Ep. 109: "#SuperVan"
Merlin: This episode of Roderick on the Line is sponsored by Squarespace, the all-in-one platform that makes it fast and easy to create your own professional website, portfolio, or online store.
Merlin: For a free trial and 10% off anything you buy, visit squarespace.com and enter the offer code SUPERTRAIN at checkout.
Merlin: A better web starts with your website.
Merlin: Hello.
Merlin: Hi, John.
Merlin: Hi, Merlin.
Merlin: Good morning.
Merlin: How are you?
John: Oh, it's been a heck of a morning so far.
John: What happened?
John: Just a heck of a darn morning.
John: Things and stuff?
John: Things and stuff.
John: I'm right now covered in pee.
John: What did it cost you?
John: Other people's pee.
John: Yes, and?
John: It was, so far, free.
Merlin: I hope you were watching your daughter.
John: I was.
John: I was watching her closely.
John: Watching her... And she was covered with pee.
John: And now I'm covered with pee.
Merlin: Does she have a tell?
Merlin: Do you know when it's coming?
Merlin: Uh... Well... I'm going to guess not.
John: Yeah.
John: She has a variety of tells.
John: She does the potty dance.
John: That's one.
John: The grabbing of the front part of her underpants is another.
Yeah.
John: I do that.
John: Yeah.
John: But this was something that happened in the night.
Merlin: Oh, man.
John: That then, you know, dragged on into the next day.
Merlin: Where are you with that process?
Merlin: I mean, if I could ask.
John: Oh, we're 98% of the way there.
John: Oh.
Merlin: But you know, that last 2%.
Merlin: It's like software development.
Merlin: All the development goes into that first 98% and then the rest goes into the remaining 98%.
John: Yeah.
John: You learned that in computer math class.
John: That's computer math.
John: We've covered that already.
John: Well, we covered that on the last episode of You Look Nice Today.
Merlin: No, wait a minute.
Merlin: You're getting confused now.
Merlin: Every day somebody's born who's never seen the Flintstones.
John: That's right.
John: Every day someone is born who's never had a Reese's Peanut Butter Cup.
Merlin: Oh, man, can you imagine that?
John: You know, you could still have your first... Now, do you say Reese's or do you say Reese's?
Merlin: I don't have any reasoning for this.
Merlin: When I was a child, I said Reese's.
Merlin: And today I say Reese's.
John: Yeah, I think I heard somebody say Reese's enough that I was like, okay.
Merlin: I think I heard that little tune in my head.
Merlin: Reese's, peanut butter cups.
John: That's a good tune.
Merlin: That is a good tune.
Merlin: I miss jingles.
Merlin: I really do.
John: Yeah, right.
John: There were so many good jingles.
Merlin: what's funny hey man is that freedom rock turn it up were they sitting in lawn chairs when they said that i just i think so sitting on lawn chairs but on top of a van my last year of college i watched a lot of tv for my work and uh that commercial was on constantly yeah yeah that was um
John: That commercial was a commercial that became a meta commercial in the culture, right?
John: I mean, that's the type of thing that Kurt Cobain would have said to Chris Cornell backstage at the VMAs.
Merlin: Is that Freedom Rock, man?
Merlin: They could have spray painted it on a shirt.
Merlin: Yep, right.
John: And now it's all the way so that only old men would even get the reference, which was already like a mocking reference to old men.
John: Like tears in rain.
John: I just feel like two guys in their 40s sitting around trading commercial jingles from the 70s and 80s.
John: It's kind of like, that's how I'm going to spend the last 15 years of my life.
John: Yeah.
John: Sitting with Sean Wolf on a porch somewhere going like... We don't have a war to talk about.
John: Babylonia is a first name.
Merlin: Lovely Lady Liberty with her book of recipes.
Merlin: You know, I've got to tell you, the Schoolhouse Rock.
Merlin: I can recommend it.
Merlin: I still feel like there's so much – see, my daughter, she's entered a stage now where she's stupid because she's what we in the expertise business call an advanced beginner because she knows just enough to think she knows everything.
Merlin: You know what I'm talking about.
Merlin: Oh, sure.
Merlin: A recent quote, a recent quote, do you want to watch this episode of Cosmos?
Merlin: It's about molecules.
Merlin: No, I already know literally everything there is to know about molecules.
Yeah.
Merlin: And this happens all the time.
Merlin: I know 3, 6, 9, 12, 15, 18.
Merlin: That helped me a lot.
Merlin: Jammed in between all of those ABC programs when I was a child that I watched for six hours every Saturday morning.
Merlin: I learned a thing or two from watching those dumb Schoolhouse Rock things over and over, and it's still in my head.
Merlin: I would bet you that people of a certain age, I bet if you did some kind of Google Ngram, turns out, I bet you there is a 15-year cohort in there that knows the preamble to the Constitution better than anyone before or since.
Merlin: I think you're right.
Merlin: Because that's the only reason I can't quote anything at length.
Merlin: I know John 3.16.
Merlin: I know the preamble to the Constitution.
John: I know my Miranda rights.
John: That's about it.
John: Do you know two roads diverge in the yellow wood?
John: I'm sorry I could not follow both.
John: You don't know that?
John: There's a bird in a tree.
John: I think that I shall never see a poem lovely as a tree.
John: I misquote that a lot.
Merlin: I like to source my quotes because basically everybody says Mark Twain has said everything.
Merlin: That much I know.
Merlin: And he's never said most of it.
Merlin: It makes him mad.
John: Mark Twain said, my watch is right two times a day.
Merlin: You used that in a song.
John: Yeah, that wasn't Mark.
John: That's my favorite song.
John: You know, the preamble to the Constitution via Schoolhouse Rock, actually, that played a very important role in a pivotal moment in my education.
John: Could I interest you in sharing it with me?
John: Well, as a matter of fact, have I ever told you the story?
John: In seventh grade, in Anchorage, in junior high, it says junior high was seventh and eighth, as it should be, as God intended.
Merlin: Oh, the junior high versus middle school.
Merlin: Yeah, that's right.
Merlin: That changes everything.
John: I don't even want to think about what it would be like to go to middle school.
Merlin: You don't think middle school?
Merlin: Not to derail you.
Merlin: I think middle school would be much easier on a child.
Merlin: My goodness.
Merlin: The difference... I mean, my gosh, what a hellhole 7th grade is.
John: Listen, we're not even discussing this because clearly those children should all be building trail.
John: Yep.
John: Write it down.
John: Go ahead.
John: Moving right along.
John: 7th grade.
John: So 7th grade...
John: Move into a junior high school.
John: And in Anchorage, there was a program called PACT, Program for Academically and Creatively Talented.
John: And it was one of those late 70s attempts to segregate the smart kids off where you could...
Merlin: You know, they could play with Play-Doh or something.
Merlin: You couldn't have tracks anymore, so you had to come up with some academic-sounding, obscure name.
Merlin: I was in DEO.
John: Yeah, DEO.
John: What did DEO stand for?
Merlin: Differentiated Educational Opportunities.
John: Right, exactly.
John: Which sounds like the helmet class.
John: And in Seattle, when I left...
John: They were pioneering a program called DIG, which was... Was there an exclamation point?
John: Yeah, DIG exclamation.
John: DIG differentiated interest group or something.
John: It was all super suspect.
John: And, of course, when you went away to the PACT class and then you came back, and the PACT or the DIG or the DO class, when you came back to the regular class, of course, you were hated by everyone.
John: Because you came back and you had glue in your hair and you'd clearly been building rocket ships.
Merlin: I made a differential machine.
Merlin: I learned to use a slide rule.
Merlin: I test marketed toys.
Merlin: You dummies.
John: Anyway, when you move into junior high, of course, that's when you transition to hour-long classes that you move around the school and go to different teachers in the high school model.
John: And yet they maintained a PACT program in the 7th and 8th grade.
John: So this PACT clearly wasn't a thing you could have in the high schools, but in the junior highs there was still PACT.
John: But they had put it in over an existing system where there were already honors classes.
Merlin: Like accelerated classes?
John: It wasn't like international baccalaureate.
John: No, no, but there was already an old school system in place where advanced students took harder classes.
John: Okay.
John: And then PACT was thrown into the mix and was regarded as higher than the honors classes.
Okay.
John: so there was a three-tier system in my junior high and again like the honors classes were hard harder classes that were like you're on a college track young person and then the packed classes were both like if you were really a hot shot and also if you were like a nose picker
John: with a bowl haircut that tested well, right?
John: And this is the problem with the advanced placement classes.
John: It's like the hotshot kids want to be in the hottest one.
Merlin: Okay, so the accelerated classes, that's for kids who want to know what's on the test and get an A. And then the nerdier, was it more creative stuff?
John: Yes, right.
John: This was the late 70s idea that creativity, that all we needed to do was activate the creativity in our children and they were going to all be rocket scientists and they were all going to be, you know, they were going to be little baby Einsteins because what they really needed to do was draw.
John: Like what they really needed to do in eighth grade was draw and, you know, and build like Eiffel Towers out of popsicle sticks and so forth.
John: Anyway, so when I entered junior high, I was put in all the packed classes.
John: But by the first quarter, it was evident that I was not ready to be in school, really.
John: I was not ready to be with other people.
Merlin: That must have been an arduous decision for somebody.
Merlin: You know, we got tracks and we got packs, but John just shouldn't be in the building.
John: He just shouldn't be here.
John: And what became apparent was that in grade school, I had been able to negotiate an arrangement with my fifth and sixth grade teachers both.
John: I negotiated arrangement with them.
Merlin: Oh, sure.
John: Where it was like, listen, I don't want to... I'm not going to be able to do the assignments you have laid out.
Merlin: But what if... You know, I could disrupt this every day from this seat.
Merlin: I don't even have to stand up.
Merlin: That's right.
Merlin: This is how this is going to go.
John: You got a real nice class here.
John: It'd be a shame if something happened to it.
John: Either I repeat everything you say in a sing-song voice...
John: While I stick pins in my first wart.
John: Or you let me read books independently and I will write book reports for you.
John: So you can teach your class and everything will be fine.
Merlin: And it's still manageable.
Merlin: They still get to be teachers and they get a dignified way out.
John: That's right.
John: And they get to assign books to me that made them feel like they were really part of the process.
John: In any case, in junior high, nobody was interested in making this arrangement with me because I had six teachers instead of one.
John: And so by the end of the first quarter, I had failed all of my packed classes.
John: I'm just, you know, and we'd never been given really letter grades before.
John: It had always been sort of checks and pluses and whatever.
John: All of a sudden, you know, grade card is just like really bad shape.
John: And the administrators said, oh, well, he obviously doesn't belong in packed.
John: It's too advanced for him.
John: We need to put him back down in the regular classes.
John: I don't know how we made this mistake.
John: The testing usually is pretty accurate.
John: We're going to put him down in the regular classes so he can catch back up with the students.
John: And I showed up for the first day of second quarter and went in and sat in these regular classes with these normal kids.
John: And I was so mortified.
Merlin: Mm-hmm.
John: And the teacher was doing, it was the first class, first day, the teacher was doing some presentation of like the Constitution.
John: And I stood up and recited from memory the preamble to the Constitution.
John: Now, of course, I was singing the song from the television program.
John: We the people in order to form a perfect union.
John: But I was smart enough to sing it to myself in my head and then translate it into very formal sounding talk.
John: We the people in order to form a more perfect union.
John: And the teacher was, like, so... And what amazed me as I was doing it was that no one in the class recognized what I was doing.
John: Like, this is the only sign I needed that the normal class was full of ding-a-lings.
John: was that no one even understood that i was just singing the song that we all knew but i was just saying it i can't believe three people didn't just join in nobody everybody just just sat and stared at me in awe and the teacher too and you know and about halfway through i'm like i'm i'm orating like abraham lincoln in that uh you know like talking about the howley smoot tariff
Merlin: This episode of Roderick on the Line is once again sponsored by our very good friends at Squarespace.
Merlin: Squarespace, you guys know it.
Merlin: It's the all-in-one platform that makes it fast and easy to create your own website, portfolio, or online store.
Merlin: John and I have been using Squarespace for the entire time Roderick on the Line has been running.
Merlin: They've been great to us, wonderful to work with.
Merlin: It's simple enough for a podcaster to understand.
Merlin: Truly, they make the whole process so simple.
Merlin: They offer an easy drag-and-drop interface.
Merlin: They've got beautiful free templates you can tweak, and all the designs are responsive, so they look great on every device.
Merlin: If you ever do get stuck, don't worry.
Merlin: Your friends at Squarespace are there with 24x7 support.
Merlin: They have dedicated teams in New York City and Dublin, which is in Ireland.
Merlin: Squarespace plans start at a mere $8 a month, and they include a free domain name if you sign up for a year.
Merlin: Also, every plan comes with the ability to create your own online store.
Merlin: So if you have anything you want to sell, you can sell it right from your very own site.
Merlin: So whether you're a podcaster or a musician, a writer or a photographer, anything –
Merlin: Please check out Squarespace.
Merlin: It's a great way to get your stuff on the web.
Merlin: And do tell them you heard about it from Roderick on the line.
Merlin: In fact, you get a free trial plus 10% off any package you choose by using the very special offer code SuperTrain when you check out.
Merlin: Our thanks to Squarespace for supporting Roderick on the line.
Merlin: We could not do it without them.
Merlin: The Kansas-Nebraska Act.
Merlin: When the boys you used to hate, you date.
Merlin: I guess you best investigate.
Merlin: The facts of life.
John: And the teacher... But a stentorian tone that says that you have rehearsed this.
John: Oh, not only that, but that I know the... If you wanted me to... Sure.
John: I could do the whole constitution.
John: Stop me when you get bored.
John: That's right.
John: And the teacher, you know, like, hightailed it down to the office and said, listen, I don't know what this... I don't know what kind of kid this is, but we don't need him in my class.
John: This is only going to be a problem.
John: I don't know the preamble to the Constitution.
John: I don't want this kid that does in my class making me look bad.
John: And so there was this period and there was this period, intermediate period, where I was, where they didn't know what class to put me in because they couldn't put me in the honors class.
John: That was clearly for students, serious students who were doing the work.
John: They had taken me out of the PAC class, and they didn't want to put me back in there.
John: I'd gotten all Fs.
Merlin: All of the children of immigrants with good cursive.
Merlin: That's right.
Merlin: They are in the honors class.
Merlin: Exactly.
John: But then in the regular class, it was clear I was just going to throw grenades all day.
John: And there, so there was a way, there was a while there where I was just like going to whatever, I would go to a different class every day.
John: And finally they were like, all right.
Merlin: Are you serious?
John: Then they were like, okay, you go back to the PAC class, but listen.
Merlin: If you're in a company, they put you in special projects.
John: What they should have done is take me and hand me over to the national park.
Merlin: I don't want to rehash this, but I'm going to say it.
Merlin: You know, every day someone's born who's never heard about cutting trail.
Merlin: It's so the entire, how am I supposed to say it?
Merlin: Crucible?
Merlin: Let's say Crucible.
John: I don't know where you're going.
Merlin: Well, you corrected me, I think, on Crucible.
Merlin: That's wrong.
Merlin: Oh, no.
Merlin: Crucible is a – yeah, that's – Okay, Norman Mailer and Henry Mailer are different, right?
Merlin: Anyway, it's excruciating.
Merlin: Whether you start in – you go 6th, 7th, 8th, or you go 7th, 8th, 9th, whatever.
Merlin: I was 7th, 8th, 9th.
Merlin: in Florida the entire experience is excruciating for everybody involved there's not a good outcome for any of it because there can't be because it is a priori a horrible existential struggle for every person who is that age and every single person who has to have any interaction with that horrible little person
Merlin: There's no way to – I mean you can make tracks all day long.
Merlin: You can make special projects all day long.
Merlin: But I mean the whole thing, it's amazing.
Merlin: It just seems like to be a junior high or a middle school, especially a junior high teacher, you really – I don't want to say you're like a prison guard, but you're really just like, I just don't want to get shibbed today.
Merlin: Like the entire experience has got to be so dispiriting with moments of joy.
Merlin: But like you're, you know, you're such a, we're all such little crazy monkeys in that period.
Merlin: You know, uh, just are your hormones are just tearing you apart in ways that you can't begin to understand.
Merlin: You have to interact with people whose hormones are tearing them apart.
Merlin: It's a, it's a mess.
Merlin: It's hell.
John: Kids aren't even sexy at that age.
John: Well, yeah, yeah, I'll go with that.
John: I, I, I figured out Merlin, I figured out the vehicle, uh,
John: that I am going to use as a mobile junior high school for my own daughter.
Merlin: Is it a custom white van?
John: When I take her out of school.
John: No, no, no.
Merlin: I was going to say, Uncle John's portable junior high.
John: I'm just going to park across the street from the real junior high and say, okay, kids want to learn something for real?
Merlin: I'm having trouble reading the plates.
Merlin: They got some mud on them.
Okay.
John: No, you know, my plan to throughout the junior high years, well, originally was to drive a Jeep to Sierra Del Fuego.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: An inexpensive Jeep that would necessarily require repairs along the way.
John: That's right.
John: That's right.
John: But I cannot navigate the Colombian gap there, whatever the hell that thing is called.
John: You know the one I'm talking about.
John: I don't because there's not a schoolhouse rock on it.
John: Yeah.
John: Right there in Panama, there's this swamp.
John: And it's sort of between the border of Panama and Colombia.
John: It's called like the – it's the Darien Gap.
Merlin: That's what it is.
Merlin: So as they say in business, you're pivoting.
Merlin: You're taking the essence of the buildings room on that you're going to go on with your daughter.
Merlin: You're pivoting.
Merlin: And what's the new direction?
John: Well, the new direction... I mean, obviously, my first choice would be to spearhead a project to build a road through the Darien Gap.
John: Right?
John: Now, what would teach a little person more than to watch her father build a road through an impassable jungle?
John: But that seems unlikely, given the will of the people.
John: I don't think there's the will...
John: I don't know if you got the right contract.
John: The people in North and South America need to have the will to join together and build a road through this impassable jungle.
John: But until that happens, I think the new project is to buy a GMC RV.
John: And you've got to Google this because it's a fantastic... There was a period when General Motors, in the early 70s, from like 72 to 78... Whoa, yes.
John: General Motors built a recreational vehicle where they used all of their top technology.
John: Oh, man.
John: And they said, this is going to be our flagship...
John: device john that's handsome it's like it's like a google bus meets super train right it's like it's like it's like a super train super van super van and i've been inside a few of these things now and they are extremely um extremely like comfortable kind of the the the ride height is pretty low to the ground they're on these pneumatic shocks they're very lots of light inside and
John: and they like general motors for whatever reason thought like in 1972 the recreational vehicle is the way of the future and we are gonna we are gonna make the best recreational vehicle that's ever been made and they made they made them only for six years and they were too expensive nobody could afford them that's right in the middle of the uh the gas crisis all the cars were getting tiny
John: Exactly.
Merlin: And so it ended up, it was kind of like... These things got, what, like 5, 10 miles to the gallon, maybe?
John: No, I think they're actually, I think, you know, I think, well, I mean, it's got a big motor, but I think they do pretty well, you know, considering that during the Reagan years, we made it a national policy to see how little of gas-saving technology we could use in cars.
John: It became a little game.
John: It was a little game, like, hey, the new Explorer only gets 11 miles to the gallon.
John: Do you remember when we started making fuel-efficient vehicles again a few years ago, and they were like, this car gets 30 miles to the gallon.
John: Isn't that amazing?
John: And it was like, cars got 30 miles to the gallon 30 years ago.
Merlin: Well, they weren't safe, were they?
Merlin: Isn't that part of it?
Merlin: I mean, you could drive around in a Pinto or something, but if you got T-boned by an LTD, you were gone.
Right.
John: Right.
Merlin: I just want to say to our listeners, I know most of you have computers and will Google.
Merlin: I really want to encourage you to look at these.
Merlin: Because when you said GMCRV, of course, my first – I'm thinking of an Airstream.
Merlin: I'm thinking of a Winnebago.
Merlin: But no, I mean it really is like a van on steroids, tons of windows.
Merlin: Did you get that interior I just sent you?
Merlin: I just sent you a link.
Merlin: Look at this.
Merlin: Look at that.
Merlin: It's got wood paneling inside.
Merlin: It's got a sink.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: It's like an RV, but it really is like a big van, though.
Merlin: It doesn't have the balloomfy feeling of a Winnebago.
Merlin: It really feels like something you could get into a parking lot, maybe.
John: Right, and the thing is, it's hyper... What I love about it is that they're designed in this hyper-efficient way so that, for instance, it's got like one of those European toilet showers where you just go into the bathroom and... I already do that.
John: If you want, the whole bathroom is a shower.
John: Oh, man.
John: And one of the other things is you can... So the bench there in the front, the back of the bench flips up and becomes a bunk bed.
John: And then the little table, the little diner-style table becomes a queen-size bed.
John: There's a queen-size bed in the back.
John: And then the closet door and the bathroom door both open into the hall in such a way that it becomes like a Jack and Jill door where...
John: The bedroom in the back can go into the bathroom and there's always a door closed between it and the front of the van.
Merlin: That's clever design.
John: And then people in the front can go to the bathroom and somebody in the back bedroom can always have a door closed.
John: It's just very nicely done.
John: So I'm going to get one of these, and this is going to be a proof of concept, a super trained proof of concept.
John: We're going to drive around America.
John: We're going to maybe solve some crimes.
John: We're going to investigate.
John: Maybe we'll probe the Darien Gap, although my research indicates that you can't get very far, even in a Land Rover, let alone in a GMC RV.
Okay.
John: But I feel like so, you know, you may recognize this because I believe that this was the this was the basis of the the combat vehicle in stripes that they took over into.
Merlin: Oh, my gosh.
John: Right.
John: Right.
John: Isn't that the.
Merlin: Yeah, I could totally see that.
John: It's the stripes RV platform.
Merlin: I want this so much.
John: I know, I know.
Merlin: But the thing is, I'm looking inside.
Merlin: Again, I'm just looking at these interior shots.
Merlin: It looks like you could very easily, if you wanted to do some classic book learning, you have ample space.
Merlin: You could have a salon-type environment if you want to have an open discussion.
Merlin: There's areas where you could sit and do your work at a table.
John: The driver and passenger seats swivel around.
John: They get captain seats, big captain seats.
John: They become like, you know, you can kind of lord it over the people who are there in your living room.
Wow.
John: And that's the thing.
John: I mean, once you're the captain of a vehicle like this, it becomes a situation where nobody sits in the captain's chair but the captain.
Merlin: Oh, what?
Merlin: You just go into your classroom and go sit in the teacher's seat?
Merlin: I don't think so.
John: No, you don't sit in the teacher's seat.
Merlin: This is the culmination of a dream for you, John.
Merlin: You could potentially tour and play music in this.
Merlin: That's right.
Merlin: But you also get to teach while you're driving and being outside the system.
John: That's right.
John: I feel like this is a pretty wonderful vehicle.
John: And if storage opportunities were maximized, I could totally take a bunch of guitars in there too.
Merlin: And it's also got big air conditioners, got all the big storage on top.
John: It's sort of like a Bill Bixby as the Hulk thing.
John: oh man type of thing i'd love to be on the run and maybe a little bit of uh of shazam right this really appeals to a middle-aged man in a certain way it really does yeah you just get in this thing and go self-contained just driving around just staying in walmart parking lots you know the thing about this is you could park it that's the thing you could park this vehicle in on city streets
Merlin: Yeah, I don't want to say that it is kind of the form factor of a stretched out van, but it is definitely an RV.
Merlin: But I mean like Walmart.
Merlin: Doesn't Walmart have a whole thing where you can park in their parking lots for free?
Merlin: Is that still a thing?
John: That's still a thing, yeah.
Merlin: There are a lot of Walmarts, John.
John: I know.
John: They figured that out.
John: And the problem with that, of course, is that that's not ever where you want to be.
John: You never want to be in a Walmart parking lot.
Merlin: Well, it's a start, and I'm also thinking you could fortify this.
Merlin: I don't know a lot about militarizing vehicles, but it seems to me that with the right kind of cop shocks, cop brakes, cop suspension, you could really make this thing work.
John: I think what I would do is I would watch Stripes multiple times and figure out exactly how they combatified that vehicle.
Merlin: Okay.
Merlin: So maybe the first trip is you bring along a TiVo and you show your daughter Stripes.
Merlin: You show her Blues Brothers.
Merlin: You show her the short, live, terrible NBC TV movie, Super Train.
Merlin: You show her what can happen when you just get out on the road.
Merlin: Maybe some of the road movies with Bob Hope and Ben Crosby.
John: I'm going to give her some crayons.
John: I'm going to give her some popsicle sticks.
John: And I'm going to say, listen, let your creativity roam.
John: We don't have to beat the Russians to the moon anymore, but we do have to beat unnamed Russians.
John: We have to beat metaphorical Russians in our quest to be the next gen.
Merlin: So we don't lose the motorhome gap.
John: That's right.
John: We don't want to be on the wrong side of the motorhome gap.
John: I feel like this is in my future somewhere.
John: I talked to some guy on the phone the other day, and I was like, who was selling one of these?
John: And his actually was like a giant gold Easter egg like this one that you've sent me.
John: But they're only 26 feet long.
John: So, you know, the big RVs are 40 feet long.
John: A 26-footer is like, it kind of is, it's small enough that it doesn't register a lot of it.
John: I mean, this is one of those vehicles that, like... Like one of those European cargo vans where you kind of got to look at it twice.
Merlin: Like, oh, that's bigger than it seems.
John: Maybe these are driving on the roads all around us and we just don't see them.
John: You know, they have that stealth technology of like, it's just small and weird enough looking that your eye doesn't pick up on it.
John: But they might be everywhere.
Merlin: Yeah.
John: I'm starting to notice them.
John: And I think there's a community of people too.
Merlin: This is one of those community building kind of vehicles for sure.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: Well, and imagine if you could get the cutting trail road program going where seventh graders were compelled to go into service to cut trail.
Merlin: Imagine if you were the director of that.
Merlin: I'm saying you've got time.
Merlin: Your daughter still has a few years to grow up a little bit.
Merlin: Wouldn't it be great if you got to a time where you could be the guy who goes and you're the inspector for that?
Merlin: You're the retired director of the trail cutting program and you just drive your GMC RV with your daughter, your guitars from place to place.
Merlin: Touring America, just checking in.
Merlin: Checking in makes your trail is being cut.
Merlin: By day, you're a tyrannical enforcer of middle school discipline.
Merlin: Then by evening, you're a sensitive singer-songwriter.
John: I'm, you know, I'm counting the money already.
John: Imagine, imagine the people that would come to the shows.
John: All the fans of the, all the fans of the, of the program.
Merlin: Absolutely.
John: I'd be an American hero by that point.
Merlin: And you could go for parents night where like once, let's say once every month or two, your parents could come and visit you briefly, not pass you anything.
John: Well, no, I mean, right.
John: You'd meet, you'd meet there in the big, in the big hall, but there'd be no touching.
Yeah.
John: I feel like something has to happen where we are able to galvanize the will of the people again.
John: I don't feel like we can do that so much anymore.
John: Right?
John: The people feel burned.
John: The people have had their will galvanized multiple times for fucked up projects.
John: And nobody's into a big project anymore.
Yeah.
Merlin: Yeah, it's also that, you know, as we've certainly talked about at length, I mean, everybody knows so much who they aren't and what they're not into and what kind of stuff has screwed them.
Merlin: We're also hypersensitive to all these things that haven't worked out before.
Merlin: I think America needs a hero.
Merlin: Somebody that can get out there or an organization where, I mean, go walk around America and notice how many things were built as like WPA projects.
John: Right, or the freaking interstate.
John: Can you imagine America having the will to build an interstate highway system now?
John: Right.
John: Where it's like, okay, here's the project.
John: We're going to do this big thing, and we're going to come into the center of every major city and tear down a six-block-wide stripe right through the heart of town.
John: But we need to do this.
John: We need to do this because we need these roads.
John: I bet that's a hell of a story.
John: It's an incredible story that has not been told.
Merlin: I was going to say, though, I mean, like all the stuff, you know, our friend John Syracuse is always talking about the supposedly fantastic biography of Robert Moses, the guy who like, you know, tore down half of New York City.
Merlin: Yeah, it sounds fascinating though, but I mean, that's the stuff behind the scenes that's so incredible.
Merlin: Think about how much eminent domain had to happen in order to get the highways built.
John: It's insane.
John: It absolutely, I mean, just looking at overhead pictures of Seattle and listening to my mom talk about it,
John: where they picked the route of the interstate through the city where it would be kind of the least disruptive.
John: They cut it through the steepest hills, I guess.
John: So they didn't have to tear down any office buildings, and a lot of the land was already somewhat fallow.
John: But it also went through like basically the nicest neighborhood in the city.
John: Wow.
John: Where all of the big homes were sitting up on the bluff with panoramic views.
John: And they just wiped it out.
John: And my mom said at a certain point in like whatever that was, 1960s.
John: That there were barges floating out of the city all the time with big Victorian homes on them where somebody had bought a Victorian home for a dollar and put it on a truck, taken it down to the lake, put it on a barge, floated it out through the locks.
John: And apparently, and I haven't been able to research this because I've been too busy looping my guitar over and over over a drum machine for the last seven years.
John: But apparently, all through Puget Sound, if you're on a boat, you'll be motoring along.
John: And then back in the trees, there will suddenly be this Victorian home on an acre of land.
John: And you're like, how the hell did that get out here?
John: And it's one of these homes from Seattle's...
John: Harvard neighborhood that was trucked away as they were cutting through what would have been, I guess, two full blocks of homes across the center of the town.
John: And that's not... I mean, and Seattle was...
John: was not a town that had a lot of, at the time, any political influence nationally or any real... There wasn't any way that Seattle could even raise a fuss about it.
John: I think everybody here was like, sure, America cares about us?
John: Wow, we're in the story?
John: We get a... Still a small town.
John: We get an interstate through us?
John: Wow, of course, we'll do whatever you say.
John: But like...
John: I mean, cutting the interstates through the center of Detroit, cutting the interstates through the center of Chicago.
John: I mean, these were massive projects and everybody just went along.
John: You've never seen a photograph of like the big protests, the big interstate highway protests where everybody came out in droves and said, hell no, we won't go.
Merlin: I mean, you get wind of the idea that there might be a crate and barrel built in five years and you're going to have 500 people there.
John: Yeah, exactly.
John: I mean, think about the things we protest now.
John: The kind of little development.
John: The Music Commission just instituted a program here where we put up signs in front of about five or six venues where it says musician parking.
John: And it was just like an idea that the Music Commission had, like, let's just put up musician parking signs so that musicians who are loading and unloading their gear out in front of the venue don't keep getting ticketed by the city, which has been a problem the whole time I've been here.
Merlin: A problem of it not being allowed or a problem of the police not knowing that it's okay for them to be there?
John: Well, it isn't okay.
John: That's the thing.
John: Like all the venues have – there is no special parking.
John: So anywhere else you tour in America or in the world, you drive up to the venue and they put a couple of cones out in front of the venue and you park your van there.
John: And then your van can stay there all night because other cities aren't crazy.
Merlin: Right.
Merlin: In Florida, you could live in it for two years.
John: Right.
John: The only cities that you can't do that are New York, where they're just like... It'll stop for anybody.
John: They're like, fuck you.
John: The UPS trucks keep moving while they're doing deliveries.
John: And Seattle, and I guess San Francisco also has a little bit of this problem.
John: But anyway, we put up these musician parking signs, and there was a huge outcry just from people in the neighborhood who were like, well, wait a minute.
John: Where's my parade?
John: Why wasn't I consulted?
John: Yeah.
John: And it's like, wow, it was only like 50 years ago that we were bulldozing entire neighborhoods, that we were ripping up the city to build the interstate on no further...
John: Like, no further authority than just like Eisenhower said, boy, the Germans really have a good idea with these highways.
John: And then somebody connected it to the idea that we needed them to escape in the event of a nuclear war.
Merlin: Same way we got the internet.
Merlin: Is that right?
Merlin: Well, as I understand it, the DARPA program that led to what we think of as the internet today started out as a way to... You know what?
Merlin: I'm not going to say anything.
Merlin: It's a computer maths thing.
Merlin: It's a maths thing.
Merlin: But it started as a defense project, what became the internet.
Merlin: But the idea that we would get an alert... We may have just enough warning to hop into our CRVs and get out of town.
John: And all those... Do you remember the sirens that used to sit up on top of phone poles?
Merlin: Yeah.
John: You know, they would all...
John: A klaxon?
John: Yeah.
John: And then you'd grab the kids, jump into the GMC RV, and hit these expressways.
John: And we were going to be able to empty out the cities on the interstate highways.
John: And all the people would roam out into... They'd all get out of the blast zone.
John: And they'd camp out somewhere.
John: They would develop a Burning Man type of encampment over the hills from the town.
Merlin: We made it!
Merlin: Let's make an art car!
John: And somehow that was like... That fantasy...
John: was all it took to galvanize the bulldozer people and the home owners.
Merlin: Oh, sure.
Merlin: Yeah, we could do that.
John: You know, like, sure, though.
John: I mean, that's absolutely reasonable.
John: That's a lot of concrete.
John: Sounds good to me.
John: And we built this incredible thing, and now...
John: Think about even the smallest national – well, think about fucking Obamacare.
John: What a dumb no-brainer.
John: You know, there's not even – you didn't have to tear down a single building to build Obamacare.
John: And it's just like it might as well be – it might as well be that –
John: that obama said i'm going to come into each home and take the oldest child obama over you know you know that and and and and and democrats that have donated a lot of money to my campaign get a little bit of lamb's blood on the door muzzle top
John: But think about what it would take.
John: And the thing is, we need it.
John: We need it.
John: We need to build a bridge through the Darien Gap.
John: We need to build, for instance, a CO2 sequestering system on all the coal plants.
John: That's a no-brainer too, right?
John: All the coal-burning plants, they all need a CO2 sequesterer.
Merlin: I don't know much about that.
Merlin: I know that coal is not good for the environment and it's tough to get off of.
Merlin: So the interim solution is to mean less emissions?
Merlin: Is that the idea?
Merlin: Well, yeah.
Merlin: We're not going to get off coal in the next five years.
John: We're not going to get off coal.
John: And to build a... And the thing is, there's no such thing as clean coal.
John: But it is possible to build a kind of scrubber system that takes a lot of the...
John: garbage that gets shot up into space and like captures it and we can compress that uh we can compress those noxious um carbons and then re-inject them back into the earth that's one thing we can do that sounds complicated
John: It's pretty complicated, but not as complicated as building an interstate highway system.
John: Yeah.
John: But right now, it's like each coal plant looks at the balance books and says, well, what do we get out of that?
John: That's a big investment, and it doesn't...
Merlin: This really makes me want to read up on this now because if you think about stuff like, you know, to me, I guess a classic example, at least in my head, would be something like the gauge of railroads or, you know, like how railroad tracks relate.
Merlin: Like if you want the trains to be able to go everywhere, they all have to be on the same kind of track.
Merlin: Otherwise, we're going to have some pretty serious problems.
Merlin: And I'm guessing that that came about probably because of the people who owned the most railway trains.
Merlin: uh, you know, miles were able to like kind of push that through to be the, whatever they wanted to for the trains that they had bought or however that works.
Merlin: But it's incredible to think like, you know, and this could be farcical.
Merlin: This is like a Saturday night live sketch, honestly, to think about what would it, what it would be like today to try and convince Arkansas, Massachusetts, Utah, and Oregon to agree on like what a highway should look like today.
John: Well, yeah.
John: I mean, you saw this the other, the other day.
Merlin: You never, you never drive onto a highway and go, I don't understand this highway.
Merlin: They all work the same.
John: You saw it the other day when I went on Twitter and was like, why the hell?
John: Because I bought a new MacBook Air.
John: I wrote a magazine article on it.
John: I saved it.
Merlin: Sure you did.
John: Is it in the cloud?
John: I saved it.
John: And then the person who I wrote it for wanted it.
Merlin: Are they in the cloud?
John: I put it in an email and I sent it to the person.
John: Is the email in the cloud?
John: And the person wrote me back and said, I can't open this.
Merlin: I'm calling you from the cloud.
John: And I said, what do you mean you can't open it?
John: I bought a brand new Macintosh computer and I wrote a thing.
John: I wrote a thing on it.
John: I've done this before on other Macintoshes.
John: This could be done.
John: I sent it to you.
John: Here it is.
John: What do you mean you can't open it?
John: He's like, it's in a format I don't recognize.
John: And so I had to go and then I realized.
Merlin: Oh, it was a pages document?
John: Yeah.
John: And I went and I realized that it automatically saves itself in a format that no one else can read.
John: And you can ask it to save the document as a Word file or as a doc or whatever.
John: But its native environment is to save itself in a .grxy format.
Merlin: It's a lot like a teenage boy.
Merlin: Its default mode is to be unreadable by anything else and difficult to work with.
John: Yeah.
John: And it's like, this is a brand new thing that I just bought.
John: This is the direction we're headed, not the direction we are coming from.
John: And so I go on the internet and I'm like, why the fuck would anybody build a thing these days that isn't readable by everybody?
John: And I get 25 replies from people that are like, well, why doesn't every gun fire the same cartridge?
Merlin: Have you tried restoring your phone?
John: And, you know, like all this kind of like huffy back pushing.
John: From the analogy police.
John: Yeah, exactly.
John: From the people who have grown up in a world where 75 different railroad gauges is what they think is a normal way of doing business.
John: And Microsoft and Google and Apple all have a different gauge of railroad.
John: And somebody sent me a link to a cartoon which was like, every time somebody says, let's get a standard that everybody can use, all it does is add one more unreadable standard to the pile.
John: Right.
John: And it's like, right, of course.
John: But that only seems like the world because it's the only world you know.
John: But as you're saying, there were 25 different railroad gauges in 1850.
John: Every single person had a different... Is that the right term for it, gauge?
Yeah.
Yeah.
John: And in fact, until very recently, like the first time I went to, uh, the first time I went on a big European train trip in 1986, when you crossed the border from France to Spain, Spain was on a different gauge and they, you, you, they would drive the train into a, into a, like a, a special terminal.
John: And I, I don't know if I've told you this before or even believe me, but I want to hear they drove the train into a special sort of facility, uh,
John: And they lifted the entire train off of its running gear...
John: They rolled the wheels out.
John: What?
John: Yes, for an entire train and rolled the new wheels underneath the train.
Merlin: They changed its shoes?
Merlin: Yes, while you're still on it.
John: Oh, my God.
John: And then lowered the train down onto its new wheels so that the train could continue on.
Merlin: I did not know that.
Merlin: If that's safe, I can't believe that's possible.
John: That is what it used to be.
John: Now, it's not that way anymore.
John: And what it required was that Spain undergo this incredible process of ripping up all their railroad tracks to conform to the system that, for some reason, for 50 years beforehand, throughout Franco's reign or whatever, they just decided they were a different gauge.
John: But, I mean, you're absolutely right to make that analogy.
John: It could have been a system...
John: In which every single little regional railroad is operating on its own.
John: And of course, that is true of the narrow gauge railways of like mining communities and so forth.
John: That little train that goes from Durango, Colorado up to Gunnison or whatever is a narrow gauge train.
John: But the idea of a standard...
John: It shouldn't be that crazy.
John: And what it requires is, yeah, either that the people will it or that somebody be enough in charge that they can impose it.
John: And this is why I think the people, this is the one thing about the rise of China that really impresses me.
John: In that they have a dictatorial system.
John: And so the Chinese can impose, like, countrywide projects and reforms.
John: And, I mean, and they do, their priorities are all over the map.
John: So it's really, you know, sometimes their countrywide reforms are, we're going to cut everyone's nipples off.
Right.
John: And it seems crazy, and we're all like, what the fuck are they doing?
John: But for instance, this CO2 sequestering of their coal plants, because China is making more coal pollution than anywhere else in the world by a hundred times.
John: But they are actually investing in this technology, and they have the nationwide will to just, if they choose, to just impose it.
John: And to whatever degree it affects profits or to whatever degree – there's not – they don't have to deal with 100 different boards of directors.
Merlin: They're not having like local meetings at the YMCA with free coffee to talk about how we feel about this stoplight.
John: Well, and it's not just that, but they don't have to deal with the Koch brothers or Donald Trump –
John: opining about it they just decide like oh this is this is actually the future and this is what we have to do and so boom we do it and it's the it's what is so messy about a democracy but but but i can't i'm increasingly finding less and less
John: And in these big terms, less and less to love about the mess of democracy when you talk about it in terms of these global problems.
John: This, I guess, is the problem with global warming.
John: And why global warming has become a proxy for the capitalists and the hippies to fight.
John: Is that ultimately the capitalists have decided that the mess of democracy works for them in certain ways.
John: And really to make a... Like we built the interstate highway systems and it did not...
John: It's imperiled democracy.
John: You know what I mean?
John: That was something that was imposed from on high.
John: It was a nationwide program.
John: People made a lot of money off of it.
John: We didn't come out of the interstate highway building system as any more of an oligarchy than we were going in.
John: But now the capitalists are afraid if we do a similar thing to try and make progress on the global warming problem, that it's inevitably trending toward a kind of statist over-government.
John: Because capitalism couldn't possibly survive one of these big projects.
Merlin: So instead of thinking of that kind of democracy as a way to put our smart heads together for some greater good, it's about focusing on all these different voices.
Merlin: Right.
Merlin: I hope I'm not changing the topic, but it makes me think of places that I've worked in.
Merlin: and just teams that I've been around.
Merlin: I think especially this comes up on places that end up having what I would call maybe an overabundance of caution or sometimes this happens in family-owned businesses, very conservative in terms of decision-making, not politics.
Merlin: But there's this thing that happens a lot of the time where – and I have to say it happens a lot in computer math culture – where there will be a certain kind of thing where like –
Merlin: regardless of the merits of something, but let's assume that it's something that is theoretically a really good idea.
Merlin: There's this thing that can happen sometimes, and I definitely have felt this in college at town meetings, as we used to call them.
Merlin: It kind of always felt like, well, here's this idea, and there's a lot of energy and enthusiasm amongst all these people for trying to make this good thing or causing this good change to happen.
Merlin: For example, there's a noise ordinance, and we want to keep having parties,
Merlin: And we're young enough to really want a loud party, but we're also old enough and mature enough to understand that we have to get along with the community.
Merlin: And so we have to govern ourselves in order to be able to keep having parties.
Merlin: So can we have a pretty loud party less often?
Merlin: Or do we really want to get to where somebody from the community shows up with a noise meter every Friday night?
Merlin: Well, ideally, we would make it so that we have a good relationship with those people.
Merlin: And so forth.
Merlin: But the thing is it takes a certain amount of maturity in getting your head out of your own ass in order to make something even like a loud party happen, a very immature thing.
Merlin: But it seems like in some organizations and some groups left to their own devices, instead it becomes an exercise in like listening for the one voice who gets to kill the entire idea by fiat.
Merlin: Right.
Merlin: because they dive bomb in with some kind of think of the children thing or some kind of what about my property values or whatever it is.
Merlin: But it just, it seems like sometimes, you know, especially in this increasingly melodramatic kind of culture we've got, it's not that difficult for those really loud voices to be the ones that like start to define the entire debate.
Merlin: And maybe it's always been that way.
Merlin: Maybe it's just that everybody's got a megaphone and a Canon now, but it seems like, you know, even on like really, really simple things,
Merlin: And finally on this, I guess one thing I learned as a project manager is to the best of my ability possible, I would try to never ask people for permission to do anything.
Merlin: Instead, I would offer an implementation solution for something that was obviously a good idea, which is another way of saying –
Merlin: We need to do something about working with the community on this noise ordinance.
Merlin: I'd be happy to set up a meeting, go to it, and then bring in my notes when I'm done.
Merlin: Like, here's a great idea, and I'll do the work.
Merlin: That kind of thing helps a lot.
Merlin: But instead, it becomes this kind of namby-pamby, let's try and put out this idea, and we're already kind of scared to even talk about this big idea.
Merlin: And then once we do, we let the conversation become completely overrun by...
Merlin: by some of the wildest or loudest opinions.
Merlin: And then that puts off all the sane people who would ordinarily get involved in that discussion, which I count myself amongst a lot of the time.
Merlin: Doesn't that feel like a thing?
Merlin: I mean, you know, obviously not everybody got a square deal probably on the interstate highway system, but thank God we've got it now.
Merlin: How many industries today like would never have existed if we didn't have that highway system.
Merlin: But, you know, if you let one person who was again, it be the one who decided to knock down that entire program, you know, then what do you do?
John: Right.
John: I think about this all the time.
John: Obviously, there were always people that stood up at town meetings and yelled.
John: There were always people that had tinfoil inside their hats.
John: There were always people that felt like everybody was out to get them.
John: But something really dramatically has changed so that we don't anymore gavel those people down.
John: You know what I mean?
John: Like in 1950, people stood up at town meetings and said, calm trails.
John: Floor it in the water.
John: Right.
John: And then at a certain point, the chairman of the committee...
John: rang his gavel on the table, and they said, let's take this to a vote.
John: I think we've heard all we need to hear.
John: And sometimes those guys got carried out of the room or whatever.
John: But now, every single person that gets up at a town meeting has got some...
John: has got dealy boppers on his hat and left and right and there is no there's no more you know and the threat the threat that is pitched at every at every elected official is that if you if you adopt that kind of imperial like we're just we're just going to go ahead and move on this
John: that in the next election, boy, you're going to hear about it.
John: You're going to hear that you are... Oh, we're going to speak truth to power.
John: Yeah, that's right.
John: And it's the whole... I mean, it's the whole... I know you hate talking about the Tea Party.
John: But, you know, the Tea Party, the analog to the Tea Party on the left is really the whole intellectual left is willing to... has been willing to burn down...
John: The part of the system that was working in order to make the point about the part of the system that wasn't working.
John: And when you think about the idea that we had not very long ago, I mean, we were opposed to the WTO because it seemed like it was just a Clinton-era money grab.
John: But I think everybody of our generation has imagined in one way or another that
John: a global economy and a global system of government at least i mean because it was woodrow wilson's idea it was the it was the it was the marshall plan it was the the idea of the united nations all of these were like we're moving in this direction clearly we need an international tribunal that can settle these disputes we don't want to keep having wars we have to be growing out of war
John: And so we're going to develop these large systems.
John: And there were always the Rockefellers and the pointy hats that were like, we're not going to turn over American sovereignty to some United Nations organization that's full of Reds and Frenches.
John: But in fact...
John: Like, what is the alternative?
John: 200 years from now?
John: 500 years from now?
John: Seriously, there are still going to be... There are still going to be 200 little countries all with different railroad gauges all bickering about who gets to kill minky whales and who gets to dump their transmission fluid into the ocean?
John: Like, no, it isn't... It is not the future, clearly.
John: And yet...
John: And yet in America, we can't even agree.
John: I mean, in Washington state, the left coast of Washington and the right coast of Washington can't even come together over where to put our tax dollars.
John: The people over on the Palouse want to spend our tax money punishing girls who have had sex with their boyfriends.
John: And the people on the left coast want to legalize pot and have granola running through the pipes into our homes.
John: And so imagine trying to get people to agree like, oh, you know what?
John: We need to cooperate with England, France, Germany, Belgium, and Spain on a larger project of...
John: of cutting co2 emissions not by 10 but by 90 like we need to cooperate with china and you know what china wants us to make some concessions too and it's not just a case where we're lecturing china but they want us to make some concessions too who how would you how would you get the american people to support a thing like that
Merlin: China's done a lot of bad stuff, John.
Merlin: China is bad.
Merlin: We probably shouldn't work with them.
John: And, you know, if we let China dictate to us one thing, then that means pretty soon we all are eating chicken feet.
John: Yeah.
John: And they're not letting us have as many babies as we want it all.
Merlin: That's how it starts.
Merlin: That is how it starts.
John: So, I mean, for myself, when I lie in bed and dream, it's like, well, clearly we need to work as a... We need to figure out a way...
John: To work as a planet.
John: Oh, my God.
John: I hate myself.
John: I hate myself.
Merlin: I hate that I even said that.
Merlin: That happens to me about twice a month, and I just want to kill myself when I say something like that.
John: I'm speaking in bumper stickers to you now.
Merlin: John, did you ever visualize world peace?
Merlin: I'm visualizing world peace right now.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: So I was going to ask you when you think roughly plus or minus, like were there events when you think this kind of change in discourse really took place?
Merlin: But I guess – and you think about that for a minute.
Merlin: But I'm just – I guess I'm also just thinking this is really just me up in the peanut gallery looking down.
Yeah.
Merlin: maybe it's just by virtue of the fact that i do see stuff like social media and and i just see how pervasive that's become as the way that we express everything and you know on the one end of the spectrum you've got this feeling amongst people which seems to be like if i don't take a photo of this and put it up it didn't actually happen there's that that's starting to seem kind of like a real thing like amongst a lot of people and then you know at the other end um
Merlin: I guess what I'm trying to get at is it's really starting to feel like it's becoming difficult for people to – this is awful.
Merlin: But it really – honestly, old guy talking here.
Merlin: It really is starting to feel like it's becoming –
Merlin: It's difficult for me to see an important difference and I guess I'll just go out on a limb and say I think it's – it's getting difficult for people to separate their idea of themselves from their opinions, from the body politic, from America's Next Top Model or whatever it is.
Merlin: It really seems like everybody is supposed to have an extremely strong and deeply held conviction about big issues as well as things that just happened and if you have no opinion –
Merlin: or if you have a light opinion, or if you're open to getting more information, you're kind of not a fully branded character yet.
Merlin: And in order to fulfill your personal brand online and therefore consequently in your life, you have to come down super hard on one side and then stick to it.
Merlin: And maybe it's always been that way.
Merlin: It's just that now there's so much on the line.
Merlin: When you're sitting there,
Merlin: It was one thing to sit there and yell at the TV while President Nixon was talking, and it's another thing now to be part of these coalitions of people, these little flash mobs of – flash slash lynch mobs of people who are constantly looking for what latest indignity or problem they can decide to rally around.
Merlin: And it just really is not that much –
Merlin: There's not that much incentive anymore for somebody to just be kind of a reasoned person who shows up and listens and says things sometimes.
Merlin: But it just – I think that's making it harder.
Merlin: I know that's obvious.
Merlin: But I really – I think that's a bigger problem than most of us are willing to admit because then each side benefits from stoking those people and from getting them more and more and more dug in on that one side.
Merlin: And it's not – it just doesn't feel like there's that much incentive out there to go out and try and become a reasoned person who can figure out what you're willing to give away in order to make something good happen.
Right.
John: I don't want to be too Roderick on the line about it.
John: Does this involve a camp?
John: Well, no, and this will sort of, I think, ignite you in a different way.
John: But for me, there's this splintering that started with Hegel.
John: And at Nietzsche, really, there was a splintering of what we thought of, what we understood to be the Western tradition.
John: And at Foucault...
John: The idea that we were... The idea that the relationship between...
John: That knowledge and power were these things that we could get outside of and look down on and see the relationships between and we could decode and we could apprehend the systems of control in a way that we could intervene intellectually and...
John: And upend, introduced into the story, into the story of human progress that we were...
John: that we were being controlled by these larger systems, literary systems, language systems, you know, and that those systems were tinkerable and we could get in and every group could recognize the point at which the actual language, the actual English language was built in such a way that it disempowered them.
John: And the actual way that we thought that our systems, that systems that we had always considered benign,
John: or neutral that those systems were actually built as control apparatus and so we needed to we needed to disassemble these systems in order to achieve equality it wasn't just a question anymore of what had always been the american project which was equality under the law right as long as everyone is equal under the law
John: That's as good as government can do, and then we have to work out everything else.
John: But at a certain point, no, that wasn't true anymore because the law was intrinsically unequal because the language it was written in was a colonial language.
John: And with the introduction of those ideas, there was this splintering of what we understood to be that any of us could agree on a common truth.
John: And with that, if everybody has their own truth...
John: What was unforeseen by all of this was practically you cannot live in a world where everybody has their own truth.
John: Or rather, you can, but it's all against all.
John: It is a war of all against all.
John: If every single person has the option of saying, I don't like that word you used because the word is in a language that is...
John: That puts me at a disadvantage.
John: And so I'm choosing my own word to describe the thing.
John: And ultimately, that's where we are now.
John: We're living in a world where every single group is... People are bickering over the word to describe the thing that they are talking about.
John: They can't even agree.
John: They're so far from being able to agree on a principle because they're arguing about...
John: Whether, you know, what to name one another.
Merlin: Well, and even if something is a fantastic idea, we might not do it because we can't agree on why it's a good idea.
John: Well, and that, so then that follows from it, right?
John: Then everything, every subsequent problem follows from this idea.
John: This shattering of like what we held in common, a common understanding.
John: And it isn't to say that Foucault and Derrida and all those critiques weren't interesting, you know, and Chomsky.
John: I mean, those are fascinating critiques.
John: And I spent many years, and I know you did too, reading them and being repeatedly kind of blown away by like, oh, wow, heavy.
John: Holy cow.
John: Yeah, I never thought of it that way.
John: Like, whoa.
Merlin: Everybody...
Merlin: should be lucky enough at some point in their 20s to be brutally destroyed in an argument by somebody who's a really good Derrida deconstructionist.
Merlin: And you end the conversation almost sobbing because you're so confused about what you don't even know you're confused about anymore.
Merlin: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Merlin: It's a really illuminating experience that helps you understand how important language is to how we think.
John: I had those experiences multiple times, and I limped out of those.
John: But wait a minute, but what about, what about... Yeah, right.
John: I mean, but I had that same exact experience arguing with a really informed Catholic about abortion.
John: I had the same experience in my early 20s.
John: A really intelligent, informed Catholic person had the logic of his position so well understood.
John: And I was approaching the argument from a like, well, I mean, it's clear that blah, blah, blah.
John: It's clear that the woman has a right to her body, blah, blah, blah.
John: And he was coming at it from this like, is human life, I mean, is life sacred or is it garbage?
John: you know a very socratic kind of like well i mean i guess if those are the choices sacred right well so if life is sacred you know and he followed from there right um but but we're for myself there was there was a moment where those critiques stopped being just interesting intellectual like party favors like ideas that we were
Merlin: But like thought-provoking exercises in how we see and think.
John: Right.
John: They're not useless.
John: But they became, sometime in the 80s, within the universities, they became the blueprint for a system, for a governing system.
Merlin: We started writing all the rule books in crayon because anything else would be dishonest.
John: Exactly.
John: And we started saying like our project from the left is to, you know, we're always terrified that the right is like infiltrating school boards and they're infiltrating zoning commissions and they're putting all their people in there who don't believe in evolution.
John: And all of a sudden we don't realize it until all of a sudden...
John: We can't get any textbooks in Texas public schools because all these school boards have the right figured out that they were going to colonize those areas.
John: But the left was doing that years and years before and sort of colonizing all of the...
John: Academic institutions and then social service institutions, all the government institutions were being infiltrated by people who had read these critiques and saw them as a framework for making public policy.
John: And so, we now, like, every sign that was going to be posted on the wall had to be in 15 different languages.
John: And that was just, that was just, seemed like a no-brainer because everybody here spoke these different languages.
John: But, of course, the underlying idea was that you could not, you could not effectively translate language.
John: Please do not fish off this bridge.
John: You couldn't really translate that.
John: It needed to be in all those different languages because translating it was an act of was an act of oppression almost.
John: You know, it was a it's a comparative literature approach.
John: project of governance and and and comp lit is the last department you want running the state and that's the so they introduced that they they started introducing that into like into local government and then into congress throughout the 80s and 90s and the the right
John: took that, they saw it and they, in a way, admired it, and they took the lead.
John: They took that lead and they said, oh, all right, well, if language has this power and if everybody has a relative truth and each relative truth is of equal standing, then we're going to start using language this way and we're going to start...
John: Using our relative truth as a lever to enact the programs that we are vested in.
John: And that's where the world we're living in now.
John: This crazy land where the word right, everybody's talking about our rights all the time, but you can't get five people to agree what right even means.
John: Like, which rights exactly?
John: Everybody's got a new Bill of Rights.
John: Right.
John: Where's my Bill of Rights?
Merlin: You know, these things cost $35,000 when they came out.
Merlin: $35,000 by 78.
Merlin: You could buy a house for $17,000.
Merlin: That's more than our house cost in 1976.
Merlin: So, yeah, our house cost less than a GMC RV.
John: $35,000.
John: Think about that.
Merlin: It has aircraft-grade aluminum.
Merlin: I've been fully engaged in this conversation every step of the way because it's fascinating to me, but I've also been looking at a lot of photos and schematics.
Merlin: John, I found a very important one.
Merlin: There's a 23-footer and a 26-footer.
Merlin: The 26-footer has 11 different floor plans available.
Merlin: Yes.
John: I climbed on one not very long ago where the people had outfitted it in bright green shag carpet.
Yeah.
John: And I was in fucking heaven.
John: It was like I walked into this thing, and I was eight years old.
John: It was 1976, and I never had any fears.
John: I was just going to drive around America in this giant beanbag chair.
John: And I don't even know how it is that I haven't bought one already.
Mm-hmm.
John: And I've talked to a couple of people and they say, listen, you can get them for cheap out there, but don't buy a cheap one.
Merlin: It sounds like they had some reliability problems.
John: Well, that's the thing.
John: Anytime you introduce a bunch of new technology in one situation, one platform, you're going to have some situations where the new technology doesn't... No, if the Chinese had made this.
Merlin: If the Chinese had made it, it wouldn't have shock absorbers.