Ep. 79: "We Are Not Snow Giants"
Merlin: Hello.
Merlin: Hey, John.
Merlin: Hi, Merlin.
Merlin: How's it going?
John: Merlin, man.
Merlin: Oh, man.
Merlin: You know, Beyonce cut her hair.
John: I think actually Beyonce just took out her weave.
John: Yeah.
John: And most people don't understand that Beyonce's hair is not normally her real hair.
John: You're pretty sure about that?
John: Yeah, I'm pretty sure, based on Beyonce's ethnicity, that a blonde Mary Tyler Moore hairstyle is not her natural hair.
John: I think it probably is natural hair.
John: I think it's very expensive hair.
John: Yes.
John: But I do not think that it belongs to her.
John: I mean, it belongs to her in the sense that she is the owner of it.
John: She inhabits the hair.
John: She inhabits it.
Merlin: John, you're in show business.
Merlin: You've been around a lot of people.
Merlin: You have concerns about Ben Affleck and what's going on in his head.
Merlin: Have you met a lot of people with fake hair?
Merlin: Now, when I say fake, I mean it could be artificially short or long.
Merlin: You could have it in a bun.
John: I see unreal hair sometimes.
John: But, you know, a lot of people brag about their gaydar or about their...
John: Other relationship dars.
Merlin: Hair dars.
Merlin: Other relationship dars, you can tell somebody's cheating on somebody?
John: Yeah, I think there are people who claim that, oh, they can tell what's going on.
John: They can tell whether someone is cheating.
John: They can tell whether someone is sleeping with someone else.
Merlin: There are varieties of dars.
John: Yes.
John: From across the room, I have been in a situation where I have, let's say, I'm going to take this into the hypothetical, but let's say, for instance, one time I was in a club.
John: And let's say, for instance, there were two people in the club that I was engaged with, with varying degrees of seriousness.
John: Like, in the present tense, we were having some kind of assignations.
Merlin: Oh, that's real hypothetical.
John: And the two people in the club, who had no reason to suspect that the other also shared my confidence...
John: They were aware of one another and commented on it.
John: They were aware of... I mean, they knew one another, but they were aware that there was something going on, and they were both very close at pinpointing what was going on, just based on how they caught each other looking at me across a crowded room.
John: Were these ladies...
John: They were ladies because this is a superpower.
John: In the hypothetical.
John: Yeah.
John: Oh, they're good.
John: They're incredible.
John: And I was like, I mean, I was there in the bar the whole night, obviously.
John: And I was watching these people from across the room.
John: And as far as I could tell, using all of my special forces training, there was nothing given away.
John: But if you go to the glossary of the Special Forces Handbook and look for lady looks in the back in the glossary, there is no section on lady looks.
John: There's a section on Punjabi sticks.
John: There's a section on how to behead a guy on a motorcycle driving down a road at night.
John: There is not a section on lady looks and how to avoid them.
John: And I was really, I was astonished.
John: I was caught off guard when...
John: I don't know if this is – When hypothetically I played out this scenario.
Merlin: I'm just hypothetically super glad I wasn't there and involved.
Merlin: They say that dogs can smell fear and it turns out – I've heard this.
Merlin: I don't know if this is true.
Merlin: But a dog's sense of smell is extremely acute.
Merlin: That's right.
Merlin: They can smell very well from pretty far away but it's just very sensitive and supposedly what a dog can smell is what you and I might call flop sweat.
Merlin: They can smell the difference in somebody who is feeling anxious.
Merlin: So for example, they say if you've got a dog, like they'll get – really what a dog will get is the vibe from the owner sometimes.
Merlin: So if the owner of another dog is really anxious – I guess what I'm saying is that maybe this is a kind of dar.
Merlin: Maybe there's something that ladies can detect.
Merlin: I don't know if it's a scent thing.
John: Well, now, have we talked about this before?
John: But, you know, in the back of certain kinds of magazines, there is that there's that ad that has the picture of the woman who discovered the human pheromone scent.
John: And that woman looks kind of like Marilyn Vos Savant.
Yeah.
Merlin: You mean the woman with the highest IQ in the world?
John: That's right.
John: And her name is something like that.
John: It's like Dr. Adonis Androgynous.
Merlin: Superiority.
John: And...
John: And she discovered the human pheromone and supposedly condensed it down into a little deer piss scent that you put behind your ears and it brings deers.
Merlin: Is she theoretically selling this idea?
Merlin: Which gender is she selling this to guys?
John: This is for men.
John: She is selling this.
John: Typically, these ads are in the back of Lad Mag.
Merlin: Okay.
Merlin: So you get like some androgen.
Merlin: You get something on there that's going to make a woman uncontrolled.
Merlin: For guys who have given up on the seduction community, they're ready to go to the next level.
John: I feel like it may even be called andros.
John: Right.
John: That's a good name.
John: The product.
John: But in any case, she has it.
John: I think what she does is she gets people aroused and then puts funnels under their arms.
Merlin: Like a squeegee?
John: Like, she squeegees them.
John: Mm-hmm.
John: I don't need this, of course.
John: No.
John: I don't need any of this.
Merlin: No, you have a very... You have a power of andress all on your own.
John: With my... Even completely clean, I still have a kind of attractant that does bring... It brings deer.
Merlin: But it...
Merlin: I think it probably leeches out of your van.
John: The van is gone now, right?
Merlin: That van's gone, yeah.
John: My gosh.
John: Someone from the March of Dimes is driving around in that van wondering why they keep getting laid.
Merlin: Ha ha!
John: I've been working for the March of Dimes for 15 years, and I have this used van that we got.
Merlin: They got a van.
Merlin: They can put their wheelchair on the back, and they're rolling around getting more pussy than Sinatra.
John: And now I am shagging so many 35-year-old women.
John: I don't know what to do with myself.
John: But in any case, so my Beyonce hair dar is – it's just – I know that she does not have that hair because of my – because my human studies indicate that she would have a different type of hair typically than the hair that she frequently rocks.
Merlin: Well, yeah, and her ethnicity is not –
John: um conducive to a blonde pixie cut out of the box yeah ethnicity does play a role in hair type but i think you could accomplish that hair but you would be we've talked recently in this podcast about donks but now we need to talk about the conk
Merlin: Yeah, this is what got Malcolm X with his head in the toilet when the cops came.
John: That's right.
Merlin: It was burning like fire.
John: The acid bleach solution, whatever it is.
Merlin: It's like lye.
Merlin: It relaxes your hair and it burns like fire.
John: The conch.
Merlin: That was a great scene.
John: It was a hell of a scene.
John: Speaking of the donk thing, we have received a lot of mail.
Merlin: Oh, God.
Merlin: Don't get me started.
John: And I know the people who have been... Don't respond.
Merlin: Don't respond, John.
Merlin: Our listeners.
Merlin: I think the Impala is an Impala.
Merlin: Thank you.
Merlin: Thank you very much.
Merlin: That was very instructive.
Merlin: And you still got 30 characters left.
Merlin: Thank you.
John: I have received so many of these.
John: I didn't respond to the first 50, but by the 150th, the 150th one, I was just like, seriously?
John: Yeah.
John: Is that the word you think I was searching for?
John: Impala?
Yeah.
Merlin: It's all right.
John: I mean, I understand people get confused.
John: We cover a lot of material.
Merlin: John, I'm just glad they listen.
Merlin: I'm glad they're here.
Merlin: You know what I mean?
Merlin: God bless them.
Merlin: Now, here's the thing.
Merlin: I was trying to explain toupees to my daughter.
Merlin: Oh, toupees.
Merlin: Yeah, I mean, there's a lot of things in life that are complicated to explain.
Merlin: But it's easy enough to explain that sometimes when people don't have as much hair as they would like, they'll put on a little hat that makes them look like they have more hair.
John: Like Billy Gibbons does.
John: Now, that's a toupee that I can appreciate.
John: Well, you're talking about not his beard.
John: You're talking about his actual head hair?
John: I'm talking about that little cap that looks like a sea anemone.
Merlin: I've never seen him without a hat.
John: Well, yeah.
John: And at a certain point, he realized that he couldn't wear a cowboy hat everywhere.
John: And he needed something that he could wear on an airplane.
John: It wasn't plausible.
John: Yeah, right.
John: It's like, hey, Billy, you know, hey, jump out of the shower.
John: Come look at this.
John: Cowboy hat on.
John: He needed a hat that he could wear everywhere.
John: He hops into the hot tub.
John: And so he had this custom-made... I'm sure he saw it at a street fair in Amsterdam or something, and it's a watch cap that looks like a sea anemone.
John: And he's been wearing... So it looks like kind of mini dreads, almost.
Merlin: You mean, is it more like the Edge, or more like a court jester at a race?
John: It's like an Edge hat if the Edge hat was covered with Lane Staley beards.
Oh!
John: multiple tiny Lane Staley yeah so if you had Lane if Lane Staley was still alive and you were cultivating his little braided chin beard and every time he grew one that was about six inches long you would cut it off and say you know and you keep feeding him Staley chow and he would keep growing these things once you had collected 500 of them you would then knit them into an edge cap and that's the Billy Gibbons hair hat
John: And what's underneath there, one can only imagine.
John: I think he looks like the professor from Back to the Future under there.
Merlin: I have not seen that, but I mean – and I don't want to sound unkind.
Merlin: We have on numerous occasions discussed the problem of hairless men.
Mm-hmm.
Merlin: And it was during one of our early video interviews where you first introduced me to the Ben Affleck problem, which is something I still turn over in my mind a couple times a month.
Merlin: I like to circle back to that.
Merlin: But I'm going to say a couple things about this.
Merlin: First of all, I'm going to say, again, thank God a man can shave his head.
Merlin: I'm so glad that this is now an option.
John: Right.
John: Remember when it wasn't?
Merlin: Oh, I, you know, I woke up the other morning and I started thinking about the special education teacher at my high school.
Merlin: Mr. I don't say his name is Mr. Zabrinsky.
Merlin: He, no, Rabinsky, Rabinsky, Zabrinsky, Rabinsky.
Merlin: Anyway, he was, he was very obviously.
Merlin: He definitely registered on my flamboyant dar.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: And he wore Keanu shirts in like 1983.
Merlin: I mean, way beyond the bell bottoms and the whole thing.
Merlin: And he... Nice guy, never married.
Merlin: He was a really, really nice guy.
Merlin: And he taught special education.
Merlin: He was incredibly patient.
Merlin: He was very kind.
Merlin: He was a great guy.
Merlin: And, you know, everybody liked him.
Merlin: But he was, you know, he was kind of weird looking.
Merlin: He had had that really bad, you know, kind of accent.
John: Yeah, and right now he's driving around in a March of Dimes van.
Merlin: He's like, what the fuck is going on?
Merlin: My life has completely turned around.
Merlin: What's happening?
Merlin: This is insane.
Merlin: Okay, so he was a super nice guy.
Merlin: I'm not going to disparage the guy, but he had very kind of odd features.
Merlin: Again, sweetest man in the world.
Merlin: But he had this strange hair problem that really approached like a bozo the clown level problem.
Merlin: Where, I mean, he had to be like in his early to mid 30s.
Merlin: But he was full on like super tonsure bald on top.
Merlin: Like shiny bald, not a lick of hair.
Merlin: And he didn't do the comb over, but he had a bozo thing going on.
Merlin: His hair was very long.
Merlin: He looked kind of like a – what's that movie where the people throw a flower?
Merlin: Rocky Horror.
Merlin: He looked like the Rocky Horror guy with the stringy hair.
John: His name is Riff Raff.
John: That's the original Riff Raff.
John: Isn't that an ACDC song?
John: Well, you're familiar with the current rapper named Riff Raff.
Merlin: I can't keep track.
Merlin: Everybody has diacriticals and exclamation points in their name.
John: I'm very confused.
John: The new Riff Raff is a guy... The new Riff Raff.
John: He actually kind of, in some ways, not physically, but spiritually resembles the old Riff Raff.
John: But he's a guy who has taken, you know, the hyper-trimmed beard...
Merlin: Oh, like a Don Johnson kind of thing?
John: Well, no, like where you have micro clippers and you are able to draw Zs into your beard.
Merlin: Oh, that's so creepy.
John: So he's taken that to the nth level.
John: He has cornrows.
John: He's a white guy, but he has cornrows.
John: Are you kidding?
John: He's a white guy?
John: Believe it or not.
John: And he cuts...
John: notches in his eyebrows and he draws very intricate little sort of mazes out of his beard hair on his face.
John: And he has the MTV logo tattooed on his neck.
John: What?
John: He's really all the rage.
Merlin: The 1981 MTV logo?
John: Yeah.
Merlin: Okay.
John: With a certain kind of...
John: young person who likes to snort oxycontin but who is not a juggalo necessarily riffraff is the dj du jour oh okay and he he cuts across all all fronts he he can he can appeal to any audience because of his variety of terrible decisions well you remember when we talked about the vein of juggalo right where is the vein of juggalo i will always talk to you about the vein of juggalo
John: The vein of Juggalo runs from just south of Cincinnati.
John: So it's in the south.
John: Through the center of America down to somewhere south of Memphis.
John: And it broadens at a certain point.
Merlin: It feels very Alabama to me, with nothing at all against the wonderful state of Alabama.
Merlin: It's got a real kind of Alabama vibe to me.
John: Yeah, there's a lot of that down there.
John: But in any case, Riff Raff...
John: He penetrates the Jane of Vuggalo.
John: I'm sorry, did I say the Jane of Vuggalo?
John: Yeah, Janeism.
John: I think it's a kind of juggalo religion.
John: He penetrates there, but he also... He's very active in South Florida, which obviously there's a lot of juggalos there too, but...
John: I don't know.
John: I'm still researching the new Riff Raff.
Merlin: Okay.
Merlin: I'll get back to you when I know more.
Merlin: Okay, well, let's table that.
Merlin: I'm going to need to do some research on Riff Raff.
John: I'm pretty sure that there was a recent movie where the actor, James Franco, plays a character derived from, like, it plays a character that is basically an homage to Riff Raff.
Merlin: Is it played straight or is it raffploitation?
John: That is a really good question.
John: I feel like Riff Raff may feel like it ain't no thing, but he might also feel like, what's up?
Merlin: Yes.
John: You know what I mean?
Merlin: It's a good point.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: So anyway, he had bozo hair.
John: Yeah.
Merlin: sweet guy and then he came back and uh late august he shows up for a new school year and he has the most luxurious like anvil like helmet of jet black fake hair that you and i think i don't i don't know if i'm assuming it was a toupee it was you know and i'm gonna get to this in a second toupee dar but like i couldn't even tell what it was i mean it was it was it was a devo helmet i was like oh
Merlin: Yeah, kind of.
Merlin: It was like a woodland creature.
Merlin: But it had all the worst components of both a toupee and a comb over.
Merlin: Like, you know, there's the comb overs you can get where it looks like an anvil.
Merlin: You get this kind of trapezoid shape on your head.
John: But I think it was a wig.
John: Ronald Reagan hair.
Merlin: I guess so.
Merlin: I guess so.
Merlin: But here's what I was struggling to explain to my daughter, and I eventually stopped because I don't want her to become a hard person like me.
Merlin: But, you know, but that's the funny thing is like, could you, you could try to explain to somebody how to spot somebody with a toupee, but it would still not really get to like how you can tell.
Merlin: A bad toupee you can tell, right?
Merlin: Like a really, really bad toupee where you've got like a two-tone hair, like you've got this black thing on top of your head and gray hair.
John: Why is that squirrel attacking that man?
Merlin: Different textures.
Merlin: It doesn't match.
Merlin: But I mean, even if you look at Tony Bennett, who has for years had one of the best rugs in the business, you can still kind of tell it's a toupee.
Merlin: And I don't know what that is.
Merlin: I don't know if this is one of those Malcolm Gladwell turns out things.
John: It's not age-appropriate hair, for one thing.
Merlin: We talked about Frank Sinatra.
Merlin: Now, Frank Sinatra, as we know, used to wear... You saw those shots of him in the studio during his comeback in the 50s and 60s, and he's wearing that cool hat.
Merlin: And you look at pictures of him in whatever... The one with Burt Lancaster having sex on the beach with Debra Carr.
Merlin: In that movie, he's a bald man.
Merlin: He's a balding bald man.
Merlin: And then suddenly...
John: And he's dancing with Nancy Reagan.
John: Yes.
John: And he has like a doormat on his head.
Merlin: Well, but here's where I will give props.
John: It's an expensive doormat.
Merlin: Well, here's my props that I have to give.
Merlin: And we've said this numerous times.
Merlin: I think it's worth repeating because this is how you help people.
Merlin: He had a realistic toupee in the sense that, yes, it was gray.
Merlin: And, yes, he had as awful of a man as he was, as poorly as he treated Mia Farrow.
Merlin: He still had the presence of mind to get a plausible toupee where it looked like his hair was thinning in the front.
John: Right, right.
John: And it was, yeah, it looked appropriate.
Merlin: Yeah, yeah.
Merlin: Anyway, I think it's a funny thing.
Merlin: I don't know if it's at all related to the ladies.
Merlin: Now, were the two ladies in hypothetical competition with one another?
Merlin: Was there a history?
Yeah.
Merlin: No, none at all.
John: And, frankly, if we can speak honestly... In the hypothetical.
John: They both had amazing hair.
John: I don't know how that plays into it.
John: Amazing natural hair.
John: Big curls.
Merlin: Have I hypothetically... Oh, I hypothetically know.
Merlin: Big hair.
Merlin: I think I hypothetically know who one of them is.
John: Naturally big hair, too.
John: She has great, thick hair.
John: Not hair that you have to tease up, but just hair that just no matter what happens.
Merlin: Humane, generous hair.
John: You're on a ferry boat.
John: The wind is blowing.
John: Hair looks great.
Merlin: Hair that put up with you a lot longer than probably anybody should have.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: I don't know.
Merlin: You can't explain that to a kid.
John: The last Ben Affleck movie, The Town, which I felt like was a... I don't know if that was the last Ben Affleck movie, but it was the last one I saw.
John: The last one you were aware of.
John: Whatever.
John: The last time I went to a Ben Affleck movie.
John: Oh, no.
John: You know what?
John: I saw Argo.
Merlin: Oh, Argo was fine.
John: Yeah, it was fine.
Merlin: I think it's deeply, deeply overrated.
Merlin: Nothing against the movie, but the buzz was way too much for how good it actually was.
John: And all those rewards it didn't deserve.
Merlin: It was like a top 20 TV movie.
John: Zero Dark Thirty was a better film.
Merlin: That's a very good movie.
John: But in any case, the last time I saw a Ben Affleck movie where there were a lot of real close-ups of the guy...
John: I swear to you, Merlin, I was enjoying the movie, The Town.
John: Yes.
John: I was enjoying it.
John: I was absorbed in the film.
John: But every time Ben Affleck came on the screen, all I could do was look at his hairline and go, where is the graft?
John: i don't john i'm looking at a photo how does he do it i'm looking at a oh well okay see i'm looking at one here where he's he's very shortly shorn yeah and it looks real it looks real it's so good it drives me crazy i mean this is the problem now that i'm i became aware of it many years ago but ever since then i cannot appreciate a ben affleck movie because the only performance i've been i'm interested in is the performance of his hair doctor
John: Isn't that awful?
John: I am judging his hair doctor the entire time like, you are amazing, sir.
Merlin: It's like hearing that somebody had a stroke and you're just kind of watching for some kind of sign for what you can tell.
John: Fudging for some soup to dribble out of the corner.
Merlin: Trying to figure out which leg somebody lost in the war before they've stood up.
Merlin: It's very, very distracting.
Merlin: Now, I'm looking at another one.
Merlin: That one, he looked well-haired.
Merlin: This one I'm looking at now.
Merlin: Hair suit.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: Yes, hair suit.
Merlin: It's like a hair shirt, but fake.
Merlin: In this one, he really does look like he's in an ad for the Hair Club for Men.
Merlin: His hair looks bad, you're saying?
Merlin: This one, it does, because it doesn't conform to the shape of the head.
Merlin: You know, what is the thing Michael Jackson had?
Merlin: Alopecia.
Merlin: Okay.
Merlin: And that's the thing where you get – Body dysmorphic disorder.
Merlin: Yes.
Merlin: It's like – isn't it like a – isn't it a starving sister of anorexia?
John: Oh, right.
Merlin: You don't see what you actually look like.
Merlin: Even though he looked like Lon Chaney Sr., he thought that nose looked good.
John: Yeah.
John: Dysmorphia I guess is the – Dysphagia would be you have trouble swallowing.
John: I think.
John: I guess.
Merlin: At any rate, he... See, I think the thing is, when you put on your little hair hat, you go to the store, you get your consultant, you are... This sounds unkind.
Merlin: But I think it's a very human thing.
Merlin: Because you go in there, and you want to see yourself as you think you look.
Merlin: Or as you think you should look, or you used to look.
John: Well, here's... So here we're into a category that kind of haunts me all the time.
John: Which is that...
John: In the morning, I wake up and I go to my closet and I ask myself, how are we going to dress today?
John: How are we going to present ourselves?
Merlin: What's the uniform of the day for John?
John: And as Chris Walla has so aptly pointed out, sometimes I show up at the studio dressed like a space cowboy.
John: Yeah.
John: And he doesn't know how to prepare for those days.
John: He's never expecting it.
John: And so I'll walk out of the house sometimes.
John: And my most recent purchase is, of course, a pair of pink pants with little blue anchors on them.
John: And I will go outside and I'll be walking around, I'll be going through my day, and then it will occur to me that maybe other people are seeing me differently than I am seeing myself.
John: Oh, I'm struggling with that right now.
John: And I am a 44-year-old, and I know that there are certain things that it's...
John: Well, in fact, I don't.
John: I was trying to make a list of all the things that I know I'm too old to wear, but I don't have anything on that list.
John: I have no restrictions on the clothes that I will wear, and I'm afraid.
John: I'm afraid for myself.
Merlin: You haven't gotten to that point.
Merlin: You're not seeing what the hairpiece actually looks like yet.
John: That's right.
John: I'm afraid that I'm walking down the street and people are saying unkind things because maybe the combination of powder blue cowboy boots and pink pants with anchors on them
John: Maybe I look like I'm having a stroke.
John: And I think I look rad.
John: Yeah.
John: But maybe the reason that people are so nice to me in supermarkets is they think that I am a disabled person.
Merlin: They want to donate a van to you.
John: Yeah, that they're like, oh, look at the poor old guy who suffers from colorblindness.
Merlin: I can't find chili.
John: Colorblindness of his soul.
Merlin: Oh, yeah, I suffered that.
Merlin: Well, I realized early as I was hitting the purchase button on Amazon that I probably don't need a third Fantastic Four shirt.
Merlin: It's identical to the other two.
Merlin: It's just I wear my Fantastic Four shirt almost every day, so I bought a third one.
John: Unless you want to go to Comic-Con with me next year.
Merlin: I would do that.
John: Would you go to Comic-Con?
Merlin: You know, I remember when I made fun of you.
Merlin: It was when we were doing the show.
Merlin: I mean, it's been in the last, you know, whatever, couple of years.
Merlin: I made fun of you for going to Comic-Con.
Merlin: I totally spaced it this year.
Merlin: I am ready to throw myself into Comic-Con.
Merlin: I'm ready to do it.
Merlin: I think we should go.
Merlin: I think we should do a performance there.
Merlin: I think we should do cosplay.
Merlin: We should cosplay as each other.
John: Here's what we should do.
John: We'll go to Comic-Con and we'll cosplay as the Mythbusters.
John: Can we both be the Doobie Brothers guy?
John: We'll do a whole Mythbusters show, but it'll be us instead of those guys.
John: And you can be the Doobie Brothers guy.
John: I'm going to be Adam Savage.
John: He talks a lot less, doesn't he?
John: The Doobie Brothers guy?
John: Yeah, but he's the one that's really blowing stuff up.
Merlin: Oh, is that his role?
Merlin: He's got the beret, so he's got to be the guy with the briefcase full of bombs.
John: He's older, and I think he's the one that likes to... He's more... I get the impression that Adam is like... He's kind of the showman.
John: He's the showman, and then... The other guy.
John: The other guy.
John: Alex, let's call him.
Merlin: My interactions with Mr. Savage have, and I know you're closer to him than I am, but all of my interactions with him have been a perfect delight.
Merlin: He is like one of the nicest kind of famous people I've ever met in my life.
Merlin: And he's so much exactly like what you would expect, but even nicer in my experience.
John: Yeah, he's extraordinary.
John: I concur.
John: He plays your songs at parties.
John: Well, but what you're saying is absolutely true and astonishing about him, which is that you meet him and he is exactly what you would hope.
John: Which is a thing that you never say that about a celebrity.
John: Oh, that's the way I say it.
Merlin: I'm not saying that to sound fancy.
Merlin: I'm saying that because I'm an older man now.
Merlin: My expectations for meeting people that I admire are very measured.
John: Right.
Merlin: As I say in Ohio, very measured.
John: You never expect a guy to exceed your expectations in every way.
John: And he does.
John: Good.
Merlin: Yeah, I mean I don't want to oversell it, but yeah, I have to say it is – it's very unusual.
Merlin: There have been a few people that I really admire that I've met in the last couple, three years as I get a little more exposure to the corridors of nerd power.
Merlin: You've known me longer than three.
Merlin: It's true.
Merlin: I've had your Andrews in my inflatable bed.
Merlin: Unflatable.
Merlin: Literally.
Merlin: Literally.
Merlin: We have to have it destroyed.
Merlin: It's like Gattaca or something.
John: Listen, you and I are going to go to Comic-Con next.
Merlin: I think we should go to Comic-Con, John.
Merlin: I'm going to order you a shirt.
Merlin: What if we both wore Fantastic Four shirts?
Merlin: And no, here's the deal.
Merlin: We'll both wear Fantastic Four shirts and we'll both wear pink trousers with blue anchors on them.
John: Oh, my God.
John: Wait a minute.
John: Maybe we should cosplay as the Fantastic Four.
Merlin: I would love to be Sue Storm Richards.
John: Can I be the Mr. Stretchy?
Merlin: You can be Mr. Stretchy.
Merlin: He's such a dick.
John: No, he's not a dick.
Merlin: That's not fair.
Merlin: Reed is not a dick.
John: Can I be Mr. Stretchy and Mr. Flamey both at the same time?
John: I think you should be Mr. Rocky and Mr. Stretchy.
John: Oh, Mr. Rocky and Mr. Stretchy.
Merlin: But I was walking around in my second blue Fantastic Four shirt and I had on – you're the one who got me back into 501s 10 years ago.
Merlin: And now all I wear is these five or six pairs of 501s in different flavors and the ones that still fit me.
Merlin: are very holy.
Merlin: I mean, I'm just, I'm just, and you know, you know how wear patterns are so weird.
John: Yeah, you wear through them in places where you're like, I do nothing in that area of my body.
Merlin: Well, and like, I'm not a pants scientist, but it seems crazy to me that yes, it is in an uneven way, like with shoes, probably a chiropractic problem, but I always one knee, let me look down.
Yeah.
Merlin: Okay.
Merlin: Right knee blows out way faster and bigger than my left knee.
Merlin: Of course, I've got a hole on the right side where my space pen and keys keep rubbing.
Merlin: I have an iPhone-shaped rectangle on my left pocket.
John: You have a chew can ring in your back pocket.
Merlin: What is it with you and the chew can?
Merlin: I, uh, you can't say them, but I, but, uh, yeah, no, they, they blow out the same.
Merlin: So I'm walking around and it doesn't matter.
Merlin: It's not important.
Merlin: We should get back to hair and Beyonce, but I, but I'm wearing, I'm wearing, I'm wearing a fantastic for sure.
Merlin: And I'm wearing these pants that look, that are so hobo and, uh, they got coffee stains on them.
John: And there's some guys in your neighborhood at the, at the, uh, humbile place, start pointing and laughing as you walk by.
Yeah.
Merlin: A little bit ping pong.
Merlin: And, uh, yeah.
Merlin: And I'm wearing a purple converse like Hawkeye wears.
Merlin: So that's, that's a moment.
Merlin: That was a moment where I said, you know, this may not be anything appropriate, let alone age appropriate.
Merlin: I pick up my daughter at places and I feel like they're, they're going to like extra double check me for security.
John: Are you, are you wearing your second, uh, fantastic forest shirt because you have them labeled like Pete Townsend's guitars, like one through four, or are you wearing your second because you blew out the first one?
Merlin: No, I just don't do laundry enough, and I'm not an animal.
John: So you have three, and they're all in rotation.
Mm-hmm.
Merlin: Yeah, I mean, you got several Rickenbackers, right?
Merlin: You don't wear the same one all the time.
John: No, I just have the one Rickenbacker.
Merlin: Is that right?
Merlin: It was at the 330?
Merlin: No, what do you have?
John: It's a 360.
John: 360, sorry.
John: Yeah, I just have the one, and I haven't played it in a long time because, as you know, I'm... On sabbatical?
John: I'm not currently making rock band music, and so the guitar is just sitting... I decided not to do my job.
Merlin: Ugh.
Merlin: Join the club, Johnny.
Merlin: Why do you think we're here?
Merlin: Comic-Con.
Merlin: I'm going to write down Comic-Con.
John: So write down Comic-Con in big letters on a 3x5 card.
John: And remember, we're going to go next year.
John: Okay.
John: The other day, based largely on conversations that you and I have had on this podcast, I decided I was going to stop eating bread, pasta, and sugar.
John: Is that right?
Yes.
John: And I've actually been doing it now for four or five days, living entirely on lettuce.
John: I'm using lettuce instead of bread.
John: And I got a Cobb salad the other day, which I was just like, Cobb salad?
Merlin: It's got blue cheese on it, right?
John: Yeah, but who orders a Cobb salad?
John: It's something Hugh Hefner would order.
John: Yeah, or somebody who doesn't want people to know he's gay.
John: Right, like Cobb's, oh, it's got ham on it.
John: Really?
John: But I ordered it and I ate it.
John: I've been eating all this food that is not my normal food.
John: I'm so interested in this.
John: Well, so I'm really tripping out.
John: Like my whole body is just, I can't say that it feels better.
John: It just feels different.
John: It feels weird.
Merlin: So four or five days.
Merlin: Yeah, and so if you're really sticking with it mostly, you're near the hump.
Merlin: I think the first week is really hard.
Merlin: I mean, it's weird.
Merlin: Like you're going like, oh God, eggs again.
John: Yeah, it's weird.
John: And I woke up, like I just ate eggs for dinner, eggs and spinach for dinner.
John: And I'm looking at this food and I'm like, is this food?
John: This seems like, I know that all the ingredients are food.
John: Right.
John: And you put it all together and it is food, but it feels like something that you would get on like Kazakhstan Airlines.
Yeah.
John: Like, dinner is served.
John: We bring in that portion of eggs.
John: It's like food that you would be five days into a seven-day hike, and you'd be opening up your freeze-dried bags and like, well, I've got some eggs.
John: Well, I've got some spinach.
Merlin: Well, I wasn't going to bring this up last time unless I knew that you were kind of thinking about it.
Merlin: But one reason this intrigues me – I'm curious if this factored into it at all.
Merlin: You're a man who – almost anything you've ever wanted to quit or chosen to quit, you've done cold turkey, right?
John: Yeah.
Merlin: You don't say, oh, I'm going to taper off the cigarettes.
John: Oh, no.
John: It doesn't work.
Merlin: Right.
Merlin: But it's interesting because the – yeah, I'm sure it's kind of a half joke.
Merlin: But like, ha-ha, you'll keep cigarettes around the house just to prove that you don't have to smoke them.
John: I have three quarters of a pack of cigarettes in my house.
Merlin: Wow.
John: And I go sometimes and I pick them up and I look at them.
John: Leave it.
John: And I go, and I go, leave it, leave it.
John: No, I don't.
John: I mean, I'm, I'm, I'm way past now.
John: I like the last time I quit smoking, which was the 20th time I quit smoking.
John: Something really did change in me.
John: And I look at them now and I, and they seem like some, they seem like something from another planet.
John: They, they have no appeal to me.
John: And in the past, I kept that pack of cigarettes around until I finally smoked one a year and a half later.
John: But now it's been four years and I haven't.
Merlin: Really?
Merlin: It's been that long?
John: Yeah.
John: And I still pick up that pack of cigarettes and I look at it and I'm like, oh, it's just a different, I have a different response to it.
John: I look at them just like, well, I mean, I have probably five cigars I brought back from Cuba.
John: that I keep in a humidifier and I keep it humidified.
Merlin: Yeah.
John: But I look at them and they seem like, it would be the same if I had a bottle of 54 Chateau Lafayette or whatever.
John: Right.
John: An interesting thing.
Merlin: This is why it's nice to have a friend who will smoke some of them for you.
John: Yeah, next time you're up, you should smoke all these old cigars.
Merlin: All your old wines.
Merlin: Well, this is why it's interesting to me as an experiment because, you know, you talked about your relationship with food.
Merlin: You know, just looking at something like the egg and spinach dinner, like that really seems super fucking weird because in your mind, that doesn't, I mean, it's not even just that that's a breakfast thing or that that's a brunch thing.
Merlin: I mean, you realize, I guess the question is, like, first of all, can this be a kind of John, leave it experiment?
Merlin: But also, doesn't it make you aware
Merlin: of like how weirdly a part of your life, a certain kind of way of eating is like eating a certain kind of food late at night.
Merlin: Yep.
Merlin: Isn't it, does it make you aware of that?
Merlin: Cause that's what I feel.
Merlin: I feel like I feel so off center because again, I go like, Oh God, what should I eat?
Merlin: What should I eat?
Merlin: Uh, I can't go have chow mein.
Merlin: I'll have another boiled egg.
Merlin: What a boiled egg.
Merlin: It's three in the afternoon.
Merlin: What's wrong with you?
John: Yeah.
John: Right.
Merlin: It's very disruptive.
Merlin: It feels very disruptive.
John: It's 10 30 at night.
John: It's peanut butter cup time.
John: And it's like, Nope, it's not peanut butter cup time.
John: But what it's making me aware of is that I have substituted quantity for variety in food for a long time.
John: If I am making food at home, I make one pound of pasta rather than making a four-course meal for myself.
John: So I will put vegetables in the spaghetti sauce, but I would not make a second...
John: plate of vegetables.
John: And taking away the pound of pasta, I'm looking at my meals now and realizing that the core nutrition, the core interesting part of the meal is not interesting enough.
John: Like a little dollop of
John: this really, you want to have a vegetable course.
John: You, you want to have a salad.
John: You want to have an, you want to have other elements.
Merlin: Something, I mean, the one that really got me was potatoes.
Merlin: Like I'm not a giant potato eater.
Merlin: I mean, it's not like I have to have potatoes and pasta with every meal, but it was amazing how quickly I, you know, I, I would, that's how I would have burgers.
Merlin: I would have a burger with cheese and stuff in green leaf lettuce.
Merlin: And like, that's actually really, really good.
Merlin: it's, it's great.
Merlin: And it's, it's just as good as a hamburger.
Merlin: It's just, but then like, where's the fucking French fries?
Merlin: Why are there not any potatoes with this?
John: It's yes.
Merlin: Isn't that strange?
John: Yeah.
John: Something's missing.
John: And particularly a strawberry milkshake is missing.
John: So anyway, I'm figuring it out because I do, because I, I opened the Atkins book, right.
John: And I looked at it, I read it and it's just like everything in the world where some white guy is trying to tell me how to live.
John: And I read it and I was like, listen,
John: I am the white guy who tells other people how to live.
John: Not you, Mr. Whoever you are.
John: Mr. Slip on the Ice and Die.
John: So I'm reading his book and he's like, if you breathe in the smell of a buttercup as you're walking through a park, you're off the diet and you need to go back and put your head in a bucket of frozen, you know... You need to wear a frozen meat helmet.
John: And I was like, I can't live like this.
John: This isn't going to be sustainable.
John: I'm never going to weigh my food.
John: I'm never going to do any of this stupid shit.
John: But I know what my problem is.
John: I mean, my problem...
John: is that I eat one pound of pasta every time I sit down at a table.
John: And that would not make an interesting 300-page book.
John: That is a tweet-length problem.
Merlin: Eat Less, Exercise More is not going to be a best-selling book.
Merlin: It's going to have to be longer than that.
John: But there it is in a nutshell.
John: And so taking away the bread and the pasta and the rice and...
John: And sugar candy seems like a workable thing.
John: But I am not sitting here trying to put myself into ketosis and monitor my pee with pregnancy strips or whatever it is that people do.
John: I did that.
John: I bought some of those.
Merlin: Those diabetes strips.
John: And did it turn color?
Merlin: It was like a video game.
Merlin: I wanted to make a change.
John: And did it?
Merlin: I think it did.
Merlin: But here, John, here's the thing.
John: Did you think you won Galaga?
No.
John: Or did you win Gallagher?
Merlin: Multi-ball.
Merlin: Well, here's – okay.
Merlin: This is not a defense of that.
Merlin: But I think, first of all, there has to be a big hook and it has to be a certain number of pages long.
Merlin: The Paleo Diet book – Multi-ball.
Merlin: The Paleo Diet book is even worse.
Merlin: I mean it's – I counted.
Merlin: It's 10 chapters before they tell you what to eat.
John: Oh, and it's 10 chapters where they're just like, this is going to revolutionize your life.
Merlin: Well, it's nine chapters of like – I'm not going to get into it because you'll get email.
Merlin: But there's like nine chapters of like, here's the indisputable science behind this.
Merlin: You know, like all self-help books, somebody said, you know, you know, tear the book in half and start reading there.
John: You know, we opened up the stomach of the prehistoric Austrian.
Merlin: There's so much about it that just it's like it's like like anything like any of that turns out stuff.
Merlin: Like it's OK as long as you don't think about it too much.
Merlin: You have to sleep in a completely dark room.
Merlin: Well, that's actually great.
Merlin: Like I do that.
Merlin: I turn off everything and I want the darkest room possible.
Merlin: And their reason is because we used to sleep in caves under the stars.
Merlin: Well, OK, but didn't you have a fire while you were sleeping in a cave?
Merlin: Doesn't that count as light?
John: Right.
John: You also went to bed at eight o'clock at night when the sun went down.
Merlin: As you do.
Merlin: But OK, so here's not a defense.
Merlin: But all I'm going to say is that I think as with the Marines and cults, the more that you can dramatize the amount of
Merlin: how much you have to plunge yourself into this and get rid of your old ideas.
Merlin: The more you can make people under, not even believe or think, but 100% accept that this is going to be a sea change in how they deal with the world.
Merlin: The more you can do that, the more likely you are to succeed with whatever it is.
Merlin: And in that case, I mean, all the ketosis stuff, again, I think that's a MacGuffin.
Merlin: I don't know if there's that much science behind that, but I do know that when you start to think more about what you eat, you tend to eat better.
John: Yeah.
John: Well, so... We're talking about food.
Merlin: This is great.
John: The larger problem for me is that adulthood has more or less been a series of exorcisms of...
John: of whatever the various demons that I, that I brought out of my teen years.
John: Right.
John: When I, when I was 24 years old, I was like a, uh, like a Bruegel painting.
John: I mean, I, I had, um, I had, uh, demons and fairies accompanying me everywhere.
John: And one by one, I have invited them to leave.
John: And now I'm 44 and,
John: And I've got all these like I've got a bunch of quiet demons left, you know, and and and all these like demons that I that I feel like are friends or maybe they're not even demons.
John: Maybe they're Icelandic hidden people or maybe they are gnomes.
John: Um, or as, you know, as Sean Nelson was telling me the other day that, that meditation really helped him.
John: And I said, I mean, uh, do you have like, do you have George Harrison thoughts now?
John: Are you, are you starting, are you starting to think, uh, that, that are you, you trying to give peace a chance?
John: And he said, no, but I do, I do believe in gnomes now.
Um,
John: which I think I guess is a side effect of meditating.
John: I've never tried it, but I've got all these, I've got all these quiet friends that are like, Oh, you're kind of, you're actually a demon, aren't you?
John: You, you were like drafting off of the loud demons and now they're gone.
John: And now I've got all these, like these, these guys left around that I'm like, is adulthood is the whole, my whole process going to be just like,
John: sweeping out my closets my whole life and by the by the time that i get like i finally have got a clean bare apartment and i've put toothpaste in all the nail holes and and then i'll be ready to take the ferry across just dust off your hands and go you dust off your hands okay done
Merlin: Done.
Merlin: Yeah.
John: Yeah.
John: So so I'm not sure that that is like I'm trying to I'm trying to think big picture now and I don't want my life to just be a process of of kicking people out of my mental house.
John: But trying to get a hold of this food thing and then realizing like, I mean, a big part of being 44 years old, having a child and being as yet unmarried is addressing this question of like...
John: It's one thing when you're 27 to read a magazine article that says human beings are not monogamous by nature.
John: That is a social construct.
John: And when you're 27 years old, you read that and you go, oh, right.
John: Yeah, totally.
John: That makes sense.
John: I knew that all along.
John: But at 44 years old, all my friends are paired off in mated couples.
Right.
John: And there is a certain I have been taking on this feeling or rather feeling myself kind of swimming against the current in a way that used to give me great satisfaction and now feels like it is.
John: I am open to the idea that it is an unnecessary labor action.
John: Why am I always swimming upstream against my peers, against nature, against the inevitable?
John: And I don't know how to approach it next.
John: I don't want to.
John: Again, it's a question of wearing anchor pants to the supermarket.
John: At a certain point, we feel like
John: we feel like a guy who is dating a younger girl, like when you are 27 and you have a 21 year old girlfriend, that is, that's like,
John: socially acceptable and it is appealing to almost everybody.
John: I mean, there are very few people that are going to look askance at that.
John: But when you are 50 and have a 25-year-old girlfriend, it begins to be unseemly.
John: Maybe it's a long way past being unseemly.
John: And at what point is chasing girls the equivalent of wearing a crass t-shirt or a Fantastic Four t-shirt tucked into your dad jeans at Comic-Con or picking up your then 14-year-old daughter at her high school.
Merlin: And her friend.
Merlin: Honey, honey, I'm over here.
John: Hey, who's your friend?
John: Beep, beep.
John: so so all of these things are now you know i'm i i believe i am maybe in middle age now i think that science would confirm it oh you're middle age don't worry about that i'm in middle age right i am i'm straight in the middle of it and if you're if you're lucky you're in middle age right exactly let's hope inshallah um
John: Uh, but so, so what am I doing?
John: Like, am I, I'm doing the same things I've always done.
John: So there's no midlife crisis.
John: I, I, I, I can't afford to buy a red car.
John: So what, what am I doing?
John: Like, what is, what is my, what's my big picture?
Yeah.
Merlin: I'm with you on everything except for the relationship thing.
Merlin: But you've made it.
Merlin: Well, but, you know, I think that's some very subtle coloration there.
Merlin: You know, I mean, it's –
Merlin: I don't know.
Merlin: I just – I guess I just feel like – but I'm with you.
Merlin: I mean I'm with you on 99.9 percent of everything else.
Merlin: I understand.
Merlin: I think I understand why you would say that or why you feel that way.
Merlin: It totally – it makes 100 percent sense.
Merlin: But the fact of like feeling – it's one thing to say like, hey, I really like to settle down with somebody because that's the thing I want to do in the same way that I don't want to eat a pound of pasta.
Merlin: I'd like to go – I'd like to pick one.
Merlin: and make this work for better or for worse.
John: Yeah, pick one.
John: Line them up and find a good one.
Merlin: I think that's, yeah, but I mean that's, you know, there's a lot of people, you know, who, you know, I think that's not an unreasonable thing to want.
Merlin: It's certainly not anything to be like embarrassed about, but the pressure part is what I don't as much, you know, buy because that doesn't seem like your MO.
Merlin: Is that what you're struggling with?
Merlin: Is the pressure part what's bugging you?
John: No, not an external pressure, but, you know, like an internal pressure of feeling, in some ways, tired of explaining myself.
John: Yeah, but yeah, when getting married will help that.
John: But tired of explaining myself to myself, I guess.
John: I know, I know.
John: You know, and part of this, Merlin, I have to be honest, my mom went on OkCupid.
Yeah.
John: At 79 years old and found an 80-year-old guy who restores cars.
Merlin: She let a man into her life?
John: And now she's dating.
What?
Merlin: I have no context for this.
John: Listen to me.
John: Listen to my voice.
John: I don't even know what to do.
John: She's dating.
John: She spends every waking minute with this guy.
John: He's a nice guy.
John: But he's an 80-year-old guy.
Merlin: Your mom never stops surprising me.
John: They go for drives in his 1947 Buick convertible that he restored.
Merlin: It's like the Rain Man car.
John: Yeah, that's exactly what it is.
John: Yeah.
John: Whoa, that's a sweet ride.
John: So she shows up over my house today with this guy.
John: dropping off Gibson, the dog.
John: What?
John: And I'm like, what a, what a, what a, what a Gibson watcher.
John: Yeah.
John: So what was, what a, what is Gibson doing here?
John: And she's like, Oh, well, you know, we're going over to the, to Kitsap County for the weekend, long weekend, three days.
John: So you're watching Gibson.
John: And I'm like, when did I get drafted into this whole business?
John: I, why am I dog sitting now?
John: But it is very confusing to me.
John: as an adult man, that my mom, after a 30-year absence from the dating pool, has returned to it with a vigor.
Merlin: But it's also, I mean, not to tell you about your mom, but I mean, it strikes me that it's not even something as simple as being out of the dating thing, but she seems just very resolute
Merlin: in her has, I mean, this is not, not to say she's not independent now, but she's been so resolutely defiantly independent.
Merlin: And I mean, just talking to her, her conversations, she's, she, she doesn't change when you talk to her.
Merlin: Like she doesn't say things.
Merlin: She, she's exactly the way she is.
Merlin: And she's not, I'm making her sound unkind, but she won't say things like just to make you happy.
Merlin: She's very gracious.
Merlin: She's a very, she's a very kind person, but she doesn't just say bullshit.
Merlin: No, she tells you if you said something wrong, that's right.
Merlin: And being around her is a really stunning experience.
Merlin: I'm thrilled for her, but it's interesting.
John: She's growing.
Merlin: She can grow at freaking 79 years old.
John: Ten years ago, she said to me, other people will always be nothing but a disappointment to you, and you should just get used to that fact and stop trying to make other people an important part of your life.
John: And I was like, Mom, that's great and everything if we were snow giants.
Yeah.
John: But contrary to what you kind of think, we're not snow giants.
John: We are not a separate race of mountain giants.
John: We are normals within certain tolerances.
John: And I'm 30 years old.
John: I'm not going to eliminate other people from my life quite yet.
John: And she shrugged her shoulders, rolled her eyes, and said, all right, whatever.
John: Do what you got to do.
Merlin: That's really odd advice.
John: With a clear sense that she was like, basically, you'll be back.
John: You'll be back in 10 years with a thousand disappointments behind you.
John: Tell me how that worked out.
John: Ready to hear my advice.
John: Ready to march up to the crystal castle that we built at the North Pole.
John: And she pulled a switcheroo.
John: And now she's like, like driving around Kitsap County in a 40 in a convertible.
John: And I'm watching the dog.
John: And so I'm like, what the fuck?
Merlin: Like, okay.
Merlin: All right.
Merlin: All right.
Merlin: I take it back.
Merlin: This is making more sense now.
John: So I'm having a little bit of like, all right, well, my whole business of like trying to find a balance between my, my needs as a, as, as a half snow giant and,
John: Half human.
Merlin: Do you have to be a fighter or can you be an illusionist?
John: I feel like a paladin.
Merlin: Speaking of Marilyn Vos Savant, I would like to give you a Parade Magazine level of sophistication observation that may or may not be germane.
John: Is this going to involve Ken Jennings?
Merlin: Brady's bits.
Merlin: Because I'm a little mad at him right now.
Merlin: Really?
Merlin: Okay, I'm going to write that down.
Merlin: I'm a little mad at Ken Jennings.
Merlin: Huh, okay.
Merlin: I'm always interested in learning about your grudges.
Merlin: I don't know.
Merlin: I've been thinking about this.
Merlin: It seems sort of related.
Merlin: You remember being a little kid and you always can't wait for the future when things are going to be better.
Merlin: You can't wait until the school day is done.
Merlin: You can't wait until the school week is over so you can have a weekend.
Merlin: You can't wait until Christmas break.
Merlin: You just can't wait, can't wait.
Merlin: And God knows you can't wait until summer vacation.
Merlin: Well, at least once I'm 17, I can go to an R-rated movie.
Merlin: Once I'm 18 and so on and so on and so on.
Merlin: So for so long, it's –
Merlin: I'm not trying to sound wise, but I think you do – at least I spent a lot of my youth just thinking about like when can I put all of this behind me and get to what actually the good stuff in life is.
Merlin: And the obvious whatever Bobby Goldsboro version of this is that, oh, your youth goes by.
Merlin: But now it's really – and that's incredibly trite.
Merlin: But of course it is true, which makes it – trite things are true.
Merlin: But then the other thing I've been thinking about lately, then there's this no man's land that you might call your 30s where that's just normal life or whatever.
Merlin: But then the thing that I'm thinking about now, when you were talking about your demons and gnomes and frost giants, what did I say?
Merlin: Snow giants?
Merlin: Isn't it also interesting that when you get to our age, now you start thinking about how much of the stuff from the preceding 40 years you've got to get rid of?
Merlin: Like all that time you were just thinking about what's going to happen in the future, whether or not you're actually planning for it.
Merlin: You're just waiting for the life that's out there for you somewhere.
Merlin: And so you spend all this time just waiting for that to go by.
Merlin: And then isn't it funny that you get to a certain point where you're like, fucking A, my pants don't fit.
Merlin: All of these years of weird eating, I have to shed that.
Merlin: All of these years of thinking I could, I could smoke three packs of cigarettes a day and be okay.
Merlin: I've got to shed that.
Merlin: All these years of thinking that eventually love will fall in my lap.
Merlin: I've got to shed that.
Merlin: And so then, and this is why your mom's story I think is germane, is that, I don't know if you feel that way, but like, I, I'm not like, you know, I'm not apoplectic about it, but I do think about that now.
Merlin: Like, it's weird that like, instead of thinking about the future in some ways now, I feel like I've got to address the past because
Merlin: And the extent to which you feel yourself having to address your past can become – can stifle your actually weirdly bright future that you could have.
Merlin: Because you've got to address the past, right?
Merlin: You've got to settle these things that are still around.
Merlin: But in the case of your mom, I think that's kind of – it's courageous for her to like put behind her all that resolution and to try this really weird new thing.
Merlin: Do you feel that at all?
Merlin: I mean, like everything you're describing in some ways, setting aside the relationship part, but all the stuff about food and substances and stuff.
Merlin: I mean, isn't that it's kind of a certain kind of chickens coming home to roost where you're like, well, I can't really move on to this one thing until I sort of address these old things.
John: Oh, yeah.
John: I mean, when I think about...
John: I mean, whenever I address my past, I feel like D'Artagnan on a bridge fighting off like 15 grenadiers where, you know, for whatever reason, three of them all attack me at the same time and I am able to block them with one parry.
John: And then I turn to the other side of the bridge and, you know, you remember the way that...
John: The grenadiers always attack in threes.
Merlin: They run at you.
Merlin: You kick three of these guys.
Merlin: You turn around.
Merlin: You kick another three guys.
Merlin: That kind of thing where they're both running at you.
Merlin: It seems very ineffective.
Merlin: It seems like poor training.
John: Right.
John: It does.
John: But what it enables you to do is fight 12 men at a time because they're only attacking three at a time.
John: And all three of them are making the same attack each time.
John: Like if three guys attacked you, one went high, one went low, and one went in the middle, there would be no defense.
Merlin: Well, if there are a bunch of guys with longbows in the back and some guys with pikes here and another guy with a dagger coming over the side of the bridge.
John: One blunderbuss and the whole game is over.
John: But in any case, that's how I feel.
John: It's disruptive is what it is.
John: I spend a lot of time.
John: I don't know if other people are like this.
John: I confessed this one time to a friend of mine, and he got real quiet.
John: We were walking downtown, and I was like, do you ever, right before you go to sleep, lay in bed and just imagine...
John: Kidnapping all your enemies in a bus where you blacked out the windows and take them to a desert prison camp that you've built.
John: And then like keeping them in isolation and feeding them hallucinogens and showing them like weird movies trying to drive them insane.
Yeah.
Merlin: Leaving the lights on all the time.
John: And he said, no.
Merlin: Oh, come on.
Merlin: Everybody thinks about that.
John: Come on, seriously?
John: Isn't that a way that you comfort yourself as you are drifting off into sleep?
John: You try to prime your dreams with a little bit of like, hey, I am kidnapping all the bad people as part of a cross-country sweep.
John: Just the worst ones.
Merlin: You're a cross between Nick Fury and John Wayne Gacy, but with righteousness.
John: Right.
John: And my victim list is all celebs.
John: It's like Rush Limbaugh's on there.
Merlin: Are you going to hurt Ken Jennings?
John: Dick Cheney?
John: No, Ken is... I mean, I'm mad at Ken, but I'm not going to put him in a desert.
Merlin: He's not worthy of a brainwashing.
John: I'm not going to put him in a desert prison camp and feed him hallucinogens and keep the lights on all day.
Merlin: Good for you.
John: No, no, no.
John: He and I can resolve our differences on the street.
John: Mono a mono.
John: Dick Cheney and I, there's a real imbalance.
John: There's not enough lights to turn on for that guy.
John: And I've created a whole apartment underground where Dick Cheney's going to live while I very subtly become his friend.
John: I will be in a lab coat, so he'll know I have some authority.
John: And he also will know that he can't get out.
Merlin: With a clipboard and photos of his kids.
John: Yeah.
John: But it'll be a comfortable apartment.
John: It's not going to be uncomfortable for him there.
John: And there will be a video monitor where he can talk to recordings of Casper.
Merlin: It's like Silence of the Lambs meets a little bit of Poe.
John: That's right.
John: But little by little, I'm going to up the dose.
John: of lsd and his drinking water and i'm gonna introduce like increasingly more confusing and incongruous events it's a total gaslighting situation where his the picture of his family that's always been on the end table is just going to be subtly modified something
John: that used to be in the background isn't going to be there.
Merlin: When he finally passes out, you switch out for like, give him slightly smaller clothes.
John: Yeah, that's right.
John: It's going to be exactly that type of situation.
John: The bathroom is going to be six inches smaller in all dimensions.
Merlin: Oh, this is so good.
John: It's going to be like, it's going to happen over the course of like years.
John: I'm so glad you said it.
John: I think about that stuff.
John: He's going to be living in this underground bunker and his apartment will be one of many apartments.
John: Yeah, Glenn Beck will be living nearby.
Merlin: Will they be able to tap out messages to each other like Steve McQueen?
John: No.
John: They will have no awareness of one another.
John: They don't get a baseball to throw against the wall.
John: Except, periodically, I may introduce one of them into one of the other's apartments.
John: Like, he'll wake up in the morning and they will be now sharing an apartment.
Merlin: And maybe Glenn Beck is dressed as a fancy society lady.
John: But at this point, their minds will have been broken down
Merlin: uh, it'll be like the movie seven kind of, uh, I'm sorry to keep trying to drop all these references, but it's, it's so many of the darkest aspects of like 300 years of literature.
Merlin: Well, you know, really it's medieval in a lot of ways, but with the ability, with the technology, what you could do to really fuck somebody up with a little bit of planning, uh,
John: And then that's the thing.
John: It has to go slowly.
John: And in order for it to be interesting, I would have to be doing this simultaneously to a lot of bad men.
John: Oh, for it to scale.
John: Yeah, just because I don't want to spend my whole day thinking about the subtle ways I'm fucking with Dick Cheney.
Merlin: It would be kind of weird to just do it to one guy, but there's something kind of grand about doing it to 80.
John: Yeah, like 80 guys in apartments built off of a retired missile silo.
John: Is there a mineshaft involved?
John: Somewhere way, way out in Wyoming where no one is suspicious of the fact that we have a bunch of trailers with satellite dishes on them kind of out in the scrub.
John: Occasionally change sides.
John: And we're just running this really long game on everybody.
John: Anyway, this is how I put myself to sleep at night.
John: And I have not found a lot of my friends.
Merlin: want to talk about it i think that's i think that's very i think it's a shame that people not admit that they've thought about things like that now now me i'm not a particularly no i'm not a vengeful person but i do like fucking with people so the gaslighting part of it is really appealing to me like if i if it's one of those things where it's like one of those ethical questions like you know if nobody's around do you steal a snickers bar from the crippled kids box you know what i mean except in this case it's dick cheney i think no
Merlin: No, but you know what I'm talking about.
Merlin: You never had a job, but like you work places and they'll have like little cardboard box.
Merlin: I think it's a scam to begin with.
John: Sure.
John: They hang two bananas from the roof and there's a box over in the corner and you're supposed to figure it out.
Merlin: Will the monkey go for the teat or will it grab the rug?
Merlin: Right?
Merlin: It's basic social science.
John: It's not complicated.
John: Right.
John: The wire mom with the...
John: The wire mom with the nipple.
John: Exactly.
Merlin: Exactly.
Merlin: Or the terrycloth mom.
Merlin: Oh, but you know, I know you're, you're trying to get to a deeper point, but I would love to talk about the apartments because the thing is, the thing is they're going to be clinging, right?
Merlin: It's, it's, it's sort of, again, it's sort of like, what am I thinking?
Merlin: I'm not the greatest kid.
Merlin: Papillon and Papillon when he won't, he won't say who gave him the coconut.
Merlin: He's not going to turn over Dustin Hoffman.
Merlin: And so they bring the shade.
Merlin: They put the shade over.
Merlin: And all he has, he's completely losing his mind.
Merlin: He's eaten roaches.
Merlin: No spoilers.
Merlin: But there's just a tiny little crack of light coming through.
Merlin: And it's like you'll do anything to have something you can depend on.
Merlin: The first thing he does when he walks in the cell is he goes like nine paces or something.
Merlin: He counts off the number of paces from wall to wall.
Merlin: And so he has this one.
Merlin: Now, I mean, at least there's something.
Merlin: It's stone walls and a floor and then two buckets that come in.
Merlin: And that's it.
Merlin: That's all his day is.
Merlin: But think about Dick Cheney.
Merlin: Some days there's an ashtray, some days there's not an ashtray.
John: It's a great Plato's cave because the reality that I would be able to show Dick Cheney, like his windows in his apartment, because even though it is in a mineshaft, there will be windows.
Merlin: The technology's there.
John: And outside the windows, the day will change, right?
John: The sun will come up.
John: The sun will go down.
Merlin: Oh, it's like the right temperature of light.
John: It'll all make sense.
John: He's not going to think he's in a mineshaft.
John: He's going to think he's in a high-rise apartment.
John: in in a major metropolitan city kids put him in a home and he's constantly trying the door like why won't why can't i get out of this hotel room he's constantly calling room service he might be doubting himself right and there's a there's an obsequious guy that answers the phone every time he and he's like unlock this door yes sir we'll send the man right up
Merlin: Like, for 15 more years, however long he lives.
Merlin: And then eventually, one day, it's unlocked.
Merlin: He opens it, and it's exactly the same apartment next door.
John: It goes on and on and on.
John: I mean, you know, because you're able... It's like D&D, though.
Merlin: Don't you want to plan out that entire dungeon?
John: You have to plan it.
Merlin: You get some hex paper.
Merlin: I would love to plan that out.
John: You have to plan it in such a way that you can do things like change the dimensions of the room in a small way that he would...
John: register without, I mean, but it cannot, you can never give away the game.
John: Okay.
Merlin: Think about like something as simple as this.
Merlin: And again, it's like software or making an automobile.
Merlin: If you plan it out ahead of time, it won't be costly to make changes, right?
Merlin: You plan it all out.
John: So you
John: Everything's on rails.
Merlin: It's all on rails and hydraulics.
Merlin: So you've got a wall that's got a window in it that he can't quite see out of, right?
Merlin: But while he's sleeping, the wall, which is on sliding hydraulic rails, the wall silently and undetectably raises six inches while he's sleeping.
Merlin: He wakes up the next day and the window is six inches higher up.
John: Well, but here's the thing about all these guys, like my list of, you know, my enemies list, my Nixon's enemies list, my dungeon list.
John: You know, you got Chaney, you got Limbaugh, you got Glenn Beck, you got all the heroes on there.
John: Yeah.
John: And the list goes on.
John: It's much deeper, of course, than these ninnies, but these three will do.
John: What?
John: The thing about them is that they'll do in a pinch, but they are all very smart guys.
John: That's the problem.
John: They should know better.
John: The thing is, you can't move anything six inches because they're going to be like, wait a minute.
John: And then they're like...
John: Then you, then they, then they know, like they would have to be in there for a year before you did anything before you made any, they would just have to get adjusted to the idea.
Merlin: You might spend a year having everything be mind numbingly identical.
John: Yep.
John: Yep.
Merlin: Which you wouldn't introduce the psychedelics yet.
John: They'd be watching television.
John: It would obviously be on a prerecorded feed.
John: So you'd be, you'd be curating the television that they had so that it looked like real television and
John: but it was just subtly, I mean, it was completely in your control.
Merlin: Oh, it could be, it could be 95%.
Merlin: Like it could be like, they watched Dick Van Dyke.
John: Right.
Merlin: So they see like, excuse me, I believe there's five seasons of Dick Van Dyke.
Merlin: You show all the Dick Van Dykes and then maybe when you show them again, there, there's like scenes that are cut out.
John: Right.
Merlin: Or, or, or maybe, you know, just for a few seconds, Dick Van Dyke's eyes bulge.
John: Yeah.
John: Or just a little flash of cock that they don't, they don't perceive.
Yeah.
Merlin: You had a cock flash.
John: They're not 100% sure that they saw what they think they saw.
John: But you're also taking current news programs and just modifying them slightly so that you're constructing a different narrative.
Merlin: See, I think this could be a little bit like a Marvel alternate universe.
Merlin: And the thing is, not everybody's watching the same shows.
Merlin: This is the beauty part.
Merlin: So when Rush Limbaugh and Henry Kissinger finally meet in the mess hall, they're going to have a completely different idea of what's happened in the last five years.
John: Exactly.
John: And this is the great sort of Truman Show.
Merlin: What do you mean Jennifer Aniston's dead?
John: The Truman Show aspect of it is, now tell me, who would not want to watch a 24-hour feed of Rush Limbaugh slowly going insane?
Merlin: It's pretty popular right now.
John: Right.
John: If I could just, if I could just arrange this in such a way that, you know, we were running it through a Russian, uh, server farm and it was on, you know, seven proxies going.
John: It was, yeah, it was through Tor and, uh, no, no one, you know, it was deep web, deep web.
John: But then you could subscribe to it with Bitcoin.
Merlin: And it's not like Comcast.
Merlin: It's totally unbundled.
Merlin: Yeah, that's right.
Merlin: You could certainly get value packs.
Merlin: You could buy a season of sports.
Merlin: You could buy all right-wing commentators.
John: Absolutely.
John: You could have A-Rod down there.
Merlin: Is he the steroids guy?
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: Your ambitions are very broad, John.
John: You can have all your favorites.
John: Well, the thing, what's amazing is when you think about abducting these guys in such a way that they wake up in a strange hotel room and they're not aware of having been darted.
John: darted, tagged and bagged and shipped to a Wyoming missile silo and installed in a hotel room that makes them think they're in Chicago.
John: It's a fun time.
Merlin: It's like a kind of super train rendition program.
Merlin: Right?
Merlin: I mean, in some ways, so you're going in there.
Merlin: And here's the other thing.
Merlin: I don't want to micromanage your project, but obviously you're going to have the resources to be able to do this the way you would like to do it or you wouldn't want to do it, right?
Merlin: I mean, this is a vanity project in some ways.
John: It has to be funded.
Merlin: No question about it, but what if it was, for example, a cabin?
Merlin: Say Dick Cheney has some kind of evil cabin that he likes to go to, and he wakes up.
Merlin: He's on vacation.
Merlin: Monday, he's in the cabin.
Merlin: Tuesday, he's in the cabin.
Merlin: Wednesday, he's in the cabin.
Merlin: Thursday, he's in the cabin?
Merlin: He wakes up and it's an exact duplicate of his cabin.
Merlin: Right.
Merlin: But now the door doesn't work and Dick Van Dyke's eyes are bulging.
John: Sure.
John: It's the trout fishing cabin that he and Scalia go up to in Idaho or whatever.
John: Is he on the list?
John: Oh, Scalia has got a whole... There's a whole dream... I mean, Scalia will actually be giving lectures to a non-existent class of law school students on a regular... He's going to have appointments.
John: Scalia's going to have appointments.
John: It's the only time he's going to get out.
John: You're going to keep him busy.
John: But yeah, right.
John: Dick Cheney's trap fishing cabin.
John: And he's just going to be like, the door is jammed.
John: He's going to look out the windows.
John: It's going to look exactly the same.
John: He won't be able to get out.
John: He'll try everything.
John: I'm sure he has a drawer full of tools.
Merlin: And they're all identically duplicated in his fake dungeon cabin.
John: Yeah, all the tools are there, except they're all just a little bit like a little broken or a little like, oh, why does this?
John: Oh, he's gone through so many screwdrivers.
John: Goddamn left-handed scissors.
John: After two years, after two years in the apartment.
John: All the scissors become left-handed scissors.
Merlin: Think about this.
Merlin: Tonight I was making a SodaStream seltzer at my house, and I knew I had just drank.
Merlin: I just had a bottle of SodaStream.
Merlin: I knew there was an empty SodaStream, and there had to be a cap.
Merlin: There's always a cap.
Merlin: And for the life of me, I could not find a cap.
Merlin: I could find another cap, but that wasn't the point.
Merlin: The point was I felt like I was losing my goddamn mind because somewhere in this area that I have been in drinking this, there should be a cap.
Merlin: And I really did feel like I was losing my mind.
Merlin: Now imagine if somebody had to live with years and years and years of that.
Merlin: As their memory has already been declining, as their cognition has also been getting a little skewed, as their politics have gotten increasingly right wing, you don't have to have that many missing soda caps before they're going to really start thinking about their life.
Merlin: Combined with...
John: Gradually increasing doses of LSD in their drinking water.
John: Occasionally some methamphetamine.
Merlin: Yeah, but if it was like Argentina or something, they give you enough to screw you up.
Merlin: They're going to torture you.
Merlin: This is not torture, obviously.
Merlin: We're not talking about torture.
Merlin: This is enhanced rendition.
Merlin: But the thing is you'd want to slap them awake, right?
Merlin: You give them some coffee.
Merlin: Wake up.
Merlin: If we're going to hit you, we want you to be awake for this.
Merlin: So you give them just enough to be a little bit confused all the time and occasionally up it?
Merlin: Or are you going to give them like some Hunter S. Thompson level drinking glass full of psychedelics?
John: I mean, occasionally it goes away.
John: Occasionally it comes back in in full force.
John: I mean, you'd have to just— And you've got to mix it up.
Merlin: You'd have to monkey around.
Merlin: Well, you give them some meth.
Merlin: Other days you give them some kind of barbiturates.
Merlin: And some days it's just peyote in the steakhouse.
John: And then occasionally there's a very, very, very low-grade electric shock that's happening throughout the house.
John: I had a friend who used to work on the docks up in Kodiak in Alaska.
John: And he was down in the bilge of a ship in waist-deep water
John: Like setting up a pump to pump out this like bilge full of fish guts and seawater.
John: And the boat connected with an overhead electrical wire.
John: like somehow the wire was draped across the boat and the boat moved in its mooring and connected with this wire.
John: And this friend of mine down in the bilge of this boat was like, Hey, hey, you guys, something, something's wrong.
John: He's getting shocked, but it's just, it's just mitigated enough by like being throughout this boat that,
John: which is also sitting on the ocean, that his friends standing on the dock are like, what?
John: What's the matter?
John: And he's like, I don't know.
John: Something bad.
John: Get me out of here.
John: And they're like, what's the matter?
John: Say it again.
John: We can't hear you.
John: And he spent a couple of minutes waist deep in fish guts and seawater being kind of electrocuted.
John: It probably felt like an extreme version of the shivers.
John: Yeah, or like pins, you know?
John: Oh, yeah.
John: But he couldn't quite describe it or couldn't quite tell what it was, but it was having... It was kind of affecting his nervous system.
John: That would be maddening.
John: Yeah, where he's just like, hey, you guys, help me.
John: Get me out of here.
John: And they're like, uh, okay.
John: And, you know, and as soon as somebody else touches the boat from the dock, they're like, oh...
John: Oh, bad!
John: But now they're like, oh, shit, we've got to get him out of there.
John: They dodged a bullet on that one.
John: Yeah, they finally hoisted him out of the hole, and he was fine.
John: But it was like one of those kind of... You get this sense of electricity of like, well, it's either you're not being electrocuted or you are being killed.
Merlin: So you would apply that tactically to potentially almost everything in the room.
John: Sure, everything in the place would have... There would be a screen, like a metal screen...
Merlin: Oh, it'd be like the opposite of a Faraday cage.
John: Yeah, exactly.
John: So you'd be, you'd wake up in the morning, you'd be walking around the house and you'd just be like, I feel weird.
Merlin: You could, if you were like a really evil Mengele type, you could like give someone anthrax.
Merlin: Like that's not cool.
Merlin: But what if you gave somebody something where they always felt like they were just getting a cold for like five years when that suck?
John: I think it's pretty clear by this description that I am a kind of Mengele type.
Merlin: No, John, you just want to get to sleep at night.
Merlin: This isn't this is not bad.
John: Yeah, this is just fun times.
John: And really, you know, and that list expands and contracts.
John: Sometimes I feel like budgetary constraints are disallow me from having 80 full apartments.
Yeah.
Merlin: With moving walls and the opposite of a Faraday cage.
John: And complete control over every environmental aspect and also built in such a way that the people inside can look out the windows and feel like they are in the world.
John: Sometimes budgetary constraints restrict my guest list
John: And I, and I don't fully have like 80 guys in there.
John: Sometimes it's a smaller group, but it really is, you know, and, and, and guys come on, guys go off.
John: I mean, Donald Trump has a permanent space, but like, I'm, I'm not really invested in a rod.
John: I don't care about him.
John: I don't want to, I'm not, I would have nothing to say to him.
Merlin: Well, would you, would you be open, would you be open to moving this beyond your very well-founded personal grudges to something where you might want to do this on a, for hire basis?
Hmm.
Merlin: No, here's what I'm saying.
Merlin: No, no, I'm not just saying that you're not you don't want to become a kind of cabin hitman.
Merlin: But I'm saying if somebody came to you and they made they said they came to you and they said, Don Corleone, on this, the day of your daughter's wedding, I want you to fuck with my ex-husband for five years.
John: No, I feel like this is I feel like this project is is reserved for people with geopolitical significance or at least American American popular significance.
John: So like my landlord from college, you wouldn't want to.
John: No, no, I'm not interested in him.
Merlin: For all time's sake, you wouldn't do that for me?
John: Michel Le Pen.
John: I think I could find a place for him.
John: Who's that?
John: Oh, he's the French right wing.
John: Oh, that guy deserves a cabin.
John: Nazi agitator.
John: You know, there's like every country has got one guy who... I mean, like Putin is obviously a bad guy.
John: But personally...
John: There's something so smug about Putin.
Merlin: He's such an arrogant... He seems like a pretty mundane villain.
Merlin: He's not like a Magneto-level cool villain.
John: Yeah, he is a Bond villain.
Merlin: Yeah, but from like a George Lazenby movie.
John: He's not like a real Bond villain.
John: He's an old-fashioned Bond villain who's like, Mr. Bonds, I expect you to die.
John: I want one million dollars.
John: So I don't care about Putin.
John: And there are plenty of people that are going to tell me like Putin is bad.
John: Build your own fucking cabin dungeon.
John: Yeah, exactly.
John: The dictator of Kazakhstan is a really bad guy.
John: That's your problem.
Merlin: It would be also nice if you could pull in people that would have a little bit of fight.
Merlin: That's the nice thing about Scalia.
Merlin: You know what I mean?
Merlin: If you could just put your hand in the water and pull in all the fish, that's not really fishing.
Merlin: You want a little bit of a fight to get that marlin in the boat.
John: Yeah, because they'd be on the phone with the desk clerk trying to negotiate.
Merlin: I'll send someone right up.
John: Because this is the thing.
John: Every time they picked up the phone, the guy would answer.
John: And they'd be like, you've been saying this for two years.
John: Send somebody.
Merlin: He'll be right there.
John: like and one day someone comes up with something they asked for two years ago oh right exactly yeah every once in a while like they wake up and they wake up in the morning this is the wonderful thing about drugs they wake up in the morning and there's a there's like uh well they would have to be fed right so every they would try and they would try and not go to sleep but you would be in charge of when they went to sleep or not you give them some prisoner gas
John: And so they go to sleep.
John: They wake up.
John: They're like, oh, I was trying to stay awake.
Merlin: On the prisoner on the prisoner when they just squirt a bunch of gas out of all the everywhere on the island or whatever.
John: And poof, he's asleep.
John: He wakes up and there's a there's a room service cart with like, you know, a very nice selection of foods.
John: And he's like, fuck.
John: And so it's like with Santa Claus, you think I'm going to stay up.
John: I'm going to see Santa Claus this year.
John: I'm going to stay up all night.
John: I'm going to see Santa Claus.
John: And he would stay up as long as he could.
John: He would eventually go to sleep.
John: The room service car would go away and a new one would come back.
Merlin: I think it's a – you get them working on their memoirs.
Merlin: Man, there's just – here's the thing, John.
Merlin: Once you make your super-trained fortune, I think having a revenue stream associated with this would be nice.
Merlin: I think a better thing would be to become – dictator is such a strong word – to become a thought leader.
Merlin: Right.
Merlin: literally leading with your thoughts, getting to where you could have a super train style system.
Merlin: And I think a lot of this stuff is going to just start falling into place.
Merlin: You're going to have a lot of people on your side.
Merlin: A lot of people who are, there's going to be a lot of people who are going to help you get to these people.
Merlin: They're not going to ask a lot of questions.
Merlin: You need those people.
Merlin: You can't just go in and say, judge Scalia, please get into your cabin.
John: Oh no, absolutely.
John: We need an entire special forces.
Merlin: You don't want to, you don't want to bag them.
Merlin: I mean, you want it to be something like where they think they're going to go into the cabin to write their memoirs.
Merlin: And then they wake up and there's a hallucinogenics and food.
John: Yeah, they've been gassed and then like retired SEAL Team 6 members working both for hire but also because they have a vested interest in making things right are working for you as a kind of a rendition team.
John: I mean, I understand Elon Musk wanting to build a spaceship that looks like a bumblebee hive.
Yeah.
John: I understand that the kid from Facebook wants to live presumably in a 10,000 square foot Palo Alto house that just has prints of white Lamborghinis like leaning against the wall.
John: Google's going to send balloons over Africa to give people internet.
John: Google Africa Internet Balloon Project.
John: I understand these rich people who are young and don't have any real sense of what the world needs, like spending their money in these dumbass ways.
John: But where is the ruthlessness?
John: Where is the sense of retributive justice?
John: Mm-hmm.
John: Like these people with all the resources in the world, any one of them could fund a bunker-based gaslight project.
Merlin: It only takes a couple.
John: This is a rounding error for Jeff Bezos.
John: That's right.
John: That's exactly right.
Merlin: $80 million we could get started.
Merlin: You need, not an angel investor, I guess a devil investor.
Merlin: You need someone to just kind of get things started.
Merlin: Family and friends round.
John: Now, and once this is up and running and once everybody is logged on to it and, you know, bitcoining their feeds, you know, talk about, like, if you believe the Texas argument that the death penalty de-incentivizes crime...
John: What is going to de-incentivize becoming like a Kissinger-like warmonger?
Merlin: If you're thinking about becoming a shitty reactionary, drop some Bitcoin.
John: That's right.
Merlin: And watch a little bit of Scalia write his memoirs while he's tripping.
Merlin: That's right.
John: That's going to set you straight fast.
John: Yeah.
John: Watch Donald Rumsfeld.
John: Try and figure out what's different about his apartment this morning.
John: And he can't.
John: Did the couch move?
John: Like, sit and watch that for a few hours and then decide that you're going to be the Secretary of Defense one more time.
Merlin: Why is my belt so small?