: Then I drilled a new hole through the glue and through the fake plywood, and then the chair is good as new.
Merlin: I'll tell you what you made, my friend.
Merlin: You have made artisanal particle board.
Merlin: Oh, right.
Merlin: Yeah, that's what it is.
John: Artisanal particle board.
Merlin: Um, my sense is based on a conversation we had at your mom's house a few weeks ago that you are not a fan of, well, I'm going to guess you like plywood for certain things, but don't you have a certain respect for a nice long piece of continuous, contiguous old growth wood?
Merlin: My sense was that you had, you have a serious respect for the boards in your mother's house.
Hmm.
Merlin: Solid wood.
Merlin: Long wood.
Merlin: Wood.
Merlin: Well... You had like 20 minutes on this.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: About all these abominations in your neighborhood made of short, pointless wood and that you had contiguous planks in the house.
John: Yeah.
John: This is a component of... This is a theme that you and I touch on a lot, which is the tearing down of a hundred-year-old thing made out of...
John: perfect old-growth lumber to replace it with something made out of off-gassing particle board and then posting a sign in the front saying, all green construction.
John: It's new green condos.
John: And all the polymers had insurance.
John: And nothing about it is green.
John: Tearing the perfectly good house down was not green.
John: And manufacturing all the...
John: All the chemical products that this house is constructed of, that wasn't green.
John: And then building this new house wasn't green.
John: There's nothing green about it except that they installed an efficient furnace in the new building.
John: They put photovoltaic...
John: panels on the roof and people walk through life going well I bought this really green condo and it's like you have no idea what was there and what we have lost as a people what we have lost in terms of our patrimony
John: these houses that were, you know, if you look at, if you tear down, tear the inside walls out of my mom's house, which I have done, these two by fours are 28 feet long and there's not a knot hole in them.
John: There's not even a knot hole.
John: They're from trees that stood, that they cut the trees that they built my mom's house out of.
John: They cut them down from three blocks away and carted them there by horse and milled them on a
John: on a sawmill, you know, presumably powered by... Probably Mexicans.
John: No, there were no Mexicans here then.
John: It was probably... The Chinese.
John: Well, yeah, there were Chinese.
John: But no, I think it was either powered by horse or by wood.
John: By the branches.
John: The high up branches.
Merlin: What could be more green and locavore?
Merlin: It's all right there.
Merlin: Everything you need is right there.
John: Yeah.
John: And to tear it down, I personally think is a crime against all humanity.
John: And then to build a thing, you know, a lot of these places, that term off-gassing is a construction term that tries to describe how all of these, all the particle board and the wall board and most of the products, the new carpet, it all, after the house is built and after you move in, it sits there and just sort of
John: Sort of permeates this gas that's formaldehyde.
Merlin: Yeah, formaldehyde, also things like, I don't know if it's a petroleum thing, but things obviously like plastics.
Merlin: Plastics.
Merlin: Well, yeah, for example, we have a bath mat we like that we've bought three times as it's worn out.
Ha ha ha!
Merlin: Wait a minute.
John: Wait a minute.
John: What are you going to do when they stop making that bath mat?
Merlin: I'm going to make one out of long wood.
Merlin: It'll be much more Japanese.
Merlin: I don't want to work ping pong.
Merlin: But every time we buy one of these, the same thing happens.
Merlin: I bring it home.
Merlin: I take it out of the plastic.
Merlin: And it's like a giant plastic vulva opening.
Merlin: The entire house is enveloped in this smell.
Merlin: And so you've got things like – Why would you use vulva as a –
Merlin: As a metaphor.
Merlin: John, it's a plastic vulva.
Merlin: I'm not being normative.
Merlin: A plastic vulva.
Merlin: Tell me what a plastic vulva would smell like.
Merlin: It would taste like a 9-volt battery and smell like a bath mat.
Merlin: Let's be honest.
Merlin: Anyway, my point being, just for what it's worth, first of all, I'd like to come back to this because I completely agree with you.
Merlin: I think the green thing, I don't want to get off on one of my jags here, but I think it depends a lot on which micro or macro level you want to look at it from.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: I mean, just to your point, I mean, I don't know.
Merlin: Maybe I don't have enough information to intelligently agree or disagree with you, but I agree with you being as unintelligent as I am.
Merlin: Hooray!
Merlin: We can all agree on Longwood.
Merlin: I agree on that too.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: Well, no, but here's the thing.
Merlin: I mean on the face of it, everything you're saying makes complete sense to me.
Merlin: And this is why when you pull back the lens just a little bit, you say, well, okay, well, there was also the vehicles that had to have gas in them to bring people there to make it.
Merlin: The cheeseburgers, those people ate.
John: The Jack built.
Merlin: Oh, you know what?
John: The house, that's pretty good.
John: Well, you know, when you go to some place like, you go to rural England and you go into somebody's house that has a thatched roof and you say, tell me about your house.
John: And they're like, this house was built in 1547.
John: And they show you around, and the ceilings in the house are about 5'2", and you have to duck everywhere you go.
Merlin: Everyone in England's a hobbit.
John: Well, they were, certainly.
Merlin: They ate a lot of canned food.
John: Go ahead.
John: Please continue.
John: The floors aren't even, you know, they're ramshackle places.
John: And you go, wow, wow, this house, you know, this house really is like, it's such a wonderful treasure.
John: And then you think about it and you're like, oh, this house was just a, this house is just the one that survived.
John: There wasn't anything special about it.
John: Over 500 years, all the much better houses than this were all torn down or burned down.
John: And so this little thing, half the reason it survived, probably, is that no one cared enough about it to tear it down.
John: No one cared enough about that piece of property, or they just didn't get around to it.
Merlin: The land that it ramshackily stood on.
John: Yeah, and so this thing survives, and now it has a plaque on the door, and now we go there and celebrate it.
John: But, in fact, it's just the...
John: It's just the detritus, all the beautiful houses are gone.
John: And this is the relationship I have with Portland, Oregon.
John: Portland, Oregon is a beautiful city full of bungalows and old architecture.
John: And the reason that's true is that for the last hundred years, no one cared enough about Portland, Oregon to tear anything down there and build something new.
John: It was a backwater and a shitberg.
John: And you'd go down there and you're like, oh yeah, it's a town full of bungalows and all of them have moss on the eaves and
John: And you can tell every single bungalow in Portland has had four people living in it, all of them chain-smoking for 20 years.
Merlin: Like a yellow patina inside?
John: Yeah, the entire city of Portland had a yellow patina until 2002.
Merlin: And who's going to fund a renovation of Hookertown?
Merlin: If there wasn't the people, as we talked about in a previous episode, if there aren't the people coming in with the Genesis device to change everything...
Merlin: Everything is going to sit there and it is ironic.
Merlin: It's the same thing happened in San Francisco where these houses that were in neighborhoods people didn't care about.
Merlin: They would get those awful 60s and 70s renovations, but they hadn't done anything.
Merlin: So like all the houses the hippies lived in and half ruined superficially in the 60s and 70s are now really expensive houses.
Merlin: You want to try and buy a house along the panhandle.
Merlin: That is a lot of dough because it's a gorgeous Victorian that was on the west side of the earthquake, made it out.
Merlin: And that's a funny thing about San Francisco is that – and now, of course, today, it's ludicrous.
Merlin: If you want to do anything to your house, there's a lot of rules.
Merlin: Like you have to maintain the bay windows.
John: Yeah, yeah.
Merlin: There's all kinds of – Bay windows will sag.
Yeah.
Merlin: Well, I just – I see those bay windows, those beautiful ones actually in like the Western Edition in particular.
Merlin: And I see those beautiful curved pieces of glass and I just think, God, it must be so costly when you have to replace curved glass in a window.
John: Yeah, it's insane.
John: Well, what happened here in Seattle was that we had the World's Fair.
John: In 1963 and 64, where they built the Space Needle.
John: And they tore down a big... In order to build kind of the Seattle Center, they tore down a ramshackle neighborhood of flop houses and stuff to build that.
John: But that wasn't that great of a loss.
John: But what happened was that was exactly the era.
John: That was kind of the peak era of that sort of modernist...
John: Two, three-story flat-roofed apartment building where the walkway was, the hallways were outside.
John: You know, it's the motel architecture.
John: And what Seattle had was that we built this World's Fair and people were going to come from around the world for a whole year.
John: We were going to have a million people a day here to see the Seattle Center.
John: And so there was this sweeping redevelopment of the city where people went into all those Victorian neighborhoods.
John: And they said, well, here, this old house full of, you know, full of transients.
John: even though it has nine bedrooms, we're going to tear this down and we're going to build a kind of motel style apartment building that will house these visitors from out of state.
John: And then after those people go, it'll be an apartment building.
John: Won't that be nice?
John: We'll have replaced that dilapidated old house with a modern apartment building.
John: And so throughout the city, in the most interesting neighborhoods we have,
John: You'll see Victorian House, Victorian House, 1963-64 motel-style apartment building, just sandwiched in between them.
John: And now, 40 years later, when a developer goes into that neighborhood and says, which one of these three things am I going to buy and tear down?
John: They invariably choose the Victorian still.
John: Because who's going to tear down a nine-unit apartment building?
John: They're still making money off of that.
John: And so we still... So Seattle looks a lot worse than Portland, I have to admit.
John: Because you walk down the street and you're just like, there's no plan here.
John: There's no...
John: Nothing is governing our development except tear the thing down.
Merlin: And obviously you cannot count on the tastes of the people who own that property to have any interest in integrating how that place looks or works.
John: You cannot count on that.
Merlin: Yeah, yeah.
Merlin: And this brings us straight back to, I think, one of our greatest threads, which, again, this is for new listeners.
Merlin: Something you acquainted me with a long time ago.
John: For our new listeners.
Merlin: For our new listeners.
John: Our old listeners are like, architectural preservation.
John: Got it!
Merlin: Got it!
Merlin: When are you going to talk about Supertrain again?
Merlin: The...
Merlin: We had a conversation one time.
Merlin: It was actually that long ago.
Merlin: It was before the program – before this program started.
Merlin: But you were telling me about how you can learn so much from a city.
Merlin: You're a man who doesn't pick up a map to go look around, right?
Merlin: But you can learn a lot just from looking at –
Merlin: The elevations in the city.
Merlin: Where is the waterway?
Merlin: Oh, this is where they put the railroad tracks.
Merlin: That explains why there are the kinds of things around here that would be good for railroad industries and the people who work there.
Merlin: Here's the waterways.
Merlin: That's why they probably stopped here.
Merlin: There's a reason Pittsburgh is where it is.
Merlin: In the case of San Francisco, for example.
Merlin: when they added the streetcars in whatever year that was, that was the first time that you could live in the highly – well, you could live comfortably in the highly desirable neighborhoods that are at the top of a very steep incline.
Merlin: Because suddenly – and these are the days before you would just zip down to the Safeway to pick up your groceries.
Merlin: So having something like what we have left today are the cable cars, which are very silly and not all that useful.
Merlin: But back then, that was a revelation and –
Merlin: And so you can tell, for example, generally living near the water in most places, if it's like a nice water, is more expensive.
Merlin: Living higher rather than lower is a nice place to live.
Merlin: And so, hey, why is it that the tornadoes always take out all the mobile homes?
Merlin: Well, because it's in the most shitty, low-lying areas where no one wanted to live.
Merlin: It floods easily.
Merlin: Tornado alley.
Merlin: Yeah, and I mean I think what's funny is like that is – even with the internet economy, I think that stuff still means a lot.
Merlin: And to just – I don't know.
Merlin: I always come back to Tallahassee where I lived for 10 years and Florida State University, the old buildings there are so beautiful.
Merlin: Yeah, they are.
Merlin: The old – but they all are –
Merlin: You can tell when the place was initially built because there's beautiful, classy, like I don't know what the style of architecture is, but I don't know the name for it.
Merlin: But it was in the 1800s, I think, and early 1900s.
Merlin: So there was a burst of money at that time, and they built the Women's College of Florida or whatever it was called.
Merlin: And then you can just tell there were bursts of influxes of money, probably old people dying, wanting their name on something.
Merlin: And there's this hodgepodge of different buildings that went up in the 50s through the 80s.
Merlin: All of them science buildings.
Merlin: All of them wildly different with only the most superficial nod toward having any kind of continuity with how the rest of the place looks.
Merlin: And some of them have that.
Merlin: I'm trying to figure out if I want to blame this one guy, Corbusier, the guy who basically invented square cement buildings and made every mall and apartment building in Skyscraper look the same.
Merlin: John Flansburg is so mad right now.
Merlin: Why?
Merlin: He loves these things?
John: Well, he'll probably yell at us for a thousand reasons about talking about Caprucian.
Merlin: Oh, is he a Corbu fan?
Merlin: Who knows?
Merlin: Okay.
Merlin: But, you know, it's like the BART station, for example.
Merlin: Every time I go to the BART station, I feel like it looks like something from Planet of the Apes.
Merlin: Yeah, Logan's Run.
Merlin: Logan's run.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: But everything, you know, and I'm sorry, I'm not sure where I'm going with this, but, but there was a funny confluence of in the 1960s in particular, I am pulling this completely out of my ass.
Merlin: There was so much money for things like education and building so much more by the late sixties than there had been.
Merlin: And my, is that correct to say that there was a lot of new building and there were obviously, you know, after the GI bill, you had people who wanted to go to college and then their kids wanted to go to college.
Merlin: There was all of this building and there's this like a pseudo perfect storm of money and
Merlin: wanting the desire to build a lot quickly and cheaply, and the influence of these square concrete buildings that are now everywhere.
John: Well, the square concrete buildings, after the war, were honestly thought, there was a moral component to them in people's imaginations.
John: Like, these were clean, they were open...
John: They were not these stick and bone little rat holes of Victorian houses that at that time were 60 years old and full of dust and mice.
John: These buildings represented to people at the time the future.
John: We had fought a war and we were...
John: we were going to build a new world.
Merlin: I mean, they were clean and they were modern and they did not look like the kinds of locations that you would see that had been bombed recently.
Merlin: Yeah.
John: These were exciting, like American buildings and am airport terminal terminals and like exciting places for people.
John: And I mean, my mom talks about it all the time.
John: Like the idea that you would have a house where all the bedrooms were on the same floor as the living room in the kitchen and
John: was a radical notion and a very exciting one where you would open a sliding glass door and step right from your living room into the garden without there being a stair step.
John: You know, all these designs that we think of as mid-century modern and...
John: And kind of, you know, like, tracked houses.
John: To their eye, all these little details were incredible innovations and incredible, like, almost... I mean, definitely, like, moral technologies.
John: This is the way people should live.
John: We now have the technology to live with ease in these custom homes.
John: And it's... And we're never going back to the bay windows...
Merlin: With the curved glass and – They certainly don't look very space age.
Merlin: At a time when that kind of modernity and kind of what they used to call populux style was coming in, if you were going to go out and you were Mike Brady and were an architect that wanted a cool-looking house, you weren't going to make it in the Chicago style.
Mm-hmm.
Merlin: Right.
Merlin: That'd be awesome.
Merlin: I would love to live in a Chicago style house.
John: Um, but you know, you look around, you look around your city and you learn, you can see this, you can see people's moral tastes, um,
John: reflected in the physicality of your town in a way that doesn't really require that much imagination.
John: You just have to see it.
John: You just have to turn your eyes that way.
John: Seattle has a neighborhood called Wallingford, which is perched on a long, broad, sloping hill
John: that overlooks Lake Union, which is the lake at the very heart of the city.
John: And then across Lake Union, there's a panoramic view of downtown Queen Anne Hill and Capitol Hill.
John: So it's this beautiful neighborhood of bungalows on this wide, broad sloping hill overlooking a lake and the rest of the city.
John: But when you go there,
John: you realize very quickly that the streets are laid out wrong.
John: The streets are 100% wrong.
John: They are laid out so that the bungalows go... So the long avenues actually go up and down the hill.
John: The long avenues are pointed at the view.
John: And the houses, there are 50,000 houses in this neighborhood, and almost none of them have a view of this lake and this panorama of the city.
John: They look on each other's backyards, and in order to get the view, you either have to go stand on the roof, or you have to go out into the middle of the street and look down the hill.
Yeah.
John: And so when you're in Wallingford, there's something about it that just kind of feels wrong.
John: You're conscious of the city being right there and of this lake and, you know, every night these incredible sunsets.
John: But the neighborhood just kind of looks at itself.
John: And then you realize...
John: That at the foot of that hill is a thing we call Gasworks Park, which is this gem in the crown of the city, this beautiful park with an old gas works where they used to process natural gas there.
John: And you realize when they built this neighborhood of Wallingford, that view down on the lake would have been a view over a chemical plant into a lake that was full of steamships all emptying their bilges at sunset.
John: There was nothing about that view.
John: That view was something that whoever was developing that neighborhood, that view was something they wanted to conceal.
John: Because when the wind changed direction, all of Wallingford was coated with a layer of chemical ash.
John: And so for the rest of eternity in Seattle, like we've cleaned up the city, that view right now is a $10 trillion view.
John: But that neighborhood is always going to be pointed the wrong direction.
John: Because at the time, a view didn't matter to people.
John: What mattered was, you know, that you turn your back to the chemical plant.
John: And, you know, that's... So whenever I'm over there, I'm always like kind of haunted by the...
Merlin: haunted by the century i guess so that the things the things that people were interested in that people could afford that people cared about that people live with end up having an impact long beyond the time that decision was made yeah forever and ever i mean they're where they're redeveloping london all the time and a lot of you know if you tear something down in the center of london
John: that was there for 700 years to build something new, in my opinion, you'd better really have a lot of faith that the thing you're building now is better than something that survived 700 years.
John: And that isn't all, you know, I don't think people think that way.
Merlin: I don't remember the details of this, so forgive me if I get some of this wrong, but I think it might have even been before the earthquake,
Merlin: I think – all I know is at some point somebody – I don't think it was Olmstead, but somebody had come up with a plan for the city as it grew that was going to be vastly different from what they'd come up with because the first thing that you notice in San Francisco –
Merlin: that doesn't seem really stupid from the air but seems real stupid on the ground is what you described, which is there's no reason that California Street needs to be that steep.
Merlin: There's no real – on the face of it.
Merlin: Like it's crazy to build a street straight if that means going straight up the side of a hill.
Merlin: And my sense is, if I remember correctly, that there was a plan, especially for the western neighborhoods like where I live.
Merlin: Well, not – where I live was basically just –
Merlin: There was not a lot out here.
Merlin: I think there was a nursing school and maybe an abattoir.
Merlin: There was not a lot in my neighborhood.
Merlin: It was just sand.
John: Sand dunes, right?
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: There's some wonderful photos of my neighborhood.
Merlin: We're looking down from, you know, kind of the top of the hill on what's like 19th Avenue now where there's I think there was chicken farms was the main thing out here.
Merlin: And I live in a chicken farm.
Merlin: Nothing wrong with that.
Merlin: Hey, chicken farms.
Merlin: Heritage chickens.
Merlin: Nothing wrong with that.
Merlin: But anyway, but some dude or dudes have come up with a plan of saying, hey, why don't we build these new roads in a way that goes around these hills in a way that's a little more humane.
John: Contours with the ground.
Merlin: And I want to say that it was the earthquake in particular that they – I guess they needed to rebuild quickly.
Merlin: I'm talking out of my ass again.
Merlin: But the point of the story is that now today, you can go out and buy a bike and walking map of San Francisco.
Merlin: That's fascinating.
Merlin: I don't know if you've seen this, but I know you enjoy a map.
Merlin: But there's a great – you go and pick these up anywhere, and it'll show you the city, right?
Merlin: A regular old road map of the city.
Merlin: But every –
Merlin: block between any two intersections anywhere in san francisco gets uh it's like the jesus seminar of cartography it shows you four different colors to show you how steep the hill is just between those two intersections on my block you can go and see i'm on the i think i'm on like the second or third like you get a light pink you get a darker pink a light red and a dark red
Merlin: You know what I mean?
Merlin: And so this is so, if you're on a bike, luckily the bike routes that exist now, you know, take advantage of the, for example, 20th Avenue.
John: You can zigzag, you're saying.
Merlin: You can tack, yeah.
Merlin: But for example, 20th Avenue is the longest contiguous north-south route in my part of town that has the least hill pound for pound.
Merlin: You've been on my street.
Merlin: I mean, I'm out of breath when I walk from my office up a hill in three minutes.
Merlin: Yeah, steep hill.
Merlin: Very, very, very steep.
Merlin: But, you know, it's kind of funny how, you know, you describe with London, for example, how, you know, who knows, this might have been a bad place to have a house because this is where people threw their chamber pots out the window.
Merlin: You know what I mean?
Merlin: And then the fullness of time, that changes.
John: Well, you know, all it takes, over the course of 500 years, all it takes is a few people...
John: who live long lives and live in the same house their whole lives to affect the course of development.
John: There's that house here in Seattle where the property developers bought the entire block except for this one bedroom bungalow, literally the smallest house you could possibly build.
John: There was just this one bungalow left on an enormous block in Ballard.
John: And the developers wanted to build a super building that had a Whole Foods in it.
John: And I'm sure it was going to be very green.
John: Oh, no, it had a Trader Joe's in it.
John: And it was going to be green construction and full of architects' offices.
John: And this one little bungalow was owned by a little old lady.
John: And her husband had built it.
John: And died many years ago, and she still lived in this one bedroom place, and she wouldn't sell.
John: And they offered her a million dollars, and she wouldn't sell.
John: And so they built their massive Trader Joe's architect building around her house.
John: And her house is still there.
Merlin: Like an up.
Merlin: They built an entire thing around this little house.
John: Yeah, it's around this little house.
John: The new building that they built is four or five stories tall.
John: And this little teeny house sits in basically a canyon that is...
John: Three feet wide on either side and three feet behind.
John: It's basically like an air shaft where this house is.
John: And she just wouldn't, you know, she wouldn't sell them.
John: They said, fuck you.
John: And the story is more hilarious because it wasn't a year or two later that she finally died of old age.
John: And she willed her house to one of the construction dudes who brought her a sandwich every day.
John: Turns out.
John: Yeah.
John: That's awesome.
John: But if you talk about someplace in England, all it took was a family to keep that house in their own hands for a couple hundred years and kind of pass it down.
John: A few people to live...
John: live long lives and live in this one place and all of a sudden this house has been protected from development just by the fact that either the family was not upwardly mobile enough to ever leave it or just sort of tradition bound and now this thing survives and we're like wow it's amazing how did this thing make it all these years and it's like well actually 500 years is just what are we talking about eight generations
John: I mean, that's not outrageous to think that every once in a while a house is actually passed down that many times.
Merlin: Well, in Florida, that's several lifetimes.
Merlin: The thing that always strikes me is – and this is just my own heuristic – but it seems to me that the more – not modern – the more contemporary you want to make a new building look, the more likely it is that it will look extremely uncontemporary in 10 to 20 years.
John: Not even four years.
John: Yeah, that building was built in 2004.
John: I recognize the shade of mauve vinyl siding.
John: Buildings now are dated instantly.
Merlin: Yeah, I'm feeling funny because I think we talked about this a long time ago.
Merlin: That's awesome.
Merlin: But I think we – yeah, I know we talked about this because of the wet cellos.
John: You're feeling funny though because you have a funny feeling.
Merlin: I do have a funny feeling.
Merlin: The Moss Building at Madison.
Merlin: Oh, yeah.
Merlin: I'll send you the link for this.
Merlin: I know we talked about this once before, this example of brutalist architecture where the first floor of the building has like a ramp.
Merlin: so that they can basically turn the hose on students that are trying to rush the building.
Merlin: Yeah, the rioters.
Merlin: Yeah, yeah.
Merlin: And of course, it's just so horrible.
Merlin: We talked about this, but it's so horribly designed and constructed where the music department, just to reiterate, the music department is in the basement where everything is wilting.
Merlin: So, you know, it's... But here's another one I remember is in the mid-80s.
Merlin: I guess there was...
Merlin: It's one of the things – you know how they say when they open a Starbucks, turns out that that Starbucks makes a lot of money and the other Starbucks don't necessarily make less money?
Merlin: It's a really strange phenomenon, which sounds a little bit like a pyramid scheme to me.
Merlin: But that's how it was in Florida in the mid-'80s.
Merlin: Early to mid-'80s, there was a sudden influx of money for new construction.
Merlin: I think it probably had to do with financing, a certain kind of attractive financing.
Merlin: But suddenly –
Merlin: People were putting up strip malls where there just didn't need to be another strip mall.
Merlin: It was unnecessary.
Merlin: And then all these places, suddenly everything had an awning and or an atrium.
John: Well, this is this economic alchemy that people talk about.
John: when they talk about job creation and they talk about lowering the taxes and trickle-down economics and all this, you create what, in conservative thinking, is this sort of ideal, magical set of circumstances where the business climate is friendly to development, and all of a sudden...
John: It's like a Genesis bomb of capitalism.
John: And these, you know, these economically stagnant areas become economically vibrant.
John: And that is the whole truth of conservatism or the magical thinking of it.
John: It's just like, look at what happened.
John: But that mentality does not take any kind of super long view on development.
John: And they'll point to your neighborhood in Florida and say, you know, development swept into this area and transformed it.
John: The tax base was suddenly elevated.
John: Everybody was making more money.
John: The city was making more money.
John: This is what happens when you lower regulation and you reduce taxes and you make a place.
John: But what they don't factor in and what is completely irrelevant to their thinking is what is in there?
John: What is that exactly?
John: It's nail salons and it's temporary businesses.
John: It's a new Starbucks across the street from the old Starbucks and somehow they're both making money.
John: It is this kind of magical place where economics is...
John: where capitalism is happening, but is that area improving people's lives?
John: Really?
John: 20 years from now, is that area still going to be economically vibrant?
John: Really?
John: Is there any reason for it to be there?
John: When you look at the land and you say...
John: Oh, there used to be a stream here, and so there was a mill here, and that's why this street is called Mill Street, and that's why this neighborhood is called Mill Town.
John: And I see why development happened here, and I see why these are warehouses instead of homes.
John: and i you know and i see like and then it fell on hard times when the mill closed because there was there was new milling technology that was happening somewhere else they didn't need a running stream you know etc you see you see development through the lens of history but then you go out into the into the flats where it's like they built a mall here because property was cheap and taxes were low
John: again creating certain conditions the conditions were right for somebody who's smart to take advantage of all these seemingly unrelated things to make something nobody necessarily needed but was good for them right but as you say conditions are in a way analogous to like oh there used to be a river here so they built a mill oh this is flat swampy land that they could fill easily and so they built a mall like there is a continuity but
John: But in the same way, like that land, there's another way of looking at it, which was that was swampy, worthless land before, and it's swampy, worthless land now.
John: Nobody is going to go there.
Merlin: Just that it's got an Orange Julius now.
John: Yeah, it has.
John: You've built a strip mall on it, but it is a kind of, it is a false paradigm of economics where...
John: Money sweeps in and transforms a neighborhood, and then economists move on in their thinking.
John: And they're like, let's go somewhere else and have capitalism transform an area.
John: But what they've left behind is this thing that is going to percolate along for a few years, and then the lack of reason for it to be there, the lack of soul...
John: is going to manifest itself and all the low taxes in the world aren't going to motivate people to go there because there's no...
John: Because it's a false thing.
John: It's a, you know, it's an Orlando.
John: And, I mean, people are still going to Orlando.
John: But, you know, is Orlando – I mean, maybe Orlando will be there in 500 years.
Merlin: But it's also – there's also a myopia, it seems to me.
Merlin: And this is true of people all over the –
Merlin: spectrum politically.
Merlin: But it's a funny idea of cause and effect where you can say something that is accurate.
Merlin: I won't even say true.
Merlin: You can say something that's accurate, which is you can say this sector of the economy is
Merlin: has created the greatest percentage of jobs in the last 15 years.
Merlin: And you could say something that anybody could... You could look at the actual untampered data and say that it's absolutely true.
Merlin: And yet, make a decision based on that that will have absolutely... There's absolutely no...
Merlin: So guarantee, let alone logic, that making a decision based on that will yield the same results.
Merlin: Specifically, you could say, for example, small businesses have created the greatest number of jobs over the last 15 years.
Merlin: Okay, so logically then, if you did the syllogism, if we give lots of money, tax breaks, or incentives to small business, then lots more jobs should happen.
Merlin: I just think that's not how that works.
Merlin: I'm not saying don't give money to people, but I'm saying it's such a simplistic view of things.
Merlin: I don't know if it's going to take a super train to help people understand how this stuff needs to be integrated, but my sense is when you give anybody money, they will try to spend it on things that benefit them.
Merlin: They're not interested in your conclusions about why that money was a good idea.
Merlin: Money, the liquidity of money is what allows people to do anything with it.
Merlin: They could spend that on rim jobs and Dr. Pepper.
John: Yeah, we're not talking about Jason Finn here.
Merlin: Okay.
Merlin: I didn't know he was a Dr. Pepper man.
Merlin: Well, but as you say, I mean – Well, first of all, does that make any sense?
Merlin: When you talk about – I don't want to get into the politics of this, but I think this is – at a higher level, this is a really, really big problem.
Merlin: Unless you're going to do something as sweeping as the New Deal where we basically all agree there are some great things that will be built and there's other things where we just need to get money to people and get them back to work.
Merlin: In a way that will make them more dignified and part of the body politic again and will keep the unions from revolting.
Merlin: Don't you think?
John: I feel like we have demonized big government in people's minds so much because what big government represents to people is that some bureaucrat is going to tell you that you have to hire –
John: people of a race that you don't admire.
John: You know, like big government to most people in America is a simple one-to-one, like you're taking my tax dollars and then telling me that my kids have to go to school in the worst school in town in order to make up for
John: some disadvantage that minority kids have.
Merlin: Or at a more practical level, you have to go hire people of any quality, where people of that particular quality that you want to give jobs to, there's just simply not enough people with that genetic component that are doing what we do.
Merlin: We want you to hire more physics experts, and they should be black women.
Merlin: Well, first of all, let's look at how many black women are physicists right now.
Merlin: Because that might be a different problem to solve.
John: Yeah.
John: It is that social engineering component, however it manifests itself, that freaks people out.
John: That big government, particularly in the hands of liberals for the last 50 years, has engaged in a kind of social engineering experiment nationwide in a thousand different ways.
John: And that is the thing that appalls people in...
John: Basically anywhere outside of San Francisco, New York, LA, Chicago, and Seattle.
John: And leaving aside whether that social engineering experiment has merit or is successful, the baby that's been tossed out with the bathwater there is the idea that there would be any organizing principle to the way we approach
John: the development of america and you know we built the interstate highway system in and it was eisenhower that did it in an absolutely socialistic fashion you know eisenhower said we are going to use eminent domain to go to all of the states in the nation and just take away land from people and employ
John: Thousands and thousands of people.
Merlin: Well, these can't be superhighways if we take that San Francisco.
Merlin: In other words, if these curve too much, they're not even going to be highways, let alone superhighways.
John: Well, although when they were building the interstate highways, they found the Pennsylvania Turnpike or the Ohio Turnpike, one of the two, one of the first ones they built.
John: They built it too straight.
John: Huh.
John: And people... It was just straight for 200 miles.
John: And people fell asleep and drove their cars off the road.
John: Turns out.
Merlin: That is good.
John: Yeah.
John: As they were developing the interstate highway system, they realized that they had to manufacture big sweeping curves in the roads...
John: where there's no reason for it, in order to keep people's attention enough that they don't crash.
John: So when you drive the highways, it's very rare, except in places like Montana or Texas, it's very rare that you'll see just straight uninterrupted straight for hundreds of miles.
John: It doesn't happen because they engineered it to kind of wend its way.
John: But anyway, so what you were talking about, which is that
John: If you say building, like the builders, that is a booming sector of the economy.
John: And we're not going to regulate it because government regulation is bad.
John: You get places like all of Florida and Nevada.
Yeah.
John: Where they build five houses for every person in the town.
John: And it's because every one of these builders acting independently says, I got to get on this train.
John: And there's nobody at the government level approving business permits, approving building permits, who's saying, hold on.
John: Do we need 600 new McMansions in this area?
John: Is there demand for it?
John: Can this town support it?
John: Everybody's just like, well, government's got to get out of the way because here we come, small business owners.
John: Small business owners have the moral imperative.
John: And this is the thing that terrifies libertarians is they imagine some...
John: some wizard of oz bureaucrat sitting behind a curtain approving or not approving their building permits to put a new bunker on their 25 acres and they feel like that is that is government intrusion that is that is police statism but if you don't have somebody
John: sitting there with a rubber stamp saying, I'm not approving any more building permits for this part of the town because I'm the only person in a position to see that we have too many houses right now being built.
John: Like, we need to put the brakes on this.
John: Then you get this development that just wipes up the side of a mountain, and you've got these houses sitting up there, and any dummy can look at it and go, no one's ever going to live there.
Merlin: Or you get the epilogue in Florida where I live.
Merlin: So I was living in that area in the mid-'80s.
Merlin: When I came back after college when the economy was in the shitter, guess what you had?
Merlin: You had a bunch of uncompleted strip malls.
Merlin: You had that one mall that used to be hanging on –
Merlin: What is it?
Merlin: There's a Chris Rock that says it's all like baby clothes and greeting cards or whatever.
Merlin: But it's true.
Merlin: Like that one mall that was barely hanging on is gone and now it's – eventually I think everything – when things – when you start seeing more farmers markets and flea markets in places that used to be retail stores, I think that's a pretty good sign that something went a little off.
John: Yeah, and the solution in most cases, the rah-rah capitalist solution to that is to go build another strip mall in a newer neighborhood.
John: It is not to repurpose that old strip mall that's now full of RC modeler stores.
Yeah.
John: It is not to tear down the shitty motel-style apartment building and build something new there rather than tear down the Victorian.
John: The solution is always go build another one somewhere else.
John: and try and light the gasoline over there so it's going to burn real hot and we're going to think we're making money.
John: We're generating money over there.
John: And there's no collective memory of all this trail of strip malls.
John: It's like the islands of Hawaii.
John: If you look at Hawaii, the reason it looks like a dragon's tail is
John: is that there's a hot spot under the ocean, and over the course of millennia, you know, the way the shifting crusts under the ocean have moved, they have moved along this hot spot, and the hot spot keeps producing islands, and then the islands move on the crust in the wake of this burning...
John: you know, this burning hole.
John: And that's true.
Merlin: I did not know this is all new to me.
John: Yeah, that's true of economic development, too.
John: The burning hole keeps moving, and in its wake are these nail salons and RC modeling stores that used to be little boutiques and Starbuckses, or whatever the Starbucks equivalent was.
John: 40 years ago was, which was not Orange Julius.
Merlin: It was... Stuff, you mean stuff that, you thought 40 years ago, the stuff that would pop up?
John: Yeah, what was a really nice... Photo mats?
John: Photo places.
John: A little Italian restaurant, like home-style Italian restaurant.
Merlin: You mean inside of an old mall?
John: Yeah, inside of an old mall that fronted a highway.
John: I'm thinking Italian restaurant where he'd walk in and there was a little fountain in the lobby where kind of a cherub had some water coming out of his penis.
Merlin: You know, there's probably so many senior theses about this that I'll never read.
Merlin: But I have to admit, I am really fascinated by what happens to a mall in particular as it goes down.
Merlin: Because there's always...
Merlin: There's always these – okay, so in Cincinnati, we had Northgate Mall.
Merlin: And Northgate Mall was probably not the first, but it was one of the first enclosed malls in the United States as far as I know.
John: Seattle also has a Northgate Mall.
Merlin: Interesting.
Merlin: Do you have a Westfield Mall?
John: We do have a Westfield mall.
John: I think – We have a Southgate mall.
Merlin: We had a Southgate in – We had a South Center.
John: I'm sorry.
John: South Center.
Merlin: But it starts out and everything is glitzy and I remember as a kid – do you remember this?
Merlin: You go to the mall as a kid and they had fountains that worked inside the mountain.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: Inside the mountain.
Merlin: Inside the mall.
Merlin: But then also they would have car shows and van shows.
Merlin: And Clearwater Mall in Clearwater, Florida, I remember at one point was the... My grandfather knew this exactly, including the asterisks.
Merlin: But it was the single largest mall under one roof in the United States.
Merlin: And it was a huge two-story mall before these things had really caught on.
Merlin: But, you know, I remember going there and there's a custom van show.
Merlin: And I remember seeing one called the Dreamweaver, where the guy played Dreamweaver on repeat.
John: Oh, yeah.
John: Do you remember the Pinto wagon that had a little...
John: Circular window in the back.
Merlin: A bubble window?
John: A bubble window a la Dreamweaver van.
John: No.
John: And you'd open the tailgate on this Pinto wagon and the inside of the wagon was all plush carpet.
Merlin: This was a thing.
Merlin: These shows.
Merlin: Done up.
Merlin: It's so sexy.
Merlin: And I remember one time they had a thing about stuff from the future.
Merlin: They had a house of the future that looked like a UFO.
Merlin: And then it starts sliding down.
Merlin: And pretty soon you got – where there used to be like Shilato's or McAlpin's, now you've got like a Pantry Pride.
Merlin: That's one.
Merlin: Pantry Pride.
John: Oh, that's when you know it's happening.
Yeah.
Merlin: But it's funny.
Merlin: Look at our mall.
Merlin: Our mall, I think, is whistling past the graveyard right now.
Merlin: I don't think you're in there, but there's the mall where the Apple Store is about almost exactly a mile south of where we live.
Merlin: And it used to be you'd walk through there and see how many places were empty.
Merlin: First of all, I don't understand how you can have like 40 shoe stores in a mall.
Merlin: I still don't understand that, but I guess there must be a reason that they stay alive.
Merlin: But suddenly there's more places like Hot Topic.
Merlin: There's more places like these high volume, younger people kind of places.
Merlin: There's tons of phone kiosks.
Merlin: But you know what they do now is when a place is empty.
Merlin: Remember how it used to be?
Merlin: They would just have like a big boarded up thing.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: And then the boarded up thing becomes something where they like drew giant people on it.
John: That's right.
John: A big mural.
Merlin: Or they'd say, are this space available?
Merlin: Well, now— Are people carrying shopping bags?
Merlin: Now they light it up and kind of make it look like it's a store.
Merlin: And the thing is, if you look twice at it, you'd realize that it's like staging a model home.
Merlin: Really?
Merlin: It's a dummy store?
Merlin: It's not.
Merlin: If you look at it, obviously, you can't walk in.
Merlin: But I think they're trying to avoid the missing teeth that those kinds of places create in a mall.
Merlin: Because I'm going to bet you, for a middle-aged person, walking into a mall with a lot of stores that aren't there, you know what I mean?
Merlin: It feels like suburban retail blight.
Merlin: Sure.
Merlin: It seems like the Warriors.
Merlin: Absolutely.
Merlin: Woo-hoo!
Merlin: Ah-ha-ha!
Merlin: Come out and play.
Merlin: I'm not sure where I'm going with that.
Merlin: But what you're describing also, though, is to get into all the infrastructure of what it takes to do any of those things.
Merlin: And are we going to have the capacity, I'm guessing, for things like go garbage and water and public transit and stoplights and all the kinds of things?
Merlin: We had a...
Merlin: A friend in – when I was in junior high who was the county administrator.
Merlin: I don't think he was a rock and roll county administrator, but he was a county administrator for Pasco County.
Merlin: And he would – just out of nowhere, sometimes he would drop these fascinating facts.
Merlin: And I was saying one day – I was helping him split some logs I think for $4 an hour.
Merlin: That's what you call it in Florida.
Merlin: Did you grow up in Indiana in 1850?
Merlin: Illinois.
Merlin: And I grew up in a formaldehyde house.
Merlin: But I said, yeah, you know, it's really crazy over there by Southgate Mall.
Merlin: It's really nuts.
Merlin: There should be a stoplight there.
Merlin: What can you do about that, Gallagher?
Merlin: Can you get a – John Gallagher, can you get a stoplight over there?
Merlin: He said, you know what?
Merlin: I think what he said was, do you know what it costs to put in a stop sign somewhere?
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: And I forget.
Merlin: I think the stoplight in 1980, I think he said any stoplight starts at $40,000.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: Which I don't know if I'm remembering that right.
Merlin: But what I do remember is when he told me what it cost to put in a stoplight or a stop sign was like over $1,000 or something.
Merlin: But it was one of those things where it was a real wake-up call to me because I just always assumed that there was a warehouse somewhere full of entirely modern stoplights.
Merlin: And all you got to do is send a couple guys over there and put it up.
John: Yeah, just send a couple guys over.
Merlin: That changes everything.
Merlin: If you're doing that on US-19 and you put in a new stoplight with a green arrow and stuff, that changes so many things.
John: Butterfly effect.
Merlin: Absolutely.
Merlin: Absolutely.
Merlin: Right now they're building a new subway line that goes to Chinatown and Stockton Street is like upside down.
Merlin: It's completely upside down.
Merlin: I was trying to explain to my daughter who just mainly wanted to go to the Disney store and have me shut up.
Merlin: The knock-on effect of closing the street for four years, like what that's going to mean to the economy for the Ben – wasn't that Ben Davis?
Merlin: Ben – what's the shirt store?
Merlin: Ben –
Merlin: Ben Gurion.
Merlin: David Ben Gurion store.
Merlin: Dickie Ben... Ben... Ben Hur.
Merlin: Alamein.
Merlin: Yeah.
John: I don't know.
John: Yeah.
John: Well, the thing about local government, you know, city government, county government, these guys are trying to balance all these factors.
John: All these things are happening.
John: And we interact with their decisions mostly on the level of, why is this street closed?
Yeah.
John: Why is there not a blank here?
John: Why is there not a stop sign at this intersection?
John: And why is there never a cop when I can find one?
John: And every once in a while, our garbage doesn't get picked up, and we're like, goddamn City Hall.
John: But these people who are working in local governments...
John: are trying to put out fires, but also trying to envision the big picture of the development of their region.
John: And this argument that we're having as a country, this big government versus capitalism argument, like...
John: it fundamentally doesn't interest me because it's fundamentally not the art.
John: It's not, we're not talking about the wrong argument.
John: It's the wrong argument.
John: Like at a certain point,
John: Unless you are an apocalyptic thinker who believes that the day that you die, the world stops existing.
John: And I think a lot of people live this way.
John: That's a really good point.
Merlin: That's such a sad way to put it, but I think you're absolutely right.
John: Yeah.
John: Either because they think they're going to heaven or because they just have never thought beyond heaven.
John: themselves but a lot of people just are like what are you talking about a hundred years from now there is no such thing i'm not going to be here so why would it matter um but without that kind of thinking and that kind of thinking is not inherently it's there's nothing intrinsically hostile to capitalism about it but it does and i and i understand people's suspicion um
John: Because this is the famous refrain of libertarians.
John: When you say, listen, somebody needs to decide how many houses are going to get built in Las Vegas, Nevada this year.
John: It can't be unlimited number of houses.
John: We can't let the number of houses built in Las Vegas be determined just by how many houses we can possibly build this year.
John: The libertarians will instantly say, well, who decides?
John: Who gets to decide?
Merlin: How about people who understand the problem?
John: Well, and the implication is that it's somewhat unqualified.
John: The implication is that that decision is going to be made...
John: by some bureaucrat with a degree in sociology from a local community college who's going to sit there and smirk at them as they decline their building permit.
John: And that is such a pervasive attitude.
John: And it's a funny thing when you think about how politics in America and in a lot of places works, where most people's political awareness
John: is at the level of they go to the DMV and they have a bad experience and it radicalizes them.
John: They become anti-government because they went to the DMV and somebody there was rude to them and charged them what they think is an unfair amount for their tabs.
John: And that is the depth of their political experience.
John: They don't have any interaction with people.
John: with government other than getting pulled over by the cops, having to wait in line at the DMV.
John: And what?
John: The guy comes into their yard to read their meter.
John: That's the extent of their contact.
John: And a few negative experiences, it radicalizes people for life because they picture Congress or they picture the people at City Hall and they imagine it's just a giant DMV.
John: full of like of like smug lazy people who most of whom probably have an agenda smug lazy people who whether they have an agenda they certainly have tenure they're not going to get fired they are you know they're part of a they're part of a city union or a government union and they have that kind of union smugness and so people you know people think when they ask when libertarians ask that question who decides who
John: What they're picturing is a DMV.
John: And what the country needs, or the way we need to think is, well, yeah, that's a good question.
John: Who decides?
John: And it's not, it isn't, the question isn't answered just by asking it in a sneery way.
John: Like, yeah, who decides?
John: Let's pick somebody, you know?
John: I mean, do we want...
John: Basically, that's asking, do we want another layer of government?
John: But it's a valid question.
John: Because the mayor has to run around town showing up at bake sales and stuff.
John: The mayor does not have the time to sit at a long table with his council of elders and consider these things.
John: But every city needs a philosopher.
John: Every city needs a...
Merlin: Almost like an existential project manager.
John: A development czar.
John: Because cities are all about development.
John: The question of cities and the question of America is really a question of development.
John: People own property.
John: They want the right to develop it how they want it.
John: But our mutual benefit depends on occasionally people being disappointed because you can't always just do what you want.
John: If we're going to have cities that are coherent, you know, if our lives are going to be coherent living together, not everybody gets to do exactly what they want all the time.
Merlin: And just one question though, as far as development, does that also under that rubric, you would also include things like infrastructure upkeep, maintenance, fixing the sidewalks, all that incredibly boring and ridiculously costly stuff.
Merlin: That's, but that all factors into the development issue, right?
John: Absolutely.
John: And there are times, and this is the, this is the thing about taxes, like the, the water that we get out of our tap in Seattle is coming through pipes and
John: That come all the way down from the mountains.
John: You know, hundreds of miles, these pipes.
John: And they were laid a hundred years ago or more by teams of men with shovels and donkeys.
John: And some of these pipes, I swear to you, are made out of cedar.
John: I'm not kidding.
John: You're making that up.
John: There are giant water mains in Washington State that are made out of cedar.
Wow.
John: And then a lot of them that are made out of iron and whatever else.
John: And at a certain point, you're going to need to modernize those systems.
John: When I bought this house, when my mom bought her house, one of the first things we did was we dug up the rusting old iron water main that went out to the street.
John: and replaced it with a new, you know, sadly, PVC water main.
John: But we only went out to the street.
John: The water main that runs under the sidewalk is whose responsibility?
John: It's only the city's.
John: And as you follow that back to the giant, you know, the cedar tube that you could run a super train through that is buried basically under the street two blocks from my house, um...
John: What do you do when that springs a leak?
John: You cannot talk about taxes.
John: You can't talk about development without understanding that all of our cities are built.
John: They were built at a time when a guy with a cigar and a handlebar mustache said, build a pipe, do it, and people did it.
John: He did not have to get approval from seven different city agencies because they didn't exist yet.
John: But now when that thing fails, it's all of our responsibility.
John: And more to the point, this is the public transit question.
John: It's like, we're not building public transit systems.
John: For now, we never are.
John: We're always building public transit for 40 years from now.
Merlin: It has to be kind of, as they say, in tech forward compatible.
John: Right.
John: And if you put it up to a public referendum and you say, hey, everybody out there, take a second, like mute your televisions for a second, and let's think about what this city is going to look like in 40 years and how transit is going to interact with it.
John: Who even mutes their television?
John: Nobody does.
John: They're all like, how?
John: What?
John: Who?
John: Somebody has to be looking at that and and and making and somebody has to be looking at that empowered to make decisions because we have people looking at it.
John: We have transit committees who look at it and they're like, well, this is what we have to do.
John: But they're not empowered.
John: All they can do is kind of limp forward with their project and try and convince the 4% of the population that reads the newspaper still.
John: And then just hope that the rest of the people...
Merlin: are too confused to read the ballot initiative properly that's why so many ballot initiatives are are phrased so convolutedly like vote yes on no to the yes project to the double negative act and the funny part is you can when you watch like the um the local you know planning meetings or anything like that on on those weird uh cable stations i sadly do
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: See, this is – I really – I'd like to come back to this.
Merlin: I would like to consider nominating you to be the czar for these things.
Merlin: I'd like you to think about that a little bit.
Merlin: A nationwide czar.
Merlin: Well, I mean, clearly – here's the thing.
Merlin: Like in England, right?
Merlin: You've got a queen and you've got a prime minister.
Merlin: I think – you know what I mean?
Merlin: You've got somebody who's there for the ceremonial stuff.
John: You might even say that the prime minister of England is a little bit of a queen.
Ooh.
Merlin: No, you didn't.
Merlin: But then, you know, you got somebody who's there to make the tube run on time.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: And then you need a czar.
Merlin: You know what I mean?
Merlin: Yeah.
John: Well, this is why Bloomberg has been such a successful mayor of New York, is that Bloomberg has had enough success running that city
John: And with enough, like, innovative ideas that he, despite the fact that he's a Republican in an overwhelmingly Democratic city, people have embraced him.
John: And despite the fact that he is a little imperial, people are like, yeah, okay, but he, you know, he's doing some pretty cool stuff.
John: And so people give him the leeway.
John: This whole, like, outlawing soda pops thing.
John: that are bigger than 16 ounces thing.
John: Um, whoever, not even Giuliani would have, would have attempted such a, such a nanny state initiative, but, but Bloomberg succeeded.
John: Can't you buy, can't you buy two?
John: Precisely.
John: Yes, you can buy two.
John: You can carry around a 32-ounce cup and buy two 16-ounce pops.
John: That'd be the green way to do it.
John: That's hacking.
John: Kobayashi Maru, my friend.
John: New York is one of those places.
John: When I stand there and I imagine it, when I look at the geography of Manhattan Island, and I imagine, what if...
John: New York was built like London.
John: What if New York was built like it originally was?
John: Which was twisty, windy streets that conform to the, more or less to the geography of the land.
John: Can you imagine Manhattan Island without the crisscrossing right angle boulevards?
John: if if manhattan had just been developed like london just goat trails and twisting little roads i mean you could say oh it wouldn't have prospered like it has but london has prospered london is a major city of the world and there are not two streets running parallel in the entire city um what if new york had not been gridded you try to imagine the
John: Try to imagine the city that same way.
John: Because the geography of New York is pretty interesting, certainly as you move up the island.
John: If you had little twisty, windy… That skyline would sure look different.
Merlin: I can't tell you why, but I also imagine there'd be just fewer skyscrapers in general.
John: Yeah.
Merlin: There would be.
Merlin: If for no other reason than it would be really hard to close off this, you know, seven-eighths of the circle-ish area.
Merlin: And the six-block area is going to be closed for a while because we're doing this.
Merlin: The crane goes here.
Merlin: You know what I mean?
John: Yeah.
John: It wouldn't be a skyscraper city.
John: It would look like Greenwich Village, the whole place.
John: But –
John: Every once in a while when I'm there, I'll stop in Union Square or something and try and hover and get the long view.
John: And I'll be like, wow, wouldn't that be... That would be so weird.
Merlin: It would seem so much less metropolitan.
John: Yeah, although London does not lack metropolitanity...
Merlin: Yeah, but it's weird.
Merlin: In my head, that grid is... Well, I've been in New York maybe four times, but it's New York City.
Merlin: But that gridness, that George Gershwin... Kind of like gridness is what it feels like.
John: It is.
John: Yeah, no.
John: It's just a fantasy thinking because, of course, it wouldn't be New York.
John: It wouldn't be the same.
John: Who would put up with that?
Merlin: Can you imagine cabbies having to deal with that?
John: Well, that that that is I mean, I've driven I've driven in London in the, you know, in the center of the city many times over the years.
John: It's awful.
John: It is.
John: I mean, it's it's crazy making.
John: And the people that live there, I think even people who have lived there their whole lives still appreciate that it is crazy.
John: isn't rome like that too isn't rome pretty crazy to drive in well rome is crazy to drive in not just for that reason but also because the people yeah it's in italy it's it is driving in rome is like driving in cairo i mean there's no there's no other way there's no other way to put it it's just like hey
John: And people driving on the sidewalks and it's just – Athens is a thousand times worse.
Merlin: I just did a quick Google Maps search on how far away my water is.
Merlin: I just made some seltzer a few minutes ago.
Merlin: At one point, that water was 189 miles away from here.
Merlin: The water that you are drinking in San Francisco.
Merlin: It comes from a place – if I drove there, it would take me four hours to get to where my water comes from.
John: Yeah.
John: Think about how long it takes the water to make that trip.
Merlin: It's like the sun or something.
Merlin: For some reason – so there's a thread that runs through a lot of what you're saying, I think, which is that most of us don't really understand –
Merlin: how the sausage gets made yeah you know we don't understand on our soap boxes and scream at each other i mean people were screaming at me on twitter yesterday well because because they've been to the dmv that's all that that is the metonymy that's like all they need is the nose that's all they need to understand everything about how government works is this surly woman with lots of um you know longevity performance badges who's not going to do something that seems very simple to you for you
Merlin: Right.
Merlin: That's emblematic.
Merlin: That becomes the whole thing then, don't you think?
John: Yeah, absolutely.
John: And it's a question of you get your tax bill and it seems unfair.
John: And you go, that's not right.
John: And that is the depth of your analysis.
John: Like the tax bill seems unfair and it's not right because that money is being wasted.
John: Right.
John: And now I am outraged.
John: And no one, it is so unusual that a person, even a liberal who's like, well, I pay my taxes happily.
John: Investigating exactly how your tax money is spent and on what is fascinating.
John: And you get to the point where you're like...
John: My tax bill came.
John: What am I going to find, you know, what am I going to discover in it now?
John: You know, there is plenty of waste, for sure, in government.
John: But they're trying to do so much, you know.
John: Government is trying to do so much.
John: And if all you have to do is go to a place like Bulgaria...
John: Where the government is trying to do a lot of things and not 100%...
John: Making it happen.
John: Not penetrating all the little places.
John: You know?
John: And you're walking around a city and you're like... I mean, this is a thing that no one in America has ever experienced.
John: But if you are in Eastern Europe and walking down the street, you see missing manhole covers.
John: Right.
John: Yeah.
John: You know?
John: Well...
John: Why do you never see that in America?
John: Because if a manhole cover went missing, it would be replaced in two seconds.
John: There is no such thing as a missing manhole cover.
John: Even in America, even in the most bombed out city here, there is enough government to keep that from happening.
Merlin: Or like you wouldn't just drive off – like if they were building or repairing some part of the highway, you would never just drive off of an off-ramp that just stopped in midair.
John: Right, right.
John: I forgot to put up with a sign.
John: Yeah.
John: There's always – I mean the other day my mom was driving down the street and they're building some public transit here in Seattle that was conceived by committee, approved by a committee that was trying to –
John: appeal to 15 different constituencies so that there was not a very good idea.
John: Like, if you look at the town, you look at how it's going to develop over the next 40 years, the train should have gone XYZ.
John: But they put the train in...
John: You know, XPL because they had to go by P because that's the hospital and that's a big constituency.
John: You have to go have the train go by the hospital.
John: And, you know, and it would be too difficult to turn the train around over here.
John: Anyway.
John: They're building what is a good thing, and they're building it in a dumb way because there wasn't somebody with the power sitting in the big chair to say, it's got to go here.
John: I'm sorry if that disappoints people, but really, this is how it should look.
John: Anyway, so they're building this thing, and so they've got the streets all torn up, and there's traffic backed up for two miles along Broadway.
John: And my mom is sitting at this traffic light, and there's a cop there.
John: And the cop is ostensibly directing traffic.
John: But the cop's got one hand in his pocket, and he's just kind of standing there like a dope guy.
John: And every once in a while, somebody gets in the wrong lane or has his turn signal on in a way the cop doesn't like.
John: And the cop kind of, you know, will yell at a guy like, keep moving or something like that.
John: But my mom looks at that cop and what she sees in his place is a vigorous traffic directing police officer who's like, come on, let's go, let's go.
John: You know, one of those guys that you see in Manhattan where he's got a whistle and is just clenched in his teeth.
John: The model of clarity.
John: This guy who's like, I'm in charge of this intersection, if nothing else.
John: If nothing else in my life, if my wife doesn't love me, if my kids don't listen to me, I am in charge of this fucking intersection right now.
John: And I want you to go now.
John: Go.
John: Now.
John: You.
John: Tweet.
John: Go.
John: You.
John: Now.
John: Go.
John: Go.
John: Okay.
John: Stop.
John: Now.
John: You.
John: Go.
John: Go.
John: Go.
John: And what that intersection needed, what the city of Seattle needed in that moment was that cop.
John: The cop who had a whistle in his teeth and he owned that intersection.
Merlin: But that's different from the attitude of a fireman who's getting you out of the building next to the one that's burning.
Yeah, right.
Merlin: You know what I mean?
Merlin: Everybody else in here is going to be thinking about what's going on and what they're going to have for dinner.
Merlin: And I'm going to stand here and every one of you is going to, in an orderly way, you're all going to go through that door and get out of here alive.
Merlin: Go, go, go, go, go, go.
Merlin: And I don't have time to explain this to you.
John: So my mom is sitting at this intersection and she's looking at this cop and she's like, the city isn't working.
John: The government isn't working.
John: And, you know, my mom has a long view, but her relationship to the police department in Seattle is very much like, my mom is very, she sends a lot of anonymous angry letters to the East Precinct.
Merlin: Whoa, so she's got her own little bitter Rolodex of exactly who it should go to?
Merlin: She takes people's badge numbers.
Merlin: Oh, God, I respect that.
John: And she writes down cop cars license plates.
Merlin: So she actually does it.
Merlin: She follows through.
Merlin: She follows through.
John: Oh, yeah, yeah.
John: She's got a whole plan.
John: She doesn't let the cops off the hook at all.
John: But so she's sitting at this intersection.
John: She's like, what the fuck is wrong with this cop?
John: What is wrong with the culture of the police department that this police person does not have the energy to actually be directing traffic here?
John: And she's looking up the street and looking down the street and she's like, this is going to affect traffic in Seattle all day because it's having a reverberative effect all through the town.
John: And it's all on this guy.
John: Who's who is taking a laissez faire attitude to his job here, you know, and and and honestly, if I was that cop supervisor and drove through there and there was nobody blocking the intersection and nobody lying dead on the street, you know, you go, yeah, he's doing his job.
John: But he's not he's not doing he's not really doing the job.
John: But you think about all these guys that came to Seattle today to drop off a bale of hay at somebody's kiddie ride, and they're driving a dually diesel Dodge pickup truck, and they're headed back out to their ranch in Yakima, and they're waiting at this intersection.
John: And, you know, I hear these people talk all the time.
John: They're like, I'd never live in Seattle.
John: Hell no.
John: All those, you know, just a bunch of, they're just a bunch of animals.
John: And that's that guy's, that's that guy's experience of Seattle.
Merlin: That's his file card.
Merlin: He's got a file card.
John: Yeah.
John: He's watching, he's watching that cop and he thinks this is bullshit.
John: And his vote counts the same as mine about whether Seattle gets the tax money to put in high-speed public transit or to replace our water mains.
John: And he's sitting out there in the same county I live in, but he's going, well...
John: That money is just wasted.
John: Who decides?
Merlin: It's just some bureaucrat.
Merlin: Well, you're onto something.
Merlin: It's a theory I've been trying to bubble around in my head for a while, and this is nothing particularly new or unique.
Merlin: But I think in an example like that, that is pretty close to a template for how millions of interactions go down every day.
Merlin: And you can certainly see the results of this on the internet.
Merlin: Once you're aware of this pattern...
Merlin: Listeners, you may see this more.
Merlin: So it's kind of a shadow of how cognitive behavioral therapy works in some ways, but in a more awful and distorted way.
Merlin: Something happens in the world, and that could be – so you're at the DMV, and you don't like this person's attitude.
Merlin: I'm at the Safeway, and I don't like that the person is talking about my groceries.
Merlin: Somebody is displeased with how that particular person is or is not directing traffic.
Merlin: And one of the very first things that happens is you see something happening and you go straight to having a very strong emotion about it.
Merlin: And let's be honest.
Merlin: Let's just even say that maybe that person is not working optimally or not working to the spec.
Merlin: Or let's just say for the sake of argument that it just didn't go as well as it could.
Merlin: Great example, customer service people.
Merlin: You call up and something was broken.
Merlin: Your Superman doll is not as well articulated as it said in the ad and you call this person and you're furious.
Merlin: But something happened.
Merlin: You get a really strong emotion about it that maybe you can't shake and it just feels like it's not a very long – there might be other steps in this.
Merlin: But to me, there's not a very long leap for most people from something happened, I have a feeling, to this will have an impact on society.
Merlin: Right?
Merlin: To like – I suddenly – I have such a – and I think part of it comes out of this impotent feeling that maybe you're a libertarian who thinks that you should only pay for one road that everybody uses lightly or whatever it is.
Merlin: Maybe – you know what I mean?
Merlin: But whoever you are, whatever your political affiliation, I honestly think that most of us, it starts with an emotion.
Merlin: It doesn't start with going to a planning meeting or a zoning meeting and understanding –
Merlin: It doesn't start with understanding that maybe that guy's cat, maybe the traffic cop's cat died that day.
Merlin: I'm not trying to be too flimsy about this, but what's funny is that the people who get the most worked up and become these people who are, like you say, what do you call it?
Merlin: The tweet storms or the Twitter bombs?
Merlin: The people who get involved in that stuff, it really just started because they're mad that their luggage wasn't there.
Merlin: To quote Barry Sobel, what do you want me to do?
Merlin: You want me to just pick up the airport and shake it until your bags fall out?
Merlin: I'm here, and you know what, dude?
Merlin: I'm the baggage guy, and I'm fucking here to help you.
Merlin: You're not going to meet another person here that is – with your attitude, you're never going to meet anybody more sympathetic than me.
Merlin: My job is to try and help you, but I am not God.
Merlin: I can't change the way that a huge broken system works, and you're yelling at me is not helping.
Merlin: And then going on Twitter and yelling about it is going to help even less because even if you get a lynch mob, it's not going to change the Denver airport.
John: And this is the –
John: This is the thing that has affected the tenor of our national conversation.
John: The idea that property rights is a thing that you would shout at somebody is – I mean there is no more personal – This is like your farmers who want to have – they don't want to build a skyscraper.
Merlin: They want the right to build a skyscraper.
John: Well, yeah, and people shout this now who do not own any property.
John: Property rights has become a kind of – It's the what's wrong with Kansas problem.
Merlin: It's like people like my mom who have the values of an extremely, extremely right-wing Republican and none of the assets to back it up.
John: Yeah, right.
Merlin: Because that's the money they want.
John: There are no two more personal words in American politics because property rights is – it is an expression of people's feeling that they do not have any power over their – they don't have autonomy.
John: They don't have power over their environment.
Merlin: Well, they've got the ownership that God has granted them as an American, but they don't have the rights that should come with that, right?
John: Well, or what they don't see – I mean, the thing is I have tremendous sympathy for municipal governments because my people were always in government.
John: My uncle was the mayor of Anchorage.
John: My dad was –
John: On the legislature, my grand uncle was a city councilman.
John: I come from these people, and I'm friends with the local government here in Seattle, and I like talking about government.
John: And so I hear from them their frustrations, and they're not expressed as frustrations.
John: They're just like, this is my job.
John: It's very hard for me.
John: to go to a meeting where I am saying, for everyone's benefit, we need...
John: to keep the side of this hill forested.
John: Otherwise, landslides will take all the soil off down into the river and we will have floods and it will be a natural disaster.
John: And I'm saying this to the five guys who own that hillside and they own that land.
John: Some of them have owned that land for 80 years.
John: And whether they ever intended to cut those trees down, they're
John: powerful desire to not be told what to do with that land is deafening them.
John: And if you don't have sympathy for those guys who own that hillside, you're crazy because you have to have sympathy for them.
John: If that was my land, I would feel the same way.
John: If that was my land, I would be at that meeting and I would be like, God damn you, property rights.
John: You can't tell me that I can't chop down these trees.
John: And show me the report.
John: Show me the science that says that this, you don't know for sure, guy, that the landslides are going to happen.
John: Like all this, and it's analogous to global warming.
John: It's analogous to every one of our national problems.
John: There is a guy at the heart of every one of those that has a personal feeling that you shouldn't be able to tell him what to do.
John: But the city, the guy whose job it is...
John: to keep that from happening and it's not his job isn't to protect his ass you know and this is the other negative version of government is that the guy's just trying to protect his ass that if the landslide happens then he's going to be on the hook for it and that's his motivation like if the government spent more money on landslide remediation they've got the budget why don't they take care of that instead of picking my pocket
John: Yeah, or there's a million permutations of it, but most people that are working in government aren't trying to protect their ass that way, or at least at the high levels.
John: They're trying to look 40 years down the road.
John: And yet they have tremendous sympathy for these people who own that property.
John: But their hands are tied.
John: And you cannot go to a meeting like that and come away from it feeling like there's any kind of elegant solution.
John: Because you're never going to convince those five guys.
John: And they are going to yell and they are going to say crazy things to you because you are taking from them.
Merlin: And in that case, you – again, I don't know if it's the next key or metonymy.
Merlin: You are the government.
Merlin: That person who's standing up there delivering that bad news they may not even have had that much of a say in.
Merlin: Yeah, is the government.
Merlin: They're the government, and their inability to do anything about it makes them even more hateable.
John: Yeah, and what's incredible about our country right now is that those five guys who own that hillside covered with trees have convinced 50 percent of the country –
John: to be just as mad as they are about it.
John: You know, 50% of the country, the whole town now is mad about whether or not these guys should be allowed to cut down those trees and create an inevitable mudslide that blocks the river.
John: And, you know, and there are people saying, show us the report, and there are people saying, property rights above all, and there are people saying, who decides?
John: And...
John: Then there's the government that's like, well, shit, you guys, seriously?
John: Do I have to show you every time this has happened before?
John: Do I have to show you?
John: I mean, come on.
John: We need to just make this decision, and it's got to get made, and I'm sorry.
Merlin: So you have sympathy for those people, but you also say, what do you think is the proper amount of evidence –
Merlin: that they should have presented to them.
Merlin: Like, you know, you're, you're a pretty skeptical guy.
Merlin: You don't like being ripped off.
Merlin: How do you, so when the club owner says, I'm, you know, I agreed to pay this much or let's even say this, I don't know how I can give you a good example without you finding a great loophole, but let's say they want to give you less than you expected.
Merlin: Like, what is the evidence that you would accept that?
John: It's the same in every aspect.
John: If somebody, you know, I know a lot of people, if somebody on Twitter writes them, responds to one of their tweets and says, fuck you, you don't know what you're talking about, that they just block that person immediately.
John: Because they just, they don't need that in their lives.
John: For me, if somebody writes me a tweet that says, fuck you, you don't know what you're talking about.
Merlin: I always reply.
Merlin: Can I block those people for you so you don't even have to see them, John?
John: I always reply because 25% of the time, there was a guy yesterday who listened to our podcast on depression.
John: And wrote me a tweet.
John: I swear to you, Merlin.
John: Wrote me a tweet that said, fuck you!
John: Depression is easy to cure.
John: You just have to try.
John: Fuck you.
Merlin: That sounds like trolling.
Merlin: Who knows what it was?
Merlin: Do you think a person believed that?
John: The thing is, if I had blocked him, I would never know.
John: So what I wrote in was, gee, sounds like you've really got depression under control.
John: Like, good on, you know, you sound super healthy.
John: Which is sarcastic, but also an opportunity for this person to stop and think about what they just did.
John: And this morning I wake up and I have a tweet from this guy going, I apologize.
John: I apologize.
John: That was rude.
John: I've deleted that tweet, and I'm embarrassed that I've become tweet-delete guy, and I had no right to talk to you that way.
Merlin: That happened when I was in Seattle, too.
Merlin: You got somebody deleted a tweet to you.
John: Yeah.
John: And so that right there is the amount of due diligence that I think anybody is owed because there are all kinds of people out there who are going to say, what?
John: Fuck you.
John: No.
John: And if you say, yeah, okay, you sound like you're a little mad now.
John: Do you want to talk about it?
Merlin: You hate when people say that to you.
John: I do, because I always think about how mad I am.
John: But you give them that chance.
John: And if they come back and say, oh, my God, I'm sorry I'm so embarrassed, then you know that you're dealing with at least the beginning of a reasonable person.
Yeah.
John: If their response to that is, fuck you, then they're blocked.
John: And if you do that in a city council meeting and they say, fuck you, my feeling is you have shown them all the reports you need to show them.
John: But that is not how necessarily a democracy works.
John: That is how Supertrain works.
John: Everybody, as Supertrain plows across the land, everybody will get a chance to read the report.
John: But they're going to get one chance to read the book.
Merlin: It seems like a lot of people will understand it on the face of it.
Merlin: People understand a crane.
John: A claw?
John: People understand a claw on a train.
John: It's just something you understand.
John: Even illiterate people, even people who don't speak English are going to see the claw on the train coming.
John: And they're going to go, I get this.
John: I get this.
Merlin: I mean, it is certainly, maybe not in a national sense, but it will involve a certain kind of eminent domain.
John: Oh, absolutely.
John: Am I understanding it a little?
John: The name of Super Train is eminent domain.
John: It's going to be written across the front of the engine in script.
Merlin: Eminent domain.
Merlin: In big letters so they can see it coming?
Merlin: It's flashing.
Merlin: Oh, Christ.
John: Here comes the eminent domain.
John: Eminent domain has arrived, and the claw...
John: The claw is choosing which houses, which forested hills.
Merlin: From a distance you can hear.
Merlin: The claw is just warming up.
Merlin: You can hear it getting closer and closer.
Merlin: i love it um hmm i i uh this is uh probably running too long but i um yeah i think i think that was probably good yeah well i had a good anecdote oh what was it no it's not important no i want to i want to hear an anecdote no you know for me it's your show well i um i i i'm trying to grow as a person you cut all this out
Merlin: Or I could leave it all in.
Merlin: I'm the editor.
Merlin: I'm the decider.
Merlin: I'm the eminent domainer.
John: That's true.
John: In this sense, in this show, you are absolutely the mayor.
Merlin: See, I'm not the mayor.
Merlin: I'm so not the mayor of the podcast.
John: Oh, not the mayor.
John: Okay, you are the city bureaucrat.
Merlin: I'm the rock and roll county executive of the podcast.
Merlin: I admire your work, and I have a limited amount of power.
Merlin: Yeah.
John: But... Exercise it with...
Merlin: I bet you need to go, right?
John: But I want to hear your anecdote.
Merlin: Oh, no.
Merlin: I'll save it.
Merlin: I'll save it for another show.
Merlin: No, no.
Merlin: I'm not trying to deny you.
Merlin: It's just something that has become, for me, I don't know why, but I keep coming up with these things that used to happen to me that make me sympathetic to...
Merlin: to the people who are getting yelled at when they're trying to help you.
Merlin: You know what I mean?
Merlin: And I don't know.
Merlin: To me, it sums up a lot of what you're talking about.
Merlin: And this is – when we first met, I was doing web development and project management as my livelihood.
Merlin: And I've been doing that since 1995.
Merlin: And when I started doing that in 1995, part of my job in some ways was educating people about why the fuck –
Merlin: They would want a website and what is the internet?
Merlin: I mean, to be honest, there were a lot of people who didn't – I wasn't making a lot of money from it.
Merlin: But nevertheless, they would sooner try and get an AOL keyword than they would try to get a website.
Merlin: Like why?
Merlin: I don't have that.
Merlin: I don't look at those.
Merlin: Why would anybody else?
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: That got easier over time, but the opacity of how internet technology works, which is – I am certainly not the master of that stuff.
Merlin: But I will tell you that most of the people I work with were hiring me because of the tiny bit of expertise I had in basically talking to them, figuring out what they wanted, turning it into a graphical website, and then using basic FTP technology to put it onto a web server where people could get to it.
Merlin: And that's what my job was.
Merlin: My job was to try and make a graphical design for a website and then put it up.
Merlin: And then they look at it in their browser.
Merlin: And then maybe emails get sent through a little Perl script form so they can form – that people can use to send them email and so forth.
Merlin: But there's a funny thing that happens.
Merlin: Actually, there's a wonderful Tumblr called Clients From Hell that covers a lot of these kinds of stories.
Merlin: But one thing that used to happen to me a surprising amount of the time was that I would get a call from –
Merlin: client often a client that hadn't been a client for several months and they would say things like uh and anybody who's ever done this for a living is already nodding because this happens all the time so people call me up and they say i can't get to my website okay you can't get to your website is it and i would say well i can see it from here and they're saying no it's not up nothing is coming up
Merlin: And you see where this is going.
Merlin: So basically, in order for them to not feel like I'm a dick, I would have to trace through whether their computer was on, whether they were in a web browser, whether their Ethernet cable was plugged in, John, whether...
Merlin: You know, whether their ISP was down.
Merlin: And so, you know, whereas they hired me to make them a website and put it up, and who knows, maybe I framed that badly.
Merlin: Now, I'm the one who has to tell them whether their Hays modem is configured correctly with the right codes and ampersands in order to get a signal.
Merlin: Or I'm the one trying to tell them their credit card expired on AOL.
Merlin: Or I'm the one explaining that they're using a five-year-old web browser.
Merlin: Or I'm the one telling them that because they're at their brother-in-law's house on a different size screen that has the color all fucked up, you're seeing something that's really screwed up.
Merlin: And I don't have the ability to do anything about any of that, but now I'm the dick.
Merlin: The thing was, I'm accessible.
Merlin: You knew how to call me, or you knew how to email me.
Merlin: I was gracious enough to talk to you, even though your check didn't clear maybe two years ago.
Merlin: But I always felt in a really funny and frustrated position because there's nothing I could say to that person that didn't sound like me making a bunch of excuses.
Merlin: All I know is I can't get to my website.
Merlin: Well, all I can really tell you is that that doesn't have anything to do with the website that I made.
Merlin: Well, then why did I pay you $107 to make me a website?
Merlin: Well...
Merlin: And that might sound really, really extreme, but when I think about that person at the DMV or I think about that person, I think about the fireman, firefighter, who's trying to get people out of that building, to explain how it is –
Merlin: That the peculiar interaction of oxygen and heat with the air that causes wood in particular to be particularly inflammable, and that buildings are made out of wood.
Merlin: To have to explain all that when they're going, why are you being such a screaming asshole?
Merlin: Well, I'm being a screaming asshole because I'm the screaming asshole who might save your life.
Merlin: And by the same token, if they went to the firefighter and said, why isn't there a stoplight by Southgate Mall?
Merlin: He could say, well, A, I don't have anything to do with stoplights even though I'm technically in the quote-unquote government, and B, get your fucking ass out of the building.
Merlin: And I think –
Merlin: I think that the interesting part of that, if there is an interesting part, is that for my clients that I had – and these are the kinds of clients who – there's things like you would see classic stories, the old jokes about people who put their drink in the CD holder, the people who touch the screen with their mouse, the people who always go to Yahoo to search for websites.
Merlin: Everybody's got these.
Merlin: Everybody in my family who's older than my age double-clicks links.
Merlin: They double-click every link.
Merlin: And I tell them, you know, you don't need to double-click that.
Merlin: You just need to click that once.
Merlin: So I'm the asshole, right?
Merlin: But my point being that it isn't like we have to understand everything about how a computer works.
Merlin: But it would be nice to understand enough in that case to know who to call and whether it's helpful to yell at anybody.
Merlin: And that's what I feel like.
Merlin: The only tiny point I was trying to make about the whole, like, the people who show up at those meetings...
Merlin: Well, like for example, I'm pals with the guy who's our merchant association liaison for our neighborhood.
Merlin: And basically the only people who show up for anything, it's like this handful of Chinese ladies with an agenda.
Merlin: And they're like, I'll take care of that.
Merlin: I'll do that.
Merlin: I'll do that.
Merlin: Because they know that there's so –
Merlin: There's so much stuff that could be done, but they're going to make sure that the only stuff that gets done is the stuff that benefits them.
Merlin: Nobody else is going to those meetings, but it isn't until there's 35 bubble drink places and 75 Verizon stores that people go, wow, our neighborhood is getting kind of weird.
Merlin: And if everybody showed up and followed everything, they'd go to all of those meetings and they'd learn to understand how that works.
Merlin: But that's the downside of the way that a system like ours works is that the bigger it gets, the more moving parts there are, the harder it is to understand.
Merlin: And to the general point that the more abstraction there is between that messenger who had to bring that unhappy message to the hill people –
Merlin: And the myriad number of connections in this fucked up game of telephone that ever led to that meeting occurring in the first place.
Merlin: And so I take the larger point about like people in their – I just think this is a basic human problem that we could all be better at on a personal level, which is understanding that the person who picks up the phone and is willing to listen to you complain is not necessarily the person who's to blame for your tax bill.
John: Yeah.
Merlin: And the government – when you say the government, like what – not you, but like what the fuck does that mean?
Merlin: That's like saying you blame the universe.
Merlin: I mean the government is people in that aid vehicle who pick you up off the street.
Merlin: It's the people working at Hetch Hetchy that bring me my water.
Merlin: It just belies such a –
Merlin: It is time for a czar.
Merlin: It's time for somebody to either explain this process to people in a way that they can't control or get away from or to make it not matter anymore and bring a claw into it.
Merlin: That's the only solution because I think people are basically emotionally driven by these things, and that emotion quickly turns into what this means about the universe.
Merlin: And then when you try to make public policy based on that, you're going to have a total clusterfuck.
Merlin: If that farmer stopped for a minute and said, okay, does it really matter if I want a skyscraper?
Merlin: Well, yeah, yeah, but it's a slippery slope.
Merlin: I've got to protect my thing.
Merlin: You know what I mean?
Merlin: Anyway, that's the way I look at it because it's helped me for one thing with being less frustrated when somebody yells at me because I can honestly say to them, look, I –
Merlin: You're trying to solve the wrong problem and you're yelling at the wrong guy.
John: Yeah.
John: Well, like you say, I think the introduction of the concept of abstraction is the key one.
John: That's the big, big, big pattern.
John: As it gets more abstract, this funny thing happens, which is that people think...
John: that they're now dealing with a world of unlimited possibility.
John: Like, in cases where people understand the whole chain of events, they also understand where there's no more you can do.
John: You know what I mean?
John: Like, if your kid falls through the ice, and you're standing on the side of the lake, and you're saying...
John: help rescue my kid, and the fireman crawls out on the ice and the fireman falls through, at a certain point you understand that no one can rescue your kid because you watched the fireman crawl out on the ice and fall through.
John: And there isn't any magic that you can bring to bear on this situation.
John: And so if your kid drowns in that lake...
John: You have a certain amount of there's no one to blame.
John: You know, the kid just fell through the ice and the fireman tried to rescue him.
John: In that moment.
John: In that moment.
John: And for the rest of your life, you have a kind of peace with it where you're like, I was there.
John: I saw it all happen.
John: I understand that my kid couldn't be rescued.
John: But if your kid falls through the ice and there's a fire truck there with a giant crane and you say, help my kid, and the fireman says, the crane isn't rated to be extended that far.
Merlin: Oh, yeah.
John: Then it is still true, just as true, that they have no technology that can reach your kid.
John: But you don't understand anymore.
John: You know, and and even though the fireman knows if he extends the crane that far, the whole fire truck is going to tip over into the lake.
Merlin: But being unable to demonstrate he had a reason, I'm sorry, but he had a reason to say, look, lady, I don't know.
Merlin: You know, I would love to help you in any way I can.
Merlin: But if I do that, 10 people might die.
John: Right.
John: But now there's this abstraction of the crane and what its load limit is and how far you can extend it and what the possibilities are that introduces the concept that maybe if he had just done it, it would have worked.
John: And so then when your kid drowns, you're full of resentment.
John: You lay awake at night and think, why didn't they just extend the crane?
John: Why didn't they just take that risk?
John: And you see this in your computer world.
John: The less people know about computers, the more they actually think anything can happen.
John: That you can just touch it with your elbow and it suddenly starts working because that's what it looks like to them.
John: So they get mad at you.
John: They get disproportionately mad and frustrated.
Merlin: with the with you know inversely proportionate to the amount of understanding they have about how a thing works and you're sitting there going listen you're just asking me to do something that does not that is not and you just nailed it that's that's that's two abstractions that dual you exactly nailed it though that's too completely not paradoxical but contrast maybe paradoxical on the one hand these fucking computers don't work and then on the other hand what the fuck these computers are supposed to be able to do everything and
Merlin: And maybe you're making the same point, but not you, but they're really – you're kind of saying different things.
Merlin: You're saying on the one hand, I knew this thing was bullshit.
Merlin: Like I know this government is crooked and screwed up and isn't doing it, but oh my god, the government should be able to do this.
Merlin: It's the government and they've got all that money.
Merlin: And those are both – could be potentially true.
John: And you're absolutely right.
John: It is people saying like, already I know that government doesn't work because if government worked, we would all be living in undersea cities by now.
John: If government worked, why are there poor people?
Merlin: Eisenhower would have made it in Atlantis years ago.
John: Yeah, we should all be living in Atlantis and the fact that we're not means the government doesn't work.
John: And it's like, do you really not understand that government is people?
John: Yeah.
Merlin: Fucking people.
John: Fucking people.