Ep. 67: "All of the Small Beer"
John: There he is.
John: Hi, John.
John: Did you, did you figure out my signals?
Merlin: Yes.
Merlin: Yes, I did.
John: Yes.
Merlin: I'm so sorry.
John: See, I, at some point I was playing the guitar in my studio room and I hit a cup of coffee with the headstock of my guitar because I was, I was, I was playing a really aggressive part and
John: And some of the coffee sloshed on my keyboard, my computer keyboard.
John: Which, it's a wireless keyboard.
John: And it caused it to initially only be able to type numeric characters, like the dollar sign and the paren and...
John: and like all the non-letters yeah like uh like like yen i could express a lot of yen because i had the symbol for yen um and then it just stopped altogether and so i sit at the computer and you are you are skype messaging me saying here we go ready ready go big guy and i'm like
John: yelling at the computer, I'm here, I'm here.
John: And then I realized I could text you, but then you probably had your phone off.
Merlin: Oh, God, where to begin?
Merlin: I'm so sorry.
Merlin: Yeah, I keep my phone away.
John: You know?
Merlin: yeah i don't think they do that anymore but but no but just you know the whole idea of distraction 100 to john you know but then i went and looked and the entire lock screen was filled with green uh with apple messages from you that were yeah yeah in our special code well i don't you know i don't see this is why i feel like computers are are still made of bicycle parts yeah
John: and vellum and you know and bailing wire yeah but i mean you're you're out there you're out there deep in dayton ohio pushing a keyboard around nothing's getting in the air yeah the and this is the problem if a guy can't get a little bit aggressive with his kramer for this floyd rose equipped kramer guitar and slosh a little coffee on his keyboard and have it keep working yeah
John: What if I was down, what if I was 200 feet under the ground in a missile silo, and I had my hand on a key.
John: I don't even want to think.
John: And you had your hand on a key.
John: Yes.
John: And I'm like.
John: Turn your yen key, sir.
John: Turn your key.
John: Turn your key, sir.
John: And my keyboard, I spilled a little coffee on it.
Merlin: One question.
Merlin: Were you seated when you were jamming?
Merlin: No, no, I was standing up.
John: But I'm telling you, this was a very aggressive guitar part.
Merlin: I've seen videos of you.
Merlin: Of course, I've seen your live programs as well.
Merlin: But when you get going, your glasses fall off and you start rolling around.
John: Yeah, people think that that's all part of the stage act.
John: That's not a bit.
John: But when I get really cranking on a part, who knows what's going to happen?
Merlin: Some coffee's going to get spilled, I'll tell you that.
Merlin: This is why you don't keep coffee on stage.
Merlin: It shows.
John: It's not.
John: It's exactly why.
John: And it's why I had to quit smoking.
John: That's why, first of all, I had to quit smoking on stage.
John: Did you burn yourself?
John: Did I ever tell you that story?
John: I was playing a rock show.
John: It was at the old Crocodile Cafe here in Seattle.
John: It was back when you could still smoke in bars.
John: And in between songs, I lit up a cigarette on stage.
John: Because one time, many years before, I had seen the band Unwound play, and the lead guy in Unwound, he came out on stage, before they ever played a note, he lit a cigarette, and he just stood there and smoked the entire thing, just staring at the audience.
John: Oh, that's good.
John: And, you know, it was a sold-out show, and nobody in the crowd knew what to do.
John: And he wasn't like, he wasn't on drugs, he was staring at us
John: It was the most confrontational, aggressive, badass rock thing I had ever seen.
John: He just stood there.
John: He smoked the entire cigarette at his leisure while we sat in the crowd dumbfounded.
Merlin: Well, naturally, you're going to pick that up.
Merlin: It's kind of a smoky overture.
Merlin: You're setting the tone for the whole show.
John: Yeah, but I could not.
John: I mean, that was a badass move, but it was also a very art school move.
Yeah.
John: And I could never walk out on stage and put that kind of art school cape on.
John: If I'm going to come out in a cape... It's going to be from Walgreens.
John: It's going to be a Walgreens cape.
John: It's not going to be some art school stare-the-audience-down cape.
John: But I did realize that smoking a cigarette on stage was something I could get away with as the star of the show.
John: And anyway, I lit a cigarette on stage and my mom was in the audience.
John: And she said, the power of suggestion is so...
John: It's so profound when a person is standing on stage that you lit that cigarette and 50 people in the audience fumbled for their pack and got a cigarette and the entire crowd lit up and then the room was unbearable.
John: Nobody could stand to be in there because everybody was smoking.
John: I was like, oh, okay, right.
John: No more onstage smoking.
Merlin: Right.
Merlin: So you've always on some level been aware of your power, but in a moment like that, it becomes really clear what you're wielding up there.
John: Mm-hmm.
John: Mm-hmm.
John: That's why I stopped snorting heroin.
John: Yeah.
Merlin: You'll do anything for your art, won't you?
John: Well, I like the crowd to be comfortable to.
Merlin: I have a couple of friends who are a couple.
Merlin: And when they first saw the face off film, you know, pretty good.
Merlin: That John Woo movie.
Merlin: They agreed by, you know, I don't know if it's unanimous to unanimous consent that they needed to develop some kind of a code.
Merlin: So if something happened and one of the two in the couple ended up getting face switched, they would have a way to let the person know.
Merlin: They'd have some kind of facial safe code to let the other person know whether it was really them or not.
John: What was their code?
Merlin: They won't tell, which I think is smart.
Merlin: Of course they won't.
Merlin: Now, if you read comics, you know this kind of thing, what they call mind-swapping comes up all the time.
Merlin: I guess what I'm saying to you is you play guitar a lot.
Merlin: You enjoy coffee.
Merlin: Maybe we need to work something out where we could have some kind of – I don't want to be ping-pong – some kind of smoke signals maybe involving the high ASCII keys that would allow us.
Merlin: Maybe a rebus.
Merlin: Maybe we could work out some kind of a rebus.
John: Well, I was ringing all the bells that I had.
John: Oh, gosh.
John: And I realized that you cannot hear the bells unless the computer is engaged.
John: No, not yet.
Merlin: Yeah.
John: Yeah.
John: Now you can.
John: I hear them fine.
John: And then I'm back to the Wright brothers.
John: Then it's like, there is no way.
John: If he's not answering his...
John: Cell phone texts, me going and getting an iPad is not going to help.
John: There's not a third way.
Merlin: I hate that feeling.
Merlin: And it's like when you lock your keys in your car and you just – first of all, you just fall apart because you realize what a dumbass you are.
Merlin: But then if you're like me, you just start reeling through all these different possibilities.
Merlin: It's like any – you don't panic like I panic, but I'm a panicker.
Merlin: And when I panic, I get real stupid and I become very, what, fabulous.
Merlin: I become like a South American writer.
Merlin: I start coming up with all kinds of crazy shit.
John: for what I could do to get a civil war ghost is going to steal your car and you won't be able to stop them.
Merlin: You know what?
Merlin: That could be plan C.
John: What we should do is get satellite phones.
Merlin: I was going to – yes.
Merlin: I was going to – again, with the comics, I was going to go more for a Batman red phone situation.
Merlin: A satellite phone could be nice because just in case – Just in case.
John: Or like a landline.
John: Maybe we should lay our own cable.
John: I should pick that.
Merlin: I –
Merlin: I think I just did a Stuart Copeland on you.
Merlin: Yes, I agree.
Merlin: Every little thing she does is magic.
Merlin: You know, the phones are a funny thing.
Merlin: My in-laws still just cannot believe that all we have...
Merlin: Are our mobile phones.
Merlin: They think it's so – and they're not that much older than us.
Merlin: But it just seems crazy.
Merlin: Like what's the first thing you do?
Merlin: You get your house and the first thing you do, you turn on the electric and you get a phone.
Merlin: Like how could you not have a landline phone in your house?
John: The first thing you do is go masturbate in every room.
John: You got to get the spooks out.
John: Did I read a different homeowner's manual than everybody else?
Merlin: I'm throwing all the cards out.
Merlin: I know.
Merlin: Okay.
Merlin: Now just to review, when you first are considering, just even considering buying a home, you go into every corner and you listen, right?
Merlin: Yes.
Merlin: Are there any spooks in here?
John: You lay down on the floor, close your eyes and you say, are there any spooks in here?
Merlin: Okay.
Merlin: We've – fast forward past the closing.
Merlin: Everything is set.
Merlin: You've escrowed or whatever that means and now it's all yours.
Merlin: Do you have a sense in your mind of the kinds of – the steps you walk through to lay your imprimatur on that floor?
Merlin: Masturbating seems like a great start.
John: Uh, yeah.
John: I mean, you've got to, you've got to walk around the house.
John: I think, I think in my case, you have to walk around the house and visibly scoff at every improvement that a previous homeowner made.
Merlin: So like I walk around and I put deriding the quality and the taste of the decision.
John: I just put like a little, I just put a little thumbprint of scorn on every other carpenter's work.
John: nice recessed lighting it's kind of like it's kind of like when you walk through the inner city and somebody's tagged and then somebody else has crossed out the tag and tagged their tag on it and then yeah just has written is gay after that is gay right right i i walk around and i just look at all the i look at all the hack carpentry because every house that's 100 years old has
John: in 20-year increments, like the rings of a tree, has hack carpentry throughout the ages.
John: So you can look at the nails and kind of gauge what era those nails are from and be like, oh, this is some 70s hack carpentry and it's over the top of some 50s hack carpentry.
John: So I certainly walked around my house and I was like, that is some park.
Merlin: The home that you're in now?
John: Yeah.
Merlin: There's some nice finishing.
Merlin: I don't want to triangulate too much here, but you'll remember I was literally taken aback by your kitchen.
John: Yeah, there have been improvements made.
Merlin: But you make decisions.
Merlin: You got a budget.
Merlin: You got time.
Merlin: You go in and you maybe fix some things and not other things so much.
John: I walked around the house and I just gave the scornful eye to all the new stuff.
John: So that the new stuff, this is my feeling, so that the canned lighting and the marble countertops don't get too ahead of themselves.
John: They don't have too much pride.
John: They sit back and they realize that they are new and I see them.
Right, right.
John: And then they become part of the house and they're not, they're not sticking out all the time.
John: Like, look at me.
John: I'm the, I'm the, uh, pressure sensitive light switch or whatever.
John: It's like, you are, you are nothing to me.
John: Yeah.
John: Pressure sensitive light switch.
Merlin: So your thing is also, you're my, you're mine.
Merlin: And here's what I want to serve at my pleasure.
John: I want from you that you work like a light switch.
John: Yeah.
Merlin: Oh, you're talking about the theater lighting thing where it comes up and down kind of gently?
Merlin: John, I got mixed feelings about that.
John: They installed this stuff in my house and every time I walk in, I hit the light switch and then it makes a decision.
John: And I'm standing there in the doorway, my arms laden with groceries or I'm carrying a girl across the threshold or something.
John: My hands are full.
John: And I hit that light switch and then it thinks about what it's going to do.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: For a second, it seems like maybe it's the opening of West Side Story and maybe the lights are just slowly coming up.
John: Yeah.
John: Yeah.
John: And then sometimes they go up a little.
Merlin: Oh, John.
Merlin: You know, there's a reason they call it a light switch.
John: I mean, there's a reason the light switch.
John: We're spelunking now.
Merlin: There's a reason that that is the analogy for on and off.
Merlin: It should give it a flick.
Merlin: It should be audible.
Merlin: And then the room should be flooded with light.
John: Lights on.
Merlin: Well, we have one of those in our dining area.
Merlin: We call it the Nook.
Merlin: And I think, yeah, you're more familiar with the old place, which is almost exactly like the new place.
Merlin: But in the new place, somebody installed – I don't know what you call it.
Merlin: It's like theater lighting, right, where it can gently – you turn it on and it gently brings the lights up, gently brings the lights down.
Merlin: Somebody installed that in our place, but they didn't finish it.
Merlin: So it's kind of hanging out of the wall a little bit and you got to mash on it real hard to get it to go.
Merlin: It really – it defeats the entire purpose of having lights in your home because it's more like an exercise.
Merlin: It's more like a children's exercise in how to make light happen than adults trying to flood a room with light.
John: Well, here's another thing.
John: Maybe I don't know.
John: I'm not going to presume how much you know about electricity.
John: A lot.
John: But if you installed 10 canned light fixtures in a room through one light switch and you put a 60-watt bulb in every one of those, that is 600 watts.
John: Yeah.
John: It is additive.
Yeah.
John: And if your light switch is rated for 300 watts, here's what's going to happen.
John: Your light switch is going to get very hot as the power pours through the tiny little... As the electrons pour through the tiny little hole.
John: Little aperture.
John: The little cable hole.
John: The hole that is a cable.
Yeah.
Merlin: You obviously know a lot about electricity.
John: Cables are holes which electricity pour through that are basically holes of plastic that are full of copper.
John: Electric hole.
John: It works like a tunnel.
John: It is a tube...
John: It's not a truck that you put.
John: It's a tube.
John: It's a long copper tube that is full of copper, which is full of electrons.
John: And it gets very hot.
Merlin: And you're seeing these brainiacs who put all this, we used to call it recessed lighting.
Merlin: You're saying can lighting.
Merlin: It's when you've got the holes in the ceiling and you get those kind of fruity, no offense, kind of fruity, the lights that are kind of in the ceiling in a can.
Right.
Merlin: Right, right, right, right, right.
Merlin: I don't care for those.
John: They used the wrong switches.
John: They used switches that were not rated for this behavior.
John: And so if the lights are powered all the way up, then you go over and you put your hand on it, you will feel one of the most uncomfortable feelings you can have as a homeowner, which is a hot plastic light switch.
Merlin: There's like two places in maybe three places in your home that you should feel warmth.
Merlin: It could be water coming out of a rated spigot.
Merlin: It could be out of some heat radiating device.
Merlin: But generally, as you know, I am not an electrical engineer, but it's my understanding that electrical things should not be hot.
John: No, you don't want your electrical things hot and you don't want ants in your upstairs bathroom.
Merlin: Oh, God.
Merlin: Are they still there?
Merlin: No, no, no, no.
Merlin: Come on.
Merlin: It's been months.
John: So they went away in the winter.
Merlin: They were in your sink?
Merlin: Is that where they were?
John: So they figured out another way because I had their routes all mapped out and I had little punji traps all around the sink so that the ants would walk across.
Merlin: Is that where you put them?
Merlin: You put a little bit of poison on a stick.
John: Yeah, well, they would walk across what seemed like a floor covered with leaves, and then they would fall into a pit and be impaled on a shit-covered stick.
Merlin: Yeah, you put poop on the sticks, right?
John: A shit-covered bamboo stick, and then they would die of infection.
John: So they couldn't go near the sink, but then...
John: In their power, their ant power, which I do not understand.
John: I cannot for the life of me understand.
John: It's one of those animal powers.
John: Like they say, a dog can smell you six miles away.
John: And it's like, how?
John: No.
John: How does a dog do it?
John: These ants can find a way.
John: They send out so many scouts, a million scouts, and they found a new way in.
John: which is that a little piece of caulk had drooped.
John: Droopy caulk.
Merlin: And, you know, you wouldn't have thought of that.
Merlin: Who thinks about droopy caulk?
John: And the only way you could see the droopy caulk is lay down on the floor of the bathroom and put your head under the toilet where the pee splashes and look under the trim, and there you will see that whoever was caulking it
John: Like they just kind of, it's not that they missed a spot.
John: It's just that the cock drooped a little bit.
John: And now it is the I-5 of ants.
John: And they're pouring into the bathroom.
John: And I'm like, what do you want in here?
John: There's nothing in here.
Merlin: Can you re-caulk that?
John: Yeah, you can.
Merlin: There's pee down there.
Merlin: You don't want to go down there.
John: Well, it's not bad.
John: It's that, you know, that I...
John: I suffer, Merlin, because I want the ants to learn.
John: I feel like I don't want to fix the problem.
John: You want to teach the ants.
John: That's right.
John: I don't want to fix the problem at the cock level.
John: I want to fix the problem at the attitude level.
John: I want to go back up the chain.
Merlin: I want the head ant.
Merlin: Right.
Merlin: I think I understand this is a big pattern for you.
Merlin: Yes.
Merlin: B, you would like to see a consequent change in behavior, but A, you want to make sure that they get their mind right.
Merlin: That's right.
John: Isn't that kind of the more important thing to teach an ant to fish?
John: I imagine the queen ant, and I imagine some lieutenant colonel ant comes up and says, we're...
John: We're missing some scouts.
John: And the queen says, send more scouts.
John: And then the lieutenant colonel comes back and he's like, sector B, we're not getting any readings from sector B. Nobody's coming back.
John: Nobody's making it back from sector B. And she's like, redouble our efforts in sector B. And we go back and forth.
John: Until the lieutenant colonel, bruised and battered, stands before her and says, we are hemorrhaging ants in Sector B. We cannot keep up this pace.
John: It's an unwinnable war.
John: Like, I want their hearts and minds.
John: I want her... Right.
Merlin: You want to win this trench war, this war of attrition.
Merlin: You want to wear them down.
John: Yeah.
Merlin: To where they're short of resources and they have to listen to you.
John: I want her to feel me there, next to her, in her nest, whispering in her ear.
Merlin: You should go sit next to her.
John: I can't do it.
John: I can't follow because she's a very tiny, tiny little creature.
John: I cannot get into her nest with her, but I want her to feel me there.
John: I want her to make decisions based on my whispering in her ear.
John: Send all the ants you want.
Merlin: You're just staring at her, smoking a cigarette.
John: But I have this amazing thing, which is called a dust buster.
John: And my dust buster is calibrated for ant bodies.
John: And I will sit and I will dust bust ants.
John: I will spend 15 days not leaving my bathroom.
John: There's a sink in there.
John: I can get water and I will just dust bust every ant that comes out of that little piece of droopy cock.
John: She feels me.
John: She knows I'm there.
Merlin: I've read a third of a book about this and I've heard four podcasts about it.
Merlin: And I will just tell you that the 15-second version of it is –
Merlin: That ants – and this is actually something I heard last week.
Merlin: Ants succeed because they're stupid and because there's lots of them.
Merlin: And when they make a mistake, things get better.
Merlin: So basically they walk around and as E.O.
Merlin: Wilson has shown, they have a little finger-shaped gland that makes their little ant smell.
Merlin: And so basically what they do is they run around and they do these little paths.
Merlin: And when they pick up a more powerful path, they walk down that path.
Merlin: So it's all completely – they call it emergence.
Merlin: It's all completely accidental, but it's also completely chaotic.
Merlin: And I'm just – as you know, I'm not an –
Merlin: I'm not an entomologist, but I think it's hard to teach an ant.
Merlin: I think they're pretty stupid.
John: What you're saying is two roads diverge in a yellow wood.
John: And sorry they could not travel both, but be one ant.
John: alone they stood there and looked down one as far as they could to where it bent into the undergrowth and then they take the other as just as fair and having perhaps the better claim because it was not grassy and did not want wear although as for that the passing there had worn them really about the same
Merlin: Now, was that Carl Sandburg or Ron Filillo?
Merlin: Who was that?
Merlin: That was an E.O.
John: Wilson.
Merlin: I'm thinking of E.B.
Merlin: White.
Merlin: No, that was Robert Frost.
Merlin: I thought I was going to guess Frost.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: Jeez, Louise.
Merlin: You know, I don't want to see.
Merlin: I don't want to think about.
Merlin: I don't want to be bothered by ants.
Merlin: I don't want to be bothered by insects.
Merlin: But like so many things in life, it's just I notice them.
John: You live in San Francisco.
John: There are so many bigger ants to bother you.
Merlin: yeah i can overlook a lot of them i can overlook a lot of them but you know it is it is frustrating and you know really in florida it was it was the roaches i mean as long as we're just talking about insects and i think we can very easily extend this to people a droopy cough notwithstanding well the roaches you know they say for everyone you see there's like you know 7 000 others or whatever i'm not not an expert but no no you see one i'll never forget my first roach it is it is so emblazoned on my mind i had a little did it touch you
Merlin: No, I wish.
Merlin: You wish?
Merlin: Well, I was 14.
Merlin: I could have used the love.
Merlin: But I was laying in bed watching Fridays, as you do.
Merlin: And the room was dark.
Merlin: I'm watching my little portable black and white TV.
Merlin: And I see a little movement.
Merlin: And there shouldn't be a little movement in your room at 12 o'clock on a Friday.
Merlin: And it was a roach in my room.
Merlin: And you've been to Florida.
Merlin: We're not talking about those ones that are the size of a pencil eraser.
John: No.
Merlin: It's like a small cat.
Merlin: And it's scurry.
Merlin: And it's insects that make noise.
Merlin: They're like a pack of gum.
John: Yes.
John: They're literally the size of a pack of gum.
Merlin: Yes.
Merlin: They're like tan gum and they make an audible noise when they move.
Merlin: And I ran out of my room.
Merlin: Of all the creatures I've had in my room, that was one of the worst.
Merlin: I had a corn snake in my room one time.
Merlin: I dealt with that.
Merlin: But the roaches are the worst.
Merlin: Because you don't know where they're coming from.
Merlin: A corn snake, you find it, you take it out like a gentleman.
Merlin: But the roaches... And you know, like so many of our troublesome animals, if their head can fit through it, the rest of them can.
John: I was sleeping in a hotel in the middle of the Czech Republic one night.
John: A motel.
John: Let's call it spade a spade.
John: It was a motel.
John: And I turned off the lights...
John: And I heard that sound.
John: And I was like, I'm too tired.
John: And I know roaches can't hurt me.
John: I'm too tired to deal with this.
John: And I just screw it.
John: And then one fell from the ceiling on me in the dark while I was sleeping.
John: And I...
John: I leapt six feet in the air and turned the light on as I was flying.
John: And the room was covered with these things that were the size of packs of gum and black.
John: And so the whole rest of the night I was killing roaches.
John: And I didn't do anything.
John: I didn't stop the plague.
Merlin: No.
John: I just made a mess.
Merlin: I had one on my ear once.
Merlin: Oh!
Merlin: Yeah, I mean, not all the way in, but he was curious.
Merlin: He was ear-curious.
John: This conversation is really going sideways.
John: Yeah, one time... Go ahead.
Merlin: Oh, okay.
John: Let's see here.
Merlin: Hang on.
Merlin: Oh, hello.
Merlin: What about that?
Merlin: Um... Whoa!
Merlin: That's Satorry.
John: Make it Satorry times.
Merlin: We were playing Stargate, actually waiting to play Stargate, the much improved son of Defender, as you know.
Merlin: And we were playing Stargate, and this guy was – he was really good at Stargate.
Merlin: He was real gross and real stinky.
Merlin: And I won't even tell you his name, but his name –
Merlin: was pretty much stinky that was kind of his last name stinky right yeah yeah his name was booger it's not boogie but he uh yeah yeah he was he was he was scooting along and killing mutants and jumping into the stargate and he started kind of shaking his his right foot and a roach crawled out of his shoe oh welcome welcome to florida stinky you're saying that the roach got the roach came there with stinky
Merlin: I don't think he was doing second player.
John: He was riding with Stinky.
John: He was riding.
Merlin: Is that Lil Wayne?
John: This one time story.
John: I was walking down the street.
John: People have missed this, John.
Merlin: They really, really missed it.
John: I was walking down the street in Washington, D.C.
John: in the middle of the night one time.
John: And you know, on the East Coast, townhouses, brownstones have stoops.
John: They have steps that come down, and those steps have beautiful sort of...
John: cast iron lintels at the bottom of the stairs, right?
John: They have two big posts made of iron with giant iron balls on the top at the bottom of the stairs.
John: You picturing this?
Merlin: Yeah, I am.
John: I was walking down a sidewalk in a fairly nice neighborhood and one of these brownstones had the top of one of those posts had been sheared off somehow.
John: And it was hollow, as they are.
John: And out of it was pouring like water flowing out of the top of this thing and down the sides and into the street.
John: Roaches.
John: Oh, come on.
John: Waves and waves.
John: Just a constant, like thousands of roaches pouring out of this post, down the sides, all four sides, and into the sidewalk and into the street.
John: And people were standing there.
John: at a healthy distance from this thing and marveling at it as if a fire hydrant
John: was open and water was spilling into the street, but it was a billion roaches.
Merlin: What do you think brought them out?
John: Coming from where?
John: Coming from their undersea lair and what was bringing them out was black magic.
John: It was the ugliest, most awful thing I had ever seen.
John: It inspired me to think of new tortures that were as bad as being buried alive.
John: Like, for instance, being stuffed down that hole.
Merlin: Oh, God.
John: You know, or being buried alive in a place where there were that many roaches.
John: I mean, there are, you know, as a man, I am contractually obligated at least once a month to think of some terrible scenario where I die or am trapped or buried alive with a billion roaches.
John: Yeah.
John: Yeah, I think that's pretty normal.
Merlin: A hopeless situation that you've been put into by an enemy, for example.
John: Yeah, and I did not have an awareness that such a terrible thing could exist until I saw this, and then I realized that even my worst fantasy was not as bad as the world could drum up.
Merlin: Yeah, I don't like swarming.
Merlin: And the funny part of it is if I were to place myself on a continuum, I think I'm – compared to a lot of people, again, having lived in Florida, having seen a roach come out of a Stargate player's shoe, I feel like on the American continuum, excluding maybe Mississippi, God bless them, I think I'm on the –
Merlin: I'm on the pretty left side of the curb.
John: Sure.
Merlin: You've been in the shit.
Merlin: I've been in the shit.
Merlin: I got the thousand-yard roach stare.
Merlin: I think there are people who are way, way more freaked out than I am about roaches.
Merlin: But again, like the Stargate player, there are people who are not quite freaked out enough.
Merlin: But I guess that's just – that's a condition of life.
Merlin: Now, like with rats, I don't like rats.
John: I don't like rats.
John: What about goth girl with white pet rat?
John: Oh, God.
John: What about pet rat on a little, like, with a cat collar on?
Merlin: They're like anchovies, you know, where if I know it's coming, so to speak, like, I'm okay.
Merlin: We just had to get rid of the third rat at my kid's school.
John: The third rat?
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: That's a terrific movie.
Merlin: Wasn't that a John LeCarrie novel?
Merlin: I think you're thinking of that Orson Welles movie.
Yeah.
John: Speaking of which, have you seen this television show The Americans?
Merlin: I have.
Merlin: I actually purchased it on my TV.
John: We don't normally sit and talk about pop media.
Merlin: I was curious what you thought about it, actually.
John: Well, you know, as an internationally famous fact checker,
John: My initial response to it was that I was pointing out all the light fixtures that were wrong and all the people that were wearing not era appropriate glasses frames.
Merlin: I wish I wasn't that guy.
Merlin: We watched Indiana Jones last night and the part where the guys from the army come and talk to him at the school, all I could do is stare at this one guy's suit from fucking 1980.
Merlin: He was so obviously wearing a 1980 suit.
John: Yeah.
John: Yeah.
John: And this – the thing about this show is – Is it 1984, 85?
Merlin: 81.
Merlin: 81.
Merlin: Oh, it's 81.
John: Right.
John: So it's very clearly like that transition.
Merlin: That's right.
Merlin: Reagan has like just come in.
Merlin: Tell people because I don't want to – no spoilers, but I think it's conceptually – setting aside the girl from Felicity who I would eat off a cracker.
Merlin: Like I think it's conceptually more – She's your type.
Merlin: She's so my type.
Merlin: Yes, she is.
Merlin: Yeah, we talked about her.
Merlin: She's got no hips.
Yeah.
John: Well, see, I didn't know who we were talking about before because you mentioned her and I was like, oh, sure.
John: But I had no idea.
Merlin: I bet she saw her and said, that's Merlin Stein.
John: I did.
John: I see her and I'm like, oh, there it is.
John: That's one of those Merlin girls.
Merlin: She's got those big eyes.
Merlin: Yeah.
John: So the premise of the show is that there are sleeper agents from the Soviet Union living in America as Americans.
Merlin: They basically, for all practical purposes, in the Soviet Union, they were like raised as Americans.
John: Yeah.
John: They're like KGB agents.
Merlin: Not allowed to speak Russian.
Right.
John: But they're devoted to the cause.
John: And I think one of the interesting things about the show is that it reminds me of a time when Soviet-style communism still seemed...
John: It is plausible to me in 1981 that people in America were still harboring sympathy with the Soviet Union.
John: I remember a time when it was plausible that there were people around who were still fellow travelers.
Merlin: Oh, okay.
Merlin: Yeah, absolutely.
John: There are some implausibilities about the show, but you know how much I love a spy show.
Merlin: Oh, and it's very... It's got all those elements.
Merlin: Yes, you absolutely do.
Merlin: I do as well.
Merlin: I want to come back to this involving Jason Bourne in a minute.
Merlin: But yes, and it's got all the elements.
Merlin: It should be a little better than it is, but it's really good because it's got layers.
John: I think it's written well.
John: I think it's acted well.
John: There are just a few moments where I'm like...
John: Those glasses are not from 1981.
Merlin: You're not just kidding.
Merlin: That's a big hang-up for you.
Merlin: Those glasses are wrong.
John: And the thing is that what I can tell is there are four people working the set design of this show.
John: And...
John: Three of them are good.
John: Are dynamite.
John: I'm looking around and I'm like, holy shit.
John: They got the socks.
John: Those pull-up socks with the stripes.
John: They got that whole thing.
John: Remember in 1981 when everybody had a weird brown and mauve quilt hanging on the wall behind their brass bed?
Merlin: Yeah, and like country kitchen with two Ks.
John: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
John: Or like a macrame plant holder that had some ferns in it and an owl.
John: Yeah.
John: And, you know, like 1981, very distinctive look.
John: And they get the cars right.
John: I'm always looking in the background of shows like that to see the one car that's wrong.
John: And all the cars are right.
Merlin: I bet that's a lot of work.
John: The clothes are right.
John: It is a lot of work.
John: There are a couple of things.
John: The lead actress has the wrong hair.
John: There's no way somebody in 1981 had hair that looked that cool.
John: But saying that, the person that's dressing her is putting her in 80s jeans but making them look contemporary.
John: Like somebody is tailoring the clothes so that they are technically right but look good.
Merlin: I bet that's a balance to strike where you don't want it to be distracting.
Merlin: It could be a little too Gloria Vanderbilt.
John: Exactly.
John: Do you remember how bad high-waisted jeans looked on women?
John: I do.
John: And we suffered through them for a decade.
Merlin: I was very focused just about two or three inches down from that, but I do remember, and I think they really nailed that in this.
John: High-waisted jeans with a little tiny alligator skin belt?
John: oh man i like the ones where it was like a double belt it would go around you get like a double belt you remember that belt so anyway they get a lot of that stuff right and then every once in a while somebody comes on screen and it's like was the good person off today and somebody just loaned you their glasses like this is and maybe maybe i'm a weirdo maybe glasses don't matter to other people but come on
Merlin: I'm with you though.
Merlin: I watch for those things too.
Merlin: You know what I always notice is the – and there are people who have gone crazy with this in I guess that show with the Winter and the Elves or whatever.
Merlin: There's like – where you can go through and look at the vernacular.
John: Elf Winter?
Merlin: Elf Winter, that show on HBO with the Peter Dinkle guy.
John: Oh, you know I've met him.
Merlin: No, really?
John: Dinklage?
John: He seems super smart.
John: So he comes on the show that Hodgman and Dick Cavett and I were doing.
John: He's one of our guests.
Merlin: Oh, come on.
John: Yeah.
John: And he's hilarious.
Merlin: He seems like a very, very smart guy.
John: He's exceptionally smart.
Merlin: I'm not just saying that because he's small.
Merlin: You understand?
John: He's very clean.
John: He's a clean man, yes.
John: He keeps himself very clean.
John: And he's very articulate.
John: He's very articulate.
John: He's also really a mensch.
John: And, you know, I think he's got a little bit of a chip on his shoulder because everybody wants to compliment him on being articulate and clean because he's small.
John: He's a little different.
John: You've done real well, Peter.
John: But, you know, like, but yeah, right.
John: I challenge anyone to try and pat him on the head.
John: I think he would break your hand into seven places.
John: But no, he's a wonderful guy.
John: I had a blast with him.
Merlin: I'd like to hear more about that.
Merlin: It looked like Dick Cavett had some kind of a rapier or a cutlass.
Merlin: He had some kind of... Was it Mr. Hodgman?
Merlin: Somebody posted a photo of you guys hanging out and Dick Cavett had some kind of a sword.
John: One of our guests was a quintathlete from the Canadian Olympic team.
John: She brought her fencing sabers.
John: She and I actually fenced
John: on the balcony of the chateau marmont uh and uh you know she she again like all great athletes she had economy of motion so i'm slashing away at the air and i'm saying come at me you know to the death and she's just like she was just carving her initials in my shirt
John: And then she made the fatal error of thinking that the duel was over.
John: And looked away.
John: At which point I dealt the fatal blow.
Merlin: Like an hour later.
John: And I got booed.
John: I got booed by everybody.
John: Because supposedly...
John: she wasn't looking.
Merlin: Yeah, this isn't the Olympics.
Merlin: This isn't those cockamamie Olympic rules.
John: Yeah, that's right.
John: This is the real world, dude.
John: But then Cabot got a hold of my saber at some point and then he's, you know.
Merlin: I don't know Dick Cabot, but I would not give that man a sword.
John: No, I learned.
John: I learned the hard way.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: You know, one time he and Groucho were talking about swords.
John: He's got a Groucho story for every single... I mean, he has an anecdote about Groucho Marx that fits any occasion.
Merlin: He is the Chuck Klosterman and the Thurston Moore of Groucho Marx anecdotes.
Merlin: You know, actually, you cannot – this is true.
Merlin: It turns out legally you cannot have a rock and roll documentary unless it's got Chuck Klosterman and Thurston Moore and that guy who looks like Joey Ramone from Rolling Stone.
Merlin: David Fricke?
John: Oh, yeah, that guy.
John: I can't stand to hear him talk.
Merlin: I'd like to hire Chuck Klosterman to never stop punching him.
John: I hate his teeth, his giant teeth.
John: The corollary is the punk rock documentary that has to have both Flea and Dave Grohl.
Merlin: Oh, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes.
John: Flea has something to say about every single punk rock band.
Merlin: Also Lars Ulrich makes a lot of appearances in rockumentaries.
John: Oh my God, I heard the greatest story.
Merlin: Please.
John: So a friend of mine is in a rock band with the famous 80s rocker.
John: who's going to remain nameless just so that just so that our our fact checker uh listeners are going to have to do they're going to have to do at least the legwork of remembering the 20 times we've talked about this person in the past you'll tell me later oh yeah yeah yeah yeah so a friend of mine financial investment guy with a famous with a very very very famous 80s rocker and they are now has all of his organs intact
John: He is still alive.
John: And we are on, or they, I'm sorry, they are on tour.
John: They were on tour in Asia recently on one of these big package tours where it's Slayer and it's, you know, it's whatever.
John: Dimebag Daryl is dead, but the rest of the guys from the Dimebag Daryl explosion and all those bands, Anthrax, they're all there.
John: And the headliner is Metallica.
John: And so this buddy of mine and some other dudes from like up and coming metal bands that I could not name are standing around backstage at the barbecue pit at one of these big, massive metal shows in Japan.
John: And James Hetfield walks up.
John: No way.
John: He's like, what's up guys?
John: Oh my God.
John: That's so cool.
John: And so these, you know, these three guys are like,
John: oh hey hey hey james headfield what's up bro and they're all standing around they all have like leather wristbands that are six inches wide and and uh they all have long goatees and so they're standing around like oh what's um how's it going you know rock and roll and james headfield's talking to him and and somebody you know kind of takes the initiative one of these guys kind of gets a
John: and he says there's always one there's always one he's like you know you know what i like about you guys james headfield is like you you made it through the 90s without like you know doing anything embarrassing musically and james headfield's like thanks man you know appreciate it
John: And the guy keeps pressing his luck and he's like, I mean, you know.
Merlin: Stop right there.
Merlin: That's as gracious as you're going to get.
John: Like a lot of metal dudes, you know.
Merlin: Let me amplify that statement.
John: Like a lot of guys your age, you know, they play and they tried to like, you know, make a like techno record or whatever.
John: And James Hetfield looks at these three guys, these three just, like, you know, young dudes.
John: And he goes, all right, can you imagine us playing, like, to a click track with Lars?
John: And then he goes, duh, and does this air drumming, like, duh, dong, dong, dong, dong, dong.
John: Wait a minute, Hetfield did this?
John: Hetfield did this.
Yeah.
John: And this friend of mine, I mean, they're all their chins just hit the floor because Lars is standing 15 feet away.
John: Oh, my God.
John: And Hetfield is like, can you imagine us trying to play to a click track with this ding dong?
John: I'm Lars.
John: You're kidding.
John: No.
John: And this buddy of mine was like, it was basically the most badass thing I have ever seen.
John: James Hetfield openly mocking Lars in front of everybody.
John: And an inconceivable metal moment.
John: And here it happened.
John: I am one kiss away from this story.
John: A man that I know very well was standing in that group and says that this happened.
John: And my esteem for James Hetfield goes through the roof.
Merlin: Oh, you know, he's... We've talked about this half a dozen times.
Merlin: He's the good one.
John: Hetfield is the good one.
John: He's the one.
John: After that some kind of monster thing, I could barely stand to see any of their faces.
Merlin: That was a slog.
Merlin: Yeah.
John: But anyway, so apparently it's not a mystery.
John: It's not a mystery to James Hetfield that Lars Ulrich is the worst drummer in rock.
Merlin: Now, first of all, you don't think he was just fun in, like, for the kids?
Merlin: i don't know because you know here's the thing pretty hard you know okay we're definitely coming to that in 30 seconds here's the thing something like that james hetfield has been through a lot of meetings i don't think that's the kind of thing you say once
Merlin: Maybe not.
Merlin: No, no, no.
Merlin: Here's what I'm saying.
Merlin: I'm saying that like talking to this dumbass, it's probably it's probably I'm just guessing that was not the first time that that revelation occurred to him in that particularly clownish format.
John: You think he's playing to the cheap seats?
Merlin: I do not.
Merlin: I think I do not.
Merlin: I think I think he does not like the drumming of his drummer.
Merlin: And they're in a business relationship that he's obligated to be in because it's probably pretty lucrative.
John: It's like the way Gene Simmons talks about Paul Stanley.
Merlin: What's he say about Paul Stanley?
John: Gene Simmons is incredibly dismissive of Paul Stanley right to his face.
John: He's such a small little man.
John: He's a terrible person.
John: He's a bad person.
John: Gene Simmons is the Donald Trump of metal.
Merlin: And, you know, we shouldn't get into that.
Merlin: Okay.
Merlin: I was born to talk about music probably.
Merlin: But so, Lars Ulrich, the idea being that, you know, he's got moves and stuff, but he can't really keep a beat.
John: Oh, he's the worst.
Merlin: Is that right?
Merlin: I don't know the guy.
Merlin: He's probably fun to have a beer with.
John: I don't think so.
John: I think he would be terrible to have a beer with.
John: Yeah.
John: He is definitely in the super group of worst musicians ever.
John: Really?
John: Like Lars Ulrich on the drums.
Merlin: anthony ketis on vocals oh you can you literally not get me started you're saying okay so if i understand what you're saying though john roddick you're not just saying like it's not talking about the shags we're talking about people who've like had records who've had at least a gold record and have a reprehensible level of non-skill at what they're supposedly more on guitar doesn't he have a black eye in that one video
Merlin: Isn't there, isn't there, it's the Doors guy, right?
John: Yeah, yeah.
Merlin: I think the video for Light My Fire on Ed Sullivan, he's got a big shiner.
John: Yeah, he walked into a door.
John: Duh.
John: That was good.
John: Yeah, okay, so, hmm.
John: I mean, there are a couple of guys in the Doors that make it into this band, but Den's more for his parts.
John: I mean... John, I don't like the Doors.
John: No, listening to his guitar part soloed, I think, is just like listening to somebody throw a guitar down the flight of stairs.
Yeah.
Merlin: He could even eat a cup of coffee.
Merlin: I've never – I like a couple door songs, but I've really – I've studied it, John.
Merlin: I've put time into it and I still don't get the doors.
Merlin: I feel like I should.
Merlin: I feel stupid.
Merlin: It's like my friends who can't get into the Smiths or Synecdoche, New York.
Merlin: I understand.
Merlin: They just can't get into it.
Merlin: But I have a lot of really smart friends for whom the doors –
John: is probably one of their top five favorite bands of all time i think it might be some kind of mass hysteria i just don't understand it i'm starting my i'm starting to i feel myself starting to change merlin i'm starting to not understand culture anymore culture big c big k really you're reaching for your gun
John: I just don't know anymore.
John: Who said that?
Merlin: I saw a documentary the other night with that line in it.
Merlin: You reached for your gun?
Merlin: I'm sorry.
Merlin: I'm derailing you.
Merlin: But I've been watching something about the Holocaust every night.
Merlin: And last night I took a little side route and watched Frank Capra's Why We Fight, which is pretty great propaganda.
Merlin: But it's a great line.
Merlin: Whenever I hear the word culture, I reach for my gun.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: Oh, right.
Merlin: Who said that?
Merlin: It was a pretty early National Socialist quote.
John: Anyway, no, but let's get back to the important issue.
John: Now, John, you're... I've been watching a lot of Holocaust stuff lately, too, and it is really a profound effect.
John: I told you about the films.
Merlin: The actual literal films they shot at the camps in 1945.
Merlin: Watch that for an hour.
Merlin: And then, you know what I did?
Merlin: You know, fuck you.
Merlin: I sat down and watched that entire six-part Auschwitz thing on Netflix two nights ago.
John: Oh, the one I told you about of the BBC one?
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: After our last phone call, you told me about this.
Merlin: I literally watched the entire thing from beginning to end.
Merlin: Doesn't that make you happy?
Merlin: Oh, my God.
Merlin: It was so well done.
John: Yeah.
John: It was a great show.
John: And also, the message of it is like no one invented the Holocaust.
John: It was the product of...
John: It was the product of 100 people all trying to do their jobs a little bit better.
Merlin: Yes.
Merlin: Oh, yes.
Merlin: Oh, 100 percent.
Merlin: And then – but I guess two things occurred to me and I'm really derailing here.
Merlin: I apologize.
Merlin: But two things that occurred to me.
Merlin: Please continue.
Merlin: Two things.
Merlin: First of all, I guess – I mean I knew that the camps started as concentration camps in the true sense of the word, not as death camps.
Merlin: Or I guess they were kind of slave labor camps, but they were mostly places to put religious –
John: Well, initially they were places to put Russian – like captured Russians.
Merlin: And it sounds like they got it worse than just about anybody.
John: Yeah, but nobody's counting the Russian dead in World War II because it's like 20 million people.
John: You can't even count that high.
Merlin: But two things that struck me is – and I'm not a scholar here.
Merlin: But it struck me first of all.
Merlin: In my head, I go, OK, Nazi death camps.
Merlin: So 1940 to 1945, like April of 1940, I'm imagining that there is gas and crematoria for like six solid years.
Merlin: And that was simply not the case.
Merlin: It wasn't really kicking in until like 42, 43.
Merlin: And then they were already kind of shutting it down in 44.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: They did all of that in like three years.
John: Yeah.
John: Yeah.
John: They were killing 15,000, 20,000 people a day per camp.
John: I mean, once they got it, they were like, let's get this done.
Merlin: Well, and there's the guy and then there was like the guy, you know, it's like the famous Toyota.
Merlin: It was the guy from Ford that went to the Toyota plant and went, ah, I see what you're doing here.
Merlin: He got up to Treblinka.
Merlin: RCA beats Sony again.
Merlin: Oh, God, ping, fucking pong.
Merlin: But the one guy goes to Treblinka and he's like, wow, you guys got a good thing going on here.
Merlin: Let's see what we can do over here.
John: Yeah, your door is all closed.
Merlin: But the second thing, you know what really grabbed me is – I don't know if this is the source of your anecdote, but on our Hitler and Stuff visit, when you told the story about the French people and separating the mothers from their children and how it was the French that were doing it.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: It's like when – I think that was – I've been so steeped in Nazis lately I could be getting that wrong.
Merlin: I think that was from the Auschwitz one.
John: Yeah, yeah.
Merlin: Yeah, I mean and I can recommend that to our listeners.
Merlin: If you're looking for a lot – you know what?
Merlin: We should just have an annotated bibliography of all the bring down things you can listen – you could watch on your television.
Merlin: I have a Roku with 700 channels.
Merlin: I have an Apple TV with about 70 purchased movies on it.
John: All of them about the Holocaust.
Merlin: After my family goes to sleep, I sit in the dark and watch things about the Holocaust by myself.
John: Yeah.
Merlin: Well, that seems healthy.
Merlin: Oh, and Scientology.
Merlin: I've been reading a lot about Scientology lately.
John: You learn, you grow.
John: You learn, you grow.
John: Yeah.
John: I don't know.
John: You know, I go out in the world.
John: Here's the problem.
John: I go out in the world.
John: I live in Seattle.
John: The biggest problem we have here is that sometimes there will be four people at a four-way stop and no one will go first and all four people will end up dying.
John: That is the biggest problem.
John: Of natural causes?
John: Yeah, they'll all die of natural causes.
John: They'll all asphyxiate on the fumes from their idling engines because no one can figure out.
Merlin: In NPR, they call it a driveway moment.
Merlin: You pull over and you listen to StoryCorps, you cry a little bit and you fucking die in your Volvo.
John: Die in your Volvo.
John: That's the worst thing that happens in Washington State.
John: A cop will pull up in the middle of the night.
Merlin: You should get the Rock and Roll County administrator on that.
John: There'll be four dead people in four Volvos.
John: And the thing is, when they die, they take their feet off their brakes.
John: And the four Volvos all creep into the intersection at the same moment and make a swastika out of them.
Merlin: Ha ha ha!
John: That's the worst thing that happens here.
Merlin: And yet... And all the onlookers come by first.
Merlin: They're going to give them CPR, but then they just hiss.
John: Spooce.
John: But I'm watching Holocaust documentaries and reading books about... My thing now, I'm afraid to tell you this, but my thing now is the war in Bosnia.
Merlin: Oh, that was bad.
John: I'm reading all this stuff about Bosnia.
John: And...
John: And so I fill my head with this information, which is real.
John: And then I go out into the world and I'm trying to interact with people who are mad at each other because somebody tweeted about Steubenville, Ohio, but used the wrong hashtag.
John: And I'm thinking 20,000 people were gassed on this day in history at Auschwitz.
John: 20,000 people today, you know, like babies.
Yeah.
Merlin: How about systemized rape in our adult life?
Merlin: Multiple times.
Merlin: Yes.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: Oh, no.
Merlin: I mean like – but that's the thing about the systematic part.
Merlin: It's like 1994 and that was happening.
John: 1994 was happening.
Merlin: This is our Treblinka.
Merlin: I mean I don't mean to sound –
John: No, people walking out of their houses and getting sniped by their next-door neighbors because they are Muslim Bosnians instead of Orthodox Bosnians.
John: And I don't know how to contextualize the one humanity and my present humanity except...
John: Except in a way that casts my present humanity, the one that I interact with every day in Seattle, in a terrifying light.
John: This was the problem I had when I walked across Europe.
John: I was perceiving everyone as a dormant mass killer.
John: And I look around my fellow citizens in Seattle, and I cannot take away the feeling that everyone here is just waiting to be a bureaucrat in some kind of, like, systematic...
John: death machine if they are just given 20% off on their next Uber ride.
John: You know what I mean?
John: It just seems like the stakes of everything...
John: This is why I'm just turning against culture of all kinds.
Merlin: Yeah, that's fine.
Merlin: You want to get back to that.
Merlin: Capital C culture.
John: Because people are talking – because I wrote that punk rock article that was based on the conversation that you and I had on our podcast.
John: I wrote an article from Seattle Weekly about punk rock.
John: And I took a strident tone.
John: I took my typical declarative tone.
John: You inhabited the viewpoint.
John: Where instead of saying, I do not like olives, I said, olives suck.
John: And if you like olives, you're an idiot.
John: And to me, that is essentially the same as saying... Good essays don't begin with, you guys.
John: You guys, I do not prefer olives, the end.
John: No, good essays begin with, fuck you if you like olives.
John: so i took my normal i took my normal montane montane began many of his best works that way dear audience fuck you and this was this so this article within the first two days of it being published was the most read article in the history of the seattle weekly and it had 150 000 unique views by like by 72 hours that's bananas
John: And the last time I heard, it had a thousand comments and growing.
John: And I was impressed, first of all, that about 90% of the responses that made it all the way through to me were positive, generally positive.
John: Either, yes, I agree with you, or I disagree with you, but it is hilarious.
John: Good job.
John: They were sensible.
John: Yeah.
John: But this 10% of people who so strongly identified with
John: punk as a concept how they so strongly identified themselves and their lives with this with this cultural little beanie cap that you know that they that they basically confirmed every ridiculous bias that i every exaggerated bias that i wrote in my article they confirmed it in spades with their death threats and their you know they're like uh
John: you suck because your dad had a job comments and, you know, and like, you don't know anything about anything because fuck you.
John: You haven't been to my all ages venue in Orlando and all this stuff.
John: And I'm just like, as, as my, as my response to it, I mean, definitely one of the things I realized was maybe if I am seeking a larger audience, I should prepare people for,
John: For what I consider to be a fairly hilarious declarative style, I should give them a little, like, advance notice, like, oh, by the way, I don't really give a fuck about your thing.
John: I just am an asshole.
John: But I feel like that should be apparent just from the picture of me at the head of the article.
John: You look at me and you're like, oh, this guy.
John: Come on.
John: Look at this asshole.
John: But also, I came out the other side feeling like, culture?
John: Really?
John: Really?
John: Punk rock?
John: Really?
John: It's all...
John: It's all just this guy's Muslim, that guy's Orthodox, and it all leads to one thing now in my head, which is that one day this group of skinheads puts that group of skinheads up against the wall.
John: I can't break this dark feeling about humans anymore.
John: And all of their little Etsy cufflinks and all of the doilies on the backs of their couches and everybody's, you know, like the effort that they put into getting the earwax out and the nose hairs trimmed.
John: It all just seems like shaving a pig.
Yeah.
John: And so what it is doing is it's putting this distance between me and my books even.
John: I'm looking at my books and I'm like, mm-hmm.
John: It's a bunch of self-justification, a lot of it.
John: A lot of it is just like, I think I could pull four books out.
John: of my shelves that I would take with me, you know, like carry to the next wave.
John: And the rest of it is all just, um, it's just people writing poor me novels and people, people trying to justify what their grandfathers did.
Merlin: A lot of it's variations on a theme around – I mean I think of this especially on the internet with what you're describing here, which is that there's certainly no dearth of rants and different kinds of polemics, but –
Merlin: And when those – when one's polemic reaches people on the other side of a fence, it just – it usually does lead to just a shouting match regardless of how smart or stupid the polemic was.
Merlin: But not so far off really Etsy cufflinks, I think I feel more and more pressure –
Merlin: Not just on me, but I mean I think pressure on people in general, more pressure to serve the audience that you've decided to identify with.
Merlin: And so – but you writing in an alternative weekly, taking that tone –
Merlin: Taking such a strong point of view on that tone and not coming at it from, you know, as an insider or not coming at it from.
Merlin: Who's more inside than me?
Merlin: Who's more inside?
Merlin: Well, you should come to my all ages club in Orlando.
John: I've been to that all ages club in Orlando.
John: And you know what?
John: I'm not paying $4 for a Fanta.
Merlin: Well, a lot of the stuff that I read from people who I like a lot and are really smart and produce something like what you're talking about here do still – and I do this all the time.
Merlin: Anytime I have something with a strong point of view, I will have an element of you guys to it where I feel like I need to say, first of all, I just want to say –
John: Yeah, I can't do it.
Merlin: Thing number one.
Merlin: No, no, I'm just saying, though.
Merlin: Thing number two, you guys just seriously.
Merlin: And the thing is, it doesn't fucking matter.
Merlin: You can say all of those things all you want.
Merlin: A good editor would cut all of those out and cut straight to the lead, which is here.
Merlin: Here's what you have to say.
Merlin: And people can agree or disagree with that.
Merlin: But, you know, there's a million.
John: This is what happened to Galileo.
John: He was like, I've been reading Copernicus, and I agree with him.
John: The earth revolves around the sun.
John: I mix them up, too.
John: The sun, earth, whatever.
John: I forget it.
John: I forget it sometimes.
John: It seems like the sun revolves around the earth.
John: This was the problem.
John: He said, I agree with this guy.
John: This was 50 years ago or whatever, but I agree with him.
John: And he didn't say... I was saying that from Galileo's perspective.
John: Yes, I know.
John: I know.
Merlin: And he didn't say... He turned into Dick Kevin.
Merlin: You know, one time I was talking to Groucho about... One time Groucho and I were talking about heliocentrism and he said, did you ever notice that Peter O'Toole
John: He didn't say, you guys, you guys.
Merlin: Guys, I know.
Merlin: What I'm going to say sounds heretical and might upset the entire power structure of our heavily religion-based society.
John: So they pushed him down.
John: They pushed him down, and they really held his head in the toilet.
John: And flushed it a couple of times and said, yeah, what do you say now?
John: What do you say now?
John: I mean, this is no, this is no fun.
John: People have been laughing at Gal.
John: I mean, not laughing, but people have tisk tisked and shook their heads at Galileo for ever since 500 years.
John: I have been, I don't know about you.
Merlin: I don't know enough to tsk.
John: But – well, tsk him because he like – he didn't stand his ground and get burned at the stake or whatever.
Merlin: But it sounds like there's a couple themes.
Merlin: I'm trying to tease that.
Merlin: You're teasing out here.
Merlin: One is this theme of once you have thought a lot about Zyklon B business relationships and the people who so blithely dropped them into a little mesh tube, it's hard to take –
Merlin: public zoning meetings that seriously.
John: Well, it's not that.
John: Public zoning meetings are maybe the thing to take most seriously.
Merlin: Oh, yeah, property rights, yeah.
John: But I was reading an interesting article the other day, and the thing that dropped out of it, the little quote that dropped out of it, and it was one of these things where the writer...
John: He knew that what he was saying was going to be breezed over by most readers.
John: And so he had to say it three times in order to make sure that we got what he was saying.
John: But what he was saying was, he was kind of paraphrasing Oliver Wendell Holmes.
John: And he was saying, the point of democracy is just that we live democratically.
John: If we are living democratically, then democracy has fulfilled its purpose.
John: The point of democracy is not to create a better society.
John: It is not to make sure there are no poor.
John: It is not to make sure that kids do not go hungry.
John: The point of democracy is just that we are Democrat, that we are Democratic.
Merlin: There's not an end in mind.
Merlin: It's the process that has primacy.
John: Exactly.
John: And we constantly make the mistake of thinking on both sides of the American political spectrum that the point of democracy is to...
John: is that we reach a consensus on all these topics, or that the majority... Oh, everybody gets a vote on how we round this off, sort of.
John: Yeah, that the majority is going to rule, and therefore the majority has got to find the way to the truth, I guess.
John: And we spend all of our time yelling at each other, when really democracy is succeeding...
John: And that is it.
John: The end.
John: Like, democracy is... The process works.
John: There is no other goal.
Merlin: And... But what a different approach than most people would say.
John: Well, yeah.
John: And that's why, you know, that's why reading it, I was like, huh.
John: And with that in mind, it feels like all the disputes...
John: are recapitulations of the same disputes.
John: If we know that on one end there is democracy and on the other end there are death camps, and in between there are lots of things at stake,
John: But it's always been hard for me to get down at the level of standing out in front of the natural food co-op with a clipboard and stopping people to talk about the Clean Air Act.
John: I mean, I've done it, but it's hard for me to be that invested in that level of like this next incremental step is really what I'm devoting myself to.
John: But I'm having a really hard time living out at the fringe, too.
John: Neither fringe place is very comfortable.
Merlin: Yeah, I feel the same way.
Merlin: Another thing is I guess it's helpful to figure out what you – how we're going to define what democracy means.
Merlin: But the first thing that comes to mind for me is democracy in the same way as being like social media in the sense that with social media, each of us tends to think of it –
Merlin: In one way or another as publishing, we publish something, we talk about it.
Merlin: Somebody publishes something and we talk about it.
Merlin: But I wonder how many people who are heavily involved in social media would want to participate if all they could do is read what other people had to say.
Merlin: In democracy, we seem most interested in democracy in the sense that we get to vote.
Merlin: And I think for – my guess is that for most people, it's not as interesting that there's lots of other people voting too because then that breaks straight down into the partisan blah-de-blah-blah.
Merlin: Let's yell about this again on Twitter kind of stuff.
Merlin: And it's why I have so much aloha for things like the ACLU and for Judaism in general because the ACLU is not – doesn't really care what your point of view is.
Merlin: They just want to make sure you have a way to say it.
John: Did I just see – did I just take a glimpse of the matrix there?
Merlin: You might have.
Merlin: It's gone now.
Merlin: All right.
Merlin: But then I also have this – I could never do this, but I have an admiration for this culture in Judaism of just arguing all the time for the sake of argument.
Merlin: I mean it's really part – it's part of what you do.
Merlin: If you're going to be in a scholarly tradition, am I wrong?
Merlin: Like a lot of what you do is talking about what this means and what is right.
Merlin: And that's – it's not like you're ever going to end it and go, you win, Shmuel.
Merlin: This is – the whole point is to have this argument.
Merlin: That's what we do.
Merlin: And you don't have to think of it as an argument.
Merlin: I mean it's just – it's a conversation that goes on and on and on and evolves.
Merlin: And sometimes somebody may get a dinger in that makes it into the book.
Merlin: But by and large, that's just what the culture is.
John: Well, I said this the other day in a tweet, and I meant it sardonically, but now I'm thinking about it differently based on what you're saying.
John: I said there are 7 billion people in the world, and I can't wait until each one finds their voice.
John: And I meant it in the sense that we cannot possibly sustain this.
John: We cannot possibly sustain through 7 billion people the amount of narcissistic self-reflection that the 20 million Americans who are on Twitter right now are indulging themselves in.
John: But maybe what you're saying is 7 billion people all arguing...
John: simultaneously, will create some kind of ticker tape of...
John: Consensus?
John: Knowledge?
John: Signal?
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: Maybe.
Merlin: I'm just – I can – I mean I'm very cynical about this.
Merlin: I have to admit and this is the fifth time probably I've said it on here.
Merlin: But it always strikes me that –
Merlin: The people are so much more interested in persuading other people to A, think the way that they do even if it's a really fucked up silly way of thinking but then to B, think in a way that comports with how that would be advantageous to me.
Merlin: There's not that many people who spend all day going out there and trying to listen to other people to develop a better viewpoint.
Merlin: I don't.
Merlin: But the point is in all of these cases, what I'm getting at poorly is that all the people who crow about how great all these things are are mostly just – they're crowing a lot about themselves.
Merlin: The people who love democracy love their democracy.
Merlin: The people who love social media love their social media.
Merlin: The people who love freedom love their freedom.
Merlin: It's just that there are these increasingly –
Merlin: useless and slippery capital letter nouns that we fight over all the time.
Merlin: And I'm not sure how far we get with it because it really is more about talking than listening.
Merlin: And that is never clearer than when we start yelling at each other about politics, as I've said, ad nauseum.
Merlin: And it gets you back to this old idea of mine we've said again before, which is like, when's the last time you changed your mind because somebody yelled at you and called you a dumbass?
Merlin: I mean, there's so much of that going on.
Merlin: There's not that many people out there going, show me how I'm a dumbass because I want to get better at this.
Merlin: That's the democracy I want.
John: Ultimately, this is the thing about the Bosnian war that this is what is so dispiriting about it is that for however many years, 50 years, they all lived under Tito more or less peacefully side by side.
John: And whatever their disputes were, whatever the arguments were, whatever they arrived at, whatever their process was,
John: Ultimately, when there was nobody watching, they just killed each other because of what their religion was or what they perceived their ethnicities were, although they were all Slavs, as far as I could tell.
John: Anybody that's not a Slav would have looked at them all and been like, I don't know, you all look like Slavs.
John: You're blonde, you're dark hair, you all have big noses.
John: But the little minute differences in their Slavitudes...
John: uh was enough and and they and they they killed each other not i mean just brutally just the worst kind of brutal like ethnic cleansing and so i mean you know not dissimilar from the tutsis and the hutus i mean same i mean the the the in rwanda it was i think worse because it was being done with hatchets just cut your arms off but
John: But that said, if you are a parent and someone comes and takes your child out of your hand and then kills them in front of you, it's pretty bad no matter what weapon they use.
John: But so I listened to our national debate and I listened to the way that we're pushing the ball back and forth.
John: We're pushing the debate.
John: We're making the case for all these different things.
John: And I just...
John: I am drawn back to the apparatus that is supporting it.
John: I am drawn to the Capitol building in Washington, D.C., and I pray to God that it...
John: that it's that it stands, you know, I'm drawn back to the, to the process because I'm no longer interested so much in the conversation because without the process, the conversation just, it devolves instantly, you know, like, like we, we have pushed, we have pushed the human rights ball pretty far in the last hundred years.
Yeah.
John: But in 1994, in Bosnia, and in 1996 in Rwanda, when was it?
Merlin: I don't remember.
John: 92?
John: Yeah.
John: Something like that.
John: I mean, the ball got pushed all the way back.
John: All the way back to...
John: where it started, like in the blink of an eye.
John: And it didn't matter that there were, that they were modern countries or that, you know, none of it mattered.
John: And this, this, this feeling that I, because what, what happened was I said somebody, a friend of mine wrote me based on something I said on the podcast, this quote, the Martin Luther King quote, where I said, the, the arc of history is long, but it bends toward justice.
John: And this friend of mine wrote me and he was like, do you really believe that?
John: And, you know, and I said it kind of at the time, sort of like hopeful slash aspirational and also a little bit like, here's a cliche, but
John: You know, the arc of history is long.
John: And part of that length is that sometimes it goes all the way back to the start.
John: I don't see that happening in San Francisco.
John: But I also am not, you know, I am not 100% clear as the father of a daughter.
John: I'm not 100% clear how to advise her as she grows up.
John: Like, what kind of world she lives in.
John: I don't want to just be, you know, I don't want to say, don't get into a car with a bunch of strange boys who have been drinking and feel like I've done as much as I can do.
John: Uh...
John: But I'm at a loss.
Merlin: Well, how do you know when it's going well with the process?
Merlin: I mean – and I know you have to keep a certain remove from Daniel Day-Lewis.
Merlin: But I'm thinking about that Lincoln movie, which I watched a couple of times and I thought was pretty great.
Merlin: And just the whole idea of like how – and I don't – again, I don't know how much of it is precisely factual.
Merlin: But the whole idea of like all the –
Merlin: Everything you would ever hear about in terms of smoky back room stuff to get all the wheeling and dealing and bribing and this and the that to get the 13th Amendment across.
Merlin: I mean that is in some sense the system working, right?
Merlin: I mean that's how it's always been.
Merlin: I don't think there's ever been a day where everybody just showed up and was noble and agreed by mutual assent that everything will be great.
Merlin: That's part of the process though, right?
Merlin: I mean that's part of the – as they say, the sausage getting made.
John: In the middle of the bloodiest war in American history where Sherman burned Atlanta.
John: He was burning Atlanta at that very moment.
John: I haven't seen the movie.
Merlin: But he had to do, at least according to this movie, he had to do some pretty big, for Honest Dave, he had to do some pretty big fibbing.
Merlin: Because the nut of it was that
Merlin: Even the people who were sort of pro the amendment were saying, well, if this war is going to end and we think it might, basically they're making – the South is making moves to say, hey, look, let's talk about how we can wind this thing down.
Merlin: This is two or three months before the end.
Merlin: And Lincoln is like going, oh, we're still going to make this happen.
Merlin: And so they go and kind of systematically, person by person – it's a really good movie – target who they can get to vote for it because it's going to be such a close vote.
Merlin: Anyway, I'm just –
Merlin: Yeah, but all that aside, I'm just curious though, one way out of this incredibly depressing morass is no, but like for example, I think I understand and I think I'm with you about this idea that is it too facile to say like the rhetoric is useful if it's in the service of the process, but the process still has to work on some fundamental level.
Merlin: That big pointy building has to have stuff happening in it.
John: Yeah, 20 years ago, I was very much like
John: I was consumed with a fascination with American-style democracy and how important it was and how magical it was and how unlike anything that had happened before in history it was.
John: And over the years, my admiration for it, I think, got lost in the weeds because
John: of the way our culture has evolved and feeling time and time again that like, oh, well, the system is not working very well.
John: I mean, it's producing all these
John: All these situations that are just ugly.
John: I feel like our nation is a bruised apple.
John: But I feel like the only way out of my alienation is to go back up to the place where...
John: even in spite of the last 20 years, American-style democracy is the most amazing technology.
John: And I want to be a supporter of it.
John: And almost it requires that, because I've never believed in non-partisanship.
John: I've always thought it was just a thing that reporters lied about.
Merlin: You mean in terms of like fair and balanced, I'm going to walk this non-existent middle line?
John: Yeah, I don't believe such a thing is true.
John: And yet I feel pulled now to a place where my allegiance is to...
John: is to our constitution and a constitutional democracy, and anything that serves it, I am a friend of, and anything that impedes it, I am a foe of.
John: Because all of the pit fighting, all of the small beer...
John: I leave to others, I guess.
John: While I'm thinking of a way to shore up the edifice.
John: To shore up the hall where it's all taking place.
John: I don't know.
John: Right now, I just was asked to be on the steering committee for the re-election of Seattle's mayor.
John: And I'm thinking...
John: in these terms, like, getting back involved in democratic politics is... I can hear you being of two very different minds about it.
Merlin: I never thought I would... I really want to get involved in this morass of democratic politics that I really fucking believe in, but oh my god.
John: Yeah, well, I mean, local politics are different in the sense that I can put my hands on
John: on the problems that the port of Seattle is having.
John: And you grew up with it to some extent, right?
John: I mean, with your dad.
John: Right.
John: Well, and my uncle and everybody.
John: That's all we talked about.
John: Local, you know, the sewers and the parks.
John: But...
John: I don't know.
John: These Holocaust documentaries, I cannot watch them and turn them off and then be free of the Holocaust.
John: And I can't imagine you do either.
John: And I can't imagine... Otherwise I would have just watched one.
John: Yeah, right.
John: Right.
John: You keep watching.
John: You keep trying.
Merlin: I keep looking for something.
Merlin: I mean, not to be melodramatic.
Merlin: It's it's amazing, dramatic viewing.
Merlin: But also, I do keep looking for something that either makes a ton more sense or a ton less sense.
Merlin: Because because when I find, you know, one or the other, I don't know, something feels maybe not explained.
Merlin: But but it I don't know.
John: It makes sense if Hitler is just a madman.
John: But when you realize that... Yeah, one madman doesn't get that much accomplished.
John: Yeah, when you realize that the innovation, the primary innovation at Auschwitz was that some lieutenant realized that they were fumigating their uniforms to kill the lice with this Zyklon B stuff that was like an insecticide.
John: Mm-hmm.
John: And he was like, well, what if we put this in the room with some humans?
Merlin: It's a really dark fucking James Burke moment because it's around the same time.
Merlin: Again, this is something we talked about on the phone the other day, an unreleased call.
Merlin: But it's too costly to have bullets.
Merlin: You got to dig all those pits.
Merlin: And then they started running into problems with like, wow, we've gotten really good at the gassing.
Merlin: But now we have to go build grills to augment the crematoria because now we can't get rid of the bodies fast enough.
Merlin: And it's just an engineering problem we deal with a little bit every week.
John: yeah, we just hire this guy and the guy comes in and he's like, well, I'm an engineer, but I can, you know, I don't have anything personally against like all these mothers.
Merlin: Oh, those interviews.
Merlin: Oh my God.
Merlin: Just as you described those interviews with the guys who had worked there, like that one guy who just, it's like, no, I just, I just hate the Jews.
Merlin: I don't feel bad about any of it.
John: The Jews were really, uh, they were really, you know, making it hard on us Germans to, to, uh,
Merlin: Yeah, again, let's go back to a million of these other kinds of us versus them things.
Merlin: The Jews screwed up my family starting before World War I. But then especially after, we're going around – my word is not his, but we're pushing around these wheelbarrows full of useless money and all these guys with the long beards are making bank.
Merlin: Off of it.
Merlin: You know, I, I, the other thing just, the other thing I mentioned to you from that.
Merlin: I'm sorry.
John: This is our first episode back in a month and I'm so, and I'm just like, so depressed.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: That'll help.
John: Yeah.
Merlin: That might help people.
Merlin: Well, I'm going to say it's going to help you.
Merlin: You're going to be up all night watching Hitler.
John: People are driving across rural Kansas and they're like, a new episode of Roderick on the Line.
John: I'm going to put it in and I'm going to listen to this.
Merlin: Where's my rubber girl?
Merlin: So what I watched the other night that I was telling you about on the Roku.
Merlin: 700 channels.
Merlin: I went straight to archive.org and watched 1945 government films.
Merlin: You know this.
Merlin: But basically they're real lo-fi.
Merlin: But basically the army went in and I guess the Russians liberated most of the camps.
Merlin: But basically they went in when stuff was – there were still people there, some living.
Merlin: And they went in with cameras and they just straight up fucking shot what was there.
Merlin: And they did not pull any punches.
Merlin: It's really interesting to watch because it starts with affidavits, like a picture of the affidavit on screen.
Merlin: It's 1945.
Merlin: It's not real hi-fi.
Merlin: And one of them is the officer who is like in charge of the project.
Merlin: The other affidavit is a filmmaker who's been in film since 1920 and he's been in the army since started it on.
Merlin: He's going to certify that all of this is correct.
Merlin: And they just jump straight into like eyes sunken, mouth open corpses being carried out of mass graves.
Merlin: The descriptions go on and on.
Merlin: It's completely appalling.
Merlin: And I sat and watched it for a pretty long while and it was just – it's engrossing but it's awful.
Merlin: But like I told you, of all that awfulness and we've all been part of just seeing some of this awfulness in films and stuff before, 60 years after.
Merlin: But I told you this.
Merlin: The one that really struck me.
Merlin: So, you know, not MacArthur.
Merlin: Eisenhower, is it some of these things?
Merlin: Patton, is it some of these things?
Merlin: One of the other big guys.
Merlin: I forget who were there.
Merlin: And, you know, they're walking through.
Merlin: And in so many of these cases, what they would go, and this is what the victor gets to do.
Merlin: They go into the village nearby.
Merlin: You know, Auschwitz or Treblinka or Bergen-Belsen or whatever.
Merlin: And you go in and you – they would pull out the local burgers, maybe the mayor.
Merlin: You bring in the citizens, ladies in fancy hats who have been eating fine for pretty much for four years and they walk them through the fucking camp.
Merlin: They walk them past the open graves.
Merlin: They walk them – they make them go in and show them –
Merlin: All of these deliberate killing devices.
Merlin: There's this one scene though that is indelibly stuck in my mind, which is they describe this one – it's like a little shack, right?
Merlin: It's a pretty small little house and it's just –
Merlin: It's just a pile of bodies.
Merlin: I mean it's a pile of bodies like eight feet high.
Merlin: Just – you can't tell what limb belongs to what trunk and it's just a big pile of bodies.
Merlin: I'm like that corpse is a lady because she's got long hair and it's – apparently the stench in this thing was so overwhelming.
Merlin: I mean you can't even imagine what a big pile of bodies would be like.
Merlin: And they take the people from the village and the guys in like fedoras and bespoke suits and they walk them in and the officers stand there and watch them walk in.
Merlin: And you can see them pointing and going, you're going to go in there and you're going to look at this and you're going to stand in this room for a few minutes.
Merlin: And then after a few minutes, they start filing out.
Merlin: Nobody is crying.
Merlin: Some people are holding handkerchiefs over their nose because it's obviously intolerable.
Merlin: And the next scene is them shaking their heads.
Merlin: They're not crying.
Merlin: They are – as they say in Scientology, they are pie-faced.
Merlin: They don't have any expression on their face and it's just the equivalent of like, well, I don't know about this.
Merlin: I don't know what was – this is – yeah, this is a thing.
Merlin: We didn't know about this.
Merlin: I can't help you.
Merlin: And that's – I mean maybe it was just that contrast of all this horribleness and me sitting here at one in the morning watching this and just thinking what the fuck has happened in the last century.
Merlin: But just the fact that that's what eats at me and it sounds like it's some part of what eats at you is the people who could walk out of there and as you said, the monster inside all of us.
Merlin: Like those guys had kids that they love.
Merlin: Those guys had grandkids.
Merlin: Those people went to church and stuff and –
Merlin: They could walk out of there and just shake their head in a fedora like, well, yeah, that smelled really bad.
John: Well, and this is the... I mean, part of the problem of the 20th century is that we have demonized the German people in a certain way.
John: The Germans live in all of our minds in this strange bubble because on the one hand, post-war Germany, like...
John: is both an economic miracle and also West Germans were our allies and our pals.
Merlin: The Beatles were playing there 15 years after that.
John: Yeah.
John: And so like in some ways we were able to convert our thinking on the Germans like uninterrupted from being our mortal enemies to then being the worst monsters in history and
John: to then being on the reaper bond in 60 you know 63 and you know like west germany we and the reality is that the germans are not monsters no and that somehow the lesson of the 20th century that we are all monsters did not get learned
John: Very well.
Merlin: They're deliberate monsters, and we did the things that we had to do to stop them.
Merlin: But they have a special place in history as a country for being the worst monsters.
John: They did some terrible, terrible, monstrous things, but Stalin killed way, way, way, way more.
Merlin: But that's kind of what you're getting at, though, right?
Merlin: That's our consolation.
Merlin: Our consolation is we have identified who the problem is here, and it's not us.
Merlin: It will never be us.
John: Right.
John: But it was not very long after that that we were dropping flaming canisters of liquid, like... Jellied gasoline.
John: Jellied gasoline on villages full of naked children.
John: And, like, we are all crazy.
John: And yet, we are convinced that we're sane and we're so merry about it.
John: We're so quick to dismiss all of these instances as unique or aberrational instances of terror, of terrible people doing terrible things over here in this corner.
Merlin: Just so confident in our smugness.
John: And somehow we get up, I get on the freeway every day and I'm just driving down the street and it's like, all right, this freeway is full of people and every one of them is a crazy animal.
John: And yet I am confident that we will all stay in our lanes.
John: That the guy in front of me and the guy next to me and the guy behind me are going to stay in their fucking lanes.
John: And I feel safe.
John: And through that same painted lines on the pavement, we are capable of...
John: of mass murder through the same process.
John: Follow the yellow line.
John: Follow the yellow line.
John: It's going to take a right and then it's going to go down some stairs.
John: Follow the yellow line.
Merlin: Ugh, God.
John: We're just going to take a shower.
John: But those yellow lines are what they guarantee to me that the guy driving an 18-wheeler next to me isn't just going to decide, you know what, I'm just going to kill everybody.
Merlin: And if he doesn't, there will be consequences.
Merlin: We are protected by the law from the people who are foolish enough to not honor the yellow lines.
John: Right.
John: And so the kid in Connecticut goes crazy and shoots a bunch of people in an elementary school.
John: And we all have like a two-day national reckoning about it.
John: And it becomes a conversation about guns.
John: And yet I look around and I'm just like, you know, my neighbors are just...
John: We have not really moved the ball on asking ourselves who we are.
John: Why be good?
John: If we are not motivated by a fear of God and a fear of hell, why else be good?
John: And I do not have a satisfactory answer.
John: I cannot keep waking up and saying, because of some complicated Darwinian family group survival model, that is why we are nice to our neighbors, because it's a mutually beneficial food gathering group.
John: That is not working.
John: And I don't feel like all the effort that we have put into as human beings trying to discern the good, trying to develop an ethical system that hinges on altruism or hinges on the idea that it is not a Hobbesian world.
John: somehow we've abandoned that project or we're satisfied we got as far as like jefferson and we're we're fine with it then we all then nietzsche kind of made it look a little bit too dark in that room and we decided to like leave it to the french like nobody is nobody has a has a good answer religion is going bonkers everywhere why be good
John: So anyway.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: We're not going to talk anymore about Lars Ulrich.
John: Such a downer.
Merlin: That was a good one.