Ep. 86: "The Junius Issue"
Merlin: Billions, billions, trillions, trillions, million, million, million, million, million, million, million, four hundred billion sun.
Merlin: Hello.
Merlin: Hey, John.
Merlin: Hey, Merlin.
Merlin: How you feeling?
Merlin: I'm well.
Merlin: Are you on the mend?
Merlin: I'm well.
John: Oh, it's a Chris Waller voice.
Merlin: I'm well.
Merlin: Yeah.
John: Yeah.
Merlin: I've never, I've never loved that response.
Merlin: I'm well.
Merlin: That's a Bellingham thing, right?
John: Yeah, it's the bear trap of getting you if you say I'm good.
John: How are you?
John: I'm good.
John: Oh, I'm well.
Merlin: It's just a little bit of like a... You're doing well or you're doing good?
John: It's a little bit of like a backhanded slap.
John: It's just a light kid glove slap.
Merlin: How are you doing?
Merlin: Leaving no footprints?
Merlin: You?
Merlin: I'm well.
Merlin: Sss.
Merlin: We talked a week ago, and you were in the throes of illness.
John: Yep, yep, yep.
John: You know, I'm slow to recover.
John: I'm slow to heal.
John: You sound so much better.
John: Oh, I feel I'm 100% better, except that I'm slow to heal.
John: So there's probably another week of just...
John: uh every once in a while i'll be like laughing at something and a big ball of phlegm will come flying out that'll teach you to laugh great yeah that's right back back into the cave another nine months without laughing the thing about having a child of course is that you laugh more because uh children are ridiculous yeah so i'm laughing all the time now do you laugh at your child
John: laugh at her constantly oh she's a she is a total clown yeah yeah but you know we laugh together at what a clown her mother is does she know that i have to imagine they they pay you back in kind oh they do you know i'm surrounded by women i always am
John: And now I'm especially surrounded by women.
John: There are no surviving men in my family.
John: My uncle Jack is 87, 88, lives in Alaska.
John: My uncle Junius lives here in Seattle, but I don't see him very often.
Merlin: What a great name.
John: Junius, yeah.
John: Junius Rochester.
Merlin: Oh, come on.
Merlin: Really?
John: Junius Rochester.
John: His father, Alfred Rochester, and his mother, Marguerite Rochester.
Merlin: Names used to be so much better.
John: Junius.
John: And Junius was named after my great-uncle Junius, who was named after his great-uncle Junius.
John: It sounds Roman.
John: Junius's brother, George Alfred Caldwell Rochester, founded the Seattle Public Library.
John: But his great uncle Junius was one of the he was the dad.
John: I ever told you the story of my great great uncle Junius, who was responsible for the founding of the Washington State Bar Association.
John: because the lawyers in seattle agreed that they needed some kind of association that could censure my my great great uncle they were like they were like we need to censure this man and we don't even have an organization powerful enough to do it so they founded a bar association just to give him just to dis disbar him from their bar
Merlin: It seems like he would have to do a lot of stuff pretty bad over and over for his colleagues to create an organization to smite him.
Merlin: That's a lot of work.
John: But the feather in his cap, the thing that they were really up in arms about, was that he basically instigated the anti-Chinese riots.
John: on the waterfront here in seattle and forced the and you know he and a mob an angry literally uh a torch carrying mob like marched the the chinese residents of chinatown down to the docks and said you're either getting on that boat to san francisco or you are going in the water
Merlin: What era is this?
Merlin: What year is this?
John: 1890.
Merlin: You're kidding!
Merlin: That's amazing!
John: Yeah, and most of the Chinese got on the boat and went down to San Francisco.
John: I would!
John: Their descendants are still probably living peacefully there.
John: Yeah, that was at a time when the Chinese were the big scare.
John: And my great-great-uncle, emigrant from Kentucky...
John: And if not veteran of the Civil War, then his brother fought in the Civil War.
John: And came up here and decided to bring a little touch of Southern xenophobia to the Northwest.
Merlin: That line just keeps moving north, doesn't it?
John: In the form of...
John: of these Chinese people cannot live here anymore.
John: These Chinese people who helped us build the railroad, who basically built the railroad, and improved the West in innumerable ways, now have to go.
Merlin: Do you know what happened?
Merlin: So they formed the Bar Association.
Merlin: So they picked a name.
Merlin: They had their salad course.
John: That's right.
John: First order of business.
John: Junius Rochester.
John: Gentlemen, let's go ahead and move on to the Junius issue.
John: So moved.
John: Well, you know, this was the Northwest, and it was a small town, and I think they censured him, and then he went on to be a... He went on to...
John: pretty sure have a some sort of dubious hand in the founding of columbia city a southern suburb of of seattle he he you know he became a real estate uh speculator and founded columbia city and then i don't know he was probably hit by a street car or some other chinese street some other inglorious northwest way of you know he was eaten by a salmon oh
John: He didn't survive to... He did not survive to the era where I have a tremendous volume of information about him.
John: And partly this is that my Uncle Junius... And Uncle Junius is really a second cousin, once removed.
John: But he is... So let me see if I can describe this.
John: Junius was 10 when my dad was 21.
John: And so Junius is not quite my dad's generation, but he certainly is.
John: He is 80 now.
Merlin: And that was his grandfather?
John: No, Junius.
John: Junius's grandfather and my grandfather were the same man.
John: Okay.
John: George Alfred.
John: No, no, no.
John: I'm sorry.
John: Wait a minute.
John: Junius's grandfather and my great-grandfather were the same man.
John: Okay.
John: George Alfred Caldwell Rochester.
Oh, greatness.
John: And so it was Junius's great uncle or great great uncle, I think.
John: And maybe my God, I can't keep it all straight.
John: But the thing about Junius is that he is a historian and has and is a generation older than me.
John: So he stood between me and all of the good stuff.
John: Right, so my grandfather's, no wait, my great grandfather's desk sits in Junius' living room.
John: And every time I come over, Junius says, John, did you notice your great grandfather's desk there?
John: And I have to grind my teeth.
Merlin: You should put a little post-it note on there for my beloved John Morgan Roderick.
Merlin: So, you know, just think when the estate sale or the estate is settled, you know, you got a leg up.
Merlin: Will you get the desk, do you think?
John: The thing is, no one else in the entire family could tell you when the 20th century was.
John: Right.
John: Like Junius's kids.
Merlin: My brother is very active in social media.
John: She is.
John: She is.
John: But if you said 20th century, go, she'd be like, uh, uh, uh, doctor, you know, and my, my older brothers and sisters, none of them care.
John: Right.
John: I mean, the, the, the desk would end up in the ocean except there is, except there is that one little thread running through my family as through all families, which is the thread of, wait a minute, John wants it.
Merlin: Oh, well, I also, I think furniture grudges are pretty common or, you know what I mean?
Merlin: When there's a piece of old something going around that becomes like, it's, it's the way like when angry people get divorced, you know, they make the kid, the, the battlefield.
Merlin: I think things like things that used to belong to dead people or soon to be dead people become very hot items.
John: Well, and this is the thing.
John: I have reconciled myself to this.
John: The desk, the end tables, the baby spoons, the center from the Washington State Bar Association...
John: Like, whoever wants that stuff, if it's that important to them, they can have it.
John: But I know that my Uncle Junius has boxes of papers.
John: All the letters.
John: He knows where all the bodies are buried.
John: And Junius is that generation prior to me where he is still embarrassed by...
John: by the crimes of the generations of our family prior.
John: Junius would never, ever, ever publicly admit that the Rochesters were behind the anti-Chinese riots.
John: Nor would Junius cop to any of the other, you know, the myriad crimes against humanity.
John: And so, Junius is very proud to hold up a photo stat of the official pardon that President Grant granted his great-great-grandfather to.
John: uh alfred well see i don't even know his name this is the problem and you need to unlock that archive john i know and the thing is there's an oil painting of this man in his confederate you know colonel's outfit or brigadier you know dress blues there's an oil painting of the man and i don't know anything about him and when when i ask genius it's like
John: He knows I want to know.
John: And his desire to tell me is trumped only by his desire to have me want to know and not know.
Merlin: That's really all he has left.
Merlin: He's probably got the price is right in soup and withholding from you.
John: It's very deep.
John: It's very deep.
John: That's complicated.
John: At one point, my Aunt Julia Lee, Julia Lee, that's two names, but one name, right?
John: They used to do that in names.
John: Yeah.
John: Julia Lee decided that she wanted to be a member of the Daughters of the American Revolution.
Yeah.
John: She traced our family.
John: This is, of course, before the internet, where you had to send letters to postmasters and say, Dear postmaster of Wide Leg, Ohio, will you send your daughter out to the cemeteries and make rubbings?
John: Of all the stones that, you know, like to research your family before the Mormons owned the Internet was very difficult.
John: But she figured out that my great, great, great, great, great, great, great grandfather was John Page, colonial governor of Virginia and childhood friend of Thomas Jefferson.
John: And so this seems like a lock.
John: Oh, it's dead on.
John: And everybody was granted.
Merlin: She's a daughter of the pre-revolution.
John: Oh, yeah, yeah.
John: I mean, if I wanted to fill out the paperwork, I would be a son of the American Revolution.
John: But I already feel like a son of the American Revolution, as we all do.
Merlin: Aren't they very conservative, that group?
John: Definitely the Sons of the Confederacy, which I also more than qualify for, have taken a turn for the worse recently.
Merlin: I was thinking of the DAR, but I don't know anything about the SAC.
Merlin: I know the DAR, but not the SAC.
John: The SAC has become an organization that is towing the stars and bars, are part of our heritage line of reasoning.
John: And so we need to keep the Confederate flag and the...
John: in the south carolina state flag or we'll have or we will have lost our our whole it might appear that we've lost the war yeah we've lost our identity as uh as as people who held other humans in bondage but i think the dar is conservative in the sense that they want to keep blacks and chinese and gays and jews and irish out
John: That's right in your wheelhouse.
John: But I mean, you know, that's not... We didn't used to call that conservative.
Merlin: No, it's really... Conservatism has really changed a lot.
John: It seems pretty conservative now by modern standards.
John: So, oh, but in any case, so...
John: Angelina named her eldest daughter Paige, not P-A-I-G-E, but P-A-G-E, Paige, as in... That's a really cool name for a girl.
John: Yeah, to echo through 10 generations back to John Paige, our colonial forefather.
John: And it's that kind of old-school...
John: Like, let's not talk about the eight generations of slaveholders and Indian killers in between.
John: Let's talk about Thomas Jefferson's buddy, our scion, John Page.
John: And it's like, well, yeah, I'd really rather talk.
John: You know, my mom's... No, who was it?
John: One of my mom's relatives rode with Custer.
John: So I got it.
John: I got it all.
John: Anybody in the States that were oppressed was at one time or another oppressed by me personally.
John: I owe reparations to direction.
Merlin: Think about – I don't know how you are with this stuff, but if I look at the patterns over the five, almost six years my daughter has been around, if I were to be really honest with myself, the stuff that I remember, but especially the stuff I capture, I capture and inhale –
Merlin: The successes.
Merlin: Like, oh my gosh, look, she's walking around.
Merlin: She's pushing a wagon.
Merlin: She's doing this.
Merlin: And I laugh along at the times that things were silly and one of us was a clown.
Merlin: But the times that people were merely disappointing don't –
Merlin: I don't know if you could say that's true of history, but it just seems like the times – sure, the times that they're flatly evil, we tend to kind of want to gloss over.
Merlin: But the stuff we put in the scrapbook and the stuff that goes into Junius, Junius' boxes, there's probably a lot of stuff in there where there's just like this is just one of the – half of this is disappointment stuff and that's really enough for me to say I'm just going to keep it sealed.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: But I think that's kind of how like a family history works.
John: I think it is.
John: And maybe I am different in that I celebrate the broken.
John: You know, I celebrate the... You sound like Walt Whitman.
John: I celebrate the unmown hair of graves.
John: I celebrate the, I mean, really, there's no family that you can look behind three or more curtains and not find some terrible news.
John: Because human beings are awful.
John: You know, just consistently awful.
Yeah.
John: And so I really do feel like that kind of revisionism does us a disservice over generations and over time.
Merlin: It certainly gives us a really skewed idea that we're the first messed up generation.
John: Yeah, and it's been happening for centuries and centuries and centuries because nobody reports, well, your Uncle Al...
John: was a rapist and because it you know because it reflects on you you feel like it reflects on you and then i think that's what's going on with juniors like he does not want to and partly it is that that i think now we're the first generation where social standing is not determined as much or at all
John: By family and blood.
John: We live in a world where social standing is entirely determined by money, new money, and by your 15 minutes of fame.
John: Crass fame.
John: But my Uncle Junius and my father and even me, I mean, I was raised still in the last vestiges of feeling like your family name was the locus of your honor.
Hmm.
John: And that's almost completely gone in America or in the West.
John: Maybe back East people still ask like, so what's your father do?
John: Where does your father go to school?
Merlin: Well, I think it feels like it's something where people at the middling levels of status are certainly not scrambling to look.
Merlin: Right.
Merlin: Whereas in the 50s or 60s even –
Merlin: you might really be scrambling to show how you are descended from a Virginia governor.
Merlin: Sure.
Merlin: And I think people today, if you go to your favorite Yale, I think you're probably still going to, you know what I mean, in the upper classes of people, people with money and people who have that lineage.
Merlin: Well, sure.
Merlin: If you've got the family tree and all that provenance and you can show it, why not flaunt it?
Merlin: But there's so many – I mean even the last – I don't want to be reductive, but even the last 40 years, the number of blended families, the number of people like – just think about what Christmas Day is like for so many people who have like five and a half parents.
John: Yeah, it's like Hanukkah.
John: But I mean, yeah, if your last name is Bush and you are the 42nd president of the United States, 43rd or whatever –
John: You don't have to be a member of the Daughters of the American Revolution because the Encyclopedia Britannica has your family line in it.
John: Or if you're Jonathan Colton or somebody like that who clearly came over on the Mayflower.
John: The whole idea of the Daughters of the American Revolution is for people who live out in San Francisco –
John: To scramble over one another's carcasses on the way to some cocktail party up on Knob Hill.
Merlin: I guess I almost wonder if – this is a little bit Tom Wolfie here.
Merlin: But I mean I'm almost thinking like – I wonder if at some point maybe around the 60s and definitely 70s, it started to be a little bit of a burden.
Merlin: To be part – not a burden, but if – you know what I mean?
Merlin: It used to be that you could say like, what?
Merlin: If you're a Rockefeller or whatever.
Merlin: But like the thing is if you followed that sort of lineal name dropping, like two things are going to happen.
Merlin: First of all, it's going to be obvious what a loser you are, that you're Bing Crosby III or whatever, which is like, oh, you're not as famous as the other one.
Merlin: OK, so what do you do?
Merlin: You work at the DMV.
Merlin: But then there's the other one, which is like nobody in America –
Merlin: There's that great phrase.
Merlin: You hear that phrase, born with a silver spoon in his mouth.
Merlin: But I think I first heard this about George W. Bush, maybe earlier, that he was born on third and thinks he hit a triple.
Merlin: Right.
Merlin: And I'll use the second half of that phrase sometimes for people who think somebody else got something easy.
Merlin: I think people don't want that.
Merlin: I think especially in a post-1960s America anyway, people don't want to look like they got where they were because of their last name.
Merlin: Right.
Merlin: They want it to be merit or they want it to be values or brand in some ways.
Merlin: I tease that word again.
Merlin: But I think today people really want to feel like they made their own way or look at somebody like there's a wonderful comic that you would love called Lock and Key written by a guy named Joe Hill who achieved his acclaim with Lock and Key by greatly covering up the fact that he was Stephen King's son.
Merlin: uh-huh because he knew if you go out there i mean something happened with what's her name that uh sand lady like you you know if you go out there and let everybody know that you're whatever ravi shankar's daughter like that's gonna have that's gonna cause strong reactions to people that regardless of which way they look at it are not going to be that beneficial for you in the long run does that make sense yeah absolutely and you kind of look like a tool to walk around going like well you know well of course you should give me my big mac at a discount i'm descended from you know chinese haters or whatever
John: But something else has changed, and I think you're right that part of it is the Candy Flake, Tom Wolfe overturning of the – not just overturning, but the change where we felt like those families were actually –
John: Not just that the later descendants are a weaker strain of the blood, but that their control of the resources and the culture has imperiled us.
John: It's the rise of the conspiracy that those families are actually dangerous and nothing to aspire to, but something to eradicate.
John: But also, I think as late as the 70s, the richest people on Wall Street, a pretty rich investment banker...
John: made five times what a normal lawyer would make.
Merlin: It's like that index of what the CEO makes as a multiple of the lowest paid person in the company.
John: Yeah, right.
John: So, you know, like a really high-powered Seattle lawyer would make $50,000 a year in 1965.
John: And maybe like the head of a Wall Street bank would make $250,000 a year.
John: And that was just like...
John: back when being a millionaire was still really something.
John: And now we live in this world where there are 27-year-olds that are making $700,000 a year as investment bankers.
John: And there isn't the premium put on not just old money, but
John: But the bulwark that old money, old families used to represent, you know, they were our cultural heritage or they kept, you know, the membership in the Yacht Club was the highest thing you could aspire to.
John: And now it's like, you know, you're Connecticut Yacht Club.
John: your, your dusty old Connecticut yacht club, like these, these, these guys have got private jets and they're living in Moscow or whatever.
John: So there's just no, who cares?
John: Right.
John: I mean, probably there are 25 year olds listening to this program right now that are just like, not even getting the idea that social standing was once a, largely a component of who your parents were.
John: It was not that you went to Harvard and that's why people respected you and you got a good job.
John: It was that your father was so-and-so and that's why you went to Harvard and people respected you and got a good job.
John: Now we have eliminated the first step.
John: We still think that going to Harvard is a big deal, but that seems like the beginning.
John: I don't know.
Merlin: Partly because that is not the same virtual guarantee of – I mean obviously it's a pretty good start, but it's certainly not the same.
Merlin: I've told this story half a dozen times.
Merlin: My friend Grant's dad – yeah, I told you this.
Merlin: When he graduated from college in 1964, 65, he – the story goes, and I think you've heard similar stories.
Merlin: He walked into a Ford dealership and drove off the lot with a Mustang because he had a diploma.
Yeah.
Merlin: I mean I've heard – there are many similar stories to that and then the corollaries to that, which are the, hey, if you don't have this, then we're going to look a little harder at all these different things.
Merlin: But I guess that still opens a lot of doors, but I'm reluctant to say meritocracy.
Merlin: I think also there's just been a real upset – can I use that as a word?
Merlin: There's been a real upset in the whole way we think about status and even in the time before social media, but especially since things like social media where you look at stuff like –
Merlin: God, when I go to my hot dog place and it's every day, it's like Maury Povich is on.
John: At the hot dog place?
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: And my daughter, she's completely hypnotized by it.
John: Are people still throwing chairs at each other on shows like that?
John: Yes.
Merlin: And pretty much every episode is about paternity.
Merlin: And it's about whether or not this is someone's baby, daddy, or whatever.
Merlin: And then there's chair throwing.
Merlin: And mostly it's a lot of very, very heavy ethnic minorities clowning around for, what, probably 700 bucks.
Merlin: But you get to be on TV.
Merlin: You get to be famous.
John: Juggalos?
John: Do you see Juggalos?
Juggalos.
Merlin: I don't know.
Merlin: You hear things about these like databases where you can like register.
Merlin: I've heard this for 20 years now that you can register in these databases to appear on things like those shows.
Merlin: And you go in and talk about what your special liabilities are or what your beef is.
Merlin: And the producers go and kind of shop those.
Merlin: But that all has been so –
Merlin: You know, to where today – like, think about – now, Leonard Bernstein might look at the Black Panthers, to go back to Tom Wolfe.
Merlin: Right.
Merlin: In the 60s.
Merlin: Whereas today, I mean, you were talking about how, like, you – you know, people who are making techs and tech and mix, you know, you might really admire somebody who makes this application that you like a lot.
Merlin: Even though – you may not know how much they make.
Merlin: You may not care.
Merlin: But they're – to use – for lack of a better word, their influence is –
Merlin: It is very interesting.
Merlin: The fact that there is somebody who's 25 – I have a friend who's 25 and he's on his second company.
Merlin: He's getting buyout offers on his second company at 25 and he's not a douche.
Merlin: He's just an extremely good manager and he's really smart and he's good with people and I was not.
Merlin: But like somebody like that, I'm very attracted to somebody like that.
Merlin: He'll probably eventually – he has pretty good money now and I'm sure he'll have more later.
Merlin: But it doesn't matter what his last name is.
Merlin: It could be a made-up name.
Merlin: It doesn't matter like where he went to college.
Merlin: The merit of that is very appealing to people and I think that's pretty different.
Merlin: Whereas in like maybe in the 40s or 50s, you might have looked at somebody like that and gone, well, this could be like one little rose among the dandelions.
Merlin: You got to still keep an eye on this guy.
John: In the 40s and 50s, the primary difference is that that guy at 25 years old might have been on his second company, but he would not have been a multimillionaire because there just wasn't that kind of capitalization of things, right?
John: So he would be a wealthy young man, but he would still be sort of...
John: living in an apartment in new york city and the real achievement you know that maybe he would be maybe they would write about him in the wall street journal but the real achievement would be that he would be invited to join a certain men's club and that the people standing at the gates of that
John: would either vet who his father was, or in the case that he was an incredible success, they would bend their own rules in order to, you know, like, well, I know that you, you know...
Merlin: Because he had something – there was something about his status.
Merlin: He brought something to that place.
Merlin: Those places don't – we've talked about this with money before.
Merlin: People don't give you money because they like you.
Merlin: They give you money because they think they can make more money than they're giving you.
Merlin: And in instances like that, if it's about status and class, it isn't that they're trying to reward you for having arrived.
Merlin: They only want you there if you make them look better.
John: Right.
John: But at the time, there just wasn't the money that there is now.
John: And I mean this is –
John: it's, it's so profound because in a way this, this super moneyed class and the super money of San Francisco and, and, uh, downtown New York and to a certain extent Seattle, like it is, uh, it's, it, there are quantities of money that transcend every other metric for every other metric that human beings use to separate one another.
John: Like if you walk into that class of ultra rich, uh,
John: It does not matter if you – nothing about you matters except that, right?
John: You could – if you become super rich and decide to change your gender and somebody reveals that your mother was Jewish and your father was Pakistani and his father killed Gandhi –
John: All would be forgiven.
John: There would be no... We would not look at you in the slightest way differently because our only way of looking at you is that you are worth $1 billion.
John: Like, that's a... It's a new... It is a new... To be that rich...
John: To be so rich that it transcends race, which has been the primary human problem for our whole history.
John: To be so rich that people don't even see your race anymore, it's a new step.
John: And there's no club in America, I don't think, that would keep a billionaire out because he was a Jew.
Right.
John: And that was not true even 20 years ago.
John: Anti-Semitism was more powerful than money.
John: Up to just like 10 years ago, really.
John: But I don't think that exists anymore.
John: I mean, maybe somewhere in Europe, maybe somewhere in Switzerland, down a mineshaft, there is a group of guys sitting around a table where they still won't let Soros be a member of the group.
John: But I doubt it, you know?
John: It's a crazy, it's a, it's a crazy thing.
John: I've been playing a game with my friends lately, which is the, what if you, what if you, I know you don't probably play the lottery and I don't either, but if you did, let's say you walked into a seven 11 and you were like, uh, give me a pack of, uh, sweet tarts and, uh, and two hot dogs with pump chili.
John: And you know what?
John: Give me a mega millions ticket.
Um,
John: And you just bought it on a whim.
John: And let's say two days later, it was revealed that you had won $180 million.
John: And so you assume that $70 million of that goes immediately to taxes.
John: So now you have $110 million.
John: What do you do?
John: And this game really makes people squirm because their initial answers are like, well, you know, I think I probably travel and I quit my job.
John: And, you know, I think I'd try and keep my head on my shoulders.
John: And it's like, no, fuck you.
John: Don't, you know, we're not living in a land of like...
John: pablum now what exactly would you do first like what would you do first are you gonna go home tonight and sleep in your own bed tonight
John: $110 million you have now.
John: Like, what's the first thing you do?
John: And what's the second thing you do?
John: And do you have a lawyer?
John: Who's your lawyer now?
Merlin: It's a great game because it's so much more complicated than anybody thinks.
Merlin: First thing is I would be scared shitless.
John: Yes.
Merlin: And I would feel exposed.
John: Oh, yes.
Merlin: Because a big part of the lottery is telling you who won what.
Merlin: That just makes you a big target.
John: So where do you go?
John: You go to a hotel, right?
John: First night, you don't go home.
Merlin: Yeah, I mean like just – this is not the answer you want but like it's aligned with the answer I guess is that I would first start by thinking, oh my god, I hope it's not – I hope it's at least a month before I completely screw this up.
Right, right.
Merlin: I've gotten chunks of money before and done stupid stuff and it's –
Merlin: I don't know.
Merlin: I mean I'm with you though.
Merlin: People want to sit around and go, well, I take care of all the college education stuff and I take a year off to go dig ditches in Ghana or whatever.
Merlin: And I don't think that's how – I mean I don't know if you gambled much.
Merlin: But I mean I can make $500 a night playing blackjack on the computer.
Yeah.
Merlin: And then in the casino, I'm down 200 bucks in an hour.
Merlin: And the difference is even if it's a dollar, even if it's a nickel, if it's real money, it's different.
Merlin: And anybody who thinks that's otherwise is either lying or has never had a little bit of money.
Merlin: Right.
Merlin: It changes everything.
Merlin: And it's just I mean, God, turns out there's reams and reams of research about how people will put this weird amount of value into a tiny little thing just because it's a game that they want to win or just because there's all kinds of crazy wiring in our heads, especially as Americans that like I think we are all really hardwired to make a lot of shitty decisions about having that kind of money.
John: Yes.
John: Yes.
John: Well, that's that's exactly right.
John: Like, what do we value?
John: And I look around the room that you're sitting in right now and say, all right, you have $110 million.
John: Boom.
John: It just arrived.
John: It's in your bank account.
John: What do you keep?
John: of the stuff that's in your room right now?
John: Anything?
John: Right.
John: I mean, what do you... If you move to a nice place, what of your stuff do you bring?
John: What do you have people put in boxes for you and bring to your new house?
John: Like your college textbooks?
Merlin: I think $100 million is interesting, but I think potentially...
Merlin: 2 million is even more interesting because a hundred million, like that's of course, you know, people, people think, Oh no, I'm going to go be very wise.
Merlin: No, you're going to go buy a bunch of stupid stuff.
Merlin: Like, you know, but I mean, the thing is something like, like 2 million is much more scary because it would, I mean, you could blow that on one house very easily.
Merlin: You know, I, I've said this before on some other shows, but like, I think part of it is like people who look at other people in terms of status or wealth and, uh,
Merlin: It's like, you know, if you had that $100 million day, just go.
Merlin: Go look in history.
Merlin: Look in the last, whatever, 50 years of these dumbass state lotteries and go look at how many people today are really happy after they won over $100,000 in the lottery.
Merlin: And the numbers are not good because those people spent their entire – this is reductive.
Merlin: But by and large, those are people.
Merlin: They played the lottery, right?
Merlin: They played the lottery.
Merlin: Most of those people had zero practice having money.
Merlin: And it's like thinking you can run a marathon.
Merlin: It's like thinking that you can go out and play a rock show even though you never picked up a guitar.
Merlin: Any of that stuff.
Merlin: It's exactly the same thing.
Merlin: Except now everybody knows you got a bunch of money.
John: The $2 million amount is...
John: See, that's a different game for me because I know and you know, we know people who one day did have $2 million.
John: Like that is not an abstract amount of money anymore.
John: If we had been playing this game 15 years ago, $2 million would have been like, whoa, what would I do?
Merlin: That would be like somebody I met at a foundation board meeting at my college in 1990.
Merlin: Right.
Merlin: Like one person.
John: Like a little old lady or something that like is clutching her pearls around her neck.
Merlin: I have several friends that, that have more money than that.
Merlin: And it's weird.
John: So do I, I mean, and, and not just people in rock and roll, but like people are people just in the, in the world that made a fucking camera app, you know, but particularly the, particularly the fucking goddamn camera app for a stupid ass goddamn phone.
John: Yeah.
John: And now they're sitting around with a solid gold thumb up their ass.
Merlin: Okay, so why is the $2 million different?
John: Well, the $2 million is different because I have thought about the $2 million thing.
John: That is an amount that it is not only plausible that some of our friends have had sort of like the check arrive.
John: But Merlin, it is completely plausible that you will make $2 million at one juncture or that I will.
John: Like that is an amount of money that is it is possible.
John: We will see.
John: So it's different from 100 million because I already have seen what two million dollars does to somebody.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: And life really fucking complicated.
John: Your life gets more complicated.
John: But I've seen people do it well.
John: You know, I've seen people I've seen people go through four million dollars and come out the other side with bupkis except a divorce.
John: But I've also seen people, you know, have two to $4 million and do it and make it, you know, come out the other side, like with a high, definitely like they have more problems.
Merlin: Like an example, like you got to think more about just dumb stuff.
Merlin: You gave me an example some time ago, like theoretically there's somebody who your pals with and they're doing pretty okay.
Merlin: And you take turns picking up the tab.
Merlin: Right.
Merlin: Right.
John: Right.
Merlin: And then something happens.
John: Somebody's rich all of a sudden.
Merlin: Other things happen.
Merlin: And then now, let's say, hypothetically, one of those people has to, for his or her own sanity, become a lot more circumspect about picking up the tab.
John: Yes.
Merlin: Because people are going to start to expect that or they're going to be envious or whatever.
Merlin: Right.
Merlin: And then you get the infrastructure and then you get – now you've got to like get a birthday gift for the lawn guy.
Merlin: And if you don't think that's real, dude, that is so – it's the hammer problem.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: It is.
Merlin: We're back to the hammer problem.
John: Well, it's, yeah, it's, it's now all of a sudden you're giving valet parking guys 20 bucks.
Merlin: I don't want to interrupt you, but remind me to come back to this.
Merlin: I was at the hotel, uh, this weekend.
John: Did you see hammer?
Merlin: No, but I was at the Tonga room.
John: Yeah.
Merlin: I was up on the roof.
John: What?
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: Yeah.
John: So when I would tell you up on the roof where I spit on the San Francisco cable car and then the cable car tweeted at me.
Merlin: I held my daughter over that precipice.
Merlin: I thought of you.
Merlin: I thought fondly of you.
John: Did she like the view?
John: It's a beautiful view.
John: It's a beautiful view.
Merlin: And she wasn't scared.
Merlin: It was kind of weird.
Merlin: I don't know if she's wired right.
Merlin: But the $100 million is in that – the problem is like – this is probably bullshit.
John: Do you know anybody with $100 million?
Merlin: Yes.
Merlin: And I know at least five people, I think, probably.
Merlin: But is the 100 meant to be a – in the trick of this trick question, is that meant to be like – you're not saying $50 billion.
Merlin: You're not saying $50,000.
Merlin: You're saying it's an amount that seems large enough to seem like on the face of it, like you could maybe never spend it if you were – never spend it all if you weren't a gambler or something.
John: I feel like 100 million is this amount where you –
John: easily could live on it and your descendants could live on it, but you could also squander it.
John: So fast.
John: You could either establish your family name for generations with $100 million.
John: I mean, I don't know.
John: My father was pretty good friends with George Weyerhaeuser, and I don't think the Weyerhaeusers were worth $100 million in 1970.
John: I mean maybe if you took all the land that they owned, but I mean $100 million in 1970, it was an inconceivable amount of money.
Merlin: That was like – Inflation freaks me out.
Merlin: It blows my mind all the time.
Merlin: I'm going to say this and I'm going to call one of my periodic – please don't respond the way you want to respond.
Merlin: What it might cost if certain things happen in governance these days.
No.
Merlin: Where this happened in 1995 and it cost a billion dollars and the speculation is it happens this time.
Merlin: It might be $2 billion.
Merlin: I was thinking about when I was a kid and the most comfortable people, the wealthiest people that we were very, very good friends with owned –
Merlin: had for generations on a coal mine in Kentucky.
Merlin: And they were the first people I know.
Merlin: And I know this because my mom was in real estate and this woman sold real estate as well.
Merlin: They're the first people I knew that had a house that cost a hundred thousand dollars.
John: Yeah.
Merlin: It was, and this is 1977, 78.
Merlin: It was 100% custom.
Merlin: Every kid, one kid had a room with AstroTurf and a golf bag.
Merlin: like golfing cup in the floor uh another guy had a bed on a raised dais another the girl had probably i'd say probably a 500 square foot bedroom and it was awesome they had they had wet bars it was it was something like six bedrooms it had a telephone booth an operating telephone booth in their in their like rec room tv area it was on was it a british telephone booth like a red it was probably cincinnati bell i'm guessing but it was no but they have a complete irish bar
Merlin: They actually had the country of Ireland.
Merlin: But then it was on beautiful land and they had dogs.
Merlin: But they were great people.
Merlin: But what I'm trying to say is like, honestly, John, I'm sorry.
Merlin: It does not seem like that long ago.
Merlin: That was $100,000.
John: Do you remember the first time you heard the term a billion dollars?
Merlin: That's when that joke started about billion with a B because you're like, no, no, I'm talking about a thousand times more than that.
John: When Carl Sagan would say billions and billions of stars, the word billion was unfamiliar to us.
John: And his coinage of billions and billions was like... The word billion sounded like a science word.
John: I do.
John: It was a science word.
John: It was like...
John: like the word Google, Google or whatever.
Merlin: Yeah.
John: Like these weren't words in the, in, in, in the common parlance because like when the hunt brothers cornered the silver market in 1980 and basically had bought up all the liquid silver, all the, all the silver that was being traded in an attempt to corner the world market on silver and
John: How much money were we talking about?
John: $50 million maybe?
John: Which seemed like an inconceivable amount of money at the time.
Merlin: Right.
John: And they drove silver up to $50 and a half.
John: Now, wait a minute.
John: I may be wrong about this $50 million, but like a billion dollars was the type of thing, was only a term that got talked about in government budgets.
Merlin: And like world population.
John: World population and maybe the number of stars in the galaxy.
Right.
Merlin: Yeah, you're right.
Merlin: Million is like now million barely registers.
Merlin: Not because I've got that kind of money.
Merlin: But now when I hear million thrown out there because there are so many numbers we hear every day, it doesn't even really register like it used to.
John: It's like there are a million notes in every one of my guitar solos.
Merlin: We bought a house – my mom bought a house when I was 10 and it was a very modest house.
Merlin: But it was a three-bedroom house with a front yard, backyard, climbing trees.
Merlin: It had some renovation but it needed work.
Merlin: But in 1976, my mom bought a three-bedroom, one-and-a-half-bath house for $28,000.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: Isn't that – and then like even – check this out.
Merlin: Now, even in 1999, I have a really good friend who he and his wife had bought a house and then moved out here to work at the place where I worked.
Merlin: He had a – this is going to kill you, John.
Merlin: He had a corner lot in Tallahassee on a beautiful street in Tallahassee, mature trees all around, corner lot, three bedrooms, $60,000.
John: Yeah.
Merlin: In the late 90s.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: Doesn't that seem – and then what's funny is then when my friend moved here and we worked at the realestate.com together, he would spend a lot of his days just going through all the real estate listings to find the most unbelievable thing that he could find.
Merlin: Oh, Merlin, here's a really good one.
Merlin: Lower Noe Valley –
Merlin: Fire damaged, tear down $450,000.
Merlin: Anytime you see fire damaged, it's something that costs six figures.
John: Yeah.
John: Well, and all of this, the way that money has become unreal...
John: has detached my imagination from the real too.
John: Like I do spend an inordinate amount of time looking up, uh, dirt roads as I'm driving on, you know, two lane blacktop in Western Washington, looking up dirt roads into the trees just to see if maybe there's a drug deal gone wrong up there.
John: And there's a, there's a van full of money.
Merlin: Oh, this is the duffel bag scenario.
John: Duffel bag scenario.
John: Like I, it is a, it is becoming a sickness, uh,
John: Because money seems so comically unreal that it just seems like, oh, well, sure, there are duffel bags of money being driven down the road all around me.
John: Did you see this thing in the newspaper the other day?
John: The government in Heidelberg, Germany, went to the newspapers and said, will the person who left...
John: The 10 pounds of gold bars and duffel bag full of cash in a locker at the bus station.
John: Please come forward.
John: Because we were emptying out the lockers that had expired.
John: And we found these pounds of gold and suitcase full of money.
John: And there appears to be no...
John: it doesn't seem like it's connected to a crime and we'd would just like to return it to its owner.
John: It's like, ah, are you kidding me?
Merlin: That's, that sounds like a jam up.
Merlin: That sounds like, um, like chief Wiggum telling you to come get your boat.
Merlin: You know, you think so?
John: You think so?
John: You think it's a little bit of like, that's my money.
Merlin: Aha.
Merlin: The jackal comma Carlos, please come collect your boat.
John: Jackal.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: We're trying to look up the details on this right here.
Merlin: Cause here's the, here's the other side of this.
Merlin: When you talk about the unreality, um, is, uh, I think, I don't know.
Merlin: So my father was born, um, just a few months before the crash.
Merlin: Oh no, no, no.
Merlin: I woke up this morning.
Merlin: I thought I was born.
Merlin: I want to get the right number on this.
Merlin: Um, but, um,
Merlin: I think, you know, unless you're like me and a PBS buff, ladies, I think a lot – I'm guessing a lot of people of our age and younger are not – they know the depression was bad, the Great Depression.
Merlin: They know it was bad.
Merlin: They may see pictures of children selling apples.
Merlin: But I'm not going to put – well, you know what?
Merlin: I almost went in a bad direction.
Merlin: Let's just say that stuff happened in the 20s and 30s that nobody thought would ever happen.
Merlin: The first thing –
Merlin: That never happened where people who had a lot of money suddenly didn't have it.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: The crash and people like Groucho Marx.
Merlin: I just remember hearing that Groucho lost it all.
Merlin: I mean, like, seriously, I think it was in less than a week.
Merlin: He lost pretty much all – because there was – because part of the problem – again, part of the – let me get my great historical perspective in here.
Merlin: Part of the very problem was what led to the crash, so many of the problems.
Merlin: One of them was that people were so heavily stuffing money into the stock market because it was such an obvious thing.
Merlin: You'd be a dummy not to put all of your money into these stocks.
John: Well, just like in 1998 or 1999, you'd be a dummy.
Merlin: Precisely.
Merlin: Even though delivering bags of pet food via U.S.
Merlin: mail doesn't, in retrospect, seem like such a great idea.
John: Hey, I've still got my Kokomo fucking messenger bag or whatever the hell.
Yeah, Kokomo.
Merlin: I think I think of John Stainless.
John: I don't actually have a Kokomo.
Merlin: Those are great bags.
John: I know it's a status symbol among a certain kind of aging.
John: I did my Christmas shopping on Cosmo.
Merlin: I did my Christmas shopping.
John: Christmas shopping.
Merlin: They just bring it to your house.
Merlin: But anyway, it's just interesting to me.
Merlin: Think about somebody like Groucho.
Merlin: He and his brothers, and he was, you know...
Merlin: I'm trying to think.
Merlin: Chico was a big gambler and was always out of money.
Merlin: Everybody says Harpo was a great guy.
Merlin: Zeppo.
Merlin: Which one is Zeppo?
Merlin: Nobody knows.
Merlin: But anyway, Groucho has made a lot of dough and he's pretty good with money.
Merlin: And I think he had perhaps at least hundreds of thousands and maybe millions of dollars.
Merlin: Let's just say that by 1930s standards, he'd done pretty well.
John: Yeah.
Merlin: And then in something like, I'll say a month, but I'm going to guess really more like three or four days, it was just gone.
Merlin: It was gone.
Merlin: And then guess what?
Merlin: You owe money because now there's calls, right?
Merlin: There's stuff where you had shorted or, you know what I mean?
Merlin: Like where you, you had a, I don't know the term, but you know where you, you short sheeted the market and now they want to know where's the legs.
John: That's right.
Merlin: And so you go from being like set for the rest of your life to,
Merlin: To this looks bad.
Merlin: To it's all gone.
Merlin: To now I owe money?
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: It's just that when people sit around and go, $100 million?
Merlin: Oh, I'd go do blib, blib, zab, zab.
Merlin: I'd go do all this obviously safe stuff.
Merlin: I mean, I would be tempted to put it in a bus locker in Germany.
John: Yeah, well, and this is what I keep coming back to, which is that money is fake, you know?
John: Money is fake.
John: And I was thinking about it the other day.
John: I was sitting in a hotel in Portland, and I realized that something had happened.
John: I don't remember when this happened, but I had crossed a threshold where I no longer looked at the prices of items on menus, right?
John: Like, I have crossed a threshold where the most expensive item on the menu is no longer a daunting amount.
John: Like, oh, is the steak $40?
John: Is it $50?
John: Like, I'm already committed to eating in this restaurant.
John: And I'm going to order the thing that I want.
John: And I am not going to order the chicken because it's $18.
John: I'm just going to order the steak.
John: And whatever the price of the thing is no longer matters.
John: And that is a threshold of prosperity.
John: that I went over at a certain point and most of us spend our lives, the menu comes and sometimes you sit down in the wrong restaurant and the menu comes and you blanch because you're like, Oh shit, I didn't realize.
John: Yeah.
John: Right.
John: And I have blanched my whole life.
John: Like the menu comes and I look at it.
John: I'm like, Oh fuck.
John: I did not know that this was going to be a $50 steak.
Merlin: Let's skip wine.
John: Let's get out of here.
John: You know, and you stand up and put the menu down and like tiptoe back out of the restaurant.
John: Um,
John: But at a certain point, however I measure my prosperity, I now realize that if I'm going to walk into a restaurant and sit down, I'm going to order whatever the fuck I want.
John: And I don't look at the price.
John: And when the ticket comes, I look at the amount on it only to calculate a generous tip.
John: This is firsthand evidence of prosperity.
John: I didn't know that this was a measuring line.
Merlin: Yeah, you didn't even realize you went from having an unconscious budget to not thinking about it.
John: Yeah, I did not aspire to.
John: One day I want to live in a world where I can order off a menu and not look at the price.
John: But one day that did happen.
John: And so as I was sitting in this hotel lobby eating my mushrooms in garlic wine sauce that had been brought to me by a delightful and capable server, I was saying, what is the next threshold for me?
John: Is it that I be able to buy a car without thinking about how much it costs?
John: There are people...
John: who say, I want that car.
John: I want the Porsche Cayman because I am a tasteless person who wants an SUV that looks like a Porsche 911.
John: Like, I want a thing.
Merlin: That sounds awful.
John: Have you not seen the Porsche Cayman?
John: I'm gonna.
John: Keep going.
John: The Porsche Cayman, they were like, we gotta get in.
John: We have to get in on this SUV market, but we only make one car.
John: which is the 911.
John: And so we will make it into an SUV.
John: And it's like, no, that is a terrible, terrible, terrible looking car.
Merlin: It looks like... The Cayman I'm seeing looks like a regular sports car.
John: Oh, wait a minute.
John: It's not the Cayman.
John: What is the 911 SUV?
John: It's got a name.
Merlin: I'm going to find out.
John: Porsche SUV.
John: Porsche.
John: Cayenne?
John: Oh, Cayenne.
John: Right.
John: Not Cayman.
John: Cayenne.
John: None of these are German words.
John: Why are they calling... Why are they using...
John: Why are they using Central American words?
Merlin: Oh, this is the worst of every world.
John: Yeah, it looks like they took a Corvette Stingray and they crossed it with a Dodge minivan and then they put a 911 front bumper on it.
John: Anyway, there are people that go down to the store.
Merlin: $49,600 for the standard model.
Merlin: For the base model.
Merlin: It has a top track speed of 142 miles per hour.
Merlin: Yeah, well, there you go.
Merlin: So you can pick up diapers really fast.
John: Like I was walking down the street the other day and a guy drives by in a Maserati.
John: And I was like, right, a Maserati.
John: Like they still make Maseratis and a certain small, small percentage of people still buy Maseratis.
John: And looking at this guy as he drove by, and it was not Sir Mix-A-Lot.
John: It was just a regular guy.
John: But looking at him as he drove by, I'm guessing that he was not a Joe Walsh fan and not buying a Maserati just because that was like... I love that song.
John: He was a huge fan of funk number 49 and this was like the next jam.
John: Yeah.
John: So people still buy Maseratis, but they have to be people that are either betting the farm or there really are people that, just as I no longer look at menu prices, they are not concerned about how much cars cost.
John: Like, I'm going to get this car and it is $200,000 and I'm just going to go get it.
John: And that is a – so do I aspire to have that be my next special?
John: No.
John: That's ridiculous.
Merlin: I'm going to posit a minority report on that.
Merlin: So first of all, with the menu thing.
Merlin: Now, the other thing you can do with the menu, and I've done this in hotels, is to figure out what it is that I want based on how much it costs because I probably want the most – it's one example where I will probably just get the most expensive steak.
Merlin: It was just faster for me to find the most expensive steak.
John: Just find the most expensive steak and order medium bears.
Merlin: Absolutely not a way I conduct myself with any other kind of thing in the world.
John: Now, as we've learned from... Oh, wait a minute.
John: You like yourself a top-shelf Nicaraguan.
John: Who?
John: What are those?
John: Cuban.
John: I'm not familiar with their work.
John: I see.
John: All right.
John: I won't go into it.
Merlin: Yeah, I've cut back on that.
John: You can cut this all out.
Merlin: No, I won't.
Merlin: But my taste in those things is...
John: But you were willing to spend $20 on a cigar.
Merlin: What?
Merlin: No, no, no.
Merlin: But that's unusual.
Merlin: So here's what I'm going to say about this.
Merlin: As we've learned from watching the great Tumblr, Rich Kids on Instagram, there are people who are there to let you know exactly how much it costs.
Merlin: So what I'm saying, and this might be...
Merlin: obvious, is I think some people are going to look at the price.
Merlin: I think if they've got the dough, they might go in and make sure they didn't get the third most expensive model.
John: Oh, I see.
John: They're looking at the price, but they're looking at it to make sure they get the expensive.
Merlin: Because when these dickheads with their cars sit around and talk about their dickhead cars, and they're going to line up their black BMWs and talk about life, there's always going to be a thing, oh, you didn't get the sports rim job or whatever.
John: The rim job.
Merlin: The BMW rim job.
Merlin: Oh, that looks so great for a standard sports rim job.
Merlin: I went ahead and got the Bavarian rim job.
Merlin: Yeah, Bavarian rim job.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: There's only six of them.
John: Well, okay.
John: You're absolutely right that among Nouveau Riche and probably among all Riche, there is price consciousness for the wrong reason.
John: But for me, my goal is to...
John: It would be nice to be, and I think this is the aspiration, to live more or less as I do now, but to be able to have the luxury to be unconscious of money.
John: Like, I do not want a Maserati.
John: Unconscious or unworried?
Merlin: Unconscious.
John: You don't want to have to think about it.
John: In the daily sort of like, I need to go to New York tomorrow, I'm going to buy a plane ticket.
John: And to not sit and have to go, well, let's see, there's an aisle seat next to the exit row, and maybe I can get the upgrade...
John: Like, to just say, I'm flying to New York tomorrow and I am buying a ticket and I'm flying.
Merlin: Yes.
John: And, you know, to live with sort of a base amount of comfort and be, like, have the luxury of not...
John: pinching everywhere to go.
John: And honestly... I think that's the dream.
Merlin: I think that is... Anybody I think could agree, it would be nice to not have to check prices on things.
Merlin: Setting aside that somebody tries to slip in a $7,000 stake, but in ordinary day-to-day stuff, it would be kind of nice to pick up the tab without having to look at it.
John: Something I would never do, but it would be nice.
John: When you get the money...
John: What you do is you don't say, I can go to the supermarket now and buy whatever I want and not have to worry.
John: You say, I don't have to go to the supermarket anymore.
John: I'm going to send somebody for me.
John: And then you are – now you're paying at a different level.
John: You're paying – you're not just paying for the groceries.
John: You're paying for someone.
Merlin: And you're opening the door to where I was hoping to walk, which is, again, to paraphrase our late friend Leslie Harpold, I hate buying presents for my presents.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: When I get a phone, the last thing I want to do is go buy a bunch of stuff for the phone.
Merlin: And this is the entourage problem because it is – this is a poor kid point of view for me, but I think it's such a fairly small number of steps from giving me the second cheapest everything to –
Merlin: Well, yeah.
Merlin: But I think the thing is – I mean I always feel like I've had a fairly low threshold for celebration in my life.
Merlin: Like I can make anything into a special event if I feel like it.
Merlin: Oh, why should I get this nicer one?
Merlin: Because today I – whatever.
Merlin: But like in the case of what you're describing, I think it makes a lot of sense.
Merlin: here's the thing in my experience, and this is why I struggle so much with the travel stuff with, um, you know, work stuff because a flight, a flight across the United States costs $700 round trip.
Merlin: Um, now if I want to, I mean, I find out until the last minute until I'm ready to check out, I might be able to get an extra nanometer of knee room for $60 each way or $80 each way.
John: Yeah.
John: If you're a gold member,
Merlin: No big deal right there.
Merlin: I'll pay that.
Merlin: But now let's be honest.
Merlin: That's like another 16% on top of what I just spent.
Merlin: Not a huge deal.
Merlin: I don't know the last time you met business class.
Merlin: If business class is available, that's going to be a $2,000 flight.
Merlin: If it's first class, that might be a $3,000 or $4,000 flight.
Merlin: Hmm.
Merlin: And so now you're back to, oh, what can I afford?
Merlin: Okay, well, let's just do business class.
Merlin: But remember, you're fancy now, so you got an assistant.
Merlin: So is your assistant going to sit and coach?
Merlin: Well, no, you want them taking your dictation and shining your nails and shit like that.
Merlin: And what about the car?
Merlin: Well, now you got to have a – all I'm saying is like maybe this is just like the limitations of my mind, but that's why the $100 million question is so interesting to me.
Merlin: It's because I don't think people iterate – they don't think they do enough iterations of the future.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: Where you go, one iteration of the future, I'd pay off all my family's debt.
Merlin: Oh, that's super nice.
Merlin: Okay, next iteration of the future.
Merlin: Now your family knows you have tons of money and you have less now.
Merlin: Okay, keep going.
John: This is where it's such a brain teaser for people because I just posed this question to a lady friend of mine the other day and she said, well, I mean, $100 million.
John: It's like...
John: you're not really set for life.
John: I mean, you could blow through that pretty fast.
Merlin: Maybe not set for your life.
John: And I was like, say what now?
Merlin: Exactly.
John: Tell me how a hundred million dollars is not set for life.
John: And she was like, well, I mean, you know, you just a little bit of here, a little bit there.
John: And I'm like a little bit here, a little bit there, a hundred million dollars.
John: That's a million dollars a year for a hundred years.
John: $2 million a year for 50 years.
John: And she's like, well, yeah, exactly.
John: $2 million a year.
John: Like I would have no trouble spending $2 million a year.
John: And I was like, oh, huh.
Merlin: Look at it this way.
Merlin: I'm going to, I'm going to, I'm totally pulling this out of my ass, but this is my postulation.
Merlin: I don't say it, but think about whether it's you or that lady or whoever, think about the largest amount of money that you've ever had in
Merlin: in a liquid form like you could spend this money yep and let's say that's whatever fifty thousand dollars or let's say something happened with your family somebody passed away you got i don't know two hundred thousand dollars whatever it is that you would rush to go do stuff with to like but i think if you give somebody more i'm making this up if you give somebody let's call that their uh their
Merlin: GLE, their greatest liquidity event.
Merlin: If you give people three – the GLE, if you give them three times their previous largest liquidity event, it might as well be a zillion dollars.
Merlin: I don't think – I'll just speak for myself in time, for myself with money.
Merlin: Like if it's more than a certain amount –
Merlin: You know, if, if you ask, if somebody asked me to do something tomorrow morning at 8am, I'd say no, cause I'm like, I'm busy.
Merlin: Somebody asked me to do something some morning at 8am, five years from now, I'll probably say yes.
Merlin: It's exactly the same amount of time.
Merlin: It's just that that's a million years away.
Merlin: Of course I can do that.
Merlin: And in that same way, a lot of those folks though, they get three times their, uh, was it GME?
John: GLE.
Merlin: GLE.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: Well, I think I'm thinking of the high school test.
Merlin: One, one extended weekend in Las Vegas, not spent well.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: You could drop – you could – you know what?
Merlin: I'm going to say this.
Merlin: I think you could drop $100,000 in Las Vegas without even trying.
John: Oh, you would just – you'd slip on a banana peel and it's gone.
Merlin: Let's just even say you go to like $100 tables in Blackjack.
Merlin: But again, everything starts moving up.
Merlin: They may comp your room.
Merlin: They're not going to comp your cristal.
Merlin: Oh, we got a great cristal.
Merlin: I'm rich now.
Merlin: So now you're setting this new pattern.
Merlin: And it's like you're still that same person.
Merlin: As I like to say, wherever you travel, the old you comes along in the suitcase.
John: Well, and this is part of what worries me is that my greatest liquidity event was in 2008.
John: I had $130,000.
John: Why are you telling me this?
John: Because for the purpose of illustrating this story.
Okay.
John: And it was a combination of... The TV ad?
John: It was all this money that I made as a rock musician.
John: And what did I do with it?
John: I didn't work for five more years.
John: Like, I did nothing with it.
John: I have spent the last five years not doing anything except drawing down...
Merlin: From your own inheritance.
John: Yeah.
Merlin: You basically inherited money from yourself.
John: Every day I go on my favorite website, bringatrailer.com, and I look at hot rod cars and I go, ooh, that'd be a cool car.
John: Ooh, look at that.
John: That'd be a cool car.
John: And a great number of these cars are affordable to me.
John: They're $15,000 for a certain kind of hot rod or $10,000, $20,000.
John: And I've been looking at these cars the entire time.
John: When I had a veritable fortune, I mean, and I had this amount of money in the bank.
John: This wasn't like money that was promised to me.
John: I was still earning money.
John: Right.
John: This was money I had in the bank.
John: And what did I do?
John: I just kept living like I'd been living, which is... So fucking easy.
John: I go to New York.
John: I go to San Francisco.
John: I go to Portland.
John: I go to wherever I want to go.
John: And I stay in hotels and I eat food.
John: But I did not increase the amount of luxury...
Merlin: Oh, I see.
Merlin: I misunderstood you.
Merlin: Okay.
John: I did not start spending more money than I had ever done.
John: And up until that point, I had been living on $20,000 a year.
John: And I continued to more or less live on $20,000 a year because I don't drink and I don't smoke and I don't buy.
Merlin: I think you can't discount gambling.
Merlin: Gambling is the secret shame thing.
Merlin: I keep learning more and more people where gambling was just their undoing.
John: Yeah, I don't gamble.
Merlin: I do not get massages.
Merlin: In a way, it's worse than drugs because in the sense that if you buy the most expensive big old bunch of cocaine in the world or heroin or whatever, whatever's expensive, if you did all of that in one night, you would die or be very, very ill.
Merlin: But you could spend 50 times more than you've ever spent on gambling in one night just because you felt like you were hot.
John: Yeah, right.
John: Oh, yeah.
Merlin: There's no upper limit to that.
Merlin: You will regrettably still be alive when that's done.
John: But I don't like it.
John: Right.
John: So my concern is that if – and this is why I pose this question to everybody – is that I'm legitimately worried that if I –
John: won $100 million or if I earned $2 million.
John: The $100 million is like, if I won $100 million, I would not keep living on $20,000 a year.
John: I would definitely like...
John: But if I made $2 million, if for some reason I made a good record or I sold a book, you know, made one of those $2 million books or, you know, was – for whatever reason, became an entertainment property such that I earned $2 million.
John: I'm very worried that I would just put it in the bank and stop working forever and live on the same sort of 30 grand a year.
Merlin: That's a nice worry.
John: But, you know, I want to be more... I want to be a little bit more flamboyant.
John: I mean, I would... I feel like...
John: Go get an expensive watch at the very least.
Merlin: My analysis from afar would be, if I hear what you're really saying, is that you're not making as much stuff as you'd like right now.
Merlin: And if you had $100 million, that's really all the reason you need to not make another thing again.
Merlin: And that's the last thing in the world you need right now.
Merlin: Right.
Merlin: Am I close?
Merlin: Does that mean?
John: Yes, yes.
John: But I cannot say to myself, your poverty is a blessing and you need to get back to the place where you do look at the prices on menus.
John: But not from the perspective of a 24-year-old living in your artist garret, but from the perspective of a 45-year-old who is feeling like tightening his belt, that is what you need because that might make you pick up the pen and go back to work.
John: And work is what gives life meaning.
John: And sitting on your front porch with a mug of coffee, watching the sun arc across the sky,
John: is not how you should mark your time on this planet.
John: And it's what I've been doing for the last five years, watching the leaves change because I didn't have to worry.
John: And I didn't have that much money.
John: I mean, honestly.
John: Right, right.
John: By comparison.
John: Sure.
John: I mean, that is not really that much money to live for five years.
John: That's pretty remarkable.
Yeah.
John: Yeah.
John: But I, but what do I spend money on?
John: I don't spend money on anything.
John: I spend money on every once while I go eat in a restaurant and I don't look at the menu the rest of the time.
John: I mean, I get, I get, somebody gives me a bag of coffee and I'm, and I make it and I sit on my porch and I watch the leaves change.
John: And then it's 2010 and every once in a while, Hodgman calls and says, want to do a show in Portland?
John: And I go, sure.
John: Yeah.
John: And generally, he buys the train ticket, so I didn't have to spend any money.
Merlin: I got to get into your racket.
Merlin: That's a good racket.
Merlin: Well, except... That's just enough activity to keep you thinking you're working.
Right.
John: Yeah, but I know I'm not.
Merlin: I didn't mean that disparagingly.
Merlin: I suffer from the same thing.
Merlin: I feel like if I can make a tiny little lesseur pea-sized poopy, I've really succeeded.
Merlin: If I create anything at all, I'm like, yay me, I get a cookie.
John: It goes back to, I think, like a foundational idea that I had as a young person, which was that money was...
John: Money provided leisure.
John: And if you had money, then you had leisure.
John: And so leisure is the highest purchase.
John: Like that is the most valuable commodity.
John: And yet I have leisure in abundance and I do not feel rich.
Merlin: Well, I mean, to state the obvious, it's hard to appreciate the leisure if you don't also have the work.
Merlin: In other words, a day off doesn't mean as much if you weren't doing something that you didn't want to have to do, or for that matter, that you wanted to do, I suppose.
John: Leisure increases in value.
John: Only in comparison to work or, or like ultimate leisure.
John: I mean, this is the, you know, my sister went on foreign exchange her junior year in high school.
John: She went to St.
John: Lucia.
John: which is an island in the Caribbean, at the southern part of the Caribbean.
John: And she came back from St.
John: Lucia from a year there, speaking with a kind of patois, a lilting Caribbean patois.
John: And she said, you know, man...
John: I mean, she was a junior in high school, blonde junior in high school.
John: She was like, we work too hard up here, man.
John: We've got to just relax.
John: And I was like... It's casual.
John: I was like, okay, okay, Rasta man, check it.
John: But it had a profound effect on her at a very impressionable age.
John: She went to...
John: an island where the breadfruit fell from the trees and the culture on St.
John: Lucia was very much like, what are you stressing about?
John: You know, relax and enjoy yourself and just, you know, hang out, go to the beach.
John: Like, and she brought that mentality back to Alaska.
John: And up until that point, she'd been a real striver in her classes.
John: You know, she'd been a straight A student.
Merlin: Was she skied?
Merlin: Is that what it was?
John: She was a competitive skier.
John: She was competitive at everything she did.
John: And she was a real go-getter, like a natural born go-getter.
John: And it wasn't clear to her what she was going to get.
John: But she was just chasing the dragon, you know, like so many of us in this culture are taught to do.
John: Like, you know, get up, go, go, go.
John: You got to get into the school and get into the place and then get the job and go, go.
John: And she went on foreign exchange and she came back and she was like, it's all baloney.
John: Our whole rat race is baloney.
John: And all we have to do is just sit on the beach and wait for the breadfruit to fall from the trees.
John: But she did not live in St.
John: Lucia.
John: She lived in Alaska.
John: There is no breadfruit.
John: It does not fall from the trees there.
John: And it became a schism.
John: That experience in her life actually became a schism in our family.
John: Because there was no...
John: We weren't able to moderate our – like what our aspirations were anymore as people.
Merlin: It would be almost like rejecting the family's religion.
Merlin: It's like it's so outside the paradigm of how you can deal with people.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: Right?
Merlin: I mean it's kind of disruptive to how your family is organized almost.
John: Yeah, absolutely.
John: Like it wasn't a question of, I mean, neither Susan nor I were going to go to Yale, but that meant that we would try to get into a really good state school like University of Washington or University of California, you know, and that was a place where we could maintain our pride at least.
Yeah.
John: But Susan went to the University of Fuck It down in Durango, Colorado, Fort Loser College in Durango, and I think registered for classes and then withdrew from class a week later and got the refund for her tuition and bought a season's pass at Telluride or Bridge or Bowl or somewhere and spent the whole season smoking pot on the chairlifts.
John: And it was just like, whoa, whoa, whoa, that's not how we do.
John: And she was like, hey, man, I'm feeling iry right now.
John: Ja Rastafari.
John: I and I ski I. And it was like, no, no.
Merlin: I can't even listen to a joke version of that kind of talking.
Merlin: It makes me, it makes me livid.
John: And, you know, what do you, what do you do?
John: And, and, and, and then I had to reflect on my own version of that, which was, you know, a kind of like a,
John: My version of it was from from Hwaisman's.
John: You know, it was a I wanted a I wanted a turtle covered with jewels.
Merlin: And I want to watch each another turtle covered with jewels in an aquarium of my own design made of leather.
John: That book is fucked up.
John: It's really fucked up.
John: But, you know, that was my version of leisure as reward or leisure as highest luxury.
John: But, you know, upon reflection, I somehow...
John: subverted my own ambition i mean what am i what would i fight for now what am i fighting for who do i care recognizes me what club do i want to be a member of who you know who what what if not for money or status why work
John: It's too abstract to work for its own sake or to work.
John: And I mean, and I know that there are people right now who are saying for others, for others, work for others.
John: I got an answer.
John: What's your answer?
Merlin: I mean, it's not an easy answer, but you work so that you can do the next project that you'd like to do, which will help you learn the next project you'd like to do.
Merlin: And you can afford to take the ticket to go somewhere where you may not make as much money, but it's the thing that you wanted to do.
Merlin: It's not a matter of just – to me, the leisure part of it.
Merlin: I guess at this point in my life, if anything, I wish I had more money.
Merlin: I'd love my family to be more secure, but I'd also love to not have to worry about stuff like, oh, well, there's not a lot of money in this show, but we'd like you to do this and just be able to do that.
Merlin: And then you go and you meet people and you become more out there and things like that.
Merlin: But in another way, you could look at it like anybody else who's made anything good out of a bunch of money.
Merlin: which is they learned how to find new opportunities in what they were doing.
Merlin: Not just to make more money, but if you start giving money away for good causes, you meet more people who need money for good causes, and you become a manager of that stuff in some ways.
Merlin: I think we run into trouble when we start feeling like we're on the end of some kind of a string.
Merlin: You know, it's just that, you know, it's just if you had a clearer sense right now of what it is you wanted to create, this would not be that hard because you'd just be able to say you could go out and you could produce a movie.
Merlin: You could go out and just go approach a filmmaker and say, I want to write a soundtrack for this.
Merlin: Or you could say to somebody, hey, you know what?
Merlin: I really like Faygo.
Merlin: I want to do a commercial for you.
Merlin: Something like that.
Merlin: That's the thing is giving feeling to me that the ultimate goal would be to feel empowered.
Merlin: Not empowered.
Merlin: To feel fearless about going and seeking out the projects that you'd like to do.
Merlin: And if that doesn't work out, there's three more you could do.
Merlin: That's freedom to me.
Merlin: It's not the ability to go out and buy four cars without looking at the price.
Merlin: It's the ability to know that each failure gets you closer to the next cool thing that you do.
John: But it presupposes that I am interested in human culture.
John: That's true.
John: You know, that I want to be a member of it.
Merlin: You're interested in human culture.
John: I mean, I'm interested in it because I don't... That's an easy out.
Merlin: You know you are.
John: Because I don't have access to any better cultures.
Merlin: You should work with Elon Musk.
John: I should, and we should go find some smart people out in space.
Merlin: That'd be a hell of a trip.
Merlin: Me and Elon?
Merlin: Yeah, search for intelligent life with an extremely narrow definition of what intelligence is.
Merlin: So if you find life, but if it's somebody who's got like a 65 IQ, you just ice them right there.
John: Or you find life and it's even, it's 120 IQ people, but they're like all talking about Sammy Hagar records.
Yeah.
John: Life, check, intelligence.
John: I was thinking about this the other day.
John: Sammy Hagar and Guy Fieri represent a kind of Dionysian human brand, right?
John: There is a whole sub-level of like... They don't work together, do they?
John: They're like Ferengi humans.
Yeah.
John: Who are all wearing flame pants and high top tennis shoes.
John: They wear their glasses on the back of their head.
John: They wear their baseball caps on backwards.
John: Chad Kroger is one of these people.
John: And you can see, once you start to recognize them, it's like a they live scenario.
John: Where you're like, oh, that's a Hagar.
John: Oh shit, there's a Fieri over there.
John: And it's a whole class of humans that are living among us.
John: And they look like Pan.
John: Oh, they do look like Pan.
John: I'm sure that Guy Fieri and Sammy Hagar both have very hairy calves.
John: and maybe cloven hooves and they just want to drink wine and party and have a good time and i don't think they're dumb what if those beards can't be shaved off that's right they have little goat beards yeah right they look like fucking pan and they are like pan men
John: and they're living all around us and i think i suspect that they are having a good time they are living on the same planet as me and when i when i'm around guy fieri and uh and sammy hagar people i feel like one of those tall ghosts uh tall like shadow um
John: like elders or whatever, like in a, in a gray cloak who are living on a, in a, in a cold hall.
John: And they got a long table.
John: Yeah.
John: And the pan people are out like, like smearing crushed grapes on their naked chests and like drum soloing or whatever.
Merlin: And I can't snowboard in here.
John: I'm, I'm somewhere, you know, it's like me and fee way bill and fee way bill.
John: Here's another one.
John: He's another one of the pan people.
Merlin: You think he's a pan person?
John: Fee?
John: Yeah, for sure.
John: But I don't want to be one of the grays.
Merlin: I think George W. Bush might be a closet pan.
John: He's a little bit of a pan, isn't he?
Merlin: He's a little panny, yeah.
Merlin: I know exactly what you mean.
Merlin: We say we disparagingly write these men off as douchebags, and they certainly are.
Merlin: But there's much more to it than that.
Merlin: There's so much.
Merlin: There's the kind of those printed shirts with lots of graphical designs on a button-up shirt.
John: Or let's say a suit jacket that someone has stenciled a dragon head on one shoulder.
John: Yes.
John: Yeah, and then it was like a thrift store jacket that they resold you for $200.
Merlin: What if, okay, so the twist is in They Live, Rowdy McDowell finds the glasses and he's able to see the skeleton people.
Merlin: Correct.
Merlin: What if they wear their glasses on the back of their neck because that's where their actual eyes are that lets them see the other pan mans?
John: Hello.
John: So what I'm saying is Elon Musk and I go flying around.
John: Let's say we we accidentally like we went into a wormhole, but it was accidentally wasn't a wormhole.
John: It was just a cloud.
John: We came around and we landed on Earth banging on the dashboard.
John: We landed on Earth and we thought we had found another place and we landed in Cabo San Lucas and we got out of the spaceship and we're like, we're on a desert planet.
John: And look, a village.
John: And we walked over and it was full of Sammy Hagar's.
Merlin: This place identifies itself as Sammy's salty rim.
John: Yeah.
John: And they're all they're all eating ribs and drinking margaritas.
John: And make it suve.
Merlin: Just all kind of like like people who are on cooking shows, people who are on in briefly in Van Halen.
John: Rachel Ray.
John: Rachel Ray.
Merlin: Rachel Ray.
John: She's a pan person.
Merlin: You ever heard her talk?
Merlin: Her voice does not sound like you would expect.
John: In fact, now that I think about it, every single member of Van Halen is a pan person.
John: Every single one.
John: Every member of the Scorpions is a pan person.
John: This is starting to get fucking creepy.
Merlin: You better be fucking ready to rock and roll.
John: No wonder I feel like one of the greys.
Merlin: I wish I had not seen this.
Merlin: I want to unsee this now.
Merlin: I want to go back to just wishing I had money because now the thing is it used to be something.
Merlin: You get those vague feelings where you know there's something there, but you don't have the time or the inclination to put it together.
Merlin: Now I can't undo this.
Merlin: This is a chart on the wall for me now.
John: That's what I'm saying.
John: If Elon Musk and I landed on this planet and landed on the wrong side of Cabo San Lucas, we might take off again and nuke the place feeling like we can't let this virus spread.
John: But in fact, it's like half the population of human beings.
Merlin: Would you have a prime directive with Captain Elon?
John: Elon's got a lot of his own opinions.
John: I'm sure I would have to negotiate something with him.
Merlin: You can only have one captain on the ship, John.
John: Yeah.
John: And I mean, I would have to I'd have to guess that he he's not going to be my Scotty, but it would be one of those things where he would, you know, he'd start off as the Spock character thinking he was the commander of the Enterprise.
John: And then they would realize that I was the that I was a born commander and that he would eventually become my first officer.
Merlin: I think a good manager knows what they're not good at.
John: Yeah.
John: Yeah.
John: And you know, you can use logic.
John: You can look for, you can look to open markets, but at a certain point you're going to need a guy that's willing to make the hard choices that does not believe in no win scenarios.
John: And that's me.
Merlin: Kobayashi Maru.
John: Panmen.
John: Panmen.
John: Panmen everywhere.
John: But they're not everywhere.
John: It's like 10%.
John: I think 10% of the people.
Merlin: Oh, you should go to our mall, buddy.
John: 100% of Van Halen.
Merlin: But 10% of like... The Panmen band.
Merlin: People.
Merlin: Uh-huh.
Merlin: You think DLR?
Merlin: DLR, he seems like he could be a pan man.
John: Sure.
John: David Lee Roth actually has cloven feet.
John: I mean, think, name a rock musician, like, definitely all of Aerosmith.
John: Panmen.
John: Panmen.
John: Oh, the Eagles.
John: Ugh.
John: Panmen, tons of them.
John: But Panmen that have adopted some kind of sad, like, you know, who else is a sad Panman?
John: Eddie Vedder.
John: Eddie Vedder, sad Panman.
Merlin: I got a cold throw and a straight beer situation.